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unmasked and frustrated. To save himself he hit upon the novel and terrible expedient of uniting the Tatars and the Cossacks Cossack Rebellion of
1648. in a determined onslaught upon the Republic, whose inward weakness, despite its brave outward show, he had been quick to discern. On the 18th of April 1648, at the general assembly of the Zaporozhians, he openly expressed his intention of proceeding against the Poles and was elected hetman by acclamation; on the 19th of May he annihilated a small detached Polish corps on the banks of the river Zheltndya Vodui, and seven days later overwhelmed the army of the Polish grand-hetman, massacring 8500 of his 10,000 men and sending the grand-hetman himself and all his officers in chains to the Crimea. The immediate consequence of these victories was the outburst of a khlopskaya zloba, or “serfs’ fury.” Throughout the Ukraine the gentry were hunted down, flayed, burnt, blinded and sawn asunder. Every manor-house and castle was reduced to ashes. Every Uniate or Catholic priest who could be caught was hung up before his own high altar, along with a Jew and a hog. The panic-stricken inhabitants fled to the nearest strongholds, and soon the rebels were swarming over the palatinates of Volhynia and Podolia. Meanwhile the Polish army, 40,000 strong, with 100 guns, was assembling on the frontier. It consisted almost entirely of the noble militia, and was tricked out with a splendour more befitting a bridal pageant than a battle array. For Chmielnicki and his host these splendid cavaliers expressed the utmost contempt. “This rabble must be chased with whips, not smitten with swords,” they cried. On the 23rd of September the two armies encountered near Pildawa, and after a stubborn three days contest the gallant Polish pageant was scattered to the winds. The steppe for miles around was strewn with corpses, and the Cossacks are said to have reaped 10,000,000 guldens worth of booty when the fight was over. All Poland now lay at Chmielnicki’s feet and the road to the defenceless capital was open John II. Casimir, 1648–1668. before him; but he wasted two precious months in vain before the fortress of Zamość, and then the newly elected king of Poland, John Casimir, Wladislaus IV.’s brother, privately opened negotiations with the rebel, officially recognized him by sending him the bulawa and the other insignia of the hetman’s dignity, and promised his “faithful Zaporozhians” the restoration of all their ancient liberties if they would break off their alliance with the Tatars and await the arrival of peace commissioners at Pereyaslavl. But the negotiations at Pereyaslavl came to nothing. Chmielnicki’s conditions of peace were so extravagant that the Polish commissioners durst not accept them, and in 1649 he again invaded Poland with a countless host of Cossacks and Tatars. Again, however, he made the mistake of attacking a fortress, which delayed his advance for a month, and gave John Casimir time to collect an army for the relief of the besieged. By the compact of Zborów (Aug. 21, 1649) Chmielnicki was recognized as hetman of the Zaporozhians, whose registered number was now raised from 6000 to 40,000; a general amnesty was also granted, and it was agreed that all official dignities in the Orthodox palatinates of Lithuania should henceforth be held solely by the Orthodox gentry. For the next eighteen months Chmielnicki ruled the Ukraine like a sovereign prince. He made Chigirin, his native place, the Cossack capital, subdivided the country into sixteen provinces, and entered into direct relations with foreign powers. His attempt to carve a principality for his son out of Moldavia led to the outbreak of a third war between suzerain and subject in February 1651. But fortune, so long Bohdan’s friend, now deserted him, and at Beresteczko (July 1, 1651) the Cossack chieftain was utterly routed by Stephen Czarniecki. All hope of an independent Cossackdom was now at an end; yet it was not Poland but Muscovy which reaped the fruits of Czarniecki’s victory.

