Preface

This is not the history of a state, or a nation, the usual concepts that frame the writing of political history, but of a political relationship: a political union that grew and changed over time, and expanded to include more peoples and cultures than the Poles and Lithuanians who established it in its original form in 1386. Historians often write of state- and nation-building; they rarely write of the formation of unions, and if they do, they usually do so from the point of view of one or other of the states or nations that form the union. After the process usually—and erroneously—referred to as the ‘partitions of Poland’ removed Poland-Lithuania from the map between 1772 and 1795, the complex historical development of the lands that once formed Poland-Lithuania has resulted for much of the time since 1795 in the union being presented in a negative light: it is seen as a failure, and above all an episode in Polish history, in which the Poles extended political control over the territories of what now constitute the modern states of Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, and parts of what became Estonia, Russia, and (until 1945) Germany. This approach has led many non-Polish historians to portray the Polish-Lithuanian union as an exercise in Polish imperialism that stunted their own national development, while there is a strong tradition in Polish historiography, dating back to Michał Bobrzyński and beyond, that blames the union for the partitions. Yet the union was no empire. In its origin it was a classic late-medieval composite state, in which the various realms that came together under the rule of the Jagiellonian dynasty between 1386 and 1569 gradually formed a strong political union through negotiation and consent, despite some spectacular disagreements as to its nature and form. Its disappearance in 1795, just as revolutionaries in France were proclaiming the doctrine of the sovereign nation, one and indivisible, means that the history of east central Europe has been written largely through the eyes of the partitioning powers and their successors—above all Russia and Germany—or by historians of the individual nation states that fought for the independence that was only secured after 1918 or 1990. Yet the largely negative assessments of the union fail to explain why it came to be, and why it lasted so long. This book attempts to answer the first of those questions.

When, more years ago than I care to admit, Robert Evans invited me on behalf of Oxford University Press to write a history of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth from 1569 until 1795, I had originally intended the story of the making of this union between 1386 and 1569 to be a brief introductory section. I soon realized, however, that it is impossible to understand the political dynamics of such a complex political construct as the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth without a clear grasp of how it was formed. There is no detailed study in English of the making of this union; indeed there is very little on it in English at all, since the Anglo-Saxon scholarly world has for far too long been largely content with the versions of the history of eastern Europe written by Russianists and Germanists.

With this in mind, and aware that there has been no comprehensive re-evaluation of the making of the union since Oskar Halecki’s classic two-volume Dzieje unii jagiellońskiej, published in 1919, I suggested to OUP that I might publish a two-volume study of the union from its formation in 1386 to its dissolution, against the will of its citizens, in 1795. This book is the result. It takes the story from the origins of the union in the late fourteenth century up to its consummation at Lublin in 1569. Halecki’s great work was written as the partitioning powers imploded in the maelstrom of the First World War, and published as Poles and Lithuanians began a war over Vilnius, the former capital of the grand duchy of Lithuania. While it is sympathetic to the Lithuanian and Ruthenian inhabitants of the former grand duchy, and is frequently critical of Polish policy towards them, it is written from a Polish perspective. This book is an attempt to provide a history of the making of the union that eschews any national perspective, and which suggests that the non-Polish peoples within the union state played as great a part in its formation as the Poles. It therefore tells the story from multiple viewpoints in order to explain the success of the union, which remains, despite its inglorious end, one of the longest-lasting political unions in European history, whose cultural legacy is evident to this day. It is the first part of a two-volume attempt to study the union on its own terms, and not to judge it for failing to be what it did not try to be. Above all, it seeks to restore the history of the largest state in late medieval and early modern Europe to the general story of European development after years of historiographical neglect outside eastern Europe.

This first volume is not and cannot be an histoire totale of the vast geographical area that constituted the union state. It is conceived as a political history that tells the story of the union’s making; it is therefore largely a histoire événementielle, and only deals with economic, social, and cultural factors of direct relevance to the making of the union, such as the political role played by religion, and the development of the rural economy, which was of crucial importance to the nobility that formed—although never exclusively—the union’s citizen body. There will be a fuller, thematic treatment of important issues such as religion, the Renaissance and the influence of humanism, and the union’s unique urban world in volume two.

The book is dedicated to the memory of four great scholars of the Polish-Lithuanian union: a Pole, a Lithuanian, a Ukrainian, and a Russian. They had very different attitudes towards it, and one of them—Mykhailo Hrushevsky—loathed it and all it stood for. All of them lived through the traumas of the twentieth century in eastern Europe, and suffered for their fearless and uncompromising attitude towards their scholarship. Two of them—Oskar Halecki and Adolfas Šapoka—ended their lives in exile, without access to the sources that nourished and sustained their scholarship; two of them—Matvei Liubavskii and Mykhailo Hrushevsky—ended theirs in Soviet detention, as their works were denigrated or suppressed by the communist regime. None of them ever abandoned their integrity as historians: this work owes much to all of them. Its shortcomings are entirely the responsibility of its author, who has had the good fortune to live in an age when the difficulties they faced have largely evaporated, and the peoples of the successor states of the Polish-Lithuanian union have mostly—although alas not yet entirely—had the freedom to explore its history on their own terms. I hope that they will accept this view from an outsider in the spirit in which it was written.

