27

Litva

The emergence of a more integrated Lithuanian-Ruthenian noble elite owed much to the practical toleration of Orthodoxy after 1434, which received its legal definition on 20 March 1499, when Alexander issued an edict confirming the rights of the Orthodox Church in response to a petition from Iozif Bolharynovych, the former Orthodox bishop of Smolensk, recently raised to the metropolitanate of Kyiv in succession to Makary, killed in a Tatar attack in 1497, requesting confirmation of the privileges of the Orthodox Church granted by Iaroslav the Wise.¹ Alexander’s edict, the first occasion on which a Lithuanian grand duke had confirmed Iaroslav’s privileges, was issued after the 1492–4 war with Muscovy, whose outcome had considerable implications for the Orthodox Church. Under the terms of the 1494 peace Alexander married Helena, daughter of Ivan III, who insisted upon a formal guarantee that she be allowed to continue in the faith of her ancestors, that she should not be harassed by attempts to convert her to Catholicism, and that an Orthodox church be built in the royal castle in Vilnius for her use, although his demand that the wedding be conducted according to the Orthodox rite was rejected. It took place on 15 February 1495 in the cathedral of St Stanisław and St Władysław, conducted by Wojciech Tabor, bishop of Vilnius (see Fig. 10). Metropolitan Makary attended but was not allowed any official role; together with a priest sent from Moscow, he muttered Orthodox prayers sotto voce.²

Helena was nineteen. Her mother was Sophia Paleologus, niece of Constantine XI, the last Byzantine emperor. She was by all accounts blessed with good looks, and the marriage was happy, although it remained childless. Helena was permitted to worship as she pleased, although she accepted Alexander’s request that Catholics be admitted to her retinue. She maintained good relations with Catholic ecclesiastics, showing a particular attachment to the Franciscans. She could not prevent the war of 1500–3 but she was an effective and tactful intermediary between her husband and her father. Although her mother had been a ward of the pope, and had been raised a Catholic in Rome, Helena’s refusal to comply with Alexander VI’s demand that she recognize the church union provoked a rift with the papacy that was not resolved by the adept diplomat Erazm Ciołek and the pro-union Orthodox magnate Ivan Sapieha, sent to Rome in 1501. She quietly demonstrated her attachment to her church by numerous donations to Orthodox monasteries, and remained in Lithuania after Alexander’s death. Although her relations with Sigismund I deteriorated following the renewal of war with Muscovy in 1512, Crummey’s contention that she was imprisoned is unfounded: Sigismund merely prevented her from returning to Muscovy.³

Fig. 10. View of Vilnius in the sixteenth century. With the kind permission of the Zamek Królewski, Warsaw.

Helena was the first Orthodox princess to sit on the grand ducal throne since Jagiełło’s mother Juliana. That she could settle so comfortably into life as grand duchess reveals much about the religious and political circumstances of Lithuanian Orthodoxy. There was no need to build an Orthodox church in Vilnius castle for there was already a flourishing Orthodox community in the city, and Helena usually worshipped at the Orthodox church of Our Immaculate Lady.⁴ Although, in deference to her father’s wishes, she refused openly to support church union, the position of Orthodox believers in Poland as well as Lithuania was crucially influenced by the legacy of the union between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches signed at the Council of Florence on 6 July 1439 and ceremonially proclaimed by Metropolitan Isidore of Kyiv and All Rus' in his cathedral of St Sophia in Kyiv on 5 February 1441. The learned Greek-born Isidore had been appointed metropolitan in 1436 by Joseph II, the pro-union patriarch of Constantinople, in order to secure the participation of the eastern Slavic church in the planned council to discuss a union that was a desperate bid for help by the Greek church as the Ottomans swept up what was left of the once glorious Byzantine empire and closed in on Constantinople. He was strongly committed to union, willing to accept the Latin interpretation of many of the theological points at issue—including the key controversy over the procession of the Holy Ghost—in order to secure mutual acknowledgement of the sacraments of each church, and the retention of the Orthodox rite.⁵

Isidore arrived in Moscow in April 1437 to solicit support for the union. He travelled to Ferrara, where Eugene IV, who had fled the Council of Basle, had established a rival, papal council that subsequently moved to Florence. Isidore was accompanied by a large entourage of Muscovite clergy, including representatives from Tver, and Avraam, bishop of Suzdal. The Muscovites took an active part in the union discussions, and Isidore and Avraam both signed the union agreement. When Isidore returned to Moscow in March 1441, however, the union was summarily dismissed by Vasilii II, and he was imprisoned, although in September he was allowed to escape after refusing to repudiate the union.

The rejection of the union by the Muscovite church and the abject failure of the Catholic powers to give effective help to Constantinople have helped create a general impression that the Florence union was a complete failure. Viewed from Poland-Lithuania, however, the picture is rather different. For the Florence union created the framework—albeit a loose one—that allowed the Lithuanian Orthodox church and Orthodox society to survive and, in its own modest way, to flourish over the next century or so. This was despite the fact that there was almost no Polish or Lithuanian representation in Florence apart from envoys of the Armenian bishop of Lwów, who signed a separate treaty of union for the Armenian church on 22 November 1439.⁶ The conciliarist Polish church broadly supported the Basle council, and the Polish delegates did not follow Eugene to Ferrara and Florence. After the signing of the union, however, Isidore travelled through Poland and Lithuania on his way back to Moscow, energetically promoting the union. Although Oleśnicki, with whom Isidore held discussions, was a supporter of the Council of Basle, he broadly favoured union, and, along with Władysław III, welcomed Isidore warmly enough, allowing him to celebrate mass in Cracow cathedral according to the eastern rite. After Władysław’s election to the Hungarian throne, the preparations for his Ottoman campaigns created a favourable political climate for union, especially since the Orthodox church in Moldavia and Wallachia had also signed the union, and on 22 March 1443 Władysław issued a charter guaranteeing the rights and liberties of the Ruthenian church.

