- Okay, greetings
everybody, happy Tuesday. You have an exam, not this Thursday, but the one after that. It will be a 50 minute exam in this space. You will have blue books. Very exciting. The TFs and I are gonna
remember to get blue books. And if you have an
accommodation for this exam, please make sure that
your TF knows about it between now and then, so we can make sure that everyone is set up the way they need to be set up. The format will be very simple. There'll be a shorter essay. There'll be a longer essay. There'll probably be some
IDs, maybe some dates. But nothing very confusing. Okay, any questions about the
practical side of this class? The exam? Sections? Everything's good? I was just waiting to see
how long it would take for you guys to nod. I was like letting the blank stares go by, waiting for you to realize you had to nod. Okay, good. What we're gonna try to do today is bring the Polish factor into our class. And this is a very important thing to do because without the
Polish factor, no Ukraine, no Ukraine as it exists today. I hope by now you've gotten
used to the idea that nations are not vertical constructions,
which were born a long time, and then continue continuously
over the same territory in the boring way that it's presented to you in your school textbooks. I hope you've gotten used to the idea that nations are a result of
encounters of larger units and things bouncing off each other, and unexpected reactions
and counterreactions. We've already worked through how at the basis of Ukrainian history, we have this encounter between the Franks and the Byzantines, with the Vikings kind of
sliding from one to the other. Without that encounter, no Ukraine. We've then worked through
how in the 13th century there was the progress of the
Teutonic Knights from the West, the Mongols from the East,
and in that encounter, Lithuania ends up controlling most of what had been the territories of Rus. Again, without that encounter, no Ukraine as we understand it. We're now moving into another encounter, the encounter between
Lithuania and Poland. And in this encounter
between Lithuania and Poland, Ukraine, for the first
time begins to emerge as something like a distinct entity. So at the end of this lecture, it should be pretty clear that
there will be the emergence of some distinct Ukrainian
political features, which are recognizable up to the present. Now, I'm gonna give you just
a few things very abstractly before I get into the historical part. We need Poland for a lot of reasons, but very briefly, like telegraphically, the things that are going to
come in from the Polish side have to do with the West. They have to do with the Franks, the Holy Roman Empire,
Western Christianity, right? Like in a way, when
Poland enters the story, it's like a delayed, you
know, six centuries delayed, but it's delayed
encounter with the Franks, the Frankish version of Europe, with the Western Christian
version of Europe, because Poland, as you'll remember, converts to not Eastern,
but Western Christianity. So from Poland, we are
going to get Catholicism, an encounter with Catholicism,
with Roman Catholicism. We're also going to get
the emergence of something called Greek Catholicism, which still exists in Ukraine today. From Poland we are going
to get the Polish language and a Polish version of the Renaissance. And from Poland, we're going
to get the idea of a republic. It is a very important
idea, a very ambiguous idea. A republic means a state,
which is for the public, which sounds wonderful. Republic, res publica,
rzeczpospolita in Polish, respublika, if you insist in Ukrainian. It means the common matter, right? But it means the public,
the public matter. But who is the public? Is the tricky question
for republics, you know, right down to and including the republic in which we are inhabiting,
which we are inhabiting today. So, if the republic is a state, which is not for just a
king, not just for a monarch, but it's for a public, who's the public? Who's in and who's out? That political question is
posed very powerfully in Poland. As we're gonna see, it's gonna
be posed vis-a-vis Ukraine. And in some sense, an attempt to answer that question by the Cossacks is where a clear national history, or at least anticolonial
history of Ukraine begins. So Poland has a structure, and this is my very
last preliminary remark, and then we're gonna dive in. Poland has a structure which
is different from Muscovy. So we're gonna see these points. We're gonna see the contact between Poland and Muscovy
over and over again. But if you think of Muscovy as being founded as a post-Mongol state with a very centralized
vertical type of regime, Poland is something else. Poland is a horizontal
regime in which the nobles are much more important than the monarch, in which the nobles have
