God’s Playground. A History of Poland, Vol. 1. The Origins to 1795

(^138) ANTEMURALE
when the Truce of Andrusovo brought the whole left-bank Ukraine under per-
manent Muscovite control, the Tsar Alexei was repudiating Nikon, though not
his reforms, and subordinating the Orthodox Church to the rule of the state. In
this way, the Orthodox faithful were forced to choose between submitting to the
new Nikonian liturgy and the new Russian discipline or staying with their old
beliefs and being branded by Moscow as schismatics. The result was the great
Raskol or Schism, which had lasting effects. The Old Believers were naturally
drawn to frontier areas where the Tsar's police could not easily reach them.
Two early centres of Old Belief, at Starodub and at Wetka to the north of Kiev,
were replaced by others further to the west when the new demarcation line of
1667 was created.^15 For their part, those Orthodox communities in the Republic
who adopted the reforms and the accompanying Muscovite discipline, gradu-
ally moved towards a position where the profession of Orthodoxy was auto-
matically associated with expectations for eventual incorporation into the
Russian Empire.
However, despite the growing rift between the Orthodox and the Catholics
in Poland-Lithuania, the complexity of their mutual relations cannot be
overemphasised. Long after the Union of Brest, there were prominent represen-
tatives of the Orthodox faith who strove to remain both loyal subjects of the
Republic and ardent advocates of religious harmony. Such a man was Adam
Kisiel (1600-53), wojewoda first of Czernihow and then of Kiev. Educated at the
Zamosc Academy in a spirit of humanism and tolerance, he was the very epit-
ome of moderation. It was Kisiel who persuaded the young King, "Wladyslaw
IV, to reinstate the Orthodox hierarchy, and Kisiel who acted throughout a long
political career as the natural intermediary between Court and Cossacks. The
fact that modern Ukrainian historians sometimes choose to belittle him as a
renegade to their cause only serves to underline the many different currents
within Ruthenian Orthodoxy which still prevailed in his lifetime.
The fragmentation of the Orthodox Church was reflected in the lives of its
leading families, many of whom ceased to hold any fixed religious loyalty.
Prince Konstanty Ostrogski himself was married to a Tarnowska, a Catholic.
His heir, Prince Janusz, was a Catholic who bequeathed the reversion of the
family estates to the Knights Hospitallers. Two of his three sons were Catholic,
and one Orthodox; one of his two daughters married Krzysztof 'Thunderbolt'
Radziwill, the Calvinist Hetman of Lithuania; the other married Jan Kiszka, the
richest Arian in the Grand Duchy. The senior lines of the Radziwill,
Chodkiewicz, Sapieha, Pac, and Wisniowiecki families, all turned Protestant.
The Sanguszko, Czartoryski, Czetwertyski, and Oginski families passed from
Orthodoxy to Catholicism. In the history of many Orthodox families, the adop-
tion of Calvinism in the sixteenth century acted as a stepping-stone to their
Catholic conversion in the seventeenth.^16
The Protestant community was also fighting on several fronts. Lutheranism
was mainly confined to the cities, with their large German populations.
Calvinism, in contrast, proved attractive to the nobility. But the Calvinists, too,