Article: Cossacks

COSSACKS

COSSACKS. Frontierspeople between the Slavic and Turkic worlds, the Cossacks (name derived from the Turkic kazak, 'free person') emerged by the fifteenth century as military servitors. In the sixteenth century, a wider strata of the Slavic-borderland foragers and fishers took on the name Cossacks. They were especially numerous in the Ukrainian territories along the Dnieper River of the Polish-Lithuanian state and somewhat later along the Don River on the periphery of the Muscovite state, where they developed skill in building small boats and navigating the Black Sea. The Lithuanian state (after 1569 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) enlisted the Cossacks in defending its ...

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