5
The Krewo Act has long been controversial. There were not many conditions. In return for Jadwiga’s hand, Jogaila agreed to pay 200,000 florins to William von Habsburg as compensation for the breach of his betrothal agreement, and to accept Catholic baptism for himself, unbaptized members of his family, and his pagan subjects.1 He agreed to release noble Polish prisoners captured in raids and to recover lands lost by Lithuania and Poland at his own expense. Finally, he promised that he would unite in perpetuity his Lithuanian and Ruthenian lands to the Polish crown: ‘demum eciam Jagalo dux sepe dictus promittit Terras suas Litvanie et Rusie Corone Regni Polonie perpetuo aplicare’ (see Fig. 4).2
That little word, ‘applicare’ has exercised generations of historians. What, precisely, did it mean? In the 1890s Koneczny and Lewicki argued that ‘applicare’ was a synonym for ‘incorporare’; therefore what came to be known as the ‘union of Krewo’ was believed to have effected the incorporation of Lithuania into Poland and the liquidation of the Lithuanian state. This incorporation thesis, also accepted by Liubavskii, became dominant among Polish historians by 1918, when the contest for the old Polish-Lithuanian lands lent a considerable edge to historical research.3 The legal historians Balzer and Kutrzeba endorsed it, if with reservations, as did Halecki, author of the first comprehensive history of the making of the union, which he saw as the expression of what he called ‘the Jagiellonian idea’, a federalist conception that, to Halecki, offered a model for peaceful coexistence in post-1918 eastern Europe.4
Lithuanian historians, keen to assert Lithuania’s historic claims to statehood, rejected the incorporationist thesis and Halecki’s rose-tinted Jagiellonian idea. Although professional historians largely shunned the populist vision that attacked Jogaila as a traitor who betrayed Lithuania in 1386, they had little liking for the union. Ivinskis argued that Jogaila’s baptism and coronation instituted a personal union, in which he ruled Lithuania separately as grand duke, although he had to institute new mechanisms for governing it since he spent most of his time in Poland after 1386.5 Šapoka translated ‘applicare’ as ‘prijungti’, meaning ‘to attach’ or ‘to connect’, arguing that although Jogaila joined Lithuania to Poland, and not the other way round, on account of the greater status of the royal title in Poland, Polish historians had too narrow an understanding of Krewo and the relationship it instituted. Lithuania was not incorporated and remained a separate state.6 Under Soviet rule from 1940 to 1990 negative views of the union were institutionalized in Lithuania, while nationalist historians in exile were virulently hostile to the union, a trend that climaxed in 1989 with the hysterical accusation that Jogaila was guilty of instituting the genocide of the Lithuanian people.7
Fig. 4. The Krewo Act (14 August 1385). Jogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania together with his brothers swears to enact certain obligations if he should marry Jadwiga, Queen of Poland. Latin, parchment, 330 mm × 220 mm. Traces of lost seals. Archiwum i Biblioteka Krakowskiej Kapituły Metropolitalnej, Cracow, D. perg. 188. By kind permission of the Archive and Library of the Metropolitan Chapter of Cracow Cathedral.
