Dmitrii Ivanovich Vishnevetskii

Date of birth unknown; died 1564. Prince.

Vishnevetskii became Cherkassk starshina (headman) in 1551. In the spring of 1556 he sent a detachment of hired cossacks to help the Russian army in a campaign against the Crimea. In the summer of 1556, with the purpose of obstructing peasant flight to Zaporozhye and for struggle with the Zaporozh’e Cossacks he constructed a fortress on the island of Malaia Khortitsa (near the present-day city of Zaporozh’e). In October 1556 he attacked the Crimean for-tress of Islam-Kermen. In the summer of 1557 the Crimean khan’s army destroyed the Khortitsa fortress, and soon Vishnevitskii entered the service of Ivan the Terrible, receiving from him considerable landholdings. He twice participated in the Russian army campaign into the Crimea. At the beginning of the Livonian War of 1558-83 he fled to Sigismund II Augustus at a moment of heightened tensions in relations between Russia and Lithuania. In 1563, Vishnevetskii intervened in the struggle for the Moldavian throne; the Turks captured him and sent him to Istanbul, where he was executed.