The Princes

The Radvila map is often attributed to Tomasz Makowski, its principal engraver, but was in fact produced by a group of car­tographers that included Maciej Strubicz. Most of the work on the map was done between 1585 and 1603, while the first known edition was published only in 1613 by Hessel Gerritsz (Gerard) of Amsterdam.³

In many ways, the Radvila map was a continuation of work initiated by King Stefan Batory at the time of the Livonian War (1558-83) and may be regarded as sign of increased involvement of the aristocracy in the political, religious, and cultural realms pre­viously dominated by the king.

All over Europe, the sixteenth century was marked by the strengthening of royal authority, centralization of the state, and regularization of political and social practices. The other side of the coin was increasing aristocratic opposition to this growth. Both tendencies were fully apparent in the preparation and con­clusion of the Union of Lublin, which had as its goal not only the unification of the two parts of the Polish-Lithuanian state but also the strengthening of the crown.

In 1558, after taking control of the Volga trade route by defeat­ing and forcing into submission the two successors of the Gold­en Horde, the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates, Ivan the Terrible moved his armies westward, trying to gain access to the Baltic Sea. The Livonian War, which Ivan started that year, would last for a quarter century and see Sweden, Denmark, Lithuania and, eventually, Poland involved in the struggle. In 1563, Muscovite troops crossed the borders of the Grand Duchy, taking the city of Polatsk (now in Belarus) and raiding Vitsebsk, Shklou, and Orsha. This defeat mobilized support for the Union among the lesser Lithuanian nobility. Given Muscovite claims to the lands of Kyivan Rus', which included not only Polatsk but also the rest of the Ukrainian-Belarusian territories of the Grand Duchy, the future looked bleak for the Duchy’s ruling elite. Union with the Kingdom of Poland now seemed the only possible solution.

In December 1568, Sigismund Augustus convened two Di­ets in the city of Lublin—one for the Kingdom, the other for the Grand Duchy—in the hope that their representatives would hammer out conditions for the new union. The negotiations be­gan on a positive note, as the two sides agreed to joint election of the king, a common Diet, or parliament, and broad autonomy for the Grand Duchy. Nonetheless, the magnates would not return the royal lands in their possession—the principal demand of the Executionists, a powerful group within the Polish nobility that demanded the recovery of public and royal lands illegally held by the magnates. Directed by Mikalojus Radvila (Mikolaj Radziwill) the Red, the leader of the Lithuanian Calvinists and the victo­rious commander of the Lithuanian army in its recent clashes with Muscovite troops, the Lithuanian delegates made no con­cessions.

The Lithuanian magnates who had feared losing their prov­inces to Muscovy were now losing them to Poland instead. To stop a hostile takeover by their powerful Polish partner, the Lith­uanians returned to Lublin to sign an agreement dictated by the Polish delegates. They were too late. In March, the Podlachia pa­latinate on the Ukrainian-Belarusian-Polish ethnic border went to Poland. Volhynia followed in May, and on 6 June, one day before the resumption of the Polish-Lithuanian talks, the Ky- ivan and Podolian lands were transferred to Poland as well. The Ukrainian palatinates were incorporated into the Kingdom not as a group but one by one, with no guarantees but those pertaining to the use of the Ruthenian (Middle Ukrainian) language in the courts and administration and the protection of the rights of the Orthodox Church. The Lithuanian aristocrats could only accept the new reality—they stood to lose even more if they continued to resist the Union.⁵

Kostiantyn Ostrozky, by far the most influential of the Ukrainian princes, decided the fate of the Union and his land by throwing his support behind the king. The Lublin border, which cut the Grand Duchy in half and separated the future Ukrainian and Belarusian territories, reinforced differences long in the making. Historically, the Kyiv Land and Galicia-Volhynia differed significantly from the Belarusian lands to the north. From the tenth to the fourteenth century, they were core areas of independent or semi-independent principalities, and, if one judges by the Primary Chronicle and its continuations in Kyiv and Galicia-Volhynia, their identities differed from those of the other Rus' lands.

