26

Shliakhta

At Vytautas’s death in 1430 the grand duchy covered 1,000,000 km², with a population of up to 3,500,000. The losses to Muscovy between 1492 and 1514 reduced its territory by just under a third to around 700,000 km². The fall in population by just over a fifth was not so drastic, as these lands were relatively sparsely populated. By 1528 the population was some 2,700,000, reaching 3,500,000 again in 1569.¹ Two long periods of peace between 1435 and 1492, and between 1522 and 1558, broken only by the Muscovite wars between 1533 and 1537, brought rising prosperity. The Order’s eclipse opened up the rivers that flowed out of Lithuania into the Baltic just as Europe began its recovery from demographic and economic stagnation. Lithuania was well placed to meet the growing demand—gradual at first but rapidly escalating after 1500—for grain, timber, tar, and other forest products. Colonization took place in the borderlands to the west, depopulated by mutual devastation during the wars against the Order, and in the vast, empty forests that covered so much of Lithuania. As demand from western Europe grew, control and ownership of land became increasingly important for the grand duchy’s elites.

The century after the union with Poland saw a fundamental transformation of these elites and a substantial process of social differentiation within them. The Horodło system was formed by Vytautas’s vision of a composite state in which Lithuania proper would dominate the grand duchy as a whole, with the most important local offices in the new palatinates of Vilnius and Trakai, and central offices in the chancery limited to Catholics, and therefore overwhelmingly to nobles of Lithuanian origin, while the annexed Ruthenian territories would have substantial control of their own affairs, albeit often under the oversight of Lithuanian Catholic governors. This system came under considerable strain in the 1430s, which saw the crucial concession of social and economic privileges to Ruthenian nobles across the grand duchy. This development, while it left central control firmly in the hands of Lithuanian Catholics, opened the door to the creation of a more coherent Lithuanian-Ruthenian elite that gradually united round the concept of noble liberty enshrined in the privileges of 1387, 1413, and 1434. While this ideal of liberty was strongly influenced by the Polish model, it was adapted to the very different conditions of the grand duchy, most notably through accommodation of religious diversity: the partial undermining of the grand duchy’s composite nature in this period was largely due to the way in which the Ruthenian elites challenged the Horodło system, yet sought a place within it.

Vytautas’s policies ensured that this new elite was shaped and differentiated internally by office and service to the grand duke, and by the landed wealth that this service conferred upon those who shouldered its burdens. The first step in its construction was Vytautas’s attack on the princely appanages, which marked an assault on the cognatic family structures that had traditionally regulated the inheritance of land and the distribution of political power in both the Lithuanian and Ruthenian traditions. Yet this assault was limited, and did not affect all of the grand duchy’s princely class. It was aimed above all at the Gediminid princes, those close family members who might threaten the new order through the Gediminid vision of the grand duchy as the possession of the ruling dynasty as a whole, not of the grand duke alone.

In 1386 there were members of twenty princely families in Jagiełło’s retinue, out of some eighty princely families in total. Under Vytautas the princes, almost all of whom were Orthodox, faced increasing pressure on their privileged status.² The princes were badly hit in the civil wars. Representatives of 42 princely families supported Švitrigaila, suffering grievous losses in the battle of Šventoji (1435), where 13 princes were killed and 42 captured. Žygimantas targeted Švitrigaila’s princely supporters, with families such as the Sangushko, Horodetsky, Pinsky, Polubensky, and Kroshynsky losing their appanages. This heralded a general assault on the remaining privileges attached to appanages, a factor that influenced the princes among the plotters who assassinated Žygimantas in 1440.³

Although historians occasionally talk of the princes as a separate estate, the sources reveal no such thing: they were a diverse group, united only by their possession of their inherited titles.⁴ There were few privileges extended to them collectively, and the grand duchy’s composite nature meant that there were no fora in which they could appear politically as a united group. They varied greatly in the privileges they enjoyed, from the appanage dukes at the top, to the ‘service princes’ (князя службовіе; князя служилые), who held their land on service tenure from the grand duke or another prince, at the bottom.

Of these 80 princely families, 52 have been identified for Volhynia, the grand duchy’s princely heartland, which was markedly different in its social composition to the rest of the Ruthenian lands, let alone to Lithuania proper, where there were few princes.⁵ At the top was a small group of wealthy families, mostly of Gediminid or Rurikid descent. Vytautas had not destroyed all the appanages: the duchies of Kobryn (to 1519); Pinsk, Kletsk, and Horodets (to 1524); Mstislau (to 1529); and Slutsk (to 1592) all survived until the families that held them died out in the male line, even if in the case of Kletsk, Pinsk, and Horodets, this was only because appanages that had been confiscated by Žygimantas were restored or granted to others by Casimir.⁶ These restorations resulted from Casimir’s desire to build support in the difficult early years of his reign and only affected a handful of families. The princes did not, collectively, constitute an independent political force.

Casimir’s increasing authority is demonstrated by his treatment of Kyiv, the greatest appanage duchy of them all, and the only one with the potential to mount a challenge to rule from Vilnius. It was stripped from Jagiełło’s older half-brother Volodymyr in 1394 to be conferred on Skirgaila; after his death it was not returned to Volodymyr, but was granted in 1396 to Ivan Holshansky, one of Vytautas’s closest supporters, though as governor, not duke. After Ivan’s death in 1401 or shortly thereafter, the governorship was held by his son Mykhailo. Kyiv’s faded glamour still hung around the city’s decaying walls, however, and the extent to which the Holshansky accepted their position as mere governors is open to question: the marriage of Mykhailo’s niece Vasylia to Ivan, Volodymyr’s second son, suggests a desire to lay claim to Kyiv’s historical legacy; Volodymyr’s elder son Olelko married Anastasia, Vasilii I’s daughter, in 1417, another equally suggestive match, although it came with Vytautas’s approval: if he was wary of granting authority to powerful Gediminid princes, he was willing to pay tribute to their status so long as they remained loyal.⁷

These claims were not forgotten. Both Mykhailo Holshansky and Olelko Volodymyrovych supported Švitrigaila, although Olelko, his brother Ivan, Semen Holshansky, and Fëdor Korybutovych, defected to Žygimantas on the outbreak of civil war. Olelko offered Žygimantas loyal support, which did not save him from being imprisoned shortly before the ungrateful Žygimantas’s murder. By opting for Žygimantas, Olelko showed that he was loyal to the wider grand duchy and the union. In 1440, he was one of the first to declare for Casimir. His reward was substantial: shortly thereafter Casimir granted him Kyiv, specifically referring to the return of his patrimony.⁸ This was a shrewd gesture to the Ruthenian elites, many of whom had supported Švitrigailo, and some of whom may have supported Olelko as a candidate for grand duke in 1440.⁹ Olelko loyally served Casimir until his death in 1454, at which point Kyiv passed to his son, Semën, despite the fact that Semën—who was married to the daughter of Jonas Goštautas, by then leader of the Lithuanian opposition to Casimir—was a popular candidate among those urging Casimir to return to the Vytautan model and appoint a separate grand duke.¹⁰

