PART VI
28
Casimir IV died in Hrodna on 7 June 1492 (see Fig. 11). With regard to the succession, the ground had been well prepared, and there was to be no repeat of the dramas of 1430 and 1440. Casimir had secured an oath from his Lithuanian councillors in Brest in 1478 to obey whichever of his sons he designated as his successor as grand duke.1 He had been absent from Lithuania for most of the previous decade, and there had been pressure for the revival of the Vytautan system. Although he rejected the proposal, after the 1481 assassination plot he made it clear that he intended one of his sons to be grand duke on his death. When his son Casimir died in 1484, Casimir decided that John Albert should succeed him in Poland, and that Alexander should become grand duke of Lithuania. He began preparing both for their future roles. Neither was entrusted with much responsibility, but each spent time at Casimir’s side during the last decade of his reign, to gain experience of government.2
Thus when Casimir formally nominated Alexander on his deathbed, it came as no surprise. Historians have made much of the fact that Alexander’s election on 30 July was in technical breach of the union treaties; the absence of any protest from the Poles suggests that Liubavskii is wrong to see it as provocative.3 They had long been informed of Casimir’s intentions and the embassy sent to Lithuania after his death raised not a squawk of protest, in stark contrast to 1430 and 1440. There was no need to protest: agreement had already been reached, and the Poles, in accordance with the treaties, invited a Lithuanian delegation to attend their own royal election, which pushed for the fulfilment of Casimir’s last wishes and opposed the other candidates: Władysław, who wished rather to register his own claims as Casimir’s eldest son than to make a serious bid for the throne, and Janusz II, duke of Mazovia, who was supported by Zbigniew Oleśnicki the younger. Cardinal Frederick’s dramatic intervention to secure the throne for John Albert was entirely in line with Lithuanian wishes; far from wanting to break the union, the Lithuanians were determined to sustain it and were perfectly happy when John I Albert was elected on 27 August.4
It is therefore hard to see why Łowmiański terms the period 1492–8 ‘the union’s greatest crisis’.5 The rapid completion of the formalities owed much to the realization that Ivan III was already preparing the attack he launched immediately after Casimir’s death. The largely harmonious cooperation of the two brothers during John Albert’s reign bears testimony to Casimir’s careful preparation, and the acceptance of the situation not just by his sons, but by both councils. Alexander spent his childhood in Poland, where he learned Latin and German, his mother’s language, but did not visit Lithuania until he was eighteen. He was the first grand duke not to speak Lithuanian, although it did not cause him any problems: the Lithuanian community of the realm defended its republic in Ruthenian or Polish. The new members of the council, schooled by Casimir, did not question the union, and the revival of the Vytautan system accorded with their vision of how the union might best work after his death.6
Fig. 11. View of Hrodna in the sixteenth century. With the kind permission of the Zamek Królewski, Warsaw.
Objections to Casimir’s testament came from within the dynasty, but they proved ineffectual. It is usually asserted that the grand duchy was the Jagiellons’ hereditary patrimony, but the dynasty’s refusal to endorse male primogeniture meant that the succession was never clear, even when a grand duke designated his successor. The tradition of acclamation of the dynasty’s choice by the boyars took on a new light after 1413, when Horodło introduced the idea of election on the Polish model, the idea that was taken up so enthusiastically in 1430 and 1440, and was endorsed by the dynasty with Žygimantas’s election in 1432. Casimir may have designated Alexander as grand duke, and the Lithuanians may have accepted his decision, but they still held a formal election. Papée argues that this was a simple enthronement or an acclamation by the assembled boyars, and that there can be no question of a free election, while Kolankowski claims that Alexander was de facto grand duke from the moment of his father’s death.7 There is no evidence that the Lithuanians saw matters in this way. Papée’s inferences from the absence of the term ‘election’ in privileges Alexander issued on 6 August 1492, which talked of him as the ‘true and rightful heir and natural lord’ (verum et legittimum heredem ac dominum naturalem) are unconvincing.8 The concept of natural rights to the throne did not preclude the idea of election and if it was half a century since the last grand ducal election the principle had not been forgotten: the joint summonses from the council and Alexander named him not grand duke, but simply ‘The most gracious and beloved prince, by the grace of God son of Casimir, king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania and Ruthenia’ (Наяснѣйшое княжа, Божею милостью Александръ, сынъ Казимера короля Польского и великогокнязя Литовского и Русского). There is no doubt that this was conceived as an election:
For we do not wish to elect (выбирати) our lord without you, our dearest brothers, but to choose (him) having agreed together with you.9
This was not the traditional language of acclamation. It bears eloquent testimony to the development of the idea of the Lithuanian republic or commonwealth.10 The 1492 election was the first general assembly to which representatives of all the grand duchy’s territories were formally invited. The summons spoke of the importance of the election diet for the common good.11 According to Liubavskii there was good reason to invite Ruthenians from the annexed territories, as there were concerns that they might separately elect Prince Semën Mykhailovych Olelkovych, son of Mykhailo Olelkovych, who had been executed in 1481. Stryjkowski’s chronicle, written a century later, tells how Olelkovych arrived with a retinue of 500, and cast his vote for himself, although Papée with good reason doubts the story, pointing to his consistent loyalty to Alexander and Sigismund, most notably during the 1508 Hlynsky rising.12
