Two hundred and thirty years — from 1340, when the Lithuanian prince Liubartas Gediminovich sat in Lutsk, until the Union of Lublin of 1569, when the Rus' palatinates passed to the Crown of Poland — the Ukrainian lands lived within the bounds of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Between the fall of the Galicia-Volhynia state in the west and the formation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the east lay an age in which the Old Rus' ("Ruthenian") tongue was the chancery language, princes of the Rurikid line ruled in Kyiv, and the law of the Lithuanian Statutes was written in Cyrillic. It is an age without which neither Cossackdom, nor the Khmelnytsky uprising, nor modern Ukraine itself can be understood.
Pre-history: Mindaugas, Gediminas, the founding of Vilnius
The Lithuanian state grew up out of the forests of Samogitia and Aukshtaitia in the middle of the 13th century — at a time when ancient Rus' was burning out under the Mongol blow. Mindaugas (around 1203—1263) united the Lithuanian tribes and in 1253 received the royal crown from the hands of Pope Innocent IV — he and Danylo of Galicia became the only crowned sovereigns of the East European space of that age. Lithuania was then still pagan, but already an ambitious state.
Seventy years later Prince Gediminas (reigned 1316—1341) transferred his capital to Vilnius, which he founded around 1323, established the dynasty of the Gediminids, and extended Lithuanian power onto the lands of Rus' — Polotsk, Minsk, Berestia, Turov. Lithuania was no longer simply Lithuanian — within it the Belarusian and Ukrainian territories were gradually becoming the majority.
1340: Liubartas sits at Lutsk
When on 21 March 1340 the boyars poisoned the last Galicia-Volhynia prince Yuri II Boleslaw, Lithuania at once entered the war for the heritage. The youngest son of Gediminas, Prince Liubartas (Lithuanian name Dmytras, Dmitry at his baptism), who had earlier married the daughter of Yuri II, advanced his dynastic claims to Volhynia and Galicia. The Poles of Casimir III took Lviv and Peremyshl, while Liubartas established himself at Lutsk.
Lutsk Castle on its island amid the marshes became his residence — and the capital of the Volhynian land for the next century. Liubartas ruled until 1383, never renounced his rights to Galicia, waged unbroken war with the Poles — now winning, now losing Kholm, Belz, Volodymyr. Though Lithuanian by origin, among the Rus' population he was their own: married to a Romanovych, baptised in Orthodoxy, issued charters in Cyrillic.
Algirdas on the Siverian and Chernihiv lands
The brother of Liubartas, the Grand Prince of Lithuania Algirdas (reigned 1345—1377), led another branch of the advance — to the east, onto the left bank of the Dnipro. On the Siverian and Chernihiv lands — territories devastated by the Mongol invasion and neglected by a weakened Horde — Lithuanian rule came more softly than Polish rule in Galicia. The small Rus' princes, descendants of the Chernihiv Olhovychi, voluntarily acknowledged Algirdas as their suzerain in exchange for protection from the Tatars.
By the 1360s, Algirdas had annexed the Briansk land, Novhorod-Siverskyi, Starodub, Putyvl, Chernihiv. He did not turn out the Rus' princes — he let them rule on, demanding only loyalty and troops for his campaigns. On these lands Lithuanian rule was so familiar a thing that many contemporaries scarcely distinguished it from Old Rus': the same languages, rites and customs, only a Gediminid prince in place of a Rurikid.
"Not to disturb the old, not to introduce the new"
This celebrated principle of Lithuanian policy on the lands of Rus' — "not to disturb the old, not to introduce the new" — became the key to a lasting and relatively conflict-free union. The Lithuanian grand princes did not impose their faith (they were pagans, therefore tolerant), did not change the customary law, did not turn out the local princely and boyar houses. The whole old Rus' life — the church, the monasteries, the language, the courts, the land-holding — continued to exist beneath the Lithuanian political shell.
What is more, the Lithuanians themselves quickly became Ruthenianised. The Gediminids took Rus' princesses to wife, were baptised in Orthodoxy, went over to the Rus' tongue, took on Rus' names and customs. After two or three generations it was no easy thing to tell a "Lithuanian" from a "Ruthenian" at the court of Algirdas or Vytautas. This made the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in the eyes of contemporaries, not an alien conqueror-state but a "Lithuanian-Ruthenian" heir of Kyivan Rus'.
