rder to vex the king, refused to
sanction the continuance of the war. Chmielnicki, now doubly hateful to
the Poles as being both a royalist and a Cossack, was again maltreated
and chicaned, and only escaped from gaol by bribing his gaolers.
Thirsting for vengeance, he fled to the Cossack settlements on the Lower
Dnieper and thence sent messages to the khan of the Crimea, urging a
simultaneous invasion of Poland by the Tatars and the Cossacks (1647).

On the 11th of April 1648, at an assembly of the Zaporozhians (see
POLAND: _History_), he openly declared his intention of proceeding
against the Poles, and was elected ataman by acclamation. At Zheltnaya
Vodui (Yellow Waters) in the Ukraine he annihilated, on the 19th of May,
a detached Polish army corps after three days' desperate fighting, and
on the 26th routed the main Polish army under the grand hetman, Stephen
Potocki, at Kruta Balka (Hard Plank), near the river Korsun. The
immediate consequence of these victories was the outbreak of a "serfs'
fury." Throughout the Ukraine the Polish gentry were hunted down, flayed
and burnt alive, blinded and sawn asunder. Every manor-house was reduced
to ashes. Every Uniat and Catholic priest was hung up before his own
altar, along with a Jew and a hog. The panic-stricken inhabitants fled
to the nearest strongholds, and soon the rebels were swarming all over
the palatinates of Volhynia and Podolia. But the ataman was as crafty as
he was cruel. Disagreeably awakened to the insecurity of his position by
the refusal of the tsar and the sultan to accept him as a vassal, he
feigned to resume negotiations with the Poles in order to gain time,
dismissed the Polish commissioners in the summer of 1648 with impossible
conditions, and on the 23rd of September, after a contest of three days,
utterly routed the Polish chivalry, 40,000 strong, at Pildawa, where the
Cossacks are said to have reaped an immense booty after the fight was
over. All Poland now lay at his feet, and the road to the defenceless
capital was open before him; but he wasted the precious months in vain
before the fortress of Zamosc, and was then persuaded by the new king of
Poland, John Casimir, to consent to a suspension of hostilities. In June
1649, arrayed in cloth-of-gold and mounted on a white charger,
Chmielnicki made his triumphal entry into Kiev, where he was hailed as
the Maccabaeus of the Orthodox faith, and permitted the committal of
unspeakable atrocities on the Je