Too much should not be read into this supposed restoration of the principality of Kyiv. Its return to Olelko and then Semën did not indicate that Casimir was loosening the ties of the annexed lands to the grand duchy. Semën on occasion styled himself ‘grand duke of Kyiv’ (князем великого князства своего Киевского) and stressed his hereditary rights to the duchy, but if Casimir did not interfere much in its internal affairs, there were distinct limits to its autonomy.¹¹ The grand duchy may have been a composite state, but it was a state nonetheless, in which Casimir felt free to dispose of its component parts as he wished. The grant of Kyiv to Olelko was for his life only, and although Casimir then bestowed it upon Semën, he prevented him dividing it with his brother Mykhailo in 1455. On Semën’s death in 1470 Casimir refused to sanction its inheritance by Mykhailo, who scurried back expectantly from his post as governor of Novgorod. Instead Casimir appointed a Catholic Lithuanian governor, Martynas Goštautas, in 1471. Goštautas may have been Semën’s brother-in-law, but the appointment of Kyiv’s first Catholic governor gave a clear message. Kyiv was given a new set of privileges to recognize its status and to buy off Olelkovych supporters, but the centre had reasserted its power within the composite state, and the term ‘grand duke of Kyiv’ began to appear in Casimir’s titles.¹² Kyiv was never to return to Olelkovych hands. Semën’s widow, his son Vasyl, and his two daughters were granted the duchy of Pinsk, which lacked Kyiv’s historic lustre.¹³ The treatment of the Olelkovych was consistent with Casimir’s general challenge to the collateral system of princely succession: although he was willing to allow inheritance, he did not regard it as automatic, and he assiduously asserted his rights to gather in principalities when families died out in the male line, ignoring the claims of collateral branches, and limiting the rights of their holders.¹⁴ Although there was some discontent when Goštautas arrived in Kyiv to take up his governorship, it soon dissipated and he held the post until 1480.

The lack of serious resistance to the liquidation of the appanage duchies is striking.¹⁵ It is important not to ascribe to Casimir’s reign the attitudes of chronicles written later, when some among the Ruthenian elites were projecting their own sense of the past onto the fifteenth century and constructing a narrative of continuity between Kievan Rus' and their own day. There was no chronicler active in fifteenth-century Kyiv, and the contemporary Ruthenian chronicles were composed in Smolensk.¹⁶ There is no contemporary evidence that the Olelkovych princes were the focus for Ruthenian patriotic feeling, while the absence of any attempt to construct it after their restoration in 1440 suggests that there was little enthusiasm for a challenge to Casimir.

The Kievan tradition revived later, in a very different context, but in the Casimir’s reign it was too poorly developed to provide any basis for a challenge to grand ducal power. Kyiv itself had never properly recovered from devastation by the Mongols. Its metropolitans kept the title, but had long departed, and if they did visit Kyiv in the fifteenth century, they mostly resided elsewhere. The southern Ruthenian lands remained relatively sparsely populated. They were far from western European markets, while the onset of regular Tatar raids from the 1480s hampered the weak economic recovery seen earlier in Casimir’s reign. There were more congenial parts of the grand duchy for colonists to settle than a region where the dangers of being carted off to the slave markets of Istanbul remained high deep into the seventeenth century.¹⁷

Thus when, after his failure to secure what he regarded as his patrimony, the disgruntled Mykhailo Olelkovych, together with Fëdor Belsky—another grandson of Volodymyr Olherdovych—and prince Ivan Holshansky hatched a plot to assassinate Casimir during a visit to Lithuania in 1481, it failed dismally. Probably encouraged by Ivan III it was supported largely by Mykhailo’s relatives and clients, and by a scattering of disgruntled Lithuanian nobles.¹⁸ Casimir removed Goštautas as governor of Kyiv, appointing him palatine of Trakai, and replacing him with the Orthodox Ruthenian Ivan Khodkevych. Mykhailo had no military force to back up his cack-handed coup, which Khodkevych crushed. The conspirators were tried and condemned to death. Belsky escaped to Moscow; Mykhailo was executed, although his widow was prudently left in place in Slutsk.¹⁹ Khodkevych’s actions—and, indeed, his appointment—casts doubt on Hrushevsky’s presentation of these events, in which he uncharacteristically follows Długosz and the sixteenth-century Muscovite chronicles uncritically, to back his claim that the Lithuanians now felt able to ignore the Ruthenian element in the grand duchy, and that they sought to rule ‘not only without the Ruthenians, but against them’.²⁰

Mykhailo Olelkovych’s execution marked the end of an era. Švitrigaila had died without issue in 1452; with the re-establishment of direct control over the duchy of Kyiv, there were no serious rivals to the Jagiellons. On Casimir’s death in 1492, the only questions were which of Casimir’s sons should succeed him as king of Poland, and whether the Vytautan system should be restored, a question answered positively in 1492 with Alexander’s elevation, but negatively in 1501, when Alexander declined to allow Sigismund to become grand duke after he ascended the Polish throne. A brief flirtation with the idea of granting him Kyiv—Sigismund was understandably keen—came to nothing.

The remaining princes were no political threat. In 1499 Alexander felt secure enough to issue a comprehensive series of privileges regulating the remaining appanage duchies and defining their relationship to the centre. If the privilege for Mstislau granted its ‘full rights and lordships’ (со всимъ правомъ и панствомъ) to its Gediminid prince, Mykhailo Ivanovych Zaslavsky, other grants were less generous. The privileges recognized the ius ducale of the princes, which included some judicial powers over local boyars and nobles, but there was no recognition of any wider political claims.²¹

While these privileges were issued against the background of the Muscovite wars and the territorial losses and defections of the 1490s, they display Alexander’s confidence that he was not thereby risking Jagiellon power.²² Apart from a small group at the top, the majority of the princely class had fared badly, not so much because of the actions of Vytautas or his successors, but as a result of the remorseless logic of collateral inheritance. Many families saw their prosperity decline or collapse with the passing of the generations, as uncles and cousins divided, subdivided, and redivided the family patrimony, with each trying to cling on to the social status and title of their father without the means to sustain it. For the more fecund, the decline could be precipitous: such were the Mezetsky in the eastern borderlands, or the Lithuanian Sviriškis, some of whom abandoned their princely titles, as did one branch of the Masalsky which, with the exception of one member, lost its princely status, sinking to the level of service boyars after producing fourteen male descendants in the fourth generation from its protoplast, Sviatoslav Tytovych.²³

The loss of the loosely attached borderlands has deflected attention away from the substantial consolidation of Jagiellon rule that had taken place by 1500. Alexander could afford his gestures to a handful of the remaining princes because their principalities were small and relatively insignificant, and princely power within the annexed territories was no longer a threat. By 1499 successive grand dukes had proven highly effective at keeping the grand duchy together despite its composite nature. They dealt far more successfully than the rulers of Kievan Rus' or the Piast dynasty in Poland between 1138 and 1320 in overcoming the problems posed by appanages.²⁴ When Sigismund succeeded Alexander in 1506, Lithuania may still have been a composite state, but the Gediminid dynastic condominium was no more; the Jagiellons had built shrewdly on the foundations laid by Vytautas.

