12
The propaganda war began immediately. It was conducted by the Polish-Lithuanian side in terms that reveal much about the nature of the union, based on the developing concept of the corona regni which—as Rowell observes—was ‘not an anti-royal concept per se, but one representing ‘the bond uniting the monarch and the community of the realm’.1 Horodło demonstrated to all Europe that Lithuania had been admitted to that community in a perpetual union established with the consent of both political communities; it asserted that the union state spoke with one voice, which it did in practice, at least for the moment.
Although Jagiełło and Vytautas always stressed their personal and dynastic authority, it was very much to their advantage to emphasize that the union was based on the consent of the community of the realm. Aware that the Order could produce documents testifying to the surrender of Samogitia in perpetuity, they based their arguments for its return to Lithuania upon the proposition that, according to ius gentium and natural law, princes did not have the authority to alienate any part of their principality without the consent of those affected, which meant both their heirs and the political community of the affected territory. This argument was applied not only to Samogitia, but also to Pomerelia, ceded to the Order in perpetuity in 1343. These arguments were put during the mediation talks, but they were in the interests of the dynasty as well as the communities of the realm, and were supported by Mikołaj Wiśliczka, representing Jagiełło’s daughter Jadwiga, and Mikołaj Cebulka, a Pole in Vytautas’s service, representing Vytautas’s daughter Sophia.
Błaszczyk argues that Cebulka’s submission on Sophia’s behalf was in breach of Vilnius-Radom, which envisaged the return of the whole grand duchy to Poland on Vytautas’s death.2 Yet this is to misunderstand the situation, as the fact that Wiśliczka also made a submission on Samogitia on behalf of Jadwiga demonstrates. Samogitia, like Trakai, had been part of Kęstutis’s patrimony; as such Vytautas had a legitimate claim to it. The significance of Wiśliczka’s submission is rather that, having secured the agreement of the Poles that Jadwiga was the natural heir to the Polish throne, Jagiełło was now publicly putting her forward as heir to the position of supreme prince in the grand duchy which, given the lack of any precedent in Lithuania for female succession was bold indeed. These arguments were partly for domestic consumption, an attempt to use the need to preserve the union to assert the natural rights of Jagiełło and his heirs in Poland as well as in Lithuania, and the rights of Vytautas and his heirs to the Kęstutid patrimony.
The major battles were fought at Constance, however, which marked the start of a long engagement with conciliarist ideas that was to play a significant role in the development of Polish-Lithuanian political thought, and was to have a substantial effect on the union’s development. From the start of the schism in 1378 Poland had remained loyal to the Roman popes Urban VI, Boniface IX, Innocent VII, and Gregory XII. In 1409, however, it sent delegates to the council of Pisa, a risky step, for Jagiełło’s good relations with the papacy had persuaded Boniface to condemn the Order’s anti-Polish policies and ban it from waging war on Lithuania in 1403. The election of Alexander V at Pisa gave the Poles hope that they might secure more effective support from him: Alexander had visited Lithuania and Ruthenia, had met Jagiełło and Vytautas, and had seen the effects of the Order’s depredations in Lithuania. In December 1409 Jagiełło swore loyalty to him, and to his successor, John XXIII, after Alexander’s death in May 1410. John repaid this loyalty with a bull annulling all the Order’s papal and imperial privileges for the conversion of Lithuania and the Orthodox east.3
Polish support for John evaporated after his deposition at Constance in March 1415. Although the Polish delegation, in Constance from 20 January 1415 until 17 May 1418, took a full part in the council, it concentrated on the conflict with the Order, which was debated in two dramatic set-piece confrontations in July 1415 and February 1416.4 The ground was prepared well, and the delegation was intellectually of very high quality. It was led by Mikołaj Trąba, archbishop of Gniezno since 1412, who, as vice-chancellor from 1403 until 1412, had been one of Jagiełło’s most reliable ministers. He was accompanied by his associate Andrzej Łaskarz, bishop-elect of Poznań, who had led the mediation negotiations, Jakub of Korzkiew, bishop of Płock, and Jan Kropidło, a Silesian Piast and bishop of Cujavia. They were accompanied by several lay representatives, and by Włodkowic, Jagiełło’s personal envoy. The canon lawyer Peter Wolfram, procurator of the bishop of Cracow, Wojciech Jastrzębiec, represented his master who, as chancellor, was unable to attend.
