PART VII
33
On 17 December 1529 Sigismund August was elected king of Poland in Piotrków. He was nine years old. There were several surprising features about his election: firstly, his father was still very much alive; secondly, the election took place at an ordinary sejm and not a specially summoned election sejm; and finally—as a bemused Sigismund told his wife—there was no opposition to what was destined to be the only successful election vivente rege in Polish history.1 The sejm had been called to consider the defence of the realm; there was no mention of the election in the pre-sejm material circulated by the chancery; and the proposal was sprung on a startled senate by Tomicki. The Lithuanians had neither been consulted nor invited; neither had Albrecht von Hohenzollern, who was pressing for recognition of his right to participate in royal elections following his designation as Poland’s first senator in the 1525 Cracow treaty.
The ground had been well prepared. The sixty-two-year-old Sigismund fell gravely ill in September 1528; when he developed a raging temperature the following May, the chancery spread rumours that he was likely to die.2 Sigismund was nevertheless astonished when, responding to Tomicki’s proposal, senators and envoys pressed him to effect it as soon as possible. The senate’s formal agreement was unanimously approved by the chamber.3 Contemporaries seemed not to have shared the view of Silnicki and Kolankowski that the procedural irregularities rendered the election illegal.4 Sigismund August was crowned in Cracow on 20 February 1530 by Łaski, assisted by nine bishops and two suffragans. This time Albrecht was present, although the only Lithuanian who turned up was Mikołaj Wieżgajło, bishop of Kyiv. Sigismund and Bona promised that their son would swear an oath to uphold the privileges conferred by his forebears as soon as he attained his majority.5
Not everyone was happy. Concern was expressed at the coronation sejm, not about the election’s validity—which nobody challenged—but about the way it had been conducted. Although Łaski had been consulted in 1528, and agreed to perform the coronation, he was caught by surprise by the timing of the election. He accepted the fait accompli but protested furiously in private. While the coronation
passed off without incident, the coronation sejm did not. Concern that the election would constitute a precedent forced Sigismund to declare on 16 March that future elections could only take place after the king’s death.6 As political opposition to Bona grew, culminating in the 1537 Lwów rokosz, condemnation of the election, now seen as an example of her malign influence, became strident, and the 1530 declaration was confirmed at the 1538 Piotrków sejm in a statute that declared elections vivente rege to be illegal.7
Bona was indeed the driving force behind the election. Sigismund was fifty-three when his son was born. The birth was a surprise, since astrologers had declared that Sigismund would have no male heirs. Bona had already had one daughter, Isabella, in 1519, to add to Jadwiga, born in 1513 of Sigismund’s first marriage; three more were to follow: Sophia (1522), Anna (1523), and Catherine (1526). The astrologers seemnot to have apologized for misreading the heavenly signs, but they could console themselves that they had been nearly right: the royal couple’s only other son, Albert, died on the day of his birth in 1527. After the death of Sigismund’s nephew Louis at Mohács in 1526, the male line of the Jagiellons rested on Sigismund August’s fragile shoulders.
Bona fought to secure her son’s future from the moment of his birth. She looked first to Lithuania, where the Jagiellons’ natural rights to the throne had long been exploited by the dynasty and the leading council families. It was a good moment. The death in 1521 of Mikalojus Radvila, chancellor and palatine of Vilnius, brought the prospect of ending the factional rivalry that had raged for years on the Lithuanian council between the Radvila family and the followers of Albertas Goštautas. Goštautas had helped crush the Hlynsky revolt, but was arrested on suspicion of complicity in January 1509.8 The arrest was encouraged by chancellor Mikalojus Radvilaitis, and his eldest son Mikalojus Radvila, who had supported Hlynsky under Alexander, but who trimmed his sails adeptly when the wind abruptly shifted under Sigismund. As a reward, in January 1509 he was granted Hlynsky’s extensive estates of Goniądz and Rajgród in Podlasie, and appointed chancellor and palatine of Vilnius in June 1510 following his father’s death.
The council was now dominated by the Radvila brothers. Mikalojus’s control of the chancery was buttressed by Jonas (marshal of the land, 1514–15, castellan of Trakai 1522) and Iurgis, court hetman and governor of Kyiv (1511–14), then Hrodna (from 1514). Jonas had married Goštautas’s sister Elžbieta. She died in 1503, but despite a dispute over her dowry, Jonas remained close to his brother-in-law, who was staying with him when Hlynsky launched his revolt. He pressed for Goštautas’s release, travelling twice to Cracow to lobby Sigismund, and his pleas helped save Goštautas from execution.9 After Goštautas’s release in 1510 there was a staged reconciliation with Mikalojus at the 1511 Brest sejm, and Goštautas was appointed governor of Navahrudak at the 1513–14 Vilnius sejm. Both men were part of Sigismund’s entourage when he travelled to Pozsony and Vienna to negotiate with Maximilian I in 1515. Relations remained poor, however, and were not improved when Mikalojus, having established a rapport with Maximilian, was granted the imperial title of duke of Goniądz and Medele.10
This rubbed salt into Goštautas’s open wounds. Mikalojus’s unconcealed ambition that should Sigismund die without a male heir the succession might devolve upon the dukes of Mazovia, sons of his sister Anna, was calculated neither to improve relations nor reassure Sigismund. The Mazovian marriage was a remarkable step for the Radvila family. Neither they nor the Goštautas were of princely descent; both families owed their position to royal patronage. Grand Radvila claims that they were descended from the Gediminid Narimantas were almost certainly spurious. None of these considerations dulled the ambitions of either family. The acceptance of a title from Maximilian for lands that lay in Podlasie was a direct challenge to Jagiellon claims that the Emperor had no jurisdiction over their territories and marked a new departure for the pany, the lords who had come to prominence in the fifteenth century, since neither the Polish nor the Lithuanian nobility used titles apart from that of prince/duke (kniaz in Ruthenian, książę in Polish), accorded to descendants of Gediminas and Rurik. The Radvila family did not flaunt their title initially, but later used it to blur the distinction and buttress their artfully constructed genealogy. Goštautas eventually secured the papal title of count from Clement VII in 1530, but it was not as prestigious as the Radvila dukedom. It did not help that Goniądz and Medele bordered Goštautas’s seat of Tykocin: from 1513 the rivals were involved in bitter and frequently violent boundary disputes.11
Sigismund sought to maintain a balance on the council, but his appointment of Goštautas as palatine of Trakai in 1519 increased the tension: during the Muscovite invasion later that year Goštautas stood with his forces at Krėva, but Radvila refused to summon the levy and the Muscovites penetrated to within fourteen kilometres of Vilnius. Radvila arrested several servants of Goštautas who, he claimed, planned to burn down Goniądz castle. Retaliating in advance, his retainers burned Tykocin castle, from which Goštautas barely escaped with his life.12
It was no way to run a war. The bitter dispute highlighted Lithuania’s dysfunctional system of government. Absentee monarchy and the concentration of government office in so few hands raised the political stakes and generated considerable and often violent rivalry among the handful of families whose wealth had raised them so spectacularly above the boyar masses. Radvila’s death opened the way to a resolution, and Sigismund travelled to Lithuania in the summer of 1521 to broker peace. Goštautas now dominated the council, and Sigismund had little choice but to appoint him chancellor and palatine of Vilnius. Sigismund insisted that Bona stay in Cracow to look after the children, but she was already in contact with Goštautas through her confidant Wawrzyniec Międzyleski, bishop of Kamianets, sent to Vilnius in 1519 to mediate.13
