ws and Roman Catholics. At the ensuing
peace congress at Pereyaslavl he demanded terms so extravagant that the
Polish commissioners dared not listen to them. In 1649, therefore, the
war was resumed. A bloody battle ensued near Zborow, on the banks of the
Strypa, when only the personal valour of the Polish king, the
superiority of the Polish artillery, and the defection of Chmielnicki's
allies the Tatars enabled the royal forces to hold their own. Peace was
then patched up by the compact of Zborow (August 21, 1649), whereby
Chmielnicki was virtually recognized as a semi-independent prince.

For the next eighteen months he was the absolute master of the Ukraine,
which he divided into sixteen provinces, made his native place Chigirin
the Cossack capital, and entered into direct relations with foreign
powers. Poland and Muscovy competed for his alliance, and in his more
exalted moods he meditated an Orthodox crusade against the Turk at the
head of the northern Slavs. But he was no statesman, and his
difficulties proved overwhelming. Instinct told him that his old ally
the khan of the Crimea was unreliable, and that the tsar of Muscovy was
his natural protector, yet he could not make up his mind to abandon the
one or turn to the other. His attempt to carve a principality for his
son out of Moldavia, which Poland regarded as her vassal, led to the
outbreak in 1651 of a third war between subject and suzerain, which
speedily assumed the dignity and the dimensions of a crusade.
Chmielnicki was now regarded not merely as a Cossack rebel, but as the
arch-enemy of Catholicism in eastern Europe, and the pope granted a
plenary absolution to all who took up arms against him. But Bogdan
himself was not without ecclesiastical sanction. The archbishop of
Corinth girded him with a sword which had lain upon the Holy Sepulchre,
and the metropolitan of Kiev absolved him from all his sins, without the
usual preliminary of confession, before he rode forth to battle. But
fortune, so long his friend, now deserted him, and at Beresteczko (July
1, 1651) the Cossack ataman was defeated for the first time. But even
now his power was far from broken. In 1652 he openly interfered in the
affairs of Transylvania and Walachia, and assumed the high-sounding
title of "guardian of the Ottoman Porte." In 1653 Poland made a supreme
effort, the diet voted 17,000,000 gulden in subsidies, and John Casimir
led an army of 60,000 men into the Ukraine and defeated th