The Impact of the Ukrainian Cossacks’ Campaigns into the Moldavian Principality on the situation of Chernivtsi and Khotyn Regions (throughout the 80s and 90s of the 16th Century)

In the late 16th century, relations between Turkey and Poland in Central and Eastern Europe significantly deteriorated. During the 1580s and 1590s, Ukrainian Cossacks conducted several successful campaigns in Moldavia. These campaigns immediately affected conditions in northern Moldavian territories, leading to deteriorating conditions in the regions, which became a battleground between Poland and the Ottoman Empire. Polish kings aimed to maintain Moldavia within their sphere of influence by supporting I. Movilă and other candidates for the Moldavian throne, as well as by exploiting anti-Ottoman sentiments in the region. The territories of the Chernivtsi and Khotyn regions were in the whirl of this struggle, since they bordered Poland and Moldavia and were often transit or war zones during the conflicts. Consequently, the Poles, Ukrainian Cossacks, and other mercenaries, on the one hand, and the Turkish-Tatar hordes, respectively, from time to time did significant damage, destruction, looting, and devastation to these lands. Simultaneously, in the late sixteenth century, the Khotyn fortress began to regain its strategic role as an outpost on the Polish-Moldavian border. This research found evidence for the Ukrainian Cossacks’ campaigns into Moldavia as push and pull factors of the deterioration in the situation of the northern Moldavian lands, which at that time turned into a field of struggle between the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as both countries sought to maintain their power over Moldavia, and accordingly, over the lands of the Chernivtsi and Khotyn regions.