Robert Frost

Warsaw, January 2014

List of Abbreviations

A Note on Personal and Place Names

There is no completely satisfactory solution to the problems, both practical and political, of rendering the personal and geographical names of eastern Europe in a text written in English. A balance has to be struck between scholarly exactitude and readability for those who do not know Slavic or Baltic languages. I have tried to strike such a balance. With regard to personal names, I have generally used English equivalents for the names of ruling princes and their families: thus Casimir, not Kazimierz; Sigismund, not Zygmunt; and Catherine, not Katarzyna. Where there is no exact English equivalent, I have preferred the native version over archaic anglicizations: thus Władysław and Lászlo, not Ladislas; Vasilii, not Basil, although I have preferred the German forms of Slavic names for the Germanized Slavic families who ruled in Silesia and Pomerania: thus Wladislaus and Bogislaw. I have preferred Louis of Anjou to Ludwig, Ludwik, or Lewis. For the man who instituted the union, I use the Lithuanian form Jogaila until his conversion to Catholicism, from which point I use the Polish form Jagiełło, since this is mostly how he is known in the English-language literature. I have used the Lithuanian form of Vytautas rather than the Polish Witold or the transliterated Russian form Vitovt, and Žygimantas for his brother, rather than Sigismund, to distinguish him from Sigismund of Luxembourg, Sigismund I, and Sigismund August. In order to help readers without Slavic and Baltic languages to discriminate between the different backgrounds of the individuals and families I have discussed, I have adopted a scheme in which Polish forms are used for Poles, and Lithuanian forms for Lithuanians until the mid sixteenth century, when Polish spread rapidly among the Lithuanian and Ruthenian elites. I have signalled the gradual switch to Polish in the sixteenth century by using Polish forms for Lithuanian names for the generation politically active in the lead-up to the Lublin union. This is the point at which the Radvila become the Radziwiłł, though the fact that Polish was the first language of Mikołaj Radziwiłł the Black (Czarny) and Mikołaj Radziwiłł the Red (Rudy) says nothing about their national identity.

The situation is even more complex with regard to names of Ruthenians, a term used to denote the inhabitants of what was known as Rus'. Modern Slavic languages distinguish between Rus' and Russia, a distinction that was unknown in the period covered by this book. Modern nationalist battles, however, make it important to distinguish between Russian (rosyjski in Polish) and Rus'ian (ruski in Polish). In order to avoid the awkward form Rus'ian in English, I have followed convention by using the English form Ruthenian, derived from the contemporary Latin. The Ruthenians in this book are the ancestors of modern Belarus'ians and Ukrainians, although Ruthenians in this period did not know any such distinction. Since Ruthenians spoke a number of different dialects of eastern Slavic, and orthography was by no means fixed, I have transliterated largely from modern forms of the names, using Ukrainian forms for Ruthenians from the southern lands, Belarusian forms for Ruthenians from the lands of modern Belarus, and Russian forms for Muscovites. I have simplified the transliterations, omitting soft signs and diacritics to make the text more readable for non-Slavic specialists; thus I use Hrushevsky, not Hrushevs'kyi; Ostrozky, not Ostroz'kyi. For families of Lithuanian origin who became Ruthenianized and Orthodox, I have used the Ruthenian version of their names: thus the Holshansky, not the Alšeniškiai.

Similar principles are used with regard to geographical names. Where there is a standard English form, I have used it: thus Warsaw, Cracow, Moscow, Vienna. My general principle is to use the language in which places appear most often in the sources, and which is used by the dominant elites in a city or province. Thus I prefer the German forms Danzig, Thorn, and Elbing to the Polish forms Gdańsk, Toruń, and Elbląg. Matters are more complex in the lands of the grand duchy of Lithuania, where the linguistic map has altered considerably since the period covered by this book. On the whole, I have therefore used Lithuanian forms for places within the territory of modern Lithuania (Vilnius, not Wilno or Vilna; Trakai, not Troki), and Ruthenian forms for territories with a largely Ruthenian population. Rather than adopt one of the numerous variant spellings that appear in the sources, I have preferred to use the modern place names in Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian. Thus I use Kyiv, not Kiev—although I do refer to Kievan Rus'; Navahrudak, not Nowogródek; Hrodna, not Grodno. The exception is for Red Ruthenia, most of which is now in Ukraine, but which was part of the Polish kingdom from the 1340s until 1795, and where Polish was the dominant language among most of the elites by the late fifteenth century. Thus I prefer Lwów to L'viv, although I use Kamianets (Podilsky) not Kamieniec Podolski, since this territory was disputed between Poland and Lithuania.

