Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (48 page)

The Khanate of Crimea was another menacing newcomer. The remnants of the original Mongol Horde had dispersed; but an important fragment of it, which had taken over the Crimean peninsula and converted to Islam, revived former fears. These Crimean Tartars enjoyed a near-impregnable base, and they grew rich from Black Sea trade and piracy and from inland raids; they also benefited from the protection of the Ottoman sultan.
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In 1399, on the River Vorskla near Ukrainian Poltava, they routed a grand ducal army under Vytautas, effectively terminating his political plans, and in the fifteenth century their raiding parties began to penetrate deep both into Muscovy and the grand duchy. These activities on the ‘Wild Steppes’ of the grand duchy’s southern expanses gave rise to the formation of self-defence communities of ‘Cossacks’ on the lower Dniepr (
Kozak
is a Turkish word meaning ‘adventurer’ or ‘freebooter’). Here was Europe’s ultimate borderland. Its Slavonic name,
Ukraina
, meant ‘On the Edge’: a counterpart to the American ‘Frontier’. Cossacks and Tartars were Europe’s ‘cowboys and Indians’. Centuries would pass before they were tamed.
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Kiev in particular remained exposed to Tartar attacks. One such assault in 1416 preceded a siege that was successfully resisted; another in 1483 led to the city’s sacking. The return of the metropolitans to residence there proves that ancient traditions were still alive. So, too, does the magnificent Kievan Psalter (1397), containing more than 300 spectacular miniatures.
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The growth of municipal pride is evidenced by the introduction of Magdeburg Law (the most widespread set of municipal rights used for the incorporation of cities in Eastern Europe), by the construction of a wooden
Ratusha
, or ‘town hall’, that lasted until modern times, and by the adoption in 1471 of the city’s emblem, the Archangel Michael. Merchants continued to be drawn to fairs where the river trade met the steppe trails. But Kiev trailed behind Vil’nya.

The grand duchy was to reach its farthest limits when the Crimean khans ceded sections of the Black Sea coast in the mid-fifteenth century in return for military assistance. The territory, largely uninhabited, was known as
Dykra
, the ‘Wasteland’. It contained a couple of fortified ports, Kara Kerman (later Ochakiv) and Hacibey (later Odessa), and apart from some nomadic tribes, nothing much else. The grand duchy could neither defend it nor develop it, and eventually abandoned it to the Ottomans.
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Over the decades, the Jagiellons and their entourage, who left Vilnius in 1386 and took up residence in the Royal Castle at Kraków, became thoroughly Polonized. Jogaila and his two sons were bilingual, as was Jogaila’s grandson, Alexander Jagiellończyk, who ruled in the grand duchy before ruling Poland as well. But by the sixteenth century, the royal and grand-ducal courts were almost exclusively Polish-speaking. Back home in Vilnius-Vil’nya, the dominant administrative language was Slavonic
ruski
, not Baltic Lithuanian.

Similar adjustments occurred among the grand duchy’s nobility. Prior to the Union of Horodło, power had rested firmly in the hands of a ruler whose subjects owed him absolute fealty. Under Vytautas, however, a policy of enfeoffment was instigated, that is, of investing nobles with fiefs and creating a class of feudal vassals. The ruler increasingly exercised power indirectly through loyal courtiers and servants who were rewarded with huge grants of land in each of the main localities. In due course, as the distant grand dukes grew less and less inclined to interfere, a small number of powerful families put down roots and turned themselves into hereditary lords. Some of them were destined to become the largest landowners in the whole of Europe. With few exceptions, these fortunes were created by individuals of either Lithuanian or Ruthenian descent, such as Gostautas (Gasztold) or Ostrozki (Ostrogski), but their descendants functioned effortlessly in the highest circles of all the Jagiellonian realms. By the sixteenth century, a score of magnates controlled 30 per cent of the grand duchy’s land, leaving the remaining 70 per cent in the hands of some 19,000 minor
boyars
, of the Church, or of the grand duke’s domain. A military register (see
Table 2
) drawn from 1528 clearly displays the magnatial preponderance. These names would reverberate throughout the grand duchy’s history.