rights, unlike in Muscovy, in which the nobles
rights increase over time. And in which by the end of this lecture, actually around the middle, the nobles are actually
selecting the monarch rather than the other way around. In Muscovy, the monarch
selects the nobles. In Poland, the the nobles
select the monarch. And that's a very, very
different kind of setup. And with this notion of a
republic and the notion of nobles who belong to the republic
comes the idea of rights. Again, not rights for everyone, but rights for the people who
belong to the noble estate. That's a Polish notion. We're gonna see how it emerges over time. But again, you have to see the difference between that and Muscovy where the notion that anyone has rights is
really not present at all until much, much, much later. And the Cassocks, the Ukrainian Cassocks are gonna emerge in this story, and who we saw a bit
of in the last lecture, the Ukrainian Cassocks
are somewhere in between. The Ukrainian Cassocks are
going to get their idea, some ideas about rights from
the contact with Poland. And the Cassocks in some
way are going to want to, they're gonna be a group that wants to get inside this system in order to enjoy the rights of
being inside the system, but are not going to be able to do so, but are going to be able to rebel. And that's where we're going to end, okay. So let's, so, for the purposes of, so you get the method, right? This is a class about Ukraine, but there is no way to do national history by just doing national history, right? If you try to tell, so you
might have noticed this, like you go to a party
and you meet a new person, and what do you do? You talk about yourself
the whole time, right? And when you talk about your
yourself the whole time, what happens? The other person falls in
love with you instantly and everything goes great, right? So, national history is like that. You can't just say, oh, there's just me,
me, me, me, me, right? If you just say Ukraine,
Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, I might get a lot of
like thumbs up, you know, from like certain Ukrainian
nationalists or whatever. But, you can't make sense of yourself without other people, right? And you can't make sense of
yourself without listening, and you can't make sense
of who you really are without understanding what
influences are coming in from where and what circumstances. So if we're gonna get to Ukraine, but if we're gonna understand the Ukraine of the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, we really have to fundamentally understand the Polish system. So we're gonna work on the Polish system or the Polish-Lithuanian system, okay. So, the first thing to know about Poland, where I just left off, the
rise of the noble estate, very important historical
difference from Muscovy and from other countries
like France, for example. The rise of the noble estate. The noble estate is in Poland, first of all, very big,
about 10% of the population, which means that by the
time the noble estate has a parliament and can vote, more people in Poland can vote
than in any other country. So it's a more representative
system than any other country until British parliamentary
reform in the 19th century. More people can vote in
Poland than anywhere else. 10% by early modern
standards is a huge number to participate in politics, okay. So it's very large. By the 15th century, the
membership has been stabilized. So all of these groups that are like, that are very selective, you know, you know what I'm talking about. You're at Yale, like all
these selective groups, you know, that you can't
get in all those groups. So all these groups at one
time were very open, right? Like, so the trick of it,
like all the things which used to be which are now exclusive
were once inclusive, maybe not all, okay? But you get the basic idea. Historically, there's
often a period where you can join something and
then that group decides, okay, no one can join anymore. The nobility in Poland
is an example of that. So in the 15th century, the nobility in Poland had
managed to define who it was. The nobility is gonna pass
on from father to son, no one else is going to join. Membership is stabilized. And the nobility has by the
15th century at the latest, a sense of a common identity in Poland. Now, what happens in the Polish system is that the power of the nobility only ever ratchets upwards. It only ever goes upwards
until the 18th century when they have a constitution
and they break it. And they have a very interesting moment of political thought, which
goes on for a few years. And then the Russians
come and it's all over. If this were a Polish history class, we'd spent a lot of time on that. I just spent 15 seconds. So, but for now, what we need to know is that the power of the
nobility ratchets upward. And there are logics to this. One logic is that the Grand
