3
The grand duchy of Lithuania was a remarkable creation. After 1200 its rulers, in little over a century, welded a cacophony of feuding Baltic tribes into a powerful, sophisticated realm that gradually extended its authority over the mixed Baltic and Slavic populations to its south by means that remain controversial. From their remote and isolated fastnesses among the network of lakes, rivers, and marshes that pierced the great forests of north-eastern Europe, the Lithuanians harassed and raided their neighbours, extending their sway in an astonishingly short period after 1240 over much of the vast territory that had been Kievan Rus' before it was shattered by the Mongols.
The Lithuanian heartland was remote indeed: travelling fifteen leagues from Dyneburg to Vilnius in 1414, the diplomat Ghillebert de Lannoy entered a vast forest in which he travelled for forty-eight hours without seeing a trace of habitation.1 Unlike related Baltic peoples—the Prussians, the Livs, and the Curonians—who succumbed to the far from tender rule of the Teutonic Order, their inaccessibility helped the Lithuanians not just to repel their enemies and survive in a hostile Christian world, but to establish their rule over one of the largest territorial agglomerations in European history, about 1 million km2 at its peak around 1430 (see Map 2).2
The grand duchy was a sophisticated power system, under a princely dynasty that only entered the written record in the thirteenth century. Since Lithuanian—a member of the Baltic branch of the Indo-European family along with Latvian and several extinct languages, including Prussian—was not a written language until the sixteenth century, the names of Lithuania’s rulers—apart from one reference to a rex Netimer in 1009—are unknown before the semi-legendary Ringaudas, who died around 1219. Ringaudas’s son Mindaugas (1238–63) launched the spectacular expansion that—after an interruption following his 1263 assassination—continued in the reigns of Vytenis (c.1295–1315) and his brother Gediminas (1315/16–1341/2).
Map 2. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1385.
What is striking is not so much the extent of that expansion—which was remarkable enough—but its lasting nature. Initially, the Lithuanians terrorized their neighbours. Between 1200 and 1236 they mounted regular destructive raids: twenty-three against the Curonians and Livonians to their north, fifteen against Ruthenian territories to their south and east, and four into the Polish lands to their west. In 1219, the Lithuanian political elite appeared in a written document for the first time, when one duchess and twenty dukes, including five recognized as seniors, witnessed peace with Halych-Volhynia.3 By 1238 Mindaugas had established himself as overall ruler, although the term grand duke (didysis kunigaikštis in Lithuanian; великий князь in Ruthenian) was not common until its institutionalization by Gediminas’s son Algirdas after 1345. It is sensible, however, to follow tradition in using one name for the prince instead of the varied forms found in the sources.4
The Lithuanians pushed south into lands where the devastating Mongol attacks that followed their first assault on Riazan in December 1237 exposed the incapacity of the squabbling Ruthenian principalities to defend themselves. Kievan Rus', united for periods under strong rulers such as Volodymyr the Great (980–1015), Iaroslav the Wise (1019–54), and Volodymyr Monomakh (1113–25), followed the Slavic system of collateral succession, in which the prince of Kyiv was recognized as supreme ruler over the numerous Ruthenian principalities. As in Poland after 1138, this proved more pious wish than practical politics. In the period of disintegration that began in 1132, three main power-centres emerged in Halych-Volhynia, Vladimir-Suzdal', and Novhorod-Siversky.5 After the razing of Kyiv in 1240 and the extension of Mongol overlordship over the Rus'ian principalities, any vestigial political unity was destroyed, leaving Rus, open for infiltration by a more dynamic and less traumatized political culture.
Lithuania’s extension of power southwards was a complex process. It was not based on force alone. Lithuania deployed forces well suited to warfare in the sparsely populated terrain of eastern Europe; they were by no means solely Lithuanian, rapidly incorporating Ruthenians into their ranks, which indicates the nature of Gediminid rule. Although military force was undoubtedly important, it is insufficient to explain the speed of expansion, or its consolidation: by 1385 Gediminid rule over much of the former lands of Kievan Rus' had lasted well over a century. Black Ruthenia—the lands along the upper reaches of the Niemen—already contained a mixed population. It had been settled by Baltic tribes before Slavic expansion into the region in the sixth and seventh centuries. Baltic and Slavic populations had mingled and assimilated ever since. Lithuanian grand dukes successfully extended their power in part because they faced few serious rivals. The Lithuanian and northern Ruthenian lands, protected by their great forests, in which the Mongol armies could not operate, had escaped the Mongol tsunami. Under Mindaugas, the cities of Black Ruthenia, including Hrodna, Navahrudak, Vaukavysk, and Slonim, were absorbed gradually without any reference in the sources to their being taken by force.6 The Lithuanian grand dukes emerged over the next half a century as the most effective force for resistance to Mongol domination, as they did not, like the shattered remnants of the already splintered Rurikid dynasty, have to bend their knee to the Mongol khan.7 Where force was used, as in the wars over Halych-Volhynia after 1340, or in the capture of Kyiv in the 1360s, it was directed primarily against rivals for control: the kings of Poland and Hungary. This was not a conquest by a foreign national group—the ‘Lithuanian occupation’ as Hrushevsky terms it—but a complex process in which force, accommodation, and assimilation all played their part.
