There are still different versions about the origin of Bogdan (Zinovy) Mikhailovich Khmelnitsky. However, most scientists, in particular the Russian historian Gennady Sanin and his Ukrainian colleagues Valery Smoliy and Valery Stepankov, claim that he was born on December 27, 1595, either in the rich paternal farm Subotov, which was located on the territory of the Korsunsky and then Chigirinsky headman, or in Chigirin himself. His father, Mikhail Lavrinovich Khmelnitsky, came from the so-called boyar, or rank, gentry and spent many years in the service of the full crown hetman Stanislav Zholkevsky, and then with his son-in-law, the Korsun and Chigirin headman Jan Danilovich. Most likely, Bogdan's mother, whose name was Agafya, came from a Little Russian gentry family. Although a number of historians, for example, Oleg Boyko, believed that she was a registered Cossack.
In 1608, after graduating from the Kiev fraternal (Orthodox) school, when Bogdan turned 12, his father sent him to study at one of the best Jesuit collegiums - a fraternal school in Lviv, where all the then “students” studied the traditional set of academic disciplines: Old Church Slavonic, Greek and Latin languages, grammar, rhetoric, poetics, elements of philosophy, dialectics, as well as arithmetic, geometry, the beginning of astronomy, theology and music. In 1615, after completing the traditional seven-year education for that time, Bogdan Khmelnytsky, who, among other sciences, perfectly mastered the French, Polish and German languages, could go to Warsaw and start a brilliant career here at the court of King Sigismund III himself. However, his father recalled his son to Chigirin, where he began military service in the Chigirin regiment as an ordinary registered Cossack who was in military service at the "Polish Koruna".
Already in 1620, when the next Turkish-Polish war broke out, young Bogdan, together with his father, participated in the campaign of the great crown hetman and great chancellor Stanislav Zholkevsky to Moldova, where his father, together with his long-term benefactor, died in the famous Tsetsorskaya battle, and Bogdan himself was captured by the enemy.
As many historians believe, two or three years of hard slavery in the Turkish gallery (or maybe in the retinue of one of the Turkish admirals) were not in vain for Bogdan, since in captivity he managed to learn Turkish, and possibly the Tatar languages. And in 1622/1623 he returned to his native land, having been ransomed from Turkish captivity either by some nameless Dutch merchant, or by Sigismund III himself, or by his fellow countrymen - the Cossacks of the Chigirinsky regiment, who, remembering the military deeds of his deceased father, helped Bogdan's mother collect the necessary amount for the ransom of his son from Turkish bondage.
Upon his return to Subotov, Bogdan Khmelnytsky was again enrolled in the royal register, and from mid. In the 1620s, he began to actively participate in the sea campaigns of the Cossacks to Turkish cities, including in the outskirts of Istanbul (Constantinople), from where the Cossacks returned in 1629 with rich booty and young Turkish women. Although then, after a rather long stay in the Zaporizhzhya Sich, in 1630 he returned to Chigirin and soon married the daughter of his friend, Colonel Yakim Somko from Pereyaslavl, Anna (Hanna) Somkovna. In 1632, his firstborn was born - the eldest son Timofey, and soon he was elected a centurion of the Chigirinsky regiment.
According to the Polish chronicler Vespian Kokhovsky, it was in this capacity that Bogdan Khmelnitsky in 1630 took an active part in the famous uprising of the Zaporizhzhya hetman Taras Shake. However, modern historians, in particular, Gennady Sanin, deny this fact. Moreover, in the history of new uprisings of the Zaporozhye Cossacks against the Polish crown, including Ivan Sulima in 1635, the name of Bohdan Khmelnitsky is no longer found. Although it has been reliably established that it was he who in 1637, being already a military (general) clerk of the Zaporozhye army, signed the surrender of the lower (not registered) Cossacks, who were defeated in the course of a new uprising under the leadership of Hetman Pavel Pavlyuk.
