Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (49 page)

In matters of religion, the grand duchy of the early sixteenth century was characterized by great diversity. Since Ukraine as well as White Ruthenia formed part of the state, Orthodox Christians formed a heavy majority of the population. They adhered to the traditional Slavonic liturgy of Kievan Rus’, not to the Muscovite ‘Russian Orthodoxy’ that was enforced beyond the eastern border. They had little direct contact
with their distant patriarch and the clergy was left largely to its own devices, the Ostrogski princes acting as their secular ‘guardian’. Their holiest shrines in the north were at Trokiele near Lida and at Zhirovice near Hrodna, where a wonder-working statuette of the Virgin was revered; and in the south at the monastery of Lavra Pecherskaya in Kiev, founded by St Theodosius in the eleventh century. Several proposals to create a separate patriarchate for the grand duchy were never realized.

Roman Catholicism, introduced into Baltic Lithuania by Jogaila in the 1380s as the second Christian denomination in the grand duchy, was strengthened by the Polonization of the nobility; the bishop of Vil’nya became a powerful figure. St Casimir Jagiellon, son and brother of kings and grand dukes, died at Hrodna in 1484. Canonized in 1522, he was declared patron saint of Lithuania.
⁶³
Nevertheless, the Calvinist Reformation made surprising headway in the grand duchy, especially among the magnates. Mikołaj ‘the Red’ Radziwiłł, grand hetman and chancellor, was a convert, and protector of a Protestant community at Birze. The Holy Bible, translated into Polish for the first time ever, was published at Brest in 1562. (The first accessible Lithuanian equivalent of the Brest Bible did not appear until 1735 when published in Prussian Königsberg; a translation into Lithuanian undertaken in Oxford during Cromwell’s Protectorate had little popular impact.)
⁶⁴

Judaism was also present throughout the grand duchy, and Jewish numbers increased steadily due to migration from Poland. Quaint wooden synagogues were a feature of many small towns. A community of
karaim
or ‘Karaites’, originally from Crimea, had been settled in Troki since the time of Vytautas.
⁶⁵
The Karaites do not accept the validity of the Talmud, and are regarded by the proponents of rabbinical Judaism as heretics. They, like the Protestant Christians, put strong emphasis on the written word, and were drawn into the printing trade, thereby contributing to the general growth of education and literacy.
⁶⁶

Vil′nya-Vilnius in the early sixteenth century was a city of many traders, many languages and many religions. The grand duchy’s capital since the fourteenth century, it was unrivalled in size and influence after the loss of Smalensk, and had been walled against possible Tartar attack. In 1522, the year that the walls were finished, it welcomed the grand duchy’s first print shop. Its owner was the humanist and bibliophile Francysk Skaryna (
c
. 1485–1540), who gained the reputation of being the founding father of Belarusian letters.
⁶⁷
The royal and grand-ducal palace stood on the site of a pagan temple destroyed only 150 years before. The Ruthenians congregated on the eastern side around the Gate of Dawn and their Orthodox church; the Jews dominated the western quarter, and its ‘German Street’. The Poles and the Catholics were in a distinct minority until the court moved there in 1543.

Kiyiv/Kiev struggled to compete. In a charter of 29 March 1514, the king and grand duke, Sigismund the Elder, reconfirmed the municipality’s right to be governed by the Magdeburg Law, which had evidently lapsed:

The mayor [
voit
] and townspeople of Kiev have petitioned us and informed us that our brother, His Grace… Alexander of glorious memory… had granted them in his benevolence the German or Magdeburg law… so that in the future the townspeople would be governed in accordance with all the articles of that law. Taking into consideration their services, therefore, and the losses they suffer from our enemies in the borderland [the Tatars], and desiring that this town of ours should increase in population and prosperity, we have done as they petitioned… And they shall observe this law in every respect, just as our town of Vil’no observes it; and by this our charter we confirm eternally and inviolably for all time to come… all those rights and exemptions which we have granted.
⁶⁸

