Kith, Kin, and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno 9780801467530

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Maps
A Note on Usage
Introduction
1. Over the Quartermaster’s Shoulder
2. The Neighbors
3. One Roof, Four Walls
4. The Bells of Wilno
5. Stereotyping, Writing, Speaking
6. Birth, Baptism, Godparenting
7. Education and Apprenticeship
8. Courtship and Marriage
9. Marital Discontents
10. Guild House, Workshop, Brotherhood Altar
11. Going to Law: The Language of Litigation
12. War, Occupation, Exile, Liberation (1655–1661)
13. Old Age and Poor Relief
14. Death in Wilno
Epilogue: Confl ict and Coexistence
Appendix A: Selected Streets and Areas Treated in the Text
Appendix B: Genealogical Tables
Abbreviations
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Kith, Kin, and Neighbors

Kith, Kin, and Neighbors Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno

David Frick

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2013 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2013 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frick, David A. Kith, kin, and neighbors : communities and confessions in seventeenth-century Wilno / David Frick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5128-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Vilnius (Lithuania)—History—17th century. 2. Vilnius (Lithuania)—Social life and customs— 17th century. 3. Vilnius (Lithuania)—Religion—17th century. I. Title. DK505.935.F75 2013 947.93—dc23 2012041071 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, lowVOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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Contents

Acknowledgments Maps A Note on Usage

vii ix xxiii

Introduction 1. Over the Quartermaster’s Shoulder 2. The Neighbors 3. One Roof, Four Walls 4. The Bells of Wilno 5. Stereotyping, Writing, Speaking 6. Birth, Baptism, Godparenting 7. Education and Apprenticeship 8. Courtship and Marriage 9. Marital Discontents 10. Guild House, Workshop, Brotherhood Altar 11. Going to Law: The Language of Litigation 12. War, Occupation, Exile, Liberation (1655–1661) 13. Old Age and Poor Relief 14. Death in Wilno Epilogue: Conflict and Coexistence

1 20 59 69 77 99 117 138 173 218 249 274 290 322 356 400

Appendix A: Selected Streets and Areas Treated in the Text Appendix B: Genealogical Tables Abbreviations Notes Works Cited Index

419 421 425 427 485 507

Acknowledgments

T

his book has been in the making for about fifteen years. A major reason for such a long time frame was the fact that I decided early in the process to publish a portion of my source base, with commentary; this has now appeared as Wilnianie. ˙Z ywoty siedemnastowieczne (Vilnans: Seventeenth-Century Lives, Warsaw, 2008). I refer the reader to that volume (Frick 2008), in addition to the archival locations, whenever appropriate in the course of my argument. I have also published articles on topics addressed in this book, materials from some of which have been incorporated in various forms. Parts of the introduction have appeared in English and in Polish in Frick 2003a, 2008. Aspects of the topic of the competing calendars in multiconfessional Wilno (chapter 4) were treated in Frick 2003a; those of ethnolinguistic and ethnoconfessional stereotyping (chapter 5) in Frick 2009; godparenting (chapter 6) in Frick 2007a; separation and divorce (chapter 9) in Frick 2007b; the language of litigation (chapter 11) in Frick 2002; the period of the Muscovite occupation (chapter 12) in Frick 2010b and forthcoming); old age and poor relief (chapter 13) in Frick 2006b. Questions of JewishChristian interactions, which arise in several chapters throughout these pages, were the topic of Frick 2005b and 2010a. A handbook-style summary treatment of some of the book’s main arguments has now appeared in Frick 2011. As the reader will quickly note, the main difference between the earlier thematic treatments and their incarnations in this book is the attempt here, for the first time, to place Vilnans and their negotiations of confessional and religious differences in specific Wilno topographies. This discussion is unique to this book and new, in its specificity, in studies of early modern cities. I have been supported in this work by a number of institutions, to all of which I offer warm words of gratitude. Research trips to archives and libraries in Lithuania, Poland, Germany, and Russia were funded by smaller and larger grants and fellowships from IREX, the Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, and Humanities Research Fellowships from the Division of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. The final writing up of the results was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. The identities of the archives visited will be clear from the list

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acknowledgments

of abbreviations. Their staffs have my utmost appreciation and gratefulness for their unfailing help. With a project this long in the making, it is impossible to name all those whose ears I have bent and who have generously offered me their advice and encouragement. The list would have to begin with my parents, Ivan and Ruth Frick, who sent me off on the journey; and with teachers, at Indiana University, Bloomington, and at Yale University—especially Riccardo Picchio, Alex Schenker, and Harvey Goldblatt—who gave me the tools, taught me how to use them, and planted the seeds of some of the questions. In Lithuania, Sergejus Temcˇinas, Dalia ˇ ekmonas, Nadežda Morozova, Elmantas Meilus, Aivas Ragauskas, Inge˙ Leinarte˙, Valerijus C Lukšaite˙, Zigmantas Kiaupa, Ju¯rate˙ Kiaupiene˙, Edmundas Rimša, and Agnius Urbanavicˇius helped me find my way in Lithuanian scholarship, archives, and collections. In Poland, throughout my work, but particularly while I was occupied with producing Wilnianie, Andrzej Rachuba, Henryk Lulewicz, Andrzej Zakrewski, Leszek Zasztowt, Danuta Sosnowska, Jan Jurkiewicz, Bogusław Dybas´, Tomasz Kempa, Aleksander Naumow, Wacław Twardzik, Roman Mazurkiewicz, and Jakub Niedz´dwiedz´ have been constant supports. In Russia, my part-time Berkeley colleague Viktor Zhivov, and in Germany, Hans Rothe, my former sponsor with a Humboldt Fellowship at Bonn University, stepped in to assist me with access to archival materials and with their expertise. Mirja Lecke of Bochum University organized a research/lecture tour of German academic centers in the summer of 2011, once again under the auspices of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, during which I was able to present the results of my work to German scholars; among them, Stefan Rohdewald has been a particularly important Gesprächspartner over the years. Karin Friedrich and Robert Frost facilitated discussions at the University of Aberdeen. Closer to home, Larry Wolff and Roman Koropeckyj both read the whole manuscript in an earlier version, Elaine Tennant and Tom and Kathy Brady read large chunks, John Connelly, Yuri Slezkine, Peggy Anderson, Jim Sheehan, Victoria Frede, Val Kivelson, and Dan Kaiser discussed materials that ended up as portions of various chapters. Susan Karant-Nunn responded to my many questions. The UC, Berkeley graduate student Russian kruzhok took on one of my chapters for spirited debate, as did the east-central European kroužek. The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC, Berkeley provided a collegial place for discussion over the course of one semester, as did other stimulating forums too numerous to mention. Several graduate-student research assistants provided crucial help, among whom Michelle Viise, Anne Dwyer, and Aida Sakalauskaite· gave considerable amounts of their time. Otylia Frick’s constant snoring was a calming blessing. My editors at Cornell University Press, Jamie Fuller and Karen Laun, were patient and careful readers; it has been a pleasure to work with them as well as with the director of the press, John Ackerman. Ingrid Plajzer-Frick lived with my absences, when I was either in archives in east-central Europe or in my study downstairs. Daughter Lillie Josephine, born halfway through the project, asked the first truly fundamental question: “Will it be a chapter book?” Heartfelt thanks to all.

Maps

T

he maps are the result of my reading of “Lustrations” done of the intramural houses of the city of Wilno in preparation for visits by King Władysław IV in 1636 and 1639 (BUJ, B Slav. F. 12 [1636] and BUJ, B Slav. F. 15 [1639]). The surveys were prepared by a royal functionary, a stanowniczy or “quartermaster,” whose job it was to determine where the royal entourage could be housed, and my numbering system follows him as he made his walk through the city. The houses, as referred to in the text, are double-numbered by survey order and house number, thus loosely following the quartermaster’s own numbering system. The numbers of the segments, from 1 to 80, accompany arrows in the maps indicating the direction the quartermaster took in his walk around the town. The individual houses in each segment are assigned their own numbers. Thus, for example, on the maps of “Upper Castle Street” and “Lower Castle Street and Market Square,” numbers 1.01 to 1.42 indicate that the quartermaster first surveyed the eastern side of Castle Street, from top to bottom, 2.01 to 2.32 that he went next to the houses across the way, again beginning from the top.

A Note on Usage

T

he Catholics kept their baptismal records in Latin. First names were Latinized, and family names were entered in the uninflected (nominative) Polish form. The Lutherans kept their financial records in German. The Calvinists kept their books in Polish with a few entries in German. The Roman Catholic Chapter kept its books partly in Latin and partly in Polish. The books of the land and castle courts were partly in Ruthenian, increasingly in Polish in the course of the seventeenth century, although Cyrillic-letter Ruthenian was always present, often as formulaic prologues and colophons. The acta of the city magistracy, a central source for this book, were kept largely in Polish with occasional formulaic prologues and colophons in Latin and a phrase or two in Ruthenian. As most of the source material for a study of seventeenth-century Wilno burgher life—perhaps 85 percent—is in Polish, and almost all of the dramatis personae of these pages appeared on stage at least once in Polish garb, I have given all names in Polish form (with variant forms in parentheses where needed). This has nothing to do with the nationalist (and thus anachronistic) fights between proponents of one orthography over another, who will insist that Sokołowski (Polish) is actually Sakalou˘ski (Belarusan) or Sokolivs'kyj (Ukrainian) or Sakalauskas (Lithuanian). By using the Polish orthography I am simply recognizing that this is the form in which these people and places most often appeared in the historical record. Their “Polishness” was much different from that imagined by modern Polish partisans. And bear in mind that Jan (in my book) was Johannes when he sponsored Catholic babies, but he was Johan or Hans or Hanus in church and at home if he was Lutheran, and Iwan if he was Orthodox. (I do use Iwan, however, if that is the only way he appears in the sources.) And the record shows that Vilnans were ready to accept such variations and hesitations and understood their significance. I have simply opted for the form that appears most frequently. A further complication: women were identified as the wives or daughters of husbands and fathers and not always in addition by their own Christian names. In Polish usage the ending -owa indicated “wife of ” and -ówna, “daughter of.” Sometimes, for reasons of euphony, -yna/ ina is used for “wife of ” and -anka for “daughter of.” I will use these forms, but I will also try to make it clear to the reader who was on stage at the given moment. For place and river names within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth I have used Polish forms, except where standard English forms exist.

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a note on usage

Calendars are the topic of chapter 4. Suffice it to say here that the new Gregorian calendar was adopted for general use in Poland-Lithuania in the fall of 1582, immediately after its introduction in Rome. Dates cited in this book are new calendar dates. Where necessary, I have given double dates, Old and New Style, separated by a slash, e.g., 10/20 March 1635. Since the end of the sixteenth century, Polish usage has allowed the making of strict distinctions between the terms kos´ciół (a Roman Catholic church), cerkiew (an Orthodox or Uniate church), and zbór (a Protestant church, usually Calvinist but also sometimes—at least in Catholic usage—Lutheran); in some contexts, however, kos´ciół can be used in a general, unmarked sense for any Christian church. The Lutherans themselves, who used the term “priest” (ksia˛dz) to refer to their pastors, regularly termed their own church and the building in which it gathered a kos´ciół, to the great dissatisfaction of Catholic clergy, who wished to draw a strict distinction between Roman Catholic usage and all the rest. On religious terminology in the Age of Reform in Poland-Lithuania, see Górski 1962. The term “Evangelical” (ewangelicki) in my source texts and translations refers exclusively to the Lithuanian Reformed Church that was in communion with the Calvinists. It excludes the Lutherans, who were identified by confession (Augsburg) or “ethnicity” (Saxon). The term “Basilian” in the usage of the time is not limited to those in the Order of St. Basil the Great, or, more generally, Uniates. It is also used to identify Orthodox clergy and institutions. It thus included all the Eastern-rite Christians. Identity as Uniate or Orthodox was sometimes also specified; when it was not, we have to infer it from the context. The units of currency most frequently met in these pages are the Polish złoty (zł) and grosz (gr) and the Lithuanian shock or kopa (k) and grosz (gr). One Polish zł equaled 30 Polish gr; one Lithuanian k equaled 60 Lithuanian gr. A royal decree of 1572 established the relationship between the two currencies (both of which were used in Wilno, at least for accounting): 2 Lithuanian gr equaled 2.5 Polish gr, and thus one Lithuanian k (60 gr) equaled 2.5 Polish zł. Hoszowski (1928) gives ranges of prices and salaries for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lwów, Adamczyk (1935) for Lublin. Similarly comprehensive work for Wilno has not been undertaken. Paknys (2007, 100–101) gives some prices of Wilno houses in the period. Shock or kopa is also used as a unit of counting in inventories, e.g., “one shock (i.e., 60) nails.” In the transliteration of Cyrillic works, passages, and bibliographic entries (mostly Chancery Ruthenian, Russian, Belarusan, and Ukrainian), I have employed the so-called scientific or academic system. I have anglicized the mostly descriptive street and area names used in the sources (and throughout the history of the oldest part of the city), e.g., Glass Street. In appendix A, I give the Polish names found in the sources and some of the later Polish names (where they had changed), as well as the current Lithuanian names, next to those I have employed in English. In this fashion, the reader can also consult contemporary and historical maps of the city. I have given only those streets that play important roles in the story told by the seventeenthcentury sources. For more comprehensive lists and the city’s street names throughout hisˇ aplinskas 2000 and Jurkštas 1985. tory, see C

Kith, Kin, and Neighbors

Introduction

I

n the summer of 1585 a Lutheran merchant of Ulm named Samuel Kiechel (1563–1619) set off on a four-year journey, which led ultimately to the Holy Lands, following a bewilderingly aimless route that passed through Bohemia, Brandenburg, the Low Countries, England, Scandinavia, Poland-Lithuania, Muscovy, Vienna, Rome, and Sicily. In the second summer of his wanderings, at the beginning of July 1586, he sojourned for eleven days in Wilno, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and, as such, the second capital of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth after Cracow, then still the seat of the Polish Crown. There he noted, in addition to the city’s “poor water, bad and little beer” (schlimm wasser, schlecht und gering bier), aspects of physical and confessional topography: The houses are generally all built of wood and covered with boards, with the exception of two of the most fashionable streets or ways, in which to the greater extent Germans and others live as merchants, who then also have their own church and pastor, whose salary they pay among themselves. In addition to the Martinists [i.e., followers of Martin Luther], the city has also many sorts of religions and sects, all of which have their churches and public exercitia [exercises], such as papists, Calvinists, Jesuits, Ruthenians or Muscovites, Anabaptists, Zwinglians, and Jews, who also have their synagogue and place of gathering. Then there are also the heathens, or Tatars, and all the religions, companies, and sects have libertatem conscientiae [freedom of conscience], in which no one is hindered.1

Kiechel’s comments belong to a small subgenre of “reports from Wilno,” in which visitors offered the outside world sometimes breathless accounts of the fantastic multitude of confessions and religions, either marveling at the relatively peaceful coexistence of the city’s inhabitants or abhorring it. In either case, exaggeration often belonged to the rhetorical repertoire. Among the chief exaggerators was papal nuncio Cosma de Torres (1584–1642, nunciature 1621–1622), who wrote in a report to Rome that although the Reformation had already lost much ground among the nobility, or szlachta, “there are not few [heretics] among the

2

introduction

common people, especially in Wilno, where one can count up to sixty different sects, and it is often possible to come upon a home in which the father belongs to one, the mother to another, and the children to yet another.”2 One of Torres’s predecessors in the nunciature, Germánico Malaspina (1550–1603, nunciature 1592–1598), had reported with some concern in 1598 on the situation in the bishopric of Wilno, where “there are up to one hundred thousand villagers who do not know the Our Father, many idolators, Mohammedan Tatars, in addition to schismatic Ruthenians and Armenians, also heretics of various sects, and the nuncio is not permitted to take a stand.” Still, Malaspina, unlike his more alarmist successor, showed a certain openness to exploiting the situation for the good of the Church. Especially worthy of attention, in his view, were the mixed marriages of “Catholics with heretics, and vice versa,” which—though “forbidden by canon laws” and “usually not permitted” by the bishops—were sometimes given tacit blessing by prelates, who “look the other way.” Malaspina was not entirely critical of the practice, since “almost always the Catholic converts the heretical spouse to his or her faith.” Thus, he concluded, hierarchs should “consider well” whether to forbid such unions.3 In fact, it was Kiechel who had gotten it about right, although a few minor corrections are in order here. Muscovites were certainly present in the form of traveling merchants dealing in furs and forest products, and they may well have worshipped with the local “Ruthenians.” (Ruthenians were the Orthodox citizens, and after the Union of Brest of 1596 the Orthodox and Uniate citizens, of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—ancestors of Belarusans and Ukrainians.) But the Muscovites had no church of their own in the city, and no one from the region would have confused them with Ruthenians. Further, there was one local Calvinist church with “Polish” and “German” congregations, but there was no division of that community into partisans of Geneva or Zürich. The Jesuits were indeed present in 1586, but they were newcomers at that time (having been introduced to the city only in 1569) next to the long-established Franciscans, Dominicans, and Bernardines. In the seventeenth century they would be joined by Calced and Discalced Carmelites, Brothers Hospitallers of St. John of God (Boni Fratelli), Canons Regular of St. Augustine (Augustinians), and Canons Regular of the Lateran Congregation. Finally, the “Anabaptists” had made a brief appearance in the Wilno confessional landscape in the 1570s, but they soon disappeared.4 Still, Kiechel’s sketch of the confessional landscape was largely accurate. And with the addition of the Uniate Church in 1596, it would hold for the seventeenth century as well. Our pilgrim from the Danube paid much less detailed attention to the ethnic landscape, noting the Jews and Tatars and, among Christians, only the Germans and Ruthenians, whom he identified with the Lutheran and Orthodox confessions, respectively. But the situation was more complicated. There were Germans (at least from our modern point of view) among the Calvinists and the Roman Catholics, Scottish merchants and tradesmen among the first, a range of other ethnicities among the second. Vilnans were not blind to what we could call ethnic difference, but they, like Kiechel, sometimes drew the lines somewhat

introduction

3

differently than we do, and they always included aspects of religion and confession in their sometimes shifting and overlapping taxonomies. The tone of Kiechel’s description of a peculiarly Vilnan convivencia—one in which “all the religions, companies, and sects have libertatem conscientiae [freedom of conscience], in which no one is hindered” in the open, public practice of religion—suggests that he belonged to the admirers of the city’s multiconfessionalism. One of the most frequently cited eulogists of toleration in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, vice-judge of the Nowogródek palatinate Teodor Jewłaszewski (1546–1617), would look back nostalgically at the end of his life—from the fallen circumstances of the early seventeenth century (the vice-judge could not know what the rest of the century would bring!)—upon the golden age of his sixteenth-century prime. Born Orthodox in the Belarusan hamlet of Lachowice in the Nowogródek palatinate, he received his first learning in Cyrillic letters and ultimately chose Ruthenian as the language of his memoirs in old age, although he would also become literate, no doubt also conversant, in Polish and Latin, and he claimed to be able at least to read Hebrew letters, if not precisely Hebrew or Yiddish texts. An early convert to the Lithuanian version of Calvinism, Jewłaszewski would nonetheless spend his public and semiprivate life among colleagues and patrons of all confessions. He would write in his memoirs that he had been living in Wilno in 1566, helping to assess the capitation tax, “where [he] had the great delight of listening to the Word of God in the Christian church [zbor, i.e., the Calvinist church] during the time of learned ministers.” At that time, Jewłaszewski had enjoyed the “great grace” of Roman Catholic prelates. With obvious satisfaction and some humor he related an event that had occurred “not so long ago” at the table of Wilno Roman Catholic canon Bałtromiej Niedz´wiedzki. Present at the dinner in Wilno were servants of then cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini (1536–1605), the future Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605), who was visiting the Lithuanian capital. Aldobrandini had been made cardinal and a papal legate a latere in 1586, and in 1588 he was dispatched to the Commonwealth to conduct delicate negotiations, the crowning achievement of which was a restitution of peace between Poland-Lithuania and the Habsburg monarchy and the release from captivity of the Habsburg contender for the Polish throne; his assignment had also been to see to it that the successful candidate, King Zygmunt III Vasa, kept the Commonwealth loyal to Rome. The members of the cardinal’s retinue (his “Italian servants”) were “greatly astonished” to discover at some point late in the evening that, unaware of their fellow guest’s identity, they had been enjoying pleasant hours of food, drink, and conversation with a Calvinist. In a more general assessment of this topic in his life’s experience, Jewłaszewski wrote, “In those days, difference in faith made not the least difference in love among friends, for which very reason that era seems golden to me from the point of view of this age, where even among people of one faith duplicity has overtaken all, and do not even ask about love, sincerity, and truly good conduct among those who differ in faith.”5 The anecdote about supper at the canon’s table was intended as an exemplum contrasting not only the golden and the iron ages in Lithuania but also customs on the peripheries—in the capital

4

introduction

of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania—with those at Europe’s confessional centers, particularly in Rome. Kith, Kin, and Neighbors attempts to provide answers to some of the questions these eyewitness accounts pose or at least suggest. What was the relationship between the physical map of early modern Wilno and its confessional and ethnic topographies? How different was seventeenth-century Wilno from other European cities of the day? To what extent did the “victory of the Counter-Reformation” in Poland-Lithuania—received notions about the degree and nature of that victory will be put to the test here—minimize difference in Wilno and serve to impose separation of the confessions and religions or to put them on a more hostile footing? How did Vilnans—lay citizens as well as their clergy—negotiate confessional differences in structuring public and more private life, from citywide lay sodalities to mixed households and shared chambers, even shared marriage beds? I have chosen to focus on Wilno in this study of how a multiethnic and multiconfessional early modern city functioned for a number of reasons. One is the distinctiveness of the place. As the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Wilno was, in the early modern period, among the most important cities in the zone of transcultural communication between the Romano-Germanic (and partly Slavic) world of Reformation and Catholic Reform on the one hand and Orthodox Slavdom on the other; this zone ran from north to south, through the eastern lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and on into the Balkans. The city was the scene of daily interactions among a bewildering array of versions of those two larger cultural spheres. But I have also chosen Wilno because the sources available, as patchy as they may be in certain spots, provide a particularly good laboratory for observing the “how” of coexistence. The object of inquiry throughout is the daily interactions among people of different confessions and cultures in Wilno in the seventeenth century. Those who come to these matters from the point of view of high culture, envisioning the situation through the prism of interconfessional polemics—and Wilno was one of the more important centers for the production of such pamphlets in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—may expect to find unceasing battles among the adherents of the five Christian confessions recognized in Wilno, as well as among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Such tensions certainly existed, but they arose not only against the background of confessional and cultural differences. The authorities sought solutions allowing people to live and work together, and individual Vilnans themselves sought peaceful and sometimes amicable contacts with the members of other groups. This cannot have been easy; it required various compromises not only from the more weakly situated minorities but also from the dominant Roman Catholics. And it did not take place without sporadic outbreaks of “tumults.” Nonetheless, this coexistence—even if, or perhaps precisely because, it took place in the context of regulated background violence and litigation—long remained the norm. What did that normalcy look like? How did it function?

introduction

5

In the course of my research I have come to several conclusions. One is that aspects of David Nirenberg’s argument about fourteenth-century Iberia have relevance for seventeenth-century Wilno—not only were convivencia and violence not mutually exclusive opposites, but well-policed “communities of violence” were central to the coexistence of confessions. Further, as in the civil society of Edward Muir’s early modern northern Italy, Vilnans kept the peace among themselves in part through a process of “continuous litigation,” through which they defended property, health, and—perhaps above all—honor against constant challenge from their neighbors. Moreover, as Benjamin Kaplan has recently argued, toleration—the nitty-gritty everyday practice of living with neighbors some may have considered benighted and destined for hell—had no necessary connection with the ideals of tolerance espoused by a few precocious members of the early modern elites; it was, in fact, often the opposite of tolerance. And, finally, as students of religion and society in early modern east-central Europe acknowledge, paradigms of confessionalization are of limited usefulness and must be modified in coming to terms with the multiconfessionalism of places like seventeenth-century Wilno.6 I point to aspects of these arguments throughout this book and return to a sustained discussion of them in the epilogue as I attempt to locate Wilno on the map of early modern European toleration. In short, the reader should not be surprised to discover that the kith, kin, and neighbors of my title were sometimes of the same confession or religion and sometimes of different ones and that they both coexisted in relative peace and fought and litigated with each other according to well-established rules of engagement. This book seeks to understand patterns, behavior, and rules of multiconfessional, multiethnic, and multicultural coexistence.

The Setting But first, some necessary background. Wilno had succeeded Troki (Trakai) as the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by the early fourteenth century. At this time, it was the seat of a sprawling multiethnic, multiconfessional polity, the ruling elite of which were Lithuanians, one of the pagan Baltic tribes. The city itself was mixed even before the formal Christianization of Europe’s last pagan state in 1386 under the sponsorship of the Polish Roman Catholic Church. At that point, it was inhabited by pagan Lithuanians, Orthodox Ruthenians, and Catholic Germans. Orthodox culture enjoyed a certain favor in those days: Ruthenians had moved to the city after territories of what had once been Kievan Rus' began to come under Lithuanian rule in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, following the Mongol invasion and sacking of Kiev in 1240. (Kievan Rus' was the medieval east Slavic principality— converted under the rule of St. Vladimir in 988 to eastern Orthodoxy—which is claimed as the earliest antecedent of modern Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusan states.) The immigrants

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brought with them the Cyrillic-based Ruthenian that would become for a while the language of culture and would remain the official chancery language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, required for land and tribunal decrees until 1696. Some of the first individual cases of conversion among the Lithuanian pagan elite were to Orthodox Christianity. At this point, the pagan temple coexisted more or less peacefully with German Catholic and Ruthenian Orthodox churches. Some have located the origins of Wilno’s traditions of practical toleration in these patterns established in the preconversion period.7 The city would retain a significant Ruthenian presence, and the use of Chancery Ruthenian remained a mark of Lithuanian particularism long after the elite stopped using the language. Nonetheless, the conversion in 1386 of the grand duke of Lithuania, Jagiełło (Lithuanian, Jogaila; “Władysław Jagiełło,” Polish baptismal and given names), to Roman Catholicism brought with it a change in the attitude of Lithuanian society toward the Ruthenian aspect of its identity. The introduction of Roman Catholicism laid the foundation for four centuries of political federation between the Lithuanian and Polish states, which also opened the doors to Polish immigration.8 More important here, it facilitated a linguistic and cultural Polonization of the Lithuanian elite that would eventually reach to the burghers, leaving, by the early seventeenth century, the greatest concentrations of monolingual Lithuanian speakers in the countryside.9 The late fourteenth century also saw the arrival in the area around Wilno of numbers of Tatars and Karaim (Karaites). The Tatars, like the Jews, were not citizens of Wilno and— unlike the Jews—had received no privilege for residence within the city walls; they settled, however, with a wooden mosque and a school, in the nearby suburb of Łukiszki (Lukiške˙s) and were thus a part of the daily life of the city.10 Karaim (a scripture-based medieval Jewish sect that had rejected rabbinical traditions and the Talmud) found a home in Troki, a morning’s walk away, and they would play a role in the life of Wilno’s Jewish community; they thus belong only to the margins of the story of Wilno in the early modern period.11 Jews were slower to gain a legal footing in Wilno than in other cities of Lithuania. In 1551 the Sejm (parliament) exempted the Wilno houses of the grand duke’s council from the jurisdiction of the magistracy, thus preparing the way for Jews to rent those noble houses within the city walls and eventually to buy them. Whereas Jews had previously prayed in private residences and small residential synagogues (shtiblekh), the first free-standing synagogue came into being in the center of the city in 1573, and in 1593, in the wake of anti-Jewish riots, King Zygmunt III Waza gave the Jews of Wilno their foundational privilege to live in certain streets and to engage in certain occupations “especially since we already found [the Jews living in Wilno] on Our happy arrival here to these domains, the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.”12 After a few false starts, the Protestant Reformation became a long-term part of the life of Wilno from the second half of the sixteenth century. Permanent aspects of the confessional landscape were the Lutherans and the Calvinists. The Lutheran complex was founded in 1555 on German Street, where it would remain. In our period it encompassed a church with spire

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and bells, but tucked away safely in an internal courtyard, together with a school and residences for ministers and other staff. The Calvinists worshipped in private residences in the 1560s, but by 1577 they had begun to build the complex of a church with spire and bells, school, and hospital across the street from the Bernardines’ Church of St. Michael. Following an anti-Calvinist tumult in 1639, a royal decree of 1640 would remove them to the site of their old cemetery just outside the walls, where they, too, remained.13 An urban Anabaptist movement with some leveling tendencies experienced a brief life in the 1570s, but it left no permanent marks on the religious life of the city.14 The Antitrinitarianism that has occupied such a prominent position in studies of the intellectual elite of early modern PolandLithuania—among whom we find some of Europe’s earliest and most eloquent theorists and defenders of religious tolerance15—played no direct or lasting role in the life of the city; and the precocious views they put forth concerning religious tolerance had little direct relationship with the day-to-day negotiations that Vilnans entered into as they sought ways to live with their neighbors. The Lutheran church was largely nongentry, comprising members of the city ruling elite (until a ban in 1666), plus professionals, merchants, and artisans—from the more prestigious professions (doctors, lawyers, and goldsmiths) to the dirtier trades (tanners and furriers). Its two congregations, a German-speaking majority and a Polishspeaking minority, shared the same building and sometimes the same bilingual ministers. The Calvinist church was largely noble, although some burghers do appear in its midst, especially, of course, in an urban setting like Wilno. Here it had a Polish-speaking majority and a German-speaking minority (and it was also home to a group of Scots). In 1596, in accordance with the Union of Brest, the majority of the Ruthenian Orthodox Church hierarchy agreed to enter into communion with Rome, forming what was known as the Uniate (only much later called Greek Catholic) Church. Much of the Ruthenian flock and lesser clergy, however, rejected the move and remained, in their view, truly Orthodox and therefore heirs to all rights and privileges conferred upon the Greeks of the city and the Commonwealth. All the churches of Wilno that were Orthodox in 1595 were eventually turned over to the Uniates, and although three of them—“the first [the Church] of the Resurrection of Christ, the second St. John [the Baptist], and the third the Church of St. Gregory in the suburbs”—were to have reverted to the Orthodox as a result of the negotiations surrounding the election of King Władysław IV in 1632, none ever did.16 In 1598, the Orthodox began establishing a new center in the Holy Spirit Church, monastery, hospital, and brotherhood, just across the street from what would now become the leading Uniate Church, monastery, hospital, and brotherhood of the Holy Trinity. When the Orthodox hierarchy was “illegally” reestablished in 1620, Wilno became the scene of the debate over the status of those bishops and their flock.17 By 1650, then, this conurbation of perhaps twenty thousand inhabitants18 was peopled by Poles (or Polish-speaking people), Lithuanians, Germans, Ruthenians, Jews, and Tatars; these peoples worshipped in some twenty-three Catholic, nine Uniate, one Orthodox, one Calvinist, and one Lutheran church, one synagogue, and one mosque; they spoke Polish,

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Ruthenian, German, Yiddish, Lithuanian, and some Tatar;19 and they prayed or wrote learned treatises also using various amounts of Latin, Church Slavonic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and a little Arabic. Polish was certainly at the least the city’s lingua franca, and all were feeling (although many ignored) pressures and enticements to conform to a certain Polish and Roman Catholic norm. That model cannot, however, be equated in any simple fashion with the stricter confessional conditions that obtained in the lands of the Polish Crown. Wilno was approximately the size of Cracow within the walls. The walls of the city of Wilno stretched for 2.9 km (Cracow’s walls—3.1 km), and they enclosed an area of 0.8 km2 (Cracow—0.6 km2).20 Wilno was granted a version of Magdeburg law in 1387, and members of all the Christian confessions would eventually be eligible for citizenship. (Magdeburg law refers to variations on the set of privileges—based on those first elaborated for the city of Magdeburg—granted by a ruler, the purpose of which was to establish the nature and extent of autonomies and obligations that came with the chartering of cities and the granting to individuals of citizenship in them. The adoption of a wide range of Magdeburg and other Germanic city codes was a crucial feature of the urbanization of Poland-Lithuania in the late medieval and early modern periods.)21 In 1536, after a city council had been elected that was 100 percent Ruthenian or “Greek” (that is to say, Orthodox), the “Lachs”—a term that usually meant Poles but here signified all Catholics, including Lithuanians and Germans—obtained from King Zygmunt I a privilege that decreed an equal division between Greeks and Romans in all future elections to the city magistracy: benchers (ławnicy, scabinii), councillors, and burgomasters.22 The career of a member of the ruling elite progressed along that path—from service in the court of the bench to the wider council and finally to the council composed of four councillors and two burgomasters, which was elected on an annual basis. A very few would reach the pinnacle of urban power, the office of the wójt (from the German Vogt), which was reserved for Roman Catholics. Parity between Greeks and Romans remained in force at every level below that of the wójt.23 In Wilno, the wójt was elected by the magistracy and confirmed by royal privilege. At this point (i.e., before the Reformation and before the Union of Brest), the terms “Roman” and “Greek” exhausted the range of Christian confessions represented in city government, although each term might cover more than one ethnic group. With the increasing fragmentation of Roman and Greek Christianity in the course of the sixteenth century, more and more groups would compete for seats under the Roman and Greek quotas. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, a Roman Vilnan might be Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist, and a Greek, Uniate or Orthodox.24 And with the increasing political dominance of Roman Catholicism in the course of the seventeenth century, some of the groups would find it increasingly difficult to succeed. Nonetheless, the principle of Roman-Greek parity would never be broken, and individuals from marginalized groups would be elected and sworn to office in Wilno well after the victory of the Counter-Reformation. In 1666 King Jan Kazimierz Waza passed three restrictive decrees (“ad instar [after the fashion of ] Cracow”) limiting the Roman seats in the magistracy to Roman Catholics and the Greek seats to Uniates. But at the same time, the king took note of the fact that

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Henryk Mones (a Calvinist, in fact, and not, as the king had been informed, a Lutheran) and Prokop Dorofiewicz (Orthodox) were still in the magistracy, serving in those years as annual burgomasters, and he specifically allowed them to serve out their terms.25 The reference to Cracow was in fact not entirely apt. In contrast to the old capital of the Polish Crown, where the power in city government was entirely limited to Roman Catholics by the end of the sixteenth century, the Wilno magistracy would remain divided between Romans and Greeks. In spite of pressure to conform to a Polonized and Catholic norm, the elite Greeks (even if they were Uniates) were still an important presence; and these Uniates—one of the surprises of my research—often looked to Greek Orthodox rather than to Roman Catholic circles in forming family and more extended human networks. That is to say, Uniate and Catholic were distinguishable identities, and many Uniates insisted on this fact—among other ways, by forming all-Ruthenian networks that excluded Roman Catholics. The types of parity arrangements worked out for the magistracy were reflected in a wide range of secular corporations, such as the guilds. Here, the royal intervention of 1666 limiting the categories of Romans and Greeks to those in communion with Rome had no direct bearing. One paradoxical result of the continuing adherence to Roman-Greek parity in the magistracy was that even in its more restrictive post-1666 form it could serve as a model for much broader multiconfessionalism in other city corporations. A variety of types of power sharing appeared, all of them in some way reflections of the royal decree of 1536 that had called for Roman-Greek parity. Here, too, the specifications of the way in which power was to be shared say something about the ethnic, social, and confessional makeup of the individual guilds, but they do not say anything about the relative numbers of each subgroup. Recognized groups were to be represented, but there was no thought for proportional representation. Thus, beginning just below the magisterial elite—probably in the influential Communitas mercatoria, or Merchants’ Guild,26 and certainly in the guilds—the restriction of Roman and Greek categories to Catholic and Uniate did not apply, and Orthodox, Lutheran, and a few Calvinist merchants and artisans continued to play important roles in the city’s life next to their Roman Catholic and Uniate neighbors, spouses, children, and relatives.

Sources and Strategies It is the “next to” that interests me in this book. How are we to gain access to these human networks? A fortunate encounter with a crucial document at an early stage in my research—the Lustration [Rewizja] of the Dwellings of the Court of His Royal Majesty (we have two such surveys, for 1636 and 1639)—determined the direction my investigations have taken.27 These are at first glance thoroughly prosaic documents, compiled, it would seem, each time the king came to Wilno.28 They were documents for use: their registration was the task of a royal appointee known as the stanowniczy (royal quartermaster) because it was his duty to

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determine where individuals from the retinues of the king and other dignitaries were to “stand” (stac´—literally, to stand, but here, to reside temporarily, to be quartered) during the king’s presence in the city. The whole event was referred to as stanowienie gos´ci (the standing of guests). It was one of the more onerous burdens of citizenship, and burghers presented to the authorities a privilege freeing them from the obligation (a libertacja) whenever they could. The purpose of the Lustrations determined their form and content. These were surveys of the houses (seemingly all of them) within the walls, conducted in a strictly regulated fashion, house by house, moving from the Lower Castle south along the Royal Way—down Castle Street, through Market Square, and past the town hall to the Rudniki (and Sharp) Gates. That is to say, the quartermaster set out from twelve o’clock to six o’clock—if we turn intramural Wilno’s gracefully heart-shaped contours into a simple circle—and then he progressed in his survey clockwise, going full circle from the environs of Sharp Gate (six o’clock) to those of the Subocz Gate (three o’clock). The eloquence of these bare lists soon becomes clear. In the first place, they make it possible to draw up a map of Wilno for the years in question and to assign “addresses” to all the houses.29 Questions remain about the precise locations of some houses in a few side streets—for instance, around the Roman Catholic Church of St. Nicholas and in the vicinity of Łotoczko Street. But in the overwhelming majority of cases I have been able to locate the houses of Wilno in 1636 (with a few supplements from the Lustration of 1639) on very precise segments of identified streets and in every case to locate a house in relationship to its neighbors. In a great many instances it is possible—although this was not the goal of this project— to draw a line of continuity—across fires, wars, renovations, and expansions—from an address in 1636 to later, even current ones. In all cases, of course, we need to think in terms of the progressive supplanting of wood by brick or the addition of another floor and of the incorporation of neighboring addresses into one larger house, especially in the general rebuildings that took place after the fires and wars that were a part of city life in the seventeenth century (and after!). In his study of late medieval Marseille, Daniel Lord Smail writes of four competing “templates” employed by the various communities in the “imaginary cartographies” they created and used to navigate space and locate people and property in the days before “urban representations from the perpendicular that take notice of streets.”30 It will be useful to keep them in mind as we examine the ways in which Vilnans imagined the map of their city and placed themselves and their neighbors in it. The first and most important spoke of streets, alleys, and squares, “the template that would, in time, become the urban norm.” This was favored by Marseille’s notaries and by our royal quartermaster. It is implicit in the usage of legal acta—deeds, bequests, testaments, even protestations—that locate people and property according to precise vicinities: “our house on the Fish Market, standing between the houses, on the one side, that known of old as the Wirszułowska, and now of His Lord Grace Aleksander Słuszka, Palatine of Min´sk, etc., and, on the other side, that of Lord Jakub Sienkiewicz, Burgomaster of Wilno.”31 The legal acta (the term refers both to the individual documents

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and to the collections of them) and the Lustrations of 1636 and 1639 can be used to corroborate each other. It is a fairly straightforward task to overlay the map implicit in the Lustrations— with their numbering of houses on segments of named (or at least described) streets, alleys, and squares—upon contemporary maps such as that of Fryderyk (Friedrich) Getkant (1600– 1666), a military engineer and cartographer from the Rhineland in the employ of PolishLithuanian rulers in the mid-seventeenth century. His outline map of Wilno’s fortifications provided the shell for Maria Łowmian´ska’s reconstruction of the intramural and some suburban streets of Wilno in the middle of the century.32 That tracery of streets and location of objects, based on a reading of contemporary documents, has served as a template for my own maps. I have added a few small streets and alleyways based on the Lustrations of 1636 and 1639, which were unknown to, and unexploited by, the larger scholarly community until quite recently.33 But although he numbered the houses as he surveyed them, it is unlikely that even the quartermaster thought in terms akin to our modern notions of street addresses. Vilnans themselves may have operated to some extent with the “skeletal tracery of streets” that is implicit in the Lustrations, but probably remnants of Smail’s three other templates functioned here as well. City blocks, or “islands,” were the preferred imaginary cartography of Marseille’s direct lords, the bishop and the Crown, and there are some indications that Wilno’s ecclesiastical authorities operated with these concepts in laying claim to their intramural and extramural jurydyki—blocks of houses possessed by ecclesiastical bodies or figures, subject to the legal jurisdiction of those entities (and not to the Magdeburg law of the town hall). The 1672 map of the Wilno jurydyka of the Uniate metropolitan overlays islands upon a crude street map.34 Related concepts of parishes and quarters (in Marseille—sixains), although preferred by the lords and the city council, were completely absent from Marseille’s notarial and “vernacular” cartographies. Something similar can be noted for Wilno. The six “quarters” of houses subject to Magdeburg law and the organization of extramural noble possessions by parishes—both employed in the 1690 hearth tax register—seem not to have functioned elsewhere.35 The “vernacular” cartographies of Marseille—those employed by Provençal-speaking artisans, merchants, professionals, and laborers—drew on two other templates: those of vicinities and those of landmarks. We will find echoes of similar concepts in the ways Vilnans located themselves within “floating knots of residential sociability or centers of production or retailing that extended across several streets, alleys, or intersections” (i.e., vicinities), or near landmarks (e.g., na podzamczu—in the region below the castle[s]). I have placed the Lustration at the base of this study not because it reflects the dominant way in which Vilnans visualized their city—although I do have a sense that Vilnans could easily read themselves into such a map—but because it offers us the most complete contemporary survey of people and possessions. It will allow us to situate individual Vilnans and their stories—even if they also thought in terms of vicinities and landmarks—in the neighborhoods and human networks within which they conducted life’s business.36

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The kinds of things that interested the quartermaster in 1636 are of different—but equally crucial—importance to the historian of seventeenth-century Wilno. For each address, the Lustration tells us things such as the type of structure (for example, a wooden house [dom] or a bricked house [kamienica]); jurisdiction (the main ones were those of the burghers’ magistracy, the Roman Catholic Chapter, the nobles’ land and castle courts, and—in the suburbs below the two castles, which were not encompassed by the Lustration—the Wilno horodnictwo, the small jurisdiction encompassing apparently rather modest to poor houses clustered outside the city walls to the north, in the suburbs called Szerejkiszki and Antokol);37 the name of current and sometimes also previous owners; the name of any other chief occupant (especially if the owner did not reside there) and the legal basis for residence (for example, “he holds it by rent”); who was to reside there now and who had resided there before; and—most important for the quartermaster and even more important for the citizens of Wilno—whether the owner had produced any sort of libertacja freeing him from the obligation to house “guests.” In order to have a sense of who might reasonably be quartered in a given dwelling, the quartermaster conducted a brief but remarkably telling survey of each building’s physical attributes. And since this particular quartermaster was fond of diminutives, the picture took on a certain subtlety. We learn, for example, whether we are dealing with a manor (dwór), a little manor, a wooden house (dom), a little house, a tiny little house (on one occasion), a bricked house (kamienica) or a little bricked house, or a hybrid—a wooden house with a certain number of “walled” (i.e., bricked) chambers (or little chambers). We can often deduce how many stories the building had (at a minimum) at the time. We survey and count chambers (izby), little chambers, and tiny little chamberlets; tavern chambers, dining chambers, landlords’ chambers; cabinets (kownaty) and little cabinets; alcoves (komory), little alcoves, and tavern alcoves; vestibules (sienie) and little vestibules; kitchens (kuchnie) and little kitchens. And in each of these cases, further qualifications were possible: “bricked” or of wood, with a stove or without, divided or not. Further, and in no particular order in this list, we visit (and, again, various qualifiers might be employed) chicken coops, galleries, recesses, apothecary shops, stalls and shops devoted to trade in specified goods, baths (including one “little bath without a stove”), basements (how many of them were “divided,” how many of them “full of water”),38 breweries, bakeries, smithies, granaries, workshops devoted to various named trades, courtyards, gardens, orchards, stables, sheds, cow sheds, pantries, storage places, wine cellars. In short, the Lustration provides the material to draw a map identifying the intramural houses of Wilno in 1636, and it makes it possible to assign several key attributes to each address: the name of the owner or chief inhabitant and of the guest assigned to the dwelling, the jurisdiction of the house, and a wide variety of physical attributes. Two crucial things are missing (for us, not for the quartermaster): the confession of the owner or chief inhabitant and the numbers, names, and confessions of the many, largely anonymous, “neighbors” (sa˛siedzi—a technical term in the contemporary usage signifying renters of a room or rooms

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in one house), who lived in the chambers and alcoves of probably every address on this map. The Lustration allows me to say, for example, which neighborhoods had the most and largest stables and sheds and just how many horses they could accommodate—certainly important facts for the quartermaster and not without interest for our image of the physical map of the city at the end of the 1630s. But the document does not allow me to tie confession and ethnicity directly to this detailed physical and jurisdictional map. This fact in itself tells us something about public discourse in seventeenth-century Wilno. When they appeared before any of the various local jurisdictions, Tatars and Jews were identified with the descriptive marker “infidel” (niewierny—unbeliever) followed by a name and patronymic, the term “Tatar” or “Jew,” and a qualifier of place—for example, “infidel Zelman Izakowicz, Jew of Wilno.”39 Christians were identified by an honorific title, name, occupation or title, and place of citizenship (for example, “famous Lord Michał Zienkiewicz, burgher and merchant of Wilno”). Confession never played a role in such formulations of identification. And it is important to remember that we are dealing with five officially recognized Christian confessions. Perhaps “everybody knew” who was who, but this information was not part of the written record, and therefore we have to look elsewhere for clues. This fact in itself offers some insight into how things worked in Wilno: all Christians were Vilnans before the law, as were, in a looser sense, Jews and Tatars; which court they were subject to depended upon things like estate and place of residence. Things connected with death—last wills and testaments, funeral sermons, burial records—provide the best evidence for confessional identity, at least for the end of an individual layman’s life, and probably there were not many last-minute conversions. Regular contributions of money—we have registers for the Wilno Lutheran and Calvinist churches— would seem equally eloquent, as would records of partaking in Communion (here for the Wilno Calvinists). Registers of inscription in religious brotherhoods also supply indicators. Other types of evidence—deathbed bequests of money and goods, baptismal and nuptial records (including service as godparent, sponsor, or witness)—are also useful. They are all, however—with the exception of Communion records—problematic to evaluate: there were some patterns of giving to institutions beyond one’s own confession, we find a certain number of mixed marriages, and there were even more cases of service as godparent or witness in a church other than one’s own. The matter is made more difficult in the last instance by the fact that the priests or ministers recording the event usually supplied only the name and extremely rarely noted the confession of the individual taking part in their services (and in consequence they passed over in silence the very presence of individuals of other confessions in their churches, as well as their participation in such sensitive rituals as baptisms). These, then, are the sources I have used in an attempt to obtain a picture of confessional allegiance and to uncover patterns of habitation and social networking among Vilnans of various confessions and religions: last wills and testaments registered in the books of the various jurisdictions (magistracy, castle and land courts, the Roman Catholic Chapter,

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the court of the Wilno horodnictwo), as well as copies that made their way into other scattered collections of families and institutions; funeral sermons (especially those of Lutheran minister Je˛drzej Schönflissius); records of inscriptions in religious brotherhoods;40 records of deaths (we have them for the Calvinists, 1671–1682,41 1687–1700;42 and for German Catholics, 1668–170043); records of regular offerings for the Lutherans44 and the Calvinists;45 baptismal records (for the Catholics at the parish Church of St. John 1611–1616, 1664–1670, 1671–1685, 1685–1692;46 for German Catholics at the Jesuit Church of St. Ignatius 1666– 1700;47 and for Calvinists 1631–1655 and 1663–1682, 1682–170048); records of marriages (for Catholics at the parish Church of St. John 1602–1615, 1664–1672;49 for German Catholics at the Church of St. Ignatius;50 and for the Calvinists 1635–1655, 1663–1681, 1684– 170051); as well as registers of participation in Communion (for Calvinists 1663, 1682–169952). There are obvious gaps in the documentation. We do not have, for example, registers of giving for the Catholics, baptismal records for the Lutherans, registers of Communion taking for Roman Catholics and Lutherans, etc. And above all, we sorely miss any of this sort of information for the Greeks of Wilno, both Uniate and Orthodox. This serious gap can be supplemented only fragmentarily and with great effort (and a little luck), through collecting information scattered throughout various court documents. Presumably the Uniates were supposed to keep the same sorts of parish registers as their post-Tridentine Roman Catholic brethren. The Orthodox may have begun to follow suit only in the course of the seventeenth century.53 In any event, whatever records there were—and echoes of them in other jurisdictions suggest their existence—they have disappeared from Wilno archives, and I have not found them elsewhere. The gaps are also of a chronological nature, and their temporal boundaries tell something of the story of Wilno in the seventeenth century. In 1610 most of the city burned, including the town hall and the books of the magistracy. The next year the Calvinist church and its archive—spared in 1610—burned in a fire started by a tumult directed at the presence of the Reformed in the city. Thus, for all practical purposes our story begins with 1611. But for the period 1611 to 1655, the record remains extremely spotty because the city again fell victim to the fires and devastation that accompanied the Muscovite occupation in 1655 during the wars with Muscovy, Sweden, and the Cossacks. There always remains a chance that some portions of the record were taken to safety in exile, which sent Vilnans to places like Königsberg and ´sk), or were confiscated by the tsarist armies, and they may yet show up in the Danzig (Gdan usual unexpected places, but for us—as for one Vilnan returning to the city after the Muscovite occupation—it seems that the magistracy archive was largely lost for the period before 1655.54 We will encounter evidence of the functioning of a temporary magistracy in Wilno even during the occupation, so the extant record for that jurisdiction picks up again right after 1655.55 The documentation becomes relatively dense for the rest of the seventeenth century beginning with the liberation of the city and the resumption of normal magisterial functions in 1662.56

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This general picture holds true to a lesser degree for the books of the Roman Catholic Cathedral Chapter (Capitula), the acta of which survived the wars of the midcentury and are a reasonably constant record of this legal instance for much of the century.57 We also have two record books for court proceedings of lower instances of the chapter for the periods 1623– 1655 and 1648–1655.58 By contrast, although we will hear echoes of the functioning of Uniate and/or Orthodox ecclesiastical courts admonishing Vilnans on issues such as conjugal behavior, we have no extant records deriving directly from those courts. We possess four slim court record books for the horodnictwo, located under the two castles across the little branch of the River Wilenka from the chapter jurisdiction.59 This jurisdiction was heavily Catholic and moderately poor; the horodnictwo was home to numbers of modest Lutherans (many of them tanners). The Wilno land and castle courts were the legal forums for local nobles as well as Jews and Tatars, who had been exempted from the jurisdiction of the magistracy. This documentation is highly fragmentary, in large part because of losses in the twentieth century; I have drawn on these sources as well, where I could, in telling this story.60

The Questions Given the extant sources available to me, the project became one of connecting a very rich source from the first half of the century (the 1636 and 1639 Lustrations), plus some relatively detailed information for the citizens of the capitula and one of its subjurisdictions from that period, as well as some spotty information for the horodnictwo, with the more thickly documented magistracy sources for the period beginning in the late 1650s. One of the stories that arises on the margins is the way in which people came back from exile—some already during the Muscovite occupation of the city, which began in August 1655, others only after the final liberation in December 1661—and rebuilt their lives at the same addresses. A document from 1688 emphasized this continuity, describing the “paternal house” as “the bricked house [handed down] from grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents in the Sien´czyło family on Subocz Street.”61 In fact, many Vilnans returned to their family homes, and the 1636 map can serve as a point of departure for a study of Wilno neighborhoods in the later seventeenth century as well. Even if the Counter-Reformation would make considerable progress in Wilno as elsewhere in Poland-Lithuania, its victory here, as in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in general, was noticeably slower in coming and much less complete than elsewhere—even in the perception of contemporaries. Here was a case, unusual among the royal cities of the Commonwealth, where the Christian “others” continued to fight some of their battles within structures provided by the city’s various corporations. It was also unusual when set next to a few cities of the Holy Roman Empire, which, in the 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg, had elaborated a modus vivendi for “two confessions in one city”—usually by the strict separation along confessional lines of corporations, guilds, and families.62 What was the cause

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of this difference? Perhaps one answer lay in the antiquity of religious difference and coexistence in Wilno, which, after all, antedated the divisions caused by the Age of Reform by two hundred years. Perhaps another answer lay in the attenuation of binary oppositions: not two confessions in one city but five confessions and in one rather small city at that, which allowed for many types of inclusive and exclusive constellations of individuals and groups. Did this multiplicity within the Christian landscape have an effect on the structure of Jewish-Christian and Tatar-Christian relationships? It certainly offered material for confessional and social polemicists, who could draw up constantly shifting lists of others: “merchants, Scots, Jews, and other people [i.e., nonguild members] of whatever condition [wszelakiej kondycyjej ludziom]” in one list (from the realm of conflicts between the guilds and those working outside those corporate structures);63 or “Jews, pagans, and heretics” (from the realm of confessional conflict);64 or “Jews, Turks, Tatars, Arians, and other blasphemers of God the One in the Holy Trinity” (in a discussion of the reception of converts into the Reformed [Calvinist] Church of Poland-Lithuania).65 The author of a printed antisemitic tract from 1621 longed for the days (because his contemporaries had supposedly gotten used to the presence of these others) when—and here we find yet another list—“a Jew was a Jew, a Scot a Scot, an Armenian and Armenian, a Tatar a Tatar, and a vagabond a vagabond.66 The sources dictate that these questions will remain partially (in the case of the Tatars—largely) in the realm of questions and hypotheses. They do grant us, however, access to some aspects of Jewish-Christian negotiations of space and interactions in public and more private spheres of life in Wilno, and the Christian-Jewish encounter is a part of the larger story throughout. The guiding questions in my study of the day-to-day relations of the peoples of the city in this period of belated, only partial confessionalization are these: To what extent did Vilnans live in neighborhoods and form human networks (through marriage, choice of guardians and other legal representatives, enlistment of godparents and witnesses, professional association, etc.) that were confessionally and culturally bounded? In what circumstances did they cross those boundaries? What sorts of cross-confessional constellations were more likely than others, and under what circumstances? The human networks are the most interesting and the most difficult to establish. In addition to ties of blood and marriage, seventeenth-century Vilnans built networks that included guardians (tutores or opiekunowie) officially named in wills as those responsible for holding the wealth of the deceased in a kind of trust, and the curators (curatores or kuratorzy) who represented women and children before the court of the magistracy.67 They also included godparents (compatres or chrzestni); friends (amicii or przyjaciele)—and this was a technical term for a specific group of family advisers whose task it was to give counsel in times of crucial decisions (marriage contracts and business contracts perhaps heading the list); and finally the signatories (sigilatorii/signatores or piecze˛tarzy), who were asked to witness the will and to sign and affix their seals to it. These last persons were often also referred to as “neighbors,” “good people,” etc., and it is clear that one requirement was that they have citizens’ rights in

ˇ aplinskas 1998, 10–11. Figure 1 Tomasz Makowski, panorama of the city of Wilno, 1600. C

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the jurisdiction in which the will was being registered. But there are also indications that these individuals too were often a part of the network of friends surrounding the deceased and his or her family.

The Chapters The first five chapters of this book provide the backdrops against which the dramas of Wilno lives played out. By revealing Wilno topographies, the first three chapters set the stage for much of the rest of the book. Chapter 1 begins with a journey to Wilno and through its streets, looking over the royal quartermaster’s shoulder as he made his survey of the city in preparation for the king’s visit in 1636. It provides the reader with a map of the city’s physical, confessional, and social topographies in which the subsequent thematic analyses will be situated. Chapters 2 and 3 move from the bird’s-eye view of real estate ownership in larger neighborhoods to questions of coexistence under one roof and within four walls. Who were the neighbors (i.e., subletters and renters) to whom Vilnans offered dwellings within their houses? What were the consequences of sharing “private” (the term will need to be qualified) spaces across confessions and religions? Chapter 4 examines the encounters of these same Vilnans in time. Members of the five Christian confessions and three religions organized their communal and more private lives according to a wide range of daily, weekly, and annual rhythms and calendars. How did this fact structure their coexistence within the walls of a city that also functioned on a clock and a calendar that were obligatory for all in certain aspects of their lives? What was at stake when matters of time and space coincided, such as during formal and less formal public processions that were connected with religious observance? Chapter 5 turns to an aspect of this constant background that must have been real to contemporary Vilnans but of which we hear only occasional echoes. What sets of ethnic, confessional, linguistic, and other stereotypes were created by, or available to, Vilnans as they perceived and represented their neighbors? Our chief source here will be the pamphlets and pasquinades produced by the dominant Roman Catholics (and largely sponsored by the local Jesuits) in attempts to marginalize Protestants, Orthodox, Tatars, and Jews. The rest of the book—chapters 6 to 14—seeks to uncover the human networks that Vilnans formed around themselves and their families in the contexts of the physical and temporal maps sketched above. The discussion is organized around “moments,” the acts of the dramas in the life cycles of seventeenth-century Vilnans, from birth to death. Not all the moments are connected with transitional events such as baptism, marriage, and death. Some of them were recurrent or constant features over longer periods of life: education, work, patronage, conflict and litigation, strategies for addressing poor relief. Others were more peculiar to a given time and place. In particular, chapter 11 examines the language of the litigation that seventeenth-century Vilnans employed as a rule-based form of conflict in maintaining community; chapter 12 focuses on a moment of crisis—the Muscovite

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occupation of the city in the years 1655–1661 that would test Wilno’s peculiar form of convivencia and see it ultimately restored to something very much like the status quo ante. Each of these moments involved people at various stages of their own life cycles, as, for example, in the first chapter: networks here involved not only the newborn babies but also parents and the spiritual kin they selected for their children. My goal throughout these chapters is to discover to what extent and for what purposes Vilnans tended to congregate within, or move beyond, their own ethnoconfessional groups as they entered into various types of associations in the course of their lives. Given the extant sources, reliable quantification of these phenomena will be possible only in rare instances. But numbers are not ultimately the point: what made this city work was the very fact that some members of every confession and at all levels of society were willing to enter into a variety of interconfessional alliances, many of which their priests, ministers, rabbis, and mullahs had told them to shun; and that the rest mostly tolerated the situation. In each thematic chapter, the analysis stems from a series of stories about the lives of individual Vilnans that I have pieced together from small facts drawn from highly disparate archival sources—a house address; a baptismal, marriage, or death record; some litigation; a last will and testament; the naming of guardians, executors, and friends. In addition to the court and church records indicated above, I have drawn on whatever else I could find: a few memoirs, personal correspondence, some funeral sermons, confessional polemical tracts, and prescriptive religious and legal handbooks. Some constellations, we will discover, were more easily formed than others: Lutherans joined with Calvinists—perhaps still surprising enough to those who study those confessions closer to their geographical homelands—but Orthodox also united with Uniates, a marriage thought to be in the range of difficult to impossible by those whose knowledge is drawn largely from the contemporary polemical pamphlets. Most important, however, is the fact that all communities were represented. Seventeenth-century Wilno was no idyll: conviviality could, and did on occasion, end in a drunken brawl; neighborliness did not preclude violence—in fact it depended on its judicious regulation. Early modern Vilnans sought to lay down the rules of encounter between members of the various religions and confessions, largely with the goal of avoiding violence, but they also established rules for acceptable expressions of hostility. The epilogue will attempt to assess the general rules of encounter and to place Wilno in the continuum of early modern European cities, from the most exclusionary at one extreme to the relatively inclusive at the other.

~ c h a p t e r one ~

Over the Quartermaster’s Shoulder

K

ing Władysław IV made one of his five entries into Wilno on 5 March 1636. Chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania Albrycht Stanisław Radziwiłł (1595–1656, chancellor from 1623), a staunch Catholic and foe of the Reformation, recorded in his diary that on this occasion “the King entered Wilno on a sleigh without ceremony and made his way to the Castle on foot. Having removed his hat, he dismissed all of us.”1 This nonevent was noteworthy precisely because of the lack of ceremony that usually accompanied the triumphal entry of a ruler. On the next occasion, 27 January 1639, Radziwiłł wrote, “The city went to great expense in order to receive the new queen [Cecilia Renata of Austria], who had come [to Wilno] for the first time.”2 Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, the entry of a ruler into a city was a highly choreographed pageant, in which the ruler and his considerable entourage would be met at the gate leading to the Royal Way within the city by local corporations such as the magistracy, the merchants’ society, and the guilds, all dressed in the livery and under banners peculiar to each.3 King Władysław loved Italian opera, and on both occasions he would command more than thirty intramural houses to quarter “His Royal Majesty’s music” (Muzyka JKrM), which probably followed the king and his retinue through the gate during a triumphal entry. The king, his entourage, and some portion of Wilno society would be entertained on both visits by the performances of Baldasarre Ferri, an Italian castrato of some European renown, who would continue his career in Vienna after the death of his Polish patron. “Little Baltazar, His Royal Majesty’s descantist” (Baltazarek, Dyskancista JKrM) was the only member of “the King’s music” identified by name in the Lustration of 1636; in 1639, he would be identified only by his profession (and the fact that he had been quartered there the last time). He was quartered by himself, on both occasions in the house of “Tyl the locksmith” (in all likelihood a Lutheran) at Glass Street 18.05.4 On 4 September 1636, the king was a part of an audience of 521 who were entertained over the course of five hours by a production of Il Ratto di Helena (The Abduction of Helen), an Italian dramma per musica with libretto by Virgilio Puccitelli and music by Marco Scacchi, who was in the employ of Władysław IV.5 In addition to feasts, pageants, concerts, operas, and hunts, the king would participate during his stay in Wilno in 1636, earlier that same summer, on 5 July, in the ceremony

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conferring the doctoral degree in theology upon Wilno-based Jesuit Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (Sarbevius), “the Christian Horace,” the best known of Polish man of letters on the European stage, thanks to his Latin poetry. The ceremony took place in the Jesuits’ Church of St. John, with the newly minted doctor of theology amazing the congregation with an eloquent Latin sermon. On that occasion the king made the poet-theologian a present of a sapphire ring.6 On 14 August 1636 Władysław IV would participate in the long-anticipated translatio of the relics of Lithuania’s patron saint, Kazimierz, one of the king’s own Jagiellonian great uncles, to the newly completed Chapel of St. Kazimierz in the Roman Catholic cathedral church. The royal preacher Sarbiewski himself would give the sermon glorifying the Jagiellonian-Waza dynasty and its role in the defense of the Church.7 Triumphal entries and the sojourns of the king and his large retinue required careful preparations, central among which would have been those for the “quartering of guests” (stanowienie gos´ci). The royal quartermaster probably arrived in the city by the route taken by his royal patron and other dignitaries.8 The “usual road” led from Warsaw, by way of Grodno and Troki. Then, nearing the suburbs of Wilno, the visitor to the city descended along Troki Road from the plateau to the south and west of the city and finally entered from the south, through Rudniki Gate; he then continued along the Royal Way that led along Rudniki Street to the back of the town hall, through Market Square and up Castle Street to Castle Gate, which also housed the Lithuanian Tribunal, the highest court of appeal in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Beyond the gate, across a small branch of the River Wilenka (Wilejka; Lithuanian, Vilnia) that served as the city’s northern limit, two focal points of temporal and spiritual power—the Lower Castle and the cathedral—were nestled under the medieval Upper Castle perched high on a hill looking out over the city to the south and over the River Wilia (Lithuanian, Neris) to the north. As a royal functionary on an assignment from the king, the quartermaster may have lodged in the Lower Castle during his stay in the city. In any event, that was his point of departure as he began his survey of the intramural houses in 1636. (And with very few exceptions, the survey of 1639 followed the same pattern.) We may imagine him having his breakfast, exiting the Lower Castle with his assistants, and passing over the little branch of the Wilenka and through Castle Gate, where he began his appraisal: Going from the Castle, on the left-hand side, the first wooden house on land owned by the [Roman Catholic] Chapter, just beyond Castle Gate, as the Father Deacon reported, fundationis Vitoldi [of a foundation of (Grand Duke) Witold]: in it lives Matys Walecki, in which [house] there is one chamber with an alcove and a vestibule; standing [i.e., residing temporarily] in it ex officio is Thomas, His Royal Majesty’s tailor. Previously there resided in it his barber-surgeon, with the benign permission of the landlord, as it was asserted [to us].9

This description, although shorter than many because the house in question was so modest, nonetheless contains the basic information found in each of the more than seven hundred

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entries of the Lustration: the location; the type of house; the types and numbers of rooms in it, along with some general information about their layout; the jurisdiction to which the house was subject; which functionaries—tailors, lackeys, washerwomen, musicians, wig makers, and marzipan bakers were also part of the entourage, alongside noble dignitaries such as cupbearers, masters of the royal hunt, judges, starostas, palatines, and marshals— were temporarily residing there now; and who had resided there previously and by what right. The physical topography I survey here is based largely on the royal quartermaster’s Lustration of 1636, with some additional material from that of 1639. A detailed examination of patterns of Jewish settlement draws, of necessity, on additional sources. The Lustrations were also my first source for the names of property owners. The royal quartermaster was uninterested in religious confession and, with only one exception, did not register confessional allegiance among Christian Vilnans, even as he carefully sorted out Jewish property owners and chief renters. I have overlaid confessional topographies upon the physical map on the basis of other sources.

Castle Street The quartermaster began his survey with Castle Street, proceeding from Castle Gate to Market Square, first on his left, as he stood with his back to the Lower Castle, facing south (1.01–1.42), then returning to the top of the street to repeat the process on his right (2.01–2.32).10 This was in fact one of German visitor Kiechel’s “two most fashionable streets or ways, in which to the greater extent Germans and others live[d] as merchants.” From Castle Gate, the street bent slightly to the left and rose gently until it came to Fish Market, widening a bit as it reached its end at the opening into the top of Market Square. In this section of his survey, the quartermaster found seventy-five dwellings and four places of worship—one large Roman Catholic church and three smaller, formerly Orthodox, now Uniate churches. Of those dwellings, fully seventy were identified as “bricked town houses” (kamienice). The other five (1.01, 1.02, 1.29, 1.31, 1.41) were called “houses” (domy); only the first was specifically called “wooden” (dom drzewiany), but all five seem to have been modest structures, two of them (1.29 and 1.41) perhaps outbuildings of other town houses. Since the quartermaster took such pains to identify hybrid structures—a “bricked town house with a wooden chamber,” a “house with a bricked chamber”—I make the assumption that structures identified simply as houses, rather than as bricked town houses, whether or not they receive the qualifier “wooden,” were in 1636 and 1639 wholly or at least largely constructed of wood. The larger neighborhood was one of impressive residences. Only a small number (five) of the seventy-five houses in this first area surveyed remained at least partially nonbricked. The survey gives the impression that, of the houses on Castle Street, only three were single-story

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houses, thirty-seven possessed at least two floors, ten had three stories, and one had four. My estimations of the number of stories in each house are based on the quartermaster’s description of rooms as lying “upstairs” (na górze) or “downstairs” (na dole) from others described. This is why I say “at least” two stories, since it is entirely possible that he neglected on occasion to specify “upstairs” and “downstairs.” The only house in the Lustration clearly described as a four-story structure was located at Castle Street 2.17. A large number of houses in the neighborhood (twenty-three) received no detailed physical description, usually because they were exempt from the obligation of housing guests and thus were of less immediate interest to the quartermaster. Many of them were exempt because they were not subject to the magistracy. The ones subject to the jurisdiction of the land and castle courts (the court of the nobles, Jews, and Tatars) were usually owned by nobles, and many of them would have been imposing structures, as opulent as—or even more impressive than—the town houses of their neighbors from the burgher elite. These included, for instance, the large town house at Castle Street 1.34, owned in 1636 by Krzysztof Chodkiewicz, an ardent Roman Catholic and a holder of a series of important offices in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania—castellan of Troki (1633–1636), castellan of Wilno (1636–1642), and palatine of Wilno (1642–1652). It is still known as Chodkiewicz Palace, and the complex, then as now, was linked by a large internal courtyard with a gate at Sawicz/Bakszta Street (in the vicinity of 68.02). Farther down the same block, at Castle Street 1.38, we find another large noble house with an internal courtyard reaching again to a rear gate on Sawicz/Bakszta Street (between 69.05 and 69.06). It was in the possession of the Roman Catholic sons of Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł “the Orphan,” himself the Roman Catholic son of the original patron of Lithuanian Calvinism, Mikołaj Radziwiłł “the Black” (1515–1565): in 1636 the owner was the castellan of Wilno, Albrycht Władysław (d. 1636), and in 1639 his brother, grand marshal of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Aleksander Ludwik (d. 1654). Across the way at Castle Street 1.16 was the so-called Cardinalia, the urban palace once in the possession of Mikołaj Radziwiłł the Black but named for another of his Roman Catholic sons (all his children would revert to Roman Catholicism)—Cardinal Jerzy Radziwiłł, archbishop of Wilno, later bishop of Cracow, who is said to have staged in 1581 outside the palace windows an auto-da-fé of the Protestant books his father had paid to have printed.11 Across St. John Street to the north of the Cardinalia was the old Roman Catholic Church of St. John (founded in 1387, first bricked in 1426), by now the Jesuit parish church of Wilno (where for much of the seventeenth century the city’s Catholic baptismal records were kept). It was the seat of the famous Jesuit Academy (established as a collegium in 1570, academy in 1579), the future University of Wilno.12 By the early seventeenth century, we find no Ruthenian owners of houses in this section of the city; nonetheless, there were still echoes of their former strong presence. The large town house at Castle Street 1.17 was called the Constantine House (kamienica konstantynowska), because it had been built by one of the greatest of the Orthodox magnates, the hetman of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Prince Konstanty Ostrogski (d. 1530).13 The house

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next door at Castle Street 1.18 was still called the Sołtan House (kamienica sołtanowska) because at the beginning of the sixteenth century it had belonged to a landed Orthodox gentryman of the Brzes´´c Palatinate by the name of Jarosław Iwanowicz Sołtan, who was a relative of the Orthodox Metropolitan of Rus´, Josyf II Sołtan (d. 1521). And there were other signs of a past Ruthenian presence in the street. The Radziwiłł and Chodkiewicz palaces on the eastern side of lower Castle Street shared the block with two formerly Orthodox, now Uniate, places of worship. The Radziwiłł palace, toward the lower end of the block (1.38), stood next to the Church of St. Nicholas (practically the patron saint of the Lithuanian Orthodox), which was erected in 1514 with an endowment by that same hetman Konstanty Ostrogski. And the Chodkiewicz palace (1.34), near the top of the block, was located next to the old Church of St. Parasceve;14 it was erected in 1345, before the Christianization of the Grand Duchy, allegedly on the site of a temple to the pagan god Ragutis. At the very end of this section of the survey, on the western side of Castle Street at the intersection with Glass Street, stood the old Orthodox, by now Uniate, Church of the Resurrection. Later in the survey, we will discover that the church was indeed still functioning, and moreover that, around the corner on Glass Street (20.01), “next to the church, in the gate to the courtyard, lives the [Greek-rite] priest [pop] of that very church, Mikołaj Rybin´ski by name, on Church land.”15 Other echoes of a Ruthenian presence in this part of town are the several “hospital houses” and other buildings owned by what were now Uniate churches, all of them on the eastern, Ruthenian side of the street, which was the entryway to the “Greek” side of the city. The houses at Castle Street 1.29 and 1.41 were “hospitals”—i.e., either the poorhouses and shelters themselves or rent-producing properties for the support of such institutions—of the Uniate Holy Savior Church and the Uniate Holy Trinity Church, respectively. Those who lived at Castle Street 1.33 and 1.40 paid rents that supported the mission of the Uniate Holy Trinity Church. It is likely that in all these instances we are dealing with old bequests of property from Ruthenian families. If the bequest predated the 1596 Union of Brest, the gift had originally been made to an Orthodox institution. This was certainly the case, for example, at Castle Street 1.40, which was originally owned by the Orthodox magnate Sapieha family. Bohdan and Apolonia Sapieha had bequeathed it to the Orthodox in 1558.16 In 1636 this remained one of the wealthiest streets in town, with clear echoes of a former Orthodox magnate presence and some palaces of newly converted Roman Catholic notables. The survey began, however, at the other end of the social and economic spectrum. The first houses that the quartermaster entered—on both sides at the very top of Castle Street, just below Castle Gate—had very little to do with Orthodox and Catholic magnate families or with Kiechel’s German merchant elites. These were all houses under the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Chapter (1.01–1.07, 1.09, 2.01–2.04, 2.06), and it was to the chapter court that their inhabitants would go for all matters of civil law. The first structures just inside the gate were of the more modest sort. The very first house, as we have seen, was nonbricked and

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consisted of one chamber, one alcove, and a vestibule; it was occupied by an otherwise anonymous Vilnan of no specified trade (and in 1639 by a cap maker); in spite of the obviously modest possibilities of the layout, it was temporary home to a guest: a royal tailor. The next house at Castle Street 1.02, likewise wooden, was home to a tailor in 1636: “In this house there is nothing but a chamber with a little alcove; in it no one resides ex officio, and previously no one resided, because there is no room in it to house a guest.” (In 1639, perhaps a year of greater need, “the washerwoman of Her Grace the Queen [resided here] ex officio.”) These modest artisans formed a neighborhood and pursued human networks with the residents of the two narrow and winding streets just around the corner from them—Bernardine Street and Skop Street—both of which were also almost entirely under the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Chapter. A bit further down, still under chapter jurisdiction, we begin to find Roman Catholic prelates living in much larger bricked houses. Marcjan Tryzna (d. 1643) was a Catholic descendant of a wealthy Orthodox, later Uniate, family, who held a series of high Church and secular offices, including that of the coadjutor of bishop of Wilno Abraham Wojna (from 1638). Later he was made bishop in partibus infidelium (from 1639) and finally vice chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (from 1641). In 1636 and 1639 Tryzna was residing “at the moment” in what would be known as the Canons’ Town House (kamienica kanonicza) at Castle Street 1.05 with its characteristic Renaissance attic; he had “restored it sumptu proprio [at his own expense].” Other clerical residents of these houses would make their appearance in the record as judges in the various instances of the chapter courts, listening to the complaints of relatively modest neighbors against neighbors—tailors, weavers, organists, lutenists from the Skop and Bernardine Street neighborhoods. But these Roman Catholic residents at the extremes of the social scale—the magnates and the prelates, the cap makers and their washerwomen guests—were the exceptions. The neighborhood as a whole was shaped by the overwhelming presence of Protestant elites: Lutheran merchants, professionals, and magistrates (until 1666) who gathered on the western side of Castle Street, their Calvinist cousins on the east. Their settlement was especially dense in the block from Skop Street to Jop Street, and from Calvinist Church Street (later called St. Michael Street) to the then-unnamed next parallel street below on the east (by the later nineteenth century known as Literary Alley [zaułek Literacki] on account of the new and used bookstores then found on it). In 1636, in the ten houses on the eastern side of Castle Street, from 1.14 to 1.23, we find seven Calvinist owners or inhabitants and three Lutherans. The Constantine Town House at Castle Street 1.17 included “a gate to the Calvinist church,” in other words, a passageway through a series of internal courtyards to the Calvinist complex, which included a church, school, and hospital located until 1640 at the other end of the block, toward the Bernardines’ Church of St. Michael. Next door, in the Rupert Town House (kamienica rupertowska) at Castle Street 1.16, lived two generations of Winholds, Calvinist merchants; the elder was an immigrant from the Low Countries, and all of them were clients of the Calvinist Radziwiłłs. The side streets were also in the possession

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of Calvinists in the first part of the century, and the entire block—until the removal of the Calvinist church in 1640—was a sort of fortress of the Reformed within the city, complete with gates and private gatekeepers. In the next block down the street we will find more Calvinists, as well as something called “the Scottish shops” (kramy szockie) which stood— apparently in the street—opposite the house of Calvinist merchant Jakub Desaus (“the Frenchman”) at Castle Street 1.26.17 There were numbers of Scotsmen on the rolls of the Wilno Calvinists, including goldsmith Jakub Mora (James Murray), who owned the house at Castle Street 1.32, and burgomaster and medical doctor Arnolt Skot (i.e., Arnold the Scotsman), who lived at 1.21. The other side of the street was thoroughly Lutheran. In fact, the block between Skop Street and the Jesuits’ Church of St. John—what Vilnans and visitors have long been accustomed to seeing as one limit of the “old campus” of Wilno University—was, in the seventeenth century, the site of the town houses of the Lutheran burgher elite. Here and in the block below house after house was owned by Nonharts, Sztrunks, Gibels, Engelbrechts, and Fonendens (von Emdens). These families practiced an extreme form of “topographic endogamy,” regularly looking no farther than next door for marriage partners, with the occasional foray across the street in order to form Lutheran-Calvinist alliances. There were a few houses of Lutheran members of the magistracy, such as those of longtime burgomaster Jakub Gibel and family (Castle Street 2.12, 2.13, and 2.18) and merchant and councillor Wilhelm Engelbrecht (at 2.15). Still, contrary to the pattern found in many other cities, municipal officeholding was not the preferred route to financial and social advancement for Wilno Protestants, even before that road was blocked to them by royal decree in 1666. Better represented among the Protestants at the top of the burgher order were the practitioners of elite professions and crafts (medical doctors, lawyers, goldsmiths, apothecaries) and what we might call “international businessmen.” Many of these families were also clients of the nobles, especially the Calvinist line of the Radziwiłł family, and many would quietly slip into the ranks of the Lithuanian nobility.18 If we omit the houses that received no detailed physical description by the quartermaster, we find in Castle Street a neighborhood of dwellings that contained, on average, around seven chambers. A heated chamber (izba), sometimes associated with an alcove (komora), vestibule (sien´), and kitchen (kuchnia), often served as a dwelling space for one family unit. The relatively large numbers of cellars (102)—and the larger houses had multiple cellars— stores (81), and shops (90), together with references to the “Scottish shops” and “Fish Market” on this part of Castle Street, add to the impression that this was a place where some part of the city’s commercial activities was concentrated. Again, these numbers take into account only the 51 houses described in full. The large houses of the nobles—urban palaces, really—often described, if at all, only as “spacious,” and “splendid” (since they were exempt from the “quartering of guests” and thus of little interest to the quartermaster), certainly would have added to the overall count of chambers, cellars, and shops and probably would have raised the averages significantly.

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Market Square The quartermaster registered his own sense of the city’s physical segmentation by the frequent introduction of new numerations of houses beginning again with the number one, as well as by the use of descriptive headers. The entire survey began with the information “Castle Street: descending from the Castle,” and it used two sets of numbering for the two sides of the street, both from top to bottom, north to south. The quartermaster noted the passage into a new neighborhood at this point by describing where he was and what he saw upon crossing over Glass Street: “Here begins the Market Square of the main town of Wilno, in the middle of which [stands] a great and ornamented town hall, and next to it cloth stalls and rich shops going along the two sides of the square, in which various goods are sold.” The square was in fact a sort of isosceles triangle that began in the widening end of Castle Street, opening dramatically toward its bottom, which was a sort of continuation and connector of German Street from the west with, a bit farther down, Subocz Street from the east. The town hall sat at the base of the triangle. From his vantage point at the top of the square, the quartermaster saw before him the two rows of shops and beyond them the front steps of the town hall. That seat of municipal power formed a sort of burgher countervalence—looking north, back up the square and Castle Street—to the foci of ecclesiastic, noble, and royal power in the cathedral, the noble courts, the Lithuanian Tribunal, and the grand ducal castles located beyond Castle Gate. The quartermaster continued his survey where he had left off, crossing Glass Street and registering first all the houses he found on the “right-hand” side (from his perspective—i.e., on the west) of the square (Market Square 3.01–3.28). Then he again returned to the top of the neighborhood, introducing a new numeration, after a heading “Left-Hand Side of the Square” (again, from his perspective looking south from the intersection with Sawicz Street), as he surveyed the remaining houses facing this open space of commerce and municipal government (Market Square 4.01–4.17). He included in his survey of the western side of the square both sides of the first block of what would otherwise be called German Street (from the corner of the square to the intersection with Meat Shop Street): Market Square 3.10–3.19.19 Certain aspects of the physical layout of Market Square give the impression of a continuum with Castle Street. Of the forty-five houses the quartermaster found here, all were bricked, only three were single-story, and the rest were at least two- and three-story (thirtythree and seven, respectively). The average number of chambers in the houses described was 5.5, which means the houses were still rather large, though not quite as large as those in Castle Street. Thus we should imagine here a similarly imposing neighborhood of large bricked town houses occupied by members of the elite. But there were also some important differences of both degree and kind. First, not surprisingly, the neighborhood was much more thoroughly devoted to commerce than was Castle Street. This aspect was noted in the description of the “cloth stalls and wealthy

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shops”—what other contemporary sources refer to as ambary or imbary—“going along the two sides of the square, in which various goods are sold.” The annual financial records of municipal income and expenditures—they are extant in complete form from 1663—tell of the goods offered at retail in the small stands of Market Square. A modest sampling from the list of shopkeepers represented—and taxed—in 1680 will give a sense of sights, sounds, and smells. There were (among many others) “salt stalls [ławki, little benches], on which salt, herring, and butter is sold”; “cap makers”; “cap makers for women”; “butchers”; “cobblers’ stalls, on which is sold various footwear”; “hay sellers”; “potters’ stalls”; “fish stalls, in which fishwives sell live and smoked fish”; “cheesemongers who sell cheese”; “chicken stalls, where chickens, geese, and other various poultry are sold”; “women who sell sauerkraut”; “stalls in which women sell eggs, apples, and other fruits”; “oil stalls”; “five women who sell [cooking] oil during Lent”; “women who, sitting on dung [!], sell vegetables.”20 These were clearly the most modest sorts of stands. The quartermaster noted 84 cellars (nearly two per dwelling), along with 203 stores (sklepy) and 75 shops (kramy) in the houses themselves, or on average more than 6 per house.21 The more prosperous merchants who owned shops in the area rented space in the many cellars and used them for storage. Commercial life in Wilno—despite the predominance of one confession or another in a very few guilds—was not subject to segregation by confession or religion. Market Square 3.28, located at the lower eastern end of the square, behind the town hall, was the so-called Guests’ House (Gos´cinny Dom: the word “guest” [gos´´c ] in older usage also meant “foreign merchant,” i.e., any merchant not from Wilno). The building contained the “scales and municipal arsenal”; it was “rather spacious and broad, where various merchants coming from various places with their goods reside during their stay.” At the moment (in 1636) there were foreign guests from Moscow, Kiev, and the nearby Belarusan city of Mogilew (Mohilëu˘). The latter two cities were foreign from the point of view of contemporary Wilno, although both were located within the limits of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Of the two, Kiev had also come to be foreign in that it was then (since the 1569 Union of Lublin) a part of the Polish Crown and no longer of the Grand Duchy. The Guests’ House contained twelve alcoves for the merchants to store their wares and had a stable capacious enough to accommodate fifty horses. (We are also informed that “last time His Royal Majesty’s mules resided here; this time no one is residing, because they have a privilege.”) In fact, although merchants found ways to circumvent the law, foreign guests were supposed to reside here during their stay in Wilno and to sell only wholesale, and only to local merchants, who could then sell retail at home. Further, situated next to each other on the lower part of the eastern side of Market Square (4.08 and 4.09) were the so-called Small and Great Bourses (Mała i Wielka Bursa), two more focal points for the merchants of Wilno. The concentration of members of the ruling municipal elite was much greater around Market Square than in Castle Street. The first house surveyed at Market Square 3.01 was that of Tomasz Bildziukiewicz, the wójt of Wilno in the years 1621–1649. In 1636 the quartermaster found in the houses facing Market Square two members of the merchants’ guild, the

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Communitas mercatoria, which often served as a first rung on a ladder leading to a career in the magistracy.22 He found six city councillors and seven burgomasters (plus one burgomaster’s widow). He found names well represented in the Wilno magistracy in the first half of the seventeenth century and a few that would remain in the elite after the upheavals of midcentury, all either Roman Catholics or Ruthenians: Dygon ´ , Szperkowicz, Kotowicz, Dubowicz, Sienkiewicz, Szycik-Zaleski. What he did not find were the nonburghers we encountered in Castle Street—the relatively poor residents of houses owned by the Roman Catholic Chapter and their prelate neighbors, all living under the jurisdiction of the chapter; nor did he find nobles living in the middle of the urban elite and subject to the castle court. All but two of the properties surveyed here received full descriptions because they were burgher houses subject to the Magdeburg law of the magistracy and thus required to provide quarters to members of the royal entourage. Only one was under the jurisdiction of the nobles’ land law. The neighborhood was thus given over almost entirely to secular, burgher pursuits: commerce and city government. The Jesuits’ Church of St. Kazimierz on the eastern side of the lower market was a newcomer, built and consecrated only in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Clustered around that church and bringing income to it were three houses owned by the Jesuit Order (4.11, 4.12, and 4.14). At the top of the western side of the market were two houses owned by Roman Catholic institutions, the hospital of the Church of the Holy Trinity (3.02) and the Dominicans at the Church of the Holy Spirit (3.03); across the way were two houses that provided income for the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity (4.03 and 4.04). Burgomaster Ignat Dubowicz (d. 1637), a convert to Roman Catholicism from Orthodoxy (probably via the Uniate Church), would soon bequeath his house at Market Square 4.06 to the Discalced Carmelites at the Church of St. Teresa in Sharp Gate.23 But such houses were mostly treated as investments to be rented out for secular use. The Jesuits’ St. Kazimierz remained the only consecrated space in the neighborhood. The most striking difference between the two neighborhoods, however, is the absolute lack of a Protestant presence among the owners of real estate in Market Square. All were Roman Catholics and Ruthenians, among the latter both Uniate and Orthodox. Here, as in Castle Street, we hear echoes of what must have been an older tendency for “Romans” to congregate on the western side of the Royal Way, “Greeks” on the east. But here, unlike that in Castle Street, the Ruthenian presence was not limited to echoes. In addition to the house owned by convert Ignat Dubowicz we can note that the two bourses at Market Square 4.08 and 4.09 were then owned by Orthodox burgomaster Iwan Hawryłowicz Szycik-Zaleski and that they would remain in Ruthenian hands in the later seventeenth century.24 The “Safianowicz bricked Town House” at Market Square 4.05 would continue to be occupied by Orthodox and Uniate merchants and magistrates. And wealthy Orthodox merchant Paweł Kossobucki was living in his house somewhere in Market Square—I am unable to locate it more precisely—when he signed his last will and testament on 22 July 1689.25 Moreover, the Ruthenian presence was not limited to the eastern side of

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the square. The Orthodox Braz˙ycz family owned the house at Market Square 3.13. The neighborhood may have been even more heavily Ruthenian in the recent past. Pioneer Ruthenian printer Franciszek Skaryna (d. before 1541) and the Mamonicz family (end of the sixteenth, beginning of the seventeenth centuries) had once set up Cyrillic printing houses on the western side of Market Square.26

From the Town Hall to Sharp and Rudniki Gates Traffic heading south through Market Square could choose between two major thoroughfares: on the left at the bottom of the square, along Sharp Street to Sharp Gate and to the Orthodox, Catholic, and Uniate places of worship clustered there; or on the right, along Rudniki Street, to Rudniki Gate. Between the two rather narrow arteries of Sharp and Rudniki Streets was the still narrower and winding Horse Street, the entrance to which was somewhat hidden behind the back door of the town hall. As he left Market Square, the quartermaster first entered Horse Street (the middle of the three paths) on its left-hand side (5.01–5.17), turning left once he reached the wall into an “alleyway from Horse Street to Sharp Street” (6.01–6.14), and then “returning along the city wall to Horse Street” (7.01–7.27).27 At this point he retraced his steps up “that same [Horse] Street along its left side [looking from the wall] toward Market Square” (8.01–8.10). Beginning again at the back of the town hall in Market Square, he then descended along Sharp Street on its right-hand side to Sharp Gate (9.01–9.12) before returning along the opposite side (10.01–10.14). Now he jumped to a “little side street going [west] from Sharp Gate toward Rudniki Gate along the wall,” where he surveyed houses along the right-hand side (11.01–11.08). Then he returned to the top of “Rudniki Street . . . from Market Square,” walking down along its left-hand side (12.01–12.12). When he reached the area of the gate and the wall, he surveyed two houses in the “little Rudniki alleyway leading to Horse Street” (13.01– 13.02) before returning, “going along the right side from Rudniki Gate to Market Square” (14.01–15.09).28 The survey of the neighborhood ended with the “first little street going from German Street” (i.e., the lower continuation of Meat Shop Street, 16.01–16.08) and the “little street leading to St. Nicholas’s” (i.e., St. Nicholas Street, 17.01–17.08).29 Much of the neighborhood had once been Ruthenian, although some Catholics and Lutherans appear in the seventeenth century, the farther west we move, away from Sharp Street and toward the “Saxon” (i.e., Lutheran) complex and the neighboring Roman Catholic churches. Moreover, by the 1630s some of the Ruthenians had themselves become Roman Catholics through conversion. Perhaps the dominant topographical feature of the neighborhood was the Holy Trinity Mountain, located in the triangle between Sharp Street, Horse Street, and the city wall. In fact, all of Sharp Street rises distinctly as it heads from Market Square and makes the slight bend toward the left in its approach toward Sharp Gate; the “mountain”—the term is too strong for this little hillock in the middle of this portion of

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town—is a somewhat steeper climb off to the right as one heads south toward the gate. Atop the mountain sat the Ruthenian Church of the Holy Trinity, encircled here and on the neighboring streets by properties owned by that church. It had been established, according to legend, in 1347 by Julianna of Tver, the Orthodox wife of the pagan grand duke Olgierd; the church existing in 1636 had been refounded in 1514 by Hetman Konstanty Ostrogski. Although not the cathedral church, it was one of the main Ruthenian centers—with its church, monastery, hospital, brotherhood, printing press, and school—by the later part of the century. It was, of course, Orthodox until the Union of Brest, but Uniate after 1608.30 Soon after 1596, the Orthodox began regrouping on the east side of Sharp Street at the recently established Church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, where they established a new monastery, school, hospital, printing press, and brotherhood. This is where the Greeks of Wilno—both Uniate and Orthodox—remained concentrated in the seventeenth century: in the southeastern and eastern parts of the city, on both sides of Sharp Street. Their settlement rose to the north only on the eastern side of town, toward Subocz Gate, the bakszta (barbican), the Ruthenian Cathedral Church of the Most Pure, and the River Wilenka; these last were the neighborhoods with which the quartermaster would end his survey. Catholic places of worship were present in the neighborhood, too, even if they were newcomers in the first half of the seventeenth century. The Discalced Carmelites’ Church of St. Teresa (founded in the 1610s to 1620s), with its miracle-working image of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the chapel built over Sharp Gate, helped to make this corner of town a place of pilgrimage for yet another confession, in addition to the well-established Uniates and Orthodox.31 The local Catholic churches seem to have exerted a certain pull on Ruthenian converts from the neighborhood. In our period the other Catholic presences were the Calced Carmelites’ Church of All Saints (founded in the 1620s) and, the latest addition, the Church of St. Joseph the Bridegroom, with its convent for Discalced Carmelite nuns (founded 1637). We will encounter Uniate and Orthodox converts among the congregations and brotherhoods of all three Roman Catholic churches, and among contributors to their growing wealth. Finally, although their place of worship was just outside the neighborhood (as the quartermaster delimited it), there was an increasing Lutheran presence at the end of this portion of the survey, the closer we approach the Saxon church, hospital, and school located in a courtyard off German Street. Taken as a whole, this neighborhood of some 154 habitations was much more modest than what we have seen so far. In 1636, fully 97 of the houses described were single-story, 40 of at least two stories, and only one that was certainly of three stories. More than a third of them (57) were wooden structures. Of the 98 bricked structures, 12 were described using the diminutive form (kamieniczka). On average, a house in this neighborhood contained only 2.5 chambers, with a remarkably low total number of associated alcoves and vestibules (45 and 24, respectively, in 154 habitations). These were, of course, averages. We still find concentrations of somewhat larger bricked structures on the main north-south arteries of

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Sharp, Horse, and Rudniki Streets, and there were many more single-story, often singlechamber, wooden houses on the east-west side streets. Moreover, the owners of real estate who practiced an identified trade came from the lower end of the prestige scale: there was a furrier at Horse Street 5.06 (a trade that was heavily Ruthenian in seventeenth-century Wilno), a cobbler at Sharp Street 9.06, a smith on the unnamed little side street next to the Church of All Saints (13.01), a glazier next door at 13.02, a carpenter at Rudniki Street 15.07, a barber-surgeon at Rudniki Street 15.19 (a Lutheran specialization, of lesser prestige than that of medical doctor, in whose ranks we also find many Lutherans), a tailor at St. Nicholas Street 17.04, and an owsiannik at St. Nicholas Street 17.05. (The word does not appear in this sense in any dictionary I know, but it must mean here a dealer in oats [owies], even if it is not quite clear what he did with them. Perhaps he dealt in horse fodder.)32 In addition to these modest artisans and tradesmen, there were members of successful Ruthenian merchant families whose presence in the ruling elite was nonetheless minimal or nil. Among them were the Orthodox Kuszyło (Kuszela, Kuszelicz) brothers, Fiedor and Abraham, at Horse Street 5.14 and 8.09. The second brother had been a member of the first sexagintavirate (the elected sixty-man governing body) of the Wilno Communitas mercatoria in 1602. His nephew Stefan, son of Fiedor, who would rise to the rank of town councillor, was a Uniate, at least pro forma, after 1666. The ranks of Ruthenian merchants—these probably Orthodox—included Daniel Parfianowicz along the town wall between the two gates (7.05) and two Pasternaks, Afanos and Cimofiej, a few houses away (7.14 and 7.15). Scattered throughout the neighborhood were the mostly rather modest houses owned, and often occupied, by members of the ruling elite, both Roman Catholic and Ruthenian: at least sixteen of the houses in this neighborhood were owned by families who were then or would later be represented in the ranks of the magistracy. Among the Catholics we find the Burbas, Rzepnickis, Radziwiłowiczes, Kiewliczes; among the Ruthenians, the Dubowiczes, Lebiedziczes, Mamoniczes, Salcewiczes, Zakrzewskis, Krasowskis, Szycik-Zaleskis. Worth special note here is the house of an Orthodox convert to Roman Catholicism, Burgomaster Ignat Dubowicz, in the street along the wall between the two gates (7.03). In spite of the fact that he owned property elsewhere in town, he seems to have preferred to live in the “old neighborhood.”33 And we find Burgomaster Iwan Szycik-Zaleski at Sharp Street 10.14, the Orthodox patriarch of the “only dynasty” in the Wilno ruling elite of the seventeenth century, whose Uniate children and grandchildren (and perhaps one great-grandson) would continue to play an important role in municipal self-government. He, like Dubowicz, was the owner of properties on Market Square. A few noble houses added to the mixed quality of the neighborhood. “Princess Ogin ´ ska” owned a house at Sharp Street 10.11, next to the new Orthodox complex at the Church of the Holy Spirit. She—Regina Wołłowiczówna—was the widow of Prince Bohdan Ogin ´ ski, Chamberlain of Troki, a main patron of the Wilno Orthodox Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit. When the Orthodox Holy Spirit printing press was temporarily shut done by royal decree in response to the printing of Melecjusz Smotrycki’s Threnos of 1610—the book was seen as

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treasonous, especially during a campaign against Muscovite armies—the brotherhood moved its printing operations to Ogin ´ ski’s estate at nearby Jewie (Lithuanian, Vievis). There the prince sponsored, among other things, the publishing of Smotrycki’s grammar of Church Slavonic (1618–1619) and his Ruthenian Homiliary Gospel (1616).34 At the other end of the neighborhood, at Rudniki Street 12.06, we find a house bequeathed to the “Saxon hospital” by Piotr Nonhart, an immigrant who was able, with perhaps questionable right, to stake a claim to membership in the Polish-Lithuanian nobility. Beyond Sharp and Rudniki Gates were suburbs separated from the city walls and embankments by bridges over a sort of moat, a channel of water leading away from the branch of the Wilenka that delimited the city in the north and northeast. A description of the city done in 1802 tells us of the dimensions of the gates and bridges at that time. Given a likely stagnation in urban building, perhaps they had not changed very much over the course of the eighteenth century. The bridge at Sharp Gate was then eight strides wide and twelve long. The bridge beyond Rudniki Gate was eight strides wide and nine long.35 Although the walls and ramparts of Wilno seem never to have been the sorts of imposing structures found in cities farther west, even at the beginning of the nineteenth century they still marked some sort of limit between city and suburbs, if not necessarily a legal one: already in the seventeenth century we frequently find “suburbanites” entering their wills and testaments and other legal instruments in the acta of the magistracy. The quartermaster did not venture into any of those suburbs beyond the walls in 1636 and 1639, in spite of the fact that at least some of those who lived there were subject to Magdeburg law. (Wilno lacked the more densely populated suburbs of Cracow, such as Kleparz and Kazimierz, with their own walls, market squares, and town halls.) There are some indications that the confessional and ethnic makeup of the suburbs corresponded to that found on the other side of the nearest city gate. Ruthenians were clearly present—and perhaps predominant—among the residents of the suburbs on the high plateau beyond Sharp and Rudniki Gates and in the Rossa suburb below Subocz Gate. Here in 1666, beyond Sharp Gate, a Uniate husband and his Orthodox wife, Afanas Otroszkiewicz and Katarzyna Kuryłowiczówna Otroszkiewiczowa, expressed their desires on 5 April and 18 November, respectively, to be buried at the nearby intramural Ruthenian churches—he at Uniate Holy Trinity, she across the street at the Orthodox Holy Spirit. Witness to her last will and testament was merchant and suburban neighbor Teodor Kochan ´ ski, who would make similar arrangements for his own burial at the Uniate Holy Trinity Church two years later in the summer of 1668. Uniate councillor Stefan Kuszelicz (a convert from Orthodoxy) from Horse Street 5.16 witnessed the testament of an Orthodox woman named Katarzyna Wasilewska in the summer of 1686; she lived in the suburbs between the two gates and made disposition for her body to be buried at the Orthodox Holy Spirit Church (and for her daughters to receive her earthly possessions, including an unspecified number of milk cows and six pigs). An altercation between guild tailors and a nonguild “bungler” (partacz, an artisan who practiced a trade for which a guild existed without belonging to the guild) that took place in the Rossa suburb was dated, by

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witness after witness quoted in a court protocol, as taking place “on Monday, which was the Ruthenian holiday of St. Nicholas.”36 In neighborhoods that were heavily Ruthenian, fasting and feasting followed a different rhythm from the one that was dominant in the rest of the city.

From Glass Street to German Street, with Jewish Street Between From this area around the southern walls, the quartermaster made a large leap—another indication of his sense of the city’s segmentation—to the neighborhood that lay to the west of Market Square. It was at the heart of the city in many ways—between the square on the east and the main artery that led from the Church of St. John to Troki Gate on the west; it stretched from Glass Street on the north to just below German Street on the south. The neighborhood was largely Lutheran and Jewish. Christians predominated in the two (more or less) eastwest streets (Glass Street and German Street); Jewish settlement would grow in the course of the seventeenth century in the north-south connectors (Jewish Street, Meat Shop Street, and St. Nicholas Street). Although few Ruthenians lived on these streets, we will encounter one still-functioning Orthodox (by now Uniate) church at the neighborhood’s edge, in addition to the complexes of Jewish and Lutheran institutions at the center of the neighborhood. Several Catholic sanctuaries exerted a pull on the southern and western peripheries. We will find a few isolated Ruthenian home owners and residents in the Glass Street neighborhood. Only on German Street, paradoxically enough, do we encounter more significant numbers of Roman Catholics in the first half of the seventeenth century. The quartermaster began his walk through the neighborhood at the mouth of Glass Street in Market Square, proceeding northwest along the left-hand side of that narrow and winding way as far as Jewish Street (18.01–18.11). He then returned to survey the houses of Meat Shop Street (19.01–19.07) before resuming his walk along Glass Street, beginning again at its mouth at the square, this time proceeding along the right-hand side. In the usage of the day, Glass Street also included the bend toward the intersection with Jop Street (in all, at this point, 20.01–20.12). He then continued, “exiting Glass Street toward Holy Spirit Street along the left-hand side”—what we would now consider the second block of Glass Street between Jewish Street and Holy Spirit/Dominican Street. In fact, other contemporary documents will confirm that people of the seventeenth century thought in our contemporary terms and also called this Glass Street. He surveyed first the left-hand side (21.01–21.05), then the right (22.01–22.05), and finally tagged on a few houses on “Holy Spirit Street.”37 The quartermaster then returned to Jewish Street, surveying the right-hand side from Glass Street to German Street (24.01–24.08), before retracing his steps across the street back up to Glass Street (25.01–25.04). At this point in the Lustration, we move down to German Street, proceeding from Market Square (i.e., in this usage, from Meat Shop Street) to Dominican Street, along the left-hand

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side (26.01–26.15), before returning on the other side of the street (27.01–27.13). The survey of the neighborhood ended with a walk through the area below German Street: St. Nicholas Street (28.01–28.10) and some back streets—“from St. Nicholas to the alleyway leading to the pipe running alongside the Church of St. Nicholas” (29.01–29.03) and the “St. Nicholas Alleyway” (30.01–30.08).38 There are reasons to treat these streets as a discrete whole, as did the quartermaster. He had arrived here from a neighborhood that did not border on this one, and he would move to quite a different point of departure for the next part of his survey. The main unifying factor was the presence throughout these streets of German-speaking Lutherans living in close proximity to (and often in the same houses with) Yiddish-speaking Jews. But there are other reasons—mostly of wealth and estate—for separating out the more affluent German Street from the neighborhood in and around Glass Street. Taken as a whole, the larger neighborhood contained 105 habitations in 1636, of which 32 (a little under a third) were still completely nonbricked. A sum of 445 chambers (plus 100 alcoves and 131 vestibules) suggests something over four potential family-unit dwelling spaces per house. There were 51 single-story houses and 39 of at least two stories. But these numbers are misleading in that they obscure the differences between the two subcommunities found in this larger neighborhood. Fully 12 habitations did not receive descriptions of any more detail than “ample and spacious” because they were owned by nobles and thus not subject to the obligation of housing guests. Consequently, we find a variety of jurisdictions here: the majority were subject to the Magdeburg law of the magistracy, but five came under the nobles’ land and castle courts, and six under that of bishop of Wilno (the latter clustered together on St. Nicholas Street). Four of the noble houses in the neighborhood, as well as most of those described simply as ample and spacious, were to be found on German Street. Here we come upon a concentration of bricked town houses of considerable size—many in the range of eight to fourteen chambers. This was no doubt the other of the “two most fashionable streets or ways, in which to the greater extent Germans and others live as merchants,” described by Samuel Kiechel during his 1586 visit to the city. The Germans, who had been in Wilno since before the conversion of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to Christianity, had first congregated in the area around what would become German Street, attending one of the city’s oldest Catholic churches at St. Nicholas (founded at the beginning of the fifteenth or even the end of the fourteenth century). The Reformation in Wilno may have gotten one of its starts among the Germans of St. Nicholas, and the Lutherans would establish their place of worship in a courtyard off German Street in 1555.39 By 1636 we still find a few Lutherans settled in the town houses near their church, although not with anything approaching the density of elite Protestant settlement that prevailed in Castle Street. The widow of Lutheran goldsmith Karol Libert, Anna Glin ´ ska, owned houses at both ends of one block of German Street (26.01 and 26.09), and she would eventually marry a Lutheran renter of one of them.40 Lutheran royal doctor and memoirist Maciej Vorbek-Lettow had inherited the family house at German Street 27.04, but he resided when

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he was in Wilno across the street at 26.03.41 As we will discover later, although he had many ties to Wilno burghers (especially to the elite on Castle Street) and did not attempt to hide any of them, he was also busy either reclaiming—or inventing from whole cloth (perhaps the latter)—his family’s “ancient” membership in the Pomeranian szlachta (nobles).42 This would ease his social integration with his less dubiously noble, mostly Roman Catholic neighbors. Palatine of Połock Janusz Kiszka (d. 1653)—a Calvinist convert to Roman Catholicism who had a Calvinist wife—owned the house next door at 26.04, although he seems not to have resided there, as the family had been renting it to Jews since 1551. The starosta of Krasnosielsk lived under castle jurisdiction at 26.13 (it, too, had been rented to Jews since 1551). Next to that at 26.14 were Jerzy Karol Hlebowicz (d. 1669), starosta of Onikszta and Radoszkowice (from 1633; he would end his political career as palatine of Wilno, from 1668), and royal courtier Łukasz Wojna at 26.15. The Słucki princes had owned the house on the other side of the street at 27.04 before Vorbek-Lettow’s father Matys acquired it; Jan Kazimierz Pac, the son of the palatine of Min ´ sk, owned the one at 27.12. Some of these addresses toward the western end of the street formed a neighborhood with the “noble ghetto” of Dominican and Troki Streets around the corner. This rather wealthy street stood in contrast nonetheless to the neighborhood on Castle Street (Kiechel’s other “fashionable street”): it was by now less thoroughly German, and it had a higher incidence of Roman Catholics and nobles. In spite of ties of confession, language, and ethnicity, elite Lutherans from both neighborhoods were set apart from the middle-level Lutheran neighborhood in and around Glass Street. In the narrower side streets and alleyways, even in Glass Street itself, we find many more wooden buildings and much smaller structures, on the whole in the range of one to five chambers. Glass Street itself boasted nineteen bricked town houses (four of which were described using the diminutive, kamieniczka) but also twelve fully nonbricked structures, even if many of the latter were of two stories. In fact, in 1636 the street, although about 40 percent wooden, had at least twenty-two two-story buildings and only eleven of a single story. The glassblowers, for whom the street was originally named, were no longer in evidence here by this time. We find, rather, a concentration of artisans identified by their trades (and occasionally only by a first name); we may assume they practiced those trades in workshops in their Glass Street houses. The Lustration noted four goldsmiths, a trade with a strong Lutheran presence (and a study of goldsmithery in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania finds several more in the neighborhood43), an apothecary, two barber-surgeons, three tailors, two cobblers, four locksmiths, a carpenter, a swordsmith, a harness maker, a soap boiler, a founder, a dyer, a painter, a stonemason, and a lute maker. Add to this a few middle-level merchants, such as the Marcin Buchner family (which included the importation of spices among its activities), and we see a community of burgher merchants and artisans, largely German and Lutheran, not of the elites but still of some solidly middle financial and social status. If we can rely on the frequencies with which the quartermaster noted professions, this neighborhood had one of the highest concentrations of artisans and their workshops.