At the same time, according to the Chronicle of the Samovist, the authorship of which is attributed to Roman Rakushka-Romanovsky, when Vladislav IV (1632-1648) ascended the Polish throne and the Smolensk War between the Commonwealth and Russia began, Bogdan Khmelnitsky participated in the siege of Smolensk by the Poles in 1633 –1634 years. Moreover, as the Kharkiv professor Pyotr Butsinsky, the author of his master's thesis "On Bohdan Khmelnitsky," established, in 1635 he received a golden saber from the hands of the Polish king for personal bravery and his salvation from enemy captivity during one of the skirmishes with the regiments of the governor Mikhail Shein. True, much later, in the midst of the next Russian-Polish war of 1654-1667, the Zaporozhye hetman allegedly reproached himself for this royal award, declaring to the Moscow ambassadors that "this saber is the shame of Bogdan."
It is clear that after such a high award, Bogdan Khmelnitsky received a special favor from the Polish king and three times - in 1636, 1637 and 1638 - was a member of the Cossack deputations to present to the Valny (general) Diet and Vladislav IV numerous complaints and petitions about the violence and devastation caused by city registry Cossacks from the side of the Polish magnates and the Catholic gentry. Meanwhile, according to a number of modern authors, including Gennady Sanin, Valery Smoliy, Valery Stepankov and Natalya Yakovenko, after the famous ordination of 1638-1639, which significantly curtailed the rights and privileges of the registered Cossacks, Bohdan Khmelnitsky lost his position as a military clerk and again became the centurion officer of the Chigirinsky regiment.
Meanwhile, in 1645, Vladislav IV, who had long been at enmity with the Valny Diet, decided to provoke a new war with the Ottoman Empire in order to significantly replenish the Quartz (royal regular) army under the pretext of this military conflict, since the Polish magnates by that time completely controlled the collection The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (gentry militia). To this end, he decided to rely on the Cossack foreman and entrusted his plan to three authoritative personalities - the Cherkasy colonel Ivan Barabash, the Pereyaslavl colonel Ilyash Karaim (Armenianchik) and the Chigirin centurion Bogdan Khmelnitsky. At the same time, the Polish king granted the registered Cossacks his Universal, or Privilege, to restore their desecrated rights and privileges taken from the Cossacks in 1625. Although the matter did not come to another war with the Turks, since the "recruitment" of the Cossack troops by the royal side caused terrible excitement among the Polish magnates and gentry, and Vladislav IV was forced to abandon his previous plans to get even with the Valny Diet. Nevertheless, the royal Privilege remained with the Cossacks and, according to various sources, was kept secretly either by Ilyash Karaim or by Ivan Barabash. When the Polish king suffered another setback in the fight against the magnate opposition, then, according to historians (Nikolai Kostomarov, Gennady Sanin), Bogdan Khmelnitsky lured the royal Privilege by cunning and planned to use this letter for his far-reaching plans.
I must say that different historians interpret these plans in different ways, but most of them, for example, Gennady Sanin, Valery Smoliy and Valery Stepankov, argue that initially Khmelnytsky himself, like most of the Cossack foremen and the top of the Orthodox clergy, included creation of an independent Cossack state, independent of Turkey, the Commonwealth and Russia.
Meanwhile, a number of modern authors, in particular, Gennady Sanin, believes that frequent visits to Warsaw as part of Cossack delegations allowed Khmelnitsky to establish rather trusting relations with the French envoy to the Polish court, Count de Brezhi, with whom a secret agreement was soon signed on sending 2,500 Cossacks to France, which, as part of the famous Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), took an active part in the siege of Dunkirk by the French prince Louis Condé. Moreover, interestingly, according to Polish and French chronicles (for example, Pierre Chevalier) and in the opinion of many Ukrainian and Russian historians, Bogdan Khmelnytsky not only received a personal audience with the Prince of Condé during his stay in Fontainebleau, but also a personal message from the leader of the English " revolutionaries "Lieutenant General of the Parliamentary Army Oliver Cromwell, who then led the armed struggle against the English king Charles I. Although it should be admitted that this fairly common version was refuted in the works of the famous Soviet Ukrainian historian Vladimir Golobutsky and the modern Polish historian Zbigniew Wuytsik, who authoritatively asserted: in fact, a detachment of Polish mercenaries, commanded by Colonel Krishtof Przymski, took part in the siege and capture of Dunkirk.
