8

Cousins

The union’s first four decades were dominated by Jagiełło and Vytautas, the most politically talented of Jagiełło’s Gediminid relations. Much remains obscure about their relationship. Born within a couple of years of each other, they were—according to chronicle accounts—the favourite sons of their respective fathers, raised on the understanding that they would succeed to their fathers’ patrimonies and political positions.1 Their exact birthdates are unknown: traditionally Jagiełło’s was given as 1348, Vytautas’s as 1350.2 In 1991 Wasilewski claimed that Jagiełło was not the eldest of Algirdas’s sons by his second wife Juliana, as was commonly accepted, but was born in 1362 or 1363.3 His views have been influential.4 Yet Wasilewski’s thesis fails to convince. The case rests on later redactions of the chronicle of Metropolitan Cyprian, compiled in 1408, the original of which has disappeared, and the oldest copy of which, the Troitskii chronicle, was burnt in Moscow in 1812, leaving historians dependent upon notes taken by Karamzin.5 Wasilewski dismisses the evidence of German chroniclers as unreliable, yet is prepared to take evidence from the Ruthenian chronicles more seriously than it deserves: they contain numerous errors and disagree wildly as to the number, order, and even the names of the children of Algirdas and Kęstutis. He argues that Vytautas was ten years older than Jagiełło, discounting the testimony of Bitschin’s chronicle, which states that Jogaila was twenty-two and Vytautas twenty when they fought at Rudau in 1370, and of Długosz, who depicts Jagiełło as decrepit by the 1420s—if Wasilewski is right he would have been in his sixties—and remarks when discussing the 1428 Novgorod campaign that Vytautas was over eighty, which would place his birth around 1348.6 Wasilewski makes much of sources that claim that Jagiełło was ‘young’ when he succeeded his father, without defining what this might mean, and is overly keen to dismiss sources stressing his advanced age towards the end of his life: Waynknecht’s chronicle states that he was old at Tannenberg in 1410, suggesting a man approaching his sixties rather than one not yet fifty, but Wasilewski prefers to claim that a younger Jagiełło makes a more plausible victor in the battle.7

Wasilewski’s dating is implausible. In the 1430s Bitschin worked closely with the Order’s hierarchy, many of whom knew Jagiełło and Vytautas personally; while Długosz may have rounded up Vytautas’s age by a couple of years, he is unlikely to have been too wide of the mark: he gleaned his knowledge of Jagiełło and Vytautas from his mentor, Zbigniew Oleśnicki, whose service he entered three years before Jagiełło’s death, which makes it likely that he had opportunities to observe or meet Jagiełło.

Ochmański plausibly argues that Algirdas’s marriage to Juliana could only have taken place in 1350 or 1351, suggesting that Jagiełło could not have been born earlier than 1351. Nikodem agrees, arguing that Jagiełło was the eldest son of Algirdas’s second marriage, born between 1351 and 1353, probably earlier rather than later; and accepts the traditional line—confirmed by Długosz—that Vytautas was younger, being born in 1354 or 1355.8 Nevertheless, this would mean that Długosz’s testimony regarding Vytautas’s age in 1428 was out by seven or eight years, a substantial rounding-up. Given that it is impossible to be accurate about dates, and the difficulties involved in moving Jagiełło’s date of birth forward to 1353, there is much to be said for accepting the earliest date proposed by Ochmański, which would put Jagiełło’s birth in 1351, with Vytautas’s in 1352 or 1353.

Whatever the truth, the nature of the relationship between the cousins is controversial, partly because of the detailed picture provided by Długosz, who was no objective observer. Born in 1415, he received his political education from Oleśnicki, who clashed repeatedly with Jagiełło after 1420 and ended his life in sour opposition to Jagiełło’s son, Casimir IV. Długosz disliked Lithuanians in general and the Jagiellons in particular, despite long service to Casimir. While he admired Vytautas, his portrait of Jagiełło, if recognizing positive traits such as his sense of honour, depicted him as ‘uneducated and simple; more suited to hunting than to government’.9

Jagiełło, if he spurned pomp, show, and alcohol, was no naïve, uneducated barbarian. His handling of Vytautas suggests that he had considerable political skill. Vytautas was short of stature and slight in build, but his energy and force of character were palpable. Długosz testified that Jagiełło realized ‘there was nobody better able to govern Lithuania and rebuild it out of the ruin and destruction of recent wars’, thereby recognizing Jagiełło’s shrewdness in inviting him to do so.10 Vytautas could be cruel: ‘the Poles fear him more than they do [Jagiełło], because [he] tends to demand instant revenge for crimes committed, and his ability to achieve his ends is twice that of the king’. Abstemious—he did not touch alcohol—and an uxorious lover of domesticity, he was nevertheless, according to Długosz’s contradictory portrait, a womanizer with a strong sex-drive capable of abandoning a battle at its height to rush to the bed of his wife or mistress.11

If the two were childhood companions, events following Algirdas’s death stretched their friendship past breaking-point. After Vytautas’s dramatic 1382 flight to Prussia, while several associates, including Ivan Holshansky, followed him into exile, many Kęstutid supporters remained in Lithuania.12 Jagiełło, an eminently practical politician, could not afford to have an unreconciled Vytautas scheming in Marienburg and stirring up Kęstutid supporters to oppose the momentous changes he was planning. In 1384, therefore, he reached out to his childhood companion.

He did not reach out very far. The details of his offer, which Vytautas accepted in July 1384, are unknown.13 Vytautas returned, but although his seal on the Krewo Act bore the legend ‘duke of Trakai’, Skirgaila still held Kęstutis’s duchy, which he had been granted in 1382. Jagiełło did not confirm this until April 1387, suggesting that he deliberately kept Vytautas’s hopes of securing his patrimony alive until he felt secure on the Polish throne.14 Instead, Vytautas received parts of Kęstutis’s Ruthenian lands, including Hrodna, Podlasie, Brest, Drohichyn, Mielnik, and Vaukavysk, which were no compensation. Vytautas later claimed that Jagiełło had promised him Trakai, although it is likely that this is how Vytautas interpreted hints about the restoration of his patrimony. His testimony on other points is dubious: he claimed that Jagiełło forced him to undergo Orthodox baptism, but this was probably an attempt to explain to the Order why he had renounced the Catholic baptism he had undergone during his first Prussian exile. It was Vytautas himself, angered at Jagiełło’s failure to return his patrimony, who decided on this step, in the hope of securing support from Jagiełło’s mother for his claim to Lutsk.15 Vytautas had burnt his bridges, however; Jagiełło could stand firm on Trakai. Yet although Vytautas publicly endorsed Krewo, he demonstrated his political shrewdness by renouncing his freshly minted Orthodoxy and accepting Catholic baptism in Cracow along with Jagiełło’s pagan brothers, retaining the Christian name of Alexander which he had adopted on his Orthodox baptism, instead of Wigand, the name bestowed on him at his first baptism in 1383.16