Lithuanians and Ruthenians already traded with one another; penetration of the trade routes of White Ruthenia and other more easterly territories soon followed. By 1307 the grand dukes controlled Polatsk, while Vitsebsk—intermittently under their control—was secured when Algirdas, Gediminas’s son, married the heiress of its last Ruthenian prince. Kyiv was first occupied by the Lithuanians in 1323; in 1332 there is evidence of a Lithuanian prince ruling there in a Lithuanian-Tatar condominium, although it was not until after the great Lithuanian victory at the Blue Waters in 1362 that it came under unchallenged Lithuanian control.8
The expanding dynasty was central to the extension of Lithuanian power. In contrast to Poland and Kievan Rus', where collateral inheritance promoted political fragmentation, the Gediminids largely contained and channelled the potential for disintegration posed by their staggering fecundity. Despite a system of succession similar to the Slavic communities surrounding them, in Lithuania the dynasty’s rapid growth proved a spur to expansion, not fragmentation. Even ignoring the children of his brothers and cousins, Gediminas himself had eight sons and five or six daughters (see Fig. 1. Genealogy 1).9
Several of his sons were just as fertile, none more copiously than Algirdas, who, together with his younger brother Kęstutis, ousted their brother Jaunutis as grand duke in a coup in 1345. Although the details of the order and the number of his offspring are unclear, with his two wives Algirdas produced twelve or thirteen sons and nine or ten daughters (see Fig. 2. Genealogy 2).10
Fig. 1. Genealogy 1. The Gediminids.
Fig. 2. Genealogy 2. The descendants of Algirdas.
Notes: Tęgowski and Lietuvos Istorijos regard Fëdor of Ratno as the eldest son of Algirdas’s first marriage. For a discussion of the problem of the order and birthdates of Algirdas’s children, see Ch. 8, 74–5.
Unlike Poland, hemmed in by the Holy Roman Empire to its west and Hungary to its south, Lithuania could expand to satisfy—for the most part—the ambitions of Gediminas’s progeny. Daughters were married to Ruthenian princes, giving the Gediminids claims to Ruthenian territory when local dynasties died out.11 Algirdas’s first marriage to Maria/Anna of Vitsebsk opened the way to the absorption of a vital centre on the trade routes of northern Eurasia, while the marriage of his brother Liubartas to a Volhynian princess provided the basis of the Lithuanian claim to part of the kingdom of Halych-Volhynia.12 Yet if dynastic manoeuvres played a significant role, it was the Gediminids’ successful resistance to Mongol domination that ensured the loyalty of many Ruthenians.13
The results were impressive. By Algirdas’s death in 1377 his sons ruled duchies across the Ruthenian lands. Of the sons of his first marriage, Andrei held Polatsk, Dmitry was established in Briansk, Fëdor held Ratno, and Volodymyr ruled Kyiv. Gediminas’s other sons and their descendants were not neglected. Narimantas was duke of Pinsk and Polatsk, and governor of Novgorod for the brief period after 1333 when it swore allegiance to Lithuania. Four of Narimantas’s five sons acquired Ruthenian duchies, while the sons of Karijotas, duke of Navahrudak, ruled Podolia.
Gediminid retention of Ruthenian duchies depended on the dynasty’s rapid acculturation based on its adoption of Ruthenian as the language of government. A sophisticated written language, it was ideal for the purpose of building Gediminid authority, while its use meant that Ruthenians could integrate successfully into the Gediminid system. The Gediminids who held Ruthenian principalities, and the daughters who married into Ruthenian princely families, were baptized into the Orthodox faith and took Ruthenian names: Narimantas became Hleb and Karijotas was baptized Mykhailo; their children bore Slavic names.
The Gediminids fused Lithuanian and Ruthenian elements into a composite, dynastic system. The long argument between nationalist historians of Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine over whether this process produced a Lithuanian state, or a Ruthenian-Lithuanian state, in which the leading role was played by the more advanced culture of the Ruthenians, rather misses the point by concentrating on state power and projecting back an image of statehood that owes more to the nineteenth than the fourteenth century. The grand duchy was not a unitary modern state, but a successful dynastic condominium built on family loyalty. Its decentralized, composite nature explains its expansion and survival. Long before 1386 the Lithuanians and Ruthenians developed a system that allowed pagan and Orthodox cultures to survive and prosper alongside each other. Ultimate control lay with the pagan grand duke in the Lithuanian heartland, but paganism was no missionary faith, and the dynastic system held together well under the powerful rule of Gediminas, and then Algirdas and Kęstutis.
Lithuania was a formidable construct, suited to its environment. By Algirdas’s death in 1377 it stretched from the shores of the Baltic virtually to the Black Sea. Yet if the Gediminids held the upper hand for much of the fourteenth century, they had important rivals in the Orthodox grand dukes of Muscovy, who were more attractive to successive patriarchs of Constantinople than the pagan Gediminids. Muscovy’s first great success was the transfer of the Orthodox metropolitanate of all Rus' from Vladimir-Suzdal' to Moscow in 1325. Algirdas brought Smolensk precariously into the Lithuanian orbit, but despite his second marriage to Juliana of Tver, Tver and Novgorod preserved their independence by playing Lithuania off against Muscovy, and could not be absorbed. Algirdas led three attacks on Moscow: in 1368 he turned back after three days; in 1370 he stayed little longer, while in 1372 he refused battle although both armies were drawn up ready. Once intimidation failed, Algirdas was unwilling to risk all-out war against an Orthodox enemy who might use religion to subvert the loyalty of his Ruthenian subjects.14 It was a dilemma that faced all his successors, and Lithuanian-Muscovite rivalry was to shape the history of eastern Europe for centuries to come.
