Creation of Cossack Settlements in the Northern Black Sea Region

Abstract

The space of the modern Northern Black Sea region was formed over several centuries under the influence of various geopolitical, socio-economic, and anthropological factors. The dynamic changes in this region at the present stage, activate interest in the Northern Black Sea region's past and identify patterns in its urban transformation.
After the collapse of the Golden Horde, the Northern Black Sea region in the 14th century became part of the Wild Fields, that is, a territory that seemed to be not inhabited by anyone and did not belong to any state. Nevertheless, life was in full swing on the Wild Fields. People came to this region, freedom-loving, desperate, and simultaneously desperate, adventurers, defeated rebels. It is to such people that the Cossacks belong, who, in addition to the Zaporizhzhia Sich, founded hundreds of farms and winter quarters. Many of these settlements still exist today in a modified form.
This study will help to see in the geographical and historical landscape the general picture of the gradual colonization of the Northern Black Sea region in the 16th–18th centuries, carried out by the Zaporizhzhia Cossacks. At that time, the Cossacks actively explored the middle Dnieper region (as is commonly believed in historiography) and the Northern Black Sea region. Indeed, at the time of the liquidation of the Zaporizhzhia Sich in 1775, there were about 4 thousand farms and winter quarters created by them.
The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time, the geographical features of the laying of winter quarters by the Cossacks were determined. The composition of their population was clarified, the factors demonstrating the dispersed nature of the habitat of various class, national, and confessional groups of the population of the Northern Black Sea region living in Cossack winter quarters were described; regularities of formation of such properties of urban space as continuity, homogeneity, and orderliness are revealed.