Vytautas refused to allow Jagiełło to consign him to the Ruthenian margins; his third baptism put him in an excellent position to influence the creation of the new Catholic establishment once Jagiełło returned to Poland in July 1387. Jagiełło was going to be largely an absentee monarch: he was not to return to Lithuania until early 1390, staying from February to May before heading back to Poland. He spent a couple of months in Lithuania in the spring of 1391, but was then absent for six years, until a brief visit to Lida in May 1397. He did not return until January 1400, leaving again in March.17

These were uncharted waters. Gediminid Lithuania had been ruled by the extended dynasty under the control of powerful grand dukes. Important decisions were taken by meetings of leading members of the dynasty; there were no mechanisms to deal with the grand duke’s long-term absence, and no proper chancery to handle routine government business: the secretaries who prepared Latin documents were sought on an ad hoc basis among the Polish or German clergy resident in Vilnius. Treaties were often drafted by the other party: in 1322, Rigan envoys brought a draft treaty from Livonia; the Polish chancery prepared the Ruthenian texts of Algirdas’s 1366 treaty with Casimir III; and the text of the 1371 treaty with Dmitrii Donskoi was drafted by the Muscovites.18

At first Jagiełło used the Polish chancery for matters concerning the grand duchy; since it was perfectly capable of preparing documents in Ruthenian there was no need to bring secretaries from Vilnius. He initially issued documents under his Lithuanian seal; once a new one was ready it was attached to documents concerning Lithuania even though it only bore his Polish title. This practice and the symbolism of the seal have been presented as evidence of incorporation, although Kosman rightly warns against such a conclusion.19 It is neither surprising that Jagiełło approved a seal proclaiming his most prestigious title, nor that he—for eminently practical reasons—utilized the services of a properly institutionalized chancery that far surpassed anything he had known in Vilnius. In the conduct of foreign relations, his royal title raised him to a different level among the crowned heads of Europe, while the chancery was careful to list his Lithuanian and Ruthenian titles in all documents that it issued. The organization of a separate chancery for Jadwiga dealing solely with Poland indicates that the distinction between Poland and the rest of Jagiełło’s domains was maintained.

For all the practised routines of the Polish chancery, Jagiełło could not run Lithuania from Cracow. This was made clear by the first challenge to the new order from Jagiełło’s Orthodox half-brothers Andrei, who still held Polatsk after Skirgaila’s failure to recapture it in 1381, and Dmitry of Briansk. In close contact with Moscow, Andrei swore homage to the Livonian Order for his duchy and allied with Sviatoslav Ivanovich, duke of Smolensk. In February 1386 the Livonians declared war, raiding deep into Lithuania. Sviatoslav struck towards Vitsebsk and besieged Mstislau.

Jagiełło hurried back to Vilnius after his coronation but, aware he would have to return to Cracow, he appointed Skirgaila governor on 13 March 1386, explicitly granting him powers over Lithuania. These powers, it was stressed, derived not just from Jagiełło but, in the spirit of Krewo, also from Jadwiga and the Polish community of the realm, whose consent to the appointment was noted.20 Skirgaila dealt efficiently with the immediate problem, winning a battle at Mstislau on 29 April in which Sviatoslav was killed, then persuading Sviatoslav’s son Iurii to abandon Andrei and return Smolensk to Lithuanian control. He led two expeditions against Polatsk: unsuccessfully in October 1386 and successfully in March 1387, when he captured Andrei, whose son Semën was killed in the fighting. Andrei was brought in chains to Poland and imprisoned for seven years. In 1388 Dmitry returned from Moscow, ending the rebellion.

In April 1387 Skirgaila was formally invested with Polatsk; on 18 June he renewed his oath of loyalty to Jagiełło, Jadwiga, and the corona regni Poloniae, promising that should he die without issue, his lands would pass to them.21 As duke of Trakai and Polatsk and governor of Minsk and Krėva, he controlled substantial territories in the most densely populated part of the grand duchy and ran the duchy of Vilnius on his brother’s behalf. Whatever Jagiełło’s original intentions concerning Vytautas, Skirgaila’s deft handling of the crisis ensured it would be difficult to deprive him of Trakai. Vytautas’s exclusion was highlighted in Jagiełło’s privilege of 20 February 1387, which raised Skirgaila above the other Gediminid princes and stressed that his authority extended over the annexed Ruthenian territories.22

Much was being placed upon Skirgaila’s shoulders. Historians are divided as to his character. Some follow Długosz’s dismissive portrait of an audacious, defiant man with considerable manual dexterity and a ready tongue, prone to drunken bouts of temper in which he could wound friends and servants. He was feared for his cruelty, having executed or maimed many who fell foul of him.23 Despite this fearsome reputation, he is often dismissed as incompetent and unworthy of the role Jagiełło assigned him.24 Yet there was good reason for the trust Jagiełło placed in him. As Długosz acknowledged, Skirgaila was able. He probably led the Lithuanian delegation at Jadwiga’s 1384 coronation, and was responsible for the 1385 negotiations over Jagiełło’s marriage. It was not just Skirgaila’s loyalty that commended him to Jagiełło: Długosz was clearly not misinformed about the effectiveness of his tongue, and he observes that Vytautas was afraid of him, not least because of his popularity among Ruthenians after his conversion to Orthodoxy.25

Skirgaila’s Orthodoxy, however, limited his effectiveness as governor. According to Długosz, Jagiełło urged him to convert, but Skirgaila’s conscience was less flexible than Vytautas’s: he replied that he would only do so in Rome.26 Vytautas, fuming on the margins to which Jagiełło had consigned him, was therefore well placed to build up support among the new Catholic elite. By 1389 his relations with Skirgaila were poisonous, and Jagiełło was forced to intervene. At a joint Polish-Lithuanian council—the only one held in this period—in Lublin in May 1389, Vytautas had to swear not to believe malicious rumours concerning Skirgaila, to maintain loyalty and brotherly affection towards him, and to support him against everyone except Jagiełło.27

Jagiełło conceded nothing, however, and the ink was barely dry on the agreement before Vytautas was plotting to seize Vilnius while Skirgaila was in Polatsk preparing to support a siege of Pskov led by Lengvenis. His plans were betrayed to Kaributas, who had been left in charge by Skirgaila.28 Vytautas had no choice but to throw himself once more on the Order’s mercy. Rottenstein was suspicious of the man who had fled Prussia five years earlier, destroying three castles as he left; nevertheless, after insisting that Vytautas send his wife Anna, his sister Ryngailė, his brother Žygimantas, and his nephew Mykolas as hostages, he agreed to shelter him again. Vytautas might be unreliable, but Rottenstein could not spurn an opportunity to sow dissent between Poland and Lithuania. In a treaty dated 19 January 1390 Vytautas agreed to surrender Hrodna to the Order; in May, a treaty of mutual support was signed with the pagan Samogitians.29

