During the 1660s and 1670s, the Ottoman Empire reached the peak of its territorial expansion with unprecedented military invasions of Ukraine and Habsburg Hungary, dramatic developments that greatly disrupted the balance of power in east-central Europe. From the perspective of the Russian, Polish, and Austrian courts—as well as other major European states such as France, England, and Venice—the Ottomans stood poised to dominate, if not take over, territories that had traditionally been regarded beyond the Porte's horizon. For Ukrainians and Hungarians, however, Ottoman military advances generated hope for protection against Moscow, Warsaw, and Vienna; there was an expectation that Istanbul's tutelage would offer an unparalleled opportunity for liberation and that one might find a more benevolent ruler in the sultan.Footnote 1 In Habsburg Hungary, such hope emanated through all layers of society and grew persistently throughout the entire period under discussion. In Ukraine this hope was strong for much of the period, but it clearly became weaker after two devastating Ottoman invasions in 1672 and 1674 and probably had largely evaporated by the end of the 1670s.
My goal here is to elucidate the political, religious, and social dimensions of pro-Ottoman hopes in Ukraine and Habsburg Hungary. Although my focus is on secular elites, that is, Cossack leaders and Hungarian nobles, my intention is to give a sense of the social pervasiveness of such hopes. Of course, sources are much more readily available about nobles and Cossack leaders, but I have given as much attention as possible to churchmen (both hierarchs and local clergy) and ordinary people (such as peasants, townsmen, rank-and-file Cossacks and soldiers). The purpose is not to delve deeply into primary documents and archives but to compare Hungarian and Ukrainian engagements with the Ottomans. Such a comparison reveals the divergent and overlapping aspects of a pervasive but largely forgotten historical reality, that is, the quest of many Orthodox and Protestant Europeans to consider a Muslim alternative to the Christian empires that surrounded them.
I use the terms Ukrainian and Hungarian not as ethnic markers but as collective references to the inhabitants of Ukraine and Habsburg Hungary. Ukrainian designates East Slavic speakers practicing the Greek Eastern Orthodox rite. Most Ukrainians spoke a language called Ruthenian (rus'kyi, ruthenus), a precursor of the modern Ukrainian literary language. But Ukraine's population also included speakers of early modern Russian (russkii, russicus/rossicus) and Belarusian. Hungarian similarly is used here as an omnibus category for speakers of Hungarian, Slovak, and German. This use corresponds to seventeenth-century standard practice; German and Slovak speakers had no problem identifying themselves as Hungarian (hungarus, magyar). The population of Habsburg Hungary was overwhelmingly Protestant; German and Slovak speakers were Lutheran; and Hungarian speakers were predominantly Calvinist except for a minority of Lutherans.
Ukraine and Habsburg Hungary were anomalies among the better-known state formations of seventeenth-century Europe. Ukraine (Ukraina, Ucraina) had only just gained its independence from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. During the Bohdan Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648–1649), Ukrainian Cossacks, nobles, merchants, and peasants had overthrown Polish Catholic rule and established the first independent Ukrainian state in history. This state, known as the Hetmanate (hetmanshchyna), was a Cossack republic led by military officers and subdivided into autonomous hosts or military districts governed by regiments. Early modern Ukraine comprised a territory of approximately 250,000 square miles stretching on the left (eastern) and right (western) banks of the Dnipro River; the historical territories of Left- and Right-Bank Ukraine form the core area of today's Ukraine.Footnote 2
Habsburg Hungary or Royal Hungary (Regnum Hungariae, Magyar Királyság), as Hungarian nobles called it, was only a rump state, a small remnant of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary, most of which had been annexed by the Ottomans after the battle of Mohacs (1526). Its territory stretched like a half-moon from the Adriatic coast in today's Croatia to the eastern parts of modern-day Slovakia. Unlike Ukraine, Habsburg Hungary was not independent but ruled by the Viennese imperial court, which had turned the Hungarian borderlands into a heavily fortified buffer against the Ottoman Empire. But traditions of Hungarian independence were very much alive among Habsburg Hungary's mostly Protestant nobles, who unlike Austrian and Bohemian elites had been able to preserve significant religious and political autonomies. This was largely the result of estate revolts that commenced in the first decade of the seventeenth century and culminated in the mid-1640s.Footnote 3
The spirit of independence in Ukraine and Habsburg Hungary owed much to the geographic proximity of the Ottoman Empire. The success of the Khmelnytsky Uprising was achieved with the help of Muslim Tatar troops from the Khanate of Crimea, an Ottoman satellite state, and to secure Ukraine's sovereignty Cossack Hetman Khmelnytsky initiated diplomatic overtures with Istanbul in 1649. Yet, help and protection did not materialize because the Ottomans were engaged in a major war with Venice in the Mediterranean. The Crimean Tatars also turned out to be an unreliable ally. To ensure the survival of independent Ukraine, Khmelnytsky finally turned to the Russian tsar whom he mistakenly saw as guarantor of Eastern Orthodox religion against Catholic Poland. The result was the 1654 Pereiaslav Treaty, which Ukrainian elites conceived as a temporary alliance for “Ukraine to free herself entirely from Poland.” But the Kremlin “interpreted [the treaty] differently” and at once began “to turn this protectorate into incorporation.” The year 1654 signifies the beginning of Russian imperialism in Ukraine; it greatly contributed to driving Ukrainians into the arms of the Ottomans during the 1660s.Footnote 4
The situation in Habsburg Hungary was similar. The Hungarian estate revolts were spearheaded by the princes of Transylvania, a semi-independent vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. Particularly noteworthy are the anti-Habsburg campaigns led by the princes István Bocskai (1604–1606) and Gábor Bethlen (1619–1622). Both princes were offered the Hungarian crown by the sultan. But more importantly, the Porte promised sultanic charters of protection (adhnames) to the Hungarian estates in 1604–1605 and 1621–1622. The collective memory of Ottoman benevolence played an important role in the mobilization of the last great Hungarian uprising triggered by the invasion of Transylvanian Prince György II Rákóczi in 1644–1645.Footnote 5 And it was not forgotten during the period under discussion in this article. In the early 1660s, there was again talk among Hungarian Protestant nobles about driving the Habsburgs from Hungary with the help of “the powerful nation” (az hatalmas nemzet), that is, the Ottomans. They would protect Hungarian Protestants “against the yoke of the [Austrian] Antichrist.”Footnote 6
There was good reason for the revival of pro-Ottoman hopes. After almost sixty years of peace, the Ottomans were getting militarily involved in east-central Europe; the August 1660 seizure of Várad (Oradea) Fortress, a strategic border castle in western Transylvania, was a clear turning point. Suddenly, “the gate to the Christian world” was open, as European observers put it.Footnote 7 The explanation for this development is beyond the purview of this article but suffice it to mention the most important factor: the restoration of Ottoman military, fiscal, and political power due to drastic reforms by the new Köprülü dynasty of grand viziers (1656–1683). Not since the age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (1520–1566) had the Porte been able to field such formidable military forces. The Ottoman resurgence coincided with the recovery of the Habsburg Empire from the Thirty Years’ War and renewed Habsburg efforts to establish control over its Hungarian lands; it also coincided with the Russian expansion into Ukraine and the Kremlin's stunning rapprochement with Poland after more than 200 years of warfare. The goal was clear: destroy independent Ukraine and divide up its territory. Thus, starting in the early 1660s, the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian Empires—the latter just emerging—got involved in a great game over political and military supremacy in east-central Europe.Footnote 8 As I will show, the Ottomans were winning in this conflict of empires by expanding into Habsburg Hungary and Ukraine.
