East Meets West
Chapter 7
The Making of Ukraine
With the Ukrainian territories integrated by the end of the fourteenth century into the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the policies of these two states, as well as relations between them, began to determine the political, economic, and cultural life of Ukraine. Especially important for the future of the Ukrainian lands were a series of agreements between the two states concluded between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
In 1385, in the town of Kreva (now in Belarus), the thirty-three-year-old grand duke of Lithuania, Jogaila, who called himself by God’s grace “Grand Duke of the Lithuanians and Lord of Rus’,” signed a decree that was, in all but name, a prenuptial agreement with representatives of the twelve-year-old queen of Poland, Jadwiga. In exchange for the Polish throne, he agreed to accept Catholicism for himself and his realm and brought about a union of the lands of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. A year later, Jogaila was crowned king of Poland. Another year passed, and in 1387 the combined Polish and Lithuanian forces helped to wrestle Galicia from the Hungarians and attach it once again to the Polish kingdom.
A number of other unions would follow the one negotiated in Kreva, strengthening ties between the two polities and culminating in the Union of Lublin (1569), which created the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The borders between the kingdom and the duchy were realigned within the commonwealth, transferring most of the Ukrainian territories to the kingdom and leaving the Belarusian ones within the boundaries of the duchy. The union of Poland and Lithuania thus meant the separation of Ukraine and Belarus, and in that regard we can hardly overestimate the importance of the Union of Lublin. It would initiate the formation of the territory of modern Ukraine and its intellectual appropriation by the local elites.
From the viewpoint of the Rus’ elites of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the unions with the Kingdom of Poland had caused nothing but trouble. The immediate outcome of the Union of Kreva was the loss of Rus’ influence on the grand prince, who not only moved out of the duchy but also became a Catholic, setting a precedent for his brothers, some of whom were Orthodox. The Orthodox hierarchs’ hope of establishing Byzantine rather than Latin Christianity in the last pagan realm in Europe were dashed.
But the real challenge to Rus’ political status came in 1413, when the Union of Horodło, which historiography treats as a dynastic union, enhanced the Union of Kreva, a personal union between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Concluded between Jogaila, now king of Poland, and his cousin Vytautas, the grand duke of Lithuania, the new agreement extended many of the rights and privileges of the Polish nobility, including the right to unconditional ownership of land, to the Lithuanian nobility. Close to fifty Polish noble families offered to share their coats of arms with the same number of families from the grand duchy. But there was a catch: only Lithuanian Catholic families were invited to the party. The new rights and privileges were not accorded to the Orthodox elite. This was the first instance of discrimination against the Rus’ elites at the state level. Denied the new privileges, the Orthodox aristocrats were thus barred from holding high office in the central administration of the grand duchy. To add insult to injury, the Union of Horodło came on the heels of the curbing of Rus’ autonomy by one of the authors of the new union, Grand Duke Vytautas, who replaced the prince of Volhynia and rulers of some other lands with his own appointees.
An opportunity for the Rus’ elites to express their unhappiness with this encroachment on their status came soon after Vytautas’s death in 1430. In the succession struggle for the Lithuanian throne, which deteriorated into a civil war, the Rus’ nobles, led by the Volhynian boyars, supported their own candidate, Prince Švitrigaila. His rival, Prince Žygimantas, responded in 1434 by extending the rights and privileges guaranteed by the Union of Horodło to the Orthodox elites of the grand duchy, turning the tide of war in his favor. Although the Rus’ princes and nobles of Volhynia and the Kyiv Land remained suspicious of the intentions of Žygimantas, their support for Švitrigaila declined, allowing the grand duchy to return to a state of relative peace. With religion eliminated as a source of grievance among the Rus’ elites, the Lithuanian court had more room to maneuver in its continuing efforts to restrict the autonomy of the Rus’ lands and principalities.
In 1470, the grand duke and king of Poland, Casimir IV, abolished the last vestige of the princely era: the principality of Kyiv itself. Ten years later, the Kyivan princes conspired to kill Casimir and install one of their candidates, but their plot failed, leading to the arrest of the ringleaders and forcing the other conspirators to flee the grand duchy. With their departure came an end to the last hopes of restoring the way of life associated with the princely traditions of Kyivan Rus’. By the turn of the sixteenth century, not only Ukraine’s political map but also its institutional, social, and cultural landscape showed few traces of the period two centuries earlier when Galicia-Volhynia had striven to throw off Mongol suzerainty and become a fully independent actor in the region. While Rus’ law and language remained well established, they began to lose their previous dominance. These essentials of Rus’ culture could no longer compete with latinizing influences and the Polish language, which took pride of place in the grand duchy after the Union of Kreva.
