Class 9. Polish Power and Cossack Revolution (1)
- Okay, greetings everybody, happy Tuesday.
You have an exam, not this Thursday,
but the one after that.
It will be a 50 minute exam in this space.
You will have blue books.
Very exciting.
The TFs and I are gonna remember to get blue books.
And if you have an accommodation for this exam,
please make sure that your TF knows about it
between now and then,
so we can make sure that everyone
is set up the way they need to be set up.
The format will be very simple.
There'll be a shorter essay.
There'll be a longer essay.
There'll probably be some IDs, maybe some dates.
But nothing very confusing.
Okay, any questions about the practical side of this class?
The exam?
Sections?
Everything's good?
I was just waiting to see how long it would take
for you guys to nod.
I was like letting the blank stares go by,
waiting for you to realize you had to nod.
Okay, good.
What we're gonna try to do today
is bring the Polish factor into our class.
And this is a very important thing to do
because without the Polish factor, no Ukraine,
no Ukraine as it exists today.
I hope by now you've gotten used to the idea that nations
are not vertical constructions, which were born a long time,
and then continue continuously over the same territory
in the boring way that it's presented
to you in your school textbooks.
I hope you've gotten used to the idea
that nations are a result of encounters of larger units
and things bouncing off each other,
and unexpected reactions and counterreactions.
We've already worked through how
at the basis of Ukrainian history,
we have this encounter
between the Franks and the Byzantines,
with the Vikings kind of sliding from one to the other.
Without that encounter, no Ukraine.
We've then worked through how in the 13th century there
was the progress of the Teutonic Knights from the West,
the Mongols from the East, and in that encounter,
Lithuania ends up controlling most
of what had been the territories of Rus.
Again, without that encounter,
no Ukraine as we understand it.
We're now moving into another encounter,
the encounter between Lithuania and Poland.
And in this encounter between Lithuania and Poland,
Ukraine, for the first time begins to emerge
as something like a distinct entity.
So at the end of this lecture,
it should be pretty clear that there will be the emergence
of some distinct Ukrainian political features,
which are recognizable up to the present.
Now, I'm gonna give you just a few things very abstractly
before I get into the historical part.
We need Poland for a lot of reasons,
but very briefly, like telegraphically,
the things that are going to come in from the Polish side
have to do with the West.
They have to do with the Franks,
the Holy Roman Empire, Western Christianity, right?
Like in a way, when Poland enters the story,
it's like a delayed, you know, six centuries delayed,
but it's delayed encounter with the Franks,
the Frankish version of Europe,
with the Western Christian version of Europe,
because Poland, as you'll remember,
converts to not Eastern, but Western Christianity.
So from Poland, we are going to get Catholicism,
an encounter with Catholicism, with Roman Catholicism.
We're also going to get the emergence of something
called Greek Catholicism,
which still exists in Ukraine today.
From Poland we are going to get the Polish language
and a Polish version of the Renaissance.
And from Poland, we're going to get the idea of a republic.
It is a very important idea, a very ambiguous idea.
A republic means a state, which is for the public,
which sounds wonderful.
Republic, res publica, rzeczpospolita in Polish,
respublika, if you insist in Ukrainian.
It means the common matter, right?
But it means the public, the public matter.
But who is the public?
Is the tricky question for republics, you know,
right down to and including the republic
in which we are inhabiting, which we are inhabiting today.
So, if the republic is a state,
which is not for just a king, not just for a monarch,
but it's for a public, who's the public?
Who's in and who's out?
That political question is posed very powerfully in Poland.
As we're gonna see, it's gonna be posed vis-a-vis Ukraine.
And in some sense, an attempt to answer
that question by the Cossacks
is where a clear national history,
or at least anticolonial history of Ukraine begins.
So Poland has a structure,
and this is my very last preliminary remark,
and then we're gonna dive in.
Poland has a structure which is different from Muscovy.
So we're gonna see these points.
We're gonna see the contact
between Poland and Muscovy over and over again.
But if you think of Muscovy
as being founded as a post-Mongol state
with a very centralized vertical type of regime,
Poland is something else.
Poland is a horizontal regime in which the nobles
are much more important than the monarch,
in which the nobles have rights, unlike in Muscovy,
in which the nobles rights increase over time.
And in which by the end of this lecture,
actually around the middle,
the nobles are actually selecting the monarch
rather than the other way around.
In Muscovy, the monarch selects the nobles.
In Poland, the the nobles select the monarch.
And that's a very, very different kind of setup.
And with this notion of a republic and the notion of nobles
who belong to the republic comes the idea of rights.
Again, not rights for everyone,
but rights for the people who belong to the noble estate.
That's a Polish notion.
We're gonna see how it emerges over time.
