16

After Jagiełło

Although the new privileges encouraged many Ruthenians to abandon Švitrigaila, they did not end the civil war. Švitrigaila still enjoyed considerable support in Kyiv and Volhynia, and it was not until 1437 that the tide decisively turned.1 The situation was complicated by Jagiełło’s death on 1 June 1434. Oleśnicki was in Poznań en route to the Council of Basle when he heard the news. Recognizing the dangers of another long interregnum he acted decisively. He summoned an assembly of the Wielkopolska nobility to Poznań and threw his weight behind the immediate election of Władysław, Jagiełło’s elder son, who had been acclaimed as the preferred successor at the 1432 Sieradz assembly.2 Oleśnicki skilfully secured Wielkopolska’s agreement to a swift election and coronation, playing on Wielkopolskan resentment of the dominance of the Małopolskan lords, a group of whom, led by Spytek of Melsztyn the younger, wished to reject Jagiełło’s sons and turn to Siemowit V of Mazovia instead. He formed an alliance with Sonka and the court party to outmanoeuvre Spytek at Małopolskan assemblies in Opatów and Cracow to secure Władysław’s election. The coronation took place on 25 July.3

The succession of the nine-year-old Władysław strengthened Oleśnicki’s position considerably. Co-operation with Sonka did not long survive the election. Denied the regency, Sonka gathered round her a growing number of malcontents opposed to Oleśnicki’s strengthening grip on power. The royal council, on which Oleśnicki played a leading role, took over the government and agreement was reached over a division of offices: the chancellorship remained with Jan Taszka Koniecpolski, Sonka’s protégé, while Oporowski, a court supporter, resigned as vice-chancellor. Raised to the bishopric of Cujavia he was replaced by Wincenty Kot, a neutral figure who had served as tutor to Jagiełło’s sons, but who was acceptable to Oleśnicki. Although Nikodem questions Oleśnicki’s opposition to Jagiełło in the last decade of his reign, there is no reason to doubt Długosz’s claim that in their last meeting he delivered a sharply critical speech in which he accused Jagiełło of spending his nights in drunken revelry and sleeping the day through, neglecting affairs of state and church, and complained that the country had been reduced to chaos and disorder. His diatribe was probably a reaction to Jagiełło’s contacts with the Hussites, and in particular his meeting with a Hussite delegation in Cracow in 1431, to which Oleśnicki strongly objected.4

The years after Jagiełło’s death saw the highpoint of Oleśnicki’s political influence, but he was by no means as powerful as he was portrayed by the admiring Długosz. Government authority was weakened during Władysław’s long minority. The council remained divided. Oleśnicki depended on the support of a group of Małopolskan families led by the Tęczyńskis and the Tarnowskis, and of his brother Jan Głowacz Oleśnicki, starosta of Cracow and grand marshal since 1430. Apart from smouldering Wielkopolskan resentment at Oleśnicki’s failure to reward their support for Władysław’s election, he faced considerable opposition from the Szafraniec, who had enjoyed Jagiełło’s favour in his last years. Chancellor Jan Szafraniec died in 1433, but Jagiełło replaced him with Koniecpolski, who had emerged as a key member of the court party despite his marriage to Oleśnicki’s relative, Dorota Oleśnicka and the fact that he had been one of those accused of inappropriate behaviour with Sonka in 1427.5 Despite not being regent, Sonka played a significant role after her husband’s death as guardian of her sons’ interests. She cultivated a large group of nobles of a new generation—called the iuniores by Długosz—who felt excluded from power, including Spytek of Melsztyn, Jan Hincza of Rogów, and Dziersław Rytwiański. These ambitious young men from wealthy families resented the domination of the ageing politicians who had served Jagiełło.6

Jagiełło’s death was a serious test of the union, and the Hrodna treaty. Little changed immediately. As long as Žygimantas needed Polish help in his struggle with Švitrigaila Hrodna held. After his victory on the Šventoji river and the 1435 peace of Brześć, however, as Žygimantas extended his authority across the grand duchy, he no longer had such need of Polish support, and the Hrodna compromise over Podolia and Volhynia came under strain. This development persuaded the Polish council to cultivate Švitrigaila. Talks began in early 1436 and a one-year truce was agreed in November. In August 1437 Švitrigaila buried his pride and came to Cracow seeking to return to Władysław’s favour.7 He requested Polish aid against Žygimantas, promising that Kyiv and his other southern Ruthenian lands would pass to Poland on his death. The Poles negotiated a deal in which Švitrigaila was granted Volhynia and eastern Podolia as fiefs for his lifetime; on his death they were to revert to Poland.8 A showdown over Podolia and Volhynia was again postponed.

