After their first victory, the wild Cossacks let themselves loose upon the Jews, many of whom were massacred, while others saved themselves by embracing the Orthodox faith. Four Jewish communities, in their anxiety to escape death, gave themselves and their belongings up to the Tartars, who accepted the gift and sold the givers as slaves in Turkey, where they were ransomed by their brethren. The rebellion continued with a ferocity and ruthlessness such as might have been expected from the character of the rebels and the magnitude of the wrongs which they had to avenge. Long oppressed by Papists and Jews, in slaying them they not only gratified their personal animosity, but felt that they were chastising the enemies of their Church. In this somewhat hackneyed work they displayed considerable originality and variety of cruelty. Every guerilla chief had his own favourite instrument of torture; one of them affecting the lasso, by which the women of the enemy were caught and dragged to shame. Shortly after the first victory, a detachment of Cossacks captured by stratagem a fortress where six thousand Jews had taken refuge, and put them all to torture and death. Another detachment attacked a town harbouring six hundred Polish nobles and two thousand Jews. The two classes, bound together by a common danger, offered a stout resistance, until the crafty Cossacks succeeded in dividing them. They assured the nobles that their sole object was to punish the Jews, promising to withdraw if the latter were surrendered to them. The Jews were persuaded to deliver up their arms; the Cossacks were admitted into the town, robbed the Jews of all their belongings, and then set before them the alternative of baptism or death. Three-fourths of the whole community were tortured and executed. Then the Cossacks turned their wrath against the Polish nobles, whom they easily overpowered and slaughtered. A third body of insurgents was at the same time wreaking a similar vengeance upon the Jews of Little Russia, where many thousands perished, and the havoc spread as widely as the rebellion, until the whole country, from South Ukraine to Lemberg, was marked with traces of massacre--here in pools of Jewish and Polish blood, there in heaps of Jewish and Polish bodies. ♦1649 Aug.♦ At last peace was concluded on condition that no Papist or Jew should reside in the Cossack provinces. Meanwhile thousands of Jewish fugitives who had saved their lives by baptism, of women who had been violated by the Cossacks, and of children whose parents had been slaughtered, swarmed into Poland, where King John Casimir allowed them to return to Judaism, for, being a Roman Catholic himself, he naturally regarded the Greek baptism as worse than valueless.