The history of the Ukrainian Cossacks has three distinct aspects: their struggle against the
Tatars and the
Turks in the
steppe and on the
Black Sea; their participation in the struggle of the Ukrainian people against socioeconomic and national-religious oppression by the Polish magnates; and their role in the building of an
autonomous Ukrainian state. The important political role played by the Ukrainian Cossacks in the history of their nation distinguishes them from the Russian Cossacks.
First period (1550–1648). In the mid-16th century the Cossack structure in
the Zaporizhia was created in the process of the steppe settlers' struggle against
Tatar raids. The Tatar raids forced the army of the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania to build fortresses in the southern region of Ukraine (in
Kaniv, Cherkasy,
Vinnytsia, Khmilnyk,
Bratslav, Bar, and elsewhere). A second category of Cossacks, known as
town Cossacks (
horodovi kozaky), was formed for the defense of the towns. They were organized by the local officials (in
Cherkasy by
Ostafii Dashkevych and S. Polozovych; in Khmilnyk by
Przecław Lanckoroński; in
Bar by
Bernard Pretwicz) as well as Samuel Zborowski,
Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky (Baida), Prince B. Ruzhynsky, and others. These leaders, together with the town and
Zaporozhian Cossacks, went far into the
steppes in pursuit of the
Tatars in order to rescue captives or to attack Tatar and
Turkish coastal towns. In time the Cossacks acquired military strength and experience as well as prestige in their own society and fame throughout Europe, which at that time was resisting the Turkish onslaught.
Another important factor in the growth of the Ukrainian Cossacks was the socioeconomic changes taking place in the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th century. Because of the favorable conditions for selling
grain in Western Europe, the Polish
nobility introduced the manorial system of agriculture (see
Filvarok). This substantially worsened the lot of the
peasantry: their land allotments were decreased, their freedom of movement was limited, and
corvée was expanded. The nobility and the Polish government attempted to impose Catholicism and Polonization on the Ukrainian population. The basic form of opposition by the peasants, and to some extent by the
burghers, was flight. The fugitive
peasants and
townspeople fled to the sparsely populated
steppe, established settlements, received, for a specified period (up to 30 years), the right to a tax-exempt settlement (
sloboda), and called themselves free men—Cossacks. But legal ownership of the expanses of land in the
Dnipro River region was obtained from the Polish kings by the nobility, who created large latifundia and tried to impose
feudal dependency on the local population—both peasants and Cossacks. By the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century this pressure of the magnates and nobility led to bloody conflicts in which the Cossacks fought against the Polish
landowners and the Polish government: the uprisings of
Kryshtof Kosynsky (1591–3),
Severyn Nalyvaiko (1594–6),
Hryhorii Loboda (1596), Marko Zhmailo (1625),
Taras Fedorovych (1630),
Ivan Sulyma (1635),
Pavlo Pavliuk and Dmytro Hunia (1637), and
Yakiv Ostrianyn and Karpo Skydan (1638), all of them brutally suppressed by the
Poles.