For the Jagiellons, church union remained the obvious solution to the grand duchy’s religious divide. Yet they faced considerable opposition to the idea not from the Orthodox, but from within the Catholic Church. Oleśnicki might have been sympathetic, but in Lithuania, Isidore received a much chillier reception from Motiejus, bishop of Vilnius, a strong supporter of the Basle council, who bluntly refused to recognize the union, Eugene IV, or his representative. This was a foretaste of what was to come: the lack of enthusiasm for union among the Catholic hierarchy was to blight relations between the two churches for generations. The reception from Orthodox bishops, however, was much more positive. As Isidore travelled round Orthodox dioceses, he secured broad support for union.⁷

Despite the repudiation of the Florence union by patriarch Simeon I of Constantinople in 1484, the Orthodox Church in both Poland and Lithuania survived and, despite many problems and difficulties, even flourished down to the mid sixteenth century. While the suggestion that throughout this period theological and theoretical unity between the Ruthenian Orthodox church and Rome survived is unconvincing, unionist sentiment was common among many of the educated hierarchy of the Ruthenian Orthodox church, and informed the approach of the Jagiellons.⁸

The Florence fallout exposed the problems created by the continued jurisdiction of the Moscow-based metropolitan over the Orthodox Church in the grand duchy. After Isidore’s escape from Moscow in 1448, Vasilii II raised Jonah, bishop of Riazan, to the metropolitanate; Isidore, now a cardinal, ended his days in exile as the Latin patriarch of Constantinople between 1459 and 1463. Although Casimir had to recognize Jonah’s authority over the Orthodox Church in the grand duchy in the peace treaty he signed with Muscovy in 1449, a metropolitan so firmly under Moscow’s control was difficult to tolerate. In 1458, in response to Casimir’s urgings, Calixtus III agreed to divide the province of Rus' into two. He appointed Gregory, abbot of the Basilian monastery of St Demetrius in Constantinople, a close associate of Isidore, as metropolitan of Kyiv. Gregory was consecrated by the patriarch of Constantinople, Gregory Mammas, then in exile in Rome, and his appointment was confirmed after Calixtus’s death by Pius II in 1459. Of the nine Orthodox bishops in the Polish-Lithuanian lands, only two—Briansk and Chernihiv—rejected Gregory, fleeing to Moscow. They were swiftly replaced. The division was permanent.⁹

Although jurisdictional wrangles and battles over titles between the rival metropolitans of Kyiv and All Rus' in Lithuania and Moscow continued after 1458, and although the reestablishment of a patriarch of Constantinople—who claimed jurisdiction over both—in Constantinople under Ottoman scrutiny helped dissipate the pro-union sentiment of the Greek church after 1453, the division of the metropolitanate at last allowed the Ruthenian Orthodox church in Poland-Lithuania to establish its own place within the Jagiellonian political and social system. That it was able to do so, and that the Orthodox elites of Lithuania, despite the frequently expressed view that they were discriminated against and were treated as second-class citizens, were broadly content with their lot was demonstrated by their reaction to the long cycle of wars against Muscovy, when the grand duchy proved rather more resilient and its Orthodox, Ruthenian elites less responsive to the blandishments of Moscow than has often been allowed by the nationalist school of Russian history, which glorified Ivan III and Vasilii III and argued teleologically that the absorption of the Ruthenian lands into Russia was a historical inevitability. This version of history was publicized to the English-speaking world by Backus in a study of defections by princes from Lithuania to Muscovy from 1386 until 1569.¹⁰ Backus uses the nineteenth-century Russian nationalist concept of ‘West Russia’ for the grand duchy’s Ruthenian lands, an indication that his study is written firmly within the imperialist Russian historical tradition, whose biases he largely adopts. As Halecki observes with commendable restraint, Backus greatly exaggerates the significance of these ‘desertions’.¹¹

If such a priori nationalist assumptions are laid aside, the evidence points in a different direction. Despite the loss of about a third of the grand duchy’s territory by 1514, and despite the defection of many border princes to Moscow in the first two wars, the overwhelming majority of the grand duchy’s Orthodox elites remained loyal. Much of the territory lost was only nominally under Lithuanian authority, largely comprising the tiny appanages of the ever-increasing number of border princes in the vast, sparsely populated marchlands, who had accepted Gediminid and Jagiellon overlordship in the long period of Muscovite weakness before 1462, and whose lands had been only loosely integrated into Lithuania’s governing structures. Their loyalties were placed under serious pressure in the 1480s through Ivan’s policy of border raiding. Following the failure of the Vilnius government to protect them, individual princes began exercising their customary right to leave the service of one lord and join another. There was no mass defection. Before the coming of war in 1492, all defections from among the Upper Oka princes were from the Novosilskii clan—the families of Odoevskii, Vorotynskii, and Belevskii. Casimir protested to Ivan about his acceptance of their service but he did not challenge their right to choose their lord, as the grand dukes of Lithuania had long benefited from movement in the opposite direction: several supporters of Vasilii II fled to Vilnius after his blinding, and were granted hereditary estates. The many defections from Muscovy to Lithuania which took place in the 1430s and 1440s, the 1530s, and the 1560s have often been downplayed or ignored, except for Kurbskii’s high-profile flight in 1564. As Rusyna drily observes, westward flights are rarely interpreted as evidence of the political pull of Lithuania by most historians of Russia.¹²