Bona had known Goštautas since 1518 when, during a long stay at court, he participated in her entry to Cracow and her coronation. She soon won his support over the succession. The matter was discussed at the second Lithuanian sejm of 1521, which opened in Vilnius in May. It deliberated until Sigismund left Lithuania in early December, mostly regarding taxation: despite the five-year truce agreed with Muscovy on 9 November, the need to maintain defences against the Tatars meant that the burden could not be lightened. Goštautas supported Bona’s plan but it did not enjoy an easy passage. Kostiantyn Ostrozky objected, worried at the reaction a unilateral Lithuanian decision would provoke in Poland. Ostrozky had been hetman since 1507; as a Ruthenian prince with extensive estates in Volhynia, he was more concerned about the Tatars than the Muscovites. Since the Tatars raided across all the Ruthenian lands, the needs of defence had stimulated considerable cooperation between Polish and Lithuanian forces, which Ostrozky had encouraged. He fought the Tatars alongside Poles in 1512, winning the battle of Vyshnevets (28 April). He won Sigismund’s trust, as was demonstrated by his appointment as castellan of Vilnius in 1511. Ostrozky maintained good relations with both Goštautas and Radvila, and Sigismund asked him to mediate between them. Apart from being an excellent soldier, Ostrozky was an astute politician, and a living example of the way in which the wealthiest and most powerful Ruthenian boyars and princes had integrated into the union state’s elite. He was a frequent visitor to the royal court, corresponded with Sigismund in Polish, and was well connected among Polish magnates.14
The Orthodox Ostrozky had a rather different view of the relationship with Poland from that of the Catholic lords who dominated the Lithuanian council. He was aware how unpopular unilateral Lithuanian action on the succession would be in Poland. His opposition was frustrating for Sigismund, who did not hide his anger after Ostrozky, during the crucial debate, dramatically fell to his knees, along with several of his supporters, begging him to abandon the plan.15 Sigismund issued a sharp public rebuke and, if Ostrozky finally accepted the proposal, his stance rallied opposition. It was only when Sigismund agreed to appoint a commission to codify Lithuanian law, a long-running demand of many Lithuanian boyars, that the Lithuanian sejm finally agreed that in the event of Sigismund’s death Lithuania would seek no other grand duke but Sigismund August.16
This declaration fell short of a formal election. That Sigismund and Bona thought one necessary casts doubt on the claim that the Jagiellons enjoyed an uncontested hereditary right to the grand ducal throne. The Lithuanian promise indicated that there would be a formal election on Sigismund’s death. Even to obtain this promise Sigismund had to make concessions, and for the moment that is where the matter rested: Sigismund left Lithuania, and did not return until 1528.
Neither the concessions nor the 1522 appointment of the Orthodox Ostrozky as palatine of Trakai brought internal peace. Sigismund’s elevation of Ostrozky, who had finally accepted the election plan, was designed to ensure that Goštautas, as chancellor and palatine of Vilnius, could not dominate as the Radvila family had done, but the granting to Ostrozky of precedence in the council was a provocative move that did nothing to promote harmony. Ostrozky’s relations with Goštautas had soured, and Goštautas protested vigorously at this breach of Horodło. The breach became permanent when Goštautas pursued Mikalojus Radvila’s widow and her sons for compensation for the burning of Tykocin with such zeal that they sought royal protection and attracted Ostrozky’s support.
These rivalries made it difficult for the council to restore order. The empty treasury meant that the professional soldiers could not be paid off, while the council could neither defend the southern borders against the Tatars, nor the eastern borders against frequent Muscovite incursions that took place despite the 1522 truce. Lithuania’s institutions were all but paralysed: in 1524 Ostrozky arrived at a sejm summoned to Navahrudak, but Goštautas called a separate assembly to Vilnius. Sejms, without the king’s mediating presence, failed to agree the necessary taxes, and the council’s divisions had serious implications for the provision of justice. Councillors begged Sigismund to return to sort things out, but he was detained by the Prussian negotiations and the Ottoman threat.17
As the Lithuanian sejm met more frequently, the council was increasingly challenged. This was not the clash between ‘magnates’ and ‘ordinary nobles’ as which it is often portrayed; it was far more complex. The Lithuanian elite had expanded considerably since 1386, and there were plenty of families excluded from high office. The weakness of the Catholic church, which had few bishoprics—and was therefore short of canonries and other plum ecclesiastical posts—closed off an important route for advancement to ambitious outsiders: only Vilnius was tolerably endowed—although it bore no comparison to the wealthiest bishoprics in Poland—and it was only the bishop of Vilnius who played any serious political role. From 1519 until 1536, when, after years of lobbying, he was translated to the far more lucrative bishopric of Poznań, Vilnius was held not by a Lithuanian, but by Sigismund’s illegitimate son Jan Zygmuntowicz.18
The internal conflicts on the council exacerbated the problems of the legal system. Nobles had been granted substantial privileges since 1387, but were often unable to secure legal protection for their properties in Lithuania’s chaotic court system. It did not help that grand dukes, in order to win support, were happy to grant council members extensive judicial privileges. A 1517 decree removed Mikalojus Radvila’s lands in Podlasie from the jurisdiction of the common law, placing them under the judicial control of the council and the chancery—held by Radvila himself. Together with the 1513 privilege granting Goniądz and Rajgród to Radvila, which made him the feudal superior of nobles settled in these lands, this decree turned Radvila’s noble tenants into his subjects, a category that expanded through the policy, pursued by several magnate families, of settling nobles on their lands on service tenures.19 Podlasie therefore became a centre of opposition to arbitrary magnate power. It had briefly fallen under Mazovian rule in the late fourteenth century and again in the 1440s, and was subject to influence from Mazovia and Poland. By 1538 the immigration of Mazovians and Poles, mostly petty and middling nobles, was substantial enough for concern to be expressed at an assembly in Navahrudak.20 These migrants brought with them Polish ideas and Polish attitudes. By 1500 Polish money was the normal medium of exchange in Podlasie. Podlasian nobles clamoured for the introduction of Polish-style land courts with elected judges. Polish migrants in Drohichyn county secured the right to use Polish law—within certain limits—in a 1444 privilege; these rights were extended in 1492, and in 1516 the Polish system of land courts was introduced. Bielsk county secured certain rights to use Polish law in 1501.21
