Stephen Bathori, who was elected to the Polish throne three years after the death of Sigismund Augustus, the last native King of Poland, showed great favour to the Jews. He guarded the race in Lithuania against the effects of the blood-accusation, and bestowed many benefits upon them, to the disgust of his Christian subjects, who in Poland, as elsewhere, envied the Jews for their prosperity and hated them for their usury and arrogance. ♦1587–1632♦ This prosperity lasted even under Sigismund III., a zealous Catholic brought up by Jesuits. He confirmed to the Jews their ancient privileges, but introduced a measure indicating his religious bias and fraught with disastrous possibilities. ♦1592♦ He ordained that for the building of a new synagogue the permission of the Church should be obtained. About this time the Reformation had lost much of its vigour in Germany; but in Poland, through the German immigrants, it was beginning to create a great spiritual agitation and to find favour among the nobles. Some of the Polish sectarians went to the extreme of Unitarianism and were stigmatised as _semi-Judaei_. To all these sources of danger for the Jews--the hatred towards them entertained by the natives on account of their usurious extortions, by the Germans on account of their commercial ability, by the Jesuits on account of their infidelity, and of the Judaic proclivities of some of the Dissenters--was added another, which proved the immediate cause of persecution. Upon the banks of the lower Dnieper and the north shore of the Black Sea there gradually arose several colonies or settlements formed partly by runaway slaves and convicts in quest of freedom, and partly by adventurers from many countries and classes in quest of fortune. These were the ancestors of the Cossack race. Their life was such as their antecedents promised. Independent and idle, they knew only one industry--brigandage. The exercise of this industry brought them into frequent collision with their Tartar neighbours and supplied them with their one recreation--war. The Kings of Poland, thinking to make use of these hardened and reckless outlaws for the defence of their eastern frontiers, granted to them a semi-autonomous constitution under a freely elected _hetman_ or chieftain. Unfortunately the Cossacks were for the most part members of the Eastern Church, and were therefore hated by the Jesuits, who, after having crushed the Polish heretics, turned their attention to these schismatics. King Sigismund III. began the crusade by oppressing the colonists with heavy taxes.