Klaipėdos universitetas

Mobility and journeys were an integral part of the life of intellectual elites, including the clergy, in the Early Modern Period. Taking to the road was often the outcome of the functions they performed: arrival at the destination was the main aim. In the case of pilgrimages, both the destination and the route were important. Itinerant clergy in search of sustenance became a disciplinary problem for their superiors. This article is based on records of journeys undertaken by canons and prelates of Vilnius Cathedral.

On the basis of documents in the Latvian State Archives, this paper discusses the armed struggle against the Soviet authorities in Vidzeme, in northern Latgala, and Sela, which took place during the Latvian Wars of Independence, and was joined voluntarily by the local population in an organised way. The discussion tells about the armed guerrilla groups that operated in Vidzeme and northern Latgala in 1919, and formed a serious obstacle to the establishment of Soviet power, the participation of ethnic minorities in guerrilla groups, and the features of the guerrilla fighting. The collaboration between Latvian guerrillas and Lithuanian troops, and their role in the expulsion of Soviet Latvian troops from the country, is analysed.

The article examines the role of the last Jagiellonian monarchs, Sigismund I (1506-1548) and his son Sigismund II Augustus (1548-1572), in promoting and securing religious peace in the multi-confessional society of the 16th-century Rzeczpospolita. The author argues that the Jagiellonian dynasty, which ascended to the Polish throne in 1386 and ruled until 1572, contributed significantly to the rise of religious pluralism in Poland and Lithuania, and paved the way for a mechanism of tolerance which made it possible for religious groups to live together and to respect their religious diversity. The author analyses the anti-heretical laws passed by Sigismund I in the 1520s, and Sigismund II in the 1550s, which were intended to suppress the dissemination of Reformation ideas. In these documents, both monarchs declared their loyalty to the Roman Church, and threatened followers of the Reformation with severe penalties. All these documents give an insight into the religious policy of the Polish kings. Anti-heretical legislation was just one part of a more complex and sophisticated policy of the Jagiellonian kings, which aimed at preserving the religious status quo in the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Rzeczpospolita.

The article explores various linkages between the violence of the Great War and the postwar conflict in independent Lithuania. The author focuses on several key Lithuanian paramilitary groups that emerged as a result of the collapse of the German occupying regime, the Bolshevik advance, and the ensuing power struggle in 1918 and 1919. It explores their grassroots origins, their motivation to fight, and their role in processes of forming a community, and state and nation-building. The author argues that these armed paramilitary formations contributed to the militarisation of the country’s civilian life. Having emerged in the contested peripheral regions of Lithuania, they were led by veterans of the Great War acting as independent warlords. Besides providing security for local people, these formations occasionally engaged in terror against civilians who were perceived as harmful elements that had to be purged from local communities. These paramilitary formations also showed a degree of operational freedom, by controlling certain peripheral regions for considerable periods of time. But the state was able to share its monopoly on legal violence with them only for as long as its own survival required the mobilisation of all economic and human resources for the war.

This article surveys evidence of Lithuanian social and religious life during the long fifteenth century as revealed by consistory court records from the sees of Płock, Gniezno, Lutsk and Cracow. The dynamics of church court evidence coincide with those of other aspects of Catholic life in the Grand Duchy. Building churches, chantry chapels, funding mansionary priests, selecting particular Masses to be celebrated by your chantry priest (Salve sancta Parens, the Five Wounds of Christ, the Seven Joys of Our Lady), going on pilgrimage, taking part in a procession, venerating the Blessed Sacrament, sending supplications to Rome to obtain permission to own a portable altar or choose a confessor all become much more common in the later decades of the fifteenth century. Cases before the consistory courts in Płock, Gniezno, Vilnius and Lutsk involve a wide social group and deal with a broad range of issues (not just matrimonial disputes or the hiring out of benefices between priests). What we do not find is any obsession with paganism, no use of pagan as an insult, no account of ‘pagan’ practices (or even folk customs, which later become tarred with an ideological brush). Lithuanian dioceses are clearly integrated into the Polish metropolitan sees (Gniezno and also to a lesser degree, Lwów).

For the first time in Lithuanian historiography, this paper examines the theories of guerrilla warfare formulated by Polish military theorists, such as Karol Bogumił Stolzman, Piotr Wysocki, Henryk Kamieński and Ludwik Adam Mierosławski, and analyses the links between Polish paramilitarism and the origins of the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, and the formation of the ideological views of the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, given the experience of similar organisations in East-Central Europe (Sokol, Suojeuskunta), and the links between the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union and the paramilitary movements formed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The conditions and the environment of the mendicant religious orders (Dominicans, Franciscan Conventuals, Franciscan Observants, Carmelites, and Augustinians) in the holdings of the Teutonic Order in Prussia differed from those in Western Europe. In newly built castles and newly founded cities, German and Polish-speaking communities predominated; while Prussians, unfamiliar with the basics of Christianity, prevailed in rural territories. The network of parish churches declined towards the eastern and northern boundaries of the state. Therefore, the mendicant orders operated there on a different model. An examination of its characteristics is carried out by means of an analysis of the stages, development and dynamics of the settlement of mendicant orders in Prussia. An attempt is made to identify the organisation of their provision and the supporting milieu. Particular attention is paid to the impact of mendicant orders on the deepening of the faith of the local Prussian population in the eastern part of the Teutonic Order’s holdings.