The Ruthenian Uniate Church — Zamość to the Partitions

A century after the Union of Brest, the Greek Catholic church of the Ruthenian lands — today's Ukraine and Belarus — was at its numerical height, holding the loyalty of most of the peasantry of the eastern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Synod of Zamość in 1720 consolidated it and also latinized it, importing Roman devotional practices into a Byzantine rite and settling its identity as something distinctly its own rather than a temporary arrangement. Then the political ground vanished: the partitions of Poland between 1772 and 1795 handed most of the church's people to Catherine II's Russia, which regarded the union as an amputation to be reversed, and campaigns of forced reversion from 1794 stripped it of the great majority of its parishes within two years. What survived did so in Austrian Galicia, where the Habsburgs raised the Greek Catholic clergy's status and paid for their education. And where the church became, over the following century, the carrier of Ukrainian national identity.