The most acute concern of the grand duchy, however, lay with the rise of Muscovy under Ivan ‘the Great’. The ideology of the ‘Third Rome’ no doubt seemed far-fetched to many non-Muscovites, since it was saying, in effect, that the grand duchy had no legitimacy. It underpinned the dubious proposition that Moscow possessed a divine, imperial mission to unite all of ancient Rus’ under its rule, thereby justifying the policy of the ‘Gathering of the Lands’. According to this ideology, the majority of the grand duchy’s inhabitants, being Orthodox Slavs and descendants of Kievan Rus’, should now defect. The message received little or no support among White Ruthenians and Ukrainians, who valued their political separation and their religious liberty, but from Moscow’s viewpoint it provided a constant and convenient
casus belli
. Alexander Jagiellończyk, son of Casimir the Great, was married to Ivan’s daughter, Helena, but when he approached his father-in-law to discuss improved relations, he was told that there could be no discussions until the whole of the ‘tsar’s birthright’ had been returned. Helena wrote to her father: ‘Everyone here thought that I would bring all good things, love, friendship, eternal peace and co-operation: instead, there came war, conflict, the ruin of towns, the shedding of Christian blood, the widowing of wives, the orphaning of children, slavery, despair, weeping and groans.’
⁶⁹

Ivan III began the campaign to recover the lands of Rus’ in 1485. It would proceed, with intervals, for three centuries, but it opened with five Muscovite wars against the grand duchy in fifty years. Vyazma was the first grand-ducal fortress to be lost, in 1494; but the most critical battle of the near incessant fighting was contested near the city of Orsha on 8 September 1514. The Muscovites had just captured Smalensk by siege with a huge array of men and machines, carrying off the city’s holy icon and immediately laying the foundations of the largest of all their kremlins. They were moving deeper into the grand duchy when confronted by a much smaller force under Hetman Konstanty Ostrogski. They attacked at dawn, enjoying a 3  :  1 advantage and confident of success. Assault and counter-assault followed, until the massed Muscovite spearhead was drawn into a trap. The Lithuanian lines parted suddenly to reveal banks of concealed artillery. Cannon mowed down the advancing infantry. Polish cavalry swept in from the wings, and, as reported with considerable exaggeration, 30,000 Muscovite dead were left on the field; all 300 of their guns were captured. Returning to Vil’nya in triumph, Ostrogski celebrated the victory by building two Orthodox churches: of the Trinity and of St Nicholas.
⁷⁰
Yet repeated attempts to recover the lost lands met only modest success. When a longer interval in hostilities was called in 1537, the Muscovites were still holding on to broad expanses of the borders including Polatsk, Smalensk, Chernigov and Seversk; Homel alone was retained.

Military problems demanded constant attention. Until the middle of the fifteenth century, the old feudal levy performed well. Poland alone put 18,000 knights into the field and the grand duchy was not far behind. Fortresses and cities were protected by dirt-and-stone walls to meet the challenge of siege artillery. In later decades, however, difficulties arose. The old type of army was no longer suited to the open warfare of the south against the Crimean Tartars. Knights could hardly arrive on the scene of distant action before the season’s campaign was ending. Casual finances, which had to be spent before the land tax was collected, no longer sufficed. The
levée-en-masse
had to be supplemented. In the 1490s a limited move in this direction was taken when an
obrona potoczna
or ‘current defence force’ of some 2,000 men was created to defend Red Ruthenia from Tartar raids. In 1526 it received an established financial grant. The trouble was that the system needed extending. Without a permanent standing army, each campaign required an extraordinary financial grant, and the numbers of men who could be fielded were constantly declining, forcing commanders to rely on the resourcefulness and (variable) quality of their troops.

In this regard, Crown Hetman Jan Tarnowski (1488–1561), was an outstanding figure. Though not a subject of the grand duchy, he played an important role in its affairs. Like his contemporary in the west, the Chevalier du Bayard, ‘the knight without fear of reproach’, he was a small man with an immense reputation. It was Tarnowski who modified the Hussite concept of the
tabor
or ‘military train’ for use in the east, and turned it into the vehicle of repeated victory against overwhelming odds. The stores of his entire army were carried in huge six-horse wagons, which could stay on the move over vast distances or which could be chained together and formed up into a square to make an instant fortress anywhere in the wilderness. A Polish-Lithuanian
tabor
besieged by twenty or thirty thousand Tartars must have closely resembled the overland wagon trains of American pioneers attacked by the Sioux or the Cherokee. Tarnowski also developed the headquarters services of a modern army: horse-artillery, field hospitals, the corps of
Szancknechte
(sappers), the
Probantmajster
’s logistical department, the ‘Hetman’s Articles’ or code of discipline, courts martial and the corps of army chaplains. His experiences were summarized in a book of theory,
Consilium Rationis Bellicae
(‘An Outline of Military Method’), published in 1558. His watchword was ‘Know your adversary’; and he preached the doctrine of military flexibility.
⁷¹

