While Lithuania today is a small Baltic republic, between the 13th and 18th centuries the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the largest country in Europe, and at various times it included the entire territory of modern Belarus, the western half of Ukraine, and large tracts of European Russia. One of the challenges faced by such an enormous country was the absence of a shared, common language. But from the 15th century onwards a myth gained in popularity that the Lithuanians were the descendants of Romans. This myth appealed to the nation’s nobility, and informed a unique cultural self-understanding that I call Lituanitas in Poetry and Nation-Building in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: a distinctive form of Lithuanian nationalism that saw the Lithuanians as a Latin people. The popularity of Lituanitas encouraged the use of the Latin language in Lithuanian literature; and, crucially, Latin in Lithuania was not a classicising affectation but a pragmatic necessity. Latin was the one language that all of early modern Lithuania’s literate elite were likely to understand; and while the Polish vernacular became ever more dominant in Poland, Latin maintained its position as the dominant language of publication in Lithuania into the 18th century.
Vilnius University, founded by the Jesuits in 1579, quickly became renowned as a leading centre of European Latinity. Vilnius produced the great Latin lyric poet Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595–1640), whose work was translated into multiple languages. But it was epic poetry – dactylic hexameters in the style of Virgil – that became most important to the burgeoning national self-awareness of the Lithuanians, who were latecomers to the top table of European geopolitics owing to their late conversion to Christianity. The earliest author to articulate Lituanitas in epic form was a Kraków-based poet of whom we know little, Joannes Vislicensis, who completed Bellum Prutenum (‘The Prussian War’) in 1515. Bellum Prutenumglorified the Jagiellonian dynasty, the Lithuanian royal house that at that time ruled both Lithuania and Poland. The poem was stimulated by King Sigismund I’s recent victory over the Muscovites at the Battle of Orsha (1514) but focussed on Sigismund’s ancestor Jogaila, who began life as the pagan Grand Duke of Lithuania but became a Christian and ascended the throne of Poland, defeating the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410.
Joannes Visclicensis’s form of dynastic epic had only limited mileage, however. The 16th century saw the Jagiellonians die out, leaving Poland and Lithuania as joint elected monarchies. This handed a great deal of power to the nobility, and the Grand Duchy reinvented itself as a patrician republic in which one family – the Radziwiłłs – culturally and politically dominated. The Radziwiłłs’ immense power rested on the success of their military exploits in the Livonian Wars, a series of conflicts between Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy over the future of Livonia (modern Latvia and Estonia). Several Lithuanian epics dealt with the Radziwiłłs (and were commissioned by them), most notably Jan Radwan’s Radivilias (1592), which is widely regarded as the national epic of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. A shorter epic is included in Poetry and Nation-Building in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, however: Franciszek Gradowski’s Hodoeporicon Moschicum, which narrates one episode in 1581 when Krzysztof Radziwiłł led a Lithuanian raiding party deep into Muscovy during the siege of Pskov, and came close to capturing Ivan the Terrible.
While Joannes Vislicensis in the early 16th century had a tendency to elide Polish and Lithuanian identity, Gradowski’s Lithuanians are far more aware of their distinctive identity. Although the Radziwiłłs were Polish-speakers by this time, their patronage of Latin poetry – the language associated with Lithuania and its mythical past – sent a message about their loyalty to the idea of Lithuania as a patrician republic. That republic was coming under increasing military pressure, however; the rise of Muscovy and Sweden threatened the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, culminating in the disastrous ‘Deluge’ of 1655 when both the Russians and Swedes invaded. Even after the invaders left, a weakened Lithuania fell prey to Ottoman ambitions, and it was Lithuania’s response to the Ottoman threat that provided the context for the third and final epic featured in Poetry and Nation-Building in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
James Bennett, the author of Virtus Dexterae Domini (‘The Strength of the Lord’s Right Arm’) was the son of George Bennett, a first-generation Scottish immigrant to Lithuania who was attracted by Lithuania’s commercial possibilities and the patronage of the Calvinist Presbyterian Radziwiłłs. George Bennett served as a general in the Lithuanian army under the command of the Field Hetman of Lithuania, Michał Kazimierz Pac, who in 1673 defeated the Turks at Khotyn in Ukraine along with the Polish commander Jan Sobieski, who was soon to be elected Poland-Lithuania’s king. This crucial battle freed Lithuania from paying tribute to the Sultan, which had effectively turned the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into a feudal subject of the Ottoman Empire. James Bennett completed an epic poem about the battle within weeks, praising the Lithuanian commanders by name and commemorating the fallen. It was to be the last true Latin epic written in Lithuania, although by no means the end of the Grand Duchy’s Latin literary tradition.
Although Latin eventually gave way to Polish and Lithuanian in the second half of the 18th century, echoes of Lithuania’s epic tradition lingered – the first poem in the Lithuanian was an epic poem in hexameters, and Adam Mickiewicz’s Polish-language Pan Tadeusz (as much a Lithuanian as a Polish work) was the last major European literary work to take the form of an epic poem. Epic was a crucial element in early modern Lithuanian nation-building, sustaining a people constantly confronted by military challenges yet committed to a ‘Latin’ identity and the idea of a free patrician republic.
By Francis Young