By 1377 the very factors that had enabled Lithuania’s rapid expansion were causing the problems that are inevitable once territorial accumulation reaches its natural limits. Orthodox Ruthenians now considerably outnumbered pagan Lithuanians in the Gediminid realms. Given the rapid cultural assimilation of so many Gediminids, the possibility that the whole dynasty would be absorbed into the Slavic world was starkly apparent: all the children of Algirdas’s first marriage accepted Orthodox baptism, and Algirdas’s second wife, Juliana, noted for her piety, brought Orthodox influences to the heart of the Gediminid system. Algirdas and Kęstutis were strongly attached to their pagan faith, and too much trust should not be placed in later Ruthenian chronicles that suggest Algirdas converted to Orthodoxy on his deathbed and was buried, instead of undergoing the spectacular traditional pagan funeral by immolation attested by other sources.15
There were good reasons for remaining pagan. Lithuania straddled the great cultural faultline dividing the Orthodox east from the Catholic west. Its rulers were adept at playing off west against east and manoeuvring effectively between the Orthodox and Catholic worlds while avoiding long-term commitment to either. The dangers of opting for one side were demonstrated by Mindaugas. In 1251, in order to win the Livonian Order’s support for a campaign against the Samogitians, he accepted baptism in the Latin rite, for which, in 1253 he was sent a royal crown by Innocent IV. Mindaugas was thus the first—and last—Lithuanian ruler before 1386 whose title of rex was recognized beyond its borders: Gediminas might style himself Gedeminne (Dei Gratia) Letwinorum et (multorum) Ruthenorum Rex or Koningh van Lettowen, but if popes might occasionally use the title for politeness’ sake they, like other Catholic rulers, did not recognize his royal status.16
The perils of conversion rapidly became apparent. The Lithuanian boyars and non-princely dukes were fiercely wedded to paganism, while Mindaugas’s acceptance of sponsorship from the Livonian Order, which was busily subduing the pagan Baltic tribes, provoked opposition from those who saw it as Lithuania’s deadliest enemy. Civil strife soon followed. In 1261 Mindaugas returned to paganism and expelled Catholics from Lithuania, although it was not enough to save him from assassination by Daumantas of Nalšia, acting on behalf of Mindaugas’s nephew Treniota, who succeeded him, only to be assassinated in his turn, as were his two immediate successors, one of whom, Mindaugas’s son Vaišvilkas, murdered in 1267, was a proselytizing Orthodox Christian.17
Order was only restored in the reigns of Vytenis and Gediminas. The resistance to Mindaugas’s apostasy gives a tantalizing glimpse of the role of the bajorai (boyars), a word that entered Lithuanian from Ruthenian and that can—if with reservations—be translated as ‘nobles’.18 Fleeting references in the sources—all of them foreign—make it clear that although under Vytenis and Gediminas the dynasty had firmly established its control, it did consult with its boyars, especially before mounting military campaigns. The nature of this consultation is unclear, and too much should not be read into Peter of Dusburg’s reference to one such assembly in 1308 as parlamentum.19 Gediminid Lithuania was a patrimonial system, but the dynasty’s authority was in practice limited by custom, not least because of Lithuania’s rudimentary institutional structure. Authority depended on the charisma of the grand duke and his relationship with his brothers, sons, and boyars. Mindaugas’s assassination was a warning that there were limits to charismatic power.
Gediminas learnt from Mindaugas’s fate. He sought to diminish the significance of the metropolitan of Kyiv’s relocation to Moscow by following the lead of Iurii I, prince of Halych-Volhynia, who successfully lobbied in Constantinople for the establishment of a separate metropolitanate in 1303. It only lasted five years, but a separate Lithuanian metropolitanate was established in Navahrudak at some point between 1315 and 1317. Thus Orthodoxy was more than simply tolerated. It was actively promoted by the dynasty, partly to ensure the loyalty of its Ruthenian subjects, and partly to advance Gediminid ambitions to rule all Rus,. Orthodox clerics contributed substantially to Lithuanian government and its relations with the Orthodox world.20 Yet neither Gediminas nor Algirdas was willing to convert. The dangers of assimilation and the obliteration of Lithuanian culture were clear, paganism was deep-rooted and well organized, and resistance to any such move among the Lithuanian boyars was fierce.
Lithuania’s relations with western Europe were equally complex. Its acquisition of Ruthenian lands coincided with rising pressure from the Order, whose conquest of the pagan Prussians was complete by the 1280s. The decayed Livonian Knights of the Sword were placed under the control of the Teutonic Order in 1237, giving the Order a great incentive to seize control of Samogitia, which divided Livonia from Prussia. The Samogitians occupied a unique position. The heartland of the Lithuanian state lay in Aukštaitija, which contained the principal power-centres of Vilnius and Trakai. The Samogitian clans were closely related to the Aukštaitijans, but jealously guarded their separate identity, distinctive culture, and political autonomy. Samogitia was but loosely integrated into the Gediminid system and remained strongly pagan: Samogitians had been prominent in the opposition to Mindaugas’s conversion.
