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Chapter 18: Reform Comes to the East
Part 18: Reform Comes to the East (1535-1546)
The reign of King Valdislavas I appeared to be oddly calm and uneventful to the Kingdom of Lithuania, but the powerhungry King Valdislavas I eyed across Eastern Europe almost like a sort of war hawk. And soon, he found an opportunity - far in the East. In the steppes, actually, in the fields of Sarai. The Golden Horde, now only a shell of it's former glorious self, was now merely a remnant of what it used to be - constantly fighting with Kazan, Astrakhan and Nogai for supremacy, having to kneel in front of the Lithuanian lord in the west, it now received an another blow to it's stability. Having learned that Crimean and Kazan raiders could base themselves in the Horde and use it for operations against Lithuania without the Khan being able to stop them, King Valdislavas I send a punishing raid all the way to Sarai. Numerous cities were burned down and a lot of tribute was taken, along with some "annexed" steppe territory in the western edges of the Golden Horde, which didn't last long because of this blow. In 1539, this successor state of the mighty Mongol Empire was destroyed by Astrakhan.
All in all, the later parts of Valdislavas's reign were marked by continuous raiding warfare with the Tatars. The Crimeans launched a total of 16 known raids within the span of two decades, and each one of them resulted in burning fields, farms and towns. Kiev suffered greatly from a large raid in 1541, when over 8000 Tatars successfully captured and sacked the city. The Khanate of Kazan, while not at all related to the Ottomans, joined in on this lucrative endeavor, with their target being the Rus' lands. The Lithuanian forces did a lot of effort in trying to stop these advances, but most of them were ineffective. Counter-raids did not accomplish much and were often even defeated by these capable warriors of the steppes, and things like fortifications, building forts across the steppe and increased garrisons varied from mildly effective to outright useless.
Despite the wrath of the Tatars, the Dykra - the southern and southeastern lands of the Lithuanian nation, mainly the Pontic Steppe - still enticed many colonists with their riches and freedom. The soil of this land could grow the most plentiful harvests, and the chance to escape from one's oppressive magnate encouraged peasants to flee to this land. Nobody will catch you here, after all - not that they would dare with those Tatars running around. The King's government encouraged some organized settling south next to the Dnieper, where help could be more easily obtained. Within the 16th century, Lithuania founded a number of fortified towns within the Dykra - for example, the city of Padniepris, or similar towns like Padonis, Vilnija, Miesčius. However, the main force behind the settling of the Dykra were escaped peasants, free Tatars and other men and women of various origins, which formed hosts across the steppe and traversed it - known by the people as Laisvavyriai (free men) in Lithuanian or Kazoki, Cossacks in Slavic languages. The Cossacks were highly autonomous and declared that they answered to no one, although Lithuania made many efforts to bring their hosts back under their fold. They also conflicted a lot with the Tatars, the former inhabitants of these steppes, and began pushing them out of the steppe between the Caspian and Black Seas.
Meanwhile, in Lithuania, a whole other development was happening, nearing the end of Valdislavas I's reign. Throughout the Age of Discovery and the Early Modern Era, the population and needs of Western Europe continued to rise, and as more and more people were switching from field work to the cities and the labor there, the demand for grain and foodstuffs was high, which resulted in grain production becoming a very lucrative endeavor for the magnates and nobles of Lithuania. However, large grain exports necessitated reforms in the countryside to increase the revenues and efficiency of agricultural production, and this is exactly what Valdislavas I took on as his task in 1543, beginning the Volok Reform (Valakų reforma). The reform was named after the Volok, a new unit of land created during the reform that equated to about 25 hectares. The size of the lands of the King, and later the rest of the nobility, were divided into Voloks, and each Volok was to be worked by one or few peasant families. The fields were to be divided into three rėžiai (stripes) each, and crop rotation between them every year was enforced. The peasantry, meanwhile, did not do well - the King declared that all of the peasantry - the veldamai - were his personal property and would have to work for him, an initiative later repeated by most of the nobility to acquire a cheap and permanent workforce.