Decisions to accept Muscovite rule depended on a range of factors, often reflecting family disputes over the subdivision of lands—as in Odoev in 1492, where the town was divided between the sons of Semën and Ivan Odoevskii, with one half loyal to Lithuania and the other already recognizing Muscovite rule—or because of Alexander’s failure to honour his obligation to defend individual princes and their estates.¹³ Many waited long before accepting Muscovite rule, and a considerable number of princes and boyars refused, abandoning their estates. They were granted land in other parts of Lithuania in compensation: one such was Ivan Sapieha, who made his career at Helena’s court and then in the central administration, surrendering his family estates near Smolensk as the price of loyalty. The migration was so significant that Alexander and Sigismund struggled to find enough land to distribute to princes and boyars who fled westward rather than accept Muscovite rule.¹⁴

Lithuania’s Orthodox hierarchy remained resolutely opposed to the claims of the Muscovite metropolitan, and the outcome of the wars was decided by the conspicuous failure of Ivan and Vasilii to win over the majority of the grand duchy’s Orthodox elites.¹⁵ After the easy initial triumphs, in the long war between 1512 and 1522, the only major Muscovite success—admittedly a substantial one—was the capture of Smolensk, which was a military rather than a political triumph. In the opportunistic revanchist wars of 1533–7, launched by Sigismund when Vasilii was succeeded by his three-year-old son Ivan IV (1533–84), Lithuania regained some of the lost territories, including Homel, although it failed to recapture Smolensk.

The important question, therefore, is not why some Ruthenian Orthodox princes accepted Muscovite overlordship, but why the vast majority of Orthodox nobles did not: all but a handful of defectors came from the marchlands. Many Orthodox nobles from other provinces demonstrated their loyalty by fighting for Lithuania.¹⁶ There was little support for the rebellion of Mykhailo Hlynsky (Glinskii) in 1508, who was less the representative of the Ruthenian people as which he has sometimes been presented—he came from a family of Tatar origin and was a Catholic—and more the disappointed courtier, Alexander’s marshal of the court, who lost his position as favourite when Alexander died and was replaced by Sigismund. Although Hlynsky did much to ensure Sigismund’s smooth succession in Lithuania, his rivals—Lithuanian and Ruthenian—were determined to exclude him from the position he had enjoyed under Alexander. In 1508, when, at the climax of a long and bitter dispute, he murdered his main rival Jan Zaberezhynsky, who had spread the false rumour that Hlynsky was plotting to seize the throne for himself, he was supported by almost nobody apart from his own clientele; like Belsky in 1481, his flight to Moscow was the result of his political failure.¹⁷

Even when several princes, including Kostiantyn Ostrozky, were captured at the disastrous battle of the Vedrosh river (14 July 1500), most resisted Ivan’s blandishments. Ostrozky did swear loyalty to Muscovy in October 1506, three years after Ivan refused to release him under the terms of the 1503 peace, and even led Muscovite troops against the Tatars, but once free from close confinement he escaped, returning to Vilnius by September 1507, where he was appointed hetman, leading the Lithuanian army that crushed the Muscovites at the battle of Orsha (8 September 1514).¹⁸

The royal response to the Muscovite wars was to extend the privileges of the Orthodox Church. Alexander’s 1499 edict affirmed various church immunities, specifically upholding the rights of the church courts and barring attempts by government and local officials from bringing suits against the church in the secular courts. Where Orthodox churches had long existed on estates or in starosties held by Catholics, they were not to be converted into Catholic churches or demolished without the permission of the metropolitan or the local Orthodox bishop.¹⁹ While these stipulations reveal some of the petty discrimination experienced by the Orthodox Church at the hands of Catholic officials and landowners, the position of Orthodoxy was not as bad as is alleged by those who point to a supposed ban on the construction of new Orthodox churches in the grand duchy instituted by Jagiełło, and the ban on Catholic-Orthodox marriages in his privilege for the Lithuanian Catholic church. Neither Jagiełło or any of his successors banned the construction of new Orthodox churches, although a ban on the building of brick or stone Orthodox churches was contained in a 1420 decree on schismatics issued by the synod of the province of Gniezno, which included the Lithuanian bishoprics of Vilnius and Medininkai. Petras of Kustynės, bishop of Vilnius, was present at the synod and it can be assumed that he approved of the measure. Its impact, however, is open to question. It applied only to the archbishopric of Gniezno, which included Lithuania proper and Samogitia, but not to the annexed Ruthenian provinces, where the bulk of the Orthodox population lived, or to the Ruthenian provinces within the kingdom of Poland, which were part of the archdiocese of Lwów. The specification that it applied to churches built of brick or stone indicates that it was intended to control church construction in large towns and cities: the vast majority of Orthodox churches in the countryside and small towns were wooden.²⁰ In the annexed Ruthenian territories Orthodox nobles were perfectly free, in accordance with local custom and privileges, to build Orthodox churches. By Sigismund I’s reign, breaches of this statute were flagrant: Kostiantyn Ostrozky, with Sigismund’s permission, began building the magnificent church of the Mother of God in Vilnius in 1511; after his spectacular victory at Orsha he was given permission to build two further Orthodox churches in the city, stone-built from the foundations up, dedicated to the Holy Trinity and to St Nicholas.²¹

It was a similar story with regard to the ban on Orthodox-Catholic marriages. This measure sought to protect the many Lithuanian communities scattered across Lithuania proper, where intermarriage between pagan Lithuanians and Orthodox Ruthenians had taken place in pagan times.²² Even in Lithuania proper the Catholic Church, outside the core Lithuanian territory of Aukštaitija, was not particularly strong, while in Samogitia, its weakness meant that paganism proved difficult to root out entirely. Elsewhere, despite the generous early foundations by Jagiełło and Vytautas, the Catholic church remained poorly endowed, with a sparse network of parishes and a mere five bishoprics covering the whole grand duchy, of which the see of Smolensk was of little consequence and was occupied by Muscovy in 1514. The Catholic church struggled to establish more than a token presence even in some of the Ruthenian territories of Lithuania proper, let alone in the annexed lands where—outside the main cities—it was barely present at all until deep into the sixteenth century. It was certainly not powerful enough to enforce laws against intermarriage or church building, or to mount any serious challenge to Orthodox domination.

