Kosinski Uprising

Kosiński uprising (1591–1593) is a name applied to two rebellions in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (modern day Ukraine) organised by Krzysztof Kosiński against the local Ruthenian nobility and magnates.

In the late 16th century the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was experiencing a short period of internal stability. This, however, was threatened by the Cossacks, who organised raids into Crimea, Moldavia and other lands of the Ottoman Empire. To counter the threat, Sultan Murad III threatened Poland-Lithuania with war if the Cossack pillaging was to continue. In 1580 the Sejm in Warsaw passed the Order in Ukraine (Porządek ze strony Niżowców i Ukrainy) Act, in which the Registered Cossacks were banned from raids to the Zaporizhian Sich, taking captives and pillaging. Any Cossack who broke this law was to be put to death without trial.

In 1591 Kosiński, who was at that time one of the colonels of the Registered Cossacks in Kiev Voivodship, was deprived of his estate in the villages of Rokitno and Olszanice by the Ostrogski family. To take his lands back, Kosiński gathered his regiment and captured the castle of Bila Tserkva. There he named himself a Hetman of Cossacks and started a revolt against Polish rule in Ukraine and the rule of local Ruthenian nobility and magnates in the lands of Kiev and Bratslav.

What started as a private act of revenge soon turned into a full-scale civil war between local Ruthenian nobility and the Cossacks. By 1592 a large part of the society of Ukraine supported the revolt and it spread to Volhynia. However, the conflict was seen by Polish hetman and chancellor Jan Zamoyski as yet another struggle for power in Ukraine and the Polish forces of hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski did not enter the war. The local nobles started a levee en masse and with their own private forces began a pursuit of Kosiński's forces.

...
Wikipedia