Historiography and Sources
Eastern European historians have done much more than central European historians to explore the impact of Ottoman imperial expansion during the period under discussion in this article. Ukrainian scholars, in particular, have embraced the expansion as a positive development facilitating Ukraine's independence, which could exist only as long as the Ottoman Empire remained strong. By contrast, Hungarian and Habsburg scholars have almost completely ignored—or downplayed—the Ottoman advance into the heartlands of Habsburg Hungary. They commonly assume that the Ottoman Empire was in decline and therefore no longer a serious competitor for the Habsburg Empire. According to the standard view, Hungarians were eagerly awaiting their liberation from the “Turkish yoke” by the Habsburgs. Not surprisingly, one finds an endless stream of studies about the siege of Vienna (1683) and the ensuing reconquest of Ottoman-occupied Hungary (often described as a “war of liberation” [Befreiungskrieg]). This interpretative paradigm can be traced back to the Europe-wide triumphalism over Ottoman defeats during the Great Turkish War (1683–1699).Footnote 9
Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish historians have focused almost entirely on the figure of Hetman Petro Doroshenko (1665–1676), who—imitating his predecessor, Khmelnytsky—reached out to the Ottomans to secure Ukraine's independence. Suffice it to mention the twentieth-century historians Dmytro Doroshenko, Mykola Krykun, and Jan Perdenia.Footnote 10 Most recently, Taras Chukhlib, Victor Ostapchuk, and Tetiana Grygorieva have placed Doroshenko's quest for Ottoman help in the larger context of his concomitant initiatives to reach out to Poles, Russians, and Prussians.Footnote 11 One must also mention the pioneering work of Czech historian Jan Rypka, who shed light on the Ottoman Porte's view of Doroshenko.Footnote 12 The principal drawback of this scholarship remains its narrow focus on top-level diplomacy. To learn more about the attitudes of Ukrainian society, particularly ordinary Ukrainians, one must turn to the—now largely neglected—Russian-language works of the nineteenth-century historians Mykola Kostomarov and Sergei Solov'ev. These pioneering scholars delved deeply into the Russian imperial archives.Footnote 13
Only two historians have written about the Ottoman-Hungarian entanglement in Habsburg Hungary. Almost 150 years ago, Gyula Pauler dug deeply in the Budapest and Vienna archives and showed that Habsburg Hungary was in fact drifting away from Vienna toward Istanbul. Most importantly, he discovered that two Ottoman-sponsored uprisings led by Protestant nobles engulfed Habsburg Hungary in the early 1670s. Pauler's focus was exclusively on the noble elite.Footnote 14 László Benczédi rediscovered and continued Pauler's work during the 1970s. He was particularly interested in the connections between the Habsburg Counter-Reformation and the pro-Ottoman sentiments of Lutheran and Calvinist nobles. Benczédi (who died in 1987) blamed the silence of Hungarian historiography on moralizing attitudes: “Binary juxtapositions such as Transylvania vs. Vienna, East vs. West … good vs. bad Hungarians, patriots vs. traitors, smart vs. retarded Hungarians, champions vs. enemies of the Christendom … have formed the coordinates … of viewing [the Turkish orientation in Hungarian history]. We act properly as historians only if, instead of making preconceived historicizing judgements, we discover the facts and their historical contexts.”Footnote 15
To overcome the elite-centeredness of established scholarship and the lingering anti-Ottoman bias of Hungarian scholars, in particular, we need to take a careful look at the primary sources. The largely unexplored riches of the Hungarian, Austrian, Russian, and Polish archives offer remarkable opportunities. For Ukraine one finds troves of letters (by elites and churchmen), appeals to Istanbul, deliberations of Cossack assemblies, petitions to Moscow and Warsaw, as well as reports of Russian emissaries, military officers, and informants. The interrogations of Ukrainian captives—including peasants and ordinary Cossacks—by the Russian authorities are particularly valuable as they reveal popular attitudes.Footnote 16 On Habsburg Hungary one also finds a wealth of diverse sources: letters (by nobles and pastors), petitions, dispatches by Habsburg military commanders and officials, reports by Habsburg spies, and diplomatic correspondence with the Porte. Most revealing are the protocols of Habsburg investigations that collected abundant testimonies from captured Hungarian rebels. Such sources allow unique insights into a wide range of societal attitudes toward the Ottomans.Footnote 17
Ukraine and Habsburg Hungary at the Crossroads
It is hardly an exaggeration to state that both Ukraine and Habsburg Hungary were on the verge of being crushed by outside imperial powers during the 1660s. Ukraine was effectively split into two halves along the Dnipro River: the eastern half, known to contemporaries as the Left-Bank, had been occupied by the Russian army and languished under the newly introduced voevoda system, heavy taxation, billeting, and brutal interferences in traditional Cossack freedoms. In addition, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church faced significant pressures to merge with the Russian Orthodox Church and give up its autonomy (that is, the independence of the Metropolitanate of Kyiv came under threat). The western half of Ukraine, commonly called the Right-Bank, faced similar administrative, fiscal, and military interventions by the Polish government, but the most sensitive issue was religious persecution: the forced imposition of the Union of Brest (with Rome), which included the confiscation of Orthodox church properties and the brutal expulsion of Orthodox clergy. Many petitions directed to the Russian and Polish courts document widespread misery and growing discontent.Footnote 18 This discontent turned into outrage after the formal division of Ukraine between Russia and Poland in the Andrusovo Treaty of January 1667.Footnote 19
Habsburg Hungary was perhaps even worse off because it had just become the target of three devastating Ottoman invasions that had resulted in the subjugation of Transylvania (1660), traditionally a close ally of Hungarian elites against the Habsburgs, and, more importantly, the fragmentation of the Habsburg border defense system. The last of these invasions in 1663 led to the Ottoman seizure of the key border castle of Neuhäusl, the linchpin of a fortified line built to protect Vienna, Lower Austria, and Moravia. Renamed Uyvar the fortress became the seat of the Ottoman Empire's latest vilayet, that is, the conquest effectively put Ottoman troops at the gates of Vienna.Footnote 20 It is wrong to assume—as Hungarian and Habsburg historians frequently do—that the Ottomans were eventually defeated in August 1664 at the Battle of St. Gotthard. The Imperial War Archive tells a very different story: shortly after the battle, the Habsburg emperor, not the sultan, sued for peace. In fact, the Ottoman army was regrouping and getting ready for another attack while Habsburg troops were exhausted, poorly equipped, and losing their morale.Footnote 21
The 1664 Vasvar Peace Treaty was dictated by the Ottoman Grand Vizier Ahmed Köprülü (1661–1676): none of the conquered Habsburg fortresses were returned and Ottoman troops were not forced to withdraw. In fact, for the next twenty years, Ottoman troops operated in Habsburg Hungary just as freely as Habsburg troops: essentially the Hungarian lands of the Habsburg Empire became a trans-Ottoman space. It was an astounding spectacle; villages and towns all the way up to the Austrian, Moravian, and Polish borders paid tribute to the sultan. Ottoman troops were imposing tribute even in the vicinity of Kassa (Kaschau, Košice), the military and administrative capital of eastern Habsburg Hungary. Habsburg tax collecting became increasingly difficult, if not impossible. Protests by the Aulic War Council, Habsburg diplomats, and Emperor Leopold I (1658–1705) were quickly dismissed by the Porte. The vizier of Buda even warned Vienna not to mess with “the Most Powerful and Most Valiant Emperor … of Greece, Persia, and Arabia who has gained heroic victories over all parts of the world.” This peculiar situation needs to be kept in mind to understand Hungarian attitudes toward the Ottomans.Footnote 22
What was the Habsburg court's response to this unprecedented erosion of control over its Hungarian province? First, the Aulic War Council initiated total militarization by pouring huge numbers of troops into territories still under Vienna's authority. The number of “German” and “Croat” soldiers increased dramatically, while many Hungarian soldiers—almost all of them Protestants—were demobilized or marginalized. Főispanok, the Lord Lieutenants of Hungarian counties, who used to have control of fortress keys, were forced to hand these keys over to German commanders. For the local population this meant endless billeting, pillaging, and many other impositions; countless towns and villages were reduced to poverty or depopulated. Mass migration to Ottoman territory set in; in June 1672 a dramatic scene played out in the Vienna Hofburg; more than 1,000 Hungarian peasants (who had walked long distances) were begging Emperor Leopold on their knees to protect them; otherwise, they would leave for Turkey.Footnote 23 The second Habsburg response was total Counter-Reformation: according to Emperor Leopold, Hungarians could not be trusted because the vast majority of them were Protestants; only a Catholic Habsburg Hungary could remain a reliable Bulwark of Christendom (Antemurale Christianitatis) and stop Islam from penetrating into the heart of Europe.Footnote 24 Considering the desperate situation the Habsburgs found themselves in, one can perhaps understand these harsh measures, but they were greatly counterproductive: instead of securing Hungarians’ loyalty, they drove them into the arms of the Ottomans whom they came to see as their saviors.