The Orthodox were therefore left largely undisturbed to worship as they wished, while the increasing social and political integration at the apex of noble society gradually extended to the council and other political institutions. Although the Horodło ban on the most important offices remained in force, Orthodox Ruthenians were by no means excluded from the wider grand ducal council after the 1430s. Orthodox Ruthenians of princely and non-princely backgrounds penetrated the new office-holding elite. As early as the reign of Vytautas, Prince Vasyl Krasny Ostrozky and Prince Mykhailo Holshansky—of Lithuanian descent, but from a family that had embraced Orthodoxy—had been appointed governors of Vitsebsk, and Kyiv respectively. Ruthenians were appointed in substantial numbers to Švitrigaila’s council, but even the reaction after his fall did not lead to wholesale exclusion, and numbers rose steadily during Casimir’s reign. Some Ruthenians, such as Prince Semën Pronsky, did convert to Catholicism, but this was by no means necessary to secure office, though most of those favoured were at least nominal supporters of church union. Over the century, the percentage of Orthodox Ruthenians among the elite of princes and lords that Suchocki terms the political nation grew from two families out of fifty-nine (3.4 per cent) between 1387 and 1413, to eleven out of fifty-six (19.6 per cent) between 1413 and 1447, to twenty out of fifty-four (37 per cent) by 1492; of the sixty individuals designated ‘councillor’ in the sources—excluding the reign of Švitrigaila—listed by Korczak for the fifteenth century, seven (10.6 per cent) were Orthodox Ruthenians: Khodko Iurevych, governor of Polatsk; his son Ivan Khodkovych († 1483), starosta of Lutsk and successively governor of Lida, Minsk, and Kyiv; Ivashko Hoitsevych, governor of Navahrudak until his death after April 1456; Ivan Ilnych, governor of Vitsebsk; Ivashko Ivanovych Iursha, governor of Bratslav, starosta of Lutsk, and governor of Kyiv; Prince Olelko Volodymyrovych, duke of Kyiv; and Soltan Aleksandrovych, governor of Slonim and then Navahrudak. Two of these—Ivashko Iursha (1488–9) and Soltan Aleksandrovych (1482–93) held the office of marshal hospodarski, a senior court official, with the latter also serving as court treasurer.²³

Evidence that old barriers were crumbling came in 1511, when Sigismund I, in breach of Horodło, appointed Ostrozky to the position of castellan of Vilnius in recognition of his military and political services; in 1522, he was elevated to the palatinate of Trakai in succession to Albertas Goštautas. Ostrozky was one of the wealthiest landowners in the grand duchy. The 1528 register estimated his contribution to the noble levy at 426 cavalrymen: a total of 3,408 service units, or some 6,816 hearths.²⁴ That placed him fifth in the table, behind only the Kęsgailas, the Radvilas, Albertas Goštautas, and Iury Olelkovych, duke of Slutsk and son of Olelko Volodymyrovych, who was assessed marginally ahead of Ostrozky at 433 cavalrymen. The presence of Orthodox Ruthenians on the council from the 1430s, and the appointment of Ostrozky as hetman, castellan of Vilnius and then palatine of Trakai indicate that by the early sixteenth century a political nation was emerging in the grand duchy that transcended its composite nature, although, as the reaction to Ostrozky’s appointment to the palatinate of Trakai was to show, there were distinct limits to that integration.²⁵ Given the problems of using the term ‘nation’ in this context, it might be better to term it a Lithuanian community of the realm: during the long cycle of wars between 1492 and 1537 the whole grand duchy was regularly referred to as Litva—the Ruthenian for Lithuania—by both its Orthodox Ruthenian subjects and their Orthodox Muscovite enemies.

As in Poland, this was a political community defined by the privileges on which it was based, with a developing idea of citizenship and a conception of politics that owed much to the Polish example. For Polish cultural influence in the grand duchy had been strong over the century and a half since Krewo. Much of that influence was channelled through the Catholic church, many of whose clergy were Poles, either from Poland itself, or, increasingly, Poles settled in the grand duchy: of 123 known canons of Vilnius cathedral down to the mid sixteenth century, only just over half (66) were Lithuanians; most of the non-Lithuanians were of Polish background.²⁶

The substantial involvement of Poles in the Lithuanian Catholic church ensured that Polish influences spread through the new educational institutions established after 1387. A cathedral school was founded in Vilnius in 1397 and parish schools were established by Vytautas in Trakai in 1409. The Franciscans opened a convent school in Vilnius in 1426, and several schools were founded in Samogitia in the first third of the century. By 1550 there were 11 schools in the Samogitian diocese and 85 in the Vilnius diocese.²⁷ There were no institutions of higher education in Lithuania, and many wealthy nobles from the grand duchy attended Cracow University. In 1409 a bursary was established by Jan Isner, professor of theology, to enable students from across the grand duchy to study in Cracow. Only five attended before 1430, but between that year and 1560, 366 Lithuanian students matriculated. Although some were commoners, they were overwhelmingly from the elite of lords and princes that dominated Lithuanian politics. The majority—100—came from Vilnius, with 34 from Kaunas and 11 from Trakai. Ruthenians also attended: fifty came from Podlasie and the Ruthenian lands. Vytautas’s nephew Jan Waydut (Jonas Vaidutis), a canon of Cracow, was the second rector of the refounded university in 1402; the first Lithuanian graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1410, and in the 1420s and early 1430s Hermanas Giedraitis, who took his bachelor and master’s degrees in Cracow, taught at the university. In 1488 Prince Andrius Svyriškis (BA 1478, MA 1488) lectured on Aristotle, while Andrius Gaškavičius, bishop of Vilnius (1481–91) was awarded his doctorate in Cracow, where many Vilnius canons also studied.²⁸