This success was in large part due to the social change that followed the union with Poland, in part stimulated and encouraged by grand ducal policies, but which soon developed a momentum of its own. Gradually a new noble elite emerged that was a fusion—though by no means a complete one—of the Lithuanian and Ruthenian boyar elites. It was a process in which Polish examples were of considerable influence, and increasingly so after 1492, but it was essentially shaped by social and political developments within the grand duchy. For if Petrauskas is right to emphasize that the elite that came to be socially dominant and to play an increasing role in Lithuania’s government in the fifteenth century already existed in 1386, there is no doubt that its nature and position changed dramatically in the century and a half that followed.²⁵

The transformation was a complex process. The privileges of 1387 and 1413 did not create the Lithuanian boyar elite, but they did much to shape its development, even if it was a long time before their full effects became clear. By giving legal security of tenure to holders of allodial land, and recognizing in law the rights of landowners to pass on their estates, the privileges launched the process in which the grand duchy’s elites ceased to be essentially a military class, required to fight or provide soldiers for the grand duke—or their appanage prince—in return for service tenures on their estates, to a class whose control of the land was based on legally defensible rights of tenure. Although their military obligation remained, many of the duties surrounding it, such as the requirement to maintain castles, were stripped away.

While the legal rights these privileges bestowed were important, their influence should not be overstated. Allodial tenure did not arrive in the grand duchy in 1387. It was known in written Ruthenian law, and therefore the initial failure to extend the privileges to the grand duchy’s Ruthenian areas was not as significant as is sometimes suggested. It was also known in the Baltic, Lithuanian tradition, albeit as part of customary, unwritten law, and was by no means a novelty in 1387.²⁶ Although allodial land existed, it was not yet particularly widespread. The privileges increased the attraction of holding allodial rather than service land, since they gave legal guarantees that it could be passed on to the next generation without interference from the grand duke. The improved legal protection of the right to bequeath land to one’s heirs lay behind one of the most significant changes of the fifteenth century: the breaking of the system of cognatic inheritance, which saw estates as the possession of an extended kinship group that had to be consulted over their disposal, in favour of an agnatic system, in which estates descended vertically to the children of their holder. This made it easier for grand dukes to exercise their right to secure the lands of noble families that died out in the male line against the claims of collateral branches.²⁷ Since the trend towards agnatic inheritance was not accompanied by any move towards primogeniture, subdivision still took place, but its worst effects had, by 1500, been substantially mitigated. The extended kinship groups were, in the absence of written genealogies, relatively loose systems whose composition tended to reformitselfwith the passing of the generations. In the fifteenth century, as the landholdings of the leading boyars grew, and as the protection for allods was strengthened, these loose kinship clans were steadily eroded in favour of a more nucleated family structure, except in the Kaunas district and much of Samogitia, where the petty nobility were dominant and, as the 1567 military register demonstrates, petty boyars were still organized in clans for military purposes.²⁸ Elsewhere, in the decades after 1413, the decay of the clan system and the trend towards agnatic inheritance was emphasized by the gradual adoption of patronymics—in imitation of the Ruthenian tradition—and, towards the end of the century, by the spread of the surnames that made the construction of more accurate genealogies possible.²⁹

The greatest beneficiaries were members of a non-princely elite among the newly Catholic, Lithuanian boyars that already existed in 1385, but whose position was strengthened under Vytautas. These were Vytautas’s men: the forty-seven Catholic Lithuanian families he selected for the Horodło adoption. Its significance should not be overemphasized: few of the forty-seven fully adopted their new coats of arms with their Latin mottos; others adapted them by replacing the Latin with Ruthenian, while some were to reject them altogether at moments of tension between the grand duchy and Poland in the 1430s and 1450s.³⁰ Nevertheless, if links with their Polish heraldic clans were initially minimal, the entry of these families into a symbolic, cultural community, with its own name, its own coat of arms, and its own mythological history, gradually formed a new matrix of social relationships in which the importance of kinship was diminished. Between 1413 and 1569 the men who ran Lithuania were almost entirely drawn from these forty-seven families.

Thus if Horodło created neither the Lithuanian boyar estate nor the elite that developed within it, it established a framework for the stratification and diversification of the grand duchy’s large boyar class. Under Vytautas, the documents began distinguishing between this group at the top and the boyar masses, using terms such as baro or baronis; dominus, domini, ‘great boyars’ (бояре великіе), and, increasingly, the term ‘lord’, using a word borrowed from Polish (пан; pan). In the Horodło adoption the Polish szlachta addressed the Lithuanian ‘boyars and nobles’ (barones et nobiles terrarum Lithuaniae), and the Lithuanians referred to themselves as nobiles, boyares ac proceres; the term pan and its plural, pany, soon became established Lithuanian usage.³¹ By Casimir’s reign documents referred to ‘the princes and lords’ ahead of the general nobility; there is much in Jablonowski’s suggestion that the gradual integration of the wealthier princes and the lords created a true aristocracy.³² Documents now used the formula ‘We, Casimir, by the grace of God king of Poland and Lithuanian grand duke . . . with the lords of our council’.³³ These lords filled the new offices created at Horodło—the palatinates and castellans of Vilnius and Trakai—and by the expansion of Vytautas’s system of government. It was they who served as governors, starostas, chancellors, and hetmans.