The council’s caution was prudent. Whatever the Polish view of the nature of the union, it had been sustained for nearly sixty years thanks to the personal loyalty felt by many Lithuanian nobles to Jagiełło. Between 1409 and 1429 Jagiełło visited Lithuania every year and consulted with Vytautas to demonstrate publicly that as supreme duke he was closely involved in its government. Władysław had none of his father’s advantages. He grew up in Poland and he was in no position to enforce his personal authority over Žygimantas, then in his seventies. Despite the Polish recognition of Władysław’s hereditary rights to the grand duchy, the fact that Žygimantas had an adult son, Mykolas, for whom he clearly had expectations, represented an obvious danger. It remained to be seen if the undertakings he made at Hrodna in 1432 and renewed in February 1434, were of any value. The Polish flirtation with Švitrigaila showed Žygimantas that continued support was not guaranteed. He took the hint. An embassy led by Oleśnicki persuaded him to reconfirm Hrodna on 6 December 1437 with minor changes necessary following Władysław’s accession. The key clause stressing that after Žygimantas’s death Mykolas would only be entitled to his father’s patrimony and would have no claim on the grand duchy as a whole, was left unchanged.9

Žygimantas could look elsewhere for support. In July 1436 Sigismund of Luxembourg, who had finally been crowned Emperor in 1433, made his peace with the Bohemians and at last secured the Bohemian throne. He was not to enjoy it long, dying in December 1437, leaving only a daughter, Elizabeth, who was married to Albert V von Habsburg. Albert was unanimously elected king of Hungary on Sigismund’s death, and king of the Romans in March 1438, assuming the title of Albert II. Although he was acclaimed king of Bohemia by a coalition of Catholics and moderate Hussites, the radical Hussites, still strongly anti-German, sought an alternative. Their eyes soon alighted on Jagiełło’s second son, Casimir.

Oleśnicki was initially hostile, but he was persuaded by Sonka to turn a blind eye when some of her supporters, including Spytek of Melsztyn and Dziersław Rytwiański led troops into Silesia and Bohemia in June 1438 to rally support.10 Oleśnicki’s concerns were justified. Despite his reconfirmation of Hrodna, Žygimantas was seeking allies against Poland. He proposed an anti-Polish alliance to the Order in 1437 and 1438, while supporting the Polish expedition to Bohemia in the hope that it would bring war with Albert.11 In 1439 he approached Albert, claiming to be an independent ruler who had inherited his throne from his brother.12

Such an alliance was attractive to Albert after the Polish force entered Bohemia in June 1438. Yet the idea, whoever first proposed it—a matter of some controversy—came to nothing. Rusdorf, smarting from his experiences with Švitrigaila, refused to consider it, while the Polish force was too small to secure victory for Casimir. By 1439 Albert had defeated his opponents and talks with the Poles began in Breslau. Žygimantas wrote to Albert expressing openly separatist views, denying that Lithuania was subject to Polish rule, and falsely claiming that he had inherited the grand duchy from Vytautas.13 Albert’s embassy to Žygimantas in early 1439 turned back when Rusdorf refused to join an anti-Polish coalition, but a second embassy later in the year proposed an alliance. Now Žygimantas was less enthusiastic; when Rusdorf again refused to join the coalition he changed tack, reconfirming Hrodna on 31 October 1439, four days after Albert’s unexpected death.14

Suspicion was endemic. The Poles showed no inclination to hand over Lutsk, promised to Žygimantas in 1437. Losing patience, he seized it in early 1439.15 It was becoming obvious that the model of a separate Lithuanian grand duke was problematic, since it depended upon mutual trust and the establishment of the close working relationship that Jagiełło and Vytautas had enjoyed until 1429. Such a relationship was dependent upon the contingent factors of personality and circumstance, and could not be reduced to a legal formula. Yet for all the problems, Žygimantas’s efforts to construct an anti-Polish coalition failed, and they failed most clearly in Lithuania itself, where they met strong opposition.16