Dukes of Lithuania, okay? So, oh yeah, the essence
of the Polish system is that they have a
Lithuanian monarch, right? You remember that, right? They have a Lithuanian
monarch Jogaila or Jagiello, from 1385 until until 1572. So for almost two full centuries, they are governed by a
Lithuanian dynasty, right? So the, the greatest, or at least the most interesting
period of Polish history is when they had Lithuanian monarchs. This is very important
for our class, right? Because it's because there's
a Lithuanian connection for Poland that there's a
Ukrainian connection for Poland. Because when Lithuania
and Poland come together, Lithuania controls most
of what is today Ukraine. So, it's through the monarch, it's through Jagiello and his descendants, descendants, descendants
for almost 200 years that Ukraine and Poland
are in the same state. It's through the body
of the Lithuanian ruler, but the Lithuanian Grand Duke, in order to become the Polish king had to make promises
to the nobility, okay? And so every time, I'm
simplifying a little bit that basically every time
the Lithuanian ruler dies, the Lithuanian ruler then has
to go to the Polish nobility. They make tours, actually. They travel from castle to castle. It's not you imagine because of, you know, you imagine that the king has a big castle and everyone comes to him. That's a little bit later. These were actually itinerant monarchs. They would, you know, you'd
travel from place to place. You'd go like seasonally,
you'd hunt with this person, you'd fish with this person,
and that's what you would do. You travel the entire
time if you were king. It's kind of interesting. And so they would have to campaign to become kings of Poland. And what do you do? What do you promise people? Well, you say things like, okay, if I agree to give you a privilege in exchange for taxes. So there are no regular taxes. Now think about how the
state's gonna operate. There are no regular taxes. Every time a tax is
levied on the nobility, the monarch has to give them something. But the nobility has a sense of its own interests and is smart. And unlike the monarch who's kind of a, it's in a one-off situation, the nobility is thinking long term. And so what do you trade the taxes for? You trade them for rights. You say, okay, we'll
pay taxes as a one-off, but in exchange, we are gonna get rights and these rights last forever. And they're gonna last
forever because we're gonna have pieces of paper with beautiful cursive and wax, right? Okay, that's not really
why, but they did have that. But, you see the notion, you
see the logic here, right? And so those rights then
only accumulate over time. And so then there's another
logic to this, okay? The other logic to this
besides election is that there are a few very powerful families, most of them, Lithuanian
or Ukrainian, actually. A few powerful nobles
who are called magnates, M-A-G-N-A-T-E, magnates. Magnateria was the Polish
word for this group. That if you think oligarchy
today, you won't be far off. So, and the king would be
in many ways less powerful than these most powerful nobles who would tend to own
hundreds of thousands of acres and have tens of thousands of serfs and be able to raise private armies of their own when they wanted to. And so, if you're the king, you need to counterbalance
the force of these magnates, of these great nobles. And so what do you do? Again, you give rights to
the nobility as a whole. You try to bring the lesser nobility, the middle nobility over to your side. And so in order to do
that, you give them rights. So some of these rights as
they accumulate over time, are listed on your sheet. There's the Czerwinsk Privilege of 1422, which is about property
rights, very familiar concept. And it's a big concept, right? Property rights is a very important thing. Again, remember the difference in Muscovy. In Muscovy, if you die, I can just decide that your property is
gonna go to somebody else. I mean, you don't even have to die, but you don't have to do
me the courtesy of dying. I can just decide. But if you die, you'll
only own the property in a contingent way. Whereas in 1422, the Polish nobility is already arranged for something, which it looks very much like
property rights at Czerwinsk. 1430, they get the right that they cannot be imprisoned for no reason. Again, you might be
thinking, or you might not be thinking depending
on where you come from, what your background is. That doesn't seem like a big deal, but that's a very, very big deal. In the English tradition
that will be known later as habeas corpus, that you can't just imprison somebody without giving a reason. Again, the difference between
this and Muscovy is stark. So these basic rights
that you can have property and that your body can't
just be put behind bars for no reason, that
establishes a fundamental kind of political, let's