This new elite was not created by Vytautas through office, as Suchocki and other Polish historians have suggested: as Petrauskas convincingly demonstrates, they were drawn from the traditional local elites who had served Vytautas’s predecessors, and they were already closely linked by kinship ties.³⁴ Nevertheless, Vytautas did much to shape the new elite after 1413. In many cases, some of the more local offices remained quasi-hereditary, though there were examples of outsiders who came to dominate local politics through grand ducal patronage, the most prominent being the Kęsgaila family, the descendants of Valimantas, one of Vytautas’s earliest supporters, who witnessed the 1398 Salin treaty with the Order, who was possibly killed at the Vorskla, and who was certainly dead by 1412. His son, the Lithuanian marshal of the land, Rumbaudas Valimantaitis, was appointed starosta of Samogitia by Vytautas in 1409, holding the post for about a year; in 1412, his brother, Valimantaitis Kęsgaila succeeded him. Kęsgaila played an active role in Samogitia’s christianization, bloodily crushing the 1418 Samogitian rising. Thus began over a century of domination by his descendants, whose rule was initially resented, as the family was not Samogitian, but came from near Ukmergė. Kęsgaila held the position until 1432; there followed a brief hiatus during the civil war, when Kęsgaila, together with Rumbaudas and another brother Jaunutis, palatine of Trakai, initially supported Švitrigaila. After going over to Žygimantas, Jaunutis’s secret correspondence with Švitrigaila was intercepted, and he and Rumbaudas were executed. Kęsgaila avoided their fate thanks to Jagiełło’s personal intervention, but he was dismissed as starosta, with Mykolas Kantautas appointed in his place. Samogitia, partly because of its resentment at Kęsgaila’s rule, and partly because of its historical links with the Kęstutids, supported Žygimantas, and—after his assassination—his son Mykolas. Casimir’s reappointment of Kęsgaila as starosta in 1440—probably at the behest of Jonas Goštautas who, along with Kęsgaila, had masterminded the 1440 election—was one of the causes of the 1441 Samogitian revolt. The Samogitians may have secured a new privilege in 1442 giving them the right to elect their starostas and the tivuny—the starosta’s chief local officials—but Casimir insisted that Kęsgaila—whom he also appointed castellan of Vilnius—returned as starosta in 1443. He held the post until his death in 1450, when Casimir pushed through the succession of his son, Jonas Kęsgaila, despite strong support in Samogitia for Kantautas. This was the true start of Kęsgaila domination. Jonas ignored the 1442 privilege, and its requirement for the election of tivuny; he was starosta from 1450 until his death in 1485, when he was succeeded by his son Stanislovas, starosta until his death in 1527, who was succeeded by his son, also Stanislovas, by which time the family had established itself as the wealthiest and most powerful among the Lithuanian pany. Stanislovas the elder was castellan of Trakai (1499–1522) and of Vilnius (1522–7); his son was castellan of Vilnius from 1528/9 until 1532. By this time, however, the Samogitian boyars were again restless, and the younger Stanislovas had to agree to considerable watering-down of the starosta’s powers in the spirit of the 1442 privilege. His only son died in infancy, ending the long Kęsgaila control of Samogitia; before his death in 1532 he bequeathed one-third of his vast estates to Sigismund August.³⁵

The career of the Kęsgaila was exceptional, but it demonstrates how it was possible for the new class of pany to benefit from grand ducal largesse in return for political support, while the fate of Rumbaudas and Jaunutis showed the importance of backing the right horse at the right time. Vytautas and his successors lavishly rewarded their supporters and servants; it was this generosity that underpinned the most dramatic of the many socio-economic changes that affected the grand duchy during the fifteenth century. Successive grand dukes distributed their patrimony on a colossal scale, largely among this narrow elite. While many of the grants, especially under Vytautas, were short-term leases tied to posts such as starosties that were frequently rotated, as time went on lengths of tenure increased, until it became normal to hold starosties for extended periods, and often for life. Important individuals received grand ducal villages and estates as outright gifts to be incorporated into their allodial holdings, either as a reward for long and loyal service, or in order to win their support for contentious measures. As individuals grew richer, grand dukes began to raise loans by mortgaging estates to lords; since they were often unable to repay the loans, many slipped out of their control.³⁶

The results were dramatic. Extensive private landed estates were virtually unknown in the Lithuanian heartlands in 1386.³⁷ By the early sixteenth century a revolution in landholding had taken place. By now there were some 13,000 noble families in the grand duchy, of which around 6,000 (46 per cent) were Lithuanian in origin. In 1386, 80 per cent of the population lived on land directly under the rule of the grand duke; by the time of the great military register drawn up in 1528, this proportion had been reduced to 30 per cent. Five per cent was church land, therefore some 65 per cent of the grand duchy’s land was now in noble hands, much of it controlled by the narrow group of families that constituted the new political elite.³⁸

The 1528 register was prepared as part of a major transformation of Lithuania’s military system. The losses sustained to Muscovy down to the fall of Smolensk in 1514 persuaded the Lithuanian council of the need to match the Muscovite pomest 'e system through comprehensive reform. A 1502 statute stipulated that every noble landholder should raise one armed cavalryman from every ten service units when called upon. Registers were to be drawn up by local starostas or governors to ensure that nobles met their obligations.³⁹ According to a 1507 statute, each noble was to prepare a list of ‘all his people’ to be submitted under oath to the starosta or governor, who would determine his obligations. In 1521 Sigismund, concerned that not all had paid what they should in recent tax levies, ordered an inspection of the registers to discover who was in arrears. In a decree of May 1528 the extent of the burden was slightly increased, with one cavalryman to be provided from every eight service units, and commissions were established to investigate the registers drawn up by nobles, and to standardize the service unit (служба/sluzhba), an institution modelled on the Dienste system used by the Order.⁴⁰ The sluzhba was formed by grouping together peasant households—normally from two to four—and provided the basis for tax assessments and military service. Nobles had to provide cavalrymen according to the number of service units they held, and had to swear an oath to the accuracy of their declarations in the presence of the local priest.⁴¹ Service was from all landed property, despite Loewe’s attempt to show that allodial estates were exempt, which is based on questionable inferences drawn from the composition of the 1528 register and the wording of the 1529 statute rather than empirical research into landholding.⁴²

By late 1528 the registers were in Vilnius ready for inspection. The local registers have not survived; what has is the protocol drafted by the chancery based upon them, which contains 19,842 individual names from 13,060 families across the grand duchy, though no data from Kyiv are included for reasons that remain obscure. The register details service obligations expressed in the number of fully equipped cavalrymen nobles were required to bring to musterings of the noble levy, known as the ‘service of the land’ (земская служба). The registers were used as the basis for local tax-collectors to check the declared size of landholdings and estates with the tax paid, to make adjustments for under-declaration, and to prosecute those seeking to avoid paying their taxes.⁴³

Musterings were the responsibility of the local ensign (khoruzhy), working with the palatine or governor. The register meant that general musterings could now be held, with the first summoned to Minsk in 1534 by the hetman, Jurgis Radvila. General musterings were not always well attended—there was a miserable turnout at Navahrudak in 1538—but the registers meant that hetmans could identify those failing to meet their obligations, for which penalties were severe. General musterings became more common after the outbreak of the Livonian War in 1558. Levies took place at Hanushishki and Krėva in 1561; at Minsk in 1562; and at Rakov in 1565. Muster-lists have only survived for 1565, which produced 8,178 horse, or 40 per cent of the 1528 register. The 1567 muster was more successful: it produced 27,536 horse, 40 per cent more than were listed in 1528. These musterlists, in contrast to the 1528 register, which listed obligations, recorded those who actually turned up.⁴⁴

These documents and two local registers that do survive—for Volhynia (1545) and Polatsk (1552)—bear testimony to the efficiency of local officials. The 1528 register contains all the council offices, except for those that were vacant, while the Volhynia and Polatsk registers include a high proportion of individuals or families listed in 1528, leading Łowmiański to conclude that the 1528 register represents an accurate listing of the middling nobility.⁴⁵ Taken together, they reveal the scale of the internal differentiation that had taken place in the boiarstvo since 1386. While a considerable class of middling nobles remained alongside an even larger one of impoverished boyars, many of whom served in person, the registers were dominated by the lords and a few princes, whose extensive landholdings were revealed by the number of horse they were required to raise. Of the 19,842 horse listed in 1528 nearly a third (30 per cent) were provided by this group, although the percentage was smaller in 1567 when it provided 4,890 horse out of 27,776, or under a fifth (18 per cent).⁴⁶ Perhaps the ordinary nobility were more assiduous than the magnates in fulfilling their obligations, although the mustering did not include private units raised separately.