Meanwhile, in the spring of 1647, taking advantage of Bogdan's absence in Chigirin, Chigirin's old man Daniel Chaplinsky, who had a long-standing personal enmity with his neighbor, attacked his farm, plundered it, took away his new "civilian" wife by the name of Gelena, with whom he began to live after the death of his first wife, he married her according to the Catholic rite and whipped to death his youngest son Ostap, who was barely ten years old.
At first, Khmelnytsky began to seek truth and protection in the crown court, however, not finding them, he turned to the king, who told him that the Cossacks, having a "saber in their belt," themselves had the right to defend their legal rights with arms in hand. Returning from Warsaw, he decided to resort to the "wise" advice of the king and, relying on his own Privilege, began to prepare a new uprising of the Zaporozhye Cossacks. True, soon a certain Roman Peshta reported on the plans of Bohdan Khmelnitsky to the Chigirin headman Alexander Konetspolsky, who ordered his arrest. But with the support of his loyal comrade, the Chigirin colonel Mikhail Krichevsky, who was himself involved in the preparation of a new Cossack revolt, Khmelnitsky escaped from imprisonment and in early February 1648, at the head of a detachment of Cossacks, arrived on the island of Tomakovka.
Gathering the local Zaporozhians around him, he moved to Khortitsa, to the Zaporozhye Sich itself, located on the Nikitsky Rog. Here Khmelnitsky's detachment defeated the Polish garrison and forced the Cherkasy Colonel Stanislav Yursky to flee, whose Cossacks immediately joined the rebellious detachment of the Registered and Zaporozhye Cossacks, declaring that "fight the Cossacks against the Cossacks - all the same, scho vowkom".
At the beginning of April 1648, having entered into secret negotiations with the Crimean Khan Islam III Giray, Khmelnitsky got him to send a large detachment of the Perekop Murza Tugai-bey to help the Cossacks. This unexpected "foreign policy" success played into the hands of Khmelnytsky, who, upon returning to the Sich, was immediately elected military hetman of the Zaporozhye army.
At the end of April 1648, the 12 thousandth Crimean Cossack army, bypassing the Kodak fortress, left the Sich and went to meet the quartz detachment of Stefan Potocki, who came out from Krylov to meet the Cossacks. Moreover, both full hetmans - crown Nikolai Pototsky and field Martin Kalinovsky - remained in their camp located between Cherkassy and Korsun, waiting for reinforcements.
Meanwhile, Bogdan Khmelnitsky went to the mouth of the Tyasmina River and camped on its tributary - Yellow Waters. It was here that the 5,000-strong detachment under the command of Stefan Pototsky was completely defeated, and its young leader, the son of Nikolai Pototsky, was mortally wounded and died. Then the Crimean Cossack army moved to Korsun, where in the middle. In May 1648, a new battle took place on the Boguslavsky Way, which ended in the death of almost the entire 20-thousandth Quartz army and the capture of Nikolai Potocki and Martin Kalinovsky, who were "presented" to Tugai-Bey as a gift.
The defeat at the Yellow Waters surprisingly coincided with the unexpected death of Vladislav IV, which caused a murmur among the Polish gentry and magnates. Moreover, interestingly, according to a number of current historians, in particular, Gennady Sanin, in June 1648 Khmelnitsky sent a personal message to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich to Moscow with an unusual proposal to stand as a candidate for the election of a new Polish king. And, although it, of course, remained unanswered, the very fact of establishing direct contacts between the hetman and Moscow is important.
