Kings From the Gutter – 1401-1432
After his release from captivity in 1401, the Kohen Gadol Rogvolod was in a tenuous position. His political power had been eroded by his capture by the King, meanwhile his affair with Queen Cicek had traduced his moral authority. The High Priest needed to make penance and prove his righteousness. He sought out his opportunity for salvation in the lawless Pripet Marshes of the Podlasie region, south of Minsk and north-west of Kiev. This land had been largely regarded as ungovernable by the Polish state for centuries, indeed the crown jewels of the First Polish Kingdom had been lost in these swamps in 1175 while King Boris fled the invading Crusaders. Since then they had become a refuge for persecuted groups of all kinds – with populations of Greek and Latin Christians, Yazidis and Muslims. Yet the bulk of the swamp people remained solidly pagan – forming the largest pagan population in Europe.
From 1402 the Kohen Gadol set out to personally lead the campaign to bring Judaism to these dark lands – tearing down idols, building synagogues atop sacred groves, and bringing the word of Yahweh to the people. Rogvolod would fail to find the atonement he sought. Instead, he provoked a rebellion from the fiercely independent peoples of the marshes and was captured and was killed by a group of bandits in 1406. The surrounding Boyars would launch a series of military campaigns to attempt to avenge the High Priest, and finally tame the region, through the course of the next decades, without achieving any lasting success. The Podlasie would remain the last bastion of pre-Jewish Slavic society for decades to come.
Religiously, the outrageous behaviour of Rogvolod had been the last straw for the growing portion of the faithful who had grown frustrated at the transformation of Jewish Orthodoxy into a deeply hierarchical church through the course of the 14th century. Yaroslav V had for a time led a charge for reform, but his humiliating defeats had ended hopes for serious change from above. Instead, pressure would come from below in the form of the Qahalist movement. Qahalism articulated the belief that the structure of the entire Jewish Orthodox church should be upended. Local Rabbis should be elected to serve individual communities by Qahals, councils of village or neighbourhood elders. These Rabbis would in turn elect Chief Rabbis at county and regional levels through councils of their own. This would ground the entire religion in the respect of the faithful and strengthen the bond between Rabbis and their flocks. These ideas of this movement were articulated by Vanya Alexeev, the Chief Rabbi of Lublin, and gained widespread traction in the early 15th century.
Since the late 14th century lords across the Polish Kingdom had started to established harsher relationships with their peasantry – pushing them into serfdom by limiting their freedom to move between estates, placing heavier demands of labour and tribute on them and exercising greater control over their village structures, not least in through their lobbying of church authorities over Rabbinical appointments. These trends had accelerated the process of Russian migration to the Steppe. While this increase in population would start to bring an end to the nomadic lifestyle of the settlers on the West bank of the Dnieper, where settled Slavic-speaking agriculturalist were increasingly dominant by 1400, in the east it created population pressures in a land where the old way of life still held sway. Gradually, the Cossacks had pushed further east, crossing the Don and reaching the Volga. However, when a large band of Cossacks seized control of Astrakhan – the jewel of the Tatar Steppe – the native Tatar lords took concerted action.
In 1414 a large coalition of Tatars lead by the Oghuz Turks recaptured Astrakhan and proceeded to pursue the Cossack hosts into the west. For years the Tatars laid waste to the Polish Steppe, slaughtering a large portion of the Slavic population and leaving Polish authority in ruin. The Astrakhan War highlighted many of the weaknesses of Poland parliamentarian political settlement, as King Yaroslav struggled to gain the approval of the Duma to raise a sufficiently large army to successfully counter the threat. It was only after the Tatars captured the key port of Azov in early 1416 that the Boyars finally agreed to open their coffers and call upon their levies. By 1417 the Tatars were clearly on the back foot and Polish troops were seeking to secure new territories across their eastern frontier.
Just as the Poles had turned the tide in the east, crisis erupted in the west. In early 1417 Vanya Alexeev, the spiritual leader of the Qahalist movement, had travelled from his native Lublin to the city of Lodz – in the western part of Old Poland. Over the course of the past two centuries Old Poland had gone through an important cultural shift. Broadly speaking, the lands around the Vistula, centred on Warsaw, and eastward were solidly Jewish and Russian speaking. The areas around the western frontier, centred on Krakow and Poznan, were Catholic and spoke the tongue of the First Polish State – usually called Krakowian. Lands between this cultural fault line, including Lodz, were divided.