Alexander’s enthronement ceremony made clear that he was no absolute, divinely appointed monarch. Grand dukes were not crowned, but he was blessed by Wojciech Tabor, bishop of Vilnius, and handed the sword and sceptre by Petras Mantigirdaitis, palatine of Trakai and marshal of the land, who enjoined him to rule Lithuania according to its traditions and customs and the example of Vytautas, and not by the laws of the Italians, Bohemians, or Germans.13 This enthronement harangue suggests that the Lithuanian community of the realm no longer regarded their grand dukes as patrimonial autocrats. The privilege granted by Alexander on 6 August made this clear: it extended boyar rights over allodial land and limited grand ducal powers to act without council consent.14 The Lithuanian republic was dismantling its patrimonial monarchy in another indication that acceptance of the dynasty’s wishes on the succession was by no means guaranteed, even if John Albert revived the title of supreme duke to underline the Jagiellonian claim that if the election of grand dukes was permissable, the dynasty maintained its hereditary right to its Lithuanian patrimony. That it was John Albert, rather than the eldest brother Władysław, who claimed the title could be justified by the Gediminid practice of dynastic designation.15
Alexander’s election brought the question of the nature of the union out of cold storage. When the Lithuanians requested aid against Muscovy in 1493 the Polish envoy Jan Lubrański stated baldly that the Poles were unwilling to become involved in the Muscovite war, and would only send aid if the Lithuanians opened negotiations over renewal of the union. It seemed that the needle was slipping back into the 1450s groove: the Poles urged that the union be confirmed on the basis of the old agreements, while the Lithuanians retorted that they could only confirm it if these agreements were amended. They did not take kindly to the plan presented to them in Vilnius in 1495 by the queen mother and Cardinal Frederick for Sigismund to be granted Kyiv as his appanage.16
The dynasty was already concerned about the future. Casimir’s sons were all in their thirties; none had yet produced an heir. Alexander had only just married, and his marriage was to prove childless. Władysław had serious marital problems. He followed a disastrous first marriage to Barbara, daughter of Albert Achilles, margrave of Brandenburg, by marrying Beatrice of Aragon, the widow of Matthias Corvinus, in 1490, despite not having divorced Barbara. His second marriage was no more successful, but he managed to secure annulments of both marriages in 1500 and his third wife, Anna de Foix Grailly, gave birth to a son, Louis, in 1506. John Albert never married. At least Sigismund proved his fertility, siring an illegitimate son and two illegitimate daughters by his Moravian mistress, Katařina Telničanka. It was not until the birth of his son Sigismund August in 1520 that the line of the Polish Jagiellons was secure.17
Halecki saw the notion of granting Kyiv to Sigismund as an opportunity to bestow greater status upon the annexed Ruthenian territories within the union by opening the way to the creation of a grand duchy of Ruthenia that might be capable of providing a more effective defence of Lithuania’s frontiers.18 There is no evidence to suggest contemporaries saw the matter in this way. For Władysław and Sigismund the justification was dynastic: it would solve the temporary problem of a junior prince without visible means of support. Alexander and the Lithuanian council saw things differently, arguing that the grand duchy was indivisible. Land could not be carved out of it to be granted to Sigismund, and Lithuania could not have two lords. The Lithuanian sejm in Brest in March 1496 rejected the idea outright.19 If anybody realized that the Lithuanians were deploying the same arguments the Poles had used during the coronation tempest, nobody had a sufficient sense of irony to point it out.
Uncertainty over the succession brought the problem of the union into focus. There were other reasons for considering the issue. Ivan III’s disapproval of the Kyiv scheme was another reminder that the 1494 ‘eternal peace’ was unlikely to last, as Ivan had no intention of abandoning his claim to be gosudar' of all Rus'. The feelers put out by John Albert during discussions of the Kyiv plan were calculated to leave Lithuanian feathers unruffled. As the Lithuanian reply made clear in 1496, the Lithuanian council, with whom, Alexander stressed, he had discussed the matter, appreciated the gesture:
Your highness ordained . . . in these matters, that with regard to the agreements and documents between our lands and realms, and the subjects of the councils of both realms, that is the crown of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania, they should be presented according to right and agreed custom, without offence to the honour or detriment of either realm.20
This document reveals that there was a new set of concepts available to discuss the question of union. Written in Ruthenian, though in the Latin alphabet, it uses the term ‘panstwo’ to designate the parties to the union. Państwo was the direct Polish translation of the Latin dominium, or lordship. By the late fifteenth century it was being used in its modern sense to designate the state as an abstract entity separate from the person of the ruler. Whereas the documents of union from the days of Jagiełło and Vytautas had used dominium in its older sense, speaking the language of lordship, those of Alexander and John Albert used dominium differently, speaking of the relationship between the various ‘states’ or ‘realms’ that they ruled. Where Jagiełło had referred to himself at Krewo as ‘grand duke, lord, and natural heir of the Lithuanians and of Ruthenia’ (dux magnus Litwanorum Rusiaeque dominus et haeres naturalis), Alexander, who styled himself ‘Lithuanian, Ruthenian, Samogitian and (of other realms) grand duke’ (вѣликій князъ Литовскій, Рускій, Жомоитскій и иныхъ), conceptualized his rule rather differently. In his 1499 privilege for the Orthodox church he stated that it was issued to Iosif Bolharynovych, as metropolitan of Kyiv, and to all (Orthodox) bishops ‘in our patrimony of the grand duchy of Lithuania, and in our Ruthenian realms (въ панствахъ нашихъ Рускихъ)’.21 This language, with its view of the relationship within the union as one between abstract political entities conceptualized as ‘realms’, with the grand duchy itself seen as a composite polity, composed of Lithuania proper and the annexed Ruthenian ‘realms’, represented an implicit challenge to the Polish incorporationist view of the union.
