ABSTRACT
The treaties of 1660-7 ended the second phase of the Northern Wars. Although the foundations of peace were hardly firm, and the bitter hostility engendered by decades of war was by no means assuaged, a combination of exhaustion and distraction ensured that peace held until 1700, apart from the Scanian War (1674-9). The Cossack problem, which Andrusovo could not solve, involved the Commonwealth in a protracted series of wars on its southern frontier, as the new hetman Petro Doroshenko, disillusioned with both Muscovy and Poland, looked to the Sultan for protection which might allow the Cossacks the autonomy they craved. War between Poland and the Tatars had broken out as soon as the ink was dry on Andrusovo; in 1672 the Turks seized the southern palatinate of Podolia, and it was not until the l680s, when the Ottoman resurgence prompted the formation of a Holy League of the Commonwealth, Venice and Austria, that the pressure began to ease. John III Sobieski (1674-96), elected after his victory over the Turks at the second battle of Chocim, led a Polish army to relieve Vienna in 1683, in what turned out to be the Commonwealth's last great military triumph. Muscovy, intermittently at war with Turkey since l677,joined the League after Andrusovo was converted into a permanent peace in 1686, by which the Commonwealth recognised Muscovite possession of Kiev. During the 1690s the Holy League pushed back the Ottoman armies, with the Commonwealth regaining Podolia at the Peace of Carlowitz in 1699.