1362: the Battle of Blue Waters
In the autumn of 1362, Grand Prince Algirdas met the Tatars not on the Siverian land but in the south — in the Battle of Blue Waters (now the river Syniukha, a left tributary of the Southern Buh, in the Kirovohrad region). Against him stood three Horde emirs — Khadjibey, Kutlug-bey and Dmytro — rulers of the Podolian and Kyivan Horde. The battle ended in the complete rout of the Tatars: all three emirs fell or were taken prisoner.
This was the first great victory over the Golden Horde in history — eighteen years before the famous Battle of Kulikovo of the Muscovite prince Dmitry. Its consequences cannot be overstated: by a single stroke Algirdas freed from dependence on the Horde the Kyiv region, Podolia and part of Volhynia, and opened to the Lithuanians the road to the Black Sea. The people of Kyiv came out to meet the Lithuanian army as liberators — and from that time Kyiv became a Lithuanian city.
Volodymyr Algirdovych — the first Lithuanian-Rus' prince of Kyiv
Soon after the victory on the Blue Waters, Algirdas gave the Kyivan throne to his son — Volodymyr Algirdovych (reigned around 1362—1394). This was the first Gediminid on the Kyivan throne — and the first of those Algirdovychi princes who for a century would hold the Kyivan land. Volodymyr was baptised in Orthodoxy, took on Rus' culture completely: he built churches in Kyiv, restored monasteries destroyed by the Tatars.
He minted his own coin with the Cyrillic inscription "Prince Volodymyr" and his own seal — a lion in a crown, inherited probably from the sigillography of the Romanovychi. Under him Kyiv begins gradually to be reborn from its ruins: new quarters are built, the merchants return, the residence of the metropolitan is opened. Thus to medieval Ukraine the capital gradually returns, which for half a century had lain laid waste.
The three campaigns of Algirdas on Moscow (1368, 1370, 1372)
In the east Algirdas entered into direct rivalry with the young Muscovite state of Dmitry Donskoy. The Lithuanian principality and Moscow contended at that time for the "heritage of Kyiv" — and Algirdas did not intend to yield to the Muscovites a single shred of the lands of Rus'. In 1368, 1370 and 1372 he three times brought a Lithuanian and Rus' army up to the very walls of the Kremlin.
Not once was he able to take Moscow by storm — the stone fortress of Dmitry Donskoy proved impregnable. But the very fact that a Lithuanian army stood three times on the hill beside the Kremlin had enormous political significance. Algirdas demonstrated: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the chief rival of Moscow for hegemony over Rus'. This laid down for long the eastern frontier, which ran somewhere halfway between Moscow and Kyiv.
Old Ukrainian (Ruthenian) as the chancery tongue
The most remarkable thing about the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is that its official chancery language was not Lithuanian (which long remained unwritten) but Old Ukrainian-Belarusian, that is "Ruthenian" — the direct heir of Old Rus'. In it were written charters, statutes, court judgments, diplomatic correspondence with the Crimea, Moldavia and Wallachia. In it were kept the Lithuanian Metrica — the richest body of documentary acts of the East European Middle Ages.
Nor is this surprising: about 80 per cent of the territory of the GDL was made up of Ukrainian and Belarusian lands, where the Ruthenian tongue was spoken by millions. The actual Lithuanian ethnic territory of Samogitia and Aukshtaitia was the smaller part of the state. Therefore the Lithuanian political elite had to adapt itself to the Ruthenian cultural majority — and not the reverse. This fact in the 19th and 20th centuries was little to the liking of Polish, Russian or Lithuanian nationalist historians alike.
1385: the Union of Krewo
The change that determined the whole subsequent fate of the Grand Duchy took place on 14 August 1385 in the castle of Krewo (now Belarus). The Grand Prince of Lithuania Jogaila (Yagaylo), son and heir of Algirdas, concluded with Polish envoys a treaty under which he was to marry the young Polish queen Jadwiga, to take the Polish throne, to baptise Lithuania into Catholicism and to join for ever the Lithuanian and Rus' lands to the Crown of Poland.
A year later, in February 1386, Jogaila married Jadwiga at Cracow and was crowned King of Poland under the name Wladyslaw II Jagiello. Thus began the Jagiellonian dynasty, which ruled Poland down to 1572. The Union of Krewo was personal — two states ruled by one monarch, while the states themselves remained separate. But the cultural and political orientation of the GDL had finally turned to the West.
