PART II
6
The disputes over the nature of Krewo demonstrate the problems inherent in attempts to classify unions on the basis of foundation treaties alone. Unions—even the loosest—are relationships that change and grow over time. Many falter and fail; some develop and deepen. Although foundation treaties establish the framework for the relationship, a union is a process, not a moment, and political reality tempers the broad aspirations they express. If the Polish lords who negotiated Krewo intended that Lithuania should be incorporated into the corona regni, it rapidly became clear that this was not Jagiełło’s understanding of the matter; that the Polish state—the regnum rather than the corona regni—was in no position to absorb the grand duchy; and that Lithuania’s elites still saw the grand duchy as a separate realm. Krewo was far from the equivalent of the 1536 Act of the English parliament by which the principality of Wales, annexed as one of the dominions of the English crown in the late thirteenth century, was incorporated into England. That Act, welcomed by most among the Welsh elites—to the consternation of not a few modern historians of Wales—was the culmination of a long process in which the principality and the other conquered Welsh territories experienced the gradual extension of English institutions and English law. The establishment of shires on the English pattern after 1284 demonstrated the benefits of English-style local government; thus there were many in the turbulent marcher lordships that had remained under the crown but which were ruled by an amalgam of local custom and feudal law, who saw the benefits of full incorporation. The 1536 Act of Union shired the rest of Wales and introduced English common law. It marked the end, not the beginning, of a process of union, albeit one inaugurated not by treaty but by conquest, while acceptance of incorporation came at the end of a long period of cultural, legal, and political assimilation.1
In stark contrast, the relationship between Poland and Lithuania was only beginning in 1386, and the two realms were at very different stages of social, political, legal, and institutional development. The process of union, therefore, was initially slow (see Map 3).2 The kingdom of Poland, itself only recently reunited, had developed rapidly since Łokietek’s coronation in 1320, but the long period of political disintegration after 1138 had left its mark. While a common sense of Polish identity survived the fragmentation, at least among the elites, Poland’s division into an ever-shifting constellation of principalities established different trajectories of social, political, and legal development across the Polish lands.3 These differences diminished after 1320, but strong local identities and attachment to local and provincial institutions as the basic building blocks of the socio-political order survived, and shaped future development.
Map 3. The Polish-Lithuanian Union in the early fifteenth century.
This period saw the consolidation of the Polish szlachta (nobility), which was emerging as the dominant political force. The szlachta’s roots lay deep in the tribal era. It emerged from the kinship groups or clans (rody) that formed the basis of the Polish social elite from the twelfth century to the fourteenth century. Although the details are obscure, it is clear that many clans provided a form of local organization, led by starostas (elders). Important decisions were taken at clan assemblies (wiece). Landed property belonged to the clan, and was shared out among its male members.4
By 1320 the passing of the generations had undermined the integrity of the clans, not least because the landed class grew substantially, as princes recruited warriors for their retinues, granting land under ius militari to sustain them. Princes offered generous terms and privileges to attract them, especially in Mazovia, whose dukes were desperate to defend their duchy against pagan tribes to the north and east. Initially newcomers were adopted by individual clans, intent on strengthening their position through the extension of membership beyond the core kinship group. The idea of the clan survived long after clans had ceased to have any real social or political significance, not least in the notion that membership of the szlachta—a term derived from the German Geschlecht (family)—depended primarily on noble descent. Clans lived on in their names, as the basis of the heraldic clans that survived as an important badge of noble identity; literally so, since the heraldic device of the clan, its herb, from the German Erbe, was adopted by its members and their descendants.