Transliterations from Cyrillic are based on a modified form of the Library of Congress system, omitting diacritics. It has long been standard for bibliographic information in footnotes to be transliterated, but computerization has made it easier and less expensive to print different alphabets. I have therefore left titles in the bibliography and footnotes in the Cyrillic alphabet. Those who read east Slavic languages do not need them to be transliterated; for those who do not, it may be useful to be able to tell at a glance whether a source is in Russian, Belarusian, or Ukrainian, rather than Polish. I have provided a gazetteer with equivalents for place names in the various languages of the region. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

A Note on Currency

Until 1569 Poland and Lithuania had different currencies, as did Mazovia until 1529 and the Prussian lands, until the currency union with Poland established between 1526 and 1530. Polish monarchs also maintained a separate system of coinage in Red Ruthenia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The Polish monetary system in the fourteenth century was heavily influenced by the currency reforms carried out in 1300 by Václav II of Bohemia, king of Poland 1300–5, and the introduction of a gold coinage in Bohemia in 1325. The silver Prague grosz—the name derives from the Latin denarius grossus, or large penny—circulated freely in Poland, as did the gold Bohemian florin in this period, at a rate of roughly twelve groszy to the florin. Władysław Łokietek’s 1315 currency reform owed much to the Bohemian example. From 1315, 48 groszy were minted from one mark of silver—grzywna in Polish—which weighed half a pound; this was worth 576 pennies (denary). In 1315, one grosz contained 3.6 grams of silver, equivalent to the Prague grosz. By 1384–86, there were 16 pennies to the grosz, and 768 were struck from one mark.

The silver content of the grosz declined steadily between 1300 and 1530, and the Polish grosz devalued substantially against its Bohemian equivalent: if in 1300–10 they both contained 3.6 grams of silver, in 1400–10 the Polish grosz contained 1.38 grams compared with 1.75 grams contained by the Prague grosz; by 1530 the figures were 0.77 grams and 1.18 grams. The mark remained a money of account.

Łokietek and his son Casimir III (1333–70) minted gold ducats, probably largely for representational reasons, and Bohemian and Hungarian ducats long remained the main gold coins circulating in Poland. Under John I Albert (1492–1501) the problems caused by fluctuations in the value of silver and gold led to a half-hearted currency reform whose major achievement was the introduction of a new gold coin, the Polish złoty (florenus polonicus; aureus polonicus), as the equivalent of the ducat, whose value was established at 30 groszy, although this was raised to 32 groszy in 1505. In 1528 Sigismund I’s currency reform laid the foundations of the bimetallic system for the rest of the early modern period. It established a new ducat or red złoty (czerwony złoty). Henceforth, the złoty became a money of account; in 1528, one ducat or red złoty was worth 11/2 złoties. In 1558 Sigismund August raised the weight of the mark from 198 to 202 grams. Between 1547 and 1571 one ducat or red złoty was worth 54 Polish groszy.

Lithuania in the fifteenth century adopted the Culm mark (hryvna) from the Teutonic Knights at a weight of 191.29 grams. In 1500, 100 Lithuanian groszy were worth just over 136 Polish groszy; after the reforms of Sigismund I, the figure was 100:125. Monetary calculations in Lithuania and Ruthenia were often carried out in kop groszy, in which a kopa was a unit of measurement denoting 60 pieces. Thus 100 kop groszy was worth 6,000 Lithuanian groszy.

A Note on the Genealogies

The genealogies in Figures 1–3 are based on Darius Baronas, Artūras Dubonis, Rimvydas Petrauskas, Lietuvos Istorija, iii: XIII a.–1385 m. (Vilnius, 2011), 338–9, 356–9; Stephen Rowell, Lithuania Ascending (Cambridge, 1994), genealogical tables 1–4; Леонтій Войтович, Княжа доба на Русі: Портрети еліти (Била Церква, 2006) and Удільні князівства Рюриковичів і Гедиміновичів у ХІІ–ХІV ст. (Львів, 1996); and Jan Tęgowski, Pierwsze pokolenia Giedyminowiczów (Poznań and Wrocław, 1999), table 1, 304–5. The exact order and number of the children of Gediminas, Algirdas, and Kęstutis is a matter of some controversy. With regard to Algirdas’s children, I have accepted the traditional view of Andrei of Polatsk as the eldest son of Algirdas’s first marriage, and Jogaila/Jagiełło as the eldest son of the second. This is the view of Rowell and Nikodem. Tęgowski and Lietuvos Istorija, iii: 356–7 take a different view. The order and birth dates of Algirdas’s children are based largely on Jarosław Nikodem, ‘Data urodzenia Jagiełły: Uwagi o starszeństwie synów Olgierda i Julianny’, Genealogia, 12 (2000), 23–49. For a full discussion of the problem, see Chapter 8, 74–5.