More significant was the 1975 claim by Dainauskas, another American Lithuanian, that the Krewo Act was a forgery, fabricated at some point between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century—he was not precise—by Poles wishing to prove Lithuania’s subordination to Poland.8 Dainauskas’s article remained largely unknown until published in Polish in 1987, when it provoked a storm: the journal’s editors made it clear that they regarded the article as more of a curio than a serious piece of scholarship. It was subjected to withering critiques by Korczak and Koczerska, who demolished its claims. A Lithuanian team subjected the document to close analysis, reaching broadly similar conclusions.9 Agreement over Krewo’s authenticity has brought no consensus as to its meaning.10 While many Polish historians still argue—with reservations—that Lithuania was incorporated into Poland in 1386, albeit for a relatively short period, others deny that incorporation ever took place.11 Błaszczyk argues first that it should no longer be a matter for discussion that Krewo was ‘an act of incorporation of Lithuania into Poland’, then admits that it was, as Lithuanian historians maintain, a promise of incorporation that was only realized ‘to a small extent’, and from which the Lithuanians rapidly withdrew, thus making it a ‘brief episode’, lasting from 1386 until 1392 or 1398, before he reaches the contradictory conclusion that ‘the Lithuanian state did not cease to exist in 1386’.12
So what was the nature of the relationship instituted in 1385–6? Krewo was not an act of union, but a prenuptial agreement in which Jogaila and his closest male pagan relations gave undertakings as to what would happen should Jogaila’s marriage to Jadwiga take place; it was reciprocated in the obligations confirmed at Vaukavysk in January 1386 by representatives of the Polish community of the realm, who formally offered Jadwiga’s hand and accepted Jogaila as their lord in what was a pre-election, subject to confirmation at a wider assembly of the community of the realm at Lublin, and conditional upon Jogaila’s marrying Jadwiga.13
Although some of the promises made at Krėva and Vaukavysk were immediately fulfilled—Jogaila, his pagan brothers, and Vytautas were duly baptized; the evangelization of Lithuania began shortly thereafter; and Jogaila was married to Jadwiga and crowned king—others were not, or subsequently become irrelevant, such as William’s compensation, which he refused. Thus even if ‘applicare’ really did mean ‘to incorporate’—and Łowmiański demonstrates that the term was so used in both private and public law by citing a range of contemporary documents—it remained a promise.14 No incorporation document survives, and no other sources give any indication that incorporation formally took place in 1386, beyond assertions made in the 1413 Horodło union. Łowmiański argued on scraps of circumstantial evidence that such a document did exist, and later disappeared, but his arguments are unpersuasive, and in his posthumously published history of the Jagiellons he was more cautious, talking of ‘przyłączenie’ (joining) not ‘wcielenie’ or ‘włączenie’ (incorporation).15
Research into contemporary usage of ‘applicare’ led Adamus to assert that what occurred in 1386 was the direct incorporation only of Jogaila’s own patrimony—that is the duchy of Vilnius—and the indirect incorporation of the duchies held by other members of the Gediminid dynasty as fiefs, in a relationship of feudum oblatum.16 The main evidence for such a claim, Adamus argued, lies in the documents in which members of the Gediminid dynasty swore oaths of homage to Jogaila, Jadwiga, and the corona regni Poloniae.17
The problem with such formulations is the tendency to assume that Krewo was a treaty between two sovereign states in the modern sense. It was not. Formally, it was an agreement between three parties: Jogaila, his pagan brothers, and Vytautas on the Lithuanian side; Elizabeth of Bosnia representing the Angevin dynasty; and envoys acting on behalf of the corona regni Poloniae, the community of the Polish realm. Krewo’s wording suggests that the relationship forged in 1386 was intended to be far more than a personal or dynastic union: a multiple monarchy or dynastic agglomeration united solely in the person of the ruler. Its very existence demonstrates that the Polish-Lithuanian union did not begin as personal or dynastic unions usually began, through simple inheritance, as was the case at the institution of the Anglo-Scottish personal union in 1603, when James VI’s accession by hereditary right was accepted by the English political elite, and he simply crossed the border to claim his throne. If, as Jellinek argues, one of the defining features of a real union is a formal, legal foundation treaty, then the relationship launched by Krewo fulfils this condition, not least because of the involvement of the community of the Polish realm as one of the parties.
If the Polish-Lithuanian union began largely as a result of the failure of the Piast and Angevin dynasties in the male line, the involvement of the Polish community of the realm in deciding who was to rule over it distinguishes it from most personal unions. Most began as the Anglo-Scottish union began in 1603, when the failure to produce heirs, accidents of mortality, or, in the case of England, Elizabeth I’s refusal to marry, disrupted the normal course of the hereditary succession that was usual in western Europe. Too often it is assumed by scholars of unions that this pattern was universal, and it is for this reason that ‘personal unions’ are barely discussed in the theoretical literature on unions: they are seen as accidents of history that might, as in the case of England and Scotland, develop into a real union, but more usually were brief episodes in which, beyond the common monarch, the parties to union shared little or nothing. Yet hereditary succession by was by no means the European norm. In eastern and northern Europe, when native dynasties died out, as they did in Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland in the fourteenth century, the community of the realm asserted its right to involvement in the determination of the succession, as in Hungary and Poland in 1382. In Scandinavia, after the wars sparked by the deaths without male heirs of Valdemar Atterdag in Denmark and Magnus Eriksson in Sweden, the 1397 Kalmar assembly elected Erik of Pomerania, the adopted son of Valdemar’s daughter Margaret, as king of a Nordic union, despite the existence of other candidates with hereditary claims to one or other of the three thrones.
