Precursor to Christ: John the Baptist as Hetman Ivan Mazepa's Patron Saint — Between Theology and Politics

This article explores the wide spectrum of motivations for Ivan Mazepa's connection to his namesake, John the Baptist, offering new approaches to understanding Mazepa's saintly venerations, how they accorded with early modern Ukrainian political thought and religious culture as well as with the hetman's political aspirations, and the way they were reflected in the verbal and visual texts of the time. It begins by exploring how John the Baptist's theological and symbolic meaning was described by ecclesiastical authors, primarily in sermons and visual imagery. It then analyses how contemporaries appropriated the language used for the Baptist and adapted it to praise the hetman at a moment when he was redefining his image as the Hetmanate's leader and a Christian ruler protecting the Orthodox faith on the Eastern frontier of Europe.