Poles to possess themselves of the Western Ukraine; while the Russian general Romanodofski, attacking Czehryn in the absence of the Turkish grand army, made himself master of that important place, capturing in it the person and treasures of the Ataman, who purchased pardon by once more changing his allegiance, and receiving investiture at the hands of the Czar. But these successes of the Russians were displeasing to Sobieski, who, dreading their becoming masters of the whole Ukraine, and anxious moreover to restore tranquillity to his own states, concluded a separate peace at the end of the year, by which the disputed territory underwent a fresh partition; the western part being restored to Poland, while the southern, with Kaminiek and part of Podolia, remained in the possession of the Turks.

The Russians, who had been entirely passed over in this arrangement, exclaimed against it as a perfidious breach of faith on the part of the Poles: and, entering the Ukraine in the depth of winter, reduced the greatest part of the country, with the assistance of Doroscensko's partisans, before the advance of the Turkish army in the following spring under the Grand-Vizir, the famous Kara Mustapha Kioprili, whose career, six years later, was cut short by Sobieski before the walls of Vienna. The Turks were accompanied by George Khmielnicki, son of the former Ataman of that name, who had been confined in the Seven Towers at the instigation of Doroscensko, but on his defection was released by the Sultan, and invested with the dignity of Ataman, in which capacity he now made his appearance to re-establish the Turkish ascendency in the Ukraine, and was joined by a considerable number of the Cossacks. The open country was speedily overrun by the Turks, but their progress was arrested by the strong ramparts of Czehryn; and after pressing the siege for two months, and losing many of his men in a night attack, Kara Mustapha abandoned his baggage and artillery, and closed the campaign of 1677 by an inglorious retreat across the Danube. But the time was not yet come when the prowess of the Turks was compelled to submit to defeat: their forces reentered the Ukraine the next year

with augmented numbers and resolution; and, in defiance of all the efforts of Romanodofski to relieve it, Czehryn was taken by storm, and the garrison of 30,000 Russians and Cossacks put to the sword. The main Russian army, struck with panic, abandoned its positions, and retreated in dismay across the frontier, pursued by the Turks, who then, for the first and only time, trode the soil of Russia as conquerors; and the Czar Feodor (who had succeeded Alexis in 1676) hastily assembled troops to oppose the progress of the invaders towards his capital; but the exhausted state of the country, which Romanodofski had wasted in his retreat, had already compelled the Vizir to retire; and on the approach of winter the Russians gradually re-occupied great part of their conquests. But, notwithstanding these successes, the war had become unpopular and burdensome to the Turks, who derived no equivalent advantage for the expense of sending armies into a remote province to contend for the supremacy over fickle vassals against an enemy whose resources were near at hand; and a pacification was finally concluded in 1680-1, by which, in return for some concessions to the Tartar Khan, Czehryn and the other Turkish possessions in the Ukraine were resigned to Russia, and the river Samara made the boundary of the two empires; while Doroscensko, distrusted by all parties alike, sunk into obscurity, and was succeeded as Ataman by Ivan Samuelowitz, a Cossack leader of great reputation and experience. It was not till five years later that the claims of Poland were finally adjusted by a definitive treaty with Russia, which ratified the truce of -Andrussow, and acknowledged the sovereignty of the Czar over the whole Ukraine. The whole of the Cossack territory was thus re-united to the Muscovite monarchy, after having been separated from it since the first conquests of the Tartars; and the Cossack annals, from this time, are necessarily incorporated with the history of Russia.

The overthrow of the Turks before Vienna, in 1683, was hailed by all Christendom as the prelude to the downfal of the Ottoman power. Russia joined the league against inst the Porte in 1685-6, and sent an army of 300,000 men under Prince Basil Gallitzin, the favourite of the Regent Sophia, to invade the territories of the Tartar Khan, to which the possession of the Ukraine offered an easy access. The advance of this mighty host through the Nogai steppes encoun. tered no armed opposition; but the country, for the space of two hundred miles, had been swept bare of every thing which could afford subsistence to an enemy; and no sooner had famine compelled Gallitzin to commence his retreat, than his divisions were enveloped and assailed by nomad cavalry, whose arrows, like those of their Parthian forefathers, dealt destruction among the ranks of their exhausted foes. This disastrous expedition cost the Russians 40,000 men, and nearly all their horses and artillery; but its failure was ascribed by their commanders to the treason of the Cossack Ataman, whom they accused of having maintained, from within the Russian camp, a correspondence with the Khan, and recommended to him the plan of defence which was adopted; and Samuelowitz was summoned to answer the charge before the assembly of his people. The judicial process which followed, is probably the only Cossack deliberative council of which the details have been preserved: the inferior atamans, the staroshines or elders, the polkovniks or colonels, and the chiefs of the different stanitzas, met in the camp on the Samara; the proofs of their leader's alleged delinquency were laid before them; and, after a solemn investigation, Samuelowitz was declared guilty, deprived of the ensigns of his dignity, and given over for punishment to the Russians, by whom he was sent, with his only surviving son, to Siberia; while the vacant office was conferred, by the influence of Gallitzin, on the lieutenant of the fallen chief, the celebrated Mazeppa. The romantic history of this personage has made his name and early adventures too familiarly known to English readers to need recital. From his hatred to the Poles, and the ascendency which his talents and edu

