Sixteen Articles That Bound the Hetman’s Power: Pylyp Orlyk’s “Constitution” of 1710

In April 1710, at Bender on the Dniester River, Pylyp Orlyk, newly elected hetman (the Cossack chief), concluded an agreement with the officers and the Cossack host. The hetman would not decide alone but would consult a council meeting three times a year; the army’s treasury would be kept separate from the hetman’s personal income; and offices would be filled by election. This is the document that has come to be called, in Ukraine, “Pylyp Orlyk’s Constitution” or the “Constitution of Bender.”

This document was written outside Ukraine’s own territory, by people who had lost their state. What circumstances led to it, what it set out, and where it survives — and where the reputation “Europe’s first constitution” comes from — are examined below.

From Defeat at Poltava to Bender

In 1708, Hetman Ivan Mazepa allied with King Charles XII of Sweden and broke with Moscow, and was defeated at the Battle of Poltava in 1709. This history is covered in our article on the end of Cossack self-rule, and how the battle’s date is written is covered in our article on the 220 years from the Sich’s founding to its destruction. Mazepa and Charles XII fled to Bender, then the site of an Ottoman fortress. According to the entry “Bender” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (IEU), published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) at the University of Alberta, Mazepa died in 1709 in Varnytsia, a village near Bender. Bender is a town in today’s Moldova (Tighina in Romanian).

Pylyp Orlyk (Пилип Орлик) was elected hetman as Mazepa’s successor. According to the IEU, Orlyk was born in 1672 in a village of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in what is now Belarus, and studied at a Jesuit school in Vilnius and at the Kyiv Mohyla Collegium (see our article on the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy). He served under Mazepa as general chancellor (head of the hetman government’s chancery) and, as Mazepa’s closest confidant, supported the secret negotiations with Sweden and Poland.

The Date: “April 5” and “April 16”

The document’s date is given two ways. At the end of its formal Latin title is written “in the year of the Lord 1710, April 5, at Bender.” This is a date in the Julian calendar (the old style) then used in Ukraine; converted to today’s calendar (the Gregorian), it is April 16. The Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine’s Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine gives both, as “16 (5) kvitnia 1710,” while the IEU gives the new-style date of April 16, 1710. Orlyk was also elected hetman on the same day.

Not a “Constitution” but “Pacts and Agreements”

The document’s title, in Latin, is “Pacta et Constitutiones Legum Libertatumque Exercitus Zaporoviensis” — that is, “Pacts and Constitutions of the Laws and Liberties of the Zaporozhian Host.” The Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine, from the Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (hereafter, the Institute’s encyclopedia), whose entry on this document was written by Taras Chukhlib, explains that here “pacta” means “agreement, pledge, or condition,” and “constitutiones” (plural) means “decisions or enactments” — in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the time, decisions of the parliament (Sejm) were called “constitutiones.”

The IEU (written by Orest Subtelny, 1984) likewise states that this title followed the model of the “pacta conventa” (the pledges made on accession) that the Polish nobility concluded with a newly elected king — an elected leader swearing to the conditions he would uphold toward those who elected him. In form, the document was closer to this tradition than to a modern constitution.

What the 16 Articles Set Out

The document consists of a preamble, 16 articles, and the new hetman’s oath. The IEU explains the 16 articles as falling into four groups; the table below combines this with the description in the Institute’s encyclopedia.

The preamble traces Cossack history and sets out the reasons for leaving Moscow’s rule and coming under the protection of the Swedish king. According to the Institute’s encyclopedia, the word “fatherland” appears 40 times in the Latin text, and “Ukraine” or “Ukrainian” appears 7 times. It also refers to the capital as “Kyiv, the capital of Rus, and the other towns of Ukraine.”

Article 6 states that past hetmans broke with the custom of collective decision-making and wielded “unlimited power,” causing suffering among the officers and the people, and it sets out the general-council system as a reflection on this. Article 9 provides that the hetman must not use the treasury’s revenue for himself, and must live on the income from the estates attached to the office of hetman.

Where the Original Survives

According to the Institute’s encyclopedia, this document survives in four forms: the Latin text and a summary version of it, and two versions of an old Ukrainian text.

• A manuscript copy of the Latin text (the preamble) and a Latin summary version are held in the “Cosacica” collection at the Swedish National Archives (Stockholm); a copy of these is held at the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kyiv.
• A mid-18th-century copy of the old Ukrainian text is held at the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts in Moscow.
• The old Ukrainian original, bearing Orlyk’s signature and the seal of the Zaporozhian Host, was handed over to Saint Petersburg in 1792 by a former Zaporozhian Cossack, and is now held at the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts in Moscow. Researchers from an archive in Kyiv found it in late 2008, and it was published for the first time in 2010.

The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance also notes that Ukrainian researchers found the old Ukrainian original at the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts in 2008, and that the original document by which Charles XII recognized Orlyk’s election is held at the same place. According to the Institute’s encyclopedia, Charles XII approved this agreement, as “protector of Ukraine,” on May 10, 1710 (May 21 in the new style).

How Far Was It Actually Put into Practice?

What the agreement envisioned was the shape of the state after Ukraine had been recovered from Russian and Polish rule. According to the IEU, Orlyk concluded a treaty with the Crimean Khan in 1711 and, from 1711 to 1714, led campaigns against Russia in Right-Bank Ukraine, but these ended in failure. Orlyk moved to Sweden in 1714, then moved from place to place across Europe, and died in 1742 in Jassy, in the Principality of Moldavia.

The Institute’s encyclopedia states that, while the agreement’s implementation was limited by international circumstances and war, during the campaigns of 1711 and 1713 local residents in part of Right-Bank Ukraine recognized Orlyk’s authority, and its provisions functioned to some degree. It never operated as a system for the country as a whole.

The Claim “Europe’s First Constitution”

This document is often introduced in Ukraine as “one of the first constitutions in Europe.” However, how strongly this is stated differs depending on who is saying it.

• The IEU’s entry on “Constitution” calls it “the first constitutional document in Ukrainian history.” It does not address its ranking within Europe.
• The Verkhovna Rada’s public affairs office, in an article of April 5, 2018, writes that “according to the assessment of Ukrainian historians, it is one of the first constitutions in modern Europe.”
• The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance cites the historian Volodymyr Zamlynsky’s assessment that “for the first time in Europe, a real model of a free and independent state was created,” while also presenting the view of the historian Natalia Yakovenko. Yakovenko writes that reading this agreement as “the first constitution of the Ukrainian state” imports a meaning it did not originally have, and that its authors thought of it as the traditional “articles of pledge” of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

No primary source has been found for this article that supports flatly calling it “Europe’s first constitution.” What is certain is that, in 1710, a document was written that sought to bind an elected hetman’s authority through a general council of officers and the host, a court system, and a treasury mechanism. Yakovenko, too, assesses it as a major event, in that the Cossack state, for the first time, put into a concrete document the division of rights and duties between the hetman and “the Cossack people.”