By 1528 a handful of families had established considerable landed fortunes. The Kęsgaila were the wealthiest, with the register recording their obligation at 768 cavalrymen, representing no fewer than 6,144 service units, or some 12,288 peasant households; next were the Radvila (Radziwiłł), with 760 (service units; 12,160), and Albertas Goštautas, with 466 (3,728; 7,456), while the Astikaitai—close relatives of the Radvila—were assessed at 337 cavalrymen (2,696; 5,408).⁴⁷ These families—all of them among the Horodło 47—owed their wealth to service in the new government institutions established by Vytautas, and the grand ducal council, which was based firmly on this elite. While birth and connections were important, the greatest rewards came to those who had held high government office in Casimir’s reign. Since he was absent for long periods in Poland, government effectively lay in the hands of the chancery and the council. Rewards could be substantial for those who held office at the local level, in particular governors and starostas. It was above all office-holders who received grants of land or rights to particular revenues in their districts, and who benefited from the system.⁴⁸

Council members benefited most. The origins of the council are a matter of some controversy. From 1411, leading Lithuanian politicians increasingly appear in documents as ‘councillors’. Article ten of the Horodło treaty, in referring to the forty-seven families adopted into Polish heraldic clans, for the first time delineated a right to be consulted.⁴⁹ Gradually, the council became regularized in the form of meetings of the most important officials, most of them with effective life-tenure on their offices. By the 1430s, the formula used by Švitrigaila ‘having taken counsel with the princes and lords of our loyal council’ (і мы порадивше съ нащими князи і съ паны съ нащою вѣрную радою) suggested that the right to give counsel was now held automatically by those of a certain rank and position: hereditary princes and the office-holding lords. Princes could and did hold the offices of governor and starosta of the leading cities that gave them automatic, life-membership of the council and princes were summoned to the wider meetings of the council that came to be known as the sejm (cеймъ; cоймъ), but the new system rested largely on the lords.⁵⁰

This was a consultative, not a consensual system. Although there is copious evidence that grand dukes sought advice there is no indication that they were obliged to take it, and Korczak finds no evidence of any use of the term ‘rada’ (council) in an institutional sense until Casimir issued his Sudebnik on 29 February 1468, the first attempt at a codification of Lithuanian written law, which contained two clauses (12 and 21) requiring him to pronounce sentence in legal cases in conjunction with his councillors, and established the powers of the council in the grand duke’s absence. It formally recognized the need for him to seek council advice, but, although it gave the council certain narrowly defined executive powers, especially with regard to the keeping of the peace, it did not grant it the power of decree.⁵¹

These measures reflected the problems of government under an absentee grand duke and bore testimony to the practice that had evolved since 1447. Regular council meetings were attended by a narrow core of officials, with broader sessions called to discuss and give public witness to major decisions. The inner council was small, usually comprising the bishop of Vilnius, the chancellor and marshal of the land, and the palatines and castellans of Vilnius and Trakai, whose membership of the council was guaranteed by Horodło. The other Catholic bishops attended rarely; they were prominent in the 1430s, but were not very active under Casimir, possibly because the miserable endowments of their dioceses meant that over forty per cent of bishops were of bourgeois origin. The council was therefore—in contrast to Poland—dominated by secular officer-holders. The tradition, established under Casimir, that the chancellorship—an office first recorded in 1429—was usually combined with that of palatine of Vilnius, and that the marshal of the land was usually palatine of Trakai meant that the inner council was even smaller than it looked.

After 1447 Jonas Goštautas, palatine of Vilnius from 1443, passed into opposition, demanding a return to the Vytautan system and angrily complaining about Polish influence but, as in Poland, Casimir gradually shaped an inner council more to his liking. In Lithuania there was a crucial difference, however: his chancellors were laymen drawn from the elite families, not ecclesiastics, which, given Casimir’s long absences after 1454, strengthened the grip of a small group of families over the system. From 1458, he had three chancellors. Mykolas Kęsgaila served from 1444 until his death in 1476; already starosta of Samogitia he was raised to the palatinate of Vilnius in 1458. His successor was Alekna Sudimantaitis, palatine of Vilnius from 1476 until his death in 1491, and chancellor from 1478. He was succeeded by the son of Radvila Astikaitis, Mikolajus Radvilaitis, marshal of the land and castellan of Trakai, who succeeded to both posts in 1491, holding them until 1509, shortly before his death in 1510; to compound the concentration of offices, he was also castellan of Trakai from 1488 to 1492. Casimir’s last two marshals Bohdan Sakovych (1480–90), palatine of Trakai 1486–90, and Petras Mantigirdaitis (1491–7), palatine of Trakai 1491–7, held the posts simultaneously, and the tradition continued with Jan Zaberezhynsky, who held both positions between 1498 and 1505, as did Mikalojus Radvila, palatine of Trakai 1505–10; marshal from 1505 to 1509.

Under Casimir’s careful and shrewd oversight, the system worked well enough, but however much he was able to shape the council, he had to exercise oversight from afar, and his long absences marked a significant watershed in its operation, as it effectively took decisions on a range of matters, including internal affairs and correspondence with foreign powers, on its own authority.⁵² It was after his death that the true breakthrough came. The narrow group of individuals who dominated the inner council were well placed to exact a price for supporting Alexander’s election in 1492. The privilege he issued in that year at last provided a proper legal framework for the council’s activities, according it significant formal powers. Henceforth the grand duke was obliged not only to seek the council’s advice but to secure its agreement on a range of matters, including the despatch of ambassadors, appointment to, and dismissal from, leading offices; the issuing of judgements in important cases; the cancellation of leases on grand ducal land; and, most significantly, over the expenditure of royal revenues. Offices within the palatinates of Vilnius and Trakai had to be filled by those proposed by the palatines.⁵³ Alexander even promised not to overrule, correct, or express his anger at councillors who opposed his views, although in a series of stipulations often overlooked, Alexander defined areas in which he was still free to exercise his prerogative, in particular with regard to his patrimonial lands.⁵⁴

The 1492 privilege was as significant for Lithuania as the Nieszawa privileges were for Poland. It introduced principles known in Polish law, including a Lithuanian version of neminem captivabimus nisi iure victum enshrined in the 1430 Jedlnia privileges, which stipulated that nobody could be imprisoned until convicted of a crime in a court of law.⁵⁵ Both sets of privileges considerably limited royal power, but whereas in Poland the Nieszawa privileges helped secure the position of the sejmiks—and therefore the ordinary szlachta—within the political system, the 1492 privileges in Lithuania had the opposite effect, entrenching the power of the new elite of the pany, and in particular the narrow group that constituted the inner council. Although meetings of the Lithuanian sejm had become regular, Lithuania was unaffected by the great changes that occurred in the Polish sejm in this period, and these general assemblies, though drawn from across the whole grand duchy, remained bodies in which the council decided and then informed the boyars.

