7: The New Forces of the Fourteenth Century
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THE FIRST LUXEMBURGS IN BOHEMIA
The Luxemburg dynasty was to govern Bohemia until its extinction in 1437. But this long
period is clearly divided in two parts. The death of the second Luxemburg, Charles, in
1378, a landmark in general European history along with the Great Western schism of the
same year, has a special significance for Bohemia’s development. A long internal
crisis came soon after what is called her “Golden Age.”
That brilliant era did not start immediately in 1310. On the
contrary, there soon followed a rebellion of the Czech nobility against their first
foreign king, who neglected their interests and proved a very poor administrator. The
opposition was defeated, but John of Luxemburg hardly took advantage of his success. He
preferred to play the part of a knight errant, abandoning the affairs of the kingdom to
the nobles, until in 1333 his son Charles was associated with the government, and long
before John’s death at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, he exercised a decisive
influence.
The old king’s participation in the Hundred Years War of
course had nothing to do with Bohemia’s own problems, and when in earlier years he
joined the raids of the Teutonic Knights into Lithuania, his role in these alleged
crusades in distant lands touched the interests of his kingdom only indirectly as far as
any joint action with the so-called Knights of the Cross was a pressure put upon Poland.
It was of little practical value that one of the princes of distant Mazovia temporarily
made himself a vassal of the Bohemian crown. But when John of Luxemburg received similar
homage from most of the Silesian princes in 1327 and 1329, the recognition of his
suzerainty by these Piasts necessarily led to the final separation of that important
province from medieval Poland. It was included in the lands of the crown of St. Václav,
together with Bohemia, Moravia, and parts of Lusatia which were also acquired in
John’s time. The recognition of that accomplished fact by the King of Poland, in the
years 1335—1339, was obtained by King John by giving up the henceforth useless
support of the Teutonic Knights and his own claims to the Polish crown which anyway had no
chance of practical realization.
The relations with Poland which had badly deteriorated under
the last Premyslids and the first Luxemburg were gradually improved by the second,
although Charles too had participated in his father’s last attack against Cracow in
1344. It was not only in restoring conditions of good neighborliness with the other Slavic
kingdom that Charles’ policy proved much more constructive than his father’s. To
what an extent it was a truly Bohemian policy, however, will always remain controversial,
since a few weeks before he succeeded to John in Prague he was elected Holy Roman Emperor.
That election put an end to the internal crisis of the Empire
under Louis the Bavarian and restored, at least temporarily, the cooperation between
Empire and papacy, with the Avignon popes consistently supporting the Luxemburgs. It was
also undoubtedly a success for Bohemia, whose king reached the goal which Premysl Otakar
II had sought in vain. Her position in the Empire now became indeed a leading one, with
Prague its undisputed center, but at the same time her connection with Germany became
inseparable. Since it happened under a German dynasty it was hardly favorable to the
national development of the Czechs.
Nevertheless, Bohemia gained so much in political influence and
in cultural and economic progress that Charles IV, as he is called as emperor, is rather
blamed for having neglected German interests. How difficult it is to interpret the
character of his policy is particularly evident in the case of the foundation of the
University of Prague in 1348. The importance of the creation of a first university north
of the Alps, outside the Romance and Anglo-Saxon world, is of course evident. But while it
is impossible to consider Prague as the first German university, it also is questionable
whether it was founded as a Czech institution. Like all other medieval universities, it
was a universal center of Western culture, open to all nations. Medieval universalism,
though already in decline in the fourteenth century, is the only possible key to a genuine
understanding of what the King of Bohemia, of German race but deeply influenced by French
and also Italian culture, really wanted to achieve as emperor.
There can indeed be no doubt that these achievements in all
spheres of life were of real advantage to the peoples of Bohemia, without distinction of
origin, and particularly to the city of Prague, now the emperor’s residence. And the
significant fact that in 1344 Charles obtained from Pope Clement VI, his former educator,
the raising of Prague to an archbishopric, is the best proof of his concern with
Bohemia’s independent position. Now, at last, her ecclesiastical life was no longer
under the control of the German Archbishop of Mainz.
Charles’ whole imperial policy, which made him twice
travel to Rome—for the first time in 1353 in order to be crowned—does not of
course belong to the history of East Central Europe. The same can be said of his reforms
in the government of the Empire, although the famous Golden Bull of 1356, establishing
permanent rules for the election of future emperors, must be mentioned here because it
confirmed the privileges of the king of Bohemia as first among the lay electors. There
are, however, both in his foreign relations and in his internal activities, important
features directly affecting Bohemia as one of the Slavic nations of the Danubian and in
general of the East Central region of the continent.
It so happened that among the rulers of that region there were
several contemporaries of Charles of Luxemburg who played a prominent role, similar to his
own, in their respective countries. One of them was Rudolf the Founder, first archduke of
Austria, whose land was serving more and more as an intermediary between Germany proper
and the non-German part of Central Europe. He was also the first of the Habsburgs who made
systematic efforts to prepare the future succession of his dynasty to the thrones of
Bohemia and Hungary through treaties with the Luxemburgs and the Anjous. Even Poland got
involved in the intricate diplomatic game which in 1360 led to a conflict between Charles
IV and Louis the Great of Hungary. Louis was offended by a derogatory statement about his
mother, which was attributed to the Emperor.
Avoiding any major war, however, the two opponents settled
their dispute through Polish mediation. Charles of Luxemburg, who in spite of the
Czech-Polish rivalry in Silesia had made alliances with Poland in 1348 and 1356 which were
apparently directed against the Teutonic Order, now went to Cracow twice. After the death
of his first wife, in 1363 he there married a princess of Western Pomerania who was a
granddaughter of King Casimir the Great. The following year, reconciled with Louis of
Hungary, he participated with him and the kings of Denmark and Cyprus in the Cracow
Congress where the problem of a new crusade was discussed and the whole situation in East
Central Europe carefully reviewed.
