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The Making of Modern Ukraine, Class 6: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania (3)

Class 6: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania (3)

by a man called Andrey Bogolyubsky,

who I think is on your list, should be on your list.

And he attacked Kyiv, not once, but twice.

The first time he successfully sacked it.

The second time he was repulsed.

But the point is that Andrey Bogolyubsky

had the idea that he was gonna make Vladimir

the most important city, the successor of Kyiv, as it were.

He took an important icon that was near Kyiv,

and he brought it to Vladimir.

He built a church in Vladimir,

which was meant to look like St. Sophia in Kyiv.

So he had the idea that he would be the most important ruler

and that his city would be more important than Kyiv.

So this is Vladimir, and Vladimir is in a district

which is called Suzdal.

The Mongols are going to come,

they're going to wipe out Vladimir,

they're gonna wipe out Suzdal,

they're gonna wipe out basically everything

in that part of Rus.

But I want you to at least mark that this idea

was already here in the 12th century,

that there could be a successor to Kyiv

that could somehow be better than Kyiv.

Okay.

When the Mongols do come, and we'll talk more about

the Mongols and what they were up to,

but when the Mongols do come, we see a partition of Rus,

which is very durable.

I'll just say a word about the Mongols

and what they were up to.

Just a word.

It is always the case that from the point of view

of the people whose cities get sacked,

that the arriving people are just marauders,

and chaotic and so on,

but it is almost always the case that, in fact,

what is happening is that those who are arriving

are trying to establish trade routes,

admittedly on terms favorable to them.

And you tend to get, I mean,

this is why we now have a European Union to avoid this,

but the way you get terms favorable to you

is you sack the city.

And then you get terms favorable to you.

I mean, it's tough, but that's how it is.

So the Mongols, like the Vikings before them,

were trying to establish a long trade route,

the Vikings over sea, the Mongols over land,

in which they would be able to trade favorably

all the way down the line

at terms which are favorable to them.

At terms which are favorable to them.

And they had tremendous success with this

everywhere they went.

They were never really defeated.

In the early 1240s, they destroy what remains

of Kyivan Rus'.

You understand that when they destroy Kyivan Rus',

they're not destroying a unified state,

because there is no unified state.

There are a bunch of districts with rivals.

When the princes of Rus' go out to meet the Mongols

on the battlefield, they're literally

arguing amongst one another on the way to the battlefield

about who is who, and who gets to go first,

and who's the most important.

So that gives you a sense.

Even if they'd have been in perfect formation,

had loved one another, they still would've

had their hats handed them by the Mongols, however.

The Mongols were gonna win.

So after the Mongol invasion,

we get a kind of three part division

of the lands of old Rus, which I'm gonna mark.

And then we're gonna talk about the most important of these,

which is Lithuania.

So, far off to the west you have a district

called Galicia-Volhynia.

And that district, Galicia-Volhynia,

is going to have a slightly different trajectory

than the rest, because Galicia-Volhynia

is gonna be ruled by its own princes for a while.

And then the Galician part of Galicia-Volhynia

is gonna become part of Poland in the mid 14th century.

So that Western part of Ukraine,

Galicia-Volhynia, is going to have

a somewhat different history.

That's part one.

Part two, so that's the extreme west,

part two is the extreme east or the extreme Northeast.

Suzdal, the areas around what is gonna be

at some point, Moscow.

Moscow has still not come into being, but I promise you,

at some point Moscow will be created.

The territories in Suzdal in the Northeast

are going to remain longer under direct Mongol domination.

That's also a different political story.

The Mongols are gonna come and they're gonna stay.

And they're gonna establish a durable form

of transactional politics with the

inheritors of Rus' princes in the far Northeast.

And we'll pick up that story next time

when I talk about the origins of the state,

which is based in Moscow, the origins of Russia.

The third and the most important trajectory

is the one we're going to follow today,

which is the grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Most of the territory of old Rus'

comes under the grand Duchy of Lithuania.