cation procured him among the rude chiefs of the Cossacks, he had been, throughout the troubles of the Ukraine, a powerful auxiliary to the Russians, at whose instigation he is accused of having suborned the condemnation of his predecessor ;-an act of perfidy which, if justly ascribed to him, was amply avenged by retributive justice in the conclusion of his own career. Under his advice and direction, a second armament was set on foot for the invasion of the Krim in 1689, during the absence of the Khan on the frontiers of Hungary. The whole force of the Cossacks, amounting to 50,000 men, joined the Russians on the border; but though, on this occasion, the invaders succeeded in forcing the defences of the isthmus after a sanguinary conflict with the Nooradin-Sultan,† and penetrated within sight of Perekop, they were amused by the Tartars with negotiations till the failure of their provisions compelled them a second time to retire with loss. The establishment of a line of fortified posts along the Samara, to check the future incursions of the Tartars, was the sole result of those two ill-conducted expeditions, which failed even in obtaining from the Khan the abandonment of the degrading tribute of 60,000 rubles, which he still annually demanded from Russia; but the revolution which took place at Moscow at the end of the year, by transferring the reins of government from Sophia to Peter, speedily gave a fresh impulse to the hitherto unorganized mass of Russian power.

Mazeppa, who had accompanied Gallitzin to Moscow, was an eyewitness of the revolution, and of the disgrace of his patron; but his politic accession to the party of Peter procured him fresh rewards and honours; and, on the conclusion of the advantageous peace of 1699 with the Porte, the Cossacks, who had done distinguished service in the war as Russian partisans, had their privileges anew confirmed and extended, while the cordon of the newly instituted order of St Andrew was conferred on their Ataman. The unity of this branch of the Cossack family had been in the mean time restored, by the re-union of the remaining Cossacks of the Polish Ukraine, who, in 1691, migrated in a body over the Dniepr into the Russian dominions: but this prosperity was of short continuance. The plans of reform which Peter had projected for every part of his dominions were carried on with fresh energy at the return of peace, and their operation was not long in extending itself to the Ukraine. An attempt (in 1701) to impose a capitation tax was so vehemently resisted by the Cossacks, who rightly regarded it as the first step to the establishment of slavery, that the scheme was for the time abandoned; but the still more obnoxious proposition of including them in the new military organization, and dividing them into regiments, trained and equipped in the European manner, was pressed with greater pertinacity; and resentment for a brutal threat with which Peter, in one of his habitual fits of intoxication, replied to the remonstrances of Mazeppa, is stated by contemporary historians to have goaded the Ataman to the fatal determination of throwing off the yoke of Russia. But the Cossacks, always restless when not employed in war, were curbed by the constant presence of Russian troops on their frontier; the free communication with their brethren on the Don, which they had hitherto enjoyed through the intermediate Cossack settlements of the Slobode-Ukraine, was purposely intercepted by the location of Russian military colonies in that quarter, ostensibly as a check on the Tartars; and it was not till 1707, when the victories of Charles XII. seemed to threaten the dismemberment of the Muscovite empire, that Mazeppa ventured to attempt the execution of his designs, by opening a correspondence with the Swedish monarch, and also with the Porte. These machinations were detected, and revealed to Peter by two polkovniks of the faction adverse to Mazeppa; but such was the confidence still reposed by the Czar in the fidelity of the Ataman, that he delivered these two unfortunate officers, as traitors, to the vengeance of their chief, by whose orders they