By the end of the summer, in Volyn, a 40,000-strong crush was assembled as part of the Polish gentry and zholnery, which, due to the capture of both hetmans, was headed by three crown commissars - Vladislav Zaslavsky, Alexander Konetspolsky and Nikolai Ostrorog, whom Bohdan Khmelnitsky himself jokingly called “feather bed, ditina and Latin . All R. On September 1648, both armies met near the village of Pilyavtsy near Starokonstantinov, where on the banks of the Ikva River the Crimean Cossack army again won a brilliant victory and plunged the enemy into a panicky flight, leaving 90 cannons, tons of gunpowder and huge trophies on the battlefield, the cost of which was no less 7 million gold.
After such a brilliant victory, the insurgent army rushed to Lviv, which, hastily abandoned by the full hetman Jeremiah Vishnevetsky, began to be defended by the townspeople themselves, led by the local burgomaster Martin Grosweier. However, after the seizure of part of the Lviv fortifications by the detachment of Maxim Krivonos, the Lvov residents paid the Cossacks a small indemnity for lifting the siege of the city, and at the end of October Bohdan Khmelnytsky headed towards Zamoć.
Meanwhile, in the middle. November 1648, the younger brother of the late Vladislav IV Jan II Casimir (1648-1668), who ascended the throne, including with the support of Bohdan Khmelnitsky himself and the deputation of the Cossack foreman, who apparently agreed with him that he would support registered Cossacks in the fight against the Polish and Lithuanian gentry and magnates for their equal rights with them.
At the very beginning. January 1649 Bohdan Khmelnytsky solemnly entered Kiev, where a new round of his negotiations with the Polish side began soon after, which had already begun in Zamoć. Moreover, according to the information of the glad modern authors - Natalya Yakovenko and Gennady Sanin - who refer to the testimonies of the head of the Polish delegation, the Kiev governor Adam Kisel, - before their start, Bohdan Khmelnitsky told all the Cossack foremen and the Polish delegation that now he, a small man who has become by the will of God, "the one-owner and autocrat of the Russian", will knock out "the whole Russian people from the slave captivity" and from now on will "fight for our Orthodox faith, because the Lyadsky land will perish, and Russia will be panuvati."
Already in March 1649, Bogdan Khmelnitsky, who had long been looking for reliable allies in the fight against the Polish crown, sent Sich Colonel Siluyan Muzhilovsky to Moscow with a personal message to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, in which he asked him to take the "Zaporozhian Army under the high sovereign's hand" assistance in the fight against Poland. This message was favorably received in Moscow, and by tsar's order, the first Russian ambassador, the Duma clerk Grigory Unkovsky, left for Chigirin, where the headquarters and the office of the Zaporozhye hetman were then located, who signed the following agreement with Bogdan Khmelnitsky: 1) since Moscow is currently forced to comply with the terms of the Polyanovsk Peace Treaty (1634), then she will not yet be able to start a new war with Poland, but will provide all possible assistance to the Zaporozhye hetman with finances and weapons; 2) Moscow will not object if, at the request of the Cossacks, the Don Cossacks take part in hostilities against the Polish crown.
Meanwhile, Jan II Kazimir unexpectedly resumed hostilities against Bohdan Khmelnytsky, although already in August 1649 the crown army under the leadership of the king himself was completely defeated near Zborov, and he was forced to declare “The Grace of His Royal Majesty to the Zaporizhzhya Army on the points proposed in their petition . The essence of these privileges was as follows: 1) Warsaw officially recognized Bohdan Khmelnitsky as hetman of the Zaporizhzhya army and transferred Kiev, Bratslav and Chernigov voivodeships to him; 2) on the territory of these voivodeships, the cantonment of the Polish crown troops was prohibited, but the local Polish gentry received the right to return to their possessions; 3) the number of registered Cossacks serving the Polish crown increased from 20 to 40 thousand sabers.