While preaching to the Jewish faithful in Lodz, Vanya Alexeev had reportedly denounced the Orthodox authorities for their tolerance of heretical and heathen religions in Polish territory – claiming they had abandoned the vision of Jacob Shamir to convert the entire world to Judaism. These pronouncements apparently raised many of the listeners into a frenzy – leading to a bloody pogrom launched against the Catholic population of the city. The city authorities promptly arrested Alexeev, and elements of the Orthodox hierarchy in the region moved quickly to make use of the situation to tackle a growing threat to their authority. Alexeev was tried of provoking civil and religious discord, promoting heresy and misleading his flock – he was to be burnt at the stake.
The shocking execution of the dissident Rabbi prompted an outpouring of rage across Poland. Quickly Qahalists began to take up arms – targeting figures of the established Orthodoxy and Christian minorities who were together blamed for his killing. In Old Poland, with its sharp religious-ethnic divides – the Qahalist Revolt took on the form of an intercommunal civil war, with the bulk of the Jewish population siding with the rebels and launching its heaviest blows against the Christian community. In response, and with little support on offer from their lords or King, the Krakowian Poles formed their own armies to defend their people while making appeals to the west for aid.
While the Qahalists were never organised enough to offer a genuine threat to the established order in Poland, they were able to sow chaos throughout the land and leave both Old Poland and Northern Ruthenia, the heartlands of their movement, in a state of chaos for years. In the east, the Poles were forced to scale back their ambitions and make peace with the Tatars – securing a number of new territorial gains across the frontier, but falling short of their ambitions - most notably leavign Astrakhan in Muslim hands. In the south, the Arab Emirates of Syria briefly attempted to take advantage of the disorder in Poland to launch an invasion of Galilee in 1418-19. While this drew Polish troops away from the European front, without the backing of the Caliph they had little prospect of real success. While the Qahalist threat drew the majority of the Polish military’s attention, the Krakowians call for assistance to the west was the greatest threat to the realm’s territorial integrity. Thankfully for the Poles, the most powerful rulers of the Catholic world chose not to interfere – but several German lords, most notably the Duke of Swabia, sent armies to Old Poland to defend the Christian populations. The formation of alliances with these foreign princes by the Catholic community in the west was viewed as open support for the invasion of Poland, leading to the royal army committed its own series of massacres against Christian populations as order was restored in the Krakowian lands. By 1421, the rebellion had finally been put down and order restored across the Polish Kingdom.
Sadly for Yaroslav V, Poland’s relentlessly unfortunate King, the conflict had claimed the most important life in his entire realm – that of his only son Voislav and direct heir. Less than a year later, in 1422, Yaroslav himself would pass away, a broken man. The direct line of descent from Yaroslav II, the Sword of Adonai, was now extinct. Following the Polish laws of succession, the next in line to the throne was the oddball figure Yefimiy the Strange. 70 years old at the time of his ascension, ancient by the standards of the day, Yefimiy was the great grandson of Yaroslav I’s third son, the younger brother of King Demid. For over a century his cadet branch of the family had ruled as the Counts of Drutsk – a small, impoverished, fiefdom near Minsk.
The Drutsk-Vyshenkys were widely despised by Poland’s upper nobility for their lowly origins and peculiar character. Coming from a comparatively humble background in the backwoods of northern Ruthenia, they lacked the breeding and class of the most powerful Boyars, will little experience of the politics and manners of Kiev. They were seen as Kings from the gutter. Yefimiy himself was a famously unusual character – utterly consumed by his obsessions with foreign mysticism, he spent most of his reign absorbed in the study of a mysterious text known as the Necronomicon – believed to be linked to the occult. The eldest of his two middle-aged son, and his heir, Vasiliy, was a known homosexual with little flair for governance. This left Yefimiy’s second son, the blunt and brutish Vasilko, with the responsibility for managing most of the new royal family’s affairs.