In the fourteenth century, the revitalized Order increased the pressure. The fall of Acre in 1291 ended its long commitment to Palestine, while the destruction of the Templars after 1307 implicitly threatened all the military orders. A new role was required. In 1309 grand master Siegfried von Feuchtwangen prudently moved the Order’s headquarters from Venice to the Marienburg in Prussia, which was reconstructed as a massive fortress-monastery at the centre of a vast network of subsidiary houses across the Empire. The Order channelled its considerable resources into the crusade against the remaining pagans of northern Europe. Its call for support met an enthusiastic response from across Europe, encouraged by John of Luxembourg. From the 1320s, foreign knights swelled the ranks of the north Germans who formed the core of the Order’s recruits. As they came, raids became more frequent and more devastating.
To contain this growing threat, the Lithuanians turned west. Gediminas proved as adept an operator in the murky labyrinth of Latin diplomacy as he was in the Orthodox world. He flirted with the papacy, writing to John XXII in 1322 expressing his desire for peace with his Catholic enemies and hinting at possible conversion. Peace was signed in Vilnius in 1323 and ratified in Rome, but when John’s envoys arrived in Vilnius in 1324 Gediminas refused baptism or support for their missionary activities. He allowed the construction of a church for foreign merchants in Vilnius dedicated to St Nicholas; and the Franciscans were permitted to build a hospital: they were to remain, ministering to the sick and providing Latin secretaries for the dynasty’s increasingly frequent contacts with western Europe, although they had to be careful not to cross the line into missionary activity. When they did, they suffered: Franciscans were executed in 1341 and 1369 for publicly challenging paganism.21
As pressure from the Order grew, the number of Lithuanian raids on Poland declined: of fifty-two mounted between 1210 and 1376, thirty-four took place before 1300.22 As raiding declined in intensity, the Gediminids played off the numerous competing powers to their west, including the Order. In 1229 Konrad I, duke of Mazovia, hired Lithuanian troops during his struggle with Władysław Laskonogi for the Cracow throne. Mazovia was ravaged by Lithuanian raids, but in 1279, in an attempt to prevent them, Bolesław II married Gaudemantė, daughter of grand duke Traidenis; she was baptized into the Catholic church, taking the name Sophia. Thereafter the Mazovians sustained largely friendly relations until the Lithuanian occupation of Podlasie in 1323–4.
Gediminas used Lithuanian princesses as bargaining counters in the west as in the east. At some point between 1316 and 1318, his daughter Danutė or Danmila married Wacław, Bolesław II’s son by his second marriage, taking the Christian name Elizabeth. In 1331, another, Eufemia, married Bolesław, Bolesław II’s grandson, who took the name Iurii when he converted to Orthodoxy on becoming prince of Halych-Volhynia. The most significant marriage, however, was that of another daughter Aldona, christened Anna, who in 1325 married Łokietek’s sixteen-year-old son, the future Casimir III. Historians have claimed that this was the centrepiece of the first formal Polish-Lithuanian alliance, seen by some as an important step on the road to Krewo. No treaty survives, but it is clear that there was some kind of agreement, though whether it took the form of a defensive-offensive alliance, a more limited pact, or a simple contract to hire Lithuanian troops is impossible to establish. There were Lithuanian troops in the army with which Łokietek attacked Brandenburg in 1326. The Poles and Lithuanians co-operated in campaigns against the Order until 1331, when a refusal by Łokietek’s Hungarian allies to fight alongside pagans may have been the reason behind his failure to turn up for a joint campaign in which Gediminas—unusually, for he was no soldier—was to take part.23 The rapprochement did not last long. It was destroyed by Casimir’s decision to make peace with the Order in 1343, and the contest for control of Halych-Volhynia. Relations over the next three decades were hostile, with major Lithuanian raids on Poland in 1341, 1350 (twice), 1353, 1370, and 1376. Lithuania now stood alone against the Order, which flourished under Winrich von Kniprode (1351–82), raiding ever deeper into Lithuanian territory and threatening Samogitia.
By Algirdas’s death in 1377, the Gediminid system was under strain. The emergence of Muscovy from the Golden Horde’s shadow following Dmitrii Donskoi’s 1380 victory at Kulikovo Field created a new and dangerous rival for the heritage of Kievan Rus'. The failure to subdue Muscovy meant that the days of easy territorial acquisitions to the east and south were over, while the Polish-Hungarian alliance under Louis of Anjou secured most of Halych-Volhynia. There would be no easy pickings for the next generation of Gediminids and no fat new duchies to distribute to ambitious princelings. By 1377 pagans were outnumbered by the Orthodox within the dynasty itself. This fact, as much as the extraordinary number of Gediminas’s descendants—in 1377, three sons, at least thirty-five grandsons, and some thirteen great-grandsons were alive in the male line alone—threatened to undermine the remarkable dynastic cohesion that had sustained Lithuania’s explosive expansion.24
Dynastic strife was contained after Gediminas’s death by Algirdas and Kęstutis, but it now threatened to break out in a new and more dangerous form. The successful collaboration of Algirdas and Kęstutis depended upon a division of labour: Algirdas controlled Vilnius and the grand duchy’s eastern and southern Ruthenian lands, while Kęstutis, from his base in Trakai, ruled over much of the ethnic Lithuanian heartland, and Samogitia, where he enjoyed particular influence after his marriage to Birutė of Palanga, daughter of a powerful Samogitian boyar. It seems that Algirdas and Kęstutis intended this arrangement to continue after their deaths through their favourite sons and chosen heirs, Jogaila and Vytautas, who, according to chronicle accounts, were childhood friends and companions, born within a couple of years of each other.25 According to Algirdas’s wishes, Jogaila inherited Algirdas’s grand ducal title, but Kęstutis was now the dynastic patriarch. The delicate balance established by Algirdas and Kęstutis was about to be severely tested.