Włodkowic was a canon lawyer. Like his friend Łaskarzyc, Kropidło, Wolfram, and several other delegates, he had studied at Prague University in the flourishing intellectual climate that nourished Jan Hus, and then in Padua. Although there is no evidence that Trąba had studied at any university, Jakub of Korzkiew held doctorates in canon law from Rome and Bologna.5 These were sophisticated men, in tune with the intellectual currents of the day. The case against the Order was carefully prepared in Cracow University, whose faculty had largely been educated in Prague: twenty-five of the thirty-one professors listed in 1404 had studied there, as had nine out of eleven of the university’s earliest rectors.6 The intellectual foundations were laid by its first rector, Stanisław of Skarbimierz, who had taken his doctorate in Prague and who, as one of Cracow’s first professors of law, probably helped draft Vilnius-Radom.7 In 1410 he published a sermon entitled On Just Wars, in which he drew on canon and natural law to argue that pagans had the right to their own state, and to defend it; furthermore, if their state were attacked without good reason by Christians, other Christians were permitted to aid them.8 These ideas underpinned the Polish-Lithuanian case at Constance. Their fullest expression came in Włodkowic’s Treatise on the power of pope and emperor with regard to infidels; he also delivered fifty-two theses at a session of the German nation—which included Poland-Lithuania—in June 1416.9
In his treatise Włodkowicz mounted a radical attack not just on the Order, but on the tradition of evangelization that it represented. After a brief introduction outlining the Order’s history and the atrocities it had perpetrated upon pagan Prussians and Lithuanians, Włodkowic turned to the legal basis for such actions, setting himself the bold task of demolishing the claims of popes and emperors concerning pagans and infidels.10 He first considered the legal position of Jews and Muslims living in Christian states, citing the Bible and a range of authorities and legal precedents to support his argument that Christian princes were not permitted to molest or expel infidels if they were peaceable and accepted the laws of the Christian community among whom they lived.11 Since infidels were rational beings created by God himself, a prince could not despoil them of their possessions or expel them from his dominions without good cause.12 Pagans had the right to their own state and the Emperor and other secular powers did not have a natural right to use violence against pagan states that did not recognize their authority unless there was good cause: the annexation of a pagan state could only take place by the will of God, or with the consent of its inhabitants. Thus the Order’s attacks on the peaceful pagans of Lithuania and Samogitia contravened divine and natural law, although Włodkowic was happy to allow that the wars of the Spanish monarchies against the Saracens were just, since they were to recover territories once held by Christians. Pagans who were unjustly attacked had a right to defend themselves despite their ignorance of divine and natural law. Similarly, it was wrong to use force to compel infidels to convert to Christianity: created as rational beings by God, they had freedom of conscience, and the right to choose.13
Włodkowic was no modern liberal, and his arguments were skilfully selected to cause the maximum damage to the Order’s case. Nevertheless, his treatise is a remarkable document. Although in impeccable medieval fashion he drew on past authorities, few had attempted such a comprehensive defence of the rights of non-Christians to freedom from unjustified aggression, and if his treatise remained largely forgotten after Constance, it anticipated many of the themes that became familiar in early modern discourses on international law.14 It did much to secure its immediate aims. In February 1416 its contention that Samogitia was naturally part of Lithuania, and that peaceful methods of conversion were more desirable and more effective than the Order’s violent approach, were bolstered by the sensational arrival in Constance of a sixty-strong Samogitian delegation, which bore witness to the rapid success of the evangelization of the province that Jagiełło and Vytautas had begun in October 1413, when they sailed down the Niemen and Dubissa rivers into the Samogitian heartlands, where they repeated the tactics that had worked so successfully in Lithuania twenty-six years earlier, gathering the leading Samogitians at an assembly which Jagiełło addressed personally.15