These developments encouraged the gradual spread of the Polish language among the Lithuanian Catholic clergy, and in society more generally. In 1528 the Vilnius diocese decreed that morals, the basis of the faith, the gospels, and the letters of St Paul should be taught in both Polish and Lithuanian. Schools also taught Ruthenian and occasionally German, but Polish was increasingly dominant: its closeness to Ruthenian meant that there were few barriers to its adoption by members of the Lithuanian elite.²⁹ Polish, with its sophisticated political vocabulary, strongly influenced by Latin and western European ideas, was a more flexible vehicle for the expression of the new concepts and political forms that spread and developed in the grand duchy after 1387, while Ruthenian suffered from the position of Church Slavonic as a liturgical language. In the relatively few Orthodox schools, the clergy taught Church Slavonic, a formal, ecclesiastical language, rather than literary Ruthenian.³⁰ Ruthenian was the language of the law, and of the chronicles, which showed more openness to vernacular forms, but Polish had a distinct educational advantage.

Vytautas’s reign brought a great deal more activity in Ruthenian—far more legal documents survive for his reign than for earlier periods—and the formation of a chancery that issued a steadily increasing flood of documents in Ruthenian was important for the establishment of the distinct western Ruthenian dialects from which modern Belarusian and Ukrainian emerged. It could not compete with Polish as a language of high culture, however, during the great flowering of vernacular literature that began as Renaissance influences coursed powerfully through Poland from the late fifteenth century. By 1550 it was far easier, as Martel observes, making an analogy with the rapid spread of French across Europe after 1700, for Lithuanians and Ruthenians to adopt a living literary language than to scrabble around constructing their own from myriad local dialects. Thus not only did Polish spread among the elites, but hundreds of Polish loan words—of which shliakhta was but one—entered Ruthenian.³¹ The Lithuanians themselves had no particular attachment to Ruthenian. Lithuanian itself only became a written language in the later sixteenth century—with the main impetus coming from Protestant Königsberg rather than Lithuania itself—and was in no position to compete with Polish. There were, therefore, few barriers to the increasingly rapid spread of Polish as the language of educated discourse. Although its triumph among ordinary nobles was to come in the century after 1569, its progress among the magnate elite was rapid after 1500.

The church was by no means the only institution that exposed the grand duchy’s elites to Polish ideas and Polish institutions. Of great importance was the royal or grand ducal court, largely based in Cracow. While there were grand ducal courts under Vytautas, Švitrigaila, Žygimantas, Alexander, and during Casimir’s rule in Vilnius between 1440 and 1447, no separate Lithuanian court was maintained on a permanent basis between 1447 and 1492, or after 1496, except for the period 1544 to 1548, when Sigismund August ruled in Vilnius as grand duke during the last four years of his father’s reign. These courts, as royal households and centres of royal power, drew individuals from across the Jagiellonian lands, and acted as important centres for cultural exchange.

The Polish presence at the grand ducal court was always significant. From the outset, several of the secretaries employed by Vytautas in his embryonic chancery were Poles, and the union opened the way for Poles to elbow Germans aside as Latin secretaries, just as Polish religious orders replaced their German counterparts after 1387.³² The Polish influence should not be overstressed. When Vytautas, as part of his lifelong campaign to display his power and status, refashioned his court, he looked not just to Poland for inspiration, but to the many other foreigners, from Bohemia, the German lands—especially Prussia—and in particular from the Silesian and Mazovian duchies, who visited or took up residence at his court.³³ Yet the Polish influence was undoubtedly strong. The Mazovians were Polish-speakers and both they and the Silesians came from areas strongly linked to Poland and its political model. Among the Poles mentioned in the sources as courtiers or familiars of Vytautas were Stanisław Ciołek, who took temporary refuge with Vytautas after writing a sharp satire on Jagiełło’s marriage to Elizabeth Granowska, until he returned to favour to become vice-chancellor of Poland in 1423 after her death. Another prominent individual was Jan of Czyżów, later palatine and castellan of Cracow, who served Vytautas between 1426 and 1430.³⁴

The Lithuanian court had traditionally been run by the hospodarski marshals, several of whom operated at any one time. Alongside them, Vytautas established new court offices on the Polish model, including master of the horse (first mentioned in 1398), cupbearer (1409), kitchen-master (1409), deputy cupbearer (1410), standard-bearer (1413), chamberlain (1428), and treasurer (1429).³⁵ These offices were not always filled, and it was not until Casimir’s reign that a hierarchy began to appear, including several new offices: steward (1447), deputy steward (1475), and carver (1481), and it was not until the sixteenth century that they were permanently filled.³⁶

Even if Lithuanian court offices were only sporadically filled, their holders enjoyed prestige, while only having to perform their duties on Casimir’s irregular visits to the grand duchy, and the ceremonial regalia associated with their offices for the most part lay tarnishing in the treasury.³⁷ The Cracow court was largely run by Poles; when Casimir and his sons travelled to Lithuania, much of it came with them. The court was not, however, a purely Polish institution. Throughout the Jagiellonian period, the Cracow court drew Lithuanians to it in various capacities, and proved an important arena in which members of the Lithaunian elite came into contact with Polish culture, Polish institutions, Polish political ideas, and—most significantly—the Polish language. For the language of the royal court after 1447 was increasingly Polish. Casimir was the last grand duke to know Lithuanian, and while his grandson, Sigismund August spoke excellent Ruthenian, he corresponded with the Lithuanian elite in Polish since—as he confessed to Mikołaj Radziwiłł Rudy in 1549—he did not know the Cyrillic alphabet.³⁸ Latin was not an option: as Radziwiłł admitted he himself ‘hardly knew est est, non non’.³⁹ Power in the union now spoke Polish and it was important that the Lithuanian elite understood.