This conceptual shift made it possible to discuss the union in a new way. The Poles took the hint immediately, sending a high level embassy to the Lithuanian sejm in Vilnius in the summer of 1496, one of whose members was Mikołaj Tęczyński, son-in-law of the late Lithuanian chancellor, Alekna Sudimantaitis. While its main purpose was to secure Lithuanian support for the Ottoman war, it brought with it the Horodło document of 2 October 1413 in which the Lithuanian boyars had sworn loyalty to Jagiełło, Vytautas, and the corona regni Poloniae. It was a good choice, for this document made no reference to the incorporation so pedantically insisted upon in the document issued by Jagiełło and Vytautas. The Lithuanians responded positively, agreeing that there was nothing problematic in the document, which they agreed to confirm, and sent an embassy of their own, with their own project for a renewal of the union.22
According to Halecki, these discussions were ‘only formally’ conducted on the basis of the old agreements. Yet if both sides adopted a new attitude towards the agreements drawn up by their forebears, the significance of the old treaties was substantial: the long stalemate over the union had not been over the principle of union, but over the interpretation of what the documents meant. The negotiations were expressly conducted on the basis of the Horodło agreement, with the Lithuanians responding positively to the olive branch offered by the Poles through the tacit abandonment—for the moment at least—of the sternly incorporationist position they had maintained for so long.
The Lithuanian project, drawn up not in Alexander’s name, but on behalf of the ‘prelates, barons, nobles, and all the inhabitants’ of the grand duchy, talked approvingly of the agreements made by their predecessors that had established the alliances, peace, concord, and friendship between the two realms, singling out Horodło for particular praise and stating that they remained fully in force (in hec usque tempore inviolate servarentur). It expressly renewed and confirmed the agreements. Referring to the circumstances surrounding the elections of John Albert and Alexander according to the wishes of Casimir, which it recognized as an ‘innovation’, the project advanced the sensible position that the treaties should not be treated rigidly, but as a flexible framework under which particular contingencies as ordained by God could be taken into account.23
There were still disagreements. The Lithuanian suggestion that the arrangements established at Horodło for royal elections in Poland should only be instigated if the Jagiellons died out in the male line proved unacceptable to the Polish envoys, who refused to accept the document. While it would have preserved the union, it would have denied the Poles the fruits of the hard-won victory over Jagiełło by which they established a fully elective monarchy.24 The Poles might in practice favour the natural rights that the Jagiellons claimed to possess, and they might always vote for a candidate who would preserve the union, but they would not surrender the right to choose.
The pressing Polish need for aid against the Ottomans had nevertheless softened the Polish position, suggesting that a compromise might be possible. The Lithuanians were determined to exploit the opportunity to reach agreement on the union’s nature. When a 1498 Polish embassy again sought help against the Ottomans, Alexander replied that the Lithuanian council had discussed the matter, and that while in principle it was willing, it could offer no assistance until the question of equality within the union was addressed. This was no simple rebuff, however, for the Lithuanians immediately sent Martin Lintfari, bishop of Samogitia, and Jan Zaberezhynsky, castellan and palatine of Trakai, and a supporter of closer relations with Poland, to John Albert in January 1499.25 That the Lithuanians were serious is demonstrated by the grant of plenipotentiary powers to agree a new union, on behalf of Alexander and ‘our whole republic’ (nostris et totiae Reipublicae).26 The council instructions put matters more bluntly. They laid down what the envoys were to say, observing that previous documents of union in which the grand duchy was not treated equally with Poland ‘as is usual between all Christian kings and princes’, had never been passed over in silence by their forebears, who had in many embassies and on many occasions informed the Poles that they had never upheld these treaties, and had never wanted to uphold them. Horodło, at least in the Lithuanian boyars’ version, was not such a treaty. The embassy was to raise two complaints. One concerned the frequent border incidents between western Podolia, under Polish control, and the Lithuanian-held provinces of eastern Podolia and Volhynia; the other touched on nomination to Lithuanian bishoprics, in which confirmation from the papacy was frequently sent to the king of Poland and not the grand duke.27
The Lithuanians were in a good position after the Moldavian debacle to reopen this issue, discussions of which had stalled in 1453. It was probably at this point that the Lithuanian chancery prepared a document that survives in Book 25 (the book of inscriptions) in the Lithuanian Metryka, the chancery archive, which comprises copies of privileges issued by Lithuanian grand dukes and was compiled in 1541 on the orders of the queen, Bona Sforza.28 The document is a reworking of Horodło that removes all hints of subservience to the kingdom of Poland. While it is possible that it was prepared in the 1440s or 1450s, it is more likely, since Horodło was central to the discussions in 1496 and 1499, that it was drafted in connection with these discussions.29 It is highly revealing of Lithuanian concepts of union. Kuolys talks of it as a forgery, but it seems better to regard it as a genuine attempt, in the context of the 1490s discussions, to draft a version of Horodło that would be acceptable to the Lithuanian citizen body. It omits entirely the first clause of the joint document issued by Jagiełło and Vytautas, with its litany of incorporationist synonyms, and radically alters the clause allowing for the election of a grand duke, omitting all reference to only electing candidates put forward by the king of Poland, and of the need to consult with the Poles, baldly stating that the Lithuanians had the right to elect whomsoever they chose as their grand duke.30
This confirms Lithuanian attachment to the principle of election, and their awareness that its legal basis rested upon Horodło. The rest of the document details the rights and privileges granted to the Lithuanian nobility in 1413, stressing in almost every case that these were to be enjoyed as they were in Poland (iuxta consuetudinem Regni Poloniae), casting doubt on Kuolys’s contention that Horodło lost its force after the election of Casimir as grand duke in 1440, and the idea that the Lithuanians took little interest in Horodło. The Lithuanian community of the realm was well aware that its freedoms and liberties depended on the acts of union, and in particular on Horodło. Instead it rejected the Polish idea of an accessory union, and sought to secure Polish agreement to changes in the text of the union treaties that would embody the Lithuanian vision of a union aeque principaliter.