Of course, not all peasants suffered the same fate. Two "classes" of farm workers emerged during the 16th century - laisvininkai (free peasants) and baudžiauninkai (punished peasants). While both of them were basically a form of serfs, there was one main difference between them - their rights. A laisvininkas was considered to be protected by the law, and it most commonly had to repay his landowner in monetary tribute, feudal land rent named činšas. Meanwhile, the situation of a baudžiauninkas was much worse - he had no rights under the law, and was pretty much locked to his land. The "punished peasants" most often served their masters 2 days a week in the folwark and additional 1-2 days in other works - this was a form of corveé, named lažas. The portion of laisvininkai and baudžiauninkai peasants varied across Lithuania. In Lithuania propria, it has been determined that over 70% of serfs were laisvininkai, while in White Ruthenia that balance was about 50-50. In the lands of the Rus', though, almost all peasants were baudžiauninkai, and they had additional duties and obligations to serve through as well. This division meant that the peasantry in the West was quite a lot freer and by extension wealthier than in the East, which had many long-term consequences...
In addition to institutional serfdom, three-field rotation and the Voloks, many nobility-owned villages in the countryside were reorganized and repositioned to more easily divide the land to Voloks. Many villages were moved to be closer to roads or rivers for easier access.
A 17th century depiction of a White Ruthenian serf
The Volok Reform took many decades to fully implement, but it was an overall success. By 1560, the income of the treasury of the King of Lithuania increased from 60 000 Lithuanian auksinas to 145 000 Lithuanian auksinas. The countryside was subjugated and turned into serfs, though many of them didn't even notice the change. After all, it was already far in development since the very creation of the Lithuanian state...
The rest of the world was still spinning as it always does. While Vespucia, the New World, was slowly beginning to entice explorers and colonizers as a land of opportunity, the Portuguese solidified their monopoly on the path to India around Africa. After intense negotiation with the local Indian princes, even with some ship cannon shelling required, the Portuguese managed to establish a presence in the trading port in Cochin, bringing Western goods in exchange for the ever so vital spice flow. The merchants also brought the first clear depictions of India since the 13th century, and informed Europe that the valleys of Ganges and the Indus were once again united by a single force. As was tradition. The Spanish, their "peaceful opponents", mounted a much more ambitious expedition - their explorer Javier Verdanna set out on a quest to circumnavigate the Earth, reach India through the Western Path and prove the ancient Greeks to be right. Unlike, say, Alvarez Cabral's expedition, this trip was driven entirely by the thirst for exploration and revelation, and Verdanna embodied the perfect Renaissance man, willing and capable to go where no else could.
He set out in 1544, and still hadn't returned...
Europe was still being slowly torn apart by religious polemics and Reformation, meanwhile. England-France, under the rule of the fanatical Catholic Henry VIII, was the first country to mount on what could be called the Counter-Reformation - under the King's orders, numerous Reformist and especially Flammantian preachers across this massive nation were imprisoned, book burnings across cities were commenced and persecution of the "bores" began. The King also sent an invasion to Scotland, which was one of the primary sources of Reformist thought in the British Isles, with limited success. In the Holy Roman Empire, numerous German princes and dukes openly denied the old ways of the Church and declared their allegiance to the Phillipites (Melanchtonites), which caught the attention of the Emperor himself. In an unrelated event, the Kalmar Union between Denmark, Sweden and Norway collapsed in civil turmoil, and while Norway remained as a "province" of Denmark, Sweden obtained full independence under the Bielke dynasty. And immediately found itself squished between Lithuania, the Danes and the Empire...
For the most part, Lithuania watched the fires burning across Europe as an uninterested and unaffected spectator. Indeed, many of the Reformists actually praised the Orthodox Church as an example of a decentralized church, though most of the praise was going to the old school Orthodox, not the Concordate ones...
