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The restoration of domestic order ran parallel to one of Casimir’s most spectacular—if short-lived—achievements: the creation of ‘Jagiellonian Europe’. His career as a dynastic politician began with his marriage in February 1454 to Elizabeth Habsburg, daughter of Albert II, king of the Romans, which marked the definitive acceptance of the Jagiellons into the charmed—if not always charming—circle of European monarchs. Jagiełło, after his first marriage to an Angevin, was forced to accept a relatively minor Italian princess—albeit of Polish royal blood—as his second wife, and subsequently married two of his own subjects. Władysław III died in battle before he could marry. Casimir’s bride, however, was the daughter of one Emperor and the granddaughter of another—Sigismund of Luxembourg—on her mother’s side.
The origins of the match lay in the complex politics of central and southeastern Europe after the Ottoman conquest of much of the Balkans; the failure of Sigismund of Luxembourg to produce a male heir; and the premature deaths of Albert in 1439 and Władysław in 1444. Varna ended the brief Jagiellon sojourn on the Hungarian throne, but did little to restore political stability to the region. Albert’s Habsburg cousin was elected as Emperor Frederick III in 1440, but his grip on the Empire was feeble after the failure of a half-hearted attempt at imperial reform in 1444. Frederick’s assertion of the Habsburg claim to the thrones of Bohemia and Hungary faced considerable opposition from the native nobilities, who fiercely defended their tradition of elective monarchy. Elizabeth was removed from Frederick’s care during the rebellion that broke out in Austria after he left for the last coronation of an emperor in Rome in 1452. Her protector was her uncle Ulrich of Celje, who led the rebellion. After the death of her fiancé, Frederick of Saxony, the idea of a Polish marriage emerged, since Ulrich was keen to secure Polish support.1
Jagiellonian power in central Europe was founded on this marriage. In personal terms it was successful by the undemanding standards of royal marriages: even Miechowita admitted that the couple were bound by ties of love.2 Elizabeth proved a devoted wife, writing warmly of her husband in her testament, and identifying herself entirely with her new realm: after Casimir’s death she stayed in Poland until her own death in 1505. Most importantly, she bore him six sons and seven daughters, of whom all but two daughters survived into adulthood.3 Of her six sons, four became kings; one became a bishop, archbishop, and cardinal; and one—albeit after her death—was canonized. All her daughters married German princes; in consequence she was the Queen Victoria of her day: every monarch in modern Europe is descended from her (see Fig. 9. Genealogy 5).
Casimir’s marriage proved a dynastic triumph not just because of Elizabeth’s capacity for bearing healthy children, but for the simple reason that László the Posthumous died without issue in 1457. Elizabeth had already produced a son, Władysław, born in 1456, and was pregnant with her daughter Jadwiga; within two years she bore another two sons. With no clear successor to the Bohemian and Hungarian thrones, Elizabeth advanced her claims as Albert’s daughter on behalf of her sons against Frederick III, who was proclaimed king by a group of Hungarian magnates in February 1459, but failed to secure the throne against the 15-year-old Matthias Corvinus, son of János Hunyadi, who was elected by the Hungarian diet in January 1458 in the expectation—soon rudely shattered—that he would prove a pliant tool in its hands. Since their children were infants, Casimir and Elizabeth declined to press their claims. The Bohemians also chose a native monarch in George Podiebrad (1458–71), the moderate Hussite leader who brokered an uneasy peace between the Catholic and Hussite parties.
The Jagiellons’ day was dawning, however. The fall of Constantinople increased Ottoman pressure on Hungary and stimulated the papacy’s interest in uniting the crowns of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland to stiffen resistance. The memory of Władysław III’s heroic death at Varna survived in Rome and Buda, while civil strife continued to ravage Bohemia and Hungary. As Casimir’s sons matured, a Jagiellonian candidature became viable. George Podiebrad lost the support of many Catholics, and Corvinus, with papal encouragement, joined a Catholic insurgency based in Moravia, where he was crowned king of Bohemia in May 1469. Podiebrad looked to the Jagiellons for assistance, recognizing Casimir’s eldest son Władysław as his heir, despite having legitimate sons of his own. When Podiebrad died in March 1471, his supporters elected Władysław to succeed him. A bitter war against Corvinus lasted until 1479, when Władysław surrendered Moravia, Silesia, and Lusatia to Corvinus to secure his throne.