The Lithuanian presence at the royal court was considerable. One of the conditions upon which Casimir insisted in 1447 was that he would have the right to have Lithuanians at his court, and the court accounts reveal many Lithuanian and Ruthenian names, indicating that a considerable number of court personnel and servants were from the grand duchy. Many were of lowly status, mostly coachmen, falconers, huntsmen, and stablemen—as had been the case under Jagiełło—and there were Lithuanians and Lithuanian Tatars in the royal guard. Yet Lithuanian magnates and politicians visited the court, and sent their children to Cracow to learn the ways of the union state, and to learn Polish; many served as gentlemen of the bedchamber, including Alekna Sudimantaitis, Bohdan Sakovych, Jonas Kučukaitis, Stanislovas Kostevičius, Levko Bohovitynovych, and Jonas Radvila, son of Mikalojus Radvilaitis. Several young nobles from Casimir’s Lithuanian entourage, including Sudimantaitis, were captured by the Order at Konitz in 1454.⁴⁰ The Lithuanian presence in Cracow in the early years of Casimir’s reign was so substantial that Oleśnicki, in his public attack on Casimir in Cracow in June 1452, condemned Lithuanian courtiers for enriching themselves, mawkishly claiming that the king was deaf to the pleas of Polish widows and orphans. He complained that all gentlemen of the bedchamber were Lithuanians, who controlled access to the king and his family, excluding Poles and favouring their own countrymen.⁴¹

Oleśnicki’s bilious outpourings parallel the fuss in London over the Scots brought south by James I after 1603. Yet for all the inevitable conflicts, royal courts provided an ideal environment for networking and establishing political and social alliances in union states, while their rituals and ceremonials allowed for the defusing of conflict through the establishment of norms of display for all parts of the composite realms. This unifying function was displayed by the Lithuanian court, for all its intermittent existence after 1447. The registers of payments to courtiers drawn up during Casimir’s stays in Lithuania in 1483 and 1488 contain the names of almost all the young men who were later to dominate Lithuanian politics, from the Radvila, Zaberezhynsky, Mantautaitis, Hlebovych, Sakovych, Davaina, and Nemirych families, alongside the Ruthenian princely families of Zaslavsky and Hlynsky. Courtiers were drawn from across the grand duchy and the whole spectrum of the nobility. Among the 350 Lithuanians and Ruthenians in the accounts there were 33 individuals from Smolensk and 8 from Vitsebsk. Young magnates brought their own retinues to court, and Casimir’s court comprised some 1,000 individuals during his visits to Lithuania, though the figures for Sigismund’s 1509 visit were lower.⁴²

Presence or service at court was the normal route to royal favour. The most spectacular case was that of Alekna Sudimantaitis, a favourite from Casimir’s days in Vilnius, who, after service as deputy cupbearer, rose fromhumble boyar origins to be governor of Polatsk (1466–1476/7), palatine of Vilnius (1477–91) and chancellor (1478–91). After 1447, the newly wealthy Lithuanian magnate families turned out with magnificent retinues to major court occasions; even Długosz was impressed. At the wedding of Casimir’s daughter Jadwiga to Georg von Wittelsbach in Landshut in 1475, Jadwiga’s entourage consisted of Polish nobles dressed in white and Lithuanian nobles dressed in red in a vivid visual tableau of union that is still celebrated annually by the city.⁴³

The wealth and ostentation of the leading Lithuanian and Ruthenian magnates was in stark contrast to the hordes of impoverished Scottish lairds who flocked south with James I. By the end of the fifteenth century, the fortunes of the grand duchy’s wealthiest lords at least equalled and often surpassed those of their Polish counterparts. This wealth and the status it brought opened the way to what was to become an important trend in the sixteenth century: marriages between members of the magnate elites of Poland and Lithuania. The first such alliance was forged in 1478, between Mikołaj Tęczyński, sword-bearer of Cracow and scion of one of the wealthiest and most influential Małopolskan magnate families, to the daughter of Alekna Sudimantaitis.⁴⁴ By 1492 the practice had become common enough for it to raise concerns among the Lithuanian elites about the possibility of Poles using marriage to secure property in the grand duchy. Alexander’s privilege of that year contained a clause insisting that Lithuanian noblewomen marrying a Pole or a Mazovian could bring no property into the marriage, but had to distribute any they owned to their relations. If the intention was to prevent such unions, the measure failed, and its repetition in the codifications of Lithuanian law in 1529 and 1566 suggests that it was ineffectual: Tęczyński sold his wife’s Lithuanian properties after 1492 to prevent their loss; others challenged or ignored the law. It did not prevent a steady increase in intermarriage. Marriages were entered into by members of the Ruthenian princely families of Khodkevych, Zaslavsky, Zbarazky, and Olelkovych, and were contracted by the Polish families of Tęczyński, Szydłowiecki, Tarnowski, Sieniawski, Dębiński, Uchański, Zborowski, Trzebuchowski, and Działyński. Three families from the grand duchy contracted more than one marriage. The Sapiehas, Catholic converts from Orthodoxy, married three daughters to Poles before 1569, while both the sons of Kostiantyn Ostrozky, Ruthenia’s leading Orthodox magnate, married Poles. It was the Radvila family, however, that entered the Polish marriage market in greatest force. Elżbieta Katarzyna, daughter of Jonas Radvila, Lithuanian cupbearer († 1542) married Hieronim Sieniawski, castellan of Kamianets; Stanislovas Radvila († 1531), son of Mikalojus, grand chancellor and palatine of Vilnius, married Magdalena Bonerówna; his sister Anna married Konrad III, duke of Mazovia, in 1497, while the second wife of hetman Jurgis Radvila († 1541), was Barbara Kolanka, from a Polish family long established in Podolia.⁴⁵ Jurgis Radvila’s son by Barbara was Mikołaj Radziwiłł Rudy (the Red) (Mikalojus Radvila Rudasis, c.1515–84); he too was to marry a Pole, Katarzyna Tomicka, daughter of Jan Tomicki, chamberlain of Kalisz, while his cousin, Mikołaj Radziwiłł Czarny (the Black) (Mikalojus Radvila Juodasis, 1515–65), son of Jonas and brother of Elżbieta Katarzyna, married Elżbieta Szydłowiecka, daughter of Krzysztof, Polish grand chancellor from 1515 to 1532.

