Khmelnytsky’s 1648 rising built a Cossack state on the Dnieper
The Cossack Hetmanate, officially the Zaporozhian Host, was a stratocratic state in Dnieper Ukraine born from Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s 1648 uprising. The 1649 Treaty of Zboriv recognized it in eastern Commonwealth lands. Catherine II abolished the hetman office in 1764.
After Ivan Mazepa’s failed break with Russia in 1708, the area fell into Kiev Governorate with autonomy crushed. Historians coined “Hetmanate” in the late nineteenth century from the general’s title; official documents said Zaporizhian Host. “Ukraine” named the homeland poetically more than bureaucratically; Pylyp Orlyk’s 1710 constitution used the language of a Ruthenian polity. Its lands lay mainly in central Ukraine, with slices of Belarus and southwestern Russia and, at times, the Zaporozhian Sich further south. The name Zaporizhian, meaning beyond the rapids, came from the Sich Cossacks even though the state was not centred there. Moscow's diplomats called the territory Little Russia, the Ottomans the Country of Ukraine, and Johann Homann's map labelled it the Land of Cossacks.
Khmelnytsky told Polish envoy Adam Kysil in 1649 he ruled a Ruthenian state; Metropolitan Sylvestr Kosiv called him land’s commander. Proposed Grand Principality of Ruthenia imagined the Host inside a Polish–Lithuanian–Ruthenian Commonwealth. Causes of revolt included corruption, social strain, and religious conflict in Commonwealth Ukraine.
Its independence eroded in stages. The 1654 Treaty of Pereiaslav, which made the Hetmanate a vassal of the Tsardom of Moscow, is treated as a landmark by Soviet, Ukrainian and Russian historians alike. A second Pereiaslav council in 1659 curtailed its freedom further, and the 1667 Treaty of Andrusovo, negotiated with no Cossack delegates at all, split the Hetmanate along the Dnieper between Poland and Russia and put the Sich under joint supervision. From 1764 it was run as the Little Russia Governorate under Pyotr Rumyantsev until the last of its institutions disappeared in 1781. Descendants of its ruling class later led the Ukrainian national revival of the nineteenth century.
Source: Cossack Hetmanate
