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gone down river far away south into the feather-grasssteppe and had organized themselves in three separateCossack ' hosts,' on the middle and lower Don, themiddle Ural river, and the lower Dnieper where theZaporozhian ('beyond the cataracts') Cossacks played asomewhat similar role for the Ukrainians under Polandas the other Cossacks did for the Great Russians underMuscovy. 1 All three 'hosts' were stoutly Orthodox, afact of special importance in the struggle of the UkrainianCossacks against Poland (see pp. 225-228).Apart from these three spontaneous, independent'hosts,' Cossacks were used by the government forcourier and other military services, and in the eighteenthcentury the state formed, more or less on the modelof the original 'hosts,' Cossack defence forces to guardand settle the frontier, in the North Caucasus, thesouthern Urals, Siberia, and latest of all in the Far East.They enjoyed special privileges, but unlike the Don,Ural, and Zaporozhian Cossacks they were founded andalways controlled by the ministry of war.The Don Cossacks, recruited mainly from GreatRussians, maintained themselves for a hundred years,until 1671, in semi-independence of Moscow as a 'host,'organized on a military basis, but democratically governedby an assembly and elected officers, with full control ofadmission into their ranks. For this first hundred yearsthey were very nominal subjects of 'the White Tsar.'They paid no taxes and had free trading rights. "Wefight," they declared, "for the House of the ImmaculateVirgin and the Miracle Workers of Moscow and forthee . . . Sovereign Tsar and Grand Prince of Greatand Little and White Russia, Autocrat and Sovereignand Possessor of many Hordes,'' In fact, like any otherof his hordes they fought, pillaged, and negotiated whenand as they pleased, particularly with the Crimean Tatarsand the Turks holding the Don delta with their stonefortress of Azov. They then mustered probably about1Gogol's prose epic Tar as Bulba (1834; translated in Everymanedition) on the Zaporozhian Cossacks in the seventeenth century, forall its romantic idealization, gives the feel of the steppe and the fightingspirit of the Cossacks with compelling power.50