The Kozak officers were a body by themselves. Wherever the old landlords were driven away, the officers sought to secure their estates. They no longer considered themselves elective servants of the Host but they saw themselves as a new nobility. They demanded that they receive as their own the abandoned estates and that required the control over the former serf population, if the lands were to be run properly and profitably. They saw the Polish and Muscovite nobles ruling autocratically over large tracts of territory and being the masters of many villages. They realized that the old hit and miss elective system was not suited to the administration of large areas of territory and the maintenance of a consistent foreign policy and they could not visualize reform in any other way than by assimilating themselves to the prevailing mode of life in Eastern Europe. Their object was either the formation of an aristocratic republic like Poland or unrestrained overlordship like Moscow. They resented the rights of the lesser Kozaks and once they had secured estates, they were determined not to allow their serfs and peasants to join the Kozak body and thus escape the more burdensome obligations. Quite the reverse. Just as the Poles, they sought to force the Kozaks into servile labor. Their demands were mild at first but with each year they became more oppressive and galling. As a result they began to hire mercenary guards for their persons and property and this marked an overwhelming change in the constitution of the Host. The early Kozaks who had dared to raid the outskirts of Constantinople would have been aghast at this development, at this denial of the fundamental equality of the members of the Host, but the process went on inexorably. The ordinary Kozaks deeply resented this transformation of their corps of officers into something like the hated landlords and tried in every way to thwart and hinder the movement. They swung like a pendulum from one group of officers to another and allowed themselves to become the prey of all kinds of intrigues. Nevertheless very few of them thought seriously of the situation and even when they did succeed in electing a hetman from their own class, they did not support him and he in turn adapted his manners to those of the other officers. Thus the mass of the Kozaks in their search for their old freedom maintained only their old turbulence and their wild and unreasoning attachment to Orthodoxy and this prevented them from exerting the full force of their influence in a constructive way. At the same time, the Kozaks, even when they were almost reduced to serfs, still maintained their superiority to all other classes of the population.