The institution of the Spanish union of the crowns was rather different. It stemmed from the decision taken in January 1469 by Isabella, just named heir to the throne of Castile by her half-brother Henry IV, to marry Ferdinand, heir to the Aragonese throne, as opposed to Charles Valois, son of Charles VII of France, or Afonso V of Portugal, Henry’s favoured candidate. Although there was a strong pro-Aragonese party at court, led by the archbishop of Toledo, this was Isabella’s decision, and the marriage contract, signed at Cervera on 5 March 1469, indicated the strength of her position as the legitimate and recognized heir. It was, as Elliott writes, ‘humiliating’ for Ferdinand, since it dictated that he should live in Castile, where he was to be subordinate to Isabella. Henry died in 1474; it was only after a five-year civil war against supporters of his daughter Joanna—whose paternity was widely doubted—that this dynastic decision could be implemented. Without the direct involvement of the community of the realm, the personal nature of the Castilian-Aragonese union was encapsulated by the terms of Isabella’s will: after her death in 1504 Ferdinand was rudely stripped of the title of king of Castile that he had assumed under the Segovia agreement of 1475, although he was allowed to retain the governorship of Castile until Joanna—their mentally unstable daughter—returned from the Netherlands to take up her crown, or until her son Charles should reach his majority. Only after the premature death of Joanna’s husband, Philip the Fair of Burgundy, tipped his widow over the edge into insanity was Ferdinand left as effective ruler of Castile until his death in 1516.18
Even if Krewo was but a prenuptial agreement, the involvement of the Polish community of the realm meant that it was very different from the Cervera treaty, which established the arrangements by which Ferdinand and Isabella would rule in Castile. The agreement was necessary because neither Jogaila nor Jadwiga possessed a clear hereditary right to the Polish throne in Polish law or custom. Jadwiga, for all that the Poles recognized her natural rights, had only acquired the Polish crown by election, while Elizabeth of Bosnia had to accept that Jadwiga’s marriage would be determined by the Polish community of the realm. Jogaila, although he had some Piast blood in his veins, had no claim to the throne, and could only be elected to it by the Polish political community, the third party to the Krewo Act.
The Polish lords who represented their fellow citizens were well aware of the distinction between the community of the realm and the state. It was expressed in the documents through different uses of the terms corona regni, referring to the community of the realm, and the kingdom of Poland, the regnum. The term ‘kingdom of Poland’ is used three times in the Krewo Act: twice to refer to the barons of the kingdom (baronibus regni Poloniae); its only other use came in the promise Jogaila made to recover the lost territories of the kingdom: ‘universas occupantes et defectus regni Poloniae perquorumvis manus distractas et occupata’. Significantly, it was to the corona regni Poloniae, not the regnum, that Jogaila swore to join his Lithuanian and Russian dominions.19 If he fulfilled his obligations Jogaila was to become, in the words of the Vaukavysk document, ‘lord and king’ of the kingdom of Poland.20 Before his coronation, he was referred to as ‘tutor et dominus regni Poloniae’; it was, however, to Jogaila and Jadwiga, as king and queen of Poland, and to the corona regni Poloniae, not the regnum, that Lithuanian princes and boyars swore loyalty.21
The Poles were perfectly capable of distinguishing between the political community and an abstract ‘state’, which they termed the kingdom, and of separating the person of the ruler from that state, distinctions which some scholars have deemed medieval politicians incapable of making:
Growing out of feudalism and harking back to Roman imperial times, the system of government that appeared in Europe during the years 1337–1648 was still, in most respects, entirely personal. The state as an abstract organization with its own persona separate from that of the ruler did not exist.22
According to van Creveld, ‘with the exception of the classical city states and their magistrates, none of the political communities which existed until 1648 distinguished between the person of the ruler and his rule’, an idea that was, he suggested, invented by Hobbes, and was only instituted between 1648 and 1789.23 The examples of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland show that this is simply untrue: as Reynolds argues, the concepts of transpersonal kingship or a transpersonal state existed from at least the eleventh century in Germany and even earlier in England.24
By 1385, Poles not only had well-developed ideas of the political community, and of an abstract state separate from the person of the ruler; they also had a sophisticated state structure, with institutions of government that had developed significantly since 1320. During the long interregnum after 1382, in an age in which, according to Creveld, authority was ‘entirely personal’, the community of the realm ran affairs tolerably peacefully and nipped incipient civil war in the bud. It assembled to resolve contentious matters, the most important of which was the determination of the succession, on pragmatic political principles. While at Jogaila’s coronation in March 1386 the community of the realm accorded their new king the respect and obedience owed to a monarch, it was made clear that this obedience was conditional.