The Emperor returned to these problems in the later part of his
reign in connection with two issues which were of vital importance for his Bohemian
kingdom. One of them concerned the March of Brandenburg, which after the acquisition of
practically all of Lusatia had become a neighboring country. In this formerly Slavic land
where, as in Lusatia, the native population had not yet entirely disappeared, Charles IV
obtained the succession for his son Sigismund, after a branch of the Bavarian
Wittelsbachs, old rivals of the Luxemburgs, which like their Askanian predecessors had
made the march the most important German outpost in the East, particularly threatening to
Poland. For the dynasty which now governed Bohemia this succession was a distinct success.
Whether it would also be a check to German influences and expansion was to depend on the
personality of Sigismund of Luxemburg.
However, the Emperor wanted to secure a much higher position
for him, equal to that of his elder brother who received the typically Czech name Václav
and was to inherit Bohemia and possibly also the imperial crown. Therefore, along with the
Habsburgs, Charles of Luxemburg entered into negotiations with the last Anjou king of
Hungary, his former rival Louis the Great, who had only daughters, the future heiresses of
both Hungary and Poland. Almost simultaneously one of them, Mary, was betrothed to
Sigismund of Luxemburg, and her younger sister Jadwiga to William of Habsburg. For the old
Emperor it seemed a guaranty that Sigismund would succeed to Louis in either Poland or
Hungary, and in any case this was to be a gain not only for the Luxemburg dynasty but also
for Bohemia where their power would remain based.
Under Charles IV, who did not live to see the outcome of these
carefully planned developments, Bohemia also made a great deal of progress in the field of
administration, thanks to his codification of the law of the country. He enjoyed the full
support of the hierarchy, with Arnost of Pardubice, the first Archbishop of Prague, as his
main advisor. Both not only maintained a close contact with the papacy, the Emperor in
1368 paying a visit to Urban V when he had temporarily returned to Rome from Avignon, but
they also showed a real interest in missionary problems, such as the conversion of
Lithuania, whose princes came to see Charles in 1358.
It was even more important that both of them realized the
necessity of ecclesiastical reforms which were claimed by eloquent preachers from among
the Czechs and from abroad. These were shocked by the wealth and worldly life of part of
the clergy, including the richly endowed monasteries. In the days of Charles that reform
movement had not yet had any heretical or distinctly anti-German character. It was a
serious warning which gained in significance when in 1378 the final return of the Holy See
to Rome was followed by the outbreak of the Great Western schism.
It was regrettable that the Emperor died just at the beginning
of that crisis. But his death was a special loss for Bohemia, where the general problems
of Christendom were to have particularly serious repercussions. The country soon lost the
position, unique in its history, which it had occupied under Charles, while the close
association of a Slavic people with German power, apparently successful during his
lifetime, soon produced the most dangerous consequences. And none of his sons, the last
Luxemburgs, proved equal to his task.
HUNGARY UNDER THE ANJOUS
That task was the more responsible because four years after the death of Charles IV the
Hungarian branch of the Anjous was extinguished and the parallel development of Bohemia
and Hungary under the foreign dynasties established there at the beginning of the
fourteenth century came to an end. There are, however, other differences in that
development. The reign of the Anjous in Hungary was much briefer than that of the
Luxemburgs in Bohemia, limited as it was to two generations in the male line, and that
dynasty, although of foreign origin, was not German but French.
There was, therefore, no danger whatever that the foreign
rulers, the second of whom had incidentally already been born and bred in Hungary, would
promote a foreign influence dangerous to the independence and national character of the
country. Their French homeland was faraway, without any ambitions or possibilities of
controlling or absorbing a country in East Central Europe which even the neighboring
German Empire had failed to include. It is true that the Anjous who took the place of the
Árpáds did not come directly from France but from Italy. Their ancestors, so long as
they ruled Sicily, had shown the usual ambitions of all masters of Sicily directed toward
the East. But even these aggressive aims were directed at the Byzantine Empire and its
possessions in the south of the Balkan Peninsula, and since as early as in 1282 Sicily had
been lost to the kings of Aragon and the Italian kingdom of the Anjous practically limited
to Naples, that dynasty could hardly dream of creating an empire on both sides of the
Adriatic.
In Hungary, they did, of course, spread from their brilliant
court at Buda or nearby Visegrad, a Romance culture, partly French, partly Italian,
already touched by the early Renaissance movement. But this proved a real contribution to
Hungary’s genuine cultural life which in spite of an entirely different racial
background was Latin in its character from the day of her conversion. Under the Anjous
there could not possibly appear that German impact which at the equally brilliant court of
the Luxemburgs in Prague, in connection with a German colonization much more important in
Bohemia than in Hungary, gradually supplanted the native Slav and also the Romance
elements introduced by the French contacts of the Luxemburgs and Charles IV’s
relations with great Italians such as Cola di Rienzi and Petrarch.
All that does not mean that the Hungarians did not resent, at
least at the beginning, the establishment of foreigners at the site of their native kings.
Just like the Bohemian nobles in the early years of King John, so also important factions
of the Hungarian nobility, nationally more homogeneous, proud of their Golden Bull, and
organized in powerful genera as in Poland, created opposition to Charles Robert
when he arrived in 1308. But his wise policy, which enabled him to find a large group of
supporters for his efficient administration, soon made him much more popular than John had
ever been in Bohemia. Residing permanently in his new kingdom, he fully identified himself
with its national interests, leaving those of Naples to his brother.
