Whilst professing allegiance and devotion to the Tsar, they did not think it necessary to obey him, except in so far as his orders suited their own convenience.

And the Tsar, it must be confessed, acted towards them in a similar fashion.

When he found it convenient he called them his faithful subjects; and when complaints were made to him about their raids in Turkish territory, he declared that they were not his subjects, but runaways and brigands, and that the Sultan might punish them as he saw fit.

At the same time, the so-called runaways and brigands regularly received supplies and ammunition from Moscow, as is amply proved by recently-published documents.

Down to the middle of the seventeenth century the Cossacks of the Dnieper stood in a similar relation to the Polish kings; but at that time they threw off their allegiance to Poland, and became subjects of the Tsars of Muscovy.
Of these semi-independent military communities, which formed a continuous barrier along the southern and southeastern frontier, the most celebrated were the Zaporovians* of the Dnieper, and the Cossacks of the Don.
* The name "Zaporovians," by which they are known in the West, is a corruption of the Russian word Zaporozhtsi, which means "Those who live beyond the rapids." The Zaporovian Commonwealth has been compared sometimes to ancient Sparta, and sometimes to the mediaeval Military Orders, but it had in reality quite a different character.