How does our contemporary picture long-dead rulers? Most often like this: he was bellicose, always riding a horse, his whole life was a chain of endless wars, and he is almost untutored in political gamesmanship. This is an erroneous stereotype. Of course, all nobles of that epoch, without exception, had be good at wielding a sword. But even in those times, political leaders arose who knew perfectly well how to act not so much by brawn as by brains. A vivid example of this is the life of Grand Duke Vytautas (Witold), whose almost 40-year rule also embraced a huge part of the Ukrainian lands from Podillia to Kyiv and from the Black Sea coast to Chernihiv.
The state Vytautas led in 1392- 1430 was unique in many aspects. In spite of its historic name of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, ethnic Lithuanians only accounted for 5- 7% of the population. In essence, the Grand Duchy was a common state of the Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Belarus, and, partially, the Russian (it also included the Smolensk area) peoples for two centuries. Therefore, although the Great Princes Gediminas, Algirdas (Olgierd), and Vytautas were Lithuanians by origin, the period of their rule is an integral part of Ukrainian national history.
It would be a gross oversimplification to regard the annexation of Slavic lands by the Lithuanian nobility as a routine foreign invasion. As a rule, the common pattern was as follows: Ukrainian or Belarusian towns, rendered desolate by Tatar forays and Polish encroachments, would conclude sort of a politico-military contract with the Grand Duke of Lithuania: they recognized his authority, purely nominal at first. In return, the Duke guaranteed them military defense from the Tatars (and sometimes even from the Poles) and in addition the inviolability of their previous politico- economic systems. “We neither remove the old nor instill new things,” the Grand Dukes would say. They would appoint the ruler (often representing the ruling dynasty) who quickly converted himself to the Orthodox faith and learned the then Old Ruthenian language (ancestor of contemporary Ukrainian and Belarusian — Ed. ), the official language of the Grand Duchy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In a word, he would rapidly be assimilated. The influence of the Slavic politico- cultural element on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s life-pattern was so strong that Mykhailo Hrushevsky considered precisely this state as a legitimate successor to Kyivan Rus and the Halych- Volyn Principality.
Vytautas was the son of Duke Kestutis (Kiejstut), brother of Grand Duke Algirdas (1345- 1377), during whose rule the newly-formed Slavic-Lithuanian state reached unprecedented might. Vytautas’s road to the Grand Ducal throne was hardly strewn with roses: during the bitter power struggle that began immediately after the death of Algirdas, the new Grand Duke Jagiello (Jogaila), the cousin of Vytautas, ordered Duke Kestutis, our hero’s father, arrested and secretly executed. Vytautas had to flee abroad, to Marienburg, Prussia. Here he displayed for the first time his persistence and ability to successfully enter into temporary political alliances: under the pretext that his legitimate rights had been violated, he turned for help to the Teutonic Knights (the same whom he, together with Jagiello at the head of the Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian-Russian troops, would beat to a pulp in the Battle of GrЯnwald! But this would happen 28 years later) and, after a few years of struggle, forced Jagiello to recognize him as ruler of the Great Duchy of Lithuania in 1392.
Seven years before, in 1385, the Union of Krewo had been concluded, under which the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (including the Slav lands) and the Catholic Kingdom of Poland were brought together in personal union under the aegis of the Polish king who was simultaneously the Lithuanian grand duke. The Polish throne, however, was ascended by Jagiello who had to cede power in his homeland to Vytautas. Under the conditions signed, both rulers were politically independent of each other; should Vytautas die, Jagiello would become Grand Duke and finally form a unified state; if Jagiello, the Polish nobility pledged not to elect the king without Vytautas.
The problem was whether the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (particularly, the Ukrainian principalities making part of it) would preserve their political, economic, and religious (Orthodox) independence or lose it and be absorbed by Catholic Poland. Thus the years of Vytautas’s rule was a time of momentous political choice. The Grand Duke showed a striking facility in the art of maneuver. Without spurning the obligations his state had undertaken to Jagiello’s Poland in the Union of Krewo, Vytautas pursued a sufficiently independent policy, striving to strip the signed agreement of any real content. Historians have long argued whether Vytautas’s ambition was the decisive factor explaining his relative independence and what was the ultimate direction of his policy (Ivan Krypiakevych and Mykhailo Hrushevsky believed it was toward Poland, while Dmytro Doroshenko thought otherwise).
