When did Kozelets Receive the Magdeburg Law?

Abstract

The date and circumstances of Kozelets’s acquisition of Magdeburg law have so far been the subject of debate. Disputes over the introduction of Magdeburg law in Kozelets were based on two documents: the universal of Hetman B.Khmelnytskyi (1656) on the release of Kozelets citizens from a number of duties and the letters patent of King John Casimir (1663). However, the main document – the first letters patent – was not known in the scholarship and remained unpublished. The article fills this archeographic gap. The funds of the National Museum of Ukrainian History contain a diploma of Tsar Oleksiy Mykhailovych of 1655, who granted the townspeople of Kozelets the Magdeburg law. The text of the diploma, as well as the accompanying sheet, which was added after 1667, is published in this article. Taking into account this document it is possible to reconstruct the history of how Kozelets obtained city rights. In 1655 the citizens submitted a petition to the tsar for a letters patent. Their request was granted and a diploma was issued, which is now in the National Museum of the History of Ukraine. It is probable that the petition of the citizens to the Tsar was caused by the activity of I.Vyhovskyi, who in 1654 received from Aleksey Mikhailovich the right to possession of a number of villages, towns and cities. One of them was Kozelets. The second known document in the history of Kozelets self-government was the universal of Hetman B.Khmelnytskyi (1656). In the summer of 1663, the inviolability of the rights of the citizens of Kozelets was confirmed by Hetman I.Briukhovetskyi. Soon Aleksey Mikhailovich’s diploma was taken out of Kozelets by the King John Casimir during the campaign to the Left-Bank Ukraine in 1663–1664. Instead, the king issued a new letters patent on his own behalf. On the example of the documents of 1655–1663, connected to the establishment of Magdeburg law in Kozelets, it is possible to trace how the city legends about “old rights” were formed. The top citizens of Kozelets, led by O.Dolynskyi, quickly “invented” the tradition about the “rights and freedoms” given to the city by “old” Polish kings. Ironically, the real granting of the letters patent by the Polish king put an end to this tradition.