Vytautas poured his bile into his Sache, a bitter justification of his actions, claiming that Jagiełło had destroyed the harmony that had existed between their fathers, who divided Lithuania between them and ruled together amicably. In contrast Jagiełło, on succeeding Algirdas, had conspired with the Order behind Kęstutis’s back. This provoked Kęstutis into mounting his coup, after which he treated Jagiełło with consideration. Jagiełło, however, had acted treacherously, first offering Kęstutis and Vytautas safe conduct, and then seizing them, before murdering Kęstutis and his wife. He had also reneged on his promise to restore Vytautas’s patrimony.30

Vytautas’s Sache is a powerful, if tendentious, indictment. Despite the support he attracted from Kęstutid supporters—one source claimed 2,000 followed him into exile—and despite the Order’s military backing, he was not powerful enough to overthrow his cousin.31 Jagiełło acted decisively. In May 1390 he travelled to Lithuania, where he replaced Andrius Goštautas as starosta of Vilnius with the Polish vice-chancellor, Klemens of Moskorzew in a move that has frequently been presented as evidence of Lithuania’s incorporation, since Klemens was accorded the title of starosta general, and the equivalent offices in Małopolska and Wielkopolska enjoyed considerable authority.

Too much should not be read into this title, or Klemens’s appointment, almost certainly made in May 1390, not late 1389, as was once believed. Skirgaila was neither dismissed, nor were his powers limited to Trakai, as Halecki argued.32 The appointment was occasioned by the political crisis, not by any desire on Jagiełło’s part to effect Lithuania’s incorporation. Klemens was to command the Vilnius garrison, and Jagiełło did not confer any wider powers upon him. Even in Vilnius control was divided, with Klemens controlling the lower, and Skirgaila the upper castle. It would have been uncharacteristically rash of Jagiełło to dismiss Skirgaila at the height of a major political crisis. With Vytautas commanding considerable support among the Lithuanian boyars, Jagiełło clearly felt he could not rely on Goštautas, while the Polish garrison brought important expertise in siege warfare.

It was a sensible precaution. In September the Order’s large international force—the earl of Derby, the future Henry IV of England, brought 300 archers—joined Vytautas and his followers to attack Vilnius. The besieging army took the crooked castle, the third fortress guarding the city, when its defenders betrayed its commandant, Jagiełło’s brother Karigaila, who was killed, as was Vytautas’s brother Tautvilas.33 The other two castles held out, however, and the siege was lifted on 7 October. Klemens promptly resigned following disputes with Skirgaila, neatly demonstrating where real power lay. Jagiełło struggled to find another Pole willing to replace him, before eventually persuading Jaśko of Oleśnica. The war was not over, however. Vytautas still had considerable support.34 It was marked by cruelty on both sides: according to Długosz, when the Gediminid prince Narimantas was captured at the siege of Vilnius he was strung up by the legs and used as target practice by the Prussian gunners; Długosz also mentions the impalement of children, while fifteen Poles were executed after Vytautas’s recapture of Hrodna in 1391.35

These may be tall stories: Długosz is the only source to mention Narimantas, by whom he probably meant Tautvilas: Gediminas’s brother Narimantas had died in 1348, and Długosz claims that he was married to Juliana, who was Tautvilas’s wife. There is no reason to doubt the cruelty of the conflict, however. It was a critical moment for the union. The vultures were circling: in early 1392 Sigismund of Luxembourg opened talks with the Order, his brother Wenzel, and Wladislaus of Oppeln—who attempted to seize Cracow in Jagiełło’s absence in 1389—over a partition of Jagiełło’s dominions.36 Sigismund encouraged the Order to accept Wladislaus’s offer to pawn the strategic territory of Dobrzyń, which he had been granted by Louis of Anjou in return for surrendering Podolia. In May Sigismund proposed selling the Neumark to the Order, which, if it had happened, would have greatly increased the threat to Poland’s western borders.37 Finally, the marriage in January 1391 of Vytautas’s only daughter, Sophia, to Vasilii I, who succeeded Dmitrii Donskoi on the Muscovite throne in 1389, showed the breadth of Vytautas’s vision and demonstrated that despite his freshly reminted Catholicism he was seeking allies and influence on another front. Drastic action was required. Jagiełło therefore took a momentous and ruthless decision. Once again he reached out to Vytautas.

This time he had to reach much further. Contact was established in late 1391 through Henryk, bishop-elect of Płock and son of Siemowit III of Mazovia, who on arrival in Prussia fell for Vytautas’s sister Ryngailė, for whom he was to renounce his religious career, marrying her in June 1392. He cannot have been entirely distracted, for the secret talks succeeded. At Astrava on 4–5 August 1392 Vytautas again swore loyalty to Jagiełło, Jadwiga, and the corona regni Poloniae in return for the restoration of his patrimony, including Trakai and Lutsk, which had remained loyal to Jagiełło. Skirgaila was to receive Kyiv in compensation, although it would first have to be taken away from Volodymyr, Jagiełło’s half-brother, who had held it since 1364. There was no apology from Vytautas for his actions: responsibility for the disputes between the two cousins was ascribed to the poisonous machinations of a conveniently abstract serpent.38

Astrava marked the end of Vytautas’s direct challenge to Jagiełło’s authority. Its significance is a matter of controversy. The chronicle account states that Vytautas was placed on the grand ducal throne to rule over all the Lithuanian and Ruthenian land, as does Długosz, who gives a touching account of a tearful Vytautas begging Jagiełło’s forgiveness, stating that not only was Vytautas’s patrimony restored, but that he was given authority over all the land.39 These accounts have led historians to make some grand claims, suggesting that Astrava marked the end of incorporation, that it demonstrated conclusively that Lithuania had preserved its character as an independent, sovereign state, and even that it suspended the union for Vytautas’s lifetime, marking ‘the end of Jagiełło’s rule’ in Lithuania.40 Łowmiański, while arguing that Astrava changed nothing in the legal relations between Poland and Lithuania, accepts that Vytautas was granted power over the whole grand duchy as governor, a view shared by Nikodem.41

Yet the chronicle account—which Długosz knew—was influenced by Vytautas, and none of this emerges from the Astrava documents. They were neither acts of union, as Koneczny and Ivinskis maintained, nor were they, as Błaszczyk asserts, ‘the first revision of Krewo’. They neither appointed Vytautas governor, nor conferred upon him ‘partial sovereignty’, as Gudavičius avers. Nikodem, who regularly attacks other historians for exercising historical intuition beyond the documents, asserts that Jagiełło granted Vytautas the governorship orally, although the evidence he cites is circumstantial at best, and his conclusion owes much to his intuition concerning the relationship between Jagiełło and Vytautas.42 Halecki considers that Posilge’s chronicle confirms Długosz’s assertion, but it does no such thing, accurately stating that Vytautas was granted his patrimony, with no mention of wider powers.43 The documents deal only with the conferment upon Vytautas of the duchies of Trakai and Lutsk. Vytautas swore loyalty on behalf of himself and his supporters not just to Jagiełło, but also to Jadwiga and the corona regni Poloniae, which suggests that the Krewo framework remained intact. Significantly, it was stated that he received his authority from Jagiełło alone.44

