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previous: Chapter 3 This webpage reproduces a chapter of The Story of Lithuania By Thomas G. Chase printed by Stratford House, Inc. New York, 1946 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 5

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 p28  Chapter IV
Brothers and Co‑Rulers

(The numbers link directly to the sections.)

Under the guidance of Algirdas (1345‑1377) and Kestutis (1345‑1382), the Lithuanians adopted a desperate program of self-defense against the German forces in Old Prussia and in Livonia. And at the same time, while success­fully uniting under their banner the Tatar-ravaged Eastern Slav regions on both sides of the Dnieper River, they were compelled to engage the Poles in battle to protect the rights which Liubartas had obtained in Volhynia.

1. Defense of the West

After the Livonian Order had purchased in 1343 the northern Estonian lands held by the Danes, and after the Order of the Cross had acquired Pomerania and Chelmno from Poland by the treaty of Kalisz that same year, the German crusaders became masters of a state that stretched almost from the very mouth of the Oder to the Gulf of Finland. Lithuanian Samogitia, lying between the Nemunas and Courland, alone broke the continuity of their possessions. Preparing to crush Lithuanian resistance with one well-timed blow, the Teutons carefully mapped out the military expedition of 1345. They were favored, on this occasion, by the arrival of many dignitaries from various parts of Europe, such as King John of Bohemia and King Louis of Hungary. Nevertheless, their attempted invasion from Prussia was completely frustrated by the strategy employed by Algirdas and Kestutis. Feigning an attack  p29 on Sambia, the Lithuanian princes caused the withdrawal of the German forces to that province. In the meantime, Lithuanian troops under Algirdas marched into Livonia, where they destroyed the fortifications at Mitau (Jelgava), at Duobele, and on the outskirts of Riga, while Kestutis attacked Rastenberg near the Pregel. Outmaneuvered, the Germans, upon their return from Sambia to the Lithuanian border, found themselves incapable of proceeding effectively with their plans. Dissension within their own ranks was quelled by the substitution of Henry Dusemer for Ludolf Koenig as the Grand Master.

It was some fourteen years after this event that the Sword Bearers recovered sufficiently from their losses to cooperate with the Teutonic Knights. The latter, instead of entertaining grandiose schemes for a speedy conquest of Lithuania, resorted to a systematized method of sponsoring approximately seventy hostile raids on Lithuanian territory during the following thirty-two years (1345‑1377). Their brethren in Livonia organized some thirty other predatory incursions from the north. According to the chronicles, the Lithuanians repelled the former in a similar fashion thirty-one times, and the latter in ten instances.

In 1348, Algirdas and Kestutis repelled an apparently serious German penetration near Kaunas at the Streva, a tributary of the Nemunas. Their brother, Narimantas, perished in this battle. Four years later, retaliating for Winrich von Kniprode's devastation of Ariogala and Raseiniai in Samogitia, they invaded the area bordering on the Kurisches Haff (Kursiu Marios) between Ragnit and Labiau. In 1362, the year after Kestutis had escaped from eight months of captivity and imprisonment at Marienburg, the Teutonic Knights in conjunction with the Livonian Order succeeded in defeating Kestutis' son, Vaidotas, and in destroying the fortress of Kaunas, which guarded the waterways of the Nemunas and Neris. In 1364, they even reached Ukmerge, only again to be turned back by Kestutis. In 1365, the Order of the Cross failed in its attempt to take Vilnius, while in 1370 the Lithuanians under Algirdas and Kestutis, having come to within one mile of the German stronghold of Koenigsberg, were compelled to retreat.

This warfare increased in intensity during the last years of  p30 Algirdas' reign and Kestutis' life. All in all, it did not alter the boundaries already existing; it enabled neither the Teutons to improve their position on the Nemunas nor the Lithuanians to rid the Baltic of the German peril; it tended to arrest all cultural and economic progress in that region and served to embitter the Lithuanians towards the representatives of Latin Christianity; it had become a struggle in which each contestant sought to decimate the resources of the other in order to make ultimate victory possible.