And not only that, one of the reasons why I've spent

so much time talking about this civilization is that,

interestingly, this civilizational package

associated with Yaroslav, the language,

the Chancery Slavonic, the law

all gets absorbed by Lithuania.

The Lithuanians take it over.

They appropriate it, they make it their own

very comfortably.

And so in that sense, the Kyivan civilization survives

in the written form of its law.

So it's sometimes it's helpful to think of history

as having different speeds, or different

elements in history having different kinds of durability.

So a language has a lot of durability.

It changes over time.

A particular civilizational package, like law,

it doesn't last as long as a language,

but it can last much longer than a person.

So the fact that Yaroslav got the law together

has meaning, which goes well beyond his lifetime,

deep into the history of Lithuania.

Centuries later, when Lithuanians

are gonna be writing their grand statutes,

which starts in the 16th century,

when they write their statutes, three of them,

they're gonna be using this language, Chancery Slavonic.

In turn, it's gonna have more words

from their part of the world and so on,

but this civilizational package long outlasts

the actual Kyivan Rus'.

So the last big thing we have to do,

we've gotten Volodymyr to Yaroslav,

Yaroslav to the end of Rus'.

Now we have to get to Lithuania.

What is Lithuania?

And how could Lithuania be so, I mean,

isn't Lithuania just this tiny country?

It's this tiny country filled with Baltic speakers?

How can it?

It was the biggest country in Europe, my friends.

It was the biggest country in Europe at the time.

And it emerged, as countries often emerged,

because of pressure from two directions.

The Lithuanian state consolidated,

because of pressure from the west,

in the form of Christianity.

Now a very aggressive, pointed pressure

in the form of crusades.

A few centuries earlier, when we're talking about

the Franks, and Poland, and Moravia, and so on,

that's a more gentle pressure.

You know, we want you to convert.

Perhaps you'll be a little bit subordinate to us.

We're now in the 14th century in the era of crusades,

and the Lithuanians were subject to violent,

forcible conversion.

By that I mean, all the men were killed

and the women and children were taken and baptized.

That's what the Teutonic Knights did.

So pressure from the west,

the Teutonic Knights had wiped out the Prussians.

I realize there's still a place called Prussia,

but the place called Prussia today takes its name

from an earlier people who spoke a Baltic language,

similar to Lithuanian.

These people were exterminated by the Teutonic Knights.

They no longer existed.

And as that was happening,

the groups of Baltic speakers

that are called the Lithuanians

managed to consolidate a state.

So they were consolidating because of pressure

from the west.

And also, as we'll get to, they consolidated

because of what the Mongols did in the south.

So faced with pressure from the west,

the Lithuanian state in the early 14th century,

in the 13 hundreds, was able to move south

from its base around Vilnius into what's now Belarus,

and deep into what's now Ukraine.

And so, as they were pressed from the west,

they took advantage of what the Mongols had done

in the east.

It might help, although, you know,

in the kind in a kind of Christian dominated historiography,

this would never be put this way,

to think of the Teutonic Knights and the Mongols

as arriving at about the same time, which they did,

and their arrival at about the same time

creating the conditions in which a Lithuania

could face a challenge and respond to that challenge

by gathering up territories from the south,

from Rus, and becoming the biggest state in Europe,

which it was.

So what do we know about Lithuania?

The Lithuanians, so I talked earlier about the math,

the math of slavery and paganism.

The Lithuanians were the last holdouts in this.

They were the last major pagan group in Europe.

They were the last ones who were able not to be enslaved

more than they enslaved others.

They were using slave labor of others in their countryside.

They raided Rus' for slaves, they raided Poland for slaves,

they also raided their Baltic,

their pagan neighbors for slaves.

So long as they had pagan neighbors.

They brought in tens of thousands of people

to work as slaves in their agriculture.

We know that they traded timber, and furs, and grain,

and wax and honey for iron products.