How extensive was that authority? The Astrava documents do not specify: they were the equivalent of the acts of homage sworn by the Gediminids in 1387, whose form and wording they echo. Astrava was not concerned with the union, but with the complex dynastic dispute over the legacy of Algirdas and Kęstutis. Vytautas’s outrage, expressed in his Sache, concerned the duchy of Trakai, his patrimony, which had been stripped from him. Jagiełło was taking a substantial risk in restoring it to him, not least because he had to take it from Skirgaila, who was to be compensated with Kyiv, a city whose name and glorious past did not match its current importance, and which would have to be prised from Volodymyr’s grasp. It is implausible that Jagiełło, given Vytautas’s record, would grant him control not only of his own patrimony of Vilnius, but of the whole grand duchy while reducing Skirgaila, to whom he owed much, to a subordinate position. There is no document similar to that which had raised Skirgaila above all the other Gediminid dukes in 1387 to suggest that Vytautas was granted this role. The grand master’s chronicle, a well-informed source, suggests that Jagiełło floated the idea of granting Vilnius to Vytautas, but that Skirgaila vigorously and successfully opposed the idea, as Jagiełło must have known he would.45 It seems that—as Posilge suggests—Jagiełło secured Skirgaila’s agreement to the restoration of Trakai, but left him in control of Vilnius, to act, with Kaributas, as a counterweight to Vytautas. As for Vytautas, while Nikodem is right to reject Halecki’s optimistic view that Astrava marked the start of close cooperation between the cousins, during his second exile Vytautas was—as Nikodem recognizes—in a weak position.46 Jagiełło, recognizing his earlier misjudgement, was happy to restore Trakai, but there was no need for him to concede more, which would risk alienating Skirgaila. Astrava sought to establish dynastic peace, not Lithuanian statehood.

Dynastic peace proved elusive. Vytautas accepted the deal, but he had no intention of accepting subordination to Skirgaila. Relations broke down immediately, and meetings with Jagiełło in December 1392 in Bełz, in October 1393 in Lwów, and in February 1394 in Dolatycze brought no relief from the endless quarrels.47 Skirgaila proved an ineffective counterweight. He was in Poland from 1393 to the autumn of 1394 urging Jagiełło to order Vytautas to assist him in seizing Kyiv from Volodymyr to secure his compensation for surrendering Trakai. Vytautas was in no hurry, while Jagiełło could offer little more than sympathy: the Poles were uninterested in internal Lithuanian politics, while to ask them to help would raise questions about the grand duchy’s position. Although the siege of Kyiv began in late 1394, Skirgaila did not live to see its fall, dying, reputedly poisoned, on 23 December.48 The sources merely note this, without attributing blame; whether or not anyone wielded the bottle, the death of his only real rival was highly convenient for Vytautas.

Skirgaila was the most competent of Jagiełło’s brothers: the others, according to Długosz, were too fond of hunting and drinking, and were incapable of ruling.49 Of his younger brothers only Lengvenis, Kaributas, and Švitrigaila were still alive, and only Švitrigaila was Catholic. In 1392 Jagiełło committed himself to bringing Vytautas back into the fold. Even if he was initially cautious, Skirgaila’s Orthodoxy made it difficult for him to establish himself at the head of the new, Catholic system to which Jagiełło had committed himself. Vytautas, after his return to Catholicism, was far better placed to build up support among the newly Catholic boyar elite, not least because he already had a considerable political following, which Skirgaila lacked. Jagiełło had committed himself to Catholicism. If it were to survive and flourish in a polity in which most nobles and the overwhelming majority of the population was Orthodox, it would require strong Catholic leadership which Jagiełło, in distant Cracow, could not directly provide. Like it or not, with Skirgaila dead, he had little option but to entrust Vilnius and the effective governorship of the grand duchy to Vytautas, who had the drive, energy, and political skills to establish the new system.

It was a considerable risk, and Vytautas’s actions over the next seven years seem to provide much evidence for those historians who see him as the champion of Lithuanian independence and sovereignty, and for Nikodem who, while careful to stress that Vytautas did not directly challenge the union, argues that throughout his career he pursued a dynastic policy in favour of the Kęstutids, consistently seeking to undermine the Algirdaičiai—the descendants of Algirdas—in general, and Jagiełło in particular. Such views challenge the idea, most fully developed by Halecki, and endorsed by many Polish historians, that in the 1390s Jagiełło and Vytautas established the close cooperation that henceforth supposedly characterized their relationship: as Błaszczyk put it, their collaboration in the 1390s ‘is, perhaps, an obvious fact’.50

It is not, perhaps, quite that obvious. Vytautas first turned his attention to the dynasty. The harrying of Skirgaila launched a campaign against the appanage duchies that sapped the crumbling foundations of the Gediminid condominium. The appanage princes were not consulted over Astrava, and several refused to pay Vytautas dues they had previously rendered to Jagiełło.51 In 1393, Fëdor Lubartovych, removed from Lutsk a year earlier to make room for Vytautas, was deprived of Volodymyr; as compensation he was granted the sparsely populated marchland duchy of Siversk, later receiving the small territory of Zhydachiv in Red Ruthenia. Fëdor, son of Algirdas’s younger brother Liubartas, was a relatively easy target, and Volhynia had been promised to Vytautas at Astrava. Fëdor was not granted all of Siversk, and did not long retain control of what he received: by 1398 he was in exile in Hungary. Other victims were more prominent. In 1392 Siversk was held by Kaributas. Long loyal to Jagiełło, he rebelled after Astrava. He was defeated at Dokudov, captured and stripped of his duchy. Later released, he was granted Bratslav and Vinnitsa and ceased to play a significant role.52

Next in line was Jagiełło’s youngest brother Švitrigaila. After their mother’s death in 1392 Švitrigaila, displaying the brutal impetuosity that marked his whole career, seized Vitsebsk from its governor, Fëdor Vesna, whom he executed. Švitrigaila was captured by Vytautas and Skirgaila in a rare cooperative moment, and despatched to Cracow, where he kicked his heels for several years, before heading to Silesia and then Hungary. In 1393 Fëdor Koriatovych, duke of Podolia, was forcibly deprived of his duchy; uncompensated, he fled to Hungary.53 The removal of Volodymyr from Kyiv, which he had ruled for thirty years, highlighted the inability of the appanage dukes to defend themselves: Volodymyr’s appeal for help to Vasilii I fell on deaf ears, and he was shunted off to the tiny duchy of Kopyl, where he died four years later.54 Of the substantial appanages, Polatsk, Vitsebsk, Novhorod-Siversky, and Kyiv were now in Vytautas’s hands; only Dmitry of Briansk was left alone. The leading Gediminid princes now held insignificant duchies: Volodymyr (Kopyl), Fëdor (Ratno), and Mikhail Javnutovich (Zaslav).55

The age of the princes was drawing to a close; the age of the boyars was dawning. Vytautas turned his back on the dynasty, appointing Lithuanians to act as governors of the vacant duchies, rewarding those who had supported him during the civil wars. Most were Catholics, but Vytautas assigned the greatest prize of Kyiv to his Orthodox brother-in-law Ivan Holshansky, son of one of Algirdas’s followers from the Ruthenianized Alšėniškai family of Lithuanian kunigaikščiai.56 The appointment of Catholic governors significantly increased Vytautas’s personal authority.