The clan ethos lingered in the tradition of regarding landed property as the common inheritance of the extended kinship group. Partible inheritance shaped the szlachta’s development over the next four centuries, working over the longer term against the consolidation of powerful magnate dynasties and a narrow oligarchy. While individual magnate families used their positions to secure their status and wealth over several generations, the nobility’s steadily increasing size and the recurrent need to divide family lands among all children ensured that the position even of the most powerful families was never secure: there were always ambitious and hungry challengers for office, honour, and status. Grants of land on military tenure were made directly by individual princes, and usually—initially at least—for life. These were not feudal grants on the western European pattern. Problems of monitoring the status of land meant that over time they tended to be folded into a family’s allodial holdings. The szlachta gradually secured full allodial rights to their lands, outside frontier areas such as Red Ruthenia, where defence needs ensured that a tighter grip was kept on military tenures. Thus if western concepts of vassalage and feudal hierarchy did spread through the influence of German law, the western European system did not take root on Polish soil.5 In consequence, although deep into the fifteenth century bishops and dignitaries issued fiefs to their retainers, no feudal hierarchy emerged. In Małopolska, the status of Cracow as the senior principality and the fact that the province was not subdivided ensured that a handful of powerful families dominated political and social life in the palatinates of Cracow and Sandomierz. In contrast, extensive subdivision in Wielkopolska gave fewer opportunities for the consolidation of power and wealth. Wielkopolska was to remain the heartland of the middling nobility, those holding one—or at best a few—villages, for generations to come.6
In the fourteenth century the legal position of the szlachta was consolidated. Casimir III’s statutes declared that nobility was an inherited status, giving legal form to what was already the dominant conception of szlachectwo (nobility). In Wielkopolska, descent from three noble families was demanded, usually one’s father, mother, and paternal grandmother, to secure recognition of noble status; in Małopolska, descent from one noble family was sufficient until the fifteenth century. Attestation by six family members on the paternal side was all that was required. In Wielkopolska, four members of two different noble families were needed in addition to two blood relations. This public attestation of noble status by witnesses decided whether or not an individual was regarded as a noble; but even as the noble estate defined itself and attempted to shut itself off to outsiders, its most remarkable feature was how broadly it defined nobility. Nobility was closely associated with landowning, but ownership of land was neither sufficient to secure recognition as a noble, nor was it considered essential. Thus the szlachta contained not just wealthy landowners, the possessionati, but also those who worked their land themselves without dependent peasants—the szlachta zagrodowa—those who leased their land, and even those without land—the impossessionati—were not excluded if they could demonstrate noble descent. By the fifteenth century the Małopolskan nobility contained great magnates like Jan Głowacz Oleśnicki, grand marshal of Poland and palatine of Sandomierz, who owned one town and fifty-nine villages, alongside the forty-seven nobles who owned slithers of the village of Krzyszkowice in Proszowska county.7
Mazovia, which was not gathered into the Polish realm in 1320, was exceptional for the size and poverty of its nobility, which may have constituted an astonishing twenty per cent or more of the population by 1400.8 Despite the huge differences in wealth between the Małopolskan magnates and the hordes of impoverished impossessionati, and despite the extensive clientage relations that to an extent replaced the old clans, the szlachta rejected hierarchical internal structures in favour of a broad presumption of equality of status, at least in legal and, gradually, in political terms. The phenomenon of scartabellat, which emerged in Mazovia and Małopolska—though not in Wielkopolska—in the thirteenth century as a form of semi-noble status for those serving the knights who constituted the princely retinues, disappeared in the fourteenth century as these squires (włodycy, ścierałscy, or, in Latin, scartabelli) either sank back into the commonality, or slipped into full noble status.9 The most important causes of this development were the reunification of the kingdom, which encouraged belief in the nature of the szlachta as a national elite transcending the divisions within the corona regni, and the privileges that the nobility obtained as a result of the succession problems faced by Casimir and Louis of Anjou.