We know that they turned a corner in their own

agricultural planning in the early 14th century

under their most important ruler,

who I may not have put down, Gediminas.

Is he there?

He's there?

Okay.

So under Gediminas, who ruled from 1315 to 1343,

they started moving away from slavery

and towards colonization,

where they would accept the rules of local,

they would kind of control land rather than people.

So in a way it's the same kind of transition

you see earlier in Rus', control land, rather than people,

accept basically the rules that already existed.

And then try to tax.

It's Gediminas who moves into what is now Rus'.

What was their religion?

Very briefly about this,

we know a lot more about it because their paganism

lasted for another four centuries.

And many people had contact with them, many Christians,

many Muslims, many Jews had contacts with them

over the centuries.

There were Christian churches in Vilnius the whole time.

Why?

Because if you're a tolerant, prosperous regime,

you need to have traders coming from other places

and you have to make sure they have churches, right?

And additionally, just to make sure this is always clear,

this story is gonna end with

the Lithuanian rulers converting,

but the Lithuanian rulers are always ruling over a country

which is majority Christian.

Because most of the people who are in Lithuania

are in what is now Belarus, and then later

in what is now Ukraine, i.e. they're Eastern Christians.

So the whole time this is a regime where

the rulers are pagans, and the ruling families are pagans,

but most of the population are actually Christians.

So when I talk about this religion,

this is the religion of the Baltic core,

which then spreads out and tolerates Christianity.

They make no attempt at converting the Christians at all.

So we know that the grand duke was also the high priest.

We know that the priests were priests of sacrifice,

as in the Slavic lands.

We know what some of the most important gods were,

who were familiar figures already.

They had a version of Perun, who was called Perkūnas.

In general, if you just add us to the end,

you'll get a Lithuanian word.

So like, okay, doesn't always work.

Doesn't always work.

But the Lithuanian version of Perun was called Perkūnas.

Other important gods were

Andai, who was associated with water,

Teliavel, who was associated with like a Hephaestus figure,

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Class 6: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania (3) Klasse 6: Das Großfürstentum Litauen (3) Clase 6: El Gran Ducado de Lituania (3) Classe 6 : Le Grand-Duché de Lituanie (3) Klas 6: Het Groothertogdom Litouwen (3) Classe 6: O Grão-Ducado da Lituânia (3) 第六类:立陶宛大公国(3) 第六類:立陶宛大公國(3)

by a man called Andrey Bogolyubsky,

who I think is on your list, should be on your list.

And he attacked Kyiv, not once, but twice.

The first time he successfully sacked it. ||||erfolgreich|entlassen| |||||took possession of| |||||захопив|

The second time he was repulsed. |||||abgelehnt |||||rejected again |||||відбито Вдруге він отримав відсіч.

But the point is that Andrey Bogolyubsky ||||||Боголюбський

had the idea that he was gonna make Vladimir

the most important city, the successor of Kyiv, as it were. |||||наступник|||||

He took an important icon that was near Kyiv, ||||Ikone||||

and he brought it to Vladimir.

He built a church in Vladimir,

which was meant to look like St. Sophia in Kyiv.

So he had the idea that he would be the most important ruler

and that his city would be more important than Kyiv.

So this is Vladimir, and Vladimir is in a district |||||||||specific area

which is called Suzdal. |||Суздаль

The Mongols are going to come,

they're going to wipe out Vladimir,

they're gonna wipe out Suzdal,

they're gonna wipe out basically everything

in that part of Rus. ||section||

But I want you to at least mark that this idea

was already here in the 12th century,

that there could be a successor to Kyiv

that could somehow be better than Kyiv.

Okay.

When the Mongols do come, and we'll talk more about

the Mongols and what they were up to,

but when the Mongols do come, we see a partition of Rus, |als|||||||||| |||||||||division of|| |||монголи|||ми|||поділ Русі|| але коли монголи приходять, ми бачимо поділ Русі,

which is very durable. |ist|| |||long-lasting |||дуже міцний який є дуже довговічним.

