The Union of Poland and Lithuania

Once the issue of Galicia was settled, the political leaders of Poland and Lithuania realized that they shared important common interests. Both countries were threatened by the aggressive designs of the Teutonic Order, which controlled the Baltic coast.

In 1385, in a small Belorussian town, the two sides concluded the Union of Krevo. In return for the hand of Jadwiga and, perhaps more appealing, the title of king of Poland, Jagiełło agreed, among other conditions, to the acceptance of Catholicism for himself and the Lithuanians and to attach “for all eternity” his Lithuanian and Ukrainian lands to the crown of Poland.

It seemed, from the formal point of view at least, that in return for the Polish crown, Jagiełło had agreed to liquidate the Grand Principality. But no matter what the Polish magnates and Jagiełło agreed upon, the Grand Principality was too big and vibrant, its elite too self-confident to allow itself to be absorbed by Poland. Lithuanian and Ukrainian opposition to Polish influence galvanized around Jagiełło’s talented and ambitious cousin, Vytautas (Vitovt), who, in 1392, forced the king to recognize his de facto control of the Grand Principality.

For the Ukrainian nobles – the masses hardly mattered politically – the preservation of the autonomy of the Grand Principality was a matter of great importance because unlike the Poles, the Lithuanians treated them as equals. Moreover, Vytautas followed two policies that warmed the hearts of his Ukrainian subjects. By renewing Algirdas’s drive to the east, he continued the “gathering of Rus’” lands. And he pushed southward with the avowed purpose of subjugating the fragmented remnants of the Golden Horde, building in the process a system of fortifications to protect his subjects from the nomads. But the strong-willed Vytautas also instituted measures that were much less pleasing to the Ukrainians. To appreciate their significance, a few general remarks about the political structure of the Grand Principality are in order. The political policies of the Lithuanian grand princes

In a certain sense, the Grand Principality was similar to Kievan Rus’. It was a hodgepodge of semi-independent principalities, ruled by members of Gediminas’s dynasty and clustered around a core area of which Vilnius was the capital and the seat of the grand prince. There was, however, a crucial difference, especially evident during the reign of Vytautas, that allowed Lithuania to avoid the fragmentation that Kievan Rus’ experienced: the Lithuanian grand princes were clearly supreme rulers, not merely first among the equal members of the dynasty. By introducing a series of reforms in the 1390s, Vytautas saw to it that this did not change. The problem, as he perceived it, was that many Ukrainized princes of the Gediminas dynasty had sprung such deep roots in their principalities that they were more committed to local interests than to those of the Grand Principality as a whole.

To remedy the situation, Vytautas systematically reshuffled the princely holdings so as to remove the princes from their local bases of support. For example, Fedir Liubartovych was deprived, piece by piece, of his rich Volhynian lands. In exchange he was offered (but did not even bother to accept) the much less attractive Novhorod-Siversk principality, which was taken from Volodymyr Algirdovych, who, in turn, received a lesser holding. If a prince resisted, as did Fedir Koriatovych of Podilia, he was accused of disobedience, attacked by Vytautas’s army, and driven into exile. In place of the semi-independent princes, Vytautas appointed his own servitors, who were often untitled boyars and who held their lands “at the Grand Prince’s pleasure.” Even petty boyars were exposed to change. In order to retain their lands, they were obligated to perform military service for the Grand Prince. Thus, the Ukrainian elite experienced strong, centralized rule of the type it had never known before.

While these policies caused widespread dissatisfaction among the Ukrainians, even more unsettling developments followed. In 1413, at Horodlo, Jagiełło and Vytautus agreed to grant the Catholic boyars of Lithuania the same far-ranging rights the Polish nobles had recently won. To speed up the implementation of this decision, forty-seven Polish noble families invited the same number of Lithuanian boyar clans to share their coats of arms. But as the Polish and Lithuanian nobles drew closer, the gap between the Lithuanian and Ukrainian elites grew deeper. The Catholic/Orthodox split that appeared in the Grand Principality as a result of the Union of Krevo in 1385 was now exacerbated by the social and political distinctions that favored the Catholics. The resentment that this circumstance engendered among the Orthodox came to the fore when Vytautus died in 1430.

That year the Ukrainians, backed by some Lithuanian magnates that disapproved of close ties with Poland, elected as grand prince Jagiełło’s youngest brother, Svidrigaillo, who was prince of Siversk in eastern Ukraine.

