Personality According to the memoirs of his secretary and close ally Pylyp Orlyk, Mazepa had a great talent for attracting people. His good education and manners, as well as knowledge of numerous languages, among them
Polish,
Russian,
Latin,
Italian,
German,
Tatar and
Turkish (besides his native
Old Ukrainian) made him a popular companion in conversation and an invaluable intelligence asset. In particular, his excellent knowledge of Latin, at a time when there were said to only be four Latin speakers in Muscovy, earned the powerful Prince Golitsyn's attention. Mazepa was, however, described by the French ambassador as being one who "belongs to those people that prefer either to keep quiet or speak and not to say anything." Mazepa was noted for being deeply proud of his own intellectual abilities, while being disdainful of those he who found to have inferior intelligence. The Russian historian writes that, "It is indisputable that Mazepa possessed an intellect, diplomatic abilities, and a broad political outlook."
Romantic relationships depicting Motria Kochubey on the bed in Mazepa's palace According to the classical interpretation based the historian
Mykola Kostomarov's work, in 1668 Mazepa married one Anna (Hanna), the daughter of
Bila Tserkva colonel Semen Polovets and widow of his successor Samuil Frydrykiewicz. That marriage allowed Mazepa to enter the circles of Right-bank
Cossack starshyna, contributing to his career rise. Hanna died in 1702. The above interpretation is increasingly challenged by modern scholarship, as in 2015, a 118 page long manuscript on
Mount Athos was discovered which contains a wealth of information about the patrons of the
Zograf Monastery from Ukraine and Russia. The names of patrons and their families were recorded from 1639 to the late eighteenth century. Multiple prominent Cossack officers are listed there, including
Ivan Samoylovych,
Danylo Apostol,
Pavlo Polubotok and others, as well as the name of Ivan Mazepa and 19 members of his family (which is the most complete record of the hetman's family yet discovered). Immediately after Ivan, a certain Maria is listed while a Hanna is nowhere to be found, suggesting that Maria was the wife of Mazepa, as the entries for other patrons name the wife in the second place as well. This theory is partially supported by the common usage of Maria instead of Motrona or Motria when referring to the much younger love interest of Mazepa, Motria Kochubey, as by
Alexander Pushkin in his
Poltava poem: the true name of Mazepa's wife may have been preserved in folklore, but then mistakenly merged with the name of Motria Kochubey over time. Thus, Hanna Frydrykevych may not have been the wife of Mazepa. Whatever the true name or identity of Mazepa's wife was, she died in 1702. In 1704, at the age of 65, Mazepa started courting the much younger Motria Kochubey, daughter of chief judge
Vasyl Kochubey. No reliable records detailing Motria's age have been preserved: suggests she was 16, while Pavlenko states she was 18-22 years old in 1704. Motria's parents strictly opposed the possibility of their marriage, as the hetman was her
godparent, and such a union would be prohibited according to church law. However, Motria disobeyed, and in the same year fled her parents' house to live with Mazepa. Fearing a scandal which could lead to his own anathema, the hetman sent Motria back, but the couple continued their contacts in correspondence. In total, twelve
love letters written by Mazepa to Motria have been preserved. Kochubey eventually married his daughter to a member of
Cossack starshyna called Chuikevych. Mazepa's affair with Kochubey's daughter led to a conflict between the two men. In 1707 Kochubey accused Mazepa of treason in a letter to Peter I, but the following investigation blamed the denouncer himself due to being bribed by the hetman. After numerous tortures, in July 1708 Kochubey and another accuser of Mazepa,
Poltava colonel Ivan Iskra, were delivered to the hetman's military camp and
beheaded (following Mazepa's desertion both would be posthumously rehabilitated and reburied in
Kyiv Pechersk Lavra). Motria herself was exiled to
Siberia together with her husband, and upon her return would become a
nun.
Ethnic identity The term and concept of a
fatherland () was an important feature of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century political discourse in both the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the territory of modern
Ukraine. Before Khmelnytsky's uprising, Poland or the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania were most commonly referred to as the fatherlands of their inhabitants, and Polonised
Ruthenian noblemen such as
Jeremi Wiśniowiecki or the
Czartoryskis were described as sons of Poland or Lithuania, not of the
Rus' or Ukraine. After the formation of the
Cossack Hetmanate and break from Poland, the slow transferral of the fatherland away from Poland or the Commonwealth began. While pro-Polish hetmans continued to refer to Poland as a "common fatherland" with the Poles, by the 1660s, Cossack Ukraine was increasingly seen as the fatherland of its inhabitants. Hetman
Ivan Briukhovetsky of
Left-bank Ukraine became one of the first to introduce this new idea of a Ukrainian fatherland into common political use (though his main rival, Hetman
Pavlo Teteria of
Right-bank Ukraine still called Poland a "common mother" of the Cossack Hetmanate). Notably,
Bohdan Khmelnytsky himself was oft called the "father of the fatherland", clearly demonstrating that Ukraine primarily referred to the territory of the Cossack Hetmanate. While Ukraine became widely recognised as the fatherland by many, among them the hetmans
Petro Doroshenko and
Mykhailo Khanenko, the Rus' or Ruthenia was also sometimes called the fatherland, rather than Ukraine. Mazepa himself was no exception to this new trend. By the turn of the 1700s, his circulars often spoke of a distinct "
Little Russian fatherland", while he himself was sometimes also called the "father of the fatherland" (that is, the Hetmanate). After Mazepa's defection to the Swedes in 1708, however, Peter I — who had not frequently used the term before — positioned himself as champion and defender of "Little Russia", while labelling Mazepa a traitor who wished to restore Polish subjugation. , made around the time of Mazepa's rule Now locked in an ideological battle with Peter I, Mazepa called upon
Ivan Skoropadsky to attack the "Muscovite" troops as a "true son of the fatherland"; in explaining his reasons for siding with the Swedes, he stated that he was acting for the welfare of "the common welfare of my father-land, poor unfortunate Ukraine". A significant innovation of Mazepa was framing the war against Russia as a battle between two wholly separate nations: the Little Russians (Ukrainians) and Great Russians (Muscovites). Despite Mazepa's defeat at the
Battle of Poltava, the usage of Ukraine as the name of a national fatherland distinct from Great Russia or Muscovy became only more popular in the years after his death, while the old terms which referred to a supposed
All-Russian nation (such as Little Russia) declined; a 1728
drama dedicated to the new Hetman
Danylo Apostol likened him to Khmelnytsky and called upon the viewers to celebrate Khmelnytsky's victories: "Do not weep, o Ukraine, cease to grieve; it is time to turn your sorrow into joy." Subsequently, the modern Ukrainian national identity developed largely out of the 18th century Little Russian or Cossack Ukrainian identity, which Mazepa (and his close ally,
Pylyp Orlyk) had done much to advance. During his lifetime, Mazepa widely used an
early form of the Ukrainian language for official matters, such as to issue orders or grant privileges. The linguist notes that for his highly private and personal love letters to Motria Kochubey, the hetman used "the most polished Ukrainian that the sixteen-year-old object of his affection could understand", suggesting Mazepa was most comfortable using that language, rather than Polish or Russian. For these reasons, modern historians generally refer to Mazepa as a
Ukrainian figure;
Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva speaks of Mazepa as a "Ukrainian historical leader"; while
Paul Robert Magocsi calls him "the Ukrainian hetman", as does Bushkovitch. ==Title and style==