Calls for codification of Lithuanian law were therefore not unwelcome to the council magnates, who could expect to shape the process and ensure that it did not result in a radical shift in power away from the council on Polish lines. A draft codification was already in preparation in 1522, but since it had been drawn up under Mikalojus Radvila, Goštautas rejected it.22 As chancellor, he now had the opportunity to use codification to institutionalize his own vision for the grand duchy. For Goštautas had a vision. He is frequently depicted as a radical Lithuanian separatist and an anti-Polish defender of Lithuanian sovereignty and independence.23 Yet if Goštautas certainly advocated and defended Lithuanian autonomy, his vision was more complex. To challenge the union directly would have been to challenge the dynasty, which was committed to union, and had long defended the Lithuanian conception of union against Polish incorporationism. No Lithuanian politician could really contemplate breaking the union, since this would have left the grand duchy, deprived of Polish financial and military support, helpless against Muscovy. Goštautas knew all of this. Rather than defending Lithuanian sovereignty and statehood in the modern sense, he mounted the most coherent intellectual case yet made in favour of the Lithuanian vision of a union of equals—aeque principaliter—in which he sought to exploit the royal desire to secure the succession for Sigismund August to achieve recognition of the grand duchy’s equal status with Poland within the union.24
Goštautas was a sophisticated cosmopolitan aristocrat. He was the grandson of Jonas Goštautas († 1458), one of the Horodło 47, who was adopted into the Awdaniec clan. Jonas supported Švitrigaila, but changed sides in 1432, signing the Hrodna union. He masterminded Casimir’s election in 1440, and was created palatine of Trakai (1440) and Vilnius (1443) as a reward. After 1447 he moved into opposition, leading the 1450s campaign to remove from the union treaties all phrases implying that Lithuania was not an equal partner in the union. Albertas’s father Martynas († 1483) chose a different path, supporting Casimir and ending his career as palatine of Trakai and a wealthy man. Albertas was his only son; he had one sister, and so inherited most of Martynas’s considerable estate, to which he added throughout his life: in 1528, he was assessed at the highest tariff of any individual (466 horses) in the military register. He travelled in his youth, and was probably one of the young men from the Goštautas family seat of Gieraniony who, circa 1492, were students at Cracow University, of which his grandfather had been a benefactor.25 He learned excellent Polish and Latin, and visited the imperial court in 1501. He was a cultivated man whose political and cultural world extended far beyond Vilnius: a list of some 90 of his books survives: 37 titles (40 per cent) were in Ruthenian; 47 (52 per cent) in Latin; several in Polish, three in Czech, and one in Serbian.26 He was well-connected at the Cracow court, a regular correspondent of leading Polish politicians, and enjoyed good relations with Albrecht von Hohenzollern.
The 1522 deal gave Goštautas the opportunity to chart his own political course and secure not just the council’s authority within Lithuania, but also the position of Lithuania within the union. The succession issue gave him considerable leverage, that was increased by the 1525 Prussian homage and the death of the last two Mazovian dukes in 1526, which raised the question of the relationship of the various parts of the composite Jagiellonian state to each other. In 1526, supported by the Radvila family and bishop Jan Zygmuntowicz, Goštautas told Sigismund that when a papal envoy passed through Vilnius en route to Moscow to discuss a permanent peace treaty between Lithuania and Muscovy, he had informed the council that his mission was to persuade Vasilii III to convert to Catholicism, with the promise that if he did, the pope would offer him a crown.27 To ensure that the status of his patrimony was maintained, Sigismund August should, so the council suggested, be crowned hereditary king of Lithuania, with the crown supposedly seized by the Poles from Sigismund of Luxembourg’s envoys a century earlier.28
Halecki sees this embassy as evidence that Goštautas was an advocate of ‘extreme particularism’, claiming that Bona was behind the idea.29 Although Bona saw the advantages of the plan, it is unlikely she was its initiator: her brief honeymoon with Goštautas did not long survive 1522. The queen’s interest in Lithuania grew in the 1520s, but her support of Ostrozky, and her closeness to Łaski, with whom she shared a deep hostility to Albrecht von Hohenzollern and Sigismund’s pro-Habsburg policy, meant that she thought along very different lines to Goštautas, who was pro-Habsburg and close to Albrecht; Goštautas therefore established links to Bona’s leading critics, Tomicki and Szydłowiecki.30
When in 1529 Bona suggested that the Polish system of land courts should be introduced in Lithuania, Goštautas responded with a carefully constructed argument that constituted an invitation and a warning. After claiming that he was writing neither in his official capacity, nor as a private individual, but in the interests of the common good, Goštautas warned of the consequences of the introduction of Polish law and the Polish court system by discussing his personal circumstances: although he had only one son, he was concerned that should his son have children, and the generations should thereafter multiply, subdivision might take place, reducing the great Goštautas clan to the ranks of the ordinary nobility. After this none-too-subtle warning that his family interests were primary, Goštautas brought up the succession, pointing out that while Poles enjoyed the right of free election, and could choose anyone they wished to be their king, Lithuania was the common patrimony of all the king’s sons.31
Goštautas was not simply endorsing the idea that Lithuania was a hereditary monarchy: as he stressed, it was the patrimony of the dynasty, not the king’s eldest son. The selection of a successor therefore depended on the consent of the Lithuanian sejm, and in practice on the council, whose central role he stressed in a reminder to Bona of how useful the maintenance of Lithuania’s distinctive political system was to the Jagiellons. After discussing the external threats faced by the union state, he observed that if in Poland noble envoys had to agree to taxes and the making of laws, in Lithuania matters were differently ordered: nobles were summoned to the sejm simply to be told to do what the king and council had decided. He pointed out that every country had a different way of conducting their parliaments; this was the case in Rome, Venice, Florence, Germany, Spain, France, and—closer to home—Bohemia, Hungary, Prussia, and Mazovia. Given the king’s long absences from Lithuania, members of the council were his experts and his eyes. The council could summon the nobles to war, and tell them what to do. Goštautas argued that Lithuanians should therefore be ruled according to Lithuanian custom. He concluded by praising Sigismund’s father for respecting Lithuanian customs, and for not trying to reform the grand duchy; instead he permitted it to retain a system that had successfully resisted all its enemies from the time of Attila.32
The critical reader might suggest that the system had not proven so effective against less mythical enemies, but the reference to Attila reveals another aspect of Goštautas’s vision: the construction of a historical justification for Lithuania’s existence as a separate realm, distinct from its neighbours and from Poland, though united with it. Goštautas was closely involved in the rewriting of the grand duchy’s history as presented in the contemporary redactions of the Lithuanian chronicles. These drew on the first redaction, composed under Vytautas’s influence in the 1420s, and largely based on his Sache, which recounted his conflict with Jagiełło and Skirgaila in the 1390s.33 The Vytautan chronicles were expanded and rewritten in Smolensk in the 1440s. The fullest version of the first redaction, completed around 1446 presented a Lithuanian version of the grand duchy’s past, while challenging the Muscovite view of Ruthenian history. The second redaction, the Chronicle of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Samogitia, was probably compiled between 1510 and 1517.34 There is evidence that Goštautas was involved in this redaction, but he was the driving force behind the third redaction, the so-called Bychowiec chronicle, which reveals most about his political aims.