But that doesn't mean that the winds of reformation never reached Lithuania. They did. And for that, we need to meet a person named Andrius Volanas (Andrzej Wolan, Andreas Volanus), a theologian born in the year 1495 in Vilnius. His parents were Polish refugees who fled their nation during the Polish Succession War, arriving to Lithuania and, unlike many of their peers, accepted and submit to the Orthodox faith. Andrius studied theology in the University of Vilnius and was later emplyed as a secretary of Viktoras Goštautas, a Lithuanian magnate. Goštautas was a man with many connections to the West, and thus Volanas travelled numerous times to Germany, Italy and the Low Countries on business trips. Here, he learned of the ongoing Reformation and was the first Lithuanian to bring Reformist texts, like Melanchthon's 118 Theses and the translated German Bible, sharing it with his university peers and spreading this knowledge across the former students of the institution.
Volanas arrived to the conclusion that many of the ideas that the Reformists proposed can also be applied to the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox should not allow Catholics to spread their ideals and accept the Pope as their spiritual leader! The Orthodox should allow Mass and liturgy in national languages, be it Lithuanian, Ruthenian or Russian! The Orthodox should return to the old ways, to the ones that Christ taught them of, and the ideas accepted in the Brest Concordate are heresy! And the King should not have a say in how people express their faith, the people are all equal in front of God! These ideas and many, many more were put into Volanas's famous treatise "The Concordate, the Godliness of the Kingdom and a New Path for the Church of Christ", he found numerous supporters among Lithuanian academic circles, like Jonas Bretkūnas and Mikhail Vyshansky, sparking what is now known as the Volanite Movement. The Volanites were the Reformists of the Eastern Orthodox - they were against the edicts of the Brest Concordate and wanted to return the faith to what it once was and what it stood for. While it achieved moderate support in Lithuania proper, it began spreading like wildfire in Russia, which was still bitter about having the Concordate enforced on itself.
Who's going to laugh at the West for their religious split now?
On an unrelated note, King Valdislavas I died after choking on a chicken bone at a dinner table in 1546, right in the midst of the greatest spread of the Volanites. He was succeeded by his son, also named Valdislavas - a confused man, one educated in the University of Vilnius and overall an erudite, but still unsure on what his path will be... Is this the best chance for the Volanites to convert the King himself to their beliefs?
---
Hope you like me using the Lithuanian terms for absolutely everything. I think it would create an aura of Eastern-Europeanness (?) for foreigners like you...
Part 18: Reform Comes to the East (1535-1546)
All in all, the later parts of Valdislavas's reign were marked by continuous raiding warfare with the Tatars. The Crimeans launched a total of 16 known raids within the span of two decades, and each one of them resulted in burning fields, farms and towns. Kiev suffered greatly from a large raid in 1541, when over 8000 Tatars successfully captured and sacked the city. The Khanate of Kazan, while not at all related to the Ottomans, joined in on this lucrative endeavor, with their target being the Rus' lands. The Lithuanian forces did a lot of effort in trying to stop these advances, but most of them were ineffective. Counter-raids did not accomplish much and were often even defeated by these capable warriors of the steppes, and things like fortifications, building forts across the steppe and increased garrisons varied from mildly effective to outright useless.
Despite the wrath of the Tatars, the Dykra - the southern and southeastern lands of the Lithuanian nation, mainly the Pontic Steppe - still enticed many colonists with their riches and freedom. The soil of this land could grow the most plentiful harvests, and the chance to escape from one's oppressive magnate encouraged peasants to flee to this land. Nobody will catch you here, after all - not that they would dare with those Tatars running around. The King's government encouraged some organized settling south next to the Dnieper, where help could be more easily obtained. Within the 16th century, Lithuania founded a number of fortified towns within the Dykra - for example, the city of Padniepris, or similar towns like Padonis, Vilnija, Miesčius. However, the main force behind the settling of the Dykra were escaped peasants, free Tatars and other men and women of various origins, which formed hosts across the steppe and traversed it - known by the people as Laisvavyriai (free men) in Lithuanian or Kazoki, Cossacks in Slavic languages. The Cossacks were highly autonomous and declared that they answered to no one, although Lithuania made many efforts to bring their hosts back under their fold. They also conflicted a lot with the Tatars, the former inhabitants of these steppes, and began pushing them out of the steppe between the Caspian and Black Seas.
