By Serhiy MAKHUN, The Day
In the late fourteenth century, Ukraine was completely under the control
of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. On August 15, 1385, the Union of Krewo
was signed, which determined the historical prospects of Poland, Lithuania,
Ukraine, and Belarus for almost four centuries. Pagan Lithuania, ruled
by Grand Duke Jogaila who coveted the vacant Polish crown (the Polish nobility
selected as Queen the Hungarian King Louis's younger daughter Jadwiga and
managed to marry her off to the young Lithuanian neighbor), gained nothing.
The Poles wanted to turn the lands of Lithuania (with Ukrainian and Belarusian
estates accounting for about 90% of its territory) into ordinary provinces.
Lithuanian dukes felt themselves last in line soon after signing the
Union of Krewo and managed to virtually disavow it in 1400, forcing Jogaila,
now Polish King Jagiello, to place his cousin Vytautas (Witold), the son
of Kestutis, Jagiello's uncle, on the grand ducal throne. But one of the
conditions was, no doubt, in favor of Poland: Lithuania remained independent,
but Vytautas still recognized the supremacy of Jagello and his descendants
on the Polish throne. As early as the 1390s, they began together to curtail
the rights and freedoms of the East Slavic Orthodox principalities, then
part of Lithuania, perpetually shuffling local princes like a deck of cards,
transferring them from more to less important thrones and often confiscating
their lands.
The Ukrainian lands thus lost the last vestiges of independence, with
each inhabitant being a subject of the Lithuanian realm. The process of
Polonization and conversion to Catholicism assumed a continual nature.
For only a little earlier the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had in fact been
an East Slav principality, with ethnic Lithuanians making up a tiny minority
of the population and Old Ruthenian (the common ancestor of Belarusian
and Ukrainian -Ed.) being the official language (in the fourteenth century).
Jagiello, having embraced Catholicism immediately after his wedding,
launched a virtual crusade against Orthodoxy. The princes and boyars (even
from the Lithuanian dynasty), who kept to the Eastern rite, had their political
freedom restricted. Betraying one's ancestral faith became a condition
for social mobility.
But then at the end of the fourteenth century the political arena of
Lithuania saw the advent of Svidrigaila, prince of Vitebsk, son of Algirdas,
and younger brother of Jagiello. The latter managed to convince Svidrigaila
to adhere to Catholicism, for he had always leaned toward Orthodoxy, and
his wife was Orthodox Princess Anna of Tver. When still young, the restless,
impulsive, and bellicose Svidrigaila always took part in conspiracies against
Jagiello and Vytautas. For example, in 1394 he allied with the Teutonic
Order whose troops laid siege to Vilnius. As the Prince of Siversk, he
did not want to reconcile himself to the power of Vytautas, thinking that
Jagiello had sacrificed him in the interests of the new royal dynasty.
In 1407 Svidrigaila went into voluntary exile to Moscow. The Grand Prince
of Muscovy Vasily Dmitrievich gave him in fief the cities of Vladimir and
Pereyaslavl and three more small towns, with due account of the exile's
high rank. But Svidrigaila, an adventurist by nature, sought, in common
with the Tatar Khan Edigei, every opportunity to make Vasily Dmitrievich
quarrel with his father-in-law Vytautas. The latter two made peace at last
in the fall of 1409, while junior Russian princes were offended at such
great power being given a foreigner. Svidrigaila had to return to Lithuania.
Yet he found no rest there either. His unbridled nature led him to a new
conspiracy now in alliance with the Teutonic Knights, the main enemies
of Lithuania, to topple Vytautas. Failures continued to plague the ill-fated
pretender, for Vytautas had learned about his cousin's plot and threw him
into a dungeon.
Svidrigaila spends almost ten years in castles and at last found himself
in Kremianka. The Ukrainian and Belarusian princes, who had long been attempting
to set their leader free, could finally learn about his whereabouts. Danylo
of Ostroh and Prince Oleksandr Nis Volyn, found a way to get in touch with
the captive. In 1418 they and their retinue attacked the castle at a predetermined
hour and liberated Svidrigaila.
By that time, Jagiello and Vytautas had made great progress in fighting
the Teutonic Knights: in 1410 the united Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian forces
dealt a crushing blow to the crusaders near GrЯnwald, marking the beginning
of the order's irreversible decline. But Svidrigaila decided after liberation
to resume his struggle, again without calculating his own strength. Having
captured Lutsk, he had to seek refuge in Hungary, fleeing from Vytautas's
forces. Later, the Hungarian King Zsigmond (Sigismund) managed to reconcile
the brothers, and Svidrigaila received the faraway throne of Chernihiv
and began to patiently bide his time.