The Samogitian delegation was formally welcomed in Constance cathedral on 4 December 1415. At a plenary session on 13 February 1416, the Propositio Samaytarum, possibly drafted by Włodkowic, was presented. It contained forty points in which the Order’s violent attempts to convert Samogitia were contrasted vividly with the peaceful means adopted by Jagiełło and Vytautas.16 This public relations exercise exaggerated the success of the conversion: Jagiełło and Vytautas spent only a week in Samogitia, and Długosz’s account, with its affecting picture of Jagiełło addressing the Samogitians in their own language, is overdrawn. More effective were the deliberate destruction of the sacred groves and temples, and the efforts of Vytautas and a legion of Polish priests, accompanied by local translators over the following years. The process of conversion was much slower than the Constance delegation implied, and met with considerable resistance, which forced a relaunch in 1417. Nevertheless, the delegation successfully won over the majority of the Constance delegates: they could point to the considerable success of Jagiełło’s peaceful methods in Lithuania and the failure of the Order’s long campaign of violence and oppression. In 1417 the council agreed to the establishment of a new bishopric at Medininkai; as in Aukštaitija the establishment of the Church’s institutional structure, with the creation of a network of parishes and the training of Lithuanian priests at Cracow University, slowly laid the foundations for ultimate success.17
The campaign achieved much, but not outright victory. Włodkowic’s pamphlet challenging the Emperor’s powers, and the refusal of the Polish delegation to recognize imperial authority over the kingdom of Poland in the session of 5 July 1415 displeased Sigismund, who began defending the Order. Yet if no conclusive outcome to the dispute was reached at Constance, there was no doubt that the Poles won the propaganda battle. They were helped by the Dominican Johannes Falkenberg, who followed up an attack on Włodkowic’s treatise—effectively rebutted—with an inflammatory satirical pamphlet whose intemperate tone was counterproductive. As is frequently the case with satire, it was taken seriously, and its call for what amounted to genocide against the Poles was so extreme that Falkenberg was disowned and imprisoned by the Order, which realized the damage he had done, even if the Poles failed to secure his outright condemnation from Martin V, despite a dramatic appeal at the plenary session closing the council on 9 May 1418, which they refused to withdraw despite papal threats.18
The Polish-Lithuanian campaign at Constance did much to ensure that the Order did not receive any substantial military support when the Thorn treaty proved incapable of preserving peace. Poland-Lithuania emerged victorious from three brief wars with the Order after 1413—the ‘hunger war’ of 1414, when a large army devastated the Order’s lands, only retreating when it could no longer feed itself; the 1419 ‘war of retreat’, when the Order hastily sued for peace before another large army had even crossed the frontier; and the ‘Golub war’ in the same year, when the allies besieged and captured Golub and cut a swathe of devastation across Prussia. Military superiority, backed by the diplomatic offensive at Constance, finally produced the desired result. In the 1422 treaty of Melno, Samogitia was recognized unconditionally and in perpetuity as a Lithuanian possession; Lithuania also received the port of Palanga and a narrow strip of land fifteen kilometres across that provided access to the Baltic Sea, separating the lands of the Order’s two branches. Poland secured relatively little—the castle of Nieszawa near Thorn and a handful of Cujavian villages—but the Polish-Lithuanian triumph was decisive: the Lithuanian-Prussian border fixed at Melno was to remain unchanged until 1919. Two years later Falkenberg formally renounced his theses, and the Poles withdrew their appeal.19
The Order was by no means finished, but the tide had turned decisively. The striking feature of the Polish-Lithuanian campaign at Constance is the extent to which it was rooted in Polish views about the nature of politics, and the Polish conception of the nature of the union with Lithuania. The case presented was selective and designed to win over an international audience, but it rested on propositions about the nature of the political community that drew extensively on currents in Catholic political thought. Włodkowic, who had studied in Padua, drew on the works of Marsiglio of Padua in his Treatises.20 Echoes of Marsiglio’s view that ‘the legislator, or the primary and proper efficient cause of law, is the people or whole body of citizens, or the weightier part thereof, through its election or will expressed by words in the general assembly of the citizens’ are clearly evident in his writings, informing the argument that territory could only be ceded with the consent of its inhabitants.21 These ideas underpinned the whole development of the Polish political system after 1382. They informed the practice of confederation, and they ran like a golden thread through all the union treaties. The consent of the citizens was central to the process of union, and it was this concept, embodied in ideas about the corona regni as the community of the realm, that underlay that process, not ideas about statehood. The Polish-Lithuanian interventions at Constance demonstrate how deeply such ideas had penetrated Polish Catholicism, upon which Jagiełło’s government rested so firmly.