Thus, there was a very important difference between the geopolitical situations of Ukraine and Habsburg Hungary: during the 1660s Ukraine was not directly subject to Ottoman occupation or raids by Ottoman troops (not counting persistent raids by Crimean Tatars), while large parts of Habsburg Hungary most certainly were. Only a thorough study of the relevant tax registers (defterler) in the Ottoman archives will tell us how significant the Ottoman penetration actually was. But it is safe to say that Habsburg Hungary was quickly becoming an Ottoman trans-imperial space.Footnote 25
Elite Contacts with the Ottomans
There can be no doubt that Cossack leaders were more successful in garnering support in Istanbul. The Porte granted them berats and fermans, that is, sultanic appointment charters and edicts of protection that the Hungarians could only dream of.Footnote 26 Yet, Hungarian nobles tried very hard for more than fifteen years until they finally obtained such acts in 1682. According to Habsburg diplomatic reports, they regularly competed with Ukrainian emissaries for the Porte's attention. These Hungarian visitors were at least as successful, if not more successful, in procuring meetings with Grand Vizier Köprülü and leading Ottoman dignitaries.Footnote 27 Like the Ukrainians they had a regular presence at the Porte, but they had one significant advantage: they had strong allies in Transylvanian emissaries who helped make Hungarian lobbying at the Porte more continuous and intense than Ukrainian lobbying.Footnote 28 There was, of course, a good reason for this: the Porte's determination to fulfill the dream of Süleyman the Magnificent, that is, to defeat the Habsburgs and seize the Golden Apple (Vienna).Footnote 29 Habsburg spies who penetrated meetings with Hungarian nobles reported that Ukraine was only a temporary priority. For example, in April 1673—seven months into the first Ottoman invasion of Ukraine—the Vienna court learned that the Porte's intention was “none other than to end the Polish and Muscovite machinations [die Polnischen und Moscovitischen händl]” as soon as possible. The plan was to turn the Ottoman army around (wider umbzuwenden) and invade Habsburg Hungary. In short, the pacification of Ukraine would lead immediately to the next Habsburg-Ottoman war.Footnote 30 Many Hungarian nobles also were convinced of this; in fact, they strongly believed that their lobbying had been successful. Grand Vizier Köprülü himself had explicitly told them that the Porte's real intention was to liberate all of Hungary and seize Vienna. Sustained by a deep-seated disdain of the Habsburgs these nobles never lost trust in the Ottomans.Footnote 31
Of course, Ukrainians and Hungarians also considered alternatives to the Ottomans. Hetman Petro Doroshenko never stopped corresponding with the Polish Crown and the Kremlin (as well as their representatives). In fact, this correspondence was quite intense during the years 1666–1668 when Doroshenko's first contacts with the Porte occurred.Footnote 32 It became less so in the following years, only to resume in intensity during the years 1674–1675 (especially with Moscow).Footnote 33 In several letters the hetman expressed his willingness to become a Polish or Russian subject if the unbearable oppression inflicted by the Kremlin and the Warsaw court was rescinded. These letters powerfully evoke the hardships inflicted upon Ukrainians by the billeting of soldiers, administrative corruption, heavy taxation, the brutal imposition of the Union of Brest, persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox clergy, and efforts to abolish the autonomy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.Footnote 34 When these pleas remained without effect Doroshenko appealed to the elector of Brandenburg Prussia; he also appears to have written to the Habsburg court in Vienna.Footnote 35 Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Polish and Russian efforts to lure Doroshenko over to their sides remained unsuccessful. Doroshenko clearly trusted the Ottomans more than the Poles and Russians (although on occasion he referred to the tsar as the true defender of Orthodoxy).Footnote 36 In the end the Porte abandoned Doroshenko for the sake of peace with Poland and Russia in late 1675. Without Ottoman military support, the hetman had no choice but to switch his allegiance to the Kremlin.Footnote 37
The Porte's abandonment of Doroshenko went hand in hand with intensifying Ottoman military mobilizations along the Hungarian borders. Hungarian nobles finally saw the results of nearly a decade of appeals to Istanbul. In January 1676 longstanding plans for a decisive Ottoman campaign against the Habsburg Empire were activated.Footnote 38 Until then Hungarian nobles had to deal with constant uncertainty; everything depended on the Ottomans’ ability to pacify Ukraine. Like Ukrainian Cossacks they never gave up appealing to their worst enemy, that is, the Habsburg court: they demanded an end to the confiscation of Protestant churches, the expulsion of Lutheran and Calvinist clergy, the terror of the Habsburg soldatesca, and exorbitant war taxes. They also continuously asked for protection against Ottoman troops, which were roaming large parts of Habsburg Hungary unopposed.Footnote 39 When Vienna made no concessions, the Hungarians turned to France, Brandenburg Prussia, and Poland for help. And when the Counter-Reformation intensified in the early 1670s, they appealed to England, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands. They were not successful; at best foreign rulers expressed their sympathy or registered their concern in Vienna. The Dutch and Swedish ambassadors were the most energetic: they confronted the imperial court directly and wrote protest memoranda that circulated widely in Europe. The Elector of Brandenburg warned that Hungary would fall to the Ottomans if the Habsburgs continued their attack on Protestant religion. When nothing came of these foreign initiatives, Hungarian leaders put their hopes entirely in the Ottomans.Footnote 40
But it was not only despair and the absence of viable alternatives that brought Ukrainian and Hungarian elites into the Ottoman camp: there was a better feeling about the Ottomans; they appeared less threatening. Hungarians expressed this view in many letters, appeals, and testimonies.Footnote 41 But such sentiments were also strong in Ukraine. Suffice it to look at data from the year 1669 when the Ottoman protectorate over Ukraine was in fact established (after more than three years of back-and-forth communications).Footnote 42 A good example is the testimony of Doroshenko's scribe, who was close to the inner circle of the Cossack leadership. After falling into Russian captivity in spring 1669, he described the mood of the men around Doroshenko: they wanted to escape “the Christian monarchs who are merciless toward the Cossacks; they are building fortresses against us and do not allow us who are people capable in war to move about freely … The Turkish Emperor does not hold his lands by means of fortresses and still rules over almost the entire universe. He pays his troops well and feeds them: the Turks know better than others how one must rule over lands and people.”Footnote 43 The frequent failure of the Polish and Russian treasury to pay soldiers was indeed largely responsible for many of the hardships of Ukrainians of all ranks. Plunder and pillage were the norm; the same holds true for Habsburg Hungary, where hordes of unpaid soldiers tyrannized the countryside.Footnote 44
The belief that the Ottomans were more benevolent rulers also helps to explain the draft of a treaty proposal with the Ottoman Empire by the General Cossack Assembly (Rada) of Korsun in March 1669.Footnote 45 The draft called on the sultan “to order [your] troops … to come and help the [hetman] … to liberate the Ukrainian people [russkii narod] from those who hold them in slavery….” In turn, the Cossacks would “stand against all enemies of His Majesty, the sultan.…” But neither the hetman's authority nor Cossack freedoms should be reduced; there should be no tributes, no billeting, no Turkish garrisons, no mosques, no interference in Orthodox religion, no interference in the jurisdiction of the starshyna,Footnote 46 and no meddling with foreign policy. Yet, the emphasis was on liberation and unification: under the protection of Sultan Mehmed IV (1648–1687), Ukrainians would all live again in one unified state “and if those who recognize the Poles or Moscow … commit evil acts against [us] who stand under Turkish power [sostoiashchim pod turetskoiu vlastiiu] … we will resist them with force.”Footnote 47 The latter statement was directed against Doroshenko's Ukrainian rivals, that is, hetmans who had declared their loyalty to the Polish and Russian governments (such as Mikhailo Khanenko, Dem'ian Mnohohrishnyi, and Ivan Sirko). A unified Ukraine could be achieved only if these competitors were eliminated.Footnote 48