Even better than many of the Árpáds, Charles Robert realized
the importance of a close cooperation with neighboring Poland, restored as a kingdom and
always popular among the Hungarian nobles, especially in the northern counties where at
the outset there had been the greatest reluctance to accept the Anjou rule. The king s
marriage to Elizabeth of Poland, the highly intelligent and ambitious daughter of
Wladyslaw Lokietek, which was contracted in 1320, the very year of the latter s
coronation, was accompanied by a close alliance which was to last throughout the whole
Anjou period.
That alliance made Charles Robert the natural mediator in the
conflict between Poland on the one hand and Bohemia and the Teutonic Order on the other.
It was therefore at Visegrad, the Anjou residence, at a congress of the three Kings of
East Central Europe held in 1335, that an arbitration suggested by Charles Robert tried to
appease that conflict. While it did not put an end to the basic antagonism between the
Poles and the Teutonic Knights, it prepared the rapprochement between Poland and Bohemia.
Such a friendly collaboration with both Slavic kingdoms in Hungary’s immediate
neighborhood was in itself an advantage to that country. But as far as the relations with
Poland were concerned, they opened for the King of Hungary two additional opportunities,
both discussed, at a second Visegrad meeting in 1339, with his Polish brother-in-law, King
Casimir the Great.
First, there was the old Hungarian claim to Halich and even to
Volhynia, expressed in the addition to their title, rex Galiciae et Lodomeriae.
After the death of the last descendants of Roman and Daniel, around 1323, one of their
Polish relatives, Boleslaw of Mazovia, called George when he became the ruler of an
Orthodox country, succeeded them. Facing internal troubles which were to lead to his
assassination in 1340, George in turn designated his cousin King Casimir as his successor,
precisely on the occasion of the second Visegrad congress. It probably was at once
anticipated that Hungary would support Poland in that matter, as she actually did in the
following years, but not without serious chances of connecting, one way or another, the regnum
Russiae, as the heritage of Daniel used to be called, with the crown of Hungary.
That issue was inseparable from an even more important one.
Although the King of Poland was still quite young, discussions regarding his successor
immediately started. It was decided that if he were to continue to have only daughters the
Hungarian Anjous would inherit the crown of Poland, uniting both countries in a powerful
confederation. If, however, these prospects, so attractive to the new Hungarian dynasty,
would not materialize, the regnum Russiae could be redeemed by the King of Hungary.
These arrangements became final under Louis, the son of Charles
Robert. He succeeded his father in 1342, two years after the beginning of the struggle for
Halich and Volhynia between Poland and Lithuania. The new King of Hungary participated in
this struggle on several occasions, once personally joining an expedition into distant
lands. But the problem of the Polish succession, combined with Ruthenian and Lithuanian
entanglements, was merely one aspect of the many-sided foreign policy of a king whom the
Hungarians, proud of his achievements, called the Great. And he proved equally remarkable
in his internal administration.
Like his neighbors, he also founded a university in the
Hungarian city of Pécs, but that foundation of 1367 did not develop into a lasting
institution. And though he contributed successfully to the country’s cultural and
economic progress, favoring particularly the cities and promoting their trade relations,
he was chiefly interested in a better organization of the military forces needed for
Hungary’s territorial expansion. To the geographical unit already formed by the lands
of the Crown of St. Stephen, he wanted to add a surrounding belt of vassal provinces. In
the east, in addition to his Ruthenian project, he tried to bring under Hungarian
suzerainty the principalities created by the Rumanian people; not only Wallachia which
already had an existence of more than a hundred years, but also Moldavia, organized in his
own time, where Hungarian and Polish interests had clashed from the beginning.
Even more ambitious in that respect was Louis’
program of expansion toward the south, far into the Balkans. Here his prestige was
at its height when in 1366 the Byzantine Emperor, John V Palaeologus, visited him in Buda
to get military assistance against the Turks. In spite of papal appeals and
encouragements, Louis’ plans for conducting an anti-Ottoman crusade never
materialized. But he extended Hungarian influence over at least part of Bulgaria, checked
Serbia’s expansion in the years of her greatest power, and tried to keep Bosnia under
his control, marrying Elizabeth, the daughter of Stephen Kotromanich, the rival of Stephen
Tvrtko, King of Serbia and Bosnia. In all these regions the advance of Hungary was also a
progress of Catholic influence.
Like his predecessors, however, Louis of Anjou had as his main
rival another Catholic power, the Republic of Venice. He definitely served the interests
of his country when in 1358, in his first war against Venice, he regained the maritime
province of Dalmatia for Hungary. But when he joined the coalition against the Republic
which toward the end of his reign almost destroyed Venetian power, it was in connection
with his Italian policy, in which he was deeply interested for dynastic reasons.
Louis’ brother Andrew, who had gained the Kingdom of Naples by marrying its heiress,
his cousin Joan, was murdered in 1345, not without his wife’s responsibility. Through
repeated but unsuccessful expeditions into Southern Italy, Louis wanted not only to avenge
that crime but also to conquer Naples for himself or his successors.
This was an additional reason why he regretted having no son,
and why after the birth of his three daughters in the early seventies, one of his main
objectives was to secure a third kingdom in order to leave a royal crown to each of them.
From 1370 onward he already possessed a second kingdom in Poland where, according to the
frequently confirmed earlier agreements, he succeeded the last Piast. Even here, however,
it was not without difficulty that the hereditary rights of one of his daughters were
recognized because the Poles blamed him for neglecting their interests and for placing the
province of Halich under Hungarian administration. It also proved difficult to determine
which of the daughters, all of whom were already engaged in their childhood to members of
the leading European dynasties, would inherit which kingdom. Since Naples was never
retaken from the Italian branch of the Anjous, and since the eldest daughter, Catherine,
the fiancee of Louis of France, the future Duke of Orléans, died before her father, the
problem was reduced to Hungary and to Poland.