The Polish monarch did not own his kingdom, whatever might be the case in Lithuania, where the limitations on princely power were practical, rather than legal or theoretical. Lithuania in 1385 was certainly a state: it had survived for nearly two centuries in a hostile environment; it had an effective military structure that had enabled it to expand prodigiously. Yet it was a composite, patrimonial state, in which the power of the dynasty was paramount and government was conducted through the households of the various members of a loose dynastic conglomerate under the ultimate suzerainty of the grand duke. There was little meaningful distinction between the public and private spheres, and although much was regulated by custom, there was no body of written law to protect the property of individuals from the grand duke or his Gediminid relatives. While the integrative force of that dynastic authority was considerable, the tribal origins of Lithuanian power were still apparent in the core Lithuanian territories, and the links with the Ruthenian territories—which possessed a sophisticated legal heritage from Kievan Rus'—were fragile, as the power-struggle after Algirdas’s death demonstrated.
This is not to say that the non-princely Lithuanian—as distinct from Ruthenian—elites were politically insignificant. The resistance to Mindaugas’s conversion, his assassination, and the bitter power-struggle that followed, are ample demonstration that Lithuania’s boyars were not simply the obedient tools of their grand dukes. Some families—most notably the Alšėniškai—had married into the dynasty and played a substantial part in internal politics.25 Łowmiański argued that although there was no mention of the Lithuanian boyars in the Krewo Act apart from as objects of Jogaila’s promises concerning conversion, other contemporary documents make it clear that they were an important political force, suggesting that Krewo was the work not just of Jogaila, but of the whole military-social elite at whose head he stood.26
It is clear from the work of Petrauskas that the Lithuanian boyars constituted an important political force, and that if it can certainly be seen as a patrimonial system, the claim that the grand dukes enjoyed unlimited authority is unsustainable.27 Yet if the Lithuanian boyars were undoubtedly informed of Jogaila’s plans, they were not a party to Krewo, as the Polish community of the realm undoubtedly was, and Paszkiewicz and Błaszczyk are right to criticize Łowmiański for reading too much into certain formulae in the documents which talk of consultation and consent. Lithuanian boyars travelled in large numbers in Jogaila’s entourage to Lublin and Cracow in 1386, but it was not to negotiate with the Polish nobility, and the Lublin assembly was in no way the counterpart of the 1397 Kalmar assembly, in which representatives of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway jointly elected Erik of Pomerania king.28 The Lithuanian boyars were informed of what transpired, and in that sense consulted, but it was Jogaila and his closest relatives who put their seals to the Krewo Act. The boyars then swore loyalty to their prince in his new capacity.
