15

Rus^'

There is no reason to doubt that Švitrigaila was seeking the means to effect a complete break with Poland. It does not follow, however, that those who elected him shared this aim. His prospects depended not on the foreign aid he could muster, but on his ability to sustain his support. He had been elected not by a united political nation demanding its independence from Poland, but by a coalition of the disaffected, and from the outset there were tensions among his followers. His survival depended upon him securing backing from Vytautas’s supporters, who had flourished since 1413. Yet their support was not guaranteed. For there was one way in which Švitrigaila’s election did breach Horodło. He had been elected by both Lithuanian and Ruthenian nobles, whereas Horodło had extended the privileges of the Polish szlachta only to Catholics. Although Švitrigaila was Catholic, he drew considerable support from the Ruthenian territories, where he had been granted estates by Jagiełło and Vytautas when not rebelling against them. He had long cultivated Ruthenian support and it was Ruthenian lords, led by Prince Dashko [Fedorovych Ostrozky] of Ostrih, who sprang him from captivity in March 1418.¹

If Švitrigaila’s Ruthenian support made him dangerous, it also rendered him vulnerable. The breaking of the union would not see the establishment of anything corresponding to the modern nation state of Lithuania, but a composite realm whose viability would be in serious doubt. The union had fundamentally altered the relations between its Lithuanian and Ruthenian elites, and between Lithuania proper and the annexed territories. If the adoption of Catholicism was a deliberate attempt to preserve a separate Lithuanian identity from the threat of absorption by Ruthenian culture and the Ruthenianization of the dynasty, the creation of a new, privileged Catholic elite raised questions about the grand duchy’s internal coherence: the privilege of 20 February 1387 was extended only to those professing the Christian faith—which meant Catholics. It excluded all those who, having accepted Catholic baptism, subsequently abandoned the faith, or those who refused to convert. In another privilege of 22 February Lithuanians were banned from marrying Ruthenians who did not convert. Orthodox exclusion was institutionalized at Horodło: privileges were extended to: ‘predicti nobiles, proceres et boyari terrarum Littwanie’. The absence of the term ‘ac Russie’ was no accident.²

Lithuania had expanded as rapidly as it had and had sustained itself as effectively as it did because of its ability to encompass and satisfy the Orthodox elites at the head of a substantial majority of its population. Just how substantial is unclear. Plokhy accepts a ratio of one to twelve for ‘Lithuanian ethnic territories to those settled by eastern Slavs’ for the mid fifteenth century, but this begs the question of what constituted Lithuanian ethnic territory.³ Given that the area of Lithuanian settlement was much broader than the boundaries of the present-day Lithuanian state, and was more densely populated than the Ruthenian territories, this estimate is dubious. Błaszczyk calculates that Lithuanian territory constituted ten per cent of the grand duchy under Vytautas, while Łowmiański claims that circa 1400 the Lithuanians constituted up to twenty per cent of the population. Whatever the true figure, which probably lay within this range, the balance was more even among its noble elites, with Błaszczyk suggesting a fifty–fifty split for the late fifteenth century.⁴ The disparity between the estimates stems partially from differing definitions of who belonged to which ethnic group in a society in which Lithuanian nobles increasingly spoke Ruthenian, noble intermarriage was not uncommon, and many families had a hazy view of their forebears once they slipped from living memory.

Before 1386 the disparity in population was not particularly significant in political terms on account of the grand duchy’s composite structure which, as Hrushevsky observes, was very similar to that known by its Ruthenian subjects before they came under Gediminid rule.⁵ The establishment of Gediminid princes in Ruthenian duchies, where they converted to Orthodoxy and rapidly assimilated, meant that the absorption of large areas of what had been Kievan Rus' made little practical difference to the local population. Grand dukes guaranteed that Ruthenian laws, privileges, and customs would be respected, encapsulated in the concept of starina (the old ways). Grand dukes regularly reassured their Ruthenian subjects with the phrase ‘we shall neither disturb the old, nor shall we introduce the new’ (старини не рушаем, а новини не вводим).⁶ Ruthenian influence on the formation of the Gediminid composite state was considerable. Kievan Rus' was a sophisticated political culture long before the unification of the Lithuanian tribes into a recognizable polity, and its political structures, political culture, and legal norms greatly influenced Lithuania’s development. Since Lithuanian was not a written language, Ruthenian became the language of government, of much diplomatic contact, and of the law, while even pagan Gediminids sustained courts where Ruthenian cultural influence was powerful. The Ruthenian contribution to Lithuania’s development should not be exaggerated, yet if Rowell is right to signal that it did not really begin until the end of the thirteenth century, his downplaying of Ruthenian influence after 1300 is questionable.⁷ Vytautas’s mother was pagan, but he himself married two Ruthenian wives; both of Algirdas’s wives were Orthodox princesses, and Jagiełło’s mother Juliana lived in Vilnius for thirty years, giving her husband’s court a powerful Ruthenian ambience (see Figs 7 and 8).⁸ Thus if Jagiełło was bilingual, Ruthenian was his mother tongue, although that did not make him Ruthenian: in 1387 he indicated where his loyalties lay by stressing the differences between the Ruthenians and ‘omnes nacione Lithvanos’.⁹

The reality of Ruthenian influence upon the grand duchy’s development long ago ignited a controversy about whether it was in origin and nature a ‘Lithuanian’ or a ‘Russian’, or, indeed, a Belarusian state—Ukrainians, who derive their historic claims to statehood more directly from Kievan Rus' and the seventeenth-century Cossack hetmanate, were never quite so bothered. The grand duchy was from the outset a composite polity formed by a cosmopolitan fusion of influences.¹⁰ Yet the choices made by Jagiełło and his supporters in 1385 and 1413 transformed its nature. While the Ruthenian language retained its status, and Ruthenian culture was still influential, the establishment of Catholicism as a new focus for Lithuanian identity marked a radical new departure: there is much to suggest that Jagiełło and Vytautas favoured union in order to preserve the Lithuanians as a distinct people.¹¹ The assault on the Gediminid dynastic conglomerate and its replacement by a more centralized, authoritarian system signalled a significant change: the dynasty could no longer play the key unifying role that had resulted in the dilution of its Lithuanian nature.¹²

In 1413, Vytautas and Jagiełło took a deliberate decision to treat Lithuania proper differently from the annexed Ruthenian territories and Samogitia: there were no Samogitian boyars among the forty-seven families adopted by the Polish heraldic clans and Samogitia was excluded from the administrative structures established by the treaty. Horodło created a two-tier polity, while Vytautas reduced the considerable degree of autonomy that the southern and eastern Ruthenian lands had enjoyed through the appanage duchies. Even if Horodło applied only to Lithuania proper, and the ban on non-Catholics holding office did not cover the annexed Ruthenian territories, it stated that only Catholics were permitted to counsel the grand duke and consider the public good. Only Catholics could be appointed to major office in the new palatinates of Vilnius and Trakai, which included many large, preponderantly Orthodox territories.¹³ Yet Vytautas also sought to consolidate his lordship and his control of the large number of royal estates scattered across the grand duchy; to this end he rewarded his servants and trusted agents with control over them, spreading Catholic noble administrators across the Ruthenian lands. Nevertheless, it is important not to overemphasize the extent of centralization, or to portray Vytautas anachronistically as a visionary builder of a unitary state.¹⁴ Horodło created a highly complex structure, in which the political relations between the various parts of the composite Gediminid realm were ambiguous and unclear. This lack of clarity was to cause serious problems after 1430, in Samogitia as well as in the Ruthenian lands.