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 the growth of royal power, which in the Polish-Lithuanian case came from the aristocratic houses of the grand duchy, many of them deeply rooted in the princely tradition of Kyivan Rus’ and Galicia-Volhynia. But in the mid-sixteenth century, elite opposition to increasing royal power diminished in response to the growing external threat to the grand duchy, which it could meet only with the help of Poland. The threat came from the east, where in the course of the fifteenth century a major new power had been rising: the Grand Duchy of Muscovy.
In 1476 Grand Prince Ivan III, the first Muscovite ruler to call himself tsar, declared the independence of his realm from the Horde and refused to pay tribute to the khans. He also launched a campaign of “gathering the Rus’ lands,” taking Novgorod, Tver, and Pskov and laying claim to other Rus’ lands outside the former Mongol realm, including those of today’s Ukraine. In the last decades of the fifteenth century, the newly created Tsardom of Muscovy and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania entered into a prolonged conflict over the heritage of Kyivan Rus’. Muscovy was on the offensive, and by the early sixteenth century the grand dukes had to recognize the tsar’s rule over two of their former territories, Smolensk and Chernihiv. It was the first time that Muscovy had established its rule over part of what is now Ukraine.
The westward advance of Muscovy, stopped by the grand dukes at the beginning of the sixteenth century, resumed in the second half. In 1558, Ivan the Terrible, the decisive and charismatic but also erratic, brutal, and ultimately self-destructive tsar of Muscovy, attacked Livonia, a polity bordering on the grand duchy that included parts of what are now Latvia and Estonia, starting the Livonian War (1558–1583), which would last for a quarter century and involve Sweden, Denmark, Lithuania, and eventually Poland. In 1563, Muscovite troops crossed the borders of the grand duchy, taking the city of Polatsk and raiding Vitsebsk (Vitebsk), Shkloŭ (Shklov), and Orsha (all in present-day Belarus). This defeat mobilized support for the grand duchy’s union with Poland among the lesser Lithuanian nobility.
In December 1568 Sigismund Augustus, who was both king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania, 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 the joint election of the king, a common Diet, or parliament, and broad a
utonomy for the grand duchy, but the magnates would not return the royal lands in their possession—the principal demand of the Polish nobility. The Lithuanian delegates packed their bags, assembled their retinues of noble clients, and left. This move backfired. Unexpectedly for the departing Lithuanians, the Diet of the Kingdom of Poland began to issue decrees, with the king’s blessing, transferring one province of the grand duchy after another to the jurisdiction of the Kingdom of Poland.
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 1569, the Podlachia palatinate on the Ukrainian-Belarusian-Polish ethnic border went to Poland. Volhynia followed in May, and on June 6, one day before the resumption of the Polish-Lithuanian talks, the Kyivan and Podolian lands were transferred to Poland as well. The Lithuanian aristocrats could only accept the new reality—they stood to lose even more if they continued to resist the union. In his magisterial depiction of the Lublin Diet, Jan Matejko, a famous nineteenth-century Polish artist, portrayed the chief opponent of the union, Mikalojus Radvilas, on his knees but with his sword drawn in front of the king.
The Union of Lublin created a new Polish-Lithuanian state with a single ruler, to be elected by the nobility of the whole realm, and a single Diet. It extended the freedoms of the Polish nobility to their counterparts in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which maintained its own offices, treasury, judicial system, and army. The new state, called the Commonwealth of Both Nations—Polish and Lithuanian—was a quasi-federal polity dominated by the geographically expanded and politically strengthened Kingdom of Poland. The kingdom incorporated the Ukrainian palatinates 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.
At the Lublin Diet, the local aristocracy—princes and boyars, the same stratum that had opposed the union in Lithuania—represented the Ukrainian lands. But unlike their Lithuanian counterparts, the Ukrainian delegates opted for joining the kingdom, while asking for guarantees for their law, language, and religion. Why did the Ukrainian elites, the princely families in particular, agree to such a deal? This question takes on particular importance, given that the new boundary between Poland and Lithuania would later become the basis of administrative divisions determining the modern border between Ukraine and Belarus.
Did the Ukrainian provinces of the grand duchy join the Kingdom of Poland because their identity and way of life differed from those of Belarus, or did the Lublin border serve to differentiate these two East Slavic peoples? There is no indication that in the mid-sixteenth century the Ukrainians and Belarusians spoke two separate languages. Today, in Ukrainian-Belarusian borderlands people speak transitional Ukrainian-Belarusian dialects, as they probably did in the sixteenth century, making it all but impossible to draw a clear dividing line based exclusively on linguistic criteria. It appears, however, that the Lublin border, based on the boundaries of historical Rus’ lands, 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 centuries, they were core areas of independent or semi-independent principalities. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the location of the Ukrainian lands on the periphery of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the challenges they faced on the open steppe frontier also set them apart from the rest of the Lithuanian world.
Unlike the Lithuanian aristocracy, 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. Incorporation of the frontier provinces into the kingdom might engender a different attitude. One way or another, the Ukrainian princes approved the incorporation of their lands into Poland. We have no indication that they ever regretted the move. The Volhynian princely families not only held onto their possessions but dramatically increased them under Polish tutelage.
