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LITHUANIA AND THE UNION WITH POLAND (1362 - 1569) Paul Robert Magocsi Excerpts from the book ”History of Ukraine”, Toronto / 1996 |
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The
disappearance of the Galician-Volhynian Kingdom in
the mid-fourteenth century heralded the beginning of a new era in eastern
European history and in Ukrainian lands in particular. The Pax Mongolica, which had
allowed for a high degree of independence in the old lands of Kievan Rus' under the nominal
hegemony of the Golden Horde, was to be successfully challenged for the first
time by a new power, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Before the end of the
fourteenth century, all the Ukrainian lands that had been part of Kievan Rus' had been
incorporated into Lithuania. Unlike the Golden Horde, Lithuania was to
undergo a gradual process of internal change that eventually would alter the Rus' lands under its control. Therefore, Kievan Rus' and the Kievan period in Ukrainian history ended not with the
invasions of the Mongols in 1237-1241, but with the arrival of the
Lithuanians a century later. The consolidation
of the Lithuanian state The
Grand Duchy of Lithuania began its rise to power in the 1230s, at which time
a prince named Mindaugas (reigned 1219-1263)
succeeded in uniting several Lithuanian tribes and the land called Samogitia into a feudal state. Closely related to though
distinct from the Slavs, the Lithuanians had lived since prehistoric times
along the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea and in the inaccessible swamps and
forests along the valleys of the Western Dvina and Neman Rivers. Although the
Lithuanians were in close contact with the neighboring East Slavic tribes,
they were outside the orbit of Rus' culture and
remained pagans. Rus' princes, beginning with Volodymyr the Great (983), had fought from time to time
against Lithuanian and other Baltic tribes, especially the Iatvigians. The first real threat to the Lithuanians
came, however, not from the east, but from the west. In 1226, a Roman
Catholic duke of Mazovia, in northern Poland, who
felt threatened by a neighboring Baltic tribe, the pagan Prussians, invited
German knights and other adventurers returning from the Crusades in the
Christian Holy Land to spread their missionary zeal along the shores of the
Baltic Sea. The Knights of the Teutonic Order arrived in 1233 along the lower
Vistula River, setting
up their stronghold at Thorn/Torun. Filled with the fervor of religious
fanatics and still smarting from their expulsion from the Holy Land by the
Saracens at the end of the twelfth century, the Teutonic Knights turned their
energies toward northern Europe. By the 1270s, they had exterminated most of
the Prussian population. The knights were now ready to turn to other
Lithuanian and Baltic tribes farther east. In fact, they had the Lithuanians
almost surrounded, since in 1202 another Germanic knightly order had come
into existence in Livonia, just north of Lithuania. In 1237, this Livonian
Order became a branch of the Teutonic Knights. It
was the threat posed by the Teutonic and Livonian Knights in the west and
north that prompted the Baltic tribes to unite under Mindaugas
in the 1230s and to expand toward the south and east. Their expansion brought
them into conflict with the Rus' princes of Polatsk, with the Poles, and then with Danylo of Galicia- Volhynia.
Like Danylo, the politically astute Mindaugas also negotiated with the pope, adopting (if
only temporarily) Roman Catholicism and receiving a crown in 1254. This
politically inspired act brought temporary peace with the Christian Teutonic
and Livonian Knights - even if the mass of Lithuanians remained pagan - and
it allowed Mindaugas to direct his attention
further southward. There, how-ever, he was confronted by Danylo,
who through military force, diplomatic alli-ances,
and dynastic marriages kept Mindaugas from
achieving at least one of his goals, the acquisition of Volhynia. The
policy of expansion southward was carried on by the successors of Mindaugas, especially Gediminas
(reigned 1316-1341), who became founder of the dynasty of Lithuanian rulers
known as the Gediminids. Not only did Gediminas add to the rest of his realm the Polatsk principality, the Brest and Podlachia
regions of northwest Volhynia, and the Turau-Pinsk principality (that is, most of present-day
Belarus), he also was the first Lithuanian ruler to encroach directly upon
the Golden Horde's sphere of influence. As early as the 1330s, a Lithuanian
prince ruled in Kiev, although his was a kind of joint stewardship with the
Golden Horde, in that he ruled under the supervision of a Tatar official. It
soon became evident, however, that from his new capital at Vilnius Gediminas was not content with sharing authority over the
lands of old Rus'. In anticipation of future
territorial acquisition, Gediminas assumed as his
title 'King of Lithuania and Rus" (Lethewinorum et Ruthenorum rex).