The treaty proposal received the following response from the sultan: “I have accepted you and all the people [under my protection] so that your land exists in peace and is not devastated by anyone. Petro Doroshenko must keep this oath of loyalty, not break his word, and serve me honestly. I will then stand up for him and the Host [the Hetmanate],Footnote 49 the starshyna and the common people [chern’], and all the towns and lands [of Ukraine] … I do not want any taxes, services, or gifts from you; I grant you all your freedoms and you will remain in them without any interference and with only one condition: when I need your troops you and your hetman must go where you are ordered…. I will defend you all and your land and take you all under my wings. I will stand by my word and not break it.” It is noteworthy that the sultan recognized Doroshenko as ruler of both Right- and Left-Bank; that is, he strongly supported the idea of Ukrainian unification.Footnote 50
One is struck by the frequency with which Hetman Petro Doroshenko received letters from the sultan, grand vizier, and pashas during the years 1666–1676. Some of these letters have been identified or published. We know that Doroshenko's rivals also received such letters, but by summer 1668 the Porte considered Doroshenko by far the most important Ukrainian leader.Footnote 51 In Habsburg Hungary the situation was different: there was not as yet a recognized leader who commanded authority over the various epicenters of the Hungarian anti-Habsburg movement. This was only the case when the magnate Imre Thököly became the Hungarian Doroshenko in the early 1680s. There were at least four different Hungarian diplomatic initiatives at the Porte: two of them originated in the western parts of Habsburg Hungary and Croatia (a Hungarian Crown land) and two others in eastern Habsburg Hungary; one of these was Calvinist, the other was Lutheran. Each of these initiatives represented extended networks of county nobles who often were connected by kinship and marriage.Footnote 52 The Lutheran faction, for example, was led by István Petrőczy, the uncle of the young Imre Thököly; Petrőczy repeatedly traveled in the Ottoman world. When he was not at the Porte, he lobbied Grand Vizier Ahmed Köprülü's favorites, that is, his fellow Albanian clients (such as Vizier Ibrahim Pasha of Buda and Prince Ghica of Wallachia); they had the grand vizier's ear and facilitated Petrőczy's access to top Ottoman power brokers (including the grand vizier himself). The multiplicity of Hungarian actors knocking at the Porte's doors was confusing to Habsburg spies and foreign diplomats. We know that the Porte played them out against one another, but in the end they all shared a common goal: a pan-Hungarian uprising that would overthrow Habsburg rule all the way from the Adriatic Sea to the Transylvanian borders in the east.Footnote 53
There can be little doubt that the Calvinist faction was by far the most successful. It was represented by Pál Szepessy, a wealthy landowner, who commanded significant influence in Habsburg Hungary's easternmost Calvinist counties as well as in Transylvania. His close contacts in Transylvania included the Ottoman-appointed Prince Apafi and powerful pro-Ottoman magnates such as Mihály Teleki. These fervent Calvinists shared a deep concern about the ongoing destruction of Calvinist religion by Hungarian bishops who tyrannized villages and towns with Habsburg troops and Catholic thugs.Footnote 54 A crisis point was reached in June–July 1671, when the Habsburg emperor gave his full support to the eradication of Protestantism; the emperor's Turcophobe advisers had convinced him that all of Hungary would defect to the Ottomans if Protestantism was not wiped out. It was hardly coincidental that Szepessy met for the first time with Grand Vizier Ahmed Köprülü in early July 1671.Footnote 55
Men like the Calvinist Pál Szepessy never gave up hope: he became a regular visitor at the Porte, often staying months at a time; his name appears again and again in the reports of Habsburg spies and residents. Szepessy had at least four meetings with the grand vizier and also spoke with the sultan, but unlike his Ukrainian counterparts he was unable to procure a sultanic charter or any other legal document.Footnote 56 Still, he always considered Ottoman rule the best option for Hungary. As he told Ahmed Köprülü in July 1671: “We would like to recognize the authority of more powerful and more gentle overlords than the Germans. They have gotten used to raging over the living, dead, and even our souls … May Europe recognize Your generous magnanimity [nagylelkű nemességeteket] towards the suffering and may other nations hold up Your example in front of their eyes because those who have suffered iniquities from others have found refuge with You and they are now in the habit of fleeing under Your wings.”Footnote 57
What was the impact of Hungarian and Ukrainian endeavors to procure Ottoman protection? In Ukraine the Korsun Rada and the sultan's positive response basically set the scene for two major Ottoman invasions in 1672 and 1674. Not so in Hungary, although it initially seemed that an Ottoman invasion was imminent. Pál Szepessy, for example, informed his compatriots in August 1671 that God had taken mercy on them and “the sun was about to rise.” “Please believe me,” he wrote,” that God will provide for a good outcome. Encourage people and tell everyone to get ready.”Footnote 58 But Szepessy did not know that Hetman Doroshenko had begun to bombard the Porte with desperate calls for help against a large Polish army. It was this army's invasion of Galicia and Podolia that likely prevented war in Hungary in summer 1671. This at least was the opinion of Vienna's Aulic War Council, which followed developments on the ground very carefully.Footnote 59 Ottoman troops finally broke into Poland in August 1672 and quickly raced from victory to victory. It is important to note that the pro-Ottoman hopes of Pál Szepessy and other nobles immediately revived. It was widely believed that the victorious Ottoman army would now cross the Carpathian Mountains and liberate the Hungarians from Habsburg rule once and for all.Footnote 60
Ottoman strategies in Habsburg Hungary were different from those in Ukraine. The key purpose was the systematic destabilization of Habsburg power. Yes, there was a military buildup along the borders; the pashas of Varad, Eger, and Uyvar kept their troops in a constant state of mobilization. The Imperial War Council in Vienna discussed the emergency at the borders continuously. And when it seemed that the Ottomans would actually strike in summer 1671, Emperor Leopold gave instructions to the Catholic clergy to pray for God's intercession to save the Habsburg monarchy.Footnote 61 But most of the Ottoman troops never moved: instead, the pashas supported the formation of Hungarian rebel forces on their territories. This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Hungarian situation vis-à-vis Ukraine: the Ottomans encouraged thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Hungarians who had either fled into Ottoman territory or lived in territory penetrated by Ottoman power to go to war against the Habsburgs. The result was a vicious border war and a spiral of anti-Habsburg rebellions. For example, when Ottoman troops were closing in on L'viv in September 1672—after demolishing Polish border defenses—Hungarian rebel forces supported by the troops of local pashas invaded the eastern provinces of Habsburg Hungary. They triggered a massive popular uprising that swept away Habsburg power. The frightened imperial court in Vienna breathed an audible sigh of relief when the Porte did not exploit its grandiose victory in Poland to intervene in Hungary. This allowed the Habsburgs to throw fresh armies against the Hungarian rebels. The resulting mass slaughter did not break Hungarian resistance; the remnants of the rebel army fled into the vilayets of Varad and Eger.Footnote 62