Of particular importance were the 1374 Koszyce privileges. They constituted the first set of privileges issued to the szlachta as a whole, thus consolidating its position as a legally defined estate across the kingdom. Louis confirmed all privileges issued to nobles by his predecessors and granted new ones, in what has traditionally been depicted as a needlessly generous grant of rights. It is still sometimes inaccurately asserted that he exempted the szlachta from all taxes except for the land tax (poradlne), henceforth levied at what is often referred to as the ‘symbolic’ or ‘nominal’ sum of 2 groszy per hide (łan) of land worked by their peasants.10 Nobles were only obliged to provide military service within the kingdom’s borders, and the king would henceforth pay them for service abroad. Local offices could only be filled by the king from among the local nobility, and Louis affirmed that the territory of the corona regni was inviolate, and could not be divided or alienated.11
The Koszyce privileges eloquently expressed the new sense of unity, based round the idea of the corona regni, among the szlachta of Małopolska and Wielkopolska. With hindsight, they have often been presented as the founding charter of the noble irresponsibility and selfishness that, so it is frequently argued, destroyed the Polish-Lithuanian state at the end of the eighteenth century. While their significance is undeniable, they should be viewed in context and not as part of the corrosive teleology of failure that rots so much historical writing on Poland-Lithuania. Louis was a clear-headed, expert negotiator, and the privileges represented a compromise between king and nobility rather than an outright victory for the szlachta, as is often assumed, based on the false claim that the rate of 2 groszy per hide represented a substantial drop in the rate of the poradlne, which had supposedly been levied at 12 groszy prior to 1374.12 In fact, as Matuszewski’s careful analysis of land-tenure documents reveals, there was no permanent land tax before 1374; what concerned the szlachta was the arbitrary way in which monarchs levied the poradlne.
While it is true that it had occasionally been raised at rates of 12 or even 24 groszy, collection had been intermittent and unpredictable. Since the poradlne was not raised every year, on average it yielded the equivalent of 2 groszy per annum before 1374. At Koszyce Louis secured a principle that suited both parties: the poradlne was to become permanent, allowing the royal treasury to budget properly, and ensuring that landowners faced a steady and predictable burden.13
Far from being a foolish concession that demonstrated the monarchy’s weakness, this measure attained recognition for a principle that many late medieval monarchs failed to secure: the right to tax their nobility on a permanent basis. In 1381 it was complemented by a similar agreement with the church, in which the lands of the secular clergy were taxed at the same rate, while monastic lands paid 4 groszy per hide. It was not Louis’s fault that, over the next two centuries, inflation gradually eroded the tax’s value. It was the failure to increase the rate at which it was levied, not the Koszyce privileges, that eventually reduced the poradlne to a symbolic gesture. That problem was by no means unique to Poland, and the compromise worked well initially: treasury revenues, while not lavish, were sufficient to ensure that monarchs only had to raise extraordinary taxes on two occasions—1404 and 1440—in the next seventy years.14 In 1374 two groszy per hide was by no means insignificant, constituting around fifteen per cent of the average lord’s income from his lands, and possibly more, since revenues from noble estates seem to have dipped slightly after 1374, before recovering later in the century.15
The Koszyce privileges were nevertheless an important milestone. While they did not exempt the nobility from taxation in perpetuity, they established the important principle that the monarchy could only levy extraordinary taxation with szlachta consent. This principle was the cornerstone of the consensual Polish political system whose foundations were laid in Louis’ reign, and during the interregnum after his death. Between 1374 and 1386, the szlachta came of age as a political community, establishing a system that profoundly influenced the elites of neighbouring lands, above all in the grand duchy of Lithuania.