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When we look later at various aspects of network formation (godparenting, marriage, clientage, and patronage, for example), we will find a high degree of neighborhood cohesiveness among these middle-tier Lutherans. And yet, even in such a closely delimited neighborhood and network, we still encounter the occasional exceptions: Orthodox merchants and goldsmiths, apparently drawn by ties of professional solidarity; members of the ruling elite, including a bencher, a councillor, and a burgomaster, all Roman Catholic; and the lone noblewoman—Jadwiga Niwierzanka (Glass Street 20.06 and 20.07), the widow of the starosta of Traby, Filon Drucki-Sokolin ´ ski, who was the son of the palatine of Połock, Prince Michał Sokolin ´ ski. The latter was a convert from Orthodoxy to the Uniate Church and a partisan of the future martyr-saint Jozafat Kuncewicz (beatified in 1642), Melecjusz Smotrycki’s competitor as Uniate archbishop of Połock.44 We are thus clearly dealing with two subneighborhoods here, the loose agglomeration of nobles and Lutherans of German Street and the considerably more cohesive network of Lutheran artisans and midlevel merchants in and around Glass Street and environs. And yet a few things made this mix into one larger neighborhood. First, there was, as I have already noted, the marked presence of German Lutherans in both areas. But second, and more important, a Jewish settlement was beginning to take shape here, drawing together Glass and German Streets. At this point let us take a closer look at the “Jewish neighborhood” in Wilno.45 I have put quotation marks around the phrase because in spite of encouragement, incentives, and commands, the process of the formation of a neighborhood remained unfinished at the end of the seventeenth century, and Jewish settlement—although concentrated—was in no way delimited (to say nothing of being closed behind gates). The term “ghetto” or even “quarter” applied by some historians to Jewish settlement in Wilno in this period misses the mark.46 After the 1551 decree exempting the houses of the grand duke’s council from the rule of the magistracy, Jews began to live and work in certain noble houses: that of Stanisław Piotrowicz Kiszka (palatine of Witebsk and starosta of Brasław, d. 1554) at German Street 26.04 (next to that of Vorbek-Lettow) and that of the Słucki princes across the way at 27.04 (now owned by Vorbek-Lettow). This practice cleared a path for Jews to rent and eventually buy other noble houses and finally also burgher houses within the Wilno city walls. Venturing out from these two houses—which would remain “Jewish houses” from the late sixteenth century onward— Jews began to live in neighboring streets between German Street and Glass Street and below German Street toward St. Nicholas’s Catholic Church. A street that had been identified descriptively in 1556 as the one that ran “from St. Nicholas to the hospital of St. Mary [Magdalene]” had acquired a name for one segment of it by 1592: Jewish Street.47 The Jewish community of Wilno differed from those of Cracow and Warsaw (to choose two other capital cities of royal residence) in two crucial regards. First, settlement was established much later here than in Cracow and Warsaw, where Jewish immigrants began to arrive in some numbers from Germany and Bohemia in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Indeed, Wilno was late by the standards of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where Brest,

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Grodno, and Pin ´ sk first comprised the Lithuanian Va'ad, or Council of the Chief Jewish Communities. The Lithuanian Va'ad was established as a body of self-governance separate from the Council of the Chief Jewish Communities of the Polish Crown lands in 1622–1623. Wilno would be named one of the chief communities only in 1652. Second, unlike Cracow or Warsaw, where the Jews were banned from residing within the walls of the old cities (in 1495 and 1483, respectively), Jews would establish themselves in the heart of Wilno and were thus more of a constant presence for their Christian neighbors.48 In response to a complaint against a burgher-led attack on Jewish life and property, King Zygmunt III Waza issued a founding privilege on 1 June 1593 granting the Jews of Wilno for the first time the explicit right to “acquire and purchase dwellings with the nobles, especially since, at the time of our accession to these domains, the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, we found [Jews] living [here].” He further permitted Jews to “have and celebrate their religion, to conduct various kinds of trade and commerce, just as our other subjects who live in our cities in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.” In a separate decree he granted the Jews of Wilno the right to establish a synagogue, cemetery, ritual bath, and meat shops.49 A privilege of King Michał Korybut Wis´niowiecki from 15 November 1669 repeated provisions Zygmunt III had made on 28 February 1630. The king had then (in 1630) permitted the Jews of Wilno to erect—as a precaution against fire—a bricked synagogue on Jewish Street on the site where the original wooden main synagogue had stood (between 24.06 and 24.07). He stipulated, however, “that its peak not be higher than the town houses, and that it bear no similarity in its appearance to Roman Catholic and Ruthenian churches [do kos´ciołów i cerkwi].”50 The stipulation was one frequently met in grants to found non-Catholic places of worship and in regulations concerning the dress of non-Catholic clergy, who were not to look like Catholic priests. What is more specific to Wilno is the provision that the synagogue not resemble either a Roman Catholic or a Ruthenian (Uniate or Orthodox) church. At the coronation of King Władysław IV Waza in the winter of 1633, two members of the Wilno Jewish elite, Samuel and Łazarz Mojz˙eszowicz, received a new privilege. In addition to reaffirming his father’s 1593 grant, Władysław called upon the Jews of Wilno to live not scattered throughout the town in houses under the Magdeburg jurisdiction but gathered together in one place, after the model of other Polish-Lithuanian cities. Adhering to a project drawn up by Father Marcjan Tryzna, royal secretary and spiritual referendary of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the one who resided in the Canons’ Town House at Castle Street 1.05), the king commanded the Jews to “buy, exchange for, or obtain by some other legal means the wooden and bricked houses in the following places: all houses on Jewish Street on both sides, as well as the houses at the back of Jewish Street across from the meat shops [i.e., the western side of Meat Shop Street], and the houses on both sides of St. Nicholas Street.” The royal decree set a limit of fifteen years, during which time “all Jews [were] required to move to the quarter assigned to them, with a ban on living in other parts of the city.” Exempt from

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that ban were the two original “Jewish houses” on German Street—the Kiszka and the Słucki houses (26.04 and 27.04).51 Some more clarifications came soon thereafter on 20 July 1633. The Jewish settlement would now take in both sides of Meat Shop Street.52 Jews would be allowed to build on any Jewish-owned back properties that opened onto German Street. Those structures, however, could have only windows—no gates of entry to the houses—from the German Street side. A royal commission that had been assigned the task of investigating an anti-Jewish tumult in 1635 proposed the construction of gates to the Jewish quarter, one at Glass Street and two at the intersections of German Street with Jewish and Meat Shop Streets. The gates were to be in the control of the Jews.53 In 1644 the magistracy registered a series of complaints against the Jews, alleging that not only had they acquired all but three or four houses in the allotted streets, not only had they occupied the “best street” in town (presumably German Street, in this estimation) and taken over Glass Street, but they were also living among Christians on Jop Street, Holy Spirit Street, and others, and they were even approaching the town hall. The magistracy claimed it was helpless to protect Jewish life and property because of the multitude of jurisdictions within the city, and it urged the Jews to build the proposed gates for their own protection.54 The Jewish side countered that more than twenty houses in the assigned streets were still owned by Christians and that as long as Christians lived there it was impossible to put gates on the community.55 In its ruling on the litigation, the Lithuanian Tribunal set a new twenty-five-year deadline (by 1669) for Jews to purchase the houses in the Jewish quarter, and it allowed Jews during that period to own one house elsewhere in the city for every Christian-owned house in that quarter.56 Appraisals of property values in the proposed Jewish quarter were to be conducted by a commission of two Christians and two Jews in an attempt to obtain reasonable prices for both buyer and seller.57 A survey conducted in 1645 determined that in the Jewish quarter Jews owned thirty-two houses and Christians eleven and that Jews lived in seventeen houses “among Christians.”58 Upon his election as King of Poland-Lithuania in 1669, Michał Korybut Wis´niowiecki reaffirmed royal privileges for the Jews of Wilno. This was the year in which the twenty-fiveyear grace period had run out. The king granted a new twenty-year extension (to 1689) on the required move to the Jewish quarter in recognition of the “calamitas moderna temporum [recent misfortune of the times] and in view of the fact that Wilno itself had remained for several years in the hands of the enemy under Muscovy [1655–1661], and the Jews had had to wander around various places and cities.”59 Although Wilno burghers and guild elders may have tried sporadically to make exclusive claims, they never really received an enforceable privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis (the right not to admit Jews). I know of only one attempt to obtain such a ban: that was during the Muscovite occupation of the city in 1655–1661, and there are some indications that the burghers’ petition to Tsar Aleksej Mixajlovicˇ met with temporary success.60 Muscovite forces

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had entered the city on 8 August 1655. Soon thereafter (28 December 1655) some Jews of Wilno petitioned the new Muscovite palatine of Wilno, Mixail Šaxovskoj, for permission to return to their houses within the walls. The petition seems not to have been granted.61 But Jews, too, returned to the city, even during the occupation. In a protestation from 23 July 1660, well before the city’s liberation, Lewek Majerowicz complained (as did many of the returning Christian Vilnans) that the things he had buried in the cellar when he fled the city were—to his great surprise and indignation!—no longer there.62 In fact, although it is certainly possible to discern the outlines of a Wilno neighborhood in which Jews were preponderant, that neighborhood was never—at least in the seventeenth century—uniquely Jewish. The triangular section of the city (German Street-Jewish StreetMeat Shop Street) that had been proposed for Jewish occupation behind gates became largely Jewish but not entirely so. And St. Nicholas Street, which also belonged to the official Jewish quarter, was a kind of dangling appendage across German Street and could not be gated effectively. To get to it from the Jewish Triangle, you had to cross German Street, which— although Jews lived there legally (in two houses only) and illegally—was still a street in which mostly Christians (Lutherans and Catholics) occupied some of the city’s better houses. What is more, many Jews continued to live elsewhere in the city and suburbs. The Lustrations of 1636 and 1639 noted—at a minimum—Jews in three houses on German Street (26.05, 27.06, 27.08) in addition to the two explicitly granted to them (26.04, 27.04).63 I say “at a minimum,” because, as we know, these particular surveys were conducted in order to determine where members of official entourages should reside while accompanying the king on his visits to the city; the quartermaster was almost entirely uninterested in who also lived in the house in addition to the owner or chief renter. Thus he may well have overlooked other Jews living elsewhere in town as renters in Christian or Jewish houses. Other types of surveys make the picture clearer on this question. In 1676, fulfilling the requirements of a constitution of that year in preparation for a Jewish capitation tax, Wilno Jewish elders Salomon Jakubowicz and Mojz˙ esz Dawidowicz, along with Jewish bailiffs (szkolnicy64) Mojz˙ esz Jakubowicz and Lewek Izraelewicz, came before the officials of the Wilno castle court to render their solemn oaths concerning the census of Jews living in the city under jurisdictions other than that of the magistracy (and thus apparently also outside the Jewish quarter). In the castle jurisdiction (i.e., noble houses) there lived 922 “Jewish heads of both sexes, both male and female, children and servants,” and in the Episcopal jurisdiction, 84—in both cases “excluding children under age ten and beggars incapable of work.”65 Yet another type of census offered even more information on this topic. In 1690, detailed surveys of the Wilno palatinate were conducted for the purpose of assessing hearth taxes, including two separate reviews of houses subject to the Wilno magistracy and “belonging to the synagogue of Wilno.” In the survey of houses under the jurisdiction of the synagogue we find, in addition to the Jewish quarter and the two German Street houses originally granted for Jewish occupation (the Kiszka and Słucki residences), four more Jewish residences on

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German Street. But it is the much larger review of houses subject to the magistracy that gives a picture of the spread of Jewish habitation—certainly not to every quarter of town but still widely among the city’s Christians. The year 1690 followed immediately upon the expiration of Wis´niowiecki’s new twenty-year grace period for removal to the Jewish quarter. The survey noted thirty-one houses in which Jews were living subject to the magistracy. Jews appeared in houses in the Third Quarter (“going from Rudniki Street from Market Square toward German Street on the left side”) and Fourth Quarter (“going from the castle toward the market on the right-hand side”). Perhaps farthest afield from our Jewish Street focal point was the neighborhood around Troki Street and heading toward Wilia Gate, where we find fourteen houses in which at least one Jewish hearth was reported (and sometimes there were several in one house).66 I find no Jews in the Ruthenian neighborhoods: around the Uniate Holy Trinity Church and to the east (right) of the Castle Street-Sharp Street axis, around and to the north of the Orthodox Holy Spirit Church. There are some indications that conflicts between Ruthenians and Jews in the Commonwealth were greater and more violent than those between other Christians and Jews and that either side might initiate the violence.67 The survey of 1690 ends with the complaint that members of several groups—including specifically Catholic clergy and Jews—refused to cooperate, even though they were living in houses under the jurisdiction of the magistracy. This caveat thus implies an even greater Jewish presence outside the Jewish quarter than that reflected by the registered Jewish hearths.68

From the Church of St. John to Troki Gate Once again the quartermaster moved from a place near the walls on the southern side of town to a more central location, by now from a bit farther around the clock face; from here he would survey the next several minutes on the dial. Standing at the mouth of St. John Street, with the Jesuits’ Church of St. John and on his right and the now-Catholic Radziwiłłs’ Cardinalia on his left, the quartermaster had before him a thoroughfare that led west-southwest in a slightly bending line from Castle Street to Troki Gate. In those days, as now, its course was divided into separately named segments: St. John Street beginning at the church of that name, Dominican Street (sometimes then called Holy Spirit Street for the Dominicans’ church of that name on that segment) beginning at the intersection with Bishop Street, and Troki Street beginning at the intersection with German Street. And yet, then as now, in the mental geography of most Vilnans it was perceived as a direct path between upper Castle Street and Troki Gate and the road to Troki beyond it. A visitor coming into town from along Troki Road had a commanding view of the city from the end of the plateau before making the short descent to Troki Gate. Once inside the walls, he saw a mostly flat road ahead of him until the intersection with Glass Street/St. Ignatius Street, where the way descended in a graceful curve toward the left to the intersection with Bishop Street before continuing, now on the level, in a slight bend toward the Church of St. John.

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The quartermaster treated these three streets as a single axis, surveying first the lefthand side of the entire stretch from the Church of St. John to Troki Gate (31.01–34.08) before looking into the little side streets at the gate itself (35.01–36.10). He then made his way back up the other side of Troki Street (37.01–37.14), now turning off to the left to survey all the streets between this main artery and the walls and gates on the northwest side of the city. At the end of the Troki Street segment he turned left into what might be perceived as the continuation of German Street. Then (as later) it was known as Wilia Street because it led to Wilia Gate and eventually, through suburbs and fields, to the Bricked Bridge (near the site of the Green Bridge) over the River Wilia. After registering the intramural houses on this street up to the gate and back (38.01–39.09), he returned to two houses on the Dominican Street section of the main artery (40.01–40.02). He then turned left into what might be seen as the continuation of Glass Street—called St. Ignatius Street for the Jesuits’ novitiate church and monastery at its end—which he surveyed to the wall and back (41.01–41.06). Not quite returning to the main artery, he made the sharp left into the downwardly sloping and bending Tatar Street, so-called for Tatar Gate at its end, which led to the Tatars’ settlement and mosque overlooking the river in the Łukiszki suburb. (Tatars did not have right of settlement within the walls.) He seems to have registered the houses on this street from the gate back to the Church of the Holy Trinity (42.01–42.07), whereupon he visited the buildings of Bishop Street (43.01–43.05), which also fell away gently from the intersection of Dominican Street and St. John Street. He then finished his walk through the neighborhood with the other side of St. John Street (44.01–44.05), ending at the Jesuits’ church of that name.69 This part of the survey—no matter how clearly delimited—was, of course, much too farflung to form a cohesive single neighborhood. The houses surveyed at the beginning, for example, were more closely tied to those across the street, visited at the very end, and they had little to do with those visited in the outlying areas in the vicinity of the three gates. Still, there was a certain overarching shape and sense to the grouping. We perceive a major artery from St. John’s Church on Castle Street to Troki Gate and the outlying suburbs grouped along the Troki Road. And from this main artery we find several side streets, two of them leading directly to city gates and to the Łukiszki suburb overlooking the river. These streets and houses—all told, a sizable portion of the surface area of Wilno within the walls—are underrepresented in the information I can glean from the surveys of 1636 and 1639 and from my reading of the Wilno court books. There are two main reasons for this silence in the sources. The first is the large number of nobles who owned many of the houses along the main corridor between the Church of St. John and Troki Gate. Since these houses were largely exempt from obligations to house guests, the quartermaster frequently recorded little more than the name of the owner, and most often just the title or office—for example, at St. John Street 31.05, “His Grace, Lord Under-Chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania”—and the fact that the given town house was “rather spacious and fine.”

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The owner of this particular property was Stefan Pac (1587–1640), and we can identify many of his brethren-neighbors. Jan Alfons Lacki (d. 1646), castellan of Min ´ sk (1630) and then Samogitia (1634), owned the house at St. John Street 31.07. Krzysztof Zawisza (d. 1670) would rise from master of the hunt of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1629), starosta of Min ´ sk (1631), grand notary of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1637), marshal of the court (1649), and grand marshal (1654), to castellan of Wilno (1669); he owned the house next door at St. John Street 31.08. One of the Doro(ho)stajskis (Paknys identifies him as Władysław70) owned the houses at Holy Spirit Street 32.05 and 32.06. Holy Spirit Street 32.07 had been the property of marshal of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania Jan Stanisław Sapieha (d. 1635) and was now occupied by “His Grace, Lord Notary of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania,” the brother of Kazimierz Leon Sapieha (d. 1656), both of whom were sons of Lew Sapieha (1557–1633), palatine of Wilno and grand hetman of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Jerzy Chreptowicz (1586–1650), then castellan of Smolen ´ sk (1632) and future castellan of Samogitia (1643), palatine of Parnawa (1645) and Nowogródek (1646), owned a second house at Troki Street 33.01. He was an ardent Roman Catholic; it was most likely his Lutheran wife, Zuzanna Nonhartówna, daughter of a possible newcomer to the noble estate, Piotr Nonhart, who induced him to buy another house at Castle Street 2.09 among the Lutheran burgher elite. Jan Rakowski (ca. 1594–1639), royal courtier, under-treasurer of the court (1631), palatine of Brzes´´c (1635) and of Wicebsk (1638), owned the house two doors over at Troki Street 33.03. Returning along the other side of this main thoroughfare, we find Stefan Pierchlin ´ ski (d. 1659), royal courtier and cellarer of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, at Troki Street 37.01; Calvinist royal courtier Dawid Szweykowski next door at 37.02; a second house of Jan Alfons Lacki at 37.09; castellan of Smolen ´ sk (1631), later palatine of Min ´ sk (1638) Aleksander Massalski (Mosalski) at 37.08; and at 37.12, “His Princely Grace, Lord Hetman of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania”—this was Calvinist patron Krzysztof Radziwiłł II (d. 1640). Prince Jan Ogin ´ ski, castellan of Ms´cisław, was next door at 37.13, and in the next house at 37.14 lived Prince Szymon Samuel Sanguszko (d. 1638), palatine of Wicebsk. In the next block, at Holy Spirit Street 40.02, we find yet another house owned by the notary of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Kazimierz Leon Sapieha. We know much more, of course, about almost all of these individuals than we do about any of the wealthy and not so wealthy burghers of Wilno, whose stories we will pursue throughout this book. Most of them are profiled—some at considerable length—in the multivolume Polish Biographical Dictionary (Polski słownik biograficzny). We are even able on occasion to place them at important events in the life of the city. Our first example, Stefan Pac (St. John Street 31.05), was a devout Catholic and a member of the biconfessional commission—together with his neighbor and opponent in these matters, Krzysztof Radziwiłł, Calvinist palatine of Wilno and Lithuanian grand hetman (37.12)—that was charged with investigating the anti-Calvinist riots of 1639–1640. During a lull in the proceedings, Pac took on the ceremonial function of giving Radziwiłł’s daughter, Katarzyna,

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away in marriage to Jerzy Karol Hlebowicz, who was himself Catholic and a future palatine of Wilno.71 We have already encountered Hlebowicz around the corner at the end of German Street (26.14). Further, Pac served as a witness of the last will and testament of his neighbor Jan Wojeciech Rakowski (Troki Street 33.03).72 But these networks were not the immediate result of neighborhood proximity (as we often find in the case of Wilno’s burghers). It is more likely that the neighborhood was itself the result of already existing networks among the Lithuanian szlachta. After all, each noble house in Wilno was only one among other country and city dwellings (including those in other cities) owned by the individual nobleman, and the given owner may have been present at these Wilno addresses quite rarely, if ever. Moreover, legal dealings, if registered locally at all, would have appeared in the books of the Wilno land and castle courts, which since World War II are in incomparably worse shape than those of the magistracy—a factor that adds to the neighborhood’s silence in this book. But the simple point remains that the nobles were not of the city in the same way as were the burghers or even the residents without citizenship. A second reason for the relative silence of this large portion of the city in the sources available to me is the high concentration of church-owned property, especially in the side streets. In these cases, we do not learn the names of inhabitants. This applies especially to the houses along St. Ignatius, Tatar, and Bishop Streets. Related to this may be an issue of settlement density. With the exception of Wilia Street, the survey gives the impression that the area between the artery connecting Troki Gate with the Church of St. John and the walls to the northwest, heading toward Łukiszki and the River Wilia, was quite sparsely settled. Even today, a walk along St. Ignatius Street confirms the impression of large, rather open plots of land (within the walls!) associated with churches and monasteries. Indeed, laconic entries for this area register the presence of some imposing ecclesiastical buildings and institutions without linking them to any names. At St. Ignatius Street 41.05 we discover the recently founded “church of the Jesuit fathers and monastery [consecrated only in 1647], where they also have their novitiate.” The seminarium at Bishop Street 43.03 was the so-called Alumnat, the Catholic theological seminary chartered in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, with its recently (1622) added Renaissance courtyard. The “manor” next door at 43.04 was a residence of the bishop of Wilno. And the collegium across the street at 43.05 was the first seat of the Jesuit Academy, which would become Wilno University, eventually taking over the Lutheran houses on Castle Street at the other end of the block and spreading through its maze of internal courtyards from St. John Street to Skop Street. Catholics, it would seem, predominated here to a greater degree than in any neighborhood we have visited so far. The nobles along the main artery were largely Catholic (with the exception of Krzysztof Radziwiłł and Dawid Szweykowski, both Calvinists). The churches here—the Jesuits’ St. John (established in 1387, taken over by the order in 1571), the hospital Church of the Holy Trinity (1530s), the recently established Jesuits’ St. Ignatius (built 1622– 1647), the Dominicans’ Holy Spirit (late fifteenth century), the Benedictines’ St. Catherine

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(after 1618), and the Franciscans’ Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary “on the Sands” (first half of the fifteenth century)—formed a dense network of exclusively Roman Catholic places of worship. We may suspect that many of the named and unnamed inhabitants of the more modest houses in the side streets attended these neighborhood churches. And yet there were certain exceptions to the rule of noble and Catholic residence here. Even in the main artery we find a few nonnobles, by no means all of them members of the ruling burgher elite (which is weakly represented here). And we can find the occasional exception to the rule of Catholic confession, such as the few Lutheran burghers of Dominican and St. John Streets, who lived in the vicinity of their brethren on Glass Street. Lutheran municipal clockmaker Jakub Gierke, for instance, lived at the corner of Dominican Street (32.01) and Glass Street; we may suspect he felt some sense of belonging in both neighborhoods. As late as 1690, Jews were renting chambers in Christian houses on Wilia Street. Finally, in the side street by the wall at the Troki Gate (35.06) we come upon a house owned by a mysterious “Obduła,” which would appear to suggest the presence of at least one nonbaptized Tatar (Abdullah)—and within the walls, if only barely.73 But he was the exception: the main Tatar settlement was in the Łukiszki suburb on the banks of the River Wilia. In the side streets, there were not only the residences of anonymous burghers and occasional artisans (three cobblers, a boilermaker, a trumpeter, and a fiddler) but also their gathering places—for instance, the Furriers’ Brotherhood and the Wax Works at Troki Gate (36.02 and 36.01), across the main artery from their neighbor Obduła. The Lustration of 1636 suggests an almost even division between bricked and wooden structures among the neighborhood’s 112 habitations and an average of something over three chambers per house and only one building with clearly at least two stories. But the numbers are especially misleading in this case because of the unusually large noble presence. We should clearly think of the artery leading from the Church of St. John to the Troki Gate as one of imposing bricked structures of two or more stories and many chambers (“rather spacious and ornate” was a typical description, with no further information), a sort of nobleman’s ghetto in the city of Wilno. None of these houses was described in any detail by the quartermaster because—since they were exempt from the obligation to house guests— they did not interest him. By contrast, in the side streets we encounter single-story, often single-chamber, wooden houses. My knowledge of the suburbs beyond the three gates of this segment of the Lustration is limited to the few documents I have encountered dealing with owners and inhabitants of houses in these areas. Here too, bridges over a water-filled channel led from the gates to the suburbs. In 1802 the bridge at Troki Gate was bricked, ten paces long and eight wide; at Wilia Gate, likewise bricked, twelve paces long and seven wide; and at Tatar Gate, wooden (as late as 1802!), eight paces long and five wide.74 Here again we sense connections between the suburbs and the parts of the city just beyond the nearest gates. There are indications that some of the dirtier trades were banished to these suburbs (as well as others). We encounter furriers here (one Bazyli Zawiski, who lived “in suburbio

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Trocensi acialiter ex opposito Portae Trocensis [in the Troki suburb, directly opposite the Troki Gate]”) and tanners (a certain Tomasz S´ widerski).75 And the Salcewicz family, who were Orthodox members of the ruling elite (with the family house at Horse Street 8.04), owned an empty plot of land “beyond the Wilia Gate, on Tanners’ Street, which goes from the Clay Mountain to the River Wilia.”76 Further, one result of a dispute between Jewish and Christian butchers in 1667–1668 was a decree of the Lithuanian Tribunal banishing the slaughter of animals to the suburb beyond Troki Gate; the decree cited the filth that accompanied the profession in its decision to remove its practice—by both Christians and Jews—from within the walls to this particular suburb.77 (But note that as late as 1667 Christian and Jewish butchers were still slaughtering animals within the walls, perhaps at their own places of residence.) The Łukiszki suburb beyond Wilia and Tatar Gates, perched on the high bank of the Wilia River, must have been quite a mixed place. In addition to the nearby smells and sounds of the butchers, furriers, and tanners, we find the extramural houses, manors, and gardens of the city’s ruling elite. Many of them kept the boats (wiciny) they used for conducting commerce here on the banks of the Wilia. This was the port of Wilno. Contact with the world led down that medium-sized river to the broader River Niemen (Lithuanian, Nemunas) and thence into the Baltic, with Königsberg as a frequent first port of call, before heading to such further destinations as Danzig.78 Here in the suburbs their properties lay side by side with the quite modest wooden houses of families whose only place of residence was beyond the walls. Among their other neighbors were the Tatars of Wilno, who were settled here with their wooden mosque and school. Tatars had probably been present in Łukiszki from the fifteenth century. Their wooden mosque dated from 1558. In 1631 the Łukiszki suburb was the site of thirty-two houses and the palace of Jerzy Chreptowicz (the husband of Zuzanna Nonhartówna), who owned two houses within the walls and had founded the suburban Łukiszki Church of SS. Filip and Jakub.79

Skop and Bernardine Streets Now the quartermaster turned his attention to the area between eleven and one on the clock dial, at the northern extreme of the city within the walls. On either side of Castle Street at its very top, just below Castle Gate, were two similar and in fact closely related subneighborhoods. They were close enough to an old branch of the Wilenka, nowadays long filled in and paved over, to smell it in the air from time to time. Rather than a wall or ramparts, this little stream, plus Castle Gate, marked the edge of the city to the north and separated it from the cathedral and the castles. The owners of these houses were mostly Roman Catholic, although here, as everywhere, we can document exceptions to the rule among the owners, and we may suspect exceptions among the neighborhood’s mostly anonymous renters.

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The dwellings were largely wooden, smaller and poorer than most we have encountered so far. And yet the inhabitants of these houses are anything but silent in this book. This is because they were almost all under the jurisdiction of the Wilno Roman Catholic Chapter and some of them additionally under a subjurisdiction known as the Monwid (or Moniwid) Altar—presumably rents from the houses were devoted to the upkeep of that particular altar in the cathedral church.80 They were not subject to, nor did they have access to, the magistracy. The people who lived here took their complaints, deeds of sale, inventories, and wills to the clerical judges of the chapter court, which acted in these cases just like secular courts and adhered to the Lithuanian statute in making its determinations. Access seems to have been freer, and perhaps cheaper, than before the magistracy, since relatively modest people appeared on a daily basis with their smaller and larger complaints. And because the Acta Capituli Vilnensis have been preserved relatively well, we are able to hear a louder and denser set of voices of relatively minor figures than in other jurisdictions. Moreover, these acta, as well as two sets of record books for lower instances of the chapter jurisdiction and the Monwid Altar, also allow us a glimpse of something largely missing from the books of the magistracy: a seventeenth-century Wilno neighborhood in the period from before the Muscovite occupation of the city and the destruction of most of the city archive. Once again the quartermaster’s path reveals that he was attuned to the shapes of Wilno neighborhoods. He began his survey from the mouth of Skop Street at Castle Street, as usual beginning on the left-hand side of the street from his perspective (now facing west). He surveyed all the houses of Skop Street up to Mary Magdelene Gate (45.01–45.14) and then crossed the street to make the return journey, first examining the house at 46.01 next to the “little hospital church of St. Mary Magdalene” (established in the 1510s). Just past the church he made a left turn into an alleyway identified only as “a little side street heading toward the castle on the River Wilenka.” Here he surveyed the houses on the street’s left side (47.01– 47.05), with the little river flowing through the backyards, and then returned along the right (48.01–48.04). He now completed his survey of the other side of Skop Street, ending up back at its mouth in Castle Street (49.01–49.13). At this point the quartermaster crossed Castle Street and went to its top, where he would begin his survey of the city’s “left half ” (looking down the axis from Castle Gate to Sharp Gate), that is, its eastern side. He entered the first cross street south of the bridge and gate— a “little street going from Castle Street to the Royal Mill”—again apparently registering the two houses and the mill on the left-hand side of the street (50.01–50.03) before crossing over to complete the survey on the other side (50.04–50.08). Then he returned to the mill and to a “little street going from the Royal Mill to St. Bernardine”—probably what would later be known as Mill or Orangery Alley—to survey its six houses (51.01–51.06). I have no indications here on which side of the street these individual houses lay. “Having entered Bernardine Street from the Mill,” he surveyed three houses (or rather two little manors and a wooden house, 52.01–52.03) before reaching the “the monastery of the Bernardine fathers, and there

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the wooden gate to the Transfluvia [suburb].” Then, “returning on the left-hand side,” he first noted “the Church and Convent of St. Michael,” before bringing his survey back up Bernardine Street to its conclusion for this segment at Castle Street (53.01–53.10).81 Of these sixty-one dwellings, a mere three—and those widely scattered—were under the jurisdiction of the magistracy (Skop Street 45.01, Mill Alley 50.02, Bernardine Street 53.06). Only one was described as under the castle jurisdiction. This was the little manor of an otherwise unidentified “Lord Vice-Judge of Min ´ sk” at Bernardine Street 52.02. Two other dwellings of unspecified jurisdiction may also have been subject to the castle court. These were the little manor next door at 52.01, which was the property of royal courtier Adam Sakowicz (“five chambers, a store, bakery, stable for a few teams of horses”). Although we find him implicated in Calvinist circles as a sort of client of Krzysztof Radziwiłł II, Sakowicz was Roman Catholic. He would hold many offices: chamberlain of Oszmiany (1628), vicepalatine of Wilno (1633–1640, under Krzysztof Radziwiłł), master of the horse of Wilno (1645), starosta of Oszmiany (1649), palatine of Smolen ´ sk (1658), administrator of the treasury of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1659–1662).82 The other possibly noble house was the manor of “Lord Michał Zienowicz, courtier of His Royal Majesty” at Mill Alley 51.04 (“six chambers, a spacious kitchen, an alcove, a little pantry, a shop, cellar, stable for a few teams of horses”).83 All the rest were either (1) owned and occupied by various “father canons of Wilno” or owned by the bishop himself (45.10, 45.11, 46.02, 47.01, 47.02, 48.07, 51.05, 51.06, 53.08, 53.09); (2) the property of the Ambrosian and Korsak bursae (church-subsidized lodgings for poorer students of the Jesuits’ Academy, 45.06, 45.07, 53.10); or (3) the vast majority here— the properties of various artisans, musicians, and “bailiffs general” (functionaries of the nobles’ land and castle courts), mostly Catholic, living under the jurisdiction of the Wilno chapter. The majority of this large third category were single-story buildings (fifty-one of fifty-three described dwellings), predominantly wooden (fifty of sixty-one) with only a few chambers (fewer than four, on average). We often sense the relative poverty of the edge of town in the stories of the owners and inhabitants of these houses. Sometimes we even smell it. Especially on the Bernardine Street side we will sense the tanneries. Hanus Kiczka (Hans Kietzcke) was a Lutheran “white-leather tanner” (Weißgerber, białoskórnik, bałtusznik, also sometimes called a “chamois tanner,” Sämischmacher, zamesznik) who lived in a little wooden house next to the Royal Mill at 51.01 that contained only “a chamber with an alcove,” in addition to “a workshop in which they tan skins.”84 I know from other sources that the Paweł Rachwicz (Rejchowicz) who lived on the little side street heading toward the Mill (50.01) was another Lutheran chamois tanner, again no doubt working from home.85 Just across the Wilenka River from Bernardine Street to the north was a cluster of houses in a suburban neighborhood called Szerejkiszki, which was under the jurisdiction of the horodnictwo. The horodnictwo—from the Ruthenian word for castle (horod)—is not to be confused with the castle court (sa˛d grodzki, from the Polish cognate word for castle—gród). The latter was the court of the nobles (also of Jews and Tatars), and its like was to be found

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throughout the lands of both the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The former was a purely Lithuanian institution, found in a few cities of the Grand Duchy. The Wilno horodniczy (administrator of the horodnictwo) had responsibility for the upkeep of the castles, and he ruled over a court that heard the litigation and registered the testaments of the modest owners and inhabitants of the little wooden houses clustered in his jurisdiction under the castles.86 In addition to the Szerejkiszki suburb, the horodnictwo ruled over houses on the other side of the castles and cathedral, toward the Antokol suburb. I can offer no precise map for these suburban houses, but a picture emerges of a group of tanners and other artisans— many of those in Szerejkiszki were Lutheran—clustered on both sides of the Wilenka and no doubt dirtying its waters in the course of their labors. In many ways, the horodnictwo formed a kind of Lutheran mirror to its Catholic counterpart just inside the city limits on the other side of the Wilenka under the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Chapter. Two of the more important holders of the office of horodniczy in our period were Protestant: Piotr Nonhart (1619–1633), a Lutheran, was succeeded by the recently ennobled royal doctor Calvinist Paweł Kleofas z Brylewa Podchocimski (1634–1657). The documents connected with these houses—both those under the Roman Catholic Chapter jurisdiction and those under the horodnictwo—give a sense of the rough-andtumble of these probably crowded houses and neighborhoods, peopled largely by poorer artisans, some of them engaged in the dirtier trades, plus—always a marker of a poorer, marginal neighborhood—a large concentration of students and other transients, or as one document put it, “students, paupers, and other loose people.”87 The houses may have been small and probably crowded, but the courtyards must have been of some size. This neighborhood, especially that around Skop Street, seems to have been a good place to tether your horse, the numbers of which may have vied here with the teeming human population. Just a few examples. The one-story wooden house at Skop Street 45.04 had 6 chambers and a stable for 12 horses; that at 45.09 had 4 chambers and a stable for 8 horses. The second house of bailiff general Jan Dziblewski on the little side street off Skop Street (48.03) was a one-story wooden house with only 2 chambers, but it had a stable for 20 horses! And so on. The larger neighborhood boasted only 200 chambers in 61 houses (or 3.3 per house), but it could bed down at least 288 horses (4.7 per house). This fact, added to the local “tanners’ ghetto,” contributes to the sense of the neighborhood’s olfactory richness. But of course occasional whiffs of equine waste—and human, for that matter—would hardly have been unfamiliar to the noses of those occupying “the most fashionable streets and ways.” A reading of court records often leads to an exaggerated sense of the verbal and physical violence of a society. Still, it is hard to escape the impression that the citizens of these two neighborhoods were particularly given to litigation and subject to violence. Skop Street denizen “Ambroz˙y the weaver” was probably one of the more litigious residents of this neighborhood—and that is saying something: the last entry in the record book for a lower instance of the Roman Catholic Chapter was dated 24 July 1655, just two weeks before the

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city would be occupied and pillaged by Muscovite armies.88 Citizens of the chapter were pursuing their small litigations with their neighbors at a time when they could hardly have been unaware of the gathering storm. Those who could do so—mostly the wealthier burghers from the jurisdiction of the magistracy—had already fled to Königsberg. Ambroz˙y the weaver seems to have spent much of his time in court. A scrap of paper made its way into the books of the court at its lowest instance, a list of expenses incurred by one Jan Motowicz (otherwise unknown to me) in litigation with Ambroz˙y the weaver during the year 1636.89 The violence of these peripheries is given chilling expression in a laconic entry found in the acta of the horodnictwo: “27ma Augusti [1690]. Bartłomiej Sobolewski made a claim of a deflorata virgo [a deflowered girl] at the house of Jan Waserowicz. Sobolewski brought his complaint against Andrzej. Andrzej Krasmowski alleged that Bartłomiej, who brought the girl Anna Misiewska, seven years old, placed her on a bench and poked her with an awl.”90

The Environs of the Old Calvinist Church On 25 June 1640, after a year of confessional unrest, Władysław IV signed a decree banishing the Calvinists of Wilno from within the walls, but—typical for the practice of that ruler in which both tolerance and intolerance were mitigated—allowing them immediately to regroup just outside the walls, near their “garden,” which is to say, by their cemetery.91 The Catholic side had made allegations against the Calvinists of general haughtiness and of purposeful shooting of arrows on 4 October 1639 at the Bernardines’ Church of St. Michael and its convent. After a series of anti-Calvinist “tumults” blamed, as so often, on “students” and “other loose people” and after the usual flurry of protestations registered with the jurisdictions willing to entertain them, the Calvinists were both banned and specifically permitted to rebuild, under somewhat different rules, almost within the walls. The king had noted as a root cause of the unrest the close proximity of confessions: “And . . . it is evident that the location of the Calvinist church among Catholic churches gave the occasion for both the earlier and the current excesses.”92 In fact, three confessions ( four if we consider Orthodox claims on Ruthenian institutions) competed for hearts and minds in this picturesque neighborhood, which fell away from Castle Street to Bernardine and Savior Gates and their bridges over the River Wilenka to the Transfluvia suburb. Not all of the images were violent ones. In 1622, in the course of the polemic over the “illegally” reestablished Orthodox hierarchy—largely vacant since the 1596 Union of Brest had drawn most of the bishops to the Uniate Church—the Uniates of the Wilno Holy Trinity monastery would claim that Rus´ knew “from their elders” that “in Wilno, having heard the morning divine service at the [Church of the] Holy Most Pure, the entire people used to go to the Bernardines for the sermon.”93 Melecjusz Smotrycki, Orthodox archbishop of Połock and archimandrite of the neighboring Holy Spirit monastery, responded by granting the assertion but adding a qualification: “They know this not from old

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people, but even now from the young and from what they themselves saw with their own eyes and reckoned: that when their Calvinist church took up its place alongside the Holy Church of the Most Pure in Wilno, the Rus´ of Wilno, after hearing the morning divine service, almost all of them . . . used to go to the Calvinist church for the sermon, whereby many of them even remained there.”94 Smotrycki’s goal was to set the assertion in its proper context: “Rus´ used to go to the Roman Church in Wilno; they used to go even to the Calvinist Church. They go even now in many cities—but not led astray by the love of the rite, only partially for the spectacle, partially curiositatis gratia [for the sake of curiosity], and no less for the organ, which the commonality, the simple folk, are wont to do.” His point had to do less with Wilno and more with the identity of “ancient Rus´,” but what we see inadvertently is a glimpse of life in this highly mixed neighborhood. The quartermaster began again at Castle Street, now one street down from Bernardine Street, registering the properties on Calvinist Church Street (i.e., St. Michael Street 54.01– 54.09). Then he returned to Castle Street in order to survey the houses on both sides of the next cross street down, a “little street heading toward the [Uniate] Church of St. Iwan [i.e., John the Baptist]” (55.01–55.02 and 56.01–56.06)—what would much later be known as Literary Alley. His movements became more and more complicated and difficult to chart as he entered into the narrow side streets of this part of town. Across the little street at the bottom of Calvinist Church Street was the large Bernardine complex. First, directly facing the old Calvinist church was the Bernardine convent and Church of St. Michael the Archangel (founded at the end of the sixteenth century, consecrated in 1629). Behind that was the little Church of St. Anne (founded at the beginning of the fifteenth century, rebuilt a century later), which in turn stood in front of the Church of SS. Francis and Bernard, founded by Kazimierz IV Jagiellon ´ czyk (d. 1492), and the associated Bernardine monastery. Here the quartermaster surveyed the houses next to St. Michael’s, across the street from the Calvinist church (57.01– 57.05), which street he would not identify any more precisely than “Calvinist church, across the little street an alley.” Then he continued “along that same street to the Holy Most Pure [Virgin],” sometimes also called Savior Street (58.01–58.12). I draw indications concerning the location of specific houses here and throughout the survey of this side of town, from the quartermaster’s frequent use of phrases like “on the other side,” “facing” to describe the relationship of the house then under consideration to the preceding address. In other words, he no longer made it his practice in every case to walk first along the left and then the right sides of streets from beginning to end; rather, he zigzagged back and forth, registering all the houses as he went on both sides of the street. At this point, the quartermaster entered a “little alleyway off Savior Street on the left-hand side” in order to note its two houses (59.01–59.02) before, “again having crossed Most Pure Street on the left-hand side,” proceeding to survey the remaining houses in front of the now Uniate Cathedral Church (60.01–60.03). Here the quartermaster registered the presence of the “bell tower of the Most Pure and the [Cathedral] Church of the Most Pure and the hospital next to the Gate” (61.01–61.08), and then he surveyed the houses across the street. Finally,

Figure 2 Jan Bułhak, photograph, ca. 1912, Literary Alley looking toward the Church of St. John. Matulyte· 2001, 313.

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he reached “Savior Gate, from which Transfluvia Street begins,” and noted the eight houses clustered in its vicinity (62.01–62.08).95 Savior Gate reflects in its name the old Ruthenian hospital Church of the Savior situated next to the metropolitan church. Both were probably founded and built from the end of the fourteenth through the first half of the fifteenth century. The neighborhood was highly mixed in several regards—including the confessional, the social, and the physical. We began with the two east-west streets leading from Castle Street toward the churches and monastic institutions of the Bernardines (i.e., Calvinist Church Street [St. Michael Street] and the parallel street immediately below it [the later Literary Alley]); they were the upper and lower limits of the block that contained—until 1640—the Calvinist church, school, and hospital. This was something of a Calvinist fortress within the city (until 1640) with closed gates and a private guard. These were more modest dwellings than those on this same block of Castle Street, but they were still bricked town houses of four and five chambers, sometimes of two stories, several of them houses of the nobles under the jurisdiction of the castle court. The sense of a Calvinist compound is heightened by the fact that at one point the quartermaster stopped registering houses individually and in detail and simply stated in his entry for the addresses at Calvinist Church Street 54.03–54.09: “seven houses, among which are divided bricked town houses, of which some of the bricked ones belong to the Calvinist hospital and are on noble ground. No privileges were shown. No one [of the guests] resided here previously, and no one resides here now.”96 In fact, all the houses on Calvinist Church Street (54.01–54.09) were owned by the local church, as were at least two of the houses on the parallel street at the other side of the block (56.04 and 56.05). Two Calvinist notables owned houses in the neighborhood under the jurisdiction of the castle court: castle notary Aleksander Sawgowicz (d. 1661) at 57.04; and Daniel Naborowski, cupbearer of Wilno (1635–1640), castle judge of Wilno (1637–1640), and renowned poet, who lived at 58.01. Both of them were clients of Krzysztof Radziwiłł II, Calvinist palatine of Wilno and Lithuanian grand hetman. The remaining houses in the neighborhood were modest one-story wooden structures of a chamber or two. In the entire neighborhood, there were twelve bricked houses and thirtyeight wooden ones, forty-two of them of a single story. The larger and bricked structures were in the vicinity of the Calvinist church. The loudest interconfessional conflict in the neighborhood involved the Calvinist and Bernardine establishments, directly across the street from each other until 1640. And yet throughout these streets, especially as we move south, we feel the presence of churches of the Greek rite and their faithful. At 55.02, on the “street to the Orthodox/Uniate church of St. Ivan,” we find a bricked house owned by that neighboring church on “[Orthodox/Uniate (cerkiewny)] church land,” in the courtyard of which seems to have been the remnants of an old cemetery: “a spacious square, on which quite a few dead people were buried, since, as the landlord related, this [house] used to be an Orthodox church.”

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In fact, as we move toward the now Uniate Cathedral Church of the Most Pure and the remnants of the Church of the Savior, we find house after house described as “under municipal jurisdiction [i.e., the Magdeburg law of the magistracy], on [Orthodox/Uniate] church ground” (miejska na gruncie cerkiewnym). There were thirty-two such houses in all, forming a tightly knit block (57.01–57.03, 57.05, 58.02–58.12, 59.01–59.02, 60.01, 61.01–61.08, 62.02– 62.04, 62.06–62.08). The interruptions in the sequence were for the noble houses of Calvinists Sawgowicz and Naborowski (57.04, 58.01) and one other under castle jurisdiction at 62.05; a lone house under the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic bishop of Wilno (62.01); and two houses owned by Uniate Metropolitan of Rus´ Józef Welamin Rutski (60.02 and 60.03). In fact, there are reasons to connect this subneighborhood to that with which we will begin the final segment of the survey as we head into Sawicz and Bakszta Streets; house after house there, too, was “under municipal jurisdiction, on Orthodox/Uniate church ground,” and we will continue to encounter remnants of old Orthodox churches on “private” grounds.97 In these houses we often come upon artisans practicing some of the more modest trades: a cobbler, two furriers, a painter, a cooper, a butcher, two smiths, a fiddler, a carpenter, and a boilermaker. The furrier named Iwan was certainly Ruthenian: the trade was largely Ruthenian in seventeenth-century Wilno, and Wilno documents might register a Ruthenian as Jan (when he went by Iwan at home and in church), but they would never identify a Catholic or Protestant as Iwan.98 Still, the names of the neighborhood’s residents suggest a mixture of confessions (similar to the mixture of places of worship). Wojciech the painter was unlikely to have been Ruthenian; Hanus (Hans) the carpenter was probably German, although he could have been Lutheran, Calvinist, or Roman Catholic. There was a small congregation of German Catholics at the Bernardines’ Church of St. Anne; perhaps Hans attended that neighborhood church.99 The Transfluvia suburb rose from the banks of the little Wilenka River on the other side of Savior Gate. A few documents offer some hints about life in this no doubt somewhat untamed area. There were paper mills, brickworks, and at least two public baths, one owned and run by a Ruthenian family, the other by Roman Catholics.100 And we hear a complaint of neighbor against neighbor in 1676 concerning pig feces flowing between the two properties down to the Wilenka and a brewery ceiling so low that there was a “great periculum incendii [danger of fire].”101

Sawicz and Subocz Streets Now, finally, the quartermaster arrived in the once largely Ruthenian neighborhoods to the east of Castle Street, from the top of Sawicz/Bakszta Street102 to Subocz Gate. There were three major arteries here: Sawicz/Bakszta Street, which angled, mainly south and a little east, from an opening in Castle Street just above the Uniate Church of St. Parasceve at Fish Market,

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rising sharply at the end toward the barbican (bakszta) in the city walls; a second Sawicz Street (the one that still bears that name), which began at the top of Market Square and headed east to meet Sawicz/Bakszta Street at the middle point of its run; and Subocz Street, which began just below the bottom of Market Square and headed eastward, parallel to Sawicz Street, through Subocz Gate to the Subocz suburb and below that the Rossa suburb. In addition to these major arteries, the Lustrations suggest the location of several smaller side streets. This was a large territory, for the most part void at that time of places of worship. The Catholic Augustinians (Canons Regular of the Order of St. Augustine) settled in the middle of it only after 1661. We encounter, however, further remnants of Orthodox churches on what was now private property, and we feel the pull of other places of worship on the periphery of this territory: the Uniate Cathedral Church of the Most Pure to the north, the Jesuits’ St. Kazimierz on Market Square to the west, and the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit to the south. The bottom part of the neighborhood remained heavily Ruthenian even in the second half of the seventeenth century, and its residents formed some human networks with co-confessionals in the areas around Sharp, Horse, and Rudniki Streets. The quartermaster began at the top of Sawicz/Bakszta Street, presumably on its left-hand side as was his wont, examining the first five houses (63.01–63.05), before he reached “the little street called Łotoczko that goes toward Savior Street.” Here he surveyed three houses (64.01–64.03) and then ducked into a “tiny alleyway in that same little Łotoczko Street” (65.01–65.04) before resuming his survey of Łotoczko Street (“once again going out into Łotoczko Street”), first on the same side to the intersection with Savior Street (66.01–66.02); then, crossing the street to survey the houses on the south side, he “return[ed] to Sawicz [Bakszta] Street” (66.03–66.09). Now, “entering into Sawicz [Bakszta] Street on the lefthand side,” he surveyed two houses (67.01–67.02), before turning his attention to “Sawicz [Bakszta] Street on the right-hand side” (68.01–68.02). Like the majority of the houses at the end of the previous section, all the dwellings here, from 63.01 to 68.02, were described as “under municipal jurisdiction, on [Orthodox/Uniate] church ground.” The inhabitants of these mostly tiny wooden structures were largely anonymous: the house in the alleyway off Łotoczko Street at 65.04 was occupied by “Ambroz˙y” (no last name or occupation); it consisted of a bakery, a single chamber “without a stove” (the presence of which usually was the minimal requirement for a room to be called a chamber), and a little bath. Owners of these houses included—in addition to one nobleman—a smith, two fishermen, two weavers, and a glassblower. At this point, the quartermaster continued his walk down Sawicz/Bakszta Street “on the other side,” indicating that he had on occasion crossed back and forth across the street in its upper reaches to survey particular houses by describing them as “on the other side” (69.01–69.19). With the last address (69.19), the quartermaster had reached the wall at the barbican.103 Now, turning northward and “returning from the wall, on that same Sawicz [Bakszta] Street on the left-hand side” (70.01–70.07), he brought his survey back up to the

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intersection with “the Sawicz Street that empties into Market Square,” i.e., the current Sawicz Street. Sawicz/Bakszta Street was more of a social mix than the environs of Łotoczko and Savior Streets, and we begin to sense the crumbling grandeur of what must once have been a neighborhood in which Orthodox elites had predominated in the sixteenth century. Even in 1636 fully half of the twenty-six dwellings were bricked town houses. The wooden houses of the upper reaches of the street may have been owned by bag makers, smiths, tailors, and harness makers, but by the time we reach Sawicz/Bakszta Street 69.10 we enter into a stretch of bricked town houses owned and occupied by dignitaries, often under the jurisdiction of the castle court. Among them we find Antoni Tyszkiewicz, son of the palatine of Brzes´´c (69.10); Jan Kole˛da, land court notary (69.15: “quite a lot of chambers in it”); a Sapieha identified as the starosta of Riga (69.16; according to Paknys it was Andrzej Stanisław104); two Kirdejs, the first the land court notary of Oszmiany, the second the vice-judge of Oszmiany (69.17, 69.18); the widow of vice chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania Paweł Stefan Sapieha, inhabiting a large manor (70.04); and Tomasz Sapieha, son of the palatine of Nowogródek (70.05). The next-to-last property had the remnants of the Orthodox Church of SS. Cosmas and Damian on its grounds; the last one had “an [Orthodox/Uniate] church [cerkiew] in the little alleyway.” Most of the noble families owning property in the street had once been Orthodox; many had converted to Roman Catholicism. Now the quartermaster turned into Sawicz Street, at first “on the left-hand side” but again crossing the street on occasion to look in on houses “on the other side” (71.01–71.13) until he reached Market Square on the north side of the street, then continuing “on Sawicz Street, going on the right-hand side from Market Square” (71.14–71.17). These were largely bricked town houses (thirteen of sixteen), with a considerable number of structures of at least two stories, especially at the end of the survey (71.13–71.17), some of them moderately large (seven chambers). The first three were owned by the hospital of the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity. One (at 71.06) was the property of a Wołłowicz, perhaps Piotr (from a formerly Orthodox noble family), chamberlain of Troki (1625–1651), who was living under the jurisdiction of the castle court in a bricked town house described as “rather spacious and ample.” The rest were anonymous burghers—a goldsmith and a cobbler among those with identified professions. Continuing his survey south to its culmination in Subocz Street, the quartermaster now entered the “the tiny side alleyway that leads to the bricked town house of the Brotherhood of the Lord Councillors” (72.01–72.05), apparently what was later known as Augustinian Street. We are aided in taking our bearings here by the fact that between 72.02 and 72.03 the quartermaster took note of the “back of the Jesuit fathers” (i.e., the complex at the Church of St. Kazimierz in Market Square), and between 72.04 and 72.05 the “gate to the manor of the Lady wife of the Under-Chancellor.” This was Zofia Daniłowiczówna (d. 1642), fourth wife and widow of Paweł Stefan Sapieha (d. 1635, i.e., the year before the survey), and we have already encountered that manor at 70.04.

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When the quartermaster entered the “alleyway behind St. Kazimierz” (i.e., Kazimierz Alley, 73.01–73.04), he found between 73.01 and 73.02 the “gate to the monastery of St. Kazimierz, the Jesuit fathers.” He then entered a “little alleyway to the manor of the Lord Under-Chancellor” (74.01–74.05). Here we can again get our bearings from the fact that the list began with the “gate in the corner to the manor of the Lord Under-Chancellor.” This was, in 1636—as we have just seen—actually the property of his widow (at 70.04). The survey then resumed on Kazimierz Alley—“on the other side, the gate to the monastery of St. Kazimierz, the Jesuit fathers” (75.01–75.06). These alleyways offered the same mixture of grand manors of formerly Orthodox noble families (often the back gates of properties that fronted on Sawicz/Bakszta Street) and modest burgher Ruthenians (judging by the names): the widow of the tailor Filon; fisherman Timofiej Fiedorowicz; and members of the magistracy— councillor Iwan Jas´kiewicz, the widow of councillor Braz˙yc, councillor Zachariasz SzycikZaleski (son of burgomaster Iwan), and burgomaster Michał Serhejewicz. All of these were Ruthenian. At long last, the quartermaster had arrived at the mouth of Subocz Street, the sole remaining unvisited thoroughfare, which he surveyed “going from Market Square to Subocz Gate,” beginning, as he often did, on the left-hand side (76.01–76.04). After the fourth house, he surveyed the houses “in the side alleyway from Subocz Street on the left-hand side” (77.01– 77.06); then, “entering Subocz Street again on the left-hand side,” he continued his walk to Subocz Gate (78.01–78.11). Finally, “returning from the gate on the left-hand side,” he completed his survey of the entire city by walking straight back along Subocz Street to the bottom of Market Square (79.01–79.12).105 In Subocz Street he found an almost equal division between bricked and nonbricked structures, as well as some of the remaining two-story houses on this side of town. These were mostly Ruthenian merchants and members of the magistracy, many of the merchants still Orthodox in the second half of the seventeenth century. The more prominent families included those named Minkiewicz, Dorofiewicz, and Sien ´czyło, all of whom had members who played important roles in the ruling elite and some of whom (the Sien ´czyłos, for instance) seem to have given up politics for commerce as the price for remaining Orthodox after 1666. And there was one nobleman: cupbearer of Volhynia Lawrenty/Ławryn (Wawrzyniec) Drewin ´ski, one of the more vocal noble defenders of Orthodox causes in the 1620s and 1630s, who had just recently (26 March 1636) bought the little house in the alleyway at 77.06.106 This side of town probably had then, as now, a certain picturesque charm. Sawicz/Bakszta Street rose dramatically toward the barbican, offering a commanding view of the Uniate cathedral church and the Transfluvia suburb. Łotoczko Street fell off sharply from the top of Sawicz/Bakszta Street, as it curved down toward the Wilenka and the gate leading to Transfluvia. The largely wooden houses at the top of the neighborhood, many again “under municipal jurisdiction, on [Orthodox/Uniate] church ground,” gave way farther down to the manors and bricked town houses of the szlachta and eventually to the bricked town houses

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of the city’s Ruthenian burgher elite in the area from Sawicz Street to Subocz Street. Subocz Gate contained the place of residence—not the place of work!—of the municipal executioner. That office was often held by a German Lutheran “master” (mistrz), who, whenever he deigned to reside there—and there was at least one who was reluctant to do so!—may have been the lone “Saxon” in the neighborhood.107 The evidence is thin, but we do have some indications of a Ruthenian presence in the suburbs beyond Subocz Gate. In addition to a report on an altercation in the Rossa suburb dated according to the Ruthenian old calendar, we find the last will and testament of an Orthodox merchant named Samuel Matwiejewicz, alias Boczoczko (Ruthenian, meaning little barrel), who lived in the suburb beyond Subocz Gate. That document, registered 19 May 1657 during the Muscovite occupation of the city, suggests that he too had something to do with the heavily Ruthenian fur trade.108 His presence here adds to the impression of a preponderance of Ruthenians in the suburbs outside the old Ruthenian part of town: beyond Savior, Subocz, Sharp, and Rudniki Gates, in Transfluvia, Rossa, and the Sharp and Rudniki suburbs. He was neighbor there to Orthodox burghess Anastazja Polikszanka Orzeszycowa/ Dziedzin ´ ska, who had a stake in the Minkiewicz family house at Subocz Street 78.06 and whose story we will take up later. One final note on Wilno topography at the macrolevel. We have a 1682 inventory of a suburban house “beyond the Subocz Gate.” It seems rather impressive for a suburban property; perhaps the suburbs were experiencing growth in the rebuilding that followed the ravages of the Muscovite occupation (1655–1661). Of special interest is the description of the “house bath.” It appears to have been of the sauna sort, with two stoves, one for baking bread, the other no doubt for heating the bath, and a “large limewood trough for pouring water.” The Lustrations of 1636 and 1639 show a fairly even distribution of household breweries and bakeries throughout the town. Everyone ate bread and drank beer, and these goods were made on the spot in a large number of houses of all neighborhoods and all confessions. Such was not the case with the home baths. The streets within the walls where we find them in house after house—Subocz Street and, to a slightly lesser extent, Rudniki Street—were Ruthenian streets, and the household baths were clearly concentrated in Ruthenian neighborhoods. Was this a reflection of confessional and cultural differences in this highly mixed city, in a period when western Europe was coming to see contact with water as a threat and an invitation to disease and to equate cleanliness with frequent changes of baggy linens and the use of perfume?109

~ c h a p t e r two~

The Neighbors

A

s we have seen in the previous chapter, house ownership in seventeenth-century Wilno was shaped by tendencies to buy real property in neighborhoods in which one confession might predominate, tendencies that could, however, accommodate greater and lesser numbers of confessional and religious outsiders. Romans settled, in general, to the west of the Royal Way and Greeks to the east, where most of their respective places of worship were located. There were three recognizable Lutheran settlements: the elite—professionals, merchants, and magistrates—in Castle Street, with a few in German Street; the middle tier of lesser merchants and artisans in and around Glass Street; and lowlier sorts—above all the white-leather tanners—in the Szerejkiszki and Antokol suburbs. Calvinist burgher elites gathered on Castle Street, across from their Lutheran counterparts and cousins. The most thoroughly Ruthenian, even Orthodox, street in the seventeenth century was Subocz Street, although we still find evidence of what must have been a denser settlement radiating out from there toward the Sharp, Horse, and Rudniki Street neighborhoods to the west and south and toward the Sawicz and Bakszta Street neighborhoods to the north, including the eastern side of Market Square. Some Roman Catholics could be found in most neighborhoods, elites in the Market Square and Horse and Rudniki Street neighborhoods, more modest families in the Skop and Bernardine Street areas living under the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Chapter. Nobles—by now mostly Roman Catholic—were most densely concentrated in the Dominican Street-Troki Street axis, with a few more important houses in Castle Street, plus individual instances elsewhere. And the suburbs tended to form satellites from these settlements—Greeks in Transfluvia and beyond Subocz, Sharp, and Rudniki Gates and Romans beyond Troki, Wilia, Tatar, and Castle Gates. Jews were beginning to gather in the center of the city, although their real population growth seems to have come in the second half of the seventeenth century. Tatars continued to be settled mostly in the Łukiszki suburb. But perhaps the most important constant here is that of the exception: these were tendencies toward predominance but nothing more than that; everyone had daily, close contact with individuals of other groups, for among other reasons because they owned property and lived in the neighborhood.

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But what about the “neighbors”? The preceding sketch of the ethnoconfessional profiles of Wilno neighborhoods is based solely on the identities of property owners. The term “neighbor”—in Polish, sa˛siad—had a different, more technical, meaning in the seventeenth century. In many contexts (though not all) it did not signify those who lived together in a “neighborhood,” as I have been using the term so far. In its more technical sense, it referred rather to “subletters,” renters of dwelling spaces within the walls of one house.1 In 1670, then councillor (later burgomaster and finally wójt) Andrzej Gierkiewicz purchased a house on German Street next to the Kiszka Town House (in other words either 26.03 or 26.05). The Lustration of 1636 tells us that the first address had “seven chambers, upstairs and downstairs, two stores, an apothecary, two basements, a stable for four horses, a garden in the back”; the second, “two chambers with alcoves, three [chambers] in the back without alcoves, one store, one basement.”2 Not a word about the neighbors in either house because they were of no interest to the quartermaster. A hearth-tax census from 1690 of the houses of the city of Wilno under the jurisdiction of the magistracy described the same house (whichever one it was) in these terms: “The large bricked town house of His Grace Lord Gierkiewicz, wójt of Wilno. His Grace himself lives there, together with four Christian neighbors, seven Jewish neighbors.”3 The order of houses in the census of 1690 suggests that it was the house at German Street 26.03, once owned by royal doctor and memoirist Maciej Vorbek-Lettow, that Gierkiewicz had purchased. Whichever house it was (and it was clearly rebuilt and expanded after the destruction associated with the Muscovite siege and occupation of 1655), a comparison of the two surveys—that of 1636 and that of 1690—makes it amply clear that all the chambers, with and without associated alcoves, kitchens, etc., which were simply enumerated in the Lustration of 1636, were potentially occupied by an equal number of neighbors. It also shows that many of the chambers, if not all of them, were actually occupied. Here we see that Gierkiewicz, the wójt of Wilno, the highest official in the ruling elite, lived in a large house but with eleven other neighbors. (Like many of the elite, he also owned some smaller, probably wooden house in the Łukiszki suburb on the River Wilia—this one with only one hearth.)4 Thus the house on German Street must have had at least twelve chambers by this time. A neighbor was usually not one person but a family unit, which might include some sort of service entourage and apprentices, gathered around one hearth (i.e., in the heated chamber).5 A conservative multiplier of five for the family, plus two for any entourage, would place eighty-four inhabitants in Gierkiewicz’s house on Castle Street in 1690 (probably one the city’s largest houses). Finally, the record suggests that the neighbors might not be of one’s own confession or, in this case, even one’s own religion. Paradoxically enough, surveys like this tell us which houses were shared by Christians and Jews; they even give us a sense of the relative numbers of adherents of the two religions inhabiting the various chambers of one house. And yet, since such documents never identified Christians by confession, we are left to guess whether the Christian neighbors were of the same confession as the Christian owner of the house. This is doubly paradoxical in that we

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have so much less information about Jews in Wilno than about the Christians. But since the Jews were almost always noted as “other” and members of the Christian confessions were not, the few surveys provide a much more detailed picture of Jewish-Christian cohabitation of houses than of, say, Catholic-Lutheran cohabitation. So let us begin with the Jewish neighbors. Jews were not supposed to live in burgher houses. The magistracy had attempted to keep them out, and Jewish authorities themselves—apparently in an attempt to ward off potential for this sort of domestic conflict—sought to ban the practice. But burghers offered rooms for rent and houses to hold in arenda (a system of leasing fixed assets or prerogatives), and Jews took them. In 1679, the Va'ad, or Council, of the Chief Lithuanian Jewish Communities, entered a specific regulation in this matter (here with reference to a case in Grodno): Dwelling in non-Jewish houses is absolutely forbidden in any regard . . . with the exception of the houses of the nobles, where dwelling was permitted from the very beginning. Every other non-Jewish house—no matter whose it might be—is declared a forbidden morsel for everyone who bears the name of Israel, and it is forbidden to take up residence in it, whether for temporary or for permanent dwelling.6

Who was doing the forbidding and the permitting here? The permission—“from the very beginning”—to live in the houses of the nobles clearly came, as we have seen, as much from the Christian side as from that of the Jewish community. Conversely, King Michał Korybut Wis´niowiecki’s 1669 decree that Jews should be given additional time to buy up residences in Wilno’s Jewish quarter and would thus have to be allowed to continue residing “in other streets and houses” for another twenty years tacitly acknowledged that Jews might be living in Christian houses of various jurisdictions. Thus, as far as burgher houses were concerned, it would seem that the Va'ad’s ban came largely as a Jewish initiative and was an expression of Jewish concerns about the situation. The surveys of Wilno houses conducted in 1636 and 1690 indicate that Jews were indeed living in Gentile houses—and perhaps more so at the end of the century than at the beginning. The survey of 1636 told, for instance, of the house of one Antoni Krot, apothecary, under the episcopal jurisdiction on St. Nicholas Street at 28.06 (i.e., in the block below German Street intended for Jewish residence and on which street Jews were in fact living at that time). This was a large structure containing some sixteen chambers “in which Jews live as renters, as well as various Christian tenants.”7 In spite of a 1633 privilege granted to the Jews that freed them from the obligation to provide lodging to official entourages (“even during Our Royal presence”),8 many Jewish houses did receive guests when the king visited Wilno in 1636 and in 1639. The map of guests provides ancillary information for a socioconfessional topography of the city. Modest individuals were assigned modest quarters. “Tomasz, His Royal Majesty’s tailor,” for instance, stayed in the single-chamber wooden house at the top of Castle Street, just under the Lower

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Castle (1.01); it was then owned or inhabited by a certain Matys Walecki.9 “Jerzyna [i.e., “George’s wife”], His Royal Majesty’s washerwoman” lived in the alleyway leading to the Royal Mill (51.03) in the house of “Piotr the blacksmith.”10 We discover that in 1639 two doors down, in the house of Lutheran white-leather (chamois) tanner Paweł Rejchowicz at 50.01, “His Royal Majesty’s footmen had previously lodged, and even now Michał, Wilhelm, and Antoni were lodging there.”11 By contrast—an indication of relative priorities?—“His Royal Majesty’s marzipan maker [pasztetnik], Sir Gronostajski,” had lodgings in the rear of a house of some splendor (two stories, five chambers) right on Market Square (3.05). His neighbors there were among the “better” sort of temporary guests: at 3.04 we find the “Court Under-Treasurer of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania” (in 1636 that was Piotr Pac) and at 3.06 “Lady Rajecka, wife of the judge of Troki.”12 (This was Princess Regina Drucka Sokolin´ska, wife of land judge of Troki Olbrycht Dunin Rajecki, widowed since 1633.) Thus the guests formed neighborhoods of their own, in parallel to the more permanent neighborhoods in which they resided. And the fact that they were frequently present in the city, often for weeks and months at a time, meant that they played some role in defining those “permanent” neighborhoods. Władysław IV, as we know, made five trips to his second capital city—in 1634, 1636, 1639, 1643, and 1648.13 A comparison of the Lustrations of 1636 and 1639 indicates a considerable continuity in the location of guests. These patterns add to our picture of Jews and Christians in one house and of Lutherans and Jews in one neighborhood. In 1636, thirty-three houses were required to offer shelter to His Royal Majesty’s muzyka, i.e., musicians of various sorts. Władysław IV was a great fan of Italian opera, and his personal company traveled with him.14 The map of “musical houses” overlapped to a remarkable extent with the larger neighborhood of Jews and Lutheran artisans and petty merchants on Glass Street, Jewish Street, and Meat Shop Street but also on St. Nicholas Street below German Street, which abutted on several Lutheran properties, including that of the church itself (i.e., addresses in the range 18.01–25.04 and 28.01–28.10).15 One house on St. John Street (32.01) was also assigned to the royal music. Although it came considerably later in the survey, it was on the corner of Glass Street and St. John Street, right next to Glass Street 21.05 and thus a contiguous part of the “musicians’ quarter,” even if a somewhat better address. It was the house of Lutheran municipal clockmaker Jakub Gierke. Gierke was the father of Wójt Andrzej Gierkiewicz, who must have converted to Roman Catholicism in order to pursue a career on the Roman side of the magistracy in the period after the royal decree of 1666.16 The musical guests had clearly been ghettoized. One wonders what the neighborhood sounded like when the king was in town. But although the city’s Jews were concentrated in those streets, Jewish houses were not particularly targeted here within the area. Musicians lodged in houses throughout the neighborhood, both Christian and Jewish. In fact, one reason for the choice of locating musical guests here may well have been the presence of the widow of Balcer Danquart at Meat Shop Street 19.04. Danquart (Tanguatt, Danguatt,

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Dankwart) had served “all his life” as one of the king’s chief local musicians, and his son Jan was continuing in the music business, serving the king and the nobles by producing stringed instruments; he resided in his parents’ house when he was in town.17 (Balcer’s grandson Jerzy would sell the house to Jewish buyers in 1689.)18 Thus musicians were placed in the not very compact streets of the official Jewish settlement (including St. Nicholas Street below German Street) but also in equal concentrations on Glass Street with its mostly Lutheran owners and some Jewish neighbors. Nine of the houses in question had Jewish owners or chief renters. The other twenty-four were Christian houses, although Jews were among the renters of chambers. In any event, the location of musical guests clearly provided one more link between Jews and networks of middle-level Lutherans and put Christian musicians, for frequent and lengthy stays, in Jewish houses.19 The 1690 hearth-tax survey of Wilno, which carefully noted the presence of Jewish neighbors, tells us two things: that many Jews still lived well outside the allotted streets and that Jews lived in Christian houses. The latter may have been the case in most of the houses listed as containing Jewish neighbors. There were thirty-one such dwellings.20 (This was in addition to the twenty-two houses “subject to the Wilno synagogue” that were surveyed separately, together with their unidentified but presumably Jewish neighbors.)21 But in several cases, as in that of Wójt Gierkiewicz, the situation was made absolutely clear. Christian clergy—to turn now to the question of Christian neighbors—frequently called upon the faithful to avoid communion with those of other confessions in contexts like baptisms, marriages, schools, and funerals, calls that were frequently ignored. I am unaware of any statements on the part of the clergy or of decrees from secular governing bodies—as we have found on the question of Christian-Jewish cohabitation of houses—that sought to limit the sorts of direct contact between the Christian confessions that would arise through the renting of chambers in one house. But did this happen? Did, for instance, Lutheran Vilnans rent rooms in Calvinist-, or Catholic-, or Ruthenian-owned houses? Lacking even the sort of quantifiable evidence offered by the hearth-tax survey of 1690 for Jewish renters, I am forced to resort here to anecdotal evidence and hypotheses based on other patterns of community formation, a sense of which should become clearer in the course of this book. One rare, practically unique document allows me to inhabit a house with its neighbors. The Lustration of 1636 had given only a physical description. This was the large house of Jarosz Jabłko, apothecary, at Castle Street 1.37, in other words, an address on one of Wilno’s “more fashionable streets or ways.” Jabłko’s neighbors at Castle Street 1.38 were the sons of Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł (“the Orphan”): in 1636, castellan of Wilno, Prince Albrycht Władysław Radziwiłł (d. 1636), and in 1639 his brother, grand marshal of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Prince Aleksander Ludwik Radziwiłł (d. 1654). After Jarosz’s death, the house became the property of his daughter Cecylia and her husband, royal cannon founder Joannes Brentell. A survey of the property done on 9 March 1652 and entered into the acta of the Wilno magistracy tells us something about the neighbors:

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First, facing the street, an apothecary’s shop with a little chamber, from which the yearly rent brings 80 florins. The payment year begins from the Ruthenian Shrovetide. Facing the street, a vaulted tavern chamber with a brewery, an apartment, and a basement, from which dwellings there comes 100 Polish zł in rent. The payment year begins on the Roman Candlemas. A basement from the street side, for rent, bringing 50 zł. A vaulted chamber, in which a tailor lives, brings in rent 30 zł. The year begins on the Roman Shrove Tuesday. And empty shop for rent. An empty second-story dwelling for guests, 10 florins per week. A little chamber in front of the kitchen, where the gatekeeper lives; brings 12 1/2 zł. The year begins with Christmas. A chamber with a dwelling space on the second floor, where a furrier lives, pays 30 zł in rent. The year begins a week after the feast of SS. Simon and Jude. A chamber with a dwelling space, where a baker lives, likewise pays 30 zł. The year begins in Advent in December, three weeks before Christmas. A chamber with a recess, where an embroiderer lives, pays 30 zł. The year for the payment of rent begins with the feast of SS. Simon and Jude. A little chamber in the back is vacant. A chamber in which a cobbler lives, from which he pays rent of 30 zł. The year begins with the feast of St. Mary Magdalene. A chamber where a tailor’s widow lives, pays 17 zł, 15 gr Polish. The rental year begins with the feast of St. Mary Magdalene. In the back, a chamber for rent, from which 30 zł in rent is to come. In the back, a ruined chamber.22

This survey confirms three important notions. First, the chamber, sometimes with an adjacent alcove (komora), vestibule (sien´), and perhaps a kitchen, functioned as the core dwelling space for a family unit, and each might be occupied by a different family unit. Second, the professions of the neighbors—and thus also their wealth and social status—might cover a wide range. Third, the renters might be of various confessions: how else are we to interpret the fact that as late as 1652 rents in this particular house fell due on two different calendars? Another document makes this last phenomenon absolutely clear. In response to allegations in 1646 that—in spite of the ban placed upon them in 1640—the Calvinists were continuing to meet and to hold religious services and synods at their old seat within the city walls, officials canvassed the neighbors to discover what they had seen and heard: And first of all, when Mr. Daniel Hanke, a citizen and merchant of Wilno, was questioned, he testified sub conscientia [by his faith] that here, where we have been living for

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several years, there have never been any church services or synods or commotions. Then we went to a weaver by the name of Jan Tum, a German, and we asked him about the above-mentioned things. And he also testified by his word that he and his journeymen had neither seen nor heard any of those things. Then we went to a tailor by the name of Hendrych Heyn, asking him whether any synods or church services of the Evangelical [i.e., Reformed] religion had taken place since the above-mentioned time. He, too, testified by his word that there had never been any of the aforementioned things. Then we went to a second weaver by the name of Piotr Kant. He too witnessed by his word the same as the others. Finally we went to Iwan Bielski, tailor, also living there in the very gate to the estate, and he testified to the same thing by his word—that there had been neither commotions, nor any sort of synods, nor Evangelical church services. All the abovementioned artisans are citizens of Wilno and guild members, some of the Catholic religion, some of the Saxon, others of the Ruthenian Uniate religion.23

This is a unique document in that it identifies the Christian citizens of Wilno by their confession. It is obvious to what end the investigators made an exception to the rule in this instance: the fact that neighbors of a variety of confessions—none of them Calvinist—all agreed on the matter lent added weight to their testimony exonerating the Calvinists. But what is important here is that the document suggests that, for instance, a Catholic-owned house in a neighborhood of predominately Catholic proprietors may have given shelter to anonymous neighbors of a variety of confessions. Most noteworthy, in this instance, is the presence of otherwise anonymous Lutherans. This was a neighborhood in which there was not a single Lutheran property owner in 1636 and 1639 and where there were no other indications of a Lutheran presence, and yet a chance document reveals a Lutheran neighbor. In any event, the two documents raise the question whether other houses were similarly mixed and thus whether the neighborhoods—once we include the neighbors in the technical sense of the term—were more diverse than they would seem if we look only at the owners of real estate. The rest of the evidence remains of the anecdotal sort. Most of this type of information comes in the form of descriptions of “crime scenes” included in protestations registered with the various courts. Here is one. On 28 August 1664 a certain Anna Nejmanówna, wife of Jan Norwej, came before the court of the bench to register a complaint against Ambroz∧y Mejer. In short, the aforementioned Ambroz∧y Mejer, having forgotten the fear of God and the severity of common law, . . . not enough that he had abandoned his own wife in Lübeck and seduced a certain girl and got her with child, but then he fled from Lübeck to Wilno, where, living in the town house of His Grace Lord Litaw on German Street, and my husband and I there together as well, he tried to persuade me that I should break the matrimonial oath to my husband and be obedient to him. And since he was very irked [by my refusal], we had to move to another town house, that of Mitasz.24

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Mejer decided to exact revenge against the couple and their family, and the remainder of the complaint tells of the drastic events that met a highly pregnant Nejmanówna, her husband, and their young children. These included incarcerating first the husband, then the soon-tobe-delivered wife in his stead, then their ten-year-old son as a kind of surety against their flight, followed by an armed incursion in the apartment of the postpartum mother, during which the newborn was thrown out of its crib. What is important here is the location of the events and the identities of the participants. “Litaw” was the Lutheran royal doctor and memoirist Maciej Vorbek-Lettow, who owned two houses on German Street, at 26.03 and 27.04. Communion records of the Calvinist church and offering rolls of the Lutherans tell us that Norwej was of the Augsburg confession, Meyer of the Reformed.25 Thus the Lutheran Norwej family had first sought lodging in a Lutheranowned house. And a Calvinist would subsequently become a neighbor, a fellow renter of a chamber or an alcove, in the house in which they were living. This was not an unusual confessional juxtaposition in Wilno, although most of the other cases I have encountered were quite different, ranging from peaceful coexistence to matrimonial unions. When the Norwejs felt the need to move out, they moved within the neighborhood, to the house of Stefan Mitasz at 27.11, which was just across the street from Litaw’s house at German Street 26.03 and down the street from his second residence at 27.04. I can offer no positive confessional identity for Mitasz, although he shows up nowhere in Lutheran or Calvinist circles, which would suggest that he was Roman Catholic. Another complaint was about verbal violence. On 24 April 1663, Jakub Desaus II entered a protestation against Daniel Hartman with the Wilno court of the bench.26 The events in question had taken place during and after “the wedding of His Grace Lord Mones.” Henryk Mones was a Calvinist, the last Protestant burgomaster of Wilno; he would go on to hold a variety of appointed offices, including that of postmaster general of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Through his second marriage with a member of the Sztrunk family he was thoroughly implicated in the Lutheran circles of Castle Street. The wedding in question, however, was actually not Mones’s own but rather that of his Calvinist daughter (from his first marriage), Barbara, with Jan Sztrunk III, a Lutheran cousin of Mones’s own second wife. (The Sztrunk family house was at Castle Street 2.10.) Presumably the wedding party took place somewhere on Castle Street. (The widow of arch-Catholic Krzysztof Chodkiewicz offered the family palace at Castle Street 1.34 when, in April of the fateful year of 1655, Mones himself sought a place to put on his own second wedding feast.)27 The alleged crime took place during the celebrations, when the plaintiff, having gone downstairs to take care of his own need [i.e., to use the “necessary alcove,” or toilet], was once again going back upstairs, the aforementioned inculpatus [accused], having run into the plaintiff on the steps as he was going downstairs, without giving even the least cause, began immediately, with most harmful words, to

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revile and shame [the plaintiff’s honor], saying: “do you remember, you scoundrel, what you said to me?”

Whatever Desaus may once have said to Hartman, it was enough, according to the plaintiff, to move the accused to resort to much more extreme language and measures, including threats of violence through “third parties” and a challenge to a duel, with pistols at dawn, which the plaintiff decided to sleep through, since such things were contrary to divine commandments and human law. The challenge to the duel had been shouted from the street “in front of the bricked town house where both he himself, inculpatus, and protestans [the plaintiff] live.” This may have been the Desaus family house at Castle Street 1.26, a portion of which was still in Jakub II’s possession when he signed his will on 13 November 1675.28 We know from other sources that Desaus was a member of the Reformed Church and Hartman a “Saxon.”29 This would suggest that in this instance a Lutheran neighbor was paying rent to a Calvinist landlord. Still, confession played no overt role in the altercation: the scene of the crime, after all, was a wedding between a Lutheran groom and a Calvinist bride (and the Calvinist father of the bride himself had wedded a Lutheran eight years earlier). Finally, we find one more case of alleged violence in Protestant circles. Lutheran barbersurgeon “Andrzej Ofman” (Andreas Hoffman) had married the widow of Calvinist barbersurgeon Jan Majer, thereby taking over “the Majer Town House” at Castle Street 2.05.30 On 2 December 1675 Hoffman’s son-in-law Jerzy Gross registered a complaint in the acta of the court of the bench against one Dorota Zebertowska, widow of Hrehor Tomkowid.31 The charge was defamation through the usual “licentious words,” but also with an accompanying lewd act: “And what is more, not being satisfied with this, having cast her entire shame to the side, having lifted up her skirts (si licet cum venia dicere [if one may be given leave to say so]), she uncovered her body up to the waist with great abuse and derision.” According to Gross, the reason she so dishonored him was that having rented through a certain contract a dwelling place in the house of Mr. Andrzej Hoffman, burgher of Wilno and father-in-law protestantis [of the plaintiff], and living there for no little time, having forgotten the fear of God and the severity of common law, as well as the honor of the widowed state, [the accused] began to lead a dissolute life; then the protestans, guarding the honor of his father’s house, that such deviations not occur in their dwelling, asked various friends, especially noble Mrs. Rychter, wife of a burgomaster of Wilno and sister of the accused, as well as the renowned Mr. Jakub Leszczewicz, burgher and merchant of Wilno, as her curator, that they might deign confidenter [confidentially] to rebuke her for her evil and dissolute life.

The important information here is that the accused was renting a room in a Lutheran house and that the plaintiff had first attempted to influence her behavior by going to her friends

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(and he named them), the circle responsible for giving her advice in financial, legal, and social matters. Zebertowska’s husband may have been Ruthenian—his name was given as Hrehor, after all, not Grzegorz (Ruthenian and Polish versions, respectively, of Gregory). But there is every indication that she was herself Roman Catholic. She does not appear under her own name (as widows regularly did) on the rolls of Lutheran offerings, and her friends were Catholic: her sister was the wife of Catholic burgomaster Mikołaj Rychter (who in spite of his German surname was no convert, although we often find him in Lutheran circles); and her curator (he would have been named in her husband’s will) was Catholic merchant Jakub Leszczewicz.32 What the data on Jewish and Christian neighbors—both from surveys and from anecdotes—suggest is that we should not be particularly surprised to find neighbors in a single house from all the confessions and from both the Christian and Jewish religions, regardless of the confession of the house owner or of the preponderant confession in the larger neighborhood. After all, if we learn of the cohabitation of one house by multiple confessions largely through litigation over conflicts (and those conflicts seem not to have been confessionally motivated), how many other, more harmonious cases must have escaped documentation? That said, my suspicion is that the renters sought dwellings in much the same way Vilnans entered into other social networks—the most natural choice was with your own, and after that, certain types of networks were more natural (e.g., Lutheran-Calvinist, Uniate-Orthodox, Catholic-Uniate)—but that, especially for those in need, a roof over one’s head was a roof, and rental income was income, regardless of who was providing and receiving it. If, as we will see later, every possible confessional combination is to be found among married couples in Wilno, we should expect at least the same proportions among the renters and thus imagine tendencies to rent from (and to) members of one’s own confession, but with considerable room for exceptions.

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One Roof, Four Walls

W

hat was at stake when a Vilnan of one confession or religion became a neighbor in a house owned by someone of another, or found neighbors of other confessions and religions already living there? This goes to questions of public and private space within the walls of a privately owned house. The Lustration of 1636 is of little use here in that it enumerates types of rooms, sometimes with a bit of information on their relative locations and size but with nothing that would allow us to imagine how the inhabitants of a given home negotiated its internal space. More eloquent on this topic are the extensive inventories of individual houses, often done in connection with contested inheritances; these sometimes offer a clearer image of movement through rooms, nooks, and crannies than the often laconic entries from the Lustrations of 1636 and 1639. And, once again, protestations, carefully read, can provide sources for spatial imagination. A large number of the recorded protestations had to do, after all, with what we might call “domestic violence”—conflicts between members of one family but also between neighbors, between renters of rooms within the walls of one house. Here, too, the evidence is anecdotal but highly suggestive. On 8 June 1676 a certain Katarzyna Krakówna Masnerowa, widow of stonemason Antoni Masner, “came personally to the acta of the noble Wilno court of the bench” (i.e., to a session of the court with the intent of entering a document into the acta) and made her “solemn manifestation and protestation” against a stocking weaver named Franciszek Rodziewicz, who happened to be renting accommodations from her.1 The story went like this. Rodziewicz had “begged” Masnerowa to rent him a place to live in her abode. The closeness of the encounter was to lead to problems. Masnerowa—no doubt with the help of a notary—put it this way: Living [here] for four years with another stocking weaver, he wished that the plaintiff give her daughter to him in the state of matrimony. But since the plaintiff did not wish to do this—since her daughter herself did not wish to marry him—the accused, having forgotten the fear of God and the severity of common law, wishing to bring it about by evil means that she marry him, having waited for the time when the plaintiff together with her

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daughter and their neighbor, a tailor’s wife, had gone to the baths on Wednesday of Mid-Lent, and the accused remained in the dwelling all by himself with just a little boy, the son of the tailor’s wife, then looking for something in the plaintiff’s bed—or perhaps he purposely sought the [night]shirt of her daughter (which she had put away deep under the straw at the head of the bed, and especially since it was soiled menstruis [with menstrual blood])—and having found it, and having torn four rags from it cum praefatis menstruis [with the aforementioned menstrual blood], he had tucked them away in his pocket, and the plaintiff would not have known of this if the aforementioned little boy had not told [the story] to the plaintiff as soon as they had returned from the baths. Whereupon the plaintiff, seeking to prevent the accused from doing anything bad, began to look in his dwelling space [u niego] for those rags torn out of the shirt, and having found them, together with the neighbor, the tailor’s wife, they barely managed to tear away three rags, but the fourth they were unable to take away, and it remained with him. And having that rag, he made the following boasts in these words: “Because you do not wish to give up your daughter to marry me, you will give her up against your will. For I will work it upon her hairs or upon some trace [corrected in the protocol from “shadow”] of her, such that even if I should be a hundred miles from Wilno, your daughter will pine for me and will run after me like a mad woman, and she must marry me.

In fact, the plaintiff tacitly acknowledged the efficacy of her tenant’s witchcraft upon her daughter, testifying that “indeed, she is greatly changed; for she, who was ruddy and happy, is now pale and melancholy.” A description of yet another altercation with the violent and drunken stocking weaver ended with a further shirt-tearing incident. In this case, the victims were again the plaintiff’s daughter and the cobbler’s wife, their neighbor. Here, too, it would seem likely that the concern— and hence the motivation for the inclusion of the detail—was that the stocking weaver was collecting physical traces of his potential victims upon which to work their bewitchment. But the framework and backdrop for the story of the gradual collection of traces was informed in large measure by concerns about space and boundaries. Masnerowa clearly regretted allowing herself to be “entreated” four years earlier by the stocking weaver to rent him a room or a part of a room. The verb is a bit stronger in Polish. Uprosiwszy sie˛ na mieszkanie: Rodziewicz had begged and wheedled until he finally got what he wanted. But what did he get for his money? Houses of that place and time were not designed for privacy. Inventories indicate that the core of a dwelling space was the heated chamber, but there were no shared corridors providing access to private apartments. Neighbors often had to walk through one another’s rooms to get home. At best they might enter their own space by way of the wooden galleries perched around an internal courtyard at the level of every floor beginning with the second. A series of outdoor stairwells connected the ground with the galleries. But even this architectural feature—of limited use for access to interior rooms and alcoves—could not provide what we think of as privacy. Neighbors using the galleries as their path home would

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constantly see, hear, and smell what was going on in the other neighbors’ spaces as they walked past the courtyard windows. Before the changes in attitudes and the architectural innovations of the eighteenth century, no one was ever alone.2 An altercation that occurred in May 1678 in the house of Uniate city councillor Aleksander Ihnatowicz (Market Square 4.05) involved two women whose families lived “on the same gallery” (na jednym ganku).3 The one complained that the other had called her a murwa (a euphemism for kurwa, which was, and is, the worst thing you could call a woman in Polish) “and nothing good,” and that she had told her to “take your Jewish bastards, unbaptized puppies, from the gallery, or I will throw them off like dogs.” It is possible that confessional difference (“unbaptized puppies”) played some role here, but it may just have been a useful rhetorical tool in the larger conflict, much of which seems to have had to do with living at close quarters. But to return to our spell-working stocking weaver, Rodziewicz—whether he had his own chamber or just some space behind a curtain in an alcove—was sharing quarters with, and no doubt subletting it to, another stocking weaver. In a complaint from 14 October 1671, Roman Kołczan added living arrangements to the list of attributes disqualifying his opponent Stanisław Dziedzin´ski from serious regard: “He has no fixed abode, but only lives in a rented alcove.”4 The phrase komora˛z∧yc´ (to live in an alcove) now means simply to rent a room; it is what a student might do. In the seventeenth century it was a simple statement of fact; the alcove was separated from the chamber by little or nothing. Those who lived in an alcove were a part of the “family” occupying the chamber and its associated nooks and crannies. We do not know whether Masnerowa was the owner of the whole house. I suspect she was not. She was an otherwise anonymous Vilnan. She may well have been subdividing some “apartment” that was rented to her. She used the term mieszkanie to identify both her own dwelling space and the object of Rodziewicz’s entreaties. This was how she described the second shirt-ripping incident: “Having enjoyed himself in a tavern somewhere until midnight on the day of the seventh of June, having arrived home drunk, when the plaintiff did not wish to let him into the [her/their] apartment, he broke the shutter with a rock and attempted to crawl in through the window.” The Polish phrase here, lacking a demonstrative pronoun (Slavic languages have no articles) or possessive adjective, was normal usage—do mieszkania. It does not tell us whether this was her apartment or the—that is, their—apartment. And in fact, the normal modern translation of the word as “apartment” is misleading here: in that day, it meant simply a “dwelling space,” the boundaries of which may not have been too tightly drawn. The impression remains that she had locked him out of his own dwelling space and not that he was primarily attempting to break into hers. At a minimum, the entry from the outside was the same for both of them and, indeed, for the other neighbors as well. The cobbler’s wife, after all, also got involved in the altercation and surrendered a piece of her own nightshirt in the process. Rodziewicz probably slept in the same room with his professional colleague, perhaps in the same bed. Masnerowa and daughter seem to have slept on the same straw, and

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Rodziewicz apparently knew this, since he knew to seek the daughter’s nightshirt in the mother’s bed. The other neighbors had the run of the place as well. The situation seems to have been that of two unmarried adult men, the stocking weavers, living in close proximity to widows and their children, including a girl Rodziewicz may have watched pass from childhood to marriageable age. Masnerowa was attempting to draw some boundaries in a space that allowed for little or no privacy. She had bolted the door and closed the shutters. Contemporary inventories tell us in great detail about the layout of houses and the succession of rooms, whether or not there were locks on the doors or shutters on the windows, and whether the key was still to be found. All security and what little privacy there was depended on these locks and keys. Employing them naturally brought consequences like late-night ruckuses between the neighbors who were locked in for the night and those who had been out on the town. Read in the light of the events like those described in Masnerova’s complaint, an otherwise highly prosaic inventory takes on added significance. Calvinist merchant Korneliusz Winhold II died on 31 May 1638. His Lutheran wife, Katarzyna Giblówna Winholdowa, must have died by 1644. In that year her sister Elz∧bieta Giblówna, widow of Jan Sztrunk II, took possession of the Winhold house at Castle Street 1.16 from the guardians of the estate, who seem to have been her brothers Tomasz and Jakub Gibel II. The lone heir to the estate, Jakub Winhold, was still living, but he could have been no more than twelve years old.5 Presumably Elz∧bieta Giblówna was functioning as an in situ guardian for her nephew, since her brothers, as was common among second-generation members of the urban elite who aped the nobles, seem to have preferred country life to city air. When she took possession of the house in 1644, she also received a lengthy inventory, only one paragraph of which I cite below: Inventory of the survey of the Winhold bricked house that lies on Castle Street. The year 1644. First, a gate on swivels, a wicket on hinges, on which gate a bolted lock, with an iron to bolt the wicket, one key for the wicket, to the gate itself a padlock with a key. Going from the gate, on the left-hand side, little vestibules, from these vestibules, a door on hinges, with a large lock and a key. From the vestibules a door to a kitchen on hinges with an old lock and a handle, in the kitchen a fireplace for cooking in good shape, one window with leaded glass with an iron grating, a cupboard in this same kitchen, five little doors to it with internal locks and a key, and the sixth little door with a latch, for this cupboard only one key. A kitchen storage cupboard, to which two doors, one with a lock and a key, and the other without a key. A third storage place without doors. A stove in the kitchen for heating the room, to which little iron doors. From this vestibule, doors to a chamber on hinges with a bolted lock, with a handle and one key.6

And so on for nine more such paragraphs. One is struck here by the sense of passing from room to room without any clear demarcation of where one potential apartment might be carved out and set in opposition to the next. Presumably the owner would offer a chamber

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for rent to an individual family and then figure out what associated alcoves, vestibules, kitchens, etc. might form a part of the allotted space. Perhaps some of the associated rooms were shared between neighbors. What privacy there was came in the form of a seemingly unending series of doors to rooms and of cabinets with multitudes of little doors and drawers, all outfitted with locks and keys. Access to the house’s single “necessary alcove” (komórka potrzebna, i.e., the toilet) may have been an object of negotiation between the owner and the neighbors. It had a “little door . . . on hinges with a latch,” but no lock! We must suspect that these physical layouts and housing practices led to common occupancy of internal space by members of the various Christian confessions unrelated by blood or matrimony. But here, too, since the issue was such a potentially dangerous one, it is the Christian-Jewish case that, paradoxically, is best documented, both in prescriptive statements and in anecdotal evidence. I will begin with one of the anecdotes. On 20 May 1638, a Jew of Wilno named Mendel Samuelowicz called upon Jan Gronostajski, general of His Royal Majesty in the palatinate of Wilno, on official business. A “general” was a chief bailiff (woz´ny generalny) for the nobles’ castle court, which was also the forum that heard cases brought by Jews. Generals were frequently called upon to take testimony, deliver summonses, collect evidence, etc. As a subject of the castle court, Samuelowicz had turned to the correct jurisdiction, and the beginning of the general’s official report (kwit) was the standard boilerplate. At the request of Samuelowicz, and accompanied—as foreseen by the Lithuanian statute—by two noblemen (named here, as always in this genre),7 Gronostajski stated that he had gone with this Jew Mendel and with the gentry entourage to the house called Antoni’s in Wilno, situated behind the Church of St. Nicholas, to the dwelling of this Mendel, where, once I had arrived, I found lying on a bed the sick servant girl of that Mendel. She was called Nastazja Jakubówna from Róz∧anka, and by her sat her mother, she was called Orszula Jakubowa, and quite a few other women sat there.8

This was probably the house of Antoni Krot, apothecary, at 28.06 St. Nicholas Street, a large structure in 1636 containing some sixteen chambers “in which Jews live as renters, as well as various Christian tenants.”9 Samuelowicz had summoned the general in order to have the girl’s testimony officially registered with the court. “The Lord God has visited this sickness upon me,” she reportedly said. “There is no [other] cause, no one owes me anything.” And her mother, sitting by her, corroborated her story: “There is no need for a cause, when the Lord God decides to visit someone. My daughter never suffered any harm, nor does she now, and nothing harms her in any way. If only the Lord God would wish to have mercy and to grant her health.” The general’s report did (and yet did not completely) make clear what was at stake here: “Which words that Jew Mendel had attested by me, the general, and by the noble entourage, for a future time, if she—God forbid!—should die, so that he not have any trouble.” The crux

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of the matter was, of course, that the “landlord” was a Jew, and that his sick servant was a Christian, and a young girl at that, perhaps Ruthenian, given her first name. This was certainly a delicate situation, and Samuelowicz was attempting to avoid trouble—perhaps allegations of poisoning or other mistreatment—should the girl die. Among the things that made the situation so sensitive was the fact that masters and servants shared rooms, often just one chamber, with its various recesses and alcoves for sleeping areas. In fact, the Sejms frequently forbade Christians to work as servants for Jews.10 Jewish regulations—apparently responding to the same sorts of fears that had led Samuelowicz to seek out the general—followed suit, but only to a point. The Va'ad of the Chief Lithuanian Jewish Communities meeting in 1628 in Pruz∧any addressed the issue in the following manner: In view of the fact that our enemies are up in arms against us and, like a prickly thorn, are a hindrance for us through their intrigues and scoffing on account of non-Jewish servant women serving in Jewish houses, and in view of the fact that it is absolutely impossible to do away with this [practice] for now without damage to the interests of all, we perceive the necessity to limit—to the extent possible—the employment of such services. It has become clear to us that it is necessary to assert firmly . . . this inviolable law: not to keep in one dwelling, called a stube [i.e., chamber, the Polish izba], more than one non-Jewish servant girl, even if in one stube there will live two, three, or four landlords—all of them together may not keep more than one non-Jewish servant girl.11

Thus, as far as this particular Jewish ordinance was concerned, Samuelowicz may have been in compliance (we don’t know how many Christian servants he had); but he was still in a potentially delicate situation with Christian authorities, and thus also with Jewish authorities, since the purpose of such rulings was to avoid “intrigues and scoffing.”12 Conversely, Jewish authorities placed controls on the temporary presence of unaccompanied Jewish women in Christian rooms. The Lithuanian Va'ad ruled in 1628 that any Jewish woman selling wares door-to-door “may go there [into the house of a Christian] only in the company of her husband and a boy, or a married man and a boy. . . . If she should wish to send one of them for some object, she should send the boy, such that her husband or the married man remain with her.”13 A conflict between Christian and Jewish butchers from 1667 also raised the question of cohabitation of rooms. In the course of the lengthy court battle, among other charges, the Christian side alleged that “they [the Jewish butchers] entice to themselves Christian apprentices [czeladz´], who, having caused not inconsiderable harm to their masters, and having incurred debt with them, depart from them; and they [the Jewish butchers] receive them and maintain them [i onych przechowywaja˛].”14 The allegation would imply that Christian apprentices were living with Jewish master butchers. The 1663 statute of Wilno’s Christian glaziers declared in article 47 that “those apprentices, who up to now have spent their years in study with Jews . . . just as those who had been with a bungler [partacz, nonguild artisan]” would

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have to complete the required service with a Christian master before they would be admitted to the guild. Here, too, the expressed fear is not of Jewish-Christian cohabitation of dwellings but of Jewish (or bungler) competition with the guilds. But the point remains: Christians served apprenticeships with Jewish masters and in Jewish quarters.15 Another court case took such living arrangements for granted; they were the unspoken point of departure for the protestation. A Jew of Wilno named Samuel Jakubowicz came before the castle court to lodge a complaint against his Christian servant woman, Halszka Korzewiczówna. Around five in the evening of Friday, 28 October 1644, he and his wife had gone to the synagogue for religious services. His wife had given the key to the dwelling to her seven-yearold granddaughter. Having tricked the girl into giving her the key, Korzewiczówna had entered the dwelling, opened the door to the chamber, and found the keys to the box lying on the table, from which she proceeded to steal 400 talars.16 These were clearly wealthy people, with considerable private space (recall the assumption of the Va'ad that as many as four households might occupy one chamber). But however we imagine the living arrangements, the presence of a Christian servant girl in them was taken as a given: it required no comment or defense. Did Jews and Christians go to the baths together? The Jews of Wilno possessed royal privileges for the establishment of a bricked synagogue, a cemetery, and a bath (presumably a mikvah, or ritual bath), to be heated as the Jews themselves saw fit. One of the privileges stipulated that the bath was to be “only for Jews, and in no way for Christians.”17 Perhaps this was an unnecessary restriction, but if so, one wonders why it was made. By contrast, the Cracow kahal (actually the Jewish settlement was then in the town of Kazimierz, just outside the walls of the main city) recognized that Jews might sometimes have reason and need to go to Gentile bathhouses, and it sought to control this usage. One regulation stipulated, It is forbidden for any woman or young maid to bathe in the Gentiles’ bathhouse whenever His Majesty the King or his court are visiting. . . . Should a woman require a Gentile bathhouse for remedial purposes, she must request permission from the parnas [leader] of the month. . . . Any man desiring to go to a Gentile bathhouse must first give the Jewish bathhouse owner one shilling. . . . Unmarried men and boys may not go to a Gentile bathhouse at all, . . . unless he present a written document from [the Head of the Yeshiva] permitting him to do so on account of illness, crippling injury, or a skin ailment.18

This Cracow regulation forbade Jews to use the Gentile bathhouses of both Christian Cracow and Jewish-Christian Kazimierz (an autonomous municipality just outside Cracow’s walls) during the presence of king and court. This would suggest that the Jews of Kazimierz did indeed use Gentile bathhouses when the king was not present and as far afield as Cracow. Perhaps the practice was similar in the Commonwealth’s second capital? For the sake of information: the only public baths I have encountered in the sources were on the Wilenka, near Holy Savior Gate, one apparently in Ruthenian hands, the other owned by Roman Catholics.19 I have no indications concerning the confessions of the bathers.

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And finally, what about that most common image of Jews and Christians in one room— the Jewish tavern and its Christian customers? This was, of course, an image from rural Poland-Lithuania, and it usually involved the lands and interests of the szlachta, Jewish middlemen, and Christian peasant drinkers. What was it like in this royal city? A reading of the court records suggests that many Vilnans of a range of professions made extra money by selling alcohol in “tavern chambers” (izby szynkowne) on the ground floors of their intramural houses. The magistracy of Wilno did its best to limit both the number of Jewish taverns within the walls and their availability to Christian burghers, but the course of the court battles suggests only limited success. Thus in the capital of the Grand Duchy, too, we may have reason to imagine Christians drinking in taverns that were not only Jewish-run but also Jewish-owned, and perhaps alongside Jewish fellow customers. A commission brought to Wilno to investigate an anti-Jewish tumult that had occurred on 7 March 1635 made an attempt to sort out the Jews’ and the burghers’ conflicting royal privileges. Jews were to pay an annual flat tax to the magistracy in exchange for certain rights and liberties. In particular, they were permitted szynk—i.e., the operating of a tavern—in their twenty intramural houses, but Christians, although allowed to buy, were forbidden to consume alcohol on the spot.20 But nine years later (1644) the burghers again registered a series of complaints concerning alleged Jewish harm to the interests of the city of Wilno. On the topic of alcohol, the protestation charged that Jews sold drink for consumption on the premises in more than thirty houses, sometimes in multiple taverns (szynki, izby szynkowne) per house. In a rhetorical move that looks largely like a blaming of the victim, the magistracy alleged that the antiJewish tumults that had been occurring in the city since 1635 (and which it was the magistracy’s responsibility to prevent) were the direct result of Christian commerce in Jewish taverns. The unrest in the streets and attacks on Jewish property and persons were all “because not only a servant, but even an artisan, drinking in a Jewish tavern, takes on a greater boldness for profligacy than when he drinks in a Christian tavern.” (I would note, however, that several of the protestations in the magistracy books arose out of barroom brawls that occurred between Christians and in Christian taverns.) If only, the complainants argued, the Jews would close the doors of their taverns to Christians, put gates on the entries to the Jewish neighborhood (and, of course, cease co-occupation of rooms with Christians), they would be able to live in Wilno without fear.21 In short, I suggest that here, too, we should expect to encounter in shared internal space not only people of one confession but also, and probably with a certain regularity, people of the interconfessional groupings that we will discover in familial and wider social networks. We should not be surprised to come upon—with some frequency that will remain difficult to measure with any precision—individuals of all confessions and religions in the close quarters of Wilno dwelling spaces, both as cohabitants of houses and rooms and as regular visitors.

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The Bells of Wilno

V

ilnans not only negotiated potential conflicts in shared space; they also found it necessary to address problems arising from systems and habits of marking time that both brought them together and set them apart. It was here that questions of time and space frequently coincided. There was one dominant clock and calendar in seventeenth-century Wilno—that of the new-calendar (Gregorian) Roman Catholics. But many Vilnans followed other rhythms as well: those of the Jewish and Muslim religious days, weeks, and years; those of the old Julian calendar that set the pace for the religious life of the Ruthenians, both Uniate and Orthodox. Even the Lutherans and Calvinists of Wilno, although they seem to have adhered to the Gregorian calendar from early on, were not entirely in the same time zone as their Roman Catholic neighbors when it came to religious observance and celebration. What is more, they would have been well attuned to the old calendar still used by their siblings, cousins, and other co-confessionals living in places as nearby and as frequently visited as Königsberg. The issue was not unrelated to questions of public space: who could be in the streets and where, at what times and for what purposes. But the matter also required negotiation at the more local level, among the neighbors: what to do, for instance, when one was fasting and the other feasting. The tensions appear subtler to us from a distance than those, for instance, of the “parity cities” of the Holy Roman Empire like Augsburg, where two officially equal confessions sometimes fought for supremacy and sometimes attempted to coexist, and where historiographies often use “before and after the conflict over the calendar” in their periodizations.1 But the fact that the calendar conflicts in Wilno seem muted in comparison should not make us insensitive to what must have been everyday moments when Vilnans registered differences with their neighbors that stemmed from divergent clocks and calendars. This was clearly the case among the Christian confessions between the Romans (Roman Catholics, Calvinists, and Lutherans) and the Greeks (both Orthodox and Uniates), who used the Gregorian and the Julian Church calendars, respectively, and who shared duties in the magistracy and in a great variety of lesser secular corporations such as the guilds. I begin with this divide.

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The Ruthenian Month Sometime soon after 1582 the expression “Ruthenian month” (ruski miesia˛c) entered into the Polish language. It meant “a good long while,” as in “they beat him so thoroughly that he had to salve his wounds for a Ruthenian month” (usage from 1615).2 The Ruthenian month was long because it was late, ten days late in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, eleven days late in the eighteenth, as a result of the ever-increasing discrepancy (one extra day each of three centuries out of four) between the old Julian calendar and the new Gregorian one. For matters of official record keeping, the jump of ten days had been made in PolandLithuania in October of 1582, the year when the calendar was first introduced by Pope Gregory XIII (and thus only a few days after the official date of 4 October set by the pope, after which 15 October was immediately to follow).3 The Catholic Church, together with Catholic society in Poland, also made the change at this time.4 But the new calendar was not imposed in more private matters, including the religious observance of non-Catholics. The Orthodox, the Uniates (after 1596), and some Protestants (I will return to this issue later) continued to adhere to the old calendar for varying lengths of time, the Orthodox and Uniates throughout the period in question and beyond. In some regards, the Ruthenians and any others who remained on the old calendar were in a position similar to that of the Tatars, Jews, and Karaim of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, who kept time according to their own systems: they were allowed to use their own calendars for internal affairs but were forced to adapt to the dominant norm for any matters that reached beyond the limits of their own community. Life in the worlds of politics, law, and commerce necessitated constant adaptation on the part of the more weakly situated groups. There were some cases of syncretism. For example, in spite of attempts by the Jewish community council, or kahal, to ban such procedures, the Lithuanian Jews sometimes registered business transactions conducted with other Jews not only with the Jewish court (and according to the Jewish calendar) but also with the local Christian courts according to the new Roman calendar. Lithuanian Tatars, by contrast, sometimes used a hybrid dating system in correspondence with other Tatars—years given AD followed by Arabic months.5 If an Orthodox or Uniate individual or polity used the old calendar for some reason in correspondence with the non-Ruthenian world, the usage was clearly marked as such: “in the old fashion” or “according to the old calendar.”6 Otherwise, in dealings with the wider world the unmarked mode of timekeeping usually implied the new calendar. But the very fact that Ruthenians would think of using their own time reckoning in correspondence with the outside world reflects a fundamental difference between the situation of this relatively subordinate group and that of the more thoroughly subordinate Jews, Tatars, and Karaim. The Ruthenians of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were engaged in a losing battle within a Christian world in which Roman Catholicism was increasingly dominant. Still, in this border area of the eastern and western rites, adherents of the Greek rite sometimes acted as if their cultural norms had more general applicability.

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The issue came to the fore a few years after the introduction of the new calendar in PolandLithuania by King Stefan Batory in 1582. Batory directed two decrees specifically at Wilno in 1586. One of the major sore points was the habit of Ruthenians (as well as Jews, Tatars, and apparently some Catholics) to conduct business on Catholic holidays. The economic basis for the problem was obvious: if your own religious calendar required a certain number of days during which no business could be conducted, could you afford not to work on the holidays celebrated by the dominant religion(s) as well? On 29 July 1586 Batory issued a decree requiring Ruthenian merchants and artisans to rest on Catholic holidays: We have come to understand that there in Wilno, on holy days according to the new calendar, which have been established by the universal Christian Roman Church, you initiate some sort of difference, open shops; and some of the merchants and artisans take care of other forbidden necessities. Further, people of the Ruthenian religion interpret letters published from our chancery according to their own intent. And thus, opposing this, we command that peace and the ancient custom in the celebration of holy days be maintained in this matter.7

Ruthenians might argue whether “ancient custom” had indeed been maintained in this fashion, but hereafter they could not conduct business on Catholic holy days without fear of punishment. Vilnans at large, however, were not required by royal decree to have the same sort of regard for Ruthenian holy days. Thus, whether or not an Orthodox or Uniate burgher rested according to the Ruthenian calendar remained an issue of discipline within the Orthodox and Uniate Church communities. Nonetheless, a certain compromise was made. In a decree of 8 September 1586, the king instructed the Wilno magistracy not to force Ruthenians to appear before the municipal authorities on Ruthenian holidays: We command . . . that you not cause any problems in this matter in this city of Wilno for people of the Greek rite, and that you not make any obstacles in the celebration of holy days according to their rite, and especially the Birth of the Lord, His Baptism, Circumcision, Resurrection, the Lord’s Ascension, the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, all the holy days of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, and of the other Apostolic Holidays, according to their ancient custom and rite, and that, on these above-mentioned holy days, the people of the Greek rite not be summoned to the town hall and submitted to judgment by the courts . . . and that oaths not be rendered by them on these holy days.8

Batory charged the Wilno magistracy, “in the name of Christian love,” to take pains that “one side not cause any scandal for the other” so that “the peace might be maintained in this city of ours in all respects.” Thus, at least in theory, Ruthenian merchants and artisans rested on Roman and Greek holy days, and the Wilno magistracy rested on the Roman holy days and did limited business (not involving Orthodox parties) on the Greek.

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But these accommodations made for the Ruthenians were minimal, and the city conducted its affairs largely on Roman time. And since the Ruthenians were involved at every step in the work of the city as a whole (to a much greater degree than the Jews and the Tatars), they were forced to make constant adjustments. Consider the city’s various guilds. As we will see, many of them were highly mixed organizations, and many made provisions for parity in power sharing among the elected officials in ways similar to those established for the town councillors. Typically, this meant a two- or three-way division of authority among a fixed number of “annual elders” (sometimes also among other lesser officials in strict parallelisms). The tailors’ guild, for example, in a charter of 1665, stipulated that there were to be six annual elders, “three of the Roman, and three of the Greek religion.”9 The tanners’ guild, in a charter of 1672, specified that its six annually elected elders were to come “two from the Roman faith, another two from the Greek, and two from the German.”10 What is important here is the fact that Greeks were represented in many guilds, and they often took part in their administration; and while their lives as Greek Christians were governed by the rhythms of the Julian calendar, their lives as Ruthenian tailors and tanners were largely conducted according to the Gregorian calendar. Following traditions that long predated the introduction of the new calendar, each guild was instructed to meet on established days identified by the saints’ feasts. When, for example, the cobblers’ guild, which shared power between Greeks and Romans, was directed on 9 December 1552 to meet each year on the festival of St. Nicholas to choose its elders, the timing was still one that united citizens of this particular trade.11 After 1582 all such terms were a potential source of division. The red- and black-leather tanners (in articles dated 27 November 1614) agreed to meet annually on St. Michael’s Day.12 The fishermen (on 28 May 1664) decided to meet on the feast day of the fisher of men, “the Roman St. Peter’s holiday according to the new calendar.”13 And the tailors wrote into their statute of 23 March 1665 that they would meet annually to choose their elders (three Romans and three Greeks) on the day of St. Nicholas.14 (All unspecified dates were according to the new calendar.) Guild membership brought with it a number of obligations that had implications for the organization of time. Above all, each guild endeavored to maintain a particular altar in a particular church, almost always Roman Catholic.15 Members were regularly required to attend Sunday and holy day Masses at their designated place of worship. In the course of the seventeenth century a system of “buying out” evolved, whereby non-Catholic guild members could pay into the guild box for the right not to attend certain religious ceremonies. What is important to note here is the fact that, in confessionally mixed guilds, non-Roman Catholics were forced by their trade to be aware of, and to make accommodations for, the Roman Catholic calendar. In addition to telling Wilno guild members what they should do with their time on Sundays and Catholic holy days, the laws of the city told all inhabitants what they must not do. This

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concern is already familiar to us from Batory’s decree of 29 July 1586, ordering the Rus´of Wilno “not to open their shops or to practice their trades on holy days according to the correction of the new calendar.”16 Similar concerns arose in contexts where Roman Catholics and peoples of other calendars came into close daily contact. One such place was in mixed households, which brought together husbands and wives or masters and their subordinates who were of different religions and confessions. Here, too, it was the Ruthenian who—at least according to law—had to make accommodations for the requirements of the new calendar. And yet there are indications that the Roman calendar was not absolute in its rule over the life of the city. Legal documents often specified that the given reckoning was according to the new calendar; such stipulations appeared throughout the century after the introduction of the Gregorian calendar and beyond.17 This indicates a situation in which the unmarked choice still required marking on occasion. It may also indicate an awareness that a divisive and troublesome choice was being made. In 1627 the goldsmiths’ guild shared power in their new articles equally between Catholics and an unspecified “other religion.” An interesting article seems to have allowed for the differences caused by the different calendars: “A priest is to be engaged [najmowac´] for a year, according to agreement with him, but without table, since it would not be proper to include dinners in view of the fasts and vigils of various [brethren] of the other religion.”18 I will return in a moment to the question of which other religion was intended. What interests me here is the fact that this article represents an isolated piece of evidence that the calendar of the “other” figured in the minds of those who lived according to the dominant time. This leads to a more general question: Did Roman Wilno know when Greek Wilno was celebrating its holy days (even if it did not alter its work schedule on those days)? Given the numbers of Uniate and Orthodox inhabitants of the city, the number of Uniate churches, and the importance of the one Orthodox complex, as well as the public nature of preparations for holidays, it would seem likely that Catholics and Protestants (as well as Jews and Tatars) in Wilno lived with an everyday awareness of the Eastern-rite calendar. An incident that took place in December of 1683 may shed some light. On the twentysecond of that month, students of the Jesuit Academy brought a complaint before the Wilno magistracy against the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit: After the conclusion of the Mass in the parish Church of St. John [the seat of the Jesuits in Wilno], they [the students] went to the Church of the Uniate Holy Trinity, wishing to render veneration to the Most Holy Virgin in the miraculous image that is found there, since it was the feast of the Immaculate Conception according to the old calendar, as well as wishing to take a look at the brotherhood helping to celebrate that feast with beating on drums and kettles. And having tarried there a while, wishing then to take a look at the dialogue [i.e., theater piece] that was being performed in the Disuniate [i.e., Orthodox] Church of the Holy Spirit, they went to the aforementioned church and stood peacefully

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in it and listened to the entire dialogue. There they looked at the first rockets as they were set off. Then a few hand rockets were fired upon the above-mentioned gentlemen, their lords the students of the academy, and they covered with soot, sulfur, and burns the hats, ´ski, however, they inflicted a harmful wound cloaks of some; upon His Grace, Sir Dunin on the cheek of his face [na jagodzie w twarzy] under his left eye, and they also covered with sulfur and burns the eye itself. . . .Whereby more than once did they make taunts and boasts, his formalibus [in this manner]: “we will drink yet of Lach [i.e., Polish Catholic] and student blood.”19

This gruesome account of a religious celebration turned violent contains a certain amount of sad humor for modern readers in its image of Orthodox clergy and laity thirsty for “Lach and student blood.” It may also have raised some eyebrows when it was registered with the court. In spite of attempts by the Catholic clergy in 1640 to portray Jesuit students as helpless innocents from whom the private Calvinist municipal police of Wilno palatine Krzysztof Radziwiłł took away their mother’s pierogies as they returned to their studies through the city gates from stays at home,20 the students did not enjoy good a reputation with the citizens of Wilno. The account of events cited above was, of course, the version offered by the Jesuit students themselves to the Wilno magistracy. The monks of the Holy Spirit monastery registered counteraccounts, in which they claimed they had been the victims. A legal settlement reached in the Wilno castle court on 28 January 1685, to which both sides gave their blessing, put an end to the conflict.21 The report noted laconically and without further comment that the original tumult had occurred on 18 December, which was indeed the new calendar date for the old calendar feast (8 December). But the point here is that, whether with innocent or deceitful intent, the Jesuit students came to visit the Uniates and the Orthodox precisely because it was a holy day in the Greek calendar. And given the Uniate “beating on kettles and drums” and the Orthodox “dialogue” and fireworks that accompanied the celebrations in a kind of neighborhood competition, it seems unlikely that anyone in town was unaware just what day it was.