Fig. 7. King Władysław Jagiełło and the Virgin Mary. Fresco from the Holy Trinity Chapel, Lublin Castle, c.1418. The frescoes of the Catholic Holy Trinity Chapel in Lublin were commissioned by Władysław II Jagiełło c.1407, and were painted by Ruthenian artists trained in the Orthodox tradition. They indicate the extent of Ruthenian cultural influence on Jagiełło’s court. By kind permission of the Muzeum Lubelskie w Lublinie (Lublin Province Museum). Photograph by Piotr Maciuk.

Fig. 8. King Władysław Jagiełło on horseback. Fresco from the Holy Trinity Chapel, Lublin Castle, c.1418. By kind permission of the Muzeum Lubelskie w Lublinie (Lublin Province Museum). Photograph by Piotr Maciuk.

For all that Vytautas insisted on his respect for starina in the annexed territories, and his appointment of Catholic governors and administrators of royal estates did not herald a major challenge to the control of the local elites within them, Krewo and Horodło raised important questions concerning the position of Orthodox nobles. The privileges granted to Lithuanian Catholics in 1387 and 1413 mattered, particularly since, after his assault on the Gediminid appanages, Vytautas’s generosity in rewarding his supporters meant that prominent Catholic nobles began amassing holdings of land across the grand duchy’s Ruthenian territories, over which they acquired rights after 1387 not granted to the Orthodox. These land grants gradually began to undermine the principle of starina, and brought legal problems on account of the different treatment of lands held by Catholic and Orthodox nobles.

Moreover, for all the broad toleration afforded to the Orthodox Church by Jagiełło and Vytautas in a continuation of the pagan tradition, their adoption of Catholicism radically altered the grand duchy’s political dynamic. As pagans, Gedimin, Algirdas, and Kęstutis could stand as neutrals between the Latin west and the Orthodox east; as Catholics, Jagiełło and Vytautas could not: paganism had been replaced by adherence to a powerful church that regarded the Orthodox as schismatics. Promotion of Catholicism was not limited to Lithuania proper. The original grant of land made by Jagiełło when he established the diocese of Vilnius in 1387 contained estates round Lida and Bakshty, areas of ancient Lithuanian settlement, but by then largely Ruthenian.¹⁵ The Catholic Church had long sustained small outposts across the Ruthenian lands—the Dominicans and Benedictines were present in Kyiv from the thirteenth century, and Henry, a Dominican friar, was appointed Catholic bishop of Kyiv in 1321, although the diocese failed to establish itself. While the majority of the forty-two parishes in the Catholic diocese of Vilnius by 1430 lay in Aukštaitija and Black Ruthenia, which had a substantial Lithuanian population, Jagiełło and Vytautas granted the Catholic Church estates across the grand duchy: Jagiełło’s donation of Streshevska (1391) was followed by Vytautas’s grants of Uborch (1412), Kamianets (1415), and Ihumen (1430); this gave the Vilnius diocese a cluster of estates in the middle Dnieper region, with around sixty villages and vast tracts of forest.¹⁶

Jagiełło and Vytautas were aware of all these problems; they sought to address them through the promotion of a union of the western and the eastern churches, or at least a union of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches within the grand duchy. It was a good moment. Byzantium’s retreat in the face of Ottoman expansion had reduced the prestige of the Constantinople patriarchate, while the emergence of Lithuania as the dominant state in eastern Europe provoked a power struggle within the Ruthenian church. Kyiv ceased to be the seat of the metropolitanate of all Rus' in 1299 or 1300, when Metropolitan Maximos abandoned it for Vladimir in the wake of the Mongol devastation of the southern Ruthenian lands. Maximos’s successor Peter moved to Moscow in 1325. The separate metropolitanate of Halych-Volhynia founded in 1303, was formally dissolved in 1331 after a successful protest by Teognost, metropolitan of Kyiv and all Rus', then resident in Moscow, against Patriarch Isiaih’s recognition of the metropolitan title of Fëdor, bishop of Halych, in 1328. After a failed attempt to revive it between 1345 and 1347, it was re-established in 1371 following a request by Casimir III.¹⁷

Tension grew between Moscow-based metropolitans and the grand duchy’s Orthodox bishops, who complained that their Church was neglected. In 1375 Patriarch Philotheos agreed to consecrate Cyprian, a Bulgarian monk, as metropolitan of Kyiv, Rus', and Lithuania, although Metropolitan Alexius was still alive, sparking a power struggle in which Constantinople’s vacillations saw Lithuanian and Muscovite candidates claiming the title of metropolitan of all Rus', with Muscovy winning a significant propaganda victory when Cyprian moved to Moscow in 1390.¹⁸

The divisions within the Ruthenian church and Constantinople’s declining cultural and political influence thus created a favourable climate for church union. For Jagiełło and Vytautas, church union would provide a neat solution to the grand duchy’s major political problem: if Orthodox Ruthenians could be welcomed in some form into the arms of the Catholic Church, then the privileges granted to Catholics could be extended to their elites, thereby securing their loyalty and reducing Muscovy’s attraction.¹⁹ In 1396 a meeting with Cyprian, who was visiting Lithuania, led to a proposal for a Ruthenian council to discuss union that was rejected by patriarch Antonius IV, who expressed support but thought the time was not right. Further discussions during Cyprian’s next visit in 1405 led nowhere; after his death in 1406 church union disappeared from view.²⁰

Jagiełło and Vytautas, absorbed in the wars against the Order, only returned to the idea a decade later, but with a different approach. Cyprian might have moved to Moscow, but he had originally been based in Lithuania and he was willing to listen to and—to an extent—work with Jagiełło and Vytautas. His successor, Fotius, was cut from a different cloth, loyal to Muscovy and its rulers. By 1415 Jagiełło and Vytautas had seen enough. On 15 November a synod of Lithuania’s Orthodox bishops in Navahrudak elected Cyprian’s nephew Grigorii Tsamblak metropolitan of Kyiv and all Rus' in a direct challenge to both Moscow and Constantinople. In a sharply worded justification of the election sent to Constantinople, Vytautas and the bishops complained at the neglect of the Lithuanian church by its Moscow-based metropolitans, arguing that they were appointed not by synods, but by Muscovite grand dukes, in breach of canon law. Vytautas decried the stripping of the wealth of the Kyivan church when the metropolitanate moved to Moscow, complaining that the patriarch had ignored his request that Feodosius, Orthodox bishop of Polatsk, be appointed metropolitan of all Rus' after Cyprian’s death, and that he be based in Kyiv. He played on the Ruthenian sense of tradition by arguing that the return of the metropolitanate to Kyiv would restore the situation to what it had been in the past (по давному).²¹

