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‘There is no luxury of any kind in his room; the walls are bare. The furniture consists of rough wooden benches covered with leather cushions . . . A damask rug lies before the hetman’s small bed, at the head of which hang a bow and a sabre,’ 15 A couple of years later, Paul of Aleppo was surprised to find this ‘old man, possessing every quality of a leader’ having dinner in ‘a small and mean shelter . . . with the table spread before him and no other dish laid on it but a mess of boiled fennel’. 16
    For the first fifty years of his life, Khmelnytsky pursued a perfectly conventional szlachta career. Born around 1595 of noble Orthodox parents, he was educated by Jesuits at Jaroslaw, before joining the Polish army. Serving in Moldova, he fell prisoner to the Turks and spent two years in captivity. In 1622 he came home to the family estate in central Ukraine, where he spent the next twenty-five years farming and bringing up his family, avoiding involvement in the uprisings of the 1620s and ’30s and climbing steadily up the ranks of loyal registered Cossacks. What induced this respectable middle-aged figure to start a rebellion that would last eight years, lay waste Ukraine, kill hundreds of thousands of people and almost destroy the Commonwealth of which he had hitherto been a loyal and successful member?
    The answer, apparently, was a personal grudge. In 1646, while Khmelnytsky, now a widower, was away on business, a Polish neighbour with whom he had quarrelled raided his estate, beating to death his young son and kidnapping the woman he had been planning to marry. Having failed to win redress from the local courts or the Senate in Warsaw, in January 1648 the infuriated Khmelnytsky fled to the Sich, where he succeeded in persuading the Zaporozhians to rise once more under his leadership. At the same time he concluded an alliance with the Tatar khan, giving him a force of 4,000 cavalry, vital against the Poles’ fearsome Husaria, who galloped into battle with twenty-foot lances and feather-covered wooden wings hissing above their heads. Forewarned, the Poles marched south, and in April the two sides came face to face at a village north-west of the Sich called Yellow Waters, where a 3,000-strong Polish advance guard was surrounded and cut to pieces.
    That spring and summer Khmelnytsky seemed invincible. Marching north-west towards Warsaw, his raggle-taggle army scored victory after victory, leaving the Commonwealth in tatters. Registered Cossack troops came over to the rebels in droves, and all over the country peasants took the opportunity to loot and massacre. ‘Wherever they found the szlachta, royal officials or Jews,’ says the nearly contemporary Eye-Witness Chronicle, ‘they killed them all, sparing neither women nor children. They pillaged the estates of the Jews and nobles, burned churches and killed their priests, leaving nothing whole. It was a rare individual in those days who had not soaked his hands in blood . . .’ 17 Jarema Wisniowiecki, leader of an earlier pacification campaign and the most powerful magnate in Ukraine, raised his own army and instituted savage reprisals, ordering captives to be tortured ‘so that they feel they are dying’. Imitating the Tatars, both sides took to using prisoners for target practice, or impaled them alive upon wooden stakes.
    For three years Khmelnytsky held all of present-day western and central Ukraine, from Lviv in the west to Poltava in the east. His luck ran out in 1651, when the Cossacks were deserted by their Tatar allies and suffered a crushing defeat at Berestechko, north-east of Lviv. Beaten and betrayed, Khmelnytsky needed an ally. Fatefully – some would say fatally – for the whole of Eastern Europe, he found it in Russia.
    By now Muscovy was already a vast empire. Ivan IV (‘The Formidable’ to Russians, ‘The Terrible’ to everyone else) had conquered the Muslim khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, taking the border south to the shores of