Class 6: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania (4)
associated with the smithy.
But as with the Slavic paganism, the gods were not separate.
This is much more animistic, it's much more a religion
where everything is in some sense animated by divinity.
So trees were venerated.
Specific groves of trees regardless as important.
In specific groves of trees,
the dead would be burned as a sacrifice.
Specific springs and rivers and rocks were also important.
The Lithuanians, like the Slavs, also didn't have temples
until they made contact with Christians.
And then they began to build temples,
it appears, as a kind of borrowing from the Christians.
We know that they divined omens from the behavior of,
some of them still do, from the behavior
of horses and snakes.
We know that after victories they sacrificed
a third of the spoils to the gods.
We know that horses were of special significance.
That horse skulls were meant to ward off evil spirits.
That two horses in front of a house, on the gable of houses,
was meant to bring good fortune.
We know that if you were important and you died,
you were buried with your horse so that you would
have your horse in the next world.
And Lithuanians also thoughtfully did this
to important people who they captured on the battlefield.
So for example, when they were in battle with
the crusaders, and they captured important knights,
they would thoughtfully burn them to death,
fully armed, on horseback.
That's a mark of privilege.
A major Teutonic Knight who, so the crusading wars
between the crusaders and Lithuanians
were unbelievably fierce on both sides,
and were recorded by the crusaders that way.
The conflict between the crusaders and the Lithuanians
actually makes it into English literature
right at the very beginning.
So if you've had like a high school course
in English literature, where you were forced to read,
where you happily read Chaucer, the Canterbury Tales,
you might remember that when the knight is introduced
as a character in the prologue,
he's described this way.
A knight there was, and that a worthy man,
that from the time that he first began to riding out,
he loved chivalry, truth and honor, freedom and courtesy
above all nations in Prus, Prussia, in Lithau had he reysed
and in Rus.
Lithau is Lithuania and Rus' is, of course, Rus'.
So the Knight in this English story from 1380,
from the 14th century, is a Crusader,
but he's a Crusader in Northeastern Europe.
He's a Crusader in Lithuania.
And that word, he reysed, that's the German word, reyse.
And reyse, in this particular context, every year
the Teutonic Knights declared that there was a reyse,
which meant that all of the flower of chivalry,
all of the Knights from the other Christian countries
were meant to come and join the crusade.
That's what they did.
They had the crusade was a kind of seasonal adventure,
which was called a reyse.
So it's the Teutonic Knight who are forcing Lithuania
to consolidate and who are pushing Lithuania to the south.
The Teutonic Knights creep their way across the Baltic sea
as Polish rulers invite them to come and deal
with pagan problems or other problems.
Teutonic Knight come, Teutonic Knights stay,
Teutonic Knights establish their own state.
They rule Teutonic state along the Baltic Sea.
They do this in defiance of the Polish Kings who say,
or grand Dukes often who say,
we just wanted you to solve this particular problem.
They also do it by exploiting a specific
feature of Western Christianity, which is that
the Teutonic Knights play off between
the Holy Roman Emperor, we'll talk about
what this means later on,
but the Holy Roman Emperor,
the chief secular figure in the west,
the chief secular leader, and the Pope.
They manage to play off between these two patrons
and essentially do what they want and become
a power into themselves.
So these are armed monks.
They are crusaders.
They're men who isolate themselves from the world
who are trained in the spirit of sacrifice.
Their fellow monks find them intimidating.
Their basic program of Christian conversion, as I mentioned,
is that you attack, you kill all the men,
you resettle your own men, and that's baptism,
that's conversion.
Their major achievement was the colonization
of the Baltic Basin, from what's now in Northern Poland,
all the way up to what's now Estonia
where Germans had some kind of significant social
and political presence for the next 700 years until 1945
and the arrival of the red army.
So they begin something which lasts in some form or another
for a very long time.
So it is their war.
We're now getting to the crux,
which I'm sure you already understand,
it is their war against Lithuania which coincides with
and brings about the Lithuanian absorption
of the lands of Rus'.
They are fighting in the late 13th century
into the 14th century.
I'm gonna read you one long quotation
from the chronicler of the Teutonic Knights,
Peter of Dusburg, just because it gives you
the flavor of how they saw it.
The odd kind of respect that the crusaders,
the Teutonic Knights, had for the Lithuanians,
but also the fierceness of this.
This is from 1283.
He writes, 53 years had flowed since the war began
on the Prussian nation, and all the nations
in the said land, Prussia, had been beaten and exterminated
so that not one survived which did not humbly bow the neck
to the Holy Roman Church.
Okay, so that's Prussia, which is gone.
The afore said brethren of the German house, us,
Teutonic Knights, initiated the war against
this mighty people, most hard of neck
and well versed in war, which is neighbor to land of Prussia
dwelling beyond the Nemunas River in the land of Lithuania.
So that's how it looks from the Teutonic Knight's
point of view.
The Lithuanian reaction is not,
we will never become Christian.
Lithuanian reaction seems to have been,
we will not become Christian this way.