By comparison, there was an eagerness on the part of the Ottoman leadership to get involved in Ukraine. Why? One explanation was certainly Ottoman condescension toward Poland and Russia; they were not taken seriously as major powers while the Habsburgs most certainly were. For example, a May 1672 letter to Warsaw by Grand Vizier Köprülü expressed amazement that the Polish Crown considered Ukraine part of Poland: “God alone can be called the master over territories; this eternal ruler of the world has established the law that lands which are torn apart by internal conflict and lawlessness submit themselves only under the protection of the most majestic rulers. Thus, according to the will of Providence, the Cossack people sought refuge under the lordship of the House of Osman.” Köprülü followed up with an angry tirade denouncing the Polish Crown for brutalizing Ukraine. Nothing similar ever was sent to Vienna; if at all the Habsburg resident was summoned and lectured.Footnote 63 The sultan acted with similar arrogance: in late 1671 he threatened to hunt down the Polish army like prey.Footnote 64 And when Doroshenko told Köprülü in a meeting in Kamenets (Podolia) in October 1672 that he attributed the loss of Left-Bank Ukraine to the tsar's “huge army” (velikoe voisko) the grand vizier responded: don't worry about it; when we are done with the Polish king we will give you control over all of the Left-Bank and Kyiv.Footnote 65 This arrogant condescension toward Poland and Russia was also demonstrated in the treatment of Polish and Russian ambassadors at the Porte: they were repeatedly treated with disrespect, put under house arrest, and even physically abused.Footnote 66
Grand Vizier Köprülü understood better than his successor Kara Mustafa that going to war with the Habsburgs required a long-term strategy. The destabilization of Habsburg Hungary through cross-border raids and popular uprisings was a key part of it. But just as important was keeping Poland and Russia in check; this required defeating Poland and turning Right-Bank Ukraine into a buffer against Russia. Without stability on its eastern flank, the Ottoman Empire's campaign against Habsburg Hungary and Vienna was not conceivable. This explains why Köprülü was determined to avoid war with Russia; he tried to enlist the Swedes for diversionary attacks in Karelia and the Baltics, but when this failed he finally sacrificed Hetman Doroshenko. Unlike Kara Mustafa the grand vizier understood that the war in Ukraine had turned into a quagmire. The October 1676 armistice with Poland was the signal for war in Hungary; Hungarian pashas and thousands of armed rebels stood poised to invade. But Köprülü died less than a month later.Footnote 67 The rest is history: Kara Mustafa became Köprülü's successor and promptly started a devastating war with Russia that depleted the Ottoman Empire's resources and gave the Habsburg Empire time to prepare for the inevitable attack on Habsburg Hungary and Vienna.Footnote 68
Religion and Church
The religious dimensions of pro-Ottoman attitudes in Ukraine and Habsburg Hungary should not be underestimated. In a Christian world that was predominantly anti-Muslim, taking the Muslim side was not easy. Catholic and Orthodox Church hierarchs did not cease to vilify those who sided with the Ottomans. Turcophobe Hungarian bishops such as György Szelepcsényi, the primate of Hungary's Catholic Church, bombarded Emperor Leopold I with warnings about a Protestant-Muslim conspiracy. The future not just of Habsburg Hungary, but all of Christendom was at stake. Archbishop Lazar’ Baranovich of Chernihiv and Archimandrite Innokentii Gizel’ of the Kyivan Monastery of the Caves warned that the acceptance of a Muslim head for Orthodox Rus’ would be disastrous. The example of the Greeks “who are moaning under the Muslim yoke to this day” should be a deterrent. Baranovich warned Doroshenko that “you will have a sheep with a wolf's head; and the wolf … will strive to devour the orthodox sheep.”Footnote 69 Citing the anti-Muslim polemics of Ukrainian churchmen, historian Serhii Plokhii argued that “the Orthodox of Ukraine were consistently hostile toward Islam, and Cossack warfare against the ‘infidels,’ like their occasional alliances with them, could only effect a partial and temporary change in that attitude, not alter its essence.”Footnote 70
Yet, there is substantial evidence that Metropolitan Iosyf Tukal'skyi, the most important orthodox leader of Ukraine during the 1660s and 1670s, was not openly hostile to Islam. Rather he was the declared enemy of the Catholic Church. He had personally become the victim of persecution in his native White Russia, had been incarcerated by the Poles, and finally fled to Hetman Doroshenko who recognized him as the legitimate metropolitan of Kyiv (against Polish and Russian candidates).Footnote 71 Tukal'skyi arguably became Doroshenko's closest adviser and a staunch supporter of pro-Ottoman policies, especially after the sultan recognized his right to be the metropolitan of Kyiv in mid-1668.Footnote 72 He negotiated with Ottoman emissaries, blessed them, shared meals with them, and actively contributed to the draft of the above-mentioned Korsun Treaty with the Ottomans.Footnote 73 The pivotal role of Tukal'skyi in bringing about the Ottoman alliance was noted repeatedly by contemporary observers and Archimandrite Gizel’ suggested to the tsar (in early 1669) that he should follow the sultan's example and recognize Tukal'skyi as metropolitan of Kyiv: “Give him the metropolitan see in Kyiv and the endowments appropriate to his rank. Hopefully then the Cossacks will no longer waver and stop leaning towards unification with the Turks.”Footnote 74 It is worth noting that Doroshenko only turned away from the Ottomans after Tukal'skyi's death in August 1675.Footnote 75
Tukal'skyi's overriding passion was “to liberate the Church of God from its attackers, the godless liakhi” (as he told a Russian informant in December 1667 using a derogative term for Poles). He gave sermons in which he denounced the liakhi as “persecutors of the true faith” who were not trustworthy and raged against Ukrainians and White Russians (especially nobles) who had betrayed their native religion by recognizing the pope as their master.Footnote 76 He was also an avid defender of Ukrainian Orthodox independence from Moscow. When Doroshenko temporarily united Ukraine after a major anti-Russian uprising in early 1668, Tukal'skyi immediately launched a purge of Moscow-appointed clergy. He also decreed that prayers for the tsar should be substituted by prayers for Doroshenko. And he repeatedly rejected overtures by the tsar to recognize him rather than the sultan as the Ukrainian church's protector.Footnote 77
Clearly, Tukal'skyi had no love for Russians and Poles, but did he have any love for the Ottomans? One answer is certainly that he was a pragmatist: in late 1671, for example, he called for an Ottoman invasion to show Moscow and Warsaw who was really in charge in eastern Europe: “The sultan has so many troops that the liakhi and Moscow might as well give up.” And in September 1672 when Ottoman troops operated in the vicinity of L'viv, Tukal'skyi called on Doroshenko to steer them east instead to liberate Kyiv from the Russians.Footnote 78 But it was much more than cool calculation that brought Tukal'skyi into the Ottoman camp. He instructed Ukrainian clergy to pray for Sultan Mehmed IV, “the great, most glorious emperor, the great favorite of God, and the guardian of the Holy Sepulcher.” And even after Ottoman atrocities during the 1672 invasion had alienated many Ukrainians, he continued to promote the Ottoman alliance. For example, he had Cossack officers swear an oath of loyalty to the sultan (which he personally administered); and when the Ottomans stood poised for another invasion in 1673, he called on people not to be afraid including the townsmen of Kyiv who hesitated to open their gates.Footnote 79
What about other Ukrainian churchmen? There is good evidence that upper clergy supported Doroshenko at least until the Ottoman invasion of 1672: the archbishop of L'viv, for example, came out in his support shortly after the 1669 Korsun Rada; and in Kyiv—under Russian occupation—there was a network of influential monastic clergy who sympathized with Doroshenko's Turkish alliance. The linchpin of this network was the Monk Gedeon, the son of Bohdan Khmelnytsky.Footnote 80 In January 1668 Gedeon appeared at a Rada meeting in Chyhyryn standing next to Doroshenko; he called for an all-out war of liberation against both Russia and Poland and supported bringing in Tatar troops (at a time when Ottoman troops were not yet operating in Ukraine): “I will dig up all my father's treasures and pay the Tatars. Only let's no longer be under the rule of the Muscovite tsar and Polish king….” In Kyiv Gedeon was assisted by his mother, that is, Bohdan Khmelnytsky's widow: she lived in the Monastery of the Caves, and according to a Russian spy report from early 1668 the brethren of this and other Kyivan monasteries stood behind Doroshenko. The spy even questioned the loyalty of Archimandrite Innokentii Gizel’: “Be it known to you [in the Kremlin] that the archimandrite of the Monastery of the Caves and Tukal'skyi have great love for each other….” Perhaps a merciful letter by the tsar would cheer up (obveselit’) Gizel’ and keep him from joining Doroshenko.Footnote 81