Meanwhile, in Lithuania, a whole other development was happening, nearing the end of Valdislavas I's reign. Throughout the Age of Discovery and the Early Modern Era, the population and needs of Western Europe continued to rise, and as more and more people were switching from field work to the cities and the labor there, the demand for grain and foodstuffs was high, which resulted in grain production becoming a very lucrative endeavor for the magnates and nobles of Lithuania. However, large grain exports necessitated reforms in the countryside to increase the revenues and efficiency of agricultural production, and this is exactly what Valdislavas I took on as his task in 1543, beginning the Volok Reform (Valakų reforma). The reform was named after the Volok, a new unit of land created during the reform that equated to about 25 hectares. The size of the lands of the King, and later the rest of the nobility, were divided into Voloks, and each Volok was to be worked by one or few peasant families. The fields were to be divided into three rėžiai (stripes) each, and crop rotation between them every year was enforced. The peasantry, meanwhile, did not do well - the King declared that all of the peasantry - the veldamai - were his personal property and would have to work for him, an initiative later repeated by most of the nobility to acquire a cheap and permanent workforce.
Of course, not all peasants suffered the same fate. Two "classes" of farm workers emerged during the 16th century - laisvininkai (free peasants) and baudžiauninkai (punished peasants). While both of them were basically a form of serfs, there was one main difference between them - their rights. A laisvininkas was considered to be protected by the law, and it most commonly had to repay his landowner in monetary tribute, feudal land rent named činšas. Meanwhile, the situation of a baudžiauninkas was much worse - he had no rights under the law, and was pretty much locked to his land. The "punished peasants" most often served their masters 2 days a week in the folwark and additional 1-2 days in other works - this was a form of corveé, named lažas. The portion of laisvininkai and baudžiauninkai peasants varied across Lithuania. In Lithuania propria, it has been determined that over 70% of serfs were laisvininkai, while in White Ruthenia that balance was about 50-50. In the lands of the Rus', though, almost all peasants were baudžiauninkai, and they had additional duties and obligations to serve through as well. This division meant that the peasantry in the West was quite a lot freer and by extension wealthier than in the East, which had many long-term consequences...
In addition to institutional serfdom, three-field rotation and the Voloks, many nobility-owned villages in the countryside were reorganized and repositioned to more easily divide the land to Voloks. Many villages were moved to be closer to roads or rivers for easier access.
A 17th century depiction of a White Ruthenian serf
The Volok Reform took many decades to fully implement, but it was an overall success. By 1560, the income of the treasury of the King of Lithuania increased from 60 000 Lithuanian auksinas to 145 000 Lithuanian auksinas. The countryside was subjugated and turned into serfs, though many of them didn't even notice the change. After all, it was already far in development since the very creation of the Lithuanian state...
The rest of the world was still spinning as it always does. While Vespucia, the New World, was slowly beginning to entice explorers and colonizers as a land of opportunity, the Portuguese solidified their monopoly on the path to India around Africa. After intense negotiation with the local Indian princes, even with some ship cannon shelling required, the Portuguese managed to establish a presence in the trading port in Cochin, bringing Western goods in exchange for the ever so vital spice flow. The merchants also brought the first clear depictions of India since the 13th century, and informed Europe that the valleys of Ganges and the Indus were once again united by a single force. As was tradition. The Spanish, their "peaceful opponents", mounted a much more ambitious expedition - their explorer Javier Verdanna set out on a quest to circumnavigate the Earth, reach India through the Western Path and prove the ancient Greeks to be right. Unlike, say, Alvarez Cabral's expedition, this trip was driven entirely by the thirst for exploration and revelation, and Verdanna embodied the perfect Renaissance man, willing and capable to go where no else could.