I'll just say a word about the Mongols |||||||монголи

and what they were up to.

Just a word.

It is always the case that from the point of view

of the people whose cities get sacked, ||люди|чиї|міст||пограбованих людей, чиї міста розграбовані,

that the arriving people are just marauders, ||||||Plünderer ||||||raiders ||||||мародери

and chaotic and so on,

but it is almost always the case that, in fact,

what is happening is that those who are arriving

are trying to establish trade routes,

admittedly on terms favorable to them. zugegebenermaßen||||| it must be said|||beneficial to them|| слід визнати|||||їм

And you tend to get, I mean,

this is why we now have a European Union to avoid this,

but the way you get terms favorable to you

is you sack the city. |du|||

And then you get terms favorable to you.

I mean, it's tough, but that's how it is. |||difficult|||||

So the Mongols, like the Vikings before them, Отже|||||||

were trying to establish a long trade route,

the Vikings over sea, the Mongols over land,

in which they would be able to trade favorably

all the way down the line

at terms which are favorable to them. ||||||їм

At terms which are favorable to them.

And they had tremendous success with this |||great|||

everywhere they went.

They were never really defeated.

In the early 1240s, they destroy what remains During|||||||

of Kyivan Rus'.

You understand that when they destroy Kyivan Rus',

they're not destroying a unified state, ||||single entity| ||||єдиний|

because there is no unified state.

There are a bunch of districts with rivals. ||ein||||| |||||||competing districts |||||||суперники Є купа районів з суперниками.

When the princes of Rus' go out to meet the Mongols Коли князі Русі виходять зустрічати монголів

on the battlefield, they're literally ||||buchstäblich на полі бою, вони буквально

arguing amongst one another on the way to the battlefield disputing with each|||||||||

about who is who, and who gets to go first,

and who's the most important.

So that gives you a sense.

Even if they'd have been in perfect formation,

had loved one another, they still would've ||||||hätten sie trotzdem

had their hats handed them by the Mongols, however. bekommen||||||||

The Mongols were gonna win.

So after the Mongol invasion,

we get a kind of three part division

of the lands of old Rus, which I'm gonna mark.

And then we're gonna talk about the most important of these,

which is Lithuania.

So, far off to the west you have a district

called Galicia-Volhynia.

And that district, Galicia-Volhynia,

is going to have a slightly different trajectory має мати трохи іншу траєкторію

than the rest, because Galicia-Volhynia ||||Галичина-В|Волинь ніж решта, бо Галичина-Волинь

is gonna be ruled by its own princes for a while. буде під владою своїх князів деякий час.

And then the Galician part of Galicia-Volhynia

is gonna become part of Poland in the mid 14th century.

So that Western part of Ukraine,

Galicia-Volhynia, is going to have

a somewhat different history.

That's part one.

Part two, so that's the extreme west, ||||||західна частина

part two is the extreme east or the extreme Northeast.

Suzdal, the areas around what is gonna be

at some point, Moscow.

Moscow has still not come into being, but I promise you,

at some point Moscow will be created.

The territories in Suzdal in the Northeast

are going to remain longer under direct Mongol domination.

That's also a different political story.

The Mongols are gonna come and they're gonna stay.

And they're gonna establish a durable form

of transactional politics with the |related to transactions||| |транзакційної політики з|||

inheritors of Rus' princes in the far Northeast. descendants||||||| спадкоємці князів Русі|||||||

And we'll pick up that story next time

when I talk about the origins of the state, коли я говорю про витоки держави,

which is based in Moscow, the origins of Russia. яка базується в Москві, витоки Росії.

The third and the most important trajectory Третя і найважливіша траєкторія

is the one we're going to follow today,

which is the grand Duchy of Lithuania. |||велика|князівство||

Most of the territory of old Rus'

comes under the grand Duchy of Lithuania.