After 1492, the council had the means of holding the grand duke to account, and ensuring that he respected laws passed and decisions made in its presence. The measures concerning international relations seem merely to have formalized what had long been practised. Control over the grand ducal treasury was a major concession, although it remained to be seen what it meant in practice. Perhaps the most significant measures were those concerning appointment to office and tenures on grand ducal land. Alexander had surrendered a considerable degree of control over the political elite: he could only remove individuals from office with their consent, or by advancing them to a more prestigious position; he had to accept the officials bequeathed to him by his father; and had to share control over the appointment of their replacements. The lords of the council now held the keys to the door of their exclusive club.

These changes shaped the course of Lithuanian politics over the next half-century. It was the council, not the sejmiks—which did not yet exist in Lithuania—or the sejm, that had secured control over grand ducal policy in a development that owed much to Casimir’s abandonment of the Vytautan system. Its restoration under Alexander was short-lived, and from 1506 the Lithuanian council was again in effective control of day-to-day government. Yet despite the triumph of this new elite of lords the ordinary boyars were not wholly excluded by the new, oligarchic arrangements cemented in 1492, and were to play an increasing political role.

During the fifteenth century the term ‘boyar’ gradually changed its meaning. The word is of Slavic and military origin: the boiarstvo was literally composed of those who fought, and in Kievan Rus' had denoted the greatest landowners at the apex of the social system. After 1387 it gradually lost its primarily military connotations. By the early fifteenth century, a distinction began to be made between ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’—known in the Ruthenian lands as ‘younger’—boyars; with the emergence of the new class of lords as a politically dominant and increasingly wealthy elite, the term ‘boyar’ was used to refer to the mass of the ordinary nobility, who continued to serve in a military capacity when called upon. Other terms were used for the elite as a whole: shliakhta, a borrowing from the Polish; nobiles in Latin, or zemianin, another term that showed clear Polish influence, which was derived from the Slavonic term for land, and marked the development of an elite more firmly based on the ownership and transition of landed property.⁵⁶

It was by no means easy to distinguish just who belonged to the wider boiarstvo. The 1387 privileges were issued to Lithuanian boyars who converted to Catholicism, but Horodło merely stirred mud into the water with its designation of an elite encompassed by the adoption, which did nothing to resolve the question of who, precisely, enjoyed the privileges granted since 1387. The extension of most—if not all—privileges to the Ruthenian boyars and to the annexed territories in the 1430s, and in Casimir’s general privilege of 1447 clarified little: as Liubavskii observes, every grand duke ritually confirmed the Horodło privilege without offering any suggestion as to who was to be considered a member of the shliakhta, or who was to benefit from these generous privileges, which created a strong incentive for individuals to claim noble status.⁵⁷

The problem was that the privileges granted between 1387 and 1434 introduced a distinction between the boyars and the broader class of freemen that was difficult to establish on the ground, especially in areas where there were substantial settlements of military servitors, such as Samogitia or the Kaunas district, which had been in the front line of the war against the Order. While wealthier boyars beyond the Horodło 47 could and did sustain a lifestyle little different from the new elite of lords, and marry into princely and lordly families, it was different at the other end of the scale, where many boyar landholdings were little different from peasant farms, and boyars and their families often lacked dependent peasants and worked the land themselves.⁵⁸ Wealthier freemen and peasants could and did percolate into the lower echelons of the boiarstvo; this process was aided by the existence of artisans and groups among the upper peasantry with various obligations of a broadly military nature that blurred the dividing-line between them and the lower boyars. These groups were often freed from other obligations, saw themselves as freemen, and resisted the imposition of any measures tying them to the land or suggesting their subservient status. They were hard to distinguish from such groups as the putnie boyars, who undertook various forms of service on the roads, keeping them in repair and assisting grand ducal envoys and servants passing along them. Governors and starostas sometimes issued formal attestations of the noble status of such individuals, with the sources using the striking phrase ‘raising a boyar into nobility’ (возведенія в шляхецво бояръ), an indication of how the term gradually lost its cachet after 1413. By 1500 ‘boiarstvo’ and ‘shliakhta’ were not necessarily synonyms and there was a substantial group of individuals whose status was legally unclear. Many boyar families, subject to the pressures of subdivision, saw their economic position decline. Struggling to maintain their service obligations, they had to start rendering the dues from which the nobility was now exempt; others obtained peasant land, and had to meet the obligations and dues upon it, while seeking to maintain their status.⁵⁹

Most of the petty boyars had little if any allodial land, and therefore did not benefit from one of the most important elements of the privileges. Their small landholdings were frequently service estates, and the boyars were greatly affected by the reorganization of the sluzhba system under Vytautas. Service estates were held at the pleasure of the grand duke who could—and did—confiscate them for many reasons, the most important being the failure to provide service when called upon, There was a market for service estates, and it was not unusual for commoners to buy one in attempts to establish their position as boyars.⁶⁰ Boyar families had traditionally supplied a range of services, and it would be naïve to assume that the various privileges meant that a largely petty and illiterate nobility immediately abandoned the customs, traditions, and obligations of previous generations, especially since Vytautas took measures to mitigate the potentially disastrous impact of noble privileges upon the grand duchy’s defensive system. As the great latifundia grew in the fifteenth century, boyars could—and increasingly did—secure service tenures from lords and princes, receiving small estates in return for the obligation to turn out when required by their masters. It was these service boyars—some from princely families fallen on hard times—who swelled the retinues and military units of the magnates and wealthier princes.⁶¹

Even before the 1492 privileges handed such a measure of control over appointments to the pany, it was becoming difficult to break into the charmed circle, and there are few examples of individuals rising out of the boiarstvo to careers among the elite during the later fifteenth century.⁶² Yet the extension of privileges gave even the poorest of boyars a major incentive to retain their status and lay claim to those privileges. By 1500, cases of boyars going to law to defend their shliakhta status were common.⁶³ During the Muscovite wars the government began scrutinizing such claims, and therefore entitlement to exemption from the increasing number of exactions drawn from commoners. The council declared that individuals whose status was in doubt had to secure the testimony of two neighbours of impeccable noble status to testify that their family were ‘boyars and shliakhta through the ages’ (зъ вѣковъ бояре шляхта); these cases often hinged on such issues as whether or not their grandfathers had cut hay for the grand duke.⁶⁴ They were prepared to go to court to defend themselves against demands for services made by lords who sought to treat them as peasants, or against peasants, who accused them of falsely claiming boyar status to avoid the obligations laid upon commoners in their village.⁶⁵

