Vyshnevetsky had offered to combine with the Tsar against the Tatars of the Crimea and had taken part in one expedition with the Muscovites but had not received any support and it was a long while before the offer was repeated. His successors as hetmans preferred to go their own ways and build up and strengthen their Kozak system until it could stand alone. The Kozaks could not escape the attention of the Kings of Poland. They were uncomfortable neighbors but they were also useful. The King and the gentry of Poland had no taste for building up a military establishment strong enough to protect the country. In earlier days the bulk of the army was composed of Lithuanian forces, largely recruited from Ukraine and White Ruthenia. Once the full union of Poland and Lithuania had taken place and the golden liberty of the Polish szlachta had been extended throughout the land, this resource was gone. Between the weak Polish army and the Tatar and Turkish raiders there stood only the Kozaks. Common sense would have advised the King and the magnates of Poland to come to terms with the organization or to have secured enough forces of their own to render it useless and to destroy it. They did neither. In times of war with Turkey or the Tatars they willingly took the Kozaks into their service and welcomed their assistance. In times of peace they were constantly striving to prevent their growth. They did go so far as to register a few thousand Kozaks and consider them as a separate part of the Polish army but even then they rarely paid them the sums promised, because of the opposition of the gentry and the lack of money in the treasury. [Illustration: ST. VOLODYMYR ST. OLHA (Victor Vasnetsov)] [Illustration: The Zaporozhian Kozaks writing a letter to the Sultan (Ilya Repin)] Even this slight support, however, gave the Kozaks the idea that they owed only a general loyalty to the King and they were bound only to obey their own elected hetmans. They came to feel that they were free from all taxes levied by the Polish government and they refused to draw a line of demarcation between registered and unregistered Kozaks, for they well knew that at the first sign of trouble on any Polish border, all the Kozaks, registered and unregistered alike, would be called into service on the same footing.