Cossacks Mercenaries of European States
As early as by the late sixteenth century, Europe no longer been looked on the Zaporozhzhian Cossacks as something strange or exotic. Ukraine, then part of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, began to play an ever-increasing role in Old World international relations. And, despite the Cossacks being subjects of the Polish king, they very often pursued an independent military policy without looking to Warsaw.
For example, after the Cossacks had carried out several successful expeditions in the 1580s (first of all, the seizure and ruination of the fortress of Bendery in 1583), Vatican diplomacy decided to persuade them to join the Holy League, an alliance of Christian states worried over the increased expansionist desires of the Ottoman Turks in Europe. Poland, in the person of its king, Transylvanian prince Stefan Batory, took a conciliatory attitude toward the Sublime Porte. Frightened by the Turks’ war effort after the Cossacks’ victory at Bendery, he ordered the execution of 31 Cossacks, who took part in that expedition, in the presence of Turkish diplomats. Stefan Batory tried not to spoil relations with the Sultan because he was much more interested in the war against Muscovy in Livonia.
In spite of a brilliant victory of the allied Christian fleet over the Turkish forces off Cape Lepanto in 1571, the Venetian Republic lost the island of Cyprus only four years later. The Ottoman Empire signed a peace treaty in 1585 with Venice, a state with a powerful navy, which threw into confusion all the Papal attempts to strengthen the Holy League’s positions (including the attempts to do so by involving the Cossacks). Turkish diplomacy was ascendant.
But as soon as in the 1590s, Western politicians again begin to seek contacts with the Zaporozhzhian Cossacks. For example, in 1593-1594 Papal envoy Alexandr Komulowicz and Ambassador of Emperor Rudolf II, Erich Lasota, managed to find and send for a fee a detachment of 12,000 volunteers to Moldova, then a vassal of the Porte.
Returning to Regensburg, Lasota, who left quite interesting memoirs about his trip to the Sich, wrote: “I and the Cossacks (envoys) received a favorably audience with the Caesar (Emperor) in the presence of privy counselors, and the Cossacks presented the Caesar two Turkish flags.” The expedition was headed by Severyn Nalyvaiko, the future leader of an anti-Polish uprising. The Moldovan hospodar suffered a defeat and declared himself for some time a vassal of the Austrian Habsburgs.
In fact the Cossacks acted here as condottieri for the first time, for they can hardly be called such when they fought under the colors of their suzerain, the king of Poland. A special subject is participation of Zaporozhzhian Cossacks in the expeditions of False Dmitry I and False Dmitry II against Muscovy in 1607- 1612. Here again, it was the Polish king who inspired the two pretenders. In 1604, Hetman Semen Skalozub, at the head of a 4,000-strong force, launched an expedition against Turkey’s Black Sea coast. It is this action that helped, to a large extent, foil the planned Turkish assault on Austria. The Cossack’s activities on the Porte’s northern borders did not diminish in the 1610s-30s. The expeditions of Hetman Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny and the Cossacks’ decisive role in the victory over the Turks and Tatars in 1620-1621 near Khotyn are common knowledge and are not called into question even by Polish historians.
Soon after, the Thirty Years War, the first all-European conflict, broke out, to last from 1618 to 1648. It was participated in by the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs, Bavaria, and a number of German Catholic principalities supported by the Holy See, on the one hand, and a bloc of German Protestant principalities and Bohemia, assisted at certain stages by Denmark, Sweden, France, Transylvania, England, and Holland, on the other. The Cossacks took part in this war on the side of those who paid them.
In October 1619, in the very heat of the siege of Vienna by the insurgent Czechs and Transylvanians with Bethlen Gabor at its head, a 10,000- strong corps of Cossack mercenaries, under the colors of Emperor Ferdinand II Habsburg, entered Transcarpathia. On November 1619, they routed the Transylvanians, laid siege to the Slovak towns of Kosice and Presov, and in fact foiled the plans of the anti-Habsburg bloc’s troops, forcing them to lift the siege of Vienna. However, the Cossacks returned to the Sich in December 1619 because the Austrians refused to pay them all the money they were owed.
