Kyiv's Lithuanian Period (1266-1764)
(To summarise my first Kyiv1 post [1]: in A.D. 1054, the polity called Kyivan-Rus stretched from the White Sea and the borders of Finland to the Black Sea and the borders of Byzantium [2], while neither the town nor the duchy of Moscow existed. In my second blog-post (Kyiv2) on the history of Ukraine [3], I followed the fate of Novgorod in the northern part of Kyivan-Rus as it became vassal first to the Mongolian Golden Horde, then fell progressively under the growing power of Moscow, up to the chaotic reign of Ivan the Terrible who died in 1588.)
Meanwhile, the western and southern parts of Kyivan-Rus were exposed to the growing power of Lithuania, which felt that it should, ethnically and logically, inherit the old territory of Scandinavian Rus. Whether that belief was justified or not, it seems that Lithuania's approach to empire was distinctly more consensual than that of the other contemporary players on the checkers-board of Europe: the crusading Livonian and Teutonic Knights (to their west and north), the Mongols (to their south) and the Muscovites to their east.
Thus, the independent and staunchly democratic city-state of Pskov, in the north-west corner of modern Russia, under attack from the Teutonic and Livonian Knights, in 1266 elected a Lithuanian prince (Daumantas) as their military leader, subject to the Veche or parliament. He fortified Pskov so successfully that the town withstood all attacks till 1510, when it was forcefully merged into the duchy of Moscow by the moving of hundreds of families. (As mentioned in Kyiv 2, also in Novgorod there was a significant minority that would have preferred Lithuanian rule to that of Moscow.)
In 1321, the Lithuanian duke Gediminas captured Kiev, sending Kyiv's last Rurikid ruler into exile. Forty years later (in 1362) the Lithuanians routed the the Golden Horde at the battle of Blue Waters on the Southern Bug. The Duke at that time was Algirdas, who was ably supported by his co-operative and loyal brother Kęstutis, who busily defended the western and northern borders of Lithuania against Poland and the Teutonic Knights respectively.
Sandwiched between Catholic Poland to the west and Orthodox Russia to the east, the Dukes of Lithuania used their paganism as a diplomatic tool, alternately flirting with one, in order to alarm the other. Algirdas married twice, both times to Muscovite princesses, having 8 children by the first and 13 by the second. Again illustrating a diplomatic approach to politics, one of his sons (Prince Andrew) was elected as Prince of Pskov.
Smolensk was attacked in 1395, and in 1403, but in 1404 it opened its gates voluntarily to the Lithuanians.
In the generation after Algirdas, the flirting, this time with Catholic Poland, went a lot further than those two Muscovite marriages. The empire of Poland-Hungary had found itself without a king when Louis of Anjou died in 1382 leaving only two daughters, Mary and Hedwig (Jadwiga). Mary was betrothed to Sigismund of Luxembourg, with Hungary as her dowery, while Hedwig was betrothed to an Austrian Habsburg. But a majority of the Polish lords thought they would do better if Poland were allied to Lithuania rather than Austria, and suggested Grand Duke Jogaila of Lithuania as Queen Hedwig's husband; provided he espouse also Catholicism. They were married in 1386, and Jogaila became King Władysław II of Poland (by marriage) while remaining Grand Duke of Lithuania.. This union of the two states was formalised, in 1569, by the Union of Lublin which created the enormous Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The term Ukraine appears in the fifteenth century. It apparently means borderland, and describes the south east corner of Lithuania where it bordered the Islamic Ottoman territory of Crimea and south the Black Sea, and the Duchy of Moscow to the east. The political and geographic situation favoured the development of a semi-independent, semi-nomadic, multiracial, somewhat militaristic, Orthodox and Slavic-speaking culture, identified as Cossack.
The hundred years from 1555 to 1655 saw the apogee of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1610 Polish cavalry defeated Russian forces, captured Moscow and took the Tsar (Vasili IV) back to Warsaw in a cage; where he was humiliated and murdered. In 1620 war with the Ottomans lost some territory to the south, and in 1626-1629 war with Sweden lost more territory to the north. Various factions arose, pro-French, pro-Habsburg. The crown seldom passed from father to son, and was often chosen by a process of election (by the nobles). Nevertheless the monarch hankered after absolutism (as was the fashion of the times). In 1648, attempts to impose Catholicism angered Ukrainian Cossacks and led them to revolt. (It also angered protestant Sweden, and in 1655 lost Poland its control over Prussia, heralding Poland's decline as a European power.)
When the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky marched into Kyiv in 1648, he was greeted with joy as a liberator from the Polish yoke. But after 6 years of war with Poland, during which he was repeatedly let down by the Crimean Tartars, Khmelnytsky started negotiations with Moscow. A treaty was concluded in April 1654 in Moscow by which Cossack Zaporozhia became an autonomous Hetmanate within the Russian state (Zaporozhia means 'beyond the rapids', presumably the area down-stream, as Dnipro is north of Zaporozhia). Ukraine retained that status until Catherine II (the 'Great') of Russia abolished the Hetmanate in 1764. (See my post Kyiv 4)
References
(General reference:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:History_of_Ukraine)
[1] https://occidentis.blogspot.com/2023/03/kyiv-1.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#/media/
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