Naturally, Bohdan Khmelnytsky tried to make the most of the truce that had arisen to find new allies in the fight against the Polish crown. Having enlisted the support of Moscow, where the idea of an alliance with the Zaporozhye hetman was supported by the Zemsky Sobor in February 1651, and Bakhchisarai, who entered into a military alliance with the Cossacks, Bogdan Khmelnitsky resumed hostilities against Poland. But in June 1651, near Berestechko, due to the vile betrayal of the Crimean Khan Islam III Girey, who fled from the battlefield and forcibly detained Bogdan Khmelnitsky in his camp, the Zaporozhye Cossacks suffered a crushing defeat and were forced to sit down at the negotiating table. In September 1651, the belligerents signed the Bila Tserkva Peace Treaty, according to the terms of which: 1) the Zaporozhye hetman was deprived of the right to external relations; 2) only the Kiev Voivodeship remained in his administration; 3) the number of registered Cossacks was again reduced to 20 thousand sabers.
At this time, Bogdan Khmelnitsky himself had to endure a difficult personal drama. His second wife Gelena (in Orthodoxy Motrona), whom he married in 1649, suspected of adultery with the military treasurer, by order of Timofey Khmelnitsky, who did not like her stepmother, was hanged along with her thieving lover.
Meanwhile, the new peace with the Commonwealth turned out to be even less durable than the previous one, and soon hostilities resumed, which even the Russian Ambassador Boyar Boris Repnin-Obolensky could not prevent, who promised to forget the Poles' violation of the terms of the old Polyanovsk Treaty, if Warsaw will exactly observe Belotserkovsky contract.
In May 1652, Bohdan Khmelnytsky defeated the army of the crown hetman Martin Kalinovsky, who fell in this battle together with his son, crown train Samuil Jerzy, near Batog. And in October 1653, he defeated the 8-thousandth detachment of Colonels Stefan Charnetsky and Sebastian Makhovsky in the battle of Zhvanets. As a result, Jan II Kazimir was forced to go to new negotiations and sign the Zhvanets peace treaty, which exactly reproduced all the conditions of the "Zborovskaya mercy", bestowed on them by the Cossacks in 1649.
Meanwhile, in October 1653, a new Zemsky Sobor was held in Moscow, which, according to a new, fifth in a row, the petition of hetman ambassadors Kondrat Burylya, Siluyan Muzhilovsky, Ivan Vygovsky and Grigory Gulyanitsky finally made a firm decision on the acceptance of the Zaporozhye army under the "high hand" of the Russian tsar and the beginning of the war with Poland. To formalize this decision, the Great Embassy was sent to the headquarters of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, consisting of boyar Vasily Buturlin, okolnichy Ivan Alferov and Artamon Matveyev and the Duma clerk Ilarion Lopukhin. In January 1654, in Pereyaslavl, the Combined Arms Rada was held, at which the Zaporozhye hetman, the entire military sergeant major and representatives of 166 "Cherkasy" cities took the oath to be "eternal subjects to his all-Russian tsarist majesty and his heirs."
In March 1654, in Moscow, in the presence of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, members of the Boyar Duma, the Consecrated Cathedral and hetman ambassadors - military judge Samuil Bogdanovich and Colonel Pavel Teteri from Pereyaslavl - a historic treaty was signed on the reunification of the ancestral Russian lands with Russia. In accordance with the "March Articles": 1) throughout the territory of Little Russia, the former administrative, that is, the military-regimental system of management was preserved, “so that the Zaporozhye Army itself would elect the Hetman and inform His Imperial Majesty that His Majesty would not be in trouble, that long-standing custom of the military”; 2) "In the Zaporozhian Army, that they narrowed their rights and had their liberties in goods and in courts, so that neither the voivode, nor the boyar, nor the steward would intervene in the military courts"; 3) "The Zaporozhian army in the number of 60,000 so that it was always full", etc. Moreover, what is especially interesting, the "March Articles" specified in detail the specific size of the sovereign's salary and land holdings of the entire Cossack (military and junior) foreman, in particular, the military clerk, military judges, military colonels, regimental esauls and centurions.