were put to death by repeated strokes of a mallet or mace, the ordinary Cossack punishment for sedition. But when, on the advance of Charles towards the Ukraine in the following year, the mask was at length thrown off, Mazeppa was dismayed by finding that none of his followers, excepting his personal adherents and the wild Zaporofskis of the setsha (whom he had gained over by largesses) were disposed to brave the wrath of the Czar. Abandoned by the greater part of his troops, he joined the Swedish camp with 7000 Cossacks only,* rather as a fugitive than an ally; while the Russians under Menzikoff, aided by the bulk of the Cossacks, found no difficulty in capturing Bathurin, the stronghold of Mazeppa, whose partisans were every where consigned to the wheel or the gibbet. The events of the succeeding campaign, till the hopes both of Charles and Mazeppa were extinguished on the field of Pultava, are matter of general history : 12,000 Cossacks and Zaporofskis perished in the battle and pursuit; but the Ataman escaped to Bender, where he died in 1709, while the sword and the scaffold were busy in completing the destruction of his adherents. The setsha of the Zaporofskis, in the islets of the Dniepr, hitherto inviolate by the foot of an enemy, was forced by the Russians, and its inhabitants slaughtered, without distinction of age or sex. Thousands of Cossacks were dragged in chains to the shores of the Baltic, to labour on the canals and other public works; and though a nominal Ataman was appointed in the room of Mazeppa, he was declared subordinate in authority to Menzikoff, who fixed his residence in Bathurin, and assumed the viceroyalty of the Ukraine. A remnant of the Zaporofskis, to the number of 4000, who escaped from the slaughter and captivity of their comrades, took refuge, with their koschevoi-ataman, Horodenko, in the territories of the Tartar Khan, who assigned them some lands on the banks of the Kaminka, a river falling into the Dniepr, in the vicinity of their ancient settlements.

The revolt of Mazeppa was in its results a deathblow to the independence of the Ukraine, which thenceforth fell

had borne the title of Ataman ever since the deposition of Mazeppa, the office was suffered to remain vacant. But the Cossacks, though no longer able to vindicate their liberties by force of arms, still retained the spirit of freemen; and an energetic remonstrance was presented at the foot of the throne in 1724, by a deputation from the Ukraine; their various grievances were enumerated and insisted upon; and Peter was boldly reminded, that in infringing the convention by which his predecessor had bound himself to the observance of their privileges and independent jurisdiction, he dissolved the tie which connected the Cossacks with the crown of Russia.*

The despotic temperament of the Czar, accustomed to see in his subjects only the blind instruments of his sovereign will, was irritated to fury by this address: the deputies were denounced as rebels, and thrown into the dungeons of Schlusselburg, where a few only survived the hardships of their imprisonment till the accession of Catharine I., who (in obedience as she said to her husband's last commands) released them and restored them to their country. But though Catharine, during her short reign, showed herself well disposed to ameliorate the condition of the Ukraine, the oppressive edicts of Peter still remained in force; and it was not till the fall of their arch-enemy, Menzikoff, in the reign of Peter II., that the Cossacks obtained a partial restoration of their privileges, with liberty to elect an Ataman. Their choice fell on Daniel Apostol, who had been the spokesman of the deputation to Peter I., and was regarded by the Cossacks, from his subsequent sufferings, as a martyr to their cause; and, as the favour extended to them by Peter II. was continued by his successor Anne, the Ukraine presented such a spectacle of returning prosperity, that the remains of the Zaporofskis, who had sought refuge in Krim Tartary after the overthrow of Mazeppa, made overtures of submission in 1733 to the court of Petersburg, on condition of being restored to their former posses sions. The koschevoi-ataman Orlik, an old follower of Mazeppa, who had succeeded Horodenko, vehemently,

but in vain, opposed all reconciliation with their former foes: the promises and gifts of Russia prevailed: Orlik retired into Turkey, where he became a Moslem and entered the service of the Porte; and the Zaporofskis, after having signalized their zeal for their resumed allegiance by a sanguinary foray into Volhynia, re-occupied in triumph their ancient setsha on the Dniepr, and welcomed with discharges of artillery the Russian commissioners appointed to receive their adhesion to the Czarina.

In the war of 1806 with the Porte, the Cossacks of the Ukraine furnished to the Russian army a contingent of 20,000 men, who were mostly organized as irregular cavalry; but their exploits no longer corresponded to their former fame. Deprived since the time of Peter I. of the free exercise of arms, they had lost the habit of using them; and their total inability to withstand the impetuous onset of the Spahis, suggested to the Russian commanders the expedient of arming both the Ukraine and Don Cossacks with the lance, which has since become so formidable in the hands of the latter, as a means of repelling the scimitars of their fiery opponents. The Zaporofskis, on the contrary, who formed a separate corps of 8000 men, distinguished themselves as of old, both by valour and relentless ferocity, which defied the control of the Russian generals. In the wild partisan warfare in the marshes of the Dniepr and the steppes of the isthmus, they recognised both the character and scene of their ancient achievements; and when Munich at length entered as a conqueror the hitherto impregnable capital of the descendants of Zingis, their appetite for blood and plunder was amply glutted by the sack of Perekop. In three successive campaigns, the Tartar territories fell almost wholly into the hands of the Russians; but the losses of their Austrian allies on the side of Hungary arrested them in the career of triumph, and Anne was reluctantly compelled to acquiesce in the treaty of Belgrade (1793), which restored all her conquests except the dismantled fortress of Azoph.

The forms of the ancient Cossack constitution had been partially restored