IN THE EPICENTER OF THE CONFLICT BETWEEN CHRISTIAN AND MUSLIM CIVILIZATIONS

In March 1669, a tchaouche (messenger) came to Chyhyryn with a letter in which the Sultan agreed to take Cossack Ukraine under its protection. Hetman Petro Doroshenko and his entourage, who had achieved their coveted protectorate of Turkey during the Council of Korsun, were in no hurry to swear allegiance to the Sultan.

Under the concluded treaty, the Porte promised to form a separate political entity, sanjak or province, for any lands won back from Poland and Muscovy (naturally, with the help of Cossack sabers). A similar status was held by Moldavia, Walachia, and Transylvania, all of which were treated as separate self-contained, but not sovereign, territories ruled by laws of their own and even having the right to international relations with other states. It was rather simple to win this kind of status in the Ottoman Empire: all one had to do was recognize the suzereignty of the Sublime Porte and become in name only an Islamic country.

Hetman Doroshenko in turn pledged under the treaty to take part in the wars Turkey waged against Christian states. Although Ukraine was proclaimed a land of Islam, the Hetman managed to have an item entered in the treaty, prohibiting Turks from building mosques on Cossack territory.

Accepting the Ottoman protectorate meant that the Cossack Revolution Bohdan Khmelnytsky had begun was no longer a purely ethnic one, i.e., not so much pursuing Ukrainian ethnic objectives (such as local independence, etc.) as in solving the supraethnic problems of Eastern Christian Europe. Ukraine found itself in the very whirlpool of the confrontation between the Muslim and Christian worlds.

All Europe was preparing for a war to be unleashed, according to Istanbul espionage reports, by the Ottoman Empire on the Continent. Turkish Sultan Mohammed IV decided to personally lead his forces against Poland. After ending hostilities against Venice, he sent an army of 200,000 across the Dnister in the summer of 1672 and laid siege to the strategically important fortress Kamyanets-Podilsky. He was joined there by a Tatar horde of 50,000 and 12,000 Cossacks led by Doroshenko. After the fortress defenders had surrendered, the Sultan with his Tatar and Cossack vassals solemnly marched into the town, forcing the Polish troops commanded by the Royal Hetman Jan Sobieski to retreat westward.

Newly elected Polish King Michal Wisznowiecki, weak son of the famous warrior Jarema Wiszniowiecki, was compelled to conclude a truce with Turkey. But in the fall of 1673 Sobieski routed the Turkish troops near Chotyn. Only the king’s sudden death kept him from capitalizing on his success, and next year the Ottomans ousted the Poles from Moldavia.

The next year saw the outbreak of a new war on Ukrainian soil between Sultan Mohammed IV and the new Polish King Jan Sobieski. Left to his own devices, the so-called Turkish Hetman Petro Doroshenko gave up the hetman’s mace and was deported to Moscow. He was given there the village of Yaropolche as a fief and was even the voyevoda (military commandant — Ed.) of faraway Viatka for some time.

On October 1676, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth signed a peace treaty with Turkey, thus untying the Sultan’s hands in his war against the Orthodox world.

At first Mohammed IV requested the Constantinople patriarch to persuade Doroshenko to change his mind, but the patriarch advised to consider a more worthy, in his opinion, candidacy of Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s son, Yuri, for the vacant post of Ukrainian sanjak-bey. The latter had resided in Instanbul at a Greek monastery and even risen to the rank of archimandrite since 1673, when Doroshenko handed him over to the Turks.

In 1677 on the grand vizier’s demand Hetman Yuri Khmelnytsky signed an appeal to the Cossacks to abide by the treaty with Turkey; then the patriarch defrocked the archimandrite and the Sultan bestowed on him the title of hetman (to be more exact, sanjak emir) and prince of Sarmatia.

Early that August the Orthodox world saw the onslaught of an Ottoman army of 100,000 led by Ibrahim Pasha with the new prince of Sarmatia in his retinue. The Turks besieged the Cossack capital of Chyhyryn, only to retreat in the fall, incurring heavy casualties. Yet a year later a new and larger army of 200,000 led by Grand Vizier Kara-Mustafa again emerged by the walls of Chyhyryn and finally captured the town after a stormy assault. True, the Turks failed to hold Chyhyryn for long and again retreated beyond the Dnister territories they controlled in the fall. But before doing so the grand vizier ordered him men to raze to the ground the Cossack capital of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Cossack chronicler Samiylo Velychko wrote, “Ukraine on the other bank, the Little Russian and Cossack Ukraine finally fell... as once did the great ancient city of Babylon... All the Cossacks perished or allowed themselves to be conquered due to their rivalry.”

In spite of two unsuccessful expeditions bound for Chyhyryn, the Ottoman Porte did not abandon its intentions to attack the Orthodox world. But those events forced the Christian states to join efforts and coordinate their actions to deal with the Muslim threat.

In 1679 Moscow received Polish envoys who brought an old proposal: to set aside all previous differences between the Catholics and the Orthodox and to form an alliance of Christian rulers against the Muslim world. The Muscovite government declined to give a clear answer, which immediately became known to the Sultan who offered the Tsardom of Muscovy an armistice in order to concentrate all forces against the Catholic world. Soon after, on January 13, 1681, Moscow and Turkey concluded a treaty in Bakhchisarai, which provided for a twenty year truce and drew the border between them, i.e., the Orthodox and Muslim worlds, along the Dnipro.

The Turks launched their last great expedition against the Catholic world and laid siege to Vienna, capital of the Habsburg Empire, in 1683. This time also Vienna put up a heroic resistance. Meanwhile, Leopold II finally managed to form the anti-Turkish Holy League, in which Austria, Poland-Lithuania, and the Venetian Republic played key roles. Polish King Jan Sobieski was entrusted command of the allied forces. On September 12, 1683, the great Turkish-Tatar army was defeated and siege of Vienna was lifted, burying forever the long cherished Ottoman dream to subjugate the Christian world. It was perhaps under the impression of the Polish king’s brilliant victory that Moscow understood it was time to join the alliance of Christian states. Following negotiations, Poland- Lithuania and Muscovy signed the so-called Treaty on Eternal Peace on May 2, 1686, in Moscow. Both states undertook not to make a separate peace with Turkey. Moscow agreed to join the Holy League and promised, pursuant to this alliance, to mount an exhibition against the Muslim Crimea.

After peace treaties were signed with Turkey in 1683, with Poland in 1686, and the Turks were routed near Vienna, Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, saw a certain stabilization of the military and political situation.

Next came an epoch of a Christian onslaught on the Muslim world. But the Ukrainians no longer participated in these clashes as an autonomous force.