Jewish Time and Christian Time The general problems that King Stefan Batory addressed in his decrees sent to Wilno— the ban on labor and commerce on Roman Catholic holy days, coupled with the instructions to the magistracy to be aware of another calendar—had already arisen in response to Christian-Jewish conflicts. The documents here were not directed specifically at the situation in Wilno, but they may provide some insight into possible problems and strategies for their solution. Already in 1542 the Roman Catholic synod of Piotrków had protested:

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We are tired of tolerating the growing audacity of the Jews. Not satisfied with engaging in occupations interfering with the livelihood of Christians, they raise their heads as enemies of the Christian religion. They ridicule all sacred things, they walk and talk on our holidays in all public streets in our city. They also refer to many simple folk and peasants in derogatory terms. They shave them and cut their hair, serve them drinks, keep shops and stores open for them, and perform a variety of tasks desecrating and interfering with our holidays. For this reason, we decree that on holidays no Jew should dare to walk in public places, trade with, serve drinks to, shave, cut hair, let blood, or perform other medical ministrations [for Christians].22

But in 1592, King Zygmunt III extended, perhaps somewhat grudgingly, the same sorts of protections to Jews that Batory had granted to Wilno Ruthenians concerning their own calendar of holy days: “Jews, in accordance with the prohibition of their superstitious law, shall neither be summoned nor judged on the days of their Sabbath or other festivals.” And other decrees spelled out what days those were: “their fast days [Bosiny; literally, days of bare feet], the nine days of mourning [Ab 1–9] and those of the renowned fairs at Jarosław and on Gromnice [the fairs held in Lublin].”23 Gromnice is the Catholic feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or Candlemas (2 February); it was the occasion for the annual fair at Lublin, which was also the time and place for annual meetings of the Jewish Council (Va'ad) of the Four Lands. Such protections go back to guarantees provided in canon law based on Roman imperial legislation.24 Presumably the Jews of Wilno did not arouse the ire of the Romans by working on specifically Greek holy days, and we might suspect that they were indeed less cautious about their activities on those days, since the dominant calendar was the Roman one. After all, what merchant could afford to observe three sets of holy days (Jewish, Roman, and Greek)? But if this was the case, perhaps it was an added source of conflict between the Jews and Ruthenians in Wilno. We have seen that although Jews were found residing in many Wilno neighborhoods and in Christian houses even late into the seventeenth century, there is no record of their presence in Ruthenian streets. In any case, the structure of the conflict over timekeeping between Christians and Jews mirrored that between Christians of the Eastern and Western rites, and the strategies for addressing them ran in parallel. Jews not only used the Christian calendar in their litigations in Christian courts, but they also sometimes identified days in question by naming an associated Christian feast. On 21 May 1593, Jewish elders came before the castle court of Wilno to enter a document in Chancery Ruthenian marking the resolution of a complaint concerning “the attack upon our school [i.e., synagogue] on the Day of the Lord’s Ascension” that had occurred in the preceding year.25 The feast is celebrated on the sixth Thursday—which was forty days—after Easter. In 1592, Ascension Day was celebrated on 7 May. My point here is that non-Catholics were well aware not only of the dominant calendar but of its (Catholic) rhythms of feast days.

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The Jewish complaint located the event in time not by a calendar date but by its associated feast. Many—Jews as well as Protestants—were keenly aware of some of the Roman Catholic feast days, since their annual recurrence provided the moments of tension that sometimes led to violence against the minority groups.

A Saxon Month? And what about Wilno’s Protestants? They were certainly fewer in number than the Ruthenians but nonetheless of considerable importance. In the middle of the century the Calvinists were still represented by one branch of the powerful Radziwiłł family, and they would long have a faithful backing in a certain middle-level szlachta; and some of Wilno’s Lutherans were members of an urban elite (although largely outside the magistracy), with wealth and political significance disproportionate to their numbers. In other parts of Europe, some Protestant societies made adherence to the old calendar a defining aspect of their difference from Roman Catholics—in England and Sweden, for example, into the middle of the eighteenth century (1752 and 1753, respectively).26 What about here? In short, was there a “Saxon month” in Wilno? The answer involves certain ambiguities. The question of doctrine and practice in the matter of the calendar reform among the various Protestant churches in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth has received next to no scholarly attention. This may be, in part, because it seems to have been a nonissue for the Protestant societies of Poland-Lithuania at the time of the reform. I know of no Polish Protestant defenses of the old calendar, and I am aware of few positive statements on the question. A synod held in Poznan´ dated its proceedings Thursday, 5 May 1583.27 This was a new calendar date, used without apology—and without comment—in this official context by a provincial synod of the Polish Church of the Czech Brethren (which was in communion with the Calvinists throughout Poland-Lithuania), about half a year after the introduction of the corrected calendar. I have not been able to establish any use of the old calendar in synodal documents at the provincial level after the introduction of the new calendar in 1582. Our records for the Wilno Reformed Church begin only after the destruction of its library and archive in 1611 in a fire that accompanied an anti-Calvinist tumult. The extant records indicate that, at least by that date, the Wilno Calvinist Church was using the new calendar. On the other hand, protocols of the annual provincial synods indicate regional variation within the Lithuanian Calvinist Church. The Wilno synod of 1616 stipulated that the new calendar was to be the norm, except in the so-called Ruthenian (i.e., Belarusan) district of the Lithuanian Calvinist Church, where, “for the sake of the edification of the Lord’s Church,” either calendar was to be permitted.28 This deviation was allowed in spite of increasing pressure for uniformity within the Lithuanian Calvinist Church, with Wilno usage serving as the norm. The provincial synod of 1614 had determined that the “form [of worship] is to be that

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which is in the Wilno church.”29 By 1644, a provincial synod meeting in Wilno declared that “propter conformitatem [for the sake of conformity] with other churches of God, holy days should be celebrated there [in the Ruthenian district] from now on according to the new calendar.”30 Thus, although the Wilno Calvinist church seems to have been using the new calendar from early on, a certain lack of conformity within the larger Lithuanian Church was allowed for some time. In addition to the variance between the Wilno and Ruthenian districts, we should consider the possibility that certain nobles, including those who played important roles in the life of the Wilno Church, allowed or encouraged use of the old calendar on their estates and among their clientele. One factor in both cases may have been the presence outside the towns of large—perhaps preponderant—numbers of Ruthenians, whether Uniate or Orthodox. The case of the chief patron of the Wilno Calvinist church in the first half of the seventeenth century, Lithuanian hetman and palatine of Wilno Krzysztof Radziwiłł II (1585–1640), raises certain questions. One study has cited a letter from Radziwiłł as evidence that the hetman was dating his private correspondence according to the new calendar by 1624.31 But actually this letter raises more questions than it answers. In it Radziwiłł invited his friend and regular correspondent, bishop of Wilno Eustachy Wołłowicz, to attend “the christening of my little son set pro die 30 Junii stylo novo [for the day of 30 June according to the New Style].”32 Radziwiłł might well have dated his voluminous correspondence stylo novo without calling attention to the fact. I imagine that this was a necessity in order to avoid misunderstandings, especially given the fact that so many of his letters were addressed to Catholics such as the bishop of Wilno. But the fact that he thought it necessary to inform his good friend the bishop that the christening would take place on a particular day according to the new calendar points rather to a need to be clear. It indicates a sense that the bishop, who knew Radziwiłł well, might otherwise mark the event in his social calendar only after figuring out a new calendar equivalent for a perceived old calendar date. In any event, the specification of the calendar points to a usage that was still in flux four decades after the calendar reform. And what about the Lutherans across town on German Street? Here I have only a few pieces of indirect evidence. When Andrzej Schönflissius, longtime pastor of Wilno’s Lutheran congregation, published his Polish-language funeral sermon for Wilno Burgomaster Jakub Gibel (Castle Street 2.13), he silently used the new calendar in giving the date of his death: Friday, 13 November 1637, was a new-style date.33 This would seem to indicate that the Lutheran congregation employed the new calendar, at least by this time. Somewhat contradictory evidence is offered, however, by one of the leading polemicists of the first generation of Wilno Jesuits, Stanisław Grodzicki, who published Two Sermons on the Correction of the Calendar in Wilno in 1589. These works were directed against both the “heretics” and the Ruthenians. They were an answer “to the allegations of both the people of the Ruthenian rite, who take delight in their Greek errors, and also of the heretics, who, as adiaphorists, are displeased by any sort of order.”34 It is not entirely clear to what extent

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Grodzicki addressed local Protestants under the rubric “adiaphorists” (those who believe that certain religious doctrines and ceremonies are matters of indifference) and to what extent his remarks were aimed at heretics in general. Only one passage points directly to the Wilno Lutheran church: “I know,” Grodzicki wrote, “what the heretics of the Saxon faith say, both in Germany (about which books have been published), and also here (about which we know), that this [adherence to the new or the old calendar] is a voluntary thing . . . adiaphora [indifferent matters].”35 I find significant the lack of specificity in Grodzicki’s attack on the local Germans (“about which we know”) and the fact that he attributes to them not a defense of the old calendar but an indifferent attitude to the entire issue. This stands in stark contrast to the detail and specificity of his attack on the local Ruthenians. Another piece of evidence, however, may suggest the use of the old calendar by some of Wilno’s Saxons. The above-cited 1627 statute of the goldsmiths’ guild, which divided power between Catholics and others, contained some interesting evidence in this regard. It said (once again) that the priest who was to be engaged was to be “without table, since it would not be proper to include dinners in view of the fasts and vigils of various [brethren] of the other religion.”36 In fact, the guild had long been almost entirely Polish and German. It seems unlikely that the other religion in this case referred to the Uniates or the Orthodox.37 Thus, the others were probably the still strongly positioned Saxons, whose calendar sensibilities were being considered here. In sum, Polish-Lithuanian Protestants seem to have been employing the new calendar from the very beginning and in an official way, since synodal records were kept according to that reckoning. Nonetheless, there are recurring suggestions of a lack of conformity. And above all, I note the dog that didn’t bark: I have been unable to find any record of internal Protestant discussion surrounding the initial switch to the new calendar—apparently made together with the Catholics in 1582.

A Time to Fast and a Time to Feast If there was no great public polemic over the calendar between Catholics and Protestants in Poland-Lithuania, there was certainly a debate over how the Christian was to make use of his time. The Agenda published in Danzig in 1637, which was to be normative for all Calvinists and Czech Brethren of Poland and Lithuania, established a Church calendar headed simply “The Calendar, which is commonly called Gregorian.”38 In smaller congregations there were to be only two services during the workweek, on Wednesdays and Fridays. In the larger congregations, “and where there is a school for this purpose” (this would have been the case at the Wilno Calvinist church), services were to be held twice a day, morning and evening.39 Calvinists and Czech Brethren were to celebrate, among others, Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter, Trinity Sunday, and the Feasts of the Ascension, the Circumcision, and the Transfiguration; in addition, various commemorations of the Virgin

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Mary, of the Holy Apostles, martyrs, and other faithful confessors and imitators of Christ the Lord “for the call to imitate them in faith and in a pious life.”40 This was a calendar unusually full of saints’ days and high holy days for Calvinist usage. Still, an implicit distancing from perceived Catholic attitudes toward the celebration of holy days is evident in notes on how the Reformed were to behave on those days. All days, we read in the Agenda, are equal: “Not only on Good Friday is Christ the Lord crucified.” On Sundays, the Christian was not to engage “in the labors customary to weekdays.”41 Holy days were established among Christians “not for loafing about, nor for drunkenness, dancing, etc.”42 On saints’ days, in contrast to Sundays, “having listened to the Word of God, . . . [Christians] proceed to the work of their vocation. They do not spend them in excesses, in idolatry, nor in superstitions.”43 The parish pastor was warned against adding to this already full ecclesiastical calendar, “partly because on holy days sins are multiplied more in taverns, dancing, and in other indecencies, which teach idleness, and partly because there are barely enough working days for the poor to take care of the things necessary for life.”44 Although Calvinists engaged in fasting according to a particular schedule and celebrated certain saints’ days, Catholic polemicists derided them on both accounts for engaging in Catholic activities in un-Catholic fashion. A leading figure among the Czech Brethren in Great Poland, Szymon Teofil Turnowski, published in 1594 in Wilno, as a result of his presence there for a disputation between Protestants and Jesuits, a Mirror of the Christian Religion in Poland, Beginning with the Acceptance of Christianity, Up to the Current Year 1590 [sic]. The work was answered by Wilno Jesuit Marcin Łaszcz in a 1594 tract entitled Eyeglasses for the Mirror of the Christian Religion in Poland. Łaszcz could not fault his opponent for adherence to the old calendar: Turnowski not only accepted the new one; he also claimed at one point to have proselytized for its use among the Orthodox during his stay in Wilno.45 Rather, the Jesuit polemicist attacked what the Protestants had done with the calendar. “I certainly have cause to praise you,” he wrote sarcastically, “in that you have received our dear St. Adalbert [Wojciech] and dear St. Stanisław into your Church and, as I hear, have written them into your calendar. And what is more, that you, as you claim, have converted these saints to your faith.”46 Further, Łaszcz defended the Catholic calendar of fasts as the original one: “Poles did not eat meat on Saturday for six hundred years; it has only been during the time of you Lutherans that the gluttony has begun . . . . You cannot stand to look at fasting. You prefer to look into the kitchen where meat is being cooked. Not so did St. Adalbert, who fasted both Fridays and Saturdays.”47 The citizens of Wilno may well have looked into each other’s kitchens, and their noses probably told them when their neighbors were preparing the wrong foods at inappropriate times. Those who lived on the same gallery must have known these olfactory dissonances quite well; they would have been a part of their own sense of the passing of time. An instance of alleged Protestant Sabbatarian carnivory gave the Jesuits of Wilno occasion in 1623 to publish a versified pamphlet deriding the recent death of their Lutheran colleague across

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town, Pastor Mikołaj Burchardy. The unfortunate pastor had apparently fallen from a chicken coop ladder and broken his neck. In this Jesuit representation, the Lutheran congregation of Wilno then wrote a letter (in verse) to Martin Luther in heaven that was to be taken along on the journey by the deceased minister. It turns out, of course, that the addressee was instead residing in hell, “where already a third of the devils speak German,” and where the good minister eventually landed.48 The minister’s fall, moreover, had occurred on a Saturday, when, after returning from giving his sermon and “chugging some booze,” he asked his wife what was for dinner. Upon hearing that she intended to prepare eggs and some fish, the minister flew into a righteous rage: “Well, stupid,” he says, “do you intend to become a papist That you feed me scrambled eggs on a Saturday?” And so, somewhat enthused by that booze, And raging like a lion over your [i.e., Martin Luther’s] decrees, Being a true son of you, his father, He bounds up the ladder to the chicken coop for a hen. .......................................... That head, entirely full of God’s Writ, Clattered upon the ground such that the wool flew out of it. The tongue, with which he once briskly flogged God’s Words, Was cut by his teeth, whereupon his speech also ceased. And his little soul, when the doors were closed for it in his throat, Barely escaped, the poor thing, through the other end. Thus if it should smell a bit of musk, May Your Grace direct it to the baths; let it wash itself. ............................................ And if he should have missed the road to heaven by a bit, (Which is no cause for surprise with a drunk), You should indicate to him the straight road. ................................... He wished to eat meat on a Saturday, that true martyr. For, in order not to keep papal fasts, He did not begrudge breaking his neck, falling from the chickens.49

And there are other passages from the polemical literature suggesting that people (or, in any case, confessional polemicists) in Wilno knew what their neighbors did and when they did it. In a litany of alleged discrepancies between Uniate program and Uniate practice, their observer from across the street, archimandrite of the Orthodox Holy Spirit monastery Melecjusz Smotrycki charged in 1621, “You confess, practice, and teach one way publice [publicly] and another way privatim [privately].  .  .  . Publice you monks do not eat meat, but

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privatim—hah!”50 (And he went on to note, “Publice you celebrate according to the old calendar, but privatim according to the new one.”)

The Backwardness of the Ruthenian Month Not all months were equal. In addition to being long or late, the Ruthenian month became also backward, second-rate. Rus´ was, in the current stereotype, “simple” and “crude,” and one of the ways it betrayed this simplicity and crudity was through a stubborn adherence to the old calendar. When Wilno Jesuit Stanisław Grodzicki wrote in 1589 against the heretics and schismatics who favored the old calendar, he attacked the Protestants on issues of dogma and science; his words toward the Ruthenians (his most immediate audience, since the Protestants seem to have refused to fight back on this issue) often added elements of derision. The following passage is typical of Catholic polemical postures: But our Ruthenians point to the current spells of cold weather [in arguing against the new calendar], and with them they abuse the simple man. But they themselves are much greater simpletons in this matter. . . . If they do not believe me, let them ask those who have been there [i.e., in the Holy Lands], or let them make a quick trip themselves even a bit nearer by, to Italy or to Spain. Then they will see that in those places not only the fields but even the trees are already now turning green. If they understand that elsewhere it is already much warmer, then why do they wish to mark the beginning of spring according to the warmth of their Lithuania?51

The inhabitants of the Ruthenian month were, in this representation, isolated and provincial (and cold!), ready to make general pronouncements according to experiences limited to Lithuanian latitudes. In Catholic (and even some Uniate) polemical works, there appeared the figure of the Ruthenian bumpkin, who was unqualified to participate in complicated discussions of calendar reform and should therefore simply have accepted the findings of the wiser Catholic mathematicians and astronomers. An extreme example of this sort of treatment was published in 1642 by Kasjan Sakowicz. Long-time archimandrite of the Uniate monastery in Volhynian Dubno, Sakowicz had first converted from Orthodoxy to the Uniate Church in about 1624. Nearly twenty years later, around 1640, he made what was considered an impossible confessional move, a conversion across the supposedly nonexistent border between Greek and Roman Catholicism. The last straw in this case, at least according to Sakowicz, was a failed attempt to convince the Uniates of Wilno’s Holy Trinity monastery that it was finally time for the Uniates to switch to the new calendar.52 The work I consider here was entitled A Dialogue or Conversation between Maciek and Dionizy, the Wilno Schismatic Pop. In it, a Catholic, Polish-speaking visitor to Wilno named Maciek

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encountered a local, Ruthenian-speaking pop, or simple Orthodox priest, named Dionizy. Dionizy’s Ruthenian was represented, in Latin letters, as a kind of crude, jargon version of Polish, and Dionizy mistook all the abstract Polish and Latin technical terms of Maciek’s discourse on the calendar for similar Ruthenian words with physical, rustic meanings. Matematyka (mathematics) became matyka (hoe), and komput (computation, a technical term for handbooks on determining when to celebrate Easter) became kapiut (they dig) in the Ruthenian perception and rerendering. A final argument against celebrating Easter according to the old calendar was the “great quantity of rotten fish and herring” Maciek noticed in the Wilno Market Square on his way to his conversation with Dionizy.53 In a piece of charming doggerel, Maciek addressed Rus´: The poor herrings now roast in the sun, So long have your fast days dragged on. Nay, soon even herrings will not stay, If you the Lord’s Rising so delay. Know by such a clear clock at the least, When you ought to celebrate the Feast.54

Thus, in Sakowicz’s portrayal, Rus´ was immediately recognized in Wilno by its adherence to the old calendar, and in an attitude typical of converts toward their former coreligionists, he associated that community—here, both Orthodox and Uniate—with physical degradation. Note further that Sakowicz had simply turned the argument of Grodzicki’s Ruthenian “simpletons” on its head: the old calendar could not be right because it was too hot at Ruthenian Easter. And part of the evidence came from a perceived disharmony of diet and time: the Ruthenians were eating their herring and thin soups out of season. The Ruthenian month thus became a subject for derision on the part of Catholic polemicists and a source of insecurity for Ruthenian elites. In a learned treatise on astronomy, astrology, and the calendars from 1603, Marcin Łaszcz joined the polemic once again, providing a detailed chart showing the constant slippage of the old calendar, such that Easter would eventually be celebrated over the years in all seasons: in AD 23,358, for example, Greek Easter would be celebrated on 15 October; and by AD 43,574, Greek Easter would have made its way through the cycle of months back to 15 March!55 These futuristic calculations also belonged to what would become a kind of favored genre among Catholic and some Uniate polemicists: the revelation of the “great absurdities” of Ruthenian usage. There was a political problem here for Catholic and Uniate polemicists. From 1582 until the Union of Brest in 1596, Catholics could criticize Ruthenian adherence to the old calendar without any restraints. After 1596 the Catholic side was supposed to accept the validity of Uniate usages, including adherence to the old calendar. There was a clear perception among elites that this aspect of Uniate usage was due to a calculation that switching to the corrected calendar would greatly diminish the ability of the Uniate Church to

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compete for souls among “simple Rus´.” This perception put Ruthenian elites in a position of internal conflict. Wilno Jesuit Wojciech Tylkowski would write in 1685 that “even the Uniates differ [with respect to the calendar] by permission of the Church for great reasons, but in this it is not a matter of something that belongs to the faith, but to doctrine.”56 The “great reasons” of which Tylkowski wrote probably had to do with the above-mentioned calculation on the part of Catholic and Uniate hierarchies. When, in 1622, archimandrite of the Wilno Orthodox Holy Spirit monastery Melecjusz Smotrycki attributed to his Uniate neighbors across the street a secret use of the new calendar, he was alleging that they thought of the calendar as belonging to the category of adiaphora, and it was only because they risked losing their flocks that the shepherds adhered to the old rather than the new. Thus the Uniate hierarchy, too, believed in the simplicity of Rus´. Writing in 1628 after his conversion, the now Uniate Smotrycki would claim that his former cobishop and new opponent, Orthodox Metropolitan of Kiev Hiob Borecki, had long seen the matter of the calendar as the chief stumbling block for a union of Rus´, since the “simple people” could not be made to understand the need for the correction.57 Uniates left particularly eloquent testimonies to the discontents of difference from the dominant world. They, of course, did not write disinterestedly about Ruthenian difference. They often presented their program with the words of Christ: “That they all may be one” (John 17:21). But these writings are of some use in imagining the kinds of difficulties caused by difference. I cite here two Uniate polemicists: Kasjan Sakowicz and Jan Dubowicz. Both had direct experience of confessional relations in Wilno. Sakowicz spent time in the city in 1640 to make his plea for a correction of the Ruthenian month; Dubowicz may have been related to a family of long-standing importance on the Greek side of the Wilno city magistracy. Both left testimonies to the difficulties of life in a community run on various clocks, and both focused on the absurdities of lives as they were lived in close contact between Eastern and Western Christians. In 1644 Jan Dubowicz called the variance in the celebration of “the same” holy days a matter of “heartfelt disgust” (dyzgust serdeczny): The one sings “Christ has arisen from the dead,” while the other occupies himself with a threnody over the most dear passion of the Lord. One rejoices at the coming of the Holy Spirit, but the other is still preparing for the Lord’s Ascension. These celebrate the festivals of SS. Luke the Apostle, George the Martyr, Stephen the Protomartyr, John the Baptist, but for the others are now the days of the Holy Apostles Simon and Jude, of the Holy Cross, Epiphany, or of Three Kings, the Birth of the Most Virgin Mary. And what is worse, the holy days themselves are broken through various entertainments, work.58

Uniate polemicist Sakowicz wrote in 1640 of the “shame” involved with the old calendar:

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By receiving the new calendar you will avoid those difficulties that occur in the married life of a Roman with a Ruthenian woman, of a Ruthenian with a Roman woman, in the making of pilgrimages, in going to sessions of the courts, tribunals, Sejms, to weddings and funerals. Also in the maintaining of servants and retinue of various religions, in preparing different food for them, etc., etc. And so you will have one set of joys from the receiving of the new calendar, in home, in the Orthodox church, in the Catholic church, on pilgrimages. But from adhering to the old—only tribulation of the soul, and a certain shame, and no little incurring of harms. That, Sir Ruthenian nobleman, they do not allow you to celebrate your holy days, but you have to go to court and render account of yourself. . . . And you, Sir Merchant, have to celebrate Roman holy days whether you like to or not, and your workers are idle, and you have to feed them, give them to drink, clothe them, pay them, and all this takes away from, not adds to, your pocket book. . . . It is very improper when the one says Christos Woskres [the traditional Church Slavonic Easter greeting, “Christ has arisen”], and the other will not reply for five weeks Wo istinu Woskres [the traditional response, “He has arisen indeed”], and your Roman friend in his rejoicing will be dancing about, but you, sitting over herring and sour soup, will be in distress.59

The Regulation of Public Processions Questions of space and time came together in crucial ways when Vilnans took to the streets in ceremonial marches along more or less precisely established paths and at particular moments, some predetermined by calendars, both secular (e.g., annual “musterings” of the guilds and other corporations) and religious (e.g., Corpus Christi), others in sudden response to circumstance (e.g., visitation of the dying and funeral processions). As an introduction to these issues, let us take a look at some of the structural similarities the various sides encountered in negotiating Jewish-Christian and Christian interconfessional relations in the area of public processions. Lutheran memoirist and doctor to King Władysław IV, Maciej Vorbek-Lettow (German Street 26.03), who was residing in Wilno in 1654 as the war with Muscovy was building, noted his surprise “that the Jews, too (about which we had never heard before)—under their own banner (it was red, edges of the borders white on both sides, with a Hebrew inscription)—mustered with good kit about 130 of the Jews who were eager to bear arms.”60 But perhaps the doctor need not have been so surprised. In fact, every corporation within the city had its own banner and colors, and all were required to muster once a year outside the city “in the field beyond St. Stephen.”61 The exercise served a paramilitary function, since one of the obligations of these guild and other corporation troops was to defend the city in time of attack. Corporations were also required to present their colors to greet the arrival of important functionaries. These reviews sometimes provided opportunities for acts of violence against the Jews on the part of the burghers.

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When Christian and Jewish tinsmiths came to a mutual agreement in 1673 accepting four Jewish tinsmiths (“but no more”) as adjunct members of the Christians’ guild, the Jews were accorded certain rights (to work and sell their wares) and obligations (to pay a fee to the guild altar at the Roman Holy Trinity Church). They also received one important liberty: “except for the annual fee, they are to remain free [from the obligation to appear] at all guards and reviews, also at the Corpus Christi procession, and at the arrival [in Wilno] of His Royal Majesty, as well as for the coming of His Grace the Bishop and of His Grace the Lord Palatine of Wilno.”62 In a series of letters to the Wilno magistracy beginning in January 1682, King Jan III Sobieski admonished city leaders to show some understanding in this matter, “since almost every year . . . as also now during the recent review of the entire city, fearing attacks, violence at this review, the Jews asked Your Graces that they might be freed of [the obligation], that at least, not going out into the field, they might be reviewed right here in town, namely in the palace of His Grace the Palatine of Wilno.”63 But the magistracy had refused to listen to this Jewish request, and the feared violence did occur. In response to the Jewish petitions, Sobieski made “the aforementioned Jews from now on absolute [absolutely] free from review,” taking “all of them, that is, the entire Wilno synagogue and each individual Jew into Our royal protection.”64 But in 1687 Sobieski again had to remind the magistracy of its obligations to protect Jews and in particular that it was not to make them appear in public as a corporation at the annual municipal review. In his letter of 1682, the king had placed a considerable monetary penalty (zare˛ka) upon the persons of the magistracy for infractions against the Jewish protections. The magistracy had pointed out that given the patchwork quilt of jurisdictions in Wilno, it was hardly in a position to guarantee protection to Jewish life and property. Still, one protestation reflects at least a partial attempt to do so. In 1681, Stefan Izaak Dziahilewicz, councillor of Wilno (and thus a member of the magistracy), brought before the magistracy a complaint against the elders of the tailors’ guild and against their entire corporation for the tumult they had caused at that year’s review. Dziahilewicz had noticed at the end of the review that two Jewish “companies” (chora˛gwie, units gathered under one banner) were standing next to merchants’ and shopkeepers’ companies. As the guild companies began to approach, the tailors’ guild used the presence of the Jews as a pretext for starting a tumult. When Dziahilewicz sent his servants to the tailors, admonishing them to maintain order, they attacked the councillor’s entourage. Thus the protestation was in the end about general sartorial unrule and specifically about attacks upon a member of the magistracy (and not upon the Jews). On the one hand, it would seem that the magistracy had indeed required Jews to participate in the review in 1681 (one year before Sobieski’s first extant intervention); on the other hand, a member of that body located the potential threat to the Jews in the guilds (and not in the merchants or shopkeepers, to say nothing of the magistracy), and he claimed he had sought—at risk to himself—to maintain civic order.65 The Jewish (and Protestant) presence in the streets during Roman Catholic religious processions, whether large or small, formal or semiformal, was a constant potential source of

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friction. A pastoral letter from Bishop of Wilno Mikołaj Stefan Pac written 28 September 1682 gives a sense of some of the situations that regularly arose and of one strategy imposed from above for avoiding conflict: To the parish priests of the city of Wilno. When, here in the city, you carry the viaticum [here: Holy Communion given to those who are dying as a part of the last rites] to the sick going along Jewish Street, a most unseemly custom has already come into use—that of attacks carried out by the persons and Church servants assisting the priest, who are called sacramentalists. They inflict insult upon the Divine Mystery, when, with great license and unheard-of violence, they attack the Jews they encounter: by beating the Jews with whips and other instruments, by overturning the tables they have put out with items for sale, by snatching those things away; and by various buffoonish derisions of Jews and Jewesses, they incite the rabble to laughter and pillage, and they scandalize the pious. Quite often, in order to have a cause for similar license, they purposely give the sign with the bell as quietly as possible, or they even cease ringing the bell entirely, so that the Jews not be given warning and that they be unable to avoid the encounter with them. Therefore, in order to curb such continuing grave abuses, the scandalizing [of the pious], and the insult to the Most Holy Sacrament, and for the protection of innocent Jews from damages and harm, We most insistently enjoin, and We command without fail, that you never carry the Most Holy Sacrament along Jewish Street, rather that you carry the viaticum to the sick through other streets; moreover, the servants assisting the priest are required to ring the bell loudly as a warning for the Jews, so that they might take refuge the more quickly. Those who disobey this command will be severely punished. Given in Wilno, in Our residence in Antokol.66

The bishop was interested here in establishing the rules of the game in the Christian-Jewish encounter in a way that would preserve the dignity of the Sacrament, the consciences of the pious, and the health and property of Jews and Jewesses. The rules, in his version, permitted the “sacramentalists” to beat up and rob Jews who did not seek private quarters when the Host passed by in the streets: they remained fair game. But the bishop’s rules also sought to limit such occasions to the point that they would become practically nonexistent. And they mandated severe penalties for Christians who did not abide by them. Above all, they were based on sensitivities to time and place in Wilno topography: Roman Catholics must cease conducting holy processions, no matter how informal, through Jewish Street for the preservation of the sacred but also for the protection of Jewish health, property, and honor. It was a more sensitive issue if a Jew opened shop on Roman Catholic Good Friday or Corpus Christi than if a Ruthenian did so. The argument with the Ruthenian, after all, was over timing, not so much over the body of Christ. Protestant behavior during Corpus Christi, however—given the debates over transubstantiation—was no less thorny an issue, and Roman Catholics were likely to put the heterodox and the Jews in one category: those who

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scoffed at the notion of the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Host and who therefore ought not to appear in public or even to open their windows on that day.67 Let us look at one conflict over space and time that was litigated in court. In 1667–1668, the Christian butchers of Wilno fought a legal battle with their Jewish counterparts. Part of the complaint here had to do with how and when commerce could be conducted in a public space. Not only—so the Christian complaint had it—had the ranks of Jewish butchers “multiplied beyond count” (when they had been limited to four by a royal privilege and six by a later guild charter), but on Fridays, and especially during Lent, having established the seat of their slaughterhouse near Roman monasteries and churches, killing cattle in the city publice, and throwing the faeces [remains] out near their synagogue, where people of the Roman Catholic faith are wont to go to gather for Church services at the Reverend Father Franciscans, having laid out cows, calves, sheep, and goats consulto [on purpose], without any annual corporal oath [of allegiance to the city], distrahunt [they sell retail].68

The appeal in this legal argument was to Catholic religious sensibilities: the incompatibility of Jewish meat and Christian feasts. It was also an appeal to (Christian) public order and propriety: the argument was based on the specter of Jewish dirt and disorder near Catholic holy places and at sacred times. But the motivations were clearly also those of commercial rivalry. The Christian butchers of Wilno were forced to accept the right of Jewish butchers to have their own guild, but they complained when they saw that the Jewish guild was such a successful institution that Christian journeymen found it an attractive and lucrative place to learn their trade. The goal here was to restrict Jewish commerce (“they sell retail”). The protestation about place, time, and manner may have been ancillary to that end. Objections similar to those in the Christian butchers’ complaint about proximities and the normal paths for navigating the city had also been raised in the course of recurrent conflicts between Catholics and Calvinists. In one instance, Catholic protestations claimed that modest Catholics—in this case, Bernardine monks and nuns—could not make their way from their convent and monastery at St. Michael and SS. Francis and Bernard to Market Square without passing by the neighboring Calvinist complex and encountering derisive comments and gestures and general threats to health, honor, and sensibility.69 The royal decree of 25 June 1640 removing the Calvinists from their seat within the walls tells us that the founder and patron of the Bernardine convent and Church of St. Michael, palatine of Wilno Lew Sapieha (d. 1633), had been forced to remove “the dormitories that were on that side of the street facing the Calvinist church” and to wall up the windows because “when the nuns, following common Catholic custom in dedicatione ecclesiae suae [in dedication of their church], hung out banners, then [the Calvinist students from the other side of the street] in contemptum religionis [in contempt of religion] hung out from the Calvinist church facing the nuns’ church what neither honorable lips [can speak], nor the dignified ears of the senate

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can hear sine horrore [without horror].”70 Whether the Calvinist boys were facing the horrified nuns or had turned their backs to them (more likely the latter offensive gesture), the alleged behavior clearly had to do with an obscene baring of body parts. Here again the appeal was to offended sensibilities, and it was based upon incompatible juxtapositions: Catholic virgins in Christ facing Calvinist profanities. In both instances—the Bernardine-Calvinist and the Christian-Jewish conflicts—it would have been quite easy to find a minimal detour that would have brought sensitive souls to their goals, from convent to market and from just about anywhere in town to the Franciscans’ church and monastery at the city wall near Troki Gate, without any need to pass by the offending sites. The Christian butchers’ complaint is particularly interesting in this regard. It is hard to imagine how anyone not living on Jewish Street would feel compelled to go to the Franciscans by way of that street, where all the offending carcasses were lying about. This confirms the impression that Christians were a regular presence on Jewish Street and Meat Shop Street, but it also suggests that the Christian butchers were searching hard for something to complain about, since it is unlikely that Roman Catholic Vilnans walked that way to Mass at the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary “on the Sands.” The representative for the Jewish butchers replied to the allegations of the Christian lawyers concerning sacred time in this manner: that Jewish butchers do indeed “sell meat on Fridays and during Lent, but then distrahunt not publice but privatim, and only to their own Jews at that.” This may not have been strictly true: there are some indications that Jewish shops, including those of the butchers, served Christians as a kind of neighborhood convenience store when Christian shops had to be closed. Here, too, the question of competition in the marketplace may have been lurking behind arguments about the profanation of the holy. The lawyer for the Jewish side then addressed the question of place: “the fact that Jews slaughter cattle in the city—this is usus antiquus, a majoribus of them introductus [ancient usage, introduced by (their) ancestors] . . . , as also the Christian butchers of Wilno do not have their separate house, rather they slaughter cattle partly in their own houses, partly in their meat shops.” And as far as the oath is concerned, the Jewish butchers were ready to swear on an annual basis that they “do not sell sick meats or infected cattle.” The tribunal ruled that henceforth both Jewish and Christian butchers were to do their slaughtering in the suburb beyond Troki Gate.71 What these few episodes reveal is the tension between regulations, both Christian and Jewish, that aimed at maintaining the separation and distinction of members of the two religions on the one hand and on the other the negotiations that necessarily followed—on the part of both individuals and law-giving bodies—when “ideals faced reality.”72 Questions of proximity, public behavior, dress, architecture, and times and place of commerce were not limited to Jewish-Christian discussions. Although Roman Catholicism was becoming the dominant religion of the szlachta and to an extent of the state, its position was weaker in places like Wilno. Jews negotiated some of these issues on occasion with all five Christian confessions; at the same time, the Christians of Wilno were engaged in similarly structured

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debates with each other over dress, behavior, and indeed their very presence in the streets, doorways, or windows during each other’s public processions.

The Wilno Acoustic Environment How people kept time, and what moments they marked as belonging to the sacred, was one of the most pervasive aspects of difference among the peoples, religions, and confessions of early modern Wilno. This was a city in which the calls to worship rarely ceased: think only of the regular daily, weekly, and annual Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cycles of services—then add to this the conflict between the Christian calendars. The lists of high holy days I have cited (Batory’s list of days on which the Orthodox were not to be called into court, the Calvinist calendar set in the Agenda of 1637, plus the very full Roman Catholic calendar) suggest that the bells of Wilno got little rest. In addition to the bells of the Christian churches, there were the appointed “criers” who called Tatars and Jews to their places of worship. A 1558 account of Tatar life drawn up by a Lithuanian Tatar for Sultan Sulejman noted that, contrary to normal practice in Muslim countries, in Lithuania “before worship, one of our citizens goes around the streets, summoning aloud [the worshippers] to prayer in the mosque.” The nineteenth-century editor of this text, A. Muchlin ´ ski, suggested that this non-Islamic practice was borrowed from Lithuanian Jews, who selected someone to walk through the streets summoning the faithful to the synagogue.73 It is clear that the calendars played a role in the religious violence that took place throughout the age. Daily, weekly, and annual rhythms provided regular occasions for tumults and excesses within the city: every week—every day even—as the various religions and confessions heeded the call and made their way to their closely situated places of worship; every week as the kitchen smells of those who, in the opinion of the other, ought to have been fasting made their way to the noses of those who actually were fasting; every year, as the various confessions celebrated their many and various high holy days, held festivals (often loud), and conducted public processions; every year, at the time of provincial synods. Noting the inherent difficulties involved in offering a “reconstruction of [the urban] acoustic backdrop” from extant textual descriptions, Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum nonetheless devoted an evocative chapter to “Clock Time Signal, Communal Bell” in his masterful History of the Hour that can serve as a suggestive framework for thought about the peculiarities of seventeenth-century Wilno. The large monoconfessional cities of the west soon reached a “threshold to signalling chaos,” with the plethora of churches, in addition to the municipal bell/clock tower, and the many types of signals to be sent on a daily basis: calls to worship according to the daily cycle of offices, calls to work, calls to rest, summons to important secular gatherings, call to curfew. Against the background of calls to worship “everyday life was [further] temporally structured through and through by bell signals, with hardly a day resembling another. Apart from signals for proclamations, prohibitions, and ordinances,

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the inhabitants of the city also received a wealth of acoustic information about important public civic events.”74 Seventeenth-century Wilno was a place where the ordering of temporal life through bell signals coexisted with, and indeed was no doubt an auxiliary tool of, clock culture. There was one central municipal clock at the town hall, and there was a municipal clockmaker. In the first half of the century, he was a Lutheran named Jakub Gierke, and he lived at Dominican Street, 32.01.75 The Calvinist church that was within the walls (until 1640) had a “small clock tower.”76 Personal inventories indicate that some of the elite possessed domestic timepieces of various sorts. Among owners of watches and clocks we find Uniate councillor Aleksander Ihnatowicz (1679, Market Square 4.05), Uniate burgomaster Stefan Lebiedzicz (1649, at the city wall heading toward Horse Street 7.07), and Orthodox burghess and merchant’s widow Anastazja Witkowska Gilewiczowa (1684, Horse Street 8.02). Orthodox merchant Grzegorz Sien´czyło (1686; he lived at Glass Street 20.05, but the family house was at Subocz Street 78.07) owned a “table clock,” a “hanging clock” (i.e., with a pendulum), and two “pectoral watches.”77 The cacophony of Wilno bells and calls to worship meant that all Vilnans were constantly reminded of the fact that they were sharing the city with a number of other confessions and religions, which could have led to tension and resentment; but it also meant that a citizen of Wilno had a good sense of the rhythms of life of all those others. An insomniac visitor to the old town of a modern European city quickly learns to distinguish the bells of one establishment from those of another—by pitch, volume, direction, and manner and purpose of ringing. Surely Vilnans knew immediately whether a given bell was intended for them and if not, who among their neighbors was being summoned and for what purpose. Bells that summoned Vilnans to shared activities such as work and service to and defense of the city may have served to create a shared identity. After all, not all the bells and signals exerted a centrifugal force upon the inhabitants of Wilno. The bells also summoned a wide spectrum to work in the various guilds, and the night watch announced curfew by “beating the capa [or capstrzyk, from German Zapfenstreich, curfew] on the drums in order to remind [the citizenry] of their obligations.”78

~ c h a p t e r f iv e~

Stereotyping, Writing, Speaking

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nother aspect of the backdrop for the intercultural dramas played out in seventeenthcentury Wilno was that of language, both spoken and written. The lingua franca of early modern Wilno may have been Polish, but in the streets of the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, one heard—depending on the neighborhood, or whom one met passing through Market Square—an array of other tongues, including Ruthenian, German, Lithuanian, and Yiddish, to name only the most important of the minority languages that were present on a permanent basis. To this constant spectrum we may add some uncertain numbers, although certainly more than just a few, of Scotsmen and Italians, even the occasional Spaniard.1 Foreign merchants, including a steady stream of Muscovite forest-product and fur traders, resided during their stays in the city in the municipal “guests’ house” located behind the town hall. In addition, Vilnans heard words and phrases in Latin, Church Slavonic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Ottoman Turkish in religious worship and discourse, and they could have encountered texts written in Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic letters, in addition to the Latin letters used for Polish, Latin, and German. The questions I address here are these. What were the spoken and written linguistic environments in which the citizens of the second capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth conducted their lives? How did the speakers of the various languages perceive and caricature each other in ethnolinguistic terms?

Stereotyping I will start with the stereotypes. In 1642 the Lutherans of Wilno allegedly welcomed a new minister—a “Father Lut[h]ermacher”—recently arrived from Königsberg, the nearby capital of Ducal Prussia. A good practitioner of Protestant sacred philology, he liked to insert phrases in Greek into his homilies when he explicated Holy Scripture. Whether he preached in German or Polish on this first occasion remains unclear: Lutheran Vilnans heard sermons in both languages, and their ministers were often bilingual. In any event, a contemporary Jesuit pasquinade—supposedly “printed in Wittenberg in the year 1642, yesterday” but actually the

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product of the local Uniate printing press—made the minister’s linguistic pretensions the premise of its satire.2 The versified mock encomium for the learned clergyman began with a prose “Preface to the Augsburg [Auszpurski] Reader” by a fictitious Wilno Lutheran named Bilger Reinhercigius, who was made to write in a bizarre Polish: “And, understanding that his high intellect is comprehensive of the varieties of lingual spirits [jest poje˛tny rozmaitos´ci duchów je˛zycznych]— in addition to the Greek, also Polish, Lithuanian, Ruthenian, Latin, German, and a bit of Hebrew—I illustriously dedicate this text to the New Sun, and I publish it to the world with a greeting to schismatic Rus´, the Germans, the Latins, and the Wilno Jews themselves.” The short versified pamphlet itself began with a “Greeting As to a Wise Man of Six New Languages Together”: Kaip ad nos il tes Hencher licha duszka minister? Ar tanis bolsz alloon ewona litewska gut est? Od galgen pryszodł, lecz entade sydera weyzdy, Su dich przyniosłes´ hreckoje gamma tibi. Du kanst greckie logos kadu tua burna hłaholi, Os nori, francie, sasów ducere flux na hłaholi?

The “poem” was indeed a bewildering mixture of all six languages, with never more than two words in the same language in succession. It can be “translated” (more or less) as follows: How does the executioner long for us? Does the Lithuanian aura (?) suit you more than others? He has come from the gallows, but here he looks to the stars. You brought with you the “Greek gamma” [i.e., the gallows]. You know Greek words when your lips speak [Ruthenian, hłaholi]. Do you, you rogue, wish to bring the Saxons quickly to the gallows [hłaholi]?3

Hłaholi, the final word of the last two lines, is both the Ruthenian/Slavonic verb “to speak” and the name of the Cyrillic letter h (Γ), the equivalent of the Greek gamma (Γ) that had ended the line before, both of which were thought to have the shape of the gallows. I will return to this point in a moment. The Jesuit pamphleteer had replaced the minister’s high ground (i.e., the sacred philologist’s recourse to the pure sources of the original biblical languages) with the Babel that was seventeenth-century Wilno and in which we find real living Greeks (i.e., Ruthenians) and Hebrews, next to Lithuanians, Germans, Tatars, and others. The linguistic assumption made by the author was that Polish was the only spoken language of Wilno with any sort of dignity. It was, in fact, what might be called the framing language of the entire pamphlet—even though, or perhaps precisely because, it was the language least in evidence in the versified

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prologue cited above; and all the other voices, including that of the Catholic Lithuanians, became debased variants of, or deviations from, that norm. But in this first poem of the pamphlet, it was the German with his Greek New Testament and the Ruthenian with his Greek faith, the dissident and the schismatic, who were most closely linked. This joining of suspect religion with suspect social and political identities was a constant in the Polishlanguage portrayals of Lutheran burghers and of “foolish Rus´” penned by the local Jesuits. It was adumbrated here through the insistence on the Greek gamma and its Ruthenian equivalent, hłaholi. Looking at the matter from the Lutheran and Ruthenian perspectives, the letters were symbols of that which was holy: of Lutheran recourse to the unsullied Greek font of Holy Scripture and of Ruthenian Greek Orthodoxy with its sacred Slavonic letters. But gamma and hłaholi were also the contemporary symbol of the gallows, and the identification had wider usage in the works of Polish and Ruthenian baroque writers.4 The Greek capital pi (∏), which then was written with a shorter right vertical line and thus resembled the capital gamma, also functioned in this way; it is encountered in the Latin curse i ad graecum pi—“go to the Greek pi,” in other words, “take yourself to the hangman,” “go to Hell.” The juxtaposition was much more than gallows humor, and it had quite local and specific referents that would have been immediately transparent to contemporary readers. In the seventeenth century, the members of Schismatic Rus´ were frequently dubbed Nalewajkos in reference to Seweryn (Semen) Nalewajko, who had led a Cossack uprising in 1594–1596 and was subsequently executed in the Warsaw town square.5 Among the voices of Wilno recorded further on in the Jesuit pamphlet, we encounter Sien´ko Nalewajko himself, come back from the dead to send his own “friendly lesson/sermon” (pouczenie . . . pryjatelskoe) to the new Lutheran minister in Latin-letter Ruthenian (or Ruthenianized Polish) verse. His lesson was, in fact, not at all friendly toward the Protestant clergyman, and he made it clear that the enemies of the Orthodox included not only the Poles and the Uniates—“It is hard for us with the Poles as well, but worse with the Uniates” (Tiaszko nam i z Lachami, a horsz z unitami)—but also the sometime ally, the hellenizing Protestant, who, from Nalewajko’s point of view, had nothing to do with what was really Greek. “You gave the sermon,” Nalewajko objected, “having begun to utter nonsense in Greek. At the end of the lesson you added something in Czech. We will find for you, you son of a bitch, another tongue in the water. You will speak the rogue’s language in that cold.”6 In other words, the resurrected leader of the failed rebellion promised to find for the Lutheran minister the same watery death that had met uncooperative clergy and magistrates, drowned by Cossacks in the recent decades of the conflict over the Union of Brest in various Ukrainian rivers.7 The irony, of course, was that Nalewajko himself had ended his days in a meeting with the executioner. But the central conceit had to do with the uncomfortable connection between Protestants and the profession of the executioner. Another versified pamphlet parodying recent events in the Wilno Lutheran church, this one from 1623, claimed that the noble patrons of the Lithuanian Calvinist Church treated their plebeian ministers with such disdain that “many a

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one would rather see his son an executioner than a catechist or a minister for Calvin. After all, that’s just what happened recently in Wilno, that some hangman was their minister.” The author was referring to rumors circulated widely, and gleefully, by Catholic polemicists in the early seventeenth century about a certain Stanisław Sudrowski, who was an elder in the Wilno Calvinist church. According to those Jesuit allegations, Sudrowski had been an executioner in Lwów before moving north; he had been sentenced to death there for theft, and the sentence had been commuted to that of taking on the taboo profession of executioner.8 The Lutheran church in Wilno may not have had any executioners among its clergy, but it most definitely had a few in the pews over the years on Sunday morning. The rolls of offerings to the Lutheran church did not regularly indicate professions, but for those years where they did do so we find several executioners (and one “executioner’s widow”) next to bakers, barber-surgeons, cobblers, and goldsmiths.9 The historian of the executioner’s office in Wilno has claimed that the profession—its practitioner was called “master” (mistrz)—was not dishonoring, unlike that of the executioner’s assistants (hycle, dog catchers). I have doubts about his claim: the Jesuit pamphleteers clearly expected their readership to see the profession as ignoble. However this may be, it was certainly a job that required training. And some of the best training was to be had in German-speaking cities. Wilno imported from Königsberg not only Lutheran ministers but also masters and their assistants. The executioners were supposed to reside in the Orthodox neighborhood of Subocz Street, in Subocz Gate itself at the city walls.10 It was to this uncomfortable connection between Lutherans and the gallows that the Jesuit pamphleteer was alluding in his insistence on the minister’s gamma. The broader goal was, of course, to emphasize difference, not only that of all the peoples and confessions of Wilno from the Polish Catholic norm but also differences among those many nations and tongues. But a second goal was also to note something they shared: none of them were of the szlachta; the Lutherans and the Ruthenians in particular were burghers and peasants and were associated in these representations with the lower, physical realm. At one point, the Jesuit pamphleteer had the “old Saxon women” (baby saskie) sing a “thanksgiving to the minister for his szprach and Greek predyk [pseudo-German for language and sermon]” to the tune of a well-known song of the times, in which they (as had also Nalewajko) confused greka (the Greek language) with gryka, which could be a substandard dialect form of greka, although its more usual meaning is “buckwheat.” The substandard adjectival form for “Greek” would have been grycki (standard form, grecki), but the pamphleteer indicated that the Lutheran faithful had confused Greek with buckwheat by having them use the adjectival form that can refer only to the latter delicacy: gryczany, as in that most noble of all kashas, kasza gryczana, or “buckwheat groats.” Thus we hear not of a greckie kazanie (Greek sermon) but of a gryczane kazanie (buckwheat sermon). And the Saxon women complained that the “minister’s speech is complicated” and that “it gets in the way of my prayers when they stuff us full of buckwheat/Greek” (gdy nas gryka˛otykaja˛).11

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A final, longer section of the pasquinade of 1642—a “Conversation between Lejba the Jewish Bailiff and Rabbi Łachman about the Arrival in Wilno of the New Talmudist Lut(h)ermacher”—gave the view from the Wilno margins. Lejba had told the rabbi that he had “heard from Hans who goes to the Saxons that a neophyte teacher has arrived here in Wilno; their worthy rabbi reads them sermons in Greek.” Here, too, the immediate connection was the Greek language. In mentioning the “seventy who translate the Bible,” Lejba was referring, of course, to the translators of what came to be known as the Septuagint, which, according to Jewish tradition, was the Greek version of the Hebrew Old Testament done for Ptolemy Philadelphus (285–246 B.C.) and his famous library at Alexandria. Rabbi Łachman was intrigued and gave his blessing to the bailiff to “converse with him about the faith.” The rabbi set the minister’s Greek over that of the local Greeks: “The neophyte does well to take away their Greek, and to catechize the Nalewajkos in his church [zbór12], for they are entirely unable to defend their faith. They may be Greeks, but they will not be able to save their Greek language.” But the rabbi finally decided not to send Lejba to the minister for fear of contamination: If he will be a Christian, our Talmuds will perish and all of us will die. He will teach us to suck pigs, to eat pork, he will teach us to talk Greek, just as he himself does. Shrimps, scallops and crickets, lobsters and crabs will be considered great delicacies on our tables, even though that is forbidden. Rather advise him to join the Mosaic law. Tell him, it is not a big thing; all we ask of him is that he allow us to circumcise him publicly in the synagogue.

“Not a big thing” (nie wielka rzecz), to the rabbi, perhaps; but presumably the good minister was of a different opinion.13 The Jesuit pamphleteers employed linguistic tools at every step, here and in other parodies, to facilitate the stereotyping of the non-Polish and non-Catholic Wilno others.14 Lutherans were not just uxorious, beer-sopped burghers and plebeians, Ruthenians were not just rebellious Cossacks and bearded peasants and merchants, and Jews were not just circumcised Talmudic casuists: they also had exotic—sometimes fancifully parodic—names, and they talked funny. Jews were Lejba and Łachman, Ruthenians Sien´ko, Dionizy, and Mikita. Germans were occasionally Hans, Hansworszt, and Herman Worszt. But they also had gaudier names, many of which were parodies of the names of identifiable contemporary Wilno Lutherans. To choose just one example, Półhełm Ogonbrychth was no doubt meant to be Wilno merchant and city councillor Wilhelm Engelbrecht (his house was at Castle Street 2.15). (The name was from pół, half, and hełm, helmet, perhaps by analogy with półhak, a type of weapon; and ogon, tail, plus the visual absurdity for Polish readers of -brychth.)15 The Jews of Wilno, in this satire, mixed Hebrew and pseudo-Hebrew into their Polish, alongside words of Ruthenian, perhaps even Muscovite origin. Ruthenians added the final t in thirdperson singular and plural of verb forms where Polish lacks it, substituted a and u

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for the Polish nasals, sometimes said h instead of the Polish g, and often used so-called pleophonic forms (e.g., gorod instead of gród). Even the Lutherans—at least in their Jesuit representations—knew to make fun of the Ruthenians by calling Mikita borodaty instead of brodaty (i.e., the Ruthenian, rather than the Polish form of “bearded”).16 And, of course, the Germans were made to speak Polish with the standard vaudeville markers of a German accent: the v-sound devoiced to f, s voiced as z, s before stops pronounced as sh (spelled, Polishstyle, sz), z pronounced sharply as ts (spelled with a c, as required by Polish orthography), monosyllables predominant. Minister Verbi Dei became Minister Ferbi Dei (and minister became ´swinister, from ´swinia, pig, often as not); universitas królewiecka became unifersitas królefiecka (University of Königsberg), and universitas itself could become unfersztas. Nor were the Tatars left in peace. The Roman Catholic printing house of Józef Karcan was involved in the publication of an anti-Tatar pamphlet entitled The True Tatar Alfurkan; the work was attributed to a fictitious Piotr Czyz˙ewski and published in Wilno in 1617. Czyz˙ewski’s main goal, announced on the baroque title page, was to prove that “Tatars are not nobles, nor landed gentry [ziemianie], nor princes [kniazie], but goatherds [kozin´cy] and tanners [skóroduby].” The author identified himself on the title page as one “whose father was killed by the Tatar Assan Alejewicz.” The work was a product of either the Wilno Roman Catholic Chapter or the local Jesuit pamphlet mill. The fact that the work was printed by Józef Karcan argues at the least for a connection with Wilno Catholic and probably with Wilno Jesuit circles.17 Contemporary opinion and law distinguished three types of Tatars by estate: simple, Cossack, and Hospodar. The latter group shared certain rights with the Polish szlachta but was excluded from the political life of the Commonwealth; converts from this group to Roman Catholicism, on the other hand, were full members of the szlachta.18 Czyz˙ewski’s main argument was that the perception that there were noble Tatars was based on a printer’s or corrector’s error in the relevant Lithuanian statutes: there was no Tatar kniaz´ (the Ruthenian word for prince), only the Tatar koziniec (goatherd). Czyz˙ewski used what he saw as stock Tatar names to impress upon his readers the absurdity of the notion of the Tatar prince: just imagine speaking of Prince Mucha (it means fly in Polish), Prince Obduła (i.e., Abdullah), Prince Habdziej, Prince Achmec´ (i.e., Ahmed), Prince Assan Alejewicz, etc.19 The stylistic dissonance alone told his readers that the Tatar nobleman was an impossibility. Czyz˙ewski lent his Tatar several qualities that allowed him to make his main point. These, for him, were a servile people, brought to Lithuania as prisoners of war; they had not, as one might have read elsewhere, voluntarily entered into military service under Lithuanian Grand Duke Witold (Lithuanian, Vytautas). At first, they, like the Jews, were forced to pay kozubales. (From kozub, a basket carried by Jews, kozubales was a tax, a kind of protection money, paid by Jews to Christians, especially students and priests, as they encountered them on the road and in exchange for not destroying or stealing their baskets.) The major Tatar occupations were to work as carters and tanners and to cultivate the land and sell cucumbers and onions—hence Czyz˙ewski’s further semantic absurdity: “the cucumber noble and the onion gentryman.” These were drunken and violent people, who worked on Sundays and holidays and forced

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their Christian servants to work on those days too. They converted their Christian wives, children, and wet nurses to Islam. They engaged in sorcery and spying. And finally, although they affected szlachta ostentation, wearing silk clothing and other costly items (which they should cease doing), they were physically crude: “one smells some sort of unpleasant stench from little Tatar children, which one never smells from Christian children.”20 The Tatar, in Czyz˙ewski’s representation, was a willing participant in every sort of violence and lawlessness. “If anyone wants to make a raid upon someone, the Tatars will quickly help in this. If you want to murder somebody, get yourself a Tatar. If you want to raise a ruckus, the Tatar won’t say no, to the contrary, he will take the lead.” What is more, and here the stock Ruthenian rebel once again came into play, “If you wish to be a Nalewajko for the destruction of the state, you will see that all the Tatars will flock to you like flies to honey.”21 And note that the stereotypical Tatar often spoke—in contemporary Polish representations— a form of Ruthenian or Ruthenianized Polish.22 The solution to the Tatar problem, according to Czyz˙ewski, was to be found in the Spanish model, which did not tolerate heretics or Jews. Czyz˙ewski offered a ten-point program: force the Tatars to go to church and listen to sermons; make them work for the church (ringing bells, hauling wood, etc.); demand a tithe for the church from their communities; destroy the mosques and forbid them to hold private services at home (and allow the Jesuit students of Wilno to use the resulting scrap wood to heat their lodgings); remove their privileges, and forbid them to take part in “knightly affairs”; establish a head tax, and force them to do public works (repairing and building the walls around Wilno, etc.); make them care for soldiers’ horses; forbid them to walk about in silk garments, wear swords, or have servants (in imitation of the szlachta); forbid them to work on Sundays and holy days; and finally, “compel them to come in” (the classic proof text for the licitness of compulsion in religious matters; see Luke 14:23)—threaten them with expulsion from the land if they do not convert.23 Czyz˙ewski concluded his work with a call for the removal of the Tatars from the city of Wilno.24 Presumably this meant from their settlement in Łukiszki. There are good reasons for exercising caution in evaluating the historiographic usefulness of these ethnolinguistic stereotypes. First, all our written evidence on this topic in seventeenth-century Wilno stems from those who laid claim to control over the discourse: Polish-speaking and -writing Roman Catholics (mostly from Jesuit circles). The lack of such sources from other camps should not make us blind to the probability that a set of sociolinguistic stereotypes about the others, including caricatures of the dominant Polish-speaking Roman Catholics, functioned in each of the more weakly situated groups, alongside the anxieties and insecurities often met on the margins. Second, the fact that the dominant discourse portrayed the others as deviations from the Polish and Catholic norm does not mean that those others did not contribute to the shaping of contemporary Wilno Polish usage. And third, the Polish of that place and time, even in the usage of Roman Catholic Poles or polonized people, was not what we think of as standard codified Polish. In fact, all the languages of seventeenth-century Wilno may have been hybrid, to greater and lesser degrees, and the

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Polish was certainly that of the eastern borderlands with its characteristic articulations and intonations. The Jesuits attempted to make the local Lutherans into vaudeville Germans. But all indications are that on the one hand, second-generation Germans, such as royal doctor and memoirist Maciej Vorbek Lettow, were more at home in Polish than in German (their first-generation fathers saw to this) and that, on the other hand, the Polish of a majority of Vilnans was most likely similar across the confessions and different from that spoken in Cracow or Warsaw.25 What we witness in these pamphlets is an attempt by local Jesuits to create or exaggerate differences and then to exploit them. One wonders, however, just how successful these pasquinades ultimately were; after all, many Vilnans, of various confessions and religions, saw the students of the Jesuit Academy, with their noble pretensions and refusal to be subject to the magistracy, as the most obvious “intruders.” And—except for in these pamphlets—the Lutherans, unlike the Calvinists and the Jews, were left mostly in peace. And yet, some of those differences must have been palpable to contemporaries. The Jesuit pasquinades suggest that Vilnans of different confessions may have dressed differently from each other. The Jesuits of Wilno lampooned the religious practices of the local Orthodox by having them act out Ruthenian “simpleness.” The congregation—this was the premise of a pasquinade from ca. 1635—was supposed to have put a note in the coffin of a recently deceased local merchant by the name of Jarmuła Złotowicz. This was to be a sort of letter of recommendation to St. Peter. The letter, written in a kind of Latin-letter Ruthenian, “involuntarily” revealed the foolishness of the Ruthenian congregation: “And that was a good man, he did not have a bit of pride in him. He walked about in a sheepskin coat, he did not tie up his great boots, nor did he ever comb his hair; he didn’t wipe his nose or his ass, and he didn’t wash his feet.” In similar fashion, the religion of the Orthodox was “innocently” portrayed as naive, downright primitive. The letter threatened St. Peter that if he did not receive Złotowicz into heaven, the Orthodox of Wilno would “put all of your icons out of our churches, nor will we kiss your bones.” But if he fulfilled their demands, they would “thank you before good people, princes, lords, and boyars of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and paint grand icons to you, and Jarmuła’s son will set out a great wax candle to you, and will beat his forehead in submission to you.”26 (The Jesuits may not just have been making fun of a perceived Ruthenian crudeness here. They may also have sought to deride a funeral practice that set the Orthodox apart. In Muscovy, letters of attestation to St. Nicholas were regularly put into the hands of the dead in preparation for burial.)27 On German Street, so one of the Jesuit pasquinades tells us, “there sits a crowd of Hosen Saksen in gaudy federhuts ” (Hosen Saksen gromada/W szumnych federhutach siada). The federhut is the German feathered hat, and Hosen Saksen, the term used here to describe the ethnos itself sounds a bit like place-names such as Frankfurt’s Sachsenhausen suburb but also turns the Germans into “Saxony-pants” (Sachsen-Hosen). And in fact, one of the collective—and derogatory—terms the Wilno Jesuits and others used for the Germans was pluder (Polish plural as an ethnonym, pludrowie; as clothing, pludry), which was the German (and borrowed

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Polish) term for the short, puffy pants popular in and characteristic of Luther’s Germany.28 (In German, it was usually Pluderhosen.) While the Jesuit pasquinades must be used with caution when it comes to descriptions of dress and grooming of Wilno’s non-Roman Catholics, other evidence suggests that some such differences may have been real and functioned in the perceptions of contemporary Vilnans. On 28 March 1669, an inquisition was conducted at the request of the bishop of Wilno, Aleksander Sapieha, in the matter of an altercation between Samuel Brykman, a goldsmith who did not belong to the local guild, and guild members, who had attacked and robbed him. He had apparently been living and working in a property under the jurisdiction of the bishop or the Roman Catholic Chapter and thus in theory was exempt from the rigors of guild statutes. The guild members felt otherwise. One part of the recorded inquisition tells us of the offending goldsmith’s appearance: “The German goldsmith [Brykman], having heard the ruckus on account of more people in the vestibules, since he had a small chest before him, hid it in his pludry and went into a German rage” (do pluder schował i po niemiecku furiował).29 A case heard before the bishop’s consistorial court in Wilno on 28 January 1668 tells of the nighttime robbery of a German in the Rudniki suburb carried out by a priest and his lay accomplices, one of whom gave testimony in this fashion: “I caught sight of the German. We attacked him. The priest struck him first with the flat of the sword that Pawłowski and Nacewicz had taken away from a Tatar during the day. . . . Interim [in the meantime] all four of us grabbed that German, took his coat from him, Karny [the priest] knocked his hat off his head, they took away his sword, Father Karny immediately reached into the pocket of his [the German’s] pludry, [looking for money].”30 Brykman and the anonymous German victim of nocturnal priestly violence may have been recent arrivals in Wilno, but their recorded sartorial predilections suggest that we should keep in the back of our imaginations certain sensory differences—dress, speech, song, and cooking and other smells—that were associated with smaller and larger groupings of the various confessions and ethnicities. Were Vilnans readily able to assign ethnicity and confession or religion on the basis of speech patterns, tastes in song and dance, grooming habits, dress, gait, diet, and so forth? The evidence points on occasion in both directions. Think only of worries among Roman Catholic authorities that Vilnans might confuse a Calvinist minister, as he wended his way through the streets of Wilno to visit the sick, with a Catholic priest.31 All this suggests that we must be alert both to the levelings that brought Vilnans together and to the legible markers of difference, both subtle and obvious, that kept Wilno society in a constant state of tension.

Writing Now the second question: What was the written environment in which seventeenthcentury Vilnans conducted their lives? I begin with an aspect about which I have no evidence,

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only a strong suspicion based on what seems to have been the irresistible urge, felt across cultures and centuries, to scribble and to carve letters, words, and phrases on everything from masonry walls to wooden benches. Wilno can hardly have been the world’s only graffiti-free zone.32 We may imagine a preponderance of the majority language in the given neighborhood, but we might also suspect a certain amount of “tagging” done by the literate in the public space of the market and in the territories of the others. Furthermore, late medieval and early modern cities sported other sorts of more officially sanctioned signage: identifications of streets, houses, and businesses.33 Some of these would have been images, but some were texts, and we may suspect that—again, depending on what part of town they were in—not all of them were in Latin-letter Polish. These most public of signs must remain an imagined backdrop for what we know from extant documents. Among the latter we find scattered autograph signatures and the rare holograph letter from Wilno family archives. Wilno was a multilingual city, and many individual Vilnans spoke, and some were literate in, more than one language. Consider, for example, the letters sent by second-generation Dutch Calvinist merchant of Wilno, Korneliusz Winhold II, to his Lutheran cousin Dawid Rendorf. The Winholds were not nobles, although they served as arendars (lease holders) for the Calvinist Radziwiłłs.34 The elder Winholds sent their young son on a “peregrination to the schools” in imitation of noble customs. He arrived in Marburg in 1615 at age fifteen and matriculated at the academy in Basel the following year.35 A few years later we find him looking in on family business concerns in Amsterdam and planning a trip to Paris. He sent an autograph Polish letter (with an address in German) from Amsterdam to Wilno in 1620 and another, in German but with a French address, from Paris in 1621.36 Secrecy may have played some role in the choice of languages for the body of the letters (Polish in a letter sent from Amsterdam, German for that from Paris), transparency in the addresses (German in Amsterdam, French in Paris). However this may be, the exchange between the young Calvinist and his Lutheran cousin suggests a community of German-Polish bilingualism—and literacy—among Wilno Protestants. And in this particular case we find a twenty-year-old merchant’s son with fluent mastery of at least two modern languages (next, no doubt, to grammatica, i.e., Latin) as well as of the quite different hands customarily used to write them.37 But these sorts of private documents have not survived in great numbers for Wilno burghers, and we are most familiar with the hands of the “professional writers,” the notaries charged with keeping the acta for Wilno’s many secular and religious corporations. These included the books of the several jurisdictions that made up the patchwork quilt of the Wilno legal systems—the land and castle courts for the nobles but also for the Jews and Tatars; for the burghers the magistracy but also the Roman Catholic Chapter and the so-called horodnictwo. In addition, the Roman Catholic consistory kept its own records, as did, apparently, some court-like venues associated with Wilno’s other confessions. In addition, there were baptismal, marriage, and death records for most if not all of Wilno’s confessions. (The possible exceptions here were the Orthodox in addition to the Jews and Tatars.) Confraternities

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connected with the various churches kept records of meetings, contributions, and “inscriptions” (sometimes autograph), as did at least some of the trade guilds. Jewish and Christian societies functioned in parallel structures. In addition to rabbinical writings in Hebrew with some Aramaic admixtures, we may assume—although none of this is extant for Wilno—the presence of record books, the pinkasim, kept by the Jewish kahal and perhaps also by the burial and charitable societies, as well as by the Jewish guilds.38 An extant Yiddish “Ballad on the Martyrs of the Wilno Blood Libel,” apparently published in Amsterdam ca. 1692 but probably produced by a Wilno Jew, may serve as confirmation of some sort of Yiddish scriptural community in the city in the period even if there was as yet no standard orthography for the language.39 Finally, there is a reference to a judge—a qa¯d.¯ı —for the Tatar community of the Wilno county, and he may well have kept some sort of record book, although it is not clear in what language. We have the last will and testament of such a qa¯d.¯ı from 1594, entered in Ruthenian in the books of the Wilno castle court but with an Arabic-letter signature.40 In general, Lithuanian Tatars, including those of Wilno, produced and read so-called kitaby (the Slavic plural of the borrowed Arabic word for book), Arabic-letter—although Slaviclanguage!—collections of legends, fables, adventure stories, descriptions of Moslem rituals, moralistic tales, and guides to fortune-telling and interpretations of dreams based on the Koran. What we may call scriptural communities grew up around these secular and religious sodalities and nodes of authority. Most Vilnans were members of multiple communities. Even the illiterate and the semiliterate participated in them in some ways: their oral testimony would be recorded; they would listen to the reading of documents; they would have notarized extracts from them made for their personal archives. After all, to choose only one example, the possession of a record of legitimate birth could be extremely important to the bearer and his heirs in a variety of contexts, even if the directly interested parties were unable to read it. We find an easy equation of the languages of scriptural and ethnic communities only on the margins and among the non-Christians. Few were the erudite Christians who could read Hebrew and had an interest in Talmudic interpretation or Kabbalah. Perhaps there were one or two such persons at some point among the transient communities of Wilno’s Jesuits or Dominicans. Perhaps people like our Lutheran minister from Königsberg had some biblical Hebrew at some point in their studies: we know of contacts and conversations between Antitrinitarians and Jews (and Karaim in nearby Troki),41 but that would have been about it. It is doubtful that Christian Vilnans had an interest in, or access to, the record books of the kahal or other Jewish bodies. For almost all non-Jewish Vilnans, with the exception of a few theologians, Hebrew letters must have seemed a secret code. The same no doubt held true, only more so, for the Arabic-letter writings of the Lithuanian Tatars. The Tatars assimilated linguistically within a generation or so and began speaking and writing a variant of Belarusan (Ruthenian) if they were village dwellers or Polish if

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they lived in a city like Wilno. But they wrote their Slavic kitaby (perhaps also the records of the Tatar judge, if he kept them) in Arabic letters. There was a functional similarity here with Yiddish. This was a language based on the spoken idiom of the Christian environment but with considerable admixtures of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish and written in the sacred letters of the cult. Only the rare Christian orientalist or merchant/traveler would have had access to this scriptural community.42 Scholars have noted a tendency among Lithuanian Tatars to establish hierarchical equivalencies, translating Arabic texts of great cultic dignity into Polish (but again—in Arabic letters!), lowlier Turkish material into Belarusan (Ruthenian).43 A brief footnote here: Polish-Lithuanian Jews not only read Yiddish and Hebrew written in Hebrew letters; they also read Polish in that form. We know this, among other things, from rare privileges granted by Christian authorities transcribed in this manner—Polish texts written in Hebrew letters—and entered into Jewish record books.44 I have no evidence for this sort of scriptural practice in Wilno. We do know, however, that Wilno Jews knew Polish to varying degrees of fluency and for use in various forums (in the marketplace, in court, perhaps with Christian neighbors), and so we may wonder whether they jotted things down from time to time in Hebrew-letter Polish. Here, again, the alphabet could have functioned as a secret code. There are some indications that Lithuanian Jews learned Polish and Ruthenian from the Christian servants who lived with them.45 Finally, we have evidence of various local German hands. We find them in the acta of the magistracy, where Germans signed legal documents written in Polish or Latin and in the scripts normally employed with those languages. Further, German script was routinely employed in the various record books of the Wilno Lutheran church. It may have been less a mystery to some seventeenth-century non-German Vilnans than to later readers of German. I find some evidence that those with business interests beyond Wilno were able to read, even write, in this script. After all, one common trade route took merchants and goods down the River Wilia to the Niemen, thence eventually to the Baltic Sea and to Königsberg, as the first port of call to the old Hansa network. Königsberg was the first choice of asylum for Vilnans of all confessions, including the Orthodox, during the Muscovite occupation of Wilno. Asylum seekers signed oaths of loyalty to the elector of Brandenburg in the winter of 1656. See, for example, the autograph signatures of Calvinist merchant Michał Baranowicz and Lutheran Adam Palczewski. Neither was German, but both signed the oath in that language, the former in a standard German hand, the latter in a Polish hand.46 The other scriptural communities—centered around Latin letters in the various Polish and Latin hands, and Cyrillic, which was used for both Church Slavonic and Ruthenian— were much less specific to confessional and ethnic identities. True, it was mostly Ruthenians who signed their own names in Cyrillic by the seventeenth century or who read anything in that script other than the court documents and royal decrees that were written in Chancery Ruthenian. Still, the Lithuanian land and castle courts, which served the nobles, as well as the Jews and the Tatars, continued to employ Lithuanian Ruthenian cursive as a chancery

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language until 1696. Its use was obligatory until that date for all land and tribunal decrees. In the course of the seventeenth century it appeared in fewer and fewer court documents, depending upon which territories we look at. But we still find it often enough in the highly fragmentary acta of the Wilno land and castle courts and right up to 1696. Usage here ranged from documents written entirely in Chancery Ruthenian through those in which boilerplate introductions and/or conclusions accompanied specific acta entered in Polish to entries entirely in Polish.47 For example, the Polish-language testament of Katarzyna Rejchowiczówna Gierlicowa (“the street leading to the Church of St. Iwan,” 56.05), which was recorded in the acta of the Lida castle court in 1658, had such a Ruthenian-language prologue; it was rerecorded with the Wilno court of the bench in 1663. She was Lutheran, as had been her first husband; her second husband had been Calvinist.48 The household archives of the nobles—not just Ruthenians, but also Roman Catholics, Calvinists, and recently gentrified German Lutherans—could have included significant amounts of texts with Ruthenian writing in them, including deeds of sale, wills, litigation, and other legal instruments. Furthermore, individual Jews and Tatars who went before the land and castle courts, either with Christians or with fellow Jews and Tatars (and we find examples of both, although Jews were not supposed to litigate with other Jews outside Jewish courts), would have been in possession of similar types of documents with varying amounts of textual material in Ruthenian. Even the occasional burgher who pursued a case up to the Lithuanian tribunal came home with a Ruthenian decree. (Some contemporary copies of Ruthenian court pronouncements were made with Ruthenian morphemes but in Latin letters in a standard Polish hand.) The acta of the other jurisdictions—the magistracy, the Roman Catholic Chapter, and the horodnictwo—were kept in varying proportions of Polish and Latin, depending on the type of document and the level of the instance. For example, the acta of the lowest instances of the Roman Catholic Chapter were kept entirely in Polish. At the highest instance, proceedings of the canons were kept in Latin, although last wills and testaments, as well as records of various sorts of litigation between residents of the chapter jurisdictions, were often still recorded in Polish. These forums heard cases brought by Christians of all confessions, as well as by Jews and Tatars, on the principle of actor sequitur forum rei (the plaintiff goes to the court of the accused).49 Although the magistracy functioned according to a well-defined system of Greek-Roman parity and there were notaries for both the Greek and the Roman benches, Cyrillic was used rarely, at least in the extant acta of the Wilno magistracy. A common pattern here was a Latin prologue and/or colophon with a Polish main text. Vilnans of all confessions, religions, and ethnicities participated in these Polish-Latin scriptural communities, occasionally leaving written evidence of their presence through Cyrillic, German, and Hebrew signatures. There were other indicators—in addition to signatures in alphabets, scripts, and languages other than those of the documents themselves—that point to a blurring of the boundaries between linguistic systems, or perhaps a creation of hybrids that included more than

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one of them. Readers of seventeenth-century Polish texts—from baroque poetry through polemical pamphlets to forensic prose—are used to deciphering Polish-Latin macaronicisms.50 Clearly, the complicated games played by the more sophisticated practitioners of the literary art differed from the habitual use of Latin in the forensic genres, as did both of these rhetorical styles from the code switching and simple mixings of average speakers in multilingual contexts. Some of these performances required an acute awareness on the part of both actor and audience that a well-defined linguistic boundary had been crossed. Others were the result of an equally profound lack of such awareness. Still, from high to low, an everyday presence of more than one language and an openness to hybrid solutions was part of the linguistic backdrop. One of my favorites in the local usage at the lower end of the artfulness scale—I’m not certain how widely the usage was spread—is that of the Latin pauperibus, the ablative plural of pauper, employed as a Polish nominative. This example is taken from a court interrogation: [P]omieniony Fiedorek Andrzejewicz chodził do bramy przez kilka nocy i tam z pauperibusami w bramie nocował (the aforementioned Fiedorek Andrzejewicz came to the gate for several nights and he slept there together with the [other] pauperibusses).51 Here, on the whole, Polish functioned as the framing language, with Latin words and phrases inserted and correctly inflected according to Latin norms but governed by the rules of Polish syntax. But we also find Wilno Lutherans introducing Polish words into their own German texts in similar fashion, switching to a Polish hand for Polish words and sometimes giving proper Polish inflections to the Polish words, depending on the requirements of the German syntax in the larger context. One example: Anfenglichlichen [sic] daß haus inn der Rudnischen gassen, welches von Ihr Gnadden fraw Elisabeth Volerofney Alexendrowey Holowniney. [First, the house on Rudniki Street, which [belongs to] Frau Elisabeth Vonlerofna Alexendrowa Holownina.]

The name has been put in the Polish dative, as required by the German syntax. The woman is identified according to the rules of Polish legalese: she is Elizabeth, daughter of Voler, wife of Aleksander Hołowna. But note that the first name of this Lutheran woman is left in German, Elisabeth, not the expected Elz∧bieta (dative, Elz∧biecie); that her patronymic is written the way a German would pronounce the Polish—Volerofnej, not Folerównej (or, actually, Fo[n]larównej, as she is in Polish documents52); that her husband’s names (they are possessive adjectival forms) are absolutely correct Polish; and that her two names were written in a German hand, those of her Ruthenian husband in a Polish hand. And we find this combination of scripts two lines later in the names of two Poles: Łukasz Hos´ciło and Melchior Rudzian´ski, and a bit further along two “foreign” words (Contract and Inventiret).53 In somewhat similar fashion, we find scribes absentmindedly switching back and forth on occasion between Latin and Cyrillic hands, turning passages—apparently unintentionally—into

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Polish-Ruthenian hybrids. Given the close similarity of the two spoken languages, we should consider the likelihood that literate non-Ruthenian Vilnans could make out varying amounts of Ruthenian textual material.

Speaking This brings up the final set of questions. What languages did Vilnans speak in public and more private places, and how did they speak them? Did spoken usage reflect similar sorts of slippage between language boundaries? The sounds of seventeenth-century speech are, of course, largely unreconstructable, but written sources offer some indications of paths for fruitful speculation about the linguistic aspect of Wilno’s acoustic backdrop. Especially useful here are those protestations in which citizens defended their honor in court against the “dishonoring words” (słowa uszczypliwe) uttered against them by their neighbors. Most were not satisfied with the simple allegation that their honor had been challenged: they wanted to put on record the precise words that had been uttered against them. There is, of course, a paradox here: in having his protestation recorded, the plaintiff was preserving in writing for posterity—and making as public as could be for his contemporaries, for whom his honor or dishonor were quite real things—precisely what dishonoring words had been used to slander him. Here, it would seem, we finally come close to hearing something like the living speech of the seventeenth-century Wilno market, street, and chambers. Again, three caveats. First, these are the words of the accused, as reported by the plaintiff. Still, there are certain reasons to expect some sort of reliability here: should the litigation proceed to the next stage, in the absence of other witnesses, the plaintiff, as the one “closer to the proof ” (bliz∧szy do dowodu), would be called upon to take an oath in three days’ time, together with two “co-jurors,” swearing to the veracity of his allegations. Such oaths were taken seriously and not only for religious reasons, as there could be penalties for refusing to take the oath, since now the complainant could himself become liable to charges of defamation. Second, Wilno was a city of many languages. It is not necessarily the case that the alleged exchange of words took place in the language of the acta—which was most often Polish, occasionally Ruthenian. Third, more important to me here, these recorded insults—seemingly so full of real lives—adhered to certain generally recognizable rhetorical norms. The peoples of the various ethnicities who have laid claim to the city have either argued explicitly in their modern national historiographies or tacitly assumed that the sounds of Wilno were largely music to their own ears. Poles have tended to equate the language of the majority of the sources with the language of the majority of the speakers and imagined a chorus of pure Polish in the streets of Wilno. Lithuanians have seen the use of Polish in chancery documents as a political necessity and caught the intonations of Lithuanians

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speaking their own language in more local and private settings. Others will hear Ruthenian when they make mental visits to the neighborhoods of early modern Wilno; still others will hear Yiddish or German. The question of what languages Vilnans spoke can never be answered definitively, but the sources provide a few clues. There is no direct answer, for example, to assertions by some scholars that although the city may have written Polish, it spoke—at least in some places and in some situations—Lithuanian. And yet a court case from the horodnictwo sheds a little indirect light on the matter. In June of 1686 the court heard a case of defamation.54 A certain Andrzej Jurewicz charged that Piotr Kowalski had been alleging in public that Jurewicz’s father was a płaktynik. The word is both Polish and Lithuanian: the formant -nik is Polish (as in nudnik), and the root płakty comes from the Lithuanian verb plakti, which means “to flog,” “to thrash,” “to whip.” The case—recorded as was usual in Polish—dragged on for several days, so the unusual word came up a few times: “calling him a płatkynik, that is, alleging that the executioner beat his father at the whipping post and drove him from the city”; “calling him, in Lithuanian style [z litewska], a płaktynik, that is, alleging that the executioner drove his father out of the city”; “calling him a płaktynik, as if the executioner had driven his father out of the city.” The accused answered that he had “never called Mr. Jurewicz a płaktynik, rather he had heard that other people said this, but he [Mr. Kowalski] considered him a good man.” Litigation ended with a court-imposed apology from Mr. Kowalski and a demand for 4 złotys to cover legal fees. The case suggests several things: that a sort of Polish-Lithuanian jargon functioned in Wilno, at least in the poor suburbs under the castles; that enough people, at least in those neighborhoods, were sufficiently capable of understanding the word płaktynik that Jurewicz felt the need to go to court in defense of his father’s honor; but also that the word was not universally transparent, even in those marginal suburbs. In all but the last occurrence, the record glossed the word, on one occasion noting that it was “in Lithuanian style.” This story would seem to suggest that there was a zone of Polish-Lithuanian hybridity on the margins, probably also that there were speakers of Lithuanian, at least in the suburbs, but that the language was not widely known in the city and its immediate suburbs by 1686. The language of the Polish acta of Wilno’s various legal forums suggests further hybridity. Here we find unglossed Lithuanianisms (next to Germanisms and Ruthenianisms, among other “foreign” material), much of which would have to be glossed for speakers of standard Polish. Some of them are not only missing from the dictionaries (notably the otherwise compendious Warsaw and the Wilno dictionaries), but they have also escaped notice in the works of Konstantinas Jablonskis (1941) and Jurgis Lebedys (1976), which seek to document all Lithuanianisms in early modern Polish and Latin texts. This fact suggests that further study will uncover a deeper and broader hybridity in the official Polish usage of seventeenth-century Wilno. Two examples. Acta regularly include the bałtusznik in lists of professions, sometimes next to the more transparent białoskórnik (white-leather tanner) and zamesznik (chamois

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tanner). This was a tanner who specialized in white-leather products, from the Lithuanian baltas, “white”—hence bałtusznik.55 Inventories listed among personal possessions the indówka, which must have been some sort of vessel for domestic use. In one case, under the heading Miedz´ (copper), we find jedna indówka i dwie miedziane miednice (one indówka and two copper washbowls).56 The word must come from the Lithuanian indas, “dish, vessel.” In another case Uniate town councillor Samuel Filipowicz had found two Ruthenianspeaking witches squatting in his house at Subocz Street 79.08 in the spring of 1662 upon his return from asylum in Königsberg. This case points in a somewhat different direction from that of the defaming płaktynik. I cite part of it here. The reported speech of the witches was in Polish with Ruthenian phrases inserted, as well as a Latin aside indicating that a Ruthenian obscenity had been omitted in order not to offend the sensitive reader, all in the same Latin-Polish hand. The words in bold below—in no way distinguished from the rest of the text in the original—contain the Ruthenian reflexes: For immediately, in the presence of that Lady Koszewska, they made an intrigue and a boast upon the health [of the new inhabitants] iis formalibus [in this fashion]: “Whoever will live here will not thrive. Neither did that cobbler’s wife rejoice, who drove me out of my dwelling in the monastery.” To this they added terrible and frequent improperia et maledictiones [taunts and curses], once taking inspiration even from the dead. For when [a corpse] was being carried across the street, [they made their taunts] with the following words: “May they carry that (honoris gratia contumeliosum omittitur verbum [for honor’s sake, the abusive word is omitted here)], as they carried that corpse.” [Zaraz abowiem przed ta˛z∧ Pania˛ Koszewska˛ machinacyja˛ i odpowiedz˙ na zdrowie iis formalibus uczynili: “Kto tu budiet z∧yt nikoli nie rozz∧ywiecsia. Nie ucieszyła si˛e i szewcowa, szto menie z monasterskoho mieszkania wykuryła.” Przysta˛piły do tego straszne i cz˛este improperia et maledictiones, pochop biora˛c od samych czasem umarłych. Gdy wi˛ec przez ulic˛e którego prowadzono temi słowy: “Bodaj toho (honoris gratia contumeliosum omittitur verbum) tak niesiono jak tego trupa.”]57

There are, I think, three main points to be drawn from this. First, in this passage and elsewhere in the rest of the protestation where the witches’ speech is reported, Ruthenian words were left unglossed. The assumption was that all speakers and readers of Polish would understand them without aid—unlike the “Lithuanian” płatktynik. Second, Filipowicz was himself Ruthenian, although of the elite. By in essence parodying the Ruthenian speech of his foes he came perilously close to denying cultural capital to himself. This was the dilemma of Ruthenian elites, especially the Uniates, in early modern Poland-Lithuania: how to maintain both dignity and difference when the language spoken by fellow Ruthenians could easily be caricatured as a jargonized, second-rate version of Polish. And finally, the reported speech of the two witches was a Polish-Ruthenian hybrid. It may have been that Filipowicz inserted only a few Ruthenian forms to signal that they were speaking “pure” Ruthenian. But it might

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also have been the case that they spoke this hybrid language, that indeed all of Subocz Street could sound this way on occasion.58 There are reasons to suspect that a number of hybrid languages functioned in seventeenthcentury Wilno and that individuals of various ethnicities were able to employ more than one of them. Moreover, Wilno may have been a local example of what has been described as the “communicative community” of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the site of the convergence of things like place of articulation and aspects of morphology and syntax, not only between closely related languages like Polish and Ruthenian but between those two idioms and languages much more distantly related to them such as Yiddish and German.59 If we listen carefully, I think we hear something of the Jesuits’ Tower of Babel that was seventeenth-century Wilno and with which I began this chapter—but in quite a different tonality. The picture of strict separation and maintenance of difference was a dream of the various clergies and of late modern nationalisms; such distinctions were largely ignored in the daily life of early modern Wilno. As we move through the corridors of the various houses, through the various neighborhoods, drop in at workplaces and at christening parties, we hear many different hybrid languages, all having some relationship to the linguistic convivencia characteristic of early modern Wilno. We hear people communicating with each other across linguistic and ethnic boundaries. We also hear people making jokes in secret about the others in their own secret languages. The midlevel Germans of Glass Street and their Jewish neighbors may on occasion have had recourse to some common Germanic jargon. But mostly we will hear them all speaking Polish (the Jews and Tatars also spoke Polish), as this was the language of public discourse in most circumstances. But it was a Polish with an articulation and syntax that Ruthenians, Lithuanians, Germans, Scots and Italians, Jews, and Tatars could accommodate. In some ways, it was probably a bit like the Polish one still hears to this day in certain corners of Wilno.

~ c h a p t e r six~

Birth, Baptism, Godparenting

I

n a postil published in Poznan ´ in 1580, Polish Jesuit Jakub Wujek—future translator of the Bible and a key player in the Counter-Reformation in Poland-Lithuania—criticized the sins of “our Catholics,” who “even in things that touch upon the faith, make bold to keep company with the heretics by attending their baptisms, their weddings, and their funerals.”1 Wujek’s concerns were for the state of the Church in the Commonwealth at large, but he had just returned from a stint as the rector of Wilno’s academy (he held that office in 1578–1579), and he certainly also had Lithuanian conditions in mind as he wrote. On the other side of the confessional spectrum, the Calvinist Agenda published in Danzig in 1637, a handbook on doctrine and ritual for reformed ministers, contained similar warnings against permitting any sort of spiritual kinship with those outside the confession: “The servant of God is to strive most vigilantly that faithful parents not receive for Holy Baptism godparents of another religion, and he himself should not admit such ones without some great and significant reason.”2 These were attitudes more at home in the Polish Crown, where confessionalization was marginally more successful; nonetheless, the Reformed superintendents demanded that they be binding for laity and clergy in the notoriously lax Grand Duchy of Lithuania as well. The title of the Agenda stated specifically that it was for use “in the evangelical churches of the Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania” (emphasis added), and its authors gave special attention to the maintenance of uniformitas religionis (uniformity of religion).3 One of the reasons for the prohibitions, in addition to general attempts to maintain discipline, was that clergy of all the confessions that practiced infant baptism—whatever their belief about the nature of the sacrament—were largely in agreement that one function of godparenthood was the Christian upbringing of the child.4 There are indications, however, that—at least in Wilno—not all parents heeded the call and that some local clergy silently looked the other way when a member of another confession presented himself or herself at the baptismal font for service as a godparent. This suggests that, for some—laymen but perhaps also local parish clergy—godparenthood served purposes different from, or at least in addition to, spiritual instruction within the confines of the confession. In what follows, I examine practices and attitudes surrounding birth, baptism, and godparenting: how children were viewed; what motivated parents in choosing names and godparents for their

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children; the extent to which the choices served to delineate confessional identities within the city landscape; and what sorts of syncretisms arose in these practices.

The Royal Doctor’s Babies We have few and highly scattered sources for the attitudes of seventeenth-century Vilnans toward their children. That evidence is perhaps most concentrated in the journal of the Lutheran doctor to King Władysław IV, Maciej Vorbek-Lettow (German Street 26.03), the closest thing we possess to a burgher memoir from that city. Vorbek-Lettow was busy reestablishing his family’s presence in the Polish-Lithuanian nobility. Whatever the case was concerning the family’s patent of nobility, Vorbek-Lettow was intimately implicated in numerous networks that included Wilno burghers, and he made no attempt to exclude them from the narration of his life. Vorbek-Lettow’s Calvinist wife, Elz∧bieta Isfelt, bore him eleven children over the years 1619 to 1642; he was from twenty-six to forty-nine years of age during this period, she, eighteen to forty-one. The memoirist belonged to the new clock-and-watch culture in Wilno, as did others of the elite and perhaps not only the elite, and he noted with great precision not only the place and date of his children’s births but also, with only two exceptions, the precise time of his wife’s “fortunate deliveries”: his first child, Elisabet Zofia, was born “that same [1619] year, on the 31st day of March, the first day of Easter [i.e., Easter Sunday], just at noon, a quarter before twelve”; others were born “before nine at night on the half-clock,” “at half past eleven” at night, “on the night of Saturday to Sunday, an hour before day,” “at one in the afternoon on the eve of St. John’s,” and so forth.5 For the girls, he asked of the Lord God, as in the case of his firstborn, “that she might grow unto Your Holy praise, for us parents a comfort.” For the boys, he added the appropriately noble pursuit of the martial arts, as in the case of his second child, Krzysztof Wiktorzyn, born 27 February 1621: “Grant Lord God that he might grow unto Your Holy praise, for the service of the Commonwealth, [and] for us parents a great comfort and support in our old age.” The intensity of the hopes and fears associated with each new life is reflected in the small variations in the formulaic language used in the report of each birth but especially in additions to the accounts such as that which followed in this last case: “That right after the baptism he cried out in a stentorian voice [tubalnym głosem]—may God make of it a bonum omen [good sign]. The Prince, Lord Hetman [Krzysztof Radziwiłł II, one of the godparents] said to me, ‘You will see, when he achieves his years he will make a good soldier.’ ”6 In fact, his cry may have been a good sign: Krzysztof Wiktorzyn was one of the few of Vorbek-Lettow’s children who lived to adulthood. The concern—the hopes and fears and the search for signs and omens at birth—must have been a constant. Of the eleven children, although six reached what was then considered maturity, only three, all boys, would outlive their father. The pain and sorrow with which their father recorded their deaths is palpable,

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even in its occasional use of recognizable rhetorical formulas. Here, too, he noted the precise times, whenever he could, including the death of his firstborn child, daughter Elisabet Zofia, who lived just past her ninth birthday. The entire memoir, it should be noted, was written in Polish with the usual admixtures of individual phrases in Latin. In this instance, however, the doctor switched in the middle of a sea of Polish to record a discrete event entirely in Latin. I would argue that our modern linguistic sensibilities are exactly wrong here: the grieving father felt a need to have recourse to the more dignified language in order to give expression to keenly felt emotion, inexpressible for him at the moment in the “vulgar tongue”: Anno 1628 die 17 aprilis inter horam octavam et nonam ante meridianam Elisabet Sophia, filia mea primogenita, unice dilecta, angina opressa, ex hac miseriarum valle decessit. Vixit annos novem. [In the year 1628, the 17th day of April, between the hour of eight and nine in the morning, Elisabet Zofia, my firstborn daughter, especially beloved, afflicted with angina, departed from this vale of miseries. She had lived nine years.]7

Other passages on the sufferings and death of children, equal in length and detail to those devoted to the passing of adults, suggest strong ties of affection across the generations in the Vorbek-Lettow family and elsewhere. The doctor’s concern for his own children clearly shaped the consolation he attempted to give a fellow Lutheran. She was Zuzanna Nonhartówna (Castle Street 2.09), Lutheran wife of Roman Catholic nobleman Jerzy Chreptowicz (by then castellan of Smolen ´ sk). She had many personal contacts with those Lutheran burgher residents of Castle Street who quietly slipped into the noble estate in the course of one generation, and she and her father, Wilno horodniczy Piotr Nonhart (Rudniki Street 12.06), may have belonged to that category. On 15 August 1640—by which time Vorbek-Lettow had received eight children from his wife and already buried four of them—he wrote to Nonhartówna about some matters involving the local church but also in reaction to her family news: I understand that the Lord God has deigned to visit upon Your Grace sorrow at the death of your Lord son, nonetheless may Your Grace deign to take note in your grief that the Lord God only lends us children in this world; He does not give them to us for eternity. The Fatherland of us all is in heaven. And why [does He take] some sooner, others later? We must ascribe this to His incomprehensible will, which, just as it causes sorrow, so it also consoles us, and I do not doubt in the least that He will grant you as a recompense to enjoy great consolations in your remaining offspring.8

Vorbek-Lettow was drawing here in metaphorical fashion on a principle from Lithuanian testamentary law: some goods could be bequeathed only on the basis of doz˙ywocie (advitalitium, for use during the legatee’s lifetime); others could be bestowed “for eternity”

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(na wiecznos´´c ; i.e., the legatee could bequeath the property further). In this life we are granted only temporary joy from our children; eternal consolation comes in the next life. Care for children (his “tiny little sons” [synaczkowie]), for grandchildren, for the children and grandchildren of blood relatives, in-laws, and friends; pleasure in their increase; and sorrow at their loss are constant themes of the Treasurehouse of Memory. They appear on practically every page. Vilnans were attached enough to their young children to express their grief through the commission—and publication in print!—of funeral sermons for them. Lutheran minister Je˛drzej Schönflissius, who published funeral sermons for members of all the burgher elite families of Castle Street, devoted at least three of them to children. There was a certain amount of rhetorical monotony, even self-plagiarism, to Schönflissius’s funeral sermons, and yet, especially in the final sections entitled Personalia, certain concrete details about individual lives shine through. And the important thing for my argument here is that lives of the young were valued just as highly as, and perhaps lamented with even greater effusions of sentiment than, those of the elderly. In 1633, Schönflissius helped Lutheran merchant and magistrate Wilhelm Engelbrecht (Castle Street 2.15) lament the loss of his fifteen-year-old Katarzyna—“a withered rose and lily, whom cruel death has cut down with his scythe.”9 In 1637 he published his funeral sermon for fourteen-year-old Zofia Majerówna, daughter of Calvinist barber-surgeon Jan Majer (Castle Street 2.05).10 In 1635 he accompanied to the grave one Anna De˛bowska, daughter of a Lutheran apothecary named Marcin De˛bowski (about whom I know nothing further). She was twelve years old when she died. Schönflissius dedicated the printed version of his sermon to the girl’s mother, Elz˙bieta, with the words “A mother’s love for [her] children is the more ardent.”11 Not to be outdone by his Lutheran neighbors and in-laws from across the street, Calvinist merchant Korneliusz Winhold II (Castle Street 1.16) had his own minister publish funeral sermons not only on the deaths of his parents but also for his children. The title page of one of them told the story: A Parent’s Meditation during the Sickness and after the Death of Children, Submitted over the Little Son of Noble Lord Korneliusz Winhold, Who, Having Seen the World on the Day of 1 August in the Year 1637, Parted with It Peacefully on the Day of 12 October of That Same Year. Jan Winhold had been baptized on 11 August, and one of his godfathers was Lutheran merchant Wilhelm Engelbrecht from across the street, the same one whose own daughter had died at age fifteen. The title page of another printed funeral sermon—the Memoria Winholdiana— gave the names of Korneliusz’s parents and his deceased infant son Korneliusz III (baptized 1 January 1635, funeral 6 March of the same year) equal billing.12 No other documents I have encountered connected directly with seventeenth-century Wilno speak so directly to love for children. Still, I see no reason to suppose the royal doctor was unique or that this sentiment was limited to the Lutherans and the Calvinists. Occasional references in documents like last wills and testaments and other moments when parents sought to provide for the well-being of their children suggest similar attitudes toward children across the confessions in Wilno.

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In addition to the precise time of birth, Vorbek-Lettow carefully registered the place of baptism, the name of the minister or priest presiding (like most Lutherans, he used the word others reserved for Roman Catholic priests—ksia˛dz—for clergy of all the Christian confessions), and the names of godparents. Vorbek-Lettow sought, whenever possible, to have his children baptized by a Lutheran minister, preferably in Wilno. His first three children, Elisabet Zofia (b. 1619), Krzysztof Wiktorzyn (b. 1621), and Konstanty (b. 1622), were all baptized by “father Samuel Dambrowski, [our Wilno] Polish ‘Saxon’ [i.e., Lutheran] preacher.” As Vorbek-Lettow’s career as a royal doctor took shape, and the family’s fortunes improved, he was away from Wilno more and more, often residing with the entire family on an estate in the nearby countryside, especially during times of plague. His third child, Krystyna (b. 1625), was baptized “in Berdówka, in an estate belonging to nearby Wsielub,” by “father Tomasz Chociszewski, the Evangelical [i.e., Calvinist] preacher of Bielice [a Calvinist Radziwiłł town], since it was impossible to get [one] of my own confession from Wilno at that time on account of the [pestilential] air cruelly reigning there, which lasted until Candlemas Day [2 February] in the year 1626.”13 Twins Anna Felicitas and Marcin Feliks (b. 1630) were baptized by the same Calvinist minister and under similar circumstances.14 Vorbek-Lettow’s last child, Aleksander Jerzy (b. 1642), would be born in Warsaw, where the family was residing temporarily in connection with the doctor’s service to King Władysław IV. He was baptized in the capital’s Roman Catholic Cathedral Church of St. John—there were no Protestant churches in Warsaw at the time—and by a Catholic neighbor from Wilno, Father Marcjan Tryzna, soon to be under-chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then coadjutor of the bishop of Wilno and spiritual referendary of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was he who had “restored [the Canons’ Town House at Castle Street 1.05] sumptu proprio [at his own expense]” and was thus living across the street from Vorbek-Lettow’s burgher relatives and in-laws.15 Recourse to non-Lutheran clergy for his babies’ baptisms was not a matter of religious indifference. On both occasions when he was forced to make use of a Calvinist minister, Vorbek-Lettow noted why it had been impossible to bring a Lutheran minister from Wilno— because of the plague then raging there—and he made it clear that the solution was not his first choice. In fact, if his Calvinist-born wife remained a member of her father’s confession, it would have been entirely normal for the family to have decided to baptize the girls in their mother’s church and the boys in that of the father. This was not a law but a common practice in mixed marriages of the day. Aleksander Jerzy’s Catholic baptism (we may suspect he, too, was to be raised Lutheran) went without comment, other than the fact that his mother happened to be in arch-Catholic Warsaw when the time came to be delivered and that she was unable to travel. Vorbek-Lettow’s choice of godparents and of names for his babies is reflective of a strategy for placing the family and the individual children in networks of friends and spiritual kin drawn both from the ranks of noble patrons, but also from Castle Street burgher relatives and in-laws.16 There were always worries about sudden deaths, especially in the case of his

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twins: when Anna Felicitas died at age one and a half, the concerned father doubled his prayers for her brother’s safety, “especially since people are commonly wont to doubt that twins can ever be raised in good health.”17 The memoirist’s two grandsons, born in 1642 and 1643 (their mother was Greek Orthodox), both died the day they were born, and both were baptized immediately by the Lutheran minister in Wilno, apparently in fear for their lives and souls: “the Lord God granted us to rejoice in our grandson only a brief while, for he lived only five hours from his birth, and having received the name Władysław [no doubt for his grandfather’s royal patron] at baptism, he fell asleep in the Lord. I had his little body [ciałko] buried in my chapel that same day and month of that year. Preserve us, Christ Jesus, from similar sorrow and grief in the future.”18 None of Vorbek-Lettow’s own children died that quickly; all the recorded baptisms took place a week to a few weeks after the birth and reflect a careful orchestration of networks of spiritual kin, ranging across the same spectrum between pomp and asceticism that Vilnans would negotiate in plans for their funerals. Elisabet Zofia received two noble godparents— her father’s Calvinist patron at the time, Castellan of Wilno Janusz Radziwiłł, and the latter’s Lutheran wife, Margravine of Brandenburg Elisabeth Sophie, daughter of Elector of Brandenburg Johann Georg (for whom Vorbek-Lettow obviously named his own daughter). But standing at the font was also one Lutheran burghess from the neighborhood. This was Katarzyna Sztrunkówna, wife of Szymon Engelbrecht II. She was a sort of cousin to her goddaughter, since Maciej’s sister Krystyna had married Szymon Engelbrecht I, and Sztrunkówna was her daughter-in-law. The burgher godmother lived in the Engelbrecht house at Castle Street 2.11, next door to the Sztrunk family house at 2.10 into which she had been born and two houses over from that of Zuzanna Nonhartówna Chreptowiczowa at 2.09. Krzysztof Wiktorzyn was named for his first godfather, his father’s new patron, Calvinist castellan of Wilno (and future palatine and grand hetman of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania), Krzysztof Radziwiłł II. He received his second name in acknowledgment of the fact that his birth date (27 February) was the “day of St. Victorinus.” I have been unable to identify a St. Victorinus or Victor whose feast is celebrated that day. The feast of St. Victor of Troys, a French noble who died in the seventh century, is celebrated on 26 February. That of St. Victorinus, a Greek who was martyred in Egypt ca. 284, is celebrated on 25 February. But the point remains: the Lutheran Vorbek-Lettow organized a part of his life according to the saints’ calendar.19 Krzysztof Wiktorzyn’s other godparents were likewise from the Lithuanian Calvinist nobility: future equerry of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania Bogusław Radziwiłł (Janusz’s son and Krzysztof ’s nephew) and Ewa Abramowiczowa, wife of the son of the palatine of Smolen ´ sk.20 Use of the saints’ calendar in naming babies and marking important events—we will see more of this—suggests that Wilno Lutherans shared some aspects of a sense of time with their Roman Catholic neighbors that went beyond the simple use of the Gregorian calendar for measuring temporal life. These clearly included aspects of the holy— even if we remain puzzled about which St. Victorinus with a memorial on 27 February Vorbek-Lettow could have had in mind.

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Other of Vorbek-Lettow’s children received less prominent godparents, and one child was raised from the font by even more important notables, but the general strategies for naming the child and surrounding him or her with spiritual kin remained the same throughout. Konstanty was named for his father’s great-uncle, and at least two and probably all three of his godparents were Protestant burghers.21 Krystyna was named for her aunt, Krystyna Vorbekówna-Lettowówna, wife of Szymon Engelbrecht I. She too received three Protestant burgher godparents—the first two of whom were her uncle, Jakub Isfeld, a Calvinist, and her Lutheran cousin Sara Engelbrechtówna (daughter of aunt and namesake Krystyna), who had married the neighbor boy, Lutheran merchant Jerzy Sztrunk II.22 (Again, the Sztrunk and Engelbrecht families lived side by side at Castle Street 2.10 and 2.11.) Jan— named both for his stepuncle Jan Katerla but also for the fact that he was born “in the year 1627, the 23rd day of June, on the eve of St. John’s Day” (i.e., St. John the Baptist, Midsummer Day)—would receive four godparents. One of them came from a Roman Catholic magnate family. This was castellan of Wilno Mikołaj Hlebowicz (d. 1632). He was VorbekLettow’s own neighbor at German Street 26.14; in 1640 his son Jerzy Karol would marry Krystyna Radziwiłłówna, Calvinist daughter of the doctor’s patron Krzysztof Radziwiłł II. The other three were all Lutheran burgher neighbors on Castle Street: the infant’s uncle, Szymon Engelbrecht I (Castle Street 2.11); Jerzy Sztrunk I (Castle Street 2.10); and Katarzyna Giblówna, daughter of Lutheran burgomaster Jakub Gibel (Castle Street 2.13) and sister of Tomasz Gibel (Castle Street 2.12). Giblówna remained Lutheran, although she was married to Calvinist merchant Korneliusz Winhold II, with whom she resided across the street at Castle Street 1.16.23 Anna Felicitas and Marcin Feliks both received their first names in honor of relatives: the first for her maternal grandmother, the second for his paternal great-grandfather. VorbekLettow “added Felicitas and Feliks because the day of the baptism [19 November] was St. Elizabeth’s Day, on which day I had made my first entry into the home of my wife’s father for the purpose of seeking her hand, and because God had miraculously protected them in the womb when she was struck by a beam in Berdówka.” In other words, they represented happiness and good fortune for their father, and he dated one major aspect of that happiness by the saints’ calendar. (And note further that the young Lutheran doctor had purposely chosen St. Elizabeth’s Day to make his first entry into the house of his future wife, Elz˙bieta (Elizabeth) Isfeltówna. When he got around to re-creating his memoirs—lost to fire in 1644—Vorbek-Lettow confused dates a bit. The Feast of St. Elisabeth—cousin of Mary, wife of Zachary—was 5 November, the date of his twins’ birth, not of their baptism. But, again, the point is that the Lutheran doctor marked time according to the saints’ calendar accepted by his Catholic neighbors.) The baptism took place in a Calvinist church during the family’s stay in the country, where they had fled from the plague, but they had fled there with some of their old circle from Castle Street. Anna’s godparents were Lutheran merchant Jerzy Sztrunk II (Castle Street 2.10) and “the woman who received [her]” (babka, co przyjmowała), i.e., the midwife. (Others on occasion would ask a beggar kept in the church’s hospital to be the

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godparent. We have records of this for the Calvinists.)24 Marcin’s godparents were Szymon Engelbrecht II (Castle Street 2.11) and the memoirist’s step-sister Katarzyna—the Lutheran cousin and aunt of the baptized baby.25 Maciej—clearly named for his father and paternal grandfather, although the memoirist did not point this out—would also be put under the care of Protestant neighbors: the recently ennobled Calvinist royal doctor and master of the Wilno horodnictwo Paweł Kleofas z Brylewa Podchocimski, who had married Krystyna Giblówna, daughter of Lutheran burgomaster’s son Tomasz Gibel and Vorbek-Lettow’s niece Anna Engelbrechtówna (Castle Street 2.19); Tomasz Gibel himself (Castle Street 2.12); and finally, wife of Lutheran merchant Wilhelm Engelbrecht, Zofia Zuchowczanka (Castle Street 2.15).26 Władysław—the fact that there was no explanation of the name suggests it was meant to honor the doctor’s patron and patient, King Władysław IV Waza—had three godparents: “His Grace, Lord Krzysztof Eperyeszy, Lord High Steward of Kowno,” who had married Lutheran burghess Barbara Sztrunkówna, daughter of Jerzy Sztrunk II and the memoirist’s niece Sara Engelbrechtówna (Castle Street 2.10); Marcin von Enda (Fondenden, Fonemden), a Lutheran, probably some relative of the Andrzej von Embdens, father and son, who lived at Castle Street 2.14; and Lutheran “Halszka” (Elz˙bieta) Giblówna, daughter of Jakub and brother of Tomasz Gibel (Castle Street 2.13 and 2.12), who was married to Lutheran merchant Jan Sztrunk II (Castle Street 2.10).27 The choice of name (again left unexplained) for the next son, Zygmunt, appears to have continued in the Catholic Waza line, now honoring Władysław’s father, King Zygmunt III. He was baptized by the Lutheran minister of rural Gojcieniszki (a holding of the Nonhart family). His godparents were Piotr Kopacz, “a near neighbor and my trusted friend” (about whom I know nothing further); His Grace, Lord Krzysztof Nowowiejski, “the landwójt [from the German Lehnsvogt, the local representative of an often absent wójt/Vogt] of Nowogródek, cousin of my wife” (he was Calvinist); and the memoirist’s daughter-in-law Anna Dorofiewiczówna Lettowowa, who came from a family of the Orthodox burgher elite in Wilno and seems to have remained of that confession.28 And finally, Aleksander Jerzy, baptized by a Roman Catholic prelate in the Cathedral Church of St. John in Warsaw, received the most prominent of spiritual kin, none of them burghers. His godparents were King Władysław IV; under-chancellor of the Polish Crown Jerzy Ossolin ´ ski; Crown carver Piotr Danielewicz; Queen Cecylia Renata; and Elisabeth Słuszczan ´ ska Kazanowska, wife of castellan of Sandomierz, Adam Kazanowski. (The king was ill at the time, and “His Grace, [Roman Catholic] Father Piotr Gembicki, Crown Chancellor,” stood in for him; “Danielewiczówna Ossolin ´ ska, wife of the Crown UnderChancellor,” represented the queen.) All were Roman Catholic; all but the officiating priest, Marcjan Tryzna, were connected with the Crown elite rather than that of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.29 This set of data obviously raises several important questions. How did Vilnans choose names and godparents for their babies? What role did confession play in these choices? What

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was the purpose of godparenthood for those directly involved—parents, children, godparents? I will postpone discussion of these issues until I have examined the networks surrounding some other nodes of godparenthood in Wilno.

