Pan Michael by Henryk Sienkiewicz — Read

When the earth had grown dry, and grass was flourishing, the Khan moved in person, with fifty thousand of the Crimean and Astrachan hordes, to help Doroshenko and the insurgents. The Khan himself, and his relatives, the petty sultans, and all the more important murzas and beys, wore kaftans as gifts from the Padishah, and went against the Commonwealth, not as they went usually, for booty and captives, but for a holy war with "fate," and the "destruction" of Lehistan (Poland) and Christianity.

Another and still greater storm was gathering at Adrianople, and against this deluge only the rock of Kamenyets was standing erect; for the rest of the Commonwealth lay like an open steppe, or like a sick man, powerless not only to defend himself, but even to rise to his feet. The previous Swedish, Prussian, Moscow, Cossack, and Hungarian wars, though victorious finally, had exhausted the Commonwealth. The army confederations and the insurrections of Lyubomirski of infamous memory had exhausted it, and now it was weakened to the last degree by court quarrels, the incapacity of the king, the feuds of magistrates, the blindness of a frivolous nobility, and the danger of civil war. In vain did the great Sobieski forewarn them of ruin -- no one would believe in war. They neglected means of defence; the treasury had no money, the hetman no troops. To a power against which alliances of all the Christian nations were hardly able to stand, the hetman could oppose barely a few thousand men.