Hrushevsky presents proposals for church union in this period as emanating from Rome for entirely political reasons, suggesting that they lacked support among the Orthodox clergy and Ruthenian society.²² He offers no evidence in support of this contention. The discontent of Orthodox bishops with Fotius was palpable. Tsamblak’s election marked a decision to explore union with Rome on the part of the Lithuanian Orthodox Church alone and not, as in the initiative launched in the 1390s by Jagiełło and Cyprian, on behalf of the whole Orthodox Church. When Tsamblak made a spectacular ceremonial entrance to the council of Constance on 19 February 1418, his entourage contained Ruthenian, Tatar, and Moldavian princes, sixteen Basilian monks, and representatives of Ruthenian communities across Jagiełło’s realms.²³ They did not attend on Rome’s orders: Tsamblak had an audience with Martin V, whose polite refusal to pursue the matter casts doubt on Hrushevsky’s interpretation. Although Tsamblak stayed to the end of the council, no substantive negotiations took place. His magnificent entrance impressed the assembled delegates, but Constance was concerned with ending the schism within the Latin Church; it was unrealistic to suppose it would be willing or able to heal the older and deeper schism with the Orthodox. On Tsamblak’s death around 1419 church union and the Ruthenian issue disappeared from sight for a decade and more.

The problems of knowing what the Ruthenian elites thought of these changes are all but insurmountable, as there are few contemporary sources that give access to their ideas. The Ruthenian and Lithuanian chronicles are problematic sources, partly on account of their provenance, partly on account of the fact that many of them were compiled substantially after the events they relate, and partly on account of their particular approach to historical narrative. When they discuss events known from other sources, they frequently turn out to be unreliable. They have been used tendentiously to support various sides in the debate over the formation of the modern Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian nations. Despite the importance of the idea of Rus' to the grand duchy’s Ruthenian elites, caution is necessary before ascribing to them the national sentiments of a later age: the fourteenth-century Halych chronicle makes it clear that religion, while important, was not a necessary factor in provoking loyalty to individual princes, with the Black Ruthenians along the river Niemen preferring pagan Lithuanian rule to that of the Orthodox Halych Rurikids.²⁴ The Ruthenian chronicles—compiled by Orthodox clerics—sought to instil a general Ruthenian consciousness that they were constructing in their own time, rather than reflecting the conditions of the age they purported to describe. Kievan Rus' was a decentralized polity, whose fragmentation had been exacerbated by the Mongol conquest and the coming of Lithuanian overlordship. There were substantial differences within the Ruthenian lands: Ruthenians living in Lithuania proper, where Ruthenian and Lithuanian populations lived side by side, interacting socially and economically, often intermarrying and assimilating, were in a different position to those living in distant Kyiv or Chernihiv. To postulate the existence of a strong pan-Ruthenian identity and a common set of political demands is to read history backwards. Loyalty was a complex matter, in which ethnic and religious identity undoubtedly played a role, but in which lordship, personal ties, and local traditions were equally significant: particularism was usually of more consequence than supposed national loyalties.²⁵ While the Ruthenian language played a central role in Ruthenian consciousness, it was a double-edged sword since it was also the language of the law and of government in Lithuania proper, where religion, not language excluded Ruthenians from power after 1413.

If the Lithuanian Catholic elites broke the union, they would have to solve the Ruthenian question. Would they seek to maintain their privileged position within an independent grand duchy? If so, the Ruthenians might well compare Lithuanian policies towards them with those of the Poles towards the significant Ruthenian population in the kingdom of Poland. Could the small Lithuanian Catholic elite maintain its control over the annexed territories outside the union, which had let the powerful genie of noble privilege out of its jewelled bottle? There is no indication that Švitrigaila or his Catholic supporters had even broached these questions, let alone developed a political programme to take account of them before the quarrel between Poles and Lithuanians flared into the open warfare that had threatened since 1429. The war was not, however, caused by the quarrel over the nature of the union, but broke out in the annexed Ruthenian territories where Vytautas’s death unleashed a bitter dispute over Podolia and Volhynia, which Poles and Lithuanians had contested since 1340. Conflict sharpened after 1392, when Vytautas removed Fëdor Koriatovych as duke of Podolia. Although the Poles claimed that Podolia and Volhynia were integral parts of their kingdom, the situation on the ground was complex and constantly shifting. In 1395 Jagiełło divided Podolia: Vytautas was granted the eastern half, while Jagiełło’s Polish favourite Spytek of Melsztyn received the western half with full ducal rights for a substantial payment, of which Vytautas received 20,000 groszy.

When Spytek was killed at the Vorskla in 1399, Jagiełło purchased western Podolia from his widow for 5,000 Prague groszy in order to grant it to Švitrigaila, while Vytautas paid the considerable sum of 40,000 Lithuanian kop groszy for it in 1410.²⁶ In 1411 Jagiełło postponed the day of reckoning for a generation by granting Podolia to Vytautas for life, although its western half was to remain within the kingdom of Poland. On his death all Podolia was to revert to Poland. Vytautas introduced Lithuanian administration across both halves, although Poles in western Podolia resisted swearing oaths of loyalty to him; only Jagiełło’s intervention in 1418, when he stressed that their oaths to himself as king of Poland and to the corona regni would not thereby be invalidated, resolved the matter. The Poles still maintained their claims to Volhynia as part of the principality of Halych-Volhynia.²⁷

The subordinate position of Orthodox nobles in both Poland and Lithuania was highlighted after 1413. As Poles settled in Red Ruthenia, the contrast between Polish nobles, protected by the 1374 Koszyce privileges, and Ruthenian boyars, who were not, and who were, under Ruthenian law, subject to various burdens imposed upon them by princes or the local starosta, became ever starker, especially after the 1422 Czerwińsk privileges. Ruthenian boyars, unlike Polish nobles, were not entitled to the five marks per spear payable to Polish noblemen for fighting beyond their borders, while they were subject, in addition to the poradlne, to tax payments in kind, in oats and rye; others, holding land on service tenures from the king or from great landowners, had to reside on their estates and perform military service according to the terms of the grant.²⁸