Since the appanage duchies were subsumed into the grand ducal estate, his revenues and his ability to provide patronage increased significantly. He now had the means to institute a new system, controlled through a small group of largely Catholic Lithuanian boyars, who came to be known as lords: the term, pany, was borrowed from Polish. They formed Vytautas’s growing clientele, but there was a price to be paid. In order to secure their support, Vytautas had to reward his protégés with generous grants of land and office.57

It was now that the significance of the 1387 privilege became apparent, as Vytautas’s associates began to establish the great complexes of estates that were to become such a prominent feature of the Lithuanian social structure. The eclipse of the Algirdaičiai worked to their benefit. Where previously the dynasty had played the central role in the administration of grand ducal lands, leading boyars were now granted substantial service holdings, in various forms. What had been largely, if not entirely, a military-service class, bound tightly to the prince, began to evolve into a primarily landed class.58

The consolidation of Vytautas’s authority was accompanied by an ambitious foreign policy. Initially he had to deal with the backlash to his second defection from the Order, which mounted six raids on Lithuania between 1392 and 1394, penetrating as far as Navahrudak and Lida, and laying siege to Vilnius.59 Vytautas was looking in another direction, however. Sensing Muscovy’s weakness under Vasilii I, his inexperienced son-in-law, he sought to establish himself as the most powerful prince in the eastern Slavic lands. In 1395 he secured Smolensk, which won him recognition from the petty Ruthenian princes along the upper Oka river, and cast his eye towards the wealthy cities of Novgorod and Tver.

It was a good moment, thanks to internecine squabbles among the Tatars. In 1381 Tokhtamysh defeated Mamai to unite both halves of the Golden Horde; in 1391 he lost control of the eastern half to his former patron Timur (Tamurlane); in April 1395 Timur defeated him on the Terek river, deposed him and installed Temür Kutlugh as khan of the Golden Horde. Tokhtamysh threw himself on Vytautas’s mercy. In 1397 Vytautas led a joint force to secure the Black Sea coast to the south of the Ukrainian steppe, building forts at Chorny Horod on the Dniester estuary, and on the site of what later became Odessa, returning with large numbers of captives. In 1398 an expedition reached the Don. In 1399 Vytautas and Tokhtamysh ventured south in a grand campaign in which Vytautas sought to break the Horde’s grip once and for all.

As Vytautas turned east he needed to secure his rear. Peace with the Order did not come cheap, however. In terms agreed at Hrodna in April and confirmed on Salin island in the river Niemen on 12 October 1398, Vytautas ceded Samogitia to the Order. The sacrifice was in vain. His eastern ambitions were rudely halted by a shattering defeat on the Vorskla river on 12 August 1399. Temür Kutlugh lured Vytautas out of his fortified camp, and the Lithuanian army was surrounded and massacred by another force led by Emir Edigü that had lurked unseen. Vytautas escaped; seventy-four princes, including Andrei of Polatsk and Dmitry of Briansk, and several prominent Poles, including Spytek of Melsztyn, were not so lucky.60

The Vorskla debacle ended Vytautas’s expansive ambitions for the moment. The effects of the humiliating defeat are a matter for controversy. For those who see Vytautas as the great defender of Lithuanian independence and sovereignty, the Salin treaty was the keystone of an independent foreign policy designed to destroy the union: the cession of Samogitia to the Order was the act of a ‘sovereign, not a governor’.61 It was only the Vorskla catastrophe that forced him to draw back and restore relations with Jagiełło.62 Much of the evidence can certainly be read in this way. Vytautas gradually inflated the titles he accorded himself. At Astrava he was referred to simply as dux Lituaniae; he soon began using the title magnus dux, however, which is how he appeared in the Hrodna agreement in April 1398; by the time of its ratification at Salin he was styling himself supremus dux Lithuaniae. This was the prelude to an incident reported by Posilge at the banquet celebrating the Salin treaty, in which Vytautas was hailed as king of Lithuania by the Lithuanian and Ruthenian boyars present.63

The suggestion that in 1392 Jagiełło and Vytautas slipped easily from the hostility that characterized their relations since 1381, so viscerally exposed in Vytautas’s Sache, into a harmonious collaboration based on trust and the pursuit of common goals is inherently implausible. Nevertheless, despite plenty of evidence from the 1390s of Vytautas’s headstrong independence, there is still much to suggest that the political interests of the cousins were not as divergent as might be assumed, and that it was the Polish council, rather than Jagiełło himself, that was most strongly opposed to Vytautas’s assertive foreign policy, although it cared little about internal Lithuanian politics. While Jagiełło was undoubtedly perturbed at some of his cousin’s actions, it seems that he and Vytautas recognized the usefulness of cooperation; and that they gradually established a modus vivendi which characterized their whole relationship thereafter, finding considerable common ground with regard to the grand duchy’s government and its relationship to Poland. To understand why, it is necessary to abandon anachronistic ideas of national sovereignty and independence in favour of a perspective rooted firmly in contemporary ideas of lordship and composite monarchy. For although both men challenged the traditional Gediminid dynastic system, they had grown up within it, and still thought broadly in terms not of unitary state-building, but of personal government, of lordship, of the tradition of dynastic consultation that had marked the joint rule of their fathers, and of the flexible arrangements possible within the composite polities of late medieval east central Europe.

Jagiełło was perfectly willing to challenge the Gediminid system. While the sacrifice of Skirgaila was personally difficult, there is no reason to suppose that brotherly love had much influence over Jagiełło’s relationship with his male siblings, several of whom had rebelled against him, some more than once. There is nothing to indicate that he opposed the destruction of the appanages; indeed, Jagiełło himself began the process by ruthlessly stripping Skirgaila of Trakai and Fëdor Lubartovich of Lutsk, while Volodymyr’s loyalty did not prevent Jagiełło approving his ousting from Kyiv at Astrava. Skirgaila himself was involved in defeating and capturing Švitrigaila after his seizure of Vitsebsk, while the fact that Vytautas sent Kaributas in chains to Jagiełło after his capture suggests that Jagiełło approved.64 The dispossession of the Gediminids was the inevitable and accepted consequence of Astrava, and Jagiełło was closely involved in it, although he did not always indulge Vytautas, as his 1395 grant of Podolia to his Polish favourite, Spytek of Melsztyn, ‘cum pleno iure ducale’, demonstrated.65

Such actions were a subtle demonstration that whatever titles Vytautas claimed, Jagiełło remained ultimately in control as he condoned actions that transformed the grand duchy’s politics and destroyed a system that had served the Gediminids well, but whose deficiencies had long been apparent. By 1400 all of Jagiełło’s older brothers from his father’s first marriage were dead: Volodymyr (1398), Andrei and Dmitry (1399), and Fëdor of Ratno (1400). The Gediminids had largely been broken. There were no significant rivals to Vytautas from within the dynasty, owing to the principles of cognatic, collateral succession, in which sons could not succeed to an office their father had not held.66 Both Vytautas and Jagiełło had invested considerable political capital in the transformation of Lithuania into a Catholic polity; the breaking of the Orthodox Gediminids removed one of the most significant obstacles to the realization of the Krewo plan.

