Making a Great Ruler: Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania (review)

This welcome study is based in a 2002 doctoral dissertation in Medieval Studies at the Central European University in Budapest. The author, Associate Professor in Art History and Theory in the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts, was directed in her work by the distinguished North American and Hungarian medievalist János Bak, and the resulting scholarship makes an important contribution to our understanding of East Central European history. Her book seeks not to provide a biography of Grand Duke Vytautas (ca. 1348–1430), but rather to answer the question of how this individual, controversial in his own time and after, came to be regarded as "the Great" and how his image and reputation was shaped in the fifteenth century and succeeding periods.

Vytautas — Witold in Polish historiography and the same, generally, in German and Western writing — lived a life whose deeds, as the author notes, "are frequently regarded as ambiguous, his ends as too ambitious." He was "a betrayer and loyal ally . . . a born heathen thrice baptized, a supporter and promoter of the Catholic Church, a perfidious neophyte, always striving for victory, glory, and regalia, an omnipotent ruler, who died waiting for the royal wreath, and a tyrant relishing bloodshed" (3). Understanding his image is complicated because each of the foregoing elements is grounded in historical fact. Thus Mickūnaitė's task of tracing the process by which the various images of Vytautas emerged is a difficult one.

She begins with a summary of his life, tracing his rise in Lithuania, his ambiguous relationship with the Teutonic Order, and his struggles and sometime cooperation with his cousin Jogaila, who had converted to Christianity in 1385/86, married Jadwiga of Anjou, the ruler of Poland, and promised to unite the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Subsequently Jogaila (known in Polish historiography as Władysław Jagiełło) and Vytautas joined forces to defeat the Teutonic Order at the Battle of Grunwald, but later quarreled over control of Lithuania and Vytautas's ambitions to be crowned king there. For the reader not well versed in the affairs of East Central Europe, this useful overview provides a framework within which subsequent analyses of correspondence, privileges, treaties, Prussian and Polish chronicles, Russian annals, and other sources may be understood.

In the first of her four core chapters, Mickūnaitė argues that, despite other views circulating at the time, Vytautas was himself the most important force in shaping his image. She pays particular attention to a document, known most conveniently as Witoldes sache, in which Vytautas asserts that he is a good Christian and rex iustus et pacificus against charges that he was either a usurper or an aggressor. She also uses effectively a variety of visual sources, including murals from Trakai, Vytautas's chief residence, and evidence from coins and seals. The next chapter shows how Vytautas's image was refined and reshaped, especially by the Polish historian Jan Długosz, who saw him as a great, wise, and active ruler. Her reading of Długosz is in many ways very fresh and original, with unexpected insights. The long third chapter covers a great deal of material, including folklore elements and humanist writings that show Vytautas as a tyrant. This chapter also reveals the way Vytautas came to be seen in the Baroque period as a Christian hero of institutional foundation and patronage. The final chapter treats the way elements of the image of Vytautas either survived over time or were discarded because they no longer served the needs of that particular moment. In a very brief conclusion Mickūnaitė summarizes her main points.

Occasionally this volume betrays its origins as a dissertation, particularly in the third chapter when, almost mechanically, every source, seemingly without distinction as to its relative importance and significance, is briefly treated. But the English of the text is sound, the bibliography is...