It must be said that in modern Ukrainian historiography, and in the broad public consciousness of many "Ukrainians", there is a persistent myth about the existence of a special form of republican rule in Little Russia (Hetmanate), which was visibly manifested in the image of a free Cossack state. However, even a number of modern Ukrainian historians, in particular, Valery Smoliy, Valery Stepankov and Natalya Yakovenko, rightly say that in the so-called Cossack Republic there were much more visible elements of double authoritarianism and oligarchic rule, especially during the hetmanship of Bohdan Khmelnitsky himself., Ivan Vyhovsky, Yuri Khmelnitsky and Pavel Teteri. Moreover, almost all applicants for the hetman's mace, outwardly demonstrating their adherence to the ideas of subordinating the hetman's powers to the "collective will" of the Zaporizhzhya army, in fact made every effort to expand the boundaries of their authoritarianism and even inherit the hetman's mace. Moreover, Professor Natalya Yakovenko directly stated that it was under Bohdan Khmelnytsky that a military dictatorship was established in the Hetmanate, since all the leading posts here were occupied exclusively by military foremen. It is also well known that many Little Russian hetmans, after coming to power, pursued a policy of terror against all political opponents. For example, the same Ivan Vygovsky only in June 1658 executed Pereyaslavl colonel Ivan Sulima, Korsun colonel Timofey Onikienko and more than a dozen regimental centurions. Therefore, fleeing from the hetman terror, Uman colonel Ivan Bespaly, Pavolotsk colonel Mikhail Sulichich, general secretary Ivan Kovalevsky, hetman Yakim Somko and many others fled from Little Russia.
Also untenable are the constant references and unfounded lamentations of the Ukrainian self-styledists about the special national-autonomous status of the Left-Bank Ukraine (Little Russia) as part of the Muscovite kingdom, since in reality it was not a national or regional, but a military-estate autonomy resulting from the special border position of the Little Russian and Novorossiysk lands, located on the borders with the Crimean Khanate and the Commonwealth. Exactly the same military-estate autonomy existed in the lands of the Don and Yaitsk Cossack troops, which, like the Zaporozhye Cossacks, carried out border service on the southern borders of the Muscovy, and then the Russian Empire.
Taking the Zaporizhzhya army and the entire Hetmanate under his "high hand", Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, of course, took into account the inevitability of a war with Poland, so this decision was made only when the Russian army was able to start a new war with its old and strong enemy. A new Russian-Polish war began in May 1654, when the 100,000-strong Russian army set out on a campaign in three main directions: Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich himself, at the head of the main forces, moved from Moscow to Smolensk, Prince Alexei Trubetskoy with his regiments set out from Bryansk to join with the troops of Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky, and the boyar Vasily Sheremetev from Putivl went to join the Zaporozhye Cossacks. In order to prevent the possible action of the Turks and Crimean Tatars, at the same time the boyar Vasily Troekurov was sent to the Don with an order to the Don Cossacks to vigilantly guard the Crimean borders, and, if necessary, not hesitate to oppose the enemy.
During the military campaign of 1654, the Russian army and the Zaporozhye Cossacks, inflicting a number of major defeats on the Polish-Lithuanian Quatsar army of hetmans Stefan Potocki and Janusz Radziwill, took Smolensk, Dorogobuzh, Roslavl, Polotsk, Gomel, Orsha, Shklov, Uman and other cities in Belarus Little Russia. The military campaign of 1655 also turned out to be extremely successful for the Russian army, which inflicted a number of major defeats on the Poles and captured Minsk, Grodno, Vilno, Kovno and reached Brest. But by the summer of 1655, the situation on the territory of Little Russia itself was seriously complicated, since part of the Cossack foreman, who did not recognize the decisions of the Pereyaslav Rada, supported the Polish gentry, and the crown hetman Stefan Potocki managed to assemble and arm a new army. However, already in mid. June 1655, the elite regiments of Bohdan Khmelnitsky, Aleksey Trubetskoy and Vasily Buturlin defeated the Poles near Lvov, and the city itself was encircled. Meanwhile, the new Crimean Khan Mehmed IV Girey decided to help Warsaw and invaded the Polish Ukraine, but in the area of Lake Tatars were defeated and hastily retreated. After these events, the Polish king Jan II Kazimierz fled to Silesia in panic, and the Lithuanian hetman Janusz Radziwill went over to the Swedish king Charles X Gustav, who started the Northern War (1655-1660) with the Polish crown a year ago.