Lithuania,
however, was not the only claimant to the territorial heritage of Kievan Rus'. The northern city
of Moscow, which had developed from the Rus'
principality of Vladimir-Suzdal' into an
independent grand duchy, continued the tradition begun by Vladimir's rulers
in the twelfth century of claiming Kiev as their 'patrimony and ancestral
property.'1 Yet while ideologically prepared to claim Kiev, Muscovy had not
yet consolidated its authority over its immediate Rus'
neighbors (Tver' and Novgorod) and so could hardly
hope to challenge powerful Lithuania farther south and west. Unlike
the rulers of Lithuania and Muscovy, each of whom claimed to be the
legitimate descendants and heirs of the Kievan
patrimony, the Golden Horde sim-ply tried to
transform the local Rus' princes into vassals who
would recognize the ultimate authority of the Tatars in eastern Europe. They
were successful until the second half of the fourteenth century, when Mongolo-Tatar authority witnessed ' its first crisis.
Beginning in 1357, two decades of internal political crises racked the Golden
Horde. They were followed by the arrival in the 1390s of a new threat from
the east in the person of Tamerlane. This fierce competitor for leadership
throughout the Mongol world destroyed the capital of Sarai
in 1396 and almost brought to an end the Golden Horde's existence. This
period of weakness in the Golden Horde coincided with the rule in Lithuania
of Gediminas's son Algirdas
(reigned 1345-1377), who shared the realm with his brother Kestutis (reigned 1345-1382). During their joint rule,
they achieved their father's ambitious goal of conquering all the lands of
old Rus'. In the words of Algirdas
(1358), 'All of Rus' simply must belong to the
Lithuanians.' Volhynia had already been fully
secured in the early 1340s, and the other principalities in the southern Rus' or Ukrainian lands systematically followed - Cherni- hiv between 1345 and
1356, Novhorod-Sivers'kyi in 1355, Kiev and Pereiaslav in 1362, and Podolia
in 1363. The region around Chelm and Belz was annexed by Lithuania as early as 1336, but was
lost to Poland three decades later before being reannexed
in 1382. Hence, by the mid-fourteenth century, all the Rus'
principalities on Ukrainian territory with the exception of Galicia had
princes of the Gediminid dynasty ruling them. The
symbolic moment marking the beginning of the new order in eastern Europe was
the decisive victory of the Lithuanian army over the Golden Horde in 1362 at
the Battle of Blue Waters. Thus, within a century of the death of Mindaugas, who had first united the Lithuanian tribes of
the Baltic region, a vast territory that included the western and southern
principalities of Kievan Rus'
(much of what are today the republics of Belarus and Ukraine) had come under
the political hegemony of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. What
was the secret of this rapid Lithuanian success? The strength of the
Lithuanian armies, which were the first to challenge successfully the
previously invincible Golden Horde, certainly made territorial expansion
possible. But how were the pagan Lithuanians, with their relatively primitive
social and administrative structure, able to control lands that had a much
higher level of political and cultural development? The most plausible
explanation is that at least initially the Lithuanians changed little in the
territories they took over, a policy summed up by one grand duke with the
phrase 'we're not introducing anything new and we won't disturb what is old'
(my novin ne uvodim, a starin ne rukhaem). While
it is true that the Riurykovych princes from Kievan times were replaced by members of the Lithuanian Gediminid dynasty, the territorial integrity of the Rus' principalities was at first maintained, and, most
important, the Orthodox faith was left undisturbed and sometimes even
promoted. Although the successors of Mindaugas
reverted to paganism, which remained the official religion of the realm, many
Lithuanians became Orthodox Christians. Moreover, throughout the fourteenth
and early fifteenth centuries, the grand duchy's pagan rulers lobbied hard in
Constantinople in an effort to obtain their own Orthodox metropolitanate
(and for brief periods it did come into existence) or to have the seat of the
metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus' transferred from
Moscow back to Kiev after the city had come under Lithuanian control in the
1360s. Finally, the Lithuanians initially left intact the legal and social
structures of Kievan Rus'
and even adopted Ruthenian, a Belarusan
version of Church Slavonic written in Cyrillic, as the grand duchy's official
language. As the enactors of such policies, the Lithuanians were in fact
welcomed by most of the Rus' princes, who were con¬tent to live in what was effectively a Lithuanian-Rus' state, the official name of which was the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania, Rus', and Samogitia. The
Polish-Lithuanian connection The
height of Lithuanian power was reached at the beginning of the fifteenth
century, but even before, there occurred a series of events that was to
change pro-foundly the direction of Lithuanian and
Ukrainian history. The first was the end¬ing of the
joint rule of Algirdas and Kestutis.