Thus Czarny and Rudy, who dominated Lithuanian politics in the 1550s and 1560s and led the resistance to closer union, both had Polish wives, and Rudy was himself half Polish. Their careers demonstrate that the adoption of the Polish language and the attractions of Polish culture, did not lead to the Polonization of the grand duchy’s elites in terms of consciousness or identity. Casimir’s long reign had frozen the disputes over union, but the issues had not gone away. When the long cycle of wars against Muscovy broke out after his death, the question of the nature and future of the union once again entered the political arena. Some among the grand duchy’s elites were now attracted to the idea of closer union; others resisted the increasing pressure from Poland for acceptance by the Lithuanians of the Polish view of an accessory union. The Lithuanian elites were far more sophisticated than they had been at the time of the coronation tempest, and were now capable of engaging the Poles on their own terms. When the two Radziwiłł cousins emerged from the 1540s as the dominant force on the Lithuanian council, they defended their Lithuanian identity and the loose union constructed by their forebears in perfectly modulated Polish. The problem for them was that greater exposure to Polish politics and Polish culture had increased the attraction of closer union among many in the Lithuanian and Ruthenian elites whose command of the Polish language was not nearly so impressive. By the first half of the sixteenth century, the loose, composite, patrimonial Gediminid state had been transformed into a more coherent entity known as Litva. The union had spread the vision of a political community of citizens that was open, at least in theory, to Orthodox nobles. Litva had, to a considerable extent, managed to encompass its religious diversity and create, at the level of the wealthiest nobility at least, an elite in which Orthodox Ruthenians could find a place. It was a vision which ensured that most of them rejected the siren call of Muscovy, Europe’s only remaining independent Orthodox state after 1453. From the 1520s, however, the fragile unity of this new political nation faced a serious challenge, as Poles once again began to assert their vision of an accessory union in which, so they claimed, Litva had been incorporated into Poland. This challenge provoked rapid change within Lithuania, before the controversy over the union reached its dramatic climax in Lublin in 1569.

1 AZR, i, no. 166, 189–91.

2 Fryderyk Papée, Aleksander Jagiellończyk, 2nd edn (Cracow, 1999), 18–20.

3 Edward Rutski, Polskie Królowe, i (Warsaw, 1990), 157–78; Oskar Halecki, From Florence to Brest (1439–1596) (New York, 1958), 100.

4 Chodynicki, Kościół, 77, 79–80.

5 Gudziak, Crisis, 44–5; Halecki, Florence, 49; Chodynicki, Kościół, 49–50.

6 Halecki, Florence, 48–9.

7 Gudziak, Crisis, 44–5; Halecki, Florence, 54–61; Chodynicki, Kościół, 52.

8 See Ihor Mončak, Florentine Ecumenism in the Kyivan Church (Rome, 1987), and Gudziak’s review of it: ‘The union of Florence in the Kievan Metropolitanate: Did it survive until the times of the union of Brest? (Some reflections on a recent argument)’, HUS, 17, 1/2 (1993), 138–48.

9 Halicki, From Florence, 85–7; Gudziak, Crisis, 45–6.

10 Oswald P. Backus, Motives of West Russian Nobles in Deserting Lithuania for Moscow 1377–1514 (Lawrence, KS, 1957).

11 Halecki, Florence, 122. Particularly striking is Backus’s failure to consult Wolff’s, Kniaziowie, still of great value, but absent from the notes and bibliography. Jablonowski, although he also uses the term Westrussland, is far more reliable, while the St Petersburg historian Mikhail Krom’s outstanding work on the wars demolishes the Russian nationalist assumptions that Backus uncritically accepts.

12 Кром, Меж Русью, 94; Jablonowski, Westrußland, 116–17. Олена Русина, ‘Проблеми політичної лояльности населення Велико князівства Литовського у XIV–XVI ст.’, UIZh, 6(2003), 3–16. For Kurbskii’s defection and the attractions of Lithuania see Inge Auerbach, Andrej Michajlovič Kurbskij (Munich, 1985).

13 Кром, Меж Русью, 84–5; Jablonowski, Westrußland, 128.

14 Pietkiewicz, Wielkie Księstwo, 130–1, 142, 147; Русина, ‘Проблеми’, 9–10.

15 Кром, Меж Русью, 138.

