Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [195]
How dare a Polish noble despise a Cossack! Were not the Cossacks free?
There were three main sections of their great fraternity. Four hundred miles away to the south-east, where the great River Don came down to the Black Sea shore, dwelt the Don Cossacks in their many settlements. Here, in these southern Kievan lands, lived the Dniepr Cossacks, proudly independent men like Ostap on his little farm by Russka. And lastly, far to the south, in the wild steppe below the Dniepr rapids, lay the Cossack horde – the Zaporozhian host – wild, unpredictable, living in a huge camp where no women were allowed, thousands strong and answerable to no man.
That was where the two fellows disguised as monks had come from.
How proud Andrei was to be a Cossack! He had learned their exploits at his mother’s knee. Who had been hired by the powerful Stroganovs, late in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, to explore and conquer the huge wilds of Siberia? Ermak the warrior and his brother Cossacks. Indeed, though Andrei did not know it, other Cossack adventurers, at this very time, were reaching those distant shores, five thousand miles away, that stared across the narrow straits to cold Alaska.
It was the Don Cossacks who had seized the great fortress of Azov, by the Black Sea, from the mighty Ottoman Turks. And it was the Zaporozhian Cossacks who had not once, but twice, taken their long boats down to Constantinople and burned the Ottoman fleet under the very noses of the Turks.
Everyone feared the Cossacks. The Tatars in the Crimea feared them, so did the Turks who were the Tatars’ overlords. Poland had needed their services again and again. Even the Pope had sent an envoy to the Zaporozhian camp. ‘And without us Cossacks,’ the old Ostap always said, ‘the Tsar and his family would never have gained the throne of Muscovy.’
Even this boast was half-true.
Poor Muscovy. What awful torments the northern land had suffered. Soon after Ivan the Terrible’s death the ancient ruling house of Muscovy had ended. For a time a great boyar related to the royal house – Boris Godunov – had tried to hold the land together, but had sunk under the burden. Then had come those dismal years – the Time of Troubles – when plague and famine swept the land, when one after another false claimant to the throne seized power, until it was hard at times to say if any Tsar ruled in Russia. Other powers had seen their chance; Sweden had invaded and worst of all, using every kind of treachery and guile, the Polish King had tried to take the throne of Muscovy and make her Catholic.
And then, at last, great Russia had risen. She had suffered the terror of Ivan, plague and famine and foreign invasion but now, having suffered, she arose. It was not the great princes and magnates, not the leading gentry, who turned like an irresistible tide against the Poles. It was the simple peasants, the small landholders, and the grim, bearded elders of Orthodoxy from beyond the Volga River who massed with spears and axes to sweep the Catholics out. ‘And we Cossacks helped them, our Orthodox brothers,’ Ostap would say with truth, and with rather less truth: ‘Without us, they would have lost.’
The Poles had been driven out. A great meeting, a Zemsky Sobor, had been called, and a popular boyar family had been chosen to found a new dynasty.
In this way the family of Ivan the Terrible’s first, kindly wife, who had been despised by the great magnates only fifty years before were, in the year 1613, chosen to be rulers, and the new Romanov dynasty was begun.
Andrei had mixed feelings about the Muscovites. Like most Ukrainians, he thought them crude. With all Cossacks, he was suspicious of any authoritarian ruler like the Tsar. But the Russian people were his brothers, for a very simple reason: they were Orthodox. ‘They drove the Catholic Poles out of their land. Perhaps