For all his political acumen, Vytautas was by no means unassailable. His power rested firmly on the newly Catholic Lithuanian boyars who had benefited from the 1387 privileges: the Ruthenian boyars had largely supported Jagiełło in 1390–1391.67 Removing or neutralizing the influence of the Orthodox Gediminids, who had provided leadership to the Ruthenian boyars, and centralizing authority in his own hands was a risk, however. It remained to be seen how the annexed Ruthenian territories would react to their new governors. Vytautas was aware of the problem, and the extent to which the old order was disrupted should not be exaggerated: the grand duchy was neither turned into a single political unit as Dėdinas claims, nor did Vytautas’s policy see ‘a rapid acceleration of the development of a centralized unitary state’ as Rhode asserts.68 Lithuania was still very much a composite polity, and Vytautas was careful not to alienate the Ruthenian boyars by challenging their laws, privileges, and customs. He stressed his respect for the old ways, the starina, and did not challenge the large number of more minor princely clans in the annexed territories, especially in the princely heartland of Volhynia. Brothers were dangerous; distant cousins were not.

There was another consideration. Jagiełło faced a complex and increasingly difficult political situation in Poland after 1392. Jadwiga was now eighteen. Without an heir to seal the Krewo deal, Jagiełło’s position with regard to the Polish throne was unclear. His right to it depended on election and the fulfilment of the promises he had made at Krewo. If Jadwiga should predecease him without producing an heir, his very possession of the throne might come into question, as was made clear in 1395 when, as Długosz noted with some relish, on her sister Mary’s death the Hungarian lords assembled to consider the possibility of electing a new monarch ‘as if Sigismund had ceased to be king’.69 Although Sigismund retained his throne he by no means sat securely upon it; the lesson was not lost on Jagiełło. The group of ‘Cracow lords’, as they are usually called, who had masterminded the union in 1385–6, and who still dominated politics, made it clear that they did not consider that he had fulfilled his promise to join Lithuania to Poland in their incorporationist understanding of Krewo. Jagiełło was forming his own clientele in an attempt to free himself from the shackles imposed by this narrow group, but this took time, and provoked opposition: if his 1395 donation of Podolia to Spytek turned one of the Cracow lords into a mainstay of the embryonic royal party, the grant provoked outrage, not least from Jadwiga, because Jagiełło made it as grand duke of Lithuania, and Podolia was claimed by Poland.70

Jadwiga was emerging as a powerful figure in her own right. Her court, which was Polish-speaking, in contrast to Jagiełło’s whose core was formed by Lithuanians and Ruthenians, became a magnet for those who wished to execute and institutionalize the incorporationist interpretation of Krewo.71 Thus it was very much in Jagiełło’s interests to support Vytautas’s consolidation of power in Vilnius and to form a common front with him in defence of his patrimony and of the grand duchy’s separate status within what Jagiełło refused to regard as an accessory union. Vytautas had no desire to see Jagiełło forced off the Polish throne, since this would bring his return to Vilnius. He had every reason to cooperate.

Matters came to a head in February 1398, when a breakdown in relations between Jagiełło and Jadwiga was reported by the Order.72 The cause was a letter from Jadwiga to Vytautas demanding that he pay an annual rent in respect of the dower granted to her by Jagiełło which, according to Posilge—the only source—comprised ‘the land of Rus' and Lithuania’.73 There has been much debate about what this meant. Łowmiański and Bardach conclude that it simply referred to estates that formed part of Jadwiga’s dower settlement, whose terms are unknown.74 Vytautas’s reaction, however, suggests that the letter was far more provocative, suggesting that Jadwiga’s dower consisted of the whole grand duchy, which was one possible interpretation of Krewo.75 He assembled leading Lithuanian and Ruthenian boyars and asked them if they felt themselves to be Polish subjects, required to pay a yearly tribute. They replied that they were free, as their ancestors had been free; that they had never paid rent to the Poles; and that they wished to remain in their original state of liberty.76 While there is no corroboration of Posilge’s account, it would explain the independently reported breakdown of relations between Jagiełło and Jadwiga. Vytautas, of course, may have deliberately misrepresented the terms of the letter to the boyars, but the episode as related by Posilge fits with other indications that the Cracow lords, concerned at Jagiełło’s failure to take any steps to incorporate Lithuania, were pushing Jadwiga to resolve the dispute in Poland’s favour.

The quarrel provides a plausible explanation for Jagiełło’s apparent support for Vytautas’s policy towards the Order. For the proclamation of Vytautas as king at the Salin banquet did not fall suddenly out of a clear blue sky. It was neither a misunderstanding in which the term ‘king’ did not mean an anointed monarch in the general European sense, nor a simple case of drunken revelry. Raising Vytautas to royal status was not the Order’s idea: the previous February it reported that Jagiełło and Vytautas had written to Boniface IX requesting that he authorize Vytautas’s coronation as king of Lithuania and the Ruthenian lands.77

The approach was a reaction to the refusal of Jadwiga and the Cracow lords to sanction Polish support for Lithuania’s war against the Order. Jadwiga and her supporters stood by the 1343 Kalisz peace, demonstrating that they only supported an incorporationist vision of the union when it suited them. Jagiełło responded by dismissing several opponents of the war from their positions as starostas in the Ruthenian lands in dispute between Poland and Lithuania, replacing them with Orthodox Ruthenians.78 Błaszczyk sees this as the reason for Jadwiga’s letter to Vytautas, suggesting that the approach to Boniface was a response to it. This is plausible, but although Błaszczyk accepts Jagiełło’s support for the conferment of a crown on Vytautas, he finds it puzzling, arguing that the plan’s success would affect Jagiełło’s own rights to Lithuania, and undermine the union. He suggests that Jagiełło, despite the evidence of his involvement in the plan, opposed his cousin’s rapprochement with the Order, and the Hrodna and Salin treaties.79

Yet Jagiełło undoubtedly understood the implications of the coronation scheme when the letter to Boniface was written, and Błaszczyk does not explain why he should abandon his support for Vytautas beyond suggesting he had little room for manoeuvre, since opposition to war in Cracow was so strong. The Hrodna treaty, however, contained a clause allowing for its confirmation by Jagiełło if Vytautas felt it necessary.80 This was omitted from the Salin text, but if this may have been because Vytautas did not feel it necessary, or had broken with Jagiełło, the omission probably had more to do with Vytautas’s cession of Samogitia: as Vytautas well knew he did not have the authority to cede part of Jagiełło’s patrimony. It left the way open for Jagiełło to challenge the treaty’s legality.