16 Krom, ‘Konstituierung’, 491–2.

17 Vladimir Kananović, ‘Grand Duchess Elena Ivanovna and Duke Michael Gliński: Aspects of rulership at the Jagiellonian court’, in Jacek Wiesiołowski (ed.), Zamek i dwór w średniowieczu od XI do XV wieku (Poznań, 2001), 161–5; Кром, МежРусью, 150–1; Pietkiewicz, Wielkie księstwo, 113–14; Halecki, Dzieje, ii, 40–9; Łowmiański, Polityka, 382–5.

18 PSB, xxiv, 486; Wolff, Kniaziowie, 347; Zygmunt Wojciechowski, Zygmunt Stary, 2nd edn (Warsaw, 1979), 94–5.

19 AZR, i, no. 166, 189–90.

20 Chodynicki, Kościół, 77, 79–80.

21 Chodynicki, Kościół, 80–1.

22 Ochmański, Granica, 79–80; Chodynicki, Kościół, 78.

23 Suchocki, ‘Formowanie’, 66, 73–4; Korczak, Rada, 49–50, 78–102.

24 Iakovenko, using a multiplier of three hearths per service unit, suggests some 10,500 hearths, with a population of c.60,000 peasants: Яковенко, Шляхта, 95; Krom also uses a multiplier of 2–4: Кром, МежРусью, 127. I have preferred Ochmański’s more cautious multiplier of two, which would mean a peasant population on Ostrozky’s estates of 34,000–41,000, using Iakovenko’s estimate of 5–6 individuals per hearth, still an impressive figure.

25 See Ch. 33, 422.

26 Rita Trimonienė, ‘Polonizacija’, inVytautasAlišauskas et al. (eds), Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštijos Kultūra (Vilnius, 2001), 498.

27 Gudavičius, Lietuvos istorija, i, 447; Jerzy Ochmański, ‘Najdawniejsze szkoły na Litwie od końca XIV do połowy XVI w.’, in Ochmański, Dawna Litwa, 116–19.

28 Suchocki, ‘Formowanie’, 61; Gudavičius, Lietuvos istorija, i, 451, 464; Maria Topolska, Społeczeńśtwo i kultura w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim od XV do XVIII wieku (Poznań, 2002), 62–3; Trimonienė, ‘Polonizacija’, 499.

29 Topolska, Społeczeństwo, 63.

30 Antoine Martel, La langue polonaise dans les pays ruthènes, Ukraine et Russie Blanche, 1569–1667 (Lille, 1938), 12.

31 C.S. Stang, Die westrussische Kanzleisprache des Großfürstentums Litauen (Oslo, 1935), 1–2; Martel, Langue, 12–13.

32 Kosman, ‘Kancelaria’ 104–12.

33 Rimvydas Petrauskas, ‘Didžiojo Kunigaikščio institucinio dvaro susiformavimas Lietuvoje (XIV a. pabaigoje–XV a. viduryje)’, LIM, 1 (2005), 9.

34 Petrauskas, ‘Didžiojo Kunigaikščio’, 28, 29; PSB, iv, 83.

35 Petrauskas, ‘Didžiojo Kunigaikščio’, 12.

36 UWXL, i, 33, 57–8, 142–3, 149–50, 163–4, 186–7; Krzysztof Pietkiewicz, ‘Dwór litewski wielkiego księcia Aleksandra Jagiellończyka (1492–1506)’, in Kiaupa and Mickevičius (eds), Lietuvos valstybė, 75–6.

37 Marek Ferenc, Mikołaj Radziwiłł ‘Rudy’ (ok. 1515–1584) (Cracow, 2008), 49; Marek Ferenc, ‘Uwagi o dworze litewskim Zygmunta Augusta w latach 1548–1572’, in Kras et al. (eds), Ecclesia, 537–48.

38 Sigismund August to Mikołaj Radziwiłł Rudy, Cracow, 23 October 1549: Listy króla Zygmunta Augusta do Radziwiłłów, ed. Irena Kaniewska (Cracow, 1997), no. 64, 134; Łowmiański, Polityka, 215.

39 Quoted by Ferenc, Rudy, 24.

40 Petrauskas, Diduomenė, 141; Biskup, ‘Spisy jeńców polskich z bitwy pod Chojnicami’, PH, 56 (1965), 25.

41 Annales, xii, 130; Stephen C. Rowell, ‘Trumpos akimirkos iš Kazimiero Jogailaičio dvaro: neeilinė kasdienybė tarnauja valstybei’, LIM, 1 (2004), 27–8, 47–8.

42 Rowell, ‘Trumpos’, 27, 47–8; Pietkiewicz, ‘Dwór’, 79–80, 105–25.

43 Rowell, ‘Trumpos’, 29–30, 33, 44; Włodzimierz Jarmolik, ‘Kariery polityczne dworzan litewskich Kazimierza Jagiellończyka’, in Zbigniew Karpus et al. (eds), Europa orientalis: Polska i jej sąsiedzi od średniowiecza po współczesność (Toruń, 1996), 93–101.

44 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 430–1; Petrauskas, Diduomenė, 141–2.

45 Ewa Dubas-Urwanowicz, ‘Uwarunkowania prawne i konsekwencje małżeństw polsko-litewskich przed unią lubelską’, in Krzysztof Mikulski and Agnieszka Zielińska-Nowicka (eds), Między Zachodem a Wschodem: Etniczne, kulturowe i religijne pogranicza Rzeczypospolitej w XVI–XVIII wieku (Toruń, 2006), 67–73; Ferenc, Rudy, 13–14; Marceli Antoniewicz, Protoplaści książąt Radziwiłłów (Warsaw, 2011), 33, 49–50.