The Khmelnytsky Uprising
Bohdan Khmelnytsky raised the Zaporozhian Cossacks against Polish rule in 1648, and the rising destroyed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's position in Ukraine permanently. The grievances were layered. Registered Cossacks — those the crown paid and recognised — had been cut sharply while their numbers grew; the magnate estates spreading east had imposed serfdom on a peasantry that had come there to escape it; and the Union of Brest had subordinated the Orthodox Church to Rome, which the Cossacks regarded themselves as defending. Khmelnytsky's own grievance was personal: a Polish noble raided his estate, killed his son and took his wife, and the courts gave him nothing. He fled to the Sich, was elected hetman, and allied with the Crimean Tatars, whose cavalry answered the Commonwealth's one clear advantage. He destroyed Polish armies at Zhovti Vody and Korsun in 1648 and at Pyliavtsi, and the rising spread into a general peasant war. It included massacres of Jewish communities, who were widely employed as estate managers and tax farmers by the magnates and were therefore the closest available representatives of the system. Estimates of the dead range from around 18,000 to far higher figures in older accounts. The Tatars changed sides at Berestechko in 1651. Needing a stronger patron, Khmelnytsky signed the Pereiaslav agreement with Moscow in 1654, accepting the tsar's protection — a document whose meaning has been argued about ever since, and which Russian historiography read as the reunion of Ukraine with Russia. The Commonwealth lost the left bank of the Dnieper and Kyiv permanently by 1667. The period is called the Deluge in Polish history and the Ruin in Ukrainian.
- Year: 1648 CE
- Category: Political