It was a difficult balance to maintain against the ambitions of Algirdas’s other sons. The eldest, Andrei, had ruled Polatsk since 1349; Dmitry was duke of Briansk; Volodymyr, duke of Vitsebsk, had been granted Kyiv in 1367; while Fëdor was duke of Ratno. The loyalty of these Orthodox princes to the pagan establishment was open to question now that Muscovy was a growing pole of attraction. Algirdas’s testament raised potential problems for the pagan sons of his second wife, Juliana. For if Jogaila was bequeathed all of his father’s extensive patrimony, his pagan brothers—Skirgaila, Lengvenis, Karigaila, Vygantas, Kaributas, and Švitrigaila—received little or nothing. Given that Kęstutis held much of pagan Lithuania as duke of Trakai and would undoubtedly expect to pass these lands on to his own sons, there was almost nothing that could be granted to them in the Lithuanian heartlands, and Kaributas converted to Orthodoxy in 1380 when granted Novhorod-Siversky.26
The favourable circumstances that had sheltered Lithuanian paganism in the fault line between the Latin and Orthodox worlds were coming to an end. The issues were laid bare after Algirdas’s death, as Lithuania faced simultaneous threats from west and east. In July 1377 Louis of Anjou attacked areas of Halych-Volhynia in Lithuanian hands with a joint Polish-Hungarian force. Only duke Iury Narymuntovich of Belts offered any resistance. Fëdor, duke of Ratno and Algirdas’s brother Liubartas, duke of Lutsk, swore loyalty to Louis, as did the three sons of Karijotas, who had accepted Catholic baptism, in Podolia.27
In the east, disorder was the result of Jogaila’s first attempt to unravel the dynastic conundrum left by his father. Jogaila, aware of Andrei of Polatsk’s resentment at being overlooked in Algirdas’s testament, stripped him of his duchy in the winter of 1377–8, granting it to Skirgaila, his younger brother and right-hand man, who, like the other sons of Juliana, had received nothing from Algirdas.28 Andrei fled, first to Pskov, and then to Moscow; within a year, he returned with Dmitrii Donskoi to ravage Sevirsk, as Skirgaila was chased from Polatsk by its inhabitants, reluctant to accept a pagan governor. Skirgaila converted to Orthodoxy, but failed to retake the city despite a thirteen-week siege.
Jogaila’s deposition of Andrei was risky, but it confirms that the dynastic condominium was breaking down. Algirdas and Kęstutis had cooperated successfully, but although some historians talk of a system of diarchic rule, there was no formalized structure, and the system of Algirdas and Kęstutis rested on their personal relationship.29 Relations between uncle and nephew soon deteriorated. In 1380 Jogaila allied himself with Mamai, khan of the Blue Horde, against Dmitrii Donskoi, only to arrive too late—probably deliberately—for the decisive battle of Kulikovo. Between 1377 and 1379 the Order plundered Samogitia and Podlasie and threatened Vilnius. Kęstutis could not mount any serious raids in response. Fearing that the Order might support Andrei, Jogaila persuaded Kęstutis to sign a ten-year truce in September 1379, although it did not cover Samogitia.30 The Order, keen to drive a wedge between uncle and nephew, insinuated that Kęstutis was planning a coup. In February 1380 the Livonian Order signed a secret treaty with Jogaila alone, in which it agreed not to attack his lands. As mistrust grew, Jogaila signed another secret treaty in May 1380, promising not to aid Kęstutis if the Order attacked Trakai.
In 1381 the pot boiled over. The Order hinted to Kęstutis of its treaties with Jogaila. While Jogaila’s forces were besieging Polatsk after Skirgaila’s expulsion, Kęstutis marched into Vilnius where he caught Jogaila unprepared. He found the secret treaty with the Order, declared Jogaila deposed, and adopted the title of supreme duke, forcing Jogaila to renounce his powers in writing, and to swear an oath of loyalty.31 Jogaila was deprived of his patrimony and granted the duchies of Krėva and Vitsebsk. If Kęstutis calculated that Jogaila would follow the example of Jaunutis, who had accepted his 1345 deposition with relatively good grace, he miscalculated badly.
Jogaila’s brother Kaributas, encouraged by Jogaila, led the counterattack. As Kęstutis hastened south-east to confront him, Jogaila struck. The Vilnius merchants, fearing that Kęstutis’s hostility to the Order might adversely affect trade, handed the city over to Jogaila. He formed an alliance with the Order, which besieged Trakai. When asked whether they wished to surrender to the Order or to Jogaila, the inhabitants chose Jogaila. Vytautas, hurrying to his father’s aid, was routed in a bloody encounter beneath the walls of Vilnius. When Kęstutis and Vytautas deployed their forces outside Trakai opposite Jogaila’s much larger army on 3 August 1382, Jogaila suggested that to avoid further bloodshed they should talk peace. Despite giving assurances of their personal safety, Jogaila arrested them, sending Kęstutis in chains to Krėva, where he died in mysterious circumstances five days later, suffocated or strangled according to Vytautas and other sources favourable to him, although there is no independent confirmation of the allegation, and suicide has also been suggested. Jogaila did not execute Vytautas, who escaped dressed as one of his wife’s female attendants, possibly because Jogaila deliberately ensured he was loosely guarded.32 Kęstutis’s duchy of Trakai was given to Skirgaila. There was to be no return to ducal rule, and apparently no place for the Kęstutids in Jogaila’s Lithuania (see Fig. 3. Genealogy 3).