But again, you have to see the difference
between that and Muscovy where the notion
that anyone has rights is really not present at all
until much, much, much later.
And the Cassocks, the Ukrainian Cassocks
are gonna emerge in this story,
and who we saw a bit of in the last lecture,
the Ukrainian Cassocks are somewhere in between.
The Ukrainian Cassocks are going to get their idea,
some ideas about rights from the contact with Poland.
And the Cassocks in some way are going to want to,
they're gonna be a group that wants
to get inside this system in order
to enjoy the rights of being inside the system,
but are not going to be able to do so,
but are going to be able to rebel.
And that's where we're going to end, okay.
So let's, so, for the purposes of,
so you get the method, right?
This is a class about Ukraine,
but there is no way to do national history
by just doing national history, right?
If you try to tell, so you might have noticed this,
like you go to a party and you meet a new person,
and what do you do?
You talk about yourself the whole time, right?
And when you talk about your yourself the whole time,
what happens?
The other person falls in love with you instantly
and everything goes great, right?
So, national history is like that.
You can't just say,
oh, there's just me, me, me, me, me, right?
If you just say Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine,
Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine,
I might get a lot of like thumbs up, you know,
from like certain Ukrainian nationalists or whatever.
But, you can't make sense of yourself
without other people, right?
And you can't make sense of yourself without listening,
and you can't make sense of who you really are
without understanding what influences are coming in
from where and what circumstances.
So if we're gonna get to Ukraine,
but if we're gonna understand the Ukraine
of the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries,
we really have to fundamentally
understand the Polish system.
So we're gonna work on the Polish system
or the Polish-Lithuanian system, okay.
So, the first thing to know about Poland,
where I just left off, the rise of the noble estate,
very important historical difference from Muscovy
and from other countries like France, for example.
The rise of the noble estate.
The noble estate is in Poland,
first of all, very big, about 10% of the population,
which means that by the time the noble estate
has a parliament and can vote,
more people in Poland can vote than in any other country.
So it's a more representative system than any other country
until British parliamentary reform in the 19th century.
More people can vote in Poland than anywhere else.
10% by early modern standards is a huge number
to participate in politics, okay.
So it's very large.
By the 15th century, the membership has been stabilized.
So all of these groups that are like,
that are very selective, you know,
you know what I'm talking about.
You're at Yale, like all these selective groups,
you know, that you can't get in all those groups.
So all these groups at one time were very open, right?
Like, so the trick of it, like all the things which used
to be which are now exclusive were once inclusive,
maybe not all, okay?
But you get the basic idea.
Historically, there's often a period where you
can join something and then that group decides,
okay, no one can join anymore.
The nobility in Poland is an example of that.
So in the 15th century,
the nobility in Poland had managed to define who it was.
The nobility is gonna pass on from father to son,
no one else is going to join.
Membership is stabilized.
And the nobility has by the 15th century at the latest,
a sense of a common identity in Poland.
Now, what happens in the Polish system
is that the power of the nobility
only ever ratchets upwards.
It only ever goes upwards until the 18th century
when they have a constitution and they break it.
And they have a very interesting moment
of political thought, which goes on for a few years.
And then the Russians come and it's all over.
If this were a Polish history class,
we'd spent a lot of time on that.
I just spent 15 seconds.
So, but for now, what we need to know
is that the power of the nobility ratchets upward.
And there are logics to this.
One logic is that the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, okay?
So, oh yeah, the essence of the Polish system
is that they have a Lithuanian monarch, right?
You remember that, right?
They have a Lithuanian monarch Jogaila or Jagiello,
from 1385 until until 1572.
So for almost two full centuries,
they are governed by a Lithuanian dynasty, right?
So the, the greatest,
or at least the most interesting period of Polish history
is when they had Lithuanian monarchs.
This is very important for our class, right?
Because it's because there's a Lithuanian connection
for Poland that there's a Ukrainian connection for Poland.
Because when Lithuania and Poland come together,
Lithuania controls most of what is today Ukraine.
So, it's through the monarch,
it's through Jagiello and his descendants,
descendants, descendants for almost 200 years
that Ukraine and Poland are in the same state.
It's through the body of the Lithuanian ruler,
but the Lithuanian Grand Duke,
in order to become the Polish king
had to make promises to the nobility, okay?
And so every time, I'm simplifying a little bit
that basically every time the Lithuanian ruler dies,
the Lithuanian ruler then has to go to the Polish nobility.
They make tours, actually.
They travel from castle to castle.
It's not you imagine because of, you know,
you imagine that the king has a big castle
and everyone comes to him.
That's a little bit later.
These were actually itinerant monarchs.
They would, you know, you'd travel from place to place.
You'd go like seasonally, you'd hunt with this person,