Buchners at the Font The practices of the rest of the Lutheran congregation are difficult to determine, given the lack of an extant baptismal record book. We do have such records, however, for the more numerous Roman Catholic community and for the smaller Calvinist congregation. In them we can occasionally discover godparents from beyond the given confession, including—or perhaps especially and in both communities—Lutherans. A consideration of observable patterns here will help flesh out the picture suggested by Vorbek-Lettow’s memoirs and extend it—beyond the space he occupied at the intersection of the Lithuanian szlachta and the Wilno burgher elite—to the middle reaches of merchants and artisans. I turn my attention in what follows to members of one Lutheran family that practiced particularly promiscuous extraconfessional godparenting. In spite of the fact that they may have said hello to each other at church services, theirs was a network set quite apart from that functioning among the Lutheran elites of Castle and German Streets. As we have seen, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, middle-level Lutheran merchants and artisans—goldsmiths perhaps chief among them, but also swordsmiths, ironsmiths, founders, soap boilers, and barber-surgeons—had settled in and around the narrow and winding Glass Street, which ran from the top of Market Square westward toward the St. John Street-Troki Street axis. They were thus around the corner from the Lutheran elite residing in upper Castle Street and one street up from their common place of worship on German Street. Their shortest path to the Lutheran church took them through the Jewish neighborhood that consolidated in the course of the seventeenth century on Jewish and Meat Shop Streets, and we find evidence of lively contacts between these Lutherans and their Jewish neighbors. Here they occupied modest though often two-story houses of two to five chambers; many of them were bricked, but in stark contrast to Castle Street, we still find a number of wooden structures here in the first half of the seventeenth century. The street, as we have seen, was heavily Lutheran. At Glass Street 18.08 we find the modest two-story “little bricked house” of Lutheran merchant Marcin Buchner. Buchner and wife Regina Stegnerówna had at least five children, all of whom married Lutherans, as did the one granddaughter I have been able to identify. And all of them would own and occupy houses in the Glass Street neighborhood. Regina Stegnerówna Buchnerowa signed her will on 16 June 1685 in Wilno. She had returned to the city by 1662 after the family’s exile in Königsberg—which offered asylum to Vilnans of all five confessions during the Muscovite occupation—and, as “Frau Merten Buchnersche,” “Martin Buchners Witfrauw,” etc., she generously supported the Lutheran

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church in the period 1664–1683.30 Her husband had died before 1652. Regina thus outlived him by more than thirty years, and—contrary to one common pattern of the day—she never remarried; and yet she seems to have played a certain independent role in Wilno society and to have conducted her affairs largely on her own.31 Her youngest son, merchant Jan Buchner, became a pillar of this second tier of Wilno Lutheran society. He prospered for a time, rivaling the Lutheran elite in his generosity to the church over the period 1662–1701.32 Like them, he would appear as “senior” of the congregation in the years 1671 and 1673.33 He remained in the neighborhood, however, and here he built his networks. The 1690 tax register of hearths found “Pan [Mr./Lord] Buchner” owning two “large bricked houses” on Glass Street. Buchner lived in one of them himself, together with one Christian and six Jewish neighbors. In his second home there were four Christian and two Jewish neighbors.34 Jan’s older brother Michał had identified himself as a spice merchant when, in 1656, he signed the oath of loyalty to the elector of Brandenburg along with many other Wilno exiles of both noble and burgher estates.35 Perhaps the spice trade was part of the family business. But if the greater Buchner family married exclusively within the Lutheran community (if we ignore one black-sheep Calvinist second cousin), many participated in more extended networks that crossed this confessional boundary. Jan Buchner signed his name at least twice in the local Calvinists’ financial records, acknowledging his financial contributions “to the support of God’s praise.”36 Jan Buchner, his wife Krystyna Rejterówna, and a “Miss Tropówna” (Buchner’s niece Marianna) served several times as godparents for Calvinist babies.37 And Jan Buchner, mother Regina Stegnerówna, wife Krystyna Rejterówna, and niece Marianna Tropówna appeared on numerous occasions as godparents for Catholic babies.38 Jan’s wife and in-laws, the Rejter (Reutter) family, bring us into a related Lutheran network, members of which also frequently engaged in godparenting beyond their own confession. Many of their trips to the Calvinist and Catholic baptismal fonts brought them together with cosponsors from the Buchner family.39 Jan Buchner appeared at the font of the Catholics’ Church of St. John at least twenty-seven times over the years 1665–1680. There are some obvious gaps in the ledger in 1665–1666 and 1671, but the rest appears to be complete. I focus on that fifteen-year period in my comments here. Over that period there was only one year when he did not appear at all. This was in 1671, one of the years for which the extant record is incomplete; his name may well have appeared in the missing entries for that year. He reached his peak in 1674 when he sponsored 5 Catholic babies. The year seems to have been a high point for the rest of the family as well: mother Regina was at the Catholic font four times, wife Katarzyna once, niece Anna (Marianna) Tropówna four times, which makes fourteen appearances by the immediate family in one year. The total number of babies sponsored by the four Buchners that year was fewer— 11—since Jan Buchner’s name appeared once with each of the three women from his family. That year, a total of 705 babies were baptized at St. John’s, so the immediate Buchner family

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participation in Catholic godparenting was 1.6 percent of the total. But villagers from rural regions not belonging to Wilno and its suburbs regularly brought babies for baptisms, often waiting for major feast days such as Palm Sunday. As they came from quite a distance, they cannot be said to have belonged to the daily life of the city and its rhythms. Thus if we wish to estimate Buchner family participation in the sponsoring of Catholic babies from the Wilno conurbation, the number rises somewhat. That year, 625 sets of parents from the city and its suburbs had their babies baptized at St. John’s, and Buchners sponsored 1.8 percent of them. The total number of babies who had non-Catholic godparents in 1674 was at least 32, or 4.5 percent of the total; this was at least 5.1 percent of the babies from Wilno and the immediate environs. I say “at least” for two reasons: I can identify Orthodox and Uniates only where I have chanced upon information about them from other documents such as testaments; further, women were frequently identified only by their husbands’ or fathers’ names. Thus I have undoubtedly overlooked some non-Catholics among the godparents. Jan Buchner’s appearances at St. John’s over the years, it is worth noting, came on every day of the week, including six times on a Sunday.

Buchner Case Studies I offer here three clusters of Buchner family interventions as godparents for Catholic babies. This is not the whole story, but it will help give a sense of what was going on in Wilno and provide a basis for some further hypotheses.

Buchners and Sie´nczyłos On 26 August 1673, Szymon Safarowicz and Katarzyna Wojsowiczówna offered a son for baptism at the Catholic Church of St. John. They named him Bartłomiej, and he was “raised from the font” by four godparents: Gabriel Sien ´ czyło, Jan Buchner, Anastazja ˙Z agiewiczówna, and Anastazja Sien ´ czyłowa. A little over two and a half years later, Szymon Safarowicz was back in the same church, together with wife Katarzyna Daniusiewiczówna, to present a daughter, Rozaria.40 Her godparents were Jan Harszewski, Jan Buchner, Anastazja Sien ´ czyłowa, and Katarzyna Kalofowa.41 We know Jan Buchner. About Jan Harszewski, I can offer nothing further. Katarzyna Kalofowa was probably the wife or a relative of the Lutheran Kalofs, who took on the duties of godparent for Catholic babies alongside other Lutherans, once sharing the role with Regina Buchnerowa.42 “Valentin/Valtin Kalau” made regular offerings to the Wilno Lutheran church in the years in question (1671–1691) and would seem to have been the head of the household.43 Anastazja ˙Zagiewiczowa may have been Orthodox. Her first name suggests Ruthenian origins, and the Józef ˙Z agiewicz, who crops up in the archive for the years in question,

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was a merchant with strong Ruthenian connections.44 These names—Kalof and ˙Z agiewski— belong to the realm of circumstantial evidence, but they may take on more significance when placed in the context of larger patterns. The two remaining godparents were Orthodox. Anastazja Sien ´ czyłowa was married to Grzegorz Sien ´ czyło, and Gabriel—Anastazja’s co-godparent for Bartłomiej Safarowicz— was her brother-in-law. The Sien ´ czyło patriarchal home was in the thoroughly Ruthenian neighborhood across town at Subocz Street 78.07.45 Anastazja herself was from the Sokołowski family, which produced a number of Orthodox Wilno merchants.46 Members of the Sien ´ czyło family—Anastazja, Grzegorz, and Gabriel—appeared in the Catholic baptismal record at least thirteen times over the years examined.47 The Safarowicz babies were not the only ones for whom Buchners and Sien ´ czyłos shared the duties of godparenthood. What brought them together in this role? One thing the two families had in common is the fact that the ancestral family houses were objects of attempted confiscations during the wars with Muscovy by the law of escheat (jus caducum), which allowed the king to alienate the property of traitors, as well as that of foreigners who died without male heirs.48 Another was the fact that members of both families spent part of the period of the Muscovite occupation of Wilno (1655–1661) in shared exile in Königsberg. Both the Buchners and the Sien ´ czyłos were thus moderately successful merchant families, well integrated into Wilno society, both before and after the wars of midcentury, and yet subject to being portrayed as outsiders. Jan Buchner was at the top of the middle-level Lutherans. Even if he had wished to launch a career in the ruling elite, he would have been unable to do so: in spite of his wealth, his ties to the Lutheran elite residing on Castle Street were limited and not those of social equals. And in any case, after 1666 Lutherans were banned from holding office in the magistracy. In this situation, ambitious members of the Lutheran burgher elite were busy marrying or otherwise stealing their ways into the Lithuanian nobility. The Orthodox Sien ´ czyłos had been on their way to joining the ruling burgher elite in the first half of the century. Filip Sien ´ czyło (he was the father of Paweł, Gabriel, and Grzegorz) was annual councillor in 1614 and burgomaster in 1634 and 1641. Paweł had been a bencher.49 Gabriel and Grzegorz were wealthy men, but they did not seek office in the magistracy, perhaps because after 1666 this would have required at least pro forma allegiance to the Uniate Church. And yet, while it may have given the Buchners and the Sien ´ czyłos something to talk about, outsider status alone did not create this network. The answer lies in the ties of neighborhood. Gabriel Sien ´ czyło seems to have been the older of the two brothers, and it was most likely he who took possession of “the Sien ´ czyło house that has been handed down from the grandfathers and great-grandfathers on Subocz Street,” right in the middle of the Ruthenian neighborhood. It was still in the family in 1688.50 Younger brother Grzegorz had to set himself up, and he made the unusual move for an Orthodox Vilnan of buying a house on Lutheran Glass Street. He and wife Anastazja Sokołowska had purchased the house of Lutheran

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barber-surgeon Jerzy Dames at Glass Street 20.05 in 1667, and she was still living there as a widow in 1690.51 The posthumous inventory of Grzegorz’s property conducted in 1686 offers a picture of a wealthy businessman with interests in the family properties on Subocz Street and an intent to be buried with the Orthodox at the Holy Spirit Church and monastery in the old neighborhood; but it also reveals business connections typical of the Glass Street neighborhood: his debts were to, and his creditors were among, the Lutherans and Jews of the immediate surroundings.52 This suggests that Safarowicz, about whom I know nothing further, was being careful about his ties to the Glass Street neighborhood when he selected godparents for his children. Szymon Safarowicz himself would sponsor Catholic babies on at least four occasions, his wife Katarzyna Safarowiczowa at least twice. In every instance, the Safarowiczes shared the duties of godparenthood with Lutherans, all but two of whom I can situate in specific Glass Street addresses.53 And the survey of 1690—to return now to a piece of circumstantial evidence with which I began this discussion—tells us that the “great bricked house once of the Kalof family [quondam Kalowska]” was in the neighborhood.54

Buchners and Grekowiczes ∧ On 10 May 1680, Marcin Z egalin ´ ski and wife Katarzyna Dyjakowska had their son Dominik baptized at St. John’s. Not a one of his godparents was Catholic: they were Jan Buchner, Bazyli Omelanowicz (Orthodox or Uniate, probably the former), Anna Grekowiczówna, and ´ski was Catholic; wife Dyjakowska (judging Katarzyna Golliuszowa (both Calvinist).55 Z˙egalin only by the name) could have had some Ruthenian roots. But the choice of godfather Bazyli Omelanowicz, if it had any confessional motivation (the name can only be Ruthenian), was again probably based more on ties of neighborhood and the profession that predominated there. ∧ Marcin Z egalin ´ ski was a goldsmith. His father Augustyn (d. 1657) had also been a Catholic goldsmith and had owned “half a house” on Glass Street. The other half was the property of Lutheran goldsmith Job Bem (Böhm), who, in 1636, resided (apparently then as a renter) at Glass Street 18.11, three houses down from the original Buchner family dwelling.56 Marcin ˙Z egalin ´ ski inherited part of his father’s Glass Street property, and he also owned the “Tym house,” likewise on Glass Street. A document from 1679 tells us that Augustyn ˙Z egalin ´ ski’s house was near the property of Jan Buchner and that Marcin’s sister Anna sold her portion of the family house to Buchner.57 Bazyli Omelanowicz was probably some close relation—perhaps the son—of a goldsmith by the same name who had also lived and worked in Glass Street. The elder Bazyli was married to Marianna Sznejderówna, the daughter of Lutheran goldsmith Jakub Sznejder, in whose Glass Street atelier he lived and worked. He had died by 1666.58 I suspect the younger Omelanowicz’s presence at the font had something to do with the goldsmith’s trade that his older namesake had practiced and with the fact that the latter had lived and worked on Glass

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Street. The Bazyli Omelanowicz I find active around 1680 had ties with the Orthodox and Uniates of Subocz Street.59 Anna Grekowiczówna (probably a mistake here, and it should have been Grekowiczowa, as it was on all other occasions) was probably the wife of one of the Calvinist goldsmiths of that name. Jan Grekowicz had once lived and worked on Glass Street before moving nearer the Calvinist church, where he served as a lay elder.60 Anna Grekowiczowa was named as godmother on twelve occasions in the record of the Wilno Calvinist church during the years 1663–1682.61 She also took on those duties at least three other times for Catholic babies, on one occasion in 1674 sharing the task with Jan Pecelt, a Lutheran locksmith from Glass Street, and on another occasion with Regina Buchnerowa and a certain Albrycht Sznejder.62 The latter was the apothecary who attended the Lutheran church in those days; he was probably a son or nephew of the goldsmith by that name who had worked and lived on Glass Street in the 1640s.63 The elder Albrycht Sznejder was the brother of Jakub and thus the uncle of the elder Bazyli Omelanowicz.64 The younger Albrycht Sznejder still lived on Glass Street in 1690.65 Katarzyna Budrewiczówna Golliuszowa was a Calvinist and the wife of Calvinist royal secretary Jan Golliusz.66 As there were no professional ties here through the goldsmith’s trade and no confessional connection with either parent, we might again suspect some connection through the neighborhood. Evidence for this hypothesis can be found in the Golliuszes’ own choice of godparents for their Calvinist babies: for one of them “Nastazja” Sien ´ czyłowa (i.e., our Anastazja Sokołowska Sien ´ czyłowa), for another “Lord Sien ´ czyło”— the place for the first name was left blank, but here too it was most likely Anastazja’s husband or brother-in-law.67 In any event, both were Orthodox and could have been tied to the Golliuszes directly by the Glass Street neighborhood.

Buchners and Da˛browskis The surname name Da˛browski is not uncommon, and several men and women with the name appear as parents and godparents in the record book for baptisms at St. John’s. In several instances, Buchners and others of their Lutheran circle appear with them, which makes me suspect we are again dealing with individuals tied to the Glass Street neighborhood. I will focus on one of them, Tomasz Da˛browski, who had at least three children baptized at St. John’s. I have no reason to suspect he was not Catholic. His wife was once called Marta Tarnawska, once Marianna Tarnawska, and once simply Marianna. But this was probably the same person, and she, too, was apparently Catholic. The couple chose names for their children that appear regularly among Catholics: Katarzyna and Jerzy among the more popular, Antoni among the somewhat less common.68 But the sponsors they chose for these Catholic babies included many non-Catholics. The duties of godparenthood for Katarzyna (baptized 19 March 1673) were shared by Grzegorz Sien ´ czyło (our Orthodox merchant living on Glass Street), Szymon Safarowicz (probably a

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Roman Catholic with strong Glass Street connections), Krystyna Buchnerowa (Jan’s wife), and a certain Katarzyna Mogilnicka, about whom I know almost nothing further. Her maiden name was Fokitinówna (this we learn from the Catholic baptismal record of her own child).69 The name—the registrar seems not to have gotten it quite right—suggests “otherness.” Even so, she may have been Catholic. Jerzy Da˛browski (baptized 6 May 1675) also received four godparents: Jan Buchner, Jan Pecelt, Katarzyna Safarowiczowa (Szymon’s wife), and Anastazja Sien ´ czyłowa. Again, it was the neighborhood that brought them together. Only Jan Pecelt is mostly new to us. (We found him sharing godparent duties with Anna Grekowiczowa above.) There were two middle-level Lutherans of that name, father and son, both ironsmiths. This was probably the son. He had married Katarzyna Szmitówna, widow of “Malcher” (Melchior) Ilis, the Lutheran swordsmith who owned the house at Glass Street 21.03.70 In the 1660s and 1670s Pecelt was overseeing his wife’s properties, which included two more houses in the neighborhood.71 Finally, Antoni Da˛browski (baptized 17 May 1680) received only two godparents: Jan Buchner and Dorota Bezowa. The Bezes (Böß) known to me were Lutherans; one of them, Daniel, was a surgeon, and the other, Zachariasz (occupation unknown), served during their Königsberg exile as a witness to the testament of Jan Buchner’s sister Marianna Cylichowa.72

Godparenting and Network Building I began this chapter with the strictures of Church hierarchs—Roman Catholic and Calvinist—against reaching beyond the confines of confession for godparents. The Jesuit pamphleteers of Wilno, always well aware of what was going on among the other congregations, made Vorbek-Lettow’s use of Calvinist godparents for his children an object of their parody. In a pamphlet published in Wilno in 1624, “Martin Luther” himself addresses a versified letter from his new residence in Hell—he appears to have received bad directions on his journey to the other world—to his faithful flock on German Street in Wilno. In it he takes the royal doctor to task for his acceptance of Calvinist spiritual kin for his children.73 In fact, of the thirty-four godparents Vorbek-Lettow chose for his eleven children, sixteen were Lutherans, six Calvinists, one Orthodox, and six Roman Catholics. (I am unable to assign a confession to the other five of them.) The evidence I have put together—some pieces of it direct, others circumstantial— suggest further lines of reasoning. Clearly, Christian education, if we define that term as an upbringing within one’s own confession, cannot have been chief in the minds of either Vorbek-Lettow or the Roman Catholic parents who turned to the Buchners and their circles as they chose sponsors for their babies. I have pointed to the ties created by neighborhood, which sometimes included the ties of professions and social estates predominating in a

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particular neighborhood. Parents were interested—at least in these cases—in providing their children not so much with guides in the faith as with patrons in a very local, worldly life. A small baptismal record for a congregation at the Jesuits’ St. Ignatius, in which entries began in 1666, after the Muscovite occupation, may suggest the importance of ties of ethnicity, which may also have been ties of trade and neighborhood. In it I find parents who remain almost entirely anonymous to me, but who—judging by their names—would seem to have been German Catholics. In the period from 1666 to 1699, at least 7 (of a total 220 over that period, or a little over 3%) had at least one Lutheran godparent. Jan Buchner appeared here three times (in 1666, 1673, and 1695), and his wife Katarzyna Rejterówna served together with Jan Sztrunk III in 1674 as Lutheran godparents for a Catholic baby.74 How did the local clergy look upon this? We have only the most indirect of information. The Calvinist record of baptisms occasionally drew attention to the presence of a “Saxon” or of a member of the “Augsburg confession/rite” or of a “female papist” among its godparents.75 The Calvinist church of Wilno disciplined one of its own at the synod of 1664, a member of the Grekowicz goldsmith family, for fraternizing with members of another confession; the following year’s synod noted his return to grace (and discipline).76 The fact that the Calvinists identified non-Catholic godparents on six occasions over the years may suggest some discomfort about the practice, which, the Agenda of 1637 had urged, the ministers must not permit “without some great and significant reason.”77 But in spite of—or along with—any discomfort, those reasons must have come up with troublesome regularity. The record book identifies them only six times, but I count at least seventy-seven other occasions when godparents of another confession raised Calvinist babies from the font. This means that, at minimum, of the 404 Calvinist babies baptized in the Wilno church over the years 1631–1682, 83 (21%) had at least one non-Calvinist godparent. On the other hand, the fact that they all had at least one Calvinist godparent may suggest some attempt to adhere to the guidelines imposed by the Agenda. (Recall that some Catholic babies received no Catholic godparents.) Of the non-Calvinist godparents of Calvinist babies that I have been able to uncover, the vast majority were Lutheran. Only three were Roman Catholic and three were Orthodox. The numbers could be due, in part, to the fact that, thanks to extant offering rolls, I have a much more complete list of Lutheran heads of households (and the names of a few Lutheran wives) than for the other confessions. But I suspect the overall proportions would not change much if I had similar lists for the others. Although it may have been a contributing factor, the small numbers of Calvinist burghers in Wilno cannot have been the sole—perhaps not even the main—reason for looking outside the confession for spiritual kin. What we see here is the same sort of easy formation of Calvinist-Lutheran networks in Wilno that functioned among Vorbek-Lettow’s kin and circles among the elite of Castle Street. The only Orthodox godparents I am able to identify with certainty—the Sien ´ czyłos—had become a part of those same Lutheran, now LutheranCalvinist networks.

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Unfortunately, we do not have any registers of Lutheran baptisms, so we are unable to form an impression of what sorts of spiritual kin people like the Buchners were choosing for themselves and their babies. We might expect them to be somewhat more open than the Calvinists, who frequently drew on Lutheran godparents, mostly silently, but less frequently on Catholics. Jesuit pasquils notwithstanding, Wilno Lutherans coexisted with the dominant Roman Catholics much more peacefully than did their Reformed brethren.78 Here, as elsewhere, we are hampered in our attempt to gain a picture of Ruthenian practices by a near total lack of Uniate and Orthodox record books for the Wilno communities. Still, the suspiciously frequent appearances of otherwise anonymous Anastazjas, to choose one usually Ruthenian name, among godparents for Catholic babies may suggest that the Greeks of Wilno also played some role in supraconfessional networks. In 1668 alone, 22 of 835 Roman Catholic babies (2.6%) had godmothers named Anastazja, which may suggest not only the presence of Ruthenian godparents at St. John’s but also perhaps the popularity of the name among Wilno’s Romans. The frequency with which Catholic parents chose non-Catholic godparents for their babies is, I think, remarkable. For the 835 babies baptized at St. John’s in 1668, I have been able to identify 54 (6%) who received at least one non-Catholic godparent. There may well have been more. But equally or perhaps even more surprising is the absolute silence of the priestregistrar on this topic. The entries were boilerplate. They tell us, always in the same order and with the same syntax, the date of the baptism; the names of the officiating priest, baby, father, and mother; the fact that the child was (or was not) legitimate; the parents’ place of residence; and the names of the godparents. Not a word about the confession of the godparents (or parents). It is only by comparing these names with other lists and documents that I have been able to ferret out the interlopers. It cannot always—not even often, in my view—have been a case of turning a blind eye. There are signs that Jan Buchner, for one, enjoyed a certain amount of respect among local Catholic authorities. In 1669 he and Łucja Jus´kiewiczowa stood as the sole godparents for the illegitimate but Catholic child of a certain Katarzyna.79 What is more, the child was a boy, and Jan Buchner gave him his own Christian name. Perhaps neighborhood again played some role. Why else would an apparently Catholic woman seek the services of this Lutheran man as a sponsor for her illegitimate child? Godparents played even more important roles for illegitimate children than for those legitimately conceived, but the priest did not insist on any objections he might have had.80 A year earlier, in 1668, Jan Buchner had sponsored a Jewish girl or woman who received the name Anna when she was baptized in the Catholic church. This seems to me an even stronger vote of confidence on the part of the Catholic clergy. These occasions were treated as festive events, and the godparents were often drawn from the Catholic elite. When that same year a Jewish male converted and took on the name Kazimierz (that of the Jagiellonian patron saint of Lithuania), he was baptized not by the usual parish priest but by bishop of Wilno Aleksander Sapieha, and his godparents were palatine of Wilno Jerzy Hlebowicz and

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“Magnifica D[omi]na Leonora Gorska Wojnina,” all of them Catholics.81 Wojnina was the wife of vice-palatine of Wilno Aleksander Michał Wojna Jasieniecki. Jan Buchner’s Jewish goddaughter did not receive sponsors of quite that rank, but still they were significant: in addition to Buchner, there was Wilno burgomaster “Dominus Franciszek Burba,” “Domina Cecylia Kukowiczowa,” and Konstancja Burbianka Antonowiczowa.82 All but Buchner were related. The Burbas were a Catholic family with members in the burgher ruling elite. Cecylia Kukowiczowa was the wife of Uniate mayor Jan Kukowicz. She was probably Orthodox or Uniate. She and her husband lived in the house they inher˙ ypła, in a heavily Orthodox neighborhood (St. Kazimierz ited from her father, Mikołaj Z Alley 75.04). In his testament, Jan Kukowicz called Franciszek Burba his brother-in-law, so perhaps one of Jan’s sisters had married Franciszek.83 Konstancja was a Burba (Burbianka = daughter of Burba). She was the wife of Joachim Antonowicz, who also seems to have been Catholic. But the Antonowiczes drew on Lutheran Glass Street denizens for godparents for their own children: in one case, Zachariasz Hubryk, a Lutheran merchant and brother-in-law of Jan Pecelt; in another, Orthodox merchant Gabriel Sien´ czyło.84 Other members of the Antonowicz family did the same: Kazimierz Antonowicz called on Zachariasz Hubryk and Lutheran Barbara Zatrybowa, whose Catholic husband had witnessed the testament of Jan Buchner’s sister Marianna Cylichowa during the Königsberg exile;85 and Stanisław Antonowicz chose Regina Buchnerowa as godmother for his children (three times!).86 All of this suggests that neighborhood was also at play here. Glass Street and Jewish Street formed one community in some ways, and Jan Buchner himself lived in his Glass Street house together with Jewish renters and rented out a neighboring house to both Christian and Jewish families. Perhaps the newly baptized Anna was one of his neighbors. But this also suggests a certain status for Jan Buchner in the eyes of Catholic clergy. Not just anyone was asked to stand as godparent to a Jewish convert. The documents of the Wilno magistracy kept in Polish (and that was the vast majority) used the title pan (lord, sir) for almost anyone, regardless of birth; to indicate nobility it was necessary to write something like Jego Mos´´c Pan.—“His Grace, Lord.” The baptismal record for St. John’s was kept in Latin, and the use of the title dominus, although an exact translation of the Polish pan, was regularly reserved for the nobles or for the families of Wilno magistrates, who enjoyed noble rights. In the previous record, Burba and Kukowiczowa, a burgomaster and a burgomaster’s wife, were titled dominus and domina. Buchner and Antonowiczowa were not given titles. But on one occasion Catholic baptismal records accorded Buchner the title dominus. What is more, his co-godparents included a Catholic priest (Admodum Reverendus Dominus Joannes Kal, Most Reverend Lord Jan Kal), in addition to Lady Łucja Bojmowa, and Lady Marianna Rychterowa.87 The first godmother was the wife of Wilno wójt Paweł Bojm, the second the wife of burgomaster Mikołaj Rychter. Both men were Roman Catholics. Burgher Jan

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Buchner had entered into higher spheres here. More notably, he stood on this occasion next to a Catholic priest as co-godfather. Godparenthood provided Jan Buchner with a certain status in Wilno society, and it gave the families of his godchildren a burgher patron of some importance. The fact that nearly all the people for whom Buchner sponsored babies remain for me little more than names suggests that they had looked higher than their own estate for godparents. It also allowed him to build community across confession at the neighborhood level. Think of baptismal and other celebrations that brought together Lutherans, Calvinists, and Orthodox for food, drink, and music in the dwellings of their Catholic neighbors on Glass Street. The lowerlevel clergy administering the baptisms were much more a part of the life of the neighborhoods than the likes of Jakub Wujek and the higher clergy who penned the Calvinist Agenda. An understanding of the importance of this sort of community building in the lives of some of their parishioners—what John Bossy has termed the establishment of “a relation of formal amity”88—may have made it possible for them to act contrary to the strictures of the hierarchs. In any event, this kind of confessional indifference in the choice of godparents was clearly not limited to the nobles or the burgher elites of Castle Street.

What’s in a Name? This practice fits well with the emerging picture of other aspects of the coexistence of the confessions in seventeenth-century Wilno. That coexistence was founded on a mixture of confessional discipline and generous amounts of give. Acceptance of Roman Catholicism was the acknowledged road to advancement, but those who would not take that step found ways to prosper within the limits imposed by religion and estate. People created neighborhoods and networks largely within their confession, but many had some ties of community across those bounds. The Catholic clergy succeeded only partially in imposing discipline on their flock. One example is to be found in the naming practices used by the faithful. The baptismal registers reveal the expected clustering of Bartłomiejs around the feast of St. Bartholomew (24 August; all nineteen of them in 1668 were baptized between 15 August and 2 September) and of Agnieszkas around that of St. Agnes (21 January; all twelve baptized between 6 and 29 January of that year). In fact, those were two of the names that did not appear even once among the 404 Calvinist baptisms recorded over the years 1631–1682. Others of some popularity among Catholics (and absent among Calvinists) included Agata, Ewa, Kazimierz, Klara, Konstancja, Łucja, Magdalena, Marta, Mateusz/Matiasz, Szymon, and Teresa. Conversely, we find several names used by Calvinists that were not met even once among the 835 Roman Catholic baptisms recorded in 1668: Balcer/Baltazar, Dawid, Florentyna, Korneliusz, Małgorzata/Margareta, Marek, Samuel, among others. Even with names used by both

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confessions (e.g., Andrzej and Anna), one difference appears to be the recourse to the saints’ calendar among the Roman Catholics and the preference for family tradition among the Calvinists. Lutherans also looked to family naming traditions, but—as we saw in the case of Vorbek-Lettow—that practice could coexist with the old saints’ calendar, perhaps another example of Roman Catholic-Lutheran syncretism in Wilno. A glance at the genealogical tables I have assembled for a few Wilno Protestant burgher families will give a sense of the importance of family traditions. In this, Protestant burgher families of Wilno behaved like Catholic nobles, for whom family traditions were of paramount importance in the choosing of names, and the saints’ calendar played only a secondary role, if in fact any.89 By contrast, arch-Catholic royal secretary and burgomaster Stefan Karas´—he would ask on 22 February 1684 to be buried under the altar of St. Francis Xavier at the Jesuits’ St. John— chose names for his children that reflected the program of Counter-Reformation Roman Catholicism: Francisio (little Francis), Teresia (little Teresa), Basia (little Barbara), Kasia (little Catherine), Ignacy (Ignatius). We may suspect that, in addition to choosing names of great importance to post-Tridentine Catholicism, he might have relied to some extent on the saints’ calendar.90 Thus in addition to a certain number of names shared among the confessions, there were some names more or less clearly marked as Roman Catholic or Lutheran, Calvinist or Ruthenian. The names I have collected from contexts other than church registries offer considerable impressionistic data on which names to expect in which communities. Dawids, Daniels, and Zuzannas were most likely Lutheran or Calvinist. Afanasys, Eudoksjas, Fiedors, Iwans, Bazylis were most likely Ruthenian, whether Uniate or Orthodox. And so if you met a Vilnan named Zuzanna or Anastazja, you might feel tempted to bet your house on Glass Street that the first was a Lutheran or a Calvinist, the second Uniate or Orthodox. But you might end up homeless. In 1668, for example, out of 835 Catholic babies, 3 were baptized Anastazja and 1 Zuzanna.91 One of the Anastazjas was baptized on 26 December, the day after her feast in the Western church. (That Anastasia—the martyr who died ca. 304—was commemorated in the East a bit earlier in the old calendar, on 22 December/1 January.) The other 2 were baptized within two days of each other (30 October and 1 November), which suggests a more local cult—perhaps under Ruthenian influence—of St. Anastasia II (d. 257), whose feast day was 28 October. A further sort of Catholic-Ruthenian syncretism is suggested in the names of two Roman Catholic babies baptized in 1668—Eudoksja and Eufrozyna. In both cases we might suspect the interference of the old calendar. Eudoksja was baptized on 18 March. The feast day of this saint is 1 March, but if the parents were using the Julian calendar for domestic purposes, they would have celebrated the feast ten days “late,” on 11 March, New Style; they brought her for baptism just a week after that. This sort of calculation seems even more likely in the case of Eufrozyna, who was baptized on 4 June. St. Euphrosine of Połock (daughter of Prince Svjatoslav; d. 1173) was the object of a cult among the Ruthenians of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Her feast day was 23 May, which—again, if the parents of this Eufrozyna were using the

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old calendar at home—would have been 2 June, two days before they brought her to church for baptism. I would further note that Eudoksja’s godmother was named for the same saint and that Eufrozyna’s mother’s name was Anastazja. Seventeenth-century Vilnans were certainly subject to a kind of confessional disciplining in naming and godparenting practices, but it was imposed economically and in moderation, with concerns for the creation of supraconfessional community located in neighborhoods sometimes overriding the strictures of the clerical elites.

~ c ha p t e r se v en~

Education and Apprenticeship

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ven in still relatively prosperous times, the Lithuanian Calvinist Church seems to have lived under a siege mentality. Canon 2 of the Wilno General Synod, 28 June 1621, read, in part: 2. Concerning Evangelical [i.e., Calvinist] children. Since they are the semina Ecclesiae [seed of the Church], the children of Evangelical parents, must not be seasoned in the leaven of opposing religions; rather right ab incunabulis [from the cradle] they must be trained in the fear and in the true knowledge of God. And although this is sufficiently protected both by God’s law and ecclesiastical canons, nonetheless, many parents and guardians, having gotten a taste for some sort of worldly enticements, unto the contempt of the Evangelical churches and schools, with evident harm to the praise of God, some give their sons to the schools of the adversaries, others keep false preceptors at home for them. And they either cast the girls into conventual orders, or, for the sake of the mothers (when it happens that only the father is an Evangelical) they allow them to go to the opposing side. . . . Therefore, a term of 12 weeks from the conclusion of this synod is set for parents or guardians, before the expiration of which they must and are obliged to correct the described errors, take their sons from the schools of the adversaries and give them to Evangelical ones (since, by God’s grace, we haven’t yet begun to lack them), remove the pedagogues of the opposing religion, withdraw their daughters from the convents and consecrate them to no other religion but the genuine Evangelical one.1

Those who continued in their errant ways were to be “anathematized and excluded from the Church of God” at a local synod. The concern that good Calvinist parents were employing “preceptors of the Arian [i.e., Antitrinitarian], Ruthenian [i.e., Greek-rite, whether Uniate or Orthodox], and papist faith” for their children or sending them to “opposing schools” was a constant refrain in the canons of the general synods throughout the seventeenth century.2 One Calvinist, a certain “Mr. Gauter”—this was most likely Marcin Gauter, alias Uphogen, Uphagen, etc., a steward and elder in the Wilno church in the first half of the seventeenth century (he owned the house at Castle Street 1.13)3—was singled out for public censure in canon 24 of

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the Wilno General Synod of 1638: “Reprimand of Mr. Gauter. Even though he was frequently admonished by the pastors of the Wilno Calvinist church about removing his children from the Jesuit schools, he has not wished to acknowledge his duty.”4 A letter from the superintendent of the Lithuanian Calvinists to the ministers dated 1639 proclaimed under the rubric “incentives for good cheer” (pobudki do otuchy) that “only one thing is lacking for complete happiness” (do zupełnej pociechy): “the deprivation of its privileges, or the removal of the Wilno [Jesuit] Academy from its location.” Unfortunately for perfect Calvinist joy, that was not going to occur, even under—or perhaps especially under—the relatively benignant rule of Władysław IV Waza. The concern about sending the community’s children (sons) abroad for schooling was not limited to Calvinist clergy. As always with such anxieties and strictures, several questions arise. Why did priests and ministers feel a need to promulgate such decrees? What practices of the laity elicited these attempts to impose confessional discipline upon education? How did the faithful view and approach the problem? This chapter examines religious, cultural, and occupational aspects of upbringing, broadly construed, in seventeenth-century Wilno. One of the terms for “upbringing” generally used at the time, wychowanie (a verbal substantive from the infinitive wychowac´), also included—perhaps even implied for the majority—first and foremost the simplest material aspects of care for minors: food, clothing, shelter.5 Here I look at spiritual, intellectual, and practical components of providing and acquiring training in the faith and the tools of a profession and/or trade. I am less interested here in the details of the various rationes studiorum (plan of studies), and more, as throughout, in the role of confessional allegiances and identities in forming interpersonal associations in the context of providing and acquiring an education in the broader sense of the term.

Mixed Families I begin where I left off last chapter—with baptisms and godparenting but focusing now more specifically on the children of confessionally mixed couples. What I offer here may serve as a corrective, or qualifier, to the impression of a certain confessional indifference in the practices of some parents. Choices of spiritual kin, among other things, suggest an occasional willingness to situate children and the kinship networks formed around them at baptism across the boundaries of confession. And yet, even in these cases, parents still made a choice to have their children baptized in one Church rather than the other. This choice— especially in the case of mixed marriages—may suggest that, no matter how “irenicist” some Vilnans may have been in some of their views on confessional discipline, baptism—even when the godparents were of another confession—nonetheless signified some sort of initiation into the faith taught by one Church rather than another. After all, the differences between the articles of faith of the various confessions, if parents listened to the theologians and polemicists, brought either salvation or damnation.

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There was a tendency in the mixed households in the east of the Commonwealth—by no means written into law—to raise the boys in the confession of the father, the girls in that of the mother. Lutheran royal doctor Vorbek-Lettow seems not to have followed this pattern, in spite of his openness to social and other ties with members of all the other confessions. His wife was born into a Calvinist family and probably remained in that faith: this was the pattern we will discover in several other Lutheran-Calvinist marriages.6 The fact that two of the three girls (and one of the eight boys) were baptized by a Calvinist minister was due to circumstances and not to strategies for keeping harmony in what may have been a mixed marriage: the family had fled the plague from Wilno to the countryside, and the doctor had to make do with a Calvinist minister, since “at that time it was impossible to get [one] of my own confession.”7 The sources also suggest that other Vilnans—many of them well known or even related to the royal doctor—did in fact adhere to the practice of allotting different confessions to boys and girls in the maintenance of religious order and peace in multiconfessional households. The practice must be inferred in most instances, however, not only because we have no positive statements from contemporaries about it but also because of the nature of the available sources. We have, for instance, baptismal registers for one confession (Calvinists) and offering rolls for another (Lutherans). Use of these two record books, coupled with other evidence about confessional allegiances and the numbers and sexes of children born to confessionally mixed couples, suggests cases where we find boys brought up in the Church of the fathers, girls in that of the mothers. I start under the spreading genealogical tree of the Gibel family. As we learn from the Personalia section of one of the many funeral sermons by Lutheran minister Je˛drzej Schönflissius, longtime burgomaster Jakub Gibel (b. 1569) was the son of Lutheran city councillor Tomasz Gibel and burgomaster’s daughter Katarzyna Dochnowiczówna, probably also a Lutheran. In any event, “as soon as the Lord God had given him to them into the world, they offered him to Him through holy baptism. Then they raised him [wychowali] in the fear of God and in the doctrine and obedience of the Lord.” Jakub’s father soon died, and his mother married another Lutheran, merchant Piotr Fonderflot, who continued his upbringing, sending him abroad on a study trip. Upon his return to Wilno, ca. 1600, he met his future wife among the daughters of Lutheran merchant Andrzej Fonderflot (perhaps the brother of his stepfather?). Krystyna Fonderflotówna, with whom he lived in marriage for thirty-eight years, gave birth to six sons and four daughters, of whom half, three sons and two daughters, would survive their relatively long-lived father (he died in 1637 at age sixty-eight). So far as I can tell, the couple raised all their children in the Lutheran faith. The layout of the dedicatory page in Schönflissius’s sermon suggests orders of birth among the boys and girls: Tomasz, Jakub, Jan; Katarzyna, Elz∧bieta.8 In 1636 the Gibels (Jakub and apparently eldest son Tomasz) owned three houses on Castle Street—Jakub at 2.13 and 2.18, Tomasz next to his father at 2.12. Daughters and sons-in-law (and one grandson) also lived in the neighborhood.

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Tomasz Gibel—although he would successfully maintain a claim to noble rights as the son of a Wilno magistrate—would marry a burghess from the neighborhood. This was Anna Engelbrechtówna, quite literally the girl next door (Castle Street 2.11). She was the daughter of Lutheran merchant Szymon Engelbrecht I and Krystyna Vorbekówna-Lettowówna, sister of the royal doctor. The couple would have at least five children. One of them, daughter Krystyna Giblówna, married a Calvinist. She was the second wife of royal doctor and master of the Wilno horodnictwo Paweł Kleofas, whom King Władysław IV would ennoble during the 1633 Election Sejm as “z Brylewa Podchocimski” in recognition of his medical services to the then future king at the Battle of Chocim (1621) and over the next decade.9 At that time, in the early 1630s, Podchocimski’s first wife was apparently still living. She was the Anna Podchocimska who served as a godmother for a Calvinist baby on 2 October 1635.10 “Pan Doktor [Lord Doctor] Paulus Cleophas” brought his own son Paweł to the font at the Wilno Calvinist church on 14 October 1631 to be baptized. Two years later, and newly incorporated into the ranks of the Lithuanian nobility, “His Grace, Lord Paweł Cleophas Podchocimski, medicinae doctor, secretary of His Grace the King, Wilno architect [budowniczy],” would name his second son Władysław Karol in honor of his royal patron, who would be the boy’s nominal godparent.11 These were sons borne by his first wife. None of his other children would receive baptism in the Wilno Calvinist church. Podchocimski had at least four children with his second, Lutheran wife, Krystyna Giblówna, three of them, according to Vorbek-Lettow, daughters: Katarzyna, Anna, and Zofia.12 Their absence from Calvinist baptismal, marriage, and Communion records can best be explained by the assumption that they were raised in their mother’s Lutheran confession (for which baptismal records are lacking). Similar pictures emerge from an examination of the cases of their mother’s cousins. A daughter of Jakub Gibel named Katarzyna married Calvinist merchant Korneliusz Winhold II in 1622.13 The couple resided across the street from the Gibel properties in the Winhold family home at Castle Street 1.16. As we learn from the funeral sermon for Korneliusz II (d. 31 May 1638) published by Calvinist minister Baltazar Łabe˛dzki, the deceased “had five children with [Giblówna], of whom only one remains alive, and four of them they accompanied to the grave with sorrow.”14 The sole surviving child was named Jakub. He was still a minor at the time of his mother’s death, and in 1644 his Gibel aunt, “Halszka” (Elz∧bieta), received a detailed inventory of the family house that she would be holding in his name.15 Two of those who had already died were Korneliusz III and Jan. They had been baptized in the Calvinist church on 1 January 1635 and 11 August 1637, respectively.16 From funeral sermons by Calvinist minister Łabe˛dzki, we learn of Korneliusz III’s burial on 6 March 1635, and of the death of Jan on 12 October 1637.17 Jakub, no doubt named for his maternal grandfather, the Lutheran burgomaster Jakub Gibel, seems to have been the oldest son; his absence from the Calvinist baptismal register could be explained by the fact that the first entry in that book is from August 1631, and he was probably born before that date. The other two unnamed children—likewise absent from Calvinist baptismal rolls and otherwise unmentioned in Łabe˛dzki’s funeral sermons, even though they too had died by 1638—would seem to have

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been girls, baptized and raised in their mother’s Lutheran church. Records of offerings given to that church by “Frawe Corneliuß Wiencholdtsche” for the two-year period ending 1640 (29 zł, 10 gr) indicate that she remained in her family’s confession.18 Women appeared independently in the rolls of Lutheran giving only in two instances: as widows or when their husbands were of a different confession. Both of these applied to Giblówna in 1640. Moving to the next branch of the Gibel family tree, we find sister of Tomasz and Katarzyna, Elz∧bieta Giblówna—the one who received the inventory of the Winhold house. She was the wife of Lutheran merchant Jan Sztrunk II. (The Sztrunk family owned the house nearby at Castle Street 2.10.) Their son, Jan Sztrunk III, would marry Barbara Monesówna, the Calvinist daughter of Henryk Mones, who was the last Protestant burgomaster of Wilno and would go on, after the royal edict of 1666 banning all but Roman Catholics and Uniates from office in the magistracy, to hold a number of high offices and titles, including that of royal secretary, royal administrator of the customs, and postmaster general of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Mones’s family had immigrated from Belgium, and Vorbek-Lettow numbered him among his first cousins, once removed (cioteczny wnuk).19 Mones’s own second wife was Lutheran Sara Sztrunkówna, whom he married in 1655. She would thus become a cousin-inlaw to her own stepdaughter, and both father and daughter, Mones and Monesówna, would have Lutheran Sztrunk spouses. Barbara Monesówna and Jan Sztrunk III married on 18 November 1663. Barbara Monesówna’s mother had apparently also been a Calvinist; we find “Monesowa” (occasionally further identified as “Halszka”) on numerous occasions in the role of godmother to Calvinist babies in the period before Mones’s second marriage, and the couple’s two daughters would both receive Calvinist baptisms.20 In any event, Lutheran merchant Jan Sztrunk III—he would also attain the title of royal secretary and begin claiming membership for the family in the Lithuanian szlachta as “de Sztrunk”—appeared in the Calvinist church on at least three occasions in order to baptize his daughters: Halszka (12 March 1668, probably named for her Lutheran paternal grandmother Elz∧bieta Giblówna), Katarzyna (3 November 1675, perhaps named for Lutheran great-aunts Katarzyna Giblowna and Katarzyna Sztrunkówna), and Anna (20 March 1677, perhaps named for another Lutheran great-aunt, Anna Engelbrechtówna).21 Their mother, Barbara Monesówna, would remain Calvinist. We find her name, together with that of her first daughter Halszka and second daughter Katarzyna, among the communicants of the Reformed congregation in the 1680s.22 If the couple had any boys, they were evidently raised in the Lutheran church. Jan Sztrunk III was one of the major contributors to that congregation’s finances in the second half of the seventeenth century, and the family name would live on in Wilno society.23 We have yet another, similar example from the Calvinists on the other side of Castle Street. The Desaus family lived—and successfully defended their property against confiscation for alleged collusion with the Swedes during the midcentury wars—in the town house at Castle Street 1.26. The chief object of allegations of treason, Jan Desaus, would return to Wilno and see his daughters married in the local Calvinist church; he would also serve with some

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frequency as an elder of the church and godfather for Calvinist babies in the 1660s and 1670s.24 His daughter Katarzyna (baptized in the Calvinist church on 6 March 1650) was married twice, the first time to a certain Piotr Korona, apparently a Calvinist, with whom she had two daughters, both baptized in the Calvinist church.25 Her second husband was Lutheran royal secretary Jan Szretter (1686–1698). He would go on to hold the office of treasury secretary, Lithuanian treasurer, and—an incredible coup for a former burgher—castellan of Livland. The couple was married on 10 October 1674.26 She would also have two daughters with her second, Lutheran husband, and he would bring them to the font in his wife’s Calvinist church—Marianna on 15 November 1675 and Zuzanna on 23 November 1679.27 Katarzyna continued to take Communion in the Calvinist church, along with her daughters.28 We know that the Szretter line would continue in Lithuanian society and that it would remain Lutheran—apparently deriving in part from Jan.29 In any event, it seems likely this couple too had some boys, and since they are entirely missing in Calvinist records, we may assume that they were raised in the Lutheran Church. We have one example from more modest circles. A baptismal register of mostly German Catholics from the Jesuits’ Church of St. Ignatius tells us that on 22 January 1688 a certain Thomas Bader and his wife Anna baptized their son Thomas in that Roman Catholic church. The Lutheran offering rolls tell us two things: that Thomas Bader was a white-leather tanner (probably he lived among the other Lutheran chamois tanners in Szerejkiszki) and, by default, that he was the Catholic in this marriage, as the entries for offerings to the Wilno Lutheran church—from 1679 to 1691—were all ascribed to “Thomas Bader’s wife [Thomas Bader Haußfrau].”30 The son was clearly named—perhaps in imitation of German Lutheran patterns?—for his Catholic father (and was to be brought up in the Catholic faith). The nearest Catholic feast to the baptismal date was that of St. Thomas the Apostle on 21 December. And finally we have one example of a mixed marriage of a different confessional constellation. Contrary to some assertions, Burgomaster Stefan Lebiedzicz was Uniate, not Roman Catholic.31 His wife, Marta Paszkiewiczówna, however, was a member of the local Reformed church. She was probably some relation of the several Paszkiewiczes who held office in the magistracy in the first half of the seventeenth century, at least one of whom was a Calvinist.32 Lebiedzicz and Paszkiewiczówna had two daughters, Halszka and Katarzyna, whom they had baptized in the local Calvinist church 2 October 1633 and 8 March 1635.33 The posthumous inventory of Lebiedzicz’s estate tells us of a son named Stefus´ (Stevie) and of a gift of six golden spoons to him from his godmother.34 Stefus´ was not baptized in the Calvinist church. The father’s fidelity to the Uniate Church is reflected in the several provisions for local Uniate institutions found in his posthumous inventory of possessions but also by the fact that the son was not baptized a Calvinist.35 Daughter Halszka would marry a certain Krzysztof Hendrych Dydykien. A Krystyna Lebiedziewiczówna (daughter of Stefan)— perhaps there was a mistake here and Krystyna and Katarzyna were the same person—was married to Stanisław Gurski, a “ziemianin of His Royal Majesty in the Polish Crown” (in other words, a gentryman of limited noble rights).36 Lebiedzicz’s Calvinist daughters seem to have

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been headed on the path that would take them out of Wilno, to the land, and into the first rungs of the Polish-Lithuanian szlachta. Uniate son Stefus´—here, too, among the Ruthenians, we see adherence to family tradition in naming practices—seems to have died in childhood. The majority of Wilno’s children would have received their upbringing in monoconfessional households, learning the rudiments of religion in the same Church to which their parents belonged. But even they would have been aware at some early age that others who lived close by were learning other things about God and faith. And some number of them must have been aware—if only through questions of the sort “Where’s your Mommy?” heard before or after religious services—that a certain number of their playmates had parents of various other confessions. The cases I have pieced together suggest that the fears of the Calvinist synod of 1621 were entirely justified, that at least in some cases, “for the sake of the mothers (when it happens that only the father is an Evangelical) they allow them [or at least the girls] to go to the opposing side.”

Apprenticeships Any further education beyond the rudimentary religious training of the catechism would for the vast majority of Vilnans have been connected with the learning of an art or trade. While the topic belongs, in a sense, to the first rung on the ladder of work in a given profession, there is clearly a pedagogical aspect to an apprenticeship. There was a hierarchy among the trades, ranging from the more noble (goldsmiths, barber-surgeons, printers), downward to the dirtier (furriers, tanners, butchers), to the downright dishonorable (executioners and their assistants, the “dog-catchers”). General levels of literacy and education varied greatly across the spectrum of trades and professions, and the skills taught and acquired were, of course, specific to the given art. What interests me here is not so much how the apprentice was to be trained as how those involved—both the teachers and the taught, masters and apprentices—viewed reaching across boundaries of confession, even religion, in acquiring the tools of a trade. In spite of scattered attempts to draw confessional limits, the guilds of Wilno—unlike those of most other multiconfessional cities—remained highly mixed, even after the victory of the Counter-Reformation. This necessitated working out methods of power sharing among the masters of a trade who belonged to a range of confessions. Since the guilds remained mixed and the masters themselves had gone through the steps from apprentice to journeyman to owner of a shop, we may presume that the workers in the shop, beginning at the lowest rank, were also of various confessions, even if the guild statutes rarely addressed the issue of relations between the confessions below the level of the elected “annual elders.” Efforts to exclude artisans from a guild by confessional criteria—reflected in the sources on remarkably few occasions—were undertaken not only from the theoretically stronger

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Roman Catholic side. On 10 October 1641 Władysław IV signed a decree in Warsaw instructing certain guilds of Wilno (these included barber-surgeons and various types of tanners) to cease placing restrictions on Roman Catholics. In each case, we may suspect that the complaint was directed against the Lutherans, who predominated in some of these areas, and that the king’s decree came in response to specific requests brought by Wilno tradesmen, in this case Roman Catholic. Specifically, so the complaint went, “the elder and younger chamois tanners have made some sort of conspiracy [zmowa] among themselves, concerning the acceptance of both journeymen and apprentices of the Catholic faith of the Polish and Lithuanian nation, as also in the election of elders of their craft,”37 and the king ordered them to stop the practice. In general, the guilds were supposed to accept apprentices without regard for confession or ethnicity, except for Jews, Armenians, and Tatars, the sole criterion being the ability to provide a certificate of legitimate birth, of an “honorable bed” (uczciwe łoz∧e).38 Thus we may treat as an exception—and wonder just how successful it was—the attempt of the white-leather tanners’, glove makers’, and chamois tanners’ guild (they formed one guild) “not to receive any other apprentices but those of the Catholic faith, of an honorable bed, and born of free [parents].”39 Occasional attempts to ban Christians from serving their apprenticeships in Jewish guilds—and one instance of a ban on Jewish apprentices in a Christian guild—suggest that crossing this particular religious boundary in seeking and providing training in a trade may actually have been something of a troubling, perhaps not entirely uncommon, practice. The only reflection I have seen of the possible presence of a Jewish apprentice in a Christian guild came in a compromise statute for the needle makers in 1672 that allowed four Jewish artisans into the Christian sodality, “and no more,” and specifically disallowed Jewish apprentices and bunglers.40 But the real attraction seems in fact to have been in the other direction. The articles of the glaziers’ guild enacted 3 December 1663 commanded, “Let no Jew from the date of these statutes of ours dare to receive an apprentice of the Christian faith for training [na nauke˛].” The very fact that a burgher institution was attempting to dictate Jewish behavior suggests that this was indeed a common practice. In fact, the Jewish glaziers of Wilno may have had a head start on the Christians, which might be an added reason for the attractiveness of an apprenticeship among them in this particular trade. In 1633 King Władysław IV had allowed Jews to engage in trades not yet organized into guilds in Wilno, and he named specifically “furriers, haberdashers, and glaziers.” King Michał Korybut Wis´niowiecki reaffirmed this privilege in 1669, again naming the same three trades. But the Christian glaziers were incorporated no later than 1663, and their charter that year pointed to a conflict, demanding that Jews cease receiving Christian apprentices to study the trade with them.41 A legal battle fought in 1667–1668 between Christian and Jewish butchers’ guilds resulted in a decree that forced the Christian butchers of Wilno to accept the right of Jewish butchers to have their own guild, but it also registered one aspect of their complaint that pertains to the subject at hand: the Jewish guild, so the language of the Christians’ lawyers implies, was

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such a successful institution that Christian journeymen found it an attractive and lucrative place to learn their trade: “They [the Jewish butchers of Wilno] entice to themselves Christian apprentices [czeladz´], who, having caused not inconsiderable harm to their [Christian] masters, and having incurred debt with them, depart from them; and they [the Jewish butchers] receive them and maintain them.”42 In fact, this was a problem not unique to Wilno: the Jewish guilds of Poland-Lithuania offered an attractive product—high-quality training in certain trades and at prices lower than those found in the Christian guilds.43 (By way of comparison, in Lwów toward the end of the seventeenth century, the lace makers’, glaziers’, tinsmiths’, haberdashers’, needle makers’, and gunsmiths’ guilds were either completely Jewish or included only two or three Christian members, and Christian artisans, including those who became masters, sought apprenticeships with Jews.)44 Although certain confessions were predominant in a few guilds, all were mixed in the seventeenth century to greater and lesser degrees. This would suggest that young Vilnans of the various confessions (and occasionally of the Christian and Jewish religions) rubbed shoulders as they gained professional training from masters who were not necessarily of their own religious group. This also meant that with their first steps outside the family— even in the case of those who gained no literacy but only training in a trade and even if they came from a monoconfessional household—young Vilnans would have encountered both colleagues and superiors of another confession on a daily basis and from an early age.

The Royal Doctor’s Schools Although some elements of the catechism, with the addition of training in a trade, would have been the end of an education for the vast majority of Vilnans, some sought out the schools. For most, a year or two at Wilno’s various church-affiliated grammar schools would have had to suffice. Some would venture forth to nearby gymnasiums in ducal or royal Prussia—Königsberg, Elbing, or Danzig. A very few—probably almost all of them from the upper reaches of the burgher elite—would set off on “peregrinations to the schools,” partly in emulation of the szlachta, partly in order to gain training in a profession that might facilitate their own passage into that estate (medicine, law, and mathematics/fortifications chief among them). The richest concentration of information on the personal experience of an individual Vilnan is to be had, once again, in The Treasure-House of Memory of Lutheran royal doctor Maciej Vorbek-Lettow. The account takes us on a journey through a highly mixed experience in the lower schools of Wilno itself and of ducal and royal Prussia (a common first destination for Protestants of Poland-Lithuania), back to Wilno for studies in the Calvinist lyceum and the Jesuit Academy, and then on to universities and academies of western Europe (both north and south) for the purpose of learning languages and acquiring training in a profession, in

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this case that of medicine. This rather comprehensive account of the education of one Vilnan offers some context in which to situate the few and isolated details we possess about the experiences of others from the city. Vorbek-Lettow tells us that he was born 12 February 1593 and that, “after seven years [i.e., ca. 1600], [he] began to go to the Saxon [Lutheran] school at the Wilno church. In half a year [he] had learned to read and to write mediocriter [not particularly well].” His first two teachers, Michael Frobenius and Je˛drzej Usłowski (“a learned and exemplary youth”), seem to have been satisfactory. The third, Andrzej Gutowski, although “a worthy and good man,” was, in the memory of his young student, “extremely unfit for teaching; he did nothing but waste my years.”45 Presumably the emphasis was on learning the rudiments of Latin, but some German reading and writing may have been a part of the equation, perhaps also some Polish. The result was that, “having completed grammaticam [grammar, i.e., Latin] in this school very perfunctorie [superficially],” the future doctor was sent by his father to Königsberg at age ten (ca. 1603) to continue his studies. He attended a school there—most certainly some sort of Lutheran grammar school and not the university—in the Old Town for “almost a year.” But since “the German tongue is vile in Königsberg,” the now eleven-year-old went on to Elbing (Elbla˛g) in royal Prussia to live with his father’s stepmother so that he might “acquire ‘high German’ [górna niemiecka mowa], for it is pronounced purely only in this one Prussian city.” Clearly, the purpose of traveling to study was to acquire not only Latin but also the local vernaculars. After a year in Elbing, thus ca. 1605, at age twelve, Vorbek-Lettow moved on to Danzig. There he began to study at the famous Calvinist gymnasium, where he heard lectures in logic by Bartholomew Keckermann (1571/1573–1608)—a professor of philosophy and theology of international renown, often seen as one of the “fathers of modern systematic theology”46—and in medicine by Danzig doctor and physician Nicholas Oelhaf.47 We do not learn how long he stayed in Danzig, but, he wrote, “since I was sent [to study away from Wilno] as a youngster, I began to become deficient [szwankowac´] in Polish.” When his father noticed this in the letters his son was sending to him—evidence that the Saxon father and son corresponded at least partly in Polish—he “ordered me to come home, which I did.”48 At that point (ca. 1608 if Vorbek-Lettow remained a year or so in Danzig, as he had done in Königsberg and Elbing) the school at the Calvinist church in Wilno was, according to the memoirist, experiencing a period of “glory.” His father placed him in it for another year and ordered him to “listen to various lectiones [lectures].” He attended lectures in theology and logic by Calvinist minister and doctor of theology Baltazar Kros´niewicki, in physics and ethics by Marcin Chmieleski, and in rhetoric by Adam Rassius (“vir literatissimus [a most learned man]”).49 Vorbek-Lettow had spent barely a year with the Calvinists, when, “tempore vacationum [at vacation time],” he happened to meet “father Gruszewski [other sources call him Gruz∧ewski], Jesuit, professor designatus pro renovatione studiorum philosophiae [appointed for the reformation of studies in philosophy].” Jan Gruz∧ewski first studied in the Wilno Jesuit Academy and

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then went to Rome to complete a doctorate in theology. He had returned to Wilno in 1609, the year he met the future royal doctor, and he spent five years teaching and reforming the instruction of philosophy at the academy before taking over the instruction of theology in 1618. From 1618 to 1625 he would serve as one of the academy’s more energetic rectors.50 But in 1609 he had come to see Vorbek-Lettow’s father—himself a barber-surgeon—“for getting advice conservandae valetudinis [about how to maintain his health].” The Jesuit patient encountered his Lutheran doctor’s son in the courtyard (no doubt of the Vorbek-Lettow family house at German Street 26.03) with “a book under my arm.” Upon discovering the identity of the young student (now sixteen years of age), the new professor asked his doctor to send his son to begin the study of philosophy under his tutelage beginning 1 September. “I assure you by my priestly word,” Gruz∧ewski told his doctor, “that he will learn more in half a year than in the schools to which he went through all those years. As far as religion is concerned, I promise that I will leave him in peace.” On the basis of the motto “omnia probate, quod bonum est tenete” (1 Thessalonians 5:21, “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good”), Vorbek-Lettow Sr., “having invited the Calvinist church preceptors to a dinner, gave them his thanks and sent [his son] off to the collegium [college].”51 The young student was generally appreciative of the training he was to receive at the academy: I must grant it to the Jesuit fathers that they teach diligently and benevolently. They keep an eye on the youths. Even if one did not wish to, through the constant repetitions, no matter how incompetent he might be, he will have to learn something. In addition to this, they teach methodice [methodically], they do not burden the youths with various subjects, as they do in other schools and as it was with me: ex omnibus aliquid, ex toto nihil [something of everything, of all—nothing].52

The religious question was another matter, and the experience in the Jesuit Academy both challenged Vorbek-Lettow’s Lutheran faith and finally confirmed him in it. He did not experience “any sort of harassment [dokuka] from the professor himself, but enough and more from Father Jakub Ortisius, a Spaniard,” who promised him “mountains of gold” if he would convert to Roman Catholicism. Vorbek-Lettow girded himself for confessional battle during his year at the Jesuit Academy by going “every Sunday and Thursday for half an hour for privatae [private lessons] to Father [Grzegorz] Borastus, the Polish preacher augustanae confessionis [of the Augsburg confession]. He resolvebat propositos nodos [solved the problems posed] and taught me fideliter [faithfully] how I was to answer them from Holy Writ.” When Borastus (1584–1630)—a Swedish doctor of law and theology and a royal secretary—left for Prussia, Vorbek-Lettow’s father placed his son in a sort of student dormitory run by Father Chrystian Bruno, “the German Saxon preacher, a pious and learned man.” (Was this at the Lutheran church complex just up the street from the Vorbek-Lettow house?) Among other things, the boys would eat

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together, one of them reading aloud—from the Bible on holy days, from Protestant Church historian Johannes Sleidanus (1506–1556) on weekdays. But when they got up in the morning, “[they] would go . . . each to his own school.” Bruno “saw to it that [they] learned diligently the lessons [they] received in school.” Making each boy write on the wall above his bed in the dormitory an admonitory text was to encourage another sort of self-discipline: “In omni loco oculi Domini contemplantur bonos et malos” (Proverbs 15:4, “The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the good and the evil”).53 The story of a dispute between Lutheran minister Chrystian Bruno and Jesuit doctor of philosophy Je˛drzej Nowak adds a few details to our picture of the schools of Wilno and the conditions in them. It was Father Nowak who had laid down the gauntlet: “If he, Bruno, could prove ex patribus et consilis [from the fathers and the councils], that in primitiva ecclesia [in the early Church] there was given tam clericis quam laicis sub utraque specie Venerabile Sacramentum [the Venerable Sacrament to both clergy and laity under both kinds], then he would convert to the Saxon faith; if not, he [Bruno] would convert to the Roman. To which they gave each other their hand in the presence of trustworthy people.”54 Bruno did not have an unabridged copy of the Council of Constance (“non castratum concilii Constantiensis codicem”) in his library, but he knew that the local Dominican fathers at the Church of the Holy Spirit did have one. (And note that a Lutheran minister in Wilno knew off the top of his head where to look for a specific book in the libraries of his local confessional competitors!) So he sent VorbekLettow’s stepbrother, Paweł Katerla (yet another future royal doctor, apparently Calvinist), who happened to be studying philosophy with Nowak at the time, to make a copy of the crucial passage for him. Katerla, Bruno knew, “was on good terms with the Dominican librarian,” so the Lutheran preacher asked him that he, “praetextu alio [under another pretext], having received permission to go into the library, write out what he needed (for all their books are chained to the benches by little chains)—and namely, the canon of sessio 13 consilii Constantiensis [session 13 of the Council of Constance].” The canon stated clearly that the usage of the early Church was to grant Communion to the laity in both species but that a recognized custom had arisen later whereby only the priest received Communion in both the bread and the wine, the laity in the bread alone.55 Nowak was mightily surprised at the turn of events and asked where Bruno had found the proof-text, demanding “ipsum autenticum codicem [the authentic codex itself ].” The Lutheran preacher replied, “I don’t have it. Go to the library of the Dominican fathers, it is there, and you will find it in no other form.” The duel ended amicably but without the conversion of either party. Vorbek-Lettow often returned in his memory to that moment: “Every time I read that canon, or brought it to memory, it confirmed me miraculously in the genuine apostolic faith.”56 “Upon completing philosophiam [the course in philosophy] with the Jesuit fathers, the Lord God punished Wilno with fire.” With this stunning anacoluthon—we might be inclined to see it as a pre-Freudian slip were it not for the fact that Old Polish usage enthusiastically embraced such constructions—Vorbek-Lettow brought to a close the chapter on his studies

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in Wilno and the two Prussias and turned his attention to an account of his “peregrinations to the schools” of western Europe. The Polish-Lithuanian nobles regularly sent their sons to western Europe for some years of travel from school to school. The itineraries changed over time and with the progress of the Counter-Reformation. In the middle of the sixteenth century, a nobleman might be expected to sample several universities and academies, of both north and south and of all the confessions. Gradually, places of learning began to be chosen with the confession of the student in mind, although there was still a certain amount of indifference on this front and more interest in the particular strengths of the given institution of higher learning.57 Vilnans traveled too, and for some of the same reasons, above all because of a lack of certain faculties at the Wilno academy (especially the professions—law and medicine) and because non-Catholics were not permitted in the higher subjects (theology, sometimes even philosophy) or because non-Catholic parents simply preferred not to entrust their sons to the Jesuits. Some of those from families situated at the intersection of the burgher elite and the Lithuanian nobility, such as Vorbek-Lettow, may also have used such a study tour as yet another way to emulate the szlachta and facilitate the family’s (re-)entry into it. Much of Wilno, probably including Vorbek-Lettow’s own house, had burned to the ground on 1 July 1610. In view of the dire situation, his father sent him on 15 August “to foreign countries for education,” giving him his blessing and a viaticum (here, provision for the road) that included a symbolic reminder of his parents’ situation in the Lithuanian capital. This was “a portugal [a coin] melted together with a taler found in the ashes of the ruins, as a souvenir, so that, looking at them, [he] might remember in what ashes [he] had left [his] parents, for this warning, that [he] might be a good, thrifty custodian of the viaticum they had bestowed upon [him], . . . that [he] might take care and heed of [him]self and not be a burden to [his] lord parents.” Vorbek-Lettow Sr. was a balwierz, a barber-surgeon, who managed to cultivate relations with elite patrons. His goal for his son was to move one rung up on the professional ladder, to that of medical doctor, which would open even more doors. The younger Vorbek-Lettow traveled as far as Frankfurt am Main with his brother-in-law or perhaps at that time still future brother-in-law, Szymon Engelbrecht I (Castle Street 2.11), arriving there on 6 October, before heading off on his own for Paris.58 By 13 October he had arrived in Basel, where he presented himself to “Kasper Bauchinius, renowned botanicus et anatomicus [botanist and anatomist].” Caspar Bauhin (1560–1624) was indeed a famous scientist, a precursor to Linnaeus in his work on the classification of plants.59 No one interested in the study of medicine would have needed to be told to pay Bauhin a visit; still, the way to the scholar’s door may have been opened by the contacts made by Vorbek-Lettow’s future patron and future palatine of Wilno, Krzysztof Radziwiłł II, who had also made the journey some years earlier and was then carrying on a correspondence with the Swiss scientist.60 (Vorbek-Lettow would find Radziwiłł and wife, among others, feasting at his father’s table on his return to Wilno 15 August 1616.61 The family acquaintance probably predated the beginning of the peregrination.) Bauhin offered the young Vorbek-Lettow “lodging and table,

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if only [he] would wish to reside with him.” As the plague was then raging in the city, the traveler preferred to “join some Lord Poles residing in Aucen [Augusta Rauracorum] two miles beyond Basel.” This was Augst, an old Roman settlement on the left bank of the Rhine a few kilometers below Basel. When the plague reached Augst, the “Lord Poles” decided to move on: Princes Juliusz and Aleksander Pron´ski, whom Vorbek-Lettow identified as Calvinists (Evangelicals), set off on the return trip to Poland; Lords Piotr and Samuel BolestraszyckiS´wie˛topełk and Lord Je˛drzej Czuryło departed for Paris, “and I in their company.”62 On the way to Paris, the preceptor who had been sent along to supervise the education of the young noblemen, a certain Silesian (natione S´la˛zak) by the name of Hieronim Praetorius, “noticed . . . that [he] had red złotys sewn [in his cloak] in reserve. He pleaded so long that [he] admitted it and loaned them to him.” The agreement was that Praetorius would return the money once the group reached the French capital. The seventeen-year-old learned his lesson the hard way, of course—this, too, was part of an education. The group arrived in Paris on 2 December 1610. The “little Lords” (panie˛ta) spent three months there before departing for England, at which point they sent their preceptor back to Poland for more funds, “and that was the last [Vorbek-Lettow] saw of him and [his] money.” The future doctor was forced to feed himself for the next three months by “serving with riding horses” for a riding teacher (kalwakator) by the name of Jean Baptiste who lived in the St. Germaine suburb.63 This brings us to the summer of 1611, when sons of palatine of Brzes´´c Mikołaj Sapieha, Fryderyk and Aleksander, took Vorbek-Lettow on as a servant (za sługe˛). He spent about a year with them in the Roman Catholic university town of Louvain, whereupon they all traveled back through France to Italy, stopping in Paris, Lyon, Turin, Milan, finally arriving at Bologna. Vorbek-Lettow complained that his masters gave him nothing but his food, his “bread” (chleb), that they paid him nothing, and that he had to clothe himself. Their preceptor in turn admonished the frustrated burgher student, “It is enough for you that you visit foreign countries at the side of these Young Lords without any expense of your own.”64 The study part of the trip began in good earnest during the year in Louvain—but not without certain difficulties of a confessional nature. Vorbek-Lettow’s father had sent him abroad to study medicine. To start down this path, he now wished to hear the lectures of “doctor of medicine Phienus,” a faculty member at the local academy. The problem was that Pope Pius IV had promulgated a bull (written 13 November 1564, published 4 December 1564) that placed upon doctoral students, professors, and administrators of Catholic academies and universities the obligation of making a public confession of the Roman Catholic faith.65 This did not end the presence of the heterodox in Catholic centers of higher learning, but it made it more difficult for those who did not wish to dissimulate concerning their religious beliefs to take degrees, at times even to be present at lectures. This included, of course, the many Protestant peregrinators from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The papal bull encouraged the growing tendency for Protestants from the Commonwealth to send their sons to Switzerland, parts of Germany and the Low Countries, and England and conversely, for the sons of

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Roman Catholics to head to Italy, Spain, France, and other parts of Germany and the Low Countries. Conditions in each institution varied somewhat. Here is how Vorbek-Lettow described the practice at Louvain of dealing with those unwilling to take the oath: If he does not take the oath [that “he is a Catholic and wishes to remain one until his death”], since he is unmatriculated, as soon as the students notice that he comes once, twice to school to listen to lectures, ex instituto et consuetudine continuata [by the uninterrupted ordinance and custom] of that academy, all of them, having stood up, will importune the professor with calling and banging as long as it takes until he comes down from the cathedra; asked by him why they had been impatient, [they will say] that a nonmatriculatus [unmatriculated person] was sitting among them. Whereby no one of any religion other than the Roman [Catholic], and praestito fidei instrumento [with the performance of a record of the faith] at that, can listen to public lectures in that academy. I, too, had to give it up, wishing to have free and unsullied conscience.66

Thus were his attempts to begin medical studies at Louvain thwarted at the outset, and for strictly confessional reasons. Vorbek-Lettow’s status as a sort of valet to the Sapiehas, however, helped him out somewhat here, although he had to give up, for the moment, his intention to study medicine. Noble sons went abroad to gain the tools needed for public life: in addition to fencing and martial arts (especially mathematics/fortifications), languages—including Latin and the vernaculars—rhetoric, and some aspects of history and the law. Vorbek-Lettow was able to make progress in all the latter fields, especially law, by sitting in on his masters’ private lessons with local humanists and lawyers. In fact, it was often Vorbek-Lettow rather than his masters who attended the lessons. Professor Corselius, “juris profesor primarius, vir literatissimus et locupletissimus [first-rate professor of law, a most learned and capable man]” was then lecturing, and the professor, the young noblemen, and their servant worked out an arrangement: the Sapieha boys would pay Vorbek-Lettow “2 red złotys per month each, so that [he] might write down [the professor’s] dictata [lessons] for them, which he [Corselius] allowed, since he had fifty or so auditors, of which each paid 1 red złoty.” In this fashion, the would-be student made a little money as well as quick progress in the study of the law, and the magnate sons did not need to trouble themselves with showing up for class.67 But a law degree had not been the father’s desire for his son. Thus as soon as VorbekLettow reached Italy with his masters, he began looking for possibilities to study medicine. On 4 November 1612 he arrived in Bologna with his young lords and on 1 December departed for Padua, apparently now on his own, arriving there on 5 December: “I took a room with madonna Ewa Todesca alla Crosara del Santo. Having made myself comfortable, and having inscribed my name for certain reasons [z pewnych respektów] in matriculam nationis Germanicae [in the matriculation register of the German nation], I began, in the

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name of the Lord, to study medicine.”68 Although Vorbek-Lettow claimed he never made a secret of his confession, nor did he dissimulate, there are certain red flags in the narration of his studies in Padua that suggest that he might have made a few compromises in order to complete the desired degree. But we also see clearly that practice at the Venetian university was considerably less strict than at Louvain when it came to the students’ confessional allegiances. Vorbek-Lettow declared Padua, with the exception of Paris, “without equal in Europe.” The good German burgher son’s mentality shows through in the reasons. The first was the stellar faculty—in the practice of medicine, Joannes Minandus, “scriptis clarissimus [most brilliant in his writings],” and Benedictus Sylvaticus; in the theory of medicine, Sanctorius Justineapolitanus, “vir ingeniosissimus [man of the highest intellect],” and Angelo Sala; in surgery, Hieronimus Aquapendens and Placentinus, and so on. But the second reason—and this theme comes up often enough that we begin to suspect its prime importance—was that they frequently taught for free. They did this for two reasons: those they taught privately and for free would attend their public lectures, thereby giving them renown and eventually—at least indirectly—also money; and since two or three professors taught the same subject at the same time, the younger or less famous ones listed second for each subject above would teach for free in order to fill up their lecture halls. One gets the impression that VorbekLettow received much of his training from the “seconds,” even if he wished to record his presence in the vicinity of the stars.69 In 1613 the entire theological, medical, and philosophical faculties of the university, “nemine contradicente [with none opposing],” elected Vorbek-Lettow their syndic. The syndic, as the future doctor explains, ran university affairs in the absence—and they were mostly absent—of the likewise elected student rectors and vice-rectors. The latter wore togas “just like the senators of Venice,” whereas the syndics “go about normally.” Rectors and vicerectors were all “young lords” (i.e., magnates’ sons) because it cost so much to obtain and maintain the office. Giving the example of Jan Zamoyski (1542–1605), the former grand hetman and grand chancellor of the Polish Crown, Vorbek-Lettow notes that they sought the office during their student days “for the great respect and memory that they had been rulers in an academy so famous in all of Europe.” (Burgher sons, he seems to grumble, even if he would soon seek to leave that estate behind, do the real work.)70 Once he had completed his year in the syndic’s office, Vorbek-Lettow joined Venetian forces in a campaign against the Habsburg archduke Ferdinand (future Roman emperor) outside Gradisca. After several months, the academy recalled the student-soldiers, and Vorbek-Lettow began negotiations with Venetian authorities about the requirement of a confession of the Roman Catholic faith in order to complete the degree at Padua. Clearly the practice in Padua was different from that of Louvain. After all, the “ultramontane heterodox” (Vorbek-Lettow’s usage was the old one, in which “ultramontane” meant “from north of the Alps”) had been streaming here for decades and were never subject to the immediate removal from the lecture hall that he had witnessed at Louvain.

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At Padua, the moment for the oath came at the end of studies, before the conferral of the degree (and not before entering the lecture hall for the first time, as at Louvain). It took place “in aula ordinaria promotionum penes ecclesiam cathedralem situata [in the usual graduation hall located at the cathedral church].” No one was granted the degree (promowano) before he had made an oath of fidelity to the Roman Catholic faith, gone to confession, and taken the Most Holy Sacrament. The oath was taken in the cathedral church “before the bishop of Padua as the chancellor of the academy or before his substitute.” Ever since the papal bull of 1564, northern European Protestants had been in an ever more difficult situation in Padua: Arriving foreign ultramontani dissidentes in religione [ultramontane dissidents in religion], having spent their time and years there in study, avoiding such an oath, could not take the gradum doctoratus [doctoral degree]. They were forced to travel back to Wittenberg, Leipzig, Strasburg, Altdorf, Basel, Heidelberg, at no little cost, and what is more lamentable, with a loss of time, work de novo [from the beginning] to earn the favor of the local professors and their future promoters. Others, less concerned with glory, not leaving Padua, took their degrees [promowowali] sub comitibus palatinis [before representatives of the palatine]. And such actus [acts] were carried out imperatoris romani autoritate et sibi concessa facultate [by virtue of the authority of the Roman emperor and the power granted him] in their dwellings privatim [privately].71

But such degrees were derided as second rate. Both local Roman Catholic doctors and German academics called such doctors bullati (i.e., created on the basis of a bulla, a sealed privilege) and refused to consider them their equals, since they were “doctores promoti sub camino [doctors granted degrees “under a chimney,” i.e., privately, unofficially].” The result was that fewer ultramontane students were now seeking an education in Padua. Those who did were giving their money not to the Venetians but to the representatives of the emperor. Hence the saying then current in imperial circles: “Nos accipimus pecuniam et asinos mittimus in Germaniam et Poloniam [We take the money and send the asses to Germany and Poland].” Vorbek-Lettow was sent to Venice to attempt to find a compromise that would keep ultramontane money in Venetian hands and fully backed doctoral degrees in those of the heterodox graduates. The final motivating argument was the alleged poverty of the students coming in from beyond the mountains. The newly minted doctor’s report on the compromise solution is unclear (to me, at least) about how it “both non aggravantur dissidentium conscientiae [does not oppress the conscience of the dissidents] and nil derogatur veteri ordinarie a Sede Apostolica approbatae promotioni [in no way causes the diminishment of the ancient awarding of degrees normally approved by the Holy See].” It is certainly possible that La Serenissima [The Most Serene Republic] had found a characteristic “compromise”—acceptable in Venice but not really in Rome. It is also possible that Vorbek-Lettow’s degree remained somewhat suspect in the local public realm; there are several moments of defensive self-fashioning in his memoirs. In any case, so he

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claimed, “the Doge together with the Venetian Republic came to the decision that, in place of the canceled [oath], propter et in gratiam ultramontanorum inopum [on account and for the sake of the poverty of the ultramontanes] (that was the praetextus [pretense]), [they] would be granted their degrees in universitatis auditorio maiori publice, sine ulla obligatione [in the great hall of the university, publicly, without any obligation], for which [they] were also given a diploma.” The result was that “Romanenses [the Roman (Catholics)] receive insignia doctoratus [distinctions of the doctor’s degree] in that place as in old usage, and the dissidentes [dissidents] here, subject to the same examinibus et aliis ritibus [examinations but different rites], with the exception of the oath fidei catholicae romanae [of the Roman Catholic faith].” Vorbek-Lettow was decorated with the doctoral laurel in philosophy and medicine in Padua on 16 December 1614. He then spent a year and a half in Bologna (a period curiously lacking all narration in his memoir) before returning to Wilno 8 July 1616 on the “anniversary” of his departure after some six years of “peregrinations to the schools.”72 The story of Vorbek-Lettow’s education reflects both old and new patterns in European pedagogy and is both typical and atypical, in its various stages, of the experience of contemporary Vilnans. The haphazard quality of his studies before he entered the Jesuit Academy at age sixteen in 1609 is reminiscent of medieval patterns still echoed in the experience of people like Swiss pedagogue Thomas Platter (1499–1582).73 But by the time he reached the Jesuits, Vorbek-Lettow had entered the “modern” world of the ratio studiorum and similar “rationalized” pedagogies of all the confessions, where students were expected to begin to study at more or less the same age and to proceed from classis to classis on some more or less strictly prescribed schedule. Vorbek-Lettow was both remarkably open to contacts with both burghers and szlachta of all confessions and remarkably loyal to his Lutheran faith. For all that, his experience in the grammar schools of Wilno would not have been so much different from that of his contemporaries. All who advanced beyond the most rudimentary instruction in reading and writing would have encountered fellow students from other confessions; many would have sought instruction in schools based outside their own communities. But the path of his foreign peregrinations was somewhat unusual for the time: while it began in the north, which was a common travel goal for a Protestant (Germany, Switzerland), it was concentrated in centers more customary by that time for Catholics (Paris, Louvain, Padua).

The Schools of Wilno We have only scattered fragments attesting to the experiences of other Vilnans in the schools of Wilno and elsewhere. The trajectory of Vorbek-Lettow suggests one path up the Roman side of the local ladder of educational institutions. It reveals an obvious hierarchy of institutions: from the basics at the grammar school attached to the Lutheran church, then—after a detour to the grammar schools and gymnasiums of Königsberg, Elbing, and

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Danzig—to the more advanced lyceum run by the local Calvinist church, and finally to the Jesuit Academy at the Church of St. John. We have little direct information about practices on the Greek side in Wilno, but we do know that many Orthodox, as well as the Uniates, eventually sent their sons to the Jesuit Academy as well, and we may imagine that those who lived in the Lithuanian capital got some of their first training at the local Orthodox and Uniate grammar schools, just as Vorbek-Lettow got his start among his own Lutherans. Some sent their sons from the countryside to begin grammar school in the city. The story of one young man of much more modest means and horizons than the royal doctor suggests a similar testing of the schools on the part of local and area Ruthenians. During a peak in confessional unrest in October 1639, students, mostly of the Jesuit Academy, rioted against the Calvinist church, and a certain Fiedorek Andrzejewicz (Little Theodore, son of Andrew) was taken into custody and interrogated. The name points to Ruthenian (Uniate or Orthodox, but probably the latter) origins, although this is nowhere made an explicit part of the record. Fiedorek told his interrogators, ´sk [Belarusan Slavensk, a manor estate ca. 60 miles southeast of I hail from Słowien Wilno], born of father Andrzej Stefanowicz and mother Elz∧bieta Stefanowiczowa, and I am 15 years of age. I have been here in Wilno for four years, during which time I have been going to school, partly in the parish school [i.e., the Jesuit Academy], partly in the Disuniate [i.e., Orthodox] Holy Spirit school, and for the last four weeks now in the castle school [the bishop’s grammar school]. And when the bursa [subsidized dormitory for poorer students] pauperibusses74 [i.e., the poor pupils living in church-sponsored dormitories, on Skop Street, 45.06 and 45.07] from the castle school and from the parish school of St. John [the Jesuit Academy] went to tear down the Calvinist church [the tumults occurred on 5–6 October 1639], I was there with them, but I do not know how any of them are called by given and family names, and I am unable to name them, although I would recognize them. A certain Nikifor (probably, judging by his name, also a Ruthenian), who was the gatekeeper at Rudniki Gate (the main entrance to the city from the south, at the mouth of the Royal Way from outside the city to the castle hill), was then summoned to give his testimony concerning Fiedorek: “The aforementioned Fiedorek Andrzejewicz came to the gate for several nights and there, together with pauperibusses, would pass the night by himself in the gate; but for several weeks now, since he began to go to the castle school, he hasn’t come back anymore.”75 And if he had not been caught up in the events of 1639–1640, we would know nothing of his strategies for survival, which seem to have included—from age eleven!—not only sleeping in one of the city gates, but also trying out the schools, and perhaps also the bursae, of Wilno’s various confessions.

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By the seventeenth century, Wilno was home to grammar schools of some sort connected with all the confessions and religions, at least one for each—more than one, as we know, for the Roman Catholics. We know nothing specific about the perhaps one Tatar and no doubt several Jewish schools of seventeenth-century Wilno and must imagine their structures from patterns observable elsewhere. Here, of course, it is unlikely that we would encounter students other than Jews and Tatars, although we should remember that some Christian theologians and philologists of the day were interested in learning Hebrew and did go to rabbis for instruction and debate.76 And some Christians mastered Turkish and served in the Polish-Lithuanian “foreign service.”77 However this may be, crossing of confessional boundaries was certainly more common in the schools of the Christians. A Greek Orthodox school located at the Brotherhood of the Holy Trinity Church received a privilege in 1589 from King Zygmunt III with provisions for teaching “children of the inscribed brethren and impoverished orphans Ruthenian, Greek, Latin, and Polish language and writing, for free, at the expense of the Brotherhood.”78 The Orthodox Church and Brotherhood of the Holy Trinity and the school connected with them became Uniate institutions in the wake of the Union of Brest of 1596. The Lustration of 1636 noted that at the large town house at Castle Street 1.39 there now lived eighteen different inhabitants who all paid rent to the Uniate St. Michael Church but that “before the fire [i.e., the conflagration of 1610] there was only a [Uniate] school [szkoła tylko cerkiewna].”79 The main location for the Greek-rite school was at the Holy Trinity Church, but we should not be surprised to find other small grammar schools connected with this confession in other locations. This situation would seem to apply to all confessions that had more than one parish (i.e., the Uniates and the Roman Catholics). After 1596 the Orthodox regrouped a stone’s throw across Sharp Street and established the church, brotherhood, and hospital of the Descent of the Holy Spirit. The school that completed the complex was similarly a grammar school, also attempting to teach the rudiments in Ruthenian, Greek, Latin, and Polish language and writing (as at the Holy Trinity). It, too, received a royal privilege.80 For this school we have something like a ratio studiorum—for at least one aspect of its program—in the preface to Melecjusz Smotrycki’s grammar of Church Slavonic, published in nearby Jewje in 1618, which he dedicated “To the Teachers of the Schools.” The grammar itself owed something in its structure and categories to the textbooks of Latin used by contemporary Western grammar schools (Despauterius, A' lvarez). It was a description of Church Slavonic grammar, with paradigms as well as discussions of usage written in Slavonic, the target language, just as Latin textbooks were then written in Latin. The grammar would be used (in whole or in part: it was one of those early modern printed books that would make its way back into manuscript culture) for two centuries by teachers throughout the Eastern-rite Slavic world, including the Croatian Glagolitic monks and the Romanian Orthodox (who used Slavonic for liturgical purposes). It surely made its way across Sharp Street in Wilno for use in the Uniate school at the Holy Trinity Brotherhood.81

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What interests me here, however, is the minimal plan it presents for the first stages of instruction in Church Slavonic reading and writing, clearly based on similar methods of instruction developed by Jesuit schools and emulated by the Protestants in a process of mutual influencing and competition. The grammar itself was written in Church Slavonic, but the preface was in Ruthenian. This was the equivalent of producing a Latin grammar in Latin but with an address to the teachers who would be using it in the national language of the community (e.g., Polish, German, Portuguese, French). The first task of the teachers, according to the preface, was to convince the community that “Slavonic grammar is indubitably capable of bringing to its Slavonic language” the same benefits that Latin and Greek grammars had brought to those languages: a pure and, above all, fixed usage. Instruction was to proceed “in the common manner of the schools.” Something from Proverbs, or Wisdom, or Sirach, “translated from the Greek into the pure Slavonic language” was to be read during the lessons, and the class would then “translate [it] into the Ruthenian language.” In the manner of the student snitches appointed in each Jesuit class to report on colleagues who lapsed from Latin into the vernacular in their schoolboy conversations, “the Slavonic dialect will be maintained in usual school conversation among the pupils under threat of punishment.” Beginning students were to be given a primer, “commonly called an Alphabet Book, drawn from this very grammar.” Their first steps were to learn the Book of the Hours and the Psalter in Slavonic by heart. Here, as in late medieval schooling and in Vorbek-Lettow’s experience on the Roman side of town, a certain amount of repetition and rote memorization was foreseen at the early stages. If the teacher had not himself learned the art of Slavonic grammar, he was to give the book “to the children and youths  .  .  .  who already know how to read Slavonic.” They were to entrust it to memory “quickly and easily,” and upon their passage to “a more illustrious school,” they would both understand it and “come to a beneficial use of its art.”82 (It would take a truly prodigious effort to commit this book to memory.) There was a lot of programmatic wishful thinking in Smotrycki’s writing. The “more illustrious schools” he spoke of were supposed to be Orthodox Slavic equivalents of late humanistic trilingual academies (with Slavonic substituted for Hebrew). This project began in the Orthodox school sponsored by Konstanty Ostrogski at Ostroh in the 1580s, with which Smotrycki’s father Herasym had been involved, and it culminated in the academy founded by Piotr Mohyla in Kiev in the 1630s.83 But in Wilno, Ruthenian schooling remained at the most basic level. Still, this glimpse through the window of a Slavonic grammar school helps us imagine what went on in the Ruthenian Brotherhood schools in Wilno. The language and the script differed, but the structure of instruction and the tools required of the students were the same here as in Vorbek-Lettow’s Lutheran grammar school. Students learned grammar in the sacred language (Latin or Church Slavonic) by rote memorization and repetition, and they gained some rudimentary experience in reading and writing the vernacular. We find Ruthenian boys like Fiedorek trying out the Latin schools in Wilno, but there were probably few non-Ruthenians in the brotherhood schools. Still, it was not only the Orthodox and

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Uniates who sought the ability to read and write Chancery Ruthenian; some Catholics and Protestants may have made their first steps in these grammar schools or with the help of their instructors. Other than Vorbek-Lettow’s comments on the Lutheran grammar school—that one of the teachers was totally unsuited for the job and that the learning he received was rudimentary at best and superficial at worst—we know little in detail about the curriculum and teachers at that institution. We must assume that it was a basic grammar school in which young Vilnans made their first steps in learning to read and write Latin, probably also some German and Polish. And note that this was an age when a person could be literate in the sense of being able to read but illiterate in the sense of being unable to write, sometimes even to the point of being unable to sign his or her name.84 In Vorbek-Lettow’s statement that he had learned there “to read and to write mediocriter,” the Latin adverb may modify the second verb and not the first. We may assume that the student body was largely Lutheran, but we should not be too surprised to find others, especially given the fact that German was a language of commerce in the region, and there are indications that non-Germans learned it for use in their business travels and negotiations with German merchants. Perhaps some of the Vilnans with Slavic names who had mastered the language and were also able to write in the reigning seventeenth-century German script had made their first steps in the Wilno Lutheran school. Vorbek-Lettow’s experience suggests what we know from other sources: that the Calvinist school, in spite of the fact that the local community was much smaller than the Lutheran, was a “more illustrious school.” Calvinist families from throughout the Grand Duchy of Lithuania would send their sons here and to the school in Słuck. The case of Vorbek-Lettow suggests that here, too, in spite of attempts to impose confessional discipline through visitations and catechetical examinations in the schools, not all the “scholars” were of the Reformed confession. At its most optimistic, the general synod of the Reformed Church of Lithuania viewed its schools at Wilno and Słuck as gymnasiums that would prepare the select for trips to Calvinist universities in western Europe as a gateway for careers back home as ministers and theologians. During this period a few names of some wider renown were connected with the institution. In addition to the teachers mentioned by Vorbek-Lettow, we may note that in 1640 the rector of the school was Jerzy Hartlib, brother of Samuel (ca. 1600– 1662). Jerzy Hartlib had met John Amos Comenius (Jan Amos Komenský, 1592–1670), the leader of the Unity of the Moravian Brethren, at Heidelberg in the 1610s, and Samuel Hartlib, after his emigration to England, would be instrumental in introducing that figure to Britain and in attempts to bring him there. A friend of Milton, Samuel Hartlib was close to the Oxford group out of which the Royal Society was to grow.85 But all roads in Wilno led students who wished to advance beyond what even the Calvinists had to offer to the Jesuit Academy. Founded as a Jesuit collegium in 1570, it was granted a privilege by King Stefan Batory in 1579 establishing it, next to Cracow, as the Commonwealth’s second academy or university. From the beginning, its mission was to educate (and

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thereby ultimately to convert) the non-Catholics of the area, not only the Orthodox and the Protestants but also the Tatars and the Jews. The first generation of Jesuits in Poland came from abroad—Czechs, Englishmen, Scots, Spaniards, Italians. But from the second generation forward, a constantly shifting cohort of Poles and Polonized people from all over the Commonwealth rubbed shoulders with the foreigners sent on assignment. Vorbek-Lettow’s experience may have been typical. Although the local Jesuits also sought the conversion of non-Catholic students, they tended to be more pragmatic about the multiconfessionalism of Wilno and the eastern parts of the Commonwealth than were those who came from the Crown lands, to say nothing of the Spaniards, who were regarded with some suspicion locally as agents of intolerance.86

Town and Gown, or, “Students, Paupers, and Other Loose People” A brief digression now about the relationship of the students to the other residents of Wilno. First the numbers. Early modern demographics, particularly for this part of the world and especially for Wilno, can be only a highly approximate science. Estimates for the population of the city as a whole on the eve of the death, exile, and deportations that followed the Muscovite invasion of 8 August 1655 vary wildly, from fourteen to forty thousand. As I have argued, a number more like twenty thousand seems reasonable for the city and its suburbs. But how many of these were students? This is an even more difficult question. A census of the Jesuit Academy for 1618 suggests the presence of 1,100 students in the “grammar (or humanistic) school” (the seven classes from basic grammar to rhetoric) and 110 students in the last two years of philosophy and theology.87 The number probably grew over the course of the century. To this we should add the much smaller but still not insignificant numbers of students in the other schools—not insignificant because there were so many of them. In addition to the Lutherans and the Calvinists, there were the Catholic schools of the bishop and the Dominicans (they had not only a library—with books chained to the benches—and a librarian but also a school that taught philosophy) and probably some sort of grammar school in each parish church; the Orthodox had one school, the Uniates at least one, perhaps also more for the other parishes. This means that some large percentage of the town’s inhabitants were professional students, mostly teenagers but some younger, perhaps the majority of them on their own. If the number of students of all categories reached 2,000 by 1655, which seems likely, this would make 10 percent of my estimate of a population of twenty thousand. But perhaps more important is the phrase “on their own.” Not all were “townies” like Vorbek-Lettow; probably many were not. Students came from far away in Lithuania to study at the Jesuit Academy; Little Theodore had come from the countryside to try out the various offerings of the city’s grammar schools. And even Vorbek-Lettow bunked in the Lutheran dormitory for some reason (it couldn’t have been more than a couple of houses away from

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his home on German Street) while he attended the Jesuit Academy. To the burghers of Wilno, the students were a foreign body, perhaps even more intrusive than the Jews, who were, after all, there on a permanent basis. More important in this estate-based society, the students of the Jesuit Academy, who were placed under the jurisdiction of the bishop and many of whom were noblemen’s sons, were outside the reach of the burghers’ Magdeburg law, and they behaved with youthful impunity, often letting the burghers know they thought themselves of better blood. A section of the so-called Fond of the Commission of the Educational Foundation (the archive inherited from the Jesuits by Hugo Kołła˛taj’s Komisja Edukacji Narodowej [Commission of National Education]), which resides in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA) in Moscow, contains a large collection entitled “Papers of litigation between the Wilno Academicians and the dissidents, Orthodox, and burghers of Wilno.”88 More scattered echoes of town-gown tensions are to be found throughout the acta of all the local jurisdictions. I cite here one complaint as evocative of the issues at play in town-gown conflicts. On 26 January 1684, Father Jerzy Inkiewicz and two “academicians” (i.e., students of the academy), ∧ Jan Zarnowski and Franciszek Budkiewicz, came before the court of the bench of the Wilno magistracy to register a complaint against a burgher, goldsmith Józef Barczyn´ski. The two students and their clerical representative protested “in their own name et totius almae Aca∧ demiae [and that of the entire alma (mater) academy]” that the previous day, as Mr. Zarnowski was returning along Glass Street on foot to his lodgings (ku gospodzie swej) around ten o’clock, minding his own business, Mrs. Barczyn´ska, not paying any attention to pedestrians, rode ∧ by on her sleigh, “mightily whipping the horse.” As she passed Z arnowski, who was not expecting anything of the sort [nic sie˛nie spodziewaja˛cego], she knocked him in the chest with the shaft so forcefully that, having fallen to the ground, he had to lie there in the street for a moment unconscious. And then, having gathered his strength, he stood ´ska’s husband], wishing to expostulate with up and went to the accused [i.e., Barszczyn 89 him about rendering justice.

When, after one failed attempt, now accompanied by a fellow student, he finally found Mr. Barczyn´ski at home, he began to present to him his complaint about the “affront and dishonor, not to mention the blow.” Barczyn´ski, not waiting to hear the conclusion of the “querimony,” had recourse to “acrimonious words, harmful of good reputation [do słów uszczypliwych i dobrej sławy szkodza˛cych], calling both Their Graces, the Lord Academicians rascals, intruders, sons of a dishonorable mother and using other names, reviling and disrespecting [lz∧a˛c i despektuja˛c] them.” When the students reported the events to the academy’s prefect, Father Jerzy Inkiewicz, S.J., the priest decided to take up the issue of the bona fama of the students and, by extension, of the entire academy, with the irascible goldsmith. During the interview, Barczyn´ski “began

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to revile, shame [lz∧yc´, sromocic´], and to heap calumnies and incivilities (which, ob reverentiam [on account of respect] for honorable ears, shame does not permit one to express) not only upon His Grace, Father Inkiewicz, but also upon the plaintiffs.” The plaintiffs soon found themselves dodging a flying inkwell and enduring other physical and verbal abuse from the accused: “I will order one of you to be beaten here with a club, or to be hanged, especially since you didn’t get it in the mug from that inkwell. And what will you do to me, for whom it is nothing new to sit and to converse with senators and lords?—I’ve made myself known to those better than you.” And as they were departing, Barczyn´ski “reviled, shamed, and disrespected [lz∧ył, sromocił, despektował] as he saw fit, whatever the saliva brought to his tongue [co mu ´slina do ge˛by przyniosła].” The phrases glossed in Polish are part of the standard rhetorical language of the protestation and show up in complaint after complaint by parties of all confessions and religions and in all forensic forums. What interests me here are the competing senses of honor, that of the burgher goldsmith and that of the academicians. The goldsmith claimed dealings with “senators and lords,” better than the likes of these “invaders,” “sons of a dishonorable mother.” The academicians were defending their own honor but also by extension the nobility of the entire academy. There were many burghers who wished to register similar protestations against the students themselves but were thwarted by the legal system: on the whole, the students refused to see themselves as subject to the magistracy, and the bishop and the nobles’ castle court often protected them. In most instances, it was the burghers who complained of mistreatment by the students. Here the students were attempting to co-opt the role of victim. The general problem was reflected in a decree directed to the city and the academy by King Jan III Sobieski in response to complaints by the Jews of Wilno about their treatment, among other things, at the hands of the students. In a decree of 1687, which allowed the Jews to be mustered on an annual basis not in the open field with the rest of the city’s corporations outside the walls (where anti-Jewish tumults often resulted) but in a nobleman’s house within the walls, Sobieski identified students and pseudostudents of the Jesuit Academy at St. John as one of the circles from which violence against Jews frequently emanated, and he ordered the institution of something like a student registration program. Owners of houses in Wilno were not to rent a room to a student until the prospective renter presented a sort of identification card, approved and registered by the magistracy and the academy (which were to keep a record book of all bona fide students): “Since it has come to Our attention that under the name of the student academy are to be found various licentious people, and having found such a one who is not properly a student, but rather is engaged in nighttime, or daytime, prowling about [grasancyja], such a one is to be brought to the attention of the magistracy, and We order that he be incarcerated or made to work on the walls, ramparts, and needs of the city.”90 The “intruders” were concentrated in places like the bursae of the various schools. The Jesuit Academy had two of them side by side on Skop Street (45.06 and 45.07), and the

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students were frequently blamed for unrest in the neighborhood. But the impression is that one could find students throughout the town. Fiedorek moved about in looking for a place to sleep, from the bursae of the schools of various confessions to a bunk with the other pau∧ peribusses on the floor in Rudniki Gate. Z arnowski rented a corner somewhere in the Glass Street neighborhood. In May 1639, shortly before the anti-Calvinist tumult that resulted in the removal of the church beyond the walls, the Reformed of Wilno called for an inquisition into alleged scholastic nocturnal rock throwing directed at the roofs of the Calvinist complex. The biconfessional commission that conducted a door-to-door investigation in the Calvinist Church Street neighborhood arrived at the last two houses and asked whether they, too, “gave lodging to any students.” They recorded the response: “The women [białe głowy] said (for we did not find any men in those two houses) that we do give lodging to little pupils [małych z∧aczków], but we never saw that they threw rocks at the roof of the Calvinist church.”91 Town-gown relations were certainly not only ones of conflict. One need only think of the theater productions mounted by the academy, which certainly drew appreciative local audiences. That was one of the main points of Jesuit instruction after all—religious instruction through spectacle. But we should certainly think of Wilno as a student town, with all the benefits and detriments that come from locating a large concentration of student intruders and their sometimes itinerant instructors in a smallish urban setting. And although the student attacks upon the Calvinists and their Wilno real estate were useful to local hierarchs in their attempts to diminish the presence of non-Catholics in the city, we should not think of the student throngs as Catholic gangs preying upon non-Catholics. The presence in them of Orthodox students or would-be students such as Fiedorek Andrzejewicz, who was somewhere in the middle or the near sidelines of the anti-Calvinist riots in 1640, suggests that student unrule was not only about confession. The conflict between Barczyn´ski and the academy was not about confession. In spite of his profession and neighborhood of residence (both of which were heavily Lutheran), all indications are that Barczyn´ski was Roman Catholic. The conflict was rather a social one, between a prominent burgher with pretensions to ties with the nobility and student intruders who were beyond the discipline of the magistracy.

Other Vilnans’ Pedagogical Peregrinations For most Vilnans who received any formal schooling at all, the basic grammatical and rhetorical skills taught at the Lutheran and Calvinist schools would have sufficed. For some others, the training in philosophy and theology offered to an extent at the Calvinist lyceum but above all at the Jesuit Academy would have been the culmination of an education that set them far apart from the majority of their fellow Vilnans. But for a very few others, like Vorbek-Lettow, professional preparation could not be complete without a peregrination to the schools, and this always implied western Europe, both north and south.

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The case of Vorbek-Lettow himself indicates that such study tours were not limited to the magnates or even the middle reaches of the szlachta and that, even by the beginning of the seventeenth century, traveling students were not necessarily limiting themselves to the academies of their own confession. Whatever the color of the future doctor’s blood, he left Wilno the son of a successful barber-surgeon of a burgher lifestyle, and he made ends meet during his trip by carrying the book bags and taking notes for magnate sons who had better things to do (all the while grumbling about them); but he returned to his hometown with a doctorate in medicine from a first-rate Italian Catholic university, equipped to make full use of the patronage system in his climb up the ladder of the estates, and without ever feeling the need to abandon his Lutheran faith. Vilnans of lower standing in the burgher elite also sent their sons to the west to experience life abroad, to learn languages, and to study. In a funeral sermon by Lutheran minister Je˛drzej Schönflissius, we discover the outlines of longtime burgomaster Jakub Gibel’s education. Gibel’s parents had “raised him in the fear of God and in the doctrine and obedience of the Lord.” His father died early, and his mother married Lutheran merchant Piotr Fonderflot. His stepfather then took over the task of seeing to Jakub’s further training, which presumably began, as it had for Vorbek-Lettow, in the local Lutheran school: “He had care of him and provided for him at his house. When he had grown up a bit [podrósł], he sent him to foreign lands, where he spent his young years in honorable occupations appropriate to his merchant’s estate, conducting himself honorably and well among foreign people.”92 We do not know exactly what the occupations were or where Gibel engaged in them. They would probably not have included things martial, which noblemen’s sons studied in addition to law and languages. They may well have included some courses of study at academies and universities and focused on the acquisition of languages and some rudiments of law and history. We possess a bit more information about the peregrinations of Gibel’s son-in-law, Calvinist merchant Korneliusz Winhold II (Castle Street 1.16). The sources include the 1638 funeral sermon written for him by Calvinist minister Balcer Łabe˛dzki, two entries in matriculation books of Western academies and universities, and two autograph letters the young student sent back home during his trip. Winhold was born 25 December 1600 of “pious Christian parents,” who “trained him right from the years of youth in the genuine knowledge of God and in the genuine [i.e., Reformed] Christian faith.” This sounds much like what Schönflissius had to say about the first training of Winhold’s future father-in-law. We hear a somewhat different tone, however, when it comes to the further course of this merchant’s education: “He spent his entire life in the liberal arts [nauki wyzwolone], not only here in the city of Wilno, but he also visited foreign academies.”93 No mention here of limiting himself to pursuits “appropriate to the merchant estate,” as in the case of his Lutheran burgomaster father-in-law. Presumably he began his studies at the local Calvinist grammar school. The first foreign matriculation record I have found for him was for Marburg in 1615, when he would have been fourteen years old. He would seem to have been accompanied by Paweł Kleofas (the future “z Brylewa Podchocimski”), the royal doctor who would be ennobled in

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1633, serve as the master of the Wilno horodnictwo, and marry a niece of Winhold’s future wife (daughter of Tomasz Gibel II, Castle Street 2.19). Or perhaps the two future in-laws simply met there: we know little of Kleofas’s youth. However they met, they matriculated at Marburg together, the young Winhold yet as a pupil of the pedagogium (presumably a sort of preparatory high school), Kleofas at the university. The next year we find them both matriculated as students of the University of Basel.94 We do not know when Winhold began his study trip abroad—probably it was not too much earlier than his appearance in Marburg. Nor do we know what his next stop was after Basel. We do know, however, that—by now he would have been nineteen years old—he had reached Amsterdam by 2 June 1620, the date on an autograph letter in Polish that he sent to his “dear cousin,” a Lutheran merchant of Wilno by the name of Dawid Rendorf. The date of a second autograph letter to the same recipient, this one written in German, shows that he had gone on to Paris by 18 March 1621. Here we see that it was not only liberal arts that occupied Winhold’s attention during his peregrination. The letter from Amsterdam tells of a dinner party a few days earlier at the house of Rendorf ’s mother (we are not told where she lived), where the health was drunk “frequently and often” of friends back in Wilno; those friends, to many of whom he sends his greetings, were from the Lutheran-Calvinist merchant circles of Castle Street. Those with whom he had contact in Amsterdam were also engaged in decidedly mercantile pursuits. Jochim Wikefort was “sweating diligently in the shop.” Ludwik Marin was “preparing to set off for Archangelsk” (the Arctic seaport of the state of Muscovy)—in other words he must have had something to do with the Dutch Muscovy Company.95 Probably Winhold himself was by now taking care of business connected with the interests of the Radziwiłł estates his father was overseeing. Some of the Dutch cattle that were imported through Riga to Lithuania in the period ended up on the Radziwiłł estates at Bielica, for which the Winholds held the arenda.96 Winhold seems not to have traveled alone. One assumes his parents sent someone along with him at the beginning of his study trip, if not the preceptor that accompanied noble sons, then at least some sort of adult servant. From Amsterdam he intended to travel through Brabant to France with Samuel Wikefort, whom he expected any day from Hamburg. In the letter from Paris (18 March 1621) he tells his cousin that he is “ready for the road [gantz reißfertig], since [he] intends to set off for Orleans in several days and to head out into other cities in France.” Winhold had “a horse of [his] own, also a lackey.”97 Vaclovas Biržiška has combed the readily and not-so-readily available matriculation records of west European gymnasiums, academies, and universities in drawing up a catalog of “Lithuanian students at foreign universities in the XIV–XVIII centuries.” His criterion was self-identification. Where a student neglected to mention Lithuania, a city of the Grand Duchy, or, in the case of the nobles, a father’s title or office, he overlooked a few “Lithuanians” (as in the case of Paweł Kleofas, who is missing from his catalog). The sources are more easily available for northern Europe than for Italy and France. And the case of VorbekLettow—who was, after all, in Königsberg, Elbing, Danzig, Paris, and Louvain but never

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signed the matriculation record in any of those places—indicates that these signatures tell only a small part of the story. Still, Biržiška’s meticulous work offers a good starting point for gaining a picture of seventeenth-century Vilnans abroad in pursuit of an education. The first observation is that absolutely no one from Lithuania was going to Cracow any more in the seventeenth century, as they had done during the university’s golden age of the late fifteenth and very early sixteenth centuries. The university had long ago lost its attraction and luster, and Poles, too, were looking elsewhere for an education, or at least for a supplement to what the old capital had to offer. In Biržiška’s catalog, 118 entries for the seventeenth century can be specifically linked to Wilno. Of them, by far the most were for the Albertina in Königsberg—58 or 49 percent. In a distant second place were the gymnasium at Elbing (Elbla˛g) and the University of Padua with thirteen each (11%). Here is the list: Königsberg, fifty-eight; Elbing, thirteen; Padua, thirteen; Leiden, six; Ingolstadt, four; Braunsberg, four; Dillingen, three; Basel, three; Altdorf, three; Rostock, two; Wittenberg, two; Heidelberg, two; Würzburg, one; Giessen, one; Frankfurt, one; Marburg, one; Freiburg, one. These numbers tell a few stories. First, in this documentation, it was mostly Protestant burgher Wilno that went abroad to the schools and mostly not too far abroad—Elbing for the gymnasium, Königsberg for the university. By the end of the seventeenth century, beginning in 1673, at least in Biržiška’s data, Vilnans went only to Königsberg; in fact, before that, from 1655 to 1673, fifteen had matriculated in the Prussian capital and only three elsewhere (Braunsberg, Rostock, Altdorf ). Thus for the entire second half of the century—beginning with the Muscovite occupation of Wilno in 1655—Königsberg was practically the only port of call for burgher student peregrinators who now traveled on a much diminished scale. Moreover, for the most part, Protestants now attended Protestant institutions, and Catholics, now traveling in even more reduced numbers, visited academies found in Roman Catholic cities. We find a few familiar names and are able to flesh out a few more family histories. “Thomas Gibelius Vilnensis” and “Jacobus Gibelius Vilnensis,” sons of burgomaster Jakub Gibel, were enrolled in “classis 1” (i.e., rhetoric, the highest class of Latin grammar school) at the gymnasium in Elbing on 8 August 1616. Vorbek-Lettow had spent some time there, living with his stepgrandmother (although apparently without matriculating); perhaps Elbing had been on Jakub Gibel Sr.’s itinerary. Elbing and Königsberg seem to have been first stops outside Wilno for the local Protestant elite. Jakub II’s path did not end here. We find him signing his name in precisely the same fashion on 30 August 1619 at the Protestant University of Altdorf (which served Nürnberg). It was probably a younger brother, “Johannes Gibell Wilna Lithuanus,” who matriculated in Königsberg on 24 May 1631 and whom we find (now as “Johannes Gibel Lituanus Vilnensis”) as a student of law at the University of Leiden on 4 November 1633.98 In his funeral encomium for the elder Jakub Gibel, Schönflissius noted with approval that he had sent his sons abroad for their own peregrinations to the schools. The sons of Wilno magistrates “enjoyed noble rights” (although not without

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challenges from those born to the szlachta), so there would have been no need for a merchant’s son’s modesty here in the choice of studies and style of life.99 Two sons of Maciej Vorbek-Lettow matriculated at the gymnasium in Elbing on 12 November 1637; unlike their father in Padua, they now claimed the noble status he had managed to win (he would have said “regain”). They were “Christophorus Littaw, Fratres Nobiles, Victorinus Littaw, Lithuani (classis II), Constantinus Littaw.” Actually, the record is a bit garbled. These were the two (not three) eldest Vorbek-Lettow boys, Krzystof Wiktorzyn and Konstanty. Thanks to their father’s memoirs, this is one of those rare instances where we can assign ages to students in particular classes: Krzysztof Wiktorzyn was sixteen and a half at the time of his matriculation in the penultimate class of the gymnasium; his younger brother (class unspecified, but it may well have been the same) had just turned fifteen. Still younger brother “Johannes Vorbeck Letoff, Nobilis Lithuanus” matriculated at Leiden as a student of law on 25 October 1649. He was a little over twenty-two years of age at the time and had certainly studied in other gymnasiums and universities before beginning his studies of the law.100 In fact, the closely knit Lutheran-Calvinist society of upper Castle Street flocked together to the schools. In addition to the Vorbek-Lettows and the Gibels at Elbing, Königsberg, and Leiden, we find more family names from their circles, especially in the Prussian capital, among them, “Christophorus Melczer Eperyeszy, Lituanus” (7 November 1610); “Joannes Agrippa, nobilis Vilnensis, Lituanus” (1 December 1612); “Paulus Mollerus Vilnensis Lithuanus” (30 August 1623 and 7 April 1625); “Wilhelmus Pohl, Vilnensis Lituanus” (10 April 1637); “Wilhelmus Engelbrecht Wilnensis Lituanus” (29 February 1640); “Arnoldus Zaleski Vilnensis Lituanus famulus” (8 July 1642); and “Georgius Strunck Vilna Lituanus” (3 December 1646).101 All these people were related in some fashion—usually through marriage, sometimes through ties of friendship—with the Gibels and the Vorbek-Lettows. Most notably, on 15 February 1656, three from these circles, plus their Lutheran pastor, signed the matriculation record of the University of Königsberg. They were all present together in the Prussian capital because Vilnans of all confessions had fled there in the wake of the Muscovite occupation of Wilno. These were all grown men, most of them with their study years well behind them, with the royal doctor himself, who had turned sixty-three three days earlier, at the head of the list: “D. Mathias Vorbeck dictus Lettau Ecclesiae Wilnensis senior, DD Paulus Mollerus Vilnensis Med., Arnoldus Zalesky Eccl. Vilnensis provisor, Otto Mathesius Pastor Wilnensis.”102 Perhaps they intended to wait out the occupation by passing the time in study; more likely, they were eligible for certain rights of citizenship as former and current students, and this was a help during their exile. Not all the Vilnans we find in the matriculation records of Elbing and Königsberg had German names or were indeed Protestants. Two cases may bolster my argument that non-German and non-Protestant Vilnans sought to gain the ability to read and write German, probably for business purposes. On 1 July 1622 “Niccolaus Sienczytowicz Vilnensis Lituanus (Classis III)” matriculated at the gymnasium in Elbing.103 This was a mistake in transcription.