In 1377, Algirdas died. His son and successor, the
ambitious Jogaila, was unable to rule with his
uncle Kestutis and in 1382 arranged for his
relative to be assassinated. The latter's son, Vytautas,
who expected to rule at least part of the realm as had his father, fled to
the Teutonic Order. At this time, the Teutonic Knights were at the height of
their power and were still intent on converting, or, if necessary,
destroying, the pagan Lithuanian state. Vytautas
persuaded the Knights to join him in a campaign against his cousin Jogaila. Fearing a Teutonic invasion, Jogaila
turned to the only other strong power in the region - Poland. But why should
Roman Catholic Poland have been interested in the plight of the heathen
Lithuanian Jogaila on its eastern frontier? The
answer calls for a review, however brief, of developments in Poland. By
the late eleventh century, the Polish Kingdom under the leadership of rul¬ers from the Piast dynasty
had come to control most of the territory that is within the present-day
boundaries of Poland. The Piasts were the first
dynasty and the creators of Poland. Consequendy,
the concept of the Polish state and the ruling Piast
dynasty was undifferentiated. Piast success in
gathering territories under its rule suffered a reverse during the thirteenth
century, when Poland lost a signifi-cant portion of
its territory: in the northwest, to German principalities of the Holy Roman
Empire; in the southwest, to the Kingdom of Bohemia-Moravia; and in the
north, to the Teutonic Order. Surrounded by such powerful neighbors, Poland's
only outlet was in the east, and when the kingdom revived in the fourteenth cen-tury, it was precisely toward the east that its
foreign policies were directed. Under the leadership of Casimir
III ('the Great,' reigned 1333-1370), Poland signed accords with Hungary, its
only ally in east-central Europe, and, taking advantage of the decline of the
Galician-Volhynian Kingdom after 1340, gradually
brought under its control Galicia, and from Lithuania annexed the Chelm-Belz region and western Podolia.
This territorial expansion in the east was complete by the time of Casimir's death in 1370. Casimir had no male heir, however, and
before his death he chose as a succes¬sor his
nephew, the king of Hungary, Louis I ('the Great,' reigned 1342-1382). As a
member of the Anjou dynasty, Louis ruled southern Italy as well as Hungary,
and now in 1370 he added Poland to his family's patrimony. Louis was not
really interested in Poland, however, so he proposed that the future husband
of one of his three daughters should rule there in his stead. To prepare the
Polish nobles for his plans, he summoned them to Hungary (Kosice) in 1373 and
1374. In return for the nobles' support, Louis was forced to make several
concessions: (1) renunciation of the king's right to impose upon the nobility
an extraordinary levy for troops and war money, (2) perpetual exemption of
the nobility from having to pay taxes, (3) agreement that official posts in
Polish provinces would be held only by nobles who were natives of the
province, and (4) agreement that only a person of Polish and of non-royal
blood could become a starosta, or royal governor of
one of the twenty-three most important castles. These
concessions, known as the Statutes of Kosice, set the tone for future
relationships between the king and the nobles in Poland. Whereas the Piasts had been the founding and, in a sense, a national