Lithuania in 1386 was a composite, not a unitary polity. As a dynastic agglomeration it was not ruled in a uniform manner, and its component parts were marked by substantial differences in law, institutions, and political practice, although to judge it a disorderly mess, as does Pietkiewicz with reference to the late fifteenth century, is to apply the anachronistic standards of a later age.16 Composite states were by definition irregular in their composition, and the grand duchy was no more a mess than France, the Empire, or the composite monarchy of Castile and Aragon. It is true that it is difficult to establish the exact relationship of the various parts to each other. The use of the terms ‘Lithuania’ and ‘Ruthenia’ have proven confusing to those who choose to see in them a clear division along national lines. For the term ‘Lithuania’ did not refer to an ethnic Lithuanian state in 1386, but to the heartlands of the Gediminid realm: the duchies of Vilnius and Trakai, which Liubavskii, reflecting contemporary usage, christened ‘Lithuania proper’ (собственная Литовская земля, Litwa ścisła, Lithuania propria). Despite Kutrzeba’s attempt to add Samogitia to Lithuania proper, in order to include all the territories that nineteenth-century Lithuanian nationalists—though by no means all Samogitians—regarded as forming ‘ethnic Lithuania’, the concept as reflected in contemporary sources was much as Liubavskii suggested. Lithuania proper excluded Samogitia, and comprised the core territories of the grand duchy, including Black Ruthenia—the territories round Hrodna, Vaukavysk, and Navahrudak, and extending as far east as Minsk and Mahiliou. While Lithuanian settlements survived—some heavily Ruthenianized, others maintaining Lithuanian culture and the Lithuanian language—large areas of ‘Lithuania proper’ were Ruthenian in culture and Orthodox in religion.17 Contemporaries, including Długosz—who put the border between ‘Lithuania’ and ‘Ruthenia’ on the river Berezina—and even the Muscovites, referred to these lands as Lithuania.18
The other territories under grand ducal authority were treated differently. Throughout the fifteenth century they received separate grants of privileges and were administered differently. Liubavskii presents the grand duchy as a federation comprising twelve parts: Lithuania proper and the ‘annexed territories’ or ‘cetera dominia’ (other lordships) to use the contemporary term: Samogitia, Polesie, Podlasie, and the five Ruthenian territories of Polatsk, Vitsebsk, Smolensk, Volhynia, and Kyiv, plus Lithuanian Podolia and the principalities of Chernihiv-Siversky.19 To call it a federation, however, as Gudavičius also does, is anachronistic. There was no federal treaty to regulate relations, each of the ‘annexed’ territories had a different relation to the centre, and the relationship between the various parts of the realm was conceived in terms of personal lordship: Jagiełło, as his titles make clear, saw his realms as separate entities, and the term ‘grand duchy’ referring to the whole does not appear in the sources until 1430.20 Yet the relationship between the grand duke and the appanage dukes was not a feudal one in the western European sense: the workings of the Gediminid and east Slavic dynastic system were different, and Niendorf’s characterization of it as quasifeudal (lehnsähnlich) seems fair: the annexed territories were—for the most part—no longer fiefs whose princes were vassals of the grand duke, but territories which, despite being largely left in charge of their own affairs, were considered part of the grand duke’s patrimony.21 The grand duchy was neither a unitary state nor a modern federation. It was a classic composite state.
At Krewo, Jagiełło promised to join his Lithuanian and Ruthenian territories to Poland. While he showed little inclination to effect the incorporation that was the Polish understanding of ‘applicare’, it was not long before he looked to Polish models to promote social change within the grand duchy. On 20 February 1387, back in Vilnius to convert his pagan subjects, he issued privileges to all pagan nobles (armigeris sive boyaris) who accepted Catholic baptism. They were to receive the same rights as their Polish counterparts: this meant that for the first time they were explicitly granted full property rights at law, including hereditary title to allodial noble land and the freedom to decide on the marriage of daughters and other female family members without asking the grand duke’s permission. All labour services for the grand duke from their allodial lands, except for the duty to construct and repair fortifications, were abolished.22
It was to be some time before the full effects of this act became apparent, since Lithuania as yet lacked the legal and political institutions to give it force, but its symbolic importance was considerable. As Halecki observes, it was more the declaration of a programme than the instant transformation of a social group: although it hinted at the establishment of a system of local noble courts on the Polish model, no practical steps were taken to establish one.23 The explicit mention of the rights of the Polish nobility in the documents demonstrates that despite his lack of enthusiasm for incorporation, Jagiełło was from the outset thinking of a relationship between his two realms that was more than a simple personal union: he wished to bring them into closer harmony. For the Lithuanian boyars the wording highlighted the extensive rights and privileges enjoyed by their Polish counterparts. It was the first step on what was to prove a long journey.