With commissioners despatched into the provinces to examine whether boyars were capable of fulfilling their military obligations, the 1528 military reforms and the general musterings of the noble levy that followed provided boyars with an excellent opportunity publicly to demonstrate their status. Although the register demonstrates the substantial contingents raised by the greatest magnates, it also bears testimony to the thousands of petty boyars who turned out in person in the general musterings that took place over the following decades. Samogitian boyars were particularly well represented, even though they are all but absent from documents recording Alexander’s donations of land.⁶⁶ For generations after 1528, listings in the register detailing the family and the estate from which service was provided constituted excellent proof of the status of a boyar family’s ancestors, and therefore of its claims to a place in the shliakhta.

Thus although the fifteenth century saw a substantial economic differentiation within the nobility across the grand duchy, and a growing monopoly of political power on the part of a narrow elite at the top, at the same time a powerful sense of a wider noble estate developed and deepened, in which awareness of the legal privileges of the shliakhta played a key role. From the 1430s, if not earlier, this sense of nobility as a privileged group within the grand duchy strengthened in the annexed Ruthenian territories. Apart from the religious differences, there were few cultural barriers to greater integration at the highest level of the nobility. Language was no obstacle as Ruthenian spread steadily across the ethnic Lithuanian territories as the language of law and of written communication. The policy instigated by Jagiełło and Vytautas of granting land to Lithuanian Catholic magnates in Ruthenian lands—at first in the Ruthenian areas of Lithuania proper, and increasingly across the grand duchy—helped bring the elites together, as did intermarriage. This was not a colonial operation in which ‘Ruthenian’ lands were granted to Lithuanians; it worked the other way as well, particularly during the Muscovite wars, when many loyal Ruthenian nobles were granted lands in Lithuania proper; while most grants were made in substantially Ruthenian areas such as Black Ruthenia, some were made in Lithuanian areas and even in Samogitia, where Ivan Sapieha and Timofei Ivanovych Kapusta received estates.⁶⁷

1 Gudavičius, Lietuvos istorija, i, 383; Henryk Łowmiański, Zaludnienie państwa litewskiego w wieku XVI (Poznań, 1998), 210, 221–2. Niendorf, citing Gudavičius, suggests an area of 500,000–520,000 km2 following the losses to Muscovy, although this is not the figure the latter gives, substantially exaggerating the extent of the losses: Niendorf, Großfürstentum, 24.

2 Wolff, Kniaziowie, 20; Kamieniecki, Społeczeństwo, 23, 55, 56.

3 Яковенко, Шляхта, 109; Любавский, Сеймъ, 90; Wolff, Kniaziowie, xix.

4 Михаил Кром, Меж Русью и Литвой, 2nd edn (Moscow, 2010), 130.

5 Korczak, Monarchia, 60; Кром, Меж Русью, 130; Яковенко, Шляхта, 90–1.

6 Kamieniecki, Społeczeństwo, 51, 52.

7 Русина, Україна, 123; Wolff, Kniaziowie, 95–6, 327.

8 Грушевський, Історія, iv, 199, 204, 216, 234–5; Русина, Україна, 123. Magocsi—who gives the wrong date for Vytautas’s death—mistakenly suggests that all the former Ruthenian principalities were restored ‘for a time’ in 1440: Paul Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (Toronto, 1996), 77–8, 133–4.

9 The claim is made in Wolff, Kniaziowie, 328, and repeated in the entry on Olelko in the Polish biographical dictionary. Wolff cites Stryjkowski’s sixteenth-century chronicle in support, but Stryjkowski, though he lists Švitrigaila and Žygimantas’s son Mykolas as candidates, does not actually mention Olelko: Maciej Stryjkowski, O początkach, wywodach, dzielnościach, sprawach rycerskich i domowych sławetnego narodu litewskiego, żemojdzkiego i ruskiego, ed. Julia Radziszewska (Warsaw, 1978), 422. For Wolff’s misreading of the sources for Olelko’s life, see Грушевський, Історія, iv, 234, n. 3.

10 Русина, Україна, 127–8; Грушевський, Історія, iv, 247. Semën’s name was again put forward in 1461: Грушевський, Історія, iv, 249.

11 Русина, Україна, 128; Korczak, Monarchia, 53.

12 Kamieniecki, Społeczeństwo, 20.

13 Яковенко, Шляхта, 105; Pietkiewicz, Wielkie księstwo, 103; Wolff, Kniaziowie, 330; Łowmiański, Poliytka, 232.

14 Wolff, Kniaziowie, xix–xx; Кром, Меж Русью, 121–2.

15 Korczak, Monarchia, 57; Грушевський, Історія, iv, 268.

16 Jablonowski, Westrußland, 71.

17 Hrushevsky, History, vi, 4–6.

18 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 426–7.

19 Anna Krupska, ‘Wsprawie genezy tzw. spisku książąt litewskich w 1480–1481 roku. Przyczynek do dziejów walki o “dominium Russiae”’, RH, 48 (1982), 120–46; Кром, МежРусью, 67–8; Halecki, Dzieje, i, 429.

20 Грушевський, Історія, iv, 268–73. Hrushevsky makes much of a 1567 letter of Belsky’s descendant Ivan to Khodkevych’s descendant Jan Chodkiewicz, in which Ivan accuses Khodkevych of betraying Mykhailo, that says more about the 1560s than it does about the 1480s.

21 Pietkiewicz, Wielkie księstwo, 107–8; Кром, Меж Русью, 120–1; Яковенко, Шляхта, 65–6.

22 Backus misunderstands them, arguing that their limited nature was a motive for the flight of border princes into Muscovite service: Oswald Backus, Motives of West Russian Nobles in Deserting Lithuania for Moscow 1377–1514 (Lawrence, KS, 1957), 18–23; see Pietkiewicz, Wielkie księstwo, 107–8.

23 Кром, Меж Русью, 58–9, 61–4; Pietkiewicz, Wielkie księstwo, 94–5.

24 Korczak, Monarchia, 55–6.

25 Rimvydas Petrauskas, ‘Vytauto laikų didikų kilmė’, Lituanistica, 1/2 (41/42) (2000), 16–31; Łowmiański, Studia, 367–8, 386–403. For an English overview of Petrauskas’s important arguments, see: Rimvydas Petrauskas ‘The Lithuanian nobility in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Composition and structure’, LHS, 7 (2002), 1–22.