That significant numbers of rank-and-file clergy also supported Tukal'skyi is indisputable. Hostile feelings toward Moscow and Warsaw were running deep. It was not just the horrors of the union with Rome but also the trauma of the Russian annexation of Smolensk and Polotsk in 1654. The Russian Patriarch Nikon's plenipotentiary, the bishop of Suzdal’, had “deprived the ecclesiastical estate of all rights and freedoms; he calls the [orthodox] clergy … without exception heretics.” The privileges and endowments granted to the Ukrainian clergy by “the throne of Constantinople, Prince Volodymyr and all the Princes and Lords of [Kyivan] Rus’” were in jeopardy.Footnote 82 A delegation of Kyivan clergy warned Moscow that any attack on their traditional liberties would generate “a schism [raskol] and significant revolt … They would rather die than accept a Muscovite metropolitan in Kyiv.”Footnote 83 Is it any wonder that Ukrainian parish priests welcomed Doroshenko as their liberator in 1668? According to a Russian spy, the monks of Kyiv loved Metropolitan Tukal'skyi; they wanted him, and not a Russian candidate, as their metropolitan. In 1670, the Russian-oriented Hetman Dem'ian Mnohohrishnyi had to give strict orders to the Orthodox clergy not to obey Tukal'skyi. Among Tukal'skyi's strongest supporters were priests and archpriests who acted as his liaison to the patriarch of Constantinople. Among others they procured a patriarchal letter that excommunicated Mnohohrishnyi; the letter circulated widely in Left-Bank Ukraine and undermined the hetman's authority.Footnote 84
In Habsburg Hungary the attempt to destroy Protestant churches generated very similar discontent among the Lutheran and Calvinist clergy. There is good evidence that quite a number of them reached out directly to the Ottomans for protection. Most important among these pro-Turkish clergymen was István Czeglédy, the Calvinist pastor of Kassa, which was the center of imperial power in eastern Habsburg Hungary. In late 1669 upon hearing of the Ottoman conquest of the Venetian fortress of Candia (Crete)—a glorious victory that had been attempted in vain for decades—Czeglédy gave public sermons in which he celebrated the Ottoman success as a sign of divine intervention. He promised large crowds that “the victorious arms of the Turks” would soon arrive “to break the chains of their servitude, restore them to their freedom, and establish them under a quiet and tranquil dominion.” Shortly afterward Czeglédy was on his way to Transylvania to meet with Transylvanian and Turkish dignitaries: he asked for protection against the Habsburg army, which was systematically confiscating Protestant churches. In September 1670 Czeglédy was arrested with several other Calvinist pastors for having stirred up a pro-Turkish uprising. The truth is that Czeglédy—like Tukal'skyi—was close to the inner circle of powerful leaders, mostly Calvinist lords, who had been responsible for organizing the uprising (which collapsed when it became clear that Turkish troops massing on the borders had no intention of invading).Footnote 85
For the Habsburg court, the Protestant clergy were the most dangerous pro-Turkish activists in Habsburg Hungary. Both Lutheran and Calvinist pastors were repeatedly accused of sermons and prayers invoking God's help for the Ottoman army. The Aulic War Council instructed General Paris von Spankau, the commander in chief, to incarcerate these dangerous clerics. In March 1674 hundreds of pastors were rounded up and collectively accused of being rebels and Turkish agents; many languished in prisons, at least forty-two were sold as galley slaves in the Mediterranean.Footnote 86 One of the most popular pastors was the apocalyptical preacher Miklós Drábik, who praised the Turks as instruments of divine punishment. A Turkish invasion would annihilate the Austrian beast, end the reign of the Roman Antichrist, and give Hungarian lords the opportunity to exterminate all Catholics on their estates. After this cathartic event, he prophesied, a divine light would enter the darkness of the world and the Turks would convert to Christianity and become Protestants. Drábik was condemned to death and executed on July 16, 1671, a brutal episode that shocked Hungarian and European Protestant communities.Footnote 87
The autobiography of Georg Buchholtz, a Lutheran pastor, provides glimpses into the reasons for pro-Turkish attitudes among the Hungarian Protestant clergy. For Buchholtz, an ethnic German, Habsburg Hungary's tragedy was occupation by the “foreign Germans” (ausländische Deutsche). The German soldateska—whom Buchholtz described as godless cowards and pig knights (Schweinsritter)—did not dare to confront the Turks but instead led a war against the local population. Buchholtz's father was abducted, maltreated, and left to freeze to death in the middle of winter. When troops expelled Buchholtz from his community, he fled under the protection of Kaimakam Kara Ibrahim of Eger. To Buchholtz the Ottomans were the kinder masters whose friendliness—particularly toward children and women—he compared with the Habsburgs’ ruthless violence (Gewaltthetigkeit). This is perhaps surprising if one considers that Buchholtz presided over a congregation that had in the past been deeply traumatized by Turkish raids (a plaque in his church recalled a massacre and the abduction of women and children). Still, he opted for the Turkish side and was grateful not just for himself but for all the expelled Protestant pastors who survived Habsburg persecution under Ottoman protection.Footnote 88
The Popular Dimension
What were Ukrainian and Hungarian popular attitudes toward the Ottomans? This question can be addressed more easily in the Hungarian case since the Habsburg authorities gathered thousands of testimonies after the suppression of pro-Ottoman revolts.Footnote 89 For Ukraine similar inquisitorial records undoubtedly exist in the Russian archives (e.g., about the Left-Bank uprisings of 1668–1669).Footnote 90 The best sources we have to date are eyewitness accounts by Polish and Russian officials, diplomats, and spies. Not a few of these sources have a strong Turcophobic bias—a fact that also holds true for official reports and letters that reached Vienna from Habsburg Hungary.Footnote 91 To retrieve Ukrainian popular perceptions of the Ottomans, one needs to be careful not to absorb this bias. It is too easy to assume that the Ottoman presence in Ukraine was only destructive and that people got quickly disillusioned (if they were not hostile from the very beginning). This is certainly the view of the Eyewitness Chronicle (Litopys samovydtsia) which was written with a distinctive anti-Ottoman bias.Footnote 92 It is very important to look at different phases; clearly, pro-Ottoman attitudes were much more pronounced in 1668 than in 1675. In Habsburg Hungary, such a differentiation is not necessary: people never stopped looking to the Ottoman side of the border for liberation even though this hope was often less connected to the Ottomans themselves than to the Hungarian exiles who assembled formidable rebel forces on Ottoman territory.
Doroshenko claimed a popular mandate to the very end. In a letter to Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich (1645–1676) from January 1676, he maintained that he had no choice but to follow the wishes of the Cossacks around him: “When we received charters from the tsar, from Poland and from Turkey at [Rada] meetings the question arose: Who should be our sovereign, and everyone agreed that we should remain with the Turkish sultan. If I had dared to resist, they would have chosen another hetman and stayed with the pagans anyways.”Footnote 93 Doroshenko's claim was undoubtedly opportunistic; he was after all pleading for the tsar's mercy. He wrote at a time when he had lost most of his support in Ukrainian society. Ottoman sources made similarly broad assertions about Doroshenko's popularity. A synopsis of Ottoman chronicle accounts compiled by Dmitrii Kantemir in the 1730s maintained the following: “Doroshenko announced to all of his people that he had concluded a treaty with Sultan Mehmed IV. The people received this news with approval and affection [liubov'iu].”Footnote 94
Although one must remain skeptical about such assertions, there can be little doubt that Doroshenko did in fact enjoy significant support among ordinary Ukrainians after entering an alliance with the Ottomans. The news that the sultan would honor all Cossack freedoms (vol'nosti), safeguard Orthodox religion, and protect Ukraine against its enemies was well received.Footnote 95 There were three principal reasons: first, the brutal Russian occupation of Left-Bank Ukraine; second, the trauma of the union with Rome imposed by the Polish crown; and finally, the lack of protection against the raids and slaving expeditions of Crimean Tatars.