Žygimantas, who owed his throne to the Poles, could not unite the grand duchy’s elites behind him, and there is no evidence that they shared his view that he had inherited his position, which was simply untrue: he had been elected by those very elites, whose subsequent behaviour suggests they had not forgotten. Žygimantas had little to offer beyond his personal ambition, while his cruelty to those who opposed him alienated many. On Palm Sunday (20 March) 1440 he was assassinated in Trakai castle by conspirators led by Prince Ivan Chortorysky, who slipped into his apartments with concealed daggers under their cloaks. Mykolas and Žygimantas’s servants were attending mass in the castle chapel but Žygimantas had chosen to hear mass in his bedchamber.17 He died under a hail of blows and his body was conveyed on a cart to Vilnius, where he was interred with due honours in Vytautas’s grave.18

Led by a Ruthenianized Gediminid, the assassins included both Ruthenians and Lithuanians. Among them were Chortorysky’s brother Oleksander, Jonas Daugirdas, palatine of Vilnius, and Petras Lėlius, palatine of Trakai. There is no reason to doubt Długosz’s assertion that the triggers of the assassination were Žygimantas’s cruelty and the fear that he was about to strike against his enemies. The Chortorysky brothers had long been loyal to Švitrigaila, only abandoning his cause after 1438.19 Nikodem’s attempt to prove that Žygimantas’s reputation as a cruel tyrant was propaganda is unconvincing. The civil war was brutal, and Žygimantas showed little mercy to his enemies: among the victims were Vytautas’s favourites Rumbaudas Valimantaitis and his brother Jaunutis, executed in 1432; Žygimantas even executed his own envoys when they returned empty-handed from a mission to Švitrigaila.20 There is ample evidence of Žygimantas’s unsympathetic and psychotic character to suggest that the plotters had good reason to fear that their lives were in danger; his assassination was provoked by rumours that he intended to strike against his opponents during the Easter festivities. He had no obvious successor, and his death posed a real problem for the union.


1 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 317, 322.

2 Annales, xi/xii, 55.

3 Karol Olejnik, Władysław III Warneńczyk (1424–1444), 2nd edn (Cracow, 2007), 42–5.

4 Annales, xi/xii, 110–13; Jagiełło was a late riser: Annales, xi/xii, 124–5.

5 Zawitkowska, W służbie, 142–3.

6 Bożena Czwojdrak, ‘Kilka uwag o konfederacji Spytka z Melsztyna z 1439 roku’, in Idzi Panic and Jerzy Sperka (eds), Średniowiecze polskie i powszechne (Katowice, 2002), 204 and Bożena Czwojdrak, ‘Królowa Zofia Holszańska a biskup krakowski Zbigniew ‘Oleśnicki—konflikt, współpraca czy rywalizacja?’, in Kiryk and Noga (eds), Oleśnicki, 147; Sperka, ‘Oleśnicki’, 118.

7 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 686, 730.

8 Nikodem, ‘Zbigniew Oleśnicki wobec unii polsko-litewskiej, ii: W latach 1434–1455’, NP, 92 (1999), 90; Любавский, Областное, 59–60.

9 Nikodem, ‘Oleśnicki wobec unii’, ii, 91.

10 Czwojdrak, ‘Zofia’, 148–9.

11 Nikodem argues that Žigimantas did not initiate the plan, but his alternative proposal, that it was the brainchild of an anonymous canon of Cracow, is unconvincing: Jarosław Nikodem, ‘Uwagi o genezie niedoszłego przymierza Zygmunta Kiejstutowicza z Albertem II’, Docendo discimus (Poznań, 2000), 335–56. Cf. Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 733–74.

12 Gudavičius, Istorija, i, 284.

13 CESXV, ii, no. 261, 402–3. It is wrongly dated 27 October.

14 AU, no. 66, 113–14; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 750–5.

15 Nikodem, ‘Oleśnicki wobec unii’, ii, 90–1.

16 Nikodem, ‘Uwagi’, 346.

17 PSRL, xxxv, col. 157.

18 Annales, xi/xii, 216–17; Русина, Україна, 118.

19 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 756.

20 Nikodem, ‘Przyczyny zamordowania Zygmunta Kiejstutowicza’, BZH, 17 (2002), 5–33; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 772.

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