dynasty whose hereditary right to rule was never seriously contested, after
the death of Casimir III the traditional fusion of
the identities of state and dynasty was broken. Casimir's
successors were considered foreigners; hence, Polish nobles felt they had the
right and even the duty to negotiate with their future ruler before pledging
allegiance to him. This was the origin of that rather unique system of
aristocratic democracy in Poland, whereby the nobility (the magnates and
gentry), subsequently represented in a central Diet (Sejm), were to play a decisive
- and sometimes destructive - role in Polish political life. Having
reached an accommodation with Poland's nobility, Louis turned to the question
of which dynastic arrangement would enable him to continue his essentially
absentee rule. Since he had only daughters, the husband of one of them would
have to be king. His oldest daughter died in 1378, and after Louis's own
death four years later his second daughter decided to remain in Hungary. This
left his youngest daughter, Jadwiga. The Polish nobles favored a dynastic
connection with the offspring of Louis, but they objected to the fact that
the five-year-old Princess Jadwiga was betrothed to an Austrian prince. At
this point, the Lithuanian Jogaila entered the
picture. It
was precisely during Poland's succession crisis in the 1380s that Jogaila's grand duchy was threatened by his cousin Vytautas, who in alliance with the Teu-tonic
Order was preparing to invade Lithuania to regain his patrimony. For his
part, Jogaila was in need of allies and was
impressed by the strength and prestige of a Poland that in the recent past
had been ruled by the powerful Casimir III and
Louis I of Hungary. Being themselves in need of a ruler, the Polish nobles
accepted Jogaila's overtures. Through Jadwiga's
mother, they persuaded the now eleven-year-old girl to break her promise of
marriage to the Austrian prince (with whom she had loved to play as a child)
and in the interest of the nation marry instead the thirty-seven-year-old
Lithuanian pagan grand duke, Jogaila. As his part
of the bargain, Jogaila had to agree to certain
demands made by the Polish nobles, which were incorporated into a document
known as the Union of Krewo/ Krevo
(1385). In return for Jadwiga's hand, Jogaila was
to accept both Roman Catholicism, not only for himself but for his whole
nation, and the permanent union of Lithuania with Poland. This new Christian
monarch was then crowned as Wladyslaw II Jagiello, King of Poland (reigned 1386-1434), and thereby
founded a dynasty known as the Jagiellonians. Jagiello also had to promise to work for the
recovery of all Lithuanian and Rus' lands that
supposedly had once belonged to Poland (terras suas Lithuanae
et Russiae coronae Regni Poloniae perpetuo applicare). It is interesting to note that at the
negotiations at Krevo, the Polish nobility claimed
as its ancient patrimony not only Galicia but all the other Belarusan and Ukrainian lands of Kievan
Rus'. Thus, in 1385 the Polish nobles not only
reasserted their power vis-a-vis
their future king, but also set the foreign policy he was expected to follow. After
assuming the throne, Jagiello carried out his side
of the bargain. Immediately following his coronation in early 1386, he
returned to the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius and, like Volodymyr
the Great of Kievan Rus'
400 years before, destroyed pagan statues and promoted mass conversions.