Jogaila had overthrown Kęstutis with the Order’s support, but the Order had little interest in sustaining him. It sought to destabilize the Gediminid dynastic state, hoping to sever the pagan Lithuanian core from its Orthodox hinterland. Having supported Jogaila against Kęstutis, it kept the pot bubbling by offering a safe haven to Vytautas, despite signing peace with Jogaila on 31 October/1 November on the Dubissa river, where it exploited the political turbulence to inflict harsh terms. Jogaila agreed to support the Order against all its enemies, not to declare war without the Order’s permission, to accept baptism for himself and all Lithuania, and, in the most painful clause, to cede Samogitia up to the Dubissa. The terms were so harsh that Jogaila refused to ratify them, and grand master Konrad Zöllner von Rottenstein declared war on 30 July 1383.33
If Jogaila was to feel secure on his throne, he would have to find a solution to the grand duchy’s structural problems, exposed by Andrei’s rebellion and Kęstutis’s coup. By 1382 the days of paganism were numbered. Should more Orthodox Gediminids follow Andrei and Dmitry of Briansk in defecting to Moscow, control over the grand duchy’s Ruthenian lands would be fundamentally threatened. An obvious solution would be for Jogaila to accept Orthodox baptism. Events to the east produced an apparently favourable conjuncture: in August 1382 Tokhtamysh (Tohtamış), khan of the Golden Horde, razed Moscow to avenge Kulikovo. Although Jogaila allowed his mother to negotiate a peace treaty with Dmitrii at some point in 1383–4, its terms constituted a Faustian pact. In return for the hand of one of Dmitrii’s daughters, Jogaila promised to accept Orthodox baptism, but it was clear that Dmitrii expected him to recognize, if not his outright suzerainty, then at least his superiority. Should the Gediminids abandon paganism, the Lithuanians would be dominated or completely swallowed up by east Slavic culture, if Dmitrii did not serve them up to the Order.34
Fig. 3. Genealogy 3. The Kęstutids.
Notes: This is a simplified table. It follows Rowell, Lithuania Ascending, genealogical table 2b in only giving the seven children of Kęstutis known from verifiable sources. Rowell regards Vaidotas and Butuatas as dialect variations of the same name, unlike Tęgowski and Lietuvos Istorija, iii.
Jogaila had another iron in the fire. Historians have long argued about which side initiated the negotiations that led to the Krewo Act, with many Polish scholars following Halecki, whose classic 1919 account claimed that it was the Poles who first suggested a marriage between Jadwiga and Jogaila.35 It is impossible to determine who made the first move: attempts to do so depend on intuition and creative reading of the scanty sources. Despite the unresolved conflict over Halych-Volhynia, where a de facto partition had embedded itself by the 1380s, several unconnected developments opened the way to a rapprochement. For the Poles, a political relationship with Lithuania was enticing. Although they had crowned Jadwiga in regem in 1384, it was vital to find her a husband to sustain the dynasty. Jogaila was an attractive candidate. A union with Lithuania would strengthen Poland after the severing of the link with Hungary. This was necessary given the prospect of Luxembourg control of Brandenburg, Hungary, Bohemia, and the Empire, where Sigismund’s elder brother Wenzel (Václav) was elected King of the Romans in 1376. Union would end the Lithuanian raids that had caused so much damage to Poland’s eastern palatinates and open the way to a settlement over Halych-Volhynia, while Jogaila’s baptism and the conversion of his pagan subjects to Catholicism would strengthen Poland’s position within the Catholic world and embarrass the Order. Yet it would be wrong to see hostility to the Order as the fundamental factor bringing the two realms together: Poland had been at peace with it since 1343, and although Krewo contained a clause in which Jogaila swore to regain lands lost by the corona regni, the Poles were reluctant to end the long peace. For the Małopolskan lords who played such a prominent role in the negotiations with Jogaila, Prussia was of little concern; they were far more interested in the south and east.
The Lithuanians, however, needed help against the Order. Not counting numerous minor border incursions, the Order mounted 96 raids on Lithuanian territory between 1345 and 1382: 66 from Prussia and 30 from Livonia. The Lithuanians managed 42 in reply: 31 on Prussia and 11 on Livonia.36 By the 1370s the Order could strike deep into the Lithuanian heartlands, using the rivers as highways into the dense forests that were Lithuania’s defensive barrier. It devastated the Trakai region in 1374, 1376, and 1377; Kaunas in 1362 and 1368; and attacked Vilnius itself in 1365 and 1377.37 The cession of much of Samogitia in 1382, however temporary Jogaila regarded it, demonstrated all too plainly the dangers of dynastic strife. If Kaunas and the line of the Niemen fell, the Lithuanian heartlands would be dangerously exposed.
