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COSIN COSSACKS 391 COSIN, John, D. D., an English prelate, born in Norwich, Nov. 30, 1594, died Jan. 15, 1672. He was educated at Cambridge, where he be- came fellow of Gonville and Caius college ; was librarian of Bishop Overall of Lichfield, 1616-'19 ; and became archdeacon of the East Hiding of Yorkshire in 1624. By command of Charles I. he prepared a manual of " Private Devotions" (1627). In 1634 he became mas- ter of St. Peter's college, Cambridge, and six years later* dean of Peterborough and vice- chancellor of the university. Being a devoted loyalist, he was deprived of his preferments by the party in power and went to Paris, where he occupied himself in performing cleri- cal duties among his exiled countrymen. On the restoration of Charles II. he was made bishop of Durham (1660). Among his works best known are " Scholastical History of the Canon of Holy Scripture" (1657), and His- tory of Popish Transubstantiation " (1675). COSMAS OF PRAGUE, a Bohemian ecclesiastic, and the earliest historian of his country, born in 1045, died Oct. 21, 1126. The first part of his work, the Chronicon Bohemorum, contains the most ancient traditions of Bohemia to 1038 ; the second part carries the chronicles to 1092, and the third and last part to 1125. The first edition was published by Freher in 1602, and the last edition is contained in Pelzel and Do- browsky's first volume of Scriptores Rerum Bohemicarum (Prague, 1783). COSMO. See MEDICI. COSSACKS, warlike tribes of S. and S. E. Russia, those of Little Russia (Malorussians) and those of the, Don forming the chief divi- sions. In their own as well as in the Russian language they are called Kazaks, which in Turkish designates robbers, and in the dialect of the Tartars free, light mounted warriors. Whether this is the origin of their name, or whether they have inherited it from a more eastern people, is a matter of controversy, as well as whether they came into Russia as a horde from the east, and spread as far as the Dnieper, or whether they have been conglom- erated into a national body through a long course of time, from various fragments of roving or fugitive neighboring tribes. Certain it is that about the middle of the 14th century the banks of the southern Dnieper and of its tributaries were settled by Russians, who fled before the invading Poles, built villages and towns, were joined by people from the neigh- boring borders, and thus formed the bulk of the warlike Malorussian tribe, which so often appears in the border wars of the Poles, Russians, and Crimean Tartars. Stephen Ba- thori, one of the ablest kings of Poland (1576- '86), constituted these Cossacks of the Ukraine the guards of the S. E. Polish frontier, giving them a regular military organization under hetmans (Russ. attamans, or chiefs). But the extortions of Polish officials, and the persecu- tions by Polish Jesuits under the following reigns, exasperated the Cossacks, who belonged to the Greek church, and their insurrection under Chrnielnicki (1648) was stained with the wildest deeds, and ended with their submission to Russia (1654). But the new rule proved no less oppressive, and a part of the tribe was ready to follow Mazeppa, their attaman, and to join Charles XII. against Peter the Great. For this attempt, which failed, the czar took bloody revenge after his victory at Poltava, and many of the Cossacks fled to the Crimea, whence they were allowed to return under the reign of Anna. Of these western Cossacks, the Zaporogians (in Slavic, those beyond the cascades, viz., of the Dnieper) were regarded at all times as the boldest, fiercest, and most predatory. They despised marriage, and re- cruited their numbers by kidnapping children. The eastern Cossacks appear in the service of the Russian czars as early as the first half of the 16th century. Before the severity of Ivan Cossack Man and Woman. the Terrible, the adventurer Yermak fled with a small band of Cossacks to Siberia, roved over its vast plains, and gave it to Russia for his pardon. f Some of their revolts were as dangerous to Russia as were those of the west- ern Cossacks to Poland ; and that under Puga- tch^ff, during the reign of Catharine II., shook the empire to its very foundation. Since the bloody suppression of this revolt, the chief object of the government has been gradually to deprive them of their independence, by transforming their bodies into more regular military organizations; and the dignity of chief attaman is now vested in the crown prince of Russia. The eastern division, which has been strengthened by transplantations from the western under Catharine II., forms now the great bulk of the Cossacks. Their chief province is the vast steppes W. of the Don, which gives the name to the tribe, with Tcher-