The contrast between the privileged position of the Polish nobility and their Ruthenian counterparts brought increasing pressure from Ruthenian boyars for the extension of Polish privileges to the Ruthenian territories. Such an extension was promised in a clause of the 1425 Brest privilege to the kingdom’s Ruthenian nobles, but the privilege’s destruction at Łęczyca meant it did not take effect. The problems were highlighted in 1426 when, at Sigismund of Luxembourg’s request, Jagiełło summoned the Red Ruthenian boyars for a campaign against the Ottomans. Sigismund failed to show up, and the 5,000 or so Ruthenians who did kicked their heels for two months in a camp on the Danube in Bessarabia before dispersing. Many stayed at home, demanding their five marks per spear. Jagiełło arrested the ringleaders and confiscated their estates, but his harsh reaction provoked widespread demands for the extension of Polish privileges. Jagiełło was forced to release the prisoners and restore their lands, although he reaped a reward for his magnanimity when some 400 middling and lower Ruthenian boyars swore acts of homage in Halych in June 1427 agreeing to accept the succession of his sons.²⁹

The Poles recognized the attractive force of noble privilege during the struggle over Podolia and Volhynia. The 1430 Jedlnia confirmation of the Brześć privileges repeated the clause concerning the extension of privileges to Red Ruthenia; one of the three surviving original copies—drafted for the Sandomierz nobility—qualified it by stating that Ruthenian nobles would still be subject to their traditional burdens, but in their reconfirmation at Cracow in 1433, this phrase was omitted.³⁰ It was therefore not a surprise when members of the local Polish and Ruthenian nobility in Podolia, led by Vytautas’s former chaplain, Paweł of Bojańczyce, the Catholic bishop of Kamianets, took matters into their own hands. On hearing of Vytautas’s death they seized several local castles, including Kamianets, and declared their loyalty to the corona regni Poloniae. Švitrigaila was outraged, and secured the 29 November agreement over the future of Podolia with Jagiełło, then under house arrest, although the Polish council undermined it by sending secret instructions that Jagiełło’s order to implement it should be ignored.³¹ The dispute rapidly escalated into open war. In February 1431 the Sandomierz assembly, outraged by the siege of Smotrych and Lithuanian raids across Podolia, sent an embassy to demand that Švitrigaila apologize for his actions, that he recognize Horodło, and that Volhynia as well as Podolia be handed over to Poland. This amounted to a declaration of war.³² Polish and Lithuanian delegations did meet at Biecz in April, with the Order mediating. The Lithuanians rejected the Polish demands and asked for the restoration of the Podolian fortresses. War was now inevitable. A few days after Švitrigaila signed the Christmemel treaty, the Poles began military action, although war was not formally declared until early July.³³ With a grim sense of irony the first town they attacked was Horodło.

The coming of war by no means indicated that the two sides were irreconcilable. The fighting was not intensive. Jagiełło’s forces took Lutsk in August, but a storm of the castle failed, and the two sides began talking. A two-year truce signed at Chartorysk on 26 August 1431 was confirmed by Švitrigaila in early September. Historians have been baffled by Švitrigaila’s decision, since three days earlier the Order had fulfilled its obligations by attacking Poland. Newly secure on their south-eastern frontier, the Poles concentrated their forces and again demonstrated that the Order—horrified to learn of the truce—was a shadow of its former self by crushing its army at Nakło on 13 September and driving it back across the border.

It has been suggested that Švitrigaila signed the truce because he had not received Rusdorf’s 12 August letter telling him of the invasion. The Order had been preparing for war since Christmemel, however, and it is likely that Švitrigaila knew it, even if he was unaware of the intended invasion date. Hrushevsky, who believed he did know, concluded that even if he did not, the truce demonstrated that he was an imbecile with little military or political talent.³⁴ Yet there were other factors that lay behind the truce. For the Lutsk war demonstrated the fragility of Švitrigaila’s support. There was little appetite for war, which suggests that feelings on the issue did not run as high among fifteenth-century Lithuanian or Ruthenian nobles as they did among nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist historians.

There was little appetite for war on the Polish side either. Jagiełło’s passive conduct of the 1431 campaign is only partially explained by his age. The Poles, as they demonstrated after Švitrigaila’s election, were inclined to negotiation, not war. They were well aware that the union could not be sustained by force. After the truce they despatched embassies to Švitrigaila seeking to restore good relations. Lithuanian prisoners were released, and it was even suggested that Švitrigaila be appointed regent after Jagiełło’s death, although Jagiełło rejected the idea.³⁵ Nevertheless, at an assembly in Sieradz in late April and early May 1432, the Poles recognized Švitrigaila as grand duke of Lithuania on the same basis as Vytautas—a remarkable concession given events since the latter’s death.

Švitrigaila would have done well to accept. He did not. The Lutsk war demonstrated the superiority of the Polish armies over his own forces and those of the Order, yet he renewed his alliance with the Order at Christmemel on 15 August. His position was much weaker than it had been in 1431 as Lithuanians abandoned him en masse when the extent of his reliance on Ruthenian support became apparent. Loyalty to Jagiełło remained strong, and the conflict rapidly turned into a civil war. As the struggle for Podolia and Volhynia demonstrated, the Lithuanians and Ruthenians had fundamentally different interests: the Lithuanians wanted to assert their rights to lands they regarded as integral parts of the grand duchy, while local Ruthenians, already divided between Poland and Lithuania, were keen to defend their local traditions against centralizing forces from Vilnius and some appreciated the possible benefits of accepting Polish rule over Podolia and Volhynia.

For the Lithuanians, the dangers were all too apparent. All the witnesses to Švitrigaila’s first surviving document as grand duke, dated 5 November 1430, were Ruthenians. Although Lithuanian names generally dominate in other documents from the early period of his rule—the first Christmemel treaty was witnessed by one Ruthenian boyar, Khodko Iurevich, alongside eight Lithuanians—the number of Ruthenians grew steadily: among the fifty witnesses to the second Christmemel treaty were over a dozen Ruthenians, and representatives of thirteen Ruthenian towns compared to only three in Lithuania. Švitrigaila acted cautiously, and the rise in Ruthenian influence was gradual: Łowmiański exaggerates when he claims that he sought a complete equalization of the rights of the Orthodox Ruthenians and the admission of Ruthenians to the grand ducal council and all high offices: despite scaremongering by Oleśnicki, who claimed in 1432 that the Orthodox now counted for more in Lithuania than Catholics, Švitrigaila made no appointments that breached Horodło. The only major offices he granted to Orthodox nobles were the governorship of Vitsebsk awarded to Vasyl Drutsky-Krasny, and the starosty of Lutsk, given to Iursha Ivanovich, who had defended it in 1431. Neither appointment was in Lithuania proper. Nevertheless, if Oleśnicki’s lurid picture was overdrawn, Švitrigaila did not make a single donation to the Catholic Church in his two years in power, a striking contrast with Vytautas’s reign.³⁶ Whatever Švitrigaila’s aims, his policies provoked discontent among Lithuanian nobles, in particular those who had been closely associated with Vytautas. By 1431 opposition, in which the Catholic bishops played a leading role, was growing. Anti-Polish feelings whipped up during the coronation tempest slowly abated. If any Lithuanians had truly sought to break the union, the growth of Ruthenian influence provoked second thoughts.

