Class 9. Polish Power and Cossack Revolution (4)
but it's actually an extraordinary achievement
to take a vernacular and turn it to a written language
and then have that version of the written language
be accepted by everyone.
It's an extraordinary thing, right?
In England, it's largely a matter of Shakespeare
or the King James Bible.
But, you know, so the language question,
what's the answer, right?
So some places it might seem more or less obvious, like,
okay, you take a version of French or version of English,
but in Ukraine, what's the answer?
What's the answer to the language question in Ukraine?
You have old church Slavonic,
which is still around somewhere.
You have the Ukrainian vernacular,
which is perfectly well exists.
And you have Polish.
And all these things are possible, right?
These are all possible answers to the language question.
But the way it's answered,
the actual answer to the language question
in Ukraine is Polish, as I said before.
So people start writing in a language
which isn't an ancient language, which is not Greek,
it's not old church Slavonic, it's not Latin, it's Polish.
But this answer to the language question
is fundamentally different from the other answers elsewhere.
If the answer to the language question in Poland is Polish,
that means suddenly everybody has the same, not everybody,
but many people have the same language,
top to bottom, right?
The nobles and the peasants
can be speaking the same language.
In France, the same.
England, the same,
Germany the same.
But in Ukraine, if the answer
to the language question is Polish,
then suddenly roughly one to two,
maybe three percent of the population has one language,
and 97% and 98% has another.
That's a very different social outcome,
very different social outcome.
So the language question always gets answered
in terms of the modern language,
but it doesn't always get answered
in terms of the vernacular, right?
So that's one thing which is very dramatic
about the situation.
Secondly, which is very dramatic, is religion.
So again, while I'm telling you
about the Czerwinsk Privilege,
while I'm telling you about these Polish details,
the Reformation is going on.
And the Reformation is going on also in Poland.
And in Poland in the 16th century,
most of the nobility actually goes Protestant.
So like during the period,
which the Poles find themselves find the most interesting,
which is the 16th century, they had a Lithuanian dynasty,
and they had a Protestant parliament,
which is just worth remembering,
small talk for your Polish friends.
And in Ukraine, you also have the Reformation.
But in the Reformation in Ukraine
is going to involve Protestants,
it's going to involve Catholics in the Counter-Reformation,
but the population is mostly Orthodox, right?
This is Rus, this is Eastern Christianity.
So you have a Reformation and a Counter-Reformation,
which are overlaying onto this population,
which is mainly Orthodox.
And the Reformation and Counter-Reformation
are gonna go through all kinds of gymnastics.
And the elite families are gonna,
they're first gonna go Protestant,
and then they're gonna go Catholic.
And it's all very interesting.
But at the end of the day, what happens is that
after about three generations of this,
you're going to have a top layer
of the Ukrainian population, generally the richest nobles.
The people who also own a lot of land and a lot of serfs,
they're gonna be Roman Catholic,
and they're also gonna be the same people
who are speaking Polish, right?
So that's the second thing which happens.
There's a new religious question.
And then the final thing which is going to happen,
which I've already suggested, is the social question.
Suddenly, Poles can own land in Ukraine.
So if you're an ambitious Polish noble
with maybe not enough land, you go east, right?
And you go east with European land management practices,
and you go east with your
almost certainly Jewish manager, right, and his family,
and you go off and you colonize and you make money.
And then the local Ukrainians who see what you were doing,
the local Ukrainian nobles,
they immediately copy what you're doing.
They also insert their peasants.
They also take a surplus.
They also sell it up to the Vistula River into Europe
and the wider world if they can.
And so the result of this is that you have
suddenly a population which is ever less free,
which enserfed, which is bound to the land.
And you have a noble class, which is small.
So I said in Poland as a whole,
10% of the population is noble, yes.
In some places, more.
Mazovia, it's like 25%, right?
So basically in Mazovia, if you're not a noble,
you have some explaining to do.
But, in Ukraine, 1%, 2%, okay?
So 1%, 2% of the population owns the land,
controls much of the rest of the population,
largely speaks Polish, and is largely Roman Catholic.
And that whole transformation takes place very quickly.
Three generations from about 1569 to the 1640s.
That's the Polish connection.
So, on the one side Polish connection,
very beautiful, right?
The Polish connection means variety.
The Polish connection means the Renaissance.
The Polish connection means a whole lot
of really interesting theological disputes.
The Polish connection means that the Ukrainian clerics
start their own academies and use Greek,
force themselves to learn Greek, which they'd been,
you know, lazy about for the previous six centuries.
But now they do it and they learn Latin,
and they learn Polish, and they learn French.