Corvinus’s victories, his glittering monarchy and the intellectual accomplishment of his magnificent Renaissance court could not disguise the shaky foundations of his rule. In Hungary he faced considerable—if frequently silent—opposition from many who had engineered his election, but who were dismayed at his autocratic ways. In the south he faced growing Ottoman pressure, while his failure to produce a legitimate male heir threatened his legacy. His desire to secure the succession for his illegitimate son, János, alienated his second wife Beatrice of Aragon, who loathed her stepson, and encouraged his opponents to look elsewhere.
Fig. 9. Genealogy 5. The descendants of Casimir IV.
Corvinus had many enemies. The peace he signed with Frederick in 1463 broke down in 1485. Corvinus seized Lower Austria and Vienna, Styria, and parts of Carinthia, assuming the title of duke of Austria and chasing Frederick out of the Habsburg heartlands, which Corvinus held until his death in Vienna on 6 April 1490.4 His aggression and lack of a legitimate heir left central Europe in turmoil, and the Jagiellons emerged to seize the prize, if at some cost to dynastic harmony. Casimir had prepared his sons carefully for government, giving them responsibility and practical experience. Władysław, despatched in 1471 at fifteen to secure the Bohemian throne, was an indolent sybarite, and Casimir’s hopes were invested in his second son, also Casimir, born in 1458 and, like his younger brothers, given an excellent education by Długosz and the Italian humanist Filippo Buonaccorsi (1437–96), known in Poland as Kallimach. Famed for the piety that would later bring his canonization, Casimir was personable, popular, and able.5 Aged thirteen he was despatched to Hungary in 1471 to stake a claim to the Hungarian throne as the figurehead of a magnate party plotting to overthrow Corvinus. Three years of inconsequential fighting followed, before failure was admitted. From 1481, when his father spent five years—with one small interruption—in Lithuania, Casimir governed Poland on his behalf. His death from tuberculosis in 1484 left his parents grief-stricken, and his mantle as Casimir’s designated successor passed to the third son, John Albert, Elizabeth’s favourite.6
John Albert was given considerable responsibility. In 1485 he accompanied Casimir on campaign in Moldavia, where the growing Ottoman threat to a principality over which Poland had long claimed suzerainty had been made grimly apparent with the seizure of the former Genoese colonies of Kilia and Cetatea Alba, which threatened trade down the Danube and Dniester into the Black Sea. The ending of the Lithuanian civil wars and the compromise settlement over Podolia and Volhynia stimulated trade through Kyiv, Kamianets, Lwów, and Lutsk. As the great caravans wound their way across Ruthenia with their rich cargoes of silk, velvet, damask, pepper, saffron, and spices from the east, wax and honey from Ruthenia, and cloth and manufactured goods from the west, Poland and Lithuania faced increasing competition from rival powers.7 The days when Vytautas built castles on the Black Sea coast were long gone. As the Ottomans extended their influence northwards, the Crimean Tatars began their devastating raids into the southern Ruthenian lands. John Albert defended this southern border, winning several victories against Tatar forces.8
Corvinus’s death in April 1490 demonstrated that fecundity can be as great a problem for a dynasty as the failure to produce an heir. Casimir now advanced John Albert’s claims to the Hungarian crown. His elder brother Władysław, whose Bohemian kingdom had been truncated by the rapacious Corvinus, had different ideas, moving with uncharacteristic alacrity to challenge his younger brother and Corvinus’s illegitimate son János. It took two years of civil war before the matter was settled in Władysław’s favour. Casimir switched his support to Władysław, but John Albert was elected by a party among the Hungarian nobles and stubbornly refused to renounce his claim, spending two years fighting his brother before Casimir negotiated an agreement in which John Albert was granted the duchy of Glogau and half of Silesia with the title supremus Silesiae dux, and the promise of the Hungarian succession should Władysław die without heirs.
