“Historical Patron of Zaporozhzhian Sich”
My heart is beating evenly in chest...
Oh Sultan, Caesar, Tsar, King!
Your anger will never frighten me,
Nor will your graces ever buy me.
Whether life or death, heaven or blazing hell,
It’s all the same to Baida Zaporozhets.
This small extract from Panteleimon Kulish’s drama Baida, Prince Vyshnevetsky describes Dmytro Ivanovych Korybut-Vyshnevetsky, a freedom-loving Ukrainian prince born in Volyn.
A famous warrior and favorite Cossack leader praised in Ukrainian songs and ballads, he would inspire awe in Crimean Tatars and Turks. Most historians believe, it was Vyshnevetsky who was destined to become Ukraine’s first Hetman and the founder of Zaporozhzhian Sich. The prince’s nickname, Baida, is quite interesting, as far as its origin is concerned. Borys Hrinchenko’s dictionary says that baida is a careless person and the verb baidykuvaty means to laze around, drink heavily, and not work. Academician Mykhailo Hrushevsky supposed that “it is probably the name of a reckless Cossack that personifies the figure of Vyshnevetsky in the song.”
In Tsarhorod at the marketplace
Baida drinks vodka;
And he’s been at it for more than a day or two,
For more than a night or an hour or two...
Oh, I see three doves flying,
And I want to kill one for his daughter.
Oh, I shot and hit the Tsar
And the Tsarina in the neck
And his daughter in the head.
As we can see, the prince’s figure takes on some semi-legendary features in this song. And who was Vyshnevetsky in reality? In what time did he live? At the beginning of the sixteenth century Ukrainian peasants suffering from the oppression and yoke of magnates, village headmen, and state officials, and the expansionist policy of the Catholic Church, tried to escape from the Dnipro and Buh basins by any and all means and began to settle in the wild steppe. These people were called Cossacks. The yoke of the ruling classes professing aggressive Catholicism made many well-off Orthodox nobles also join the ranks of the Cossacks. It was very hard for them to make a career in the Rzeczpospolita, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. The last attempt by the Ukrainian and Belarusian Orthodox magnates to get equal rights with Catholics was defeated in 1430s in the uprising under the leadership of Svidrigaila, son of Algirdas.
Finally, a hundred years later, prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky steps onto the broad political scene from the ranks of Orthodox grandees. He traced his ancestry back to Korybut-Dymytry, the son of Algirdas and grandson of Gediminas, the Grand Dukes of Lithuania. Soltan, the great grandson of Korybut-Dymytry, founded the castle Vyshnevets and was the first to call himself Prince Korybut-Vyshnevetsky. Soltan’s brother Vasyl had a son Mykhailo who became progenitor of princes Vyshnevetsky. Dmytro Ivanovych, in turn, was his grandson. Hrushevsky wrote, “The princely Vyshnevetsky clan was the senior branch of the princes Zbarazky, descendants of prince Fedko Nesvyzky, a glorious hero of the Ukrainian gentry’s uprising led by Svidrigaila. This was a rich princely clan whose nest was southwest Volyn (Kremenychchyna), and the two closely situated towns, Zbarazh and Vyshnevets, gave their names to the two branches of the princely family.”
The attacks of Crimean Tatars on the Ukrainian lands were becoming more regular and devastating, especially after their khans from the Girey dynasty became vassals of Ottoman Empire in 1480. Ukrainians literally flooded the slave markets of Cafa, Trabzon, and Istanbul. The Rzeczpospolita was unable to resist the steppe hordes. This is why it was mainly village headmen, state officials, and middle-class gentry who had to defend its southern borders. Among them, Yevstafy Dashkovych and Bernard Pretvych did an especially outstanding job. In 1512 Prince Mykhailo Vyshnevetsky, grandfather of our hero, defeated a large Tatar horde near Lopushna. And his grandson in turn took part in expeditions headed by Bohdan Pretvych in the late 1630s.
In 1548-1549 Prince Vyshnevetsky several times attacked the Sultan’s Ochakiv Castle. Precisely then the king of Poland appointed Vyshnevetsky castellan of Cherkasy and Kaniv. It was a very troublesome position at the forefront of the struggle against the Tatars and Turks. But the prince not only defended the Ukrainian lands adroitly but also initiated an offensive and very active tactic in fighting the “infidels.” In fact he took the war to the enemy’s territory.
In order to have reliable bases in the wild steppe, in about 1552 he began to build a “castle,” a fortification with many wooden structures, on Lesser Hortytsia Island in the Dnipro. That this peculiar ambush base was located not far from the territory where the Crimean Tatars roamed allowed the Cossacks to control the movement of these hordes. This sixteen hectare island towered over the Dnipro by about fifteen meters, and the tempestuous river stream kept attackers from landing easily on the island.
In the fall of 1553 Prince Vyshnevetsky arrived in the capital of the Ottoman Empire to try to resolve border conflicts with Sultan Suleiman I the Magnificent. In Hrushevsky’s opinion, the goal of the prince’s trip “was the idea of a two-front alliance: being supported by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to maintain good relations with Turkey, and lay hands on the Crimea.” After coming back from Istanbul the prince was appointed the guardian of Khortytsia by the Polish King Zygmunt II Augustus.