It was now that the relatively restrained Polish response to Švitrigaila’s rebellion paid dividends. After the breakdown of Polish-Lithuanian talks concerning the extension of the truce in February 1432, the Poles adopted a different approach. The offer of the Sieradz assembly to restore the Vytautan system, with Švitrigaila as grand duke and effective autonomy for Lithuania, sent a signal to Lithuanians disturbed by Švitrigaila’s policies, and marked a retreat from the tactless insistence on incorporation during the coronation tempest. When Švitrigaila rejected the offer and opted for war, Lithuanian resistance crystallized.³⁷

According to Halecki, the subsequent plot to overthrow Švitrigaila was a Polish initiative, yet Długosz’s claim that it was planned by his Lithuanian opponents, encouraged by Jagiełło and the Poles, is entirely plausible.³⁸ Although the Poles gave assistance, in particular during the diplomatic missions of Wawrzyniec Zaremba, castellan of Sieradz, in May and July, a group of Lithuanian lords who had been closely associated with Vytautas hatched the plot.³⁹ The leader was prince Semën Holshansky, Sonka’s uncle and former guardian. Other prominent supporters were Olelko and Ivan, the sons of Volodymyr, the former duke of Kyiv, and Prince Fëdor Korybutovich, another of Algirdas’s grandsons, which suggests that not all Ruthenians and not all Gediminids were enamoured with Švitrigaila. The princes resented his usurpation of lands and titles they felt to be rightly theirs: dynastic and personal loyalties were far more important than the national patriotism that so many historians emphasize.⁴⁰ The bulk of their fellow plotters were Lithuanians, including Vytautas’s close associates Petras Mantigirdaitis, Jonas Goštautas, Mykolas Kęsgaila and his brother Rumbaudas Volimuntaitis; Kristinas Astikas, castellan of Vilnius, and his son Radvila Astikaitis, all leading figures in Vytautas’s new Lithuanian establishment.⁴¹ That so many were plotting to overthrow Švitrigaila barely eighteen months after his election calls into question the idea that separatism was the dominant motivation for their actions. Without Polish support, the Catholic Lithuanian establishment could not sustain itself. The coalition of the disaffected had fallen apart. The result was eight years of civil war and political upheaval.

The plotters struck on the night of 31 August–1 September 1432. Švitrigaila was in Ašmena, on his way to Brest to meet Jagiełło. His pregnant wife and some members of his entourage were arrested, but Švitrigaila escaped with several supporters, including two leading Lithuanians, Jurgis Gedgaudas, palatine of Vilnius, Ivaško Monvidaitis, who had warned him of the plot, and possibly Jonas Sungaila, castellan of Trakai.⁴² The plotters and their Polish supporters had a candidate to replace Švitrigaila: Vytautas’s brother Žygimantas, who led the attempt to seize Švitrigaila, and was immediately proclaimed grand duke; the extent of support for the coup meant that he rapidly secured Lithuania proper. Švitrigaila, however, retained control over most of the annexed territories, including Polatsk, Vitsebsk, Smolensk and Kyiv.⁴³

While the civil war that followed was bitter enough, despite the predominance of Lithuanians supporting Žygimantas and Švitrigaila’s reputation as the spokesman of Ruthenia there were Lithuanians who supported Švitrigaila and Ruthenians in Žygimantas’s camp. Hrushevsky, true to his populist inclinations, saw Švitrigaila as the spokesman for the Ruthenian aristocracy; there is something in this assertion, although Volodymyr’s sons resented his control of Kyiv, which they regarded as their patrimony, while if lesser nobles were not tied by clientage or kinship to his aristocratic supporters they were as likely to look to Žygimantas, whose policy of wooing the Ruthenians through political concessions soon bore fruit.⁴⁴ Žygimantas and his supporters, who were essentially Vytautas’s men, returned to the tried and tested. An embassy to Jagiełło requested that Žygimantas be confirmed as grand duke; a high-level embassy led by Oleśnicki and Oporowski was immediately sent to Vilnius.⁴⁵ On its arrival in Hrodna, according to Długosz, it was met by the new grand duke and his supporters ‘respectfully and cheerfully’.⁴⁶ On 15 October, after a week of talks, Oleśnicki issued a document widely known as the union of Hrodna, though it was not a treaty of union but an agreement over how Žygimantas was to rule the grand duchy; it did not come into force until its confirmation by Jagiełło in Cracow on 3 January 1433, and its reconfirmation by Žygimantas’s son Mykolas in Vilnius on 18 October 1432, and by Žygimantas himself in Trakai on 20 January 1433.⁴⁷

According to Krzyżaniakowa, the Hrodna treaty was a victory for the Poles; according to Lewicki, the Lithuanians secured what they desired: their right to statehood, albeit in continued subordination to Poland.⁴⁸ Both judgements rest on anachronistic assumptions. Hrodna did not replace Horodło; it marked little more than a return to the arrangements established in 1401, adjusted to take account of changed circumstances.⁴⁹ There is no indication that its negotiation was particularly difficult; it was a compromise acceptable to both sides. Strikingly, this was achieved by a Polish delegation led by Oleśnicki. His selection by Jagiełło suggests that Nikodem is justified in his view that Oleśnicki’s approach to the union was realistic and practical, and that he appreciated the unfortunate consequences of his incorporationist posturing during the coronation tempest.⁵⁰

Hrodna demonstrates that Švitrigaila’s election and the two years of upheaval that followed had introduced an air of sober realism in Poland. It contained none of Horodło’s incorporationist rhetoric. Jagiełło’s instructions to Oleśnicki stressed a desire to restore peaceful alliance, a fraternal league, union, and perpetual concord between Poland and Lithuania.⁵¹ They talked of restoring the various agreements and pacts made between the two realms, and Jagiełło empowered his ambassadors to make certain changes to those agreements.⁵² The outcome was a text that satisfied the supporters of Vytautas who negotiated it, and was acceptable to the Poles. Žygimantas was recognized as grand duke, subject to the limitations placed on Vytautas’s power; the canon law phrase ‘in partem sollicitudinis’ was again deployed to emphasize his subordinate status. It was stressed that Žygimantas held his position from Jagiełło, and after deliberation and election by the ‘princes, prelates, barons, and nobility of both realms’. Thus were the forms established at Horodło preserved. As had Vytautas, Žygimantas was to hold these territories for life. It was emphasized that they included Vilnius and other lands belonging to Jagiełło’s patrimony; they were conferred by Jagiełło not in his capacity as king of Poland, but as supreme duke of Lithuania, in an acknowledgement of Lithuanian sensitivities.⁵³ On Žygimantas’s death they were to revert by hereditary right to Jagiełło and his heirs, and to the crown and kingdom of Poland, the only overt reference in the document to the broader framework of union as established by Krewo and Horodło. Trakai was explicitly granted to Žygimantas as his patrimony; after his death it would pass to Mykolas, although it was stressed that he would have to obey Jagiełło, his successors, the crown and kingdom of Poland, and whoever was elected grand duke after his father. Kęstutis’s patrimony was preserved for the Kęstutids, but their place in the political structure was carefully defined.⁵⁴

