These communities were filled up with people who chose freedom and danger in favor of the relatively safe and dependent living in Central Russia.
They lived in fortified settlements that were set up to protect the duchies from the nomadic tribes that wandered around in the area called the Wild Fields – between the lands of Vladimir-Suzdal Rus’ and the Caspian and the Black seas. The first Cossacks were people who were living on the outskirts of the Russian duchies, mainly in the South of the Russian lands – approximately from the 14th-15th centuries. Obviously, in Russia it appeared to denote people who weren’t tied down to their masters or landlords. The very word Cossack (‘казак’) is Turkic and means a free man, a vagabond, a fortune seeker. One of the oldest surviving Siberian Cossack fortresses Yalutorovsk ostrog (fortress), Tyumen region, Russia.
