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,
