By December i676 Doroshenko's forces numbered no more than 2,000 and Doroshenko was compelled to surrender. But Samoilovich was unable to exploit this to establish his control over the right bank, for the Ottomans still claimed sovereignty over Ukraine, now as a principality of Lesser Sarmatia under their new puppet, Iurii Khmel'nyts'kyi, and they appeared to be ready to campaign on Iurii's behalf to seize not only Chyhyryn but Kiev and thereby eliminate any Muscovite military presence on the eastern side of the Dnieper. Sufficient provocations for an Ottoman attack had already been given - Zaporozhian cossack raids on the Crimean coast and small-scale operations by Don cossacks and Muscovite forces against the Ottoman fortresses on the lower Don. And the Poles could no longer be counted on to divert the Ottomans on the right bank: now that he was king, Sobieski found it harder to raise armies of the size he had commanded while in confederatio revolt, so in October 1676 he had signed an armistice with the Turks at Zorawno and ceded the right bank to them. The Turks seem to have led him to expect that Smolensk would be restored to the Commonwealth once Samoilovich and the Muscovites were defeated. Moscow was unable to present Sobieski with a compelling counter-offer, especially as Tsar Alexis had just died and Matveev's influence over foreign policy was fading.
In June 1677 an Ottoman army of 45,000 under Ibraim Pasha crossed the Danube and marched towards Chyhyryn, the symbolic capital of the Het- manate. Muscovy now risked being dragged into full-scale war with the Ottoman Empire. But Romodanovskii and Samoilovich were able to convince Moscow to reinforce the Muscovite-Ukrainian garrison at Chyhyryn and to let them lead a large relief expedition of over 50,000 men. Samoilovich was especially adamant about holding Chyhyryn, without which he could not maintain the loyalty of the Zaporozhian host much less extend his sovereignty over the towns and villages of the right bank. Moscow was probably more convinced by Romodanovskii's argument - that the capture of Chyhyryn would give the Turks and Tatars a staging area for attacks upon Kiev and the towns of the left bank - and by the realisation that failure to endorse Samoilovich's projects could weaken Samoilovich's support for Muscovite occupation over the left bank.
In late August Romodanovskii and Samoilovich succeeded in routing the Ottoman and Crimean forces besieging Chyhyryn. Their victory appears to have been one of the more striking Muscovite military successes to date: total Muscovite and Ukrainian casualties were reported at just 3,000 dead and 5,000 wounded, while the Turks and Tatars allegedly lost about 20,000 men.[74]The sultan subsequently expressed his displeasure by imprisoning both Ibraim Pasha and Khan Selim.
In June 1678 the Ottomans made a second bid to seize Chyhyryn. This time the invading Ottoman army numbered 70,000 (not counting Crimean Tatar auxiliaries), had a much larger artillery train and was commanded by Kara Mustafa Pasha, the grand vizier. Romodanovskii and Samoilovich again marched to the relief of Chyhyryn, with the same forces and nearly the same plan of operations as the year before. The crucial difference this time was that they halted their armies on the far side of the Tias'min River, nearly four kilometres from Chyhyryn, on 4 August, ostensibly to await reinforcements, and meanwhile made no serious effort to harass the Ottoman camp. This gave the Turks time to continue their bombardment of Chyhyryn and move their trenches up to its walls. On 11 August Romodanovskii ordered Chyhyryn evacuated and burned to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. He and Samoilovich then withdrew across the Dnieper.
Given Romodanovskii's insistence the year before on the strategic necessity of holding Chyhyryn, this had the appearance of a major defeat, and it led many Ukrainians to blame Romodanovskii for incompetence or even treason. Actually Moscow had issued Romodanovskii secret orders to do everything to avoid battle with the Turks, to seek peace talks with them and to be prepared to sacrifice Chyhyryn rather than his army so as not to leave Kiev and the left bank under-defended. Chyhyryn was of greater importance to Samoilovich than to Moscow, which placed higher priority on defending Kiev and the left bank.[75]
The Russo-Turkish war of 1676-81 is usually seen as a stalemate or even as a Russian defeat because Chyhyryn had to be destroyed and the right bank was thereby lost to the Turks and Iurii Khmel'nyts'kyi. In fact the right bank did not fall to them. The higher Ottoman priority at the time was consolidating control over Podol'ia, to hold the Moldavian and Wallachian hospodars in line and block Sobieski from invading Moldavia. A massive Muscovite force build-up on the left bank, in Sloboda Ukraine, and along the Belgorod Line provided sufficient deterrent against an Ottoman attackacross the Dnieper or a Crimean Tatar invasion from the south: in 1679 70,000 Muscovite troops and 30,000 of Samoilovich's cossacks defended Kiev and the left bank, while 50,000 Muscovite troops held the Belgorod Line; roughly equal numbers were fielded in 1680.[76] The Ottomans therefore made no effort to rebuild Chyhyryn as a base for operations against Kiev and the left bank, and most of the Ottoman and
Crimean troops supporting Khmel'nyts'kyi were soon withdrawn. By January 1681 the pasha of Azov was signalling the Sultan's interest in armistice talks.
Chyhyryn proved far less decisive in shaping the destiny of the right bank than the spring 1679 raids on right bank towns and villages undertaken by Samoilovich's son Semen and Muscovite troops out of the Kiev garrison and the regiment of Grigorii Kosagov. This operation came to be called the Great Expulsion. Several of the larger right-bank towns were burned and about 20,000 of their inhabitants were driven across the Dnieper into the left-bank hetmanate. This depopulated most of the right bank as far as the Bug River, turning it into a no man's land buffering the Dnieper frontier of the left-bank hetmanate. Iurii Khmel'nyts'kyi was left only with the western part of Bratslav palatinate as a resource base. The Turks deposed him in 1681 and tried to set Moldavian hospodar Gheorghe Duca over Podol'ia and the right bank, but this was frustrated by a cossack revolt supported by the Poles. Sulimenko, the next pro-Ottoman hetman on the right bank, was overthrown in 1685.
The 20,000 refugees pushed across the Dnieper could not all be resettled on the territories of Samoilovich's cossack regiments, where competition for ploughland was already intense, so two-thirds of them were transferred to Sloboda Ukraine, to perform cossack service from virgin steppe land along the Northern Donets and Oskol' rivers. This strengthened the Sloboda Ukraine cossack regiments serving in the Muscovite army and encouraged further Muscovite and Ukrainian colonisation of the region, to safeguard which the Military Chancellery began erecting a new defence line, the Iziuma Line, running 530 kilometres in all, linking up twenty garrison towns, enclosing an area of 30,000 square kilometres, and thereby extending the Muscovite frontier another 160 kilometres southward. With the construction of the towns of Maiatsk and Tor Muscovy now had garrisons within 150 kilometres of the Black Sea coast.28
The build-up in Sloboda Ukraine and link-up of the Iziuma Line with the Belgorod Line provided much greater protection against Crimean Tatar raids. Khan Murad Girey was compelled to negotiate at Bakhchisarai a twenty-year armistice with Muscovy (1681), formally recognising Kiev and the left bank as Muscovite possessions and a 10-kilometre-wide strip ofthe right bank along the Dnieper as a neutral zone closed to territorial aggrandisement by any power. The khan subsequently induced Sultan Mehmed IV to ratify these same terms.
74
A. N. Popov 'Turetskaia voina v tsarstvovanie Fedora Alekseevicha',
75
Brian Davies, 'The Second Chigirin Campaign (1678): Late Muscovite Military Power in Transition', in Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe (eds.),