Jagiellons now sat on the thrones of Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia, and Hungary. By Casimir’s death in June 1492, however, the favourable conjuncture that had brought this dynastic triumph had passed. Papal hopes for an anti-Ottoman league foundered as the dynasty showed a distinct lack of brotherly affection. Despite a cautious rapprochement between Władysław and John Albert, cobbled together in several meetings after the end of the Hungarian civil war, rivalry over Moldavia and Silesia soured relations. In 1497 after protracted squabbling, John Albert led a large Polish army into Moldavia at the invitation of his vassal, Stefan III, seeking to retake Kilia and Cetatea Alba. The expedition was a disaster. When the Hungarians, who also claimed suzerainty over Moldavia, failed to support it, Stefan promptly changed sides, accepting Ottoman overlordship and turning on the Poles. John Albert’s army, dubiously claimed to have been 40,000 strong, mostly comprised the noble levies of Małopolska, Wielkopolska, Mazovia, and Ruthenia. It never came near its objectives and was ravaged by disease, which laid the king low and forced a withdrawal. Harried by Moldavian forces it was ambushed in a long ravine at the battle of Koźmin in Bukovina (25–26 October 1497), and was only saved from disaster through a charge of the royal bodyguard. Some 5,000 died, including many leading nobles, and the army streamed back to Poland in disorder. John Albert drowned his sorrows in an extended period of debauchery in Cracow that earned him an admonition from Cardinal Frederick, himself no model of moral rectitude.9
The disaster dissipated John Albert’s crusading spirit and undermined his health. Its aftermath demonstrated the dangers of taking on the Ottomans alone. In 1498 a punitive revenge attack reached Przeworsk and Jarosław; a second in November 1499 approached Sambor. Two devastating raids by the Tatars in June and August 1500 were even more of a shock, crossing the Vistula and striking into Mazovia and Podlasie. Poland was in no position to contemplate an Ottoman war, and a five-year truce was negotiated in October 1502 that set the pattern for the rest of the century. Although Tatar raids continued, Poland sought to avoid war. The truce was extended in 1507, 1509, 1510, 1511, 1514, and 1519. In 1510 and 1517, papal proposals for a Polish-Hungarian campaign were politely rebuffed. When the Ottomans attacked Hungary in 1521, Sigismund I did send aid, which resulted in a brief war that was deeply unpopular in Poland. Another truce was signed in 1525.
Thus, although up to 1,500 Poles volunteered to join the army of Sigismund’s nephew Louis, who succeeded Władysław as king of Hungary and Bohemia in 1516, he was effectively abandoned to his fate, becoming the second Jagiellon to die fighting the Ottomans when he drowned in the chaotic flight after the disastrous battle of Mohács (29 August 1526). The fragile Jagiellonian dynastic edifice collapsed along with the medieval kingdom of St Stephen. The Habsburgs reaped the benefit. Ferdinand I, younger brother of Emperor Charles V, who had married Louis’s sister, secured the crowns of Bohemia and the small northern strip of Hungarian territory that the Ottomans had failed to occupy, laying the foundations of a dynastic conglomeration that reaped its reward when the Ottoman tide began to ebb in the 1680s.10