It was Louis’ final decision that Hungary should be
left to his youngest daughter Jadwiga, and since she was engaged to William of Habsburg,
this would have resulted in a first Austro-Hungarian union. Mary, who was supposed to rule
in Poland, would have connected that country with the Brandenburg March of her fiancee
Sigismund and thus with the domains of the Luxemburgs. The consequence of this intricate
dynastic policy of Louis the Great and of his matrimonial projects would have been,
therefore, a wide advance of German influence in East Central Europe, an advance which
that Hungarian king of French-Italian descent had rather opposed throughout his life.
The artificial combinations of his last years were reversed
after his death by the strong national forces which he himself had fostered in Hungary and
never completely controlled in Poland. But when he disappeared in 1382, he left behind him
the memory of a period of real greatness which Hungary had enjoyed under the last Anjou,
who did his best to make her the leading power of East Central Europe, closely associated
with the Latin West and yet fully independent in her national development. It soon became
evident, however, that such a role was beyond the forces of Hungary alone; she was not
even in a position to maintain the union with Poland and entered into a very serious
internal crisis. The death of Louis of Anjou, coming only four years after the death of
Charles of Luxemburg, is therefore a similar landmark in the course of the history of East
Central Europe.
THE RISE AND FALL OF SERBIA, AND THE OTTOMAN ADVANCE
The Hungarian crisis which followed the Anjou period was the more regrettable because
at this very moment the Turkish onslaught was already approaching the Danubian region
after conquering most of the Balkans, while the rest of the Byzantine Empire was
completely isolated. Hungary was, however, not without responsibility for the main reason
which made possible that sweeping advance of a new Muslim power—the lack of unity and
cooperation among the Christian countries. A serious obstacle was, of course, the
continuing schism between Catholics and Orthodox, but even among the Orthodox, who were
supreme in the Balkan Peninsula, there was no coordination in defense against the Asiatic
invaders. On the contrary, there continued, first, the agelong antagonism between the
Greek Empire and the Slavic states north of its reduced territory, and secondly, the
almost equally old rivalry between Bulgarians and Serbs.
In the fourteenth century it was definitely Serbia which was
assuming the leading position in the Balkans. Under Stephen II’s equally prominent
and warlike successor, Stephen Urosh III, the kingdom of the Nemanyids had to face the
joint opposition of Byzantium and Bulgaria which were temporarily allied. But the Serbs
defeated both of them in 1330, when Michael Shishman, together with his Bulgarian army,
was killed in the battle of Velbuzhd, and when Emperor Andronicus III had to make peace
after the loss of most of Macedonia. In the following year Stephen III was replaced by his
son and former co-ruler, Stephen Dushan, who ranks among the greatest monarchs of his time
and who aimed at the creation of a Serb Empire which would take the place of the declining
empire of the Palaeologi.
His chances seemed quite favorable because Byzantium, after
losing almost all its possessions in Asia Minor to the Ottoman Turks during the reigns of
Andronicus II and Andronicus III, after the death of the latter in 1341, entered into a
period of civil war between his son John V and a highly gifted usurper of the Cantacuzene
family who made himself a rival emperor under the name of John VI. Both of them continued
the negotiations with the papacy, which had been started by their predecessor with a view
to putting an end to the eastern schism and joining the league against the Turks which was
promoted by the Avignon popes. But while that action was making little progress, both
emperors occasionally used Turkish auxiliaries in the civil war. It was of little avail
that in 1344 Catholic crusaders took Smyrna from a less dangerous Turkish ruler, since
about the same time the Ottomans, under Osman’s particularly aggressive successor,
Urkhan, started their invasions of European territory as allies of one or the other Greek
Emperor.
In the meantime, Dushan, at the beginning, also unaware of the
supreme Ottoman danger to all Christendom, was occupying more and more imperial territory,
extending the frontier of Serbia far into Albania and Thessaly. First crowned in 1333 as
king of Serbia only, in 1346 he celebrated another coronation in the Macedonian capital,
Skoplje, assuming the ambitious title of Emperor of Serbs and Greeks or, as he was later
called, Imperator Rasciae et Romaniae. During all these years he also strengthened
Serbia internally, unifying the country under a well-organized administration, codifying
the customary law, and favoring cultural relations with the West.
In addition to negotiations with Emperor John V who in 1354
finally defeated his rival, Pope Innocent VI also tried to gain Dushan for a religious
union with Rome and for an active participation in the crusade against the Turks. The
Serbian ruler now realized the urgent necessity of stopping the Muslim invaders who
inflicted upon the Serbs a first defeat near Adrianople in 1352 and finally, in the
critical year of 1354 gained a first permanent foothold on European soil by occupying
Gallipoli. Unfortunately, Dushan’s possible cooperation in a crusade which he himself
wanted to lead was troubled by the persistent hostility of the other prospective leader of
the Christian forces, Louis of Hungary, the rival of the Serbs in Bosnia. Under these
conditions even Dushan’s better relations with Venice were of little help, and the
plan of Serbia’s religious union with the Catholic world, which would have been so
important for the cultural unity of all Yugoslavs, was abandoned.
Another obstacle to any joint defense of the Balkans was of
course Dushan’s imperial ambition which made impossible any real collaboration with
Byzantium. When he suddenly died in 1355, it was at the very moment when instead of
marching against the Turks he was probably preparing for the conquest of Constantinople.
Nevertheless his premature death was a serious blow not only for Serbia but also for the
Christian peoples of the Balkans in general. The kingdom of the Nemanyids was divided
among the last members of the dynasty, who proved of much less prominence, and local
chieftains, among which the Balshas in the Zeta region—the future
Montenegro—were most important and most interested in relations with the Catholic
West. Bulgaria, too, which was divided among the last Shishmanids, could not possibly be a
really helpful ally of the Byzantine Empire. When Emperor John V, in spite of his
conversion to Catholicism of the Western rite and the sympathy of popes Urban V and
Gregory XI, did not receive any Catholic assistance against the Turkish power, rapidly
growing after Murad I’s conquest of Adrianople, the Orthodox party in Constantinople,
led by the Patriarch, continued to hope for efficient cooperation with the Orthodox Slavs
of the Balkans. But all such prospects came to an end with the battle on the Maritsa River
near Adrianople, then the Turkish capital, in 1371.
