Brian Davies

Patrick Gordon and the Chudnov-Slobodishche Campaign, 1660

The Chudnov-Slobodishche Campaign in 1660 was one of the bloodiest in the Thirteen Years’ War and resulted in the destruction of an entire Muscovite field army of 32,000 and the defection of Hetman Iurii Khmel’nyts’ky to the Poles. Patrick Gordon was a participant in this campaign, as a Captain Lieutenant of dragoons in the Polish army—he was then just 25 years old and had entered Polish service only a year before. Gordon’s account of the campaign, in folios 53–93 v. of the second volume of his diary, provides valuable details about both Polish-Lithuanian and Muscovite military technique at this stage of the war. It also relates the circumstances under which Gordon, after helping to destroy a Muscovite army, left Polish service and managed to enter the service of the tsar. 1

Lisowski’s Free Lances: Polish-Lithuanian Mercenaries in Muscovy’s Time of Troubles

This article argues for placing greater emphasis on the impact of Polish military intervention upon the course of the Time of Troubles in Muscovy. Before 1610 such intervention took the form of adventurism by Polish nobles leading mercenary bands and operating without the approval of King Sigismund III.

THE ROAD TO PEREIASLAV Ukrainian and Muscovite Understandings of Protectorate, 1620-1654

AbstractThis article reexamines the political and cultural background to the 1654 Pereiaslav Agreement placing Bogdan Khmel´nyts kyi’s Hetmanate under the protection of Muscovite Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich—an action that had significant unforeseen consequences for the political development of Ukraine and that continues to generate controversy today. It argues that the adoption of the Pereiaslav Agreement had much less to do with discourse about the historical religious-political kinship of Ukrainians and Muscovites and the original unity of Rus´ (this discourse had only recently begun and had not yet achieved much coherence or credence) than with military considerations, specifically, Tsar Aleksei’s interest in securing Ukrainian cossack participation in his campaign in Belarus´ and Lithuania. It also argues that neither side came to Pereiaslav with a firm and concrete idea as to how protectorate would redefine the respective sovereignties of Muscovy and the Hetmanate, for the available historical models of protectorate derived from conditions Khmel´nyt´ski could not arrange given his strategic position at the time and which Muscovite tsars had no precedent for accepting.