Table 2. Military Register (1528)
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None of the magnates of Litva faced a more star-studded future than the Radziwiłłs, yet their origins were obscure, and their rise to prominence occurred late and quickly. The legend that they were descended from the last pagan archpriest of Vilnius is a fabrication. The first of the clan was Krystyn Ościk, the castellan of Vil’nya from 1417 until 1442, whose son’s first name became the family’s surname. Long life, lavish dowries, numerous offspring, high office and territorial appetite did the rest. The clan was firmly ensconced by the time the Jagiellonian era came to an end. From then on, their record of office in the grand duchy was unrelenting: 7 hetmans or ‘Supreme Commanders’, 8 chancellors, 5 marshals, 13 palatines of Vil’nya, 6 palatines of Troki, 2 bishops, 1 cardinal and a total of 40 senators. Their motto read: ‘
Bóg Nam Radzi’
– ‘God Advises Us’.
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The assembling of the largest estate lands in the grand duchy took about a century. Krystyn Ościk had no great fortune, but his great-grandsons accumulated
c.
14,000 homesteads with a serf population of
c
. 90,000. There were three branches: the Radziwiłłs of Rajgród and Gonia˛dz on the Polish frontier, who died out in 1542, the Radziwiłłs of Nieświez˙ and Ołyka in the south, and the Radziwiłłs of Birze close to Livonia. They obtained properties by serving the grand dukes, who rewarded them well, and by marrying wealthy wives. But they also purchased land, broke new ground in the wilderness, and took in estates as security against loans. Their key property of Nieświez˙ arrived in their portfolio with Jan I’s third wife in 1523. Mir was received in grant. Ołyka, on the other hand, which lay beyond the Pripyat’ in Volhynia, was discarded, and eventually became the seat of the Czartoryskis. Yet, by the 1550s, when Mikołaj ‘the Black’ and Mikołaj ‘the Red’ were the favourite ministers of the king and grand duke Sigismund-August, and Mikołaj the Red’s sister, Barbara, was queen, they had outrun all competitors. The permanence of their fortunes was to be sealed in 1586. In return for supplying the Crown with an annual quota of troops, the Radziwiłł estates were raised to the status of an
Ordynacja
(entail), which could never be legally dispersed.

Their palace at Nieświez˙ lies in the rolling country near the source of the Nieman, halfway between Minsk and Pinsk. It was one of the three Radziwiłł estates entailed in 1586, and was developed by Jan I’s son, Mikołaj Krzysztof ‘Sierotka’ (1549–1616), ‘the Orphan’. Completed in 1599, it was graced by Bernadoni’s Baroque Corpus Christi church to mark the family’s return to Catholicism at various times during the Counter-Reformation. Its five wings boasted 106 main rooms, an entrance gate, a clock tower, a parade ground and park. It was later extended by Prince Michał Kazimierz ‘Rybeńko’ (1702–62), the ninth
ordinatus
, whose wife Franciszka Wiśniowiecka was a playwright, who demanded and received her own theatre. Though robbed and sacked in various wars, the fabric was never destroyed, and it has survived, like the castle of Mir, to be designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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Each of the key castles of the magnatial estates grew into a small-scale capital, overshadowing the modest incorporated towns. The growth of the magnates was also accompanied by an influx of Jews, who were attracted both by the commercial possibilities and by the demand for literate administrators. In this, the grand duchy followed in the footsteps of Poland, which since the mid-fourteenth century had been Europe’s main safe haven for persecuted Jewry. The stereotypical image of rural towns throughout the grand duchy presents a picture of a Polish or Polonized landowner, a small middle class of strong Jewish complexion, and a surrounding peasant mass of illiterate serfs, Lithuanians or Ruthenians.

Given the increased influence of the magnates, the governments of Jagiellonian Litva took the form of a partnership between the grand duke or his deputies and the Lords’ Council. (As yet, there was nothing equivalent to the Polish
Sejm
or parliament that first assembled in the late fifteenth century.) The grand dukes never formally surrendered their absolute powers, but since they were frequently absent in Poland, the Council was able to assume far-reaching responsibilities. At the regional level, the Polish model was followed. The grand duke’s representative, the
wojewoda
or ‘palatine’, exercised supreme political and military authority in each of the palatinates except in the far south beyond Kiev, where Tartars and Cossacks roamed at will. ‘Ukraina’ only felt the rod of government intermittently from the rewards and punishments meted out by royal/grand-ducal expeditions.

The great offices of state were reserved for a narrow circle of magnates. The same surnames recur. The
hetman wielki
or ‘great hetman’ commanded the military forces of the grand duchy, and was expected to lead them in person; he supervised a network of castellans charged with defending the grand-ducal castles and organizing regional defence. The
kanclerz
or ‘chancellor’ headed the civilian administration, based in Vil’nya, and was assisted by the palatines and district
starostas
, whose function had originally been military but was gradually transformed into that of regional and local executives.

Attempts to modernize the administration of the grand duchy were hampered by the absence of a uniform legal code, but this deficiency was remedied in 1522 by a commission convened on the grand duke’s orders. The ‘First Lithuanian Statute’ was implemented seven years later. It consisted of 282 articles in 13 chapters, many of them drawn from the ancient code of Kievan Rus’, the
Russkaya Pravda
. It was handwritten in the
ruski
language of White Ruthenia, and has survived in several copies. The first article states that ‘all citizens of the grand duchy of Lithuania shall be judged by the same court regardless of their rank and title’.
Chapter 3
summarizes the privileges of the nobility,
chapter 4
, family law, and
chapters 11
,
12
and
13
, criminal law. Many extravagant claims have been made about the Lithuanian Statutes, suggesting, for instance, that they were the only comprehensive legal codex between Justinian and Napoleon. If this is an exaggeration, the achievement was certainly real.
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