call it, dignity, okay. So, and then a third thing which happens, and this is under Casimir the Jagiellon. I think I listed these
characters on your sheet. Casimir the Jagiellon ruled in the middle end of the 15th century. He encouraged the lower nobility to create local parliaments. Very big deal. Because when you talk
about how this is something which is cool about the
early modern period. When you talk about how
there's like democracy or assemblies, you have
to look very carefully to see what's meant by this. Because very often, and the Cossacks are a good example of this, very often when you say, okay,
there was popular approval, there was voting, there was an assembly, what's really meant is like,
one guy gets to stand up on a chair or at the top of a
palace, which is even cooler, and like, shout out what's gonna happen. And then ideally with a spear, you know, and then everyone else says, yeah, right? And so like, in this form
of democracy, you're like, your role is reduced to saying, yeah! You don't have to do that. Actually, you know, definitely
don't do that actually, 'cause like, we'll all
regret it later if you do. But, so acclimation is one
form of participation, right? And traditionally, the king and
the royal council in Poland, in the capital, which
at the time was Krakow, they would announce a
decision and then there would be like a lot of shaking
of spears and shouting. And that would be approval, right? But under Casimir the Jagiellonian,
the idea was that you can, you as the nobility can organize yourself into local parliaments,
which were called Sejmikis or dietines in English. Very awkward word, diet sounds
like a regimen of eating. But a diet is another
name for a parliament. And then the diminutive of a diet, a little diet is a dietine, okay? You definitely learned
something today, right? A dietine, so if you wanna
tell your friends, like, I'm just going on diet, only on Thursdays, you can call it dietine. And they'll be like,
wow, what's a dietine? And you can say, well, my
History of Ukraine class, I learned that under
Casimir the Jagiellon, the minor Polish nobility was
encouraged to organize itself into local assemblies,
which were called dietines. Okay, now you know, you'll never forget. So, but the, no, I don't plan these jokes. So, but this is important
because it's moving towards representation, right? Not just acclimation, but representation. And these dietines then
elect representatives who go to the central diet or in Polish, very important word in Polish, Lithuanian too, also
exist at Ukrainian, Sejm, that's the name of the parliament, the lower house of the
parliament, the Sejm. And so if, you know, you
guys were all minor nobles in a certain region, you could elect one of you to go to the, so then you actually do have something which is like representative democracy. And that's a step so then you
can discuss your interests over the course of the year. You send your representative
and you actually get to vote. The voting still had to be unanimous, which we'll talk about maybe later, that can pose a problem, as the European Union sometimes notices. But, you had a vote,
you actually had a vote. You were, you were represented, okay. In foreign policy, three
questions for Poland. Very quickly, I just want you
to know about these things. Mazovia, Mazovia is the
central district of Poland. It's where the current
capital of Poland, Warsaw is. Warsaw is not the historic
capital of Poland. The historic capital of Poland is Krakow. Warsaw becomes the capital
of Poland after 1569. Krakow is the capital
of Poland, historically. Mazovia is only added the Poland in 1526. So, the Dukes of Mazovia die out and Mazovia becomes
part of Poland in 1526. Okay. just so you know. Second thing I need you to know, and we'll return to these
guys in a couple of lectures, the Habsburgs. There's a very important
central European family called the Habsburgs
who are going to emerge and they're going to be in
competition with the Poles for, you know, only about half a millennium. And they are going to, in
general be making alliances with the Russians or later, with the Prussians against Poland. And as a result of this rivalry, we get these two very interesting
moments that define Poland as an East European and not
a Central European country. The first is very early,
we already talked about it, when the, the Polish king
Jadwiga marries Jagiello. Jadwiga's a she, she marries Jagiello instead of marrying a Habsburg. We talked about that
a couple lectures ago. Because Jadwiga marries Jagiello instead of marrying a Habsburg, Poland then becomes an East
European country, right? Poland and Lithuania together instead of Poland and the
Habsburg are together. The second moment like
this is 1515 and 1526, the early 16th century,
