the Commonwealth lived primarily in towns, but in the seventeenth century many
moved with Polish gentry to Ukrainian lands to work as agents on noble estates.
The sixteenth century in the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania witnessed
confessional struggles on par with western Europe. Lutheranism swept across the
lands of the Teutonic and Livonian Knights on the Baltic littoral already in the
1520s, winning over the majority of the population (gentry, townsmen, and
peasants). Across the sixteenth century in the kingdom of Poland and in areas of
the Grand Duchy, Arianism (Anti-Trinitarianism) found ardent adherents
among the peasantry, while Calvinism made dramatic inroads among the Polish,
Lithuanian, and even Ruthenian Orthodox nobility (in 1572 Calvinists were in the
majority in the Parliament’s lower house, and of the lay senators, 70 were Catholic,
60 Protestant, and 3 Orthodox). At this time there were 21 Catholic printing
presses in the Commonwealth and 24 Protestant ones; about two-thirds of provincial
governors in 1564 were Protestant.
From the 1580s or so, Poland’s Catholic king, Sigismund I of the Swedish Vasa
dynasty fought back, welcoming hundreds of Jesuit and other missionaries who
founded schools and colleges with a modern curriculum combining Catholic
Counter-Reformation doctrine with science and modern languages. Their allure,
plus the king’s refusal to appoint non-Catholics to lucrative high office, prompted a
wave of conversion back to Catholicism. By the turn into the seventeenth century,
the ratio of Catholic to Calvinist noblemen in the Parliament had reverted to 6 to 1,
and Protestantism survived primarily among lower classes—Lutherans in the north,
Anti-Trinitarians in modern day Belarus’, and Ukraine. Jesuits and other proselyt-
izing Catholic orders turned their attention towards the Orthodox as well.
A majority of the highest Ruthenian elite—the princely families—did indeed
convert, as did many but not a majority of Ukrainian noble gentry, drawn by the
political utility and cultural superiority of Catholicism.
In the Ruthenian lands, the great loser was the Orthodox Church, whose social
leadership was decimated as Orthodox nobles convertedfirst to Calvinism, then
Catholicism. In an effort to reinvigorate the Orthodox Church, a group of bishops
negotiated a Union with Roman Catholicism at Brest in 1596, according to which
Orthodoxy accepted subordination to the Pope in return for preserving differences
such as married clergy and liturgy in Old Church Slavonic. The Polish king then
abolished the Orthodox Church in his realm, declaring its parishes property of the
new Church, which came to be called Uniate or Greek Catholic (see Chapter 20).
Its priests were forced to accept the union or be dismissed. In response, opposition
Orthodox bishops and laymen, particularly lay fraternities of Orthodox burghers in
Lviv and Kyiv (as Iaroslav Isaievych deftly chronicled), mounted campaigns to save
Orthodoxy. They founded“Greek-Slavonic-Latin”schools modeled on the Jesuit
curriculum to produce effective spokesmen for the faith; the most famous was the
one in Kyiv that was promoted to“academy”level and named after Metropolitan
Peter Mohyla (1596–1646). Emulating Counter-Reformation Catholicism, frater-
nities and Orthodox monasteries founded printing presses and published vernacular
religious works, including a catechism written by Mohyla, homilies and collections of
hagiographies, and other pietistic texts. Learned Orthodox intellectuals engaged in
74 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801