Even at this critical moment no league of Christian powers,
either Catholic or Orthodox, had been concluded, and it was Serbian forces alone, under
Dushan’s last successors, which were crushed in that first major victory of the Turks
in Europe. And it was Serbia which Murad I now wanted to destroy completely before
attempting to conquer encircled Constantinople where his influence was already decisive.
The final blow came in the famous battle at Kossovo Polje “the field of the
blackbirds” where the Turks crushed the remaining forces of free Serbs in 1389. The
assistance of other Balkan peoples had again proved entirely inadequate, and even one of
the Serbian chieftains, Marko Kralyevich, wrongly praised in later legends, probably
fought on the Turkish side. It is true that along with the Christian leader, Lazar, Murad
I also lost his life, but his son and successor, Bayazid I, continued his policy of
ruthless conquest.
The next victims were the now isolated Bulgarians. While some
Serb elements continued to resist in the northwestern corner of the Balkan Peninsula, in
the mountains of Zeta and of Bosnia where Stephen Tvrtko’s kingdom disintegrated only
after his death in 1391, Bulgaria, near the European center of Ottoman power, was
completely subjugated in 1393 after the fall of its capital, Tirnovo. The cultural leaders
who had been active in that city went into exile, and the national life of the Bulgarians
was simply annihilated for almost five hundred years. There always remained, however, the
tradition of Bulgaria’s medieval power, just as Dushan’s glory and the tragedy
of Kossovo continued to inspire the Serbs not only during their last local struggles in
the following century but also until their liberation in the nineteenth.
With Wallachia threatened and repeatedly raided immediately
after the conquest of neighboring Bulgaria, there started, therefore, for all free peoples
of the Balkan region the dark era of Turkish oppression and of the imposition of a
completely alien Muslim civilization and political organization. For Christian Europe this
was a serious though insufficiently realized loss. Greater was the impression created by
the imminence of the conquest of Constantinople, now completely encircled and engaged in a
policy of appeasement under both the old Emperor John V and, after his death in 1391, his
son Manuel II. Only in connection with attempts at saving the Eastern Christian Empire,
was the liberation of the Balkan Slavs also incidentally considered.
Even these attempts were, however, more difficult than before,
since Constantinople was now impossible to reach except from the sea, and since, instead
of ending the Eastern schism, the Great Western schism had been started, adding another
element of division to the lack of unity among the Christian countries. Although the
Catholic powers of East Central Europe at first remained loyal to the legitimate pope in
Rome, the participation of Burgundy—the Western country most seriously concerned with
the Eastern problem, but siding, like all of France, with the Pope of
Avignon—excluded any papal initiative in the crusade of 1396, which seemed to have a
good chance of success. That expedition ended, however, in the defeat of Nicopolis,
where the crusaders, long before reaching imperial territory, met the Turkish forces near
the Danubian border between Wallachia and Bulgaria. That fateful event therefore merely
strengthened in that whole region the position of the Ottoman conquerors who had even
compelled Serbian forces to fight on their side.
Strangely enough, it was also an auxiliary Serb detachment
which distinguished itself six years later in the battle of Angora, where Bayazid I was in
turn defeated by another Asiatic conqueror, Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane, who for a short
period revived the empire of Jenghis Khan. It is well known that this unexpected
catastrophe of the rising Ottoman power permitted the Byzantine Empire to survive for
another half century. Under the impression of his intervention in Turkish affairs, the
Christian West even considered the savage Mongol leader as a possible ally. Only Venice
never shared this illusion, having lost her Eastern European colony of Tana, at the mouth
of the Don, in 1393, through an earlier invasion of Tamerlane in northeastern Europe.
That same invasion not only threatened Muscovite Russia, where
the opposition against Mongol rule had just started, but also the new power in East
Central Europe which the Venetians and other experts on the whole Eastern question rightly
considered an indispensable factor in any action against the Muslim onslaught, even in the
Balkans. This was the Polish-Lithuanian federation, including also the Ruthenian lands of
the old Kievan State, which had been formed, thanks to the restoration of a powerful
kingdom of Poland and to the stupendous expansion and eventual Christianization of the
Lithuanian Grand Duchy. These two events are therefore an important part of the profound
changes in the whole structure of East Central Europe which developed in the course of the
fourteenth century.
THE LAST PIAST KINGS OF POLAND
The growing international role of Poland in the fourteenth century, so different from
her precarious political position in the thirteenth, was the natural result of her
restoration as a united kingdom. That restoration on a national basis and as a permanent
factor in the European state system was the achievement of two remarkable rulers, father
and son, and it came immediately after the merely temporary and territorially limited
restoration of the kingdom under Przemysl II and its occupation by a foreign ruler,
Václav II of Bohemia, followed for just one year by his son Václav III.
After the death of the latter in 1306, the Piast prince,
Wladyslaw Lokietek, who had become the leader of the national opposition against Czech
domination, immediately succeeded in occupying Little Poland, but it took him six years
before he was universally recognized in Greater Poland where he had a Silesian cousin as
his rival, and eight more years before he was crowned king in 1320. Through his tireless
efforts during these difficult years. of transition, he emerged as the first restorer of
the kingdom which, after his death in 1333, his only son Casimir could inherit without any
difficulty.
It was, however, a state which included little more than the
two basic provinces of Little and Greater Poland with Cracow and Gniezno as main centers,
in addition to Lokietek’s original patrimony, which was only a small part of Cuyavia.
