That same spirit and that same daring, that same zeal for the Faith which they had received from their fathers, that same longing for a freedom which they no longer had burst out in the east of Europe and started the Kozaks on their historic mission. Where the Atlantic seaboard saw men of courage and of action put out to sea in small and scarcely seaworthy craft, in the east men of similar character swept across the steppes, ready to fight and to sell their lives for liberty. They formed a force that was difficult to control and impossible to check. They revived the courage and the bravery of the early rulers of Kiev and they left an imperishable mark upon their surroundings. The Kozak Host became in a few years an object of terror and concern to all of their neighbors, be they Poles, Muscovites, Turks, Tatars or whoever else attempted to restrain their unbridled energy and to reduce them to the status of serfs. It was an outpouring of the human spirit that has scarcely been equalled at any time or in any region and the Kozaks were praised or hated, according as they met with friend or foe. The name Kozak is borrowed from the Turkish word meaning “free warrior” and the meaning of the word amply expresses the dominant characteristic of these people. They were in essence the frontiersmen of eastern Europe, living in those areas where there was no law but the sword and where no man could be called to account except by one who was stronger than he. They reacted fiercely against every invasion of their rights and in the beginning co-operated only for defence or attack. The stories of the first Kozaks have much in common with the legends of some of the American pioneers who crossed into Kentucky, the dark and bloody ground, as it was known in the eighteenth century. There was only the difference that the Kozaks were operating not in mountainous and wooded territory but on the open plains and that their opponents were not small bands of Indians, hardly more numerous than themselves, but large masses of well-mounted troops eager for plunder and for slave collecting. The weakening of the Golden Horde and conflicts between the Khan and the Sultan of Turkey had relaxed control over the black earth region across the Dnyeper. In that no man’s land and along the Dnyeper itself there was a rich area in which there were few or no permanent residents. It offered an ideal place for men who had no fear of death and who valued their personal liberty above everything else, to live a lawless and carefree life without personal obligations. The prospect appealed to many who were suffering under the oppressive rule of the feudal lords in both Poland and Lithuania. Likewise men streamed out of the Muscovite lands into the lower Don and the lower Volga areas. Out of these groups of men there developed the Don Cossacks, who were nominally subject to Moscow, and the Zaporozhian Kozaks, who were originally required to pay some sort of allegiance to Poland.