Bohdan Khmelnytsky

Ukrainian Cossack hetman (r. 1648-1657)

• Born: c. 1595
• Birthplace: Subotiv (?), Ukraine
• Died: August 16, 1657
• Place of death: Chyhyryn, Ukraine

Between 1648 and 1654, Khmelnytsky led the Zaporozhian (Dnieper) Cossacks in a successful uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, permanently changing the balance among Eastern European powers and advancing the cause of Ukrainian nationalism.

Early Life

Bohdan Khmelnytsky (BAWG-dahn khmyehl-NYIHT-skuhih), hetman (chieftain) of the Zaporozhian Cossack Host and founder of the Hetman state (1648-1781), was the son of a member of the Cossack gentry. Khmelnytsky’s father came from the Pereyaslavl region and served the Polish crown hetman Stanislaw Zolkiewski and later the Polish provincial governor of Chyhyryn. It was in Chyhyryn that the elder Khmelnytsky acquired his estate, Subotiv, where Bohdan was probably born. During the Polish-Ottoman War of 1618-1621, Bohdan’s father commanded recruits from Chyhyryn under his old mentor, Zolkiewski, until he was killed in the battle of Cecora (September, 1620).

Bohdan Khmelnytsky was raised Orthodox and spoke Ukrainian as his first language. By the time he lost his father, he had completed his education under the Jesuits, probably at L’viv, and was fluent in Polish and Latin, to which he later added a knowledge of Turkish, Tatar, and French. His first experience of war was at Cecora, beside his father, where he was taken prisoner and spent two years of captivity in Constantinople, before his mother ransomed him.

Little is known about Khmelnytsky’s movements between 1622 and 1637, but at some point in the 1620’s, he became a “registered Cossack,” in effect a member of the Polish-officered Cossack militia first instituted by King Stephen Báthory in 1578 for frontier defense. In 1638, he was part of a Cossack delegation that went to Warsaw to request the restoration of former Cossack privileges, and in 1645, he served with a Cossack detachment in France. On Khmelnytsky’s return from France in 1646, King Władysław IV Vasa (r. 1632-1648), seeking to put Poland at the head of an anti-Ottoman alliance, summoned him to Warsaw to discuss ways to enlist the support of the Zaporozhian Host. He was thus a person of some note in the eyes of the Warsaw court. Around this time, Khmelnytsky lost his first wife, with whom he had had three sons, including Tymish (1632-1653) and Yurii (1641-1685), and four daughters.

Life’s Work

In the southeastern lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth where Khmelnytsky lived, the Catholic Polish magnates and landowners were intent upon reducing the overwhelmingly Orthodox local population, both peasants and Cossacks alike, to virtual serfdom on their vast estates. They hated the free spirit of the Cossacks and by the 1640’s were determined to break the independent-minded members of the Cossack gentry, such as Khmelnytsky.

With the complicity of the provincial authorities, several landowners descended upon the Khmelnytsky estate at Subotiv and destroyed it. In the course of the attack, a small son of Khmelnytsky was beaten to death in the marketplace at Chyhyryn, and his fiancée was abducted. His own arrest and execution were ordered, but thanks to the intervention of the Chyhyryn garrison, he escaped in January of 1648 and fled beyond the Dnieper River with such followers as he could muster.

The events of 1647—a dead wife, a murdered child, an abducted fiancée, and a devastated estate—turned what had hitherto been a middle-ranking fifty-year-old Cossack officer with a record of loyalty to the Polish crown into a terrifying nemesis to Poland, dedicated to the destruction of the Polish elite and all who aided them. These events changed forever the history of eastern Europe. However much Khmelnytsky was driven by a lust for revenge, though, he could not have achieved what he did had his treatment been an isolated experience. Khmelnytsky’s tribulations were merely the most extreme examples of injustices to which all the Cossacks, both the elite and the rank and file, had been exposed. His rebellion became a means for channeling their collective resentments.

Khmelnytsky’s revolt was the greatest and bloodiest of the insurrections that tore apart the Polish-Lithuanian and Russian borderlands. Against the Poles, the Cossacks’ greatest weakness was a lack of trained cavalry, but Khmelnytsky appealed for support from the traditional enemies of the Cossacks, the Crimean Tatars. His timing was perfect, for Tatar-Polish relations were at a low ebb, and the khan, Islam Giray III (r. 1644-1654), sent four thousand Tatars to support the Cossack rebellion. On May 6, 1648, an advance guard of six thousand Poles, riding ahead of the main force of twenty thousand, was ambushed at Zhovti Vody, near the Sich, the Zaporozhian Cossack headquarters. Almost three weeks later, on May 26, 1648, the main Polish army was annihilated near Korsum, where many Polish leaders and magnates were taken prisoner.