The Poles would not accept such a radical redrafting of Horodło, but the firm stance of the Lithuanians brought results, with the agreement of what has been called—though the term is disputed—the Vilnius-Cracow union. John Albert and the Polish council ratified the agreement in Cracow on 6 and 14 May 1499, sending with the ratification a copy of the document drawn up for the Polish nobles at Horodło. Alexander summoned a sejm to Vilnius that agreed to reciprocate on 14 July, sending a copy of the Lithuanian redaction of Horodło.31 The new agreement closely followed the 1496 Lithuanian proposal, and marked the success of the new Lithuanian approach to relations with Poland, which had persuaded the Poles to modify their insistence that Lithuania had been incorporated.32
Some historians have seen the 1499 agreements as establishing a confederation, league, or alliance between two otherwise independent states, linked by no institution.33 Yet this was no mere alliance. The documents presented the relationship as both a union and a league, stating that the unions and alliances entered into by Jagiełło and Vytautas remained in force. It confirmed the Horodło documents prepared for the Polish nobles and the Lithuanian boyars, rather than the document issued by Jagiełło and Vytautas with the incorporation clause.34 In an implicit reference to the events of 1430, 1440, and 1492, it was stated that clarity would be brought to the institution of election as established in 1413. The Lithuanians promised that on the death of their grand duke they would not elect a successor without the knowledge and agreement of their Polish brothers: Polish ambassadors would be invited to attend the election. Similarly, the Lithuanians would be invited to attend Polish royal elections, and the Poles agreed not to elect their king without Lithuanian knowledge and consent.35 The desire for clarity was laudable, although increased clarity was not necessarily the outcome, since the documents gave no indication as to how the elections were to be conducted. The use of ‘pariter’, rendered in the Polish translation as ‘wespółek’ (together with), suggests that in the light of the principle of unanimity that governed Polish parliamentary procedures, it was intended that the respective ambassadors would have a veto, at least as a bargaining tool to ensure that consensus was reached.
The document confirmed the Horodło privileges, which included the adoption into Polish heraldic clans, thereby reasserting the vision of a common, fraternal union of political communities. The development of the Lithuanian community of the realm, as expressed in the idea of the Lithuanian respublica meant that—as had not been the case in 1413—both parties to the union could conceive of the relationship in different terms within what was becoming a common political culture that used a common political language in which the idea of the respublica was as important as that of the state, the państwo.
These concepts, embedded in the Vilnius-Cracow documents, and the provisions they made, including the selective confirmation of the Horodło treaties, support Błaszczyk’s contention that 1499 represented far more than the establishment of a mere alliance between two otherwise independent states, and that therefore it is justifiable to refer to the ‘Vilnius-Cracow union’.36 It is true that it created no formal, common institutions of government, and therefore does not fit the standard idea of what constitutes a real union, but it established—or rather confirmed—a relationship that was far more than a mere personal or dynastic union. Its main innovation was the agreement over royal elections, which marked a significant advance on Horodło, particularly with regard to Lithuania. Horodło allowed for the election of a grand duke after Vytautas’s death, but did not require it, and the Lithuanian boyars promised only to elect such a grand duke as was nominated by Jagiełło or one of his successors, and by the ‘prelates lords, nobility, and proceres of the kingdom of Poland’s.37 While Vilnius-Cracow did not explicitly state that such an election must take place in future, it strongly implied that when a grand duke died, an election would take place: the promises made by the Lithuanians concerned only consultation with the Poles. The most striking feature of the clauses concerning the succession is the absence of the dynasty—in stark contrast to Horodło. It was the political communities of Poland and Lithuania that were to be consulted, not the king of Poland (in the event of the death of the grand duke), the grand duke (in the event of the king’s death), or the dynasty. John Albert appreciated the significance of this omission, stressing that he ratified the treaty without prejudice to the dignity and rights of himself or Alexander as grand duke of Lithuania.38 Yet it remained to be seen how far the Jagiellon claim that Lithuania was their patrimony could be sustained against the idea of elective monarchy, especially since John Albert’s ratification was issued only to the Poles.39
Halecki dubiously asserts that Alexander did not need to issue a similar caveat in Lithuania because nobody there questioned the Jagiellons’ hereditary rights, and that in the light of Jagiellonian solidarity, the equality of election rights suggested in the Vilnius-Cracow union was illusory. There is, however, no mention of any ‘supreme duke’ of Lithuania in the Lithuanian redaction, and no acknowledgement that on the death of a grand duke supreme power over Lithuania was vested in the king or crown of Poland. There is no mention of the practice of nomination by the dynasty, and the redrafted Horodło clause in the document preserved in the Lithuanian Metryka suggests that the Lithuanian community of the realm now saw the right of free election of their grand dukes as the foundation of their Lithuanian republic. For all that the dynasty continued to assert its hereditary rights in Lithuania, and for all that the Lithuanians themselves were in future to appeal to these rights when it suited them, the Vilnius-Cracow union marked an important watershed. While Bues goes too far in suggesting that in 1499 Lithuania became an elective monarchy, the new union reasserted the principle of royal election in Lithuania. It is by no means clear that, as Rowell claims, the rights of the dynasty were protected by confirmation of Horodło, since in the document issued to the Lithuanian boyars in 1413—which is what was confirmed in 1499—the clauses that deal with the succession make no mention of the dynasty’s hereditary rights in Lithuania, but establish what was to happen with regard to the Polish throne should Jagiełło or his successors die without an heir.40 In 1413 the question of Jagiełło’s hereditary rights in Poland was unclear to say the least.
Halecki, who saw the whole union as the ‘Jagiellonian idea’, in assessing the Vilnius-Cracow union from the dynasty’s point of view, asserts that it served the union less well than the 1496 proposal would have done, since it failed to preserve anything that was important from Horodło apart from promises of mutual assistance that had proven illusory since 1422. He therefore concluded that it was not a fresh start, but merely the sanctioning of the status quo, adding, in something of a non sequitur, that it marked the end of an era, and was therefore an appropriate point at which to end the first volume of his history of the union.41 Seen, however, as a staging-post in the process by which the political communities of the realms of Poland and Lithuania envisaged a union that was built from below, not above, it marked an important step: the first point at which the principle of royal election as an institution binding those communities together was enunciated. As events after John Albert’s death in Thorn on 17 June 1501 were to show, the implications of Vilnius-Cracow were considerable.