The Bychowiec chronicle was a rather different text to the first two redactions, and there is much less consensus concerning the date of its preparation and final compilation. It was first published by Teodor Narbutt in 1846. Narbutt was not altogether trustworthy with regard to his sources, and the subsequent disappearance of the manuscript on which it was based inclined some to regard it as a forgery.35 There is enough internal and external evidence, however, to accept it as genuine. While the final version was probably compiled between 1538 and the early 1560s, there is much to suggest that it was first assembled, as Jasas suggests, under Goštautas’s direction between 1519, the date of the first edition of Miechowita’s chronicle, on which it draws, and Goštautas’s death in 1539, with most of it completed by 1525.36
Whenever the final version was compiled, there is much in the Bychowiec chronicle to suggest that Goštautas was behind it. It has frequently been used as evidence of his supposed separatist aims. Jasas observes that the text does not use the word union once, and ignores many important episodes in the union story. It glorifies the Lithuanian nobility in general and the Goštautas family in particular, mounting a staunch defence of the council after 1440.37 Although the Bychowiec chronicle, like the second redaction, constructs a history of the Lithuanian people designed to establish their ancient lineage, and presents the grand duchy as a distinct political entity with its own history and traditions, its attitude towards the union, and towards relations with Poland, is rather more complex.
The suggestion that the bulk of the chronicle was compiled in the 1520s is supported by the extent to which it is a direct response to the view of the Lithuanian past promulgated by Miechowita. The need to respond to Miechowita would explain not only why a third redaction was necessary so soon after the second had been compiled, but also why so much of the text differed from the second redaction, and would confirm Jasas’s view that the second redaction was compiled between 1514 and 1517, rather than Ochmański’s dating of 1522–7.38
There was much in Miechowita to reply to, most of it concerning the union. The first redaction, reflecting its origins in Vytautas’s entourage, was a tale of princes, largely devoted to the fraught relations between Kęstutis, Jagiełło, and Vytautas, and—reflecting the influence of Herasym and the Smolensk circles that compiled the final version—was concerned with combating the view of the Lithuanian past peddled in the Muscovite chronicles. Little attention is paid to relations with Poland apart from the struggle for control of Podolia and Volhynia: Jagiełło’s accession to the Polish throne and the christianization of Lithuania is mentioned merely in passing, while the story of Vytautas’s reign focuses almost entirely on his relations with Skirgaila and the Gediminids, and his interactions with Muscovy and the Tatars.
The second redaction is aristocratic in tone. Although it drew heavily on the first redaction, it constructed a completely new account of the origins of the Lithuanians aimed at countering claims in the fifteenth-century Muscovite chronicles that the Rurikids were descended from Prus, a relative of Octavian. This hijacking of the legacy of Rome had to be combated, as did the historical account designed to justify Rurikid claims to be the legitimate rulers of all Rus', and Polish allegations concerning the barbarous nature of the Lithuanians before christianization. The second redaction contains an elaborate account of the legendary origins of the Lithuanians, claiming that they were descended from Prince Palemon, a relative of Nero. The point of this story becomes clear with the construction of lineages that not only defend the honour of the Gediminids against Muscovite claims that Gediminas was grand duke Vytenis’s master of the horse rather than his brother, but also assert the ancient and noble descent of several leading families, among them the Goštautas, the Holshanskys, and the Giedraitis, whose descent from the Roman nobles who accompanied Palemon is asserted: the Goštautas from the Colonna, and the Holshanskys and Giedraitis from the Centaurs (Kentauros).39 The Radvila family are conspicuously absent.
Miechowita required a different response. He drew substantially on Długosz’s unpublished Annals, echoing much of Długosz’s negative attitude to Lithuanians and presenting a view of the union that owed much to Oleśnicki’s incorporationist ideas. He baldly states that with Jagiełło’s coronation Lithuania was ‘perpetually inscribed and incorporated’ into Poland; Horodło was presented in similar terms.40 Although Miechowita, following Długosz, wrote of the Italian origins of the Lithuanians, he depicted them as barbarous and uncivilized before 1386, dwelling on polygamy and other immoral practices of the Samogitians. The Lithuanians had fallen under the domination of the Ruthenians, by whom they were regarded with contempt, and from whom they were liberated by Vytenis. It was only at Horodło that some Lithuanians received a veneer of civilization through their acceptance into Polish heraldic clans.41
The Bychowiec chronicle directly challenges this picture. Although it drew on the earlier redactions it had a very different approach to Lithuanian history. While it retained an account of the Roman origins of the Lithuanians, the story was moved forward to the fifth century. Palemon disappeared, to be replaced by the Roman prince Apolonus and 500 noble families he led out of Italy to escape Attila’s depredations after the siege of Aquilea, which had the advantage of considerably reducing the number of generations required for Lithuanian noble genealogies.42
This shift sought to bolster the story’s historical veracity, but the principal changes concerned Lithuania’s relations with Poland, in a direct challenge to Miechowita’s version of the union’s history. The narrative broadly followed the first redaction in portraying Vytautas as inheriting his grand-ducal title from Kęstutis, and although it dealt extensively with Jagiełło’s accession to the Polish throne, it made no mention of Krewo or his agreements with Vytautas. It does, however, mention Horodło, as the second redaction does not. Horodło is presented as a succession pact between Jagiełło and Vytautas, in which the Poles and Lithuanians agree to treat each other as equals, swearing mutual oaths that should Jagiełło die without heirs, the Poles would elect nobody but one of Vytautas’s sons, while if Vytautas should die without heirs, the Lithuanians would elect one of Jagiełło’s sons.43
Thus the union was explicitly endorsed, with a stress on the elective nature of the grand ducal office and the provision that in the event of Jagiełło dying without heirs, Vytautas’s sons would rule over both Poland and Lithuania. There is no mention of incorporation or the Horodło adoption, which is shunted forward into the account of the coronation tempest. This had featured in the second redaction, but after describing how Vytautas decided he wanted a crown, and how ‘his Polish enemies’ had prevented him securing it, the second redaction used the Lutsk assembly of 1429 simply as a means of glorifying Vytautas by dwelling on the magnificence of the occasion and drooling over the guest-list.44 The Bychowiec chronicle repeats a version of this section but in its creative remoulding of the story it was Jagiełło, concerned at his advanced age (‘ja czełowik letny’), who proposes that Vytautas should be crowned, and suggests that permission should be sought from Sigismund and the pope. At Lutsk Sigismund is won over, promising to send his envoy to secure papal agreement. Sigismund then suggests to Jagiełło that he should persuade Vytautas to unite the nobilities of Poland and Lithuania through adoption, to prevent bloodshed and to promote friendship and brotherhood between them, as in the past the Poles had been adopted by the Bohemians, and had assumed their coats of arms.45
With Sigismund’s endorsement, the Lithuanian nobles assert their status. They reject the proposed adoption by claiming that while the Poles had been commoners until the Bohemian adoption, the Lithuanians, in contrast, were nobles of Roman lineage, who needed no other coats of arms but the ancient ones inherited from their illustrious forebears. Sigismund and Vytautas duly recognize the ancient nature of the Lithuanian nobility, while Vytautas pleads with the nobles to accept the adoption to promote brotherhood with the Poles, and to secure the crown for him and for Lithuania.46
The aristocratic nature of this vision of the past is shown by the next passage, in which Vytautas tells Sigismund that he cannot agree until he has consulted his councillors. It is here that the point of the relocation of the story becomes clear, and the brilliance of this exercise in aristocratic one-upmanship can be appreciated in all its sophisticated glory. The way that the Bychowiec chronicler—and through him Goštautas—tells the story, the Lithuanians graciously accept the invitation to lower themselves by accepting the adoption, while providing an explicit justification for the continued use by many Lithuanian families of their old crests. By doing so, they were endorsing the vision of a fraternal, brotherly union proposed at Horodło and confirmed at Mielnik, a vision of union that the Lithuanians had never rejected, and which reflected the actual social relationships and political alliances that had recently been established between the great Polish and Lithuanian magnate families. Linking this tendentious and unhistorical version of the adoption story to the issue of the crown offered to Vytautas by Sigismund enabled the chronicler to accuse the Poles of breaking the fraternal bond by blocking Vytautas’s coronation and refusing to recognize Lithuania’s equal status in the union.
