Mazeppa

Mazeppa, IVAN STEPHANOVICH, hetman of the Cossacks, was born in 1644, descended of a poor but noble family of Podolia. He became a page at the court of John Casimir, king of Poland. A Polish nobleman, having surprised him in an intrigue with his wife, caused him to be stripped naked, and bound upon his own horse, lying upon his back, and with his head to its tail, and let the animal loose, leaving Mazeppa to his fate. The horse carried him, senseless from exhaustion, to its native wilds of the Ukraine, according to the usual account. A more credible story is that his horse carried him through woods and thickets and brought him back torn and bleeding to his own home. Mazeppa now joined the Cossacks, became secretary to their hetman, Samoilovich, and in 1687 was elected his successor. He won the confidence of Peter the Great, who loaded him with honours, and made him Prince of the Ukraine; but, on the curtailment of the freedom of the Cossacks by Russia, Mazeppa conceived the idea of throwing off the sovereignty of the czar, and for this purpose entered into negotiations with Charles XII. of Sweden. His treason was revealed to Peter the Great, who long refused to credit it, but after Pultowa ordered his effigy to be hanged upon the gallows, and his capital, Baturin, to be razed to the ground. Mazeppa's hopes perished in the disaster of Pultowa (1709), and he fled with Charles to Bender, where he died miserably the same year. His story is the subject of a famous poem by Byron, of a novel by Bulgarin, and a drama by Gottschall, of two paintings by Vernet, and of a masterly historical work by Kostomaroff (1882).