Thus Krewo, and the union that followed, was not, and could not be, the result of a tidy political arrangement between equal sovereign states according to the neat definitions of modern scholars. While Polish law and legal thought had a relatively sophisticated conception of the political community and of the nature of the abstract state, the power-system in the grand duchy was still largely, if not entirely, patrimonial in nature. This imbalance between the partners to the union in terms of political development and political culture lies at the basis of much of the uncertainty about what Krewo signified. Yet if one should be properly sceptical about the extent to which the Lithuanian boyars were involved in forging the union, one should not read too much into the pious phrases concerning ‘the whole community of the Polish realm’ and its involvement in the negotiations, which were clearly carried out in practice by a narrow group of lords, most of them from Małopolska. Nevertheless, the fact that it was felt necessary to consult the community of the realm while acting in its name is significant, and that consultation was no formality, as was the case in Lithuania.
Although Krewo was the product of negotiations between three separate parties, its most striking feature is its brevity. It was far shorter than the document signed by Louis of Anjou in 1355 when he was recognized as Casimir’s heir, which regulated relations between his Polish and Hungarian kingdoms should the personal union reach fruition.29 It was also shorter than either of the documents produced by the Kalmar assembly: the coronation letter (kroningsbrevet), drawn up on 13 July 1397 and the union letter (unionsbrevet). The former, witnessed by sixty-seven individuals from all three realms, established the basis on which Erik ruled the union states as one entity from Copenhagen.30 The unionsbrev was much longer, drafted on paper instead of the parchment on which all official documents were prepared. It sought to curtail royal power on behalf of the community of the realm. It seems that it was never accepted by Erik or Margaret, who remained the power behind the throne until her death in 1412. The programme laid out in the unionsbrev remained influential, but it was never enacted, and Erik governed through one council for all his realms, until growing aristocratic opposition after 1436, which drew on the unionsbrev, led to his 1439 deposition and the elections of his nephew Christopher of Bavaria as king of Denmark (1440), Sweden (1441), and Norway (1442).31
The Kalmar Union was very different to the Polish-Lithuanian union instituted nine years earlier.32 The Nordic kingdoms had closely related languages that were to a significant extent mutually comprehensible; their political cultures were at a similar stage of development and had much in common. Norway and Sweden had recently been in a personal union under Magnus Eriksson (1319–43), and there were numerous family links between the elites of all three realms. The contrast with Poland and Lithuania is striking, but there was one interesting parallel. Despite a strong aristocratic programme that sought to limit the powers of the crown, as expressed in the unionsbrev, it was drawn up after Erik’s coronation. Margaret and Erik were able to ignore it and govern on the basis of the coronation letter, which marked the limits of the concessions they were prepared to make. Similarly, once Jogaila was crowned, and his Polish subjects had sworn loyalty to him, they were no longer in a position to extract from him any definition of what Krewo’s vague terms signified. The lack of any equivalent of the unionsbrev, in which a vision of what the union might in practice look like was drafted but not agreed, suggests that neither party cared to define more closely what ‘applicare’ actually meant. The complete silence in other sources suggests, as Łowmiański’s critics have argued, that no document of incorporation was ever drafted, and no formal incorporation took place.33
The Krewo Act was a perfectly normal diplomatic document for the time.34 Yet if, as Rowell argues, in form it was similar to the 1469 Cervera treaty, there were differences, not least because this was not a purely dynastic marriage treaty, since the Polish community of the realm was a party to the negotiations, and—in stark contrast to Cervera, which seriously limited Ferdinand’s powers in Castile—it contained no practical guidance as to how government of the united realms was to be conducted, or what applicare signified. Rowell suggests that it was a neutral and broad word, whose meaning was not narrowly tied to the sense of incorporation, but was similar to the term adhaerere, which appeared in the various acts of homage sworn to by Lithuanian princes and nobles after 1386.35
Yet Rowell goes too far in suggesting that historians have created a problem for themselves over the meaning of ‘applicare’, and that Krewo lost its significance once the marriage between Jadwiga and Jogaila had taken place. For although the marriage was a necessary part of the process that turned Jogaila into Jagiełło, his crown depended crucially on the election at Lublin that preceded it. By the time he was crowned he had fulfilled what was in many respects the most important promise made at Krėva: to undergo baptism for himself and the remaining pagan Gediminid princes. His coronation, and the oaths he swore, took place after the marriage, by which time both sides had fully committed themselves. It is unlikely that either side, in the circumstances, wished to jeopardize the fragile new relationship by attempting to define too closely the way in which the union would operate. Jadwiga had reached the canonical age of marriage; had the Poles pulled out of the Krewo arrangements they would have thrown the initiative back to Elizabeth, who might again have attempted to force Sigismund of Luxembourg upon them.
