their fanatical faith in their feudal rights, lost every opportunity of rallying the Cossacks to their standard. Religious intolerance soon played its fatal role. The Catholic bishop of Cracow grossly insulted the Orthodox metropolitan of Kiev, whose place had been assured him in the Plenary Council of the Diet. The Greek-Orthodox Cossacks, maddened by this act, joined in a sudden massacre of the adherents of the Hetman Wykowski. Under the leadership of the son of Bogdan the majority of the Cossack settlements returned once more to their Russian allegiance. The fairest provinces of the ancient "land of Rus," Kiev, Poltava and the broad steppes of the Ukraine were lost forever to the Polish Crown. Even in their undeveloped state these rich borderlands were recognized both by the rulers of Russia and Poland to be a prize essential to the predominance of their states.
A vivid description of the appearance of the Ukraine at this time is to be found in Sienkiewicz' famous work, "With Fire and Sword."
"The last traces of settled life ended on the way to the south, at no great distance beyond Chigirin on the side of the Dnieper, and on the side of the Dniester not far from Uman; thence forward to the bays and sea there was nothing but steppe after steppe, hemmed in by the two rivers as by a frame. At the bend of the Dnieper in the lower country beyond the cataracts Cossack life was seething, but in the open plains no man dwelt; only along the shores were nestled here and there little fields, like islands in the sea. The land belonged in name to Poland, but it was an empty land, in which the Commonwealth permitted the Tartars to graze their herds; but since the Cossacks prevented this frequently, the field of pasture was a field of battle too.
How many struggles were fought in that region, how many people had laid down their lives there, no man had coimted, no man remembered. Eagles, falcons, and ravens alone saw these; and whoever from a distance was heard the sound of wings and the call of ravens, whoever beheld the whirl of birds circling over one place, knew that corpses or unburied bones were Mng beneath. JSIen were hunted in the grass as wolves or wild goats. All who wished engaged in this hunt. Fugitives from the law defended themselves in the wild steppes. The armed herdsman guarded his flock, the warrior sought adventure, the robber plunder, the Cossack a Tartar, the Tartar a Cossack. It happened that whole bands guarded herds from troops of robbers. The steppe was both empty and filled, quiet and terrible, peaceable and full of ambushes; wild by reason of its wild plains, but wild, too, from the wild spirit of men.
^ At times a great war filled it. Then there flowed over it like waves Tartar chamhuls, Cossack regiments, Polish or Wallachian companies. In the night-time the neighing of horses answered the howling of wolves, the voices of drums and brazen trumpets flew on to the island of Ovid and the sea, and along the black trail of Kutchman there seemed an inundation of men. The boundaries of the Commonwealth were guarded from Kamenyets to the Dnieper by outposts and stanitzi; and when the roads were about to swarm with people, it was known especially by the countless flocks of birds which, frightened by the Tartars, flew onward to the north. But the Tartar, if he slipped out from the Black Forest or crossed the Dniester from the Wallachian side, came by the southern provinces together with the birds."
By the terms of the Treaty of Andrusov, signed January 13th, 1667, the Tsar and the King of Poland came to a first definite arrangement covering the territories of Ukraine. This document carefully defined the influence each monarch was to exercise upon the Cossack settlements of the Dnieper. The classic stream became effectively the boundary between the two states. Kiev, the capital of Little Russia, was left (pending future negotiations, to which the Tsar Alexis looked forward without anxiety) in the hands of the Russians. The administration of the turbulent Zaporogian sitch was made subject to the joint "protection" of both Crowns, a pretension which, needless to say, the "Republic of the Free Cossacks beyond the
Cataracts" disclaimed with scorn. Both high contracting parties agreed not to enlist in their respective armies subjects of the other crown, nor to encourage the emigration from one bank to another of Cossacks settled in their respective territory.