The Bychowiec chronicle is no anti-union tract, but a radical challenge to the Polish incorporationist interpretation, and the idea of a Polish civilizing mission. Although it was not published until the nineteenth century, it influenced subsequent Lithuanian historians, including Stryjkowski and Kojałowicz. At its heart lay the ideal of a union built round the dynasty and its alliance with the narrow group of families whose genealogy the chronicle presented. Most important were the Goštautas—the only family whose descent was, like the Gediminids, drawn from the Colonnas, which suggests that the Bychowiec chronicle was partly an attempt to place the Goštautas family in the frame as possible successors to the Jagiellons at a time when Sigismund August was an infant.
It was in the context of this redraft of Lithuanian history that the 1526 proposal for elevating Lithuania to the status of a kingdom was made. The pretext was flimsy. It was unlikely that Vasilii would convert to Catholicism or, if he did, that the Muscovite Orthodox church could be persuaded to follow his lead at a time when it was in a much stronger position than during the council of Florence. The embassy brought with it a long, carefully constructed document that reflects the vision of the union embodied in the Bychowiec chronicle and draws heavily on the political language of union. Written like the Bychowiec chronicle in a Ruthenian replete with Polonisms—this time in Cyrillic—it opposed the incorporationist view of the union and presented the Lithuanian case for recognizing that the grand duchy’s relationship with Poland constituted a union aeque principaliter. It urged Sigismund to support the proposal:
for the benefit of Your Majesty’s descendants: for it will always be better and of greater profit for them if this, Your Majesty’s realm and fatherland, retains its titles and laws separate from the kingdom of Poland.47
This was not a statement of Lithuania’s independence, but a particular view of the union: like Royal Prussia, which also retained its own laws, Lithuania constituted a separate realm within the union. The document observed that the Lithuanians had freely and willingly elected Sigismund August grand duke in 1522—a statement that was not, strictly speaking, accurate—which the Poles had, up to now, refused to do. This would not have been possible had Lithuania been incorporated into Poland. After requesting that Sigismund August be crowned with Vytautas’s crown, the Lithuanians stated that if Lithuania were raised to the status of a kingdom, it could not be incorporated into Poland (втѣлено имъкъ корунѣ; привлащоно къ корунѣ Польской), since no kingdom can contain another kingdom (бо коруна въ коруну втѣлена быть не може).48
This was no call to end the union; neither was it a statement of ‘extreme separatism’, whatever that might be. It was a restatement of the Lithuanian view of the union as a fraternal relationship between equal partners. It suggested that the Poles should cease thirsting for the humiliation of the grand duchy through incorporation, but allow it to stand as an equal in fraternity and friendship, and in unity against every enemy. If the Poles refused to return the crown, then the envoys were to urge Sigismund to ask pope and emperor to provide a new one for Sigismund August’s coronation.49 The document concluded by proposing that instead of incorporating Mazovia into Poland, Sigismund should grant it as a fief to his son. This would give the Poles a double incentive to elect him king on Sigismund’s death, since otherwise Mazovia would be attached to Lithuania rather than Poland.50
This was no unilateral declaration of independence. It was a plea for Sigismund to resist unitary visions of his composite realm and to institutionalize the Lithuanian concept of a union of noble citizens whose various realms would be governed separately, as they had been since 1386. Each would retain its own laws and customs, and would share a common ruler—or rulers—from within the dynasty, as they had since 1386. Goštautas and the council were aware that the Poles would oppose any such plan, as they had during the coronation tempest; it was therefore important that the Lithuanians defend their equal status and that the Jagiellons should exploit the Polish desire to maintain the union and ward off pressure for closer union by presenting the Poles with faits accomplis through the election of a grand duke, as the Lithuanians had in 1430, 1440, 1492, and 1501, thus implicitly endorsing the Lithuanian vision of the union.
Sigismund had no intention of accepting the Lithuanian proposal; it is unlikely that Goštautas believed he would, or was particularly disappointed at its rejection: there was to be no rerun of the coronation tempest when Sigismund returned to Lithuania in 1528, this time accompanied by Bona, for a two-year stay that transformed Lithuanian politics. He summoned a sejm to Vilnius at the end of April that, because of the importance of the issues and the bitter divisions within Lithuanian politics, lasted almost a year, until February 1529.51 One of its first acts, on 1 May, decreed the preparation of the 1528 military register.52 The sejm discussed taxation, although it was only with difficulty that Sigismund obtained a new grant of the serebshchyzna in July. As in Poland, regular taxation to fund the Muscovite wars provoked serious discontent among ordinary nobles, who not only had to bear the burden of the noble levy but were paying tax rates that had risen steeply since 1492. As in Poland with regard to the royal domain, voices were raised against the large-scale alienation of grand ducal land, mortgaged to a handful of magnates, often on lifelong leases, and with considerable tax exemptions.53
The main purpose, however, was to complete the bargain negotiated in 1522. On 18 October 1529, the nine-year-old Sigismund August was enthroned as grand duke of Lithuania after swearing an oath—along with his father—to respect the privileges granted by his predecessors. Once again the Lithuanians had stolen a march on the Poles. With Sigismund August installed as grand duke, no viable alternative in sight following the extinction of the Mazovian Piasts—those persistent if perennially unsuccessful candidates for the throne of their ancestors—and no reason to postpone the decision, the Polish sejm was startled into its election vivente rege, which Sigismund hurried back to Piotrków to secure.