Polish reluctance to fight the Ottomans was largely due to developments in the east. During the century after 1386 Lithuania dominated the marches of eastern Europe. Yet Vytautas’s ambitious plan to secure hegemony over the eastern Ruthenian principalities foundered. Lithuania may at times have exercised its influence over the principalities of Novgorod and Pskov, but Muscovy proved more resilient despite being plagued by political conflict and a succession of weak rulers after the death of Dmitrii Donskoi in 1389. The cautious and unassertive Vasilii I (1389–1425) was easily eclipsed by the vigorous Vytautas; his son, Vytautas’s grandson Vasilii II (1425–62), was only ten years old when he succeeded his father, and was immediately exposed to the rampant ambitions of his uncle, Iurii of Galich, after Vytautas’s death. From 1431 civil war raged in Muscovy. Although Vasilii II fought off the challenge from Iurii, who died in June 1434, and then defeated and blinded Iurii’s son, Vasilii Kosoi, in 1436, he himself was defeated in the battle of Suzdal in 1445 and captured by Ulug-Mehmet, khan of the GoldenHorde. Vasili II’s release on payment of a huge ransom prompted a bid for the throne by Kosoi’s younger brother Dmitrii Shemiaka, who seized and blinded Vasilii in Muscovy’s own revenge tragedy. Although most boyars failed to recognize Shemiaka’s legitimacy, it was not until his death in 1453 that Vasilii was secure on his throne.11
Despite the civil war, Vasilii repelled the half-hearted attacks of the young Casimir on Muscovy in the 1440s. After his acceptance of the Polish throne in 1447 Casimir abandoned his eastern ambitions, settling with Vasilii in 1449, when he conceded that Novgorod and Pskov lay within Muscovy’s sphere of influence and agreed that both should maintain friendly relations with Tver. After 1447 there was no grand duke in Vilnius capable of pursuing Vytautas’s eastern ambitions. Vytautas’s policy of keeping Muscovy in check through friendly relations with the Tatars was no longer possible once the khanates of the Crimea (Perekop), Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia began competing viciously for the Golden Horde’s legacy with the Great Horde, which sought to keep alive the nomadic Mongol tradition.
Poland-Lithuania was drawn into the bewildering world of steppe politics, in which it competed with Muscovy and the Ottomans for influence among the splintered remnants of the Golden Horde. The Islamic faith of these khanates meant that the Ottomans possessed an advantage. Although modern scholars have demolished the view that they extended their suzerainty over the Crimean horde in 1478, none of the Crimean khans from the Giray dynasty could ignore or defy Istanbul for long. Lithuania’s control of most of the lands immediately to the north of the Crimea, and the common hostility of Muscovy and the Crimean Tatars to the Great Horde meant that from the late fifteenth century, the Crimean khans broadly favoured Muscovy over Lithuania, a development that owed much to the pursuit of Jagiellon ambitions in Hungary, Bohemia, and Moldavia and the consequent deterioration of Polish-Ottoman relations.12 Union had its price.
By his death in 1462 Vasilii II had extended his authority across Muscovy, bringing to heel the various Rurikid appanage princes and subduing the boyar conflicts that had fuelled the civil wars. In 1448 after his blinding, he made his eldest son, the eight-year-old Ivan, co-ruler without seeking the permission of any of the successors to the Golden Horde. Vasilii built well; his son, Ivan III (1462–1505) and grandson Vasilii III (1505–33) were to reap the rewards. Ivan set Muscovy on a very different political path from its Lithuanian neighbour and rival. By marrying Sophia Palaelogus, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, he enabled Muscovy—now the only independent Orthodox power—to lay claim to the heritage of the eastern Roman Empire. As Casimir looked on, largely passive, Ivan extended his control westwards. In 1478, after a long campaign of political and military pressure, he annexed Novgorod; Tver fell to him seven years later. These annexations were followed by a massive redistribution of lands that enabled Ivan to establish the pomest’e system of military service, which underpinned the Muscovite army until deep into the seventeenth century.