In that very region there remained local dukes, close relatives of the king, who
recognized his authority but who also enjoyed a large degree of autonomy, while the dukes
of Mazovia, the youngest line of the dynasty, were practically independent. And even
before the loss of Silesia, which the numerous descendants of the eldest Piast line placed
under the suzerainty of Bohemia, Lokietek suffered the equally painful loss of Polish
Pomerania.
In the difficult beginning of his reign, when that province,
together with the port of Danzig, was threatened by the margraves of Brandenburg, Lokietek
asked the Teutonic Order, still considered a friendly neighbor and possible ally, to come
to the rescue of the city. They did so, but only to occupy it for themselves after the
treacherous slaughter of a large part of the Polish population. By 1309 the conquest of
the whole province and its incorporation into Prussia was completed, and Poland was
completely cut off from the Baltic Sea.
The king was so determined to regain Pomerania that in the very
year of his coronation he submitted the dispute to the judgment of the Holy See. Pope John
XXII, with whose agreement Wladyslaw I (as he was called as king) had been crowned,
appointed leading representatives of the Polish clergy as arbitrators. After a careful
canonical trial, they recognized the king’s claims. Their decision was of course
disregarded by the Teutonic Order, and as soon as the king had added to his alliance with
Hungary a similar alliance with Lithuania in 1325, threatened by the Order in her very
existence, he tried to reconquer the lost province by force of arms.
In the course of these years of hard fighting, he even invaded
Brandenburg, now allied with the Teutonic Knights, but the cooperation with the still
pagan Lithuanians did not work, while the Order enjoyed the support of John of Luxemburg.
In 1331 and 1332 Poland herself suffered invasions and devastations by the Knights of the
Cross, which limited victories, like that of Plowce, could not possibly compensate, and
when the king died, even his native Cuyavia was occupied by the Germans under a truce
which he had been obliged to accept.
It was therefore in extremely difficult circumstances that his
son Casimir took the power the next year. But his reign of thirty-seven years proved so
successful that, alone among all kings of Poland, he was later called “the
Great,” and already in his lifetime he enjoyed an extraordinary prestige both at home
and abroad.
His greatness is particularly evident in the field of internal
administration, which had been rather neglected by his father. With experienced jurists as
collaborators, throughout his whole reign he worked at a codification of Polish law which
helped him to restore order in the whole country and to establish a sound balance of all
classes of society. In his time the Polish knighthood already appears as a privileged
class of nobles, but supported by faithful partisans he checked any possible abuses of
turbulent aristocratic leaders, particularly in Greater Poland where a first
“confederation” or league of nobles directed against his authority had been
formed. He also promoted the development of the cities, which continued to enjoy the
franchises of German law but under a local court of appeal established in Cracow. Finally,
he became famous as protector of the peasants and also of the Jews, who having already
received charters of liberties in the preceding century, now settled in Poland in rapidly
growing numbers, thus escaping from persecution in the Western countries.
It is doubtful whether Casimir succeeded in having a unified
code of law accepted in all Poland which would have combined his separate drafts for Great
and Little Poland that had been promulgated around 1346. But great progress was achieved
in the unification of the administration through the creation of central offices, and
almost all local duchies were converted into provinces directly under the king whose
Cuyavian cousins died out with only one exception. As to the dukes of Mazovia, they
gradually recognized the king’s suzerainty, and here too the extinction of various
side lines of the dynasty enabled Casimir to establish his immediate rule over at least
part of that province and to remove any foreign interference with its affairs.
In his foreign policy, Casimir realized the necessity of
beginning with concessions made to stronger neighbors. After the unavoidable recognition
of Bohemia’s suzerainty over almost all the Silesian duchies, he hoped to concentrate
against the Teutonic Order and tried once more to recover Pomerania peacefully through the
decision of another papal court of arbitration which this time met in Warsaw in 1339 and
was composed of French prelates. But once more a decision favorable to Poland was rejected
by the Order, and in 1343 Casimir felt obliged to conclude the peace treaty of Kalisz,
which gave only Cuyavia back to Poland, while Pomerania was left to the Teutonic Knights
as a “perpetual alm.”
The king never ceased to look for an occasion to reclaim it,
but he was already engaged in a political action which was to be his main objective from
1340 onward and which kept him busy at the eastern borders of Poland. It was the problem
of his succession in Halich and Volhynia after the death of his cousin Boleslaw—a
problem intimately connected with that of the Hungarian succession in Poland.
Casimir was well received by the population, though mostly
Ruthenian, of that controversial border region, to which he granted full autonomy and
respect of their local customs. He was, however, opposed not only by the Tartars, but
particularly by the Lithuanian princes who also claimed the heritage of the former princes
of Halich and Volhynia. The King of Poland, after occupying all the former state of Halich
and Volhynia in 1349, had to limit himself to the province of Halich in 1352. Lwow, a
recently founded but rapidly developing city, was its new capital. Finally, in 1366, he
added the western section of Volhynia to it and his overlordship was recognized by the
Lithuanian rulers of Podolia.
Time and again he tried to come to an understanding not only
with that Podolian line but with the whole Lithuanian dynasty and to cooperate against the
Knights of the Cross. He encouraged all projects of converting Lithuania to the Catholic
faith. There are also some indications that he was already considering the opportunity of
a Polish-Lithuanian union, again in connection with the choice of his own successor. This
choice was his permanent concern in the later part of his reign when he realized that in
spite of his three marriages he would leave no male heir.
