Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (46 page)

In the thirteenth century two external dangers appeared whose impact was to be lasting. The first was the Teutonic Knights, a German crusading order that had assumed the mission of converting the Baltic pagans. The second, the Mongol Horde of Genghis Khan, galloped out of Central Asia into the heart of Europe. The principalities of Rus’ were caught between the two.

German crusaders landed on the Baltic coast at the very start of the century. Their fort at Riga, founded in 1204, served as the base for their northern province of Livonia, the
Terra Marianna
(‘Land of the Virgin Mary’). Their southern province of Prussia, founded in 1230, became the base for operations driving eastwards towards Samogitia and Aukštota (see pp. 339ff.). Before long, the Knights controlled access to the sea via the estuaries of the Nieman and the Dvina, and the leaders of Polatsk, Novgorod and Vladimir felt sufficiently threatened to take common action. Prince Alexander Nevsky (1220–63) of Novgorod had already made his name battling the Swedes on the River Neva; in 1242 he and his allies won a still more spectacular victory over the Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus. He is regarded nowadays as Russia’s most popular hero.
⁴³

The Mongol Horde attacked when Alexander Nevsky was heavily embroiled in the north. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of nomadic horsemen rode out of the steppe into the ill-defended borders of eastern Rus’. Moscow was totally destroyed in 1238, less than a century after its foundation. Kiev suffered the same fate in 1240. The Horde stormed on through Poland, razing Kraków, and cutting down the assembled knights of Silesia. Tribute was exacted by the Mongol khan from all parts of Rus’ that his riders could reach, and Alexander Nevsky was obliged to submit to the Horde for confirmation of his titles.

The twin threats from north and south produced a predictable reaction from the lands caught in the middle. The Baltic tribes of Samogitia and Aukštota, under pressure from the Teutonic Knights, found common cause with the Orthodox Christian princes of Polatsk. At this distance, it is impossible to tell whether the Baltic party simply attacked their weakened Ruthenian neighbours and annexed their land, or whether something closer to a voluntary merger was engineered. The well-established Principality of Polatsk need not have been razed and destroyed in the manner of Moscow and Kiev. It is more likely that the constituent districts of the principality submitted successively to Baltic overlords, until a point was reached at which the new overlords gained a controlling interest.

However it came about, the key figure henceforth is best identified as the ‘High King’ Mindaugas (1203–63), otherwise Mindoug or Mendog, who was crowned in 1253 with the German-derived title of
konung
. He could not have attained this position without the benefit of a preceding period of state-building. Recent scholars have emphasized that the Baltic tribes had been organizing military formations, tax collection and manorial enterprises for at least a century.
⁴⁴
One of them proposes 1183 as the date when the new Baltic state was launched. Another suggests that Mindaugas, though originally a pagan warrior, had fought as a mercenary in the land of Navahrudak, had converted to Orthodox Christianity, and had then used Navahrudak as a power-base for further expansion. His religious elasticity was notorious. At another time, he was baptized into the Catholic faith, and later abandoned it. Yet he was certainly strong enough to attack Novgorod in the early 1240s, and, following his repulse, to pick off Polatsk, Vitebsk and Minsk in turn. His coronation must have been the culmination of a series of political and military triumphs. As a sign of his enhanced dignity, his entourage gave him the same status of ‘grand duke’ or ‘grand prince’ that Alexander Nevsky had recently negotiated for himself from the Mongols, and they called his new state the Grand Duchy of Litva. In the practice of the Ruthenian scribes, the name was usually shortened to VKL: ‘V’ for
Vielkie
or ‘Grand’, ‘K’ for
Knyaztva
or ‘Duchy’ and ‘L’ for
Litvy
. In the practice of Latin scribes, VKL was transcribed as MDL, and Litva was translated as ‘Lithuania’:
Magnus Ducatus Lithuaniae
.

The name Belarus – or some earlier form of it – also came into currency in this same era. Its literal meaning of ‘White Ruthenia’ is not in doubt, but its derivation has been the subject of endless speculation. Most plausibly, ‘white’ had the connotation of a free territory, and ‘black’ that of territory that was occupied, or tribute-paying. It certainly fits the circumstances. White Ruthenia was the only part of Rus’ to stay free of the Mongol yoke. The name of
Czarnorus�
or ‘Black Ruthenia’, which became attached to the Land of Navahrudak, might conceivably be explained in the same way, since it was probably the first part of the Principality of Polatsk to be occupied by the Balts.

