Remembering the Jagiellonians

Natalia Nowakowska, Natalia Nowakowska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351356572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Remembering the Jagiellonians is the first study of international memories of the Jagiellonians (1386–1596), one of the most powerful but lesser known royal dynasties of Renaissance Europe. It explores how the Jagiellonian dynasty has been remembered since the early modern period and assesses its role in the development of competing modern national identities across Central, Eastern and Northern Europe.

Offering a wide-ranging panoramic analysis of Jagiellonian memory over five hundred years, this book includes coverage of numerous present-day European countries, ranging from Bavaria to Kiev, and from Stockholm to the Adriatic. In doing so, it allows for a large, multi-way comparison of how one shared phenomenon has been, and still is, remembered in over a dozen neighbouring countries. Specialists in the history of Europe are brought together to apply the latest questions from memory theory and to combine them with debates from social science, medieval and early modern European history to engage in an international and interdisciplinary exploration into the relationship between memory and dynasty through time.

The first book to present the Jagiellonians' supranational history in English, Remembering the Jagiellonians opens key discussions about the regional memory of Europe and considers the ongoing role of the Jagiellonians in modern-day culture and politics. It is essential reading for students of early modern and late medieval Europe, ninteenth-century nationalism and the history of memory.

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OUR FOREIGN TRAITORS AND REDEEMERS

Remembering Jagiellonians in Lithuania

Giedrė Mickūnaitė

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the patrimony and political point of origin of the Jagiellonians, and was ruled by them as grand dukes from the fourteenth until the late sixteenth century. Having emerged as a short-lived kingdom under Mindaugas (d.1263), Lithuania was consolidated as a grand duchy under Vytenis (r.1295–1316), whose brother Gediminas (r.1316–41) gave his name to the Gediminid ruling house. Jogaila succeeded his father Algirdas (r.1345–77) to the grand ducal seat, only to be overthrown by his uncle Kęstutis in 1381–82. Having re-established himself as grand duke, Jogaila was elected king of Poland in 1386. This election resulted in Lithuania’s conversion to Catholicism and Jogaila’s residence in the kingdom of Poland. Having styled himself supreme duke of Lithuania, Jogaila transferred the grand ducal office to his cousin Vytautas (r.1392–1430), who later earned the epithet ‘the Great’. The close association of Lithuania and Poland, which began with Jogaila’s election, culminated in the establishment of the Commonwealth of both nations in 1569 during the reign of Sigismund Augustus (1544/8–72). However, it was only after all male heirs of Jogaila had died out in 1572 that the Jagiellonian name started to be exploited when claiming political power and royal prestige. Individual rulers continued to be referred to as lawgivers and authors of major deeds; thus the Jagiellonians remained symbolically present in the political thought and practice of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, even if physically extinct. After a brief glimpse into the consolidation of the Jagiellonian legacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this essay concentrates on the period after the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795. It traces developments in the Lithuanian remembrance of the Jagiellonians and discusses its manifestations from the establishment of the Lithuanian nation-state in 1918 and throughout the twentieth century to this day.

In 1603, Krzysztof Warszewicki’s Liber Parallelum …¹ paired Jogaila and Sigismund Augustus as the two complementary biographies framing the Jagiellonian dynasty. The first represented potential, the second embodied decay. Warszewicki’s view echoed opinions current in the later 1570s. Critical judgements about the reign of Sigismund Augustus and his mismanagement of the Commonwealth were expressed during the king’s lifetime and exploded after his heirless death. The nobility mobilised to execute their right to elect the king, rather than approve the son of the deceased one, as had happened ever since the election of Jogaila. The newly elected king’s reign was considered a contrast to that of the last Jagiellonian. Indeed, it exceeded these projections, although unfortunately not as expected: Henri Valois (r.1573–74) was late to assume royal office and, having arrived in the Commonwealth, stayed there for just four months before secretly escaping to France to take the inherited throne. The foreign king from far away appeared to be a profound failure. In parallel, disputes about the inheritance of Sigismund Augustus and arguments for the Commonwealth’s debt to the Jagiellonians for two hundred years of prosperous rulership provided a favourable package for the Jagiellonians memorialised as a whole.² Hence Warszewicki’s negative judgement in the 1603 paired biographies seemed anachronistic, as under the reign of Sigismund Vasa (1587–1632), who styled himself as a Jagiellonian and profoundly exploited his blood connection to the extinct dynasty, the Jagiellonians had come to be regarded in a highly positive light.