At the Lublin Diet, the Ukrainian elites saw little benefit in maintaining the de facto independence of the Grand Duchy, which was ill equipped to resist increasing pressure from the Crimean and Noghay Tatars. The Kingdom of Poland could help the Grand Duchy fight the war with Muscovy, but it was unlikely to assist the Ukrainians in their low-intensity war with the Tatars.

A different attitude might be expected if the frontier provinc­es were to be incorporated into the Kingdom. As things turned out, the Volhynian princely families not only kept their posses­sions but dramatically increased them under Polish tutelage. Kostiantyn Ostrozky, who played a key role in the Lublin Diet, kept his old posts as captain of the town of Volodymyr, head of the Volhynian nobility, and palatine of Kyiv.

The opposition between the Volhynian princes who helped Sigismund Augustus divide the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, among whom Ostrozky was the most prominent, and the Lithu­anian aristocrats did not last very long, as both camps soon found common ground in developing political and cultural projects that strengthened their independence of royal authority. The cultural awakening took place on both sides of the new Polish-Lithuanian border, fueled by the political aspirations of the princes and di­rectly linked to the religious conflicts of the time. In Lithuania, the Radvila family set an example of linking politics, religion, and culture. The main opponent of the Union of Lublin, Mikalojus Radvila the Red, was also the leader of Polish and Lithuanian Calvinism and the founder of a school for Calvinist youth. His cousin, Mikalojus Radvila the Black, funded the printing of the first complete Polish translation of the Bible, which was issued in the town of Brest on the Ukrainian-Belarusian ethnic border.

The first to do so was an Orthodox magnate, Hryhorii Khod- kevych (in Belarusian, Khadkevich), who, like the two Radvila cousins, had led the Lithuanian army as the Duchy’s grand het­man—one of the supreme posts in the hierarchy. In 1566, two years after the appearance of the Polish Bible, Khodkevych invited two Moscow refugees, the printers Ivan Fedorov and Petr Msti- slavets, to his town of Zabludow (Zabludau). At Khodkevych’s request and with his sponsorship, they published a number of books in Church Slavonic there. Khodkevych died in 1572, caus­ing the printers to stop their work, but his initiative would have consequences.

A few years after Khodkevych’s death, Kostiantyn Ostrozky began his own publishing project in Volhynia. In 1574 he moved his residence from the Volhynian town of Dubno to nearby Os- trih. He hired an Italian architect then living in Lviv to build new fortifications, the remains of which can still be seen today in Ostrih. He also employed one of Khodkevych’s printers, Ivan Fedorov, who was summoned to Ostrih to take part in the prince’s most ambitious cultural undertaking—the publication of the full Church Slavonic text of the Bible. In his new capital, Ostrozky assembled a team of scholars who compared Greek and Church Slavonic texts of the Bible, emended the Church Slavonic trans­lations, and published the most authoritative text of Scripture ever produced by Orthodox scholars. The project was truly inter­national in scope, involving participants not only from Lithuania and Poland but also from Greece, while the copies of the Bible on which they worked originated in places as diverse as Rome and Moscow.

The close contacts between Kostiantyn Ostrozky and the Lithuanian aristocrats, as well as their shared interest in support­ing cultural projects with broad political ramifications, support the assumption of those scholars who claim that it was indeed Kostiantyn Ostrozky who helped Prince Mikalojus Kristupas Radvila to produce the map of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

While Radvila harbored no political ambitions that might un­dermine his loyalty to the king and the Commonwealth—he converted from Calvinism to Catholicism and opposed the Ze- brzydowski Rebellion of 1606—his map suggests that he had never given up the historical and cultural claims to the lands of the Grand Duchy lost as a result of the Union of Lublin. It was their interest in those territories, especially the ones located along the Dnieper River, that united Ostrozky and Radvila.⁷