For the context had changed. A year earlier, on 3 May 1500, war with Muscovy resumed when Ivan III sent his armies across the border. One seized Briansk, leaving Siversk open to the south. The Poles could not help, since they were fully engaged beating off two large Tatar attacks. A hastily assembled Lithuanian army was destroyed on the Vedrosh river near Dorohobuzh on 14 July, after which the Masalskys and Mezetskys deserted Alexander for Ivan; over the next three years, vast tracts of the grand duchy’s eastern borderlands fell under Muscovite control.42 With Emperor Maximilian I seeking an alliance with Ivan while encouraging the Order to believe it might secure imperial support for a revision of the 1466 Thorn peace, the common interests of the union partners were clearer than at any time since 1422. On hearing of John Albert’s unexpected death Alexander, aware that Lithuania was incapable of resisting Ivan alone, declared his candidacy for the Polish throne. The Lithuanian council, disoriented by the crushing Muscovite victories and uncertain of the loyalty of the Ruthenian elites, recognized that Ivan could only be defeated with Polish help. Despite Vilnius-Cracow’s reaffirmation of the Vytautan system, it backed Alexander’s bid.43
Alexander’s path to the throne was by no means smooth. Władysław took a more active role than in 1492, first advancing Sigismund’s claims, and then putting forward his own candidature when it became clear that Sigismund, who had little to bring to the table compared with Alexander, had few supporters in Poland. An embassy from Władysław’s supporters travelled to Buda to urge him to stand.44 According to Miechowita, Władysław announced his succession to Maximilian and Louis XII of France. 45 If he did, the announcement was premature. Frederick for the moment sustained the appearance of neutrality, writing to assure Władysław and Sigismund of his good will, but he quietly promoted Alexander’s election, endeavouring to convince Elizabeth Habsburg, who was ill-disposed towards Helena.46
Frederick faced a more difficult task in 1501 than in 1492. There was considerable discontent during the last years of his brother’s reign. John Albert confiscated the lands of some 2,400 nobles for failing to answer the summons of the levy during the disastrous 1497 Moldavian campaign, while Frederick was attacked for ordering that noblemen be summarily imprisoned in his episcopal court.47 Chancellor Krzesław Kurozwęcki was outraged when the increasingly authoritarian king confiscated the lands of Krzesław’s recently deceased brother Piotr for peculation during his service as vice-chancellor.
With accusations of tyranny in the air, and a potential Muscovite threat to the Ruthenian lands under Polish rule, Frederick was in no position to decide the outcome of the election with the sort of dramatic and decisive action he had taken in 1492. John Albert’s many enemies were determined to clip the monarchy’s wings, and Frederick’s letters during the interregnum adopted the language of Polish constitutionalism, defending the rights of the council lords, warning his brothers that they must respect electoral law, and berating Alexander after hearing rumours of plans to seize the throne by force.48 Aware of the dangers of a contested election, he bought Krzesław’s support with a promise to reverse the confiscation if Alexander was elected.
It was the council, however, not Frederick, that played the central role in negotiating the terms of Alexander’s election. Thus it was not merely an excuse when Frederick explained to Władysław—disingenuously, given his support for Alexander—that he had supported Władysław’s election, but had been forced to take account of majority opinion on the council.49 The spectacular Muscovite advance meant that the Lithuanians were in a much weaker position than in 1444–7, or during the negotiations over the union between 1496 and 1499. The changed circumstances persuaded the Poles to abandon the moderate stance they had adopted in the 1490s, and to reassert their vision of an accessory union during the negotiations conducted with Alexander in September, first in Bielsk and then in Mielnik on the river Bug. Alexander was not in a strong position. He granted plenipotentiary powers to the Lithuanian delegation invited by the Poles to participate in the electoral sejm at Piotrków, in accordance with the 1499 treaty. The envoys were all supporters of closer union: Wojciech Tabor, Jan Zaberezhynsky, Aleksander Holshansky, Mikalojus Radvila, and Petr Olekhnovych. In their accreditation documents—one issued by Alexander in Hrodna on 27 August, and another by the council in Bielsk on 9 September—they were not only given powers with regard to the election, but were permitted to negotiate a new union treaty, with the only condition being that it was not prejudicial to either realm.50
Aleksander was duly elected, with the participation of the Lithuanian envoys in accordance with the 1499 treaty, most probably on 30 September, although his election decree bore the same date as the new treaty of union agreed by the Lithuanian envoys in Piotrków on 3 October and formally accepted by Alexander and the Lithuanian council in Mielnik on 23 October. Three days later Alexander issued another document testifying that twenty-seven Lithuanian princes, lords, and nobles had sworn to uphold the new union, and promised to ensure that the whole Lithuanian nobility accepted it.51
The Mielnik union, as it is known, demonstrated where the advantage lay in the negotiations. The Poles made it clear that, while they were willing to support the Lithuanians against Muscovy, that support depended upon agreement on the nature of the union. As Frederick later told Władysław, the Poles demanded recognition of the incorporationist vision expressed in the document issued at Horodło by Jagiełło and Vytautas, which had not been ratified in 1499. The original was hauled out of the Cracow chapter archive in March 1502, along with Žygimantas’s promise, made in Trakai on 20 January 1433, to return the grand duchy to Jagiełło on his death, and the Hrodna union of 27 February 1434. The originals were described in detail, and copies were made and notarized.52