Speaking in modern political language, the point was to choose the right “strategic partners.” Then as now, this was an important and complicated task. Vytautas hesitated for a few years. It was difficult to curb the onslaught of Teutonic Knights without alliance with Poland, but, on the other hand, the Ukrainian and Belarusian Orthodox princes were highly suspicious of the attempts of the Polish “Catholic” elite to oust (and, in perspective, to destroy) Orthodoxy even from the lands subject to by Vytautas. There also was the third factor: the increasing strength of the Muscovites. The Grand Duke of Lithuania himself tried to go down the “centrist” (as it would be called today) line, distancing himself from the two religious poles. But the Catholics brought pressure to bear on him. Also important was the political aspect. Vytautas’s aim, which he pursued cautiously without unnecessary verbal declarations, but persistently, was to become a king fully independent of Poland. But the medieval legal traditions required permission of the Holy Roman Emperor. While laying the groundwork for this, “the Lithuanian and Ruthenian boyars” proclaimed Vytautas “the king of the Lithuanians and Ruthenians” at a secret conference in 1398. Full political independence was only a step away.
Ukraine faced the question of whether Vytautas’s previous course would be continued and completed (one of the contemporaries referred to the Grand Duke as “consolidator of the system”) or would their lands come under Jagiello’s? The difference was that the Lithuanian dukes and boyars, unlike the Polish szlachta , considered Ukrainians and Belarusians equal (or almost equal) to themselves. Vytautas looked upon “consolidation of the system” in the Ukrainian lands primarily as a political reform. To do so, he tried to restrict the political influence of numerous local princes who thought they were masters of their territories (Kyiv, Volyn, Chernihiv, etc.). The Grand Duke began constantly throwing princes off their estates, where they enjoyed strong local support to entirely different places where they were completely dependent on his will. Despite all the contradictions of Vytautas’s political and religious course (the main thing is he never decided what strata of society — Slavs or Lithuanians, Orthodox or Catholics — to rely on), these measures were objectively a step forward.
In his economic policy, Vytautas paid special attention to urban development. While he was in power, the towns literally thrived and many of them were even granted the Magdeburg Law and, hence, the right of local government and free trade. But the Grand Duke always remembered the military factor. Dozens of fortresses were built on his order in 1392-1398 in southern Ukraine and on the Black Sea coast in order to protect the state and the local population from the Tatars.
This “southward expansion” was dealt a staggering blow, however, following the defeat of Vytautas’s troops in the battle against the Tatars on the river Vorskla (Poltava region) in 1399, when he was recklessly carried away while pursuing the enemy advance guard and fell into an ambush. This resulted in horrible raids by the nomads on Kyiv, which was leveled to the ground, and other towns. Yet, political mastery came in handy for the Grand Duke this time also. He would enter into successful political alliances with some steppe nomads against the others, even forcing the Tatars to forsake their “rights” to the Rus’ (Ukrainian) lands in favor of Vytautas.
What proved far more difficult was political relationship between Vytautas and Jagiello. In spite of Vytautas’s wide international links (his daughter Sophia was the wife of Grand Prince Vasily I of Muscovy; the Danish king was also his relative) and in spite of the alliance between Vytautas and Jagiello in the Battle of GrЯnwald (July 15, 1410), which allowed the Slav nations to thwart the Teutonic threat, Poland’s political pressure on Vytautas was mounting. The Poles took advantage of the Vorskla defeat and worked successfully for concluding (in 1412, though) the Union of Gorodel which granted the Lithuanian boyars equal rights with the Polish nobility provided they converted to Catholicism. Although Vytautas also took some steps toward the Orthodox hierarchy, particularly, instructing them to elect a metropolitan of their own in 1416, Catholicism remained on the rise.
Grand Duke Vytautas died at the age of 79 in October 1430 on the eve of seeing his old dream, a royal coronation, coming true. He had managed to enlist the support of Emperor Sigismund (having also “asked the permission” of Jagiello for the coronation, he never received it, of course, so he further acted decisively and independently), but the Poles held back the crown itself en route (more than a formality in that epoch), and Vytautas died, waiting for it of the old age along with “sadness and aggravation” as his contemporaries said. The expeditions of Duke Svidrigaila (Swydrigiello), Vytautas’s other cousin (see: Serhiy Makhun, “Duke Svidrigaila: Adventurist or State Builder?” The Day , No. 12, March 30, 1999), were the last attempt of the Grand Duchy’s Orthodox Slavic population to defend their independence. As to Vytautas, his 38-year rule again confirm the old truism: a state of your own, even with endless problems, is incomparably more important than the most beautiful foreign land.