While Jagiello's policy would have favorable
results for members of the Lithuanian nobility who converted to Roman
Catholicism, it would have negative repercussions for the vast numbers of
inhabitants living in the grand duchy - namely, the Orthodox Rus' population (Belarusans and
Ukrainians). Almost immediately after taking power, Jagiello
agreed (1387) that all Roman Catholic princes of Lithuanian origin could
remain in the Rus' lands they ruled as long as they
pledged themselves vassals of the king. Such
a policy was, not surprisingly, met with opposition by Jagiello's
brethren in Lithuania, who were always jealous of their rights and wary of
any infringement of them. But even before their discontent could lead to
serious consequences, the whole Polish-Lithuanian relationship was altered by
the untimely death of Jadwiga (by then only twenty-four) in 1399. The queen's
death automatically abrogated the Union of Krewo,
and in the absence of any offspring of her marriage to Jagiello,
the union of the two countries based on the crown no longer had validity. In
1401, Vytautas, who had broken his alliance with
the Teutonic Order, was recognized by Jagiello as
the acting grand duke of Lithuania, and from the beginning of the fifteenth
century Polish lords and Lithuanian boyars met to work out a new political
relationship. Their meetings culminated in a pact signed at Horodlo in 1413. At Horodlo, Vytautas was confirmed as grand duke for life, and Poles
and Lithuanians agreed that the future political relationship between their
countries could be determined only as a result of periodic consultation and
by mutual agreement. When Vytautas died in 1440,
the dynastic link with Poland was restored, since Jagiello's
son by a later marriage, Kazimierz, was chosen by
the Lithuanian boyars as their grand duke. Kazimierz
retained that tide even after he became king of Poland (1445), and he issued
a charter in 1447 that reiterated the rights and privileges of the grand
duchy. Thus, Lithuania remained united with Poland through the person of its
ruler and at the same time maintained its independence. Ukrainian
lands were directly affected by the new Polish-Lithuanian relation-ship. Although
Jagiello and Vytautas
continued their personal and political rivalry, they agreed on certain
policies. For instance, during their period of joint rule the Rus' principalities were disbanded and replaced by
smaller territorial entities ruled by boyars of the Roman Catholic faith, who
were required to pledge their loyalty as vassals of the Lithuanian grand
duke. In return, the Lithuanian Catholic boyars were granted certain judicial
and political privileges (1387 and 1413) which gave them a sense of superiority
to the Orthodox Rus' boyars, whom they called by
the pejorative Lithuanian term gudai. Even after 1434» when the Orthodox church was
officially recognized in Lithuania and its adherents promised juridical and
social equality with Roman Catholics, it was clear that social and political
advancement would be severely limited for non-Roman Catholics. The
situation was particularly severe in Galicia, which, as the result of an
agreement with Hungary and Lithuania in 1387, was recognized by those states
as part of Poland. In Kievan times, the Orthodox
boyars had been a potent political force in the former Galician Rus' kingdom, but now several were forced to leave the
area. They were replaced by Polish officials and gentry, who, together with
the Roman Catholic church, were awarded large tracts of land. Facing a
continual decline in status, some Galician Rus'
leaders looked south for help from Orthodox Moldavia, which in the late
fifteenth century united with Walachia and became a powerful state under the
leadership of Prince Stefan ('the Great,' reigned 1457-1504). Cooperation
between the Galician Rus' and Moldavia took the
form of a popular revolt under a local leader, Petro Mukha,
who between 1490 and 1492 led nearly 10,000 Moldavian and Rus'
peasants (as well as several petty nobles and townspeople) in an unsuccessful
attempt to overthrow Polish rule in southern Galicia. The
status of the vast majority of the Orthodox Rus'
population who remained under Lithuanian rule varied during the fifteenth
century. For instance, the old Rus' principalities
under hereditary Gediminid princes were restored
for a while in the 1440s. But three decades later they were eliminated for
the last time, and in each the prince was replaced by a limited-term
appointee (the voievoda) responsible directly to
the central government in Vilnius. The end of the old Kievan
Rus' political order combined with intermittent
discrimination against Orthodox lay and religious leaders gave rise to a new
phenomenon: emigration eastward to Muscovite lands. The sixteenth century, in
particular, was characterized by the flight of numerous Rus'
nobility, clergy, townspeople, and even peasants from Belarus and Ukraine,
who moved from what they considered an oppressive Roman Catholic environment
in Lithuania to a more hospitable one in lands under the control of Orthodox
Muscovy. Muscovy
and the Polish-Lithuanian union This
movement of people to the east, as well as Muscovy's expansion westward,
prompted increasingly frequent conflict during the sixteenth century, as a