Casimir did not see any suitable candidate for the Polish crown
among the surviving lines of the Piasts, and though he seems to have taken into
consideration various alternatives, including the succession of a grandson, Casimir of
Stettin, whom he adopted and endowed with large territories in Poland, the original idea
of leaving Poland to Louis of Hungary prevailed. The relations with this nephew, so
important for Casimir’s policy in general European affairs, were particularly close
at the time of the Congress of Cracow in 1364, when Casimir showed his unusual
versatility, dealing even with Scandinavian and Balkan problems. In the very year of that
memorable assembly which best evidenced the rise of Poland’s power, the king also
made his greatest contribution to the progress of Polish culture by founding the
University of Cracow on the model of the famous Italian law schools.
When Casimir died prematurely in 1370, Louis of Hungary started
the twelve years of his Polish reign in cooperation with his mother, the sister of
Casimir. Supported by a strong party among the aristocracy of Little Poland, opposed by
most of Greater Poland where native candidates were much more popular, he practically
limited his interest in Polish affairs to the desire of having the succession of one of
his daughters recognized in Poland also. He reached that goal at the price of a charter of
liberties granted to the Polish nobles in 1374 at the second of three successive meetings
he held with them in Kassa (Kosice) in northern Hungary.
It was then that the privileged position of the szlachta,
which had been developing throughout the preceding centuries, was legally established. The
most important concession, which limited the ordinary taxes to a small merely symbolic
payment, was the origin of parliamentary government in Poland, since no further taxation
was henceforth possible without a vote of representatives of the nation. Equally important
was the participation of the nobles in the settlement of decisive political problems. Well
trained in that respect under a foreign ruler who was frequently absent, they themselves
were prepared to take care of the vital interests of the country when he died in 1382,
hoping in vain that the daughter whom he had chosen for Poland would rule there, together
with her future German husband who had also been selected by her father.
His plan to assign Poland to Mary, who was engaged to Sigismund
of Luxemburg, failed as soon as the Hungarians elected her as queen. Nobody wanted the
personal union with Hungary to continue. Amidst the general confusion of an interregnum
which seemed to favor the election of a Mazovian Piast, the Poles remained faithful to
their obligations toward the Anjou dynasty but invited Louis youngest daughter,
Jadwiga, who in spite of her age of hardly ten was sent to Cracow in 1384 and crowned as
“King” of Poland.
The choice of her husband was to have a decisive importance for
all East Central Europe. She, too, had a German fiancee, William of Habsburg, but the
Poles were no less opposed to him than to Sigismund of Luxemburg. They decided to choose
another candidate who was himself eager to gain the Polish crown in the interest of
Lithuania, his country of origin.
LITHUANIA’S EXPANSION UNDER GEDIMINAS AND HIS SONS
While two remarkable kings re-established the great medieval tradition of the Poland of
the Piasts, two simultaneous generations of Lithuania’s rulers succeeded in making
Europe’s last pagan country the largest state in East Central Europe. They did it
through an almost uninterrupted struggle on two fronts: defending what remained of the
free Baltic tribes against the German Knights of conquered Prussia and Livonia, and at the
same time expanding in the opposite direction in spite of Tartar opposition and the
growing power of Moscow, while the Ruthenian population remained practically passive.
That tremendous task, which resulted in a basic change of the
map of Europe and in the creation of its largest body politic outside the German Empire,
was started by the first prominent representative of Pukuveras’ dynasty, his son
Vytenis. But it was chiefly by his brother Gediminas, who followed him in 1315, and after
the death of the latter in 1341 by his numerous sons, successfully led by two of them,
that the decisive achievements were performed.
Gediminas realized even better than his predecessors, from
Mindaugas onward, that he could not create a real European power nor even assure the
peaceful survival of the Lithuanian peoples without converting them to the Christian
faith. As early as 1321 he started negotiations with the papacy, avoiding the dangerous
intermediary of the Teutonic Order and using Franciscan friars to take his letters to
Avignon. Again there is some doubt as to the authenticity of the source material, and it
is hard to determine whether Lithuanian hesitation or German intrigues made the whole
project fail, although papal delegates arrived in Vilnius (Wilno), Gediminas’
recently founded capital, and peace was concluded with his German neighbors in 1323.
A few years later, in spite of his temporary alliance with
Poland, Gediminas again found himself in an extremely difficult position, while regular
raids of the Teutonic Knights penetrated far into Lithuania and used her persistent
paganism as a pretext for crusades which attracted participants from all Western Europe.
But in addition to the permanent effort of organizing the defense of the country along the
western border, the rex Lithwinorum et multorum Ruthenorum, as the grand duke
proudly called himself, continued to extend his eastern frontier by connecting the main
White Russian principalities with Lithuania. These principalities were Polotsk, where
Lithuanian influence had already been established, and Vitebsk, whose prince gave his
daughter in marriage to Gediminas’ heir. He also incorporated minor territories,
still held by the Tartars, as far as the limits of Volhynia and Kiev.
After a few years of internal crisis which followed the death
of Gediminas, his most prominent sons, Algirdas and Kestutis, settled the problem of
succession. In 1345 they made an agreement which put the whole state, including the
duchies of their other brothers, under their joint leadership. Loyally cooperating with
each other for more than thirty years, they divided the two main problems of
Lithuania’s foreign policy between themselves. Algirdas, the senior partner who
resided in Vilnius, mainly directed the activities in the East, while Kestutis, from
nearby Trakai (Troki), organized the defense against the Germans. Frequently, however,
they would both join in facing that increasing danger or in invading the Teutonic
Order’s territories in turn. Sometimes they suffered serious defeats and saw a large
border region of their country practically turned into a wilderness, but they still
resisted the onslaught of what was then the strongest military power in Central Europe.
From time to time there again appeared projects for the
conversion of Lithuania, including her great leaders, to the Catholic faith, possibly
through imperial, Polish, or even Hungarian intermediaries. But there was another conflict
with these friendlier Catholic neighbors which proved to be a serious obstacle. It was
rivalry for the possession of Halich and, at least, Volhynia. This protracted struggle,
which started shortly before Gediminas death, was only part of a much bigger problem
which Algirdas summarized in his ambitious statement that omnis Russia ought to
belong to the Lithuanians.
