power accompanying the weakening of the Horde in the second half of the
fourteenth century, the Grand Dukes of Lithuania claimed Belarus’an- and
Ukrainian-speaking lands of the Kyiv Rus’state. Settled by East Slavic Orthodox
Christians, since the eleventh century these lands had been dividing into small
principalities ruled by branches of the Kyiv dynasty. Upon conquest those princes
were integrated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, maintaining local power and
serving as governors and administrators. In 1387 the Grand Dukes entered into a
dynastic alliance with the kingdom of Poland, which relationship deepened until in
1569 the two states united in a“Commonwealth,”according to which the south-
ernmost lands, called at the time the“Rus’”palatinates, were transferred into the
kingdom of Poland, while the Grand Duchy retained control of the areas that
became modern Belarus’. The Commonwealth had a single ruler (as had been the
case since 1387, occasionally honored in the breach), a single noble-dominated
parliamentary system, and a single foreign policy. At the same time, significant
differences were accommodated: parallel laws and legal systems, two armies, two
state budgets.
Across the centuries from 1387, even though elites in these Orthodox, East
Slavic-speaking areas retained their status, lands, and religion, they also experienced
political and cultural Polonization. At politically sensitive moments in thefifteenth
century they demanded and won the extensive rights, privileges, and institutions of
the Polish nobility, including a parliamentary political system with representative
institutions at county and national levels, an elected king, virtually exclusive access
to landholding and serfs, preferential position in the economy including the right to
produce alcoholic beverages, freedom from taxation, legal right to resist the king,
and legal guarantees of these rights by charter. Orthodox princes and nobles
flourished with the rest of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility in thefifteenth and
sixteenth centuries as the Commonwealth became a major exporter of grain, cattle,
and other goods to the growing cities of western Europe. The nobility pushed laws
through Parliament to enserf peasant labor and to undercut townsmen in the
marketplace, although on the Baltic shore German-language towns from Gdansk
to Riga and Revalflourished. As Natalia Iakovenko has shown in her studies of the
mentality of the Orthodox princely elite, they shared in common the warrior ethos
and culture of the Commonwealth’s nobility, even while maintaining afirm sense
of their Ruthenian identity.
Polish-Lithuanian lands experienced all the waves of cultural change of the
Catholic medieval and early modern times; high Gothic adornedfifteenth-century
cathedrals, followed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Renaissance
neoclassical architecture and a classical curriculum developed from close ties to
Italian universities. Printing spread quickly from central Europe to Poland to
Ruthenian lands in the sixteenth century, as well as the use of Polish, Old
Ukrainian, and Old Belarus’an vernacular in public documentation (replacing
Latin). Literacy became standard for noblemen and wealthy burghers. Towns
received self-governing rights according to Magdeburg and other urban lawcodes.
Jews were also a significant population group, self-governing in communities
protected by monarchical privileges that also ensured religious freedom. Jews in
Assembling Empire 73