result of which Lithuania lost some of its eastern lands, including the
cities of Chernihiv, Novhorod-Sivers'kyi,
Starodub, and Smolensk. The situation became
especially serious during the 1560s, when the aggressive tsar of Muscovy,
Ivan IV ('the Dread,' reigned 1547-1584), turned his attention westward and,
in 1562, cap¬tured Lithuania's stronghold of Polatsk. Faced with this Muscovite threat, the Lithuanians
turned to the Polish king, Zygmunt II Augustus
(reigned 1548-1572), for military aid. They also realized the desirability of
closer union with Poland. For his part, Zygmunt
came to the aid of the Lithuanians, since in a sense the attacks from the
east represented part of a larger struggle between Muscovy and Poland, both
of whom claimed the lands that had formerly been part of Kievan*
Rus'. In
order to further their goals in the east, Zygmunt
and the leading Polish magnates favored some fusion with or perhaps the
incorporation of Lithuania, which until then had been in only personal
dynastic union with Poland. Representatives of both sides met in 1569 in the
city of Lublin. Some Lithuanian nobles rejected the maximalist position
proposed by the Poles, which advocated full incorporation, and negotiations
dragged on for several months. The deadlock was finally broken when Zygmunt II unilaterally ordered the incorporation into
the Polish Kingdom of the contested borderland region of Podlachia
as well as of the Ukrainian-inhabited lands farther south, which were
thereupon transformed according to the Polish administrative pattern into the
palatinates of Volhynia, Bratslav,
and Kiev (including the former Rus' principality of
Pereiaslav). A segment of the local Orthodox Rus' nobility in these three palatinates welcomed
annexation by Poland, notably the gentry, who acquired thereby all the
privileges of their Polish brethren. These included freedom from military
service and most forms of taxation, the right to use state lands for life and
manage them as personal estates, and the right to elect government officials
and to hold political or ecclesiastical office. The new Polish palatinates of
Volhynia, Bratslav, and
Kiev were also allowed to retain certain rights, including the full legal
protection of the Orthodox church, the use of Ruthenian
as the administrative language, and Lithuanian law according to the Second
Lithuanian Statute of 1566 (popularly known as the 'Volhynian
Statute'), among other rights. Although
Volhynia, Bratslav, and
Kiev entered Poland as distinct territorial entities, each governed by its
own provincial dietine, or noble assembly, in a
sense they functioned together as a unit. The nobility in all three
palatinates retained a sense of common purpose, which derived from the fact
that their allegiance to Poland was not the result of territorial annexation,
but a voluntary union following a negotiated settlement. That settlement,
moreover, assured them of local privileges - including laws embodied in the
Second Lithuanian ('Volhynian') Statute - which in
large part were based upon and helped to define their distinct Rus' political, religious, and cultural heritage. The
estimated number of inhabitants in the Ukrainian territories annexed by
Poland in 1569 was approximately 937,000. To this number can be added the
approximately 573,000 inhabitants of the western, largely Ukrainian-inhabited
palatinates of Rus' (Galicia), Belz,
and Podolia, which were already part of Poland,
with a Polish legal system and Polish as the official language. Faced
with the loss of its southern regions, the Lithuanian nobles agreed to what
became known as the Union of Lublin. According to this covenant, signed on 1
July 1569, Poland and Lithuania would henceforth be united in a 'common
republic' (Rzeczpospolita)
with a king elected by both regions and represented by one Diet (Seym). While it
is true that after Lublin Lithuania retained its own army, treasury, law
code, and local administration, in subsequent decades the grand duchy's
particularities were brought more and more in line with the character of the
rest of Poland. In foreign affairs, the new state acted as a single entity
known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In short, the Union of Lublin
transformed the relationship between Poland and Lithuania from that of a
personal dynastic union into that of a federal union. Thus,
during the nearly two hundred years from the second half of the fourteenth
century, when Rus' principalities in Ukraine first
came under Lithuanian rule, neighboring Poland succeeded in steadily bringing
the Grand Duchy of Lithuania within its political and cultural orbit. This
effort culminated in the Union of Lublin in 1569, as a result of which Poland
replaced Lithuania as the principal rival of Muscovy for control of the
heritage of Kievan Rus'.
In the case of Ukrainian lands, the former principality of Galicia (since
1387 the Polish palatinate of Rus Czerwona, or Red Rus') and the
palatinates of Belz and Podolia
were joined, after 1569, by Volhynia, Bratslav, and Kiev, all of which became integral parts of
the Polish Kingdom. Henceforth, the history of Ukraine would be largely
determined by the fate of Poland. |
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