In his absence, Goštautas piloted through the codification of the law which was the price for Sigismund August’s election. Discussions over its final form extended the sejm until February, when what is known as the First Lithuanian Statute was agreed. It came into force on St Michael’s Day (29 September 1529). Written in the chancery Ruthenian that had been the grand duchy’s language of government since the fourteenth century, it soon appeared in Latin (1530) and Polish (1532) translations.54 The Lithuanian success in agreeing a codification contrasted starkly with the problems Sigismund faced in Poland, where, after the process foundered in the early 1530s, no successful codification of the law ever took place.
The statute was a considerable achievement. While there is no proof that Goštautas was its author it is certain that he played a substantial role in its preparation, and in steering it through the sejm.55 With 233 articles divided into thirteen sections, it was a proper codification; not a compilation of previous laws and privileges like Łaski’s 1506 digest, but a new legislative code that replaced much previous law, although it did not affect the noble privileges that Sigismund August and his father swore to uphold shortly after its promulgation.56 It covered a wide range of matters, from the laws regulating military service that underpinned the 1528 register (section II), to violence, homicide, and theft (sections VII and XIII), and included a range of laws regulating Lithuania’s agricultural economy on matters such as the value of bees and trees (section IX/14)—an issue of considerable importance in the grand duchy—and the legal remedies for an attack by an untethered dog (section XII/13).57
In theory the statute went a long way towards meeting the demands of ordinary nobles, not least because of its extensive provisions with regard to the conduct of the courts, both civil and criminal, and in its articles concerning property, which at last gave some legal shape to the principles enunciated in the various privileges granted since 1387. It clarified inheritance law and devoted one whole section (IV) to the law concerning female inheritance rights and the principles under which women were given in marriage. These provisions provided the basis for the considerable legal rights of noblewomen under Lithuanian law: dowers were protected, as was the right of a widow to live on her portion until her death. The provision was generous—widows could be granted up to a third of their husband’s estate as their dower—and provision was made for widows whose husbands had failed to make provision for them. While women could not marry without their family’s consent, women of princely families could not be forced to marry against their will.58
The statute bears eloquent testimony to the consolidation that had taken place since 1387 within the union state as a whole, and within the grand duchy in particular. While it drew heavily on Ruthenian law, whose roots lay in the Pravda Russkaia of Kievan Rus', it enshrined much customary practice within Lithuanian common law, and was influenced by both Polish and Roman law.59 Knowledge of Polish law had spread widely after Ruthenian translations of the statutes of Casimir III and Jagiełło’s land laws were published between 1423 and 1434.60 By confirming it, Sigismund explicitly endorsed Goštautas’s vision of a union aeque principaliter, in which the parties to the union were of equal status, and preserved and administered their own laws. In section III/i, which concerned the liberties of the nobility and the grand duchy’s territory, Sigismund swore that if God granted to him ‘another realm or kingdom’ he would not allow Lithuania or its council to be derided or mocked, but would protect them from ‘defamation and degradation’, as his father had done.61 Since the kingdom of Poland was the most likely realm that God might bestow on him, this clause sought to enlist Sigismund and his successors in the defence of the grand duchy’s status within the union.
While the statute confirmed the privileges of the nobility and met many of their demands for the improvement of judicial procedure, it did much to underpin the oligarchic system. The grand duke was to protect and preserve the position of the council and its chief officials and shield them from denigration. The council’s role as an appellate court was enshrined in law. Most importantly, in a clear echo of Nihil Novi, the grand duke was to preserve all old privileges and customs; while new law could only be made with the ‘knowledge, counsel, and consent’ of the council (III/vi).62 There was no mention of the sejm, and the pleas of the ordinary nobility, supported by Bona, for the introduction of Polish-style elected land courts fell on the deafest of ears.
With Sigismund August’s election and the statute’s promulgation, Goštautas and his council allies sought to buttress their vision of the union and the relationship with Poland, and to institutionalize the council’s dominant position against those calling for a greater role for the nobility. The fact that the statute’s eminently sound articles did little to improve the quality of justice actually delivered in the courts, however, meant that the voices of ordinary nobles were not stilled. Grumbling only increased after the failure of the last in the long cycle of Lithuanian-Muscovite wars, launched by an optimistic council in 1534 to exploit the apparent political weakness of Moscow following the 1533 accession of the infant Ivan IV. Despite the 1528 military reforms and the agreement of considerable levels of taxation by the sejm, the Lithuanians failed to win any serious victories, or to recover territory lost between 1492 and 1514 apart from Homel, returned in the five-year truce signed in 1537.
As the clamour grew, the council elite closed ranks. Around 1533 Goštautas buried the hatchet with the Radvila family. In 1536 he married his only son Stanislovas to Barbara, daughter of Jurgis Radvila, castellan of Vilnius, who had been created hetman on Ostrozky’s death in 1530. Goštautas was already an old man, however. He died in December 1539; his only son Stanislovas followed him into the grave three years later. The Goštautas were no more, and the door was opened to a long period of Radvila dominance. Barbara was to play a brief, if spectacular, part in that story, as the system that her father-in-law had defended so tenaciously came under increasing pressure.
