PART I
1
The small, sleepy town of Kreva is little more than a straggling village, hard to distinguish from the rolling wooded countryside in which it lies. Rundown wooden houses with hens running free in their vegetable gardens cluster haphazardly round a large, whitewashed Catholic church. There is a small café with parking for the odd bus-party of tourists visiting the ruins of an imposing fourteenth-century fortress. The scaffolding erected at some point to effect repairs has mostly collapsed. A sign declares the castle to be a valuable historical and cultural monument of the republic of Belarus, and that anyone damaging the ruins will be prosecuted. One is tempted to ask whom the authorities intend to prosecute for neglect.1
Little about Kreva today suggests that it was ever of any great importance. In the fourteenth century, however, it was Krėva, a power-centre of the Gediminid dynasty. In 1338 it was given by Gediminas, grand duke of Lithuania (1317–41), to his son Algirdas (c.1300–77). Long after Algirdas became grand duke in 1345, he in turn bestowed it upon his chosen heir, Jogaila. It was here that Jogaila was imprisoned in 1381 after being deposed by his father’s brother and co-rulerKęstutis. It was here that Kęstutis was imprisoned a year later after Jogaila overthrew him. Five days later Kęstutis was found dead in mysterious circumstances. Besieged and sacked by the Perekop Tatars between 1503 and 1506, the castle was visited by the imperial ambassador Sigismund Herberstein en route to Moscow in 1518. It was at Krėva that Andrei Kurbskii took refuge after 1564 from the blood-spattered rule of Ivan the Terrible. Thereafter, Krėva lost its military and political significance. When Napoleon Orda sketched it in the mid nineteenth century in his classic survey of the historic monuments of the former Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, the castle had long been an abandoned ruin. It suffered further damage during the First World War, when for three years Krėva lay on the front line. Abandoned by its inhabitants, who were evacuated deep into Russia, it was heavily bombarded in 1916, and was at the centre of a major battle in 1917 as the Germans pounded the Russian line.
It is for other reasons that Kreva has gone down in history. It was here, on 14 August 1385, that Europe’s political geography was transformed by a document of a mere 26 lines and 560 words. It was written in Latin, on a parchment to which were attached the seals of Jogaila, his brothers Skirgaila, Kaributas, and Lengvenis, and his cousin, Kęstutis’s son Vytautas. The seals disappeared during the nineteenth century, but the document is preserved in the chapter archive of Cracow cathedral. It marked Jogaila’s acceptance of terms agreed in Cracow the previous January for his marriage to Jadwiga, elected queen regnant of Poland in 1384, two years after the death of her father, Louis of Anjou, king of Hungary and Poland. Since Jadwiga was a minor, Skirgaila travelled to Buda to secure the consent of her mother, Elizabeth of Bosnia, who sent a delegation to Krėva where the document known as the Krewo Act was agreed.2
It took five months to consummate the relationship. In December Duke Siemowit IV of Mazovia, from a cadet branch of the Piast dynasty that had ruled Poland until 1370, was persuaded to resign his claims to the throne. On 11 January 1386 a Polish delegation met Jogaila in Vaukavysk, between Vilnius and Brest, presenting him with a document in which his safety was guaranteed and the Poles confirmed their promise to elect him as their king.3 The election—or rather pre-election, since Jogaila would not be crowned until he had fulfilled his promises—took place in Lublin on 2 February, whence Jogaila travelled to Cracow, where he was baptized on 15 February, adopting the Christian name Władysław in homage to Jadwiga’s great-grandfather, Władysław Łokietek, who had refounded the Polish kingdom in 1320. Vytautas and Jogaila’s pagan brothers Vygantas, Karigaila, and Švitrigaila were baptized alongside him. Three days later Jogaila married Jadwiga; on 4 March he was crowned by the Polish primate, Bodzęta, archbishop of Gniezno.4
Thus did the pagan grand duke Jogaila metamorphose into the Christian king Władysław II Jagiełło (1386–1434) and two very different realms were united in an association that was to last 409 years. Why the Krewo Act should have laid the foundations for what remains one of the longest political unions in European history is hard to glean from the brief documents agreed at Krėva and Vaukavysk, which left a great deal unsaid and contained much that was unclear. There was nothing inevitable about the momentous decision that Jogaila took in committing Lithuania to a political relationship with the Poles and their western, Catholic, culture, and much to suggest that this association would prove as short-lived as the Polish unions with Bohemia (1300–6) and Hungary (1370–82).
1 Kreva’s population in 2004 was 726, down from a peak of 2,300 in 1909, <http://krevo.by/readarticle.php?article_id=17> accessed 2 July 2010.
2 AU, no. 1, 1–3; KA, 17–20.
3 AU, no. 2, 4.
4 Grzegorz Błaszczyk, Dzieje stosunków polsko-litewskich od czasów najdawniejszych do współczesności, i: Trudne początki (Poznań, 1998), 206–8; Jadwiga Krzyżaniakowa and Jerzy Ochmański, Władysław II Jagiełło (Wrocław, 2006), 94–7. For a translation of the Vaukavysk document, see Stephen Rowell, ‘1386: The marriage of Jogaila and Jadwiga embodies the union of Poland and Lithuania’, LHS, 11 (2006), 137–44.