COSSA, PIETRO

(1830-80), Ital. dramatist; wrote tragedies on cla ical subjects and Ital. history. kish or Kirghiz in origin, signifying ‘freebooters,’ applied to certain military communities of the former Ru ian Empire, who furnished the best light cavalry of the beegpepe army. ‘They were organized in ten voiskos (Don, Volga or burg, Siberia, Semiryechensk, ur, and Usuri). The unit of Co ack life is the stan its a, or village commune. Nomadic tribes, they began about the 16th cent. to appear as a settled people in the lower Don basin, and soon afterwards are found on the Dnieper, Sigismund I. of Poland granted some of them lands on the lower Dnieper, ‘below the cataracts’; hence the name Zaporogian Co acks. Stephen Bathori (1575-87) gave the Dnieper warriors (Co acks of the Ukraine or ‘frontier’) a regular organization under an ataman or hetman. In 1792 the Co acks of the Kuban (Black Sea) were formed, and other lines were subsequently established on the lower Volga, Terek, Ural (river), in W. Siberia, Transbaikal, etc. During n er the World War there were nearly half a million Co acks in the ranks, and they played a prominent part, especially in the invasion of Galicia. Although they had been long an immovable pillar of Ru ian autocracy, they were not hostile to the revolution of 1917. Under the Bolsheyist regime the Don Co acks formed an independent republic. See Ru ia.