This exhumation demonstrates that for all the solemn oaths sworn in October 1501, the meaning of the Mielnik union was controversial. The terms appeared to represent an outright victory for Polish incorporationism. The first clause decreed that the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania were perpetually united and combined into one indivisible and uniform body, so as to form one gens, one populus, one brotherhood (fraternitas), one common council, and a body with one head: one king and lord who was to be elected in common. It was stipulated that this election would be valid even if some of those eligible to vote were absent.53 Elections were to be held in Poland, and the Lithuanian electorate was defined narrowly, comprising the Catholic bishops, the palatines, castellans and ‘dignitaries’: essentially this meant the wider council.54 Clause three laid down that common counsel was to be taken on affairs that concerned the ‘whole body’ of the realm. Each party promised not to desert the other in times of need; clause five decreed the establishment of a common currency, to be regulated by the common council. Other clauses stipulated that treaties with foreign powers were to remain in force unless they breached the laws or customs of either party; all officeholders were to swear an oath of loyalty to the king of Poland, and to uphold the mutually agreed treaties of union. The king was to swear to uphold the liberties and rights of his counsellors and dignitaries, and at his coronation was to confirm the rights and privileges of both realms.55
It was a radical document. It envisaged a real union based upon the common election of the monarch, a common council that would deliberate on matters that touched the entire union state, and a common currency. For Halecki, it represented a completely new departure, and he explained away the fact that it was negotiated by the same men who agreed the 1499 treaty—which he claimed merely recognized the status quo—by arguing that the circumstances of the Muscovite war forced the Lithuanians into extensive concessions, while the childless Alexander agreed to it on account of his personal ambition, since the principle of common election effectively abrogated the dynasty’s hereditary rights to Lithuania.56 Halecki observed that the document did not explicitly mention incorporation, but others have interpreted it as a triumph for Polish incorporationist views.57 In Buda, Władysław recognized the implicit threat to the Jagiellons’ hereditary rights to Lithuania. A Hungarian delegation that arrived in Cracow after Alexander’s coronation formally protested at the slight to Władysław’s honour, maintaining that he, as the eldest son, possessed prior rights to the thrones of his father and grandfather by primogeniture. Sigismund came to Cracow in person to assert his own rights to a share of the Jagiellon patrimony.58
Alexander needed no instruction on Mielnik’s implications, and the question of incorporation remained academic, for the treaty never came into effect, despite its ratification by Alexander and the twenty-seven Lithuanian lords, and despite Halecki’s unsubstantiated claim that it was implemented ‘for a short time’.59 Alexander was forced to agree to it as the price of his coronation: although he ratified it in October, he was only allowed to use the title rex electus until his formal election, which took place in Cracow on 12 December.60 Nevertheless, he had room for manoeuvre. He had come to Mielnik with several of his councillors and a large group of officials, but the gathering was far short of a full sejm, and representatives of the annexed territories were conspicuously absent.61 He therefore promised that confirmation would be sought ‘per universos praelatos, barones, nobiles et boiaros Lithwaniae’.62 Since such confirmation was neither sought nor received, the document remained a dead letter. Rowell suspects that this was because Alexander was fully aware of its implications, and his ratification was a ‘Jagiellonian sham to trick the Poles (with Lithuanian noble support)’ into accepting him as their king, although he did order copies be made of the document to be sent out to gather the seals of council members not present in Mielnik. Liubavskii argues that Lithuanian concern about ratifying the agreement was principally due to the Muscovite war, which made the calling of a full sejm impossible; moreover, with the Ruthenians absent from Mielnik, to draw formally closer to Catholic Poland was politically risky, since it might provoke more Ruthenian defections to Ivan.63
Both arguments are plausible. Alexander, whose playing of the difficult hand he had been dealt bears out Pietkiewicz’s positive assessment of his political ability, was well aware of Polish incorporationist attitudes, and of Mielnik’s implications for the dynasty, as he pointed out in a sharply phrased defence of his actions to Władysław, who boycotted Alexander’s coronation. In declaring his candidature in August, Alexander told the Polish council that Władysław’s claims as Casimir’s oldest son had been nullified by his abandoning Poland to take up the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns, and by Casimir’s decision to designate John Albert as his preferred candidate for the Polish throne.64 Alexander berated Władysław for condemning his coronation, and sending his envoys to attack him for allowing the incorporation of the grand duchy into Poland without his consent. Alexander replied that he himself was a member of the dynasty, and that he had been elected unanimously by both the Poles and the Lithuanians. He observed sarcastically that Władysław should well know (non debuit M.V. ignorare) that this election was nothing new, and it in no way challenged the natural, hereditary rights of either Władysław or Sigismund, continuing, again sarcastically (scire enim potest S.M.V.), with a potted history lesson reminding Władysław of the tradition of dynastic designation, and asserting that what had occurred did not breach Horodło.65
Alexander’s response was, as Rowell observes, self-exculpatory and tendentious.66 It nevertheless demonstrates that he had inherited a substantial dose of political realism from his father. He remarked that Władysław’s attempt to assert the rights of primogeniture was justifiable neither in historic terms nor in the light of the union treaties. Yet if—for obvious reasons—he was opposed to primogeniture, Alexander did care about his dynasty’s natural rights in Lithuania, and ensured that Mielnik never came into effect. He was assisted by two circumstances: the treaty’s vagueness concerning how it was to operate in practice, and its narrowly oligarchic character.
For if the Poles regarded Mielnik as securing Lithuanian recognition of their incorporation, the treaty gave no hint of what incorporation meant in practice, unlike the 1454 treaty with the Prussians. Lithuania’s political structure was fundamentally different from Poland’s, and despite the establishment of the palatinates of Vilnius and Trakai at Horodło, the grand duchy lacked the developed system of local courts and sejmiks that formed the basis of the Polish political system. Mielnik represented a compromise between the only two institutions that were roughly equivalent between the two realms: the ruler’s councils. It was the councils that were to come together to elect the common ruler, and to deliberate together on matters that affected the whole realm, not the two sejms, for the Lithuanian sejm was as yet a very different body from its Polish counterpart.