Horodło demonstrates the extent to which Jagiełło and Vytautas accepted and propagated—up to a point—this vision of the political community. For Vytautas, the support of the Catholic Lithuanian boyars was essential to buttress his position as grand duke. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the extension to them of the rights and privileges of their Polish counterparts. Nevertheless, for all the apparent vindication of the union that Tannenberg and Melno provided, it was still a fragile creation, as is demonstrated by the number of adjustments that had been made to it since 1386. That it had worked so effectively reflected the working relationship thrashed out between Jagiełło and Vytautas between 1392 and 1413. Horodło’s provisions concerning Lithuania’s government indicate that both Jagiełło and Vytautas were looking to the future: the union had to be secured after their deaths if the gains of Melno were not to be squandered. Yet if Horodło sought to provide a mechanism for deciding the succession, there was no guarantee that it would be accepted, either by surviving members of the Gediminid dynasty, or by the political communities of Poland and Lithuania. In the years after 1422, as both Jagiełło and Vytautas lived on and on, the strains became increasingly apparent, until a full-blown crisis of union erupted in their last years, a crisis that exposed the ambiguities in Horodło and all but destroyed the union.
1 Rowell, ‘Dynastic bluff ?’, 9.
2 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 372–3.
3 Tomasz Graff, Episkopat monarchii jagiellońskiej w dobie soborów powszechnych XV wieku (Cracow, 2008); Thomas Wünsch, Konziliarismus und Polen (Paderborn, 1998), 32; Jan Fijałek, ‘Kościół rzymskokatolicki na Litwie: Uchrześcijanienie Litwy przez Polskę i zachowanie w niej języka ludu po koniec Rzeczypospolitej’, in Kłoczowski (ed.), Chrystianizacja, 152.
4 Graff, Episkopat, 202.
5 Karol Górski, Z dziejów walki o pokój i sprawiedliwość międzynarodową: Ostatnie słowo Pawła Włodkowica o Zakonie Krzyżackim (Toruń, 1964), 8–9; Wünsch, Konziliarismus, 54–7.
6 Wünsch, Konziliarismus, 34.
7 Krzyżaniakowa and Ochmański, Jagiełło, 182.
8 Stanisław from Skarbimierz, ‘De bellis justis’, in Ludwik Ehrlich (ed.), Polski wykład prawa wojny (Warsaw, 1955), 90–144.
9 Hartmut Boockmann, Johannes Falkenberg, der Deutsche Orden und die polnische Politik (Göttingen, 1975), 209–10; Paweł Włodkowic, Tractatus de potestate papae et imperatoris respectu infidelium in Rerum publicarum scientiae quae saeculo XV in Polonia viguit monumenta litteraria, ed. Michał Bobrzyński (Cracow, 1878), 161–94.
10 Włodkowic, Tractatus de potestate, 161–2.
11 Włodkowic, Tractatus de potestate, 164–5.
12 Włodkowic, Tractatus de potestate, 165–6; 188.
13 Włodkowic, Tractatus de potestate, 173–4; 175; 178; 188.
14 Frederick Russell, ‘Paulus Vladimiri’s attack on the Just War. A case study in legal polemics’, in Brian Tierney, and Peter Linehan (eds), Studies on Medieval Law and Government presented to Walter Ullmann (Cambridge, 1980), 243–4, 253–4.
15 Ivinskas, ‘Litwa’, 121.
16 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 458; Ivinskis, ‘Litwa’, 122–3.
17 Fijałek, ‘Kościół’, 152–4, 183–263; Ivinskis, ‘Litwa’, 121–6; Marian Banaszak, ‘Chrzest Żmudzi i jego reperkusje w Konstancji’, in Marek Zahajkiewicz (ed.), Chrzest Litwy (Lublin, 1990), 57–76.
18 Johann Falkenberg, Liber de doctrina potestatis papae et imperatoris editus contra Paulum Vladimiri Polonum in Sacro Constantiensi Consilio, in Rerum publicarum, 196–232; Paweł Włodkowic, Tractatus de Ordine Cruciferorum et de bello Polonorum contra dictos fratres ad confutanda scripta Johaniiis de Bamberga (Johannis Fal[k]enberg) in sacro Constantiensi Generali Concilio, in Rerum publicarum, 233–96. Falkenberg’s satire is printed in Boockmann, Falkenberg, 312–53.
19 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 438; Boockmann, Falkenberg, 297–305.
20 e.g. Włodkowic, Tractatus de potestate, 170.
21 Marsilius [Marsiglio] of Padua, Defensor pacis, tr. Alan Gewirth (Toronto, 1956; 2nd edn 1980), 45.