This was first of all a challenge to the Tartars. Their
European realm was disintegrating, but they still opposed the Lithuanian advance. Finally
a great victory, gained by Algirdas in 1363, brought Kiev itself together with most of
what was later called the Ukraine under his control, which thus approached the Black Sea.
He was wise enough to leave considerable autonomy to all the Ruthenian territories, merely
replacing their native princes by members of his own family. One of his sons, for
instance, was established in Kiev, after a long interruption of the historic role of that
city. Most of the territory of the old Kievan State being now associated with Lithuania in
one way or another, it would seem that the grand duchy was a continuation of that state
under Lithuanian leadership.
As a matter of fact, that leadership was purely political,
since not only did the Lithuanian princes ruling in Ruthenian lands adopt the Orthodox
faith, the language, and in general, the more developed culture of their new subjects, but
there was also a possibility that Lithuania proper, smaller in area and population than
her acquisitions in the East and the South, would come under Ruthenian influence and,
threatened by the Catholic West, turn Greek Orthodox. The Lithuanians and their dynasty,
had, however, an Orthodox rival also. Moscow, too, was trying to unite “all the
Russias” under her leadership, and the common faith was indeed a very important
asset. On the other hand, the control of Moscow, itself still under Tartar overlordship,
was not yet that full liberation from the Tartar yoke which was one of the advantages of
Lithuanian rule, a rule which, autocratic in the nucleus of the state, was nevertheless
more respectful of local traditions than were the despotic princes of Moscow.
Therefore various principalities, even in Great Russia, sided
in that conflict with the pagan Lithuanians, in spite of the indignation of the
ecclesiastical authority which was headed by the metropolitan residing in Moscow. Tver, in
particular, was looking for Lithuanian protection, and it was with this and other Russian
allies that Algirdas, whose second wife was a princess of Tver, thrice advanced as far as
Moscow, without, however, taking the city or decisively beating his eastern neighbor.
Therefore various principalities, including Smolensk, were hesitating between the two
hostile powers.
The situation of Lithuania, placed between two equally
irreconcilable enemies in addition to the Tartars, whose invasions did not end at all, and
hesitating between Western and Eastern influence, became particularly critical when
Algirdas died in 1377. It now became apparent that the internal political structure of the
huge realm was also rather weak and had depended exclusively on the cooperation of two
unusually gifted brothers who supplemented each other well. One of Algirdas’ twelve
sons, Jogaila, was supposed to continue such cooperation with Kestutis, and later with the
most prominent of Kestutis’ sons, Vytautas. But the relations between uncle and
nephew were not as harmonious as they had been in the earlier setup, and their mutual
distrust, skillfully exploited by the Teutonic Order, soon led to a disastrous civil war.
First, Kestutis, the old pagan hero of so many years of
struggle against the Germans, defeated Jogaila and, taking Vilnius, expelled him to
Vitebsk, inherited from his mother, in 1381. But the next year he was in turn crushed by
his nephew and killed in jail. His son Vytautas escaped to Prussia and tried to recover
his patrimony with the support of the Knights of the Cross, to whom he abandoned the
coveted province of Samogitia, the territorial link between the two Baltic colonies of the
German Knights, Prussia and Livonia. Baptized as a Catholic, Vytautas, if placed on the
Lithuanian throne by the Teutonic Order, would have made the rest of the country a German
protectorate.
Jogaila’s policy seemed undecided. He himself would
negotiate with the Order, making promises similar to those of his cousin. At the same time
he would consider the possibility of turning toward the East, although it proved to be a
legend that at a given moment he accepted as did many of his brothers the Orthodox faith.
Against Moscow he was even ready to cooperate with the Tartars, but he avoided joining
them in the decisive campaign of 1380 which ended in the famous victory of Dimitry
Donskoy, so called in memory of the battle of the Don. And he was fully aware that some of
the Lithuanian princes, already converted to Orthodoxy, particularly his brother Andrew of
Polotsk, in alliance with Moscow if not with the Germans, were ready to oppose him. In
their duchies, some of which were far away from Vilnius, they could at any moment
challenge the authority of the grand duke, as Vytautas had done.
Lithuania’s expansion, almost unique in its rapid success,
thus proved beyond the real forces of the Lithuanians alone and of a dynasty which in
spite of the unusual qualities of many of its members was too divided by the petty
rivalries of its various branches to guarantee a joint action under one chief. At a time
when the Teutonic Order reached the height of its power under Grand Master Winrich von
Kniprode (1351—81), while Moscow tried for the first time to replace the Tartar power
in Eastern Europe, Lithuania, larger than either of them but composed of loosely connected
territories different in race and creed, excluded from the European community because of
her official paganism, was doomed to destruction or disintegration. The comparatively
small group of ethnic Lithuanians would have been the main victim, but the whole of East
Central Europe would have suffered from a chaotic situation amidst German, Muscovite, and
possibly Tartar interference.
But in these critical years, especially in 1384 when he made a
move toward appeasing the Teutonic Order after a precarious reconciliation with Vytautas,
Jogaila was already conducting secret negotiations with the Poles which were to change the
situation altogether. The son of Algirdas had realized that the only way to save his
country and her proud tradition, as well as his personal position, was to come to an
agreement with the only neighbor who could help reorganize Lithuania as a Christian nation
without destroying her very identity. A union of Poland with Lithuania and her Ruthenian
lands, added to those already connected with Poland, could indeed create a new great
power, comprising a large and crucial section of East Central Europe and strong enough to
check both German and Muscovite advance. The amazing success of a plan which would seem
almost fantastic was a turning point in the history not only of that region but also of
Europe. In connection with so many other changes around 1378 and the following years, it
inaugurated a new historical period.
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