And not only that, one of the reasons why I've spent

so much time talking about this civilization is that,

interestingly, this civilizational package

associated with Yaroslav, the language,

the Chancery Slavonic, the law |court of equity|||

all gets absorbed by Lithuania.

The Lithuanians take it over.

They appropriate it, they make it their own |привласнюють|||||| Вони привласнюють це, роблять це своїм.

very comfortably. дуже комфортно.

And so in that sense, the Kyivan civilization survives І в цьому сенсі київська цивілізація виживає.

in the written form of its law.

So it's sometimes it's helpful to think of history

as having different speeds, or different

elements in history having different kinds of durability.

So a language has a lot of durability. |||||||staying power |||||||стійкість до зм

It changes over time.

A particular civilizational package, like law,

it doesn't last as long as a language,

but it can last much longer than a person.

So the fact that Yaroslav got the law together

has meaning, which goes well beyond his lifetime,

deep into the history of Lithuania.

Centuries later, when Lithuanians

are gonna be writing their grand statutes, ||||||Gesetze |||||important|

which starts in the 16th century,

when they write their statutes, three of them,

they're gonna be using this language, Chancery Slavonic. ||||цю|мова|канцелярська|слов'янська

In turn, it's gonna have more words

from their part of the world and so on,

but this civilizational package long outlasts |dies|zivilisatorischen||| |||||survives longer than

the actual Kyivan Rus'.

So the last big thing we have to do,

we've gotten Volodymyr to Yaroslav,

Yaroslav to the end of Rus'.

Now we have to get to Lithuania.

What is Lithuania?

And how could Lithuania be so, I mean,

isn't Lithuania just this tiny country?

It's this tiny country filled with Baltic speakers?

How can it?

It was the biggest country in Europe, my friends.

It was the biggest country in Europe at the time.

And it emerged, as countries often emerged, ||||||came to light

because of pressure from two directions.

The Lithuanian state consolidated, |||became stronger |||укріпилася Литовська держава консолідувалася,

because of pressure from the west, через тиск з заходу,

in the form of Christianity. у формі християнства.

Now a very aggressive, pointed pressure

in the form of crusades. ||||Kreuzzüge ||||military campaigns ||||у формі хрестових походів

A few centuries earlier, when we're talking about

the Franks, and Poland, and Moravia, and so on,

that's a more gentle pressure.

You know, we want you to convert.

Perhaps you'll be a little bit subordinate to us. maybe|||||||| можливо||||трохи||підлеглий||

We're now in the 14th century in the era of crusades, ||im||||||Kreuzzüge||

and the Lithuanians were subject to violent, ||||||gewalttätigen і литовці піддавалися насильницькій,

forcible conversion. gewaltsame| coerced| примусовий| силовій конверсії.

By that I mean, all the men were killed Під цим я маю на увазі, що всі чоловіки були вбиті

and the women and children were taken and baptized.

That's what the Teutonic Knights did. |||deutschritter|| |||Germanic||

So pressure from the west,

the Teutonic Knights had wiped out the Prussians. |||||||Preußen |||||||native inhabitants |||||||пруссианці

I realize there's still a place called Prussia, |||||||Preußen |||||||Пруссія

but the place called Prussia today takes its name

from an earlier people who spoke a Baltic language,

similar to Lithuanian.

These people were exterminated by the Teutonic Knights. |||ausgerottet|||| |||destroyed completely|||| |||знищені||||

They no longer existed.

And as that was happening, І||||

the groups of Baltic speakers

that are called the Lithuanians

managed to consolidate a state. ||unify or strengthen|| змогли об'єднати||||

So they were consolidating because of pressure

from the west. ||the west

And also, as we'll get to, they consolidated

because of what the Mongols did in the south.

So faced with pressure from the west,

the Lithuanian state in the early 14th century,

in the 13 hundreds, was able to move south

from its base around Vilnius into what's now Belarus, ||||Vilnius area||||

and deep into what's now Ukraine.