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Mikołaj Sien´czyło(wicz) was an Orthodox merchant, a member of the elite on the Greek side of the bench in the early seventeenth century. His brothers would seek asylum in Königsberg together with the Protestants during the Muscovite occupation of Wilno. His younger brother Gabriel would buy a house in the middle-level Lutheran neighborhood of Glass Street (20.05) and, although he would be buried with the Orthodox on the other side of town, he would develop the same German and Jewish business ties as his German and Jewish neighbors. ´czyło family tradition.104 Perhaps speaking German was a Sien In similar fashion, we find a member of the Roman Catholic side of the ruling elite signing the record in Elbing on 26 May 1625 as “Stanisław Gawłowicki Vilnensis (classis III).”105 He was the son of Cyprian Gawłowicki, notary of the Wilno weighing house. Stanisław would rise to the office of burgomaster. Among his siblings we find a councillor (Kasper), a royal secretary (Dominik), a Catholic nun, two Catholic priests (Szymon and Marcin), and the wife of another Catholic burgomaster (Katarzyna, wife of Mikołaj Kliczewski).106 We are in thoroughly Catholic circles here. The conclusion must be that Wilno’s Orthodox and Catholic merchants sent their sons abroad to acquire German. There were, of course, no Orthodox institutions of higher learning in western Europe, so when Ruthenian families sent their boys abroad on peregrinations they had to decide whether to send them to Protestant or Catholic institutions (or both). Sien´czyło attended the Lutheran gymnasium in Elbing. Melecjusz Smotrycki’s peregrinations were typical of one Orthodox pattern. He began at the trilingual academy at Ostroh, perhaps receiving some of his first training from his father, Herasym, who had organized that school. Then he spent some time in Wilno at the Jesuit Academy. Finally, the future Orthodox archbishop of Połock and archimandrite of the Wilno Holy Spirit monastery accompanied a young Orthodox nobleman, Bohdan Sołomerecki, serving as his preceptor, as he visited mostly Protestant academies and universities of German-speaking lands. The lists of stops for this trip vary in the sources, but they certainly included Leipzig and Wittenberg, perhaps also Wrocław and Altdorf. A matriculation record for Sołomerecki places him in Leipzig in 1606.107 Other Orthodox parents sent their sons to Catholic institutions. An entry for 20 November 1616 at the Catholic University of Ingolstadt records the matriculation of “Zachariasz Szycikowicz Lithuanus, Stephanus Szycikowicz Polonus Lituanus.”108 Their presence in the record together suggests that they were brothers. Judging by the names and probable ages, these would seem to be the sons of Wilno burgomaster Iwan Hawryłowicz Szycik-Zaleski, the Orthodox patriarch of one of Wilno’s only true dynasties in the ruling elite. One of his sons, to his great dismay, would become a Bernardine monk. Zachariasz and Stefan would go on to pursue long careers in the Wilno magistracy, converting, of necessity, to the Uniate Church after 1666 in order to hold office, as was required by the royal edict of that year. Neither they nor their children seem to have abandoned the Eastern rite, however (in spite of a stay at arch-Catholic Ingolstadt).109 Catholic institutions are much less well represented here, as are Catholic Vilnans. This may be due in part to the available sources. But I think it also reflects the facts: the expectations and

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aspirations of a small but socially mobile Protestant burgher elite that valued and used education as a tool for social advancement. The one Catholic Vilnan peregrination whose outlines we are able to sketch was that of a nobleman connected with the city: “Enoch Colenda nobilis polonus Vilnensis,” as he signed the matriculation record at the Catholic university in Swabian Dillingen on 3 April 1619. The Kolendas were an old Orthodox noble family of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. By now they were all Uniate or Roman Catholic. Enoch’s journey continued: “Enoch Kolenda Lituanus” at Ingolstadt (31 May 1619), “Enoch Kolenda Nobilis Lituanus” at Würzburg (28 January 1620), and finally “Enoch Kolenda Lituanus” at Padua (21 April 1621). On that day he had joined two Wilno prelates: “Eustachius Wołowicz, episcopus Viln.” and “Lucas Gornicki canonicus Vilnensis.” Even the bishop (he held that office from 1616 to 1630) could sign in as a “student” on his way through town.110 Kolenda began his political career as the castle notary of Troki (1626–1632) and would rise through ranks that included a stint as vice-palatine of Wilno (1640–1642) to a culmination in the office of the palatine of Dorpat in 1651.111 Padua, with thirteen records of matriculations by Vilnans of various sorts, shared second place, after Königsberg, with the Lutheran gymnasium at Elbing. Most Vilnans who came to the Venetian university were Roman Catholic, as on that day in April 1621 when Kolenda and his bishop matriculated together. But royal doctor Vorbek-Lettow seems to have started a tradition among Protestant students of medicine from the Lithuanian capital. He would be followed by “Davidius Szolc chirurgus Vilnensis” in 1616 (we find him on the rolls of Lutheran offering-givers for 1640, but I know nothing further about him);112 and by “Paulus Mollerus Wilna Lithuanus Ph. et Med. Dr.” in 1638.113 Möller (Meller, in Polish) belonged to the Lutheran circles of Castle Street and was by far the most generous supporter of church finances in the second half of the seventeenth century.

The Perils of Education As we have seen, clergy urged their flocks not to send their children to schools outside their own confession and, to their minds, for obvious reasons. All the schools were tied, to greater and lesser degrees, to one Church, and there was too much danger, they argued, that education—especially if it included philosophy and, heaven help us, also theology—would lead to conversion. Parents and students—in spite of any concerns they may have shared with their clergy concerning the dangers of venturing abroad for an education—had equally obvious reasons for taking on that risk: training at the higher levels necessary to prepare both noble and burgher for public life (and the latter with tools for social advancement) was not always readily available in the schools of one’s own confession or in one’s hometown; thus certain compromises and risks were sometimes accepted. Many were like Vorbek-Lettow: they returned from their studies in an opposing camp both equipped with the tools they had sought and confirmed in their original faiths. But

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other cases reveal that the clergy’s concerns were not without basis. From the start, one of the missions of the Jesuit Academy of Wilno was to convert the “heretics and the schismatics.” One historiographic tradition maintains that the seeds for the future conversion to the Uniate Church of Melecjusz Smotrycki, Orthodox archbishop of Polack and archimandrite of the Wilno Holy Spirit Monastery—spectacular and scandalous in its day—were planted by his studies at the local Jesuit Academy (before his own peregrination to Protestant German academies and universities).114 Such concerns (or hopes) lay behind a complaint brought on 4 July 1685 against the estate of that most generous of the patrons of the local Lutheran church, Dr. Paweł Meller. It was he (“Paulus Mollerus”) who had followed in Vorbek-Lettow’s footsteps to complete his doctorate in philosophy and medicine at the University of Padua; he would become the second husband of Elz∧bieta Giblówna, widow of Jan Sztrunk II. The Gibel family house was at Castle Street 2.13, that of the Sztrunks at 2.10; Meller himself at one point owned the house near the Lutheran church at German Street 26.13.115 The story—at least in the version presented by the Roman Catholic side—went this way. Meller had had several sisters, all of whom—with one exception—“he married off, giving them a good dowry, and receiving from them a renunciation of further claims on his estate.” The one exception, a Pani Westerman, had a son named Samuel. Since Meller was unmarried at the time and childless, he “promised to make her first son [this Samuel] . . . his own son, . . . promising him his entire inheritance and estate.”116 Meller sent Samuel to the best local schools he could find—first to the Jesuits in Kroz∧e (Lithuanian Kražiai, a small town in Samogitia, about 200 km/124 miles northwest of Wilno), then to the Jesuit Academy in Wilno, where, “he attended two years of rhetoric, but since (uti moris est [as the custom has it]) he was a dissident [here, Protestant], he was not admitted to lectures in philosophy.” (The ban must not have been uniform: Vorbek-Lettow, after all, attended lessons in philosophy at the academy.) At this point Meller brought his adopted son to the Wilno Dominican monastery at the Church of the Holy Spirit, where he was to pursue philosophical studies. When the prior said to the doctor, “And what if, having become a Catholic, he remains in the monastery” Meller allegedly responded, “Even if he were to become a Dominican, I permit it and do not forbid it, nor would I change my affection for him, for I love this order more than the others.” The father’s words must have found a responsive place in the adopted son’s heart, since— again, this according to the Catholic account—“within two years, listening to lectures in philosophy, [the youth] took on the holy habit of the order, together with the holy faith.” Meller then himself had an alleged change of heart, and for more than twenty years, solely “odio religionis [out of hatred of religion], . . . since it was not fitting for his son to be a Catholic,” he refused him all support, “promising to make up for it after his death with his testament.” On the basis of this reported promise, Westerman and the order were now challenging in the courts some uncited, although apparently existing, testament.117 Whatever the merits of the case and whatever the doctor’s true attitude toward Roman Catholicism, in the background of the narration we sense a certain local ecumenism in the acquisition and

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provision of education, as well as the fear on the one side and the hope on the other that schooling might indeed lead to conversion.

Vilna Docta These Wilno stories reveal a willingness to cross the boundaries of confession in seeking and providing an education at all levels and an ability to maintain difference both during and after the experience. We also sense the importance of estate and profession: merchants, whether Lutheran or Orthodox or Roman Catholic, would for the most part have come away with a similar training (once they got beyond learning the catechism); so would magistrates and nobles of all confessions. Orthodox and Lutheran goldsmiths would possess one set of tools, Orthodox and Lutheran tanners another, Orthodox and Lutheran burgomasters yet another. One impression specific to confession that arises from a reading of the court and other documents is that of Lutheran (and perhaps also Calvinist) literacy and learning and the willingness to travel some distances in order to acquire it. This will of necessity remain nothing more than an impression, but a reading, for instance, of the oaths of Vilnans of all confessions signed in the winter and spring of 1656 in their Königsberg exile, swearing loyalty to the elector of Brandenburg and neutrality to the king of Sweden, suggests higher rates of literacy for the Protestants.118 This impression is supported by the presence of some (probably small) numbers of literate women of those confessions, both Lutheran and Calvinist. In fact, with one exception, the only literate female Vilnans I have encountered were Protestant. Literacy was at the crux of a complaint brought by Katarzyna Szmitówna, the widow of Lutheran swordsmith Melchior Ilis (Glass Street 21.03), against her own daughter, Marianna Ilisówna, in 1679. The mother possessed various “court decisions, registers, promissory notes, bills of debt,” which, “since she was unable to read, she gave to [the daughter, at her request] to read, not suspecting that she would steal anything from these documents, having chosen the best ones.” The case over property theft dragged on for some time, and the issue of the mother’s illiteracy and the daughter’s literacy remained at the center of it.119 Autograph signatures by other Protestant women also attest to some level of literacy. Korneliusz Winhold II’s Calvinist mother, Jakumina Deschampsówna Winholdowa (Castle Street 1.16), signed her name to a letter to the family’s patron, palatine of Wilno Krzysztof Radziwiłł II, on 13 January 1627.120 Barbara Monesówna Sztrunkowa, her daughter Halszka Sztrunkówna Ruczowa, and neighbor on Castle Street Katarzyna Desausówna Szretterowa— all of them Calvinists—signed their own names when they gave offerings to the local Calvinist church (all had Lutheran husbands and gave to the church in their own names).121 They all employed Polish scripts. In another case, the extant version is a copy, but the 1656 testament of Marianna Cylichowa, the daughter of Lutheran spice merchant Marcin Buchner, indicates that she too was literate, having signed the document “in her own hand.”122

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The only literate non-Protestant among Wilno women I have encountered is Akwilina Stryludzianka Dorofiewiczowa. She was the daughter of Prokop Stryluda and wife of Paweł Dorofiewicz (Subocz Street 79.10), both Orthodox merchants of some significance. Her eldest son, Prokop Dorofiewicz, had a long career in the burgher ruling elite; he would have the distinction of serving as Wilno’s last Orthodox burgomaster before the royal decree of 1666 limiting the office to Catholics and Uniates. Her daughter, Anna, would marry VorbekLettow’s eldest son, Krzysztof Wiktorzyn. On 24 November 1651, Akwilina signed her name in Cyrillic under her Polish-language last will and testament.123 Here, too, the extant document is a copy, but the indications are that she had signed the original, since all but one of the other signatures were in Polish, and no one is identified as having signed for her (as was the practice in the case of illiterate “signatories”). How these women became literate remains unclear. Perhaps they were taught at home, either by family members or by specially hired preceptors. Or perhaps they were allowed—or encouraged?—to look on as their brothers made their first steps in home schooling. The sources are silent on the education of female Vilnans of the seventeenth century. The majority of Vilnans, however, were no doubt illiterate. Time and again we find them— especially women but by no means only women—acknowledging their illiteracy (or at least their inability to write) when it came time to have their wills notarized. Religious education depended heavily on listening and memorization; trades were learned by example and observation.124 But once they ventured outside the family (and even earlier in mixed families), Vilnans encountered instructors and fellow students of a confession, sometimes of a religion, other than their own. One imagines that Vilnans were surprised when they first encountered people from elsewhere, instructors at the Jesuit Academy and fellow students from the Polish Crown lands, or foreign professors and students in their peregrinations; it may have been a shock when those used to Lithuanian laxity were forced to come to terms with the greater confessional discipline that characterized contemporary societies to their west. I return to the image of the young Vorbek-Lettow during his year of philosophical studies with the Wilno Jesuits and its mixture of openness and confessionalizing tendencies. While studying there—at a level usually off limits to dissidents—he encountered both a local Jesuit, who no doubt would have loved to see him convert but had made explicit promises to the student’s Lutheran father that he would not actively seek this, and a Spanish Jesuit, who was much more insistent. Vorbek-Lettow lived in a Lutheran boarding house run by a kindly preacher who bolstered the faith of his charges with pious readings and admonitions, engaged in a good-natured dispute with a Jesuit colleague, was well versed in the contents of the local Dominican library, and was not averse to a friendly subterfuge to gain access to it. But above all, in the morning the preacher would send his charges “each to his own school” (emphasis added) but not before he had seen to it “that [they] learn diligently the lessons [they] received in school.”

~ c h a p t e r e ight ~

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ierarchs were no less concerned about mixed marriages than they were about the fact that some of the faithful reached across confessional boundaries to find godparents for their children or to provide for their education. In fact, these aspects of cross-confessional mixing were often interrelated. The Provincial Synod of the Wilno District of the Reformed Church meeting in June 1613 warned Calvinist men against Arian, Ruthenian, and “popish” wives who would cause them to “allow their children to be baptized and ruined [psowac´]” in those very faiths.1 Things got so dire here that the Wilno Provincial Calvinist Synod of 1638 had to devote an entire canon to “ministers who marry their daughters to people of another religion/rite [obcego naboz∧en´stwa].” The “brother ministers” were supposed to be a model for the Lord’s flock, and thus the punishment was to be correspondingly severe: any minister who continued the practice “was to be suspended ab officio et beneficiis pro isto ausu temerario [from the office and its benefices on account of that audacious venture].”2 Jakub Wujek, postillographer, translator of the Bible into Polish, and onetime rector of the Wilno Jesuit Academy, wrote in his Postil of 1579–1580 (just after his stay in Wilno), “A Christian must not be joined in marriage with people of another faith, for example, with Jews, pagans, heretics.”3 In a further passage, Wujek considered the question of whether it was proper “to have intercourse [obcowac´] with sinners?” He distinguished three sorts of sinners: “those who sin secretly, those who sin manifestly, but are not condemned, and the third who are anathema.” One may have to do with members of the first two groups, “but with the third, those who are anathema (as are all heretics), it is not fitting to have intercourse so long as they are such.” And—as we have seen—he went on to warn, “It is precisely in this matter that our Catholics sin who have intercourse with heretics in matters that concern the faith—when they attend their baptisms, weddings, and funerals.”4 Thus not only was a Catholic not to marry outside the Church, but he or she was not even to attend the weddings of people of another faith. And although the Orthodox were, to them, technically “schismatics” and not heretics, Roman Catholic propagandists frequently blurred that line and included them with the “non-Christians.” These were the strictures, but what were the practices of seventeenth-century Vilnans?

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An established tradition in the study of early modern family structures and marriage patterns notes a basic divide between eastern and western Europe. In the West, in this model, early modern couples married late, often in their late twenties, and lived in “simple,” nuclear families with a sense of lateral kinship. In the East, couples often married up to a decade earlier and lived in “complex” households including multiple generations, with a pronounced attachment to patrilineal structures. Although some pockets of variation have been found (especially in the south of western Europe), the basic distinction drawn by the so-called Hajnal line, which stretched from the area around St. Petersburg to Trieste, is still found in much of the literature.5 The line places most of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, including its capital, to the east of this cultural divide and nearby Livonia, with Riga, to the west. But what was the pattern in such a mixed place as Wilno? Did, for instance, Wilno’s Saxons marry later, and live in simple households, like their cousins still living in western Europe and with whom many maintained lively contacts? And did those without such close international contacts marry earlier, and form complex households? Did Wilno’s Ruthenians behave like their co-confessionals from lands further east where the Orthodox were in the majority, marrying as early as twelve or thirteen for the girls, sixteen to eighteen for the boys?6 Or do we find a type of Wilno syncretism on these and other issues? Current research on other cities might suggest being attentive to the latter. The patterns found east of the Hajnal line applied above all to rural settings. The cities—admittedly much weaker here than in the northwest of Europe or in northern Italy—had already begun to show Western admixtures in family structure patterns with the Ostkolonization that began in the late medieval period.7 And work in Poland and Lithuania since the 1990s has questioned the absoluteness of the Hajnal line and has suggested for east-central Europe in general a “transit zone,” or a “zone of cultural transition.”8 A further reason for hierarchs to reject mixed marriages in their polemical and doctrinal writings may have had to do with the differing attitudes toward courtship, marriage, and divorce that were supposed to shape the actions of their flocks. But again, perhaps a distinction remained between strictures and behavior? There was some initial lag, for example, in bringing Protestant practice in line with the Reformers’ programmatic statements, just as there were national and regional variations in Roman Catholic implementation of the decrees of the Council of Trent.9 Still, by the seventeenth century, we might expect that attitudes and practices differed somewhat across the confessions in accordance with the prescriptive and proscriptive standpoints of the various Churches. What were they? A brief survey will help to establish a context. The Protestant reformers, while envisioning an important role for the Church and the clergy in the family life of their parishioners, came to see marriage as a civil contract. As Luther famously put it, “Marriage is a worldly thing [Die Ehe ist ein weltlich Ding].” Clandestine marriages were no longer to be treated as valid. There was thus to be a corresponding growth in the role of parental consent in entering into that contract.10 In response to reform movements within and without the Roman Catholic Church, the Council of Trent reaffirmed the sacramental nature of marriage with the decree Tametsi (1563).

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Protestant and Catholic doctrine on what constituted a valid marriage now differed somewhat. The post-Tridentine Catholic Church also sought to put an end to the medieval practice of clandestine marriages—sacramental unions “which the spouses administered to themselves by the exchange of consent”—by insisting on the participation of a priest and the posting of banns. This was the program. Practice in certain societies differed, and the Church continued to recognize the validity of clandestine marriages, even without parental authorization. Protestants on the whole now insisted on parental participation and consent.11 The Orthodox Church treated marriage as a mysterion. (The Protestants used the philological argument that a mystery and a sacrament were two quite different things, and that the Catholics’ Vulgate—sacramentum, in their view, was a mistranslation of mysterion—had led them astray on this issue.)12 Orthodox doctrine foresaw a two-part process of marriage— betrothal and the wedding—which might take place on different days or one after the other on the same day. Whenever they occurred, both were to be public ceremonies, performed in church, and they presupposed parental consent.13 Uniates were bound by the teachings of the Council of Trent, although in practice they may have behaved more like their Orthodox neighbors (and relatives). The teachings of the Churches also varied sharply on questions of incest: within what degrees of consanguinity and affinity were couples forbidden to marry? The medieval Western Church at one time banned marriage within seven canonic grades of consanguinity or affinity (fourteen in modern reckonings). These completely unenforceable restrictions— seen by Reformers as largely a moneymaking mechanism through sale of dispensations— were altered by the Council of Trent. Now marriages were forbidden for Roman Catholics within four degrees of consanguinity and two degrees of affinity, although these continued to include “spiritual kin,” i.e., godparents. The Reformers moved at various speeds to lift some of the restrictions. Luther banned marriage only within two degrees of consanguinity and one degree of affinity. Some Swiss Reformed cantons retained bans within three degrees of consanguinity and two of affinity. Spiritual kin were no longer off-limits as marriage partners for Protestants.14 The Orthodox Church retained—at least in theory—far-reaching prohibitions on marriage “within the family,” as far as eight degrees of consanguinity and six or seven degrees of affinity among in-laws. It also included a wide range of spiritual kin among the prohibited—not just godparents but also the godparents’ own relatives by blood and affinity and godchildren of the same godparent—and placed bans on marriage to them within similar degrees of relationship.15 But did these teachings reflect the attitudes of the faithful toward courtship and marriage? To what extent were children governed by the matrimonial plans their parents had arranged for them? What degrees of consanguinity and affinity were acceptable? At what age did they marry? What caused conflicts between spouses? What sorts of strategies did unhappy couples employ in seeking to circumvent restrictions on separation and divorce? To what extent did the clergy practice what the Orthodox called “economy,” the relaxing of the strict letter of the law on a case-by-case basis for the salvation of the individual and the greater good of

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the community?16 Above all, to what extent did the coexistence of the confessions in Wilno, and indeed sometimes the intermarriage of their members, influence attitudes and practices relating to family life?17 The available sources are few, scattered, and fragmentary, and they will not allow comprehensive, quantifiable answers to the basic questions only sketched above. Scattered pieces of evidence do allow us, however, to note details about individual marriages on occasion— including things like ages at marriage, parental participation in the preparations, degrees of consanguinity and affinity between the spouses, and practice in and strategies for making marital alliances within and across confessional boundaries. In what follows, I look at what the sources can tell us about courtship and marriage in seventeenth-century Wilno. Given the nature of the sources—above all, the lack of marriage records over any large period for any of the communities and the absolute lack of church record books for the Ruthenians, both Orthodox and Uniate—the stories I tell are anecdotal, based on a variety of disparate types of documents: a memoir, letters, litigation, testaments, and fragmentary Roman Catholic and Calvinist marriage records. Still, it is possible to produce snapshots of attitudes and patterns surrounding marriage in a few very specific contexts and networks and to provide some hypothetical answers to some of the general questions raised above. (I will postpone questions of marital discontent, separation, and divorce to the following chapter.)

Courtship To what extent were parents in Wilno involved in arranging marriages for their children? The indirect evidence that results from a consideration of the practice of what may be called “topographic endogamy”—i.e., marrying within a limited neighborhood, often quite literally the girl or boy next door—suggests that some parental planning may have been at play; but even this practice does not rule out the role of the individuals’ own wills and desires in choosing a partner. After all, he or she married one neighbor rather than another. Let us take a look at the more direct evidence offered by a few individual cases. On 12 February 1641, royal doctor Maciej Vorbek-Lettow’s firstborn son Krzysztof Wiktorzyn married “Her Grace, Miss Anna, the only daughter of spouses Lord Paweł Dorofiewicz and Lady Akwilina Strzeludzianka Dorofiewiczowa.”18 King Władysław IV was ill at the time, in residence in Warsaw, and unwilling to release his doctor. Vorbek-Lettow marked the occasion by inviting a circle of friends, most of them of the nobility, including Roman Catholic prelates and secular dignitaries, two Jesuit priests, a chamberlain, a master of the hunt, a carver, a royal secretary who was then wójt of Wilno (Tomasz Bildziukiewicz, Market Square 3.01); but also two Warsaw burghers, Mr. Meidel and Mr. Pletenberg, perhaps Saxons like their host; in addition to “a few of the lord citizens of the city of Warsaw.” All of them were invited “for the sake of my delight, which was taking place in Wilno, made merry, danced, and banqueted [weselili sie˛, tan´czyli i zapustowali] with me here.” The verb he used for “to make merry”

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(weselic´ sie˛) is based on the same root as the word for “wedding feast” (wesele): Vorbek-Lettow was in a sense participating at long distance and vicariously in his son’s wedding. At that Warsaw wedding feast, the oration for Krzysztof Wiktorzyn was given by a nobleman, “His Grace, Lord Andrzej Eyrymowicz, castle notary of Wilkomierz” (a city to the northeast of Wilno in the same palatinate); and for the bride by a member of the burgher elite, “His Grace, ´ski, notary of the Wilno council.” Both the bride and the groom were, of Lord Stefan Bilin course, in absentia. Vorbek-Lettow was in the process of (re)establishing his family’s membership in the nobility and chose his circle of friends accordingly. He neither hid, nor did he particularly draw attention to, the fact that his circle included many burghers, that his son was marrying a merchant’s daughter, and that, although her brother would rise to the office of burgomaster, the Dorofiewiczes moved in decidedly burgher circles. The two families lived in quite different neighborhoods, the Vorbek-Lettows at German Street 26.03 and the Dorofiewiczes at Subocz Street 79.10. It seems likely that the alliance was facilitated by the connections of both families within the burgher elite across a range of confessions. (Vorbek-Lettow himself had served in the magistracy on two occasions—in 1635 and 1641.)19 But what Vorbek-Lettow seems to have been somewhat uncomfortable with, and what he mentioned only obliquely, was the fact that his son’s in-laws were Ruthenians and Orthodox at that: “The marriage ∧ [´slub] was performed (praeter meam opinionem [contrary to my will]) by Father Z oła˛dz´, elder of the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit in Wilno.” The marriage took place, according to Lettow, five days before his son’s twentieth birthday: “As the Germans say—“Früh aufstehen, jung freien soll niemandt gereuen [No one ought to regret rising early and marrying young].” What Vorbek-Lettow both concealed and emphasized with his switch to Latin in an aside—praeter meam opinionem—was his displeasure with the fact that his son had followed the accepted practice of the groom’s going to “fetch” his bride by marrying in her parish church, which in this case meant not only a different parish but a different confession. Anna Dorofiewiczówna would appear to have remained Orthodox. Her mother remained in that confession until her death. Her Orthodox brother Prokop would convert to the Uniate Church only after the royal decree of 1666. He would serve as godparent for one of her sons who died in 1643, ten hours after he was born. That baby was named Paweł, which was the name of his Orthodox maternal grandfather, although Vorbek-Lettow did not point out this fact.20 (That both infant sons were baptized and buried in the Lutheran church simply confirms the rule that sons were to be raised in the father’s confession.) The father’s displeasure was directed not necessarily at his son’s choice of spouse but at the venue the couple chose for the marriage. Still, the story may point to a certain independence on the part of the marrying children. It also suggests the influence here of the practices east of the Hajnal line (even if the father again felt the need to comment upon it and justify it): the groom, a Lutheran, had not yet turned twenty when he married. The timing of the wedding is of interest here. Vorbek-Lettow noted that the wedding day, 12 February 1641, was “the last day of Carnival.” This was a new calendar date: Ash

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Wednesday came on 13 February for the Roman Church that year. But what is more interesting here is the fact that this Lutheran-Orthodox wedding conformed to behavior expected of Roman Catholic societies: the frequencies of weddings were supposed to peak precisely in this period with a precipitous drop during Lent. And it put both a Lutheran and an (oldcalendar) Orthodox family on a Roman Catholic calendar. Neither had any need to rush the wedding service to get it done by 12 February: the Lutherans of Wilno were probably using the new calendar, but they were not obliged to shun marriage during Lent; and Orthodox Lent began that year much later—on 9 March. In his masterful investigation of the “invisible border” between Lutherans and Catholics in early modern Augsburg, Etienne François notes the rarity of—the taboo against—mixed marriages, which does not seem to be the case to the same extent in Wilno, even if quantification is impossible here. But he also notes a calendrical syncretism: Lutheran Augsburgers continued to shun marriage during Lent well into the eighteenth century, unlike their coreligionists in monoconfessional cities who were quicker to adopt “Protestant rhythms.”21 The timing of the wedding of Vorbek-Lettow and Dorofiewiczówna, of Lutheran and Orthodox, may suggest a similar syncretism in Wilno. It may also have owed something to a father’s wishes. He, after all, was making merry with Catholics in a very Catholic society, and his choice of words may have reflected that fact. They “made merry, danced and banqueted [weselili sie˛, tan´czyli i zapustowali],” but the archaic last verb— zapustowali—can also have the more specific meaning of “to celebrate zapusty” (Shrovetide), which is what they were indeed doing. It is also worth noting that the memoirist himself had been engaged at age twenty-three, only a few months after returning from his long peregrination to the schools and that he was married “a week before Shrovetide,”22 which may suggest that Wilno Protestants followed Catholic rhythms when it came time to marry. Another story from the close-knit Lutheran-Calvinist world of upper Castle Street might point rather in the direction of a certain amount of parental arranging of marriages. Although many in this neighborhood found their mates in the household behind the next gate, one couple ventured as far afield as across the street—in this case directly across the street. In 1622, Katarzyna Giblówna, daughter of Lutheran burgomaster Jakub Gibel (Castle Street 2.13) married Korneliusz Winhold II, son of Calvinist merchant Korneliusz Winhold I (Castle Street 1.16); she and her husband would inherit that property after the death of the elder Winholds.23 The arrangements for the marriage were in some danger of falling apart at one point. Korneliusz II, as we know, had begun his peregrination to the schools of western Europe, at the latest by 1615 when he was fourteen years of age. We have two letters he sent to his Lutheran cousin Dawid Rendorf in Wilno—one from Amsterdam dated 2 June 1620, and a second dated Paris, 18 March 1621. One exchange from the first letter, written in Polish, allows us to eavesdrop on the long-distance courtship of two young Vilnans: At the same time Your Grace makes a very charming and pleasant legation to me, saluting me from Her Grace, Miss Katarzyna Giblówna, although I do not know whether Your Grace does this of your own accord, or whether you deign to bestow upon me these sweet

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words at her desire and request. But however this may be, I thank Your Grace very much for this readiness to oblige, urgently bidding in return that you render a low bow from me to Her Grace, Miss Katarzyna, and recommend most urgently my most humble services to the mercy and friendship of Her Grace; and if the time and occasion should permit it, not to omit to bestow a kiss and a hug from me. For when Your Grace does this, Your Grace will do an act of great friendship to me in this matter, which I always remain ready to return and repay.24

But from the second letter, written in German nearly a year later, we learn that there were concerns that Korneliusz might have waited too long to return to Wilno and claim his bride. In response to his cousin’s report on the latest state of affairs he wrote, As far as Lord Gibel’s daughter is concerned, who, as I understand from your writing, is already half promised to Lord Simon Engelbrecht, and the notion that there will be no more maidens available for me should I remain absent any longer—I have no apprehension that one or another man will be able to do me harm in this matter or make any hindrance for me. Even if they [by “they,” he means “wives”] are not be found there, one certainly has other places where one can look for them [andere Örter mehr dar man sie suchen kan]. But since I am now on my journey, I do not concern myself with this; certainly when the time comes God will find ways and means for us.25

This competitor could conceivably have been Szymon Engelbrecht I, a recent widower at the time (if, indeed, he was still living), but it was much more likely his son Szymon II. The recently deceased wife of the elder Szymon, Krystyna Vorbekówna-Lettowówna (sister of Maciej Vorbek-Lettow), was in fact Korneliusz’s own godmother. Winhold had learned of her death from a letter sent him by Dawid Rendorf most likely in late spring 1620 (and to which he had responded from Amsterdam on 2 June). As we will soon discover, Szymon II would go on to marry his own girl next door—Katarzyna Sztrunkówna (the Engelbrechts lived at Castle Street 2.11, the Sztrunks at 2.10). They all lived across the street from the Winholds (Castle Street 1.16), and a couple of houses up from the Gibels (Castle Street 2.13). (And they were all Lutherans.) The first letter suggests an emotional investment on Korneliusz’s part and the hope for reciprocation. The second smells of sour grapes and betrays a young man’s attempt to save face with his cousin. After all, he had reached the ripe old age of twenty when his cousin warned him there would soon be no more maidens left for him in Wilno if he remained away too long, and he felt compelled to boast that there were plenty of other places to look for them. In any event, what I think we see here is some element of parental arranging, coupled with some amount of sentiment on the part of the bride and groom. We do not know whether Korneliusz’s absence from Wilno had lasted uninterrupted from 1615 to 1621, although the tone of the letter from Paris suggests that its author was still on some sort of peregrination

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to the schools. Whether he had been gone without interruption since age fourteen or whether he had returned to Castle Street at about sixteen or eighteen, after his documented studies (matriculations in 1615 and 1616) and before heading back on business to Amsterdam and Paris, the age of the groom and the presumably even younger age of the bride suggest some negotiations on the part of the neighbor-parents. After all, Jakub Gibel I had married in 1600, and thus Katarzyna could in any case not have been more than a month or two older than her future husband and was more likely somewhat younger.26 When the couple married in 1622, Korneliusz II had not yet turned twenty-two. In any event, some combination of parental negotiations and reciprocated affections helped overcome the obstacles of distance and separation to cement this Lutheran-Calvinist family alliance on upper Castle Street.

Topographic Endogamies One way in which neighborhoods were formed in seventeenth-century Wilno was precisely through marriages contracted between neighbors. There have been various names for this and in various rhetorical registers: laziness, marrying the girl/boy next door, and in more technical language, topographic endogamy.27 In most cases it was probably not convenience or lack of initiative but rather a calculation that those who were of similar or higher estate, subject to the same laws (recall Wilno’s patchwork quilt of jurisdictions), of comparable wealth, from families of the same or related profession, and often of the same confession or similar (e.g., Lutheran and Calvinist or Uniate and Orthodox) made better marriage partners and helped to secure the well-being, even advancement, of the immediate family and the cohort. The logic is circular, of course, but I think it reflects what was often happening here: proximity facilitated the contracting of marriages, and marriages helped create and bring people into networks defined in part by neighborhood. In this section I examine six distinct Wilno subcommunities: one Roman Catholic node of domicile and matrimony, three quite separate Lutheran (partially Lutheran/Calvinist) networks, and two among the Ruthenians (Orthodox/Uniate). I begin with some rather modest to poor Roman Catholics. I then discuss the Protestants, moving from the elites to the middle-level sorts to the more modest artisans, and finally I look at two neighborhoods of Ruthenian members of the ruling elite and their merchant cousins. The choice of the communities examined—as well as the themes of the stories I am able to locate in those communities—is dictated largely by the nature and thickness of the available sources.

The Kostromskis of Skop Street The houses at the very top of Castle Street (1.01–1.07, 1.09; 2.01–2.04, 2.06), together with those in and around the first two intersecting streets—Skop Street and Bernardine Street— were all subject to the Roman Catholic Chapter. The neighborhood was modest—largely wooden with more room for horses in its courtyard stables and sheds than chambers in the

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houses for residents. The two-legged residents were mostly Roman Catholic, although we do find at least one Lutheran exception. They were artisans in the middle and lower levels: tailors, weavers, organists, lutenists. The story of one Skop Street family from the center of the neighborhood will help give a sense of ties of place and confession. We enter the saga somewhere in medias res. On six days in the course of March 1623, two sets of neighbors came to the lower instance of the court of the Roman Catholic Chapter, the so-called Foundation of the Monwid Altar, to which most of the residents of Skop Street were additionally subject, in order to register complaints and countercomplaints against each other.28 On 12 March 1623, tailor Jakub Szczygielski alleged before the court that his wife, the former Anna Lewoszówna, had received a beating the previous day “at seven o’clock, just at dusk, on Skop Street.” The perpetrator was a certain “Mrs. Zofia, wife of Andrys the lutenist [Pani Zofija Andrysowa lutniszczyna],” and the proof, as so often in these cases, was the physical evidence registered by an officer of the court: “a wound on the chin, with a bruise, black and blue around it.” “Later that same day (eadem die),” the wounded Anna Szczygielska came to court herself in order to complain that the lutenist’s wife had “beaten and slapped” her daughter Maryna, wife of “Jan Kostrompski” (in other sources he will be Kostrza˛bski or Kostrowski but most frequently Kostromski, the central name in this story), during the latter’s absence and also on the evening of the day before. The next day, so the court record tells us, the case was postponed until Kostromski’s return on the grounds that this was a “causa conjuncta” (a joint case), although we remain in the dark about what role the absent husband and son-in-law might have played in the dispute. The lutenist and his wife brought their countercharges a day or so later.29 Here we discover that the Kostromskis were neighbors, renters of rooms in the abode of lutenist Andrys Helmer (Elmer). In 1636 he owned the bricked house at Skop Street 49.07 (“in it five chambers, a stable for six horses, a basement, a shed for six horses”), which was the scene of the crimes alleged in these complaints.30 According to the landlords, the story had actually begun earlier, on 8 March, when “Marusza Arcimówna, wife of Jan the tailor” (i.e., their neighbor Kostromska) had sent her servant-boy (chłopiec—even renters of chambers sometimes had a “boy!”), whose name was Wasyli, with the express purpose of using “dishonoring words” (słowa uszczypliwe) against the Helmers’ servants, “two girls by the name of Anna” (dwie dziewki imieniem Anny). More specifically, he called them “thieves” (złodziejki). Here we finally begin to get a sense of what had happened. Life in the close quarters shared by house owners and their neighbors (and the servants of both—servants were treated to a certain extent as family31) must have led to frequent charges of petty theft and the exchange of dishonoring words. The physical evidence of Szczygielska’s bruised chin was easily explained—at least by the Helmers: she was, they alleged, a “woman given to drink” (biała głowa opiła), as was her daughter (nor was tailor Szczygielski—likewise a człowiek opiły, “a man given to drink”—one to refuse a glass); thus the wounds must have been self-inflicted. After all, when on 11 March

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Szczygielska came to the Helmers’ quarters to complain in turn about the way her daughter and her servant had been treated (perhaps mother and daughter shared the servant?), she herself—so the allegation went—directed dishonoring words against the Helmers and on the way out grabbed a rock from the street and threw it at Mrs. Helmer, hitting her in the chest. At this point, according to the complainant, Szczygielska’s daughter, Maryna Kostromska having run out of her dwelling space [mieszkanie] to come to that wife of Jakub, her mother, allegedly in order to hold her back, when she led her, wife of Jakub Szczygielski, her mother, as she was a woman given to drink, away from the gate of their house since it was slippery, there was slick ice in front of the gate, the one grabbing at the other, they fell on the slick ice before the gate, perhaps they could also have injured themselves.

The violent words and deeds escalated over the days after the first complaint and countercomplaints were registered with the court, eventually involving larger feuding factions. On the one side were Szczygielski and wife, Kostromska and her servant, as well as her two brothers, Paweł and Tomasz Arcimowicz (although, oddly enough, never involving Kostromski himself—was he perhaps still away?). On the other side were the Helmers and the “two girls named Anna,” as well as a fellow lutenist named Jerzy Szulc. Some themes of the conflict emerge. There was a professional opposition—tailors versus lutenists. There was an ethnic opposition—locals versus foreigners: Jerzy Szulc (Georg Schultz?) was probably some sort of immigrant, and at one point Helmer himself allegedly said to Szczygielski, “If only the Lord God would give me the right to finish with you, know, Mr. Szczygielski, that I will kill you, and having killed you, I will leave here, because this is not my homeland [ojczyzna].” The end to the feud was a classic restitution of peace through the imposition of an oath upon the Szczygielskis (as the party “closer to the proof ”). As often happened, rather than submit to the oath, the parties accepted a legally imposed reconciliation—“for all times, under threat of statutory penalties.” But the conflict, which dragged on from its first act on 8 March to its conclusion on 24 March, was not about confession. Helmer and Szulc, despite their names, left no record of any sort of dealings with the local Lutherans or Calvinists. With the exception of the servant boy Wasyli, whose name suggests he was Ruthenian and whose only role was to deliver his mistresses’ dishonoring words, all parties to the dispute must have been Roman Catholic—although the Helmers’ next-door neighbor at Skop Street 49.06—“Amplowa” in the 1636 Lustration, the Lutheran widow of organ builder and/or organist Hans Ampel (Empel, Hempel)—sat quietly by as all this was going on. Rather, what we begin to see here is a feud of two family networks—both of them Roman Catholic—brought into close contact with each other through the renting of rooms in a house on Skop Street. Perhaps the Helmers and Szulc were members of the congregation of German Catholics at the Bernardines’ Church of St. Anne at the other end of the neighborhood.

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Szczygielski and wife lived in the neighborhood as well, perhaps in the same house with the Kostromskis. In 1612 Szczygielski had been named a guardian for the orphaned minor daughter (Małgorzata) of salt merchant Bartłomiej Wała together with Grygier Moz∧ejko, the maternal uncle (wuj) of the deceased, and weaver Łukasz Budziłowski. All but Szczygielski were identified as “citizens of the chapter”; Szczygielski was termed a “citizen of the Monwid Altar,” which was a subjurisdiction of the chapter and encompassed all of Skop Street.32 Weaver Budziłowski may have been a relative of the Budziewiczes (such hesitations and variations in the recording of names were common) who also lived in the Skop Street neighborhood and among whom we find another weaver named Wasyli/Bazyli. Whatever his relationship to weaver Łukasz Budziłowski, weaver Bazyli Budziewicz was also a Skop Street neighbor of tailor Jakub Szczygielski, and the two appeared together in the record on a few occasions. In fact, the names of Szczygielski and several from his circle were registered with some regularity in a curious ledger called Income and Expenditure for the Endowment of Poor Maidens. The extant book contains entries from 1620 to 1654, ending a little over a year before the Muscovite occupation of the city. It was a foundation of the Monwid Altar and a tool for Roman Catholic confessionalization. Recipients of the dowries were recommended by neighbors, who were attesting to a few issues—their material need, their marriageability, and their Catholicism. A few were converts, brought into the fold through this sort of almsgiving. In any case, these were all Roman Catholics, either from birth or by the time they received the grant.33 A weaver named Łukasz “Budziwolski” (most probably our own Budziłowski), was one of the recommenders of a marriage in 1620, together with neighbor Paweł Kotlik, wheelwright, who owned the house at Skop Street 49.05 in 1636.34 Other Budziewiczes, perhaps relatives, received dowries, or helped to dower brides, thanks to the same program: weaver Bazyli Budziewicz married Anna Łomciewiczówna in 1626; Maryna Budziewiczówna married Mikołaj Jodelewicz in 1646; Barbara Budziewiczówna married Piotr Burakiewicz in 1650; Tomasz Budziewicz married Maryna Sadykowska in 1627.35 All the brides received poorrelief dowries from the Monwid Altar. These were neighbors, on the whole, all marrying in the same Catholic circles. Consider the following instance: “9 September 1622, to Miss Krystyna Chrzanowska and Balcer Kupicki, carpenter, both from Wilno, at the recommendation of Paweł the wheelwright and Bazyly the weaver, a dowry of 2 k.”36 These were again Paweł Kotlik and Bazyli Budziewicz, both of whom owned and inhabited houses on Skop Street (Kotlik at 49.05 and Budziewicz at 45.1237), and both of whom made other appearances in this little ledger. We know further that Paweł died a Catholic and asked to be buried at the Holy Trinity Catholic Church, around the corner from Skop Street.38 Tailor Jan Kostromski, implicated largely by his absence in the court case with which I began this section, was also involved in these circles. In fact, he owed his (apparently) first marriage to precisely this endowment for poor Catholic would-be brides. We read in the ledger: “8 November 1622, to Miss Maryna Arcimowiczówna from Wilno and Jan Kostrza˛bski,

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tailor, at the recommendation of Mr. Jakub Szczygielski, 2 k.”39 The family names are all different, but we know from the litigation of a little less than half a year later that Szczygielski had married the widow of an otherwise anonymous Arcimowicz, thereby acquiring at least three stepchildren, and that he had thus recommended for acceptance in this Catholic poorrelief program a woman who was then, or would shortly become, his own stepdaughter. None of this was noted in the ledger. The newlyweds would not stay forever in rented rooms. By 1636 Jan Kostromski had bought the house next door to his old landlords, the Helmers, at Skop Street 49.08; and in 1640 he would purchase the house at Skop Street 49.05 from the widow of wheelwright Paweł Kotlik.40 By 1636, his brother-in-law, Paweł Arcimowicz (he, too, had been implicated in the feud of 1623), owned the house at Skop Street 49.10. Like his brother-in-law and stepfather, he was a tailor. He was among the more litigious denizens of Skop Street—which is saying something—and he would appear before the lower instances of the chapter court on several occasions, on at least two of them in conflict with brother-in-law Kostromski.41 By 1640 at the latest, Maryna Arcimowiczówna had died, and Kostromski had remarried, a certain Cecylia Szymakowska, who was by all indications also a Roman Catholic. It was her name that appeared with his on the deed of purchase of the new house from Kotlik’s widow.42 By 18 November 1648, Szymakowska was a widow. The year before she had registered the contents of the dowry she had brought into the marriage with Kostromski, perhaps in preparation for taking control of her own fate.43 She seems in fact to have been a rather strong woman. The court record of November 1648 that tells us she was a widow contained the allegation by a certain Mr. Łukaszewicz that she had stolen his “bay horse.”44 Kostromski had held the guardianship of the orphans of a Skop Street neighbor and professional colleague, tailor Stanisław Malcewicz (Skop Street 49.12), jointly with two other citizens of the chapter jurisdiction, tailor Tobiasz Rodziewicz (Skop Street 45.04) and gunpowder maker Tomasz Winkiewicz (Bernardine Street 53.02). The guardians became involved in a drawn-out litigation with Malcewicz’s widow over the fate of the guardianship. They claimed she had hidden the fact of their appointment as guardians from them and thus also withheld the funds that went with the office. They argued that this was not in the interest of the orphans, since, although their mother had remarried, she might predecease her new husband, and then the children would be at the mercy of a stepfather. This is exactly what happened in the course of protracted litigation that began in 1642 and was still going on in 1650. During that period Kostromski had died as well, and—in spite of objections from the other side that a woman could not do this—his widow, the alleged horse thief, appeared in court together with the two original coguardians, claiming, apparently with success, to be her husband’s legal heir in the matter. The case would be heard in the lower as well as the higher instances of the chapter court.45 Szymakowska would go to court frequently as an independent legal actor, which seems to have been easier for a woman in the various instances of the chapter jurisdiction than in all other jurisdictions, and easier everywhere for a widowed head of household. It is from these

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appearances that we are able to form a sense of the bare outlines of a biography. On 11 July 1651 she came to court to complain that “the wife of the master of the kitchen, who was subject to the jurisdiction of the revered chapter, had directed her neighbor, the hajduk’s wife who lived with her, to hit her son in the neck with a rock, on the street, without giving any reason.”46 At this point she was still “Cecylia Kostromska,” although we know from another source that she had already become a widow by 1648. By 17 July 1652 she was “wife of Kazimierz Win ´ski” (Kazimierzowa Win´ska). Mutual complaints brought on that day before the court by two sets of her neighbors concerning alleged witchcraft identified them as “living in an alcove at the house of Kazimierz Win ´ski’s wife.” The fact that Win ´ski himself was not named suggests that she had managed to remarry and bury another husband in short order. She would eventually go to law herself in this matter, and by 11 October 1652 she had obtained a court order requiring one of the troublesome neighbors to remove himself and his household from the premises “within a week.”47 It was in fact not the alleged witch and her husband but the couple who had first brought the charges of witchcraft against their neighbors who would be evicted. She was quite definitely “Cecylia Win´ska, widow” by the fall of 1654 when she got involved in another drawn-out litigation with a family—that of “Mr. Jakub Miglin´ski, lieutenant of the Wilno Castle”—who had purchased the house next door at Skop Street 49.03– 49.04.48 The events (and litigation) occurred from 28 October to 20 November 1654, and they included alleged window breaking (a standard complaint in the genre), violence to children and a pregnant woman (Mrs. Miglin´ska), and general hooliganism conducted against each other through third parties. The charges and countercharges descended at one point to the absurdly mundane: Miglin´ski complained that he had been the object of “the calumny of the lost goose [i.e., he had falsely been accused of goose thievery], but said goose was found somewhere other than at the plaintiff’s house.” And yet, by late in the litigation both sides— identified to this point as Mrs. and Mr.—were claiming blue blood: “Noble-born Lady Cecylija Win´ska complained and soleniter [solemnly] protested against His Grace, noble Lord Jakub Miglin´ski.” The priestly judge was able to impose peace and reconciliation in the neighborhood by convincing both parties to accept the explanation that “licentious people” (swawolni ludzie—this was, after all, the neighborhood that included two student bursae for the Jesuit Academy), under orders from neither of the parties, had been responsible for the violence.49 It is at this point (eight and a half months before the Muscovite invasion of 8 August 1655) that I lose sight of Szymakowska. Two of her children with Kostromski, Maciej and Justyna, would survive the war, however, and live to litigate with the Jesuits of the Corpus Christi Brotherhood at the Church of St. John over an alleged debt incurred in connection with their Skop Street property. The children were able to argue that the debt in question was connected with Jan Kostromski’s first house at Skop Street 49.08 (they did not put it this clearly, but this must be what was going on), and they sent the Jesuits to the current owner, the widow of Matiasz Styszewski (yet another tailor), to collect their debt. Besides, they argued (here

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confusing the logic a bit), after the destruction of the war and the occupation, the current Kostromski house at Skop Street 49.05 brought no taxable income: it was “an empty and bare piece of land, empty after the destruction by the enemy and without any walls or buildings.”50 Justyna would rebuild the house at Skop Street 49.05, together with her husband Jan Baranowski, a musician in the employ of the Palatine of Wilno Jerzy Karol Hlebowicz. (In 1636, the house, in this largely wooden, modest neighborhood, was described as follows: “A wooden house. . . . Six chambers from the front and in back, a kitchen, a shed, a basement full of water, a brewery.”) I think we can see some of her mother’s independence in the few details we learn of her life. After the liberation of the city from the Muscovite occupation, Baranowski would buy a ruined town house in the “noble ghetto” at Troki Street 33.02, around the corner from that of his patron at German Street 26.14. (That patron was the Roman Catholic son-in-law of Calvinist palatine of Wilno Krzystof Radziwiłł II [d. 1640].) Justyna was Baranowski’s second wife. She would eventually live in the Troki Street house with him and bear him some unspecified number of children. In his testament, Baranowski claimed that the five surviving children of his first marriage had already received their portions and that his entire estate belonged to his second wife and her children. He gave her 500 zł and “lifetime usufruct [doz∧ ywocie]” of the house on Troki Street. He “gave” her outright—it was hers, after all—the “little bricked house on Skop Street under the jurisdiction of the Monwid Altar, ruined by the enemy Muscovite, which, together with my wife, I restored and received the expenses I incurred from the rents from it over those years.” He, too, was Catholic and would ask to be buried around the corner from his Troki Street house with the Franciscans at the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary “on the Sands.” Baranowski lived long enough to put his signature (he was literate) to two wills. In the first, dated 1 July 1684, he named two Wilno burgomasters, Andrzej Gierkiewicz and Jan Berkinowicz (both Roman Catholic), as the guardians of his children from the second marriage. In the second will, dated 5 October 1685, there was one major change: the sole guardian of the children was to be their mother, Justyna Kostromska.51 She would live another ten years, having her own will witnessed (she was illiterate) on 28 December 1696. She does not seem to have died a prosperous woman, but she made what provisions she could for her son Wincenty, including arrangements for “protection” for him by noble guardians; she asked to be buried with her husband at the neighborhood Franciscan church.52 We will encounter a few other Skop Street family stories in other contexts. What emerges is a picture of a community—or a cluster of networks—of relatively modest Roman Catholics, drawn together by ties of blood, marriage, legal jurisdiction; often also by ties of profession and service as guardians, witnesses, executors of wills; and above all by ties of proximity. I have not discovered non-Catholics in these circles in spite of the presence of at least one Lutheran house owner in their midst. In the Kostromski family saga we also see a case of moderate social advancement. The daughter of a tailor, whose own start in married life had been the dowry his first wife received from the Roman Catholic Church as a part of

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Figure 3 Józef Czechowicz, photograph, Upper Castle Street, 1870–1880. Karpavicˇius 1995, 45.

its poor-relief programs and whose customers included priests and a few prelates, would herself marry a Catholic client of the Catholic palatine of Wilno and move out of the neighborhood and “up” to Troki Street. She thus put herself and her son in the proximity of the nobles and removed the traces of the family story from the acta of the Roman Catholic Chapter to those of the city magistracy.

The Sztrunks of Castle Street The section of Castle Street just around the corner from Skop Street was one of German visitor Kiechel’s “most fashionable streets or ways,” and it is here that we find some of his Germans occupying large bricked houses of two and three stories, with a normal range of eight to fourteen chambers and numerous outbuildings. I will focus here on the block on the west side of upper Castle Street, bounded by Skop Street to the north and St. John Street to the south. This is now the eastern limit of the old seat of Wilno University; in 1636, its precursor, the Jesuit Academy, occupied a few buildings and three internal courtyards at the opposite end of the block, on Bishop Street (now University Street). The owners of the Castle Street properties were at that time almost exclusively Lutheran, members of an urban elite,

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intimately tied to each other through marriage and other social bonds and set apart not only from other non-Lutheran Vilnans but also from the other two, more modest Lutheran neighborhoods and networks that we will visit next. These Lutherans had close associations with a smaller group of burgher Calvinists located directly across Castle Street. And they were quite separate from the more modest Catholics who lived under the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Wilno Chapter or of the bishop and who occupied much of the other three limits of what would become the core of the university: Skop Street, Bishop Street (now University Street), and St. John Street. The houses in this block of Castle Street were all under the jurisdiction of the magistracy. Only one owner remains without a story. This was a certain Adam Downarowicz, a tailor who occupied the first house at 2.08 and about whom I know nothing further. The rest were all in some way Lutheran houses. The survey from 1636 reveals the following names and addresses: at 2.09 Jerzy Chreptowicz (a Catholic nobleman but with a Lutheran wife, Zuzanna Nonhartówna; no doubt it was because of her the couple had a house here in addition to the one among the nobles at Troki Street 33.01 and a palace in the Łukiszki suburb); at 2.10 Jerzy Sztrunk II; at 2.11 “Szymonowa Engelbrechtowa”; at 2.12 Tomasz Gibel; at 2.13 Jakub Gibel; at 2.14 Je˛drzej Fonend; at 2.15, the last house before the Jesuits’ Church of St. John, Wilhelm Engelbrecht. I have chosen to put the Sztrunks at the center of this narration, although these families were so closely intertwined that one could tell much the same tale beginning with any one of them.53 One of the stories to be told here is that of the quick rise of a tightly knit Protestant (Lutheran and Calvinist), immigrant (from Germany, the Low Countries, and France), and decidedly burgher population into the lower reaches of the Lithuanian szlachta. The Jerzy Sztrunk II who lived at Castle Street 2.10 in 1636 was the grandson of a merchant and burgher of Kowno named Jan Sztrunk I. As we learn from yet another funeral sermon by the indefatigable pastor Je˛drzej Schönflissius, in 1561 Jan I and wife Anna Korsakówna had a son named Jerzy I (the father of our 1636 homeowner), whom they “baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity and raised . . . in his youth in the teaching and discipline of the Lord [Ephesians 6:4].” In Jerzy’s twelfth year, around 1573, the elder Sztrunks sent him to Wilno to live—as a sort of ward and apprentice (na słuz∧be˛, unto service)—with “the once famous and honorable man, Piotr Fonderflot, Lutheran burgher and merchant of Wilno.” Jerzy Sztrunk I served Piotr Fonderflot for fifteen years (i.e., until about age twenty-seven, ca. 1588), when he married “Maiden Barbara,” daughter of Wilno burgher and merchant Symon Karej. Judging by the names, both father and son had married into the local communities and not among the German immigrants; perhaps both brought their spouses with them into the Church. Barbara Karejówna “lived in beautiful and sweet harmony in the state of holy matrimony for thirtyeight years” with Jerzy Sztrunk, giving birth “by the special grace and blessing of God” to eleven children, “six sons and five daughters, of which four sons and two daughters are living [in 1634], and another two sons and three daughters rest in the Lord.” Jerzy Sztrunk I died in 1634 at the age of about seventy-three.54

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His surviving children included Jerzy II, Jan II, Krzysztof I, Marcin, and Katarzyna.55 A survey of the marital choices of the elder Jerzy’s children and grandchildren will help suggest the interconnectedness of the neighborhood. I begin with Jerzy Sztrunk II, who was married to Sara Engelbrechtówna. The Engelbrecht family owned two houses on the block, one at 2.11 (next to the house Jerzy II owned in 1636) and a second at 2.15. Jerzy II had married the girl next door (Castle Street 2.11). Sara Engelbrechtówna was the daughter of Szymon Engelbrecht I and Krystyna Vorbekówna-Lettowówna.56 Jerzy II and Sara, still clearly burghers, would marry their daughter Barbara to lord high steward of Kowno Krzysztof Eperyeszy, thus facilitating her entry into the world of the lesser Lithuanian szlachta.57 Confession may have played a role in contracting the marriage: Urszula Giecówna, Krzysztof ’s mother and wife of Janusz Eperyeszy, was Lutheran, and—contrary to trends that made the Lithuanian Calvinist Church largely noble and the Lutheran Church burgher—we find the Eperyeszy family on the rolls of the Wilno Lutheran church over the years.58 Following family traditions, Jerzy’s sister Katarzyna Sztrunkówna married the boy next door, Lutheran Szymon Engelbrecht II, brother of Sara Engelbrechtówna, thus making their children cousins twice over.59 Szymon II—and not his father—was most likely Korneliusz Winhold’s competitor for the hand of Katarzyna Giblówna in 1620. He would inherit the family house at 2.11; by 1636 it was in the possession of his widow. And by 1639 the house was registered in the name of Lutheran Reinhold Witmacher, who was Katarzyna Sztrunkówna’s second husband. Witmacher, a onetime city councillor, served in 1655 as the guardian for the orphans and widow of Wilhelm Engelbrecht, who had owned the house at 2.15.60 He would be among the Wilno “dissident” burghers accused of collaboration with the Swedes during the wars of midcentury, and in 1661 the house was the object of an attempted confiscation—this one, unlike the others I have encountered, apparently successful.61 Marcin Sztrunk had a daughter named Sara. In 1655 she became the second wife of Henryk Mones, then a Calvinist city councillor and a future burgomaster, royal secretary, administrator of the customs of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and Lithuanian postmaster general.62 Mones was the great-grandson of a certain Bausin, allegedly from a Belgian noble family. We learn this from the unpublished genealogical materials in Vorbek-Lettow’s Treasure-House of Memory. This made him the first cousin once removed (wnuk cioteczny) of Maciej Vorbek-Lettow and Krystyna Vorbekówna-Lettowówna Engelbrechtowa, since their mother, Elz∧bieta Bausin, was the sister of Zuzanna Bausin, who was the grandmother of Henryk Mones.63 Henryk’s father, Franciszek, seems to have been a burgher of Gdan´sk; in any event, Vorbek-Lettow, who never missed an opportunity to do so, did not call this member of the extended family a nobleman.64 Henryk Mones had two daughters with his first, Calvinist wife, Halszka. In 1663 one of them, Barbara, married Lutheran Jan Sztrunk III, son of Jan Sztrunk II and Elz∧bieta Giblówna. This would make Henryk Mones the cousin by marriage of his own daughter. By 1675, Jan Sztrunk III was, in the words of a disgruntled stepfather (it was Lutheran doctor Paweł Meller, second husband of Elz∧ bieta Giblówna) “titling himself ” royal secretary. By 1701 he

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was “de Sztrunk,” as was his cousin, Krzysztof II (son of goldsmith Krzysztof I, Castle Street 2.26), and the name entered into Polish-Lithuanian heraldry in that form or, more often, as Desztrunk.65 Mones’s second daughter, Zuzanna, was engaged in 1666 to Vorbek-Lettow’s son Zygmunt, the cupbearer of Starodub. At this point, Calvinist father (Mones) and one Calvinist daughter (Barbara) were both married to Lutheran cousins; the other, also Calvinist, daughter (Zuzanna) was now betrothed to a Lutheran. That marriage seems, however, not to have come to pass. The couple was in fact related by blood but not closely enough to raise any eyebrows in these Protestant circles. Whatever happened here, Zuzanna later figured as the wife of Tobiasz Pe˛kalski, Calvinist court judge of Wilno and later master of the royal hunt of Wilno, also a member of the minor szlachta.66 Elz∧ bieta Giblówna (mother of Jan de Sztrunk III and wife first of merchant Jan Sztrunk II and then of doctor Paweł Meller—both were Lutherans) was the sister of the Tomasz Gibel, who owned the next house down from the Engelbrecht/Witmacher house at 2.12. She was also the daughter of longtime burgomaster Jakub Gibel, who resided in the next house at 2.13. The Gibels were Lutheran. The elder Gibel was born in Wilno in 1569. He lost his father early on and was raised in the house of his stepfather, Piotr Fonderflot, the same man who served as a patron for the young Jerzy Sztrunk I on his arrival in Wilno from Kowno. The two grew up together—Sztrunk was eight years older than Gibel—in the same house, but while the ward of the house was learning his trade in Wilno, the stepson, as we have seen, was sent “to foreign lands, where he spent his young years in honorable occupations appropriate to his merchant’s estate, conducting himself honorably and well among foreign people.”67 Gibel returned to his “fatherland” (i.e., Wilno) around 1600 and at age thirty-one married Krystyna Fonderflotówna, daughter of Andrzej Fonderflot and presumably some sort of niece of his stepfather Piotr. (A Zygmunt Andrys Fonderflot—perhaps the same person as Andrzej Fonderflot?—had sold his house at Castle Street 2.11 to Szymon Engelbrecht I in 1622.)68 The couple lived together for thirty-eight years, producing ten children, six sons and four daughters, of whom three sons and two daughters survived their relatively long-lived father. The five surviving children of Jakub Gibel and Krystyna Fonderflotówna were Tomasz II, ∧ Elzbieta, Katarzyna, Jakub II, and Jan.69 I am able to situate the first three more precisely in this neighborhood and its networks. We have already met Elz∧bieta. Tomasz was married to Anna Engelbrechtówna, yet another child of the family at Castle Street 2.11.70 This made him a brother-in-law of Sara Engelbrechtówna (wife of Jerzy Sztrunk II two doors back) and of Szymon Engelbrecht II (husband of Katarzyna Sztrunkówna, next door at Castle Street 2.10), and all of them, once again, were nieces and nephews of Vorbek-Lettow by either blood or marriage.71 Tomasz and Anna Engelbrechtówna—both Lutherans—had at least five children. Daughter Krystyna married Calvinist master of the Wilno horodnictwo (horodniczy) Paweł Kleofas, who would be ennobled by King Władysław IV at the Coronation Sejm of 1633 as “z Brylewa Podchocimski.”72 They owned a house at Castle Street 2.19, next door to

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another Gibel property at 2.18 and a few houses away from Krzysztof Sztrunk I at 2.26.73 A second daughter, Sara, married Ferdynand Ro(h)r, who was horodniczy of Troki (1665– 1670?), lord deputy steward of Troki (1665–1688?), and lord high steward of Troki (1677?– 1692).74 A third, Katarzyna, was the wife of the standard bearer of Nowogródek Aleksander Szwykowski.75 In other words, all had joined the lesser Lithuanian szlachta. In August 1651, Tomasz Gibel successfully defended before the Lithuanian Tribunal of the Treasury his right to own land. He made his case on the basis of a royal privilege given to Wilno burgomasters and councillors, as well as their children, by King Zygmunt II August in 1568. His plenipotentiary argued, “Not only they themselves, but also their proles [offspring], so long as maechanicis non contaminarent artibus [they not defile themselves with mechanical arts], but if liberalia et militaria tractarent opera [they should exercise free and military pursuits], can hold landed goods jure nobilium [by the right of the nobles] not only in pawn or lease [arenda], but also as eternal property.”76 The case was also based on precedent: Tomasz’s burgomaster father had also owned and sold landed property. Sister Katarzyna Giblówna, as we have seen above, married into the Calvinist burgher elite located just across Castle Street. (She remained Lutheran, nonetheless.) Her husband was Korneliusz Winhold II—twenty-one years of age at the time of his marriage—son of Calvinist merchant Korneliusz I and Jakumina Deschampsówna, who had purchased the Rupert House at Castle Street 1.16 in 1599.77 This side of Castle Street was a Calvinist mirror of the Lutheran block across the way, even if the networks were a bit thinner and more of the houses were under the jurisdiction of the nobles at the Wilno castle court. The block containing the Winhold house was at one time a Calvinist stronghold in the center of the city. The upper and lower side streets were largely owned by the Calvinist church or individual Calvinists, and the house next to the Winholds’ at Castle Street 1.17 contained at the rear a “gate to the Calvinist church,” which until 1640 was located at the other end of the internal courtyards in this block.78 Given the tightness of the web that linked all these people—in many cases in degrees of consanguinity and affinity not permitted to Roman Catholics and in some cases of doubtful validity according to the pronouncements of the Reformers—it is perhaps not too surprising that a challenge would be raised to one of these unions. We know of this because of a letter dated 15 June 1633, after the deaths of both parents, that Korneliusz Winhold II wrote to family patron Krzysztof Radziwiłł II seeking his protection against charges brought before the Lithuanian Tribunal by a certain Biegan´ski, who is otherwise unknown to me. Winhold wrote, “My parents entered into the state of holy matrimony not furtively [poka˛tnie], but in the presence of many worthy people and with the permission of those who mattered, not, as the plaintiff alleges, within forbidden degrees of blood or affinity.”79 Perhaps lurking in the background here was not Deschampsówna’s marriage to Winhold Sr. but her previous union with a Vonlar, who was a cousin of Vorbek-Lettow’s father-in-law Justus Isfeld. The royal doctor and memoirist derived his wife’s family name—perhaps somewhat fancifully—from the German version of a place name in the Rhineland

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near Cologne, which Vorbek-Lettow writes as Gissfelt: the g could be replaced by j in pronunciation (and spelling), or simply dropped. Vorbek-Lettow interpreted is as the German aus/us (from), to which he added Feld (field). The Latin for this, Vorbek-Lettow tells us, was Decampo (de campo), the French version of which would have been Deschamps (although the memoirist was silent on this point). Thus perhaps Jakumina Deschampsówna was in fact an Isfeld and had married a blood relative of some sort. Vorbek-Lettow devoted a few lines to questions of what would happen to the Vonlar estate upon the death of his widow, now married to Winhold.80 Perhaps it was legal challenges to that inheritance that lay behind Biegan´ski’s litigation. A relative of Korneliusz II, presumably a sister, Zuzanna Winholdówna by name, had married the Calvinist merchant Jakub Desaus, known as “the Frenchman,” who owned the house at Castle Street 1.26. With the Desaus family we come to an equally local network of burgher elite with aspirations to the lower reaches of the szlachta but one that was more thoroughly Calvinist. When the Winhold house passed out of the family in 1648 by the law of escheat (jus caducum), on the grounds that the Winholds were foreigners and had died without a male successor, heirs to both Zuzanna Winholdówna Desausowa and Katarzyna Giblówna Winholdowa sought to keep some of the property in the family.81 The Desaus family, too, in spite of allegations of treason and attempts to confiscate their property during the midcentury wars, would enter the ranks of the Calvinist szlachta, although its modern chronicler, Szymon Konarski, noted that in this case “marks of nobility were not always maintained in the record books.”82 (His suspicions about the family’s status were justified.) As we have seen, one of Jan Desaus’s daughters, Katarzyna, would marry a Lutheran burgher, Jan Szretter, who made the startling rise to treasury secretary, Lithuanian treasurer, and finally castellan of Livland. In any event, what we find here in upper Castle Street is a Lutheran-Calvinist neighborhood and set of networks shaped by extremely close ties of blood and affinity—perhaps on occasion nearly within the degrees proscribed by the Reformers themselves. We find remarkably easy formation of Lutheran-Calvinist matrimonial alliances without the conversion of one of the partners. We also find anecdotal evidence for a mixture of marriage patterns and family structures. Jerzy Sztrunk I, who was sent out as an apprentice to another town and another household, married late, as did Jakub Gibel, in whose house (or rather that of his stepfather) Sztrunk had come to live; they married at ages twenty-seven and thirty-one, respectively. Krzysztof Wiktorzyn Vorbek-Lettow and Korneliusz Winhold II married quite young (nineteen and twenty-one). Maciej Vorbek-Lettow himself had married at age twentythree, as quickly as possible after his return from his long tour of the universities. Perhaps what we see here is an opposition between Lutheran burgher circles, where marriage is thought to have come late, and those with stronger connections with the nobles (including some Lutherans and many Calvinists), among whom marriage often came earlier. But what is most remarkable is the rapidity and apparent ease with which these burgher families made their ways into the Lithuanian nobility, using a combination of professional

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skills (medicine and law chief among them) and marriage strategies to do so. This holds true, I would argue, for two individuals closely connected to this block of Castle Street but whose noble origins have only rarely been questioned in the literature. They were Maciej Vorbek-Lettow and Zuzanna Nonhartówna Chreptowiczowa. Vorbek-Lettow devoted several pages in his memoirs to his legal battles with the Wilno magistracy. His problem was that “at the frequent fervent request of the Wilno magistracy, in my youth, as I was ignorant of the laws, I allowed myself to be elected a bencher of Wilno.” The royal doctor had served “barely three months in the bench” when he was “taken into the council” on St. Nicholas’s Day (6 December)—the day when “each year the magistracy is changed.” This was in 1635.83 (These were the first two rungs on the ladder of power in the magistracy. The next was that of burgomaster.) At this point his uncles and other relations warned him that he was risking his status as a nobleman because “fulfilling the duties of the civil magistracy removes noble birth.”84 Vorbek-Lettow had just entered the service of the king, and he devoted much attention over the next year to effecting an official renunciation of burgher office. These efforts were reflected in a series of protestations registered with the magistracy and with the Wilno castle court (and inserted into his memoirs).85 The Sejm of 1635 (Warsaw, 31 January to 17 March) had granted Vorbek-Lettow the indygenat—a patent reconfirming or granting nobility (according to the royal doctor, it was the former)—on the basis of a document allegedly stemming from 1506, which he produced attesting to the origins of the family in the Pomeranian nobility. But there remain several ambiguities here and not a little defensiveness. He wrote in his protestation to the Wilno magistracy, in an attempt to forestall objections, that “praeterita conditio status [the past situation of the estate] of my father, . . . which acerbae fortunae sors induxerat [the fate of bitter fortune had introduced], could raise some ansam [occasion] for certain people of various condition to doubt about my noble birth.”86 In fact, the royal doctor inhabited a world situated quite comfortably at the intersection of the burgher elite and the Lithuanian nobility. His oldest son Krzysztof, as we have seen, would marry burghess Anna Dorofiewiczówna.87 The godparents he chose for his eleven children born over the years 1619– 1642 ranged from the Roman Catholic king and queen (represented, it is true, by high-born substitutes) through the Calvinist Radziwiłłs to Lutheran and Calvinist burghers of Wilno, many of the latter his kin and in-laws.88 It is hard to believe in Vorbek-Lettow’s claim of ignorance of the laws, and he was hardly a youth when he was first made an “annual councillor”: born 12 February 1593, the royal doctor was almost forty-three at the time. Even the story of his renunciation of burgher office had an ambiguous ending: it was his service as councillor in 1635 that had led to his difficulties, but if we trust a near contemporary, burgomaster Grzegorz z Kostrowic Kostrowicki, Vorbek-Lettow would hold that office again in 1641, well after the matter had been resolved.89 The point here is that there were “better and worse” claims to nobility, and that gained by service in the magistracy—the route taken by Vorbek-Lettow’s in-laws, the Gibels—was more suspect than that based on patents and blood.

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In 1636, the house at Castle Street 2.09 was in the possession of Jerzy Chreptowicz (1586– 1650), then castellan of Smolen´sk (1632) and future castellan of Samogitia (1643) and palatine of Parnawa (1645) and Nowogródek (1646). He was an ardent Catholic and a patron of the Łukiszki Church of SS. Philip and Jacob and of the Dominican monastery in Wilno, where his portrait hung. He also owned a house among the nobles at Troki Street 33.01 and a palace in the Łukiszki suburb.90 I suspect he acquired the Castle Street house either through or at the request of his wife. She was Zuzanna Nonhartówna, daughter of Lutheran immigrant Piotr Nonhart, who had died in 1633.91 As we learn from Nonhart’s funeral sermon written by Wilno Lutheran pastor Je˛drzej Schönflissius (who wrote funeral sermons for at least four people on this block, including Zuzanna Nonhartówna herself ), Nonhart had also been the object of rumors concerning his nobility. He claimed to be the son of His Grace Lord Stanisław Nonhart—a Polish nobleman residing at the court of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian (it would have been Maximilian II, who reigned 1564–1576)—and Elz∧ bieta Angermundyn, a “hetman’s daughter.” When he was a little boy, “he was stolen secretly from his parents and sold to the Turks, which was not hard to do there at that time, to steal noble children and drive and sell them to the pagan horde.” After he had spent a few years there, “God miraculously freed him, about which the deceased used to give sufficient account to everyone during his life.” He spent his young years in Hungary and then came to Poland in the entourage of Hungarian nobleman, Antitrinitarian, and pretender to the Transylvanian throne Kornyat Kasper de Békés, a favorite of King Stefan Batory. Nonhart would serve Batory and Zygmunt III, receiving the office of starosta of Oran and rising to that of horodniczy and royal architect.92 Nonhart, Schönflissius tells us, had many enemies who liked to slander him, as a foreigner, to the Polish kings. They alleged that he was not who he said he was—and specifically that he was not a noble. But “God miraculously aided him in all this, for by His special grace he demonstrated manifestly with letters, documents, and imperial privileges (which even today everyone can see and read) that he was born of a Polish szlachcic, who, tarrying in Germany for the German language [i.e., using the stay there to learn German], established himself there by God’s special counsel, since no one could forbid him this as a free szlachcic.”93 The story is an odd one. Clearly rumors must have been circulating throughout Nonhart’s life and after, and Pastor Schönflissius’s language betrays much defensiveness. Still, Nonhart seems to have been able to make his claim stick. His sister, Krystyna Nonhartówna (was she also stolen away by Turks?), had married Lithuanian Calvinist nobleman Sebastian Sebastianowicz Ke˛sztort, land judge of Samogitia, and the couple were patrons of the Wilno Calvinist church in the early seventeenth century.”94 Nonhart married his other daughter to Calvinist royal forester of Niemonice Aleksander Naruszewicz, also a patron of the Wilno Calvinist church.95 The daughter of Zuzanna Nonhartówna and Jerzy Chreptowicz, Zuzanna Chreptowiczówna, would marry first the Catholic palatine of Nowogródek Tomasz na Holszanach Sapieha (1598–1646) and then Catholic Aleksander Hilary Połubn´ski (1626– 1679), who would ascend to the office of grand marshal of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.96

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This was a quick rise for the descendants of an upstart burgher, if that is indeed who he was. Zuzanna Nonhartówna’s mother, Zuzanna Mrzygłódówna, Piotr Nonhart’s second wife, was in fact a burghess. She was the sister of Katarzyna Mrzygłódówna, wife of Lutheran merchant Arent Engelbrecht, who had once owned the house at the far end of the block next to St. John’s (2.15).97 Zuzanna Nonhartówna’s burgher cousin Wilhelm, merchant and member of the magistracy, owned it in 1636. “Wilim Engelbrecht” was annual councillor once, in 1641, serving that year next to “Matys Litaw,” i.e., Maciej Vorbek-Lettow.98 And note the adherence in these Lutheran burgher/noble circles to family naming traditions: three Zuzannas in three generations, ranging from merchant circles to the upper reaches of the nobility. The Lutheran and Calvinist burgher elite of Castle Street facilitated their advance through skills that were useful to noble and royal patrons—knowledge of languages, “international business” connections, law, medicine, “engineering.” The Lutheran Nonhart, who apparently knew something about engineering, and the Calvinist doctor Podchocimski occupied the office of the Wilno horodniczy from 1619 to 1633 and 1634 to 1657. The office of postmaster general of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was practically a Wilno Protestant burgher monopoly in the seventeenth century. The postal system of Poland-Lithuania was established by a constitution of the Sejm of 1620 and entrusted to royal secretary and Italian immigrant Karol Montelupi (Polonized as Wilczogórski).99 Beginning in 1645 a separate office was created for the Grand Duchy under Motelupi’s rule but was administered by a local deputy, Lutheran Berent Vogt (whose wife was also Lutheran).100 After Montelupi’s death in 1662, the Grand Duchy had its own independent postmasters. The first was Henryk Mones, Calvinist royal secretary, the last Protestant burgomaster of Wilno, and administrator of the customs of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, who held the office from 1662 to 1666. Mones’s first wife had been a Calvinist, and his second was a Lutheran Sztrunk from Castle Street. He was succeeded by the Calvinist factor of the treasury of the Grand Duchy, Reinhold Bizing, who served as postmaster from 1666 to 1686 (and whose wife, “Reinholt Bisinksche,” was a member of the local Lutheran church).101 Perhaps the first rung on the step to becoming castellan of Livonia for Jan Szretter, Lutheran burgher (husband of Calvinist merchant’s daughter Katarzyna Desaus, another Castle Street denizen), was the office of Lithuanian postmaster, which he held from 1686 to 1698 and then passed on to two sons who held the position in succession until 1740. Thus thanks to education and skills, the Protestant Wilno burgher elite was able to bypass service in the magistracy on their way to social advancement. But they also paid attention to marriage alliances, marrying each other but also marrying into the nobility. Lacking the ability to advance on your own, you could marry your daughter to a nobleman, thus guaranteeing her and your grandchildren noble status. Or you could simply claim nobility and see if anyone would challenge you.102 Jan de Sztrunk III and Krzysztof de Sztrunk II were great-grandsons of a Lutheran merchant from Kowno, grandsons of a merchant of Wilno, and sons, respectively, of a local merchant and goldsmith. A family

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genealogy from 1801 claims that the lineage was known in Austrian lands as early as 1274.103 Available evidence suggests we should heed the grumblings of Jan III’s suspicious stepfather, Paweł Meller: the stepson was now a royal secretary but only “as he titles himself.”104

The Buchners of Glass Street In 1636, at Glass Street 18.08, the royal quartermaster came upon the modest two-story “little bricked house” of Lutheran merchant Marcin Buchner. Buchner and wife Regina Stegnerówna had at least five children, all of whom married in Lutheran circles even to the generation of the grandchildren.105 Spice merchant Michał Buchner was the elder son of Marcin Buchner. Marcin’s name appeared in Lutheran offering records for 1640 but not for 1652, by which time he had apparently died, and Michał, whose name we now see on the rolls, had become the head of the family. The family seems to have established itself financially only during and after the wars: Marcin managed an offering of only 8 zł in 1640, Michał a paltry 2 zł, 15 gr in 1652.106 It was Michał who would lead the family to exile in Königsberg, signing the loyalty oath for them together with the other Germans on 16 February 1656: “Ich, Michel Buchner, bürger undt gewürtskrämer von der Wilde, vor mich und meiner haußfraw, wie auch vor meiner fraw Mutter undt meinem Schwieger-Vater, Mertten Jensen, Chirurgus, [ . . . ]lenßborgck, wie auch vor meinem Jungen, Conradt Burchardt [I, Michał Buchner, burgher and spice merchant from Wilno, for myself and my wife, as well as my lady mother and my father-in-law, Marcin Jensen, surgeon, ( . . . )lenßborgk, as well as my apprentice, Conradt Burchardt].”107 Buchner was among those who quickly returned to Wilno. His name is missing, however, from the rest of the postoccupation record of life in Wilno, and a document from 31 August 1658 tells us why: he had died of the plague that visited the city the previous year.108 Father-in-law Marcin Jensen, a Lutheran barber-surgeon, contributed 8 zł to church coffers in 1640 and an even more respectable 16 zł in 1652. He survived the exile, as did his pocketbook: in 1662, amid the general impoverishment of Wilno society, he managed to give 14 zł, and his widow was able to increase the family’s giving to 22 and 24 zł in the next two periods (1664 and 1667).109 From other sources we know that at least two of Michał’s sisters, in addition to their mother, had accompanied the family group in flight to Prussia, as perhaps did the younger brother, Jan, whose postwar career in Wilno is the best documented of the entire family. One sister was Marianna, wife of Fryderyk Cylich, a “burgher of Wilno and a servant [barbersurgeon] of His Grace, Prince Bogusław Radziwiłł.” As “Friedrich Zülich,” he also signed the loyalty oath that same day “for myself and my wife [haußfraw].”110 She soon died in exile, probably within half a year of their arrival. In any event, on 19/29 August 1656 she put her signature to her last will and testament (in Polish) and had it entered into the acts of the Königsberg magistracy.111 She asked her husband to see to it that her “sinful body be buried according to the Christian rite [porza˛dkiem chrzes´cijan´skim, by which she meant Lutheran], as modestly as possible inasmuch as we are now in exile [ile pod ten czas wygnania naszego].”

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Cylich himself was also a Lutheran: “Friedrich Zülich, balbierer,” contributed 15 zł, 2 gr to the Wilno church in 1652.112 He also soon died, perhaps while still in exile. On 19 July 1660 a certain “Lord Jakub Trop, captain of His Royal Majesty’s artillery of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania” received a privilege given in Warsaw by King Jan Kazimierz for the confiscation of Cylich’s house on Glass Street by the law of escheat. By 3 September 1661, Trop had returned to Wilno to present his royal privilege to the Wilno magistracy and to request “intromission” into his new property.113 I will return to this case in greater detail in chapter 11. What is important here are the family connections. The royal decree did not overtly make Cylich into any sort of traitor; he was simply a foreigner—although that is always a tricky category during a time of war—and he had died without an heir. The rhetoric of the royal grant, however, was one of rewarding faithful servants during that war. What the king seems not to have known was that Trop was also a German Lutheran—although a citizen through his office—and that he was the brotherin-law of the foreigner Cylich. Trop, too, had been present at the beginning among the German asylum seekers in Königsberg, although he seems to have arrived there with another wife. On 16/26 February 1656 Lutheran burgher and locksmith Erasmus Ertsleben signed the oath “for myself and my son-in-law, Jakub Trop, for his wife and children.”114 His wife must have promptly died. A decade later, on 29 December 1667, the matriarch of the Buchner family, Regina Buchnerowa, wife of the long-deceased Marcin Buchner, came close to charging her former sonin-law, the same Jakub Trop, with defrauding her granddaughter (and his daughter) of her Buchner inheritance. Here we learn that Trop had married Regina’s daughter Anna Buchnerówna “in the year 1658 in Königsberg”—some two years after he had arrived there with a previous wife. The couple had produced a daughter—Marianna Tropówna. Anna Buchnerówna had died by the end of 1667, and Regina Buchnerowa now entered a detailed register of the dowry she had given her daughter at the time of her marriage in Königsberg. Her purpose here was to make certain that her daughter’s property passed into the hands of her granddaughter (and did not remain in those of her son-in-law).115 Trop had married into a family that included at least two clients of Bogusław Radziwiłł (which was a potentially risky move, given the Calvinist Radziwiłłs’ attempts to found a Swedish-Lithuanian union during the wars of the midcentury): in addition to Cylich, there was brother-in-law Samuel Kalander, who signed the loyalty oath immediately after Cylich, also identifying himself as a “servant of His Princely Grace, Lord Bogusław Radziwiłł.”116 The same volume of the Prussian Etatsministerium record books contains copies of Germanlanguage “passports” given to Kalander and Cylich by Radziwiłł, both dated 31 January/10 February 1656.117 Kalander was the husband of yet another Buchnerówna, named Regina after her mother. He was a Lutheran wine merchant: “Samuel Kallender, Weinschenker,” contributed 10 zł to Lutheran coffers in 1652.118 An inventory of Kalander’s Wilno property was conducted “at the behest of His Grace, the Lord Palatine of Wilno, Prince Mixail Semenovicˇ Šaxovskoj” on

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30 December 1656.119 (The stipulation that the date was given “according to the new calendar” is regularly found in magistracy records only in documents between 1655 and 1661, when the Muscovite-occupied castle functioned on the old calendar but city business remained on the new calendar. Before and after the occupation, all dates were recorded stylo novo but without comment.) The inventory was conducted by a “temporary” (natenczas) councillor and two city quartermasters, “in the house of the deceased Lord Marcin Buchner”— perhaps the one at Glass Street 18.08—and in the presence of Zachariasz Bez, Michał Buchner, and Dawid Paciukiewicz, “burghers and merchants of Wilno.” Bez was also a Lutheran and had been in Königsberg in February 1656 together with Michał Buchner; both had clearly returned home very quickly, by the end of the same year at the latest. There is no record that Paciukiewicz sought exile in the Prussian capital. He was Roman Catholic.120 On order of Šaxovskoj, Kalander’s possessions were to be “given over to famous [sławetny] Lord Michał Buchner, burgher and merchant of Wilno, as his nearest relative.” In any event, the Glass Street neighborhood, populated by middle-level Lutherans and Jews, was where the members of the larger Buchner family made their homes, both before and after the Muscovite occupation. We find other Lutherans on the lists of exiles in Königsberg who were close neighbors of the Buchners back home and who would return with them to their houses. They included goldsmith brothers Jakub and Zachariasz Sznejder and swordsmith Malcher Ilis, all of whom owned houses on Glass Street (Glass Street 20.02 and 21.03).121 Mother Regina, younger son Jan, and son-in-law Jakub Trop would return to Wilno and play important roles in Lutheran society over the latter part of the century. The 1690 tax survey of hearths found “Lord [Jan] Buchner” owning two “large bricked houses” on Glass Street. Buchner lived in one of them himself, together with one Christian and six Jewish neighbors. In his second home there were four Christian and two Jewish neighbors.122 The Glass Street neighborhood and the human networks with which Jan Buchner surrounded himself set him quite apart from the Lutheran elite on upper Castle Street. Still, this middlelevel Lutheran and his family survived the experience of war and exile, and his postwar offerings to the Lutheran Church rivaled those of the elite; like them, he served as a senior of the Lutheran Church.123 Jan Buchner was married to Krystyna Rejterówna. Her father, Joachim Rejter, was also a Lutheran merchant who had shared the period of exile in Königsberg and flourished in postoccupation Wilno.124 At this nexus we can flesh out this second-tier Lutheran network a bit more. In addition to Krystyna, Rejter had two heirs, identified in a document of 1673 as son Paweł, a “Wilno patrician,” and daughter Dorota, wife of Andrzej Fonderflot, the latter two both deceased by this time. That couple had at least two children, Katarzyna Fonderflotówna, married by 1673 to Andrzej Poz∧arski/Pez∧arski, and Zuzanna Fonderflotówna, then still unmarried.125 Andrzej Fonderflot had been a Lutheran. On three occasions during the period 1662–1667 he made no contributions; he apparently died sometime after 1667.126 In general, the

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Fonderflot family appears to have slipped in income and status since the days when Piotr Fonderflot was Jerzy Sztrunk’s mentor and Jakub Gibel’s stepfather and burgomaster Gibel himself had sought his bride within the family. Zuzanna Fonderflotówna would marry sometime after 1673. Her first husband was Dawid Lidert, another middle-level Lutheran in the period 1673–1683.127 Her second husband was “Reynold Vonderenna.” His name appears in the ranks of Lutheran offering givers for the years 1683, 1689, and 1691. “Reinhold von der Ende Haußfrau” (and “Reinhold Vonderenin”), i.e., Zuzanna Fonderflotówna, contributed on her own in 1685 and 1687. This is all a bit curious. The Lutheran financial records carefully distinguished between male contributors, female contributors (if their husbands were not Lutheran), and Lutheran widows of Lutherans who continued contributing after the death of their husbands. So Reinhold seems to have made some contributions, perhaps also worshipping with the Lutherans. But he would take Communion all his life with the Calvinists. Perhaps he participated in some active way in both congregations?128 Husband of Katarzyna Fonderflotówna, “Andrzej Pomian Pe˛kalski,” served in 1684, together with uncle by marriage Jan Buchner and Maciej Vonderflot (perhaps a cousin or uncle by marriage), as guardian of the widowed Zuzanna Vonderflotówna. His name was certainly not German, although he too was Lutheran. The Lutheran treasurers frequently shifted from their standard German script to a Polish script when they came to the name “Andreas Pomean Pezarsky,” as if to mark his foreignness. Had he perhaps married into the confession?129 In any event, the patterns we find in the Buchner/Rejter network seem to have been typical for Glass Street and environs. These were mostly middle-tier Lutheran merchants and artisans, even as ties of profession (especially goldsmithery) brought people of other confessions into their midst. Although the inhabitants of Glass Street formed networks with neighbors of other confessions through service as godparents and guardians, the Buchners and the Rejters married almost solely within the Lutheran confession (with one Calvinist exception). Others were not quite so exclusive in their marital choices: we find a few Orthodox goldsmiths who married daughters of local Lutheran goldsmiths and set up shop with their inlaws in their Glass Street houses, without, however, accepting the Augsburg confession. For example, Bazyli Omelianowicz—the name is clearly Ruthenian—married Marianna Sznejderówna, daughter of Lutheran goldsmith Jakub Sznejder. He would work out of, and later inherit, his father-in-law’s Glass Street house. His name never appeared on the Lutheran offertory rolls, and we will find him serving as a guardian of orphans in Orthodox circles.130

The Szwanders of Szerejkiszki Clustered on either side of the little branch of the River Wilenka that separated intramural Wilno in the north from the cathedral, Lower Castle, and Szerejkiszki suburb were two small jurisdictions of petty artisans. Within the city proper, to the south of the river branch, on both

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sides of Castle Street, was the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Wilno Chapter, largely on Skop and Bernardine Streets. This was the neighborhood of mostly modest to poor Catholics that we visited at the beginning of this survey of topographic endogamies. Across the river branch to the north was the jurisdiction of the Wilno horodnictwo. This included the Szerejkiszki and Puszkarnia (Gunsmiths’) suburbs and reached toward Antokol—in other words, all of what was loosely termed the podzamcze (the area beneath the castle). Here we find a mixture of poor artisans, plus the suburban properties (“gardens,” “little manors”) of some of the wealthier Vilnans who owned bricked houses within the walls. Many of the poor artisans seem to have been Lutherans, and some of their occasional neighbors were members of the Glass and Castle Street networks.131 Although heavily Catholic, the chapter jurisdiction was not uniquely so. We find in and around it three Lutheran siblings. The Lutheran widow of organist Hans Ampel (Hampel, Hempel), lived in a bricked house at Skop Street 49.06. She would register her will with the Roman Catholic Chapter Court in 1655, having lived there alone in her widowed state for about thirty years, and ask to be buried “in our Saxon church, in the customary place, in the Christian manner.”132 The fact that the couple was Lutheran played no role in their legal status. They were subjects of the Roman Catholic Chapter, just like their Roman Catholic neighbors: anyone who had a complaint against them would take them to that court, as did, in 1624, a Wilno Jew named Aaron Markiewicz and Calvinist merchant Korneliusz Winhold (it is unclear whether this was senior or junior), both in attempts to collect debts from the Lutheran organist.133 Ampel disappeared from the record at about this time, and his wife never remarried. She seems to have been enough of a figure around town that the local Jesuits worked a reference to her into a versified anti-Lutheran pasquinade from 1641, taunting the heterodox that “you have more difficulty in achieving harmony [in the faith], than Hemplowa a beard” (trudniej wam o zgode˛,/Niz∧li Hemplowej o brode˛).134 Amplowa made contributions to Lutheran finances in her “own name” (“Hannß Hemplerschin/Hemplersche”) in 1640 (12 zł) and 1652 (20 gr),135 and the house was registered in her name (“Amplowa”) in the Lustrations of 1636 and 1639.136 Legal documents filed with the chapter court treated her as the owner of her house: when Jan Kostromski purchased the house at Skop Street 49.05 from the widow of Paweł Kotlik, it was described as lying between those of “Marek the cobbler” and “Mrs. Janowa Amplowa.”137 As we learn in her will of 1655, her name was Anna Rejchowiczówna; in other words she was the daughter of a descendant of someone named Reich. She left her worldly goods to her sister, Katarzyna Rejchowiczówna Gierlicowa. And as we learn from Katarzyna’s own will of 1658 (written in Sielec—probably it was the nearby village of that name south of Wilno and subject to the Lida castle court, where the document was first filed and where she had evidently sought refuge during the Muscovite occupation), her own first husband had been a certain Antoni Szefer, a Wilno Lutheran. Her second husband was a Calvinist, Matiasz Gierlic, and the couple seems to have served as arendators (leaseholders) of nearby Calvinist

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properties, including the home at the “Street leading to the Orthodox Church of St. Iwan” 56.05 that they rented in 1636 and where they also resided. As a lay functionary of the local church, Gierlic was one of those mentioned by name in the royal decree of 1640 removing the Calvinists beyond the walls of Wilno. After Gierlic’s death, however, Katarzyna would return to the rolls of Lutheran giving, and she asked to be buried in the “Saxon cemetery in the city of Wilno, and honorably, according to Christian custom.”138 In her testament Gierlicowa claimed ownership of her deceased sister’s house under the chapter jurisdiction and the house she and Gierlic “had built with their own penny on the Calvinist church square.” And she claimed yet a third bricked house, left by her brother Paweł Rejchowicz, “next to the Royal Mill.” This was the house at “the little street from Castle Street going to the Royal Mill” 50.01. Rejchowicz was a white-leather tanner. I would guess that Paweł was Lutheran like his two sisters, although I have been unable to find his name on the lists of Lutheran giving for 1640 or 1652. Could it be that he was simply not an eager churchgoer (or offering-giver)?139 We do know, however, that his daughter was Lutheran. She was Dorota Pawłówna (i.e., daughter of Paweł), wife of Tomasz Burchacki, and she lived in a wooden house under the jurisdiction of the horodnictwo “by the Bricked Mill of His Royal Majesty as you go to Szerejkiszki”—in other words, somewhere in the suburban neighborhood, just across the little branch of the Wilenka from her father. Her will was recorded in her house on 19 March 1645, “in the presence of burghers and other honorable men of this same jurisdiction, her local neighbors, house owners, namely, in the presence of Andrys Szwander, Jakub Kornor, Tomasz Wójtkowski.” I have been unable to find any information on husband Burchacki or neighbors Kornos and Wójtkowski. They may well have been Catholic. Nor do I find any indication that she made any recorded contributions in her own name to the Lutheran church. And yet, she expected to be buried “in fitting fashion in the Saxon garden [i.e., cemetery].” And she chose as guardians one probable and one certain Lutheran—her father, Paweł Rejchowicz, and Andrys (Andrzej) Szwander.140 With Szwander we come to the focal point of a third Lutheran neighborhood and network. He had served as a witness before. On 25 November 1639, Jerzy Urdowski, the notary of the horodnictwo, was sent to the home of a citizen named Mr. Matys Lipin´ski. There he would find gathered around Lipin´ski’s deathbed “many honorable people, trustworthy local ∧ neighbors, namely Mr. Wojciech Z abin´ski, Mr. Wojciech Wnorowski, Mr. Jakub Orłowski, Mr. Bartosz Jacewicz, Mr. Je˛drzej Juriewicz, Mr. Michał and Mr. Andrzej Szwander, and Mr. Anus Meler.” The last three were Lutheran white-leather tanners. After the Muscovite occupation, the name Szwander, also rendered as Schweiner, Schwener, and Schwander, would continue to appear on Lutheran lists with various first names: Peter, Johen, Chriestof, Hanns. By this time the lists rarely stated the profession of the contributor, although one exception, an entry for “Hanns Schwenner, Weißgerber” from 1667, suggests a continuing family tie with this confession and the profession of tanner.141

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But Matys Lipin´ski, to return to our deathbed scene, was Roman Catholic. Lipin´ski made provisions to disinherit his wife—perhaps she was a convert—should she marry “any Saxon or Evangelical.”142 The will she recorded for her second husband ten years later tells us that she had followed his wishes and married a Catholic, one of the witnesses of her first husband’s will by the name of Bartłomiej (Bartosz) Jacewicz.143 But these two documents, coupled with other scattered sources, tell us we have actually entered a very Lutheran world here—hence Lipin´ski’s deathbed concern that his wife might not marry a Catholic. The last witness at Lipin´ski’s bedside had been the Lutheran chamois tanner Hanus (Anus, Hans) Meler. He owned a house “purchased in common” with his wife Anna Jodkiewiczówna in the Szerejkiszki suburb. On 7 March 1647 Meler went to the horodnictwo to bring the notary to his house in order to record his wife’s last will and testament. She too, in spite of her Slavic-looking family name, was a Lutheran. Perhaps she had joined her husband’s church. In any event, she asked “that my body be surrendered to the earth and buried according to the Augsburg confession, in which I die, in the Saxon cemetery, beyond the Wilia Gate.”144 Anna Jodkiewiczówna, we discover here, was stepmother to the Szwander siblings: Regina Szwandrówna, wife of Jan Krejtner (also a Lutheran); Michał Szwander; Andrzej Szwander; and Barbara Szwandrówna, wife (by now) of Roman Catholic Bartosz Jacewicz.145 In other words, Anna must once have been a wife of a Szwander whose name I have not encountered but who had fathered these four siblings with a previous wife or wives. One might hazard a guess that the elder Szwander was also a Lutheran and a white-leather tanner. Meler’s presence at the deathbed of Catholic Matys Lipin´ski next to Michał and Andrzej Szwander is explained by his relationship to the widow Barbara and her brothers: he was the second husband of their stepmother. A postscript: half a year later, on 7 May 1649, Anna Jodkiewiczówna would record a second testament of her own. In it, in addition to bequests to churches, hospitals, and family, she left 30 zł to a “fishwife by the name of Anna Popielówna.” And in her posthumous inventory, recorded in October of that year, we find that her estate included “six barrels of fish grease [rybia tłustos´´c].” Both details add to our perception of the neighborhood (and its smells), and they may also indicate that Jodkiewiczówna had a hand in the family business: the tanning of chamois leather called for the use of prodigious amounts of cod liver oil. But more important here, the Slavic or Lithuanian name Popiel appeared on Lutheran rolls in the 1670s and 1680s attached to three different individuals—curiously, all of them women.146 Perhaps the neighborhood exerted some sort of attraction toward Lutheranism among its non-German inhabitants? The Catholic Matys Lipin´ski seems to have thought so.

The Dorofiewiczes of Subocz Street Finally, we have snapshots of marriage patterns in two distinct but tangentially interrelated Ruthenian neighborhoods. Subocz Street began below the southeastern corner

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of Market Square and continued eastward toward Subocz Gate. It was overwhelmingly Ruthenian. This was also an area of the highest concentration of baths attached to private houses (twenty-four baths in thirty-three houses). In spite of the fact that members of the Ruthenian elite lived here, this was physically a much more mixed street in 1636 than Castle or German Street. There were seventeen wooden structures and sixteen bricked; only five houses were clearly of at least two stories. On average a dwelling in the neighborhood contained something over three chambers. The first sexagintavirate of the elite merchant’s community of 1602 was, like all other elected bodies in seventeenth-century Wilno, structured by a Greek-Roman parity: thirty members from each side. On the Greek side it included two members of the Dorofie(je)wicz family, Paweł and Bazyli (Wasyli).147 They seem to have been related, perhaps brothers or cousins, as it appears that they belonged to the same generation. Paweł was most likely Orthodox; his wife, Akwilina Stryludzianka, remained a faithful member of that Church until her death in 1651/1652, and her son Prokop was the last Orthodox burgomaster of Wilno before the 1666 royal decree limiting the Greek seats in the magistracy to the Uniates. Bazyli seems to have been Orthodox as well. The two patriarchs owned houses near each other on Subocz Street, Paweł in the middle on the southern side at 79.10, Bazyli on the northwest corner where the street emptied into lower Market Square at 76.01. We know little about the marriage patterns of the Paweł Dorofiewicz branch.148 He had married an Orthodox merchant’s daughter. I have found no record for son Prokop’s wife. A second son, Daniel, took a different sort of vow: during and following the period of the Muscovite occupation, he was the “vicar of the Wilno convent in the monastery of the Reverend Basilian fathers at the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit.”149 Daughter Anna, as we know, married Krzysztof Wiktorzyn Vorbek-Lettow, the Lutheran son of the royal doctor and memoirist—but in an Orthodox wedding ceremony. We have a thicker set of names for the Bazyli Dorofiewicz branch. A dispute over the patriarch’s estate—in particular, over ownership of the house at Subocz Street 76.01—that was brought before the court of the magistracy on 12 March 1667 offers some insight into family connections.150 Bazyli himself had been married to Regina Szycikówna Zaleska. This was a member of the family that Aivas Ragauskas has identified as the only real burgher dynasty in the Wilno ruling elite.151 Regina was apparently of the generation—perhaps the sister—of the patriarch of that family, Orthodox burgomaster Iwan Hawryłowicz Szycik Zaleski, who owned houses up from Bazyli Dorofiewicz in Market Square (4.08 and 4.09, the so-called Lesser and Greater Bourses); he resided, however, much closer to his presumed in-laws, in essence just across Subocz Street from the Dorofiewicz house at Sharp Street 10.14. Bazyli Dorofiewicz and Regina Szycikówna Zaleska had at least six children. In 1667 one heir to the estate, Marta Dorofiewiczówna, together with her husband Kazimierz Kostrowicki, was taken to court by the remaining siblings, their spouses, and other successors to the estate in a dispute over the division of that inheritance. Those other parties were Krystyna Dorofiewiczówna and husband Bazyli Filipowicz; Katarzyna Dorofiewiczówna and husband

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Roman Sobolewski; Anastazja Dorofiewiczówna and husband Krzysztof Ihnatowicz; and Domicella Dorofiewiczówna and husband Roman Kołczanowicz. In addition to Bazyli’s daughters and their spouses (no sons, if he had any, were party to the suit), we find among the plaintiffs Stefan Migura and Stefan Kuszelicz. Migura was the son-in-law of Uniate town councillor Samuel Filipowicz (Subocz Street 79.08). His presence in this litigation is most likely explained by the fact that Filipowicz’s first wife had been Dorota Dorofiewiczówna, yet another daughter of Bazyli Dorofiewicz. Filipowicz had died in 1663. As the husband of Filipowicz’s daughter Anna, born to his first wife Dorota Dorofiewiczówna, Migura was acting as a legal representative of an heiress to the property in question.152 The lack of any sort of church record books for the Ruthenians of Wilno, both Orthodox and Uniate, makes an assessment of their network formation considerably more difficult than among members of the other confessions. Still, juxtaposition of documents like the Dorofiewicz litigation with Filipowicz’s will and a few other sources reveals a web of kinship and residence among the Ruthenian elites every bit as tightly woven and as tied to place as that of the Lutheran and Calvinist elites of upper Castle Street. Among the children of Samuel Filipowicz and Dorota Dorofiewiczówna was a son named Bazyli. This could hardly have been the same man who was married to Krystyna Dorofiewiczówna, but if they were, say, uncle and nephew, the two namesakes would have been related both by blood and by marriage. By the time we reach Filipowicz’s second marriage, such double bonds become clearer. The councillor’s second wife was Regina Kostrowicka, whom he named as guardian of their minor children, together with his grown son Andrzej (from his first marriage) and two of his brothers-in-law, Jan and Daniel Kostrowicki. Two other Kostrowickis witnessed his will: Kazimierz (who would be the object of the litigation a few years later brought by other heirs to the Dorofiewicz estate) and Grzegorz. Another document identifies Kazimierz as a brother to Regina, Jan, and Daniel.153 This meant that Filipowicz and Kazimierz Kostrowicki were brothers-in-law twice over: first because they had both married Dorofiewiczówna sisters and second because Filipowicz had gone on to marry Kostrowicki’s sister. Indirect evidence such as names, coupled with direct evidence in testaments and other sources, tells us that all these people were Ruthenians. It is much more difficult to assign confession—Orthodox or Uniate?—with certainty in every case. All men who aspired to careers in the magistracy were de facto Uniate after 1666. Prokop Dorofiewicz, for example, was—like his parents, his sister, and his brother—first Orthodox but then of necessity Uniate. Samuel Filipowicz was Uniate before the decree of 1666 (he died in 1663); his son-in-law Migura, who went on to become a councillor, must have been Uniate as well.154 Iwan Hawryłowicz Szycik Zaleski was Orthodox, as was, apparently, his son, councillor Zachariasz. But the latter’s sons, Stefan and Samuel, who held office in the magistracy after 1666, would have been Uniate, at least in public life. (Another of Iwan’s sons, Izacy, had converted and become a Bernardine monk.)155

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Such restrictions would not have applied to men—no matter how wealthy—who did not aspire to careers in the magistracy; nor did they apply, of course, to any of the women. There are some reasons to look for Orthodox among the women, even when other relatives were Uniate. Burgomaster Grzegorz Kostrowicki was Uniate, at least in the later part of his career, but his wife Maryna Iwanowiczówna was Orthodox.156 She was the daughter of Orthodox merchant Piotr Iwanowicz, whose other daughter, Eudoksja (perhaps Orthodox like her sister and father), would take as her second husband Uniate burgomaster Samuel Szycik Zaleski, grandson of the Orthodox Iwan Hawryłowicz.157 After the death of Domicella Dorofiewiczówna, Roman Kołczanowicz would marry into the Minkiewicz family, which, as we will see in the next chapter, remained at least partly Orthodox. Kazimierz Kostrowicki himself was apparently Orthodox at least at one point in his life: in August of 1658, during the Muscovite occupation, he deposited some of his belongings for safekeeping with the women’s convent at the local Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit; in fact, by decree of the tsar, all Ruthenians remaining in Wilno during the occupation were required to be Orthodox by early 1658.158 Ties of neighborhood are also clear here. Iwan Szycik Zaleski and Bazyli Dorofiewicz lived essentially across the street from one another at Sharp Street 10.14 and Subocz Street 76.01. The Paweł Dorofiewicz family (succeeded by son Prokop) lived at Subocz Street 79.10. Samuel Filipowicz lived two doors down at Subocz Street 79.08.159 The Minkiewicz family house was at Subocz Street 78.06, and family members owned other properties on the street and in the suburb beyond the Subocz Gate. Jan Kostrowicki owned a house in the little alleyway off Subocz Street (77.02–77.03).160 Grzegorz Kostrowicki had a house on Subocz Street at the end of his life.161

The Kuszeliczes of Horse Street The one complainant in the Dorofiewicz litigation who has not yet been identified was Stefan Kuszelicz. Like Stefan Migura, he was listed alone (not as the husband of a Dorofiewiczówna), so we may be justified in suspecting that his claim to the estate came through speaking for a close relative who was more directly interested in the inheritance but who was no longer alive. Stefan’s mother had been an Ihnatowiczówna, and she had died by 14 October 1667, just a month before the Dorofiewicz litigation.162 One of the Dorofiewicz girls, Anastazja, who was no longer living by the time of the litigation, had been married to a Krzysztof Ihnatowicz, although he seems to have still been alive and should have been the interested party. It remains unclear to me what brought Stefan Kuszelicz into the picture; it may nonetheless have had something to do with his mother’s family. He was in any event Ruthenian—eventually he became a member of the magistracy—and we find his name with some frequency in largely Uniate and Orthodox circles. He was another of the witnesses of Samuel Filipowicz’s will in 1663. But the family’s home neighborhood was in the Ruthenian environs of Horse Street, where we find a similar mix of Ruthenian merchants, magistrates, and church-owned (here,

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Uniate) houses. It was somewhat narrower, and shorter, than Subocz Street. It began, hidden away behind the town hall and ran north-south, between and generally parallel to Sharp Street on the east and Rudniki Street on the west. Those two streets emptied through gates of the same names into suburbs on the high plain. Horse Street dead-ended at the wall that separated it from Horse Market on the other side. Between Horse and Sharp Streets at the end rose Holy Trinity “Mountain,” the small rising atop which sat the formerly Orthodox, now (after 1596) Uniate, Holy Trinity Church with its school, hospital, convent, and monastery. In spite of its narrowness and hiddenness, the neighborhood gives the impression of older settlement than Subocz Street. Of its twenty-seven houses, twenty-three were bricked, fifteen of at least two stories, although the houses were probably narrower, with an average of under 2.5 chambers per dwelling. The neighborhood shared with Subocz Street its Ruthenian preference for baths in private dwellings, although, for reasons mysterious to me, only on the western side of the street, where seven of ten had them (there were none on the other side). The Kuszeliczes (Kuszyło, Kuszela) were Orthodox merchants of some standing in seventeenth-century Wilno, although their participation in the ruling elite was minimal. Abraham Kuszyło had been a member of the first sexagintavirate in 1602. In 1636–1639 he owned a house (with a bath) on the upper-western side of Horse Street near the bottom of Market Square (8.09). Fiedor Kuszyło then owned a house (without bath) on the other side of Horse Street farther down toward the city wall (5.14).163 Abraham may have died—or at least have drawn up a last will and testament—by 1638: a document from that year tells us that Fiedor, together with Uniate burgomaster Bogdan Filipowicz Zakrzewski (who was Abraham’s neighbor at 8.08 Horse Street), served as a guardian to the heirs of “Abram Kuszyło, merchant.”164 A young Stefan Izaak Dziahilewicz, a grandson of Abraham Kuszyło and a future city councillor, would choose Stefan Kuszelicz (son of Fiedor) as his plenipotentiary.165 All of this suggests ties not only of neighborhood between Abraham and Fiedor but also of family. One document provides evidence that the two men were in fact brothers.166 Horse Street was a kind of border neighborhood: it was the last concentration of Ruthenians this far west in the city; they looked east to the Uniate Holy Trinity Church and the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit and to coreligionists in the Subocz Street neighborhood. By the time we reach Rudniki Street, we begin to find some Lutherans, who looked west to their own local place of worship. Stefan would have converted to the Uniate Church from Orthodoxy in order to hold office in the magistracy after 1666. His mother, Eudokia Kuszelina, was definitely Orthodox, as was probably her husband, and we may suspect they raised their children in that confession. On 14 February 1667, Stefan and brother Michał brought Eudokia’s will for entry into the books of the Wilno magistracy.167 In it she left the sum of 1,500 zł to the local Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit “so that for all time a divine liturgy be celebrated for her soul.” Stefan and Michał were accompanied on that occasion by Orthodox merchant Krzysztof Sokołowski, described as a son-in-law of Kuszelina; since his wife was a certain Maryna Konstantynowiczówna, he must have married a daughter from a previous marriage.168

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Brother Michał Kuszelicz seems also to have been Orthodox. Michał’s first wife, Eudoksia Kryłowiczówna, was definitely of that confession. We have an attestation dated 30 January 1673 in which Platon Łukian´ski, “vicar of the Wilno monastery of the Basilian fathers at the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit,” confirmed that Michał Kuszelicz had indeed “had a proper funeral [for his wife] on 22 January 1668 in the aforementioned Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit and had laid her body to rest in the paternal crypt [his or hers?] that is in that same church.”169 This “funeral receipt” is an odd document. I have encountered only one other like it in the Wilno archives, also an attestation that someone had been buried at the Orthodox Holy Spirit Church; both receipts were entered into the books of the Wilno magistracy.170 Such a document would seem to betray a certain defensiveness on the part of the recipient, an attempt to put to rest allegations or suspicions that a proper funeral had not been secured. I am unable to say more precisely what was going on in this instance, although other extant documents suggest that Michał Kuszelicz was not living in complete harmony with the Wilno society into which he had been born. On 8 April 1669, in connection with a “case against Lord Michał Kuszelicz, burgher and merchant of Wilno, concerning the killing of a child while it was still in the womb of his spouse, who was then pregnant,” two officers of the court of the magistracy were sent out to take the testimony of the “midwife [babka] named Halszka Szpakowska, who receives babies for various ladies.” She bore witness that day that when she received the baby of Lady Eudokia Krydowiczówna [sic], the spouse of Lord Michał Kuszelicz, she saw on the little head and side the marks apparently of a blow, and the face and little body of that same baby were half rotted. Which body that same midwife carried to old Lady Kuszelina, the Lady mother of Lord Michał Kuszelewicz. When the mother had seen the baby nearly half rotted, she said these words: “He will answer before the Lord God,” and she asked me, “Do not spread the news to anyone,” and she told me to bury the body in the field in Rossa beyond Sharp Gate.

