RISE OF THE COSSACKS
As the Reformation (1517-1648) plunged the rest of Central Europe into mayhem, a new empire was born on the Baltic coast. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had a remarkable cohesion undisturbed by religious differences and its territorial extent was only limited by natural barriers. Towards its southern fringes, in the uninterrupted steppes free from the menacing Ottoman Empire’s clutches, a warrior nation of Orthodox Christians came to be. It was King Stephen Bathory, of the Hungarian bloodline that ruled Poland in the late 16th century, who first recruited the roving horsemen to act as a buffer separating his kingdom’s prosperous farmlands from invasion. To exercise control over these auxiliaries King Bathory kept a ‘Register of Free Cossacks’ whose members were given rare privileges, such as the licence to fight on behalf of the Polish crown and looting their enemy’s possessions. The first notable Cossack was the river pirate Vasily Timofeyovich, better known as Yermak of Siberia, whose doomed expedition against a native chieftain helped open up Russia’s far east. By the 1600s the Cossacks had contained the Crimean Tatars, holdovers of the Mongol Golden Horde that dominated Russia for 200 years, and maintained fortified settlements along the Dnieper River in Ukraine.
These Cossacks, a name derived from nowhere for a people without origin, formed a society of libertarians who resisted kingship and serfdom. Although the Cossacks did have a country of their own, a single government never existed to unite them, -so a loose confederation became their chosen political order. Careful
