Replicas of the Ottoman Military Culture in the Military Lifestyle of the Cossack Hetmanate in the End of the 17th Century

The article presents a comparative analysis of the material maintenance forms of the professional troops of the Cossack Hetmanate and the Ottoman Empire – serdyuks and janissaries through the prism of their subcultures. Ottoman influences on the military and political practices and daily life of the Hetmanate became very intense and noticeable in the middle and second half of the 17th century thanks to a series of alliances and joint military campaigns. In the system of providing and maintaining professional mercenary troops of the Hetmanate, not only the traditions that came from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but also borrowings from Ottoman military traditions are followed. The distribution of ready-made clothes, special premium payments and other forms of incentives to the hetman’s serdyuks indicate many common features with the maintenance practices of the elite units of the janissary corps – the serden-geçtiler. These formations served as a model for the creation of permanent Serdyuk infantry regiments in the Hetmanate during the reign of Petro Doroshenko (1665–1676). Later, such contingents joined the armies of the left-bank Hetmans Ivan Samoilovych (1672–1687) and Ivan Mazepa (1687–1709). Along with the form of recruitment, traditions of material support of serdengechti were obviously borrowed. Special payments to serdyuks “for boots” and special monetary bonuses on the eve of campaigns, which have direct analogues in Ottoman practice, are applied to themselves. One of the notable features characteristic of the janissary subculture was purchases by the hetman’s treasury for the mercenaries’ cauldrons (kazan), which were the symbols of the military community that received food from the hands of the Hetman. Cauldrons were widely used in the Cossack army, but were bought with private money and were common camp implements. Food (“bread”), along with clothing (“barwa”), which, like that of the janissaries, was of the same type of the uniform, received by hetmans’ serdyuks were a sign of subjection and obedience. Paying mercenaries a salary (“zhold”), special monetary bonuses, clothing and products (in addition to a utilitarian role) also had a deeply symbolic meaning, marking the patronage and special care of the ruler over them.