Jagiełło was therefore in a strong position, and he had no need to define more closely what ‘applicare’ meant. Yet it is unlikely that either he or the Polish lords regarded it as an entirely neutral term. Rowell is right to say that the term ‘perpetuo’ should not be taken entirely seriously: it was a common feature of contemporary peace treaties that were broken almost as soon as they were drawn up. Nevertheless, in the Krewo Act the parties stated that, in some undefined form, Lithuania was to be joined to the corona regni Poloniae in perpetuity. It is all but certain that for the Poles ‘applicare’ did mean ‘incorporate’; this was to be made abundantly clear in the 1413 Horodło union—as Rowell admits—and the claim that Lithuania had been incorporated de iure in 1386 was asserted regularly thereafter. Yet that incorporation was not, according to the words used in the act, into the kingdom of Poland, but into the corona regni Poloniae.36 That there was a difference is abundantly clear from contemporary sources, and Dąbrowski long ago argued that Krewo marked an important step in the development of the concept of the corona regni. The extension of Polish control over Red Ruthenia from the 1340s had already brought non-Polish lands into the corona regni; now, Dąbrowski argues, the Polish negotiators utilized the idea of the corona regni to indicate that they were thinking of a relationship that was more than a personal union that might easily be broken, as the personal union with Hungary was broken in 1382.37
It seems reasonable to suppose that for the Poles, the joining to, or inclusion of, Lithuania into the corona regni was an important aim; this may have been the expression of a genuine belief in the benefits of the developing concept of the community of the realm, although the baser motives of opening up Lithuania to Polish influence and colonization, should not be overlooked. For all that, Jagiełło may not have grasped the full significance of the concept of corona regni; as Rowell suggests, he was undoubtedly interested in something more than a mere personal union.38 Without a firmer link than the person of the ruler, there was no guarantee that he would be able to pass on the throne to his heir, or even that he would remain king should Jadwiga predecease him.
As Uruszczak has demonstrated, the concept of ‘union’ as a legal act, was unkown in Roman law, feudal law, or in German or Polish law; it was a concept unique to canon law, and it was canon lawyers who drafted the Krewo Act. ‘Applicare’ was therefore a canon law concept. It was applied in legal acts concerning the union of benefices and churches, on a basis of the equality of both parties (unio aeque principalis).39 The Krewo Act therefore did not sanction the legal incorporation into the Polish state as so many Polish historians have presented it, but envisaged a different kind of union altogether. Nevertheless, for a century and more, Polish politicians were happy to ignore the principle of equality, claiming simply that Lithuania had been incorporated into Poland. Yet Poland was in no position to annex Lithuania or absorb it into the Polish regnum in 1386, not least because Lithuania’s political and institutional culture was so different from that of Poland. Krewo should therefore be seen more as a starting-point in a process in which both the Polish negotiators and Jagiełło were careful not to commit themselves too far. The Poles wished to end their long interregnum and install an adult king on the throne; Jagiełło sought a new throne that might give him the resources to end Lithuania’s political and dynastic crisis by restoring his control and strengthening his hand against the threat posed by the Order. Each side clearly intended this to be a lasting relationship; sensibly, in 1385–6, neither side committed itself to a detailed programme of union. At Jagiełło’s coronation on 4 March 1386 the two polities were formally joined together. Yet the very brevity of the Krewo Act, and the fact that so much about the future relationship was undefined meant that if it were to survive, the issues of lordship, dominion, and the respective status of the two parties to the union had to be clarified. That process brought conflict and upheaval, in which the ambiguity surrounding the relationship between the corona regni Poloniae and the regnum Poloniae was to be of critical importance.