The territory of the grand duchy in this earliest emanation was roughly equivalent to a combination of present-day Lithuania and present-day Belarus, and the creation of the new state dealt a heavy blow to the idea of a united Rus’. White Ruthenia parted company from eastern Rus’ for many centuries, developing along different lines and acquiring a separate identity. Its imminent reunion for a long spell with Kievan/Ukrainian Ruthenia would give the Belarusians and Ukrainians much in common, and would project the expanded concept of ‘Litva’ far beyond its modest Baltic origins. At the same time, in the late thirteenth century, that new state was entering a cultural and political sphere which was quite foreign to Mongol-controlled Moscow.

Once the grand duchy had been established, its particular characteristics would probably have caused less surprise to its subjects than to outsiders. A caste of pagan warriors held sway over a predominantly Christian population that had adopted its Orthodox ties nearly three centuries earlier. Vestal virgins tended the sacred flame in oak groves, while Christian preachers strove alongside them to inculcate a totally different religion and culture. Christianization had been in progress in Europe for more than 1,000 years; as it proceeded, all public manifestations of paganism were generally suppressed. But circumstances in the MDL did not conform to a simple pattern. The arrival of Orthodox Christianity had indeed led to the suppression of the Norse and Slavic variants of paganism. Nevertheless, resistance was protracted; the Balts of the region were not yet affected; and memories of former beliefs must surely have lingered on. Such memories would have functioned in a setting where the paganism of the late Varangian elite probably differed little from the dying Slavic paganism of the populace at large. Pagan practices often went underground or morphed into pseudo-Christian rituals, and the supposedly Christianized people of early White Ruthenia may have passed through several generations during which the continuing pagan religion of their Baltic neighbours would not have looked particularly strange or offensive. Hence, when a Baltic warrior caste stepped into the Varangians’ shoes, there was no violent reaction.

The Ruthenians’ acceptance of Baltic overlordship would have been strengthened by the growing opportunities for territorial expansion and military adventure. At the time of the coronation of Mindaugas, the Mongol Horde ruled supreme at all points to the south. In the following decades, however, Mongol power declined; the ‘Golden Horde’ settled far away on the lower Volga; and Ruthenian princes were tempted to stray, their temerity varying in proportion to their distance from the Mongols’ revenge. The Muscovites, for instance, did not make their decisive bid for freedom until the 1380s. But the princes of southern Ruthenia, in Ukraine, grew restless a century earlier, when the fading of Mongol control created a vacuum into which the warriors of the grand duchy charged with alacrity. Under Grand Duke Gediminas (r. 1316–41), they reached Kiev for the first time, ruling it for several decades in conjunction with the Tartars. In addition, a broad band of territory was annexed stretching from Podolia and Volhynian Lutsk on the Polish border to Chernigov and Bryansk on the confines of Muscovy. Brest on the River Bug was captured, together with the district of Polesie beyond the Bug.

Gediminas is generally taken to have been the founder of the grand duchy’s capital, although it may well have been built on the site of the unidentified Voruta, the principal residence of Mindaugas. According to legend, he had been hunting on the borders of Baltic and Ruthenian settlement and had a dream in which he saw an iron wolf howling on the top of a hill; a shaman told him to erect a castle on a nearby bluff overlooking three rivers. The wooden castle was soon surrounded by houses and streets running down to the River Vilnya. Its earliest mention in the historical record dates from 1323, soon before the grand duke invited foreign traders and craftsmen to live there. Municipal rights on the model of Magdeburg were granted six decades later. For the grand duchy’s original Baltic elite, the city’s name was
Vilnius
: for the Ruthenians,
Vil�nya
, like the river: for the Poles, who would soon arrive in force,
Wilno.
⁴⁵

