(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

Appearances flattered to deceive. In .1386, it was the Teutonic Knights who menaced the existence of Lithuania. Only three years before, they had capped over a century of bloody, unremitting effort by sacking much of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius and destroying the great stronghold of Trakai. Lithuania was riven by civil war; western, ‘lower’ Lithuania, Žemaitija, had been ceded to the Teutonic Order by Jogaila’s cousin and rival, Vytautas, in return for its support. The union with Poland and the acceptance of Latin Christianity were a desperate gamble by Jogaila to avert a seemingly inevitable subjugation.

Lithuania, stretching from the Baltic in the north to the Black Sea in the south, to the upper Volga and beyond the Dnieper in the cast, was a highly unstable political entity. Its rulers had imposed

themselves on these vast lands in the the wake of the Mongol invasions of the 1230s. In the late fourteenth century, the Lithuanians proper are unlikely to have numbered more than 300,000. Mainly pagan, they would have been outnumbered sevenfold by the Christian Orthodox inhabitants. Many of the descendants of the ruling house of Gediminas had converted to Orthodoxy, a deliberate policy to facilitate the dynasty’s rule over the Rus’ lands. What linguists call ’Middle Belarusian’ prevailed in the government’s chancelleries, albeit with admixtures of native Lithuanian and Latin. Lithuanian began to receive written form only in the mid-sixteenth century. To the majority of his subjects, Lithuania’s ‘Grand Duke’ was hospodar rather than didysis kunigaikštis. The formally untrammelled powers of the ruling house allowed for enormous bursts of political and military energy. A practice of more or less collaborative rule by brothers and close relatives developed, although periodically the inevitable blood rivalries erupted. Jogaila himself had come to power in 1382 with the murder of his uncle Kęstutis. When, in February 1387, Jagiello (to use the polonized form) instituted the bishopric of Vilnius and ordered his armed followers, his ‘boyari sive armigeri’, to convert to Catholicism, he aimed to deny the Knights any further justification for their onslaught on his homeland. As co-monarch with Jadwiga of Poland, he hoped for Polish support against both them and Kęstutis’ dangerous son, Vytautas.

The reasons for Jogaila’s acceptance of the Polish crown went beyond a quest for an alliance against, or protection from, the Teutonic Knights. The rapid expansion of Lithuania under Gediminas (1315 —4 г) and then under the partnership of his sons, Algirdas (1345-77) and Kęstutis (1345-82), brought its own difficulties. The vastly outnumbered Lithuanians would, under any circumstances, have had real difficulties in preserving their authority over the Rus’ lands. Algirdas’ victory at Sine Wody over the Mongol Golden Horde in 1363, consolidating his grip on Kiev itself, had given a huge boost to Lithuanian prestige. The nobles -the boyars - of these empty territories were prepared to accept those of the ruling Gcdiminid dynasty who russified and converted to Orthodoxy. How long an over-extended ruling House could preserve its authority on such sufferance was an open question.

Russification, of course, meant the loss of Lithuanian cultural identity. It would not solve the very real threat posed by the Teutonic Order, to whom heathens and schismatics were equally fair game. Moreover, the fourteenth century saw the consolidation of a new Rus’ power in the east, beyond the reach of the Lithuanian rulers - the principality of Moscow. Frictions between the two reached back to the 1330s. Dmitrii Donskoi’s defeat of a Mongol force at Kulikovo Pole in 1380 - a victory made possible in part because the Lithuanians were unable to furnish Khan Mamai of the Golden Horde with the support they had promised - did not secure the removal of Mongol overlordship from Moscow: but it did establish Moscow, alongside Lithuania, as a credible alternative claimant to the heritage of Kievan Rus’. Where individual Lithuanian princes sought to break away from Vilnius' domination - as did Jogaila’s russified half-brother, Andrew the Hunchback, prince of Polotsk, in t 377-8 - they received every encouragement from Moscow. Indeed, in 1383-4, serious if ultimately unsuccessful negotiations took place with Dmitrii Donskoi for Jogaila’s marriage to his daughter, Sophia. Donskoi insisted on the conversion of Jogaila to Orthodoxy. Had the union come to pass, one can only speculate how different the course of eastern F.uropean history might have been.