Jeremi Wiśniowiecki

Youth Jeremi Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki was born in 1612; neither the exact date nor the place of his birth are known. died soon after Jeremi's birth, in 1616. Khmelnytsky uprising Wiśniowiecki fought against the Cossacks again during the Khmelnytsky Uprising in 1648–51. A the point of the revolt's explosion he was staying in Lubny, He continued to Mazyr, Zhytomir, and Pohrebyshche, stopping briefly in Zhytomir for the local sejmik. During Wiśniowiecki's march of terror, people suspected of sympathy to Cossack insurgents would be put on stakes, hanged, beheaded, blinded and had their arms cut off. After some skirmishes near Nemyriv, Makhnivka and Starokostiantyniv (Battle of Starokostiantyniv) against the Cossack forces, In the end, the cities were not captured by the Cossacks, who in the light of the coming winter decided to retreat, after being paid a ransom by both town councils; no other large field battle took place that year. Later that year, on 14 August, Wiśniowiecki suddenly fell ill while in a camp near the village of Pawołocz, and died on 20 August 1651, at the age of only 39. He was given a "ceremonial funeral with the entire army present. On 22 August Wiśniowiecki's body was seen off with the utmost pomp on its journey to his residence". showed that the body belonged to another person, who was taller and died at a more advanced age than Wiśniowiecki. No traces of the autopsy performed in the 17th century were found; however, it is likely that this person lived in the same historical period and their corpse was kept on display in the monastery as Wiśniowiecki. == Wealth ==

The majority of the Wiśniowiecki family estates were found on the eastern side of the Dnieper River (Volhynian, Ruthenian and Kyiv Voivodships), and most of them were acquired by Jeremi's grandfather, Aleksander Wiśniowiecki, in the 16th century. The capital of his estate was located at a fortified manor at Lubny, where his father rebuilt an old castle; the population of the town itself could be estimated at 1,000. Wiśniowiecki inherited lands inhabited, according to an estimate from 1628, by about 4,500 people, of which Lubny was the largest town. Smaller towns in his lands included Khorol, Pyriatyn and Pryluky. By 1646 his lands were inhabited by 230,000 people. The number of towns on his lands rose from several to about thirty, and their population increased as well. The prosperity of those lands reflected Wiśniowiecki's skills in economic management, and the income from his territories (estimated at 600,000 złotys yearly) made him one of the wealthiest magnates in the Commonwealth. Because of its size and relatively consistent borders, Wiśniowiecki's estate was often named Wiśniowieczczyzna ("Wiśniowieckiland"). Despite his wealth, he was not known for a lavish life. His court of about a hundred people was not known for being overly extravagant, he built no luxurious residences and did not even have a single portrait of himself made during his life. It is uncertain how Wiśniowiecki looked, although a number of portraits and other works depicting him exist. Jan Widacki notes that much of the historiography concerning Wiśniowiecki focuses on the military and political aspects of his life, and few of his critics discuss his successes in the economic development of his estates. == Remembrance and popular culture ==

Wiśniowiecki was widely popular among the noble class, who saw in him a defender of tradition, a patriot and an able military commander. He was praised by many of his contemporaries, including a poet, Samuel Twardowski, as well as numerous diary writers and early historians. For his protection of civilian population, including Jews, during the Uprising, Wiśniowiecki has been commended by early Jewish historians. Until the 19th century, he has been idolized as the legendary, perfect "knight of the borderlands", his sculpture is among the twenty sculpture of famous historical personas in the 18th century "Knight Room" of the royal Warsaw Castle. in a 1934 painting by Mykola Samokysh In the 19th century this image started to waver, as a new wave in historiography began to reinterpret his life, and as the era of positivism in Poland put more value on builders, and less on warriors. Further, at that time the Polish historians began to question the traditional view of the "Ukrainian problem", and the way that the Polish noble class had dealt with the Cossacks. Slowly, Wiśniowiecki's image as a hero began to waver, with various aspects of his life and personality being questioned and criticized in the work of historians such as Karol Szajnocha and Józef Szujski. According to a legend, before dying Yarema's mother warned him against converting to Catholicism and abandoning the faith of his ancestors; his conversion against her words was believed to have put a curse on the whole family, leading to his premature death. While Wiśniowiecki's portrayal (as a major secondary character) in the first part of Henryk Sienkiewicz's trilogy, With Fire and Sword which describes the history of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Uprising, was rather positive, criticism of his persona intensified, in particular from Sienkiewicz detractors such as Zygmunt Kaczkowski and Olgierd Górka. The 1930s saw a first modern historical work about Wiśniowiecki, by . In the era of the People's Republic of Poland, the Communist Party's ideology dictated that all historians present him as an "enemy of the people", although this began to be relaxed after 1965. Widacki, analyzing the work of other historians notes that Władysław Czapliński was rather sympathetic to Wiśniowiecki, while Paweł Jasienica was critical of him. Andrzej Seweryn played Jeremi Wiśniowiecki in the 1999 film With Fire and Sword. Wiśniowiecki was the main subject of one of Jacek Kaczmarski's 1993 songs Kniazia Jaremy nawrócenie (The Conversion of Knyaz Jarema). == See also ==