7
On 20 February, four days after issuing his privilege for boyars who converted to Catholicism, Jagiełło launched the baptism of Lithuania, or at least of Aukštaitija. The details remain murky. Długosz gives the most comprehensive account, but he is often misleading. The process was not easy. At an assembly in Vilnius Jagiełło faced resistance even before he ordered the destruction of the Vilnius temple and its eternal flame. According to Długosz, Jagiełło’s personal intervention won the day, since he spoke Lithuanian, unlike the Polish priests accompanying him. While boyars were christened individually, the common people were baptized in groups of six, who all received the same Christian name. The white woollen clothes, brought from Poland and given to all who accepted baptism, were particularly popular, as people preferred them to their normal linen attire.1
How much of this is true is unclear. The conversion was a substantial undertaking. Pagan temples were destroyed and the sacred groves felled across Aukštaitija, as the institutional basis for the new church was established. On 17 February 1387 Jagiełło founded the diocese of Vilnius, endowing it richly to ensure that the bishop and chapter would have the means to lead the Christianization. A new cathedral, dedicated jointly to Poland’s patron saint Stanisław and Jagiełło’s own patron, the Hungarian saint László (Władysław), was built on the site of the pagan high temple. The bishopric was granted 50–60 villages, with some 600 hearths, not counting the 50 or so it held in Vilnius. At a stroke, Jagiełło created Lithuania’s first latifundium, by far the greatest complex of landed property after the holdings of the grand duke himself.2
The Catholic Church was granted wide privileges on 22 February. Its lands were to be held on the same basis as those of the grand duke. It was to enjoy complete fiscal and juridical immunity: the church was to pay no taxes or dues to the state, and was to have full authority over those living on its lands.3 Jagiełło toured Lithuania, founding new parishes as he went. Seven were established in the initial phase: in Krėva, Ukmergė, Maišiagala, Nemenčinė, Medininkai, and two that Jagiełło did not visit in Oboltsy and Haina. Three were founded in Vilnius, apart from the cathedral; others followed in Bystrytsa (1392), Lida (1397), and Ašmena (1398). Two of them—Haina, near Minsk, and Oboltsy, near Orsha, south of Vitsebsk—were in largely Ruthenian territory, but had substantial Lithuanian populations: some ten per cent in Oboltsy.4
Despite early difficulties, the conversion succeeded, even if popular pagan beliefs proved harder to eradicate. Jagiełło’s grip was sufficient to ensure there was little noble resistance of the sort that had led to the assassination of Mindaugas 120 years earlier, at least in Aukštaitija; in Samogitia, where paganism was strongly rooted, it was different: in 1382 the Samogitians had warned that if Jagiełło ordered their baptism, they would resist.5 Although it was to be three decades before he sought to break that resistance, the process ran relatively smoothly in Aukštatija.
That it did owed much to Polish assistance. Lithuania’s conversion laid the foundations of the closer relationship between Poles and Lithuanians that grew gradually over the next two centuries. Polish influence over the early development of the Lithuanian church was substantial. Jagiełło turned to the Poles to provide him with the necessary priests and missionaries. It is unlikely that Jagiełło personally translated the Paternoster and other prayers into Lithuanian, as was maintained by Długosz and Mikołaj Kozłowski in his 1434 funeral address, and since he left Lithuania in July 1387, it was others who were responsible for completing the conversion.6 Essential to the success was a small group of Polish clerics who already had experience of Lithuania, and who spoke the language, including the first two bishops of Vilnius: Andrzej Jastrzębiec (1388–98), who had undertaken missionary work in Lithuania, and Jakub Plichta (1398–1407), a Franciscan resident in Lithuania; thanks to the phrase in his document of election ‘vicarium Lythuanie, eiusdem nacionis et lingue’, he has been claimed as a Lithuanian. Even if he was—and his Slavic name makes it doubtful—he had lived in Poland, and it is likely that his long residence in Lithuania explains his designation as a Lithuanian.7
Before 1386 the Franciscan mission was run by the Saxon province. Responsibility now passed to the Bohemian-Polish province, and Polish Franciscans flooded into Lithuania. The parish network long remained rudimentary, but the well-organized Franciscans, who already possessed two houses in Vilnius, built monasteries in Ašmena, Lida—although here they were only present from 1397 to c.1402—Kaunas, and Drohichyn, establishing a separate Lithuanian vicariate in 1398. Other orders played a lesser role, with only individual Dominicans mentioned in this period, but the Benedictines founded a monastery in Trakai in 1405, a filial house of Tyniec near Cracow. Also important were the regular canons of the Atonement, known as Markists, from the church of St Mark in Cracow, who arrived in 1390–1391, founding a house in Bystrytsa with a filial in Medininkai.8
The context for Jagiełło’s conversion was very different to that of Mindaugas. The ground had been prepared by years of missionary effort, and the Polish church had the institutional structures capable of supplying clergy and religious institutions to sustain the new faith. The Lithuanian church took time to develop a native clergy, and Poles largely filled the breach. The Polish religious orders brought organization and intellectual traditions that rapidly penetrated Lithuanian culture. While Polish clerics did learn Lithuanian in order to preach, much of the intellectual life of the Lithuanian church took place in Latin or Polish: since Lithuanian was not yet a written language, it was in no position to compete. The use of Polish made Catholicism more accessible to Ruthenian speakers, while the dynamism and missionary ethos of Catholic orders, especially the Franciscans, contrasted sharply with the more inward-looking world of Orthodox monasticism and offered competition to the Orthodox Church.
By choosing Catholicism Jagiełło introduced a new cultural and political divide within the grand duchy. This was made explicit in the privileges granted to the Lithuanian church in February 1387, when marriages between Catholics and Orthodox were banned; henceforth, only the conversion of the Orthodox partner to Catholicism would allow the marriage to take place. This was a cultural barrier that was more significant than that between paganism and Orthodoxy, given the tensions between the Latin and Greek branches of Christendom. While the decentralized, composite nature of the Gediminid system meant that there was initially no challenge to Orthodoxy in the annexed territories, as grand dukes sought to consolidate their central authority, tensions inevitably emerged.
1 Annales, x, 159–62.
2 Jerzy Ochmański, Powstanie i rozwój latyfundium biskupstwa wileńskiego (1387–1550) (Poznań, 1963), 1–40.
3 Krzyżaniakowa and Ochmański, Jagiełło, 119.
4 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, 213–14; Jučas, Unija, 121; Marceli Kosman, Drogi zaniku pogaństwa u Bałtów (Wrocław, 1976), 36, 39; Ochmański, Granica, 58–65.
5 Die Chronik Wigands von Marburg, SRPr, ii, 619; Jučas, Unija, 128.
6 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 207–10; Antoni Gąsiorowski, Itinerarium króla Władysława Jagiełły 1386–1434 (Warsaw, 1972), 30.
7 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 200–2.
8 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 201, 204–7.