1387: the baptism of Lithuania — the last pagan country in Europe
By the terms of the Union of Krewo, Jogaila in 1387 personally brought Polish bishops and priests to Vilnius and carried out the official baptism of Lithuania into Catholicism. The sacred oak of Perkunas was cut down, the eternal fire in its temple extinguished, the place consecrated under a Catholic cathedral. The chronicles say that the king distributed white shirts to the newly-baptised Lithuanians — and so many proved willing to be baptised that the shirts ran out.
This was the last pagan country in Europe officially to accept Christianity — almost 400 years later than Kyivan Rus', later than the Hungarians and the Poles. Down to 1387 Samogitia and central Aukshtaitia remained the final bastions of archaic Baltic paganism. From this followed an important political consequence: now Catholic Lithuania was becoming "one of their own" for the West, and the ground for Teutonic crusades was at an end.
1392: Vytautas becomes Grand Duke
In 1392 the internal struggle in the dynasty of the Gediminids ended in the Treaty of Astrava: Jogaila, now seated at Cracow, made over the practical government of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to his cousin Vytautas — son of Kestutis, who had been murdered by Jogaila's father. Vytautas became the actual sovereign of the GDL while keeping the formal suzerainty of the Polish king.
Vytautas the Great (reigned 1392—1430) became one of the outstanding figures of medieval Europe. He was ambitious, energetic, conducted an independent foreign policy; he carried through an administrative reform, abolishing a significant part of the appanage princely seats, including the Kyivan dynasty of the Algirdovychi. Under his rule the GDL attained its greatest territorial extent — from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
12 August 1399: the catastrophe on the Vorskla
The greatest blunder of Vytautas was his attempt to break the Golden Horde and to seat on the Horde throne his protege, Khan Tokhtamysh. On 12 August 1399, on the river Vorskla (in the Poltava region), a great Lithuanian-Rus' army — within which were the regiments of Kyiv, Volhynia, Podolia, Smolensk, the Teutonic knights — met the horde of Edigu, the actual ruler of the Horde.
The battle ended in a devastating rout. Edigu applied the classic steppe tactic of feint and flanking strike. Eighteen princes perished, among them two of the Algirdovychi, the Teutonic master, thousands of knights. Vytautas himself barely escaped. The defeat on the Vorskla buried for ever the plans of the GDL for hegemony over the Steppe — Lithuania withdrew from her Black Sea designs and returned to European politics. In the 20th century, by the way, Khrushchev was reckoned a godson of this very battle in one of the Poltava legends.
15 July 1410: the Battle of Grunwald
The greatest military triumph of the GDL fell on 15 July 1410 — the Battle of Grunwald (Tannenberg). The combined Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian army under the joint command of King Jogaila and Grand Prince Vytautas met the knights of the Teutonic Order led by Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen.
In the centre of the Lithuanian host stood the Smolensk regiments of Prince Lengvenis (Symeon Algirdovych) — and it was they who endured the most terrible blow of the German knights, did not break, held the line, while the Polish banners hammered the Teutons on the flank. The battle ended in the complete destruction of the Order: 14 thousand knights slain, 14 thousand taken prisoner, the master himself killed. Grunwald broke the Teutonic war machine for ever — and established Poland and Lithuania as the chief military power of Central-Eastern Europe.
1413: the Union of Horodlo
Three years after Grunwald, in 1413 in the town of Horodlo on the Buh, Jogaila and Vytautas confirmed and deepened the political tie of Poland and Lithuania. The Union of Horodlo again stressed the personal character of the union: Lithuania kept her separate Grand Prince and her own institutions, but was closely fastened to the Crown of Poland in common foreign policy and dynastic decisions.
The most important novelty of Horodlo was the "adoption" of the Polish coats of arms by the Catholic Lithuanian boyars. Forty-seven Polish noble families received into their heraldry forty-seven Lithuanian Catholic boyar families — this created a single Polish-Lithuanian noble elite. But — and this is essential — the union did not touch the Orthodox Rus' princes and boyars: they remained outside this club, with a lower legal status. Thus the seed of the future division was sown.
1429: the Congress of Lutsk — a crown for Vytautas
At the height of his power Vytautas conceived the plan of being crowned king: to raise the GDL to the status of a kingdom equal to Poland. In January 1429 he convened at Lutsk a congress unparalleled: to Liubartas's Lutsk Castle came Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire Sigismund, King Eric of Denmark, the legate of Pope Martin V, the envoys of the Byzantine emperor, the envoys of the Horde, Tatar khans, the hospodar of Moldavia. Jogaila also came. It was perhaps the greatest diplomatic gathering of 15th century Europe.