With few alternative claimants to the throne, the Drutsk-Vyshenkys’ enemies had to turn to creative means of opposing the new ruling clan. A faction around Prince Dobrynia of Red Ruthenia, sought to extent the Kingdom’s drift towards conciliarism by demanding an abandonment of the existing succession laws and the adoption of an elective monarchy. Through the 10th and 11th centuries the Poles had routinely elected their Kings, allowing Dobrynia to pose this as a return to the lost liberties of old. Meanwhile, as a Dregovich, and a direct descendant of King Boris – the last ruler of the First Polish State, Dobrynia put himself forward as the natural alternative to Yefimiy and his brood.
In the early stages of the war it seemed that Dobrynia might quickly overwhelm the royalists – striking out from his home territories in Galicia and Slovakia to put Kiev under siege. However, although the Drutsk-Vyshenkys themselves lacked a significant powerbase, they were able to rely upon the personal enemies of the Prince to gather a sizeable coalition of their own. Once allied forces began to arrive near the capital, Dobrynia withdrew. Nether the less, the conflict continued to rage on. Having been forced back from Kiev, Dobrynia marched into Old Poland, where many of the local Boyars flocked to his banner and then proceeded to threaten Minsk. When Dobrynia attempted to strike once more into the east he faced a severe defeat at Hubyn. From this point, he was in retreat – with his army not surrendering until 1426 when the Prince himself was captured at the siege of Przemsyl.
After a gruelling battle, Prince Vasilko demanded a degree of vengeance against his defeated foe – and sought to confiscate much of Drobynia’s properties from him and place him under permanent imprisonment in Kiev. To the Boyars who had rallied around the monarchy, this appeared to be a return to the tyrannical exercise of royal authority that most opposed as an article of faith. The Duma demanded that, in order to restore peace and stability to the realm, the victorious royal party release all Princely prisoners, with no loss of land or titles, and in exchange the former rebels would swear perpetual loyalty to their King and renounce any claims against him.
As Vasilko refused to compromise, Poland was condemned to endure years more internal strife as a wide-ranging Boyar coalition rose up to defend the existing constitution, the Golden Liberties and the Duma. The royalists were embattled from the first, being forced to withdraw from large parts of the country. Yet on the field of battle their armies performed quite strongly – seizing control of Azov from the rebels in late 1426 and winning the support of many of the Khazars and Cossacks. The death of King Yefimiy in 1427, at the impressive age of 75, and the ascension of Vasiliy II did little to disrupt this rhythm, with the conciliarist rebels facing a number of defeats in Ruthenian through 1427 and early 1428.
The course of the conflict decisively shifted at the Battle of Cherven in 1428. There a larger royalist army was lured into a slaughter by the skilfully commanded conciliarists – tipping the balance of power strongly against the crown. In the aftermath of the battle, Vasilko advised his brother Vasiliy II that Kiev would soon come under siege once more and that he should withdraw to Minsk for safety. As the King travelled northwards, he was intercepted by a band of rebel troops – and killed in the crossfire as they attempted to capture him. Vasilko himself was then crowned King of Poland. With both his father and brother dead, and his army in disarray, the new King decided to abandon Kiev entirely to the encroaching conciliarists and withdraw to Minsk and northern Ruthenia, where he still had many allies.
Vasilko managed to rally his forces for one last major battle at Novogrudok in norther Ruthenia in 1429 yet faced another serious defeat. With this humbling, his realistic hopes of defeating the conciliarists were over. Within weeks the city of Minsk had fallen, and the King had withdrawn into the forests. He would continue to fight on for several more months before finally surrendering in 1430. The rebels were surprisingly lenient on their broken monarch. While the King agreed to further weaken the crown by transferring authority to the Duma and his council – he retained his throne and faced few other repercussions. The primary aim of this conciliarist revolt had been to defend the existing constitutional settlement, and that had been achieved. Vasilko had little opportunity to enjoy ruling a Kingdom at peace, as he fell ill and died in 1432. With the Medieval era beginning to come to an end around the globe, his 20-year-old son Sviatopolk would take on the task of leading the unstable Polish Kingdom into this new world.