2. War with the Poles

The principalities of Volhynia and Halicz were united into one duchy during the reign of Roman (1172‑1205). This state was left without an heir to its government when the last Volhynian princes, Andrew and Lev, perished in the course of their struggles against the Tatars (1323). It is then that Gediminas' son, Liubartas, who had previously married Andrew's daughter, inherited the domains of his father-in‑law; namely, the districts of Chelm, Belz, Luck, and the area west of the river Sluch. At about the same time, Boleslas George, whose mother was the sister of the slain Andrew and Lev, secured control over Halicz, Lwow, and Przemysl. The untimely death of this alert Polish prince (1340), who had been married to Gediminas' daughter, Auka, marked the beginning of a rivalry, lasting more than two centuries, between the Lithuanians and the Poles for the possession of these Ruthenian lands.

Seeking to establish himself in Halicz, Casimir attacked Lwow the very same year that Boleslas George had died. Since the Tatars raided Poland the following year, and since Liubartas seemed to consider himself the natural protector of his widowed sister, and since he had furthermore received the approval of the upper classes of the Halicz province, he did not find it necessary to adopt any means of counter­acting Casimir's pretensions. The latter, however, proceeded to cede Polish Pomerania and Chelmno to the Knights of the Cross (1343 and 1349) and to formulate a treaty with the Czechs (1348). Then, while suggesting to Kestutis that he accept Roman Christianity and presumptuously  p31 even informing Pope Clement VI that Kestutis was willing to do so, Casimir invaded Volhynia and succeeded in occupying Halicz (1349). Coming to Liubartas' assistance, Kestutis raided the Polish territories of Sandomierz, Lenczyca, Radom and destroyed the fortresses of Warsaw and Czersk. After the combined efforts of Casimir, Louis of Hungary, and Boleslas of Masovia failed to overcome Lithuanian-held Volhynia, a two-year truce was arranged, which permitted the Halicz region to remain in Polish hands (1352). Jaunutis, Kestutis, Liubartas, George Narimantaitis,⁠1 George Karijotaitis⁠2 acted as Grand Duke Algirdas' representatives.

Shortly after hostilities had been resumed, Casimir appealed to almost every available source for assistance — to the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Masovians, the Pope, Brandenburg, the Teutonic Knights and the Tatars. Nevertheless, in 1356, he was compelled to sue for peace terms from the Lithuanians. Then once again, Casimir, apparently attempting to better his case against the Teutonic Knights at the Papal Court at Avignon, announced that the Lithuanian princes were disposed for the reception of Catholicism (1357). Six years later, he renewed his war for Volhynia and by the treaty of 1366 with Algirdas, Kestutis, Jaunutis, and Liubartas, he annexed Chelm, Belz and Vladimir (Wlodzimierz). Kestutis and Liubartas, however, recovered these districts in 1370, immediately after Casimir's death, only to lose Chelm and Belz to Casimir's successor, Louis of Hungary in 1377.

3. Christianity

Responding to the appeal of Louis of Hungary in 1351, Kestutis had agreed to consider undertaking the formal Christianization of Lithuania on the condition that the German crusaders would be made to relinquish the territories they had seized on the Baltic. This condition was again clearly enunciated seven years afterwards.

In 1358, Emperor Charles IV of Bohemia sent a letter to Grand Duke Algirdas and his brothers urging them to adopt Roman  p32 Christianity. As a result, Lithuanian emissaries, probably headed by Kestutis' son, Patrick, visited Nuremberg to open negotiations. When Ernest, the Archbishop of Prague, complying with the Emperor's wishes, arrived with his delegation in Lithuania, the Lithuanians issued a series of demands, which, if satisfied, would have united practically all original Aistian lands into one political state. They required the restoration to Lithuania and the liberation from German occupation of the Old Prussian lands east of the Alle River and north of the Pregel; of the entire left bank of the Dvina with Courland. Furthermore, the Lithuanians insisted that the warrior-monks be transferred from the Baltic to the East, there to combat the Tatar peril in defense of Christian nations. The Germans, of course, were unwilling to surrender their conquests; the Emperor was not keenly interested in bringing about the removal of the Knights, nor was he in a position to do so; the Lithuanian therefore, once more found it impossible to reconcile Christianity with their own political welfare.