Chmielnicki, by suddenly laying bare the nakedness of the Polish republic, had opened the eyes of Muscovy to the fact that her secular enemy was no longer formidable. Three years after his defeat at Beresteczko, Chmielnicki, finding himself unable to cope with the Poles single-handed, very reluctantly transferred his allegiance to the tsar, and the same year the tsar’s armies invaded Poland, still bleeding from the all but mortal wounds inflicted on her by the Cossacks. The war The Russians Invade Poland. thus begun, and known in Russian history as the Thirteen Years’ War, far exceeded even the Thirty Years’ War in grossness and brutality. It resembled nothing so much as a hideous scramble of ravening beasts and obscene fowls for the dismembered limbs of a headless carcase, for such did Poland seem to all the world before the war was half over. In the summer of 1655, moreover, while the Republic was still reeling beneath the shock of the Muscovite invasion, Invasion of Charles X. of Sweden, 1655. Charles X. of Sweden, on the flimsiest of pretexts, forced a war upon reluctant and inoffensive Poland, simply to gratify his greed of martial glory, and before the year was out his forces had occupied the capital, the coronation city and the best half of the land. King John Casimir, betrayed and abandoned by his own subjects, fled to Silesia, and profiting by the cataclysm which, for the moment, had swept the Polish state out of existence, the Muscovites, unopposed, quickly appropriated nearly everything which was not already occupied by the Swedes. At this crisis Poland owed her salvation to two events—the formation of a general league against Sweden, brought about by the apprehensive court of Vienna and an almost simultaneous popular outburst of religious enthusiasm on the part of the Polish people. The first of these events, to be dated from the alliance between the emperor Leopold and John Casimir, on the 27th of May 1657, led to a truce with the tsar and the welcome diversion of all the Muscovite forces against Swedish Livonia. The second event, which began with the heroic and successful defence of the monastery of Czenstochowa by Prior Kordecki against the Swedes, resulted in the return of the Polish king from exile, the formation of a national army under Stephen Czarniecki and the recovery of almost all the lost provinces from the Swedes, who were driven back headlong to the sea, where with difficulty they held their own. On the sudden death of Charles X. (Feb. 13, 1660), Poland gladly seized the opportunity of adjusting all her outstanding differences with Sweden. By the peace of Oliva (May 3, 1660), made under French mediation, John Casimir ceded Livonia, and renounced all claim to the Swedish crown. The war with Muscovy was then prosecuted with renewed energy and extraordinary success In the autumn of 1661 the Russian commanders were routed at Zeromsk, and nearly all the eastern provinces were recovered. In 1664 a peace congress was opened at Durovicha and the prospects of Poland seemed most brilliant; but at the very moment when she needed all her armed strength to sustain her diplomacy, the rebellion of one of her leading magnates, Prince Lubomirsky, involved her in a dangerous civil war, compelled her to reopen negotiations with the Muscovites, at Andrussowo, under far more unfavourable conditions, and after protracted negotiations practically to accept the Muscovite terms. By the truce of The Truce of Andrussowo, 1667. Andrussowo (Feb. 11, 1667) Poland received back from Muscovy Vitebsk, Polotsk and Polish Livonia, but ceded in perpetuity Smolensk, Syeversk, Chernigov and the whole of the eastern bank of the Dnieper, including the towns of Konotop, Gadyach, Pereyaslavl, Mirgorod, Poltava and Izyum The Cossacks of the Dnieper were henceforth to be under the joint dominion of the tsar and the king of Poland. Kiev, the religious metropolis of Western Russia, was to remain in the hands of Muscovy for two years.

The “truce” of Andrussowo proved to be one of the most permanent peaces in history, and Kiev, though only pledged for two years, was never again to be separated from the Orthodox Slavonic state to which it rightly belonged. But for the terrible and persistent ill-luck of Poland it is doubtful whether the “truce” of Andrussowo would ever have been signed. The war which it concluded was to be the last open struggle between the two powers. Henceforth the influence of Russia over Poland was steadily to increase, without any struggle at all, the Republic being already stricken with that creeping paralysis which ultimately left her a prey to her neighbours. Muscovy