A few days later, King Władysław died and was succeeded by his half brother, John II Casimir Vasa (r. 1648-1668). Thereafter, on both banks of the Dnieper River, Cossacks, burghers, and peasants, joined by runaway serfs, bandits, and Tatars, rose up against their oppressors in a jacquerie (peasant revolt) of unparalleled savagery. The Jews were particular objects of the rebels’ hostility. The Polish magnates responded to the savage rebellion in kind, torturing and slaughtering Cossack peasants, women, and children wherever they found them. Meanwhile, the Poles assembled a formidable force of thirty-two thousand Polish troops and eight thousand German mercenaries, which Khmelnytsky’s troops met at Pyliavtsi (September 23, 1648), midway between Kiev and L’viv, winning a resounding victory.

Khmelnytsky now entered Volhynia and Galicia, where the peasants rose in his support. In early October, he besieged L’viv but was bought off by an enormous ransom. He then turned north to Zamosc, where he learned that the new king, John II, was offering him an armistice. He accepted it, for his troops, as well as the population in general, were stricken by plague and famine, and his Tatar allies were deserting him. Khmelnytsky turned east again and marched to Kiev, where he was given a tumultuous welcome by the citizens and the Orthodox hierarchy, who acclaimed him as a new Moses delivering his people from Polish bondage (January, 1649).

The Poles renewed the fighting later in 1649, advancing through Volhynia only to be ambushed near Zboriv. At his moment of triumph, however, Khmelnytsky was abandoned by Khan Islam Giray and forced to negotiate. The Treaty of Zboriv (August 18, 1649), was a triumph, but it left neither party satisfied: The Cossacks thought that Khmelnytsky had given too much away, and the Poles, that they had gained too little.

In 1651, the Poles sent another army to crush Khmelnytsky’s Cossacks and Tatars, and in a two-week battle(June 18-29, 1651) near Berestechno in Volhynia, Khmelnytsky experienced total defeat, again as a result of Tatar treachery. The subsequent Treaty of Bila Tserkva (September 28, 1651) was much less favorable to Cossack interests than the Treaty of Zboriv had been, although Khmelnytsky countered this blow by a decisive victory against the Poles at Batih on May 1, 1652. By that time, it was clear that both sides had taken, as well as given, terrible punishment and had fought each other to a stalemate.

Prevailing discontent throughout the Ukraine and conflict between the ruling Cossack elite and the rank and file, whose aim was the abolition of serfdom, underscored Khmelnytsky’s problems. Further, his unstable alliance with the Tatars was bitterly unpopular with most Cossacks. Khmelnytsky had long recognized that the Cossacks could not stand alone, however, so he decided to compel Moldavia, an Ottoman vassal, into an alliance. In 1650, he sent his eldest son, Tymish, into Moldavia with a force of Cossacks to compel Prince Vasile (r. 1634-1653) to abandon his Polish alliance. In 1652, Tymish married Vasile’s daughter, Roksana, perhaps intending by this marriage to claim the succession. However, the marriage aroused the rulers of Transylvania and Walachia, and Tymish was killed in battle at Suceava (September 15, 1653), attempting to defend his father-in-law’s interests.

With the failure of the Moldavian adventure and still mistrusting the Tatar khan, in 1651, Khmelnytsky negotiated for the Zaporozhian Host to become a vassal state of the Ottoman sultan on terms similar to those extended to Moldavia, Walachia, and the Crimea. His Cossacks, however, could not stomach a Muslim overlord. Reluctantly, Khmelnytsky turned to Russian czar Alexis, and in January, 1654, he agreed to the momentous Treaty of Pereyaslavl, by which the czar became overlord of the Zaporozhian Host. With the southwestern Ukraine ravaged mercilessly by the Tatars, allies no longer, and with Cossack tensions growing in response to Muscovite high-handedness, an embittered Khmelnytsky died in Chyhyryn in 1657.

Significance

Few men of such comparatively obscure origins and advanced age have done so much to change history as did Khmelnytsky. Khmelnytsky’s campaigns brought massacre, famine, and depopulation to vast areas of eastern Europe, marking the beginning of the decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had been at its prime when the century began and was in its dotage by century’s end. The Commonwealth’s Jewish communities, in particular, would never fully recover from the destruction wrought by the Cossacks.

Khmelnytsky’s epic struggle against the Poles forced him into the arms of Muscovy, which, thereafter, inexorably advanced into the fertile, underpopulated grasslands of Russia’s future bread bowl, but Khmelnytsky also gave the Cossacks a sense of national pride, providing the foundation for today’s Ukrainian national identity. His legacy is, therefore, complex: A monster to Poles and Jews, he is praised by Russian historians for advancing the union of the Ukraine with Muscovy, and he was praised by Soviet historians as a great revolutionary (which he was not), while to Ukrainians, he is the father of their nation.

Bibliography

Davis, Norman. God’s Playground: A History of Poland. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Khmelnytsky’s revolt is described from a Polish point of view.

Hrushevsky, Michael. A History of Ukraine. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970. A classic statement of a leading Ukrainian historian.

Longworth, Philip. The Cossacks. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. General introduction to the Cossack phenomenon.

Subtelny, Orest. Ukraine: A History. 3d ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Authoritative overview of Ukrainian history.

Vernadsky, G. Bohdan: Hetman of Ukraine. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1941. A biography of Khmelnytsky by a great Russian historian.