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 Secon
d 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.
Throughout Sigismund-August’s reign, no stable peace was achieved with Muscovy. The fifth Muscovite War had ended in 1537 with a truce, not a treaty. The grand duchy had been strengthened by a second victory at Orsha in 1564 during the Livonian crisis, and by gaining direct access to the sea at Mittau and Riga; but Moscow had also gained its first ever foothold on the Baltic at Narva. Further hostilities were awaited.72
By the mid-1560s, the most pressing concern by far was the imminent extinction of the Jagiellonian dynasty. Sigismund-August was convinced that his death would bring chaos if the grand duchy were not integrated with Poland. The Sejm, which assembled in Lublin three days before Christmas in 1568, had been convoked for the express purpose of forging a constitutional union between kingdom and grand duchy. Sigismund-August was in a hurry. This was the fourth such meeting in five years, and was attended by both Lithuanian and Polish representatives; the arguments were well rehearsed. The common danger from Muscovy, the exposure of the south-eastern provinces to the Tartars, the convergence of political cultures and the inadequacy of existing military and financial practices all pointed to the necessity of fundamental change. But there was added urgency. The king’s third marriage had failed definitively. Divorce was impossible. A legitimate heir could not be born. The Jagiellons were sure to die out.
The king-grand duke, tired and sick, roused himself for the last great effort of his life. He alone could break the barriers to reform. In the last decade, he had tried many devices to unify mechanisms in the two parts of his realm. In 1559 he had instituted a Sejm for the grand duchy, and in 1564 provincial sejmiki or regional assemblies of nobles on the Polish model. At the same time he surrendered all of his prerogatives which limited the nobility’s property rights, and extended full legal privileges to Orthodox gentry. He knew, of course, that habits do not change overnight. He knew that the Lithuanian representatives were fearful of Poland’s greater numbers, and had been selected by the magnates under threat of punishment. He watched at Lublin how the three leading Lithuanians – Mikołaj ‘the Red’ Radziwiłł, Jan Chodkiewicz and Ostafi Wołowicz – simply ordered the rest of their delegation to keep silent. After one month of formalities, and a further month of crossed purposes, the king summoned Radziwiłł and Chodkiewicz to appear in person and explain themselves. When they fled in the night he reacted angrily. Over the following days three provinces of the grand duchy – Podlasie, Volhynia and Kiev – were incorporated into the kingdom by royal decree. Two Podlasian officers, on refusing to swear allegiance to the Polish Crown, were promptly stripped of their posts. The implication was clear: if the Lithuanian lords refused to behave like Polish noblemen and debate the issue openly, the king would turn on them with all the fury of former Lithuanian autocrats.
In April the leading lords of the Ukraine* – Ostrogski, Czartoryski, Sanguszko and Wísniowiecki – took their places in the Senate (the upper chamber of the Sejm). On 17 June 1569 Chodkiewicz himself reappeared, and, in the name of his peers, tearfully implored the king ‘not to hand them over to the Polish Crown by hereditary will, to the slavery and shame of their children’. Sigismund-August replied, also in tears: ‘God dwells where Love is, for such is his Divine Will. I am not leading Your Lordships to any forced submission. We must all submit to God, and not to earthly rulers.’ It was the moment of decision. Chodkiewicz accepted the terms of the proposed Union. The Senate rose to its feet and roared its thanks. Poland and Lithuania were to be joined together, ‘freemen with free, equals with equal’.73 There was to be one Rzeczpospolita, one ‘Republic or Commonwealth’; one indivisible body-politic; one king, elected not born; one currency, and one Sejm, whose deputies were to form the state’s most powerful institution. The Lithuanians were to keep their own law, their own administration, their own army, and the titles of their princely families.
