Cossack

The Cossacks take their name from Turkic kazak, meaning a free man, and began as bands of runaway serfs, townsmen and adventurers settling from the fifteenth century in the steppe called the Wild Fields, beyond Polish, Lithuanian and Tatar lords. On the lower Dnieper they built the Zaporozhian Sich, whose rada assembly elected an ataman and admitted any newcomer who accepted Orthodox Christianity. Communities on the Don became the Don Host.

In self-governing stanitsas, granted land for frontier service, they guarded against Crimean and Nogai raiders: the Polish crown created the Registered Cossacks in 1572, and Don Cossacks under Yermak opened Siberia's conquest in the 1580s.

Repeated revolts included Bohdan Khmelnytsky's rising of 1648, which created the Hetmanate and brought the 1654 Pereyaslav agreement with Muscovy. After Mazepa's defection and the destruction of the Sich in 1775, their freedoms were curbed, many were resettled to the Kuban and Danube, and hosts became Russian regiments.