It was this narrow concept of the political system that was Mielnik’s greatest weakness. It was effectively agreed between the Polish council and a small group of Lithuanian unionist councillors who had made common cause with their counterparts in Poland, possibly because Alexander’s rule had reminded them of the benefits of an absentee ruler for their own control in Vilnius. They were vulnerable once Alexander secured his election. By the time that a six-year truce was agreed with Ivan on 28 March 1503, Lithuanian support for the 1501 treaty had cooled considerably. The Poles had failed to produce any substantial military aid, and Lithuania had been forced to make peace on highly disadvantageous terms. Alexander was secure on the Polish throne, and had no interest in pursuing ratification.
On his return to Poland in 1503, the Poles pushed him to produce the promised Lithuanian guarantees, urging him to call a joint sejm in Lublin to confirm the union.67 Although the invitation to the Lithuanians from the Polish embassy to the Lithuanian sejm in Brest in February 1505 dripped with the language of fraternal harmony, it was rejected on the grounds that Mielnik had been been agreed without the consent of the many who had been absent. Only Wojciech Tabor, Jan Zaberezhynsky, and Aleksander Holshansky spoke in its favour. The wind blew cold and hard against them. The rising star of the new royalist party, which fully backed Alexander’s new line, was the energetic and talented Mykhailo Hlynsky. The defeated party was excluded from the council. Zaberezhynsky remained marshal of the land, but Alexander stripped him of the palatinate of Trakai, which, on Hlynsky’s recommendation, was granted to Mikalojus Radvila, who had helped negotiate Mielnik, but had prudently changed sides.68
Although Halecki was wrong to insist that Mielnik was briefly implemented, he was right to suggest that it marked an important watershed in the process of union. Its first clause was clearly a compromise between the Polish and Lithuanian negotiators. Although the Poles entered the talks determined to insist upon incorporation, this clause—indeed the whole treaty—made no mention of it.69 Instead it stated that Poland and Lithuania were ‘united and combined into one indivisible body’. This formula picked up the imagery of the body politic that shot through the act’s preamble, which declared that political harmony depended upon God’s creation of kingdoms and duchies as bodies politic, in which the limbs responded to the head, and the head regulated the limbs to ensure moderation and prudence.70 These phrases were conventional pieties, but the preamble’s stress on how the old treaties sought to establish conditions under which friendship and alliance might flourish, in order to improve both Poland and Lithuania (meliorem promoventia Reipublicae, tam regni Poloniae, quam magni ducatus Lithwaniae), and upon mutual caritas within the ‘perpetual fraternal connection’ between ‘these two most noble nations’ (eorundem ac nobilissimarum Poloniae et Litwaniae nationum) was reflected in this first clause.71
Mielnik echoed the fraternal language of earlier treaties, but this formula was new, hinting at the combination of two polities into one ‘indivisible and undifferentiated body’, to form one gens and one populus, one fraternity and one (political) community. Thus, while the clause went on to stress that the king was to form the head of this new body politic, the language was of political community, not of statehood, and the stress that the king was to be elected by this new political nation made it clear that his legitimacy ultimately depended upon the express consent of the community of this new realm.
Like all compromise formulae, this clause was open to different interpretations. That many Poles still saw it as incorporationist became abundantly clear in the years that followed. Its failure to confront the problem of statehood was a weakness, although there were hints that this body might contain two realms in union together: clause 5 suggested that each party to the union would continue to be governed by their own laws and customs, and clause 11 spoke of the preservation of the liberties and offices, and the conservation of the security of both realms (utriusque dominii salva et salvas conservando).72 These phrases suggest that Balzer was wrong to stress that Mielnik formally dissolved the separate authority of the grand duke and sought to end Lithuania’s separate statehood.73 The possibility of a separate grand duke in the future was not excluded. Mielnik instead bears witness to the gradual forming of the notion that two realms could, within a union, fuse themselves into an entity that transcended both of them, as Scotland and England were formally to accomplish in 1707. It also prioritized the union of peoples over the union of states. Although Mielnik never came into effect, the vision of union it embodied was not forgotten.
1 Kolankowski, Dzieje, i, 398.
2 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 421–2; Papée, Jan Olbracht, 17–18; Pietkiewicz, ‘Spór’, 17.
3 Любавский, Сеймъ, 134–5.
4 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 437–8, 440.
5 Łowmiański, Polityka, 370.
6 Pietkiewicz, ‘Spór’, 17; Jūratė Kiaupienė and Rimvydas Petrauskas, Lietuvos Istorija, iv (Vilnius, 2009), 420; Papée, Aleksander, 10; Bues, Jagiellonen, 118.
7 Papée, Aleksander, 11–13; PSB, i, 58; Kolankowski, Dzieje, i, 399–40. Cf. Gitana Zujienė, ‘Lietuvos didžiojo kunigaikščio Aleksandro pakėlimo ceremonialo susiformavimas’, in Petrauskas (ed.), Alexandras, 56–9.
8 CDP, i, no. 194, 345; Papée, Aleksander, 13.
9 AZR, i, no. 100, 115–16.
10 See Darius Kuolys, Res Lituania kunigaikštystės bendrija, i: Respublikos steigimas (Vilnius, 2009), 63–89.
11 ‘для доброго и посполитого земського’: AZR, i, no. 100, 116.
12 Любавский, Сеймъ, 135; Stryjkowski, O początkach, 541–2; Papée, Aleksander, 11–12. The story is generally disbelieved: Грушевський, Історія, iv, 254; Halecki, Dzieje, i, 437.
13 Любавский, Сеймъ, 135–6; Stryjkowski mistakenly claims that the ceremony was performed by Ivan Khreptovich, who was marshal hospodarski, as does Zujienė, ‘Lietuvos’, 58: Papée, Aleksander, 12.
14 Любавский, Сеймъ, 130–1. See Ch. 26, 304–5.
