Of the peoples of the eastern Baltic, Lithuania alone managed to retain its independence. As the Teutonic Knights moved inexorably over their new territories, the Lithuanian tribes came together under one prince. Grand Prince Gediminas (1316–1341) transformed Lithuania into a major power. He established his capital in Wilno, closer to his new territories, lands that today comprise the whole of Belarus. His even more successful son Algirdas (1341–1377) added Volhynia, Kiev, Chernigov, and parts of the Smolensk lands to his domain. Lithuania had become in extent, if not by population, the largest country in Europe. The Lithuanian princes of the house of Gediminas now ruled more than half of the former lands of Kiev Rus, excepting only Novgorod and the northeast under the Vladimir princes, and Galicia in the southwest, which the kings of Poland had recently taken.
The Lithuanian polity was an unusual amalgam of cultures, languages, and religions. The Lithuanian language had as yet no alphabet and was neither written down nor used by the new state for recordkeeping. Instead, the Lithuanian chanceries used a variant of the East Slavic language of Kiev Rus. In religion the Lithuanian rulers and people remained pagans, though the conquest of the Orthodox lands to the south introduced a new element. The Lithuanian princes placed their kinsmen and other Lithuanian nobles in charge of the new lands and many of them converted to Orthdoxy. These new Orthodox Lithuanian princelings and nobles formed a new elite on the territory of the old Kiev Rus, with the old boyars falling to the status of local squires. Yet the Grand Duke of Lithuania himself remained pagan, and as such the object of the crusading zeal of the Teutonic Knights.
The Knights were a threat not just to Lithuania, but also to Poland, newly reunited by the efforts of Casimir the Great (1333–1370). In 1385 the Poles faced a dual dilemma: increasing pressure from the Knights and the succession to the throne. Poland’s ruler Jadwiga, styled “King” of Poland, as yet had no husband, and the nobles then chose Jogailo (Jagiełło), the Grand Duke of Lithuania to be her husband and their king. Jogailo would provide invaluable aid against the Teutonic Order, but he first had to become a Catholic Christian. The conversion and marriage, accompanied by an agreement of union in 1385–6, produced a new polity, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, that would dominate the politics of Eastern Europe until the seventeenth century. It was a personal union of the two states, each preserving its own institutions and administration under the same monarch. The more immediate impact of Jogailo’s election as king of Poland was to create a state capable of defeating the Teutonic Order. Poland and Lithuania’s victory came at the battle of Grunewald (Tannenberg) in 1410. This was the turning point in the long struggle, and by the middle of the fifteenth century the Teutonic Order was reduced to a minor vassal of the Polish crown.
Jogailo’s marriage fundamentally reordered Lithuania. A bishop was appointed to Wilno and the conversion of the Lithuanian people to Catholicism began. The vast majority of the Slavic population remained Orthodox, and Orthodox nobles and princes retained their positions for the ensuing decades. The religious division within the Lithuanian state would have far-reaching consequences in the coming centuries, but for the moment, the main result was to encourage the formation of the Belorussian and Ukrainian nationalities, like the Russians born out of the earlier Kiev Rus. With the growing strength of Lithuania, the lands around Kiev revived and once again began to form a center of Orthodox culture. The city of Kiev and the Kiev Monastery of the Caves came back to life. The Ukrainian monks of Kiev and other centers recovered their traditions by sending to Moscow and Vladimir for copies of the old Kievan texts, the Primary Chronicle, and the stories of the Cave Monastery. Thus a new religious and cultural center came into being, one that eventually would have a profound impact on Russia.
The political and military struggle with its many rivals was not the only concern of the Moscow dynasty. From 1354 to 1378 the see of the Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus was in the hands of Saint Aleksei, born to a boyar family in Moscow as Fyodor Biakont. Aleksei’s long metropolitanate coincided with a movement of monastic revival that enjoyed his patronage as well as that of the Moscow princes.
Figure 3. Monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God (Kirillo-Belozerskii) around 1900.
Kiev Rus had supported many monasteries, for almost every major town had several – as did some minor towns. In 1337 the monk Sergii of Radonezh decided to establish a hermitage in imitation of the desert fathers of late antiquity and the monks of Byzantine Mount Athos. He found a forest some thirty miles north of Moscow and soon other hermits joined him. Eventually they founded a monastery dedicated to the Holy Trinity with Sergii as its leader. The new monastery stressed the importance of the common life of the monks: common prayer and attendance at liturgy, common meals, and common work. All gifts to the monastery went to the community, which was supervised by a hegumen (an abbot in Western terminology), who directed the community with firmness and humility. This revived form of monasticism with strong Byzantine inspiration spread rapidly throughout the northeast of Russia. By the time of Sergii’s death in 1392 he had inspired many followers, and they went on to found numerous new communities such as the monastery of Saint Kirill (Sergii’s pupil) in northern Belozero. Later in the fifteenth century Saints Zosima and Savvatii traveled all the way to the Solovki islands in the White Sea to build Russia’s third great monastery.
Russia was now beginning to acquire its own saints, for in addition to the Saints Boris and Gleb came the holy metropolitans Peter and Aleksei, and especially Saint Sergii of Radonezh. The relics of the two metropolitans in the Kremlin’s Dormition cathedral and those of Saint Sergii in the Trinity Monastery were already the object of pilgrimage and the subjects of stories of miraculous events. Soon all three entered the liturgy as saints and Moscow now had its own saints to rival those of Kiev and Vladimir. The three saints raised Moscow’s prestige, particularly the rather political cults of the metropolitans. The sainthood of Sergii, Kirill of Belozero, and other monastic saints represented a less political piety, centered on the monasteries and the relics of their saints. The monasteries were the charismatic center of Orthodox piety and for the next two hundred years, almost all new Russian saints were holy monks or metropolitans.
The monastic ideal even permeated writings about laymen. The fifteenth century Oration on the Life and Death of Prince Dmitrii Donskoi praised him not so much for his great victory over the Tatars but for his exemplary Christian life, his abstinence from sexual intercourse after his children were born, his fasts, and his all-night vigils in church. These were monastic, not princely, virtues, and the text is a far cry from the earlier lives of saintly princes, such as Boris and Gleb, Michael of Tver, or especially Alexander Nevskii. Yet the Oration on Dmitrii was the example for all later accounts of virtuous princes to the end of the sixteenth century.