200 EUSSIA IN EUROPE. 



Lithuanian and Polish Ascf:ndancy. 



After the fall of Kiev and Galicia, White Russia emerged from her obscurity 

 as the centre of a new Slav empire, under the sceptre of Lithuanian princes, 

 kinsmen and heirs of the old Russian Polotzk dynasty. During the thirteenth 

 and fourteenth centuries the Lithuanian princes successively absorbed all White 

 Russia, Volhynia, Podolia, Kiev, Severia (Chernigov), partly by force, partly by 

 treaty or happy alliances, and henceforth they bear the title of " Princes of 

 Russia." By a singular coincidence the King of Poland, after occupying Galicia, 

 also takes the same title, while the ruler of Moscow, as if in energetic protest for 

 the lands that escape his grasp, designates himself " Prince of all Russia." But 

 in his relations with the Lithuanian sovereigns he at first avoids the use of this 

 high-flown title, the official recognition of which is first secured in the treaty of 

 1503 by John III. In the fourteenth century Lithuania was too powerful to be 

 threatened by the Muscovite prince. She had subdued all the Dnieper, and even 

 a portion of the Oka basin, where the river Ugra formed the limit of her domain, 

 90 miles south-west of Moscow. 



About the commencement of the fifteenth century the Tatars began to retire 

 eastwards, the steppes between the Dnieper and Dniester were thrown open to 

 colonisation, and the river populations could now frealy ship their corn for 

 Constantinople at the little port of Plaji-Bey, on the site of the present Odessa. 

 The princes of Tver, Razan, and Novgorod itself turned towards Lithuania 

 through fear of the Muscovite autocrats, who thus felt themselves threatened with 

 the loss of empire. Lithuania now became the real Western Russia, a state at 

 once Russian and European, though the name given to the principality was apj)lied 

 to a small part only of its domain. The national laws were never drawn up in 

 Lithuanian, and nearly all are in Russian, and especially in the White Russian 

 dialect. 



But the normal development of Lithuania was arrested by its political union 

 with Poland. The rulers of this coimtry, already masters of Galicia, wished to 

 justify the title of "Princes of Russia" which they had assumed. In 1386 a 

 Polish queen married the Lithuanian Prince Jagello, who on this occasion adopted 

 the Roman Catholic religion. A union at first purely personal was in due course 

 followed by that of the states, notwithstanding the protests of the Lithuanians 

 and White Russians, who, to preserve their independence, even threatened to join 

 Muscovy. Aided by the lesser nobility of the southern provinces, envious of the 

 privileges of the great Lithuanian vassals, and aspiring to equal rights with 

 the Polish gentry, the kings at last succeeded in attaching Volhynia and Kiev to 

 Poland, and the rest of Lithuania was finally united in 1569. But the internal 

 dissensions flowing from this forced union became a permanent source of weakness 

 to this double empire, whose vast extent promised at one time to secure for it the 

 hegemony of the Slav peoples, Ljàng nearer to Europe proper, enjoying a more 

 advanced culture than the eastern Slavs, and commanding more abundant material 

 resources, it had also the advantage of occupying the region traversed by the 