Sigismund agreed to send Vytautas a royal crown. But the Polish nobility, led by Zbigniew Olesnicki, was categorically against — this would have meant the equality of the GDL with Poland. In August 1430 the imperial embassy was bringing the crown to Lithuania, but the Poles intercepted it at the frontier. Not having waited for the crown, on 27 October 1430 Vytautas died at Trakai. Thus the most influential of the Lithuanian princes departed from life without a royal diadem.
1432—1438: the civil war of Svidrigaila and Sigismund
After the death of Vytautas, the Rus' and Lithuanian princes elected as Grand Prince Svidrigaila Algirdovych — the younger brother of Jogaila, a champion of Orthodoxy and of the autonomy of the GDL from Poland. Svidrigaila was one of their own for the Ruthenians: he leaned upon the Rus' princes, abolished the privileges of the Catholics, issued charters in the Ruthenian tongue. In reply, the Polish party with the support of the Lithuanian Catholic magnates in 1432 raised a revolt and proclaimed as Grand Prince Sigismund Kestutaitis — the brother of Vytautas.
Thus began a six-year civil war (1432—1438), in which the Grand Duchy in fact split in two: the western Catholic lands supported Sigismund and Poland, the eastern and southern Rus' lands — Svidrigaila. This was the last serious attempt of the Rus' Orthodox nobility to defend their political rights in the GDL — and it had its chances of success. But Sigismund found a way to turn the tide.
1 September 1435: the Battle of Vilkmergė
The decisive battle of the civil war took place on 1 September 1435 near the Lithuanian town of Vilkmergė (now Ukmerge in Lithuania). Svidrigaila, at the head of a combined Rus' and Livonian army (his ally was the Livonian Order), met the Lithuanian-Polish army of Sigismund under the command of the king's son Michael. The battle ended in the complete rout of Svidrigaila: the master of the Livonian Order perished, thirteen Rus' princes, some thousands of knights.
The defeat at Vilkmergė was for the Ruthenians a "Lithuanian Grunwald in reverse": there fell the military strength of the Orthodox princes. Svidrigaila fled to Volhynia, where for another ten years he kept a little reserve capital at Lutsk. Sigismund meanwhile became full master of the GDL — and at once began concessions to the Rus' nobility: in 1434 he equalised the Orthodox with the Catholics in personal rights. But the political autonomy of the Rus' lands had been broken.
1440—1471: the Olelkovych Kyivan principality
In 1440, after the murder of Sigismund Kestutaitis by his own magnates, the new Grand Prince Casimir IV Jagiellon gave the Kyivan land to the Orthodox prince Olelko Volodymyrovych — grandson of that same Volodymyr Algirdovych who had sat in Kyiv after Blue Waters. Thus for thirty-one years the Olelkovych dynasty was restored in Kyiv.
Olelko and his son Symeon (reigned 1455—1470) conducted an almost independent policy: they built churches in Kyiv (Olelko restored the Cathedral of the Dormition at the Pechersk Monastery), defended the frontier from the Tatars, entered into negotiations with the Crimea and Moscow. This was the last institutional self-government of the Ukrainian lands — an enclave of the Old Rus' princely-boyar tradition within the GDL. Symeon Olelkovych himself was reckoned one of the candidates for the restoration of a Ukrainian kingdom — a dream which never came to pass.
1471: Casimir IV abolishes the Kyivan principality
When Symeon Olelkovych died in 1470, his brother Michael was to inherit Kyiv. But the Grand Prince Casimir IV decided otherwise. In 1471 he abolished the Kyivan principality as an institution, took the land into the direct management of the Crown, and appointed to Kyiv a Catholic palatine — Martin Gastold, a Lithuanian magnate.
This was the end of the Old Rus' princely tradition on the Ukrainian lands. Once Kyiv had been the capital of Rus', the seat of the Rurikid dynasty from Volodymyr the Saint. Now it became an ordinary administrative centre within the bounds of a foreign state, governed from Vilnius and Cracow. The people of Kyiv, as the chronicles witness, refused to admit Gastold into the city — for two years a passive boyar opposition lasted. But they could change nothing: Kyiv had ceased to be a principality.
