Pereiaslav

Pereiaslav stands near the meeting of the Alta and Trubizh, not far from the Dnieper. A fortress of Kyivan Rus' guarded the southern frontier against the steppe, and the town became the capital of a principality. The Mongol invasion devastated it in 1239, but Pereiaslav later returned as a centre of settlement under Lithuanian and Polish rule. King Stephen Báthory granted it Magdeburg rights in 1585.

Pereiaslav became a regimental town of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. In 1654 Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskyi convened a council here during the uprising against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The council accepted the protection of the Russian tsar, an agreement whose terms and consequences became the subject of enduring disputes. The Cossack Hetmanate retained institutions of its own while a new war between Russia and the Commonwealth followed. The Truce of Andrusovo in 1667 placed Pereiaslav and much of left-bank Ukraine under Russian control. Its churches and old river setting recall a town that had been a princely frontier fortress, a Cossack centre and the meeting place of an assembly that changed the political course of the region.