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

These different ‘unions’ represented attempts to redefine and regulate relations between Poland and Lithuania in the light of changing circumstances. The Catholicized Lithuanian elite increasingly came to appreciate the value of a purely dynastic union, while at the same time they sought to preserve the maximum degree of political power for themselves. The Poles pushed for the maximum degree of influence and power over the Grand Duchy; and the final results, as expressed in these enactments, were often messy, even contradictory compromises, open to the most varied interpretations, and over which historians continue to argue. The 1499 Union of Vilnius, for example, reiterated the act of Union of Horodlo, of 1413 (which, in its preamble, explicitly enjoined the incorporation of Lithuania into the Crown, but then went on to treat the two as separate polities), but in such a way as to ignore the incorporation; and went on to suggest a common election, by Crown and Lithuanian lords, of the king of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, without providing any formal machinery for doing so. This seemingly confused relationship suited the ruling Jagiellonian dynasty well. For they enjoyed hereditary status in the Grand Duchy (even if the Polish side in some of these acts maintained, explicitly or implicitly, that they did not), and saw in that a guarantee that they would continue to be elected as kings in Poland proper, whose great nobles continued to look enviously at the prospect of acquiring lands and offices in Lithuania’s vast expanses. Almost all concerned - Catholic and Orthodox, Polish, Lithuanian and Rus’ (or ‘Ruthenian’) - came to appreciate the benefits of some kind of connection; the real and ultimately never fully resolved disputes were over what form that connection should take.

With Lithuania, Poland meant much; without it, little. It remained perilously fragile. To the suspicious nobility of Wielkopolska, Jagiello’s elevation was a bid for political dominance by the

4 Effigy of king Wladyslaw Jagiello in the cathedral of Wawel castle, Krakow. The first lifelike representation of a Polish monarch to survive.

baronage of Malopolska. The two provinces were physically separated by a belt of fiefs granted by Louis the Great to his helpmate, the Silesian Piast, Wladyslaw of Opole, who, in 1392, floated a scheme to divide the Crown between the Ordensstaat and Sigismund of Hungary. Only in 1396 were his lands forcibly annexed by Jadwiga and her husband. In 1387 disorders in Hungary helped Jadwiga to recover the Rus’ territories transferred by her father from Poland. The Crown’s narrow lands were painfully slowly bulked out with the extinction of the ruling lines of minor Piast branches, especially those associated with the duchy of Masovia. Its final incorporation with its capital, Warsaw, came only in 1526. Silesia and, even more so, western Pomerania, remained out of reach. The Crown lacked the strength to enforce its annexationist claims on the Grand Duchy, whose leading lords remained wary of such aspirations, even after the extinction of the Jagiellonian dynasty. After 1422, Poland and Lithuania pursued different, if often complementary, foreign policies, with Poland looking to the north and south and Lithuania to the east. Chronic strains dogged their relationship, not least over the possession of the southern Rus’ territories of Podole and Volhynia. The unilateral recognition in 1440 by the great lords of Lithuania of Jagiello’s second son, Casimir, as their Grand Duke, marked a technical sundering of the union, until his election as king by the Poles in 1446. Likewise, in 1492, the separate, independent accessions of [agietlo’s grandsons, John Albert (Jan Olbracht) in Poland, Alexander in Lithuania, had, strictly speaking, the same effect. The union was stitched together once more in 1501, when Alexander succeeded his childless elder brother in Poland.

The relationship survived its early years because Jagiello and Vytautas were able to compose their differences in what was, in effect, a partnership of equals, reminiscent of the glory days of the harmony between Algirdas and Kęstutis. In 1392, Jagiello acknowledged his cousin as ‘dux' of Lithuania, while maintaining a formal overlordship as ‘supremus dux’. Each clung to the hope of siring legitimate sons who would succeed to both Crown and Grand Duchy. It was Jagiello who finally scored, at the impressive age of seventy-two and on his fourth marriage (Jadwiga died in 1399). In 1424, Wladyslaw was born, in 1426 Casimir. The hitter’s unilateral acclamation as hereditary hospodar by the great families of Lithuania in T440 put an end to a decade of strife between rival, stop-gap successors nominated by Jagiello after Vytautas’ death in October 1430. Casimir IV’s accession to the Polish throne in 1447, following his election by Polish notables the previous year, restored a measure of stability in relations between the two states.