Duke SVIDRIGAILA: Adventurist or State-Builder?

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.