The crushing military defeat of Poland was skillfully used in Stockholm, and already at the end of 1655 the Swedish army captured Poznan, Krakow, Warsaw and other cities of its southern neighbor. This situation radically changed the course of further events. Unwilling to strengthen Sweden's position in the strategically important Baltic region, under pressure from the head of the Ambassadorial Office Afanasy Ordin-Nashchokin, Alexei Mikhailovich declared war on Stockholm, and in May 1656 the Russian army hastily moved to the Baltic. Although, according to historians (Gennady Sanin), Patriarch Nikon, and Vasily Buturlin, and Grigory Romodanovsky, and other members of the Boyar Duma opposed this war.
The beginning of a new Swedish campaign turned out to be very successful for the Russian army, and in just one month it captured Dinaburg and Marienburg and began the siege of Riga. However, at the beginning. October, having received the news that Karl X was preparing a campaign to Livonia, the siege of Riga had to be lifted and withdrawn to Polotsk. In this situation, in October 1656, Moscow and Warsaw signed the Vilna truce and began joint hostilities against the Swedish army, which at that time took control of a significant part of Polish territory.
This circumstance frightened Bohdan Khmelnitsky very much, and in February 1657 he entered into a military alliance with the Swedish king Charles X, sending 12 thousand Zaporozhye Cossacks to help his new allies. Upon learning of this, the Poles immediately notified Moscow of this fact, from where an embassy mission headed by boyar Bogdan Khitrovo was allegedly sent to Bogdan Khmelnitsky, which found the Zaporozhye hetman already seriously ill. Trying to justify himself in front of the tsarist ambassador, he told that in February 1657 the royal envoy, Colonel Stanislav Benevsky, came to Chigirin, who offered him to go over to the king's side, therefore "due to such tricks and lies, we let a part of the Zaporozhian Army against the Poles."Due to these obviously far-fetched reasons, Bogdan Khmelnitsky himself refused to recall his Cossacks from the Polish front, however, the Cossacks themselves, having learned that their campaign was not coordinated with Moscow, returned on their own and said to their foreman: At that time, you bowed to the sovereign, but just as you saw space for yourself behind the sovereign's defense and a lot of possession and enriched yourself, so you want to be self-appointed gentlemen."
It must be admitted that this version of events is contained in the works of many, including current Ukrainian historians. Although it should be said that the modern Russian historian Gennady Sanin, on the contrary, asserts: in Moscow, they reacted with full understanding to the behavior of Bogdan Khmelnitsky and even sent the embassy clerk Artamon Matveyev to Chigirin, who presented him on behalf of the tsar with "many sables."
Soon after the departure of Bogdan Khitrovo, Bogdan Khmelnitsky, feeling an imminent death, ordered to convene the General Arms Rada in Chigirin to select his successor, and the military sergeant-major elected his youngest 16-year-old son Yuri Khmelnitsky as the new Zaporozhye hetman. True, after the death of his father, in October 1657, at the new General Arms Council, convened already in Korsun, the head of the military chancellery, Ivan Vyhovsky, was elected the new Zaporozhye hetman.
I must say that for quite a long time the date of Khmelnitsky's death caused heated debate. However, it has now been established that he suddenly died on July 27, 1657 from a hemorrhagic stroke in Chigirin and was buried next to the body of his eldest son Timofey, who had died earlier, in the family farm Subotov, in the stone Ilyinsky Church built by him himself. True, in 1664 the Polish voivode Stefan Czarnecki burned Subotov, ordered to dig up the ashes of Khmelnytsky and his son Timofey and throw their bodies to the "dogs" …