Hrodna confronted two of the issues that had bedevilled Polish-Lithuanian relations. It stipulated that the grand duke would neither seek nor aspire to a royal crown, nor accept any offer of one from another power without the consent of Jagiełło, his successors, and the crown and kingdom of Poland. With regard to Podolia and Volhynia, the negotiators compromised, postponing a final decision. All Podolia was to return to Polish control, while Žygimantas was to be granted Volhynia—except for several towns to be handed over to the Poles—for his lifetime, in a similar arrangement to that which Vytautas had enjoyed with regard to Podolia. Volhynia was to revert to Poland on Žygimantas’s death.⁵⁵

Błaszczyk contends that Hrodna was a weak treaty that had to be reconfirmed more than once and only lasted eight years.⁵⁶ That, however, was more to do with Žygimantas’s subsequent actions than the treaty’s shortcomings. In many ways Hrodna showed the robustness of the idea of union. It demonstrated the pragmatism of both sides, and in particular of the Poles, as they faced up to the imminent reality of Jagiełło’s demise: in December 1431 Piotr Szafraniec wrote to Švitrigaila of the effects of ageing that had left the king ‘nearer to death than life’. Jagiełło was to live another two and a half years, but by 1433 he was almost blind and his energy was fading.⁵⁷ Błaszczyk expresses mild surprise at the absence of any mention of incorporation in the text of the treaty, but does not consider the reasons.⁵⁸ It is unlikely that the Poles had abandoned their incorporationist position; indeed hints of it did appear in the treaty in the passages concerning Žygimantas’s relationship to the crown and kingdom of Poland, and in the clause concerning the possibility—but no more than that—of the election of a new grand duke following Žygimantas’s death, the one major echo of Horodło in the text that demonstrates that Hrodna was not simply a restatement of Vilnius-Radom.

Now was not the time, however, to stress incorporation. Jagiełło’s imminent death promised to open a new period of uncertainty, with a royal minority inevitable, and it was imperative to protect the union. Events since 1429 had brought it close to collapse. Švitrigaila’s volatile reign, however, had revealed the divisions among the grand duchy’s elites and opened the way to a deal that might save it and preserve the position that the united realms had achieved in European politics since 1386. Hrodna was more a temporary measure to buy time than a reconceptualization of the union. The Poles realized that the bathos of the coronation tempest had to be avoided if it were to survive: it was agreed that all future disputes must be resolved peaceably, on the basis of old documents.⁵⁹

As the future was to show, it was not easy to secure that agreement, but the Poles were aware that Hrodna was a temporary solution to a real problem. With Švitrigaila still controlling most of the annexed territories after the botched coup, it was essential first to win the civil war; renegotiation of the union—if such were to prove necessary—could wait, although the Hrodna treaty was redrawn in December 1437, to take account of the changed circumstances since Jagiełło’s death on 1 June 1434, and again in October 1439 and January 1440 as the Poles became concerned at Žygimantas’s increasingly independent foreign policy.⁶⁰

The Poles and Žygimantas’s supporters proved more than a match for Švitrigaila and his Livonian allies, who were defeated in December 1432 at Ašmena. Although Švitrigaila captured Brest in the spring of 1433 and, supported by the Livonian Order, took Kaunas in July, the military balance favoured his opponents. Švitrigaila, realizing this, tried to negotiate, but overtures to Jagiełło failed. A new round of betrayals by leading Ruthenian lords after Jagiełło’s death delivered much of Volhynia to his enemies and extended Žygimantas’s reach into the annexed territories. In 1435 the Prussian Order, alarmed at the summoning of the Polish noble levy, mobilized despite the twelve-year truce agreed at Łęczyca in December 1433, but did not enter the war. On 1 September 1435 Žygimantas crushed Švitrigaila and the Livonians on the river Šventoji near Ukmergė. The Polish council had summoned the noble levy, and Poles comprised nearly half Žygimantas’s 9,500-strong army. Švitrigaila’s force was larger—some 11,000—but over half of it comprised light Ruthenian and Tatar cavalry, which was no match for the heavily armed Polish knights. Švitrigaila’s army was driven into the river, and many were killed or drowned; its commanders, Zygmunt Korybutovych, his son Mykhailo, and the Livonian master Frank von Kersdorf, were killed, together with six Order officials and thirteen Ruthenian princes.⁶¹ The Livonians withdrew from the war, signing the peace of Brześć on 1 December 1435, which lasted nearly twenty years. Švitrigaila, though he still had the support of Tver, now talked peace. A temporary agreement was reached at Lwów on 4 September 1436, although its status was never clear, and it was only after Hrodna’s renewal in December 1437 that Švitrigaila’s defeat was sealed. He was granted land in south-eastern Poland, but went into exile in Wallachia to pasture sheep, as one of the chronicles put it.⁶²

Švitrigaila’s eclipse was not simply due to Žygimantas’s military superiority. The support he enjoyed among Ruthenians forced Poles and Lithuanians to seek a solution to the Ruthenian question, which threatened not just the union, but the viability of the grand duchy itself: the exclusion of Orthodox nobles from the benefits of union. It was clear that a new approach was necessary. Following the extension at Jedlnia in March 1430 of Polish noble privilege to Orthodox boyars in Red Ruthenia, a similar approach was adopted in Lithuania after the coup against Švitrigaila. In a document issued on 30 September 1432 by Oleśnicki after negotiations with Žygimantas and his supporters, Orthodox nobles were granted the same privileges as their Catholic counterparts and, on the Horodło model, were to be welcomed into Polish heraldic clans.⁶³

Lewicki termed this act ‘the most noble adjustment of the Polish-Lithuanian union’, arguing that no other contemporary Catholic power would have been capable of it.⁶⁴ It was not quite as remarkable as he thought, however. Although the document opened by talking of the need to restore harmony to the Lithuanian and Ruthenian lands, the extension of privileges was explicitly made to Ruthenian princes, boyars, nobles, and inhabitants ‘subject to Lithuania’. This form of words suggests that the extension of privileges only applied to Lithuania proper, and not to the annexed territories; moreover, as Hrushevsky observes, there was no mention of the Orthodox religion in the document, with the privileges only extended to Ruthenian nobles, probably reflecting Oleśnicki’s reluctance, as a Catholic bishop, explicitly to sanction political consessions to the Orthodox.⁶⁵ Despite having given his negotiators full plenipotentiary powers, Jagiełło never ratified the agreement.⁶⁶ He did, however, issue a similar privilege in Lwów on 30 October 1432 for the Ruthenian nobility of Lutsk and Volhynia that explicitly extended privileges to Orthodox nobles and made important concessions to Orthodox believers. The document granted all the princes, prelates, boyars, knights, and nobles of Volhynia the full rights, liberties, and privileges enjoyed by their Polish counterparts and promised that Orthodox believers ‘of whatever sex or status’ would not be subject to forced conversion.⁶⁷