The king-grand duke laboured incessantly on the details for hours on end, day after day. ‘These are great matters,’ he said, ‘which are to last for centuries; they require long deliberation and good counsel.’ Finally, on 1 July 1569, the Act of Union was sealed. Standing hat in hand, and surrounded by the clergy, Sigismund-August received the oaths of loyalty from each of the signatories. Then, he led the entire assembly to the church of St Stanisław, knelt before the altar and sang the Te Deum in a strong voice.74
In Muscovy, Ivan IV, angered by news of the Union of Lublin, hastened to one of the crimes which earned him the name of ‘Terrible’. Novgorod, like the new Poland-Lithuania, despised Moscow’s autocratic tradition. Forged letters were produced to show that the archbishop and governor of Novgorod were guilty of treasonable contacts with Sigismund-August. The tsar administered punishment in person. The inhabitants of Novgorod were systematically seized and killed in batches of 500 or 1,000 every day. In five weeks, Russia’s most civilized city was depopulated and reduced to a smouldering heap. Ivan returned to Moscow to prepare the cauldrons of boiling oil and the meat hooks which were to chastise some hundreds of Muscovites suspected of sympathizing with Novgorod. What future for the ‘Republic of goodwill’ with such a neighbour?
Sigismund-August’s last years were tinged with remorse. His constant appeals for love and harmony were bred by the fear that love and harmony were in short supply. In 1569 the Sejm insisted on debating his marital affairs and rose on 12 September without attending to his requests. The provisions for drafting electoral procedure, for creating a central treasury and for preparing judicial reforms were postponed. ‘You see that I am a servant of Death,’ he had told them, ‘no less than Your Lordships. If you do not pay heed, then my work and Yours will be turned to nought.’75 They paid little attention.
Sigismund-August relapsed into despair and insomnia. He locked himself into his castle at Knyszyn near the Lithuanian border and refused to receive his senators. He died on 7 July 1572, surrounded by a motley company of quacks, astrologers and witches, in a room hung in black in memory of Barbara Radziwiłł. His last will repeated his beautiful lifelong wishes which were so unlikely to come true:
By this our last testament, We give and bequeath to our two realms, to the Polish Crown and to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, that love, harmony, and unity… which our forebears cemented for eternity by strong agreements, mutually confirmed… And to whomsoever of the two nations shall hold firmly to the Union… We bequeath Our blessing, that the Lord God in his favour shall grant them honour and power [and] fame both at home and abroad… But whosoever shall profess ingratitude and follow the paths of separation, may they quake before God’s wrath, who in the words of the prophet, hates and curses them who sow dissension between brother and brother…76
The last of the Jagiellons was buried on Wawel Hill in Kraków. The private person of the king-grand duke was dead; his public person rode in effigy to the burial. The royal standard was broken asunder and, with the royal jewels, cast into the grave. This same act symbolized the transfiguration of the Kingdom of Poland and of the grand duchy. The late king had ruled as the hereditary monarch of t
wo separate principalities. He was leaving them united in one elective republic.77
Within the dual Rzeczpospolita, the grand duchy found itself both diminished and strengthened. By losing the southern steppelands in Ukraine (see p. 262), it was reduced to less than half its former size, and with the Ukrainian lands added to the kingdom, its relative size vis-à-vis Poland fell to perhaps 1 : 1.5. It had returned to the traditional Lithuanian-White Ruthenian base of the distant days of Mindaugas. Observers of the Rzeczpospolita would wonder whether, if Ukraine had been set up as a third pillar of the state instead of passing under Polish rule, the resultant triple structure might not have been more balanced. As it was, the grand duchy played a junior role in the Polish-Lithuanian partnership. Yet it possessed a guarantee of internal inviolability, and its representatives could participate in full in both the common Sejm and the royal elections. The so-called Noble Democracy gave the great Lithuanian lords inordinate influence.
The administrative units and regional jurisdictions of the Rzeczpospolita were finally defined in 1581. The grand duchy possessed its own supreme judicial tribunal, which circulated between sessions in three centres: nine palatinates, plus the Duchy of Samogitia, and Livonia. The palatinates were Vilna, Troki, Brest, Minsk, Vitebsk, Mtislav, Polatsk, Seversk and Smalensk, the latter being no more than a residual entity. Each of them was divided into poviats or ‘districts’, and each held its own sejmik or ‘regional assembly of nobles’, sending delegates to the central Diet in Warsaw with precise instructions. The Duchy of Samogitia functioned as a palatinate except that it was divided into twenty-eight ‘tracts’ instead of districts. Livonia would be handed to Sweden in 1621; Seversk in 1634 and the remnant of Smalensk in 1667 to Muscovy. The rest remained intact to 1773, or in some cases to 1795.
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