There is plenty of evidence that Ukrainian peasants, townsmen, and rank-and-file Cossacks abhorred the Russian occupation. Billeting, extortion, murder, and other forms of violence were daily experiences for hundreds of thousands of people. But perhaps most painful was the arrest and abduction of their relatives; many had been taken into Russia and were languishing in prisons, Siberia, or the courts of boyars (as slaves [kholopy]). Desperate attempts to find and return these “disappeared” relatives are well documented. No wonder large parts of Left-Bank Ukraine were in an uproar and dangerous for Russian officials; Doroshenko only had to lift his hand to unleash a mob that lynched the Kremlin-anointed Hetman Ivan Briukhovetskii.Footnote 96 A report addressed to the Kremlin from early 1668 described the situation in the town of Pereiaslav as follows: “There is not one reliable and good person in town—no matter from which social rank. They are all great rebels and spies [lazutchiki], you cannot believe a single word they are saying. There is only one way to bring them back to the true path: send three thousand soldiers: then they will be afraid and become loyal.…” Similarly, General Grigorii Romodanovskii, the Russian commander in chief, warned in March 1669 that all of Ukraine would go over to Doroshenko without a massive military presence. And Prince Afanasii Ordin-Nashchokin, the well-informed head of the Kremlin's Foreign Office, confirmed in April 1669 that Doroshenko had many supporters. In fact, there were many Doroshenkos (mnogo Doroshenkov) in Russian-occupied Ukraine.Footnote 97
The trauma of religious persecution was perhaps even more palatable. The desecration and burning of churches, the expulsion of Orthodoxy clergy, and the seizure of parishes and monasteries had left a deep imprint on the popular mind not just in the western parts of Ukraine but also in the East. Popular rumors that Kyiv and all of Ukraine would be turned over to the Catholic Poles gained a fever pitch in 1670 when Russian and Polish diplomats met to discuss Kyiv's future.Footnote 98 By contrast, the Kremlin's repeated warnings that Doroshenko was about to turn Kyiv over to the Muslim Turks do not seem to have had any discernible impact. Popular hatred of liakhi and moskaly (derogatory term for Russians) was running so high that it could easily explode in massacres.Footnote 99 The popular revolt that swept away Russian power in 1668 was driven by rumors that Russia was no longer an Orthodox country: “It is now permitted to build Catholic churches [kosteli] and his Tsarist Majesty himself has sworn a secret oath in front of two Jesuits.…” The tsar's army stood poised to massacre all the Orthodox Cossacks including their small children.Footnote 100 The tsar, however, was not at fault. The godless boyars were determined to enslave the Ukrainians (vechnaia kabala i nevolia); they had made a deal with the Poles to destroy Ukrainian religion and “have accepted the union and Latin heresy…. In Moscow they are no longer using the Russian [Cyrillic] but the Latin script.”Footnote 101
A protest note from January 1671 reveals the great fear that engulfed much of Ukrainian society: “[The Poles] have been distressing us more than anything by constraining the freedom of our ancient Greek-Ukrainian faith and by multiplying their kosteli [Catholic churches] in Ukrainian towns.”Footnote 102 Metropolitan Tukal'skyi's popularity was rooted in such sentiments: “The townspeople, Cossacks, and especially the common folk [meshchane i kazaki, pache zhe chernye narody] on both sides [of the Dnipro] very much love and revere [him].”Footnote 103 Ordin-Nashchokin, the chief of the Kremlin's Foreign Office, observed the same with frustration in spring 1669: Ukrainians would never cut their ties with Istanbul as long as Tukal'skyi was their metropolitan. “All the peoples of Rus’ [vse narody ruskie] call him a defender of their faith”; he had the nimbus as a heroic survivor of Catholic persecution and a true Orthodox. Tukal'skyi's popularity was not diminished by his persistent advocacy of the Ottoman-Ukrainian alliance.Footnote 104
Finally, people intuitively understood that only the Ottomans were in a position to stop the slave-raiding parties of the Crimean Tatars.Footnote 105 Doroshenko captured this widespread sentiment rather well in a letter to the tsar from early 1671: “If we had not accepted the banners [znaki] of the Turks we would have had to fight with the strong Muslims who live close to us; we are not strong enough to do so … Our people are attaching themselves to a brotherhood [bratstvo] with our Muslim neighbors in hopes of [our] salvation.”Footnote 106 Indeed, the sultan had vowed to protect Ukraine's Orthodox Christians against all their enemies. As he put it in a charter issued to Doroshenko in May 1669: “Don't be afraid of the Crimean Khan and the Tatars … The Khan with his army is my servant … [he] cannot have any dispute with the Zaporozhian Host [the Hetmanate].”Footnote 107
Most ordinary Ukrainians apparently did not consider the Ottomans a threat to their well-being until the 1672 invasion.Footnote 108 Then rumors began to spread that Turkish soldiers had desecrated churches, sacked monasteries, and used icons and gravestones to pave roads. Stories of villagers being rounded up as slaves also circulated. Such excesses happened and they undoubtedly contributed to the decline of Doroshenko's popularity.Footnote 109 But it is by no means clear how widespread they were.Footnote 110 Testimonies of Ukrainian and Polish eyewitnesses emphasize the remarkable restraint of the Ottoman army, its peaceful advance into Galicia, and the severe punishment of looters by Grand Vizier Köprülü. In fact, the Ottoman leadership made serious efforts to contain its soldatesca. In early 1673, for example, the sultan issued a berat in which he ordered his troops and officials not to touch any Orthodox churches. The available evidence remains ambiguous, and Ukrainian historian Krykun has rightly warned us against facile assumptions about the extent of popular Turcophobia.Footnote 111 We know, for example, that peasants welcomed Ottoman troops with bread, meat, and other food offerings. And many continued to flee into the western parts of Ukraine “due to [their] fear of the Muscovites [aus Furcht der Moskowiter].”Footnote 112 Indeed, the Russian terror did not go away and the denigration of Ukrainians with ethnic slurs (za khokhly drali) had become widespread. Even the Islamophobe Archimandrite Gizel’ wondered if the Russians were Christians. The Zaporizhia region was on the verge of rebellion against the Kremlin. And when Russian troops invaded Right-Bank Ukraine in June 1674 thousands of ordinary Cossacks fought them to the death to protect Doroshenko and save the Ottoman alliance.Footnote 113 The Ottoman counter-offensive, which “chase[d] away the Muscovites,” led to a demographic catastrophe: countless women, men, and children were enslaved or randomly slaughtered; many thousands fled for their lives; entire towns and villages were depopulated.Footnote 114 This collective trauma dealt a devastating blow, perhaps even a death blow, to pro-Ottoman hopes in Ukraine.
The horrors that descended upon Ukraine in 1674 certainly suggest that often-repeated Ottoman promises to “defend the oppressed [Unterdrückte] against their enemies” were mere rhetoric.Footnote 115 Nevertheless, one wonders to what extent such rhetoric contributed to popular support for the Ottomans in both Ukraine and Habsburg Hungary. Promises of liberation were leitmotifs of sultanic charters, public speeches given by Ottoman emissaries, conversations with Ukrainians and Hungarians at the Porte, as well as warnings issued to Vienna, Warsaw, and Moscow. Grand Vizier Köprülü was particularly outspoken: he “repeatedly and in the clearest words enunciated the principle” that the Porte had the responsibility “to liberate oppressed people” (Joseph von Hammer). In fact, Köprülü expressed his sympathy with popular rebels who rose up because “they were no longer able to endure the cruelty, injustice, extortion, and repression” of their Christian rulers.Footnote 116 Fighting tyrants was a legitimate cause. And overthrowing the yokes imposed by Austrians, Poles, and Russians had to be supported by all means; the Ottoman campaigns of 1663–1664, 1672, and 1674 undoubtedly accomplished this. But military support was not the only way of helping the oppressed and persecuted. In 1673, Köprülü opened up his estates and the lands ruled by Hungarian pashas to thousands of peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who had fought the Habsburgs to the death but had been defeated. Here they were safe despite continuous Habsburg demands to extradite them. The Ottomans fed them, supplied them with weapons, and repeatedly assured them that their hour for revenge would come once the Porte had liberated Ukraine.Footnote 117
Promises of liberation and protection clearly raised significant popular hopes in Habsburg Hungary. The impact of these promises on ordinary Ukrainians remains to be investigated. But there are signs that they still held some sway even after the 1674 invasion: when the Porte mobilized for war against Russia in early 1678, the Kremlin became worried that Ukrainians would rise and join the Ottomans.Footnote 118 In Habsburg Hungary, peasants could easily be convinced to rise against the Habsburgs with promises that the Ottomans were about to come to their rescue. In April 1670, for example, Hungarian nobles circulated rumors that Sultan Mehmed IV had sworn on the grave of the Prophet Muhammed that he would liberate the common folk from the horrors of the Habsburg occupation. Messengers appeared in villages and towns of eastern Habsburg Hungary reading from a purported sultanic charter; copies of this charter were posted in marketplaces. A powerful uprising swept away Habsburg power within days.Footnote 119 Similarly, in spring 1671 peasant elders, pastors, and nobles in the valleys of the High Tatra Mountains called on peasants to attack Habsburg reinforcements from Silesia and kill as many Germans as possible. This would be the signal for an army of Turks, Transylvanians, and Hungarian exiles to invade and do away with the Germans once and for all. The result was a popular uprising that one contemporary observer compared to the Hussite revolution. The insurgency was bloodily suppressed; there was also no evidence that any Turkish soldier ever crossed the border, but it is noteworthy that rumors of imminent Ottoman help could mobilize peasant masses into revolt. Ordinary Hungarians not only perceived the Ottomans to be less threatening than the Habsburgs, but also saw them as their avengers. The Tatra peasants who were mostly Slovak speakers of the Lutheran faith had just been targeted by a vicious Counter-Reformation campaign; their hatred of the Catholic clergy was easily matched by their outrage about the Habsburg soldatesca, which was actively assisting in the attempted destruction of Protestant religion.Footnote 120