The officials registered the testimony in written form in the books of the Wilno magistracy four days later on 12 April 1669.171 The controversy seems to have arisen well after the fact. Eudokia Kuszelina was dead by 14 April 1667, when Michał and Stefan Kuszelicz, together with Krzysztof Sokołowski, submitted her will to the magistracy. And Eudoksia Kryłowiczówna was buried on 22 January 1668; perhaps she had died from protracted complications associated with the childbirth. In any event, the magistracy was interested in the case at least two years after the event, in the spring of 1669, and it was only at the end of January 1673 that Michał Kuszelicz obtained the “proof of burial.” Whether this attestation was related to the earlier investigation remains unclear. We do know, however, that by 1669, within a year of Eudoksia Kryłowiczówna’s death, Michał Kuszelicz had remarried. His second wife was a Lutheran named Anna Zaleska.

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She was the sister of the influential Lutheran lawyer and royal secretary Arnolf Zaleski, who signed the loyalty oath in their Königsberg exile in the winter of 1656 together with the other “Germans of Wilno and Grodno.” He, too, would return to Wilno and become one of the leading pillars of Lutheran society. There are some indications that Zaleski, together with doctor of philosophy and medicine Paweł Meller, might have served as leader of the Wilno Germans in Königsberg. They signed the loyalty oath, one after the other, together with the other Germans, but in Latin.172 Both were among the older former students who “rematriculated” at the Albertina in 1656. Anna Zaleska’s first husband had been a Stanisław Knapin´ski, who, together with his wife, children, and one servant boy, signed the loyalty oath along with the other “Poles of Wilno.”173 He seems not to have been a Lutheran, but his wife was, and so were his sons— contrary to the norm in mixed families, where the boys were regularly raised in the confession of the father. In 1681 “Johan Knapin´ski,” and in 1683, 1685, 1687, 1689, and 1691 “Tomaß Knapin´ski” made their contributions to the Wilno Lutheran church.174 These were Anna Zaleska’s children with Knapin´ski. Jan disappeared from the Wilno record after 1681 because he had returned to Königsberg: in her last will and testament of 1683, Anna Zaleska referred to her younger son as a “burgher and merchant of Königsberg.” From the same document we also learn that Zaleska had lost all her possessions acquired with her first husband, since “partly they remained here in Wilno when we fled from the Foe, and partly Prussian soldiers confiscated them in Königsberg.” She praised the attention and care she had received from her second husband, especially during her illness, and she made him, next to her two sons from her first marriage, a greater participant in her estate than Magdeburg law would have required. She asked of him that he see to it that she be buried “fittingly, in the customary place, in the Christian manner, according to the order and the rites of the Wilno church Augustanae confessionis [of the Augsburg confession].”175 Perhaps Michał Kuszelicz finally converted to Lutheranism. In 1667 the rolls of Lutheran offerings registered a gift from “Frau Knapin´ski,” that is, from Anna Zaleska, by now Knapin´ski’s widow, with a contribution of 12 zł. By the next two-year period she appeared as “Kuszelewiczowa” with the more considerable offering of 24 zł, and she continued (now often as “Michel Kuszelicz/Kuszelewitz Haußfrauw”) over the next decade (1671, 1673, 1675, 1677) to make similar contributions. But in 1679 and 1681 it was “Michal Kuszelewicz/ Kußelewitz” to whom the contributions were attributed.176 This ledger clearly identified (and distinguished between) Lutheran wives of non-Lutheran husbands and widows of Lutherans or non-Lutherans. The usage in this instance seems to suggest that by now Michał Kuszelicz had joined the community. Perhaps the period spent in exile in the Prussian capital had helped make the confession more familiar to him: the loyalty oath contained two sets of family signatures—one for Stefan and another for Eudokia Kuszelina and her apparently still minor son Michał.177 But except for this Lutheran deviation, the family’s connections remained in Ruthenian, often Orthodox, circles. An heir to Michał’s uncle Abraham Kuszyło brings together several

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names and places familiar to us by now. The first wife of Orthodox merchant Piotr Tros´nica was Polonia Kuszelanka, Abram Kuszyło’s daughter. The couple’s daughter Anastazja would be described as Stefan Kuszelicz’s “niece.” She would marry into the Ruthenian Salcewicz family, who owned the house (with bath) at Horse Street 8.04, right next door to the one in which her mother had grown up and which, it would seem, her parents would inherit (“the bricked town house of Kuszeła, later of Tros´nica, on Horse Street”).178 The guardians of Tros´nica’s children were Orthodox merchant Krzysztof Sokołowski (Michał and Stefan Kuszelicz’s brother-in-law) and Kazimierz Kostrowicki (one of the heirs by marriage to the Dorofiewicz estate).179 Thus we find here in Horse Street, as in Subocz Street, intricately interwoven pan-Ruthenian (Uniate-Orthodox) networks, as well as occasional ties between the inhabitants of the two streets. In each of the two mostly separate networks (the Kuszeliczes and the Dorofiewiczes) we find one mixed Orthodox-Lutheran marriage.

Mixed Marriages On 5 April 1666, Ruthenian salt merchant Afanas Atroszkiewicz (Otroszkiewicz) had his will drawn up and witnessed (he himself was illiterate), and four days later, by which time he had died, his son-in-law Stefan Borkowski had it entered in the books of the court of the Wilno Bench. It began with the usual topoi concerning human mortality, although here they were couched in somewhat more memorable language than was usually the case: Since in the Heavenly Consistory, on account of the transgression of our first parents, it was established that each man would once die, and this edict was written with a hard diamond and in an indelible hand upon the forehead of each who lives, only this did the inscrutable wisdom of God hide from us, that we cannot know the hour, how, when, and where we are to die, and there is nothing more certain than death, nothing less certain than the hour of death, therefore . . . 

Such prologues were commonplace, always followed by the name of the testator and the specific dispensations of his soul, body, and property. Atroszkiewicz entrusted execution of his will and guardianship of his orphans to his wife and his son-in-law Borkowski.180 His wife soon followed him to the grave. On 18 November of that same year (1666), Katarzyna Otroszkiewiczowa—his name (Atroszkiewicz) but not hers had been registered with an orthography reflecting not standard Polish but the local pronunciation—had her own will drawn up and witnessed (she, too, was illiterate), and on 26 November that same Stefan Borkowski had it entered in the same books. Although there were slight stylistic variations in the prologue, she quite clearly drew on the same notary—the one who liked the eloquence of the indelible edict written with a hard diamond on the foreheads of mankind—when she made ready to lay down her own dispensations.181

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But the paths the two took in death quickly diverged. After commending his soul to his “Lord and Creator,” asking Him to forgive his “grave and innumerable sins,” and to “deign to count [him] among His chosen,” Atroszkiewicz directed that his body be “buried according to the Christian order, as my means allow [według przemoz∧enia], in the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity.” Otroszkiewiczowa similarly commended her soul to her “Lord and Savior,” begging Him not to remember her “grave and innumerable transgressions” and to “deign to count [her] among His chosen.” Her body, however, was to go to its eternal rest across the street from that of her husband: “And my body, as earth, I render unto our mother earth, [asking] that it be buried, according to the Christian order, as my poor substance allows [z ubogiej substancyjej mojej], in the [Orthodox] Church of the Holy Spirit.” The extant sources allow no meaningful quantification of the phenomenon of mixed marriages in seventeenth-century Wilno, and perhaps that is not ultimately the point. Anecdotal evidence such as that of the two wills cited above suggests that such unions occurred in some number and that they were treated as normal before the law, perhaps also in the eyes of some portion of Wilno society. Moreover, although there were certainly combinations that were more likely, all types of unions were represented. The Calvinist Agenda of 1637, which was to be a binding handbook for the Reformed clergy of both the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, provided guidance for dealing with what authorities clearly saw as an evil that could not be simply banned or ignored. Even the extreme case of marriage with those who did not believe in the Trinity had to be taken into consideration. True, the wording (“unfaithful,” niewierni, i.e., “infidel”) would have fit Jews or Tatars equally well, but there were harsh penalties for marrying a nonChristian infidel. I assume this point referred primarily to Antitrinitarian Christians, the members of the so-called Minor Church of Poland-Lithuania: “If it should become necessary (God forbid!) to marry those who do not confess the One God in the Holy Trinity, the servant of God [i.e., Calvinist minister] is not to compel such ones in their oath to confess the Holy Trinity, lest the name of the Lord be blasphemed by the unfaithful for such a reason.”182 This was an extreme case, although one that Calvinist authorities felt the need to address. Clearly the concern was to avoid dissimulation on the part of the nonbelieving spouse. In other cases of mixed marriages, the Agenda continued, “frequent experience attests” that some husbands, “especially of the Roman [religion],” persecute their spouses. The “servant of God” was to prevent this by administering the following oath during the marriage ceremony: “Since, bridegroom, you are of a different rite [róz∧nego naboz∧en´stwa], I ask you before the Lord God and before this holy congregation, whether you promise and vow that you will not, regarding religion, work any irritation, force, or persecution upon this person who is entering into the estate of holy matrimony with you, on account of her faith and rite.”183 For clergy of all confessions (and religions) the obvious threat lurking behind mixed marriages was the loss of members of the community and their eventual children through the conversions of the spouse and the education of offspring in the new faith. The rate of marriage across lines of faith in Wilno is impossible to quantify, but given the apparent

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frequency of Lutheran-Calvinist and Orthodox-Uniate marriages, it would seem to be greater, for instance, than the less than 1 percent that has been established between the parity confessions of late eighteenth-century Augsburg (i.e., Roman Catholics and Lutherans), where the taboo against mixed marriage was one of the main determinants of the “invisible border” throughout the early modern period.184 Clergy—and often parents—may have had misgivings about mixed marriages, but they were a fact of life, sometimes a strategy in network building that weighed competing risks and benefits. Promises such as those suggested for the vows in the Agenda cited above could also be written into individual marriage contracts. In 1636, nobleman Jan Alfons Lacki owned two houses in Wilno’s “noble ghetto.” The first at St. John Street 31.07 was his own, and the second at Troki Street 37.09 he had inherited from his wife. He was an ardent Roman Catholic who would rise from starosta of Dyneburg to chamberlain of Wilno (1618–1630), castellan of Min´sk (1630) and of Samogitia (1634), and finally starosta of Samogitia (1643). Before he married Joanna Talwoszówna, daughter of Calvinist nobleman Adam Talwosz (starosta of Dyneburg and Radun, castellan of Samogitia, and a frequent lay director of the synods of the Wilno district of the Church185) and Marianna Fra˛c kiewiczówna Radzimin´ska, he signed a contract dated 10 May 1612. In it he vowed “not to draw [his future wife] away, not to dissuade, not to impede [her]” in the practice of her “Evangelical religion and faith.”186 (It is quite another matter that she would eventually convert to Roman Catholicism and raise her children in that faith.)187 We have few such written contracts. Still, each mixed marriage must have been accompanied by formal and informal negotiations of this sort. Two constellations stand out in what we have seen among the topographic endogamies sketched above: the Lutheran-Calvinist alliances of Castle Street and the Orthodox-Uniate unions of Subocz and Horse Streets. The first one makes a kind of socioeconomic sense. The Calvinist Church in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was composed largely of nobles. The elite Lutherans of Castle Street were on their way to entering that estate. Lutheran and Calvinist merchant and magistrate sons and daughters could easily contemplate alliances that allowed them both avoidance of conversion to Roman Catholicism and entry into the Lithuanian szlachta, with hopes for holding regularly bestowed offices. The cases I have found suggest that these people remained loyal to their confession of birth but also that they occasionally participated in the life of their spouses’ Churches. Clergy seem to have taken all this in stride. The extant marriage record for the Jesuits’ Church of St. Kazimierz—it deals mostly with German Catholics—notes the marriage on 20 November 1677 of Roman Catholic Thomas Bader with Lutheran Anna Fichbathin in the presence of a single witness, a Lutheran by the name of Christophorus Schwenert. All seem to have been Germans. The record was silent about the confessions of the participants. I have supplied this from other sources.188 Marriages between Orthodox and Uniate Vilnans seem somewhat more surprising if we look at the matter from the point of view of the prelates and the polemical pamphleteers. This was, after all, the most recent division (1596), and it had happened within one “family,”

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the “Ruthenian nation” (naród ruski) and the “Ruthenian faith” (wiara ruska). But while the hierarchs and the polemicists were insisting that only one confession, either the Orthodox or the Uniate, was the true representative of, and heir to, Ruthenian faith, rights, liberties, and privileges, many Vilnans seem to have felt comfortable with membership in communities formed by social and neighborhood networks that were pan-Ruthenian and set in opposition to the Romans, including the Roman Catholics, with whom, after all, the Uniates were supposed to be in communion. One pattern here would seem to be that of the wife who remained Orthodox while her husband was a member of the Uniate Church. This might suggest a public/male version of Ruthenianness in Wilno (the Uniate Church) and a private/female version (the Orthodox Church), an especially likely scenario after 1666, when access to magisterial office was blocked to Orthodox Ruthenians. In addition to the Otroszkiewiczes, we have seen the marriage of Orthodox merchant’s daughter Maryna Iwanowiczówna (d. after 23 December 1668) and Uniate (at least in the latter part of his life) burgomaster Grzegorz Kostrowicki (d. after 13 May 1685).189 We may assume that Orthodox merchant Piotr Iwanowicz had raised both his daughters in that Church. Maryna’s sister Eudoksja would also marry a Uniate member of the ruling elite—Samuel Szycik Zaleski.190 Unfortunately, the sources do not indicate whether she, like her sister, remained Orthodox until her death. In both these neighborhoods and networks—the Lutherans and Calvinists of Castle Street and the Orthodox and Uniates of Subocz and Horse Streets—we are dealing with elites: wealthy merchants and magistrates, some of whom (at least among the Protestants) were allied with, or making their entry into, the szlachta. Was this sort of confessional border crossing characteristic of the elites only? Caution is necessary here: we have the most information about the elites, so this may be why we see this phenomenon here. Still, the family trees I was able to sketch for the middle-level Buchners and Rejters suggest less of this sort of openness below the upper reaches of burgher society, at least among the Lutherans: the Buchners and their kin may have made regular appearances at the baptismal fonts of the local Roman Catholic and Calvinist churches, but their marital strategies seem to have admitted only the one Calvinist cousin and to have focused on the formation of strictly Lutheran family alliances. The record for the modest to poor neighborhoods of the horodnictwo and the Roman Catholic Chapter is relatively thick and also suggests less crossing of confessional boundaries in the formation of matrimonial alliances: Lutheran in the former, Roman Catholic in the latter. And yet Barbara Szwandrówna, with her two Roman Catholic husbands, may not have converted to their Church; in any event, her first husband felt the need to threaten her with disinheritance should she marry a Saxon or an Evangelical, and yet her second husband named only Lutheran guardians for her. My impression is that most neighborhoods, of whatever estate and wealth, admitted not only inhabitants of another confession but also occasional kinship alliances with them. This does not mean that religion was a matter of indifference. Atroszkiewicz and Otroszkiewiczowa might have shared a marriage bed, but they insisted on resting eternally in the

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hallowed grounds of the archrivals across the street from each other beneath Sharp Gate. Both had been married before. The question was not addressed in the wills, where it was common to do so, but it is entirely possible that one or both were in fact asking to be buried with a previous spouse. Here, again, we see the coupling of indifference and its opposite: this couple was willing to cross confessional boundaries in marriage but not at death. Moreover, even if the extant sources suggest a certain normalcy and easiness to LutheranCalvinist and Orthodox-Uniate marriages to the point where we might almost treat such unions as confessionally endogamous, all the other combinations were nonetheless present, including the more surprising Lutheran-Orthodox (Vorbek-Lettow and Dorofiewiczówna; Kuszelicz and Zaleska) and Uniate-Calvinist (Lebiedzicz and Baranowiczówna) unions. All of this adds to a growing picture of neighborhood and network formation largely along confessional lines but with considerable crossing of those lines possible.

Absolute Taboos, and Some Final Thoughts One constellation that could not normally be formed without either conversion or criminal scandal was between Christians and non-Christians. Anti-Jewish and anti-Tatar tracts raised the specter of Christian-infidel marriage and also of conversion to Judaism and Islam. Bartłomiej Groicki’s 1559 treatment of Magdeburg law in Polish allowed no doubt about the matter: “There can be no marriage between a Jew and a Christian. And if they should be joined in matrimony, they are not to be considered as other than those who live in adultery.”191 In spite of some antisemitic literature that sounded the alarm over alleged Christian conversions to Judaism, the fact remains that, for all practical purposes, conversion across this divide was in the direction of Christianity.192 What remains unclear is how often Jews actually did convert. Marriages of Christians and Muslims raised similar concerns, even if the road to acculturation in Christian society seems to have been much easier for Lithuanian Tatars than for Jews. A famous anti-Tatar pamphlet first published in Wilno in 1617 warned against TatarChristian cohabitation: not only did the Tatars themselves work on Sundays and holy days and force their Christian servants to do so as well, but they also converted their Christian wives, children, and wet nurses to Islam.193 Let us consider one marriage across the bounds of religion as an example of what was at stake. On 1 July 1670, a Christian citizen of the royal city of Nowogródek (Belarusan, Nau˘haradok) named Heliasz Jewczyc registered a complaint with the local castle court that was subsequently refiled with the Wilno magistracy.194 His protestation was against three men who turn out to be his brothers-in-law: “infidel Jews, and murderers truly never satiated with Christian blood and themselves the chief principals of the deed named below, who live in the Wilno city of His Royal Majesty—Józef, Hirsza [sic], and Nochym Izraelewicz by name—the brothers of the deceased wife.” The charge was murder: that “the wife of the said

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Heliasz Jewczyc, Katarzyna Izraelewiczówna Heliaszowa Jewczycowa [“Catherine, daughter of Izraelewicz, wife of Heliasz Jewczyc”] by name, was done away with through shameful and unheard-of murder by those traitor Jews.” The story unfolded this way. Katarzyna—this was no doubt her baptismal name—was born of Wilno Jews Samuel Izraelewicz and wife. Having become aware that she was in manifest error and unbelief, having been baptized and having received the holy Catholic faith, having entered into the estate of matrimony with the plaintiff, Heliasz Jewczyc, living with him for some ten years in the true Christian faith, having given birth to several children, they remained in holy matrimonial concord until those traitors, infidel Jews, both the parents of that Jewczycowa as well as the accused brothers and various friends, found out various methods how they, through various Jews, in any place, having stolen her away silently, secretly, treacherously, on account of the fact that she had abandoned their foul Jewish faith and had become a Christian woman, might wreak vengeance upon her. Thus, you see, all these Jewish traitors who live in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had their particular councils and committees, and they sought diligently throughout all those years to find a way secretly to catch that Jewczycowa by any means possible for torture and murder.

They found the appropriate moment when, on 19 June 1670, Katarzyna Jewczycowa set off for Kleck in the Nowogródek palatinate to buy some articles of necessity at the fair that began after the tenth Friday following Easter according to the old calendar.195 Jewczycowa took with her more than 400 red zł and some of her “accessories,” valued at 600 Polish gr (i.e., 20 zł). She was traveling in a one-horse cart with a servant named Siemion in the direction of Nies´wiez∧ when they encountered some bad weather and the horse became tired. The servant went back to Nowogródek with the horse, and Jewczycowa herself hired a Nies´wiez∧ burgher named Iwan Mazurek to drive her to Kleck, where she arrived on 22 June, taking a room with a local burgher named Tomasz Horkun. As Jewczycowa was buying goods in the market, a Jew named Hoszko Ceperski noticed that she was carrying a number of red złotys with her, whereupon “he invited her to his house in the city of Kleck, promising to exchange the red złotys for shillings, promising to give generously for each red złoty without any detriment to her.” Not expecting anything untoward, “especially since it was fair time, and many people of various conditions were present,” she moved, together with her money and her belongings, from her room with Horkun to take up residence with Ceperski. And that Jew, Hoszko Ceperski, gave her room and lodgings in his house, in the room where malt is dried. And she, feeling safe in her lodgings, not expecting any danger to herself, confidently remained in those quarters. But interim [in the meanwhile], the accused Jews, Józef, Hirsza, and Nochym Izraelewicz, the brothers of the wife of the

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plaintiff, took lodgings in the very same house of the Jew, Hoszko Ceperski. And having attacked at night, in treacherous fashion, the lodgings of the deceased wife of the plaintiff in that city of Kleck, having a conspiracy [namowa] with all the Jews of the city of Kleck, having taken that Jewczycowa from her bed at night by force, and having brought her secretly by day and by night to the city of Wilno, they tyrannically tortured unto death the poor Christian woman, wife of Jewczyc, in their secret dungeons that are in the cellars in the earth under their houses. And thereafter, working unto the disdain of the holy Christian religion, they made mockery of this act of murder in many places, saying that we punished that wife of Jewczyc, the apostate from our law, as ever we saw fit. Namely, they said, that, having cast her into a deep well, they cast great rocks upon her and stoned her, promising to do just the same to each one who should dare to have himself baptized from the Jewish faith into the Christian faith.

As usual with this forensic genre, the reader is left with the impression that some of the real issues have been blurred and perhaps on purpose. What was the role of money and property in the story, which are integral to the complaint and come up at every plot turn? Do we believe the assertion that the couple lived in “matrimonial concord,” which would seem necessary to mention only if someone had asserted otherwise? Was it a normal move for a Jewish convert to Christianity—especially a woman traveling alone—to take lodgings in a Jewish house? To modern readers, though, the story appears as a gothic tale of fears and horrors. From the Christian side were the fears that “all the Jewish traitors”—not only of the city of Kleck but of the entire Grand Duchy of Lithuania—could conspire to locate one woman and help place her murderous brothers in the room next to her; that the houses of the Jewish quarter of Wilno were riddled with private dungeons, cellars, and wells in which apostates could be stoned (or perhaps just random Christian victims incarcerated and converted or killed); that the Jews were mocking the Christians and threatening to do the same to all converts.196 And although the narrator did not try to see anything from the Jewish side, one Jewish fear stands out clearly: the fear of losing members of the community to conversion. In other words, this was a story about the fear of treason from both sides of a great divide. The Third Lithuanian Statute of 1588 (XII, art. 7) decreed that “should a Jew or a Jewess join the Christian faith, such a person and his or her offspring shall be recognized as nobles.”197 Although this provision remained law until 1764, it seems to have been implemented extremely rarely, if ever. When Jews did convert, it was only through a radical break with the Jewish community. Jakub Goldberg has provided a fascinating historicalsociological survey of Jewish converts in old Poland-Lithuania, tracing the many trajectories that such people might take: into the peasantry, the bourgeoisie, the nobility, the clergy.198 Although we can find examples of conversion to the several confessions, it is clear that Jewish converts, too, were drawn in greater numbers to the majority religion, which was Roman Catholicism.

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Katarzyna Jewczycowa converted to Catholicism. (The term “catholic” might be used in other contexts more closely connected to confessional polemics by adherents of any of the Christian confessions in attempts to claim universality for their Churches, but here it referred to Roman Catholicism.) Her husband was a burgher, but, judging by the family’s lifestyle, he would seem to have been in the upper realm of that estate, where many aspired to affect the szlachta lifestyle. He was in the employ of a member of the gentry and petty functionary of the Nowogródek palatinate named Teodor Kiersnowski (who entered a similar complaint with the castle court in Jewczyc’s name199), and his wife may have been on some estate-related business when she went to market in Kleck. The two had been living in Kiersnowski’s Nowogródek manor for some time. Goldberg’s survey tells of several cases in which relatives and community members sought to prevent conversion or to reconvert the apostate by force.200 This particular case is remarkable for its apparent extremity and also for the palpable sense of fear on the part of the Christian complainant vis-á-vis the Jewish presence around him. But for modern readers, probably some of the more remarkable things about the story are those left entirely unaddressed. Above all, How did it happen? This was not an anonymous poor Jew who converted with the help of various Christian poor relief programs (discussed in chapter 13). Jewczyc knew the names of all his nearest Jewish in-laws, and his wife was identified by a patronymic taken from her father’s Jewish family-name/patronymic.201 Had there been a courtship? Or was the marriage arranged? How? Why? Where did they meet? Were they accepted in the world of the small-town burgher elite and the minor rural gentry, which seems to have been Jewczyc’s estate and environment? When non-Christians married Christians, they most likely accepted their spouses’ confession. I am able to document some conversions of Jews and Tatars in Wilno to Calvinism.202 Perhaps adoption of the other confessions—less well documented for these sorts of things—was not entirely unheard of in Wilno. Even the more easily and frequently contracted mixed marriages of Vilnans from the various Christian confessions must have necessitated some delicate negotiations. The cases of Krzysztyof Wiktorzyn Vorbek-Lettow (a Lutheran with an Orthodox wife) and Henryk Mones (a Calvinist with a Lutheran wife) suggest that the old rules applied: the groom fetched his bride from her parish, which in the case of mixed marriages meant that he took part in a wedding ceremony outside his own confession. One odd case raises the question of repeated vows in the presence of the clergy of first one and then the other confession. An entry for 22 November 1672 in the Catholic register of marriages records the nuptials of Jan Sadowski and Zuzanna Klineberkówna.203 The wedding took place “in a private dwelling [in aedibus privatis].” The couple was married by Aleksander Poniatowski, “parish priest [that is, of the Church of St. John] and deacon of Wilno [parochus et decanus Vilnensis],” a cleric who presided over many church weddings and baptisms in those years. Not only did the venerable Catholic man of the Church go to a private dwelling to administer the Catholic sacrament; he also recorded the presence of four

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witnesses, all men—all of them Lutheran! What is more, he did this without any comment about their confession, about which he must have known: at least two of them—Paweł Meler and Arnolf Zaleski—were prominent figures.204 This was no doubt a mixed marriage in which the wife was Lutheran and the husband Catholic.205 In mixed marriages, the wedding usually took place in the bride’s church. Was this couple married twice? Was that why the Catholic ceremony was performed in a private dwelling? If it became a troubled marriage, would Lutheran attitudes toward separation and divorce have played some role in addressing the problem?

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octrine on the nature of marriage had direct implications for official positions on separation and divorce in the various confessional communities. According to Roman Catholic teaching, divorce was an impossibility; a marriage was dissolved only with the death of one of the spouses. Otherwise, it could only be declared invalid and thus annulled (because it had never legally happened) and even then only for a short list of “diriment [i.e., nullifying, invalidating] impediments.” These included insufficient age, impotency, an already existing marriage, abduction, marriage within prohibited degrees of consanguinity or affinity, and disparity of religion. For the Protestants, divorce was a theoretical possibility, although the permissible reasons were limited: for Luther and Calvin, only adultery and, with various qualifications, desertion. Neither Reformer allowed divorce on grounds of spousal incompatibility or cruelty. The Genevan case studies recounted by Robert Kingdon show how reluctant the early Reformers (with the exception of Martin Bucer) were to dissolve a marriage.1 For the Orthodox, marriage was a sacred union, blessed by the Church and in principle indissoluble. Nonetheless, when problems arose between couples, Orthodox marriages were governed by secular courts, which did ultimately accommodate the concept of divorce and developed over time a wide range of more or less restrictive reasons to grant it. In Rus´ by the sixteenth century some lists of grounds reached more than twenty and included adultery, leprosy, desertion (even if involuntary), and various sorts of spousal cruelty and incompatibility.2 Further, in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Ruthenians had long seen marriage as a civil matter between two individuals, and they continued to do so well after the Age of Reform; thus as late as the seventeenth century couples had relatively easy access to divorce without ecclesiastical help.3 In what follows, I look first at complaints of spousal cruelty, infidelity, and abandonment with an eye to what caused problems and how Wilno communities sought to resolve domestic strife. Then I turn to four case studies involving separation, divorce, and charges of bigamy in an effort to uncover what role Wilno’s confessional landscape might have played in creating practical expectations about such issues among those who lived in communities where neighbors (and spouses!) may have been subject to conflicting norms.

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Marital Complaints The many protestations registered with the courts of Wilno were largely concerned with harm to property, health, and honor, among which the latter was certainly not the least concern. Some complaints appear to have involved complete strangers seemingly brought together by chance, although in several of these cases a reading of other documents reveals what the protestation, apparently purposefully, obscured: that there were close links between the plaintiff and the defendant. In other cases the relationship is made clear: it was two members of some smaller society—two feuding guilds or members of the same guild or, more frequently, inhabitants of one house—who had come into conflict in the course of work and daily life. In several cases the parties to the litigation were in fact family members, even husband and wife. In most instances, we do not get beyond the first act of the drama. In the section that follows, I examine three stories of couples in conflict. In one of them the spouses seem to have reconciled; I know nothing about the fates of the others. These stories give a sense of what spouses in seventeenth-century Wilno deemed worthy of complaining about in their partners’ behavior before a court of law and how they formulated such complaints. They also make clear what common sense would suggest to any observer of these dramas: that confession was not the only thing and not even the first thing spouses could feud about. In fact, confession plays no overt role in any of the protestations I have seen brought before any of the jurisdictions by one spouse against the other. What is more, there is no direct evidence that any of these three troubled marriages was confessionally mixed.

“If, in the First Place, the Lord Most High . . .” In the later seventeenth century, a furrier named Bazyli Zawiski lived in the Wilno suburb located just beyond Troki Gate. On 21 December 1676 he came before the magistracy with a complaint “against the honorable Lord Matyjasz, butcher, and Lady Agata [actually, as we know from another text, it was really Jagnieszka] Safinowska Ginelewiczowa, spouses and Wilno burghers, as well as against Lady Agata [correct this time] Ginelewiczówna, their daughter and his spouse.”4 On 21 December 1676, the plaintiff’s wife and parents-in-law, together with their accomplices, had allegedly attacked his domicile (presumably also the domicile of the accused wife), “beating, and breaking, and cutting out the windows” (the latter a commonplace of the genre). Zawiski produced before the court a half-saber as proof of his claim. But the story did not end here, for, as we read in the continuation of the furrier’s accusation, not contenting themselves with even this, and wishing only to wipe him off the face of this earth, their aforementioned daughter, Agata Ginelewiczówna, served her spouse and

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the current plaintiff poison on two occasions, once in his vodka, the second time in his bigos [hunters’ cabbage stew]. And if, in the first place, the Lord Most High, and if Lord Ubryk, the apothecary, had not offered succor, he would certainly have departed this world, together with his children.

The protestation ends with a short and general inventory of property, clearly in preparation for conducting extended litigation with a murderous wife and the accomplice parents-inlaw. The choice of vodka and bigos as the instruments of poisoning proved premeditation and intent beyond a shadow of a doubt. In this particular drama we get what is almost always missing: a glimpse of the final act. I have no idea what happened before the intermission, but by curtain fall the parties had been reconciled. On 16 September 1689—thirteen years after his original complaint—the same maltreated husband was drawing up his last will and testament.5 As he was now “approaching the end of [his] life .  .  . and no longer having any hope of returning to [his] former health,” he found it was time to make a will so that there be no disputes among his eventual heirs. He had two of them. The first was a son, also named Bazyli, although this was the monastic name he had chosen when he took holy orders with the neighboring Franciscans at the Church on the Sands. This was a son from a previous marriage, presumably one of the survivors of the bigos-poisoning episode. The name Bazyli suggests Ruthenian origins, and the father’s trade—that of a furrier—was heavily Ruthenian in those days.6 But the father would ask to be buried with the Dominicans, at the Holy Spirit Church a bit farther away, and the son—even though he had chosen his father’s Ruthenian given name as his monastic name— was a Franciscan monk. Perhaps there were recent converts to Catholicism in the family, and residual ties to Ruthenian culture revealed themselves in the choice of professions and names. But we should recall that Catholic Vilnans sometimes chose Ruthenian names for their children. Anastazja, for one, was popular among Catholic parents. Bazyli was a much less common name for Polish-Lithuanian Catholics; in fact, I have not encountered it in my reading of baptismal records. Its acceptance here as a Roman Catholic monastic name may have had something to do with the meeting of Eastern- and Western-rite Christians in Wilno streets. Zawiski’s other heir was his second wife, Agata Ginelewiczówna, the same who had served him and his children poisoned vodka and bigos thirteen years earlier. He left her virtually everything, “since,” he wrote, “I have experienced the great diligence, keenness, and effort of my current wife for earning bread and the means that I have, by God’s grace.” Zawiski removed his son Bazyli from any claim upon his wife’s portion, but he obliged her to provide her stepson with certain minimal things, such as his monk’s habit on an annual basis for five years following the testator’s death. True, Zawiski wrote of “the great diligence, keenness, and effort .  .  . for earning bread,” where another might have mentioned his spouse’s “care and loving-kindness,” but still, things seem to have sorted themselves out for the most part. Perhaps the original discord had arisen in part from the fact that he had

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brought children from a previous marriage into the household; perhaps there were some disputes over the property Zawiski inventoried in his protestation. In any event, the story shows that marital reconciliation was possible, that the public forum of the civil courts might play some role in maintaining domestic tranquility, and—above all—that we should be careful not to infer from the violence described in the many protestations, which is usually all that remains from what was no doubt an ongoing story, that violence was rampant in Wilno society: public registration of complaints about violence was one of the mechanisms whereby peace, including marital peace, was fostered.

“I Will Shoot Her in the Head with a Pistol” In 1636 a Lutheran swordsmith named Melchior Ilis (Iglis) owned the house at Glass Street 21.03. Like many Vilnans—and not only German Lutherans—Ilis and family would seek refuge in Königsberg when Muscovite armies occupied their city in August of 1655.7 And like many of the exiles, they would return when the city was liberated in 1661. By the summer of 1663, the head of the household had died, leaving his estate, which now included at least two houses in the neighborhood, to his widow Katarzyna Szmitówna and their three daughters.8 Over the next twenty years mother and daughters would take each other to court with great frequency alleging fraud against the estate.9 One part of that litigation was the complaint that by 1665, two years after Iglis’s death, Szmitówna had remarried—“a young man, hurriedly and injudiciously,” according to a protestation brought by daughter Marianna as late as 9 May 1679.10 The daughter was apparently worried that her stepfather or his heirs would attempt to take over her portion of her father’s estate. This “young man” was Hans Pecelt the younger, who, like his father, Hans Pecelt the elder, was a Lutheran locksmith from the Glass Street neighborhood. The younger Pecelt seems to have had a quick temper. In August 1665, two Jews of Wilno, who were holding the lease of “his” (probably it was Szmitówna’s) house on Glass Street, came before the court of the bench to charge their landlord with violence and theft.11 He himself had “beaten and slapped” his lessee Łazarz Michałowicz and, “taking the bedclothes violently from the bed, he threw a little child of three years upon the ground, . . . which is why it fell into a severe illness, because it was terrified.” Further, part of his entourage had come to the Jews’ dwelling and “made a great ruckus and broken out the windows.” Four years later, on 25 May 1669, Pecelt would be the object of a protestation brought by barber-surgeon Andrzej Hoffman and Jan Stefanowicz.12 The former was Szmitówna’s brother-in-law, the latter her son-in-law, the husband of the same Marianna Ilisówna who would later litigate so long and eagerly with her mother. Both men were Lutheran, as was the rest of the family. (The husband of the other daughter, Anna, was Zachariasz Hubryk, a Lutheran merchant and a Dreißigman in the local church.)13 They brought the complaint against Pecelt on behalf of Szmitówna. Like other objects of protestations, Pecelt had “forgotten the fear of God and the severity of common law.” But more specific to this case were matters of

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matrimonial vows and issues associated with becoming the de facto head of a rather wealthy widow’s household: Not recalling his vow, by which he was to demonstrate all respect and spousal love to his spouse, especially since he had experienced great acts of good will and was living in her own house, immediately upon entering into the state of matrimony he began to revile and to beat her at various times, as last year, without giving any cause, having no regard for the fact that she was pregnant, he beat and tormented her so cruelly that she was covered with blood, and on account of that beating and tormenting, she had to lie constantly in her bed, not rising for six weeks. And if I, the plaintiff, as her son-in-law, had not come to the rescue of my Lady mother, certainly the aforementioned Lord Pecelt would have tormented her to death. As indeed, after the event, boasting of his evil deed, he himself said in these words: “If you, Your Grace, Lord Stefanowicz, had not come to the rescue of my wife and your mother, she certainly would no longer be alive.”

The plaintiffs in the case included in their brief an explanation of why they were bringing what was in some sense a private, domestic matter before the magistracy, which they clearly saw as a sort of last resort. It was because the accused, being admonished frequently about the beating and frequent tormenting of his wife by various people and friends, and even by the preacher of our religion himself, not only did not cease, but, having conceived an even worse intent after this frequent and cruel beating, began so to attack the health of his spouse and my Lady mother-in-law, that he wished to bring about her death.

The violence grew in the wake of the failed attempts at mediation and counseling, first by circles of friends (no doubt also Lutheran in this case) and then by Lutheran clergy: On Friday last, that is on the 24th day of May, in the evening, having returned drunk from somewhere, without giving any reason, he beat, tormented her with a piece of wood, from which beating her whole body is bruised and covered with blood, such that she is not in control of herself; rather, remaining in great danger to her health, she lies even now in bed. Seeking then to prevent further danger and wishing to halt such an excess of Lord Pecelt, her spouse, who has set his sights entirely upon her health—for during [her] frequent beating and tormenting, abusing and defaming, he spoke these words: “I will shoot her in the head with a pistol, and I myself, having taken the horse, will ride away from here,” [the plaintiffs decided to go to court].

Hoffman and Stefanowicz now asked that their protestation be entered into the acts—the first step in any further litigation and often seen as a deterrent to further aberrant behavior

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on the part of the accused—and that a conspectio, an official in situ survey of damages, be conducted and entered into the acts. The deputies sent by the magistracy to Szmitówna’s bedside reported that they had indeed found the former Lady Ilis and current Lady Pecelt lying “sick, beaten, in bed,” and that they were able to attest to the following wounds: “both arms beaten black and blue, also her back beaten black and blue, blood flowing in places, black and blue under the left eye, . . . which beating and wounds, the current ones and the previous ones, she claimed had happened to her at the hands of her current spouse, Lord Jan Pecelt.” This testimony was recorded according to the expectations of the genre. The conspectio was typically appended to protestations, written by a different hand, either at the bottom or in the margin at ninety degrees to the main text or using both spaces, and entered by the sworn servants of the court dispatched to the victim’s house and/or to the scene of the crime. As is usually the case, this is where the extant litigation breaks off. What interests me most in this protestation is the prehistory, the account of the measures taken before the plaintiffs decided to come before the magistracy. They had, in fact, attempted to resolve the matter by appealing within the Lutheran community—to “various people and friends, and even the preacher of our religion himself.” It was only when it became clear that Pecelt would not be ruled by his co-confessionals that Szmitówna’s in-laws resorted to the supraconfessional forum of the magistracy. It is worth noting that one of the plaintiffs would be involved in another dispute over domestic violence later on. Andrzej Hoffman’s own son-in-law Jerzy Gross would include similar details concerning social disciplining in his own protestation in defense of his father-in-law’s honor. As in the case of strife between Pecelt and Szmitówna, Gross came to the court of the bench only when private measures proved ineffective in controlling the behavior of one of Hoffman’s renters, a widow by the name of Dorota Zebertowska, wife of Hrehor Tomkowid: “Guarding the honor of his father’s house, that such deviations not occur in their dwelling, he asked various friends, especially noble Mrs. Rychter, wife of a burgomaster of Wilno and sister of the accused, as well as the renowned Mr. Jakub Leszczewicz, burgher and merchant of Wilno as her curator [women could not be independent legal actors], that they might deign confidenter [confidentially] to rebuke her for her evil and dissolute life.” There may have been some sexual elements in the background of this story: “Having forgotten the honor of the widow’s state, she had begun to lead a dissolute life.” And she showed her displeasure at being censured in such a fashion by her landlord’s sonin-law by baring—“si licet cum venia dicere [if one may be given leave to say so]”—her rear in a show of disrespect for him. The Hoffman/Majer house at Castle Street 2.05 may have been Lutheran, but the troublesome neighbor was apparently Catholic, and it was her Catholic friends that the Lutheran plaintiff first approached in an attempt to modify her behavior. Katarzyna Szmitówna would outlive her violent second husband by a number of years and go on to litigate with her daughters by her first husband over his estate. Pecelt the younger did not, however, take the horse and shake the dust of Wilno from his feet in 1669.

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He disappeared from the record only around 1677, but all indications are that he remained in the city, where he may well have died some normal Wilno burgher death. We do not know anything more about the married life of Szmitówna and Pecelt, but it is entirely possible that they continued to live together, more or less peacefully, for the eight years or so from the date of the protestation until his apparent death around 1677. In any event, both he and his father continued to appear in the rolls of Lutheran offering givers during that entire period, making their solidly middle-level contributions. After 1677 only Pecelt the elder appeared on the lists; hence my guess that the son had died by that time.14 In this period, Pecelt Jr. served at least twice as a Dreißigman in the Lutheran church. We find his name in 1672 and 1675 (the first time with his father’s, both times with the name of Zachariasz Hubryk, his stepdaughter’s husband), well after the events in question, which would seem to indicate that he had gained (or regained?) a certain amount of respect and authority among his confessional peers.15 This suggests a society in which a fall from grace could be precipitous, but in which a rehabilitation and full return to community—even after alleged drastic behavior—was entirely within the realm of the possible, even of the normal. Whether he was returned to community with his wife remains an open question, but it is not an impossibility. After all, furrier Zawiski, once served poison in his vodka and bigos by a murderous spouse, eventually left everything to his poisoner. No doubt Pecelt’s friends and the Lutheran community continued their efforts to talk reason to the young husband even after they had resorted to the authority of the magistracy. Here, too, transfer of property in a household with a new spouse and children from a previous marriage was at the heart of family conflict—certainly between the mother and daughters but perhaps also between a wealthy widow and her new, younger husband. After all, as the plaintiffs claimed, Pecelt “had experienced great acts of good will and was living in her own house.” By 1690 the hearth-tax surveyor knew nothing of any Ilis properties. He did find in the Glass Street neighborhood, however, one house of “Lady Hubrykowa, widow” (i.e., Anna Ilisówna) and three houses formerly owned by “Pecelt” (i.e., no doubt, the original Ilis properties), at least one of which had also passed to Hubrykowa.16 Again, all of the players in this family drama were Lutheran.

“She Sings Ribald Songs” Muscovite armies entered and occupied Wilno on 8 August 1655. Nonetheless, some institutions continued to function in some temporary mode throughout the period. One of these was the magistracy. On 7 April 1658, “Lord Matys Jodeszko, burgher and maltster of Wilno,” recorded in its books a complaint against his wife, Anna.17 A blank space was left for her last name. Presumably he knew it, and an overly taxed court recorder simply forgot to register it in his notes, although—as we will soon see—there were cases of amnesiac husbands who could not remember their wives’ names when they came before the court. Jodeszko claimed that his wife, “having forgotten the fear of God and the matrimonial oath

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with which she vowed to preserve love and virtue, frequently makes quarrels, ruckuses, various unpleasantnesses, boasts upon [his] health.” According to the aggrieved husband, her “boast” took the following form: “You are not worthy of me, you common peasant. I advise you to leave me in good time, together with your children, the bastards that you brought to me, for you yourself will not realize how quickly you will perish. After all, you heard how that [other] Matys the maltster perished. That is how you too will perish.” The incident Anna referred to may have been famous for a time around town, but we can only try to imagine what sort of end had awaited Matys’s professional colleague and namesake. Presumably his wife had also been the perpetrator of the violence. Our maltster’s surname—Jodeszko—might suggest Ruthenian origins. Since we do not know Anna’s surname, it is impossible to speculate whether this marital spat had any ethnic or confessional aspects. The fact that she, so Jodeszko would allege, was fraternizing with Muscovite soldiers might suggest that she, too, was Orthodox: it seems to have been easiest for Orthodox Vilnans to have personal relations with the occupying forces. By this time, during the occupation, all Uniate Ruthenians of Wilno were required by the tsar’s decree either to leave town or to convert to Orthodoxy. Social differences, on the other hand, do seem to have played some role. Jodeszko’s legal estate was that of burgher. Was Anna claiming noble birth? Such mixed marriages did occur. It was clearly not Jodeszko’s first marriage if he had “bastards” to bring into it. His complaint against Anna included marital infidelity. Was she, in his representations, perhaps suggesting that he was an inveterate cuckold and that his children were not his? More than one scenario, after all, would have made his children bastards. Whatever the case may have been, the long-suffering maltster went into some detail in his account of his wife’s dalliances. I quote the words of Jodeszko’s complaint: And so, executing her evil and rabid intent, transgressing God’s commandment in every way, godlessly and shamelessly, in broad daylight, having gone down into the basement with a retainer of the Lord Lieutenant, this identical spouse performed the indecent act, for which act the complainant spouse remained [sic]. This same rabid lady made a shout, speaking to the aforementioned retainer: “I beg you, kill this peasant.” And so, hearing her voice, the Lord Lieutenant, having drawn his sword, wished to kill him on the spot . . . , and if the plaintiff had not turned tail and run away, he would certainly have killed him on the spot, and he would have breathed his last on the spot; but the Lord God made certain that he hit him in the left shoulder blade very injuriously, from which blow, whether he will remain among the living, the Lord God knows.

The text is a draft, full of syntactic corrections and hesitations. I suspect he meant to say “in which act the complainant spouse discovered [her/them]” (na którym uczynku z∧ałuja˛cy ma˛z∧ [ja˛/ ich] zastał) and not “for which act he remained” (na którym . . . został), but the text quite clearly has the latter, and it is missing the expected direct object “her/them.” Either version must

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have been a painful blow to a husband’s honor. But what is most striking here is that she was committing these acts with a member of the Muscovite army, surely an extreme case of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Worse, how many were present to witness this drama? In addition to the main actors, it seems there was an audience of at least two: the Muscovite lord lieutenant and the cuckolded husband. In any case, the basement was crowded on the day in question. Jodeszko felt secure enough to bring this complaint in April of 1658, less than three years after the invasion of Wilno and while the city was still under occupation. He included in his complaint a simple inventory of his possessions, “so that the belongings protestantis [of the plaintiff] be known and not come into the hands of that same spouse in just any way, so that the children of the plaintiff produced with his first spouse not become orphans for all time.” His entire estate consisted of 300 zł in cash, 210 zł in grain, 112½ zł spent for his house, 30 zł for a horse, and 20 zł for a cow. The maltster complained that “that same spouse had brought the plaintiff to no little poverty in a short time, as soon as the regiments of His Majesty the Tsar had come to Wilno; having abandoned the plaintiff and his children, having intercourse with the lieutenant, having appropriated 350 zł in ready money, she engages in drinking bouts day in and day out, she sings ribald songs.” The Polish term obcuja˛c z, or “having intercourse with,” is ambiguous, but it could certainly also imply sexual intercourse. Was Lady Jodeszko “performing the indecent act” with both the lieutenant and a member of his retinue? Finally, we read, Jodeszko brought “this his plaintive protestation to the books of the court and noble office of the Wilno burgomasters and councillors, so that it be made manifest and known to all people.” As in most protestations—and this one adheres to the rhetorical norms of the genre—the complainant came before the court to make a preemptive legal move in protection of life, property, and honor. There is often a paradox here, at least for modern readers: the wronged individual sought to defend his reputation by making certain that it be “made manifest and known to all people” not only that his honor had been defiled but also precisely how it had been defiled. But in this case, in addition to alerting the court that it might later be called upon to save Jodeszko’s life and to restore to him his property and good name, the protestation also asked it to regulate the behavior of a married person. The objects of most protestations were charged with forgetting the “fear of God and the severity of common law”; this one—like Pecelt the younger—had also forgotten “the matrimonial oath with which she vowed to preserve love and virtue.” Jodeszko used the Wilno magistracy in an attempt to solve a marital dispute. As is often the case, the outcome remains obscure to us. Was the couple reconciled, and did they live out their days together in Wilno (amid occasional laments on the part of the wife that she had married beneath her station)? Or did Anna N.N. follow her lord lieutenant and his retinue, singing ribald songs and drinking day in and day out as the armies retreated to Moscow in the early 1660s? In any case, it was property in a household with children from a previous marriage that once again had played a role in a marital dispute. Here again confession had no overt part in the proceedings.

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Abandoned Spouses Some matrimonial problems were in fact solved—or, perhaps better put, some problem marriages were dissolved—by the disappearance of one of the spouses. In most recorded cases it was the husband who had fled the scene, but in at least one case it was the other way around. Skop Street, as we have seen, was a litigious place, and Jan Kostromski’s brother-in-law (from his first marriage), tailor Paweł Arcimowicz (49.10), was one of the more frequent litigators. His last recorded court appearance came on 30 June 1649, twenty-six years after the wars between the tailors and the lutenists, when an older, maybe wiser, and clearly weary Arcimowicz appeared in person before the lower instance of the chapter court, twice that same day, to bring complaints against his second wife.18 He seems to have been a boy in 1623, perhaps about fourteen, when his older sister and mother were feuding with their Skop Street landlords, so by now he was an “old man” of around forty. At the first appearance on the day in question, he told the court that in the year 1641, the 18th day of April, I received into my house to look after my children and the household some Helena or other [niejaka Helena], who claimed she had once been the wife of Jurewicz, a tailor from Troki. And having been with me about 10 weeks, she acquitted herself well at first, but perhaps it was only until she could catch me. And seeing her old age, and supposing that she would be well disposed toward me, I had pity upon her and took her to myself for a wife. But once she had taken wedding vows with me, immediately she changed, such that she brought my poor household, which I had entrusted unto her, to utter ruin in the course of eight years.

She did this, above all, through mismanaging the in-home tavern that Arcimowicz had put in her hands, the szynk that many property owners used to supplement their household incomes. Helena, it seems, paid out 400 złotys for malt, but Arcimowicz took in barely 100 since his wife was drinking up the profits: “Every day she would drink so terribly much hard liquor [gorzałka] that she was delirious in her head. . . . She walked, ran on the rooftops, as is well known to God and man.” Arcimowicz listed specific losses caused by his wife: she broke three one-gallon glass demijohns full of liquor; she carried, who knows where, and sold more than a hundred złotys worth of linens that he had kept for his poor children; she lost two English pewter platters; now she had “pawned six platters with a Jew, the Jew says he gave them back, but [Arcimowicz didn’t] know where she put them.” The unfortunate tailor brought his complaint to a pathetic close: On account of the aforementioned excessive drunkenness, in which she did not wish to restrain herself through those years, until now I always had to accept all of her nastiness.

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Every night she soiled the bed, and during the day as well. . . . And I saw no profit, since, with such stench, not only I myself, but I could not attract other people to our place to this day. And now, without giving any reason, she went away, having caused me much harm. Which I, the plaintiff and the one suffering harm, submit for inscription in the books. About which, God willing, will be narrated more broadly.

And indeed, “that same Paweł Arcimowicz, tailor,” was soon back in court—the Polishlanguage entry begins with the Latin inscription eadem die, “on the same day”—to submit a second protestation, this time in writing. By now his agitation had gotten the better of him, and what shaky mastery he once had over the intricacies of Polish syntax was long gone. Here he provided a more detailed inventory of the losses he had suffered through his wife’s stewardship of his household. But above all, he asked the priestly judges to share in his pain, which, one suspects, they probably did. She has brought me to utter ruin and poverty. To great debt have I come with her, and this is all because of her drunkenness, and it is with her that I have this entire debt, which I never had before. Where am I, a poor man, to get this? And she went off, leaving me. Creditors are harassing me for what she took. What is more, her head swims, the stench from her is overpowering, she always sleeps, her undergarments are rotting and all her linens. Just how am I supposed to live with such a one? And I cannot live with her anymore, in any way.

In the end, the reader is uncertain whether the troubled tailor was relieved she had gone or was complaining of abandonment. And why did he complain of her stench in the present tense when she was already gone? The main purpose of this protestation, however, was most likely to protect the plaintiff against creditors and to provide an inventory of lost property. Arcimowicz was in effect attempting to disown his wife for legal purposes and to lay claim to her possessions, if any, should she turn up in order to recoup some of his losses. But in the process he seems to have been using the court as a regulator of married life. He complained that she had abandoned him—“without giving any reason,” a rhetorical commonplace in the genre of complaints more often concerning violent deeds and words—at the same time asking how he could be expected to live with such a one. Was his goal a sort of divorce? There is a hint of an allegation of marital fraud here: tailor Arcimowicz clearly sought a professional helpmate in his second wife, but she had only “claimed” to have once been married to a practitioner of the tailor’s trade, conveniently long ago buried in “far-off” Troki. Or was his goal at least some sort of separation that might provide protection from his wife’s creditors? The end of the story remains unknown. Arcimowicz disappeared from the extant record after these two court appearances on one June day in 1649.

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When abandoned wives came before the court, the main goals were essentially the same as those of Arcimowicz: to put their finances in order. But they also sought to settle thorny questions of ownership and to establish their right to appear before the court as legal actors and to dispose of the property left behind. They were, after all, in a weaker position both financially and legally: the husband was most often the practitioner of the money-earning trade, often the owner of the bulk of the movable and immovable goods in question, and women faced disadvantages in the courts.

Separation, Divorce, Bigamy In some cases, marital problems were resolved through recourse to separations imposed by the spiritual courts—the quite legal if infrequently granted separatio a mensa et thoro (separation from board and bed). In other cases we encounter what look like self-administered ad hoc divorces, with the remarriage of one of the parties and resultant allegations of bigamy from the neighbors. I examine four of these cases below. In the stories of marital strife and abandonment we have seen so far, all the marriages appear to have been monoconfessional. The only role played by confession was that of providing the context, the circle of friends and clergy in which first attempts at intervention and reconciliation were launched. Much the same applies to the four cases of separation/divorce that I present below. A crucial difference, however, lies in the role confessional identity may have played in expectations about the necessary conditions for and terms of separation and divorce.

“In Which Separation We Remain until This Day” Maryna Iwanowiczówna was the wife of burgomaster Grzegorz Kostrowicki and the daughter of Orthodox merchant Piotr Iwanowicz. It is the complaint against her husband that she registered in her will of 1668 that serves as the central source for the following story.19 With the names Iwanowicz and Kostrowicki we find ourselves in the solidly Ruthenian circles of Subocz Street. In 1655, Piotr Iwanowicz and wife Anastazja Konstantynowiczówna Dobrzan´ska bought a house there, probably the one at 78.03.20 In 1652 he had affixed his Cyrillic signature to the Polish-language will of his neighbor, Akwilina Stryludzianka Dorofiewiczowa. She was an Orthodox merchant’s wife, herself Orthodox and mother of Wilno’s last Orthodox burgomaster, Prokop Dorofiewicz.21 The Dorofiewicz house was across the way at Subocz Street 79.11. Piotr Iwanowicz’s daughter Maryna was also certainly Orthodox. On 23 October 1668, she had her own last will and testament witnessed, and she asked to be buried at the neighborhood Orthodox Church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit. She gave her money to a number of Wilno Greek institutions, both Uniate and Orthodox, although, unlike some others, she silently excluded all the Romans (Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists) from her deathbed largesse.

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But her husband, Grzegorz z Kostrowic Kostrowicki, was Uniate, at least by the date of her will, although he may well have been Orthodox for a considerable period of their marriage.22 By royal decree, all Ruthenian members of the magistracy were Uniate after 1666, and the last Orthodox burgomaster, Prokop Dorofiewicz, must have been nominally Uniate when he again held that office after that fateful year. The couple had long lived in discord, but if Maryna wrote her husband out of her will in 1668, it was not over religious differences: My remaining husband, Lord Grzegorz Kostrowicki, burgomaster of Wilno, is not by any proper right to make any claim to any succession after my death, because he did not merit it and did not work to earn it, on account of the great cruelties that he inflicted upon me, and on account of this very thing: his turbulent living [with me], with regard to which the spiritual court by its decree separated [him] several times from spousal living and intercourse [with me], lest something worse happen, in which separation we remain until this day. And yet, not recalling these evil acts of his—and this not out of any obligation, but from a particular Christian compassion—and looking upon his great indigence, I forgive him my dowry, which he received in 1,000 zł in cash from my deceased father, and I also forgive what he was supposed to provide on an annual basis for me myself, as well as for his little daughter borne by me, according to the consistorial [spiritual, i.e., not of a secular court] decree at the time of separation. Let him content himself with this. But if he should lay claim to more of my remaining goods than what I bequeathed him of my own good will, then also this dowry or importation of mine should return [to my estate], and my guardian . . . should recover the entire annual provision for me and for his little daughter, reckoning over all the years from the time of my separation.

Among many interesting things, we hear in this passage of something like a Ruthenian consistory that had repeatedly passed judgment in the matter of Kostrowicka v. Kostrowicki. Perhaps the court in question was Orthodox: in mixed marriages the husband regularly went to his wife’s church for the wedding; this would then be the natural forum for any subsequent separation or divorce. In fact, the marriage may not have started out mixed: Kostrowicki may have converted from Orthodoxy for the sake of a career in the post-1666 magistracy. Unfortunately, no record books for either Orthodox or Uniate consistories have survived. We know of the existence of such courts only from echoes in the records of other jurisdictions like this one entered into the books of the Wilno bench. “Separation from spousal living and intercourse” sounds like the judicial separation from bed and board known to Western canon law from England to Poland-Lithuania.23 This was a court-regulated separation that placed financial obligations upon the husband and behavioral expectations upon the wife. It did not permit remarriage for either spouse. The wording of Kostrowicka’s account seems to suggest that the couple had been reconciled a few times, and each time again separated by church decree. Kostrowicki had been

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required to provide some sort of alimony (support of wife and child) as a part of this separation—also a feature of Western practice; and according to his wife, he (like so many others) had failed to meet these financial obligations. Finally, we should note that these provisions of the Orthodox (or Uniate) consistory were adduced in a testament registered with the secular court of the magistracy. The wife’s dowry was ultimately her property, and she was within her rights to bequeath it to her heir or to “forgive” it to her husband. In Magdeburg law—unlike the land law that governed the Polish-Lithuanian szlachta and left gentry wives in a relatively weak legal position—the burgher husband merely “managed” his wife’s dowry (posag, wniesienie—generally cash and real estate).24 Iwanowiczówna was renouncing her right to her portion of the dowry under the condition that her estranged husband make no further claims upon the rest of her estate. Though a merchant’s daughter, Iwanowiczówna was associated with the city’s ruling burgher elite. Her husband was just reaching that pinnacle at the time of her death. The witnesses of her will were members of the bench. One of them, Piotr Szóstak, came from a moderately prominent Ruthenian family.25 She chose as guardian of her daughter and heir— identified as “Miss Anna”—the highest city functionary, “His Grace, Lord Paweł Boim, secretary of His Royal Majesty, wójt of Wilno,” who was a Roman Catholic by definition (it was a requirement for holding the office). She felt confident enough of her status to call upon the entire body of the magistracy as a sort of corporate guardian of her will and protector of her daughter’s interests against any claim brought forth by her estranged husband, even though he had occupied high office in that institution and would go on to a distinguished career: And I humbly entreat by God’s mercy the most noble magistracy of Wilno, as the foremost guardian of all orphans, that they not allow my spouse to intrude upon these goods and their guardianship, since he is one without fixed abode [nieosiadły], and one who through all those times took no care for me or for my little daughter, and who, being a squanderer, ran up quite large debts with creditors and has not the means to pay them, unless it be he hopes to gain control over this poor succession of my child.

Should the magistracy shirk its duties and allow Kostrowicki to take control of the estate, such that “he should later squander and waste [it],” then the daughter and heir when she should come of age and marry—the future husband was to be her legal representative—was to “seek all this upon the possessions of those same Lord annual [councillors and burgomasters].” Once written and properly witnessed, a legal instrument such as a will had to be entered into the acts of the appropriate jurisdiction or jurisdictions. The document could be “submitted to the acts” by the primary party to the document or—as was frequently the case with wills—by a family member or other friends after the death of that party. In this case we find the latter pattern. Iwanowiczówna had her will drawn up and witnessed on 23 October 1668. Over two months later, on 29 December, by which date she had died, it was entered into the

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acts by two very much interested individuals: the estranged husband Grzegorz Kostrowicki himself and one Samuel Szycik Zaleski. Samuel Szycik Zaleski was the grandson of Orthodox burgomaster Iwan Hawryłowicz Szycik Zaleski. He was also the son of councillor Zachariasz and brother of councillor Stefan. The Szycik Zaleskis were one of the few real “dynasties” among the Wilno ruling elite, a family that maintained its connections to the Greek rite until the end of the century. Samuel and Stefan were royal secretaries.26 Samuel had a long career in the magistracy. He had already been annual councillor in 1665; he would go on to be burgomaster (by now, Uniate by royal decree) in 1670, 1676, 1682, and 1688.27 He was also Maryna’s brother-in-law, since he too had married a daughter of Orthodox merchant Piotr Iwanowicz. Her name was Eudoksja.28 Kostrowicki’s participation is more difficult to interpret. Like his brother-in-law, he would go on to a long career in the magistracy. He had been an annual councillor in 1652 and again in 1662 and thus a member of the first magistracy elected after the liberation of Wilno from Muscovite occupation. He was burgomaster in 1667, 1673, 1679, and 1685. The fact that he was elected burgomaster every six years, beginning in 1667, the year before the writing and recording of his wife’s will, suggests that he enjoyed the esteem of his colleagues. It was he who in 1682 set down for posterity (for future historians, in particular) the list of the four annual councillors and two burgomasters who occupied the highest Wilno city offices for each year beginning in 1516. He gave it a good baroque title: The Eternal Memory [Wiekopomnos´´c] of the Noble Individuals Who Have Been in the Most Noble Wilno Magistracy, Expressed by Names and Surnames, Who Fortunately Carried Out the Government and the Judgments of the City of Wilno, Beginning in the Year 1516, through Annual Alternations, until the Year Expressed Below, with the Multiplication of the Praise of God and the Keeping of Faith with Their Graces, the Kings, Our Gracious Lords, the Maintenance of the Integrity of the Laws, and the Love of the Common Good, Thereby Earning Never-Fading Glory. Submitted by Me, Grzegorz z Kostrowic Kostrowicki, Burgomaster of Wilno, in the Year 1682, to the Knowledge of the Citizens of the City of Wilno, with a Registering of the Succeeding Years.29 To modern eyes and ears, the situation seems incongruous. After all, we are invited to imagine Kostrowicki appearing before his peers, seeing to it that his estranged wife’s last will and testament—a document so unflattering and prejudicial to his honor—be written into the books and thus made public. Moreover, the angry last public words of his estranged wife threatened the judicial body that was receiving them with divine judgments should it engage in malfeasance, and they declared loudly that last year’s burgomaster and the very man submitting the document was one given to violence who gave no thought for the welfare of a wife and young daughter, a squanderer, a man of no fixed abode and no financial means and indeed of large debts. This was a strange and serious allegation, since osiadłos´´c , the possession and occupation of real estate, was one of the minimal requirements for basic citizenship, to say nothing of attaining the highest ranks in the ruling elite.30 However this may be, we may conclude from this story that the magistracy had room among its ranks for a man

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living under a cloud of suspicion about his morals and in a state of church-imposed separation from his wife.

“He Ordered Me to Bark Back My Words” A case from 1672–1674 tells of the attempted “divorce” between Roman Catholics Katarzyna Siemaszkówna and her second husband, Bartłomiej Krogulicki. Siemaszkówna was the widow of a certain Mikołaj Kostrowicki. The Kostrowickis were a significant Ruthenian family among the Wilno elite. Burgomaster Grzegorz, a more prominent figure, was, as we know from the preceding story, living in separation from his wife Maryna Iwanowiczówna, allegedly well behind on alimony payments at the time of her death in 1668. The children of Wasyli Kostrowicki were active in the Ruthenian networks of Subocz Street in the second half of the seventeenth century. His son, city councillor Jan Wasylewicz Kostrowicki, lived with his wife Helena Juszkiewiczówna in a house given them by her parents in an unnamed side street off Subocz Street at 77.02–77.03.31 Jan was asked in 1663, along with his brother Daniel Kostrowicki, to serve as a guardian of the orphans of his neighbor and brother-in-law, Uniate councillor Samuel Filipowicz, whose second wife was their sister, Regina Kostrowicka. Filipowicz lived at Subocz Street 79.08.32 Burgomaster Grzegorz Kostrowicki was probably a relation, perhaps some sort of cousin: he witnessed Filipowicz’s will alongside yet another son of Wasyli, Kazimierz, brother of Daniel, Jan, and Regina.33 Katarzyna Siemaszkówna’s husband Mikołaj Kostrowicki had once been the notary of the Communitas mercatoria, the influential merchants’ guild. I am unable to place him more precisely in Kostrowicki family networks, but he was probably Orthodox or Uniate. Judging by her surname, Katarzyna was also from a Ruthenian family. Siemaszkos owned houses in the Greek-Roman border neighborhood of Rudniki Street in the early seventeenth century.34 But she herself may have been Catholic. In any event, her second husband, Bartłomiej Krogulicki, was of that confession, and their marriage, however irregular it may have been, was performed by a Roman Catholic priest. Documents from 1672 and 1674 tell us something of the details of the marriage, their married life, and eventual separation or divorce. First, her side of the matter. On 13 May 1672, she registered the following complaint against her new husband with the Wilno magistracy: I, Katarzyna Siemaszkówna . . . in my great and inconsolable grief, submit this my protestation against my current husband, Lord Krogulicki, that he, having conspired with several persons, constantly sought to seduce me with his persuasion and instigation that I might take him to myself for a husband. And having forgotten the fear of God and the marital vow, having set his sights on my health and pittance, after entering into the state of matrimony, he began to try to convince me to sell or bequeath to him my bricked

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house. And right away he began to beat and torment me, for no other reason but that I do not wish to sign it over to him, nor do I allow it to be sold (after all, it does not yet entirely belong to me). And when I criticized the fact that, not having any means to support me or himself, he wishes to sell the house and to bring me to poverty, then he began to beat and torment me all the more and all the more frequently. As on the previous Wednesday, that is, on the eleventh day of the month of May, having abducted me and locked me in the basement, so that no one would hear a woman shouting for help, he used me tyrannically, for, having removed from the dog the chain with which the dog had been tied down, he placed it on my neck, and having bound my hands with this same chain, he closed it with a lock, and having fastened it to a rod with a cord close by that same chain, he beat, tormented me there, and tortured however he himself wished. . . . Nor does it befit me to keep silent about this too: that he always used me not like a spouse but worse than some slave. For when I censured an apprentice on the grounds that he had manifestly hidden several shillings, then, having abducted me on account of this, he ordered me to bark back my words after him, speaking these words: “What I spoke against the apprentice, I barked like a dog, and I take them back into my snout,” which words I had to speak, avoiding beating and tyrannical behavior, standing and shaking before him in the presence of that apprentice. . . . Having fled my house, I must wander about alien corners, since I angered my friends and benefactors, in that, without their knowledge, at the bad counsel of certain individuals, myself also proceeding stubbornly and rashly, I married him, who I now see strove not for marital friendship, but to take my health and property. . . . Wishing then to litigate with him over such a cruel and tyrannical beating of me as described in common law in the secular court, and also in the spiritual court in the matter of divorce [rozwód], I submit this my protestation.35

Siemaszkówna’s goals were clear: this was a first step in litigation in the magistracy over physical and economic abuse and in the consistory—presumably Roman Catholic—for divorce/separation. She used the term rozwód, which nowadays means quite definitely “divorce with the right to remarry.” But Polish-speaking Roman Catholic laity of the early modern period used it as well, and at times so did their priests, even though everyone certainly knew that the most that troubled Catholic couples could hope for was an annulment (uniewaz∧nienie).36 By contrast, in our previous story, Maryna Iwanowiczówna, wife of burgomaster Grzegorz Kostrowicki, had written that she and her husband were in a state of separation—rozła˛czenie—imposed by the consistory (probably Orthodox). The use of the term rozwód throughout this case may be indicative of attempts by Catholic laity, but perhaps also with some guidance by clergy, to negotiate around Catholic restrictions on separation and divorce. In any event, Siemaszkówna’s protestation laid out the grounds for that separation/ divorce. They included, in addition to spousal cruelty, the possibility that the marriage was invalid. Or at least this is how I interpret certain aspects of the case documents. At the

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beginning and the end of her protestation, Siemaszkówna sought to cast procedural doubts upon the road to marriage that she and Krogulicki had followed. Krogulicki, as we read at the beginning, had “conspired with several persons,” had “seduced [her] with his persuasion and instigation.” This was not exactly abduction, but at the least she was alleging a kind of fraud. By the end of the account, Siemaszkówna had taken some of the blame upon herself. It was, however, the sort of blame that could help her to raise further questions about the marriage: she had nowhere to turn once she had fled home and her abusive husband because she had angered her friends and benefactors; and she had angered them because she had married, “herself also [acting] stubbornly and rashly,” without their input and participation. “Friends” (przyjaciele, amici) was a technical term of some customary legal standing, denoting the circle of advisers and helpers one drew upon at key moments in life, including the disposing of one’s goods and the making of arrangements for the care of widows and orphans, as well as the contracting of marriage. It was the lack of the friends’ participation that might have lent added credence to an eventual claim of invalidity. The couple seems not to have remained together. I have found no further account of Siemaszkówna’s case against her husband. Perhaps the secular allegations about physical abuse were settled, as so often, out of court. Other matters were apparently still pending about two and a half years later. On 19 November 1674, Krogulicki registered a draft of a “voluntary, conciliatory, eternal letter” with the magistracy.37 This was a forensic genre used to sort out differences, transfer property, and record other arrangements reconciling two or more parties. In it he gave his side of the story, picking up—as if in agreement with his wife, at least on these issues—on some of the potential grounds for divorce. Krogulicki wrote that he had married Siemaszkówna “on the advice [this was a correction in the draft for an original “incorrect information”] and persuasion of several of my friends, . . . not only in the hope of spousal friendship and love, but also for the acquisition of a better fortune, for she was commended to me for many reasons for her fitting customs and morals and for all her endowments.” Krogulicki entered into the marriage despite the fact that he had received contradictory advice from the bride’s own friends, above all from her brother-in-law and curator, burgomaster Stanisław Gawłowicki, who “himself for his own part, but also through various people privately and publicly warned and admonished me that I not allow myself to be deceived and that I leave this marriage alone for certain reasons, about which he told me.” According to Gawłowicki, Siemaszkówna was “unsuited for housekeeping,” and he assured Krogulicki that he would not achieve his material goals. Krogulicki did not believe the warnings, and the couple decided to marry. They finally received permission from the “bishop of Gratianopolis”38 in spite of the objections of their respective groups of friends but only under the condition that the wedding take place in the presence of those same friends. “Not having met which condition, however,” Krogulicki continued his account, “we got married, and at the wedding there were none of the closest friends and kin of my wife. I was only barely able to entreat a few strangers [to attend].” The Roman Catholic priest who officiated at the wedding was a Father Zachorski, canon of

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Wilno. It is unclear to me why the canon did not see to it that the bishop’s conditions were met. In any event, the honeymoon was short and bitter: And after that marriage, wedding, and matrimony, in a brief time (for it was a few weeks) great discord and eternal ruckuses arose between my wife and me, as is sufficiently described and expressed in the cross-examinations and decrees of the consistorial court, where I twice went to law, and two decrees resulted by which divorce was made between my wife and me. . . . And as far as the state of matrimony itself and the divorce made twice between us is concerned, since there is now no means, hope, or likelihood that there could ever be common living [społeczne pomieszkanie] between us in the state of matrimony with this same wife of mine, who not only herself set about with all her strength to achieve a divorce, but I, too, especially desired for myself that I might be able to free myself from such a life and state of matrimony, being in which we have given ourselves up to the derision of men and offended the Lord God.

The divorce mentioned here may have been a sort of separation. After all, how could the couple have been granted two divorces? Still, it may have been a question of two decrees in a larger process, the goal of which was an annulment with the possibility of remarriage. Both spouses had sought to raise questions of validity. So perhaps it was first a separation and then an annulment. Społeczne pomieszkanie, or “common living,” had to do with “intercourse,” with all the ambiguities of that term. Was Krogulicki suggesting the marriage had remained unconsummated?39 I know nothing about the fate of this particular unhappy couple. Before his marriage to Siemaszkówna, Krogulicki was inscribed on 26 July 1666 as an “elder from the burgher estate” and a secretary of the Brotherhood of St. Anne “the One of Three” at the Wilno Bernardines. And on 18 June 1670, he paid 25 zł “from a bequest of his deceased [first] wife” to the Brotherhood of the Holy Scapular at the Calced Carmelites’ Church of All Saints.40 In that same year he stood as witness to a Catholic marriage performed at the Church of St. John, and in 1668 and 1673 (the latter in the period between Siemaszkówna’s protestation and his own statement on the marriage and divorce) he received Catholic babies from the font at the same church.41 A financial record entered into the books of the magistracy in 1678 suggests that he was still present in some way in Wilno society four years after his last statement about his marriage with Siemaszkówna. I do not know what his marital status was at the time.42 There is, of course, nothing contradictory about a man who was both violent and pious, or at least churchgoing. Without diminishing Krogulicki’s blame, I would note that he had not invented this particular punishment of eating one’s words. The Polish phrase was odszczekac´, or, literally, “to unbark,” “to bark back.” The penalty of the unbarking of an accusation from “under the bench” (under the bench was, after all, the dog’s proper place) had been a recognized part of legal practice. As we read in an authoritative history of PolishLithuanian law, “[T]he retraction of an accusation was applied in the case of defamation.

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It took place publicly, and it was often not limited to the withdrawal of the accusation, but included the assertion that the accusation was a lie. Especially degrading for the perpetrator of defamation—a punishment sometimes encountered in the record—was the threefold ‘unbarking’ of the accusation from beneath a bench.”43 Krogulicki—if we accept Siemaszkówna’s charge, and it has the ring of truth to it—had gone to the root of the expression, tying his wife up like a dog and forcing her to “bark back,” to “take back into her snout,” her unsubstantiated allegations about the apprentice’s behavior. In fact, Krogulicki may have been acting within the law: the punishment was one foreseen by Polish-Lithuanian law in cases of defamation, and husbands often felt they had the right to exercise the law unilaterally upon their wives. The fact that she felt free to take him to court over it suggests, however, that legal practice was in the process of change.

“He Gave, or Sold, or Contracted Him to People of His Majesty the Tsar” On 7 June 1657, about two years after the initial invasion of Wilno, Jan Gilewicz, “merchant and citizen of Wilno,” appeared in person “before the temporary [natenczas be˛da˛cy] office of the wójt, burgomasters, and councillors of Wilno” in order to register a complaint against “noble Lord Piotr Tulkiewicz, patrician of Wilno.” The ultimate goal was to recover the property of his sister-in-law, Maryna Witkowska, and he appended a detailed inventory of her estate to this complaint. But the story he told in support of his claim included allegations of bigamy, which is why it is of interest here.44 Gilewicz spoke in his own name but also in that of his wife, Anastazja Witkowska, and of his brother-in-law, Jan Witkowski. The last two were the siblings of the Maryna Witkowska in question. He complained, first, that just as, having information in Königsberg that his brother-in-law, Lord Marcin Poz∧arko, burgher of Wilno, is alive, he employed every means by himself and through his friends, that the same Lord Tulkiewicz not proceed to the union of matrimony with his sister-inlaw, Lady Maryna Witkowska Marcinowa Poz∧arkowa, and not manifest himself in this before God, inasmuch as the first spouse, the aforementioned, is still alive, so also now, having received more certain information from the kin and friends of that same Lord Poz∧arko who had arrived in Wilno, and from his own letters, that he is alive, Lord Gilewicz, together with his spouse, makes solennem [a solemn] protestation with regard to the marriage illegitime [illegally] concluded with her.

Second, Tulkiewicz “gave, or sold, or contracted” the son of Maryna Witkowska and Marcin Poz∧arko, Kazimierz Poz∧arko, “to people of His Majesty the Tsar,” with the result that “he was carted off from Wilno to Moscow, and the Lord God knows whether he will ever return from there.” Third, Tulkiewicz, “hiding such actions of his that are contrary to secular and spiritual law,” began to take charge of his wife’s affairs. And when she took sick, without informing her sister, the plaintiff’s wife,

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in the current year, some day in February, he brought an Office to her that is improper according to the law and privilege of the city of Wilno to record her will (about which the plaintiff even until today has been unable to find out and cannot find it in the books). That is, bypassing the Lord Burgomasters, His Grace the Lord wójt, the Lord Benchers, as well as the Lord Bench Notary, those who were present in Wilno at this time, and before them [i.e., the “improper Office”], not so much the sister of Lady Gilewicz, but rather Lord Tulkiewicz himself made the testament in her name, forgetting out of his great love even the surname of his spouse.

It is worth noting that Gilewicz was unable to find the will in any of the city books known to him and that his information was based on hearsay and rumor. But those rumors were quite detailed: how else did Gilewicz know that Tulkiewicz “out of his great love” (the turn of phrase was intentionally ironic) had been unable to remember his new spouse’s name? Were competing magistracies functioning during the occupation? Or—more likely—had Tulkiewicz gone to the castle to record his wife’s will with the Muscovite authorities? But the crux of the matter—and here too Gilewicz’s information was quite precise—was that Tulkiewicz had “shortened [i.e., undervalued] her estate by 6,000 zł plus vel minus, as will be shown from the register expressed below, such that very little of her property was mentioned, as the plaintiff has information.” Further, he, Tulkiewicz, had divided the shortened estate equally between his “stepson,” presumably the same one he had sent into Muscovite slavery, and his daughter. Gilewicz did not specify whether this daughter was the product of a previous marriage; but since he did stipulate that Kazimierz Poz∧arko had been born to his sister-in-law in her first marriage, we are left with the impression that she may have been the infant daughter of Witkowska and Tulkiewicz, a child who could have been of questionable legitimacy. If Witkowska and Poz∧arko lost contact with each other, for instance, on the day the Muscovite forces entered Wilno, there would have been enough time for this scenario to have played itself out. Had Maryna Witkowska lived, the protestation might have been directed against her as well. After all, she too was guilty of an act “contrary to secular and spiritual law.” But since she had died, the complaint was against Tulkiewicz alone because he had usurped the role of legal guardian naturally belonging to a legitimate husband and he was wrongly disposing of his “wife’s” property and purporting to take her child into his care. The circumstances of Gilewicz’s narration are evocative of the confusions of the wars and the Muscovite occupation. Brother-in-law Poz∧arko evidently had fled Wilno. Perhaps he had sought refuge in Königsberg, or perhaps it was simply that Königsberg served as a clearinghouse for information about the fates of Vilnans in exile. It is not obvious when he had become separated from his wife. Jan Gilewicz had put his signature to the oath of loyalty to the elector of Brandenburg during his exile in Königsberg on 16/26 February 1656 together with the other “Poles of Wilno”; he signed for himself and his wife and household.45 The Gilewiczes, or at

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least Jan, soon returned to Wilno (certainly by 7 June 1657) and continued to receive word from Prussia about their brother-in-law. Maryna Witkowska either had remained in Wilno or had soon returned, perhaps to look after family property. Her son Kazimierz had become a prisoner in Muscovy. These fates were common enough, and we find them repeated in several Wilno families. Maryna used the occasion to remarry, quite quickly—between 8 August 1655, if it was about this time that she lost sight of her husband, and February 1657—and earlier rather than later in this period of some nineteen months if she did indeed give birth to a daughter with Tulkiewicz. She may knowingly have committed what we might term a “slight bigamy,” as she must have been aware of the allegations that her first husband was still alive. But it is also possible she considered herself eligible for a secular divorce, especially given the extreme circumstances of war, which may have made her a de facto abandoned wife. She was probably Orthodox, which could have shaped her attitude about marriage and divorce. Her sister Anastazja certainly was of that confession. An inventory of her possessions, entered into the acts on 19 October 1684, included a detailed “Register of Funeral Expenses.” Jan Gilewicz had predeceased her, so this was at least partly also a survey of his estate. The funeral in question here, however, was definitely hers, and the accounting of expenses included 4 florins “for 4 pallbearers for carrying the body to the [Orthodox/Uniate] church” and 40 florins “for the Basilian Fathers [Orthodox in this case!] of the Church of the Holy Spirit for the sorokoust [the forty-day liturgies].”46 Anastazja’s husband, Jan Gilewicz, was probably also a Ruthenian. In 1663, together with merchant Jan Markiewicz, he took on the role of executor of the will of an Orthodox woman named Anna Danielówna. She had requested “that her body be buried in the Church of the Holy Spirit according to the rite and the custom of our Greek religion, wherever the Fathers who are in the monastery at that same church locate the most appropriate place.” She was the wife of tailor Harasym Prokopowicz, whose name also suggests that we are among Ruthenians here.47 Anastazja Witkowska’s inventory told of “a bricked house on Horse Street on the corner, lying ex opposito [across from] the Church and monastery of All Saints” and a “garden with a little house lying beyond Rudniki Gate on the street called Azarycz” (which would have been a stone’s throw away, just over the wall from their Horse Street house). The Gilewiczes lived in a neighborhood that formed a sort of borderland between Greek and Roman Wilno. It was in fact the Witkowski family house. Kasper Witkowski, probably the father of Anastazja, Maryna, and Jan, had owned the house at Horse Street 8.02 in 1636.48 Perhaps Maryna had also remained in the neighborhood. Her first husband’s surname—Poz∧arko—again suggests Ruthenian networks. Maryna Witkowska may have drawn on customary Ruthenian views of marriage and divorce when she justified to herself and her community a quick remarriage. In any event, she seems to have considered herself eligible for a second marriage when she must have known that she might indeed still have a living first husband.

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“In the Hope That He Had Mended His Ways” Finally, another case of alleged bigamy in Orthodox circles, this one from the 1670s, involved Anastazja Polikszanka and her two husbands, Teodor Orzeszyc and Stanisław Dziedzin ´ski. Polikszanka’s mother had been a Minkiewiczówna. In the years 1636–1639 the family house at Subocz Street 78.06 was in the possession of Hreory Minkiewicz.49 Hreory had two sons, Mikołaj, a merchant, and Wawrzyniec, a “Roman conciliary secretary” for the Wilno magistracy,50 and three daughters, Dorota, Marianna, and Krystyna. None of the daughters survived the period of the war and Muscovite occupation. Wawrzyniec, so it would seem, had converted to Roman Catholicism. But the family had remained largely Greek, some of them Orthodox. And in the next generation, a certain Piotr Minkiewicz, a Uniate, would hold the office of annual councillor in the 1680s, rising to that of burgomaster in 1694.51 Anastazja Aleksandrowiczówna Polikszanka was a niece of Wawrzyniec and Mikołaj Minkiewicz, the daughter of their sister Marianna Aleksandrowa Polikszyna. Anastazja was Orthodox, as were presumably her parents. The family had fled Wilno in the 1650s to Königsberg—a haven not only for Lutheran Vilnans!—to wait out the occupation. Anastazja was already married by that time. Her parents died during the period of exile. In order to protect family property, she would return to Wilno, without her husband, sometime before the city’s liberation. On 29 November 1663, her brother Samuel registered a complaint in her name with the Wilno magistracy against her first husband, Teodor Orzeszyc.52 It is this document that serves as the main source for the first part of this story. According to the protestation, Orzeszyc had abandoned her for nine years, but he had recently returned to Wilno and was now persecuting her. Anastazja asserted that her family, including her husband, had fled to Königsberg “before the conquest of Wilno.” They must have gone there already by 1653–1654, as only rumors of war were reaching the city, if we are to allow that Orzeszyc remained with them at least briefly—which the account seems to suggest—before setting out on his own, abandoning his wife for nine years. Here is part of the rest of her story as recorded in the protestation: And having returned to Wilno from exile, after the death of my parents, defending my house with its household goods, which I had on my hands yet under the Foe, with danger to my health, not without great cost and tribulation, when my husband arrived from Königsberg to Wilno in great indigence, at the urging and counsel of my friends, for greater and better household economy, in the hope that he had mended his ways, I received him, together with my Lord brother, into my house, where he was to correct certain things and look after the household. And yet, yielding to wantonness, reveling in constant drinking bouts, not having the least care for me and the household, arriving home at night drunk, he causes ruckuses and unwonted furies. . . . Fearing greater beating and tormenting, having fled my house and household, I moved to the house on

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Subocz Street, where a portion belongs to me, left me by my grandmother. But even remaining there, I am not certain of my health, for he often makes ambushes upon me as I am going to the [Orthodox] church, . . . as even in the previous month of November, the fourth day, returning home on Sunday after Vespers in a group of many people, having a saber at his side, he began to chase me and, fleeing to a convent, to chase me among people, and certainly with no other intent than to bring about my death. Having noticed which, the elder of that same convent began to reprimand him for such an excess and attack upon a convent.

The syntax is tortured, and the end of this particular episode remains unclear. Nonetheless, Polikszanka would continue to appear in the record, and her estranged husband remained on the margins of the story for some time. Four years later, on 12 October 1667, uncles Mikołaj and Wawrzyniec Minkiewicz entered a sort of contract into the books of the magistracy, outlining a detailed division of the family house at 78.06 Subocz Street (no doubt the one to which Anastazja had fled in 1663).53 It fell to the older brother, Mikołaj, to make the divisions, “and to the younger brother, Lord Wawrzyniec, to choose from the divided portions.” Anastazja’s estate will play an important role in the rest of the story. Wawrzyniec, “in accordance with the consensus of all,” chose for his part “a downstairs chamber off the gate, with a recess and a little shop, in addition the basement under that chamber off the street.” The older brother Mikołaj, “for the quicker concord and agreement among the following co-successors,” took as his part “the garden in the back of the house, enclosed by brush, and the brewery by the shop, with a portion of the courtyard, beginning from the shop up to the wall of Lord Sien´czyłos’ house [Subocz Street 78.07], however with free passage for all to the back.” The third part went to a nephew, Demiter Kołczanowicz, and niece, Helena Kołczanowiczówna, children of Dorota Minkiewiczówna, “in the presence of their father [rodzic].” They were to receive the “great downstairs chamber with an alcove, a bricked vestibule with a kitchen, a basement on beams.” The fourth portion went to another niece and nephew pair, children of Marianna Minkiewiczówna, Lord Samuel Aleksandrowicz Poliksza and Lady Anastazja Aleksandrowiczówna Polikszanka, who was further identified as “wife of Teodor Orzeszyc.” (It is only here that we learn Anastazja’s maiden name; in other documents she was identified by patronymic alone.) They were to receive “the upstairs great chamber off the street, with an alcove over the gate, which has not yet been completely bricked, a great vestibule before the chamber, a basement on beams under the lower chamber, the middle one, next to the bricked basement, the door from the courtyard.” The fifth portion was to be reserved for yet another pair of children of yet another deceased sister, Bazyli Pawłowicz and Anastazja Pawłowiczówna, children of Krystyna Minkiewiczówna, “who had been captured alive during the taking of Wilno by the Foe (as the news had it) and carted away no one knows where, so that later, if, God grant it, they should ever return from the hands of the Foe, they

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would have a place to nestle down.” Their portion was to be “a store with a bricked basement beneath that same store.” For the time being the fifth part would be given over to the use of Uncle Wawrzyniec for up to ten years or whenever the captives should return from Muscovy; and if by ten years they had not returned, “then that fifth part should fall to all of us and be divided, with the stipulation, however, that, after even the longest time, when, God grant it, they return [to Wilno], that part is to be returned by us to them.” Wawrzyniec was further to receive from them all reimbursement for his expenses, since, “renovating it after the burning of this house, as also after the conquest of Wilno, in various manners, not without risk to his health, remaining above all for the defense of this house during the occupation by the Foe, he incurred expenses and paid 354 zł.” Older brother Mikołaj could afford to be modest in his claims to the family house. He took not a chamber, the core living space for a family unit, but the garden, the brewery, and a shop. In fact, he already owned a house in another Ruthenian neighborhood, in nearby Sawicz Street (probably 71.17), and presumably he lived there. That property abutted that of the “brotherhood antiquitus [as of old] called the Lords,” which was a gathering place of the Wilno Uniate elite. A deed of 4 August 1670 defined the boundary between the two properties and thanked Minkiewicz for “his kind-hearted disposition toward the Church [in this case, the Uniate Church],” so perhaps he was himself a Uniate.54 But niece Anastazja Polikszanka was Orthodox. The church she was going to when her violent and drunken husband Teodor Orzeszyc ambushed her in November 1663 was most likely the Orthodox Church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, and the convent where she hid herself for a time would have been on the large grounds of that establishment. The Minkiewicz house on Subocz Street was across the street from houses that backed onto those lands. We do not know where Anastazja’s own house was, but probably it was in the neighborhood. In 1670, she sold a “house beyond Subocz Gate.”55 In any event, she would ask that her “sinful body, as earth to earth, . . . be buried in the [Orthodox] Church of the Holy Spirit.” This we learn from a last will and testament dated ´ski, 15 March 1671.56 We also learn there that she had a new husband, a certain Stanisław Dziedzin who was her sole heir and to whom she entrusted the burial of her body. The arrangements— with all the usual syntactic hiccups—add a few details to our picture of her family life: My pittance I dispose of thus: that after my death, inasmuch as my first husband, Fiedor Orzeszyc, who, having brought nothing into [the marriage], but having drunk away and devastated my entire pittance, has left the city; he, should he be alive, I remove him [from all claim upon my estate], and my brothers, as well as him, both my own and the kin of my first husband, since the Lord Minkiewiczes, my brothers, left me, their sister, with nothing, having given me nothing from the house, and they never helped me at all in any matter; to the contrary, it was as if they did not hold me for their sister. And if they should ´ski, I summon them before the terrible Divine wish to trouble my husband, Lord Dziedzin

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Judgment, and I ask humbly that those promissory notes [notes of obligation, obligi] that are being kept by my Lord uncle, Lord Ławryn [i.e., Wawrzyniec] Minkiewicz, that [the proper] portion be given by my Lord brothers to my husband.

The estate was indeed small. In addition to the “obligations” of unspecified and perhaps doubtful worth mentioned above, Polikszanka bequeathed to her husband the right to seek payment of a debt of 21 Lithuanian k from Stefan Kryłowicz, burgher and merchant of Wilno, as well as some indeterminate debt from Stefan Kuszelicz, “as the lessee of this house.” There are several curiosities here. First, although this, like the vast majority of documents from the Wilno magistracy in the seventeenth century, was written in Polish, the names were “Ruthenianized” in this instance: Teodor has now become Fiedor, and Wawrzyniec (Lawrence) has become Ławryn. Further, Polikszanka referred to her uncles as her “brothers”— not such odd usage in itself—but then in the same sentence she named one of them, Ławryn, and more precisely identified him as an “uncle on the mother’s side” (wuj), which was genealogically correct. And she asked that Uncle Ławryn see to it that her brothers (i.e., Wawrzyniec/ Ławryn himself and Mikołaj) give the proper portion to her husband. The sentence must have confused anyone not familiar with the family tree. More surprising is the tone she took with her brothers. After all, they had made a reasonably good impression with their division of the family property, in which Anastazja and her brother Samuel would seem to have received fair treatment. But the real question was the identity and status of that second husband. Who was he? Where had he come from? And if Anastazja had no idea whether first husband Orzeszyc was still alive (she had written: “he, should he be alive . . .”), then how could she be certain she had not entered into a bigamous relationship? Surely she would have referred to a decree of divorce and permission to remarry, which was a possibility in the Orthodox Church, if she had obtained one. This would have been useful in disinheriting Orzeszyc and his kin and in bolstering Dziedzin´ski’s claim to her estate. The protestation of a certain Roman Kołczan registered with the magistracy on 14 October 1671, about half a year after Polikszanka’s will, sheds a little light on the question.57 As usual in this forensic genre, the core of the conflict remained unexpressed, somewhere in the deep background. Kołczan (in other documents he was Kołczanowicz) was in fact a former brother-in-law of the Minkiewiczes, although we do not learn this here. He had been mentioned, though not by name, in the deed of 1667 in which Mikołaj and Wawrzyniec Minkiewicz divided up the paternal house. He was the parent in whose presence his children begotten with his first wife, Dorota Minkiewiczówna—Demiter Kołczanowicz and Helena Kołczanowiczówna—had received their portion. (Kołczan’s second wife was Domicella Dorofiewiczówna, a daughter of Wasyli Dorofiewicz at Subocz Street 76.01, which property, as we know, would be the object of another Ruthenian family struggle.)58 On this recent occasion, Kołczan had gotten into an altercation with Dziedzin´ski when the latter came to the Wilno town hall to press his claim to his wife’s portion of the

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Minkiewicz estate. But one has to have read other court documents in order to understand that the participants in the incident described below were in fact in-laws of sorts and that the issue was family finances. Here is the beginning of the complaint: I, Roman Kołczan, burgher and merchant of His Royal Majesty’s city of Wilno, protest ´ski, burgher of Wilno, that he, havsollenniter [solemnly] against Lord Stanisław Dziedzin ing arrived not long ago in the city of Wilno, no one knows from where, or of what occupation he had been before, and not having made any act of service [to the city], as others do, began to revile and to beat people, as also me, the plaintiff, in the current year, the month of October [blank space for the date], when, coming down from the town hall, conversing with the accused, I censured him for the fact that he, having no proof, accusing my son-inlaw and daughter over some sort of deposit, on the grounds that it allegedly was given for safekeeping to my first wife, troubles and summons them [to court]. And when I reminded him on this occasion that the first husband [of his wife], Lord Teodor Orzeszyc, was still alive, and if it were a matter of litigating over some deposit, then it would rather belong to him [Orzeszyc] to reclaim it than to the accused, having become enraged over those words, since I spoke the truth (as is indeed the fact), he grabbed me by the beard and jerked it. And then he struck me in the neck with his fist such that I rolled to the ground and around in the mud. . . . And after this beating and tormenting he went for his cutlass, wishing to bring about my death (which cutlass, since he is a burgher and a merchant, it is unfitting for him to bear, and he has it by him only to frighten people), and so, having beaten and tormented me, he made boasts upon my health, but being most angered when I said that he was living with someone else’s wife, who even now has a first husband; but that first ´ski] makes threats against husband does not dare to return to the city, since he [Dziedzin him [Orzeszyc]. Further, that she has a first husband, hardly anybody even knew, .  .  . except that they themselves made this manifest, and especially the accused, Lord ´ski, when his spouse, on his own information, guaranteed in her testament, Dziedzin that, after her death, if he [Orzeszyc] should show up, he should have no access to any of her goods, as is shown in the testament of the year 1671, March the [blank space] day.

Kołczan attempted to weaken Dziedzin´ski’s legal status, first by questioning the legitimacy of his marriage to Anastazja. If Orzeszyc was still alive, how could Dziedzin´ski be a party to this matter at all? Second, Kołczan questioned his social estate. He had identified him in the preamble to the protestation as a “burgher of Wilno,” only to proceed immediately to cast doubt upon that status: he was a recent arrival, had not sworn his oath of citizenship (the “act of service”), and was of uncertain profession. Later we learn that he affected gentry airs, walking about with a cutlass at his side (which was “unfitting for a burgher and merchant”). And the plaintiff ended his complaint with one more attempt to deny him the status of citizen: “And since such danger meets me through the boasts and declaration of

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vengeance upon my health made by him, who, having no settled residence here, but only lives in a rented alcove, then, avoiding further harm, I submit to the books this my protestation, both concerning the beating and his boasts upon my health.” “To live in a rented alcove,” komora˛ mieszkac´, still means to live in a rented corner of someone else’s apartment. Having “settled residence” (osiadłos´´c )—in fact, owning real estate—was a requirement for citizenship. Anastazja Polikszanka had identified her second husband in her will only as “Lord Stanisław Dziedzin´ski” without any specification of estate or occupation. But perhaps he was in fact some sort of petty gentryman. A document from June 1669—the first time we learn that Polikszanka had remarried—tells us that he was the “standard bearer of the dragoons of His Noble Grace, Lord [Benedykt Paweł] Sapieha, Esquire Carver of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.”59 So perhaps he had some right, perhaps an obligation, to wear a sword even if he seems not to have had any property and was attempting to make ends meet by laying claim to his wife’s slender estate. It is worth noting that Kołczan had “gone to the books” (i.e., the acta of the magistracy), looked up his niece’s will, and discovered there that she had admitted that she might still have a living first husband. Kołczan alleged this was not general knowledge, although it was there in the acta for the curious to see, and he did his best to draw public attention to the fact. Kołczan was exaggerating on at least one issue. He had known Dziedzin´ski for more than two years at the time he registered his complaint. The document of June 1669 that tells us that Polikszanka had sold a piece of land “cum assistentia mariti sui [with the assistance of her husband], Stanisław Dziedzin´ski, standard bearer of the dragoons of His Noble Grace, Lord [Benedykt Paweł] Sapieha, Esquire Carver of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania,” also tells us that her curator was a certain Krzysztof Demitr Kołczanowicz. This was her cousin, the son of Roman Kołczan, previously identified as Demiter Kołczanowicz. Anastazja was still alive when the beard-pulling incident took place on the Wilno town hall steps. In fact, she would live another four years after that, apparently suffering various diseases that kept her in bed most of the time. On 10 September 1675 she had a new will witnessed.60 She was illiterate. If Dziedzin´ski had married the “widow” for her money, he must have been sorely disappointed. She would once again ask him to see to it that she receive a “fitting burial in the Christian manner in the Ruthenian [Orthodox] Church of the Holy Spirit, according to [his] capabilities, by his spousal grace and love, and perform the Church rites according to custom for the salvation of [her] soul.” The qualification “according to capabilities” was the crux. Polikszanka left behind for the burial of her body “no money of [her] own, silver, gold, garments, pewter, copper, for whatever there was went for the paying off of the debts incurred by [her] deceased first husband, Fiedor Orzeszyc, and by [her]self, after his death, having become a widow, during Muscovy [i.e., during the Muscovite occupation of Wilno, which Polikszanka spent mostly in Königsberg] and after Muscovy [i.e., after the liberation of Wilno].”

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Polikszanka was being imprecise about chronology, apparently purposely so. We, the readers of the court record, know that Orzeszyc was still alive some years “after Muscovy.” After all, she herself was not sure he was dead even after she had married her second husband and was drawing up the first version of her last will and testament. This was as late as 1671—Muscovy had pulled up stakes and left a decade earlier! The phrase “having become a widow”—especially given the sloppy chronology and syntax—arouses the lingering suspicion that she had not become one or was not sure that she was one and that she knew that she had once been and perhaps still was a bigamist. Less than six years had passed between her original protestation and the first mention of her new husband, but we do not know for how long she had been abandoned and thus whether she would technically have been eligible for a Church divorce. Abandonment for some minimum period of time could have justified an Orthodox divorce, but Anastazja had apparently not bothered to obtain one. In fact, allegations of bigamy seem to have followed these family circles. A volume of the acta of the Wilno magistracy from the period of the Muscovite occupation that has survived in the Russian State Historical Archive tells the story of the litigation in the winter and spring of 1661 that Anastazja and her brother Samuel had conducted with their new stepmother, a certain Maryna Serafimówna. The stepchildren complained on 7 March of that year that “the aforementioned stepmother, in the year 1659, the month of November, the 15th day, after the death of her first husband Jankowski, in a short time, of her own and through various individuals, solicited [solicytowała] our father to take her for a wife.” The plaintiffs did all they could to convince their father, “who was old and had already outlived two wives, to forgo the third.” They were, of course, unable to speak reason to him. At the moment of the wedding, charges of bigamy would suddenly surface—but against the bride-to-be: But when it came to the marriage itself, the fathers did not wish to grant the marriage, since she had had three husbands, and now would marry the fourth. Then, during the marriage in the [Orthodox] church, before the gathered people, she swore that she had had only two lawful husbands [me˛z∧ów szlubnych], and the first one, if she did have him, then he hadn’t been lawful [tedy nieszlubnego]. After such an oath she was granted marriage with our father as her fourth husband. Immediately after the wedding party, within a few days, having abandoned his house and us, he moved in with her with all his belongings.

Thus she was about to take a third or fourth husband (depending on how we look upon that first “unlawful” one), he a third bride. Orthodox usage did not distinguish between a “bigamist” and one “twice married” (in succession). Canonists devoted much attention to the legality of third and fourth (and more!) marriages.61 The father soon died. Here, too, the main issue in the litigation was the estate of a party who had allegedly been living in a bigamous relationship.62

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Untying the Knot in Seventeenth-Century Wilno The stories of marital discord, abandonment, separation, and divorce recounted here offer a basis for some observations and further questions. These thoughts lead in seemingly opposite directions but may in fact be reconcilable. The first direction is that of Ruthenian exceptionality. The second is that of a certain leveling in attitudes and customs across the confessions within the city. The first and last of the stories about separation and divorce took place among the Ruthenians of Subocz Street. In fact, the two family stories were playing themselves out in one small neighborhood and within human networks that had considerable overlap. The first story appears to have gone according to the rules: a consistory-like court (probably Orthodox) decreed a “separation from bed and board.” There is no indication that either spouse sought to remarry while the wife was still living. The fourth story had been irregular enough to raise some questions of bigamy, not only in the mind of one contemporary with a financial interest in the matter but also for any later reader of the court record. Story number three, the other instance of alleged bigamy I have encountered, took place in a different neighborhood (Horse Street) and network of people, but the setting and actors in that drama were also Orthodox, and we have seen ties of family and networks between the two neighborhoods. Are we dealing here with peculiarly Ruthenian attitudes toward marriage and divorce? Did some of these people think in terms of relationships that were only slightly bigamous? In his now classic work “The Customary Matrimonial Law of the Ruthenian Populace of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (XV–XVII Centuries),” Juliusz Bardach painted a picture of the secular nature of marriage and divorce in the views and practices of the Orthodox (and perhaps Uniate) inhabitants of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Among the Ruthenians the practice embodied in customary law conflicted with, and often trumped, the strictures of both Orthodox canon law and the secular Lithuanian statute. In this practice a secular marriage—something called an “uncrowned marriage” (niewien´czone małz∧en´stwo)—in other words, not taking place under the wedding wreath (wieniec) and in church and without the participation of a priest (or presumably the consent of the parents)—was treated as a private contract between two people. In a society with this view of marriage, divorce—which was possible in Orthodox canon law—was often also in the hands of the married couple, which, of course, was not in accordance with that same canon law. As Bardach noted, If among the higher and middle levels of West Ruthenian society, the freedom of divorces found expression in the dissolving of marriage with the agreement of the parties in the form of a bilateral written contract, sometimes entered into the [secular] official books, then among the common people an even greater freedom obtained. Perhaps it was an echo of an earlier state when the freedom of dissolving marriage went so far that the will of one of the spouses, expressed publicly, was sufficient to dissolve [the marriage].63

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Bardach saw the reason for the predominance of customary law over canon law and the Lithuanian statute in the extreme decentralization of secular and ecclesiastical power for the Ruthenians. And he saw a slow reversal of the situation only in the course of the seventeenth century, with some pockets of resistance still to be met in the eighteenth century. The second story might suggest some confluence of attitudes toward marriage and divorce across the confessions of Wilno. Siemaszkówna may have come from a Ruthenian family, and her first husband, Mikołaj Kostrowicki, was probably Orthodox or Uniate. The Kostrowicki family networks were also located in the Subocz Street neighborhood. But in any case, Siemaszkówna’s second husband was Catholic, as was the marriage for which both spouses so eagerly sought divorce. Given the possibility of divorce available through ecclesiastical channels among Lutherans, Calvinists, and Orthodox and given Ruthenian secular attitudes toward marriage, could it be that early modern Catholic Vilnans had expectations about separation and divorce that differed from those of their co-confessionals in more “normal” countries and cities? It may be that Ruthenian attitudes were the decisive factor here: Protestants did not seek divorces in these days on the grounds of incompatibility or cruelty. The provincial synods of the Lithuanian Calvinist Church heard three divorce cases of which I am aware, in the years 1615, 1623, and 1624.64 In the first two cases, the argument was made on the basis of adultery, and the divorces were granted. In the third case, the argument was impotence, and the synod, “seeing that this was not a vitium naturale [innate defect], but a causa accidentalis [accidental cause], which justis mediis aliquando curatur [is cured sometimes by the appropriate means],” directed the couple to give it a try for another year. And if by the next synod “Deus hoc malum non avertet [God has not removed this evil], we will use other means proper to the Church.”65 Perhaps other divorces were granted at the level of the local church.

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lergy left no direct instructions for their flocks commanding them to avoid fellow Vilnans of other confessions and religions in the workplace, as they did in contexts like baptism, education, and marriage. For many other Polish-Lithuanian cities, such strictures would have been largely superfluous. Lwów offers a good comparison here: it was another eastern royal city, equally diverse, of similar size. Secular authorities and guild statutes themselves had seen to it that the workplace there was to a great extent monoconfessional.1 This was not the case in Wilno. Although one confession might predominate in a given profession (for example, Lutherans among goldsmiths and barber-surgeons, Ruthenians among sheep shearers and furriers, Roman Catholics among red- and black-leather tanners), almost all of them were mixed to greater and lesser degrees over the course of the seventeenth century. And since the guilds functioned in part as religious brotherhoods, the clergy in question—and this meant mostly Roman Catholic, although on rare occasions also Uniate— sought ways to impose confessional discipline upon the guilds. We see some attempts to use guild membership as a confessionalizing tool, to bring non-Catholics into the Church by making participation in the life of the guild altar the key to full participation in a chosen profession. But we also see approaches less focused on confessional discipline, a willingness to let the guilds work out their internal systems of keeping order and peace among the confessions—so long as, at a minimum, guild money made its way to the proper (again, almost always Roman Catholic) guild altar.2 As we have seen, a royal decree of 1666 limited participation in all levels of the magistracy to Roman Catholics on the Roman side and to Uniates on the Greek side, although the old principle of Greek-Roman parity would remain in place. A few echoes of this imposition of confessional limits were to be heard in guild statutes and other acta beginning soon after 1666, on occasion couched explicitly as an imitation of the new rules imposed upon the magistracy. The most sweeping attempt at a clergy-led, top-down imposition of confessional order upon the workplace came in a decree from before 10 November 1673 promulgated by King Michał Korybut Wis´niowiecki. At the request of Gabriel Kolenda, Uniate metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus´, the king called for a stiff fine—1,000 zł—to be leveled against any guild in Wilno that dared elect to its highest office, that of “annual elder,” a dissident (usually

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Protestant) or a Disuniate (usually Greek Orthodox). That document invoked the model of the magistracy: “Just as now [juz∧] in the Roman and Ruthenian bench no Disuniate or dissidents may take office, so let no Disuniate be elected to the eldership in the guilds of the city of Wilno.”3 Eleven years later, the guild that brought together four related subprofessions—makers of “Magyar hats” (magiernicy), dressmakers (kiecarze, also derived from a Hungarian word and signifying a dress of a certain cut worn by wealthier women), stocking weavers (pon´czosznicy), and clothiers (sukiennicy)—seems at first glance to refer to the royal decree of 1666 in statutes its elders presented to the magistracy for ratification on 19 August 1684: “Just as all the rights are conferred upon the two nations that are in this city, the Roman and the Ruthenian, so the Lord masters of the above-described trades ought not receive masters, journeymen, and apprentices of any other religion in their guild but the Catholic and the Ruthenian.”4 But this was not the story in other guilds, even in this period—from ca. 1666 through the first third of the eighteenth century—thought to mark the triumph of the Counter-Reformation in Wilno society. As we will see later, many guilds quietly (some not so quietly) ignored the decree of 1673. Moreover, I have found no evidence that the penalty of 1,000 zł was ever imposed. What is more, even in the royal decree of 1673 concerning the guilds, and in the clothiers’ guild statute presented for royal confirmation in 1684, there are ambiguities not found in the edict of 1666 concerning the magistrates. That of 1673 began with the language of the decree of 1666 but ended by excluding from the eldership only Disuniates and not dissidents, although there could be some overlap in the terms in certain contexts. The language of the statute of 1684 began with the old notion of two “nations” (narody) that in the past had included the five confessions. It then narrowed this notion by making the shift so easy in contemporary usage from categories of nation to those of religion, and it quite clearly now—in imitation of the royal decree of 1666—excluded Lutherans and Calvinists from this concept of a “Roman nation.” But the language was less clear about the “Ruthenian nation.” In the right context, a confessional polemicist writing in defense of either Orthodoxy or the Uniate Church might be able to speak of the Ruthenian nation/religion without a qualifier and expect his readers to understand he meant one confessional version of that identity to the exclusion of the other. This was not the case in other contexts, such as this one: we would have expected some further identification such as “the Ruthenian nation/religion that is [or is not] in unity with the Roman Catholic Church” (if that limitation was indeed to be imposed). In fact, although a few guilds showed an interest in excluding those not in communion in Rome (and at times quite simply all non-Catholics) from participation, or at least from exercising power in the brotherhood, most, even after 1666, were first of all interested in establishing a trade monopoly: by excluding, and imposing penalties upon, nonguild artisans of all religions and ethnicities—including Roman Catholics; by drawing stricter definitions between guilds practicing related trades (e.g., various types of tanners, who were organized in

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at least four separate guilds), and by setting fines for encroaching upon the professional territory of the other trade, in both production and sale.5 Competition from both groups—the nonguild artisans, or bunglers, and guild members from related trades—caused financial harm to individual masters and to the activities of the guild, which included poor relief and religious obligations (typically, provision of candles and upkeep for a guild altar and its priest). Second, the guild statutes attempted to impose order and discipline on guild members. This meant, among other things, determining what range of confessions could be represented and, more important, how they were to be represented, and what sorts of compromises could (and could not) be made that would provide both for a guild altar at a Roman Catholic Church and for the peaceful and productive presence of “brethren of another religion.” In some cases, the dissidents continued to hold positions of authority even while the guild fulfilled its obligations to its Roman Catholic altar and participated, in guild garb and under guild colors, in public processions that included the annual Corpus Christi celebration. This was one of the moments in the calendar in early modern Polish-Lithuanian society that regularly set confessions and religions at odds with each other and led to violence between Catholics and Protestants and Catholics and Jews. We will find a range of strategies for forcing the participation of non-Catholics, as well as for excusing them from the obligations. In this chapter I first examine how Wilno’s various guilds drew a line around their areas of monopoly and whom they left on the outside. The topic of the second section is the strategies the guilds employed in their search for order among brethren of various religions within the professional and trade boundaries they attempted to enforce. A separate section looks specifically at strategies the guilds adopted for reconciling multiconfessional memberships with participation in activities surrounding the guild altar. Finally, I look at a few questions of stricture and laxity in the application of confessional discipline in guild life.