He set out in 1544, and still hadn't returned...
Europe was still being slowly torn apart by religious polemics and Reformation, meanwhile. England-France, under the rule of the fanatical Catholic Henry VIII, was the first country to mount on what could be called the Counter-Reformation - under the King's orders, numerous Reformist and especially Flammantian preachers across this massive nation were imprisoned, book burnings across cities were commenced and persecution of the "bores" began. The King also sent an invasion to Scotland, which was one of the primary sources of Reformist thought in the British Isles, with limited success. In the Holy Roman Empire, numerous German princes and dukes openly denied the old ways of the Church and declared their allegiance to the Phillipites (Melanchtonites), which caught the attention of the Emperor himself. In an unrelated event, the Kalmar Union between Denmark, Sweden and Norway collapsed in civil turmoil, and while Norway remained as a "province" of Denmark, Sweden obtained full independence under the Bielke dynasty. And immediately found itself squished between Lithuania, the Danes and the Empire...
For the most part, Lithuania watched the fires burning across Europe as an uninterested and unaffected spectator. Indeed, many of the Reformists actually praised the Orthodox Church as an example of a decentralized church, though most of the praise was going to the old school Orthodox, not the Concordate ones...
But that doesn't mean that the winds of reformation never reached Lithuania. They did. And for that, we need to meet a person named Andrius Volanas (Andrzej Wolan, Andreas Volanus), a theologian born in the year 1495 in Vilnius. His parents were Polish refugees who fled their nation during the Polish Succession War, arriving to Lithuania and, unlike many of their peers, accepted and submit to the Orthodox faith. Andrius studied theology in the University of Vilnius and was later emplyed as a secretary of Viktoras Goštautas, a Lithuanian magnate. Goštautas was a man with many connections to the West, and thus Volanas travelled numerous times to Germany, Italy and the Low Countries on business trips. Here, he learned of the ongoing Reformation and was the first Lithuanian to bring Reformist texts, like Melanchthon's 118 Theses and the translated German Bible, sharing it with his university peers and spreading this knowledge across the former students of the institution.
Volanas arrived to the conclusion that many of the ideas that the Reformists proposed can also be applied to the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox should not allow Catholics to spread their ideals and accept the Pope as their spiritual leader! The Orthodox should allow Mass and liturgy in national languages, be it Lithuanian, Ruthenian or Russian! The Orthodox should return to the old ways, to the ones that Christ taught them of, and the ideas accepted in the Brest Concordate are heresy! And the King should not have a say in how people express their faith, the people are all equal in front of God! These ideas and many, many more were put into Volanas's famous treatise "The Concordate, the Godliness of the Kingdom and a New Path for the Church of Christ", he found numerous supporters among Lithuanian academic circles, like Jonas Bretkūnas and Mikhail Vyshansky, sparking what is now known as the Volanite Movement. The Volanites were the Reformists of the Eastern Orthodox - they were against the edicts of the Brest Concordate and wanted to return the faith to what it once was and what it stood for. While it achieved moderate support in Lithuania proper, it began spreading like wildfire in Russia, which was still bitter about having the Concordate enforced on itself.
Who's going to laugh at the West for their religious split now?
On an unrelated note, King Valdislavas I died after choking on a chicken bone at a dinner table in 1546, right in the midst of the greatest spread of the Volanites. He was succeeded by his son, also named Valdislavas - a confused man, one educated in the University of Vilnius and overall an erudite, but still unsure on what his path will be... Is this the best chance for the Volanites to convert the King himself to their beliefs?
---
Hope you like me using the Lithuanian terms for absolutely everything. I think it would create an aura of Eastern-Europeanness (?) for foreigners like you...
- Augenis
- Word Count: 2.1k