Wild Fields

According to Ukrainian historian Vitaliy Shcherbak, the term appeared sometime in the 15th century for territory between the Dniester and mid-Volga when colonization of the region by Zaporozhian Cossacks started.

[3] Shcherbak notes that the term's contemporaries, such as Michalo Lituanus,[4][5] Blaise de Vigenère, and Józef Wereszczyński,[6] wrote about the great natural riches of the steppes and the Dnieper basin.

For centuries, the region was only sparsely populated by various nomadic groups such as Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Cumans, Khazars, Bulgars, Pechenegs, Kipchaks, Turco-Mongols, Tatars and Nogais.

After the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus', the territory was ruled by the Golden Horde until the Battle of Blue Waters (1362), which allowed Algirdas to claim it for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

In 1441, the western section of the Wild Fields, Yedisan, came to be dominated by the Crimean Khanate, a political entity controlled by the expanding Ottoman Empire from the 16th century onward.

Thus, the Wild Fields were partly inhabited by the Zaporizhian Cossacks, as reflected in works of the Polish theologian and Catholic bishop of Kiev Józef Wereszczyński, who settled there in the 15th century under the condition that they would fight off expansion by the Nogai Horde and the growing danger from attacks by the Crimean Khanate.

Although estimates of the number of captives taken in a single raid reached as high as 30,000, the average figure was closer to 3000...In Podilia alone, about one-third of all the villages were devastated or abandoned between 1578 and 1583.

After the Crimean Tatars betrayed the Cossacks for the third time in 1653, Khmelnytsky realized he could no longer rely on Ottoman support against Poland, and he was forced to turn to Tsardom of Russia for help.

After the defeat of the Ottomans at the Battle of Vienna in 1683, Poland managed to recover Right-bank Ukraine by 1690, except for the city of Kiev, and reincorporated it into their respective voivodeships of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, while all the Hetmanate administration was abolished between 1699 and 1704.

After a series of Russo-Turkish wars waged by Catherine the Great, the area formerly controlled by the Ottomans and the Crimean Tatars was incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 1780s, during which nomadic life in these territories ceased to exist in its ancient version.

According to the Historical Dictionary of Ukraine, "The population consisted of military colonists from hussar and lancer regiments, Ukrainian and Russian peasants, Cossacks, Serbs, Montenegrins, Hungarians, and other foreigners who received land subsidies for settling in the area.

The territory of Wild Fields is located in the modern Dnipro, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kirovohrad, Luhansk, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Poltava, Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts of Ukraine.