Defining the Outside In articles confirmed by the Wilno magistracy on 1 October 1688, the guild of the morocco tanners (safianis´ci) attempted to lay out what a group of potential competitors could and could not do in Wilno without infringing upon their guild monopoly for the production and trade of this fine leather. That list of outsiders comprised the following: tanners (garbarze), a specific type of “white-leather” tanners (bałtusznicy), retailers (przekupnicy), Tatars, and Jews.6 The first two had their own guilds; the latter three were, in this instance, outside such structures. A second case: statutes for Wilno’s haberdashers (passamanicy) confirmed on 22 July 1633 by King Władysław IV excluded “merchants, Scots, Jews, and other people [i.e., nonguild members] of whatever condition [wszelakiej kondycyjej ludziom].”7 The restriction was repeated in articles confirmed on 9 August 1650 by Władysław’s brother, King Jan Kazimierz.8 A third case: on 28 May 1664 the magistracy confirmed articles for the Wilno fishermen’s

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Figure 4 Unknown seventeenth-century artist, panorama of the city of Wilno. Dre·ma 1991, 36.

guild that attempted to put restrictions on “Jews, Tatars, and butchers.” Jewish and Christian butchers had their own guilds (and were themselves in frequent conflict with each other). Christian butchers were “forbidden to sell retail [szynkowac´ ] any sort of fish, both summer and winter, except for two days.”9 The articles did not specify which two days these were, but they were no doubt connected with high fasts. Articles confirmed by King Jan Kazimierz for the butchers’ guild the following year on 9 March 1665 granted them more extensive rights to poach in the fishermen’s waters: “We allow Wilno elder and younger butchers the right to conduct every sort of fish commerce [wszelakie handle rybne] during Lent without the least hindrance from fishermen and other persons.”10 The kings and the Wilno magistracy frequently confirmed such statutes with conflicting articles that did of necessity result in intraguild strife. In fact, the guilds (like the Jews) often tried to play one authority off against the other. We should treat guild statutes as a sort of index of the goals of individual corporations and not always as reflective of what those groups were able to achieve. And the list goes on. In 1509, the barber-surgeons’ guild [balwierze] had stipulated that “masters are not to have any intercourse [obcowanie] with bath keepers [łaziebniki], nor are they to receive them into their community as journeymen, or take on their children as apprentices.”11 But by 1721, a low point for the guild system in Wilno, the barber-surgeons and bath keepers formed one contubernium (Latin for “tent,” the smallest unit of the Roman army,

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one of the terms frequently used for guilds and brotherhoods in early modern Wilno) in common, and they attempted to place restrictions on yet another set of competitors: “old beggar men and old beggar women [dziadowie i baby], who make bold to heal the sick through whispering and other acts of sorcery forbidden by the Roman Church,” in addition to a list of unlicensed “bloodletters” and other bunglers. That guild, on the other hand, now grudgingly accepted the notion that “Tatars, Jews, and other Disuniates [referring here not to Greek Orthodox but to all non-Roman Catholic Christians], although they cannot be participants in God’s praise, nor are they fit for God’s service,” might be adjunct members of the brotherhood—if they paid doubled fees (and if they did not do so, then they were to be subject to a penalty equal to four times the guild fee, as well as confiscation of their goods).12 And further examples of such exclusionary lists could be adduced. Two groups were named as belonging to the outside far more frequently than all others: Jews and bunglers. The first term is, of course, quite specific. The second was generic, embracing all the “others” (including “Scotsmen, Tatars, and people of whatever condition”), since its basic meaning was “one who engages in the production and commerce associated with a protected profession without membership in the applicable guild.” But by default it was often used in tandem with those other groups that were more easily and clearly defined (Jews, Tatars, Scotsmen, members of established guilds in related trades). The term most often referred loosely to local Christians who were not paying dues and had not been given any status in a guild (apprentice, journeyman, master). And paying dues to the guild box in support of its own internal programs such as poor relief and, either from it or from a separate box, to the guild altar for candles and upkeep of the priest who said Mass at that altar was the whole point here. (The guild box contained the privileges, statutes, and other official documents, such as the guild register with the inscriptions of the members.) The sticking point was not so much the religion, confession, or ethnicity of the other as the fact that guild finances suffered. In addition to being outside guild discipline—as were, for the most part, the Jew, the Tatar, and the Scotsman—the bungler also hurt commerce by producing goods that were portrayed as (and probably were) both cheaper and often of inferior quality, although these aspects seem to have been subordinated to concerns about discipline and finances.13 Attempts to exclude the bungler and the other named groups (largely “ethnicities”) were present from the beginning of the guild system; they formed a major part of the entire enterprise of seeking confirmation of guild articles from authorities like the king and the magistracy. But the complaints became louder, more prominent, and more frequent toward the end of the seventeenth century as the guild system in Wilno underwent a period of crisis. The language of the articles of the glaziers’ guild that were confirmed (most likely reconfirmed) by the magistracy on 3 December 1663 was typical on this issue, and other statutes echoed it, often nearly verbatim: “And since there are very many bunglers in the glazier trade, which works to the detriment of poor masters, to the detriment of ecclesiastical offices, and causes the diminishment of benefits to the city, therefore [we demand] that such idle and loose

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people [luz´ni ludzie] and bunglers be punished and their goods confiscated, with the knowledge of the city office, or of that to which they are subject.”14 The glaziers went on to devote the entire final article, number 47, to regulating relations between the guild and their Jewish competitors. It is worth quoting at length: In compliance with the privilege of His Royal Majesty, Our Gracious Lord, we wish that Jewish glaziers do no work under any Christian unto the detriment of the guild masters, inasmuch as they are not in the guild register nor in the community of the brethren. Likewise, that they not send their apprentices about the wooden and bricked houses with their goods, [for they are] subject to confiscation [of goods and tools] with the knowledge and aid of the magistracy. On the other hand, those [Christian] apprentices who have spent their years until now in training with the Jews cannot become journeymen of the entire glaziers’ guild, just as those who trained with a bungler, until they first serve their years and finish their apprenticeship [cejtowa´c ] with a trained guild master, for better understanding of the trade and for order in the guild. Finally, we stipulate that from the date of these articles of ours no Jew dare to receive an apprentice of the Christian faith for training in the glaziers’ trade, and that if any Christian should present himself to a Jew for training as an apprentice, in order that the scandalum [inducement to transgression] not be multiplied, he is to be taken away from him cum adminiculo officii [with the assistance of the office], and such a trade is to be forbidden to Jews.15

The final sentence calling for a ban on the Jewish presence in the trade was a case of wishful thinking. The problem here was again one of competing and conflicting privileges, in this case, those granted to the Jews by the Polish kings and this one for the Christian glaziers granted by the Wilno magistracy. In 1633 King Władysław IV had allowed Jews to engage in trades not organized into guilds in Wilno, and he named specifically “furriers, haberdashers, and glaziers.”16 King Michał Korybut Wis´niowiecki reaffirmed this privilege in 1669, again naming the same three trades.17 (It is worth noting that in Lwów, toward the end of the seventeenth century, the lace makers’, glaziers’, and tinsmiths’ guilds were Jewish monopolies.)18 The articles for the Christian glaziers’ guild were dated 3 December 1663. In reconfirming the Jewish privilege some five years later and in repeating the language of the original patent, the king was putting Jewish and Christian glaziers into a situation of necessary conflict. It is unclear whether the guild had existed before the date of the statute, but there are some indications that here too, as with so many other reenactments of privileges and contracts soon after the liberation of the city in December 1661, this was a case of acquiring a reconfirmation of a grant that had been lost during the recent wars and the Muscovite occupation of the city. The Latin prologue to the articles (they were themselves recorded in Polish) gave as a motivating factor the recent cessation of hostilities and the desire to see that worship at the (apparently already existing) guild altar at the Bernardines (i.e., at the

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Church of St. Anne) again thrive “according to ancient custom” (juxta antiquum morem).19 In any event, for some time before the reconfirmation of the Jewish privilege in 1669 it had no longer been the case that the Christian glaziers of Wilno had lacked guild structures. But the more interesting thing the final article suggests is that although the Christian glaziers were now well organized with detailed prescriptions and proscriptions on a wide range of activities, both religious and secular, and had excluded Jews from their brotherhood, they seem not to have been able to convince all future glaziers not to seek training with Jewish master glaziers. Professional competition may have been the unarticulated motivation in an altercation between a Christian glazier called Łukasz Rycewicz and a Wilno Jew of unspecified profession by the name of Mejer Jakubowicz. On 12 October 1679, Jakubowicz—so alleged his complaint before the court of the magistracy—was “walking peacefully with his companion [kompan], also a Jew, expecting nothing bad, along a public way,” when, “without giving the least cause,” he was attacked by Rycewicz. The Jewish plaintiff offered a psychologizing explanation for the event: the Christian glazier had had a falling out—it is unclear with whom— during the popis, the annual mustering of Wilno guilds under their colors in a field outside the walls. Unable to “achieve what he had planned, . . . jumping out with a drawn sword, drunk,” he attacked the innocent Jew.20 I am uncertain just what it was Rycewicz “had planned,” but it may well have had to do with settling scores with Jewish professional competitors. In any event, Jakubowicz’s complaint situates the event and its motivations in the realm of the glazier’s profession. Christian and Jewish butchers had parallel guild structures, as well as statutes—partially conflicting in their claims to a monopoly, as was so often the case with Christian and Jewish privileges—which, together with litigation in the courts between the two bodies, established how many Jewish butchers might practice the trade, as well as where and when.21 A royal decree of 4 June 1667 provided for six Jewish butchers and their stalls near the main synagogue (in this it reconfirmed terms of a Christian butchers’ guild statute of 1665), and it required—“since they do not contribute . . . to the altar of the [Christian] butchers’ guild”— an annual payment on St. Martin’s day according to the Roman calendar of half a stone (about fifteen pounds) of good tallow to the Jesuits’ Church of St. Kazimierz.22 The same documents also specified where and when Christian butchers were allowed to slaughter animals and sell retail. The two bodies were to exist separately and in parallel, although here, too, the Christian side seems to have been unable to keep Christian apprentices from learning the tools of the trade with Jewish masters. In one case—it is the only one I have encountered—Christian and Jewish artisans agreed to a sort of limited, carefully structured, coexistence under one guild statute. On 22 April 1673, representatives of the Christian needle makers’ and tinsmiths’ guild came before the magistracy, together with two named Jews (Kałman Aranowicz and Ulf Józefowicz), as well as two other Jews whose names were not recorded. They together signed a “voluntary letter of concord.” This forensic genre was a sort of contract in which two parties registered with

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the magistracy an agreement they had worked out among themselves. It might be many things: a contract for sale of real estate, an easement between two adjacent properties, a dispensation of family wealth between husband and wife. This particular provision came in response to “the ancient great harm” the Christian guild had suffered from Jewish competition. It now granted four Jewish tinsmiths—“and no more”—a kind of adjunct guild membership. The Jewish artisans would pay as a corporation 30 zł (or 7½ each—the contract allowed either solution) to the guild for the upkeep of its altar at the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity. The Jewish tinsmiths were to be granted the right to sell door to door. The document further freed them from the obligation to join in the guild’s public processions, both secular (greeting the arrival of the king or the bishop) and religious (Corpus Christi).23 These provisions echoed those the guilds would work out for reconciling non-Catholic Christian brethren to the guild’s religious mission. In sum, the guilds sought to exclude people not so much on the basis of religion or confession as on professional grounds and specifically in order to limit competition. The list of those placed on the outside by the goldsmiths’ articles of 1664 brings together this seemingly disparate group nicely: the goal was to exclude “licentious and hole-and-corner [poka˛tnych] Christians, and especially Jews and Tatars.”24 The Jews presented a special case in all this because they had royal privileges for some of their commercial activities, possessed guilds that were structured in parallel with Christian counterparts, and offered competition not only in the marketplace, where finished goods were sold, but also by attracting Christian apprentices. Thus the negotiations on the Christian side ranged from the wishful thinking of a total ban on Jewish competition through strictly established quotas of separate guilds (as in the case of the butchers) to the limited participation of Jewish artisans as adjunct members of Christian guilds (as in the case of the tinsmiths).

Ordering the Inside A very few guilds attempted to limit membership on the basis of Christian confession. For instance, the white-leather tanners’ (bałtusznicy), glove makers’, and chamois tanners’ (zamesznicy) guild declared in its articles of 18 January 1680 that it would not receive any heretical or schismatic brethren “under penalty of losing the rights and freedoms that had been granted the guild,” nor was it to “receive any other apprentices but those of the Catholic faith, or of an honorable bed and free birth.”25 Similarly, the bookbinders, in articles approved 8 June 1664, saw “great disorders” in their trade, “especially since they [the nonguild bookbinders and booksellers] import to our city of Wilno heretical books and those of other various sects, and sell them in their stalls, since Jews bind Christian books.” They sought to address the issue by, among other measures, limiting participation in guild power (the annual elder’s office) to those “who are in the Holy Roman faith, good people, and no dissidents.”26

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But even in these two seemingly straightforward cases, one wonders just how confessionally exclusive the guilds had become. The motivation for the bookbinders was the maintenance of orthodoxy in the book market (“let no one be permitted to import any heretical books to our city of Wilno”), as well as a trade monopoly for reliable people—guild members, presumably Roman Catholic, if they desired to exercise power in the guild. In fact, Protestant printing had largely moved out of Wilno by the first decade of the seventeenth century. Lutheran and Calvinist ministers of Wilno (Schönflissius, Łabe˛dzki) published their Polish-language funeral sermons for Wilno burghers in nearby Protestant centers— Lutheran Königsberg and Calvinist Lubcz (a Radziwiłł family holding).27 After a temporary ban in 1610—a royal expression of displeasure over the publication in Wilno of Melecjusz Smotrycki’s infamous Thre¯nos of that year—the Orthodox had reestablished a modest presence among printing shops in the city by 1615.28 But it is difficult to believe that the threat of confiscation of book stocks had entirely removed “heretical books” from the Wilno market. And the only named bookbinders I have encountered (other than the two elders named in the prologue to the royal privilege of 1664) were Lutherans. The local offering rolls for that church listed professions in the earlier part of the extant record; thus we find two bookbinders’ widows and two bookbinders in the church pews around 1640, and by lucky chance, we also find a certain Gotthardt Heuel, Buchbinder, who gave his 2 zł to Lutheran coffers in 1667, well after the royal privilege that had attempted to limit Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish participation in the local book trade.29 The Lutheran participation in the trade of chamois-leather tanning is even easier to document, at least for the period before the wars of midcentury, when the local church more frequently listed the professions of its offering givers. But the family names remained in the record in the second half of the century, and scattered pieces of information suggest the continuing presence and concentration of Lutheran zamesznicy/Sämischmacher clustered on both sides of the little branch of the Wilenka separating the city from the Szerejkiszki suburb on the northeast below the castles. By far the more common pattern among guilds that addressed the issue of confession was the explicit reception of brethren of other religions. A couple of examples give a sense of the language of inclusion. In a statute approved by the magistracy on 27 November 1614 for the red- and black-leather tanners, we find article 3: “Those two above-mentioned elders will be permitted to inscribe and receive into this brotherhood whoever might request this of them. Only let such ones be of good birth, making no distinction [braku z∧adnego nie czynia˛c] with regard to religion [religiia] or nation [naród].”30 In a passage that reveals the remarkably strong position of non-Catholics in the period that was supposed to be their nadir, the masons, in articles approved by the magistracy on 3 December 1687, wrote, “Let the aforementioned Lord elders of the society of masons receive into their congregation journeymen well trained in the trade, unsuspect, making certain above all that they be of free and honorable birth, making no distinction [nie brakuja˛c] in this matter with regard to nation, even if it be a foreign one, so long as he not be opposed to the Catholic faith.”31 Now in some contexts a Catholic

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polemicist might argue that only a Catholic was not “opposed to,” “in contradiction with” [przeciwny] the Catholic religion, but the articles do not specify this, and in the Wilno context non-Catholics could easily position themselves as not opposed to Catholicism. Or finally, consider the cobblers, whose three elders (one “from the Roman side,” one “from the Ruthenian side,” and one “of the Saxon confession”) came before the magistracy on 9 July 1689 and declared the guild’s willingness to receive “wandering journeymen of whatever religion [jakiejkolwiek religiej] who have come to Wilno,” so long as they produce documents proving “free and honorable birth,” and “completion of an apprenticeship” (wyzwolenie).32 But for most guilds—even after the attempts at restrictions in the 1660s–1670s—the presence of a spectrum of confessions and ethnicities was simply a more or less silent point of departure. Thus the second major goal of guild articles, after defining the outside, was to provide for good order on the inside. And one aspect of this process—alongside strictures on feasting, drinking, and general behavior in the guild house and in the public sphere—was the attempt to regulate relations between brethren of various confessions in a way that would both put people in their place and allow for the presence of others. In fact, we can follow a narrowing of usage in the language of intraguild toleration that ran somewhat parallel to that of interpretations of the “peace among dissidents in religion [dissidentes in religione]” first put forth as a desideratum for Polish-Lithuanian society by the Confederation of Warsaw in 1573.33 At first, the state of being in dissidence characterized the entire society, and there were no “others” among Christians, because Roman Catholics were every bit as dissident as the Orthodox or the Protestants; each was equally in a state of dissent with the other confessions. Eventually, as in the usage of subsequent pacta conventa affirmed by successive Polish kings and Lithuanian grand dukes, Roman Catholicism became the “nondissident” confession, and the guild charters began to treat Catholicism as the default norm and to speak of “people of another religion” when they attempted to define the position of non-Catholics in the life of the contubernium. In a few cases from later in the century, we find guild charters that no longer address the issue of the confessional mixture present, as if in reaction to topdown restrictions calling for exclusion of non-Catholics at least from power, if not from membership; but other sources tell us that the annual elders who presented the articles in question were of various confessions and that the guild silently continued to practice its time-honored methods of parity arrangements in power sharing. The guilds’ control (or at least attempts to exert control) over the behavior of their members reached into the public sphere. In their articles of 1665, the bookbinders set out specific regulations on such matters: Let no journeyman dally in the inns, except on holidays, which also applies to the taverns; in the summer only until one o’clock at night, in the winter until three o’clock, except if any of them were invited to a wedding, or to someone’s honor, under penalty of a fine of fifteen gr. And returning home, let him not rattle at the gate, if it should be closed, as if in empty places, nor strike with his weapon. Let him not cry out on the street or before his

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house, nor should he make any commotion before his house, as people without reason are wont to do. Rather, when he comes home, he is to behave honorably toward everyone, from the least to the greatest, in word and deed, harming no one, for no one will be able to excuse himself on the grounds that he did this in jest, having recourse in his argument to drunkenness and jests.34

And other statutes contained similar strictures against offensive behavior. The more general search for order began, however, not in the street in the early morning hours, but in the regularly scheduled, closed—indeed, secret—gatherings of the guild at the guild house. Guild after guild established penalties for carrying professional secrets beyond the threshold of the guild house: the tailors (1560), bell founders (1595), weavers (1604), locksmiths (1663), and tanners (1672).35 Articles of the tailors’ guild, also from 1665, give a good picture of the call to order once the brethren had arrived and the doors were closed: And when all the elders and those who sit at the table are already collected and gathered, then first the elder from the Roman side and then the elder from the Greek side are to ask in this manner: “Is it now time to call the guild to order?” And when other elders answer “it is,” then they order the younger [master] to take their swords from them [i.e., the brethren], and having taken them, he will place them under the table where the elders sit. Then the Roman elder and also the Greek will say “be silent,” and in that silence they will order that all remove their caps from their heads. And then the elder will call the guild to order in this manner: “I call the guild to order by the power of His Majesty the King; I call the guild to order by the power of the lord secretary of His Majesty the King, the wójt of Wilno; I call the guild to order by the power of their lords the burgomasters and the entire council; I call the guild to order by the power of all the masters sitting around the table. If any should transgress in deed, he will be subject to penalty, as the law of the city will have it, and whoever [should transgress] in word will be punished according to the judgment of the masters.” And one of the masters asks “Has the guild now been called to order?”; the other elder answers “It has now been called to order.” Then [the first] asks “Can anyone stand without permission?”; the second answers “No, he cannot, rather he must receive permission.” Having finished this, the elders are to say to all the brethren “You hear well, good brethren, that if anyone has something to place before us, or a complaint, let him stand before the table, and let each present his matter, that no one should come to harm.” This is to be the method for calling the guild to order.36

And other guilds seem to have followed similar procedures, placing penalties upon arriving after the guild box had been opened (the ultimate sign that the session was in order) or brandishing weapons during the meeting.37 The goldsmiths—they shared power between Catholics and “another religion” (here almost always Lutherans, although there were a few Ruthenians)—in a prologue to a statute

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confirmed by the magistracy in 1627, made that good order into the guiding theme of their articles: What the soul causes in the human body, good order does for every congregation. For wherever there is turmoil or confusion, there is disharmony, and thereafter quick destruction. Therefore, we the elder and younger brethren of the goldsmiths’ guild, through God’s grace and our striving, wishing to bring to its old order the service of God that had been neglected for several years by our ancestors, have already built from the ground up, and at no little cost, a chapel at the parish Church of St. John, and we have provided it with other needs pertaining to it.38

There was, of course, a problem here that will recur throughout the guild system: if the goldsmiths’ guild had considerable numbers of non-Catholics (and it did and would continue to do so—that was precisely why “the service of God . . . had been neglected for several years by our ancestors”), then how was good order to provide for the maintenance of guild altars that were almost solely in Roman Catholic churches? The details of those negotiations are the focus of the next section. I remain here in the secular sphere: how did the guilds address the question of power sharing among brethren of various confessions? Parity arrangements in the guilds grew up following the introduction of such a system in the magistracy in 1536. At first they imitated the practice of that body quite closely, and later, as the confessional spectrum became more complicated, they would continue to use the magistracy’s division of offices between Greeks and Romans as a general model. For instance, the maltsters and the cobblers (these were, of course, two guilds), who had their separate articles approved by King Zygmunt August on 9 December 1552, called for the annual election of four or six elders in the first case, six in the second, with equal numbers “ex Romana fide [from the Roman faith]” and “ex Graeco ritu [from the Greek rite].”39 (Curiously, both charters used precisely those locutions.) This was just before the Reformation was to gain footing in the city and well before the Union of Brest (1596); thus the terms may have been unambiguous in identifying the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox confessions, although certainly more than one ethnicity might have been included under the heading of the Roman. But only a few years later, in articles approved by King Stefan Batory on 30 May 1579, the weavers’ guild of Wilno felt the need to give greater articulation to their arrangements. They were to gather and elect four elders every year on St. Nicholas Day (6 December—the same day elections to the magistracy were held). The language is somewhat ambiguous, but it would seem that it was to have been one each from the categories of German, Pole, Lithuanian, Ruthenian, although the text could also be read to imply that there was always to be one German and three others total from the other three groups. In any event, there was to be an annual alternation among the four groups (or between the German and one from the other three) for the office of chief elder, whereby two from the groups not wielding that office in a given year (e.g., Pole, Lithuanian, or Ruthenian) were to stand and elect one who would hold

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the office that year (in this case, the German).40 The Poles and Lithuanians were presumably both Roman Catholics; Ruthenian was both a marker of ethnicity and confession (at this point, still uniquely Orthodox); but the German might represent an ethnicity (either Catholic or Lutheran) or a confession (only Lutheran). Whatever the case was here, we see the beginnings of attempts to share power across a spectrum of ethnicities and confessions, and the usual way to do this was by parity, sometimes coupled, as here, with alternation in the position of supreme power. The situation was much clearer in the articles approved for the cobblers’ guild on 1 July 1579, and from here on the German (or “Saxon”), at least in the guild articles, was always a Lutheran. The cobblers were to elect six annual elders, two “from the Catholics” (ex catholicis), two “of the Greek or Ruthenian rite” (ritus Graeci seu Ruthenici), and two “from the German faith” (ex Germanicae fidei).41 By now the latter quite clearly signified the Lutheran confession, and non-Lutheran Germans (they remained a presence in Wilno and were still seen as German) would have competed for power as Catholics. Other guilds followed suit, with greater and lesser precision as to ethnicity and confession. The goldsmiths (1627) chose two elders, one from the Catholics and a second from “another religion” (z inszej religii). Cap makers and furriers (1636; it was one guild at the time) chose two Romans and two Greeks.42 This was precisely the system that had been adopted by the magistracy about a century earlier; one wonders whether here, too, as in that body, the two terms now potentially embraced the five confessions. The weavers, who had had such a minutely articulated system of power sharing in 1579, simplified matters greatly by 28 May 1639, when they called for the election of two annual elders, one of the Roman Catholic faith and the second of the Augsburg religion, and two caretakers (szafarze), “one Catholic, and the other a Saxon.”43 The Pole and the Lithuanian from the earlier dispensation have been quietly subsumed under the rubric Roman Catholics, the German is now quite clearly a Lutheran, and the Ruthenian has departed the scene. In articles of 23 January 1641, the barber-surgeons called for elections of two annual elders, one Roman Catholic, the other a dissident.44 The locksmiths (before 1663) called for three elders, two from Lithuania, and the third a German.45 The opposition was clearly between locals and foreigners, but it was also between Roman Catholics (probably including Poles and Polonized people) and Lutherans, many of whom might have been in Wilno for a generation or more. The tailors (1665) were to be led by six elders, “three of the Roman, and three of the Greek religion.”46 The morocco tanners (1666) elected two elders, “one from the Roman and the second from the Ruthenian side.”47 Two final examples from the later seventeenth century: in articles of 30 March 1672, the tanners called for the election of six annual elders—“two from the Roman, another two from the Greek, and two from the German faith”; and on 9 July 1689, the cobblers called for three annual elders, one each among the Romans, Ruthenians, and Germans. The articles later referred to these groups alternately (and interchangeably in some instances) as “religions” (religie) or “faiths” (wiary) and as “nations” (narody).48

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There is sporadic evidence of tension within the guilds arising along confessional fault lines. In a few guilds, the Lutherans seem to have been in positions of such strength that it was the otherwise dominant Roman Catholics who claimed to be the victims of unfair treatment. In 1666 a Roman Catholic goldsmith named Jan Rohaczewicz brought a complaint against Lutheran elder Mateusz Grejter for “favoring the dissidents” (the guild was heavily Lutheran) by blocking access to power in the guild to anyone but the Lutherans.49 Confessionally motivated strife arose most frequently from conflicts between Orthodox guild members, who remained an important presence in many trades, and Uniate brethren and their clergy. The latter argued that the rights and obligations long granted to, and imposed upon, the Ruthenians in the provisions of the various guild charters now applied only to Uniate individuals and institutions. The bone of contention here—as sometimes between Lutherans and Catholics—lay rather in the religious sphere. But far more frequently the complaints that reached the magistracy targeted guild members who refused to be subject to discipline and engaged in acts of disrespect, and sometimes violence, that had no apparent connection with confession. This means that these matters—and no doubt many more—had already been raised in closed guild sessions inaccessible to us now. In 1689 the annual elders of the haberdashers’ guild, “Tomasz Krumbeich” and “Henricus von Benging,” brought a case against “famatus Michael Angel” for the greatest of all acts of license: practicing the trade without belonging to the guild.50 The offering rolls for the Lutheran church tell us that Tobias Krumbein (this was the correct form of his name, judging by the frequency of this form in other, Polish-language documents as well) and Michel Engel were of that confession; von Bengin’s name is missing in the Lutheran rolls.51 Thus we see that the guild, silently honoring the practice of giving power to multiple confessions in a parity arrangement, had sent a Lutheran elder and (in all likelihood) a Roman Catholic—even if German—to the magistracy to complain about the behavior of a Lutheran, but without any reference whatsoever to the confession of the interested parties (because that was immaterial). The guild articles typically established times for meetings and times and procedures for opening the guild box, which was the signal for the beginning of the session. Brethren were to arrive sober, in some cases on an empty stomach, without drawn weapons. In some instances, the members were to be seated by confession, Catholics on the right, non-Catholics on the left, as in the glaziers’ articles of 1663 and the coopers’ articles of 1664.52 Frequently— as in the articles for the cap makers and furriers from 3 December 1636—parity arrangements extended to control over the guild box, as well as the money itself that the brethren paid into it on an established regular basis: “The brotherhood box is to be kept at the house of the elder for that year, who has his seat in the city, under the city jurisdiction, and not in a suburb. There are to be two keys to the box, one at the house of the elder master who will be chosen from the Roman side, and the other at the house of the other elder from the Greek side.”53 The weavers made similar arrangements in their articles of 28 May 1639. Although the elders were to be “one Catholic, and the other a Saxon,” the Catholics clearly exercised

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the power in the guild. The monthly meetings were to be held “at the house of the year’s elder of the Catholic religion under the city jurisdiction.” Rather than pay all dues for all programs (e.g., both for poor relief among members and for support of the guild altar), this brotherhood kept two separate boxes. The church box was to have two keys held by “two Catholics, and no Saxon”; the (secular) guild box, on the other hand, was to be opened by the two keys held by the two elders, one Catholic, one Saxon. The same article stipulated that “privileges of His Grace the King, Our Gracious Lord, ordinances, statutes, registers of income and expense, written in the Polish language and not another,” were to be kept in the second box.54 Power sharing and alternation between Romans and Greeks or between Catholics and Saxons thus also meant alternation in physical control of the box, as well as the collaboration of the elected official of each side in order to open it, even where (and this was almost always the case) the Catholic side had a stronger set of rights. Above all, good order required the brethren to avoid “reviling and shaming” one another with “dishonoring words” (słowa uszczypliwe). These were precisely the same turns of phrase that appeared over and over in the protestations recorded in all the jurisdictions in which Vilnans of all estates, confessions, religions, ethnicities, and jurisdictions defended attacks upon honor. The guilds had the right to take an unruly member to the next instance, in this case, the magistracy, and we will see a few of these cases. But they also had the right to impose punishment within the guild, usually beginning disciplinary proceedings there, and some of the charters specified penalties for “dishonoring words”: for unruly goldsmiths (1596), one entire day in prison at the town hall until sundown; for licentious cap makers (1636), a flogging at the guild meeting; for fractious glaziers (1663), a penalty that all the masters together deemed fitting or an unspecified term of incarceration in the prison under the town hall.55 The goal was first of all to maintain the proper respect of juniors toward their elders, but it was also to maintain peace among the brethren, who, as we have seen, were frequently of a variety of confessions. The articles of the weavers’ guild, approved by the magistracy on 13 November 1578, wrote circumspection in religious discourse into its charter: “And if anyone, whether a master or a journeyman be found using dishonoring words, and especially concerning the word of God [a zwłaszcza około słowa Boz∧ego], such a one is to pay a penalty of one Lithuanian shock, of which half [goes] to the glorious councillors’ office [i.e., the city magistracy], and the second half to the guild, and this as often as he should do it.”56 And recall that this was the first guild, in its similar articles approved the next year by King Stefan Batory, to acknowledge the presence of a broader ethnoconfessional spectrum among the brethren by creating a parity system among Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, and Ruthenians.

Negotiating the Guild Altar The problem that has been lurking in the background of all these considerations is the fact that the guilds behaved in part like religious brotherhoods to the extent that they

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undertook a number of acts of church service, typically through support of a guild altar and participation in public processions not only of the secular sort (reception of dignitaries upon their arrival in town) but also religious.57 The altar in question was almost always Roman Catholic (rarely Ruthenian, which meant Uniate after 1596), as was the chief public procession—the annual Corpus Christi celebration—which divided Vilnans in at least two ways: Catholics from Protestants over doctrine on the divine presence in the Host, and Western-from Eastern-rite Catholics over the calendar (at the very least). In the rest of my comments here, I seek to present a picture of the range of strategies various guilds adopted in reconciling multiconfessional brotherhood with nearly exclusively Roman Catholic religious obligations. Let us begin with two case studies, from two guilds in which Lutherans long predominated: the barber-surgeons and the goldsmiths. In a document of 23 January 1641 we find articles presented by Catholic prelates in the name of the mostly Lutheran barber-surgeons (apparently after a mutually acceptable solution was reached between the two parties); they were directed not to the king or the magistracy for ratification, as was the usual practice, but to the bishop of Wilno: Unto the magnification of the honor and glory of God, likewise for the adornment of the altar of the surgeons’ guild at the Church of St. John of the Wilno parish, and of God’s saints, Cosmas and Damian, to the service of the capital city of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Wilno, for the healing of illnesses and infirmities upon human bodies, in mutual agreement we established these articles. . . . So that the praise of God might more easily be magnified in Roman Catholic fashion at the surgeons’ altar, also so that the Catholic clergy might have their trusted surgeons for their defects, also so that local Catholic journeymen, as well as those coming from Poland and from foreign lands, might be able to go to Catholic masters, in accordance with this agreement the lord surgeons are to receive four Catholic masters into the guild, and thereupon there will be alternation in accession to the office of master between Catholics and dissidents.58

This statute gives us a glimpse of the confessional relations then reigning in the guild. As late as 1641 (the year after the Calvinists had been banned beyond the walls), the Lutherans were still something of a practical power in the burgher landscape of Wilno, enjoying, it would seem, aspects of professional and cultural capital. Although the Catholics had managed to establish a surgeons’ altar, they, too, like the goldsmiths, clearly had trouble with its upkeep. The barber-surgeons’ guild seems to have been a dangerous place for Catholics. The Catholic elder for the year was charged with “taking care for the Catholic boys who will be learning the trade from dissidents, that they hear holy Mass and Catholic teaching on holy days, and, at certain times, take the holy sacraments prescribed by the Church.” A further article revealed a fear that crypto-Lutherans might become elders under the Catholic quota or that—more troubling—Catholic surgeons might find reasons to convert: “If anyone, who

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is a Catholic or who pretends to be, should join the guild, and then should leave the Roman Catholic faith, from such a one a great penalty is to be taken, and he is to be expelled from the guild until he come to his senses.”59 The latter stipulation suggests that practicing the art of surgery might bring with it pressures and temptations to take on the dominant confessional identity in that profession. In a decree of 8 February 1638, King Władysław IV had permitted the dissidents of all Wilno guilds who did not wish to serve the Roman Catholic guild altar to “buy out” (okupowac´) of that obligation. The barber-surgeons’ articles, as drafted by Roman Catholic prelates and submitted to the bishop, referred to that decree (it is only from these articles that we know of the decree’s existence) in permitting any of the brethren “who might wish to be free from serving the altar” to absent themselves in this manner.60 In fact, one of the keys to the good order in any society that the goldsmiths (also heavily Lutheran) likened in 1627 to the role of the soul in the human body was precisely the “buying out” provision: “all those brothers who are of another religion, and who do not provide chapel services and thus absent themselves” were to pay to the goldsmiths’ chapel box (they, too, had a separate box for church matters) three Polish zł each per annum “and not more.” Here we come full circle back to the bunglers. In this state of affairs—a guild with a large number of non-Catholics and with provisions for buying out—it had become “difficult to begin the church service, because there are not many Catholics who are supposed to do service in the chapel.” This was the reason for requiring the “bunglers and the various wanderers from the various jurisdictions” (presumably they were thought here to be Roman Catholic) to be inscribed into the guild.61 Negotiations over service to the goldsmiths’ guild altar had a history predating Władysław’s decree—he had simply confirmed one existing solution to the problem—and they would continue to evolve after his pronouncement in the matter. The nature of the conflicts and the strategies for their solution varied across the guilds, each with its slightly different confessional makeup, and through the tightening and loosening of confessional discipline in the course of the seventeenth century. Earlier, in the later sixteenth century, there seems to have been something closer to parity in service to both Greek and Roman altars, which may explain the strength of the lingering Orthodox-Uniate and Orthodox-Catholic conflicts in some guilds. In a sort of contract dated 18 December 1575, the brethren of the cobblers’ guild made specific arrangements to provide in common for two altars, one Roman Catholic, the other Orthodox (this was before the Union of Brest), in an arrangement that if not quite one of parity nonetheless undertook substantial obligations to both. In particular, “all the brethren, both younger and elder, both of the Roman and of the Greek congregation [but here, zbór, the word regularly used for the Calvinist Church and individual Calvinist churches],” agreed to “pay on an annual basis from the brotherhood box four Lithuanian k for a priest of the Roman faith, and they are to give money for wax to that same [unspecified] Roman church for candles as much as necessary from the brotherhood box, in common, both from the brethren of the Roman congregation as also of the Greek faith.” But at the same time and in similar fashion, “as far as the father or pop [baciek

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albo pop] of the Greek faith is concerned,” the brethren of both rites were to “give from the brotherhood box every year two Lithuanian k . . . and [money] for candles or wax to [the then still Orthodox Church of ] St. John the Baptist of the Greek faith.”62 Articles granted on 10 May 1582 by the magistracy to a guild that brought together cap makers, coat makers (siermie˛z∧nicy, makers of a kind of simple overcoat), and stocking makers (nogawicznicy) provide a picture of a rare monoconfessional guild, where “all of the inscribed brethren are of the obedience of the [Orthodox] Church of the Christian Greek order.” (They shared power across the specializations: two elders were to be elected annually from the cap makers, one each from the coat and stocking makers.) Since they were all Orthodox, they were to support only one Orthodox altar, at the Cathedral Church of the Holy Most Pure, where they were also to worship and to pay for the upkeep of the affiliated hospital.63 Over the course of the seventeenth century, the trend was away from monoconfessional guilds (even if, as in the case of the barber-surgeons and the goldsmiths, one confession predominated). Moreover, we see fewer and fewer provisions in guild statutes for an altar of the Greek rite (and never for Protestant institutions). But where we do see them, they were invariably a matter of controversy. Let us follow up here on a few moments in the intraRuthenian conflict in the guilds over the course of the seventeenth century. After the Union of Brest of 1596, Uniate clergy, supported by Uniate guild members, argued that all provisions made for the Ruthenians or Greeks of Wilno—including those found in guild articles—now applied solely to those who adhered to the Union with Rome.64 An early indication of increased tensions over Church obligations came on 17 August 1609 in a decree from King Zygmunt III to the wójt, burgomasters, councillors, and benchers of Wilno. At the request of Uniate metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus´ Hipacy Pociej and Uniate archimandrite of the Holy Trinity monastery Józef Rutski, the king ordered the Orthodox brotherhoods of Wilno to give their service to the Holy Trinity establishments (which had been Orthodox but now were Uniate), as had always been their obligation and obedience, and to cease their service to the new Orthodox Holy Spirit monastery, which causes “rebellions and disturbances harmful to the common peace.”65 Similarly, in a decree of 7 September 1614, the king ordered the Orthodox brotherhoods to direct the money they had gathered for the rebuilding of Wilno Ruthenian churches (this was after the major fire of 1610) to the Uniate Holy Trinity complex: half for the keeping of the monks and half for the rebuilding of the church.66 In a decree of 17 June 1615, the Lithuanian assessor’s court declared that Wilno tailors of both the Roman and the Ruthenian rite should serve their altar at the Jesuits’ Church of St. John. This decree displeased the Uniate archimandrite, who stipulated that the decision did not free the tailors from their old custom of providing candles to the Holy Trinity Church for processions.67 (Neither decision would have pleased Orthodox tailors, whose allegiance was to the Holy Spirit Church.) Uniate prelates continued to use the courts in their attempts to force Orthodox tradesmen to fulfill their altar duties at Uniate churches. Józef Welamin Rutski, Uniate monk, archimandrite of the Wilno Holy Trinity monastery, and later metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus´,

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tried on several occasions over the period 1608–1633 to impose discipline on Ruthenian members of various brotherhoods. Usually it was over the issue of supporting a Uniate rather than an Orthodox altar with money and wax and of taking part in processions under the guild/brotherhood colors to the Uniate rather than the Orthodox church.68 On 19 February 1641, King Władysław IV published a decree in response to a complaint of the Uniate Holy Trinity monastery against the elders of the tailors’ guild for not taking part in a public procession or providing candles to that church.69 And on 24 July 1645 the king found in favor of the Uniate Basilians’ complaint against the cobblers’ guild and directed them to provide candles every year on the Feast of the Descent of the Holy Spirit to the altar of St. Luke of the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity.70 One of Rutski’s successors, metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus´ Gabriel Kolenda, was fighting much the same battles in the 1670s; it was he who would obtain from King Michał Korybut Wis´niowiecki the apparently largely ignored decree of 1673 imposing stiff penalties on the election of dissidents and Disuniates to the office of elder in any Wilno guild.71 While the clergy took the lead in this conflict, there are a few, somewhat ambiguous indications of attempts originating from within the guilds to impose confessional discipline in the Ruthenian conflict. Representatives of the cobblers’ guild came to the magistracy on 29 March 1629 to complain about infractions of their statutes, which foresaw power sharing between “the Roman, as also the Greek and Saxon religion,” and which called for the contribution of the “third grosz” for the upkeep of an altar at the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity.72 This latter provision seems to have been ignored of late; worse, many of the “Ruthenian brethren” had remained loyal to the Orthodox Church. In view of this, the “cobblers of the Roman religion” (the Saxons seem to have remained mostly silent here) petitioned the fathers of the Order of St. Basil (the Uniate monastic order) to impose far-reaching church discipline upon the Ruthenian guild brothers, demanding that none of their brethren of the Greek religion be present at church services of the schismatics, baptize their babies there, get married, make confession and take Communion, bury their dead there; rather, everything that belongs to the church service and the sacraments—they are not to have any of that there, but they are to perform everything in the [Uniate] Church of the Holy Trinity that is in union with the Roman Church. And if any brother of our guild of the Greek religion should be discovered and noticed, and what is more [if he be] evidenter convictus [manifestly demonstrated] to have received any sacraments in that church, or had been at services, he must . . . give half a stone of wax in the guild . . . which penalty is to go to the Church of the Holy Trinity.

But note that it was the Roman brethren who brought the petition (not any Uniate brethren, assuming there were some), and it was the “fathers” (Uniate monks), not the brethren or the magistracy, who heard it and approved it. There may in fact have been some priestly ventriloquizing going on here.

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On 28 March 1672, the newly incorporated furriers’ guild came before the magistracy with complaints against the hatmakers’ guild. Part of the matter had to do with the crossing of monopoly boundaries: the hatmakers—so the complaint alleged—were not satisfied with making their allotted “Hungarian hats” (magierki) but were also making fur-lined caps, which was the sole purview of the furriers. But more interesting for us here is the allegation that there were more schismatics than Romans among the cap makers, and that Rus´ even had its own box: “They divide [their collections] into two contributions, one to the altar of the Bernardine fathers, the other to the [Ruthenian] church, and since there are more schismatics than Romans, the greater contribution goes to the schismatics, and there is the adornment, rather than at the Roman altar. And quod majus [what is more], there is no [other] guild in which Rus´ had its separate box, and the Romans theirs.” The furriers, by contrast, shouldered all the obligations of serving their altar at the Roman Catholic Holy Trinity through common contributions to one box by “Romans, Disuniates, and foreigners.”73 In any event, imposing confessional discipline upon the Orthodox tradesmen and artisans, from without or within the guild, seems to have met with only mixed success. A complaint brought in 1666 by the cap makers’ guild against one of their own, a certain Piotr Poskrobysz Kozłowski, alleged that he caused disruptions “from the Greek side” during guild meetings (“he reviles the brethren and shames them with dishonoring words”) and that he did so by shouting, “Why should we support the Catholic church? We have our Orthodox [or Uniate?] church and our brotherhood. We prefer to give our money there.”74 Kozłowski was most likely Orthodox, but we should not rule out such vociferous defense of Uniate difference; we will find it in other contexts, too. He used the ambiguous term cerkiew, which could refer to either a Uniate or an Orthodox church. As the guild altars became more and more uniquely Roman Catholic, compromise solutions became ever more elaborate. The weavers, who over their history continued to have a strong Lutheran presence with provisions to give masters of “the Augsburg religion” access to power within the guild, noted somewhat laconically in articles presented to the Wilno Roman Catholic Chapter on 8 October 1604 that, for the sake of unity in the guild, “master craftsmen of the various religions” [mistrzowie róz∧nego naboz∧en´stwa] had agreed to give from their dues “the third grosz” to the church box of the Catholic religion for the upkeep of the guild altar at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene. A penalty of one grosz to the church box was to be imposed upon any master or journeyman who did not attend Mass “without a proper reason.”75 Similarly, the red- and black-leather tanners, in articles confirmed by the magistracy on 27 November 1614, had agreed to receive into the guild “whoever should demand this of them . . . making no distinction in religion or nation, so long as they be of good birth.” They saw no contradiction, however, in establishing only one, Roman Catholic, guild altar: Since every brotherhood has its beginning in the Lord God and His saints, therefore we must first strive that his grace the father prior of the Church of St. George, together with

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his brothers of that convent and his elders, whomever it befits, might allow us to have, as it was previously before the fire [of 1610], our special chapel in that Church of St. George, in which the brothers of this trade might have their church services according to the determination of those fathers.76

In this case, no provision was made for a penalty for absence from the Mass. By 1627, as we have seen in the articles for the goldsmiths, what was originally a penalty for absence from the Mass had now become an institutionalized system of buying out for the brethren of another religion.77 The cap makers and furriers, in articles approved by the magistracy on 3 December 1636, went further in relieving non-Catholics from altar service. The guild statute shared power between two elders of the Roman and two of the Greek religion. It did not attempt to specify whether the term “Greek religion” was limited to the Uniates, but it did free the Greek side from Catholic religious obligations: As far as the altar is concerned, which is at the Bernardine Fathers, only the Romans are to take care of it, and if anyone from the Roman side should not come to a Mass for the dead, he must be subject to the same penalty as was named above. But the Greeks, since they have their own other rite, are to be free from caring for the altar, according to their privileges and our decrees.78

This was an unusual provision; most of the other statements sought to find some means of imposing on the whole multiconfessional guild some sort of service to a Roman Catholic altar. In 1636, the goldsmiths reiterated the provision allowing “those of various religion” to buy out of their obligations to the guild altar at the Jesuits’ Church of St. John. The fee remained 3 zł.79 In articles approved by the magistracy on 28 May 1639, the weavers, who in 1604 had simply imposed a penalty upon all for absence from the guild Mass, now adopted the institution of buying out for masters, their wives, and their journeymen “of a different religion”: the price was 1 zł per quarter for the master and 12 gr for a journeyman (it is unclear what the price was to be for the master’s wife). Here we encounter a limitation that would be placed time and again upon the practice of buying out: a guild member might absent himself from various religious observances connected with the brotherhood’s altar, but he must participate in funeral services for a brother.80 In articles approved by the magistracy on 3 December 1663, the glaziers’ guild provided both for a general penalty for the absence (apparently of Catholics) from service to the guild altar at the Church of the Bernardine Fathers (6 Lithuanian gr; 3 gr if the offender should arrive when the Mass was half over). But it also established a far-reaching system of buying out for “every brother who is of another religion and not of the Roman Catholic.” A payment of two zł would free him “from all church obligations, that is from the Holy Mass, both the fourth-weekly and the quarterly, as well as from going with candles for the elevation and for processions, with the exception of funerals.”81

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An extension of the system of penalties—eventually even of the institution of buying out of church obligations—to Roman Catholics may suggest some further loosening of confessional discipline within the guilds. In articles of 1663 approved by the magistracy, the locksmiths (who numbered Lutherans among their masters) placed a penalty of one Lithuanian k upon “anyone . . . but especially of the Saxon religion . . . who did not come” to the quarterly Mass at the Church of St. John. Similarly, “both Poles and Germans” were to be fined for each absence from a public procession, including Corpus Christi.82 By 28 May 1664, when articles for the coopers’ guild were approved by the magistracy, the system of penalties had been reformulated as a provision for buying out that all could use: But if any brother, being of another religion and not the Roman Catholic, refuses to perform church service, he is to give 5 Lithuanian k to the masters’ box. And whoever—even if he is of the Roman Catholic religion—should give 5 zł on account of his obligations, he is to be free from all [other] Church duties.83

“On account of his obligations” (dla swoich zabaw)—the implication is that these were secular, perhaps professional demands upon the Catholic guild member’s time. But on 3 March 1675, the elders of the locksmiths’ guild—among whom we find fractious husband Lutheran Hans Pecelt the younger—put their signatures to an agreement that stated simply: At the quarterly gathering of all the brethren, both of the elder and of the younger table, there was a harmonious determination between the brethren of the Catholic religion and the brethren of the Saxon faith—that the brethren of the Saxon profession ought and are obliged to go to our guild altar, which is in the Church of St. John, for all obligations: that is, for funerals, for Masses, and offerings, and other services according to the granted privileges and rights given to this locksmiths’ guild by their majesties the Kings of Poland, Our Gracious Lords.84

No mention was made in this short announcement of any provisions for penalties or buying out for those who did not wish to attend. Finally, the cobblers—in articles affirmed by the magistracy on 9 July 1689—seem to have ruled out compromise. The statute was presented by three annual elders, one Roman Catholic (Jan Skiba), one Ruthenian (Andrzej Fiedorowicz, who may have been Uniate or Orthodox), and one Saxon (Michał Fratesztela). In it, the elders, in the name of the guild, established that brethren of all three confessions were to attend regular Masses at the Dominicans’ Church of the Holy Spirit and to take part in public processions, including Corpus Christi. The penalty for any journeymen and apprentices of all three “nations” who were absent from the—apparently weekly—guild Mass at the altar of St. Mary, the One of Three, was set at 3 zł per quarter. Although the guild explicitly received journeymen “of whatever

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religion,” it also set store in discipline in both the secular and religious spheres and penalties for broader infractions greater than those for simple absence from the Mass or Corpus Christi processions: Every journeyman, namely of those three nations, who would disdain the current articles and statutes, and would not come to the church for Masses, votives, and services, and would not behave according to these articles and be disobedient to the elders, such a one is not to have a place and work with any master; to the contrary, he is to be turned out from the city from community with the others, lest he scandalize them, and if he should not leave the city, he is to be taken to prison.85

These requirements place the cobblers in 1689 at one end of a continuum—at least as reflected in the desiderata of the statutes—between rigorous confessional discipline and compromise.

Stricture and Laxity Although there were certainly some attempts in the later seventeenth century to place limits upon participation in guild life similar to those established for the magistracy after 1666 (i.e., by excluding all but Roman Catholics and Uniates), the confessional landscape of the workplace remained highly mixed and required constant attention to demands of conformity and negotiations of compromise. I find some of the things left unsaid highly significant here. Two sets of articles for the haberdashers’ guild confirmed by the magistracy on 3 November 1688 declared that, since “all guild gatherings are established for no other ends than for the praise of God,” the haberdashers’ brotherhood would undertake “according to old customs and rites” to maintain its church service with the Bernardines and to participate in all public professions ordered by the magistracy. The guild altar was to be, as always, in a Roman Catholic church, in this case the Bernardines’ St. Anne, “according to ancient customs and rites.” No further mention of confession was made anywhere in the articles, either in the election of elders or in the reception of journeymen and apprentices. Nor was there any mention of Corpus Christi obligations; it is not necessarily the case that these would have been among those imposed by the magistracy, which was more interested in seeing the guilds turn out to receive arriving dignitaries and for annual mustering of guild units in a paramilitary exercise.86 And yet, through all this, the guild seems quietly to have continued to organize its life around parity arrangements for power sharing among the confessions. Both documents were presented by two annual elders, Henryk von Bengin and Tobiasz Konrad Krumbeink. We have met them before. I know nothing further about von Bengin and have argued (on the basis of his absence in key Protestant lists) that he was Roman Catholic. The rolls of Lutheran offerings tell us that Krumbeink (Krumbein) was a

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member of the Augsburg confession.87 In other words, old habits of parity representations obtained. The goldsmiths’ articles from around the same time (approved by the magistracy on 30 November 1687) were equally circumspect about religious duties and confessional politics in the guild. Money was to be collected from members for deposit “in the guild box for both church and guild needs.” This was certainly a reference to the goldsmiths’ altar at the Jesuits’ St. John, although this fact was not made explicit. The guild was to take part in “public acts,” but no mention was made of Corpus Christi. And although nothing was said about how elders were to be elected, this guild also quietly continued to adhere to old ways: the articles were presented for confirmation by two annual elders, Stanisław Danielewicz and “Lorens Willatestejn.” Danielewicz was no doubt Roman Catholic—his name appears on no Lutheran or Calvinist lists, and he baptized a daughter in the Catholic church on 24 February 1672; “Willatestejn” was the Lorentz Willantz who contributed to Lutheran coffers in the years 1667–1691.88 What we see here, I suspect, is a quiet adherence to old patterns of power sharing across the confessions and ethnicities, even in the period following the 1673 royal decree that had sought penalties for the election of dissidents or Disuniates to the office of elder in any of the Wilno guilds. Other documents suggest that the minimum requirement in all these cases— guild support of a Roman Catholic altar, sometimes also presence at the Mass—remained a bone of contention and was often only grudgingly fulfilled. On 26 September 1669, Maciej Klarowski, the syndik (legal representative) of the Wilno Bernardine monastery at St. Anne’s, brought a complaint in the name of Father Stefan Romanowicz, the custodian of that monastery (clerics, like women and minors, could not represent themselves in court), against Piotr Szretter and Henryk Fonbegen, Lutheran masters of the haberdashers’ guild. The allegation was that they had obtained under false pretenses (i.e., they lied) a certificate of presence at that quarter’s Mass from that same Father Romanowicz.89 The case dragged on for a bit, reaching the assessor’s court of King Michał Korybut Wis´niowiecki, who, on 26 November 1669, imposed a penalty of a stone of wax for the guild altar in the Bernardine church for absence from the Mass. He also required that the guild elect elders—not necessarily Roman Catholic!—who would see to its church obligations.90 On 9 August 1670, in accordance with the royal decree of the preceding year, an agreement was reached whereby Szretter would pay (no doubt in the name of all the other dissidents mentioned in the earlier documents) 150 zł in three installments to the guild box. All master haberdashers, Catholics and dissidents, were to attend the quarterly Masses at the Church of St. Anne; but—and here we see continuing “give” in the strictures—journeymen were to be free from that obligation.91 Clearly, some Lutheran guild members, and probably also some Orthodox, continued to attempt to do no more than the minimum of service to the Roman Catholic guild altar—and not even that if they could get away with it—focusing whatever religious life they had on their own churches and religious brotherhoods. A complaint brought a century later, in 1766, by Roman Catholic carpenters against their Lutheran brethren offers a nice picture of what

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could be seen as either a stalemate or a compromise. The Catholic brethren addressed the Lutherans: “Although you are summoned to brotherhood Masses, you do not come. And even if a few of you do sometimes appear at the brotherhood Mass, you do not make the proper adoration of God, rather you wander about the chapels, and in your consultations you forge [conspiracies] for the betrayal of the Roman religion and for its contempt.”92 And yet the conflicts and the negotiations again reveal a picture of coexistence of the confessions and religions, even in the highly charged and competitive context of the workplace. Work brought members of all the confessions into one guild house (where rules of secrecy vis-à-vis the outside applied), on occasion in uniform guild dress under one guild banner in public processions. And even if they did not always show the proper respect, it sometimes brought non-Catholics into the presence of Catholic devotions, if not on a weekly or quarterly basis for the celebration of the Mass, then at least for funeral services for deceased brethren.

~ c h a p t e r elev en~

Going to Law: The Language of Litigation

A

mong the central sources throughout this study have been the acta of Wilno’s various legal forums and in particular the complaints, or protestations, that Vilnans were so quick to bring against each other—neighbor against neighbor, in-law against in-law, spouse against spouse. I have urged caution in their interpretation. Here I examine the question of Vilnans before the law and look more closely at the rhetoric of the linguistic artifacts their litigation left behind. Even if not all could afford to go to court, the habit of constant vigilance over property, health, and honor was central to the attitudes of many. One of the arguments of this book is that “constant litigation” was one of the things that made this highly mixed society function relatively smoothly and relatively peacefully: the society that litigates together stays together.1 I begin with a more detailed examination of a protestation we have encountered in a number of contexts by now.2 On 2 December 1675, Wilno burgher Jerzy Gross came—“in his unbearable harm and insult”—to the city magistracy with a complaint against a certain Dorota Zebertowska, widow of Hrehor Tomkowid, also burgher of Wilno, alleging that, when the accused, having rented through a certain contract a dwelling place in the house [at Castle Street 2.05] of Lord Andrzej Hoffman, burgher of Wilno and fatherin-law protestantis [of the plaintiff], and living there for no little time, having forgotten the fear of God and the severity of common law [zapomniawszy bojaz∧ni Boz∧ej i surowos∙ci prawa pospolitego], as well as the honor of the widow estate, began to lead a dissolute life, then the plaintiff, guarding the honor of his father’s house, that such deviations not occur in their dwelling, asked various friends, especially noble Lady Rychter, wife of a burgomaster of Wilno and sister of the accused, as well as the renowned Lord Jakub Leszczewicz, burgher and merchant of Wilno, as her curator, that they might deign confidenter [confidentially] to rebuke her for her evil and dissolute life. And the accused, having conceived a resentment on this account [zawzia˛wszy sta˛d rankor] against the plaintiff, frequently reviled and shamed him, diminished his honor and good reputation [lz∧yła, sromociła, na honorze i dobrej reputacyjej ujmowała]. And although she was rebuked for this more than

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once by her friends, still she did not cease; rather, even more, postpositis legum poenis [with disregard for the penalties of the law], being constant in her obstinacy, in the current year, one thousand six hundred and seventy-five, the first day of December, having found out about the arrival of the plaintiff in his father’s house, wishing to disrespect him all the more, and having accomplices for that purpose, she came to the chamber of the aforementioned Lord Hoffman [przyszła do izby pomienionego Pana Hoffmana], where, without giving the least cause [bez dania z∧adnej najmniejszej przyczyny], having given herself leave to use licentious words [słowa wszeteczne], she reviled, shamed, and disrespected the aforementioned plaintiff with dishonorable words, harmful of good reputation [lz∧yła, sromociła i słowy nieuczciwemi, sławie dobrej szkodza˛cemi, despektowała]. And what is more, not being satisfied with this, having cast her entire shame to the side, having lifted up her skirts (si licet cum venia dicere [if one may be given leave to say so]), she uncovered her body up to the waist with great abuse and derision [ura˛ganie i na´smiewanie]. Furthermore, she made a threat and a boast upon his health [odpowiedz´ i pochwałke˛na zdrowie], promising to do this [i.e., to harm the health of the plaintiff] through certain individuals, wherever they might encounter him.

Therefore, feeling “reviled, disrespected, and shamed” (zelz∧ony, zdespektowany i zesromocony), and being disinclined to suffer and bear further “disrespect and disgrace” (despekt i zhan´bienie), and wishing to reserve for himself free access to litigation (salvam actionem) in the matter of the widow Tomkowidowa’s dissolute life, the plaintiff presented his complaint for inscription in the books of the Wilno bench. This document is a typical example of the protestations (called in Polish protestacje, manifestacje, or simply z∧ałoby, complaints), with which the litigious populace of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth filled the court records of all jurisdictions in their attempts to defend property, health, and honor. Like others, it offers a nice combination of highly formulaic language and a glimpse of living individuals and their particular material and social environments. The language and the goals were everywhere the same—from the venues of the szlachta before the land and castle courts through the city magistracy and the suburban horodnictwo to the several courts overseen by the Roman Catholic Chapter, which, taken together, made up the patchwork quilt of jurisdictions and legal systems of Wilno and other early modern Polish-Lithuanian cities. Seventeenth-century Vilnans were no less litigious than the rest of their contemporary compatriots. In this chapter, I place Vilnans of the various confessions and religions before the courts. I provide first a rhetorical lexicon of the early modern protestation, based solely on the acta of the various Wilno courts. I then turn to the question of the swearing of oaths in court and then of Jews before Christian courts. Throughout I ask what such documents can tell us about the interactions of the confessions and religions in this highly mixed city. How were the confession and religion of the litigants treated before Wilno’s many courts of law?

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“With Great and Inconsolable Lamentation . . . ” “Z wielkim a nieutolonym z∧alem  .  .  .  ” Thus did the citizens of Wilno preface their complaints—however specific they may have been to individual cases—in a language replete with commonplaces. In fact, the prelude to the complaint was itself a key formula, used to establish the gravity of the situation. Lutheran Jerzy Gross had complained “in his unbearable harm and insult.”3 A Ruthenian merchant of Wilno, Afanas Iwanowicz, and wife, feeling insulted by his sister-in-law in 1671—she was Marianna Safianowiczówna, wife of Uniate merchant and councillor Aleksander Ihnatowicz, and both couples lived in the same house at Market Square 4.05 (that was the problem!)—brought their protestation “with great and inconsolable lamentation.”4 But most litigants simply “complained and protested solenissime [most solemnly],”5 or “quam solenissime [as solemnly as possible],”6 or they “complained and brought a solemn manifestation.”7 The point, of course, was to make it clear that the plaintiff appeared before the court because the potential harm to prosperity, health, and honor (and most often it was just a question of honor) was so serious that he or she simply could not remain silent. The rest of the protestation sought to justify this basic claim. I have marked some of the recognizable commonplaces that Jerzy Gross employed in making his case. Let us look at a few of them more closely.

“Having Forgotten the Fear of God and the Severity of Common Law” Many protestations began with some version of the phrase zapomniawszy bojaz´ni boz∧ej i surowos´ci prawa pospolitego, the purpose of which was to establish the key fact that, in the opinion of the plaintiff, the actions about to be described were crimes against both divine and human law. Note that this was solely the opinion of the plaintiff—not necessarily that of the court or even of the court of public opinion, which the plaintiff sought to influence through his or her protestation. A few examples will help to establish the status of this commonplace. Dorota Zebertowska Tomkowidowa had forgotten “the fear of God and the severity of common law, as well as the honor of the widow’s station” when she began to lead her dissolute life.8 Two Tatar brothers, the princes Roman and N.N. (the space was left blank in the recorded document) Dawidowicz, had forgotten “the fear of God and the severity of common law as it is written against such audacious and reckless people” when they attacked a poor Tatar by the name of Jan Bohdanowicz in his temporary dwellings in the Wilno suburbs beyond Sharp Gate in 1680.9 Stanisław Szwabowicz, a Wilno burgher and butcher, had “no regard for the severity of common law as it is written against audacious and criminal people” when, in 1676, he alleged that his neighbor, Bartłomiej Strokowski, a Wilno burgher and carpenter, had stolen a dog and then used that allegation as a pretext for raising a tumult, apparently also in a suburban neighborhood.10 Kazimierz Barszczewski and Paweł Czajkowski, annual elders of the gray- and white-leather tanners’ guild had forgotten “the fear of God and the severity of common law as it is written

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against such audacious, reckless, and licentious people” when, in 1675, they started a tavern brawl against Tomasz Gajdziewicz, a member of the black- and red-leather tanners’ guild. Gajdziewicz had had the misfortune to choose this watering spot in the intramural bricked house of magistrate Grzegorz Stroczyn´ski when he decided that he would like to “treat his auntie to a vodka” (chca˛c ciotka˛swoja˛wódka˛traktowac´). The fight, apparently motivated by the desire to protect guild secrets from professional competitors, ended badly enough—“if Mr. Stroczyn´ski himself and other people, including the aunt of the plaintiff, had not come to his rescue, they certainly would have crippled him”—and the ruckus led to a season of street fights between members of the two guilds.11 And the examples can be multiplied. In no instance do we know whether the allegations of criminal activity were in any way accurate; indeed, only in rare instances do we discover whether the given forum was convinced that the alleged activities merited action. The purpose here was for the plaintiff— often in a sort of preemptive strike, since he or she might soon be the object of a reprotestation—to influence opinion: that of the court but also of the public, since the court books often functioned a bit like a newspaper.

“Perhaps Having Some Sort of Resentment from of Old” “Snadz´ maja˛c z dawna jakis´ rankor.” It was important to address the motivation of the accused, but that motivation should be unjustifiable or at least inexplicable—in any event, one that worked to increase the accused’s culpability. Dorota Zebertowska Tomkowidowa had conceived her resentment against Jerzy Gross because he had admonished her not to lead a dissolute life (sta˛d rankor, thence the rancor).12 But mostly the actions of the accused were simply groundless. Bartłomiej Strokowski charged that Stanisław Szwabowicz had made his allegations of canine thievery “without having any cause against us, his neighbors, rather on account of some resentment conceived against us, who knows why.”13 In 1678, Symon Romanowicz, a Roman Catholic member of the Wilno bench, made allegations of witchcraft against Mr. Jan Gilewicz, merchant and burgher of Wilno (Horse Street 8.02), “who knows for what cause” (nie wiedziec´ z jakiej przyczyny).14 And so on. Consequently, the complainants, as the objects of verbal and physical abuse, often described the course of events as one of great surprise and themselves as unsuspecting (and, of course, entirely innocent) victims. The poor Tatar Jan Bohdanowicz was sitting quietly in his temporary dwelling just outside Sharp Gate, “not expecting anything bad, and not giving anyone even the least reason or cause for an altercation” when he was attacked.15 And Dorota Zebertowska revealed her disrespect for Jerzy Gross “without giving the least cause.”16

“With Acrimonious Words, Harmful to Good Reputation and Honor, They Reviled, Shamed the Plaintiff” “Słowami uszczypliwemi, sławie dobrej i honorowi szkodza˛cemi, lz∧yli, sromocili.” Thus did Jan Bohdanowicz bring his charges against the brothers Roman and N.N. Dawidowicz. The

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allegation contained many of the fixed phrases we find in various combinations throughout the protestations against loss of honor. The verbs “to revile and shame” (lz∧yc´ i sromocic´) occurred in tandem with great frequency. In fact, we meet them again in the following sentence of the same protestation: “And the accused Dawidowiczes, not satisfied with this, trusting in their wealth, having reviled, shamed [lz∧ywszy, sromociwszy] the complainant, a man in no wise guilty.”17 Jan Engler, a confectioner hired in 1678 by Mr. Jan Krzysztof Donat, burgher and merchant of Wilno, to help make candies and marzipans, had the temerity to challenge the accuracy of his employer’s scales, whereupon Donat, “on account of the resentment caused by his checking of the scales . . . reviled, shamed him with acrimonious words [słowy uszczypliwemi] . . . , calling him the son of this and that sort of mother, and what is more, showing contempt for the holy Roman Catholic faith and deriding it, called him a popish dog.”18 In 1663, merchant of Wilno Daniel Hartman, “perhaps having from of old some sort of rancor,” upon encountering the in-no-wise guilty merchant of Wilno Jakub Desaus II (Castle Street 1.26), “immediately began to revile and to shame him, using words greatly harmful to good fame [słowy wielce szkodza˛cemi dobrej sławie].”19 Wilno patrician and secretary of the city scales Cyprian Gawłowicki (whose father’s house was at Rudniki Street 15.08) went in 1663 to the house of Kazimierz Leszkiewicz, merchant and burger of Wilno (across the street at Rudniki Street 12.11), during the latter’s absence, and, employing “acrimonious words, harmful of good fame [słowy uszczypliwemi, dobrej sławie szkodza˛cemi],” he “reviled, shamed, and deprived of all good reputation [zelz∧ył, zesromocił i wszelkiej dobrej reputacyjej odsa˛dził]” both Leszkiewicz’s wife and his mother-in-law, “calling them witches and dishonorable women.”20 And one final example from the many that could be cited on this topic. When students of the Jesuit Academy, accompanied by their prefect, Father Jerzy Inkiewicz, S.J., came to the Glass Street dwelling of goldsmith Józef Barczyn´ski to complain about an act of violence committed upon one of the students by the goldsmith’s wife, they were dismissed without honor. As they were departing, Barczyn´ski “reviled, shamed, and disrespected (them) [lz∧ył, sromocił, despektował] as he saw fit, whatever the saliva brought to his tongue.”21 “Whatever the saliva brought to his tongue” was (and is) a Polish expression meaning “whatever came to his mind, and in whatever order.”22 The point here was to portray the accused as guilty of verbal license. (Recall Dorota Zebertowska’s słowa wszeteczne, or “licentious words.”)23 Afanas Iwanowicz had brought his complaint in 1671 against his sister-in-law, Marianna Safianowiczówna, for the acrimonious words with which she “reviled and shamed as she saw fit” the plaintiff and his wife, “whatever the saliva brought to her tongue” (including the more specifically recorded taunt that Mrs. Iwanowicz “ought rather to be selling whipping branches [wieniki] in the public bath than to be making herself at home in the Safianowicz family house”).24 Słowa uszczypliwe—which I have translated, somewhat inadequately, as “acrimonious words”—were so-called because they “nipped” (szczypac´) at a person’s honor. Other complainants (such as Jerzy Gross) wrote, in a sort of rhyming parallel, of słowa nieuczciwe or “dishonoring words,” which might also serve as a translation of słowa uszczypliwe.25 Not all

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plaintiffs went into details about the content of the acrimonious or dishonoring words; some even switched into Latin—not to translate the offending language but to explain to the reader or auditor that his or her gentle ears had been spared. But at times the complaints were somewhat more specific. Men were called “sons of this and that sort of mother”26 or of a “dishonorable mother.”27 Men and women could be accused of witchcraft. And in the logic of the protestation, this charge could work equally well in either direction: you could go to court to accuse your neighbor of witchcraft, but you could also go to court to accuse your neighbor of accusing you of witchcraft (and thus of dishonoring you).28 Husbands complained on behalf of wives whose heads had been uncovered29 or whom a neighbor had termed a murwa (a euphemism for whore).30 It is worth noting that Donat’s alleged taunting of his employee as a “popish dog” was practically unheard of in protestations in multiconfessional seventeenth-century Wilno. Christian litigants were identified before the court by estate (e.g., “citizen of Wilno”) and by profession (e.g., “chamois tanner”) but never by confession. It is other types of documents— such as last wills and testaments and various church record books—that sometimes allow me to assign confession: Jerzy Gross, Andrzej Hoffman, Jan Krzysztof Donat, and Daniel Hartman were Lutherans; Jakub Desaus II was a Calvinist; Józef Barczyn´ski, Symon Romanowicz, and Cyprian Gawłowicki were Roman Catholic; Aleksander Ihnatowicz was Uniate (although his wife, Marianna Safianowiczówna, may well have been Orthodox); Afanas Iwanowicz was Uniate or Orthodox. But confession (again, with the exception of Donat’s case) was never an overt part of the complaints in which they were involved. Many complaints, as we have seen, occurred “in the family” (and we could include the complaint among Tatars in this general category), which may be one reason for the general lack of confessional taunting: the litigants frequently came from the same milieu. Confessional or religious identity played a role only in the litigations between larger groups of Vilnans that followed in the wake of infrequent anti-Jewish and anti-Calvinist riots.

“She Made a Boast and a Declaration of Vengeance against His Health” “Pochwałke˛ i odpowiedz´ na zdrowie uczyniła.” Verbal abuse usually led at least to promises of physical abuse, which could in turn become an argument for the acceptance of the protestation at court. It was under this general heading that Catholic furrier Bazyli Zawiski, who lived in the suburb beyond Troki Gate, had brought his complaint on 1 December 1676 against his Catholic wife, Agata Ginielewiczówna, alleging that she had conspired with her parents to steal his material goods, to ruin his health (na zdrowiu zgubic´ ), and to devastate his house: “Not being satisfied with this, and wishing simply to do away with him [z ´s wiata zgładzic´ ], the aforementioned daughter, Agatka Ginielewiczówna, gave her husband and the current plaintiff poison on two occasions, once in the vodka and a second time in the bigos [raz w gorzałce, drugi raz w bigosu], and if the Lord Most High and if Mr. Ubryk, the apothecary [ gdyby wprzódy nie Pan Najwyz∧szy i nie Pan Ubryk, aptekarz], had not come to his aid, he would certainly

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have departed from this world together with his children.”31 Protestations often culminated in phrases like “not feeling certain of his health,” which then served as the crowning argument for the acceptance of the protestation by the court. For instance, on 13 November 1654, Lady Reina Weselówna, who lived in the street leading to the royal mill, made complaint against her husband, Sir Jacynt Strzałkowski, for hiding his wealth from her and for making “boasts against her health and that of her children”; “not being secure in her health, she submitted this account of hers for inscription into the books.” Fourteen days later, on 27 November 1654, the husband alleged before the same court that, “not wishing to oppose the female clamor [białogłowskie hałasy],” he had felt compelled to withdraw from his wife’s house and to seek abode in “foreign corners.” And above all, “not being secure in his health,” he submitted his account for inscription in the books of the reverend Wilno chapter.32 Odpowiedz´ (what I have translated as “declaration of vengeance”—literally reply or answer, an attempt to translate the German Absage or Absagebrief) was a contemporary legal term. It referred to the declaration made by a wronged individual, together with his family and friends, that he intended to exact private punishment upon those who had harmed him. It was entered into the acts of the castle court by the aggrieved nobleman, and it warned the adversary “to beware of the answering opponent at home, in church, in the bath, in the open field, eating, sleeping, on the road and in every place, because he will have his vengeance upon him, and he will sit upon his neck.” Although a sanctioned and practiced aspect of the legal system of the nobility in the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, these boasts against the health of one’s adversary were never granted legality in the city courts of Magdeburg law, and the odpowiedz ´ eventually disappeared from the land and castle court books of the gentry.33 But by the seventeenth century the concept had spread from the szlachta to lower levels of society, and the allegation of all sorts of answers, taunts, and boasts was a standard element of the protestation at all social levels.

“She Came to the Chamber of the Aforementioned Lord Hoffman” When she sought an opportunity to show her disrespect for Jerzy Gross, Dorota Zebertowska “came to the chamber of the aforementioned Mr. Hoffman” [przyszła do izby pomienionego Pana Hoffmana] (Gross’s father-in-law). The scene of the crime was routinely described with some precision: it was quite often in or around a particular house, and the participants in the altercation were often neighbors (renters of dwellings in the same house); frequently they were related by blood or marriage. In this particular case, Zebertowska was a tenant in the house of Mr. Hoffman, where the alleged crime took place, and the plaintiff was the house owner’s son-in-law. A large number of the complaints were thus domestic. We frequently find husbands and wives accusing each other of disrespect and beatings, husbands defending wives shown disrespect by neighbors and relatives, feuds among in-laws, disputes between neighbors and their landlords or between two neighbors of one landlord. Even in some cases of strife between seemingly unrelated citizens, chance information from

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disparate sources reveals a family tie. For example, after Roman Kołczan complained against Stanisław Dziedzin ´ski, the men turned out to be brothers-in-law. In any event, other documents often tell us that attempts by plaintiffs to distance themselves from the accused and thus to remove any possible reasons for discord belonged to the realm of fiction.

“Especially Since Honor and Life Walk with Equal Step” “Zwłaszcza kiedy honor et vita pari passu ambulant.”34 The complainants often felt moved to point out that loss of honor was just as dire as loss of health and life. At times it seemed that the plaintiff had added loss of honor to a complaint essentially about physical abuse because the physical harm might not have been truly life-threatening. Allegations concerning physical abuse frequently ended in the conditional mood with statements suggesting that had it not been for certain events, the accused certainly would have done great harm to the plaintiff.35 I do not mean to imply that complaints of physical violence were necessarily exaggerated or that people were not threatened with violence in daily life. Rather, I mean to point out that some plaintiffs revealed insecurity on this issue and, most important, that in fact these complaints were as much about words as about deeds. Injured honor was frequently the sole or main reason for going to court with a protestation.36

“Wishing to Bring Criminal Charges about This Entire Matter” “Chca˛c o to wszytko criminaliter czynic´.”37 With this and similar phrases, plaintiffs concluded their protestations, announcing that the reason they had come to the court was to open the door to future litigation (cf. Jerzy Gross’s salva actio). But in fact such statements may have been the end of litigation for most complainants. The point often seems not to have been to take your neighbor (or spouse, or in-law) to court but to make the first claim to innocence (by alleging the suffering of injury). A skeptic will find frequent evidence of some shared guilt—or at the very least some sense of vulnerability to accusations of guilt—on the part of the complainants themselves. In my reading of the books of the Wilno magistracy, I have encountered very few protestations about which we learn something of the outcome. One such exception may serve as a cautionary tale for those who would use these documents as historical sources. On 28 June 1646, Polonia Siemionówna, wife of Ruthenian councillor Stefan Krasowski, came to the Wilno bench to complain in the name of her husband, who was licking his wounds at home in bed (in the family house at Horse Street 5.02). That day Krasowski had attended some sort of dinner party at the home of Uniate burgomaster Bogdan Zakrzewski in the Wilno suburb of Łukiszki (a very short walk from the walls of the old town), where members of the urban elite had their dachas to which they would retreat from their town houses. (Zakrzewski’s intramural residence at Horse Street 8.08 made him a neighbor of the Krasowskis from across the way.) While Krasowski was sitting there peacefully with the burgomaster and the other guests, a certain Jan Korzenkowski, also a Wilno councillor, together with his accomplices,

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Bazyli Sielawa and Jan Ohurcewicz, attacked him “without giving any reason, first with acrimonious words, harmful to his reputation and honor [słowy uszczypliwemi, sławie i honorowi jego szkodza˛cemi]” and then with blows. Wishing to finish him off, Sielawa chased his prey through the open fields from Łukiszki to Wilno, and he would easily have carried out his intentions “if a common man [pospolity człowiek] living in the suburb had not stopped his efforts.” As was usual in cases of alleged physical abuse, the bench sent delegated officers of the court to Krasowski’s house to perform a conspectio of the victim’s wounds, which was then appended to the written protestation: “We saw Mr. Stefan Krasowski, lying in bed, moaning; on his right elbow a little sword wound and a bruise around it; also a bruise on his left elbow; next to his right eye, on his forehead, signs of . . . or of blows. He himself complained that he had received blows all over his shoulders. He alleged that this had occurred at the hands of Mr. Bazyli Sielawa, the son-in-law of Mr. Korzenkowski, and of Mr. Korzenkowski himself.”38 But here, atypically, we learn something about the outcome of the litigation. In a decree of 25 September 1646 from the Wilno bench, we discover that a wounded Korzenkowski had brought similar charges against Krasowski (which protestation I have not encountered in the extant books) and that the court had in fact found for Korzenkowski. In its decision, the bench ordered that Krasowski apologize to Korzenkowski before a public session of the Wilno magistracy; that he go to Korzenkowski’s home “together with good people” and that there, in the presence of “friends” (presumably those of Korzenkowski but perhaps also his own circle), he make a deprecatio (prayer for pardon) to Korzenkowski and his wife; that he “sit” in the town hall (i.e., in its jail) for a quarter of a year from the date of the decree; that he give up his functions as town councillor for that same period; that he pay 200 zł to the barber-surgeon for his treatment of Korzenkowski’s wounds plus 50 zł in damages; and finally, that—under a penalty (walata) of 100 talers (half to the magistracy and the other half to the offended party)—he not brag and boast of his evil deed.39 This case highlights several important points: that few cases seem to have proceeded beyond the initial stage of registering the protestation; that there was probably another side, or other sides, to many protestations, some of which may have been recorded but are no longer extant; that the real issue was often obfuscated by the complainant, perhaps programmatically so; that crimes against honor—here, more specifically, the ban on boasting and bragging—were as serious as crimes against person and property; that a goal of the court was conciliation, a restoration of peace between feuding parties. And, most striking, the restoration of the “convicted criminal” to full participation in society. After paying his debt, Krasowski returned to the Wilno magistracy, rising to the office of burgomaster in 1650, just four years after the crime.40 He continued to add to his fortune, which survived the Muscovite invasion and occupation, and was the object of much litigation between Krasowski’s second wife, Katarzyna Maszan´ska, and his son Heliasz in the 1660s.41 Once again, there is no indication that confession played a role in the altercation. The players in this case were all Ruthenian—most likely all Uniate—all of them from the Horse

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and Rudniki Street neighborhood. They were also brought together by ties of family and friends. This was once again a case of domestic violence, although none of this is made clear in the court documents directly concerned with the affair.

Swearing on All That Is Holy Members of all the confessions and religions of Wilno had occasion to come before all the Christian courts, not only the burghers’ magistracy and the nobles’ castle court or the suburban horodnictwo but also those of the autonomous legal jurisdictions ruled by institutions like the Roman Catholic Chapter, where canons served as secular judges. These smaller jurydyki were islands within the larger Magdeburg jurisdiction of cities and their suburbs. Practically everyone (not just members of the szlachta but burghers, poor tailors, poor Tatars, and Jews) felt that they possessed honor and that it was necessary to defend it in the forum available to them. Anyone who went to law could be asked to read a prepared oath, or rota, swearing that something was or was not the case. In Polish-Lithuanian courts, the oath served as an independent proof. A judge would declare one of the litigants “closer to the proof ” (bliz∧szy do dowodu)—in other words, one of the parties in the judge’s opinion was in a better position to know the truth and to be able to substantiate the claim. That party would then be ordered to appear before the court, often in three days’ time, in the company of two co-jurors (samotrzec´) and to read a prepared, usually quite detailed oath, ending with a phrase like “so help me God and the Holy Cross.”42 Here is one example, sworn before the Wilno magistracy on 12 January 1680: “I, Anastazja Klezina, swear by the Lord God almighty and all the Saints that, when I was serving Her Grace, Lady Zofia Ohurcewiczówna Szperkowiczowa, I did not wring the neck of her little doggie, and I did not throw it at the feet of that same Lady of mine, nor did I bewitch that same Lady in that manner or in any other. . . . May the Lord God and His Holy Passion help me, and if I have not sworn truly, may the Lord God kill me.”43 Quite often the very imposition of the oath and the fear of giving false testimony were enough to bring feuding parties to some kind of agreement before the allotted three days had expired. I have found no reference to confession in such litigation in Wilno: all Christians were considered equally capable of swearing upon the same Lord and God. (Tatars accused by other Tatars had also been accused of “forgetting the fear of God.”) In giving oaths before Christian courts, individual Jews were forced to negotiate two sets of constraints. Jewish authorities sought to place limits on appearances of individual Jews before Christian courts (and to ban entirely recourse to those forums in litigation between Jews44). In a regulation of 1623, the Va'ad of the Chief Lithuanian Jewish Communities ruled that Jews must appear before the court of the local kahal before proceeding—as plaintiff or accused—to the Christian courts in litigations with non-Jews. If the Christian court should call a Jew to give his oath, “the shammash [Jewish bailiff] must not bring him to give his oath

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before he turns to the elders for permission. If they are convinced there is no desecration of the name of God in this matter, then they will permit him to take the oath. But if not, then they do not allow him to give his oath; rather they attempt to settle the matter as they see fit, by way of some sort of compromise.”45 Once they came to give their oaths, the Jews of Poland-Lithuania were not usually subjected to the sorts of humiliations sometimes encountered in the courts of western Europe: they were not forced to stand on a shaky three-legged stool or on a swine’s skin—as the term rodale from royal privileges was sometimes translated—in attempts to make the witness stumble over his words and thus weaken his credibility. King Zygmunt II August had made it clear that the rodale upon which Jews were to give their oath referred only to the Torah scroll.46 And, as we have seen, King Zygmunt III had extended to Jews the same sorts of freedoms from court appearances on Jewish holy days that Batory had accorded to the Ruthenians of Wilno for Greek holy days. Still, the simple formula “So help me God, who illumines and observes, as well as the Books of Moses”—a Jewish equivalent of the Christian “So help me God and the Holy Cross”—was often elaborated into a lengthy series of self-imposed curses against the swearer in case of false testimony. Christian oaths, too, were becoming more and more baroque, as we see from Klezina’s simple testimony, but the Jews—whether by will or by necessity—were the leaders in this particular forensic competition. I have found two Jewish oaths in the Wilno archives. The more elaborate one was registered in October 1683, at the end of a lengthy trial before the Wilno Roman Catholic consistory in which two Jews had been charged by a Catholic priest with the theft of a ciborium—the chalice-shaped vessel with a lid that contained the sacramental bread of the Eucharist—from a village church in nearby Gieguz∧yn. The oath was offered before two officials of the Wilno consistory (the instigator, or prosecutor, and the notarius, or clerk) in the synagogue, apparently the main synagogue in Wilno, and upon the Torah scroll (supra rodale suum).47 The oath is worth citing in its entirety for its rhetoric (the narrative parts of the consistorial books were kept primarily in Latin, although this sort of first-person testimony was cited in Polish), but also for the picture it offers us of Jews swearing on all that is holy before Christian authorities (although in Jewish space). The fact that this testimony was recorded in Polish in a lengthy Latin document suggests that these two Jews spoke Polish, at least well enough to read or repeat the words of a prepared oath: I, Aleksander Mojz∧eszowicz, and I, Lejbo Mojz∧eszowicz, do swear upon the One Lord God, God and Lord, who created heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible, that we were wrongfully accused by His Grace, Father Paweł Tołoczko, deacon of Kowno, vicar of Gieguz∧yn [a nearby village], of theft of sacred property, which we never did; that ´ski to give us the keys to the church, nor did we bribe him, we never urged Marcin Szławan nor did we give him drink in order to take those keys away, nor did we cast any spells upon ´ski, as His Grace the Father deacon alleges, nor did we seek any means to Marcin Szławan ´ski; and we never opened the church in Gieguz∧yn, nor were we bewitch Marcin Szławan

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there, nor did we take any ciborium from it, nor did we dare, nor have we seen it. And that we have sworn truthfully, let the Lord God help us. But if we have sworn falsely in any single point, may we be oppressed and destroyed by the Lord God, who, in the ark during the time of the flood, saved eight people; who burned the five cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, with infernal flame; who conversed with Moses from the burning bush; and who wrote the Law given unto Moses with his own finger on tablets of stone; let God destroy us, who destroyed Pharaoh in the Red Sea and led the Jews freely to the land flowing with milk and honey, who fed the Jews with manna for forty years in the desert; let God cast us into hell, soul and body; let the earth swallow us alive, which swallowed Dathan and Abiron; may the leprosy fall upon us that, having left Naaman, fell upon Gehazi; let us be removed from the Law that the Lord God gave to Moses on Mt. Sinai through the Ten Commandments; let there come upon us the punishment for perjurers that is described in the Five Books of Moses; let us be turned into stone, as Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt; let the bloody sickness never leave us. And if we swear falsely in any point at all, let us never come to the bosom of Abraham and let God shame and condemn us for eternity, may the Lord God help us.48

The first, affirmative part of the testimony was detailed and specific to the case at hand. The second part—beginning here with “But if we have sworn falsely ”—which described what should happen to the co-jurors if they had given false evidence was a variation on the oath more judaico (“in the Jewish manner”) spelled out in the legal handbooks of the time.49 A footnote: the oath appears to have been accepted and the case dismissed. The second oath I have found was offered on 8 June 1676 by two elders of the community, Salomon Jakubowicz and Mojz∧esz Dawidowicz, and two bailiffs (the Polish word for the Jewish shammash was szkolnik), Mojz∧esz Jakubowicz and Lewek Izraelewicz. This time the proceedings were quite clearly not in the synagogue but before the Wilno castle court (Ruthenian: Na vrade hospodarskom'' khrodskom'' vilenskom). The testimony to which they were giving their oath was a census “of all the Jewish heads of both sexes, both male and female, children, servants . . . except for those not yet ten years of age and beggars too infirm to work” who were living in the jurisdictions of the nobles’ castle court and that of the bishop of Wilno—in other words, all those who were not living in houses once subject to the burghers’ magistracy, where most of Wilno’s Jews lived. The Jewish census takers reported 922 “heads” in the houses subject to the castle court and 84 in those subject to the bishop. The Jewish authorities had been directed to conduct this census, the Jewish capitation (pogłówne z∧ydowskie), by the twelfth constitution relating to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that had been promulgated at the Sejm of 1676.50 Their oath was a much more straightforward affair than that of the brothers Mojz∧eszowicz. They began by swearing “to the Lord God almighty who created heaven and earth” that they were presenting truthful evidence. And they concluded just as simply: “That we truthfully swear to this, may the Lord God aid us. And if untruthfully, let God kill us in soul and body.”51

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Jews in Court Jewish authorities tried to mediate between individual Jews and Christian courts in order to avoid “the desecration of the name of God,” imposing penalties of exclusion from the community (h.erem) upon those who did not obey the community decrees (takanot) that all private litigation be conducted through the intermediary of the Jewish bailiff.52 Or at least that was the goal. Practice in Wilno, as elsewhere, was frequently different.53 Christian judicial records of all jurisdictions were careful to set the stage—to state, almost always as a sort of preamble and in a piece of boilerplate (which could be in Latin, Polish, or Ruthenian), who had come before the court, when, in what matter, whether he had come personally or accompanied by a legal representative, and in whose name the legal actor was speaking. In theory (there were some exceptions, especially in the lesser jurydyki), single women, minors, and clergy could not be independent legal actors; they regularly appeared in court represented by curators (kuratorzy, curatores) and guardians (opiekunowie, tutores); often it was a relative or kinsman who played that role, as for example, in the protestation from 29 November 1663 of a wife against her husband: “I, Anastazja Aleksandrowiczówna, wife of Teodor Orzeszyc, with the presence of my brother, Lord Samuel Aleksandrowicz, protest against Lord Teodor Orzeszyc, that . . . ” The parties here were all Ruthenian Orthodox.54 Another example, this time from Lutheran circles, comes in the protestation of 9 May 1679 of a daughter (Marianna Ilisówna) against her mother (Katarzyna Szmitówna) in which the husband was the legal actor: “I, Benedykt Białonowicz, captain of His Royal Majesty, in my own name and that of my spouse as her conjugalis tutor [guardian by right of marriage] . . . ”55 Both of these cases were heard before the court of the magistracy. In spite of the attempts of Jewish authorities to limit the appearance of individual Jews in Christian courts, some Wilno Jews had direct recourse to the law, apparently unaided and unaccompanied by a community official; and they adhered to the same rules as the Christians—including following the rhetorical rules of the forensic genres. The evidence suggests several things: a willingness to ignore the takanot on occasion; some knowledge of the Lithuanian statute and Magdeburg law, an ability to use Polish for legal purposes; a desire to press private Jewish concerns before legal forums, some of which (such as the burghers’ magistracy) were seen as less than sympathetic to Jewish claims; and a high measure of faith in the various jurisdictions that made up the Commonwealth’s legal systems. The record of a court appearance in which Zelman Izakowicz sold the family shop to the Christian merchant Teodor Belmacewicz begins with the expected boilerplate, this time in Polish, indicating the presence of a legal actor speaking in his own behalf: “Appearing in person [osobis´cie stana˛wszy] before the noble office of the Wilno burgomasters and councillors, infidel [niewierny] Zelman Izakowicz, Jew of Wilno, voluntarily, out loud, manifestly, and in express words testified that . . . ”56 In another case, we find an analogous Latin introduction to a Polish narration. Two Jews had come to the court with a written protestation against their Glass Street landlord, Lutheran ironsmith Hans Pecelt the younger, over

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damage to property and health: “Appearing in person [personaliter veniens] before the court and the acta of the Wilno bench, infidel [infidelis] Łazarz Michałowicz, Jew of Wilno, together with Foltyn, likewise Jew of Wilno [presented their complaint that . . . ].”57 Here is another similar case with a Latin prelude and Polish testimony: “Appearing in person [personaliter veniens] before the acta of the noble Wilno court of the bench, infidel Mejer Jakubowicz, Jew of Wilno . . . presented his protestation in prepared written form [in parato scripto] . . . ”58 The fact that in these last two cases the Jewish plaintiffs offered written testimony suggests that they, like many Christian litigants, had sought legal advice before coming to court. And probably that lawyer or notary had been a Christian, since these Jews appeared in court alone, without a Jewish intercessor such as the bailiff or the shtadlan [appointed Jewish intercessor before Christian courts and rulers]. This certainly does not mean they were unable to speak Polish: Christians, too, even those who held office in the magistracy, sometimes presented their cases in parato scripto.59 These three cases happen to come from the courts of the magistracy. Similar cases can be cited from the castle court and the court of the Roman Catholic Chapter. A glance at one case from the acta of the Roman Catholic Chapter gives a hint of the slightly different rhetorical flavor of those books: On 23 March 1629, Szmula Mojz∧eszowicz, Jew of Wilno, complained against and related about Mr. Jachim Kondratowicz, that, at the instigation and command of that Jachim, students of the [Jesuit] Academy of Wilno, having come to my dwelling, a half-blue fur cap lined with sable, demanding to retrieve some two k or so of Lithuanian gr, then he snatched and took the aforementioned fur cap, which cost forty Polish zł.60

The syntactic hiccups are typical of the books of this lower instance of the chapter court and may reflect miscues between the agitated oral presentation of the complainant and a court notary who was having difficulties keeping up. In their dealings with their Christian neighbors and clients, Jews, like Christians, went to the court that had jurisdiction over the individuals involved in accordance with the principle actor sequitur forum rei (in essence, the plaintiff must go to the court of the accused).61 Here, too, the entry indicates that an individual, unaccompanied Jew was pressing his case before a Christian court, in this case, the Roman Catholic Chapter court. This jurisdiction, as we have seen, behaved like a secular court and ruled according to the Lithuanian statute in the cases it heard, which involved anyone living in houses subject to the chapter, regardless of the religion or confession of the litigants. The protracted case of one Jew and his heirs bolsters my argument that individual Jews functioned as independent legal actors in the courts of Wilno. On 17 March 1675, “infidel [perfidus] Fisiel Fajbisiewicz, Jew of Wilno,” appearing personally (veniens personaliter) before the court of the Wilno bench, presented in writing his protestation against a burgher of Wilno. The document he offered for entry into the acts was a perfect example of this forensic

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genre in Polish. His complaint was against “illustrious Lord Stefan Radkiewicz, merchant and burgher of Wilno,” who, like most objects of a protestation, had in the current year on a certain day and month “forgotten the fear of God and the severity of the common law that applies to all.” The Radkiewiczes were Uniate in the seventeenth century. The family house was “in Market Square, going toward Sharp Gate, lying between the Procewicz Town House and the public Guests’ House” (i.e., somewhere in the neighborhood of Market Square 3.24–3.27).62 The details in the case were these. When Fajbisiewicz came to Radkiewicz’s house to demand repayment of a debt of 30 zł, the merchant grabbed the Jew’s cane, with which he, as “a man of advanced years,” was propping himself up, and beat him “mercilessly with that cane,” such that he lost a cloth and two strings of pearls worth 120 zł. Radkiewicz then imprisoned Fajbisiewicz in his basement. The conspectio appended to the protestation confirmed the presence of wounds on Fajbisiewicz’s body consistent with those he claimed to have received from Radkiewicz. The case dragged on through April with repeated summonses to Radkiewicz and his lawyer to appear before the bench and with a declaration of contumacia (here, an obstinate refusal to appear in court) against both of them for failure to comply. By 21 June Fajbisiewicz had died—we are not told whether he died of his wounds—and the case was now being pursued by his widow. On that day, “infidel Sara Kopylewicz, the remaining widow of the deceased Fisiel Fajbisiewicz, Jew of Wilno,” appeared before the bench “with her curator [cum curatore suo], infidel Natan Józefowicz . . . and with Bernat Kopylewicz, Jew of Wilno, as the guardian [tanquam tutoris] of the son.” Apparently Fajbisiewicz had appointed a curator and guardian on his deathbed, as was also the standard practice in Christian society. These individuals were not identified as bailiffs or any other kinds of officeholders in the Jewish community. Józefowicz was most likely a friend or relative of the deceased, and Kopylewicz was apparently a brother-in-law. But note that although Fajbisiewicz’s widow and orphan could have chosen Christians to represent them, the litigation was conducted by two Jews who formed part of their own network of friends and kin, and they appeared without the direct mediation of the Jewish elders or bailiffs. These were private individuals, part of a family network, pressing a claim to a debt owed to the estate they had inherited.63 Jews, it seems, were in fact sometimes tempted to seek guardians and legal representatives among Christians. The Holy (Jewish) Community of Cracow (actually it was located in the suburban town of Kazimierz), for example, had decreed that “if a person desires to appoint gentile guardians [apotropsim], he must be opposed and all possible punishments applied.”64 The ban seems to have been ignored on occasion. I have found one curious Wilno case in which a Jew employed Christian legal representation. This document from 1650 bore the general title “Dominus Jonas cum Polenikowicz.” This is itself worth noting, since the Jew Jonas received the honorific usually reserved for Christians—dominus, the Latin equivalent of the Polish pan or “lord,” “sir,” or “Mr.” Indeed, the title was often reserved for nobles,

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especially in its Latin form. Perhaps Jonas belonged to the Jewish elite, which often felt a paradoxical kinship with and reliance upon the Christian elite.65 In any event, on 8 January of that year “infidel [he may have been a dominus, but he was still niewierny] Jew of Wilno Jonas Mojz∧eszowicz, appearing himself in person and through his legal representative [plenipotent], the noble Simon Piotrowicz,”66 complained to the magistracy that he had not received payment from “Marcin Steckiewicz, alias Polenikowicz, merchant and burgher of Wilno,” for seven barrels of herring and a debt of 20 zł in cash, which together constituted a considerable sum. The magistracy found for the plaintiff and allowed him to take possession of Steckiewicz’s goods, “especially his house [lying] in certain limits on Smilin´ski Street behind [the Church of ] St. Kazimierz” (perhaps our St. Kazimierz Alley).67 Protestations provide detailed allegations about the behavior of Vilnans with glimpses into interpersonal relations. Cases where further litigation and other court proceedings are extant urge caution in the use of individual documents, but they also suggest their usefulness: the story offered by any given document may be one-sided, but still it is one side of a story. The rhetorical sameness of the documents points in at least two important directions. We need to be alert to the real cultural differences of the litigating parties that the uniformity of language may mask at times. But this sameness may also reflect the existence of a community that crossed lines of confession and religion. It was created in the process of constant litigation that both reflected real conflict and built some sense of trust in shared institutions and the customs surrounding them.

~ c ha p t e r t we lv e ~

War, Occupation, Exile, Liberation (1655–1661)

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n Sunday, 8 August 1655, between nine and ten in the morning—at least this is how one German eyewitness account had it—Muscovite armies entered through four of the Wilno gates, beginning an occupation of the city that lasted a little over six years.1 According to that account, Tsar Aleksej Mixajlovicˇ made his triumphal entry around noon on the next day: He had more than sixty carriages before and behind him. In the middle there were three carriages covered in red and blue, twelve horses harnessed to each one, and three coachmen who had tall hats with black crosses, red and blue coats. These and all who followed progressed through the Sharp Gate [das Scharffe Thor, i.e., Ostra Brama] to the castle. The tsar followed thereupon in an exquisite coach built in the French manner, embroidered with pearls on the inside and lined with gray velvet. Six light brown Tatar horses drew it. The coachmen were dressed in gray and yellow, had tall coarse hats.  .  .  .  The tsar was wearing a tall hat with nine large precious strings of pearls. At his side sat an old gray man. Next to the coach walked twelve trabants in brown velvet coats and purple-dyed galloons. They carried axes like half-moons on their shoulders.

Thus began the three days of pillaging regularly allotted soldiers of armies that had conquered a city that had refused to surrender.2 The tsar established certain rules of engagement: “No more men, only women,” were to be killed; men, boys, and girls might be taken captive and sent back to Muscovy. A small guard was left in the castle, remaining until the end of 1661, but the main armies seem to have moved on: “They said that as soon as they had laid waste to the city, they would depart again hence.” The occupation would last “six years, three months, and twenty-four days,” in other words from 8 August 1655 to 3 December 1661, on which day the Muscovite garrison (which by then reportedly numbered only seventy-eight) revolted against the second Muscovite palatine of Wilno, Prince Danilo Myšeckij.3 The word “occupation,” however, is too

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strong here. It is also incorrect in implying a more or less constant state of affairs over the entire period. The work of Elmantas Meilus, among others, has begun to call into question some of the more extreme pictures of desolation during the occupation. True, record books tell us that there were 1,200 petty merchants in the city in 1647 and only approximately 40 in 1657. And yet economic activity—extending even to book trade—had quickly reasserted itself by spring 1657, just before a summer plague epidemic. A total municipal budget of 44 k in 1657, early in the occupation, had risen to 309 k by 1660. The city magistracy and courts began to function—seemingly independent of Muscovite oversight— also by 1657, when the municipal executioner once again took up his sword and other tools of the trade. What is more, the city offices engaged in a sort of purposeful denial, conducting themselves as if the occupier were not there: a reading of the extant acta of the magistracy for the period 1657–1661 gives remarkably few hints of an abnormal situation, barely even acknowledging the presence of Muscovite forces; among the reflections of the unusual situation were occasional interjections like “until the return of the full magistracy.” There are also indications that Vilnans refused to use Muscovite money throughout the period.4 We will see evidence that the first Muscovite palatine of Wilno, Prince Mixail Šaxovskoj, attempted to facilitate the restoration of order, the functioning of city offices (according to the old rules), and the rebuilding of local wealth. His successor, Prince Danilo Myšeckij, who took office by late 1659, imposed a much less benign, if short-lived, rule. The story of the Muscovite conquest and occupation of Wilno has been told by Meilus, Rachuba, and others. What I wish to focus on here in greater detail is the confessional aspect: How did the rules of encounter between the confessions and religions, which had been worked out for life in Wilno during a time of peace, change—or not change—during a period of wars with Protestant and Orthodox foes and the occupation of the city by an Orthodox army? I look first at Vilnans in exile, above all in Königsberg, for which we have the richest sources. Then I turn my attention to life in the occupied city. Some Vilnans had remained, others soon returned from exile, and all started the process of rebuilding houses and civic institutions. Which confessions were represented in the occupied city? What was the nature of their coexistence under the new conditions? A more detailed examination of the latter point focuses on allegations of collaboration and treason leveled against heterodox burghers—Orthodox, Lutheran, and Calvinist—and attempts at confiscation of their property. Next, I look more closely at the status of Ruthenians during the period of the occupation. I conclude with some thoughts about the reestablishment of the status quo in Wilno after the departure of Muscovite forces. Most important here is the centrality of the experience of occupation, exile, and liberation to the question of the coexistence of the confessions: in a time of wars that could be perceived—were perceived by many in the Commonwealth—as having confessional aspects, how did Wilno’s peculiar convivencia hold up?