1 AU, no. 1, 1–2.
2 AU, no. 1, 2; the editors published the document in classical Latin spelling; here the original spelling is given, based on the versions in KA, 19 and Maria Koczerska, ‘Autentyczność dokumentu unii krewskiej 1385 roku’ KH, 99 (1992), 77.
3 Feliks Koneczny, Jagiełło i Witold (Lwów, 1893), 33; Anatol Lewicki, ‘Über das staatsrechtliche Verhältnis Littauens zu Polen unter Jagiełło und Witold’, Altpreussische Monatsschrift, 31 (1894), 7; Матвей Любавский, Очерк историй литовско-русского государства до Люблинской унии включительно (1910; 2nd edn, St Petersburg, 2004), 74. For comprehensive surveys of the historiography, see Błaszczyk, Dzieje i, 195–267 and Jučas, Unija, 11–85, 110–16.
4 Stanisław Kutrzeba, ‘Unia Polski z Litwą’, in Polska i Litwa w dziejowym stosunku (Cracow, 1914), 447–658; Oswald Balzer, Tradycja dziejowa unii polsko-litewskiej (Lwów, 1919); Oskar Halecki, Dzieje unii Jagiellońskiej, 2 vols (Cracow, 1919–20); and Oskar Halecki, ‘Wcielenie i wznowienie państwa litewskiego przez Polskę (1386–1401)’, PH, 21 (1917–1918), 1–77.
5 Ivinskis, ‘Jogailos santykiai’, 72–3. For popular views of Jogaila, see Alvydas Nikžentaitis, Witold i Jagiełło: Polacy i Litwini we wzajemnym stereotypie (Poznań, 2000).
6 Šapoka, ‘Valstybiniai Lietuvos Lenkijos santykiai Jogailos laikais’, in Šapoka (ed.), Jogaila, 190–3.
7 V.P. Uluntaitis, Lenkų įvykdytas lieutuvių tautos genocidas (Chicago, 1989).
8 Jonas Dainauskas, ‘Kriavo akto autentiškumas’, Lituanistikos instituto 1975 metų suvažiavimo darbai (1976), 51–71.
9 Jonas Dainauskas, ‘Autentyczność aktu krewskiego’, LSP, 2 (1987), 125–42; Lidia Korczak, ‘O akcie krewskim raz jeszcze (na marginesie rozprawy J. Dainauskasa)’, SH, 34 (1991), 473–9; Koczerska, ‘Autentyczność’, 59–78; Jūratė Kiaupienė, ‘1385 m. rugpjūčio 14 d. aktas Lietuvos-Lenkijos unijų istoriografiojoje (problemos formulavimas)’, in Zigimantas Kiaupa and Arturas Mickevičius (eds), Lietuvos valstybė XII–XVIII a. (Vilnius, 1997), 39–68.
10 See the sharp exchanges between Błaszczyk and Kiaupienė: Błaszczyk, Dzieje, i, 265–7, and ‘Czy była unia krewska?’ KH, 110/4 (2003), 83–96; Jūratė, Kiaupienė, ‘Akt krewski z 14 sierpnia 1385 r.: gdzie kryje się problem—w dokumencie czy w jego interpretacjach?’ KH, 108/4 (2001), 47–61; and Jūratė Kiaupienė, ‘W związku z polemiką Grzegorza Błaszczyka w sprawie unii krewskiej’, KH, 110/3 (2003), 97–8.
11 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, i, 233–52; Nikodem, Jadwiga, 157–200; Kolankowski, Dzieje, i, 33.
12 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, i, 250–1.
13 ‘pro domino ac rege regni eiusdem, videlicet Poloniae, domino nostro praeelegimus et assumpsimus’: AU, no. 2. Rowell translates this as ‘we have chosen him in preference and assumed him as lord and king of the said realm, namely Poland, as our lord’, though in the explanatory text he refers to ‘pre-election’, which better captures the important point that this assumption of Jogaila was only provisional, subject to the confirmation of the Lublin assembly, his marriage, and the fulfilment of the promises made at Krėva: Rowell, ‘1386’, 137, 139.