Konstanty Ostrogski — Grand Hetman of Lithuania
The most distinguished Rus' commander in the GDL of the late 15th and early 16th centuries was Prince Konstanty Ivanovych Ostrogski (around 1460—1530). He came from the most ancient Galician-Volhynian princely house, a direct descendant of the Romanovychi. In 1497 he received the office of Grand Hetman of Lithuania — commander-in-chief of the Lithuanian army, and held this baton for over thirty years.
His greatest victories: the Battle of Kleck of 1506, where he routed a vast Tatar army of Khan Mengli Giray and freed 40 thousand captives; the Battle of Orsha of 8 September 1514, where with a 30-thousand Lithuanian-Polish army he inflicted a crushing defeat on the 80-thousand Muscovite army of Vasily III. The victory at Orsha was celebrated in a Latin poem and depicted on the famous painting — the symbol of Lithuanian military glory. Ostrogski was a steadfast Orthodox, a founder of churches and monasteries.
1508: the revolt of Michael Glinski
At the beginning of the 16th century in the GDL there occurred the last great armed revolt of the Orthodox Rus' nobility. It was led by the magnate Michael Glinski — talented, educated in Europe, marshal of the court. Glinski had no end of reasons for grievance against Sigismund I: the magnate party of the Gastolds had squeezed him out of the king's favour, taken his estates. In 1508 he raised in the Kyiv region and on the Polissia a revolt, declaring himself a defender of Ruthenian rights.
The attempt was put down with lightning speed. The Polish-Lithuanian army quickly broke the bands of Glinski, the revolt was choked off. The initiator himself fled to Moscow, where the Muscovite Grand Prince Vasily III received him with honour. Glinski's niece Yelena Glinskaya became the wife of Vasily and mother of Ivan IV the Terrible — thus the irony of fate: a Ukrainian rebel became the grandfather of the tsar, who would later condemn Ukraine to the cruellest of trials.
1514: the loss of Smolensk
Despite the brilliant victory of Ostrogski at Orsha, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania lost another, strategically important battle in that same year of 1514: on 30 July the Muscovite army of Vasily III took after a three-month siege Smolensk. This was the key border fortress, which had for centuries defended the GDL from the east.
Smolensk, within Lithuania from the time of Vytautas, was a great Rus' city with mighty walls and its own diocese. Its loss was a strategic catastrophe: from then on the Muscovite army could break unhindered into the depth of the GDL. Although Ostrogski inflicted on Moscow a defeat at Orsha, the Lithuanians could no longer recover Smolensk — the city remained with Moscow for a century, down to 1611. This signalled the beginning of the historic retreat of the GDL before the rising might of Muscovy.
1529: the First Lithuanian Statute
In 1529 Grand Prince Sigismund I confirmed the First Lithuanian Statute — the first full code of laws of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The document was written in the "Ruthenian tongue" — Old Ukrainian-Belarusian — and contained 13 sections, embracing all spheres: princely law, noble privileges, criminal law, inheritance, land law, judicial procedure.
It was an outstanding achievement of European law of its day — long before the Code of Napoleon. The Statute leaned upon the ancient law of Kyivan Rus', upon the Lithuanian Metrica, upon Roman law, upon local customary norms. It established the principle that "all free people have equal rights before the law." The First Lithuanian Statute remained in force on the Ukrainian lands down to the 19th century — as an official source of law on Left-Bank Ukraine after its annexation to the Russian Empire.
1566: the Second Lithuanian Statute
Forty years later, in 1566, at the Diet of Vilnius the Second Lithuanian Statute was confirmed — a reformed and considerably expanded code. It reflected the changes in the social order: the rising weight of the gentry, the restraint of magnate arbitrariness, the introduction of new court procedures, regular gentry dietines.
The most important novelties: an independent gentry court (land, castle, sub-chamberlain), the right of the gentry to gather in palatinate dietines and to elect envoys to the general diet, the consolidation of feudal privileges. It was a document of the "golden liberty" of the gentry — a true magna carta of the Rus' and Lithuanian aristocracy. In Ukraine the Second Statute remained in force down to 1840 — a record of duration for a legal document in Central-Eastern Europe. After it came still a Third (1588), which absorbed the political changes of the Union of Lublin.
1558—1583: the Livonian War exhausts the GDL
The last and most exhausting conflict of the GDL began in 1558: the Muscovite tsar Ivan IV the Terrible began the Livonian War for an outlet to the Baltic. Lithuania was drawn in as the chief defender of the Livonian Order, which could not defend itself. The war lasted 25 years and drew in the whole Baltic, Poland, Sweden, Denmark.