The grand duchy’s noble elites were at a very different stage of social, legal, and political development: if there was contiguity between the two realms, there was little conformity. The paucity of sources—and the fact that most of those that have survived are the chronicles of Lithuania’s enemies, the Teutonic Knights—make it difficult to be precise about the nature of the Lithuanian—as opposed to the Ruthenian—nobility before 1386. In origin it was a military class, serving first the local tribal leaders, and then the grand ducal dynasty after the consolidation of central power under Mindaugas and Gediminas. By 1350 the semi-independent class of dukes (kunigai, kunigaikščiai) had largely been eclipsed by the power of the dynasty, except in Samogitia, whose connections to the centre remained loose.24
The view, common in older Polish historiography, that the 1387 privileges sparked a revolutionary transformation of the Lithuanian elites can no longer be sustained. It depended upon two key assumptions: that Lithuania was a despotic, patrimonial state in which the absolute power of the grand duke meant that there were no private rights in land until the 1387 privileges; and that landholdings remained small, for most boyars consisting of one village, with only the most important servants of the prince holding two or at most three.25 The concentration on individuals and agnatic lineages has distorted the picture, however. The landholding system in Lithuania proper—as in the annexed territories—was based on the tradition of collective ownership of the land by the cognatic kinship group. It was the extended horizontal kinship group—common generations of brothers and cousins—that was most important.26
While in theory all land ultimately belonged to the grand duke, Lithuania already knew allodial landholding in 1387—as the wording of the privilege makes clear—and there are indications that expropriation of allodial—as opposed to military-service—land by the grand duke was regarded as illegal.27 Landholding, however, was a collective, not an individual matter, in which an inherited patrimony—as with the ruling dynasty—belonged to the extended cognatic family; thus its free disposal could only be made with the agreement of brothers, uncles, and cousins. Although the oldest documentary record of this practice dates from 1437, it clearly reflects earlier custom.28 Landholding was complex and dispersed; if one looks at families rather than individuals, there were already complexes of estates and the small elite of families that were to dominate Lithuanian politics after 1386 was largely in place already. It was not the creation of the union.
Yet the union was to exercise a significant influence over the development of the Lithuanian nobility, in particular for the large group of middling and lesser boyars. While private landholding certainly existed, the extent of legal protection for the customary arrangements for its disposal and inheritance is unclear. The grand duke’s patrimony was vast, and a considerable amount of land held by individuals took the form of temporary assignations of land granted during the performance of military service. Estates might be granted for life, or even in perpetuity as allodial holdings, although this was rare.29 Although in practice—as in most military service systems—holdings were often passed on to the sons of boyars, there was no legal guarantee providing for such bequests, and they could be revoked at the grand duke’s pleasure. Although few new men—or new families—penetrated the small group at the apex of Lithuanian landed society, the mass of the boiarstvo was not yet closed, and recruitment into it from the large class of free peasants, was still common. Boyar estates were traditionally worked by their families and by slaves, captured in raids: it was only in the fourteenth century that the old tribal practice of killing the menfolk and taking only women and children to provide domestic labour died out, as did the custom of burning slaves alive on the funeral pyres of their master along with the rest of his moveable property.30
The agricultural economy, while increasingly sophisticated, was not as developed as its largely rent-based counterpart in Poland, and Lithuanian boyars did not yet have the economic or intellectual resources on which to build the sophisticated challenge to untrammelled royal authority mounted by their Polish counterparts after 1370. Challenges to grand ducal power tended to come from within the dynasty itself, rather than from below, although the civil war after 1377 enabled the more important boyars to increase their political influence, as Jogaila and Kęstutis sought support. Jogaila’s power-base lay to a considerable extent among Ruthenian and Orthodox nobles, while Kęstutis drew substantial support from Aukštaitija and Samogitia.31 Yet for all that the boyars were by no means passive before 1386, it was the union that shaped the Lithuanian nobility’s political development more than any other factor.
1 Peter Roberts, ‘The English Crown, the Principality of Wales and the Council of the Marches, 1534–1641’, in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds), The British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke, 1996), 118–47; Brendan Bradshaw, ‘The Tudor Reformation and Revolution in Wales and Ireland: The origins of the British problem’, in Bradshaw and Morrill (eds), The British Problem, 39–65.