That time came when Vytautas died in 1430. Jagiello spread a rumor that
Vytautas had willed Lithuania to him on the eve of his death. But the Lithuanian
and even more so Ruthenian princes could not stand the Polonized Jagiello.
They elected Svidrigaila Grand Duke. The elder brother, a decrepit old
man, could not (and did not much want to) continue the struggle against
his younger sibling. Polish nobles at the Sejm of Sandomierz even accused
their king of treason. They forced Jagiello to open hostilities in Podillia
and Volyn. In the summer of 1431, at the head of the Polish nobility (ironic
that the Lithuanian-born Polish king goes to war against the lands he once
ruled), he crossed the Bug, captured Volodymyr Volynsk and laid siege to
Lutsk Castle. Svidrigaila's best commander Jursza managed to rebuff several
attempts to storm the fortress, the siege continued, and the warring sides
finally agreed on a two-year armistice.
The Grand Duke of Lithuania made the major mistake of resting on his
laurels, without heeding external threats, while his enemies, first of
all the Lithuanian feudal lords, irritated with the increasing influence
of the Orthodox Ruthenian princes allied with Svidrigaila, and the Poles
made deft use of these sentiments. Their messenger to the king, Lawrenty
Zoronba, organized a classic medieval plot headed by Vytautas's brother
Zygmunt (Sigismund), the Prince of Stary Dub and the son of Kestutis. He
suddenly attacked Svidrigaila, who made a hairbreadth escape from Vilnius
to Polotsk. The Ukrainian lands, Vitebsk and Smolensk remained loyal to
him. The usurper could not hold the grand ducal throne on his own, so he
came under the Polish crown, acknowledging himself, like Vytautas before
him, a vassal to it. In fact the Grand Duchy of Lithuania split in two.
At first Zygmunt was afraid to challenge Svidrigaila in battle, for the
Lithuanian princes harbored a grudge against him for excessive concessions
to the Poles.
In 1434 Polish King Jagiello died, and the nobles placed on the throne
his son Wladyslaw, who was next in succession and the second representative
of the Jagiellonian dynasty (hence the name of the Jagiellonian University
in Krakow). Svidrigaila decided to take advantage of the problems stemming
from the interregnum in Poland and to return, finally, to Vilnius. But
again he, the otherwise brave and selfless warrior, suffered a humiliating
defeat on the river Sviata near the town of Wilkomir (1435). This was the
ignominious end of his foray into Lithuania. Svidrigaila was fatally unlucky
on the battlefield. 42 Orthodox princes were taken prisoner by Zygmunt.
As to the ill-starred former duke himself, he again fled, safe and sound,
from the battlefield. Zygmunt's triumph reached its apex when Volyn also
refused to help his adversary for fear of being subjugated by Polish lords,
with whom the unscrupulous Svidrigaila had already come to an agreement
on mutual assistance.
In the fall of 1438 Zygmunt became virtually undisputed master of the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Known for his toughness, cruelty, and immorality,
even by fifteenth century standards, he soon found himself abandoned even
by his closest supporters. On Palm Sunday of 1440 Svidrigaila supporters,
princes Ivan and Oleksandr Czartoryski, killed Zygmunt, the son of Kestutis,
in Trakaj Castle "at the will of all nobles and princes," as the chronicles
say. After the later had been assassinated, the Lithuanian and Ruthenian
princes developed some differences of opinion. Who is going to be the Grand
Duke: Wladyslaw of the Jagiellonian dynasty, and King of Poland, Zygmunt's
son Michal or Svidrigaila? This interregnum was long lasting. Moreover,
Wladyslaw was killed in a famous battle against the Turks near Varna in
1444. The Lithuanians at last elected as their Grand Duke Jagiello's son
Kazimierz who, embracing in his hands the wide expanses of Europe's largest
state of the time, would soon also become Polish king.
Meanwhile, Svidrigaila was left for the rest of his life in Volyn as
an appanage prince. He died a natural death in 1452 at a quite advanced
age, which was quite rare in those times. His rule was absolute in Volyn,
but this did not, of course, satisfy Svidrigaila's lust for power and temperament.
His historical failure drew a certain line. For over two centuries,
Ukraine became a downtrodden component part of the powerful Catholic Polish
Kingdom which succeeded in subjugating Lithuania, the other member of the
Union. This became possible due to the apparent decline and degradation
of a once glorious duchy. The unbridled adventurist Svidrigaila, son of
Algirdas, made against his wish a significant contribution to this process.






