Journal:Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis
Volume 46 (2025): Nexuses of Interaction in the Borderland between Lithuania and Prussia in the Pre-Industrial Period = Sąveikos mazgai Lietuvos ir Prūsijos pasienyje ikiindustrinėje epochoje, pp. 111–135
Abstract
Although Janusz Radziwiłł (1612–1655), the Voivode of Vilnius and Grand Hetman of Lithuania, managed to acquire the Tauragė estate on the Lithuanian border with Prussia in the early 1650s, it was just before his death. His granddaughter Ludwika Karolina (1667–1695), who inherited the titles from his daughter Anna Maria (she passed away at an early age), was raised in Berlin and married the son of the Elector Friedrich Wilhelm (1620–1688) there in 1681. The Elector of Brandenburg decided to use this connection to renew his claim to the Tauragė estate (his father Georg Wilhelm had sold it in 1639). In 1688, Ludwika Karolina signed a document in Potsdam renouncing her inheritance rights to the Tauragė estate in favour of the Elector, and this was confirmed in 1691 by a court in Lithuania. Manfred Hellmann, who published a study on Prussian control of Tauragė in 1940, revealed the ambiguity that arose as a result: although Tauragė continued to belong to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it was in fact controlled by Prussia, whose monarch became the owner of private land in the Commonwealth and had to pay the usual taxes and duties there. The article examines whether or not this political ambiguity was reflected in the depiction of the Tauragė estate on 18th-century maps. The research shows that this depiction was equally ambiguous: while some maps showed Tauragė as a part of Prussia, others did not emphasise the connection at all, continuing to show that the estate belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Journal:Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis
Volume 39 (2019): The Unknown Land of Žemaitija: The 13th to the 18th Centuries = Žemaitija – nežinoma žemė: XIII–XVIII amžiai, pp. 25–48
Abstract
The first written mention in historical sources of the name of Žemaitija (or Samogitia), the west Lithuanian region, is well-known. In 1219, the Hypatian Codex described how Žemaitijan dukes, along with Lithuanian dukes, made peace with Volhynia. Much less is known about the emergence of the name of Žemaitija on ancient maps, despite the fact that old cartography often provides the first records of various geographical, socio-cultural and socio-economic phenomena. The article not only tries to trace the first appearance of the name Samogitia on maps, but also discusses its various forms and transformations, explaining the motives behind choices of particular forms of the name. The author examines nearly all the maps created before the early 19th century as cartographic sources. For the classification of this volume of material, she uses the concept of the three-stage cartographic depiction of Lithuania proposed by Vaclovas Chomskis. More than 200 maps of different scales and representing different areas, including Lithuania, Lithuania and neighbouring countries, Lithuania and Poland, Europe, Prussia, etc, were researched in order to track the use of different names for Žemaitija.