We will not become Christian this way.
So in the late 13th century and the early 14th century,
what you have is a kind of geometry of four powers.
Where there's Poland, there's Galicia-Volhynia,
there are the Knights, and there is Lithuania,
and there is What's left of Rus',
which is no longer a political entity.
So what happens is that the Lithuanians,
facing this challenge, move south in the early 14th century.
They attacked the city of Breast,
which is now in Belarus.
By 1323 it appears that they have also controlled Kyiv.
But the crucial thing here is that,
although there seemed to have been some armed engagements
in the beginning, the Lithuanian rule Rus',
not just in a spirit of toleration,
but in the spirit of appropriation.
So they come to the great ruler,
they come to the princes of Rus', and they say,
in their own language, we're not gonna bring anything new
and we're not gonna change anything old.
How do they say it in their own language?
Because remember the Lithuanian Grand Dukes
are ruling a country which is already majority Slavic.
It's already majority Eastern Christian,
it's already majority Slavic,
it already controls some of the lands that had been Rus',
which is Belarus.
So it is not as though Christianity, or orthodoxy,
or even the language is unfamiliar to them.
They know all of these things,
they know what Christians are, right?
They know all of this stuff.
So they say to the princes of Rus',
you don't have to change anything.
We're just gonna marry into your families,
you're gonna regard us as the center of the state,
and you're gonna organize taxes for us.
And that's how it works.
And it seems to have worked very smoothly.
So this process then all comes to a kind of crux
in the last part of the 14th century.
The Lithuanians are pressed from the west,
they have absorbed the lands to the south.
But the way that the Lithuanians actually find a way
to defeat the Teutonic Knights finally
is by making an Alliance with the Poles.
And this is carried out by the second Lithuanian Grand Duke,
whose name I really want you to remember
after Gediminas, which is Jogaila,
or as he's remembered by the Poles, as Jagiello.
So, oh, sorry, I forgot something very important.
The Lithuanian Grand Dukes,
they not only know all about this.
They know about Rus', they know that Rus' existed.
They know that Rus' was a very important state.
And so to their own list of titles they add,
we are the rulers of Rus'.
So the Lithuanian grand Dukes add,
we are the rulers of Rus'.
So from their point of view,
they have not just inherited the territory.
They've inherited also the patrimony,
in the legal sense,
we are the rulers of this thing called Rus'.
And, as I said before, in the earlier part of this lecture,
they inherit the legal language
and they began to use it themselves.
And that's not such a stretch, because remember,
they're used to using Slavic languages.
Slavic languages are nothing new, nothing surprising.
It's good to have a written one.
Okay.
But the way that this history reaches a climax
has to do with Poland.
Poland has a succession crisis.
The king of Poland is a 11, 12, maybe 13 year old girl.
It looks for a moment as though she's gonna be married
to a Hapsburg.
If that had happened, the whole history of our region
would've been very, very different.
But the Habsburg, who was called Wilhelm,
who's riding to claim his Polish bride never makes it,
he's stopped by some Polish Nobles along the way.
And instead this girl is married to a much older man.
I mean, I'm afraid it's a little scandalous.
He's like 40 years older than she is.
Though Lithuania's not scandalized.
So, Jogaila, what is her name by the way?
Jadvyga or Hedwig.
She has a very interesting past, too.
I mean, she has a fascinating past,
she's only just a very young girl,
but she's been raised for interesting things.
But anyway, she turns out to be the king of Poland.
Her name is Jadvyga or Hedwig.
She marries Jogaila.
And in that way, a whole bunch of things happen at once.
The Lithuanians, the ruling family convert to Christianity,
1385, 1386.
Slowly, the Lithuanian nobility,
which includes the old Rusia nobility,
will merge with the Polish nobility
and start to take up some of its norms,
which we'll talk about.
But most importantly, a new state, a defacto new state,
it's a personal union.
It's a personal union between Lithuanian Grand Dukes,
who will also be Polish Kings, is set up
and it will bump along for the next 200 years.
So the Polish, the Lithuanian Grand Dukes
and the Polish Kings are generally gonna be the same people
for quite a while now.
For a couple hundred years.
And what this means for these territories
is hugely important for Kyiv.
We're keeping our focus on Kyiv.
This means that Kyiv is gonna be attached to Vilnius
and to Poland from roughly 1320 until roughly 1670.
For a very long period of time,
which we'll be dealing with in the next several lectures.
It means that this, so there's also gonna be this,
the Northeast, there's also gonna be Galicia-Volhynia,
that most of Rus' is gonna be in this
Lithuanian Polish synthesis for the next several centuries.
Where this all leads to is a famous battle
that all the Polish kids, and actually all the students
from much of Eastern Europe will know about,
which is the battle of Grunwald.
The famous battle of Grunwald which is famous for Poles,
famous for Lithuanians.
It's the battle where decisively, in 1410,
it's the battle which is so shocking to everyone,
which it's referred to by both Hitler and Stalin
during the second world war,
it's still taught as fundamental.