when as part of an attempt to make peace with the Habsburgs, there is a complicated marriage deal, which I have to spend
basically a whole lecture explaining in my other class. And I'm not gonna do that now, I'm just gonna say
complicated marriage deal. The result of which is that a
Pole dies in a battle in 1526. And this is something you
never wanna have happen. His brother-in-law then
inherits all of his claims. And these include the claims
to Bohemia and Hungary, which from 1526 onward are at least theoretically part
of the Habsburg domain. So that's the next part of
Poland becoming an East European rather than a Central
European power, okay. The third little thing in
foreign affairs that again, I just need you to note because it's gonna become important later, before we can get to,
you know, Angela Merkel, and you know, Willy Brandt, and Hitler, and the Second Reich, and the unification of Germany
and all of these nice things, we have to get to Prussia. Prussia is the bit, the little tiny bit, the little tiny German state originally, which eventually will grow and expand and unite Germany in January of 1871. Prussia at this time in the 16th century is a a little tiny state, which
Poland recognizes in 1563. And Poland accepts a family
called the Hohenzollerns. I didn't write that down. The Hohenzollerns will
be allowed to govern. That family is then going
to be the princes of Prussia then the kings of Prussia, and
then eventually they're going to be the rulers of Germany. It's under them that Germany
is going to be unified. So I just mention this because later on, Prussia is gonna take advantage of moments of Polish weakness to
become more important to declare itself a kingdom, declare itself independent of Poland, and so on and so on and so on, until later in the 18th century, Prussia will take part
in partitioning Poland, and then Prussia will
become a great power. It will become Germany and so on. Okay, so that's Poland in domestic and in foreign policy, very briefly. What about the relationship
between Poland and Lithuania? This is also very important. When Poland and Lithuania come together, it raises the question
of what Lithuania is and how Lithuania is
different from Poland. On the one side, Lithuanian nobles take something from Poland,
which is the idea of rights, a pretty important thing to take. So the Polish noble clans adopt, join themselves with
Lithuanian noble families. And the Lithuanian noble
families take the idea that they have rights. Up until that point,
they had not had rights. But at the same time, Lithuania
remained a distinct state in the sense that you had
to be a Lithuanian to serve in office under the
Grand Duke of Lithuania. And here's an important one, which we have to remember
for the Cossacks later on. In order to own land in Lithuania, you had to be a Lithuanian. So, and remember Lithuania
at the time I'm talking about means not Lithuania, today's
Belaya Rus, all the way down into most of what's today's Ukraine. So in order to own land in those places, you had to be Lithuanian, okay. So the encounter between
Poland and Lithuania is kind of a two way thing. A Lithuanian family is ruling
Poland for almost 200 years. Fine. The Lithuanians preserve the court of the Grand Duke in Vilnius and they have their own administration, they have their own
language of law, which is, I'm gonna be so happy
if you guys know this. Chancery Slavonic, but you
took the last class, right? I'm outing you, okay. Chancery Slavonic. So, this would be a great
exam question, by the way. The Chancery Slavonic comes from where? Cyril and Methodius trying to convert the Moravians, failing, their successors, taking
the language to Bulgaria, that language coming to Kyiv
as the language of religion. Kyivan Rus taking that language and turning it into a
language of politics and law. After the fall of Kyiv to the Mongols, that language migrates to north Vilnius. And so in this grand
circle, right, which lasts, you know, eight centuries or so, by the time the Lithuanian statutes are written in the 16th century, there are three statutes of Lithuania. And they are there in part to distinguish Lithuanian
law from Polish law. They're written in Chancery Slavonic, so the point is, this is an
inheritance from Kyiv, right? This is an inheritance from Rus. So, things are going both
ways, but in general, the high culture is
spreading from west to east. So people in Poland are
not learning Lithuanian, but people, nobles in Lithuania are learning the Polish language. And this is a time in which
the Polish language is very, is flowering thanks to the Renaissance and is also a powerful
language of disputation, thanks to the Reformation. So the Polish language
becomes the language of the literate people in
the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which includes, again,
