Cossack uprisings

The Cossack uprisings (also rebellions, revolts) were a series of military conflicts between the cossacks and the states claiming dominion over the territories the Cossacks lived in, namely the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russian Empire during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Both states tried to exert control over the independent-minded Cossacks. While the early uprisings were against the Commonwealth, as the Russian Empire gained increasing and then total control over the Ruthenian (Ukrainian) lands where the Cossacks lived, the target of Cossacks uprisings changed as well.

The origins of the first Cossacks are disputed. Traditional historiography dates the emergence of Cossacks to the 14th to 15th centuries. Towards the end of the 15th century, the Ukrainian Cossacks formed the Zaporozhian Sich centered on the fortified Dnipro islands. Initially a vassal of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the increasing social and religious pressure from the Commonwealth caused a series of uprisings, and the proclamation of an independent Cossack Hetmanate, culminating in a rebellion under Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the mid-17th century. While the Cossacks were useful to the Polish-Lithuanian states in the war periods, they proved to be more problematic in the peacetime, due to their raids on the Commonwealth neighbours (primarily, the Ottoman Empire and its allies). Further, the Polish nobility tried to assert control over the Cossack territories, turn them into feudal latifundia, limit the growth of the militant Cossacks, and even reverse it, by turning the Cossacks into serfs. Afterward the Khmelnytsky Uprising, the Treaty of Pereyaslav brought most of the Cossack Hetmanate under Russian control.

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