Sigismund-August (1520–72) was to be the last of the Jagiellonian king-grand dukes, and his personal tragedy was somehow symptomatic of a hereditary system that was nearing its end. Subjected as a boy in Kraków to a hasty and irregular coronation, where the customary procedures were not observed, he was made painfully aware of the dynasty’s anxieties; the Jagiellons were losing their thrones in Hungary and Bohemia. Yet as the son of Sigismund the Elder and of Queen Bona Sforza, he grew up in the midst of Poland’s ‘Golden Age’, surrounded by Italian-inspired art, architecture and literature; he matured to be a true Renaissance man, noted for his patronage of the humanities, his religious toleration, his interest in administrative reforms and his passion for maritime affairs. He was given control of the grand duchy when still a teenager, and Vil’nya was the scene of his happiest moments.

The young Jagiellon met Barbara Radziwiłł in Vil’nya when he was a twenty-four-year-old widower and she the twenty-four-year-old widow of the grand duchy’s richest man, Stanisław Gasztołd. Their romance was sweetened by the opposition of many courtiers and by their secret marriage in the palace chapel in 1547. But Barbara was sick and childless.
She was not crowned as queen and grand duchess, and soon died from malignant cancer. Her husband was heartbroken. The dynasty was entering a cul-de-sac.

The rest of Sigismund-August’s reign proceeded in the shadow of the broken dream. The king-grand duke’s miserable third marriage, to a Habsburg archduchess, highlighted the contrast between the stricken Jagiellons and the meteoric rise of their Habsburg relatives. (This was the age of Emperor Charles V, so different from the prospects of fifty years earlier.) What is more, the pressures for political integration, which grew in the 1550s, were not generally welcomed. The brooding monarch had not been keen on it in his early years, and confessed that he was likely to die before the future of his two states had been properly resolved.

A favourable turn in foreign affairs, however, occurred in 1561. Gotard Kettler (1517–87), grand master of the Knights of the Sword in Livonia,
*
was troubled by the vulnerability of the federation to which he belonged, fearing the depredations of Danes, Swedes and Muscovites. He was also swept along by the full flood the Protestant Reformation, which was sapping the foundations of the state. Appealing to Sigismund-August for help, he decided on the same course of action which had been followed a generation earlier by the grand master of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia (see below, p.
351
): he disbanded his Order; converted to Lutheranism; and turned Livonia into a secular state. After a brief, multi-sided war, the grand duchy annexed southern Livonia, and Kettler became duke of Courland, which he held from Lithuania in fief. Sigismund-August, already the overlord of Prussia in his capacity as king of Poland, now became, in his capacity as grand duke, overlord of Courland-Livonia as well.

In 1566 the Second Lithuanian Statute was published, a revised and expanded version of the First. It now consisted of 14 chapters and 367 articles, written in the same
ruski
language that was declared the sole medium of court hearings. (One senses a vested interest of entrenched Ruthenian lawyers, who held a virtual monopoly.) Innovations included confirmation of the equality of Catholic and Orthodox Christians before the law, the extension of Lithuanian justice to the south-western province of Volhynia, and the introduction of new noble privileges in line with Poland, where the king’s powers were already formally limited. The
Polish statute of
Nihil Novi
(1505), for example, had established the parliamentary principle of
Nic o nas bez nas
, roughly ‘Nothing about us without us’; it was very similar to the idea of ‘no taxation without representation’, which some readers may imagine to have been invented elsewhere. The traditional governance of the grand duchy had tended towards the autocratic end of the spectrum. The legislation of 1566 formed part of a move in the opposite direction of limited monarchy.