Poland полностью

In less than a hundred years the Lithuanian state had quadrupled in size, but while this made it more formidable to its enemies, it endeared it to none and enmeshed it in problems which, for once, were too great for its rulers. They could not hope to administer the huge area populated with Christian Slavs by whose multitude they were to be eventually swamped. Their seizure of these lands had brought them into conflict with the Tatars on one front, while the Teutonic Knights were straining all their resources to crush them on the other. The Russian principalities were hostile, while the Poles, who now shared a long frontier with Lithuania, were growing tired of sporadic border raids. Lithuania needed an ally. The problem of which to choose was the most pressing issue facing Grand Duke Iogaila when he came to the Lithuanian throne in 1377. And that same year had placed Poland in a dilemma, for different reasons.

Kazimierz the Great had died in 1370. Although married four times, he had no heir, and left the throne to his nephew, Louis of Anjou, King of Hungary. King Louis attended his uncle’s funeral and then went back to Hungary, leaving his mother, the late king’s sister, to rule in his name. She could not rule without the support of the more powerful nobles of Małopolska, the ‘Kraków Lords’. They exploited this opportunity to assume a greater share not only in the running of the country, but in the definition of its very status.

A new concept of the Polish state had been evolving from the beginning of the fourteenth century whose gist was that sovereignty

should be vested not in the person of the monarch, but in a specific geographical area, the Corona Regni Poloniae, an expression meant to embrace all the Polish lands, even those which had fallen under foreign domination. In 1374 the Polish nobles wrested from King Louis the Statute of Košice, which stressed the indi visibility of this patrimony, and stipulated that no part of it was his to give away. They were looking to a future which remained uncertain, since Louis, too, had no male heir.

He did, however, have two daughters. He had married the elder, Maria, to Sigismund of Luxembourg, and intended him to take the Polish throne. The younger, Hedwig, was betrothed to Wilhelm of Habsburg, who was to have Hungary. But when Louis died in 1382, the Kraków Lords refused to bow to these wishes and made their own plans.

They rejected the already married Maria and brought her ten-year-old sister Hedwig, Jadwiga in Polish, to Kraków, where in 1384 she was crowned emphatically king (rex). The chronicler Długosz noted: ‘The Polish lords and prelates were so taken with her, so greatly and sincerely loved her that, almost forgetting their masculine dignity, they did not feel any shame or degradation in being the subjects of such a gracious and virtuous lady.’ In fact, they saw her principally as an instrument, and they disregarded her feelings entirely. When young Wilhelm of Habsburg turned up to claim his betrothed, she was locked in the castle on Wawel hill. After fruitless efforts to see her he left, and she was prepared by the Polish lords for the bed of another: they had found a husband for her in Iogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania.

The idea of a union between Poland and Lithuania had germin—ated simultaneously in both countries. On 14 August 1385 a basic agreement was signed at Krewo. This was followed by more specific pledges at Wołkowysk in January 1386, and at Lublin a few weeks later. On 12 February, Jagiełło, as his name had crystallised in Polish, entered Kraków, and three days later he was baptised as Władysław. On 18 February he married Jadwiga, and on 4 March was crowned King of Poland.

THREE

The Jagiellon Experience

Queen Jadwiga died young, having borne her husband no heir. Yet the fruits of her marriage to Władysław Jagiełło were prodigious. In the first instance, it sounded the knell for the Teutonic Order: with the conversion of Lithuania the need for crusading vanished, and with it the whole raison d’être of the Knights in Prussia. The union of two enemies whom the order had often played off against each other in the past only compounded this.

The order responded by trying to undo it. Władysław Jagiełło unwittingly helped when he installed his fiercely ambitious and unaccountable cousin Vytautas (Witold) as regent in Lithuania. Vytautas championed pagan separatist opposition to the union with Poland, at the same time accepting baptism and the alliance of the order. But while the order continued to intrigue with Vytautas and negotiate with Władysław, it could not hope to avoid confrontation with the Polish-Lithuanian alliance indefin itely. When this came in the war of 1409-10, it resulted in the devastat ing defeat of the Order on the battlefield of Grunwald (Tannenberg) by a combined force under the command of Władysław and Vytautas.