Background
Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the son of Michael Chmielnicki. He was born at Subatow, near Chigirin in the Ukraine, an estate given to the elde' Chmielnicki for his lifelong services to the Polish crown.
Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the son of Michael Chmielnicki. He was born at Subatow, near Chigirin in the Ukraine, an estate given to the elde' Chmielnicki for his lifelong services to the Polish crown.
Bogdan, after learning to read and write, a rare accomplishment in those days, entered the Cossack ranks, was dangerously wounded and taken prisoner in his first battle against the Turks, and found leisure during his two years' captivity at Constantinople to acquire the rudiments of Turkish and French. On returning to the Ukraine he settled down quietly on his paternal estate, and in all probability history would never have known his name if the intolerable persecution of a neighbouring Polish squire, who stole his hayricks and flogged his infant son to death, had not converted the thrifty and acquisitive Cossack husbandman into one of the most striking and sinister figures of modern times. Failing to get redress nearer home, he determined to seek for justice at Warsaw, whither he had been summoned with other Cossack delegates to assist Wladislaus IV in his long-projected war against the Turks. The king, perceiving him to be a man of some education and intelligence, appointed him pisarz or secretary of the registered Cossacks, and he subsequently served under Koniecpolski in the Ukraine campaign of 1646. His hopes of distinction were, however, cut short by a decree of the Polish diet, which, in order to vex the king, refused to sanction the continuance of the war.
Chmielnicki, doubly hateful to the Poles as being both a royalist and a Cossack, was again maltreated and chicaned, and only escaped from gaol by bribing his gaolers.
Thirsting for vengeance, he fled to the Cossack settlements on the Lower Dnieper and thence sent messages to the khan of the Crimea, urging a simultaneous invasion of Poland by the Tatars and the Cossacks (1647).
On the 11th of April 1648, at an assembly of the Zaporozhians (see Poland: History), he openly declared his intention of proceeding against the Poles, and was elected ataman by acclamation. itAt Zheltnaya Vodui (Yellow Waters) in the Ukraine he annihilated, on the 19th of May, a detached Polish army corps after three days' desperate fighting, and on the 26th routed the main Polish army under the grand hetman, Stephen Potocki, at Kruta Balka (Hard Plank), near the river Korsun.
The immediate consequence of these victories was the outbreak of a " serfs' fury. "
Throughout the Ukraine the Polish gentry were hunted down, flayed and burnt alive, blinded and sawn asunder.
Every manor-house was reduced to ashes.
The panic-stricken inhabitants fled to the nearest strongholds, and soon the rebels were swarming all over the palatinates of Volhynia and Podolia.
But the ataman was as crafty as he was cruel.
All Poland now lay at his feet, and the road to the defenceless capital was open before him; but he wasted the precious months in vain before the fortress of Zamosc, and was then persuaded by the new king of Poland, John Casimir, to consent to a suspension of hostilities.
In 1649, therefore, the war was resumed.
Instinct told him that his old ally the khan of the Crimea was unreliable, and that the tsar of Muscovy was his natural protector, yet he could not make up his mind to abandon the one or turn to the other.
His attempt to carve a principality for his son out of Moldavia, which Poland regarded as her vassal, led to the outbreak in 1651 of a third war between subject and suzerain, which speedily assumed the dignity and the dimensions of a crusade.
But Bogdan himself was not without ecclesiastical sanction.
But fortune, so long his friend, now deserted him, and at Beresteczko (July 1, 1651) the Cossack ataman was defeated for the first time.
But even now his power was far from broken.
In 1652 he openly interfered in the affairs of Transylvania and Walachia, and assumed the high-sounding title of " guardian of the Ottoman Porte. "
With all his native ability, Chmielnicki was but an eminent savage.
He was the creature of every passing mood or whim, incapable of cool and steady judgment or of the slightest self-control-an incalculable weathercock, blindly obsequious to every blast of passion.
Bohdan Khmelnytsky married Hanna Somkivna. The couple settled in Subotiv. They had three daughters: Stepanida, Olena, and Kateryna. His first son Tymish (Tymofiy) was born in 1632, and another son Yuriy was born in 1640.