Conversion to Catholicism would have two advantages. Unlike conversion to Orthodoxy with its risks of cultural assimilation, it might allow Lithuanians to retain their separate identity within the grand duchy, while removing at a stroke the Order’s justification for its attacks, and securing the support of Poland, an important Catholic power with good links to the papacy. While conversion would undoubtedly complicate relations with Lithuania’s Ruthenian territories and with the Orthodox Gediminids, for Jogaila union held out the prospect of strengthening grand ducal power by utilizing the sophisticated instruments of government developed in the Latin west. As Halecki put it, Jogaila would rather be king of Poland than a Muscovite vassal. His flirtation with Dmitrii was probably designed to put pressure on the Poles as the interregnum followed its tortuous course. Orthodox baptism would bring nothing to the table that was not already there, while the acquisition of a royal crown would strengthen Jogaila’s position within the dynasty.38
Negotiations began in earnest after Jadwiga’s coronation. In January 1385 a Lithuanian delegation led by Skirgaila arrived in Cracow with a formal request for Jadwiga’s hand. There were many obstacles to the marriage, not least the attitude of Elizabeth of Bosnia, who in July 1385 expressed her readiness to fulfil the obligations entered into with Leopold von Habsburg for Jadwiga’s marriage to his son William. Given that Jadwiga was soon to reach the canonical age for marriage, that William set out for Cracow to claim his bride, and that Jadwiga was nervous at the prospect of marrying a man three times her age rather than her childhood companion, supporters of the Lithuanian marriage had to move quickly: the Krewo Act was signed within a month of Elizabeth’s declaration. The betrothal was a potentially serious obstacle but, although the Habsburgs asserted in a case they pursued in the papal curia that William had consummated his marriage with Jadwiga in Cracow, the young Queen was under the control of the Cracow lords who had committed themselves to the Lithuanian marriage; it is inconceivable that they would have allowed the youngsters to share a bed. Jan Długosz, who relished a good scandal, denies and then supports the rumours in his contradictory account, which relates the tale, almost certainly apocryphal, that Jadwiga was so determined to reach William she used an axe to break down the door of the apartment in Wawel castle to which she had been confined after his arrival. William slunk back to Austria, muttering about the ‘Lithuanian Saracen’. He always considered himself Jadwiga’s rightful husband, refused the 200,000 florins compensation negotiated by Elizabeth of Bosnia at Krėva, and did not marry until after Jadwiga’s death.39
Jogaila now sought to heal the breach with Vytautas, to prevent the Order from disrupting the negotiations by exploiting dynastic divisions. After the breakdown of the Dubissa peace, the Order mounted a powerful raid in May 1384. Kaunas was captured and razed, and the Order constructed a castle there that they called Neu-Marienwerder as a launching-pad for further conquests. Fearing a new civil war, Jogaila secretly contacted Vytautas in his Prussian exile. In July 1384 Vytautas accepted his offer, returned to Lithuania, and appended his seal to the Krewo Act. With William eliminated and Vytautas back in the fold the way was open to consummate the union.
1 Oeuvres de Ghillebert de Lannoy, Voyageur, Diplomate et Moraliste, ed. Charles Potvin (Louvain, 1878), 38.
2 Matthias Niendorf, ‘Die Beziehungen zwischen Polen und Litauen im historischen Wandel: Rechtliche und politische Aspekte in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit’, in Dietmar Willoweit and Hans Lemberg (eds), Reiche und Territorien in Ostmitteleuropa: Historische Beziehungen und politische Herrschaftslegitimation (Munich, 2006), 129. The best account in English is Stephen Rowell, Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East Central Europe, 1295–1345 (Cambridge, 1994). For a warning against believing that the forests and lakes of the region were impenetrable, see Henryk Paszkiewicz, O genezie i wartości Krewa (Warsaw, 1938), 130.
3 Rowell, Lithuania, 50; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, i, 34.
4 Rowell, Lithuania, 50, 64–5.
5 Nancy Shields Kollmann, ‘Collateral succession in Kievan Rus' ’', HUS, 14/3–4 (1990), 377–87.
6 Генадзь Сагановіч, Нарыс гісторіі Беларусі ад старажытнасці да канца XVIII стагоддзя (Minsk, 2001), 60–1; Michał Giedroyć, ‘The arrival of Christianity in Lithuania: Early contacts (thirteenth century)’, OSP, 18 (1985), 15–16.
7 Jaroslaw Pelenski, ‘The contest between Lithuania and the Golden Horde in the fourteenth century for supremacy over eastern Europe’, in The Contest for the Legacy of Kievan Rus' (Boulder, CO, 1998), 131–50.
8 Rowell, Lithuania, 83–4; Pelenski, ‘Contest’, 134.
9 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, i, 110. Tęgowski suggests eight sons and six daughters: Jan Tęgowski Pierwsze pokolenia Giedyminowiczów (Poznań, 1999), table 1, 304–5; Rowell has seven sons and six daughters: Lithuania, genealogical table 2.
10 This is based on Darius Baronas, Artūras Dubonis, and Rimvydas Petrauskas, Lietuvos Istorija, iii: XIII a.–1385 m. (Vilnius, 2011), 338–9, 356–9; Rowell, Lithuania, genealogical tables 1–4, Tęgowski, Pierwsze pokolenia, table 1, 304–5; and Tadeusz Wasilewski, ‘Daty urodzin Jagiełły i Witolda: Przyczynek do genealogii Giedyminowiczów’, PW, 1 (1991), 15–34. It is largely, informed, however, by Nikodem, ‘Data urodzenia Jagiełły: Uwagi o starszeństwie synów Olgierda i Julianny’, Genealogia, 12 (2000), 23–49, the most convincing analysis: see Ch. 8, 74–5.