Although the negative reputation of Sigismund Augustus had expired by the turn of the sixteenth century and the memory of the Jagiellonians had begun the steep path towards rehabilitation, the contrasting evaluations of individual Jagiellonian kings remained marked. The split between collective lineage and individual person¬alities concerned only males and, moreover, only the crowned ones and St Casimir (d.1484), whose saintly reputation exceeded royal merits and situated him firmly on the ‘good’ end of the scale. With the election of Sigismund Vasa, Jagiellonians in the plural functioned as a currency of politics and prestige. Jagiellonian blood became the rhetorical trump card of Sigismund’s election and the natural bond tying the Vasa kings to the Commonwealth.

While the grand ducal office guaranteed the Jagiellonians’ symbolic presence in politics and legislation, the canonisation of Casimir in 1602 and the celebrations of his triumph in Vilnius in May 1604 opened an avenue for new memories of the Jagiellonians. During the first half of the seventeenth century, kings, magnates, and monastic orders promoted the saint’s cult. Most importantly, the Church invested in and maintained devotion to St Casimir. The saint’s lives always emphasised his status as prince of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania, and this repetition of ducal titles in text and iconography firmly sustained the Jagiellonian association.³

It was only after the dissolution of the Commonwealth (1795) that the Jagiellonians’ active membership in political discourse expired and their name entered memory proper. In the absence of statehood, Jagiellonians personified the glorious past ‘when our kings reigned’ and symbolised the nascent Lithuanian and Polish nations, embodying both a shared history and increasingly distinct nationhoods. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Lithuanian nation was represented by the citizens of the former grand duchy and, in addition to Lithuanians, included Samogitians, Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Tatars and other ethnic groups communicating mostly in the Polish language. Many of them were nostal¬gic for the lost state and cherished its heritage and history. Part of this history was naturally associated with the Jagiellonians, regarded as ‘our natural lords’.

The fact that the Jagiellonians had held grand ducal and royal offices privileged them not only during their lifetime, but also in history and memory. Rather than be discovered, they had merely to be reshaped according to the needs and views of evaluators and their audiences. The latent presence of the Jagiellonians required only minor stimuli to be activated; their memory functioned as a kind of distorted echo where various deeds from the past were evoked to the tunes of the present. The selective work of memory also contributed towards concentrating memories of the Jagiellonians in Vilnius and around the framing personalities of the dynasty – Jogaila and his great-grandson Sigismund Augustus.

Sites

From the moment the grand duchy was annexed by the Russian Empire, the tsarist government started restricting access to the country’s past, first by taking the state archive consisting of the books of Lithuanian Metrica to St Petersburg, and then by reshaping the cityscape of Vilnius, which was turned into governor’s seat.⁴ In 1798, tsarist Governor Ivan Fryzel’ ordered the demolition of the grand ducal palace, and by 1802 the ‘dangerous wreck’ was gone. The demolished palace dep-rived memories of the Jagiellonians of a tangible container. Without this palace, a much-needed substitute was found in visual art.⁵ The drawing of the palace by Pietro de Rossi⁶ from 1793, now lost, was copied extensively, with many of these copies bearing captions identifying the building as the Jagiellonian palace. The naming of the palace after the Jagiellonians can also be traced to town plans,⁷ suggesting a topographical echo of oral tradition. During the first years under tsarist rule, the preservation of historic images was led by private initiatives, most of which have become anonymous today. In 1844 the wider public learned of Franciszek Smugliewicz’s⁸ water-colours with historic views of Vilnius from 1786.⁹ The delayed public awareness of these images relates to a much broader movement that can be called ‘the past in pictures’, caused by the suppression of the anti-tsarist uprising of 1831 and the heavy censorship imposed on texts.¹⁰ Napoleon Orda (1807–83) is the emblematic figure of this movement. Having returned from forced emigration in 1856, Orda decided to ‘capture the shivers of our bygone civilisation’¹¹ by making thousands of drawings of historically charged sites in the former Commonwealth. Two hundred and sixty of his pictures were lithographed and published in fascicles of the Album of Historic Views of Poland (1873–83).¹² Of the twelve cityscapes representing Vilnius, three feature non-extant buildings copied from Rossi’s drawings. Curiously, the picture of the grand ducal palace (without Jagiellonian captions) has been turned around while lithographing and thus reflects its own absence, making the entire site an almost unrecognisable dream space from the past.¹³

FIGURE 1.1 Landscape of Jagiellonian ruins. ‘Vilna, View of the Jagiellon Royal Castle destroyed in 1802, and a part of the Cathedral’, attributed to Jan Rustem (c.1820); pen and brush in grey and black, grey wash, on paper. National Museum in Krakow/Princes Czartoryski Museum. Image from the labor...