Jagiełło’s generous concessions to Ruthenian nobles in Volhynia, after refusing to confirm similar privileges for Lithuania proper demonstrated that age had not dimmed his political skills, despite Długosz’s sneers about his senility and incapacity. The generosity of the Lwów privileges demonstrates that Jagiełło was not opposed to toleration in itself.⁶⁸ The granting of privileges only within Lithuania proper, however, would not solve the problem of the annexed territories, where Orthodoxy was strong and Catholicism weak. Instead he sought to confront Švitrigaila in his heartlands, and to resolve a long-running problem for the union by settling the vexed question of Podolia and Volhynia by giving the Volhynian elites a reason to support the incorporation of their province into the Polish kingdom. The extension of privileges was made conditional on their acceptance of that incorporation.⁶⁹

If not quite as remarkable as Lewicki thought, these acts were still of major significance. Even if the Hrodna privileges were limited to Lithuania proper, were not confirmed by Jagiełło, and therefore did not receive legal force, it is nevertheless striking that a Catholic prelate of Oleśnicki’s stature should seek to save the union by offering such extensive concessions to the Orthodox, even if he did not name them directly. They demonstrate that for all his doctrinaire insistence that Lithuania had already been incorporated into Poland, Oleśnicki was a pragmatist. Both documents reflect intellectual currents that were powerful in contemporary Polish Catholicism: the provision guaranteeing no forced conversions in the Volhynian privileges was entirely consistent with the elegant arguments of Włodkowic at Constance. At Hrodna, Oleśnicki demonstrated that the Polish Catholic Church was prepared to practise as well as preach.

Jagiełło’s ploy was risky. In seeking to solve the Volhynian question in favour of the Poles he allowed Žygimantas to adopt the role of liberator of the Lithuanian Orthodox Church and defender of Lithuania’s claim to Volhynia and Podolia. In Trakai on 6 May 1434 Žygimantas issued a general privilege to the grand duchy’s Ruthenian elites that did have legal force, as is demonstrated by its inclusion in the general reconfirmation of privileges by king Sigismund August in 1551.⁷⁰ It was witnessed by Radvila Astikaitis, Jurgis Gedgaudas, and Khodko Iurevich. All were former supporters of Švitrigaila, and Iurevich was a prominent Ruthenian.⁷¹ It closely followed the Hrodna document. Žygimantas granted the elites of his ‘Lithuanian and Ruthenian lands’, both Catholic and Orthodox, extensive privileges.⁷² Although Žygimantas—like Oleśnicki but unlike Jagiełło—did not explicitly mention the Orthodox religion, the preamble made it clear that these privileges were being extended to the Ruthenian as well as the Lithuanian nobility, and that the intention was to restore unity and end the disharmony of recent years. Ruthenian nobles were granted the same rights and liberties with regard to their estates and taxation already enjoyed by Catholic boyars, and the Horodło model of adoption into Polish heraldic clans was extended to them.⁷³

This document, along with Jagiełło’s privilege to the Volhynian nobility, marked an important watershed. Taken together, they removed almost all the limitations on the rights, liberties, and privileges enjoyed by Orthodox nobles as compared with their Catholic counterparts. Almost, but not all. There was no clause in either document concerning the right of Orthodox Ruthenians to hold office, and although the Polish system of district courts run by the local nobility, and of local office-holders was extended to the Ruthenian lands within Poland on Jagiełło’s death, no such step was taken in Lithuania. Thus the Horodło ban on Ruthenians holding office in Lithuania proper survived, although there were no such restrictions in the annexed lands, which were still covered by their own privileges.⁷⁴

The concessions were controversial enough: Długosz condemned them, testifying that many complained about the grant of privileges which the Poles had fought for so long ‘without any conditions’.⁷⁵ His hostility highlights the remarkable nature of the concession of religious toleration by a contemporary Catholic state. The civil war after Švitrigaila’s election had demonstrated to both the Poles and the Lithuanian Catholic elites the chronic political instability that threatened the grand duchy as a result of the exclusion of the Orthodox nobility from the benefits of citizenship. Although the principal motivation was undoubtedly practical and political, rather than any philosophical attachment to the legitimacy of religious toleration, the intellectual tradition established by Włodkowic and others in the context of the war against the Order should not be lightly dismissed. Orthodox nobles might remain second-class citizens on account of the Horodło provisions on office; they were nevertheless recognized as having most of the rights, liberties, and privileges of citizens. They could, and did, participate in politics. Whatever the motivation behind them, the privileges of 1432 and 1434 helped restore peace to the grand duchy and opened the way to the coming together of its Lithuanian and Ruthenian elites in a process that, while never complete, was crucial to the future of the union.

1 The Russian chronicles stress his Catholicism, while Długosz criticizes him for the favour he showed the Orthodox: Annales, xi, 303; Horst Jablonowski, Westrußland zwischen Wilna und Moskau (Leiden, 1961), 115; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 722; Lewicki, Powstanie, 51; Mikhail Krom, ‘Die Konstituierung der Szlachta als Stand und das Problem staatlicher Einheit im Großfürstentum Litauens (15./16. Jahrhundert)’, JGO, 42 (1994), 487.

2 Horodlės aktai, 41; AU, no. 51, 70; ZPL, 1–2; Wiktor Czermak, ‘Sprawa równouprawnienia katolików i schizmatyków na Litwie (1432–1563)’, RAUWHF, serya ii, 19 (1903), 353–5.

3 Serhii Plokhy, The Origins of the Slavic Nations (Cambridge, 2006), 85; Jablonowski, Westrußland, 21–2. Shabul^' do accepts the standard Soviet claim that eastern Slavic territories constituted 90% of the grand duchy: Феликс Шабульдо, Земли юго-западной Руси в составе Великого княжества Литовского (Kyiv, 1987), 92.

4 Błaszczyk, Litwa na przełomie średniowiecza i nowożytności 1492–1569 (Poznań, 2002), 8; Łowmiański, Studia, 390–2.

5 Грушевський, Історія, iv, 159.

6 Наталя Яковенко, Українська шляхта з кінца XIV до середини XVII ст., 2nd edn (Kyiv, 2008), 19; Михаил Кром, ‘ “Старина” как категория средневекового менталитета (по материалам Великого княжества Литовського XIV–начала XVII вв.)’, Mediaevalia Ucrainica, 3 (1994), 68–85.

