Ukraine has rarely had the luxury of secure borders: in the 16th and 17th centuries, much of its present territory was divided between Poland, the Ottoman Empire, and its protectorate, the Tatar Khanate of the Crimea. However, this period also saw the beginnings of a sense of Ukrainian national identity, as serfs escaping from Poland and Muscovy (Russia) took refuge in fortified camps (sichi) on islands in the Dnieper – the mighty 1,400-mile river that runs south towards the Black Sea. Under able leaders such as Przecław Lanckoron´ski, Ostap Dashkevych, and Dmytro Vyshnevetsky, these refugees gradually became a formidable military force, known as the Zaporozhian Cossacks. They were at least nominally Polish subjects, and initially supported Poland in its wars – especially against the Khanate of the Crimea, which launched frequent raids to seize slaves to trade with the rest of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. (Between 1500 and 1700, the Tatars took about 2 million slaves from Russia and Poland, and as late as 1769 a final major raid captured 20,000 Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian slaves.)
Although they were most famous for their light cavalry, the Cossacks raised equally good infantry, primarily armed with matchlock or flintlock muskets, along with two-handed berdiches (axes that served them as musket rests). Some infantry units, termed plastuni, were almost the equivalent of modern special forces, specialising in reconnaissance and ambush tactics. The Zaporozhian Cossacks were also skilled in amphibious operations in the Black Sea, using highly manoeuvrable, shallow-draft galleys known as chaiki (‘seagulls’), crewed by anything up to 70 men each. In 1615, they even raided the suburbs of Constantinople (modern Istanbul), before taking and looting the Crimean port of Kaffa (now Feodosia). Although similar raids were launched until well into the 1620s, they were gradually scaled down as the emphasis switched to land warfare against the Ottoman Empire and Muscovy.
Cossack forces played an important role in Polish victories, such as Khotyn (1621) and the Siege of Smolensk (1632/1633), but increasing tensions between the Catholic Poles and predominantly Orthodox Cossacks flared into open rebellion in 1648 under the leadership of the charismatic Bohdan Khmelnytsky. He made a triumphant entry into the ancient city of Kyiv on Christmas Day 1648, when he was hailed as ‘the Moses, saviour, redeemer, and liberator of the people from Polish captivity… the illustrious ruler of Rus’. (Rus was a widely accepted name for Ukraine until the 19th century.) Khmelnytsky established the Cossack Hetmanate, an embryonic Ukrainian state, and in February 1649, during negotiations with a Polish delegation, declared that he was the ‘sole autocrat of Rus’ and that he had ‘power in Ukraine, Podolia, and Volhynia… in his land and principality stretching as far as Lviv, Chełm, and Halych’.
The salt sellers