Belaya Rus and Ukraine. By about, as far as we can tell, by about 1640 most serious discussions in what's now Ukraine among theologians, educated people were taking
place in the Polish language. Okay, so this brings us to
the attitude towards Moscow. So in Lithuania, the
attitude towards Moscow was necessarily different
than in Poland, why? Because Lithuania was a
direct neighbor of Moscow. The Lithuanians were
more or less constantly fighting wars with
Moscow, the Lithuanians, most of them were Orthodox, and
very often they were related to people on the other side. And the Lithuanians, until the time, many Lithuanians at least until the time of Ivan the Terrible had the idea that we can make a deal with the Muscovites, right? The Poles might not be involved. We can make some kind of separate
deal with the Muscovites. When this ends and when
Poland and the Lithuania are brought together is
with Ivan the Terrible and the Livonian wars. I think I mentioned this
a couple of lectures ago. It's a very interesting thing
to think about right now. When Russia is fighting a war in Europe, which has had this surprising consequence of bringing European powers together. And everyone is making
historical analogies. Is this like the first World War? Is it like the second World War? You know, is it like 1917? Is it like the Russian Revolution? But, one analogy, which
people aren't making a lot, but which you guys are
gonna be able to make and I'm sure you will,
like, at your next party when you're talking about yourself. I wanna tell you all about me. I know about the 1560s. In the Livonian Wars, that's
when Ivan the Terrible, as you'll remember, that's
when he overreaches, right? He has that fateful thing that you don't wanna
do, which is overreach. And the problem with overreaching
is that you never know, you never know until you've done and then until it's too late. Like that's the tragedy of overreach. Like, should I talk about myself for five minutes or 10 minutes? Oh no, it should have been five minutes! So he overreaches in the Livonian Wars, and this has the consequence of bringing Lithuania and Poland together. So we're now gonna tell this story not from the Muscovite point of view, but from the Lithuanian
Polish point of view. The Livonian Wars were
the great opportunity for probably the greatest
Polish King, who was Zygmunt II. Sigismund II, Zygmunt II, who ruled technically from
1520 when he was crowned as a boy until 1572. So Zigmunt II Grand Duke of
Lithuania, king of Poland, he is the big winner in the Livonian Wars, whereas Ivan is the big loser. So Livonia, you'll remember. it sounds like a fairy tale name, right? Livonia, it's basically
Latvia Estonia today. The Livonian state is the successor of the Teutonic state in the Baltic. Livonia exists as a German-speaking state because of the Teutonic Knights. These are Baltic territories,
which they do seize, where the Lithuanians don't stop them, they then convert to
Protestantism as many Germans did. We have to remember, I know it's tough, but like while I'm talking, the Renaissance and the
Reformation are taking place, you know, not in the background,
but also in the foreground. So they convert to Protestantism and the Grandmaster of the Livonian Order asks for Polish protection. And then they also ask in the
north for Swedish protection, which leads to this very complicated war. But from the Polish point of view, what happens is that this brings Poland and Lithuania together. And the Livonian Wars,
the Lithuanian nobles understand we have to fight Muscovy. We're not gonna be making a deal. And their Grand Duke, also
the Polish king Zygmunt II goes to the Polish parliament and says, we need to fight a war,
we need to raise taxes. It's an interesting
moment because he appears, this is a very kind of
modern political moment. He appears in Polish
dress, right, in order. So how you dress and
what language you speak, very important. He appears in Polish
dress to make the speech about how we have to go to the field. We have to raise taxes. Oh, what is, okay, this
one is really hard. All right, although I
just dropped a keyword. What did he normally wear? What did he normally wear, do you think? - [Student] Lithuanian clothes. - Okay, 200 years ago, that was right. Like that's where they,
when Jagiello was showed up, he was like, he was wearing fur and like unmistakably Lithuanian. What was cool in the 1560s? Yeah. - [Student] Well, in
Polish, but basically it's something they got as a contribution from Turks and the Macedonians. - Okay. - [Student] In Turkish fashion. - All right, in combat, that's true. And we'll talk about that. He was wearing Italianate
Renaissance costume. That's what he normally wore. He normally wore Italian
Renaissance costume. That's what he, you know, puffy hat. That's what he normally wore. So on, exception because this
was the Renaissance, right? I realize we hadn't enough