The issues that separated these two camps were of crucial importance. Would the union of Poland and Lithuania continue to exist? Would the Ukrainians, by retaining Svidrigaillo on the throne, attain dominance in the Grand Principality? Or would the Poles gain access to the Grand Principarity’s vast, open Ukrainian lands? After some desultory fighting, negotiations ensued in which Sigismund and the pro-Polish side gained the advantage. By granting the Orthodox nobles the same rights that the Catholics enjoyed, Sigismund won over many of Svidrigaillo’s Ukrainian followers. When Svidrigaillo employed terror tactics, such as the burning alive of Herasym, the metropolitan of Smolensk, he only encouraged more defections, which eventually led to his defeat. As a result of this conflict, another Ukrainian land, Podilia, came under Polish control. However, Volhynia, whose populace fiercely resisted the Polish invaders, remained a part of the Grand Principality. In any case, it was obvious that Polish influence and pressure had severely disturbed the previously placid relations between the Lithuanians and Ukrainians of the principality.

In the mid 15th century, relations between the Lithuanian and Ukrainian elites took a turn for the worse, especially after the new Grand Prince, Casimir Jagiełło, instituted another series of centralizing reforms.

While the Lithuanian grand princes cared little about retaining the goodwill of their Ukrainian subjects, the grand princes of Moscow cultivated it. And they were now a power to be reckoned with. By ingratiating themselves for generations with their overlords, the khans of the Golden Horde, the princes of Moscow rose to a position of prominence among the Russian principalities of the northeast. In time they transformed their predominance into control: in 1463, the principality of Iaroslav; in 1474, Rostov; in 1478, rich and vast Novgorod; and in 1485, the last serious Russian rival, the principality of Tver, succumbed to Moscow. With almost all the northeast under its aegis, Moscow cast off, rather anticlimactically, the centuries-old Mongol yoke in 1480. Along with Moscow’s expanding power came the need to rationalize it. Therefore, the so-called Third Rome doctrine was formulated. It proclaimed that Moscow, after the fall of Rome and Constantinople, was destined to be the third – and permanent – holy and universal empire. Meanwhile, Ivan III of Moscow began to title himself “sovereign (gosudar) of all Rus’” and to claim that all the lands that were once a part of Kievan Rus’ should now belong to Moscow.

For Lithuania, Moscow’s actions as well as its words were deeply disturbing. In the 1490s, when Muscovite forces approached a number of Lithuanian principalities in the Chernihiv region of eastern Ukraine, their Orthodox princes voluntarily accepted Muscovite sovereignty.

An even more dangerous outburst of the Ukrainian elite’s discontent occurred in 1508 when Mykhailo Hlynsky, an influential and talented magnate of Tatar origin and West European education, organized an uprising of Ukrainian princes and nobles against Grand Prince Sigismund. In his exhortations to his followers, he spoke of the need to defend the “Greek” faith and of the renewal of the Kievan princedom. However, before the rebellion could spread, a powerful Polish-Lithuanian army forced Hlynsky and his supporters to flee to Moscow. The uprising of 1508 was noteworthy not only because it reflected the dissatisfaction of Ukrainians in the Grand Principality but also because it was the last time that their elite would be able to muster the self-confidence to defend its rights by force. The Crimean Khanate

Lithuania’s already acute problems were compounded by the appearance in the south of yet another threat. During the Golden Horde’s slow decline, its nomadic Tatar vassals who lived along the Black Sea coast broke away and formed the Crimean Khanate under the leadership of the Girei dynasty. Although the Crimean khans and their Nogai tribesmen lorded over the vast steppes that stretched from the Kuban to the Dnister rivers, they were unable to subjugate the rich Genoese and Greek trading cities situated on the Crimean coast. Therefore, they sought aid from their fellow Muslims and recent conquerors of Constantinople, the Ottomans. In 1475, an Ottoman invasion force captured Kaffa and most of the other coastal cities. The mighty and rapidly growing Ottoman Empire now had a foothold in Ukraine that it expanded in 1478 by forcing Khan Mengli Girei to accept the overlordship of the Ottoman sultan. However, the Crimean khans preserved a large measure of autonomy, often following those policies that best suited their interests. One of their primary undertakings was the organization of large and frequent raids into the neighboring Ukrainian lands for the purpose of capturing slaves (iasyr), which were then sold in the markets of Kaffa and Constantinople. Once again the steppe became a menace to the sedentary peoples who lived on its fringes.