If Jagiełło and Vytautas really did fall out, and Vytautas was pursuing Lithuania’s independence with the Order’s backing, it is hard to explain subsequent events. For the remarkable thing about the Salin incident is that it was not followed up. Posilge testifies that there were Poles present; the lack of any Polish protest suggests either that they did not regard it as important—an unlikely scenario—or that they were Jagiełło’s agents.81 Far from proclaiming Lithuania independent or lobbying the pope for confirmation of his royal status, Vytautas visited Cracow in early 1399 to discuss his eastern campaign with Jagiełło and Jadwiga. According to Długosz, both advised him against undertaking it, despite Boniface’s declaring the war to be a crusade.82 Yet the claim that Jagiełło opposed the expedition on the grounds that, had Vytautas succeeded, it would have rendered him unassailable is dubious.83 In August, grand master Konrad von Jungingen expressed his pleasure at the friendly relations between Jagiełło and Vytautas, which suggests there was no disagreement between the cousins over relations with the Order.84 Since the Order supported the campaign, and a contingent of 100 knights fought in Vytautas’s army, it is likely that Jungingen would have mentioned any opposition to the expedition on Jagiełło’s part. Finally, if there was no official Polish support for the campaign, the fact that the 400 Polish volunteers who did fight on the Vorskla—many of whom lost their lives—were led by Jagiełło’s favourite Spytek of Melsztyn, suggests that even if he felt the campaign was unwise, he privately backed Vytautas.


1 PSRL, xxxv, col. 62.

2 Sužiedėlis, ‘Lietuva’, 28–31; Ivinskis, ‘Vytauto’, 3–6.

3 Wasilewski, ‘Daty’, 15–34.

4 Tęgowski endorses many of Wasilewski’s findings in Pierwsze pokolonia, although he moves Jagiełło’s birth slightly earlier, to 1361 or 1362. They have also been influential in Lithuania: see Baronas, Dubonis, and Petrauskas (eds), Lietuvos Istorija, iii, table 95, 356–7.

5 Wasilewski, ‘Daty’, 20–1.

6 SRPr., iii, 479–80; Annales, xi, 245.

7 SRPr., iii, 432.

8 Tęgowski, Pierwsze pokolenia, table iii, 308–11; Jan Tęgowski, ‘Kilka uwag do genealogii Gediminowiczów’, , 36 (1997), 113–16; Nikodem, ‘Data urodzenia Jagiełły: Uwagi o starszeństwie synów Olgierda i Julianny’, Genealogia, 12 (2000), 23–49; and Nikodem, Witold, 33–41. Tęgowski supports Wasilewski against Nikodem: ‘Data urodzenia Jagiełły oraz data chrztu prawosławnego jego starszych braci’, Genealogia, 15 (2003), 137–44; as Nikodem observes, however, he concedes the unreliability of the chronicle evidence, without which Wasilewski has no case: Nikodem, ‘Ponownie o dacie urodzenia Jagiełły’, Genealogia, 16 (2004), 143–58. Cf. Леонтій Войтович, Княжа доба на Русі: Портрети еліти (Била Церква, 2006), 630–42; Rowell, Lithuania, 87–8; Krzyżaniakowa and Ochmański, Jagiełło, 54–5, 310.

9 Annales, x, 144.

10 Annales, x, 197.

11 Annales, xi, 228, 245–6; 303.

12 Krzyżaniakowa and Ochmański, Jagiełło, 82.

13 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 106–7. Cf. Ivinskis, ‘Vytauto’, 26.

14 Paszkiewicz, O genezie, 178; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 128.

15 Nikodem, Witold, 94–6.

16 Krzyżaniakowa and Ochmański, Jagiełło, 81–4, 96–7; Nikodem, Witold, 102–3.

17 Gąsiorowski, Itinerarium, 30–41.

18 Marceli Kosman, ‘Kancelaria Wielkiego Księcia Witolda’, in Kosman, Orzeł i pogoń: Z dziejów polsko-litewskich XIV–XV w. (Warsaw, 1992), 109–10.

19 Krzyżaniakowa and Ochmański, Jagiełło, 112; Łowmiański, ‘Wcielenie’, 118; Kosman, ‘Kancelaria’, 111.

20 CESXV, i/i, no. 4, 5–6.

21 CESXV, i/i, no. 9, 9–11; AU, no. 18, 15; Wanda Maciejewska, ‘Dzieje ziemi połockiej (1385–1430)’, AW, 8 (1931–1932), 3–13; Rhode, Ostgrenze (Cologne, 1955), 342–3.

22 ZPL, 1; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 42; Šapoka, ‘Valstybiniai’, 197.

23 Annales, x, 174, 206.

24 For example Paszkiewicz, O genezę, 183; Šapoka, ‘Valstybiniai’, 199.

25 Annales, x, 174. For a generally persuasive reassessment of Skirgaila see Nikodem, ‘Rola’, 83–129; Jarosław Nikodem, ‘Charakter rządów Skiergiełły i Witolda na Litwie w latach 1392–1394’, LSP, 11 (2005), 153–63. Błaszczyk tends towards the older view: Dzieje, ii/i, 83, 155.

26 Annales, x, 206.

27 CEV, no. 53, 18.

28 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 136, 141.

29 CEV, nos 63–4, 20–1; Nikodem, Witold, 127–33.

30 ‘Dis ist Witold’s sache wedir Jagalu und Skargalu’, SRPr, ii, 711–14.

31 Skarbiec, i, no. 607, 289.

32 Halecki, Dzieje, i, 133; Šapoka, ‘Valstybiniai’, 199; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 140.

33 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 148–9.

34 PSRL, xvii, cols 200–1; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 136–42; Nikodem, ‘Rola’, 113, 118; Halecki, Dzieje, i, 134; Łowmiański, Polityka, 65.

35 Annales, x, 187; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 153.

36 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 136.

37 Marian Biskup and Gerard Labuda, Dzieje Zakonu Krzyżackiego w Prusach (Gdańsk, 1986), 360; Krzyżaniakowa and Ochmański, Jagiełło, 137, 168–9.

38 AU, nos 29–31, 26–9.

39 ‘поидет оу Литву, и сядет на великом кнжени Литовском на Вилни, і были ради оуся земля Литовская і Руская’: PSRL, xvii, col. 275; Annales, x, 197.

40 Zigimantas Kiaupa, Lietuvos valstybės istorija (Vilnius, 2006), 56; Krzyżaniakowa and Ochmański, Jagiełło, 139; Dėdinas cites Liubavskii in support of his contention that Astrava restored Lithuanian independence and sovereignty, although Liubavskii is more cautious, talking of ‘a certain autonomy’: V. Dėdinas, ‘Vytauto vidaus ir užsienio politika ligi Žalgirio mūsio’, in Šležas (ed.), Vytautas, 45–68; Матвей Любавский, Литовско-Русскій Сеймъ: Опытъ по исторій учрежденія въ связи съ внутреннимъ строемъ и внешнею государства (Moscow, 1900), 19.

