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SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY VIEWS ON THE KHMEL'NYTS'KYI UPRISING 433The document emerged from the political culture of the nobility thatdominated the seventeenth-century Commonwealth. At the core ofthat culture lay the nobles' perception of themselves as the only realcitizens of the Commonwealth and their belief that the essential dividein the population of the Commonwealth was that between noble andcommoner. The institutions of the state and those of the nobility{szlachta) had become so intertwined that the distinction between theCommonwealth and the noble order had become blurred. Althoughsubject to a monarch, the nobles considered themselves to be ordainedby God as the free "political nation" of the republic. Hence, theyjealously guarded their privileges against encroachment by the monarchand limited the freedom of other social orders. Concurrently,they affirmed the concept of the equality of all nobles, although theirupper stratum, the magnates, unquestionably dominated political andeconomic life in the Commonwealth. 7The assembling of disparate states, lands, and peoples into theCommonwealth had been accomplished largely by the amalgamationof their elites. The corporate order of the szlachta that emerged in theKingdom of Poland became the model for the elites of Royal Prussia,Livonia, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. To explain the existenceof diverse lands as one Commonwealth, political thinkers cited referencesin classical sources to the ancient Sarmatians' rule over a hugeexpanse of eastern Europe. "Sarmatism" was a constantly evolving setof views about the past of this territory, its peoples, and their socialand political structures. One variant held that the nobles alone weredescendants of the Sarmatians, which explained why nobles formed agroup totally apart from other segments of the population and why aUkrainy-Rusy, 8, pt. 2: 199-211. Also see Dokumenty Bohdana Khmel'nyts'koho1648-1657, сотр. I. Kryp"iakevych and I. Butych (Kiev, 1961); Dokumenty obosvoboditel'noi voine ukrainskogo naroda 1648-1654 gg., ed. A. Z. Baraboi et al.(Kiev, 1965); and Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei: Dokumenty i materiały,1620-1654, сотр. P. P. Gudzenko et al., 3 vols. (Moscow, 1953-1954). For adiscussion of letters from the period, see Hanna Malewska, Listy staropolskie zepoki Wazów (Warsaw, 1959).7The most important recent works on the nobility are Janusz Tazbir, Kulturaszlachecka w Polsce. Rozkwit-upadek-relikty (Warsaw, 1978); Jarema Maciszewski,Szlachta polska i jej państwo (Warsaw, 1969); Henry Wisner, NajjaśniejszaRzeczpospolita: Szkice z dziejów Polski szlacheckiej XVI-XVII wieku (Warsaw,1978); and Andrzej Zajączkowski, Główne elementy kultury szlacheckiej wPolsce: Ideologia a struktury społeczne (Wrocław, 1961). For additional literature,see Frank Sysyn, "The Problem of Nobilities in the Ukrainian Past: The PolishPeriod, 1569-1648," in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, ed., Rethinking Ukrainian History(Edmonton, 1981), pp. 80-81, fn. 11, and p. 97, fn. 68.