Ivan challenged Lithuanian control over the vast borderlands between the two grand duchies. He looked for support among the Rurikid and Gediminid princes scattered along the upper reaches of the river Oka, and its tributary, the Ugra, where Lithuania’s borders extended to within 150 kilometres of Moscow. These lands were inhabited by princes whose main aim was the defence of their small appanage duchies against the twin threats of subdivision and the assertion of central authority from Vilnius. In the long period of Moscow’s weakness they had remained loyal to the Jagiellons, but as Ivan actively sought their support, discontented individuals seeking to recover what they regarded as their rightful patrimony, or chafing at the increasing assertiveness of the Lithuanian government, began to defect to Muscovy, a trend begun in 1481–82, when Algirdas’s great-grandson Fëdor Belsky fled to Moscow after the exposure of a plot to assassinate Casimir by a group of eastern Ruthenian princes. Casimir spent most of the next five years in Lithuania, leaving the government of Poland in the hands of his sons, first Casimir and then, after his death, John Albert. While his presence dampened discontent, there was another high-profile defection in 1487 when Ivan Vorotynsky recognized Ivan’s suzerainty over his duchy of Peremyshl. Others followed: by Casimir’s death in 1492, he had lost control of the duchies of Bely, Kozelsk, Vorotynsk, Seren, and Odoev (see Map 5).13
Map 5. The Polish-Lithuanian Union in the early sixteenth century.
Ivan was ready. In the summer of 1492 he launched the first of a series of five wars (1492–94; 1500–3; 1507–8; 1512–22; 1534–7) that deprived Lithuania of one third of its territory. In January 1493 he used the title of lord of all Rus' (государъ всея Русі) for the first time in diplomatic correspondence with Lithuania, thereby asserting that the Orthodox Rurikids, not the Catholic Jagiellons, were the true inheritors of the political tradition of Kievan Rus'. It was peremptorily dismissed by the Lithuanian council, but the claim symbolized a new era in the struggle for control of the Ruthenian lands.
The long cycle of wars against Muscovy altered the context of the Polish-Lithuanian union. Their impact on the process of union was profound. The end of the long period of peace which, for Lithuania—apart from the skirmishes with Muscovy in the 1440s—had lasted since the end of the Lithuanian civil war in 1437, and the darkening international context, stimulated profound political change. Poland-Lithuania’s response of to the challenge demonstrated that the union rested on far firmer foundations than the flimsy dynastic system of ‘Jagiellonian Europe’, which proved to be no system at all. Dynastic ties were no basis for an effective political relationship, and despite the claims that Poland and Lithuania were united by no more than a dynastic union after the separate elections in 1492 of Alexander as grand duke of Lithuania and John Albert as king of Poland, events were to demonstrate that the Poles and Lithuanians were bound by far more than dynastic ties, and that the majority among the Ruthenian elites were more attracted by the political liberties they had secured in the 1430s than by the prospect of rule by the Orthodox princes of Muscovy. The process of union was still very much alive.
1 PSB, vi, 251.
2 Miechowita, Chronica, 327.
3 Bogucka, Kazimierz, 136; Materiały do dziejów dyplomacji polskiej z lat 1486–1516 (kodeks zagrzebski), ed. Józef Garbacik (Wrocław, 1966), no. 45, 141–8.
4 Krzysztof Baczkowski, Walka o Węgry w latach 1490–1492 (Cracow, 1995), 12–14.
5 Casimir was canonized by Leo X in 1521; the bull was lost after the Polish envoy, Erazm Ciołek, died of the plague in Rome in 1522. The bull of canonization was reissued by Clement VIII on the request of Sigismund III in 1602.
6 PSB, xii, 286–8.
7 For Ruthenian trade see Mikhailo Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus 0, vi: Economic, Cultural, and National Life in the 14th to 17th Centuries, ed. Myron Kapral and Frank Sysyn (Edmonton, 2012), 1–83.
8 Papée, Jan Olbracht, 18–19.
9 Papée, Jan Olbracht, 125–46, 149–50.
10 Andrzej Dziubiński, Stosunki dyplomatyczne polsko-tureckie w latach 1500–1572 w kontekście międzynarodowym (Wrocław, 2005), 11–57; Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th–18th century) (Leiden, 2000), 110–16.
11 Robert Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy 1304–1613 (London, 1987), 68–75; Charles Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde (Bloomington, 1987), 58.
12 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, The Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania (Leiden, 2011), 9–11, 21–2; Halperin, Russia, 59.
13 Łowmiański, Poliytka, 401–2; Błaszczyk, Litwa, 21–3.