7 Rowell, Lithuania, 295.

8 Sužiedėlis, ‘Lietuva’, 32.

9 Paszkiewicz, O genezę, 168.

10 For the debate see Błaszczyk, Litwa, 6–8.

11 Paszkiewicz, O genezę, 170.

12 Грушевський, Історія, iv, 159.

13 Horodlės aktai, 40; AU, no 51, 66–7.

14 Korczak, Monarchia, 56.

15 Ochmański, Powstanie, 20.

16 Tadeusz Trajdos, Kościół katolicki na ziemiach ruskich Korony i Litwy za panowania Władysława II Jagiełły (1386–1434), i (Wrocław, 1985), 27–38.

17 Ігор Скочиляс, Галицька (Львівська) єпархія ХІІ–ХVІІІ ст. (L^' viv, 2010), 195–209.

18 Borys Gudziak, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 1–6.

19 Lewicki, ‘Sprawa unii kościelnej za Jagiełły’, KH, 11 (1897), 312.

20 Chodynicki, Kościół, 43; Lewicki, ‘Sprawa’, 322, 326; Грушевський, Історія, v, 509–11.

21 AZR, i, no. 24, 33–5; no, 26, 35–7; Gudziak, Crisis, 5–6.

22 Грушевський, Історія, v, 508–9.

23 Lewicki, ‘Sprawa’, 332.

24 Plokhy, Origins, 1–48, 85–115.

25 Oskar Halecki, Ostatnie lata Świdrygiełły i sprawa wołyńska za Kazimierza Jagiellończyka (Cracow, 1915), 2.

26 40,000 kop groszych. Nikodem, Jadwiga, 345; Любавский, Областное, 57–8.

27 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 51–61, 625–6; Janusz Kurtyka, ‘Wierność i zdrada na pograniczu: Walki o Bracław w latach 1430–1437’ in Kurtyka, Podole w czasach jagiellońskich (Cracow, 2011), 219–20, 225–6.

28 Janusz Kurtyka, ‘Z dziejów walki szlachty ruskiej o równouprawnienie: represje lat 1426–1427 i sejmiki roku 1439’, in Kurtyka, Podole, 32–3.

29 Kurtyka, ‘Z dziejów’, 31–47.

30 ‘eciam terram Russie includendo’: CESXV, ii, no. 177, 232; Kutrzeba, ‘Przywilej jedlneński z 1430 r. i nadanie prawa polskiego Rusi’, in Księga pamiątkowa ku czci Bolesława Ulanowskiego (Cracow, 1911), 5–6, 16–19; Kurtyka, ‘Z dziejów’, 47–8.

31 Annales, xi, 311–13; Janusz Kurtyka, ‘Podole w średniowieczu’, in Kurtyka, Podole, 128–9; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 626–7; Любавский, Областное, 58–9.

32 Annales, xi, 13–14. Грушевський, Історія, iv, 195.

33 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 638.

34 Грушевський, Історія, iv, 198–9.

35 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 652–3.

36 Lewicki, Powstanie, 78–9, 90; Łowmiański, Polityka, 143, 150; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/1, 669–71.

37 Lowmiański, Polityka, 144; Błaszczyk, Dzieje ii/i, 654–5.

38 Annales, xi/xii, 64–5; Halecki, Dzieje, i, 288–9. Lewicki sees the plot originating in Lithuania: Powstanie, 147.

39 Nikodem, ‘Oleśnicki wobec unii’, i, 139–40; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 668.

40 Грушевский, Історія, iv, 204; Rowell, ‘1446 and all that’, in Irena Valikonytė (ed.), Lietuva ir jos kaimyna (Vilnius, 2001), 195–6.

41 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 671–2.

42 Dzieje, ii/i, 694.

43 Annales, xi/xii, 64–5; Lewicki, Powstanie, 147–8; Matusas, Švitrigaila, 75–5; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 675.

44 Грушевський, Історія, iv, 202, 206.

45 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 678.

46 ‘honeste et hilariter’: Annales, xi/xii, 66–7.

47 AU, nos 55–9, 77–94.

48 Krzyżaniakowa and Ochmański, Jagiełło, 307; Lewicki, Powstanie, 155.

49 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 294–8; Łowmiański, Polityka, 147.

50 Although Nikodem, who believes Oleśnicki did not behave in 1429 as Długosz testifies, does not use the last of these arguments: ‘Oleśnicki’, i, 140–1.

51 AU, no. 54, 76.

52 AU, no. 54, 76.

53 AU, no. 58, 87.

54 AU, no. 58, 87.

55 AU, no 58, 87–8. Švitrigaila still controlled eastern Podolia, which meant that the treaty resolved little in the short term: Любавский, Областное, 59.

56 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 699.

57 CESXV, ii, no. 203, 286; Annales, xi/xii, 81, 86; Matusas, Švitrigaila, 83.

58 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 695.

59 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 695.

60 AU, no. 63, 106–8; no. 64, 108–110; no. 65, 110–14; no. 66, 113–14; no. 67, 114–15; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 699–700.

61 PSRL, xxxv, col. 36; Stanisław Zakrzewski, ‘W pięćsetną rocznicę: bitwa nad Świętą inaczej pod Wiłkomierzem 1 września 1435 r.’, in Pamiętnik VI Powszechnego Zjazdu (Lwów, 1935), 551–8; Marek Plewczyński, Wojny Jagiellonów z wschodnimi i południowymi sąsiadami królestwa polskiego w XV wieku (Siedlce, 2002), 39–44.

62 Kolankowski, Dzieje, 214.

63 CESXV, iii, dod. 17, 523–4.

64 Lewicki, Powstanie, 155, 157.

65 ‘Et quia eo tempore, quo eosdem gracias privilegia et libertates terris predictis et earum incolis concessimus principes boiari nobiles et incole Rutheni, terre Lithvanie subditi’: CESXV, iii, dod. 17, 523; Грушевський, Історія, iv, 209.

66 Czermak, ‘Sprawa’, 352–71. Although the document was drafted in Hrodna, it gave Lwów as the place of issue, since that is where Jagiełło was currently residing. For the plenipotentiary powers see AU, no. 54, 76–7.

67 CESXV, i/i, no. 82, 78.

68 Czermak, ‘Sprawa’, 363.

69 ‘Promittimus . . . quod praefatam terram Lucensem et ipsius incolas non alienabimus a corona nostra regni Poloniae’: CESXV, i/i, no. 82, 78.

70 Czermak, ‘Sprawa’, 374. The original survives.

71 CESXV, iii, dod. 22, 531; Halecki, Dzieje, i, 313.

72 CESXV, iii, dod. 22, 530.

73 CESXV, iii, dod. 22, 530.

74 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 314–15; Chodynicki, Kościół, 85–6.

75 Annales, xi/xii, 139.