Between Rome and Byzantium: The Golden Age of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s Political Culture. Second Half of the Fifteenth Century to First Half of the Seventeenth Century, by Jūratė Kiaupienė, tr. Jayde Will

Abstract

In 1564, in the midst of intense negotiations to establish a union between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a political treatise was published, which included the following appeal: ‘Unfree Lithuanian! Hear me, a free Pole; I summon you, I share with you my innate freedom and my blessings generously and honestly; not for my benefit but for yours I take you as a partner; with my freedom I make you a free man out of a serf’. Deeply offended by this exhortation, a Lithuanian author replied: ‘We wish to be one with you; we want to enjoy freedom … but we desire not to forfeit our long-established and orderly commonweal by affixing it to yours’. Originally published in Lithuanian in 2016, Jūratė Kiaupienė’s study focuses on issues that fired up polemicists such as Stanisław Orzechowski and Augustinus Rotundus, who are the correspondents quoted above, and that have continued...