Goštautas’s legacy lived on, however. His ideas formed the basis of council resistance to the campaign for closer union launched by the execution movement in Poland in the 1540s. Yet there were serious contradictions at the heart of his vision. For the enthusiasm of the council elite for composite monarchy and local self-government did not extend to the grand duchy itself, where they stood squarely behind Vytautas’s integrationist policy. The Bychowiec chronicle relates an unvarnished tale of Lithuanian conquest of the Rus'ian lands, baldly telling how the cruelties inflicted by Narimantas upon the Poles and the Ruthenians were said by the Ruthenian chronicles to be greater than those of ‘Syrian Antioch, Herod, and Nero himself’.63 It is a story of dynastic and martial expansion, not of cultural transfer and peaceful interaction. Kyiv is conquered by Gediminas, and if the achievements of the Gediminids at the head of joint Lithuanian and Ruthenian armies are lauded, the main emphasis during the narrative of Vytautas’s reign is placed upon the struggle with Skirgaila and the subjugation of the appanage princes. The 1430s civil wars are depicted as a clash between Lithuanians and Poles on one side, and Ruthenians, led by Švitrigaila, on the other. Even Žygimantas is accused of favouring Ruthenians over Lithuanians to justify his overthrow.64
The Goštautas family had benefited from Vytautas’s centralizing policies, and Albertas’s father Martynas had served as governor of Kyiv after Casimir’s removal of the duchy from the Olelkovych. Goštautas’s attitude to Ruthenians was ambivalent, however, as emerged from his clash with Ostrozky in 1522 and the bitterness he showed to him thereafter. In June 1525 he wrote to Bona complaining of Ostrozky’s behaviour and revealing his commitment to Vytautas’s vision of a system ruled from Vilnius by Lithuanian Catholics. After reminding Bona of the role he had played in 1522, Goštautas launched a sour attack on Ostrozky who had opposed the deal, and on the Radvila family for allying with him. Goštautas complains about their pretensions and the slights and injustices he had suffered at their hands, moans about their title, and accuses them of paying the astrologers who forecast that Sigismund would have no male heir.65
The letter’s main target is Ostrozky, however. He is sneeringly referred to as ‘that wee Ruthenian princeling’ (ruthenus ducaculus), and condemned as a parvenu, born into an insignificant and impoverished family. Ostrozky’s sins are rehearsed at length, his military competence questioned, and his malign influence upon Sigismund deplored. Goštautas reserves considerable bile for the Ruthenians, whom, he makes clear, he does not regard as worthy of a place within the republic of citizens to which he frequently refers. They are characterized as ‘that perverse people’ (illius perverse gentis), while the many faults that Goštautas finds in Ostrozky are presented as typical of the Ruthenian character: he is accused of pride, typical ‘Ruthenian cunning’, and ‘Ruthenian duplicity and perfidy’. Goštautas contrasts Ostrozky’s career with his own: he had risen through service, ‘not through tongue and deceitful gesture in the sycophantic Ruthenian manner’. The letter ends with a passionate denunciation of Ostrosky’s elevation to the palatinate of Trakai and a warning that he was in treasonable league with Semën Olelkovych, duke of Slutsk: ‘Ruthenus cum Rutheno, ducaculus cum ducaculo ligam iniit’.66
It is hard to know whether Goštautas’s intemperate diatribe merely reflected his annoyance at Ostrozky’s behaviour. Relations were cordial before 1522, and there were Ruthenians in the chancery and among Goštautas’s entourage. The vehemence of the slurs against Ruthenians, however, suggests something more deep-seated: the Olelkovych were hardly ‘wee princelings’, despite the loss of their Kyivan patrimony, and the sour epithets, while not for public consumption, reveal that Ruthenians were still regarded with condescension and suspicion by many Catholic Lithuanian aristocrats, at least if, like Ostrozky, they remained Orthodox. While Ruthenian families that converted to Catholicism, such as the Sapieha or Khodkevych/Chodkiewicz, were gradually accepted, those like Ostrozky who remained Orthodox were treated with suspicion and, occasionally, contempt. Nearly a century after they were supposedly accorded the same rights as their Lithuanian Catholic counterparts, Ruthenians were still regarded as second-class citizens by many among the Vilnius elite.
This emerged starkly in the furore over Ostrozky’s elevation in 1522. He had already served as governor of Bratslav and Vinnitsa (1497–1500; 1507–16; 1518–30), marshal of Volhynia (1507–22), and hetman (1497–1500; 1507–30).67 His cordial relations with Radvila and Goštautas meant that there appears to have been no reaction to his appointment to the castellany of Vilnius in 1511, despite the fact that it was one of the offices limited to Catholics at Horodło in 1413.68 His elevation in 1522 to a position of precedence within the council, however, was a step too far. The subsequent protests demonstrated the extent to which the dominance of the Catholic council elite depended on the union. For it was to Horodło that Goštautas turned. At a stormy sejm in Hrodna he orchestrated loud protests against Sigismund, who was forced to issue a declaration on 23 February 1522 confirming the eleventh article of Horodło. It stated that Ostrozky’s elevation was due to his exceptional services, and did not constitute a precedent, noting that Goštautas had agreed to accept Ostrozky’s precedence out of his particular esteem and respect for him, and with the council’s agreement. Sigismund repeated the promise in confirming Lithuania’s privileges in October 1529, as did Sigismund August in November 1551, although the Horodło ban was not included in the Lithuanian statute, and it continued to be honoured in the breach. The Orthodox Ivan Hornostai, a client of Bona who had spent long years in Poland as an agent of the Lithuanian chancery, appointed treasurer in 1519, remained in post.69
Yet for all the wealth of some Orthodox nobles, the identification of many with the republican ideals of the grand duchy’s developing political culture, and the dynasty’s willingness to promote Orthodox integration into the political elite, their religion constituted an important barrier. Goštautas’s 1525 letter to Bona and his 1529 memorial against the introduction of land courts on the Polish model demonstrate that, despite his republican rhetoric, his vision of the Lithuanian republic he wished to keep distinct from its Polish counterpart was a narrow one: government might be based on consent, but that consent was limited to a small group of magnate families. This constituted its most vital weakness: as his 1525 letter reveals, rivalry was intense, and these families could not even settle disputes among themselves without frequent recourse to violence. It was a republic that held out the benefits of a consensual, republican view to a large number of nobles, yet sought to withhold its full benefits from many, including Orthodox Ruthenians and the dependent nobles given service leases on magnate estates. In a grand duchy undergoing rapid social change, however, it was to prove increasingly difficult to sustain this narrow vision of the republic.
1 Sigismund to Bona, Piotrków, 21 December 1529, AT, xi, no. 429, 316–17.
2 Pociecha, Bona, iii, 83–4.
3 AT, xi, no. 440, 328; Kolankowski, ‘Elekcja Zygmunta Augusta’, KH, 19 (1905), 552.
4 Silnicki, Prawo, 43–50; Kolankowski, ‘Elekcja’; Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 272; Uruszczak, Sejm, 176, 219–20.
5 AT, xii, no. 48, 56–7; Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August, 19–20; Bogucka, Bona, 208–11.
6 AT, xii, no. 68, 81–2.
7 VC, i/ii, 76, 163–4.
8 Marja Kuźmińska, ‘Olbracht Marcinowicz Gasztołd: działalność Olbrachta Gasztołda 1503–1522’, AW, 4 (1927), 360–1.
9 Marceli Antoniewicz, Protoplaści książąt Radziwiłłów: Dzieje mitu i meandry historiografii (Warsaw, 2011), 24–7, 39–40; PSB, vii, 300; xxx, 317.
10 The family later changed it to Goniądz and Rajgród.
11 Pociecha, Bona, iii, 45.
12 PSB, vii, 300–1.
13 Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 269–70; Kolankowski, ‘Elekcja’, 536.
14 PSB, 24, 486–7; Kuźmińska, ‘Gasztołd’, 369; Halecki, Dzieje, ii, 82; Tomasz Kempa, Konstany Wasyl Ostrogski (ok. 1524/1525–1608) (Toruń, 1997), 18–19; Tomasz Kempa, ‘Książęta Ostrogscy a kwestia unii polsko-litewskiej w XVI wieku’, Wrocławskie Studia Wschodnie 8 (2004), 47–54.
15 Goštautas to Bona, 31 May 1525, AT, vii, no. 36, 259.
16 Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 270; Любавский, Сеймъ, 231; Грушевський, Історія, iv, 346; Halecki, Dzieje, ii, 76–7; Łowmiański, Polityka, 391–2.
17 Любавский, Сеймъ, 232–4; Halecki, Dzieje, ii, 77; PSB, vii, 301.
18 Marceli Kosman, ‘Polacy w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim. Z badań nad mobilnością społeczeństwa w dobie unii Jagiellońskiej 1386–1569’, SPS, i (Warsaw, 1981), 351.
