Batrix2070
RON/PLC was a wonderful country.
This is due to two facts. The first obvious one, the Cossack rebellion never got there, it was stopped on the border of Galicia and Ukraine.
The second, less obvious fact is that Galicia, or more precisely Eastern Lesser Poland as the Poles called this region, was longer a part of the Crown with no autonomy of its own, instead, apart from a few old privileges granted to them by Casimir III, it was subject to the law of the Crown, or more precisely Lesser Poland, and the effect of this was that the nobility there had long since been Polonized, or were loyal to the Crown because they were treated as part of the Crown nobility itself, which meant that Polish relations prevailed there.
What caused this? Namely, the absence of the annoying magnates who acted as feudal princes. In Ruthenia it was different, there inter-elite relations were not egalitarian as in the Crown, which meant that the Ruthenia provinces had relative autonomy from the Crown and governed themselves rather independently. Hence a division began to emerge between the richer Halich-Volyn Ruthnenia and the poorer Kievan Ruthenia.
Therefore, when Polishness began to cross that invisible border on its own and the great magnates a.k.a. Ruthenian princes got the green light to colonize east of the Dnieper, tensions began to form as the Ruthenian nobility began to divide into Poles (let's conventionally call them Ukrainians) and Cossacks (let's conventionally call them Malorussians).
The Cossack rebels, consisting precisely of largely middle-class nobility, for the rich had been bribed by the Crown and the poor could say little, just wanted to make autonomy vis-à-vis the Crown, an equal part of the Commonwealth, or simply an independent country, and the territories depicted are those in which this idea was gaining solid support. Why? In the simplest terms, they wanted to put a dam on the Polishness that was spontaneously spreading.
