THE BULWARK OF CHRISTENDOM 137
Potock, Josaphat Kuncewicz was murdered. Archbishop Kuncewicz was no
man of peace, and had been involved in all manner of oppressions, including
that most offensive of petty persecutions - the refusal to allow the Orthodox
peasants to bury their dead in consecrated ground. His death was the subject of
outrage in Rome, but of some relief in his own diocese. Tempers also flared as a
result of the categorical refusal by Sigismund III to approve episcopal appoint-
ments made by Muscovite Patriarchs. In 1620, unrest among the Cossacks was
sparked off by this very grievance.
With time, however, a more fundamental struggle developed. Both the Uniate
and the Orthodox churches, despairing of healing the rift, began to strengthen
their own separate identities and to formulate their own doctrines. In this, on
the Orthodox side, a prominent role was played by Piotr Mohyla (1596-1647),
the Orthodox Metropolitan of Kiev. Mohyla was a member of a princely
Moldavian family whose turbulent fortunes had been closely associated with
Chancellor Zamoyski's Balkan adventures. His uncle Jarema, his cousin
Constantine, his father Simeon, and his elder brother Michael, had all laid claim
at various times to the title of Hospodar and to the thrones of either Moldavia
or Wallachia. He himself served as a young man in the Polish Army, and in 1621
fought at Chocim under Chodkiewicz. He entered the monastery of Lavra
Pecherskaya in Kiev in 1627, and emerged five years later as Metropolitan, and
as a lifelong opponent of the Union. Having founded the Mohyla Academy in
1632, he quickly turned it into an outstanding centre of Orthodox theology, a
rival of the local Jesuit College and the first seat of higher learning in the East
Slav world.^14 His cause was greatly assisted by the Uniates' failure to gain full
political rights. Contrary to the provisions of the original agreement, the Uniate
bishops were never admitted to the Senate of the Republic. The uniate clergy
and nobility were limited to the status of second-class Catholics, which faced
them with a permanent crisis of conscience. Their numbers were slowly eroded,
both by desertions to mainstream Catholicism and by reversions to Orthodoxy.
By the mid-seventeenth century, the success of the Catholic Reformation was
being matched by a parallel revival among the Orthodox. In 1633, after thirty-
seven years of persecution, the Orthodox hierarchy was officially reinstated.
Yet further upheavals were in view. No sooner had the Orthodox Church
reasserted itself against the Uniate challenge, and established its right to be tol-
erated in Poland-Lithuania, than it began to feel the pulses emanating from
Moscow which sought to remodel traditional Orthodox practices and to turn
Orthodoxy into a Muscovite state religion. In the mid-seventeenth century, the
ancient Greek Orthodox Church of Slavonic Rite was about to be transformed
into the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1648, the outbreak of the Cossack Wars
severed the easternmost provinces of the Republic from the rest of the country.
In 1654, when Chmielnicki's Cossacks accepted the suzerainty of the Tsar and
by implication the direct control of the Patriarch of Moscow over the Orthodox
population of their vast conquests, the Patriarch Nikon was reforming the
liturgy. In 1662, Kiev itself was occupied by the Tsar's Army. Finally in 1667,