And you know, and they become some most interesting debaters
because they have a lot, frankly, they have a lot to handle.
They have to handle the Reformation
and the Counter-Reformation.
They also have to handle after 1596,
something called the Union of Brest,
which is an attempt to bring the Catholic
and the Orthodox churches together.
They have a lot to talk about,
and they learn how to do it, right?
The Polish connection means the Baroque.
It means fabulous architecture, right?
The Saint Sophia, as it stands today in Kyiv
is not the same one, which was built sadly
in the 11th century.
It's a kind of Baroque reconstruction,
and it's very beautiful.
And there are lots of churches in Ukraine
that are very beautiful, but they're in a kind
of Orthodox Baroque style, right?
So the, the Polish connection is very interesting.
It's very beautiful.
It's also hugely polarizing because it puts a small number
of people with one language and one religion,
and who have property rights against a much larger group
of people who have none of those three people,
which leads us to the Cassocks.
So, the Cassocks are free people
who manage to escape this system.
They escape the system in which either you
are a noble or a serf, right?
That's the Polish system.
They escape that system by going into the steppe, right,
into the steppe into what's now the southeast of Ukraine.
They have their headquarters and what they call the Sich
in the middle of the Dniepr River, they farm,
they fish, and they raid.
They raid the Crimean Khanate,
which we're gonna talk about.
Sometimes they even try to raid Istanbul.
And they survive by being out of reach.
They are at the fringes though of the Polish system,
and they understand the Polish system,
and many of them are educated by some of them anyway,
like Bohdan Khmelnytsky, they're educated by Jesuits, right?
They know the Polish system
and they have the idea of rights, very important idea.
They have the idea of rights.
They have the idea that if we were nobles,
we would have rights, right?
And the Cossacks wanna be in the Polish system,
but they're not allowed into the Polish system
because the existing Polish nobility
won't let them into the Polish system.
So there's a compromise, which is struck,
which is called being a registered Cossack.
So, there was a list of a few thousand Cossacks
who had some kind of status in the Polish state,
and then the rest of them were called unregistered Cossacks,
and they had no kind of status in the Polish state.
Every time Poland wanted to fight a war,
the Cossacks suddenly became very important.
And this, by the way, was the period
when the Poles were extraordinarily successful
on the battlefield, late 16th century,
early 17th century, when they were defeating the Ottomans
and they were defeating the Russians.
In the early 17th century circa 1620,
Poland is bigger than it ever will be,
ever will be before or again.
And that's when the Cossacks
are essentially serving as infantry.
And the Polish nobility is serving as cavalry.
And they fight extraordinarily well together.
It's not a combination you would wish
to face on the battlefield.
But in 1648, this all breaks up.
And you've heard some about this already.
The underlying reasons are what I talked about,
the social, religious, and linguistic differences.
The precipitating reason has
to do with the Cossacks themselves
and whether or not Cossacks
are part of the Polish state or not.
In particular, this guy whose name I probably forget
to write down, write down Khmelnytsky Bohdan.
He has a claim which has to do with his wife and property.
And he's unable to get his claim through the Polish courts.
And at least, in legend, the king laughs at him,
you know, and he naturally thinks, if I were a Polish noble,
I would have access to the Polish courts.
And he doesn't, and so he does what you do
when you don't have access to the law,
which is that he rebels.
But he rebels at a time, this is the 1640s,
at a time when the Cossacks were all gathered anyway
on the field for what was going
to be a war against the Ottoman Empire.
And instead of fighting against the Ottoman Empire,
Khmelnytsky rouses them to fight against the Poles.
This happens at a time when the Polish king dies,
which means that there's a while when the Cossacks
have a great deal of success on the battlefield
fighting whom?
This is important.
Fighting generally the Polish speaking Roman Catholic,
Ukrainian nobility, right?
This is largely a, this is not how it
is in the Ukrainian textbooks,
but this is largely a Ukrainian-Ukrainian Civil War.
At least at the beginning.
It's the Cossacks against the Ukrainized,
the Polandized Roman Catholic
Polish-speaking local Ukrainian nobility,
until the Polish army eventually shows up
and turns the tide.
When the Polish army shows up and turns the tide,
we have a very fateful moment.
And the very fateful moment is that the Cossacks
have to seek an ally.
Up until about that time, their ally had
been the Crimean Tatars, the Crimean Khanate.
As of 1654, the Crimean Khanate has withdrawn,
the Cossacks are losing to the Polish state.
And so they need an ally.
And for an ally, they find this fairly exotic
and unknown to them state,
which we've talked about a little bit.
And we'll talk about more
in the next lecture, which is Muscovy.
And after that, everything changes, thanks.