26 Łowmiański, Studia, 148; Gudavičius, ‘Baltų alodo pavbeldėjimas’, 100–11.

27 Łowmiański, Studia, 236, 239.

28 Łowmiański, Studia, 191–210.

29 Petrauskas, Diduomenė, 103–25; Rimvydas Petrauskas, ‘XV amžiaus Lietuvos bajorijos struktūra: giminės problema’, in Alfredas Bumblauskas and Rimvydas Petrauskas (eds), Tarp istorijos (Vilnius, 1999), 123–58.

30 Petrauskas, Diduomenė, 49–50; Banionis, ‘Lietuvos bajorai’, 189–206.

31 Jablonowski, Westrußland, 37; AU, no. 49, 53, 54; no. 50, 58. For Ruthenian usage of the term, see the decrees by Fëdor Lubartovych of 1421, 1428, and 1430: AZR, i, no. 30, 42–4, and the decree of ‘Pan Stashek of Davydov’ of 21 January 1421: AZR, i, no. 31, 45.

32 Jablonowski, Westrußland, 37–8.

33 ‘Казимиръ, Божею милостью король Польскій и великій князь Литовскій . . . съ паны радою нашою’: AZR, i, no. 60, 72.

34 Petrauskas, ‘Vytauto laikų’, 16–31.

35 Pietkiewicz, Kieżgajłowie i ich latyfundium do połowy XVI wieku (Poznań, 1982), 14, 19–20, 34–9, 42–5; Eugenijus Saviščevas, ‘Kęsgailų Žemaitija. Kelios pastabos apie Kęsgailų valdyma Žemaitijoje (1442–1527)’, Lituanistica, 58/2 (2004), 1–21; Rowell, ‘Rusena karas’, 5–16.

36 For a note of caution on the scale of this alienation see Pietkiewicz, Wielkie księstwo, 150–1.

37 Łowmiański, Studia, 274–81; Petrauskas, Diduomenė, 125.

38 Łowmiański, Studia, 148; Ochmański, Historia Litwy, 100–1; Литовськая Метрика: Книги публичных дел. Переписи войска Литовськая, Русская Историческая Библиотека 33 (St Petersburg, 1915).

39 Юрый Бохан, Вайсковая справа у Вялікім княстве Літоускім у другой палове XIV–канцы XVI ст. (Мінск, 2008), 306–7; Łowmiański, Zaludnienie, 17.

40 Łowmiański, Studia, 435.

41 Бохан, Вайсковая справа, 308–9; Łowmiański, Zaludnienie, 15–20; 100; Кром, Меж Русью, 124, 127.

42 Karl von Loewe, ‘Military service in early sixteenth-century Lithuania: A new interpretation and its implications’, SR, 30 (1971), 249–56; The Lithuanian Statute of 1529, tr. and ed. Karl von Loewe (Leiden, 1976), 128–39.

43 Łowmiański, Zaludnienie, 22–4; Любавский, Сеймъ, 365.

44 Łowmiański, Zaludnienie, 27–30.

45 Łowmiański, Zaludnienie, 38–45.

46 Ochmański, Historia, 124. There are minor discrepancies in the figures given by historians for the number of horse raised in 1567 in the light of research into the sources. In a more recent estimate, Ianushkevich suggests 27,597: Янушкевіч, Велікае Княства, 152.

47 Ochmański, Powstanie, 155; Любавский, Сеймъ, 355. Although the service unit was based on the Lithuanian hide, it is difficult to estimate the size of landholdings owing to the varying ways holdings of under one hide were treated: see Łowmiański, Zaludnienie, 99–101. The actual numbers of peasant households—hearths (dymy) as they were termed—may be higher: Ochmański, on whose figures these are based, uses a multiplier of two to convert service units into hearths, while Łowmiański suggests two to four hearths per unit. Iakovenko uses a multiplier of three, Łowmiański’s average, to calculate the number of hearths on the Ostrozky lands. If this multiplier is applied to the Kęsgaila and Radvila families, it produces a figure of 18,432 and 18,240 peasant households. I have, like Ochmański, opted for caution.

48 Pietkiewicz, Wielkie księstwo, 127.

49 ‘ad consilia nostra admittantur et eis intersint, dum pro bono publico tractatus celebrantur’: AU, no. 51, 67; Korczak, Litewska rada wielkoksiążęca w XV wieku (Cracow, 1998), 18.

50 AZR, i, no. 36, 48; Korczak, Rada, 20, 23–49.

51 И.П. Старостина, ‘Судебник Казимира 1468 г.’, in Древние государства на территории СССР (1988–1989) (Moscow, 1991), 279–312; Korczak, Rada, 12–15, 20–4, 32–3, 53. For the debate about the role of witnesses, see Petrauskas, Diduomenė, 57–73; Sułkowska-Kurasiowa, ‘Doradcy Władysława Jagiełły’, in SPS, ii (Warsaw, 1982) 188–220, and Klimecka’s critical remarks, ‘Czy rzeczywiście “doradcy Władysława Jagiełły”?’, in SPS, iv (Warsaw, 1990) 214–35.

52 Korczak, Rada, 21.

53 CDP, i, no. 194, 345–52.

54 ‘quecunque consilia et causas, cum dominiis consiliariis nostris determinabimus et statuemus atque concludemus, ea cum nemine alio immutare, corrigere aut deordinare debebimus. Item quando aliqua consilia et negocia, in consultacione cum dominis nostris tractanda evenerint, et ipsis dominis non placebunt, pro isto super eos commoneri non debemus’: CDP, i, no. 194, 349–50. Korczak, Rada, 52–8; Любавский, Сеймъ, 130–1; Pietkiewicz, Wielkie księstwo, 68–9.

55 CDP, i, no. 194, 346.

56 Jablonowski, Westrußland, 38–9; Яковенко, Шляхта, 61, 245.

57 Любавский, Сеймъ, 430–1; Kamieniecki, Społeczeństwo, 81.

58 Kamieniecki, Społeczeństwo, 94, 97.

59 Łowmiański, Studia, 183, 205; Любавский, Сеймъ, 431–2, 434–7.

60 Kamieniecki, Społeczeństwo, 84, 86–7, 90, 96.

61 Kamieniecki, Społeczeństwo, 93; Mirosława Malczewska, Latyfundium Radziwiłłów w XV do połowy XVI wieku (Warsaw, 1985), 62, 64; Pietkiewicz, Kieżgajłowie, 74.

62 Korczak, Monarchia, 153.

63 Любавский, Сеймъ, 436–7; Petrauskas, Diduomenė, 134.

64 Любавский, Сеймъ, 439.

65 Pietkiewicz, Wielkie księstwo, 128, 131.

66 Pietkiewicz, Wielkie księstwo, 133. For examples of petty boyars registered at one horse, see Яковенко, Шляхта, 256.

67 Pietkiewicz, Wielkie księstwo, 135.