Through a papal bull in 1373, Gregory XI attempted to approach Algirdas, Kestutis and Liubartas on the question of the conversion of Lithuania. There is no record as to how the Lithuanian leaders reacted to this message of the Pope.

4. Expansion into the East

By reason of the fact that its duke had obtained the grant of a superior title from the Tatars in return for the payment of tremendous tribute, the duchy of Moscow had risen to some prominence among the Eastern Slav principalities during the first half of the fourteenth century. And when Algirdas appointed Karijotas' sons, Aiksas and Simon, to regulate relations with the Tatars in 1349, Muscovy secretly opposed him and induced the Mongols to imprison his deputies. Two years later, Simeon of Moscow attempted to attack Smolensk, but was forced to withdraw when Algirdas, answering Smolensk's appeal, intervened. To frustrate the conspiracies fostered by the partisans of Ivan II in the Smolensk territories, the Lithuanian Grand Duke deemed it advisable to  p33 occupy Rzhev, Mstislavl, Velizh, and Belyi (1355). To quell disorder after Duke Basil's death, he took possession of Bryansk in 1356. Shortly afterwards, Novgorod-Severski and Chernigov fell under his rule. When, in 1362, he defeated the Tatars of the Golden Horde on the Sinyukha and put an end to their domination in these southern regions, Algirdas gained complete control over Kiev,⁠3 Eastern Podolia, and free passage to the Black Sea between the mouths of the Dniester and Dnieper Rivers.

The rivalry existing between Demetrius of Moscow and Michael of Tver⁠4 for the leader­ship of the Eastern Slavs precipitated three distinct Lithuanian efforts to end Moscow's bid for supremacy. After Michael had come to seek refuge in Lithuania, Algirdas and Kestutis (with Vytautas, an army of Lithuanians and Ruthenians, assisted by the subjects of Tver) defeated the Muscovite troops in 1368 and laid siege to the Kremlin. Having exacted from Demetrius a guarantee that he would no longer interfere with the affairs of Tver, they retired. In 1370 Algirdas and Kestutis again routed the Muscovites and besieged Moscow for eight days. No battle culminated the third Lithuanian expedition against Moscow in 1372; and a peace treaty was concluded.

This struggle in which Lithuania and Muscovy were beginning to engage one another, also manifested itself in the religious sphere. The Lithuanian state in this period embraced expansive Eastern Slav areas stretching from the upper Nemunas southward to the Black Sea and eastward to the river Desna; it therefore harbored a proportionate number of non-Lithuanian subjects, who were members of the Eastern Orthodox Church. To insure the continued loyalty of these people to the Lithuanian govern and to consolidate the political organization of his Grand Duchy, Algirdas, much in the same way as his predecessors,⁠5 sought to obtain the establishment of an Orthodox metropolitanate, entirely independent and separate from that which had been transferred  p34 from Kiev to Moscow. The expression of such interest clearly substantiated the numerous statements of the Lithuanian rulers to the Latins of the West; namely, that they were not opposed to Christianity itself, but merely to the aggressive and violent tactics unfortunately adopted by the would-be missionaries.

Only after Algirdas had threatened to accept Theodoret, consecrated by a separate Bulgarian patriarch, did Constantinople consent to heed his previous requests and assigned Roman as the sovereign Metropolitan of the Orthodox population of Lithuania (1354). The subsequent contention between Roman and Alexis of Moscow over the question of ecclesiastical primacy was short-lived; the former died seven years later. In 1376 his office was assumed by Cyprian, who made his see at Kiev, and he also became the Metropolitan of Moscow in 1390, thereby again joining all the Eastern Christians of these regions under one spiritual head.

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The Author's Notes:

1 His father was Narimantas, Gediminas' son.

2 His father was Karijotas, Gediminas' son.

3 He established his son Vladimir as governor of Kiev and assigned Eastern Podolia to Karijotas' sons.

4 Michael's sister, Juliana, was Algirdas' second wife.

5 Gediminas secured the establishment of a metropolitanate at Naugardukas (Nowogrodek) in 1316‑17; it was abolished in 1328. Ten years later Gediminas and Liubartas succeeded in gaining a similar metropolitanate at Halicz; but once again, it was dissolved by Constantinople (1347) upon the insistence of Moscow.

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