41 Łowmiański, Polityka, 65; Nikodem, ‘Rola’, 119; Nikodem, Witold, 147–57.

42 Koneczny, Jagiełło i Witold, 212; Ivinskis, ‘Vytauto’, 44; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 49; Gudavičius (ed.), Istorija, i, 178; Nikodem, Witold, 149–51.

43 ‘sy welden im alle dy lant yngebin, dy sinem vatir Kinstottin vor hettin gehort’: Johann von Posilge, Chronik des Landes Preussen, in SRPr, iii, 179; Halecki, Dzieje, i, 138.

44 AU, no. 29, 27.

45 ‘Umb disze vorrethnisses willen hatte Jagel Wytolde globet dy Wille mit allem zcugehore. Das wolde Schirgal nicht gestaten, szunder her besasz sy selber’: SRPr, iii, 622; Halecki nevertheless concluded that Skirgaila accepted Vytautas’s supremacy: Dzieje, i, 138, n.2. Nikodem initially dismissed Posilge’s evidence; he later modified his views, finding the suggestion that Skirgaila was left in charge of Vilnius ‘tremendously suggestive’: ‘Rola’, 119–20; ‘Jednowładztwo’, 11, n. 19. His latest account, however, maintains that Jagiełło did make Vytautas governor: Witold, 151.

46 Nikodem, Witold, 133, 149.

47 CESXV, i/i, no. 20, 17.

48 Tęgowski, ‘Zagadnienie’, 7–18; Nikodem, ‘Charakter’, 153–63; Nikodem, Jadwiga, 306–7, 312, 314, 317.

49 Annales, x, 196.

50 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i. 63; cf. Halecki: Dzieje, i, 146, 154; Nikodem, Witold, 156–7.

51 Любавский, Сеймъ, 19–20.

52 Любавский, Областное, 45; Олена Русина, Україна під Татарами і Литвою (Kyiv, 1998), 79; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 61.

53 Любавский, Областное, 57; Русина, Україна, 79.

54 PSRL, xxxv, col. 66; Михайло Грушевський, Історія України-Руси, XIV–XVI віки—відносини політичні (repr. Kyiv, 1993), 166–7; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 61–2; Русина, Україна, 80–1. According to Liubavskii, the expulsion took place in 1395: Любавский, Областное, 37.

55 Rhode, Ostgrenze, i, 350–1; Błaszczyk, Dzieje ii/i, 61–2.

56 Avižonis, Entstehung, 113–14; Józef Wolff, Kniaziowie litewsko-ruscy (Warsaw, 1895), 94–5; PSB, ix, 587–8.

57 Jerzy Suchocki, ‘Formowanie się i skład narodu politycznego w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim późnego średniowiecza’, ZH, 48/1–2 (1983), 48–9; Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 62.

58 Avižonis, Entstehung, 13–15, 116–17.

59 Jerzy Ochmański, Historia Litwy, 3rd edn (Wrocław, 1990), 77.

60 PSRL, xxxv, col. 53; Rusyna questions the figure, but the toll was undoubtedly high: Русина, Україна, 84–94.

61 Kiaupa, Lietuvos valstybės, 57; cf. Грушевський, Ітсорія, iv, 143, n. 1; Łowmiański, Polityka, 66, 68. For Lithuanian, Polish, and Ukrainian scholars sharing this view, see Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 84.

62 Šležas, ‘Vytauto’, 153; Dėdinas, ‘Vytauto’, 45–68; Nikodem, Witold, 192–4.

63 ‘Und uf die cziit worfin die Littowin und Russin Wytowten eynen koning uf czu Littowen und czu Russin, da vor ny gehort was’: Posilge, Chronik, 224.

64 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 60–1; Rhode, Ostgrenze, i, 347–8; Dėdinas, ‘Vytauto’, 46. Nikodem’s account of Kaributas’s rebellion is marred by his desire to fit the evidence—or ignore it if inconvenient—to his assumptions concerning the relationship between Jagiełło and Vytautas: ‘Kaributo maištas’, LIM (2007/1), 5–20.

65 Русина, Україна, 79.

66 Nancy Shields Kollmann, Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345–1547 (Stanford, CA, 1987), 59–70; Jan Tęgowski, ‘O następstwie tronu na Litwie po śmierci Olgierda’, PH, 84 (1993), 127–34.

67 Łowmiański, ‘Wcielenie’, 114.

68 Dėdinas, ‘Vytauto’, 49; Rhode, Ostgrenze, i, 350–1.

69 Annales, x, 212.

70 Jerzy Sperka, ‘Faworyci Władysława Jagiełły’, in Mariusz Markiewicz and Ryszard Skowron (eds), Faworyci a opozycjoniści: Król a elity polityczne w Rzeczypospolitej XV–XVIII wieku (Cracow, 2006), 41–2; Sperka, ‘Biskup krakowski Zbigniew Oleśnicki a ugrupowanie dworskie w okresie panowania Władysława Jagiełły i w pierwszych latach Władysława III’, in Feliks Kiryk and Zdzisław Noga (eds), Zbigniew Oleśnicki książę kościoła i mąż stanu (Cracow, 2006), 107–8.

71 Janusz Kurtyka, Tęczyńscy: Studium z dziejów polskiej elity możnowładczej w średniowieczu (Cracow, 1997), 212–13.

72 ‘die konigynne in grosen ungnaden ist des koniges un ouch etliche dy besten syner houbtluten’: CDPr, vi, no. 50, 64.

73 SRP, iii, 219.

74 Łowmiański, ‘Wcielenie’, 71–2; Juliusz Bardach, ‘Krewo i Lublin: Zproblemówunii polsko-litewskiej’, in Bardach, Studia z ustroju i prawa Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego XIV–XVII w. (Warsaw, 1970), 29.

75 Halecki, ‘Wcielenie’, 48–9.

76 SRP, iii, 219.

77 ‘das der konig von Polan dornach stee und Wytawte, das sie die crone obir Littowerland und Ruscheland von unserm heyligen vater dem Pabiste dirwerben wellen, daz her die geruche czu lehenen und czu eym konige bestetigen Wytawten obir die egeschreben lande’ CDPr, vi, no. 61, 66.

78 CDPr, vi, no. 65–6.

79 Błaszczyk, Dzieje, ii/i, 75–6, 85. Nikodem dismisses the approach as ‘rumour’ since it does not fit his understanding of the relationship between Vytautas and Jagiełło: Witold, 185–6.

80 CEV, no. 179, 51–4.

81 Nikodem dismisses them as ‘private individuals’, though he provides no evidence for his supposition: Witold, 186.

82 Annales, x, 226.

83 Nikodem, Jadwiga, 344–5.

84 CEV, no. 201, 59; Rhode, Ostgrenze, i, 357.

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