Under Grand Duke Algierdas (r. 1345–77), the tempo quickened. Algierdas, one of Gediminas’s seven sons, was a pagan warrior chief par excellence, who appears to have maintained internal peace by dividing his dominions with his brother, Kestutis. He battled the Teutonic crusaders and the Tartar hordes with equal enthusiasm, and twice besieged Moscow. Although held posthumously to have been a champion of Orthodoxy, his marriage to an Orthodox princess, Maria of Vitebsk, had no special significance. In 1349 the lands of ‘Red Ruthenia’ – so-called because they centred on the ‘Red Town’ of Chervien – were divided with Poland. And in 1362, at the Battle of the Blue Water near the Black Sea coast, the supremacy of the Mongol-Tartar Horde was broken for good. The consequences were immense. The grand dukes of Litva took over Kiev permanently, absorbing the southern expanses of Ukraine and putting themselves in a position to influence the metropolitan of Kiev, the highest authority of the Orthodox Church in East Slavdom. In the course of a century of raiding, of castle-building and of rewarding their followers with handsome lands, they came to govern a state that was larger than either France or the Holy Roman Empire, and was going to grow still further.

The city of Kiyiv/Kiev was the most ancient and most venerable in the whole of Slavdom. Legend attributes its foundation to the year AD 485, when the valiant Kie and his brothers set up their homes on three adjacent hills beside the Dniepr. In that remote era the various Slavic peoples were as yet undifferentiated. Thanks to modern politics, however, the city of Kiev is more usually associated in people’s minds with ‘ancient Russia’ than with medieval Lithuania; indeed, it is frequently billed as ‘Russia’s birthplace’. So a word of clarification may be in order. When the grand duchy overran it in 1362, the city was a shadow of its former self; its population had greatly declined, and the metropolitan himself was living elsewhere. The cathedral church of St Sophia founded by Yaroslav the Wise, together with its ‘indestructible wall’, which depicted the Virgin Oranta in golden mosaics, was still intact. But recovery from the Mongols’ ravages had been slow, and the city’s political importance was minimal. Nonetheless, the so-called ‘Lithuanian occupation’, which was to last for more than 200 years, was no fleeting episode; and it was undertaken by a successor state to Kievan Rus’ whose rule was perfectly acceptable to most contemporaries. One cannot judge medieval events by the teleological standards of a Russia that had yet to be created.

Muscovy also stood to reap its rewards from the Mongols’ retreat. Following the example of Algierdas, the ruler of Moscow, Dmitri ‘Donskoy’, was expanding his frontiers towards the Don, and preparing to form a coalition of eastern princes that would throw off the ‘Mongol yoke’ for ever. In this way, Moscow and the grand duchy became rivals to inherit the legacy of a divided Rus’.

Despite the waning of the Mongolian threat, however, the grand duchy knew little respite, for the Teutonic Knights were still on the march. Having subdued Prussia and Livonia, the Knights were entering a long period of hostility and intermittent conflict with Poland; their greedy crusading eyes also descended on the defiant paganism of the Lithuanians. The strategic grounds for a rapprochement between the grand duchy and Poland grew ever more apparent.

Unlike most monarchs of the age, the grand dukes of Litva, not being Christians, naturally exhibited no special preference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and they married their daughters to Catholic or to Orthodox princes as convenience dictated. Yet a view has persisted that Grand Duke Gediminas in particular had been grooming his court and country for conversion to Roman Catholicism; it is supported by the phraseology of a letter which Gediminas wrote to the pope in 1322 and which contains an expression of his readiness ‘
fidem catholicam recipere
’. A recent study, however, concludes that the grand duke’s intentions were strictly limited. The letter was sent in a tricky international phase when he was fighting fiercely against the Catholic Teutonic Order and, at the same time, seeking assistance from Catholic Poland. Gediminas was assuring the pope that he was not anti-Catholic, and that, as a gesture of goodwill, he would admit Dominican and Franciscan missions; but he was not considering wholesale conversion.
⁴⁶
Indeed, he may well have hoped that the Vatican might abolish the Teutonic Order in the way that it had abolished the Knights Templar. Gediminas did not hesitate to execute Catholic priests judged to have insulted the pagan religion, and his own funeral in 1342 displayed all the features of traditional ritual.
The grand duke’s body was placed on an open pyre. His favourite servant and his favourite horse were cast into the flames to accompany their master, and a group of German slaves, bound and gagged, were heaped on top for good measure. Algierdas, too, departed this life like his father, with no hint of Christian sensitivities.