In 1631, 2000 Cossacks, siding with the army of the Holy Roman Empire’s commander, Albrecht von Wallenstein, took part in hostilities in Silesia against Saxony, an ally of the Swedish King Gustav II Adolph, the winner of this war. The Cossacks manned light cavalry squadrons in the units of imperial generals Wert and Gallas, with Wallenstein himself preferring and valuing them higher than his Polish hussars and as highly as the Croats, past masters of deep raids in the enemy’s rear.
Volodymyr Sichynsky’s book Foreigners on Ukraine cites interesting data about participation of the Cossacks in the hostilities the imperial troops conducted in Luxembourg. For example, we find quite an interesting piece of information in the weekly Gazette de France, No. 81 for 1631, about a 4,000-strong force of Ukrainian mounted Cossacks under Colonel Tarasky who fought under the imperial colors in Luxembourg, Flanders, and Picardy against the French troops of General de Soissons. After the original failure, “the Cossacks attacked the French with a terrible war cry; our men (the French) were not used to such a cry, and they were so frightened that they began to run away and retreat to the swamp on the river’s other bank...”
The Austrian command used the Ukrainian Cossacks to form light cavalry regiments and squadrons which carried out deep-penetration raids as far as northern and northeast France. For example, in February 1636, a 2,000-strong Cossack cavalry regiment crossed the river Meuse near Verdun, burst into the province of Champagne, routing the French units stationed there, and returned with rich spoils to Luxembourg, the place the Austrian troops were quartered.
The Cossacks always had the conditions of their service set out in contracts. An ordinary Cossack earned up to six thalers a month, while Colonel Pavlo Noskovsky, a regimental commander, drew 200 thalers, a virtually astronomical amount in those times. However, the Austrian government failed to observe all the contractual obligations, so in 1636 Noskovsky’s Cossacks abandoned the theater of operations and mutinied in Silesia, en route to their homeland, demanding that the imperial authorities pay them immediately. The ungrateful Austrians sent out a large punitive corps which heavily battered the Ukrainian regiment, forcing it to cross the Austro-Polish border.
Very interesting, but still unresolved to the end, is the question of Cossack participation, as part of the French troops, in the siege of the Dunkerque sea fortress in northern France. It is known precisely that Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who held the office of military secretary, the second highest in Sich at the time, met in 1644 with the ambassador of France, Count de Bregie, in Warsaw. The latter advised Cardinal Jules Mazarin, who in fact made French foreign policy, to hire Cossack mercenaries.
At last, in October 1645, after protracted negotiations, a 2,400- strong regiment of Ukrainian Cossacks set sail to Calais via the Polish port of Gdansk. It is here that the most intriguing thing begins: Ukrainian, French and Polish historians have long argued about who headed this detachment of Ukrainian mercenaries. Polish researcher Zbigniew Wojcyk says unequivocally (after many years of research in Polish and French archives) that Bohdan Khmelnytsky never visited France. It is also hard to agree to the opinion of most Ukrainian researchers that the Cossacks fought near Dunkerque under Colonels Ivan Sirko and Soltenko. Moreover, they were practically never mentioned in the period of 1648-1655, during the Cossack Revolution against Poland, although Zaporozhzhian Sich secretaries kept a very scrupulous record of events.
Yet, we can still say confidently that the Cossacks took part in the hostilities in Flanders in October 1645 and the assault on and seizure of Dunkerque (the Spanish garrison formally surrendered on October 11, 1646). However, like in the Empire before, the local authorities cheated the mercenaries (quite in the spirit of those times), so some of them returned to Ukraine and others sided with the Spaniards.
The end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 and the signing of peace treaties in MЯnster and OsnabrЯck did not stop the hostilities between France and Spain. There is evidence that some units of Ukrainian Cossacks fought on the Spanish side against the French as late as 1655 in Flanders.
The schooling of the Thirty Years’ War, received by many Cossacks who later took part in the Liberation War of 1648, had a positive effect on the Cossacks’ combat readiness. They very soon showed their strength to Polish regular forces near Zhovti Vody, Korsun, Pyliavka, and Zboriv.