Similar rumors of another imminent Turkish invasion circulated among Hungarian peasants and townsmen during the summer of 1672 as Ottoman troops got ready for the invasion of Poland. News about the vast size of the Ottoman army and the arrival of the grand vizier spread like wildfire; peasants stopped paying taxes, soldiers abandoned border fortresses, expelled Protestant pastors returned triumphantly to their churches, and “the loyal supporters of His Majesty, the Catholics, [were] shaking with considerable fear.” Habsburg power was visibly crumbling: an official reported to Vienna that he and his colleagues were stranded in army garrisons: “German power does not go beyond the garrison towns; [our soldiers] just want to stay in their fortresses … when they invade the entire fatherland will join for the most part….” The official warned Vienna that Turkish border soldiers were on high alert and ready to move.Footnote 121 Yet it was not the Turkish army that invaded a few weeks later but a rebel force of Hungarian Protestants (led by exiled nobles). The resulting mass uprising toppled imperial power in eastern Habsburg Hungary within days. Only the withdrawal of large troop contingents from Austria, Bohemia, and Silesia allowed the Habsburgs to reconquer the lost territories. If the Ottomans had intervened Protestants all over Habsburg Hungary—still the vast majority of the population—would have welcomed them as liberators.Footnote 122
Habsburg Hungary's Code of Laws contained a unique legal category what had no parallels in Polish, Russian, or any other European law codes: the accusation of associating with the Turks or becoming Turkish—described in shorthand with the Latin, German, and Hungarian epithets Turcismus, Türkhentum, or Törökösség (which might be loosely translated into English as “Turkishness”). “Anyone who … develops friendly relations with neighboring Turks or who communicates with them by word or letter or has pernicious conversations with them” was to be arrested and strictly punished. Among those targeted were border defense soldiers who refused to fight the Ottomans, peasants driving cattle across the border, Protestant townsmen and pastors who were intercepted while trying to flee to the Ottoman side of the border.Footnote 123 Turcismus investigations reveal that many ordinary men and women considered having personal dealings with Turks the most natural thing in the world.Footnote 124 For example, Anna Csoma, was caught while attempting to marry off her daughter to a Turkish husband in a village just across the border. And Zsuszanna Goda left her village to move to areas under Ottoman jurisdiction where she married a Muslim man and was living like “a woman who had become Turkish” (töröké lett asszony). And Martin Juhasz broke out from jail with a Turkish prisoner and “fled straight in the direction of Turkey … to join the sultan's army as a renegade [pribek].” There is also evidence that ordinary Hungarians converted to Islam, such as the peasant Jakak Czako, who later tried to save his neck by claiming “he had recently become a Christian again.”Footnote 125
The Turcismus investigations illustrate close relations between Hungarians and Ottomans even on the everyday level. This may not be surprising if we consider that philo-Turcism went hand in hand with widespread popular animosity toward Habsburg soldiers and officials. One might thus argue that in both Habsburg Hungary and Ukraine the Ottomans were relatively popular, that is, they were perceived as the lesser of two or three evils. Yet, in Habsburg Hungary relations appear to have been more personal than in Ukraine, and they became more intense over time. In Ukraine, the picture remains less clear. While pro-Turkish hopes were still a factor to be reckoned with at the beginning of the 1677–1681 Russo-Turkish war, they faded quickly after major Ottoman defeats. And when the Ottomans finally moved against the Habsburgs in 1683, Ukrainian Cossacks joined Polish King Jan Sobieski's campaign to break the siege of Vienna. By contrast the Ottoman campaign against Vienna had mass support in Habsburg Hungary: Protestant clergy celebrated Imre Thököly, the Ottoman-anointed king of Hungary (1682), in their sermons; and town magistrates opened their gates to Ottoman troops and arranged public prayers for a quick Turkish victory.Footnote 126
Conclusions
The most important difference between Habsburg Hungary and Ukraine during the 1660s and 1670s was that the Ottomans did not respond to Hungarian offers of subordination and hopes for an all-out invasion. Instead, they started a proxy war involving well-armed detachments of Hungarian refugees that gradually eroded the Habsburg border defense system. This was a smart strategy that generated great anxiety in Vienna, particularly when parts of Habsburg Hungary exploded in pro-Ottoman revolts. In Ukraine, however, we count at least two major Ottoman invasions: in 1672, the Porte was able to control most of its troops, but in 1674 this was not the case. In fact, it is not even clear that the Porte wanted to control them: attacks on churches and monasteries as well as the abduction of women and children appear to have turned most ordinary Ukrainians against the Ottomans. In Habsburg Hungary, the Ottomans remained popular throughout the 1670s; the Lutheran magnate Imre Thököly, who considered the Ottomans important allies, generated broad popular support when his troops toppled Habsburg power in 1678 and 1682–1683. And even after the siege of Vienna, the Ottoman Empire remained a refuge for persecuted Hungarian Protestants for decades to come.Footnote 127
Hungarians and Ukrainians perceived the Ottomans as winning in the conflict between empires over east-central Europe. This was not surprising because the Ottoman advance in Habsburg Hungary and Ukraine was frightening to many contemporaries: it generated Türkenangst in Europe and fears of permanent secession in the Hofburg, the Kremlin, and the Wavel. For example, when Doroshenko finally switched sides in 1676 and joined the Kremlin, Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich expressed great relief that Doroshenko had been removed from Ukraine: it would now be easier to stop the Ottomans, especially given that Doroshenko could serve as an adviser who knew Turkish strategies and tactics better than anyone in the Kremlin.Footnote 128 And Emperor Leopold presided over emergency sessions of the Secret Conference discussing an imminent Ottoman invasion: the most important concern was interestingly not the loss of Habsburg Hungary but the breakthrough of Ottoman troops into “the bowels of the Empire” (viscera imperii).Footnote 129 Similar fears were expressed by the Venetian and Dutch ambassadors in Vienna. They anticipated the collapse of the Hungarian Antemurale Christianitatis and feared the worst, that is, an Ottoman invasion of Italy and Germany, and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire.Footnote 130
There can be little doubt that from the perspectives of many Ukrainians and Hungarians the Ottomans were more benevolent and better rulers than the Habsburgs, Romanovs, and Polish kings. It needs to be explored to what extent such attitudes disappeared in Ukraine after the 1672 and 1674 Ottoman invasions: while Turcophobia greatly increased, popular complaints about Russian and Polish atrocities remained also pervasive. The pro-Ottoman attitudes and hopes of Ukrainians and Hungarians are quite remarkable in a Christian Europe where anti-Turkish and anti-Muslim stereotypes were widespread and deeply entrenched.Footnote 131 Perhaps Hungarians and Ukrainians were naive but, considering what happened to them when their realms were integrated into the Russian and Habsburg empires in the course of the eighteenth century, such hopes appear not at all naive. When faced with the horrors of a decisive 1708–1709 Russian invasion, unknown numbers of Ukrainians again sought refuge with the Ottomans. Meanwhile, Hungarians continued to see the Ottomans as potential saviors: Prince Ferenc II. Rákóczi again called for Ottoman help when he unleashed a devastating revolt against the Habsburgs during the first decade of the eighteenth century. And when Russian and Habsburg troops crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1849 after a ferocious war that lasted more than a year, the last remnants of the Hungarian rebel army fled into the Ottoman Empire. Some of the army's leading officers converted to Islam and became generals in the Ottoman army: their reason for doing so was “to lead the Ottoman army for the liberation … of Hungary.”Footnote 132
Acknowledgments
Research for this article was facilitated by a Fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and a University of California President's Humanities Research Fellowship.
Georg B. Michels is Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside, and specializes in early modern Hungarian, Ukrainian, and Russian history. He has published widely on religion and revolt in the Russian and Habsburg empires. His recent book, The Habsburg Empire under Siege: Ottoman Expansion and Hungarian Revolt in the Age of Grand Vizier Ahmed Köprülü (1661–76) (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021), was awarded the Hans Rosenberg Book Prize (Central European History Society), the Susan Glantz Book Prize (Hungarian Studies Association), and The Center for Austrian Studies Book Prize; it was also recognized as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association.
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