time to get into all of this, but this was the Renaissance. This was the Renaissance. His mother was Italian, his
court was largely Italian. He normally wore it as
one did at the time, he normally looked Italian, okay? So with the Zygmunt II
dresses in Polish garb, calls parliament in order
to raise taxes, right? So, remember this is the
way it works back then. Parliament shows up. What are you gonna give me? We're gonna give you
some land after a war. What else are you gonna give me? Okay, I'm gonna give you a bunch of land that was also part of the deal. Zygmunt II gave the
nobles a bunch of land. What else are you gonna give me? Okay, we'll let you elect the kings. Promise, you can elect the next king, because theoretically they've been electing kings for a long time. But somehow it always worked out that even though there was an election, it was always a Jagiello. It was like one Jagiello
after another for, so, you know, for 200 years. Okay, fine, next time you
can really elect the king. And that actually the
next time they really did elect the king,
which is another chapter which we're gonna get to. So Zygmunt II, this is like
a wonderful story of like, of a king achieving,
overcoming his own youth. In his youth, he had like
various Lithuanian romances, and there was a Lithuanian prince who thought he had 'em in his back pocket because of these romances,
but no, Zygmunt II gathers the Lithuanians and the Poles, goes to the battlefield, they win the Livonian Wars, basically. Poland expands northward into Livonia, and Lithuania takes
part, Poland takes part. And in trying to then establish
a new political equilibrium, Zygmunt II does the thing which begins to define what Ukraine is going to be. And that is that Zygmunt II in something called the Union of Lublin,
1569 recreates Poland-Lithuania, not as a personal union. So for 200 years, it's
been a personal union. You're the Grand Duke and
you're the Polish King. Now it's gonna be a constitutional union. So by definition, the leader of Poland and the leader of Lithuania, you're gonna be the same
person constitutionally, okay? And that person's gonna be elected, great. And we're gonna call it a republic. It's the Polish-Lithuanian
Republic, Rzeczpospolita. But, and here's the but, which is crucial to Ukrainian history. Zygmunt II in the Union of Lublin, and it seems like a footnote to the Poles and also sometimes the Lithuanians, but for the Ukrainians
is not a footnote at all. In the Union of Lublin, it's still a Polish Lithuanian state. But the border between
Poland and Lithuania is changed drastically, such that now the Ukrainian part is part of the Polish crown, and Lithuania is much
smaller than it was before. Why is this so important? This is hugely important
because it means that suddenly, no longer is there
Lithuanian law in Ukraine, but now there is Polish law in Ukraine. So just to give you a very
important central example. Now, Polish nobles can own
land in Ukraine, which is, it's like the opening of
the frontier, basically. In fact, it is like an
opening in the frontier because these are rich
lands, agricultural lands. And again, I know this stuff
is happening in the background and is tough, but this is
also the age of discovery, the age of exploration. It's the first globalization,
the 16th century, and all that grain that you can raise by enserfing Ukrainian peasants, you can then sell on the world market and get gold and silver. So suddenly, it's like a globalization, which involves the Ukrainian steppe. Okay, and so anyway, but I wanna be clear, there's now a new line
which didn't exist before. There was never a line. If you imagine the northern
border of Ukraine now, Ukrainian Belaya Rus, that
line was never there before. As of 1569, there is
something like that line. As of 1569, the notions
of Ukraine and Belaya Rus start to make sense. That old territory,
which is all part of Rus, now will follow two distinct routes. The Belaya Russian part will
have more to do with Lithuania. The Ukrainian part will
have more to do with Poland, dramatically to do with Poland. Okay, what's all the drama? What's all the drama? Number one, the drama is language. The drama is language. In the Renaissance, there's something called
the language question, which is fateful for,
you know, many of us. The written language question is, do you keep using Latin or
do you take the vernacular and you turn the vernacular into a language of
literature and education? So up until that time, it was normal for universities to be using Latin, and it was normal to write, even novels, correspondence in Latin. But in the language question,
which was answered by Dante, and the answer was, make up
Italian, create in Italian, which is, it sounds easy
when I say it that way, 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.