2 Halecki, ‘Wcielenie’, 4.
3 Stanisław Kutrzeba, Historia ustroju Polski: Korona (updated repr. based on 8th edn, Poznań, 2001), 27.
4 Kutrzeba, Korona, 34–40.
5 Zientara, ‘Społeczeństwo’, 59.
6 Zientara, ‘Społeczeństwo’, 146.
7 Kutrzeba, Korona, 87–8; Zientara, ‘Społeczeństwo’, 148–9.
8 Dzieje Mazowsza, i, ed. Henryk Samsonowicz (Pułtusk, 2006), 375.
9 Kutrzeba, Korona, 40.
10 The size of a hide varied. Two systems were in operation in Poland from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century: the Flemish hide (16.7 to 17.5 hectares), and the Franconian hide (22.6 to 25.36 hectares).
11 VL, i, 24–5.
12 For example, Jerzy Lukowski and Hubert Zawadzki, A Concise History of Poland (Cambridge, 2001), 31; Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, i, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2005), 90.
13 Jacek Matuszewski, Przywileje i polityka podatkowa Ludwika Węgierskiego w Polsce (Łódź, 1983), 130–9, 173–83, 245–50.
14 Matuszewski, Przywileje, 182.
15 Matuszewski, Przywileje, 170–1, 248.
16 Krzysztof Pietkiewicz, Wielkie Księstwo Litewskie pod rządami Aleksandra Jagiellończyka (Poznań, 1995), 66, 202.
17 Oskar Halecki, ‘Litwa, Ruś i Żmudź jako części składowe wielkiego księstwa litewskiego’, RAUWHF, serya ii, 34 (1916), 214–54; Matthias Niendorf, Das Großfürstentum Litauen: Studien zur Nationsbildung in der Frühen Neuzeit (1569–1795) (Wiesbaden, 2006), 24.
18 Любавский, Областное, 2–5; Stanisław Kutrzeba, Historia ustroju Polski, ii: Litwa, 2nd edn (Lwów, 1921), 6; Jerzy Ochmański, Litewska granica etniczna na wschodzie od epoki plemiennej do XVI wieku (Poznań, 1981), 69–73. Other historians accept Liubavskii’s general argument but postulate different territorial divisions: Pietkiewicz regards Polesie and Podlasie as part of Trakai, and treats Smolensk and Chernihiv-Siversky, and Podolia and Volhynia as single units: Pietkiewicz, Wielkie księstwo, 48–66.
19 Любавский, Областное, 1–62; Niendorf, Großfürstentum, 24.
20 Edvardas Gudavičius, Lietuvos Istorija, i (Vilnius, 2001), 383–97; Niendorf, Großfürstentum, 25.
21 Niendorf, Großfürstentum, 24.
22 ZPL, 1–2.
23 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 251–2.
24 Rowell, Lithuania, 49–50; Konstantinas Avižonis, Die Entstehung und Entwicklung des Litauischen Adels bis zur litauisch-polnischen Union 1385 (Berlin, 1932), 92, 97.
25 The first was asserted most strongly by Kamieniecki; the second by Łowmiański: Witold Kamieniecki, Społeczeństwo litewskie w XV wieku (Warsaw, 1947), 27–30; Łowmiański, Studia, 142–50.
26 Petrauskas, Diduomenė, 103–17.
27 Nikžentaitis, ‘Litauen’, 70–1; Petrauskas, Diduomenė, 131; Gudavičius, ‘Baltų alodo pavbeldėjimas ir disponavimas juo’, in Gudavičius (ed.), Lietuvos Europėjimo keliais, 100–11; and Gudavičius, ‘Baltų alodo raida’, in Gudavičius (ed.), Lietuvos Europėjimo keliais, 87–99.
28 Petrauskas, Diduomenė, 117–25.
29 Avižonas, Entstehung, 116–18.
30 Łowmiański, Studia, 151, 160–3.
31 Avižonis, Entstehung, 104.