19 PSB, xxx, 318.
20 Dorota Michaluk, ‘Wymiana rodów na pograniczu koronno-litewskim w XVI–XVII wieku na przykładzie południowego Podlasia’, in Jacek Staszewski et al. (eds), Między zachodem a wschodem: Studia z dziejów Rzeczypospolitej w epoce nowożytnej (Toruń, 2002), 250, 257.
21 Błaszczyk, Litwa, 117.
22 Станисловас Лазутка [Stanislovas Lazutka], ‘Историческая роль Альбертаса Гоштаутаса в кодификации Первого Литовского Статута’, in Irena Valikonytė and Lirija Steponavičienė (eds), Pirmasis Lietuvos Statutas ir epocha (Vilnius, 2005), 16–17.
23 See e.g. Pociecha’s view in PSB, vii, 301.
24 Cf. Błaszczyk, Litwa, 107.
25 This was questioned by Fijałek, but it is now seen as probable: see Kuźmińska, ‘Gasztołd’, 352.
26 Лазутка, ‘Историческая роль’, 15–16; PSB, vii, 300; Arvydas Pacevičius, ‘Bibliotekos’, in Ališauskas et al. (eds), Kultūra, 107; Jan Jurkiewicz, Od Palemona do Giedymina, i: W kręgu latopisów litewskich (Poznań, 2012), 53.
27 The envoy was Sigismund Herberstein, sent by Charles V rather than the pope.
28 AZR, ii, no. 144, 171–6; Любавский, Сеймъ, 241–2.
29 Halecki, Dzieje, ii, 77–8; cf. Kolankowski, Zygmunt August wielki książę Litwy do roku 1548 (Lwów, 1913), 16–17. For a more sceptical view see Błaszczyk, Litwa, 106.
30 Bogucka, Bona, 118.
31 ‘Rationes Alberti Gastoldi cur judices ex equestri ordine non sint in Lithuania instar regni Poloniae constituendi’, AT, xi, no. 214, 163–5.
32 AT, xi, no. 214, 164–5.
33 See Ch. 8, 79.
34 There are seven versions of the second redaction, which appears under varieties of the same title: Летописець Великого Княжства Литовского и Жомойцького or Кроники Вѣликаго Княжства Литовскаго и Жомойцькаго. One, the Olszewski redaction, appears in heavily polonized Ruthenian in the Latin alphabet: Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego i Żmodzkiego kronika: Rowell, Lithuania, 41; Mečislovas Jučas, Lietuvos metraščiai ir kronikos (Vilnius, 2002), 44–85; Jurkiewicz, Od Palemona, 47–9, 77–83.
35 For example Kazimierz Chodynicki, ‘Ze studiów nad dziejopisarstwem rusko-litewskiem: t.z. Rękopis Raudański’, AW, 3 (1925–1927), 387–401.
36 Jurkiewicz, Od Palemona, 77–83; Rimantas Jasas, ‘Bychovco kronika ir jos kilmė’, in Lietuvos metraštis: Bychovco kronika, ed. Rimantas Jasas (Vilnius, 1971), 8–38; Ochmański, ‘Nad kroniką Bychowca’, SŹ, 12 (1967), 155–63. Others, notably Jučas, have argued that the final version was compiled later, in the Olelkovych duchy of Slutsk, or under the guidance of Paweł Holszański, bishop of Vilnius from 1537 to 1555: Lietuvos metraščiai, 86–126. Gudavičius and Lazukta use internal evidence to support Jasas’s dating and Goštautas’s involvement: Edvardas Gudavičius and Stanislovas Lazutka, ‘Albertas Goštautas ir Lietuvos istoriografia’, LIS, 24 (2009), 195–201.
37 Jasas, ‘Bychovco kronika’, 22–3, 30.
38 Jasas, ‘Bychovco kronika’, 19, 30; Ochmański, ‘Nad kroniką’, 159.
39 Jurkiewicz, Od Palemona, 96–106; 238–9, 251–4.
40 Miechowita, Chronica, 269, 282.
41 Miechowita, Chronica, 271, 282.
42 PSRL, xvii, cols 473–4; Jurkiewicz, Od Palemona, 63–4.
43 PSRL, xvii, cols 508–10, 523–4.
44 PSRL, xvii, cols. 333–5, 394–5, 458–60.
45 PSRL, xvii, col. 526.
46 ‘Lachowe ne była szlachta, ale byli ludy prostyi, ani meli herbow swoich, y welikimi dary toho dochodyli w Czechow . . . ale my szlachta staraja Rymskaja, kotoryi predki naszy, z tymi herby swoimi zaszli do tych państw . . . a czerez nich ne potrebuyjem żadnych innych herbow nowich, ale sie derżym starych swoich, szto nam predki naszy zostawili’: PSRL, xvii, col. 528.
47 AZR, ii, no. 144, 175.
48 AZR, ii, no. 144, 175.
49 AZR, ii, no. 144, 175–6.
50 AZR, ii, no. 144, 176.
51 Любавский, Сеймъ, 246–7.
52 AZR, ii, no. 152, 187–8.
53 Любавский, Сеймъ, 248–9.
54 For the original text together with the Latin and Polish translations see Pirmasis Lietuvos Statutas/Первый Литовский Статут, ed. Stanislovas Lazutka et al., iii (Vilnius, 1991). For a good, generally sound English translation, see The Lithuanian Statute of 1529, tr. and ed. Karl von Loewe (Leiden, 1976).
55 Лазутка, ‘Историческая роль’, 14–20.
56 Juliusz Bardach, ‘Statuty litewskie w ich kręgu prawno-kulturowym’, in Bardach, O dawnej i niedawnej Litwie (Poznań, 1988), 19.
57 Lithuanian Statute, 29–35, 71–80, 96, 111.
58 Lithuanian Statute, 41–7.
59 Lithuanian Statute, 2–12; Bardach, Statuty litewskie a prawo rzymskie (Warsaw, 1999).
60 Stanisław Roman and Adam Vetulani, Ruski przekład polskich statutów ziemskich z rękopisu moskiewskiego (Wrocław, 1959), 30.
61 Pirmasis Lietuvos Statutas, iii, 108; Lithuanian Statute, 36. Here, as elsewhere, I have preferred my own translation of certain terms to Loewe’s formulations.
62 Pirmasis Lietuvos Statutas, iii, 110–11; Lithuanian Statute, 36–7.
63 PSRL, xvii, col. 487.
64 PSRL, xvii, cols 528, 531.
65 AT, vii, no. 36, 259–60.
66 AT, vii, no. 36, 263–8.
67 Яковенко, Шляхта, 307.
68 Kuźmińska, ‘Gasztołd’, 353, 371.
69 Czermak, ‘Sprawa’, 385–93; Chodynicki, Kościół, 86–7; Krom, ‘Konstituierung’, 486; Pociecha, Bona, iii, 67–8.