The greatest disaster for Lithuania was the year 1563: in February Ivan IV after a siege took Polotsk — the ancient Rus' and Lithuanian city, second in importance after Vilnius. The Polotsk see, the libraries, forty churches fell into the hands of the Muscovites. The GDL proved unable to wage such a war on its own: it had insufficient human and financial resources. Lithuania understood that without a closer union with Poland it would not survive. This was the final push to the Union of Lublin.
Sigismund II Augustus — the last Jagiellon without an heir
The Grand Prince of Lithuania and King of Poland Sigismund II Augustus (reigned 1548—1572) was the last representative of the Jagiellonian dynasty. He had three marriages, but no lawful heir. This created the threat of a dynastic crisis: after his death the personal union of Poland and Lithuania, which had held them together for 184 years from the time of Jogaila and Jadwiga, could break apart.
Sigismund II Augustus personally advanced the initiative of a full state union of Poland and Lithuania — to fasten their tie not dynastically, but constitutionally. The Polish nobility supported the idea enthusiastically, but the Lithuanian magnates were categorically opposed: they feared the loss of their political weight, the flow of offices to the Polish Crown. In 1569 at the Diet of Lublin the king compelled the Lithuanians to the union — but he had to take for this a radical step, which still today provokes disputes.
5 March 1569: the decree separating the Rus' palatinates
When the Lithuanian magnates, seeing at the Diet a union dangerous for themselves, began quietly to disperse from Lublin, Sigismund II Augustus took an unheard-of step. On 5 March 1569 he issued a royal decree by which he tore from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania the four southern palatinates — the Volhynian, the Podlachian, the Kyivan and the Bratslav (Podolian) — and directly incorporated them into the Crown of Poland.
This was a revolutionary change: four Rus' palatinates, which had belonged to the GDL for 230 years, by a single stroke of the pen passed into another state formation. The Lithuanian elite protested, but had its choice: either to submit, or to go on alone in a losing Livonian War. In the end the Lithuanian magnates returned to Lublin and accepted the union — but already without the four Rus' palatinates, which even formally had become Polish. Thus the Rus' and Belarusian lands of the GDL split — and the paths of their historic development parted for long.
1 July 1569: the Union of Lublin — the birth of the Commonwealth
On 1 July 1569 at Lublin the act of union was signed, proclaiming the formation of a new state — the Commonwealth of the Two Nations (Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodow). Poland and Lithuania now had one common monarch (elected by a common diet), one common diet, a single coinage, a single foreign policy. Separate armies, treasuries, administrations and laws were preserved — but the state was one.
For Ukraine the Union of Lublin had far-reaching consequences. All the Ukrainian lands (apart from the Chernihiv region, which still remained in Lithuania down to 1618) found themselves in a single state — the Commonwealth. Hither poured the Polish magnates, buying up estates; a swift Polonisation of the gentry began; Catholic clergy, Jesuit colleges, serfdom on the Polish model were introduced. The reaction of the Ruthenian elites to these processes would form the Union of Brest of 1596, the Cossack revolts of the 1590s—1640s and, finally, the Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648.
The heritage: Ostroh, Cossack culture and Hrushevsky's "Ordinary Scheme"
Although politically the GDL ended for Ukraine in 1569, its cultural heritage lived on far longer. In 1576 in Volhynia Prince Vasyl-Kostiantyn Ostrogski founded the Ostroh Academy — the first higher school in Eastern Europe, where Greek, Latin and Church Slavonic, rhetoric and philosophy were taught. In 1581 at the Ostroh press Ivan Fedorov printed the "Ostroh Bible" — the first complete edition of Holy Scripture in Church Slavonic, a masterpiece of East Slavic culture.
The Lithuanian-Ruthenian tradition — its princely houses (the Ostrogskis, the Vyshnevetskis, the Sanguszkos), its Cossack-officer ethos, its Ruthenian tongue, its statute law — would become the foundation of the Cossack-Hetman culture of the 17th and 18th centuries. Mykhailo Hrushevsky himself in his "Ordinary Scheme" maintained: it was precisely the GDL that preserved the unbroken continuity of the state-building tradition from Kyivan Rus' to the age of Cossackdom, not allowing it to be shattered. Without those two hundred and thirty years in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Ukraine that we know would not exist.