In 1556 the Cossacks, guided by Vyshnevetsky, finally completed the construction of a fortress on this island and started to fortify another nearby island, Tomakivka. The Gireys found their situation in the steppe especially dangerous after Cossacks burned down their Islam-Kermen outpost and an Ochakiv suburb. In that year the Tatars did not succeed in their attempts to capture Hortytsia (the Cossacks fought off their attacks courageously for 24 days).
Nevertheless, in the fall of 1557 the Khan encircled Kerch once again. Along with the Tatars, the Turkish janissary and the sultan’s vassals took part in the siege. Because of a lack of food, Vyshnevetsky had to retreat to Cherkasy, and the enemies ruined the castle.
Earlier in 1556 the prince, seeing that the Polish king sought peace with the khan, sent messengers to the Muscovite tsar Ivan the Terrible with offers of his service to the Orthodox potentate. Defeated in the Sich, Vyshnevetsky made his way to Moscow. The tsar gave the town of Belev, a volost (small rural district — Ed.), and a few settlements as his demesne (pomestie). And as soon as early 1558 our hero came to the Dnipro at the head of a detachment five thousand strong. The Khan retreated beyond Perekop, intending to wait out the trouble. Very soon the prince understood that the tsar only looked upon him as a convenient instrument to tame the Tatars. Moreover, the Muscovites entered Livonia and quarreled with Lithuania. Vyshnevetsky did not want to break with the Rzecpospolita completely and began to act more carefully. In the spring of 1559 the prince appears on the Don with 5000 Cossacks and streltsy (musketeers — Ed.): according to Moscow’s plans, he was to break into Crimea through the Azov Sea. The Khan was in dire straits, for the whole Crimea was stricken with a terrible famine. But the tsar had cooled to the Crimean affairs; from then on he paid more and more attention to holding the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates he had captured. In addition, the Livonian War (1558-1583) siphoned off more and more forces with each succeeding month because the Muscovy’s neighbors — the Rzeczpospolita, Sweden, and Denmark — did not at all want the Muscovites to gain a foothold on the Baltic.
In fact, the prince found himself isolated again. He returned to Ukraine. Ivan the Terrible, reviling Vyshnevetsky in public, was privately sorry that such a brave warrior had left him. Russian historian Sergei SolovСv cites the following information: messenger “Klobukov was ordered to find out if prince Dmitry Vyshnevetsky had arrived to serve the king, if the king had paid him, if he lived with the king, and at what distance the king kept him from himself...”
In December 1562, after an audience with the Polish king at the Sejm in Lublin, the prince met famous adventure-seeker Olbrecht Laski. The latter persuaded Vyshnevetsky to intervene in the struggle for the hospodar’s throne in Moldavia. This was the beginning of the final tragic act in the life of the knightly prince. On the way, the accomplices fell out with each other: Laski returned to Poland, leaving Vyshnevetsky and his detachment of 500 Cossacks to be entrapped by the river Seret. Stephan IX, the Sultan’s henchman, surrounded the Cossacks. The latter repulsed the enemies’ attacks for several hours from the camp fortified with carts. A part of the Cossacks managed to break out of the encirclement. But the prince, seriously ill at the time due to old wounds and a mysterious poisoning he had suffered in Moscow just before returning to Ukraine, was found in a haystack by a peasant. The hospodar surrendered Vyshnevetsky to Sultan Suleiman II.
The execution of the Cossack leader in Istanbul in 1563 was but a savage, cruel reprisal. Preferring to die a martyr’s death, rather than embrace Islam, the prince boldly cursed the sultan and swore at his entourage. The sultan ordered him hanged on a hook driven into a wall of the palace. A legend has it that a Turkish archer could no longer stand the abuse of the prince and shot him dead with an arrow. This tragic end of the freedom and faith defender so much loved by the Ukrainian people was immortalized in many legends, folk songs and ballads:
“The tsar shouted at his soldiers:
‘Take Baida and tie him down,
And hang him on a hook by his rib.’
And there hangs Baida — more than a day,
A night or an hour.”
Historians have always argued about who Dmytro Vyshnevetsky really was. A Lithuanian and Muscovite condottiere and adventure seeker, as Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, a renowued French researcher, believed, or defender of Ukraine? What raises no doubt is that he was a true patriot of his land and defender of the Orthodox faith, refusing to betray it even under terrible tortures.
Dmytro Vyshnevetsky did not die in vain. Mykhailo Hrushevsky said he became “the historical patron of Zaporozhzhian Sich... and he streaked across the whole Ukrainian life like a bright and shining meteor.” His successors in line of triumph, were first of all Severyn Nalyvaiko, Samiylo Kishka, Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny. Even Bohdan Khmelnytsky only followed the well-trodden paths of the glorious Baida, Prince Dmytro Ivanovych Vyshnevetsky.