14 Henryk Łowmiański, Studia nad dziejami Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego (Poznań, 1983), 353–5.
15 Henryk Łowmiański, ‘Wcielenie Litwy do Polski w 1386 r.’, in Prusy—Litwa—Krzyżacy, ed. Marceli Kosman (Warsaw, 1989), 294–402, and Polityka, 45, 57.
16 Jan Adamus, ‘Państwo litewskie w latach 1386–1398’, in Stefan Ehrenkreutz (ed.), Księga pamiątkowa ku uczczenia 400. rocznicy wydania I Statutu Litewskiego (Wilno, 1935), 15–48.
17 Documents have survived for Skirgaila (1386), Vytautas (1386), Žygimantas Kęstutaitis (1386), Karijotas (1386, 1388), Vasyl of Pinsk (1386), Vygantas (1388), Volodymyr of Kyiv (1388), and Lingvenis (1389): AU, nos 7–9.
18 Elliott, Imperial Spain (London, 1963), 9–10, 127.
19 AU, no. 1, 1–3. 20 AU, no. 2, 4. 21 AU, nos 6, 16.
22 Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge, 1999), 126.
23 van Creveld, Rise and Decline, 53, 57, 170, 179.
24 Reynolds, Kingdoms, xxxv.
25 Rowell, ‘Pious’, 66.
26 Łowmiański, Studia, 365–454.
27 Rimvydas Petrauskas, Lietuvos diduomenė XIV a. pabaigoje–XV a. (Vilnius, 2003), 31–2, 153–76.
28 Paszkiewicz, O genezie, 196–8; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, i, 221–3.
29 Paszkiewicz, O genezie, 226–7.
30 ‘Kroningsbrevet’, in Aksel Christensen, Kalmarunionen og nordisk politik 1319–1439 (Copenhagen, 1980), Bilag 1, 301.
31 Jens Olesen, ‘Erik af Pommern og Kalmarunionen: Regeringssystemets udformning, 1389–1439’, in Per Ingesman and Jens Villiam Jensen (eds), Danmark i senmiddelalderen (Aarhus, 1994), 143–65; Erik Lönnroth, Sverige och Kalmarunionen 1397–1457 (Göteborg, 1969), 40–51; Christensen, Kalmarunionen, 131–261; Poul Enemark, ‘Motiver for nordisk aristokratisk unionspolitik: Overvejeler omkring kildegrundlag og tilgangsvinkler i unionsforskningen’, in Ingesman and Jensen (eds), Danmark, 166–81.
32 For comparisons see Stephen C. Rowell, ‘Forging a union? Some reflections on the early Jagiellonian monarchy’, LHS 1 (1996), 19;Halecki, ‘Unia Polski z Litwą a unia kalmarska’, in Studia historyczne ku czci Stanisława Kutrzeby, i (Cracow, 1938), 217–32; Zenon Nowak, ‘Krewo i Kalmar: Dwie unie późnego średniowiecza’, in Nowak (ed.), W kręgu stanowych i kulturowych przeobrażeń Europy Północnej w XIV–XVIII w. (Toruń, 1988), 57–75; and Zenon Nowak, Współpraca polityczna państw unii polsko-litewskiej i unii kalmarskiej w latach 1411–1425 (Toruń, 1996), 5–20.
33 Adamus, ‘Państwo’, 28.
34 Stephen C. Rowell, ‘Krėvos aktas: Diplomatijos ir diplomatikos apžvalga’, in KA, 69–78.
35 Rowell, ‘Krėvos’, 76–7.
36 This point was stressed by Pfitzner in the 1930s, and has recently been endorsed by Andrzej Rachuba: ‘Historia Litwy’, in Rachuba et al., Historia Litwy: Dwugłos polsko-litewski (Warsaw, 2009), 34.
37 Dąbrowski, Korona, 96.
38 Rowell, ‘Krėvos’, 72.
39 Wacław Uruszczak, Unio regnorum sub una corona non causat eorum unitatem. Unia Polski i Litwy w Krewie w 1385 r. Studium Historyczno-Prawne. (Cracow, 2017), 42–3. http://www.khpp.wpia.uj.edu.pl/publikacje.