Kostiantyn Ostrozky, by far the most influential of the local princes, decided the fate of the union by throwing his support behind the king. He kept his old posts as captain of the town of Volodymyr and palatine of Kyiv. He also extended his landholdings. At the end of the sixteenth century, Ostrozky presided over a huge personal empire that included 40 castles, 1,000 towns, and 13,000 villages, all owned by the prince. By the early seventeenth century, his son Janusz would have in his private treasury enough gold, silver, and coins to cover two annual budgets of the entire commonwealth. Ostrozky alone could muster an army of 20,000 soldiers and cavalrymen—ten times the size of the king’s army in the borderlands. At various times in his career, Ostrozky was a contender for both the Polish and the Muscovite thrones. The lesser nobles were in no position to defy this powerful magnate, on whom they depended economically and politically. Thus, Ostrozky continued to preside over an extensive network of noble clients who did his bidding in the local and Commonwealth Diets. Not only the local nobility but even the king and the Diet did not dare to challenge the authority of this uncrowned king of Rus’. The Diet prohibited the princes from fielding their own armies in wartime, but because of the constant danger of Tatar attacks on the steppe frontier, the commonwealth’s standing army could not do without the military muscle of the princes.
The Ostrozkys were the richest of the Ukrainian princes who maintained and increased their wealth and influence after the Union of Lublin, but they were not the only ones. Another highly influential Volhynian princely family was the Vyshnevetskys. Prince Mykhailo Vyshnevetsky branched out of his Volhynian possessions, which were quite insignificant in comparison to Ostrozky’s, into the lands east of the Dnieper. Those lands were either uncolonized or had been abandoned by settlers in the times of Mongol rule and were now open to attack by the Noghay and Crimean Tatars. The Vyshnevetsky family expanded into the steppelands, creating new settlements, establishing towns, and funding monasteries. The possessions of the Vyshnevetskys in Left-Bank (eastern) Ukraine soon began to rival those of the Ostrozkys in Volhynia. These two princely families were the largest landowners in Ukraine.
Changes introduced in the region in the aftermath of the Union of Lublin assisted the Volhynian princes, the prime movers behind the colonization of the steppe borderlands, in their efforts. The Polish Crown’s creation of a small but mobile standing army, funded from the profits of the royal domains, helped repel Tatar raids and promote the continuing population of the steppe. Another major incentive for the colonization of the steppe borderlands came from their inclusion in the Baltic trade. With increasing demand for grain on the European markets, Ukraine began to earn its future reputation as the breadbasket of Europe. This was the first time that Ukrainian grain had appeared on foreign markets since the days of Herodotus. Peasants moved into the area en masse, fleeing serfdom in lands closer to government centers. They simply migrated to the steppe borderlands of Ukraine, where princes and nobles were establishing duty-free settlements that allowed the new arrivals not to perform corvée (statute) labor or pay duties for a substantial period. In exchange, they had to settle and develop the land.
Eastward migration created new economic and cultural opportunities for Ukrainian Jewry. According to conservative estimates, the number of Jews in Ukraine increased more than tenfold from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, rising from approximately 4,000 to more than 50,000. They formed new communities, built synagogues, and opened schools. But the new opportunities came at a price, placing the Jews of Ukraine between two groups with opposing interests: peasants and landowners. Originally, both groups were
Orthodox. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, with many princes converting to Catholicism and Polish nobles pouring into the area, the Jews found themselves caught between resentful Orthodox serfs and money-hungry Catholic masters. This was a ticking time bomb.
Contrary to the expectations of King Sigismund Augustus, the Union of Lublin did not rein in the oppositionist aristocracy. If anything, it gave greater prominence to Ostrozky and other Ukrainian princes. But their story is not only one of building wealth and appropriating land. For the first time since the fall of the Galician-Volhynian principality, the princes began to involve themselves in cultural and educational projects. This 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 the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Radvilas family set an example of linking politics, religion, and culture. The main opponent of the Union of Lublin, Mikalojus Radvilas the Red was also the leader of Polish and Lithuanian Calvinism and founder of a school for Calvinist youth. His cousin, Mikalojus Radvilas the Black, funded the printing of the first complete Polish translation of the Bible, issued in the town of Brest on the Ukrainian-Belarusian ethnic border. In the 1570s, Kostiantyn Ostrozky began his own publishing project in the Volhynian town of Ostrih. There Ostrozky assembled a team of scholars who compared Greek and Church Slavonic texts of the Bible, amended 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 from not only Lithuania and Poland but also Greece, while the copies of the Bible on which they worked originated in places as diverse as Rome and Moscow. The Ostrih Bible was issued in 1581 in a print run estimated at 1,500 copies. Some four hundred copies have survived, and visitors can see one of them today in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.
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