And so, as they were pressed from the west, |||||pushed|||

they took advantage of what the Mongols had done

in the east.

It might help, although, you know,

in the kind in a kind of Christian dominated historiography,

this would never be put this way,

to think of the Teutonic Knights and the Mongols

as arriving at about the same time, which they did, ||||||||вони|

and their arrival at about the same time

creating the conditions in which a Lithuania

could face a challenge and respond to that challenge

by gathering up territories from the south, |acquiring|||||

from Rus, and becoming the biggest state in Europe,

which it was.

So what do we know about Lithuania?

The Lithuanians, so I talked earlier about the math,

the math of slavery and paganism. математика рабства та язичництва|||||язичництво

The Lithuanians were the last holdouts in this. |||||Widerständler|| |||||resisting group|| |литовці||||останні, хто тримався|| Литовці були останніми, хто утримувався в цьому.

They were the last major pagan group in Europe. Вони були останньою великою язичницькою групою в Європі.

They were the last ones who were able not to be enslaved Вони були останніми, хто зміг не потрапити в рабство.

more than they enslaved others.

They were using slave labor of others in their countryside. |||||||||rural area вони|||||||||

They raided Rus' for slaves, they raided Poland for slaves,

they also raided their Baltic, ||conducted a raid||

their pagan neighbors for slaves.

So long as they had pagan neighbors.

They brought in tens of thousands of people

to work as slaves in their agriculture.

We know that they traded timber, and furs, and grain, |||||wood products||animal pelts||cereal crops |||||лісоматеріали|||| Ми знаємо, що вони обмінювалися деревиною, хутрами та зерном,

and wax and honey for iron products. |Wachs||||| |beeswax||||| |віск||||| соняшниковою олією і медом на залізні вироби.

We know that they turned a corner in their own Ми знаємо, що вони змінили курс у своїй власній

agricultural planning in the early 14th century

under their most important ruler,

who I may not have put down, Gediminas.

Is he there?

He's there?

Okay.

So under Gediminas, who ruled from 1315 to 1343,

they started moving away from slavery

and towards colonization,

where they would accept the rules of local,

they would kind of control land rather than people.

So in a way it's the same kind of transition

you see earlier in Rus', control land, rather than people,

accept basically the rules that already existed.

And then try to tax.

It's Gediminas who moves into what is now Rus'.

What was their religion?

Very briefly about this,

we know a lot more about it because their paganism

lasted for another four centuries.

And many people had contact with them, many Christians,

many Muslims, many Jews had contacts with them

over the centuries.

There were Christian churches in Vilnius the whole time.

Why?

Because if you're a tolerant, prosperous regime, |||||wohlhabend| |||||wealthy| |||||процвітаючий|

you need to have traders coming from other places

and you have to make sure they have churches, right?

And additionally, just to make sure this is always clear,

this story is gonna end with

the Lithuanian rulers converting,

but the Lithuanian rulers are always ruling over a country

which is majority Christian.

Because most of the people who are in Lithuania

are in what is now Belarus, and then later

in what is now Ukraine, i.e. they're Eastern Christians.

So the whole time this is a regime where

the rulers are pagans, and the ruling families are pagans,

but most of the population are actually Christians.

So when I talk about this religion,

this is the religion of the Baltic core,

which then spreads out and tolerates Christianity. |||||accepts or allows|

They make no attempt at converting the Christians at all.

So we know that the grand duke was also the high priest. ||||||герцог|||||

We know that the priests were priests of sacrifice, ||||||Priester|| |||||були|||

as in the Slavic lands.

We know what some of the most important gods were,

who were familiar figures already.

They had a version of Perun, who was called Perkūnas.

In general, if you just add us to the end,

you'll get a Lithuanian word.

So like, okay, doesn't always work.

Doesn't always work.

But the Lithuanian version of Perun was called Perkūnas.

Other important gods were

Andai, who was associated with water,

Teliavel, who was associated with like a Hephaestus figure, |||||||Гефестом|