11 Stephen C. Rowell, ‘Pious princesses or the daughters of Belial: Pagan Lithuanian dynastic diplomacy 1279–1423’, Medieval Prosopography, 15/1 (1994), 3–75.
12 Rowell, Lithuania, 88; Любавский, Областное, 38–40.
13 Alvydas Nikžentaitis, ‘Litauen unter den Grossfürsten Gedimin (1316–1341) und Olgerd (1345–1377)’, in Marc Löwener (ed.), Die ‘Blüte’ der Staaten des östlichen Europa im 14. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 2004), 66–8.
14 Paszkiewicz, O genezie, 126.
15 PSRL, xvii, col. 416. For the evidence see Sužiedėlis, ‘Lietuva’, 38–9.
16 Catholic sources described Gediminas as rex sive dux: Rowell, Lithuania, 63–4.
17 Rowell, Lithuania, 51–2; Giedroyć, ‘Arrival’, 16–20, 22–6.
18 See Ch. 26, 298.
19 Peter von Dusburg, Chronica terrae Prussiae, in SRPr, i, 171–2; Rowell, Lithuania, 61–2.
20 See Rowell, Lithuania, 149–88.
21 Rowell, Lithuania, 189, 274–5.
22 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, i, 77, table 1.
23 Stanisław Zajączkowski, ‘Przymierze polsko-litewskie 1325 r.’, KH, 40 (1926), 567–617; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, i, 130–49; Rowell, Lithuania, 232–7.
24 See Figs 1 and 2. Genealogies 1 and 2, pp. 22, 23.
25 Henryk Łowmiański, Polityka Jagiellonów (Poznań, 1999), 128; Zenonas Ivinskis, ‘Jogailos santykiai su Kęstučiu ir Vytautu iki 1392 metų’, in Šapoka (ed.), Jogaila, 47–8.
26 Ludwik Kolankowski, Dzieje Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego za Jagiellonów, i (Warsaw, 1930), 12.
27 Krzyżaniakowa and Ochmański, Jagiełło, 58.
28 For the problems of Gediminid genealogy, see Ch. 8, 74–5.
29 Jonė Deveikė, ‘The Lithuanian diarchies’, SEER, 28 (1950), 392–405; the revival of the idea by Gudevičius and Nikžentaitis is criticized by Nikodem: ‘Jedynowładztwo czy diarchia? Przyczynek do dziejów ustroju W. Ks. Litewskiego do końca XIV w.’, ZH, 68 (2003), 7–30.
30 Krzyżaniakowa and Ochmański, Jagiełło, 61.
31 Kolankowski, Dzieje, i, 21.
32 SRPr, ii, 712–13; Krzyżaniakowa and Ochmański, Jagiełło, 65–73. Nikodem suggests that Kęstutis died of natural causes, and that Skirgaila was not responsible for his murder, as rumour maintained: Jarosław Nikodem, Witold Wielki Książę Litewski (1354 lub 1355–27 października 1430) (Cracow, 2013), 68–9, and ‘Rola Skirgiełły na Litwie do r. 1394’, Scripta Minora 2 (1998), 99–100. For the fullest chronicle account, which claims Kęstutis was throttled by Jogaila’s servants, see PSRL, xxxv, col. 64.
33 Mečislovas Jučas, Lietuvos ir Lenkijos unija (XIV a. vid.–XIX a. pr.) (Vilnius, 2000), 104–6; Paszkiewicz, O genezie, 143–50.
34 Krzyżaniakowa and Ochmański, Jagiełło, 79–81; Oskar Halecki, Dzieje unii jagiellońskiej, i (Cracow, 1919), 83–4; Jučas, Unija, 106.
35 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 83–112, and Jadwiga of Anjou and the Rise of East Central Europe (Boulder, CO, 1991), 118. Paszkiewicz, O genezę, 201–2. For the debate, see Błaszczyk, Dzieje, i, 198–232.
36 Zenonas Ivinskis, ‘Litwa w dobie chrztu i unii z Polską’, in Jerzy Kłoczowski (ed.), Chrystianizacja Litwy (Cracow, 1987), 24, 25.
37 Jučas, Unija, 99.
38 For Paszkiewicz, this was the most important motive: O genezie, 162–3, 256–7; cf. Gotthold Rhode, Die Ostgrenze Polens: Politische Entwicklung, kulterelle Bedeutung und geistige Auswirkung, i (Cologne, 1955), 297. Halecki, Jadwiga, 121.
39 The Annals of Jan Długosz: A History of Eastern Europe from A.D. 965 to A.D. 1480, tr. Maurice Michael (Chichester, 1997), 346. This is an abridged translation from the modern Polish, not the original Latin version. While it gives a good flavour of Długosz’s rich work, it is frequently unreliable and occasionally misleading. All future references are to the modern Latin edn. Nikodem, Jadwiga, 122–56 and ‘Gniewosz-Jadwiga-Wilhelm: Krytyka przekazu “Annales” Jana Długosza’, PH, 98 (2007), 175–96; Tęgowski, ‘Wprowadzenie w życiu postanowień aktu krewskiego w l. 1385–1399’, Studia z dziejów państwa i prawa polskiego, 9 (2006), 79, 83.