15 Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 82–3.
16 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 442–4.
17 Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 81.
18 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 443.
19 AZR, i, no. 135, 156–61; Rowell, ‘Dynastic bluff?’, 14–15; Halecki, Dzieje, i, 444.
20 CESXV, iii, no. 421, 436.
21 AZR, i, no. 166, 190.
22 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 445–6.
23 CESXV, iii, no. 422, 418.
24 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 447.
25 Любавский, Сеймъ, 141.
26 AU, no. 71, 119–20.
27 CESXV, iii, no. 443, 461–2; no. 444, 462–3.
28 It is published in Lietuvos Metrika Knyga Nr. 25 (1387–1546), ed. Darius Antanavičius and Algirdas Baliulis (Vilnius, 1998), 44–6 and, with Lithuanian and Polish translations, in Horodlės aktai, 281–8. The original does not survive; neither does the 1541 copy, which was recopied in 1598: Baliulis, ‘Preface’, in Lietuvos Metrika Knyga Nr. 25, xiii.
29 For a detailed analysis that does not commit itself with regard to dating see Kuolys, Res Lituania, 63–89.
30 ‘praelati, barones et nobiles Magni Ducatus Lithuaniae magnum ducum suum sine liberis et successoribus legittimis decedentem magnum ducem Lithuaniae libera electione, quem voluerint, eligent’: Horodlės aktai, 283.
31 AU, nos. 72–6, 121–30.
32 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 452.
33 Kutrzeba, ‘Charakter’, 172–3; Łowmiański, Polityka, 372–3. Halecki agrees, but adds the important qualification ‘according to modern legal terminology’: Dzieje, i, 453.
34 ‘quomodo licet uniones et foedera inter haec dominia . . . inita et constituta hucusque inviolate serventur’. In the parallel Polish text, ‘inter dominia’ was translated as ‘między państwy’ (between states): AU, no. 76, 128; ‘unionum confoederationumque’: AU, no. 74, 123.
35 AU, no. 74, 129.
36 Błaszczyk, Litwa, 36–7; Halecki’s conclusion is broadly similar: Dzieje, i, 453. Lowmiański terms it the ‘so-called union of Vilnius’: Polityka, 371–4,
37 AU, no. 50, 59.
38 ‘Per hoc tamen non intendimus neque volumus dignitate et iuri praefati illustrissimi domini magni ducis ac nostro in aliquo derogare.’ AU, no. 74, 124; Halecki, Dzieje, i, 454.
39 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 454.
40 Bues, Jagiellonen, 123; Rowell, ‘Dynastic bluff?’, 15–16; AU, no. 50, 59.
41 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 455; ii, 2.
42 Кром, Меж Русью, 115–17; Любавский, Сеймъ, 143.
43 Łowmiański, Polityka, 374.
44 AA, no. 6, 5–6; no. 11, 12; Papée, Aleksander, 46–50.
45 Miechowita, Chronica, 361–2; Nowakowska accepts Miechowita’s account: Church, 52–3.
46 AA, no. 12, 12–13.
47 Papée, Jan Olbracht, 145–6.
48 AA, no. 30, 27; Nowakowska, Church, 53–4.
49 AA, no. 30, 27–8.
50 ‘sine praejudicio utriusque dominii’: AU, no. 77, 130–1, no. 78, 131–4. Papée, Aleksander, 50–1; Halecki, Dzieje, ii, 9.
51 AU, nos. 79–83, 134–49; Łowmiański, Polityka, 376; Halecki, Dzieje, ii, 11–12; Ludwik Finkel, Elekcja Zygmunta I (Cracow, 1910), 10–11; Błaszczyk, Litwa, 38; Jučas, Unija, 180. Piotr Szafraniec, starosta of Marienburg, informed the Danzig council on 30 September that the election had already taken place: AA, no. 27, 24.
52 AU, nos. 84–6, 149–54.
53 ‘quod regnum Poloniae et magnus ducatus Lithwaniae uniantur et conglutinentur in unum et indivisum ac indifferens corpus, ut sit una gens, una populus, una fraternitas et communia consilia eidemque corpori perpetuo unum caput, unus rex unusque dominus in loco et tempore assignatis per praesentes et ad electionem convenientes votis communibus eligatur, quodque absentium obstantia electio non impediatur et decretum electionis in regno semper sit iuxta consuetudines circa illud ex antiquo servatas.’ AU, no. 79, 137; no. 80, 140; no. 82, 144.
54 AU, no. 82, 144.
55 AU, no. 82, 137–8, 140–1, 144–5, Halecki, Dzieje, ii, 12–14; Błaszczyk Litwa, 39; Jučas, Unija, 180–1.
56 Halecki, Dzieje, ii, 1–2.
57 Łowmiański argued that even the Lithuanians accepted that Mielnik incorporated the grand duchy into Poland: Polityka, 376; cf. Adamus, ‘O prawno-państwowym stosunku’, 179.
58 Finkel, Elekcja, 12–14.
59 Halecki, Dzieje, ii, 1; cf. Błaszczyk, Litwa, 40.
60 Papée, Aleksander, 54.
61 Любавский, Сеймъ, 144–5.
62 AU, no. 79, 137; no. 80, 141; no. 83, 148–9.
63 Rowell, ‘Dynastic bluff?’, 16; Любавский, Сеймъ, 145.
64 AA, no. 21, 21.
65 AA, no. 69, 74–9.
66 Rowell, ‘Dynastic bluff?’, 17–19.
67 AA, no. 277, 458–60.
68 Любавский, Сеймъ, 146–7; Pietkiewicz, Wielkie księstwo, 206.
69 Błaszczyk, Litwa, 39.
70 AU, no. 79, 135.
71 AU, no. 79, 136.
72 AU, no. 79, 138.
73 Balzer, ‘Horodło’, 174.