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Vilnans in Exile W pobiegach od nieprzyjaciela Moskwicina i Szweda: “In flight from the Muscovite and Swedish foe.” Thus did one Vilnan describe in his last will and testament of 1685, thirty years after the event, how he had managed to lose the wealth he had accumulated as a younger man.5 Still, flight was a better choice than remaining in the city that summer. Those more fortunate or blessed with greater foresight sought safe haven elsewhere. We know that a few of them went to Danzig. On 26 February 1660, Lutheran artisans of Wilno—locksmith Hans Pecelt (presumably it was Pecelt Senior) and chamois tanner Piotr Rer—appeared before the Danzig magistracy to register the information that they had been appointed guardians over the daughter of Wilno Lutheran tailor Jerzy Ros, who had died of the plague in the fall of 1653. That daughter—the guardians seem to have been unaware of this in 1660—had been taken prisoner to Moscow, would marry there, and return to Wilno only in 1672.6 Others fled to country estates. Stefan Dubowicz (Market Square 3.25), a Ruthenian convert to Roman Catholicism and burgomaster, was killed by “bandits” (rozbojnicy)—the choice of words suggests they were not necessarily part of the invading armies—who had attacked the country estate of his brother-in-law Jan Szukszta, castle notary of Kowno. Perhaps this was the Bobcin´ (a village in the Kowno region on the left bank of the River Niewiaz˙a) where Dubowicz signed his last will and testament on 16 July 1657.7 Lutheran burghess Katarzyna Rejchowicz (her first husband was Lutheran Antoni Szefer, and the second was Calvinist Matiasz Gierlic, with whom she owned the house at 56.05) put her name to her will on 25 April 1658 in Sielec, where she had found refuge.8 There were many villages in the general area named Sielec. Perhaps this was the one near the River Niemen in Lida County; she first had the will recorded in the Lida Castle. But many more sought out relatively nearby Königsberg, which was the capital of Lutheran Ducal Prussia. Henadz Sahanovycˇ has called attention to the importance of the oaths of loyalty to elector of Brandenburg Friedrich Wilhelm and of neutrality toward King Karl X Gustaf of Sweden that asylum seekers from Wilno were required to sign in the elector’s palace in the winter and spring of 1656.9 In the process of freeing Prussia from its status as a vassal of the Polish Crown, Prince-Elector Friedrich Wilhelm had attempted, without success, to maintain neutrality in the Polish-Swedish War that was engulfing the Polish Crown lands at the same time that Muscovite and Cossack forces were laying siege to the cities of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. The peace treaty between Ducal Prussia and Sweden dated 7/17 January 1656 in Königsberg laid down the rules for exiles from Poland and Lithuania. As we read in a summary of that document, asylum seekers were granted five weeks within which to take the oath. Those who took the oath were subsequently “to enjoy free withdrawal to their homeland and to their lords.”10 Beginning on 16/26 February 1656, Vilnans came to the ducal palace in groups defined by estates and nations—nobles, clergy of the various confessions, and burghers, Germans and

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Poles separately among the burghers. There they affixed their signatures and seals to nearly identical loyalty oaths written in Latin, German, and Polish. These documents were preserved in the acta of the Prussian Etatsministerium (now in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin-Dahlem). We find here not only the autographs and seals of relatively well-known people, such as Lutheran royal doctor and memoirist Maciej Vorbek-Lettow, but also those of more modest although not entirely anonymous Wilno burghers, and—of central importance to this book—of all five confessions. Other than Sahanovycˇ's brief description of the volume and its contents (in which he also published one of the Polish versions of the oath), the only scholarly use to which these documents have been put was in a debate over the Germanness (Deutschtum) of early modern Wilno that Polish historian of Wilno Maria Łowmian ´ ska conducted at the beginning of the twentieth century with Königsberg archivist Paul Karge.11 The volume of acta contains, among other things, two large clusters of burgher signatures on which the two scholars focused. One follows a German version of the oath, with mostly Germanscript burgher signatures and seals (although we also find Latin, Italian, French, and English signatures), all of them under the heading “Reversales der Deutschen von der Wilda und Grodno” (“Declarations of the Germans from Wilno and Grodno”). A second follows a Polish oath, with Polish-script signatures and seals (but also some German, Cyrillic-letter Ruthenian, and Latin signatures), under the heading “Cantio Polonorum Vilnensium” (“Oath [Incantation] of the Poles of Wilno”).12 In addition to these two lists at the center of the polemic and the other much smaller clusters of signatures grouped by estate (nobles, clergy, etc.) and placed under copies of the oath in German, Polish, and Latin, there were two further long and somewhat chaotic lists of, respectively, mostly Germans and mostly Poles, who signed German and Polish versions of the oath. Karge seems to have drawn on these last two lists only selectively. Finally, we have what appear to be attempts by Prussian officials to collect the scattered signatures in three master lists: one of “Deutsche von der Wilda und Grodno” (“Germans from Wilno and Grodno”), one of “Polnische Leute von der Wilda” (“Polish People from Wilno”), and one, without any heading, of all asylum seekers from the Grand Duchy; this last one was loosely alphabetized by first names, as German municipal records were then kept.13 In his essay on the Deutschtum of Wilno and Kowno, Karge published a selective list of the names of asylum seekers and (mis)used a quantitative comparison of the Polish and German lists in an attempt to establish the percentage of Germans among Wilno bur´ ska seems not to have seen the manuscripts, she rightly critighers.14 Although Łowmian cized Karge’s methodology. She was certainly correct in arguing that not all Wilno Poles fled the city and that not all Polish exiles sought refuge in Königsberg, both of which assumptions were at the base of Karge’s statistics.15 Karge no doubt overestimated the German presence in peacetime Wilno, but Łowmian ´ ska underestimated the significance of the fact that Wilno Germans (some of whom were actually Belgian and Dutch, even Polish, at least from her point of view) were overrepresented in skilled professions (goldsmithery,

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law, surgery, and medicine stand out as Lutheran specializations), by which they made themselves attractive to noble and royal patrons. Both scholars operated with naive assumptions about ethnic identities. And neither— Łowmian ´ ska was particularly blind to this issue—questioned the nature of the Polishness of these Poles, or noticed that there were many Ruthenians among them, both Uniates and Orthodox. For Łowmian ´ ska, membership in the Uniate Church, or any other aspect of what she saw as Polonization, turned a Ruthenian into a Pole. There is no other way to interpret the stunning statement that “the Catholic population of Wilno was on the whole (with respect to language and culture) Polish, as well as—in a small percentage—German and Lithuanian. Among Uniates and Disuniates, who were formerly Ruthenians, Poles now predominated. Likewise a significant majority of Protestants and Orthodox were Poles.”16 The categories German and Pole appear to have been imposed in these lists by bureaucrats in Königsberg and were not necessarily selfidentifications. At most, individual Vilnans could choose whether to be Germans or Poles during their exile in Königsberg. In fact, these lists of names do offer information about Wilno society in the seventeenth century, and if used more carefully they might even allow some tentative quantifying. But most directly, when coupled with other sources they allow us to piece together some stories about the lives of Vilnans during this period of great disruptions. Among other things, they help confirm the impression that exiles began to trickle back into Wilno almost immediately, and that the city in its ruined and depopulated state continued to rule itself through a temporary magistracy that functioned in some sort of mutual accommodation with a small Muscovite force located in the Wilno castle and headed by a Muscovite palatine of Wilno.17 First the numbers. In the “Reversales der Deutschen von der Wilda und Grodno” we find approximately 140 heads of households (a few entries are unclear). A signatory usually represented more than just himself and spoke for wives, parents-in-law, children, widows, servants, and others of his entourage. Of these, I am unable to place only 25 as Vilnans. The rest either identified themselves in their signature (e.g., Hans Klaßen Uhrmacher und Bürger aus der Wilda, Hans Klaßen, clockmaker and burgher of Wilno), or I know about them from other sources. Only one of these 25 identified himself as a citizen of Grodno, so it is possible that some of these people were in fact also from Wilno. Of the definite Vilnans, 71 had managed to bring their personal wax seals with them and affixed them beneath their signatures; almost all signatures appear to be autograph, pointing to a high level of literacy in this population. We find ca. 170 signatures on the “Cantio Polonorum Vilnensium,” three of which tell us they were not, strictly speaking, from Wilno. Only 44 had been able to bring their seals with them, and signatories frequently commented on the fact that they were without their seals. Eight noted that they were illiterate and had asked a friend to sign for them. There were 24 signatures here in the German language and script. A few of these may have been autograph, but many were in the same hand, which suggests that these

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individuals were also illiterate and that their presence had been registered by a Königsberg bureaucrat. There were other burgher signatures in addition to the lists of Germans and Poles. With a few exceptions, members of the magistracy signed a separate, Latin oath as a group: we find 44 of them together, their signatures all in Latin (regardless of confession), and fully 37 of them had managed to bring their seals with them. Here we find both Roman Catholics and Ruthenians but no Lutherans or Calvinists.18 In addition to these three perhaps rather elite lists (and a few cases of just one or two signatures under an oath by themselves), there were two more sets of signatures, without any sort of identifying title but again largely Polish in the one case, German in the other, and again under Polish and German versions of the oath, respectively, both dated 23 February/4 March 1656. The titled lists of German and Polish burghers (the “Reversales” and the “Cantio”) were stately affairs with each signature in the form of a small paragraph occupying the entire width of the page, frequently over a wax seal. The individuals on the untitled lists seem to have been of the more modest sort, their names cramped into the smallest possible space, in two, even three narrow columns. Most of them are otherwise unknown to me (and yet they frequently tell us they were from Wilno), and not a one of their names was accompanied by a personal wax seal. Following the Polish oath we find about 70 signatures, at least 15 of which were done for illiterate persons; others were done in the same hand, once again suggesting illiteracy on the part of the signatories. Still, many were autograph, including, no doubt, the one signature in Cyrillic.19 A similarly cramped and untidy list grouped approximately 75 mostly German (some Polish) signatories, with some done in the same hand.20 While a few of these were not from Wilno (at least 11 on the Polish list, 2 on the German), the vast majority of the names were again those of Vilnans. Thus we have roughly comparable numbers of Poles and Germans, the former only slightly predominant. I would conclude from this not, as did Karge, that these numbers reflected percentages of inhabitants in peacetime Wilno but that the Germans were disproportionately represented in terms of wealth, skills in trades and professions (perhaps also literacy and knowledge of other languages, especially German), connections with the outside world, and mobility. With about 185 German households now here from Wilno, clearly some substantial portion of Wilno’s Lutherans had been able to gather in Königsberg during the city’s occupation. The offering rolls for the Wilno congregation give us the following numbers of heads of Lutheran households: for 1640, 251; for 1652, 265; in 1661, at the time of the liberation of the city, there were only 97, but there was a steady resurgence after that (125 in 1664, 145 in 1667, 145 in 1669, 146 in 1671, 154 in 1673, etc.). The problem in assessing these numbers is the fact that not all the “Germans” who signed the loyalty oath were Lutherans (or even German, from our point of view). True, we do recognize a considerable number of Wilno Lutherans on these lists, ranging from members of the burgher elites such as medical doctor Paweł Meller and jurist Arnolf Zaleski through merchants such as Michał Buchner and Hans Magdeburger and goldsmiths such as

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Zacharias and Jakob Sznejder and Hans Rentell to the more anonymous likes of Walter Schade (tailor), Erasmus Ertsleben (locksmith), Bastian Baltzer (turner), Peter Heylandt (harness maker), and Gabriel von Salfeld (confectioner). But we also find here some of the Calvinists who were a part of the circles of Wilno Lutheran elites during peacetime—Henryk Mones, Michał Baranowicz (both of whom had Lutheran wives by this point), and Wilhelm von Pütten; and we also find some whose circles are somewhat less clear to me, such as Faltin Bister and Marcin Niegowicz. Some of the Scotsmen who formed a part of the local Calvinist congregation were also present in Königsberg and signed the German list. David Gilbort signed in English; he had been described in the baptismal record when he brought his daughter Regina to the font on 16 August 1652 as being “of the Scottish nation” (z nacyjej szkockiej). Robert Gilberdt signed in German; he too would baptize his children in the Calvinist church, where he was identified as a Scot. The two may have been related: “Gilbort” would appear as “Gilbert” as well.21 In fact, non-Germans signed for themselves and their entourages in fluent German language, often in German script. Maria Łowmian ´ ska attributed this to opportunism on the part of those with Slavic surnames.22 This is surely incorrect. People like Michał Baranowicz (Calvinist) and Adam Palczewski (Lutheran) appeared in these circles because this was precisely the company they kept in peacetime Wilno, before and after the occupation. Even some Poles and Ruthenians, as we have seen, seem to have been able to use German; this simply made sense for those involved in business beyond the walls of the city.23 And some of these Germans were, in fact, Roman Catholic. (Here again in her polemic with Karge, Łowmian ´ ska seems to have thought their Catholicism somehow disqualified them from his list of Germans and made them into Poles.) A certain Peter Gramel, carpenter, signed the oath with the other Germans on the first day, 16/26 February 1656. His name appears in no Lutheran or Calvinist lists, so he may well have himself been Roman Catholic. However this may be, he was in Roman Catholic company: he signed not only for himself but “also for Lady Gertrudt Cornelschin, organ builder’s widow from Wilno [Orgelbauerin von der Wilde wittib] and the three grown daughters she has with her.”24 This was Gertruda Szulcówna, Roman Catholic widow of organ builder Korneliusz Krapoliusz, who would return to Wilno and rebuild her house at Bernardine Street 52.03 “after its ruination and burning at the hands of the Muscovite enemy.” It is interesting to note that Gramel signed for Szulcówna’s “three grown daughters”; the fourth, “Miss Elz˙bieta . . . upon whom the Lord God had visited incomplete health and understanding”—as we will read in her mother’s will from 1671—was not included in the list of oath takers, presumably because her health and mental condition prevented her from being any sort of legal actor. One of the daughters, Katarzyna, would find her future husband among the exiles in Königsberg. He was the “Toussen Begien” (Toussaint Begine?) who signed the oath with the Germans that same day, although he was then fifty-seven positions higher on the list than his future wife. Further, he signed it in French, and he was there with a previous wife: “pour moy et pour ma fame.”25 He may in fact not have been a Vilnan at this time, but eventually this unnamed wife would

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disappear from the scene, and Toussen Begien would join his new wife, Katarzyna Krapoliuszówna, in Wilno. The “Christoff Satriebe,” who signed the oath for himself and his wife (“mit meyner fraw”) together with the other Germans on 16/26 February 1656,26 would appear, when he returned to Wilno and its Polish-language documents, as barber-surgeon Krzysztof Zatryb. His wife (“Chriestof Satri[e]bsche”), would go on to contribute solidly (around 16 zł for each two-year period) to the Lutheran church over the period 1664–1673. Zatryb, although apparently a German, was quite certainly a Roman Catholic. He left 1,100 zł to the Discalced Carmelites at Sharp Gate and asked to be buried there, as we learn from his wife’s testament of 17 June 1692.27 Her name was Barbara Zagierówna. She disappeared from the lists of offering givers twenty years before her death because she had remarried, a certain Jan Zant, again a doctor but this time a Lutheran. At church he was Johan Heinrich Zandt/Sand(t), and now the lists reflected only his solid contributions over the period 1671 to 1685. Zagierówna would return to the rolls of Lutheran giving—now as “Johan Hinrich Sandten Wittfrauw [Johan Hinrich Sandt’s widow]”—in the period from 1687 to 1691. Her daughter with Zant, Anna Sybylla, married Daniel Bez, that is, Daniel Bös, also a Lutheran medical doctor, a professional predilection she seems to have inherited from her mother. I will return to these names in a moment. The larger point here is that, although Lutherans may have been predominant, these exiled Wilno Germans were a diverse group, both ethnically and confessionally. And who were those who signed the “Cantio Polonorum Vilnensium”? Of the approximately 170 total signatures, at least 25 belonged to Ruthenians, both Uniate and Orthodox. There were, no doubt, more; these are simply either the ones who signed in Cyrillic (four cases) or those about whom I know something further from other sources. In fact, the Ruthenians are practically the only ones on the list whom I can place in neighborhoods and networks. From the Horse and Rudniki Street neighborhood, we find Orthodox merchant Kondrat Parfianowicz, three names away from his burgomaster father-in-law Stefan Rzepnicki (whose house was in the side street along the wall between Horse Street and Sharp Street 6.03). (In 1636, a Daniel Parfianowicz lived across the street at 7.05.) Konrad Parfianowicz and Dorota Rzepnicka bought a house in the equally Ruthenian Subocz Street neighborhood “behind the monastery of St. Kazimierz” in July 1660, still during the occupation of the city.28 We find Orthodox merchant Krzysztof Sokołowski (Rudniki Street 12.12 in 1664) just ahead of his Orthodox mother-in-law Eudokia Kuszelina (Horse Street 5.14), the two signatures immediately between those of Parfianowicz and Rzepnicki. We find Orthodox merchant Jan Gilewicz (Horse Street 8.02) who would soon return to Wilno and bring charges of bigamy against his former brother-in-law.29 We also find Subocz Street well represented in the Prussian capital. From the Kostrowicki family there were Grzegorz, Daniel, and Jan. It was Grzegorz Kostrowicki who would be written out of his wife’s will on account of alleged cruelty and neglect. He signed the oath in Königsberg in his and his wife’s name. She was Maryna Iwanowicz, and her father, Orthodox merchant Piotr Iwanowicz, was one of the four Cyrillic signatories of the loyalty oath.30

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Uniate councillor Samuel Filipowicz (Subocz Street 79.08) signed the oath one page after ´ czyło brothers, Paweł, Grzegorz, and Gabriel (Subocz Street Iwanowicz.31 We find three Sien 78.07), all of whom returned to Wilno before December 1661. Paweł, as we will soon see, would be charged with collaboration with the Muscovite occupiers. Grzegorz would buy a house in Glass Street in 1667 (20.05) and form networks with the local Lutherans, although he remained Orthodox; perhaps his eventual entry into Lutheran circles in postwar Wilno was eased by the stay in Königsberg. It was he, along with his wife and brother, who would stand next to Lutheran merchant Jan Buchner and family as godparents for Catholic babies.32 And there were representatives of other Ruthenian neighborhoods on the list of Poles. We find, for instance, Uniate merchant Afanas Otroszkiewicz and his wife, Orthodox burghess Katarzyna, sharing a house in the suburb beyond Sharp Gate after the liberation of the city.33 The Catholics on this Polish list, oddly enough—assuming these people were indeed Roman Catholic—are mostly otherwise unknown to me, and I am unable to place them in wider Wilno circles. A few Lutherans ended up on this Polish list for reasons not entirely clear to me. Goldsmith Michał Sznejder signed in Polish, for himself, his wife, and an apprentice named Paweł Je˛drzejkiewicz. Two more members of this Lutheran Goldsmith family—Zacharias and Jakob—had signed in German, and on the German list, in their Königsberg exile. Michał was joined on the Polish list by his Glass Street neighbor, Lutheran swordsmith Melchior Ilis (Malcher Iglis, Glass Street 21.03), who registered his presence—together with that of his wife and two journeymen, Kazimierz and Jerzy—in German. Another neighbor, Lutheran goldsmith Augustin Zeligmacher, also affixed his seal under his Polish signature and with the Poles; he was married to Anna Sznejderówna, a daughter from the neighborhood’s largest goldsmith clan, whose house was at Glass Street 20.02.34 It is only on the list of forty-four members of the magistracy that I find names of Roman Catholics (next, of course, to their Orthodox and Uniate colleagues) for whom I can sketch some personal networks: Mikołaj Kliczewski, Eustachiusz Szperkowicz, Stanisław Gawłowicki, and Andrzej Gierkiewicz.35 In thinking of this large presence of asylum seekers, we should probably imagine—in addition to the sense of displacement on the part of the exiled Vilnans—also the impression of strangeness they must have made upon the Königsbergers who received them in their city. The latter not only took fellow Lutherans (some of whom they no doubt already knew from their studies in and business trips to the Prussian capital) into their midst and their places of worship but also watched as Calvinists, Roman Catholics, Uniates, and Orthodox (accompanied by members of their clergy) re-created aspects of their former lives, including secular and religious gatherings—whether in borrowed space in local churches or in private dwellings. (Königsberg, a center of Lutheran resistance to Calvinism in Brandenburg-Prussia, would be forced by Friedrich Wilhelm to accept Calvinist citizens

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and property owners only in 1668.)36 Paradoxically, it would be the Uniates and Orthodox, mostly foreign to the Königsbergers (mostly, since non-Lutheran Vilnans also had frequent business dealings here), who would now be on the same calendar with the locally dominant Lutherans. Roman Catholics, but also Calvinists and Lutherans from Wilno, had long been accustomed to working and worshipping according to the new calendar, and now they were the ones who found themselves in the calendrical minority, although Wilno’s Lutherans were probably mindful of the old calendar habits of co-confessionals outside Wilno. The division into Germans and Poles was clearly the only choice offered Wilno burghers by local authorities, but in these lists we can sense the presence of the various sorts of networks and alliances that had been formed within and across confessions in peacetime Wilno and that would reassert themselves after the liberation. Vilnans both replicated their usual social networks during their exile in Königsberg and took steps to create new ones that they would bring back with them after 1661. We see this in the clusters of signatories: kith, kin, and neighbors came forward in groups to place their signatures and affix their seals, one after the other. We also see this in the rare glimpses we are afforded of their lives in exile. Marianna Buchnerówna, daughter of deceased Lutheran merchant Marcin Buchner and sister of Michał and Jan Buchner, was married to barber-surgeon Frydrych Cylich (Friedrich Zülich). She died in 1656 during the family’s presence in Königsberg, and her last will and testament—provisions formulated “as modestly as can be in this time of our exile”—was registered by the local magistracy on 19/29 August of that year. Executors and witnesses all had connections to the Wilno Lutheran (and Calvinist) communities, some of the elite serving here as patrons; other names came from the Buchners’ own middle-level social group. The executors were the spokesman for the Wilno Germans in the Königsberg exile, Paweł Meller (second husband of Elz˙bieta Giblówna), and Jerzy Mansfeld, both Lutherans. The witnesses were Calvinist merchants Henryk Mones and Michał Baranowicz, both of whom had Lutheran wives, Lutheran barbersurgeon Andrzej Hoffman, Lutheran jurist Arnold Zaleski, Lutheran Zachariasz Bez (no profession noted), Lutheran vintner Krzysztof Meisner, and “Chriestoff Satrius,” a misreading in this copy for the German Catholic barber-surgeon Christoff Satriebe (Zatryb); the daughter of his Lutheran wife with her second husband, as we have seen, would go on to marry another Lutheran Bez (Böß).37 We find in this list of names connections of social class—all those involved with Buchnerówna’s testament were of the middle level with the exception of Meller and Mones (perhaps also Mansfeld), who belonged to the burgher elite. There were also connections of language and ethnicity—most were in fact some sort of Germans, and even Mones, whose family stemmed from the Low Countries, clearly knew the language well—and connections of confession—most were Lutherans, two non-Lutherans were nonetheless Protestants (Calvinists), and both of them, as well as the other non-Lutheran, Roman Catholic Satriebe, had Lutheran wives. There were also connections of profession. For example, the Roman

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Catholic Satriebe was brought into the circle by his practice of a Lutheran trade, that of barber-surgeon. This was also the vocation of Andrzej Hoffman, Buchnerówna’s husband Friedrich Zülich, and perhaps also that of Zachariasz Bez. And Meller was a medical doctor, one step higher on the professional ladder. We also see the adherence to, and (re)creation of, Wilno networks in happier circumstances. Marianna Buchnerówna’s sister Anna would marry in Königsberg in 1658.38 Her husband was Lutheran royal captain Jakub Trop. He had arrived in Königsberg in the entourage of his then father-in-law, locksmith Erasmus Ertsleben.39 By the time Wilno was liberated, he had installed himself in the Buchner family Glass Street neighborhood. The common experience of exile as Vilnans may have facilitated the establishment of future networks. Frenchman Toussen Begien, most likely Roman Catholic himself, who had arrived in Königsberg with another wife, would find the next one among the Roman Catholic exile circles. Both Begien and his future wife chose to be identified as Germans. Orthodox merchant Grzegorz Sien ´ czyło would move into Glass Street and into the Buchners’ circles upon his return to liberated Wilno. Orthodox merchant Michał Kuszelicz, apparently then still a minor, who had found refuge in Wilno with his mother Eudokia Kuszelina, would share the exile with a future second wife. She was Lutheran Anna Zaleska, sister of city jurist Arnolf Zaleski, both of whom were present in Königsberg during the occupation. Arnolf signed (in Latin) together with the Germans. Anna was represented by her first husband, Stanisław Knapin ´ ski, who seems to have been a Roman Catholic and who signed for himself and his wife together with the Poles.40 In any case, these lists of signatures tell us several stories. Germans and Lutherans seem to have been overrepresented and also perhaps better equipped (with both literacy and personal seals in greater evidence), but Vilnans of all confessions, including the Orthodox, sought refuge from Muscovite armies in the Prussian capital. Vilnans brought with them networks of kith, kin, and neighbors; drew upon them for support in exile; fostered, developed, and extended them there; and brought them back to Wilno upon their return, intact and ready for further development.

Vilnans in Occupied Wilno Some number of Vilnans remained in the city after the dust settled in August 1655. Others returned at varying speeds. Those who ended up in Muscovy seem to have taken the longest to return. Maryna Rossówna—the one whose guardianship Pecelt Sr. and Rer would register in Danzig in 1660—had been taken hostage at age two and a half, together with her aunt, in 1655. Seventeen years later, in the spring of 1672—her freedom purchased some time before by the Lutheran community of the Moscow suburbs—she would make her way back to Wilno with two letters of reference from the minister and other members of that community. In them we find attestations to her legitimate birth, identity, and a recent valid marriage

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(at a relatively young age) to a German “from the city of Glückstadt in the Duchy of Holstein”—most likely also a Lutheran—named Konrad Ramus. The pastor’s attestation tells us that “quite a number [siła] of prisoners, people young and old, had been brought here to Moscow [after 8 August 1655] to servitude.” Copies of the attestations were entered into the postwar acta of the Wilno magistracy.41 In 1679—twenty-four years after the conquest of the city—a certain Konstanty Iwanowicz Wysocki would take Grzegorz and Gabriel Sien ´ czyło to court over the family inheritance (the house at Subocz Street 78.07). He would claim to be the long-lost son of a deceased Maryna Sien ´ czyłówna and to have spent “twenty-some years” in Muscovite servitude. Wysocki seems not to have prevailed—the Sien ´ czyło family fortune remained intact—but this does not nec´ czyłos were essarily mean that he had made up the story of his sojourn in Muscovy.42 The Sien Orthodox and had been in Königsberg, at least at the very beginning. Others managed to regain their freedom more quickly. Bazyli Rudomicz, doctor, occasional rector of the Zamos´´c Academy, city burgomaster, poet, and memoirist (he may well have been a Vilnan himself and certainly had many contacts with the city) recorded in his “private diary” a meeting with “Lord Maciej Korolkiewicz, a Vilnan of a renouned family [sławnego rodu] and of great merits, my kinsman,” which took place on 25 August 1658. His kinsman told him that he had been “taken into captivity to Moscow after the destruction of Wilno,” and that he had “returned home from there after three and a half years”—an obvious chronological impossibility, although the story sounds otherwise plausible. (Maybe it was two and a half years.) And since “no one could give him information about his wife, children, and kin, he then went to Danzig.” In that city he discovered that his family had indeed been there (thus our list of Wilno exiles in the Royal Prussian city grows slightly) and that they had just departed.43 Korolkiewicz was indeed from a notable Wilno Ruthenian family. A Fiedor Korolkiewicz was a member on the Greek side of the first sexagintavirate in 1602.44 Marek Korolkiewicz was an annual councillor in 1618 and 1623.45 A “Korolkiewiczowa, burgomaster’s wife, widow” lived at Market Square 3.22 in 1636; this was presumably the widow of Marek, although I find no record that Marek (or any other Korolkiewicz) held that office before 1636.46 Bazyli Korolkiewicz was a councillor in the middle of the century; both he and another relative named Fiedor would return to Wilno during the occupation.47 I find no further reference to Michał Korolkiewicz, so perhaps he never made it back to the Lithuanian capital from Zamos´´c. Many others did return, however, and they began to do so early on, joining those who never left in rebuilding life in the occupied city. Acta from after the liberation of the city—sometimes decades later—frequently reflected the destruction of houses and churches. Jan Baranowski—the musician who told of the loss of his wealth and property “in flight from the Muscovite and Swedish foe”—evoked the “ruin” (this was a commonly used term) of Wilno in his last will and testament of 1685. He had purchased with his first wife a “partly ruined” bricked house on Troki Street (33.02) in 1663; with his second wife, Justyna Kostromska, he had restored her “little bricked house on Skop Street [49.05: it

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had been the property of her parents, tailor Jan Kostromski and Cecylia Szymakowska] . . . that had been ruined [zruinowana] by the Muscovite foe.”48 A conspectio of the bricked house at Horse Street 8.10 owned by the Domicki family, which was conducted on 9 May 1657, helps give a clearer sense of the state of the city, shortly after the wartime magistracy had resumed its regular activities. This was a year and nine months after the city had been taken. The delegates from the magistracy came that day to “the entirely ruined and completely desolated” house and recorded what they saw: First of all, having entered through the gate, on the right-hand side, a store, there are no doors, it is full of muck [gnój]. Beyond this store, two more stores, there are no doors, likewise both of them full of muck. Under these stores, two muck-filled cellars, there are no stairs or windows to them, the grates have been broken out. At the back, a brewery, completely ruined and burned out, only the wall remains, without doors and everything. On the left-hand side, a cellar full of muck, without stairs. Over that cellar, a tavern chamber, a table, [all of this] partly rotted from rain, only the beams and the grates are whole. Upstairs—from the alcove, through the dining chamber, up to the chamber on the other side—everything has been burned out, all that is left are the walls. In this alcove off the courtyard, there is one grate, and in the chamber off the street three remain whole. Over all these rooms there is no roof, the courtyard is full of muck and [more] muck.49

The “muck” in question was probably a mix of mud and excrement, not only animal. The quartermaster had seen something quite different about twenty years earlier: “It has four chambers, one with a cabinet, two stores, two basements, a bakery, a bath, a stable for a few horses, a shed for keeping hay.”50 Thus by 1657, soon after their return to the ruined city, these and other Vilnans were setting about reclaiming property, assessing its value, and making provisions for rebuilding. Recording such an inventory was a first step in the process. The signs of a gradual return to normal life were many. One of the earliest entries in the book of acta of the Wilno burgomasters and councillors for the period 1657–1662 that is kept in Moscow’s RGADA recorded the will of a certain Namszewiczowa. In it she told the financial history of “the house in which I now live, not far beyond Sharp Gate. . . . It was burned entirely to the ground during the current desolation of the city of Wilno, which we fled in our poverty, and nothing more than an empty plot of land remained, upon which plot of land my current husband, Lord Krzysztof Namszewicz, building at his own cost and expense, partly of brick, and partly of wood, spent 400 Lithuanian k.”51 This document was recorded on 17 February 1657, in other words, just a year and a half after the conquest of the city and exactly a year after Vilnans began lining up outside the elector’s palace in Königsberg to sign the loyalty oath. If they had fled at all, the Namszewiczes must have returned to Wilno sometime before this date in order to have had time to do this considerable

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rebuilding; certainly they were present within a few months following the invasion. In any event, they were willing to make substantial investment in property in the city at a time of great uncertainty. I find the mundane actions of nearly anonymous citizens as eloquent as any of the other indicators. Some lucky chance has preserved the following contract dated 1 April 1657 in the sparse set of Wilno acts for the period: “I, Gabriel Lewonowicz, burgher and tailor of the city of Wilno, declare with this writing of mine, that . . . I have given over my son, Klemens Lewonowicz, for apothecary training with noble Lord Matiasz Szczerbicki, apothecary of the city of Wilno, having indentured my aforementioned son for a period of six years.”52 The book of acta kept in RGADA reveals the sequel to this story. Tailor Gabriel Lewonowicz, a.k.a. “Borodawka” (Ruthenian for facial mole) and wife Regina S´ wienczówna both died during the plague in the summer of 1657, a few months after indenturing their son. By 16 February 1658 two Vilnans, merchant Jan Zusinel and apothecary Matiasz Szczerbicki—the same to whom young Klemens had been indentured—had taken on the duties of guardians for the couple’s minor children, and two days later the magistracy carried out an inventory of the estate.53 We see here both the aspiration to return to a normal life and to make plans for the future, as well as the difficulties posed by the chaos and disease that followed the conquest of the city. Here and elsewhere, there is clear evidence that the old Roman-Greek parity arrangements for power sharing were being maintained, even as the castles were in Muscovite hands and in spite of the fact that the Orthodox burghers were now in a more privileged position. As usual, two delegates had been sent from the magistracy to oversee the process of assessing the Lewonowicz estate. They were Stanisław Gawłowicki, a Roman Catholic, and Grzegorz Kostrowicki, a Ruthenian (perhaps still Orthodox at this point). As in the Königsberg exile, all the Christian confessions were represented in the occupied city. Lutherans Michał Buchner and Zachariasz Bez had gone back by 30 December 1656 to participate in the inventory of the Glass Street property of Buchner’s brother-in-law, Lutheran Samuel Kalander, another Radziwiłł client who had sought refuge in Königsberg and apparently died there.54 Michał Buchner was to die in the plague of summer 1657, but Bez would be present in the liberated city, contributing handsomely to Lutheran finances and serving as lay elder in the church until his death sometime soon after 1679.55 (The fact that his name first reappears only in the rolls for 1667 even though the books started up again with entries for 1662 and 1664 might suggest that he had once again fled Wilno during the plague and had not returned immediately.) The acta of the magistracy during the occupation occasionally took over the function of church records in attesting to legitimate births. We find the entry on 19 January 1658 of a certificate of legitimate birth for Albertus Klet, son of Lutheran Piotr Klet and Anna Makarmondówna, who lived on St. John Street and also owned a house around the corner in Glass Street. Klet had been among the asylum seekers in Königsberg. The legitimacy of the parents’ matrimonial union “juxta ritum Augustianae confessionis [according to the rite of

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the Augsburg Confession]” and the fact of the baptism “in temploque Augustiano [in the Lutheran Church]” were proved “ex metricis ejusdem ecclesiae [from the record books of that same church]” and with the attestation of two important Vilnans, Roman Catholic bencher Jan Reybert and Lutheran municipal clockmaker Jakub Gierke (Dominican Street 32.01).56 We also find three different attestations of legitimate births for otherwise anonymous Roman Catholic Vilnans on 25 May 1658.57 Jews returned too, apparently rather quickly. Two Jews of Wilno had petitioned the new Muscovite palatine of Wilno, Mixail Šaxovskoj, on 28 December 1655, for permission to return “to live in their old houses” within the walls. He seems to have required them to reside outside the city for the time being until the tsar should make a decision in the matter.58 When on 24 April 1658 Wilno burgher elites signed a petition to Tsar Aleksej Mixajlovicˇ asking him to reconfirm their Magdeburg rights and privileges, they included a request to ban the Jews to the suburbs (in effect, the privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis they were never able to achieve in peacetime Wilno): specifically, they asked that Jewish settlement now be “transferred beyond the city, beyond the River Wilia, to the garden where they have their cemetery” (i.e., the Snipiszki suburb).59 But the Jews seem to have returned to their old houses. A survey of income from Wilno town houses for 1658 notes four Jewish arendators.60 Financial records for the city for 1659 list two “Jewesses” among Vilnans who were paying taxes for water flowing to their houses.61 A protestation recorded on 23 July 1660 reflects a return to normal: here a Jew named Lewek Majerowicz felt moved, and entitled, to come before the wartime magistracy to complain (as did many Christians) that the possessions he had buried in his basement when he fled the city were no longer there.62 Jewish settlement within the walls would continue to grow after the liberation of the city in December 1661. Still, in spite of the clear attempt to adhere to old methods of maintaining peace and parity among the represented confessions, and in spite of the fact that we can indeed find representatives of all confessions in occupied Wilno, a reading of the acta gives the distinct impression of a city in which Ruthenians now predominated, probably most of them Orthodox or at least pro forma Orthodox for a certain period. Among those Ruthenians who had returned from Königsberg during the occupation we find Stefan Rzepnicki, the Sien ´ czyło brothers (Paweł, Grygier/Grzegorz, and Gabriel), Maryna Korolkiewiczówna, Stefan Krasowski, Kazimierz Kostrowicki and wife Marta Dorofiewiczówna, Krzysztof Sokołowski, Tomasz Braz˙ycz, Stefan Kuszelicz, and many others. The Muscovite-occupied castle was functioning on the old calendar, but the acta of the magistracy were still kept according to the new one, although with a few subtle differences in tone. One main difference was that the use of the new calendar was occasionally pointed out, as if there were now for the first time since the late sixteenth century a doubt about this; still, a check of dates and days of the week reveals that even the individual documents lacking an identification of calendar silently continued to use new-calendar dates. A bigger difference was reflected in the transactions themselves: on several occasions—something found rarely before or after occupation—individual Vilnans made contracts with each other using

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old-calendar dates.63 We also find a much higher percentage of Cyrillic-letter Ruthenian used in the acta in this period than before or after, at least in the extant acta. The somewhat privileged position in which Ruthenian Vilnans found themselves during the occupation would eventually leave them open to charges of treason.

Charges of Treason, Attempts at Confiscation There were in fact a few documented attempts to confiscate the houses and property of Wilno Orthodox and Protestants during the period of the Muscovite occupation and the midcentury wars with Sweden: one against an Orthodox family, one or two directed against Lutherans, and one against Calvinists. All these attempts were based on royal privileges for the alienation of property “by the law of escheat” (jure caduco) from foreigners who had died without a male heir or convictions of treason.64 Only one of the attempted confiscations was apparently fully successful. The object here was the house at Castle Street 2.11, which Maciej Vorbek-Lettow’s brother-in-law, Szymon Engelbrecht I, had purchased in 1622 from Zygmunt Andrys Fonderflot. By 1636 the house was in the possession of the widow of Szymon Engelbrecht II, Katarzyna Sztrunkówna. And by the time of the next Lustration (1639) she had remarried, and the house was listed as the property of Rejnhold Witmacher.65 All these individuals were Lutherans, and the house stood in the middle of the “Lutheran elite ghetto” of Castle Street, between the Sztrunk family house at 2.10 and the properties of Tomasz and Jakub Gibel at 2.12 and 2.13. As we learn from one of the documents in the confiscation of the house, Witmacher had “once been a Wilno city councillor,” although his name does not appear as one of the annual councillors in Kostrowicki’s list of top magistrates. He did appear in prewar documents as an active local businessman, at the head of a group (mostly Lutheran) conducting litigation over debts owed them by the estate of Calvinist merchant Marcin Gauter (Castle Street 1.13) in 1644– 1645. He witnessed the will of Jan Sztrunk I (Castle Street 2.10) in 1645 and took on the duties of guardian over Jerzy Lang’s minor children in 1655 (Glass Street 18.01); on that occasion, he was identified here as a bencher, the lowest rung on a career in the Wilno magistracy. In those same years he was also named guardian of the children of Wilhelm Engelbrecht (Castle Street 2.15).66 All of this points to membership in the prewar society of Wilno’s Lutheran elite and the promise of a career in the magistracy. Witmacher’s name does not appear among the asylum seekers in Königsberg. A document from 3 March 1663, part of litigation over debts connected with the Witmacher/ Engelbrecht house, tells us of its confiscation in 1661 (“in a certain month and on a certain day”) by the grand marshal of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and starosta of Brasław, Krzysztof Zawisza. The document alleges that the one-time city councillor was “now living under the Swede in Riga.” A document from 1667 refers to a royal decree of 28 June 1664 and calls Witmacher “a traitor to the Commonwealth.”67 Both documents deal with debts

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connected with the property, and both imply that Witmacher had not come back to Wilno to challenge the confiscation. In fact, the hearth-tax survey of 1690 notes the presence in the neighborhood of His Grace Lord Zawisza, starosta of Min ´ sk, most likely in that same house.68 This was Krzysztof Stanisław Konstanty Zawisza, who had succeeded his relative as starosta of Min ´ sk (1685–1704, 1705–1720) and Brasław (1720–1721). Witmacher had died by 7 May 1670.69 The other recorded attempted confiscations were apparently unsuccessful. Jan and Jakub Desaus II were the sons of “the Frenchman” (Francuz), Calvinist merchant Jakub Desaus I. Jakub II had signed the loyalty oath in Königsberg in fluent German, for himself, his wife, and his mother-in-law, on the first day, 16 February 1656; Jan signed two days later, identifying himself as a “servant of His Princely Grace, Janusz Radziwiłł.”70 It may have been the Radziwiłł connections—Janusz (who had died by 31 December 1655) and cousin Bogusław would gain the reputation of traitors for their negotiations with Sweden over the creation of an independent Grand Duchy of Lithuania under Swedish protection (and Radziwiłł rule)— that caused problems for the Desaus family. (“The Frenchman” himself, Jakub Desaus I, had appeared in 1629 as a “steward of the German congregation [szafarz . . . zboru niemieckiego]” in the Wilno Calvinist church.71 By 10 December 1660 at the latest, Jakub II was back in Wilno. On that day a certain Mikołaj Rakowski appeared before the now fully functioning magistracy to have read into the acta a privilege signed by King Jan Kazimierz in Warsaw on 4 June 1659; it granted possession of, and “intromission” into, the Desaus house at 1.26 to “noble-born Marcin Jurewicz” by law of escheat on the grounds that Jan Desaus and his “co-successors” (i.e., coclaimants to the property on Castle Street) were “errant traitors and defectors to Our enemies” (as the royal privilege had it). Such decrees frequently focused on matters of treason and infidelity as reasons for removing property from one party and bestowing it on another: “We consider it a proper thing that those experience Our royal grace and generosity . . . who, in the current oppression of our afflicted fatherland, were never sequaces [followers] of the enemy partes [party] [and] always maintained indubitatae fidei integritatem [the integrity of undoubted loyalty] to Us and the Commonwealth.” Jakub Desaus II appeared before the magistracy at that same time to challenge the legality of the action, and the case was postponed until the next day.72 The only other document I have found in this matter was recorded two weeks later (18 February 1661). In it Jakub Desaus argued that he would “be happy to demonstrate [his] innocence hic et nunc [here and now],” and he pointed out that the privilege lacked the requisite legal precision. In particular, it did not name the co-successors. They were— and Jakub listed them—“in capite [first of all] Jan Desaus, the older brother, then Anna Desausówna, the widow of the deceased Ludwik Bekier, Mikołaj Desaus, who had been for sixteen years in Danzig in obsequiis [in service] with Mr. Daniel Szpal, and finally Antoni Desaus, the youngest brother, who sua exercet mercimonia [is occupied with his wares] in the Principality of Samogitia.” Lawyers for Jurewicz responded, “Not all the Desauses,

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rather principaliter [chiefly] Jan accusatur [is accused], who had been an adherent of the Swedes, and served in the Swedish army, and, now living in Prussia, had condictamina [agreements] and various conspiracies with the enemy of His Royal Majesty and the Commonwealth.”73 This is the last document I have come across in this case. It leaves the reader with the impression that the Desauses had lost in their appeal to the courts. But this is clearly a false impression. The house remained in the family: it was still partly owned by Jakub Desaus II on 13 November 1675 when he made dispensations in his will for “the portion of my bricked house that had fallen to me in the inheritance from my parents of worthy memory, now departed in God.”74 And well before this, the “errant traitor” himself had returned to an honorable position in Wilno society. Jan Desaus served as a lay elder of the Wilno Calvinist church in the 1660s and 1670s, where two of his daughters were married (27 November 1671 and 10 October 1674); and he was a godfather to Calvinist babies twice in this period (1669, 1673).75 The fact that our first postwar sighting of him is as a godfather in 1669 may suggest it had taken him some time to return to Wilno: he had been in unusually frequent demand in that office before 1655—seventeen times over a period of eleven years (1644–1655) in a rather small congregation.76 Similarly unsuccessful was the attempted confiscation of the Sien ´ czyło family home and property. On 17 September 1660—less than three months before the challenge to the Desaus property—a certain Karol Marson, “major of His Royal Majesty,” presented to the temporary Wilno magistracy a privilege from King Jan Kazimierz dated 24 August 1620. It conferred upon “the well deserving Marson,” by right of escheat, the property of “traitor Paweł Sien ´ czyło and his spouse,” who were accused of collaboration with the Muscovites. That property included: “bricked houses [plural!] in the city of Wilno and all real estate and movable goods and all sums of money.” The houses in question were two: the one on Subocz Street next to the Minkiewicz house (i.e., 78.07), and the one on “the side alleyway off Subocz Street” next to the Juszkiewicz house (i.e., 77.01 or 77.03). Here, too, the wealth of an entire family was the object of confiscation, even though the charges of treason were leveled only against one member: Paweł and wife—“as everyone well knows”—had, according to the allegation, sought a kind of asylum with the small occupying force in the Wilno castle.77 A few months later, on 16/26 January 1661, we do indeed find the couple in the Muscovitecontrolled castle, where they had appeared to register Paweł’s will. The document—and the circumstances of its enactment—raise certain questions. Was the couple really living in the castle and aiding the occupiers? But if so, the ecumenicity of Paweł’s deathbed dispensations must have raised some Muscovite eyebrows: as we will see, Sien ´ czyło not only gave to both Roman and Greek institutions but quite clearly included in his bequests the Uniate churches, which, by decree of the tsar from the summer of 1657, ought not to have existed in occupied Wilno. Interpretation is further complicated by the fact that the will—recorded according to the castle’s old calendar—was entered into the acta of the magistracy on 12 January 1662 (a

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new-calendar date), after the testator’s death and just after the liberation of the city. It was brought for this purpose by a lieutenant—apparently a lieutenant of the Muscovite army— named Bazyli Aleksiejewicz Kunigam. What is more, this was about a year and a half after the royal privilege of confiscation had been entered in the same forum. Litigation would con´czyło’s property and honor now tinue into October and November of 1662, with Sien defended by Orthodox magistrates Prokop Dorofiewicz and Samuel Szycik Zaleski.78 In any event, the confiscation must ultimately have been unsuccessful. The family fortune would survive the war and apparently grow: the family house on Subocz Street—“handed down from grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents”—was still in the hands of Paweł’s heirs in the 1680s, and the posthumous inventory of Grzegorz’s estate—quite a rich one—began with a list of sacks of coins of various sorts.79 He and his wife, as we have seen, had moved into the house at Glass Street 20.05 in 1667 and had served with their middle-level Lutheran neighbors as godparents for Roman Catholic babies. Half-successful—depending on how we look at it—was the case involving the Buchner family. In 1661 “captain of His Royal Majesty of the artillery of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania” Jakub Trop presented to the Wilno magistracy a royal decree dated 19 July 1660 in which King Jan Kazimierz granted him possession of half of a house on Glass Street. It had been owned by a foreigner, Frydrych Cylich, who had died without heir, and thus was once again the king’s to bestow by law of escheat. Cylich was in fact a client of Calvinist magnate Bogusław Radziwiłł, which may have helped make him a target of posthumous confiscation of his property. Although the basic motivation here was the death of a foreigner without male heir, as in the other attempted confiscations the rhetoric of the royal privilege presented to the Wilno magistracy was one of rewarding faithful service during the midcentury wars. The king granted the privilege in recognition of Trop’s services in “various expeditions with the Cossacks, Muscovy, and Sweden.” The decree went on to tell its readers that Trop owned the other half of the house in question. What the decree does not tell us is that Cylich was Trop’s brother-in-law (both were married by then to Buchner daughters) and that the “faithful, constant, and well-disposed” Trop was a Lutheran just like his foreigner brother-in-law, the barber-surgeon Cylich.80 Trop and the Buchners were to return to their Glass Street neighborhood and enjoy a certain respect in postwar Wilno society. One wonders whether the king knew his artillery captain had arrived in Königsberg with the first wave of asylum seekers in the company of a first wife, had married another a few years later while still in Prussian exile, and had married into the family of clients of the Calvinist Radziwiłłs who were the object of the royal decree confiscating their property. In any case, the attempted confiscations were sometimes based on fabricated evidence presented to a perhaps unwitting king in an attempt to exploit the midcentury wars for private gain at the expense of non-Catholics, both Protestant and Orthodox. As they were often fraudulent, they were also frequently unsuccessful. Elmantas Meilus has rightly warned, “It is necessary to look upon all accusations [of treason during the occupation]

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with caution, for it often turns out that people brought charges against each other out of motivations for personal gain.”81

The “Russian Man” in Occupied Wilno The Orthodox were in a new situation in the occupied city, one that brought them temporary advantages but also the danger of eventual accusations of treason. An oddity in the language of the acta from the time of the occupation provides some access to the issues and a sense of what was at stake in a city where old habits of ethnoconfessional parity remained, but the supreme authority was suddenly not Roman but Greek. Usage in the various languages of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the seventeenth century drew strict distinctions between Ruthenian (ruski and Rusin, in Polish) and Muscovite (moskiewski and Moskal or Moskwicin). In the local context, “Ruthenian” was a term of controversy. In the language of high culture, represented here by polemical literature, an exclusionary question played a central role: Was the term to be applied to the Orthodox or to the Uniates? An eitheror choice had to be made: Which group was the rightful heir to the Ruthenian religious and political patrimony and thus to the privileges, offices, and property allotted to Ruthenians in the sacred and secular arenas of the Commonwealth? The daily usage of living Ruthenians, however, at least in Wilno—and I suspect this picture may have broader applicability—was much fuzzier. The two Ruthenian confessions could be seen as markers of one common identity. Mixed marriages (Uniate-Orthodox) were frequent enough, and larger human networks—formed through testamentary donations, choice of executors and witnesses of wills, and selection of guardians for widows and orphans, among other measures—suggest a local sense of Ruthenian identity that for some (though not all), included both Uniate and Orthodox. And, more important, it often stood in opposition to Roman Catholics. But as far as the Muscovite was concerned, all were in agreement: he was other, definitely not of us. Never did a seventeenth-century Ruthenian (or Pole) refer to people or things Muscovite as ruski. Or at least that is the picture outside the few exceptions considered here. They came in the brief period of the Muscovite occupation of Wilno. The following comments examine four passages from the acta of the burgomasters and councillors kept during the time of occupation in which the adjective ruski—in Wilno usage of this strictly delimited time and context and only here, as far as I can see—quite clearly meant Muscovite. This was a marked departure from the norm.

“Will Take Precautions against the Licentiousness of Russian People” The recipient of the first document, as well as the central figure in the story it tells, was a certain Józef Kojrelewicz, “merchant and burgher of Wilno.” He was in all likelihood

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Roman Catholic. In 1639 he entered his autograph inscription in the book of the Brotherhood of St. Anne, the One of Three, at the Bernardines’ Church of St. Anne, where he made a promise of annual contributions to the “brotherhood chest.”82 And he had other Catholic connections, among other things through his wife, who was the sister of Marta Janowiczówna, the wife of a Roman Catholic bencher (eventually councillor) by the name of Marcin Kiewlicz. On 21 July 1634, Kojrelewicz was named executor (together with brother-in-law Kiewlicz) of Marta’s will; that document instructed them to see to her burial with the Bernardines at Wilno’s St. Anne’s Church, “in the crypt where my parents also rest.”83 The Kiewliczes were a Roman Catholic family of some importance in the Wilno magistracy before the Muscovite occupation; the name is absent from the postwar record.84 Although not a member of the ruling elite, Kojrelewicz seems to have enjoyed a certain amount of respect in pre-prewar Wilno society and to have moved in circles that included non-Catholics as well. On 3 December 1646 he was named curator for a certain Maryna Dyszkowska. She was a Szóstakówna, wife of Teodor (Fiedor) Dyszkowski and sister-in-law of Stefan Dyszkowski, who was a “council notary from the Greek side” (pisarz radziecki z greckiej strony) in the magistracy.85 The Szóstaks were important members of Ruthenian society in Wilno. Finally, on 12 May 1651, together with future Roman Catholic burgomaster Mikołaj Rychter, Kojrelewicz witnessed the deed of sale of a house before the court of the Wilno Roman Catholic Chapter.86 In any event, this was a man of some modest standing in Wilno society, with contacts on both sides of the Greek-Roman divide. More important for our story, “Józef Kojrelewicz, burgher of Wilno, together with his wife,” headed a list of signatories of a Polish version of the loyalty oath—the second, more modest, cramped, untitled one—which he signed in the elector’s palace in Königsberg on 23 February/4 March 1656.87 This particular list of signatories included many Ruthenian Vilnans, which adds to the impression that Kojrelewicz was on good terms with the Ruthenian side of the city.88 In any event, by 20 April 1657 we find him back in Wilno. On that day, “famous Lord Józef Kojrelewicz, merchant and burgher of Wilno” was “chosen according to the order of Magdeburg law . . . and confirmed by the magistracy” as the legal curator for Walenty Margon ´ ski, who was prior of the Calced Carmelites at Wilno’s All Saints 89 Church. Plague would soon be added to the list of the trials of war and occupation, and a document of 30 May 1657 contained “Instructions given to famous Lord Józef Kojrelewicz, wójt and burgomaster during the time of the pestilential air of the plague that is afflicting the city of Wilno, who was chosen by the entire magistracy and the commonality of Wilno, as well as to the five colleagues he should choose for himself.”90 The volume of acta preserved in RGADA shows a gap from 11 June 1657 to 19 January 1658, which suggests that those who could do so left town in an effort to survive the plague. At first, Muscovite palatine of Wilno Mixail Šaxovskoj attempted to keep Vilnans from leaving the city, but eventually, after receiving a petition from the “wójt, . . . burgomasters, councillors, benchers, notaries, . . . and all Wilno

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burghers,” he was convinced to open the gates in exchange for a promise that the citizens would not take up arms against Muscovite forces and would return to the city once the plague had subsided.91 Another document suggests that Kojrelewicz himself perished, most likely of the plague, while carrying out the duties entrusted to him. Whenever they were forced to leave the city, Vilnans sought means to protect their movable property, either by entrusting it to religious orders in the hope that pillagers and thieves would respect the notion of sanctuary or by hiding it, often buried in the ground in the basements of their Wilno houses.92 On 18 February 1658, with the subsiding of the plague, shortly after the return of the citizens to Wilno, a certain Anna Prokopowiczówna, widow of Filip Wesełowski, came before the recently reconstituted temporary magistracy to enter a protestation “about the digging up of [her] things” and an inventory of “the things that had been buried in the house when she departed [Wilno], fleeing the [pestilential] air last year,” some of which were “among the things of the deceased Józef Kojrelewicz, wójt in the time of the plague [wójt powietrzny].”93 Plague always brought crime and disorder to cities as citizens weighed risks to health in staying behind against risks to property left to destruction or theft at the hands of “loose people” (luz´ni ludzie). The chances for theft and destruction were even greater when, as in this instance, plague was coupled with war and occupation. The charge to Kojrelewicz and his five colleagues was to maintain order and protect property in these challenging circumstances. The document assumed that the occupying Muscovite forces would not provide that order and protection—perhaps some of the Muscovite elite also fled the city for these months. Further, I argue, the authors of the document—presumably it was members of the magistracy who had just received Šaxovskoj’s permission to quit the city—saw among individual Muscovites who had accompanied the occupying troops a potential source of crime. The instructions contained seven points. The first called for the formation of a regiment (piechota) of thirty men who, “making their daily rounds, day and night, were to guard houses, shops, and stores.” The second gave Kojrelewicz and his colleagues the power to judge and punish offenders. Third, they were to make inventories of the property of citizens who had died of the plague and to keep that property under lock and key “until the happy return of the entire magistracy.” Fourth, should any of the current substitutes now serving as acting magistrates depart, those remaining “in vivis [among the living]” should immediately elect “a trusted, property-owning [osiadły], and nonsuspect citizen” to take his place. Fifth, they were to make “frequent and daily surveys” (rewizje) of all the houses, basements, empty stores, and shops, “so that rogues [hultaje], nocturnal thieves not hide there and have their gatherings and conspiracies unto people’s harm.” Sixth, only one gate, Rudniki Gate, was to be the port of entry into the city; it was to be locked early, and Kojrelewicz was to keep the keys to all the other gates in his possession. Finally, since it was now spring and fires had begun to break out in the city and suburbs, “the gentlemen substitutes” (panowie substytutowie) were to see to it that “the public [water] pipes remain open for the extinguishing of fires.”

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It was the first point, the one establishing a regiment of thirty men, that contains the passage of interest here: Admittedly, it would have been fitting to have a greater regiment for such a large city, but since many people left town without making a contribution to this subscription, the current His Grace Lord Palatine promised to add twenty men from his regiment to this city regiment, who will aid this guard and take precautions against the licentiousness of “Russian” people [swowole´nstwu ruskich ludzi zabiega´c be˛dzie].

The passage is interesting for a number of reasons. The lord palatine in question was the Muscovite prince Mixail Šaxovskoj.94 Once the Muscovite forces had taken possession of the sacked and depopulated city, the remaining authorities were just as interested in law and order as was the magistracy that would soon establish itself. A document of 30 December 1656 (i.e., four months before the outbreak of plague), which bears Šaxovskoj’s name and title, reveals this concern: as we have seen, at the new palatine’s behest, Wilno city authorities conducted an inventory of the property of one Samuel Kalander “in the house of the deceased Lord Marcin Buchner” and in the presence of Zachariasz Bez, Michał Buchner, and Dawid Paciukiewicz.95 All were Lutherans, except for Paciukiewicz, who was Roman Catholic, and all but the latter had fled to Königsberg in 1655.96 Michał Buchner was Kalander’s brother-in-law. He would also perish in the plague of 1657, but the extended family, perhaps then still in the Prussian capital, would eventually return to Wilno and figure as prominent Lutheran citizens until the end of the century. The Buchners were at the top of the middlelevel of Lutheran society that had gathered in the Glass Street neighborhood.97 One way or another—and perhaps thanks in part to Šaxovskoj’s administration of the city—Buchner family property remained in the family. Conversely, city authorities thought that life during the Muscovite occupation should and would continue largely according to the old rules. If the Polish-Lithuanian Sejm could elect the Muscovite tsar king of Poland, why couldn’t the ruling burgher elite of Wilno submit its ancient charter, given to the city by Władysław Jagiełło in 1387 and repeatedly reconfirmed by his successors, for one more reconfirmation by Tsar Aleksej Mixajlovicˇ?98 But—to return to the passage from the first instruction to Kojrelewicz—what is most curious here is the phrase “Russian people” (ruskich ludzi). The editors of the text printed in volume 10 of AVAK (pp. 273–74) seem to have been unable to believe their eyes. One would, in fact, have expected to see something like luz´nych ludzi (loose people, i.e., noncitizens, those who owned no property in the city and had no fixed legal estate); it was they who were regularly blamed for unrest in times of plague and war. The editors of AVAK, unlike those responsible for other contemporary document series (e.g., AJuZR), rarely made “mistakes” of this sort in any of the languages they dealt with and certainly not in Polish. They decided to print róz˙ nych ludzi (various people), which heads in the direction of luz´nych

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ludzi, but does not, in my opinion, fit the rhetorical expectations of the genre. And in any case, the original text (it still bears the wax seal of the magistracy) quite clearly reads “ruskich ludzi.”99 This text, with its misreading in the printed version, has long been known. I have found more recently in the volume of acta preserved in RGADA three additional cases of the use of the adjective ruski in reference to Muscovites. They have now confirmed my original suspicions that the word was not unique to the manuscript of the instructions.

“He Subordinated and Incited a Russian Man” On 17 July 1658, after the plague had subsided and the wartime magistracy had returned to Wilno, a certain Jan Poradnicz, husband of Regina Pe˛ kalska, came before that body to lodge a complaint about a saddler named Je˛drzej Harasymowicz, who had a son named Jakub. I know nothing further about any of these people, although the name Harasymowicz might suggest that he was a Ruthenian. As foreseen by the rhetorical norms of the genre, the accused and his minions had done verbal harm to the plaintiff’s honor and physical harm to his health. This time, as was frequently the case, there was a second act: And not being satisfied with this, after such a shaming [of the plaintiff], he subordinated [i.e., suborned] and incited a “Russian” man [subordynował i naprawił człowieka ruskiego], who, having come to the plaintiff’s house, into his chamber, said, “The saddler gave me thirty kopecks to revile you and to beat you up, so you give me more, if you don’t wish to be beaten and reviled. And if you don’t give it to me, you will certainly not avoid this—if not today, then in a short time.”100

For the moment, I would note only the exceptional use of Muscovite coinage in this account— the “thirty kopecks.” Most Vilnans, even during the period of occupation, kept records in, and seem to have continued using as currency, the Polish złoty and grosz or the Lithuanian shock and grosz.101 Evidently the hired muscle wished to be paid in the currency of his homeland.

“Having Incited Russian People” The next text recorded the words of Stefan Kuszelicz, whose family networks we encountered in the Horse Street neighborhood. The widow of Fiedor Kuszelicz, Ewdokia Ihnatowiczówna, signed the loyalty oath in Königsberg on 17 February 1656 for herself and her son Michał, apparently then still a minor.102 Their names, like those of many Ruthenians, appeared under the “Cantio Polonorum Vilnensium.” The son that interests me here, Stefan, must have been older and on his own by this time. He signed the loyalty oath on the same day as the first exiles, 16/26 February 1656, but together with officeholders in the magistracy,

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both Roman and Greek on the same list.103 (Their oath, as well as their signatures, was in Latin.) Stefan’s recorded career in the magistracy would begin only in 1678, when he first held the office of annual councillor. His presence on this particular list in 1656 suggests that he had already been elected bencher, the first rung on the ladder of a career in the ruling elite, before 1655. Stefan was probably still Orthodox at this point, but he, too, would have to have converted to the Uniate Church after 1666 in order to contemplate a career in the magistracy. He held the office of annual councillor in 1678, 1682, 1685, 1688, and 1691, although he never rose to that of burgomaster.104 Family, neighborhood, and personal networks place him firmly among Wilno Ruthenians—both Uniate and Orthodox. On 8 February 1663, Stefan would witness in Wilno the will of Uniate councillor Samuel Filipowicz, whose name we also find among the “Poles of Wilno” in the loyalty oaths signed in Königsberg.105 On 27 August 1664 Kuszelicz took on the duties of guardian for the orphans of Ruthenian city councillor Jan Antonowicz,106 and on 7 March 1687 he was named executor of the will of an Orthodox burghess named Katarzyna Wasilewska who lived in the poorer suburbs around Horse Market, located beyond the city walls and between Sharp and Rudniki Gates. Among Stefan’s duties in this last instance was to see to it that Wasilewska was buried at the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit, “in the Holy Catholic Orthodox Greek faith” into which she had been born.107 In any event, Stefan Kuszelicz was a Ruthenian. Kuszelicz had returned to Wilno from his Königsberg exile by 2 October 1658. On that date he brought a complaint before the temporary magistracy against Wilno soap boiler Afanas Tosznicki. I know nothing further about him, although the name Afanas suggests that he, too, was a Ruthenian. According to Kuszelicz, Tosznicki had “purposefully and maliciously incited ‘Russian’ people” (umys´lnie i ze złos´ci naprawiwszy ruskich ludzi), who, at his “order and instigation” (za którym onego takowym ukazem i powodem), had “seized a horse by force and secreted it away who knows where.”108

“Having Subordinated Russian People” Finally, we have a protestation brought to the magistracy in late 1661 by Piotr Szóstak. The Szóstaks were members of the Wilno ruling elite on the Greek side of the magistracy. Bogdan Szóstak was identified as a Wilno bencher (ławnik) in the Lustration of 1639.109 Piotr Szóstak himself was still listed as municipal income notary (pisarz komerczany, pisarz prowentowy) as late as 1684, an office he had occupied by 1643.110 Documents from 1667 and 1668 call him a bencher; another from the same year records his advancement to the office of councillor (rajca).111 Szóstak was the son of Tacjana Braz˙yczówna and Matwiej Szóstak. He grew up in Orthodox circles and was probably himself Orthodox until a certain point. His cousin, Bazyli Braz˙ycz, son of Dmitr (Market Square 4.05), was buried at the Orthodox Church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit sometime before 10 March 1649.112 By 1654 Piotr Szóstak seems to

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have been the owner of the “Braz˙ycz Town House” on German Street in which he had grown up. (The Lustration of 1636 surveyed this portion of German Street as a part of Market Square; the house was at Market Square 3.13.) It was there, on 17 July 1654, that city officials, as well as Orthodox monks, came to inventory the estate of a recently deceased Orthodox merchant by the name of Jerzy Parfianowicz Łamanowski. The inventory was conducted at the request of the two guardians Łamanowski had appointed for his survivors, Szóstak and goldsmith Bazyli Omelianowicz.113 Omelianowicz was married to Marianna Sznejderówna, the daughter of a Lutheran goldsmith named Jakub Sznejder, in whose atelier in the Lutheran Glass Street neighborhood he lived and worked (Glass Street 20.02). The goldsmiths’ guild in Wilno was practically a Lutheran monopoly, but Omelianowicz, whose name points to Ruthenian origins, never appeared among those who gave offerings to the Lutheran church, which suggests he remained Orthodox or Uniate.114 Szóstak’s wife was Anna Korzen ´ kowska.115 A document from 1668 tells us that Szóstak served as curator for Eufrozyna Korzen ´ kowska (presumably some close relation of his wife), who was the widow of Krzysztof Ihnatowicz.116 In a document dated 26 July 1669 we learn that Uniate councillor Aleksander Ihnatowicz (Market Square 4.05) was the stepson of Eufrozyna Korzen ´ kowska.117 A year earlier, in April 1668, Szóstak and Ihnatowicz had been named curators of the will of Uniate merchant Teodor Kochan ´ ski, who charged them “most urgently” with seeing to it that “my children remain in Holy Unity.” By this time, Szóstak and Ihnatowicz were both Uniate themselves: they were “elders of the Brotherhood of the Most Holy Virgin” and the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity.118 Piotr Szóstak may very well have been a recent convert to the Uniate Church. His earlier family connections and other human networks were largely Orthodox, and he was most likely among those who converted after 1666 for the sake of a career in the magistracy. On 23 December 1668 (by which time he was certainly Uniate) he witnessed the will of Orthodox burghess Maryna Iwanowiczówna, the estranged wife of by now Uniate councillor and future burgomaster, Grzegorz Kostrowicki. I should also note that in those same years, on 9 February 1667, Szóstak witnessed the will of Lutheran merchant Piotr Klet.119 I have been unable to find any Szóstaks among the asylum seekers in Königsberg. On 5 November 1661, Piotr Szóstak brought a complaint against Łukasz Kuczarski and his wife, Anastazja Kuszelanka. The accused also belonged to Orthodox circles. We have already met the Kuszelicz family. Anastazja’s first husband was Stefan Dziahilewicz, and their son Stefan Izaak Dziahilewicz would ask his cousin Stefan Kuszelicz to serve as his legal plenipotentiary.120 Kuczarski was Anastazja’s second husband. Their son was an Orthodox monk at the monastery of the Descent of the Holy Spirit in Wilno.121 Thus, and this is the point here, the story I am about to recount played itself out within Ruthenian—indeed, largely Orthodox— circles. Szóstak, as we know, had been named guardian of the estate of Orthodox merchant Jerzy Parfianowicz Łamanowski in 1654. When he came before the temporary magistracy in late 1661, he complained that Kuczarski and wife, “after the taking of the city of Wilno [by the

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Muscovite armies], having arranged and subordinated (suborned) ‘Russian’ people [przysposobiwszy i subordynowawszy sobie ruskich ludzi] in the year 1657, attacked [the little rural estate (folwarek) called Waka] violento modo [violently], took possession of it, and they took profit from it, and they hold it to this day.”122 Szóstak was bringing his complaint by virtue of his guardianship over the Łamanowski estate, of which the Waka folwarek was a part. Whether or not he had fled Wilno at the beginning of the war, he was back in town by 24 April 1658 when he added his signature to instructions concerning a petition to the tsar.123 It remains a mystery to me why he was so slow to bring his case unless it was that he, unlike others, saw a benefit in waiting for Muscovite control to weaken.

Reestablishing the Status Quo Ante The ruski człowiek of these documents was civilian but not a citizen of Wilno; he was prone to license, theft, and thuggery; and—more important—in all but the first example he was the tool of Vilnans in their nefarious dealings with other Vilnans, most of whom, both plaintiffs and accused, were themselves Ruthenian. That is what lends the sense of moral outrage to the three protestations: a Wilno Ruthenian (or, perhaps better, a Ruthenian Vilnan) had employed an outsider, a ruski człowiek, to settle personal scores with a fellow Vilnan during a period of crisis. I have been able to identify a few Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists who were present in occupied Wilno, which suggests that at least token representatives of the full confessional spectrum had regathered there early on during the occupation. But a reading of the acta, especially the more systematically organized volume preserved in RGADA, also gives the impression that occupied Wilno was disproportionately Ruthenian (in comparison with the pre- and postoccupation demographics). In fact, the city may have been disproportionately Orthodox. In the summer of 1657, Tsar Aleksej Mixajlevicˇ decreed that any Uniates unwilling to convert to Orthodoxy were to be expelled from the city, and Šaxovskoj communicated the demand to municipal authorities by early 1658.124 This large Ruthenian presence is central to my argument that the ruski człowiek of these texts was Muscovite. The documents I have cited here were produced by a legal system that still attempted to function according to Wilno’s old principle of Roman-Greek parity. When Christian Vilnans came before that court during the occupation, they continued to be identified by name, estate, and profession—never by confession or ethnicity. The form for both plaintiff and accused in protestations was the same: “Lord Stefan Kuszelicz, merchant and burgher of Wilno,” for example. Even in the narrative part of the complaints themselves, Vilnans still refrained from identifying each other by confession or ethnicity. The three protestations discussed above reflect the expected usage: a Vilnan (who happened to be Ruthenian but was not identified as such) had brought a complaint against another Vilnan (also Ruthenian but unidentified), alleging evil deeds and the employment of a ruski człowiek to help him carry them out.

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The phrase itself, particularly the use of the adjectival form and as a modifier for “man” or “people,” jumps out at the reader. No one, as far as I know, ever referred to Wilno Ruthenians as ruscy ludzie. In the polemical literature, we read of Rus´ wilen´ska, lud ruski w Wilnie (the Rus´ of Wilno, the Ruthenian people in Wilno).125 In the pamphlets but also in legal documents and guild statutes they were referred to as people of the ruska (or grecka) wiara (of the Ruthenian or Greek faith). They were members of the naród ruski (Ruthenian nation). They occupied the ławica ruska (or grecka) (Ruthenian or Greek bench) in the magistracy and held the office of pisarz ruski (Ruthenian notary). In the guilds, elderships were allotted to people ritus graeci seu ruthenici (of the Greek or Ruthenian rite), to Rusini (Ruthenians), and so forth.126 Rusin, yes, but a ruski człowiek—never.127 This was what Vilnans came, on occasion, to call the Muscovite civilians with whom they rubbed shoulders during the occupation. It sounds like the answer to the question of identity that might have been posed to them on the street. “Who are you?” “Ruski czeławiek.” Still, the possibility for confusing a Rusin with a ruski człowiek suggests that a rethinking of the vexed question of Ruthenianness as it applied to Wilno burghers may have been one aspect of life during the occupation. Did Ruthenians and ruscy ludzie have anything in common? We can imagine both Ruthenian and non-Ruthenian Vilnans asking themselves this question. A consideration of two passages from the acta from those same years where we find the standard usage of Moskal and moskiewski to refer to the occupiers may help shed some light on the situation. On 26 January 1661, Zacharjasz Kanecki registered a protestation against Krzysztof Ihnatowicz. Both were merchants. Kanecki was probably a Roman Catholic. His father, Piotr Kanecki, had died in 1641, bequeathing money to the Wilno Dominicans at the Church of the Holy Spirit, asking that requiem Masses be said for his soul.128 Krzysztof Ihnatowicz was an in-law of Piotr Szóstak and the father of Aleksander Ihnatowicz; both of the latter two were Uniate by the late 1660s, but they may have been recent converts from Orthodoxy. Certainly they at least pretended to be Orthodox for some time during the occupation. The accused in this case was also probably Orthodox. Kanecki’s complaint is worth quoting at some length: In the preceding year of 1660, before the arrival of the armies of His Royal Majesty, during the temporary absence of the plaintiff, having business dealings and an understanding with the Muscovites [maja˛c handle i konferencyja˛ z Moskalami], nullo juris praetextu et sine consensu [by no pretext of the law and without the consent] of either the plaintiff himself or his Lady spouse, [Ihnatowicz] rented a shop to a Muscovite in the house of the plaintiff near the stalls. Which Muscovite not only held the shop under his management, dealing in various goods, but he also kept horses and carts in the house itself, and he paid the accused for this. And when His Grace Lord Siesicki burst into Wilno, then the soldiers, having found out about the Muscovite in the house of the plaintiff, did no little harm to the plaintiff in his Muscovite goods on account of the accused. But after the departure of His Grace Lord Siesicki, the Muscovite palatine imprisoned the spouse protestantis [of the plaintiff], together with our children and the servants and neighbors who were living in

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the house, confiscated not a few goods worth 1,000 zł, and worked great detriment and devastation in the house. And although the Lord God saw to it that [the Muscovite palatine] did not torture the spouse protestantis, and did not take her to the castle [nie me˛czył i do zamku nie wzia˛ł], nonetheless the servants were tortured.129

This story took place against the background of the increasingly frequent incursions by Polish-Lithuanian forces that would eventually lead to the liberation of the city.130 By 1658 Wilno had become a “borderland fortress” of the Polish-Lithuanian territories conquered by Muscovy, and the Lithuanian troops active in the area were beginning to make “excursions” into the city. By the end of 1659, Šaxovskoj had been replaced as Wilno palatine by the feared and hated Prince Danilo Myšeckij, whose regime was much more oppressive toward the inhabitants and took an interest in them only insofar as they were useful for the defense of the city. Imprisonment and execution of citizens became more common as anti-Muscovite sentiment rose. In this environment, Vilnans could no longer maintain that the city of Wilno was their first allegiance without a careful consideration of whose city it was. In the spring of 1660, citizens loyal to the Commonwealth informed Kazimierz Dowmont Siesicki—the figure who played a role in the preceding case—of the weakened state of the Muscovite garrison. Siesicki, who was the leader of the troops then stationed outside the city, made his foray into Wilno on 9 May of that year. He quickly retreated, and retaliations against Vilnans suspected of collaboration with him were severe. From this time forward, the city was under more or less constant blockade by PolishLithuanian forces. On 11 July 1660, troops under the command of Michał Kazimierz Pac occupied the city, and the Muscovite company was forced to retreat to the two castles. The standoff lasted for half a year. At the beginning of 1661, grand hetman of Lithuania Paweł Sapieha arrived with his troops and began to launch attacks upon the city. Around 20 October 1661, King Jan Kazimierz came to the area, and a more concentrated assault on the Muscovite forces began. On 3 December 1661, the Muscovite garrison (which now numbered only seventy-eight) revolted against Palatine Myšeckij. The next day Jan Kazimierz made his triumphal entry into the Wilno castles. Myšeckij was executed in Wilno Market Square on 10 December 1661. The story told in the protestation cited above took place in the period immediately before, during, and after Siesicki’s brief “liberation” of Wilno in May 1660. Ihnatowicz may well have been some sort of business partner of Kanecki’s. (As we have seen, most registered complaints turn out to tell stories that had taken place “in the family”—often quite literally.) The protestation confirms several important things: that there were Muscovite civilians living in Wilno during the occupation, some of them engaged in commerce; that Vilnans had business dealings with them and shared houses with them; and that Vilnans ran the risk of retaliation from both Polish-Lithuanian and Muscovite authorities if they were not cautious in their dealings with them. And we see here what Vilnans most feared at the moment— being “taken to the castle,” which, under Myšeckij’s rule, meant torture and possible execution.

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That same fear lay at the heart of the curious story told by Andrzej Józefowicz on 20 August 1661. On that day he brought a complaint before the magistracy against Orthodox (later Uniate) magistrate Stefan Kuszelicz: Kuszelicz had been one of those who alleged wrongs inflicted by other Vilnans with the help of a “ruski człowiek.” Józefowicz may have been Roman Catholic. A man by that name was an elder of the Brotherhood of the Scapular of the Most Holy Virgin at the Calced Carmelites’ Church of All Saints in 1667.131 The document in question was in fact what was known as a reprotestation. The entry preceding it in the acta for the same day had been Kuszelicz’s own protestation against Józefowicz. When Józefowicz got his turn before the judges, he made the following allegation: During the public [display of the] guard, [Stefan Kuszelicz] dared and had the audacity to make a tumult and a ruckus. Having grabbed some boy from the area around the city wall, and pretending to be a Muscovite himself [uczyniwszy sie˛sam wrzkomo Moskalem], he asked him where there were still Polish people [gdzieby lud polski zostawał], and he led him by force to the Castle [do Zamku], saying, “come with me to the Gorod ” [do Gorodu, to the Castle]. . . . And then the aforementioned Lord Kuszelicz went to the Brotherhood House, and when the guard jumped in after him, exiting the house on his own, he said about all of this that he had done it as a joke [˙ze ˙zartem uczynił].132

The “public [display of the] guard” was probably that of the municipal police force administered by the magistracy, although it could have had something to do with the small Muscovite company stationed in the two castles. In any event, in August of 1661—Sapieha had been encamped outside the city since the beginning of the year, and King Jan Kazimierz would arrive in October—it was possible to encounter members of the Muscovite force in the streets of Wilno but also members of the Polish-Lithuanian troops, who were making more and more frequent forays inside the city walls. This situation, which had probably been a part of the city’s daily life for some months, must have made Vilnans cautious around strangers, mistrustful of each other, and fearful of reprisals from whichever forces were in control of the city at the moment. Here, too, the central fear was of being taken to Myšeckij’s dungeon in the castle. This was what made Kuszelicz’s actions a “joke.” Note that in both these examples, it was Roman Catholic Vilnans who had brought complaints against Ruthenian Vilnans—again, neither identified by confession—over their associations with Muscovites. The allegation of impersonating a Muscovite suggests—on the part of both actor and audience—a distance from the Muscovite but also an uncomfortable familiarity with him. Kuszelicz knew how to affect a Muscovite accent and how to introduce Muscovite words into his Ruthenian/Polish (gorod instead of gród or zamek for castle), and the boy knew enough, maybe just enough, to mistake his speech for that of a Muscovite. Accusations of treason lurk just beneath the surface here, which is why Lutheran, Calvinist, and Orthodox Vilnans would be the target of attempts at this same time to confiscate their property.

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The period of the Muscovite occupation had turned the tables temporarily, and the Orthodox elite now enjoyed the protection of an Orthodox ruler—much as previously it had been the Catholics who had enjoyed that advantage—even though the magistracy continued to function under its old system of power sharing. For a time there may have been a sense that the city was becoming more Greek than Roman, as reflected, for instance, in the fact that the old calendar was becoming more regularly used. Although we can easily imagine members of the Ruthenian elite exploring what it would mean for their lives if Wilno were to remain subject to an Orthodox ruler, there was no exodus of the Greek side of the city with the return to Polish-Lithuanian rule. (And recall that members of the Orthodox elite had figured prominently among the asylum seekers in Königsberg at the beginning of the occupation of Wilno.) The city’s peculiar confessional convivencia soon reasserted itself under renewed Catholic rule. True, after 1666 those who contemplated careers in the magistracy would have to convert to Roman Catholicism or to the Uniate Church, but Ruthenians and Protestants found ways around these impediments to social advancement. First, given the weakness of the cities in Poland-Lithuania, attaining the status of magistrate was simply not as attractive there as in the cities of western Europe, and Lutherans and Orthodox found other paths to wealth and status. Second, some of the conversions to the Uniate Church may have been pro forma, the price paid for membership in the ruling elite after 1666. The curious use of the term ruski człowiek during the occupation to indicate a Muscovite reflects the situation of a mere few years during which Vilnans of all confessions had the opportunity to make firsthand observations of possible links between Ruthenians and Muscovites. What we see in the texts discussed here is a small and local, northern variation on what Serhii Plokhy has described as the misunderstanding-ridden Ruthenian-Muscovite encounter that accompanied a “reunification” of Cossack Rus' with Muscovy in which “neither side . . . fully understood what it was getting into.”133 In Wilno, the old dispensation (and rhetoric) quickly reasserted itself. At the beginning of the occupation, documents spoke gingerly and impersonally of the recent “troubles” (trwogi) that had beset the city.134 By the end, Vilnans were less circumspect in placing blame for the cause of the troubles. On 2 December 1661, two days before King Jan Kazimierz made his triumphal entry upon retaking possession of Wilno, Stefan Kuszelicz was once again before the court of the magistracy.135 This time he was acting as the curator of his Orthodox mother, Eudokia Kuszelina. She was pressing her claim to the estate of her relation, Hrehor Dziahilewicz. She was getting around to pursuing it with some delay as a result of the “troubles and confusion during the rapid and sudden attack of the Muscovite Foe upon the city of Wilno [w tych trwogach i zamieszaniu za pre˛tkim i nagłym nasta˛pieniem tegoz˙ Nieprzyjaciela Moskwicina na miasto wilen´ skie].” On 21 June 1661 (i.e., about half a year before the ultimate liberation of the city), Uniate fathers registered a complaint in the acta of the magistracy. The Orthodox fathers from across the street had allegedly exploited the “time of the Muscovite incursion” to take away

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from the Holy Trinity Church all its “splendor,” including, in addition to smaller church apparatus, “a large bell, called Swan [Lebiedz´]” that they were using, in the absence of a municipal clock, to beat the hours. The Uniate fathers were concerned that this “constant beating of the bell, every hour, day and night, on one side . . . with a great hammer” (when the Orthodox had other bells of their own) would eventually destroy it. They were doing this—according to the complaint—“to our detriment and to the scorn of our faith, so that for the future, as is the case now, Their Graces the Father Uniates might not have anything with which to ring to call people to the service of God of our Uniate church.” In addition, the Orthodox had carted off “two bodies together with their coffins.” These belonged to “St. Ignatius, the former patriarch of Moscow, who, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, having abandoned the Disuniate faith, . . . had become a Uniate and had died in that faith and had been buried here in that Church of the Holy Trinity,” as well as “father Weliamin Józef Rucki, metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus´.”136 A second complaint registered 28 June 1661 alleged more generally that when “the perfidious Muscovite [wiarołomny Moskwicin]” invaded Wilno, “all God’s Uniate churches and Roman Catholic churches were ruined, but their Disuniate church remains whole and untouched in its entirety.” In addition to carting off the bell called Swan and the bodies of the two Uniate patrons, the Orthodox had used the opportunity to raid other churches in the desolate city.137 On 19 August 1661—still three and a half months before the final liberation of the city— the Orthodox fathers entered their own reprotestation. In it they claimed that the Uniates were exploiting the situation, using words of slander and dishonor, solely “unto the destruction and eradication . . . of the Holy Orthodox Ruthenian faith and church.” It was rather the “perfidious enemy”—the Orthodox fathers also used the phrase, wiarołomny Nieprzyjaciel— who had robbed the Uniate and Roman Catholic churches of Wilno and elsewhere. Moreover, “more than one knows well” how and when all these things (Swan, the two bodies, altar adornments from the Holy Trinity Church, etc.) “were recovered from the hands of the enemy, not without special expense and labor.” In short, it was the Orthodox who were the local patriots, and they now accused the Uniates not only of ingratitude but also of attacks upon honor.138 Wherever the truth lies, these protestations by the Father Basilians of the Holy Trinity and the reprotestation by the Father Basilians of the Holy Spirit—both Uniates and Orthodox were Basilians in Wilno usage—reflect both the tensions of the war and occupation and a return to the status quo ante. A small Muscovite force was still occupying the city (or at least the castle), in theory Uniates had no right to be in Wilno, and yet both Uniates and Orthodox were there, with full access to the local magistracy. The sure sign of a return to old ways was the two parties’ recourse to the constant litigation that was at the bedrock of Wilno’s convivencia.

~ c ha p t e r t h irt e en~

Old Age and Poor Relief

O

n 23 August 1636, King Władysław IV of Poland-Lithuania gave a privilege to the beggars of Wilno allowing them—apparently for the first time—to organize themselves into a corporation following the model of the guilds and laying out rules for the inclusion and exclusion of members and a few guidelines for their social discipline. In fact, the document to which the king gave his signature originated from the Wilno magistracy and perhaps also in part from the incorporated beggars themselves. It was a response to “the great disorder here in the city among the poor and the great disgust that arises from it.”1 This charter, along with much of the city archive, was lost in the fires that accompanied the Muscovite invasion and occupation of the city, and we owe our knowledge of it to the great flurry of rerecording of documents such as deeds, wills, and guild charters in the years after 1662. Whoever had a copy of a prewar act came forward to have it once again entered as an official part of the municipal record. The beggars’ corporation was no different, and on 12 July 1663, officers of that group appeared before the magistracy presenting a copy of the privilege of 1636 and asking that it be recorded in the official record, since “the original had been lost through the difficulty of circumstances during the raging of hostilities.”2 Similar documents were reentered on 6 August 1729, 14 November 1744, and 11 March 1745.3 Wilno was not alone, of course, among early modern cities in its attempt to aid and discipline the poor. The topic of this chapter—public and private strategies for providing care for the poor, sick, elderly, and otherwise weak—has been investigated for many early modern societies, Poland-Lithuania among them.4 Wilno, however, has not received much scrutiny in this regard.5 As throughout this book, the underlying concern here is to assess the extent to which the strategies for the organization and delivery of poor relief, broadly construed, were limited by confessional, linguistic, and ethnic boundaries, and to what extent they crossed those boundaries. Who gave aid to whom? And how was it delivered? What were the expectations of the giver and the recipient? I focus my attention on the larger Christian community, as this is where the main sources lie, although I refer to some aspects of Jewish and Tatar strategies by way of comparison at certain points.6 My discussion moves across a continuum from the public to the more private, from centralized to decentralized approaches to the problem of bringing relief to poor people. Decentralized poor relief may have affected the greatest number of

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people, but by its very nature it remains elusive in the extant sources. To show a range of such possible responses to the threat of poverty, I recount at the end of my discussion a few stories of “self-help,” of the improvised attempts to provide a personalized safety net. I conclude with some remarks about the topography of poverty and poor relief in seventeenth-century Wilno and its relation to the question of confessionalization and religious toleration.

Bringing Order to the Poor By granting official status to a beggars’ corporation,7 the king, the magistracy, and the incorporated beggars were attempting to accomplish several things at once: to care for a certain number of deserving poor, to limit the numbers of the poor inscribed in the corporation, and to provide rules for their behavior. The program, and the statute itself, was a variant of the highly centralized system of poor relief often associated with Reformation cities (although by no means limited to them). The central feature was a “common box” (gemeiner Kasten), part or all of the resources of which were designated for support of the “deserving poor,” i.e., those unable to work because of age or infirmity and who otherwise might be permitted under certain circumstances to beg on the streets.8 In the royal privilege the king decreed that the beggars were to have an established gathering place, something akin to a guild house, “for their meetings, for the keeping of the dues box,” which house was to be “freed from the obligation of housing guests in it at all times.”9 The organizational details were provided in the letter from the magistracy to which the king gave his approval and which formed the body of the royal privilege. This document was modeled on guild statutes, which also had to be submitted for the approval of the king or the magistracy. The corporation was to elect four elders each year (roczni starsi). Unlike those of many of the guilds of Wilno, the beggars’ statutes made no specifications concerning the confession of the elders. In those other sodalities, as we have seen, peace was often maintained by distribution and/or alternation of confession among a limited number of “annual elders” who wielded power and controlled finances. The landlord or owner (gospodarz) of the guild house was to occupy “the first place, like a judge, at all the meetings.” The four elected annual elders, together with the landlord, were to choose as executors of their decisions “four beaters [biczownicy], or more, if necessary, who would drive healthy beggars out of town, report licentious [swawolni] beggars to the elders and punish them, and execute the other below-described articles.” Further, the beaters were instructed to make a survey [rewizja] of all the street beggars, invalids visited by God, and to inscribe them in a register. They should admonish the healthy to look for a job [słuz∧ba], and that they not make excesses around town under the pretext of poverty and invented defects. And whoever, once admonished, should not refrain from begging—such a one should be driven out of town by the beaters.

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The genuine beggars—those inscribed in the corporation’s roll book—were to receive a certain kind of care. If a beggar should become ill, he was to inform one of the elders, whose responsibility it would be to bring a priest to hear confession; the deceased was to be buried, “according to his means,” either near the church or in the open field. If “one of the brothers or sisters” should not have anyone to see to him during his illness, the elders were to find someone “using common brotherhood funds.” Brothers and sisters of the corporation— like brethren of the guilds—were required to attend the funerals of fellow beggars; this included the obligation to be present at religious services and to carry the body to the grave, under the penalty of half a pound of wax (to be paid to the beggars’ guild altar at the Jesuits’ St. John). Pilgrims and anyone who should arrive from outside Wilno claiming to represent prisoners—usually this meant those held in captivity by the Turks—and asking for alms for their ransom were not to be recommended for charity from the pulpits in sermons until they presented themselves at the beggars’ corporation house; here they were to render an account of themselves, whereupon they might be recommended by the elders. Beggars were to refrain from “drunkenness, licentiousness, lewd behavior in the pubs, shouting in the streets, singing in the wee hours of the morning or bawdy songs.” Amputated and rotting limbs were to be covered with a clean white cloth, because it was painful for passersby to look at them. Mothers should not lie around the streets with their babies because this was disgusting. Peasants from the village must not be allowed to beg; instead they must get a job. They should not hire themselves out to lead the blind beggars; rather, the blind should be led by the sighted lame (chromy a widza˛cy niech ´slepego prowadzi). The beggars’ corporation was required to maintain a book with the names of the inscribed members. The book should be kept in Polish so that simple people might be able to understand. Therefore, one of the members had to be literate in Polish. He also had to be literate in Latin for the translation of letters of introduction when new beggars came to the city from elsewhere. New arrivals among the beggar population who claimed to be members of the szlachta or soldiers or in the service of some gentleman were nonetheless required to be “inscribed into the brotherhood without any excuse.” The corporation was to meet once every four weeks. Each beggar was to contribute to the corporation box one Polish grosz per meeting, or 13 gr per annum. The box was to have two keys, one to be entrusted to the care of a “church elder” or a bell ringer (i.e., a nonbeggar who served as an officer of the corporation) and the other to be in the hands of one of the annually elected elders of the “street beggars.” Two Masses were to be said annually (and funded by the corporation treasury), one for the living benefactors of the poor and one for the dead. All inscribed beggars were required to attend the Mass, which would be at the Catholic parish church (i.e., again at the Jesuits’ St. John); whoever did not attend was required to pay a fine to the corporation box of one grosz. During periods of plague and famine, when there were “great intrusions from all lands,” the elders were to take special care to distinguish the invalid from the healthy; the latter were

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to be driven from the city, “since from that sort there usually arise the greatest larceny, theft, and every sort of license during those times.” Throughout the document, the concern was to make certain that everyone—even those on the margins—was enrolled in some clearly defined corporation with lists of members’ names and guidelines for behavior. The category (or anticategory) of luz´ni ludzie (loose people) was among the most feared, and these were the people regularly blamed for urban unrest and the spread of contagion.10 Poor people living in hospitals who were able to leave their beds were given dispensation to sit about the streets and beg during Lent and up to the octave after Easter, as well as one week before All Saints and three days at Christmas, during which periods they were “to be left alone by the beaters and all the others.” On the other hand, if some sick beggar should not have a place to stay, and the beaters should find him lying at the base of the wall, he should be brought by cart (kolasa), “according to custom,” to the elders of the hospital of SS. Joseph and Nicodemus. Finally—and here is the only direct reference to the multiconfessional nature of the city and thus of its beggar population—“from each Catholic church [kos´ciół], Orthodox/Uniate church [cerkiew], and Lutheran/Calvinist church [zbór] that is within the city walls, one bell ringer is to sit with the annual elders.”11 This provision was modeled on the various guild charters that provided for confessional/ethnic parity in the elections of annual elders. The text entered into the acts in 1663 was brought before the magistracy by six named beggars: Petrus Rotkiewicz, Bartholomaeus Słowin´ski, and Joannes Windziuł, who were identified as pauperum seniores, or seniors of the beggars’ corporation; Helias Me˛czyn´ski, the notarius, or secretary; and Josephus Andruszkiewicz and Gregorius Wołynkiewicz, identified as commensales (perhaps they were treasurers). Beyond this passage, I have found only one reference that may reflect the presence of the corporation in the city during the seventeenth century. In the record of offerings to the Wilno Lutheran church for 1640–1642, we find a certain “Heinrich Juchsche, Bettlersche,” in other words—in the German usage of this particular document—“the widow of Heinrich Juch, beggar” (apparently this identifies his profession, although it may have been a family business), who gave 1 zł and 6 gr (or a total of 36 gr) to the church’s coffers.12 For the sake of comparison, in that particular two-year cycle, the most generous supporter of the church was “Johanes Majus, Medicinae Doctor,” who gave 48 zł (which equaled 1,440 gr, or exactly forty times the contribution of Frau Juch).13 To give a rough idea of the value—an inventory of 1644 listed plums at 2 gr per pound, which would work out to eighteen pounds of plums for the Lutheran church from Frau Juch and 720 pounds from Doctor Maius;14 a testament of 1652 included among the deceased’s possessions shoes worth 2 zł, which would put Frau Juch’s contribution for the year at a little more than one used shoe and Doctor Maius’s at twenty-four pairs.15 I have found no other independent evidence that the Wilno beggars’ corporation played a role in the life of the city. Still, we know that its charter was entered into the acta of the magistracy at least five times, from 1636 to 1745. This fact alone would suggest that this kind of centralized poor relief was of some importance to early modern Vilnans.

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Let us assume for the moment—a reasonable assumption, I argue—that in addition to Herr (and perhaps Frau) Juch, the beggars’ corporation of Wilno also included members of the Orthodox, Uniate, Roman Catholic, and Calvinist Churches. This, after all, is what was implied by the provision for including bell ringers from all these confessions in the administration of the beggars’ corporation. It was, as we have seen, an arrangement typical for public life in early modern Wilno. On the one hand, it took into account the presence of the five legally recognized Christian confessions, and it allowed for a certain kind of representation and power sharing across that spectrum. But at the same time, it clearly recognized the dominant position of Roman Catholicism, and it sought to bring these various confessions together—under the corporation banner—at a Catholic altar. The guilds of Wilno clearly served as the model here.

The Working Poor Centralized providers of poor relief like the Wilno beggars’ corporation typically excluded able-bodied citizens from its rolls—what we would call the “working poor.” And yet almost all inhabitants of early modern cities faced the possibility of slipping into poverty at certain times in their lives. Orphans, widows, and the aged were particularly vulnerable. But even healthy working men were not free from this concern, and the guilds sought to provide a sort of safety net to its members and, to a certain extent, to their families. This was modeled in some ways on the centralized system of the common box, although it was administered at the level of the individual guild. Care for sick guild members and—for a circumscribed period of time—for their eventual widows was often a specific part of guild charters (and was probably a part of the informal practice of guilds that did not include this aspect of their activities in formal statutes). The fact that practically all the guilds were in some way multiconfessional and multiethnic implied that people of the different communities were bound to aid their guild brethren and their families. The cobblers’ guild, for example, which shared power equally among “Romans, Ruthenians, and Saxons” (i.e., in this context, Catholics, Orthodox/Uniates, and Lutherans), declared the following in articles confirmed on 9 July 1689: Love of one’s neighbor, especially Christian love, demands of everyone that there be respect for the sick, and especially for those who have come here from elsewhere [przybylce], who do not have either parents, or relatives, or masters with whom they have served. Therefore, if it should happen to any journeyman that he should take sick with some long illness, the master is not to remove him from the shop immediately; rather he is to remain by him for around two weeks. And after the expiration of these two weeks, he is to be given over to the infirmarium of the monastery of the Bonifratelli fathers. And since all remain subject to chance, there is to be a special box, into which during every meeting at

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least one shilling is to be placed, and that money is always to be kept for the assistance of the sick. But if that sick journeyman should return to health, he is to work off the expense that had been expended for him by the master through those two weeks during his illness.16

In this case, the centralized poor relief of the guild box was seen in part as a supplement to aid those who lacked the social networks that typically provided improvised, decentralized aid (“especially for those who have come here from elsewhere”). The statute of the masons’ guild (dated 1 May 1595) accepted into the ranks of the masters “foreigners, Poles, Italians, Germans, as also from this nation of the state of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.”17 Its provisions for poor relief were again quite specific: If anyone from the brethren should fall into a severe illness or poverty, he is to be provided with the appropriate assistance from the Brotherhood’s box—but in this manner: that he establish two trustworthy men who would vouch for him, that as soon as he should return to health, and acquire money, he would return to the box the assistance that was paid out for him. But if (God forbid) anyone should die in this illness or poverty, then all that was paid out for him should be remitted.18

A century later, in a reregistration of the masons’ articles (dated 3 December 1687; they too had been destroyed during the Muscovite invasion), the guild made the following new provisions: Every healthy person must expect illness, and the ill death, and all remain under the control of chance. Therefore, if it should happen that any journeyman of the congregation of masons should take sick, and could no longer have a livelihood and assistance from work, then the elders are to make good for him with a journeyman who, remaining at work, is to give the fourth grosz of his daily or weekly pay. But the master is not supposed to take from the journeyman’s weekly quota, which he usually takes from him every week, in view of the fact that the journeyman works for himself and for another who is sick. The same is to be understood about the widow of a journeyman mason, however only for a year and six weeks.19

And the examples could be multiplied.

Hospitals Early modern hospitals were not, of course, places where people chose to go for medical care: if you were sick, had a place to live, and could afford to pay a doctor and an apothecary,

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you endured your sickness at home. Wilno hospitals were originally foundations of specific churches and religious orders that took in, and sent aid out to, the poor and infirm of the community. As such, hospitals had a natural connection with confessions and neighborhoods, even though some of the hospitals associated with particular churches were administered by members of the magistracy.20 Lutheran pastor Je˛drzej Schönflissius wrote in his 1638 encomium for his former parishioner Jakub Gibel that, as city councillor and burgomaster for over thirty-eight years, “he gladly served the churches and hospitals, even though they were of another religion, on account of the office and his obligations.”21 The locations of some hospitals changed somewhat over time, with the destruction of the city through fire and war (the city burned in 1610 and 1655) and through the simple fact that specific churches purchased or received as a bequest new buildings for the use of their hospitals, at which point either the network grew or the hospital changed its address. Moreover, it is not entirely clear whether all buildings described in the various surveys and deeds as “hospital houses” (kamienice szpitalne) were used only, or even primarily, as hospitals. Clearly some of those who are described in our sources as “living in the X hospital” were not necessarily recipients of care. Consider, for example, the case of the 1690 survey of Wilno properties, which noted that on Sawicz Street there was “one little hospital house of the Holy Redeemer [at this point a Uniate institution], in which [reside] four neighbors [sa˛siedzi, i.e., renters of chambers]; a second little hospital house of the Holy Redeemer, in which [resides] one neighbor.”22 The neighbors were hardly residents of the hospital, though they presumably contributed to the support of the specific church’s hospital(s) with their rents. A few locations described in our surveys as “hospital houses of X church” must have been partly or wholly profit-earning properties for actual hospitals/poorhouses located elsewhere. And yet, in spite of these caveats, a picture emerges of a considerable network of hospitals (and hospital-owned properties) in seventeenth-century Wilno. Let us begin with the Roman Catholic institutions. These were first established in connection with specific churches and their immediate parishes and were usually adjacent to the church. In the middle of the seventeenth century there were seven such Roman Catholic hospitals: at St. Mary Magdalene (established 1514), at Holy Trinity (established 1535, deriving income from a tax on crossing Bricked Bridge and administered by the magistracy and the Dominicans), at SS. Joseph and Nicodemus (Jesuits, established 1625), at St. Stephen (established ca. 1600), at Holy Cross (Bonifratelli, established 1635), at St. Peter in the Antokol suburb (established before 1630), and at St. Anne (Bernardines, established 1640). The hospitals were frequently connected with religious brotherhoods, one of whose purposes was to provide care for the poor and infirm. This was true of SS. Joseph and Nicodemus (and the brotherhood under the same patronage), of St. Stephen (Brotherhood of St. Lazarus), and of St. Anne, where German and other foreign Catholics gathered in the Brotherhood of St. Martin.23 The beggars’ corporation had its seat at the Jesuits’ St. John, although there does not seem to have been a hospital building at that location.

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In the seventeenth century three of these institutions—the hospitals at the Churches of the Holy Trinity, St. Stephen, and SS. Joseph and Nicodemus—were under at least partial supervision of secular stewards chosen by the Roman half of the magistracy. The hospital at Holy Trinity drew some of its income from the much traversed Bricked Bridge that crossed the River Wilia to the northwest of the city and led to the Snipiszki suburb; it had a correspondingly large budget.24 Presumably, it was oversight of institutions like this one that Schönflissius had in mind when he wrote of Burgomaster Jakub Gibel’s service to nonLutheran hospitals. The magistracy seems to have farmed these duties out to Wilno merchants at times. The presence of “M. Fonderflot”—this was most likely Lutheran merchant Matiasz Fonderflot—as steward in 1671 suggests that the ban on non-Catholic and non-Uniate participation in the magistracy after 1666 did not put absolute limits on the participation of the “others” in positions important to municipal governance.25 The many Orthodox churches established throughout the eastern half of Wilno (along and to the right of the main axis leading from Sharp Gate to the Lower Castle) were taken over by the Uniates after 1596, along with schools, brotherhoods, and charitable institutions such as hospitals. Records from the middle of the seventeenth century tell of numerous Ruthenian (by now Uniate) hospitals and hospital houses. Notably, the cathedral Church of the Savior (Spas) had two hospital houses and a bath near the cathedral church and the Savior Gate, as well as several “places” (squares, open places of land) in the city. In addition, there were Uniate hospitals at St. Parasceve, Holy Trinity, and the Church of the Resurrection. Holy Trinity was the largest Uniate complex, and it also possessed a Brotherhood of the Immaculate Conception, one of whose purposes was the provision of poor relief.26 After 1596, the Orthodox of Wilno built a new church across the street from Holy Trinity, under the name Descent of the Holy Spirit, on whose lands were gathered a brotherhood, school, bursa for poor students, and hospital.27 The Calvinists had a hospital complex (the Lustrations conducted in 1636 and 1639 note three houses: 56.04, 56.05, 57.0528) near their church within the city walls, but only until 1640, when, after a year of unrest in the city, they were removed by royal edict. They soon rebuilt their church on land just outside the old city walls, where they had previously established a cemetery, and here the school and hospital also reappeared. The institution was founded in 1598 and survived until the end of the eighteenth century.29 In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Lutherans had a hospital near the Lutheran church on German Street. They also owned two hospital houses on Rudniki Street (those of Piotr Nonhart at 12.06 and of Halszka Fonlarówna Hołownina at 12.10) and one on upper Castle Street (1.18).30 The surviving register of lay offerings to the Lutheran church of Wilno includes a set of rules that were to govern the actions of the lay overseers of the Lutheran hospitals.31 The Jews of Wilno governed themselves through their kahal, under whose aegis a hospital brotherhood supervised a Jewish hospital. In 1795 we read that the Jews had had “from time immemorial a hospital for the poor and infirm on Meat Shop Street.”32 It would seem likely

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that this institution was functioning by the middle of the seventeenth century. It is noted in a survey of the houses in Wilno belonging to the synagogue that was written into the acts on 31 July 1690: “the little house of Rybnicki, divided into two parts, which is a hospital house, in both of which two parts of this hospital house, the landlord and twelve neighbors.”33 Surveys of the city done in 1636 and 1639 indicate that there was also a Jewish hospital next to the main synagogue on Jewish Street.34 Tatar poor relief in Poland-Lithuania, as far as we know, was thoroughly decentralized and did not make use of imarets (inns or hostels for pilgrims). It was based on informal, private care for relatives and friends of the sort provided in wills and other improvised self-help methods employed by Wilno’s Christians.35 Although the hospitals were clearly seen as a part of the mission of specific churches and parishes or of the Jewish kahal and were thus tied in some manner to religion, confession, and neighborhood, there is a certain amount of evidence pointing to a mixing of Christian confessions among the recipients of this kind of poor relief. And, by contrast, there is no indication of any crossing of the Christian-Jewish divide in this aspect of daily life, except in the sense that Jewish renters may have occupied some houses owned by Christian hospitals and Christian renters, those belonging to Jewish hospitals. Thus individual Christians and Jews contributed, at least indirectly, to the upkeep of the others’ hospitals.36 And Jews and Christians could have come in contact here in the sense that Jewish money lending may have been in competition with the Christian Montes Pietatis (Mounts of Piety, charitable lending banks) in providing individual poor relief. First let us note the crossing of confessional boundaries in the giving of alms to hospitals, our most direct evidence for which are the last wills and testaments of Vilnans of various confessions. In many cases, the testator specified that money was to be given to a list of hospitals throughout Wilno. These lists are not entirely random, although we do find some who direct that money be given to all hospital institutions; certain types of multiconfessional constellations were formed more easily than others. For instance, Lutherans often included Roman Catholics but rarely if ever thought of the Greeks, whether Orthodox or Uniate. Still, there are some surprises, especially the frequent evidence for a kind of Ruthenian solidarity across the Uniate-Orthodox boundary that is usually thought to have been one of the deepest divides in the confessional landscape among Christians in early modern Poland-Lithuania. There are certain difficulties in interpreting the general phenomenon. Clearly part of the motivation for giving to hospitals and to the poor was one of salvation—for the almsgiver and also perhaps for the recipient. The poor were to pray for the soul of the deceased; if you gave to more hospitals, more poor would pray for your soul. (I will address the thorny issue of belief across the confession in the efficacy of such prayers for the dead in the next chapter.) Conversely, by giving beyond your own confession you were “improving the morals” of the greater Wilno population. We should note the ecumenical aspect of this part of piety in early modern Wilno: the result would be that poor people of the Orthodox church—to choose one

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constellation—would pray that their benefactors would get into Uniate heaven, and Uniates would care for the morals of the Orthodox poor; and many other combinations arise from a reading of the testaments. The stipulation occasionally encountered that after a testator’s death the poor on the streets of Wilno were to receive some alms never limited that charity to beggars of a specific confession.37 These deathbed bequests may also reflect a mixing of confessions within the poorhouses themselves. Here, too, a funeral sermon by Lutheran pastor Je˛drzej Schönflissius sheds some light upon motivations. In an oration of 1628, the pastor praised the recently deceased merchant of Wilno, Andrzej von Embden (an immigrant from Antwerp by way of Cracow), because he did good for God’s servants, helped people in need. He gave a bounteous alms to poor little Lazaruses. Witness to his generosity is the hospital at St. Peter’s outside the city [a Catholic church located in the Antokol suburb to the north, between the Upper Castle and the Wilia River], which he built and founded at his own expense, and with this intent: that poor people of our confession might also find refuge there.38

The cobblers’ guild, which shared power among Romans, Ruthenians, and Saxons, specified in its statutes that sick and impoverished journeymen were all to find refuge in the hospital of the Catholic Holy Cross Church of the Bonifratelli. On the other hand, there is also a certain amount of evidence that institutions like hospitals were part of the arsenal of weapons in the interconfessional battles of the Age of Reform and that the receipt of aid came with a certain amount of persuasion to join the confession of the aid givers. For example, in the trying period after 1640, when the Calvinists were forced to remove their church, hospital, and school to just outside the city walls, a kind of purge of the Calvinist hospital along confessional lines was proposed at an annual synod. In article 5 of the acts of the synod of 1642 (“On the Invalid Poor of the Wilno Calvinist Church”) we discover that there were in the Wilno Calvinist poorhouse “some persons among the widows” of questionable faith: “We establish that . . . they be examined, and the pious be left in peace and the scandalous [zgorszliwe] be sent on their way; and if any of our confession should be found and, on account of the meagerness of income, could not be accommodated here, we allow that they be sent to Słuck to the superintendent of the Nowogródek district [of the Lithuanian Calvinist Church].” The article went on to state that widows (apparently here widows of genuine Calvinist faith) who were able to find maintenance with children or relatives should go there to live “so that they not be a burden to the Church of God.”39 This article points to several things: first to the more limited financial means of the Wilno Calvinist congregation after the persecutions of 1639–1640 but also to the presence of people of other religions in the Calvinist hospital before that time, to an attempt to limit the Calvinist hospital to the confessional community, and perhaps also to the use of the hospital as a confessionalizing tool.

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Dowries for Poor Maidens Other charitable organizations quite clearly limited their ministrations to one narrowly defined group; any crossing of confessional bounds was based on the assumption that the recipient of aid would convert. Such was a program administered by the Roman Catholic Chapter. My knowledge of it is limited to a record book bearing the title “Income and Expenditure of Funds for the Endowing of Poor Maidens” (“Przychód i rozchód pienie˛dzy pro dotandis pauperibus virginibus”).40 The entries begin in 1620 and break off in 1654, a little over a year before the Muscovite occupation of the city. Entries typically contain a date, the name of the couple intending to marry, and the amount of money to be given in Lithuanian shocks. Many entries contain additional information, such as the name of a parent of the bride, the husband’s occupation, where the couple came from (if he or she was not a Vilnan), the circumstances of the recipient’s poverty, any deviations from the normal use of the funds (money given simply to help out a poor person, not necessarily as a dowry, or the fact that one recipient was allowed to keep the money even though she apparently got cold feet about the marriage41), or an attestation by a neighbor or a priest. These attestations served to corroborate both genuine need and good faith. A few entries tell us that the recipient was a convert to Roman Catholicism and imply either that the grant was a reward for conversion or that conversion was the condition for the grant. This little ledger offers some insight into the delivery of a kind of poor relief as a confessionalizing tool and a few details about the nature and causes of poverty in this community. Much of the book points simply to a program to help out poor women (who, we must assume, happened to be Catholic and who in several cases lived in the modest neighborhoods of the chapter jurisdictions). A typical entry took this form: “11 January 1625, to Miss Dorota Milen´ska and Symon Makolin´ski, bird catcher, at the recommendation of His Grace, Father Zyganty, 6 k.”42 This sort and others, only slightly more informative, form the majority of entries. Other entries give us a little more insight into the nature and causes of the poverty that was to be addressed: 17 November 1640, to Barbara Kuz´miczówna, living beyond the Wilia River, a poor maiden, whose mother sits on the steps of the castle church [i.e., begging for alms], marrying Stanisław Urbanowicz, locularius, at the attestation of the Father Vice-Custodian, 6 k.43 22 October 1641, to Anna, daughter of Mikołaj Chom˛etowski, cobbler, living on Glass Street, who, bedridden with illness, has come to poverty, was given, as she enters into matrimony, as poor relief, 8 k.44 16 November 1641, to Halszka, daughter of Dzienicki the tailor, who lives on Jop Street, and who is in great poverty due to illness and the many children, eight of them, poor relief so that she may enter into matrimony, 6 k.45

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In some of the entries, the Catholic aspects of this particular program for poor relief were made more explicit. In a few cases (7 of 327, or 2%), the marriage vows in question were those taken upon entering into a spiritual order.46 In a few more instances, the motivation for the grant explicitly included information about the conversion of the recipient (17 of 327, or 5%): 5 August 1622, to Anna, a baptized Tatar woman, marrying [blank space], carpenter, at the recommendation of Father Bokszta and Father Tomasz Jurgiewicz, 3 k.47 3 October 1641, to Zofia Frezówna, who has poor parents, entering into matrimony with Jan the tailor, at the recommendation and attestation of His Grace Father Białowski, since the parents are very poor, and especially since they have converted from Calvinism, was given 8 k.48 3 January 1642, to Katarzyna Wejmarin, converted from the Lutheran heresy, marrying Samuel Cybulski, tailor, also converted from Arianism, both poor, at the commendation of Father Nicholas Hecker, of the Society of Jesus, was given 6 k.49 4 November 1645, to Barbara Piotrowska, maiden, converted from Arianism, and thus abandoned by her Arian parents, marrying Kazimierz Michałowski, at the testimony and recommendation of Father Koczanowski, vicar at St. John, 3 k.50 10 February 1646, to Anna Eymanówna, a poor maiden converted from heresy, and entering into matrimony with Andrzej Łatecki, 3 k.51

The confessional aspect of the program was emphasized by the fact that not all such grants were predicated on marriage: 23 October 1627, to Elz∧bieta, a baptized Jewish woman, an alms of 2 k.52 24 April, to Efrosyna, a poor maiden, noble woman from Pogorzel [?], converted from heresy, and abandoned by her kin, and searching about town for alms for her subsistence, at the commendation of Father Paszkiewicz, her confessor, a subsidy of 2 k.53 9 September 1644, to the converted and baptized Tatar woman Anna, at the recommendation and commendation of her poverty by Father Giedroyc´ of the Society of Jesus, was given an alms of 2 k.54

Nor were all recipients maidens: 28 June 1641, to Zachariusz Krasnowicki, who, being a Calvinist minister, has left Kiejdany [a private town in Lithuania owned by the Calvinist branch of the Radziwiłł family], and has converted to the Catholic faith, at the recommendation of His Grace the Most Reverend Lord Bishop of Wilno, are given 10 k.55

A part of the program, and especially early on, seems to have been quite local, focused on the inhabitants of the poorest streets in the chapter jurisdiction. Here I find names I can

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trace, through other documents, to Skop Street. It sometimes turns out that neighbors were recommending neighbors. Consider the following case: “9 September 1622, to Miss Krystyna Chrzanowska and Balcer Kupicki, carpenter, both from Wilno, at the recommendation of Paweł the wheelwright and Bazyli the weaver, a dowry of 2 k.”56 Others sources help identify the two recommenders more precisely. These were Paweł Kotlik and Bazyli Budziewicz, both of whom owned and inhabited houses on Skop Street (Kotlik at 49.05 and Budziewicz at 45.1257) and both of whom made other appearances in this little ledger. We know further that Paweł died a Catholic and asked to be buried at the Holy Trinity Catholic Church.58 Bazyli the weaver was sacristan at St. Mary Magdalene, the small church (and hospital) in the neighborhood at the end of Skop Street, and across from which he owned a house.59 The suspicion then arises that Chrzanowska and Kupicki may have been renters on Skop Street; renters are harder to locate and identify than property owners like Kotlik and Budziewicz, however modest the last two were. In another case—one involving neighbors of Kotlik and Budziewicz—we again find a local—indeed, a family—network: “8 November 1622, to Miss Maryna Arcimowiczówna from Wilno and Jan Kostrza˛bski, tailor, at the recommendation of Mr. Jakub Szczygielski, 2 k.”60 Other sources, as we have seen, tell us that Szczygielski was the stepfather of Arcimowiczówna, and they indicate that parents and children were renters of chambers in properties on Skop Street. By 1623, Kostrza˛bski (he appears in other sources as Kostrompski and, most frequently, as Kostromski) and Arcimowiczówna were renting quarters in the house of lutenist Andrys Elmer at 49.07. Kostromski would go on to purchase two houses in the neighborhood, by 1636 the one next door at 49.08 and subsequently, in 1640, one down the street at 49.05 (purchased from Kotlik’s widow).61 All three of the recommenders (Kotlik, Budziewicz, and Szczygielski) spoke in support of other poor couples for support.62 And Bazyly Budziewicz had gotten his own start in married life thanks to the program: “17 February 1626, to Miss Anna Łomciewiczówna and Bazyly Budziewicz, weaver, at the recommendation of His Grace, Father z∧abin´ski, 4 k.”63 There were, in all likelihood, other such programs of poor relief targeted at communities limited by confession and loosely coinciding with parish and neighborhood. Parish churches typically saw forms of material care for members of the community as part of their mission, and these sorts of aid programs were probably in some ways parallel to the hospitals maintained at the parish level. The same names appear in this particular ledger repeatedly—as recipients of aid and as sponsors of requests for aid—and the names are those of close neighbors.

Self-Help Anyone could quickly end up in need. This applied especially to those whose ability to provide for themselves and others was structurally limited: widows, orphans, unmarried

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women, and the elderly and infirm. Testaments and other legal instruments often reflected an attempt by departing husbands and wives to care for those remaining and by the elderly to care for themselves. The presence of “Lady Abłamowiczowa, burgomaster’s widow” in a list of “outpatients” of the Catholic Holy Trinity hospital bears witness to the fact that even members of the elite could quickly find themselves on the dole.64 Perhaps she belonged to Wilno’s equivalent of the “shamefaced poor” (poveri vergognosi), those whose sense of honor did not allow them to beg with uncovered faces or to seek “indoor relief ” in hospitals.65 The concentration of Skop Street names in the ledger of dowries granted to poor maidens suggests that neighbors and families drew on that program as a part of their own self-help strategies. Access to the court seems to have been freer—and no doubt cheaper—in the chapter than in the magistracy, and it is in the former that we can observe relatively modest individuals attempting to find makeshift solutions to impending poverty. We are also able to observe the priestly judges’ attempts to aid the citizens of their jurisdiction (not all of whom were Roman Catholic) in achieving their goals. What follows are five stories from the lives of citizens of the Wilno chapter. They tell not only of the plights of orphans, widows and abandoned wives, and the elderly and infirm but also of improvised solutions to those challenges. In societies like this one, all economic behavior might be seen as part of individual attempts to stave off need. I have selected only those stories in which participants or observers commented specifically on the nature and goals of their activities and situated them in that realm.

“A Child Yet in Diapers” At the top of Castle Street (1.03), on the corner of an alley described in 1636 only as “the street that goes to His Royal Majesty’s Mill,” lived a haberdasher named Piotr Kwas´nicki (a.k.a. Kwasiela, Kwas´niewski). This house, like the first few on both sides of Castle Street (1.01–1.07, 1.09, and 2.01–2.04), was under the jurisdiction of the Wilno chapter. It was partially bricked and considerably larger than the single-chamber wooden houses at 1.01 and 1.02. Still, with its six chambers (some large, some small, some wooden, some bricked), three alcoves, and four vestibules, it was considerably more modest than the town houses of the elite farther down both sides of Castle Street. Perhaps haberdasher Kwas´nicki helped make ends meet by drawing on the bricked “tavern chamber” that was a fixture in so many houses and provided extra income through szynk, the sale of alcohol on the premises. The surveys of 1636 and 1639 suggest that Kwas´nicki did not own the property but rented it from the chapter.66 We know a little about Kwas´nicki because he and his wife, Krystyna Wolska, married their daughter Regina to a tailor named Andrzej Kosmowski. This happened a few years before 1635. But to tell the story we must back up a bit further. Kosmowski himself owned a small bricked house at St. John Street 44.04 (two chambers, an alcove, a brewery, a stable for a couple of horses, a basement). Kosmowski had found his first wife, Barbara Skrocka, right next door. Her father, Wincenty Skrocki, owned the slightly larger bricked house at St. John

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Street 44.03 (five chambers, a basement, a brewery, a bakery, a shed for two horses).67 Both houses were also under the jurisdiction of the Wilno chapter, and neighboring houses were either “on the ground of the vicar of St. John” (44.05) or “on city ground” but occupied by Jesuit fathers (44.01 and 44.02). Barbara Skrocka had borne Kosmowski two sons, Jan and Jakub. She died—I am not certain exactly when—and Kosmowski remarried, soon it would seem. He had to search a bit farther afield for his second wife—around the corner and up Castle Street—although he would find her, too, in a house subject to the chapter. That second wife, Regina Kwas´nicka, had died by 1634 but not before she had borne Kosmowski a third son, named Stanisław. At this point the judges of the Wilno chapter became involved in negotiations between Kosmowski and his former father-in-law over care for the half-orphan Stanisław and over Barbara’s dowry. On 1 October 1635, Piotr Kwas´nicki came before the court of the Wilno chapter to enter into the acts a “letter of conciliation” between himself and his wife as the first party and his former son-in-law, Andrzej Kosmowski, as the second.68 The document had been drawn up and signed almost a year earlier, on 11 November 1634, by “Father Kasper Jasin´ski, Preacher of the Wilno Cathedral Church, Vicar of S´wir,” to whom the Kwas´nickis and Kosmowski had gone for adjudication. The parties had informed Jasin´ski that the Lord God had “gathered from this world the aforementioned Mrs. Regina Kwas´nicka Kosmowska, leaving in diapers one descendant, a son named Stanisław, begotten with him, Kosmowski.” The two parties had chosen the route of mediation “since they did not wish for themselves legal disputes from either side, either concerning the costs of the upbringing of the aforementioned child or the dowry of the deceased.” (The document used the term wychowanie, which as we have seen, now means upbringing but then also meant something like room, board, clothing, and instruction.) The parties thus submitted everything to the judge’s “decision and amicable resolution, promising from both sides to be content with whatever should be decided in their case.” Father Jasin´ski’s ruling formed the main section of the letter of 11 November 1634. First, “since Mr. Kosmowski is a widower and has the children of his first wife, Skrocka, he would not be able to give appropriate upbringing to the aforementioned child yet in diapers, wherefore I determined that it should be kept not with Mr. Kosmowski, but with its grandmother, until the child comes of age.” Second, Jasin´ski dealt with the matter of Kwas´nicka’s dowry and the money already spent by the widower on his son’s upbringing. Since “in accordance with natural law, the dowry of the mother passes to her offspring, therefore all the things belonging to the deceased. . . . belong to this same child.” So that these possessions “not be subject to decay,” Jasin´ski ordered Kosmowski to have them appraised, sell them, and keep the money until the child should come of age. The letter of conciliation contained the inventory of Kwas´nicka’s dowry: a small golden chain weighing 15 red złotys, worth 83½ zł; two silver mugs and two silver belts, the first formed of plates, the second a chain of white silver, all of which weighed 3½ grzywna (perhaps about 700 grams); two summer gowns, one azure damask, the other brick-red “Chinese silk,” both well worn, appraised at 100 zł; a cherry-red velvet coat; a violet satin gown; a

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Chinese silk coverlet; a long gown of Venetian mohair, already well worn, appraised at 20 zł. “And after the conclusion of this compact of mine,” wrote judge Jasin´ski, they are not to trouble [turbowa´c ] or to summon each other to court from either side concerning the aforementioned things under penalties described in the law, after payment of which this letter is nonetheless to remain in force in every court, and the aforementioned goods that are with the parents are not to be dispersed until the child should come of age, who will have access together with the other [children] to the goods of Mr. Kosmowski, as his father.

But the peace held for less than two years before Kosmowski troubled his former father-inlaw before the same court and in the same matter. On 8 August 1636 the “canon prelates and the entire chapter in the Cathedral Church of St. Stanisław at the Wilno castle” heard the case “between Andrzej Kosmowski, plaintiff, and Piotr Kwas´nicki, accused, our Wilno burghers belonging to the jurisdiction of the Witold Foundation in our Cathedral Church.”69 The case had been referred to the court of the highest instance in the chapter jurisdiction by His Grace, ∧ Father Wojciech Zabin´ski, dean and procurator of the Wilno chapter. The matter concerned “guardianship of a child of the male sex, Stanisław by name, begotten with him, the plaintiff Kosmowski, as the father, by the deceased, Mrs. Regina Kwas´nicka, his spouse and the daughter of the accused, as well as the things inherited from the aforementioned mother belonging to this child.” The problem was this: Kosmowski, “stubbornly wishing to break the compact,” had called his former father-in-law into court on 1 August 1636, alleging “il∧ legality or forgery [of the first contract],” and Zabin´ski, not rendering a decision in the matter, had referred it to a full session of the chapter. The chapter rejected the notion that Father Jasin´ski had drawn up a contract that was “not in accordance with the statute of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.” As we see here, the court of the Wilno Catholic chapter, which in fact behaved entirely like a secular court as it administered justice to its citizens, both Catholic and Protestant (I have not found Ruthenians living in the chapter jurisdiction, but they too would have been subject to its courts), saw the Lithuanian statute as binding, even though those subject to the chapter were rarely members of the gentry. The fact of the matter was that “in view of the person of the reverend father Jasin´ski, who had long been in integra fide [in blameless credibility] in the preacher’s office and the courts of his burghers, he, Mr. Kosmowski, had received certain things from Mr. Kwas´nicki following [the judge’s ruling] ad rationem [according to] the compact expressed in that letter, which in itself would seem to affirm the compact.” In other words, Kosmowski had at first recognized Jasin´ski’s authority, and at least part of the exchange of property required by the first letter of conciliation had in fact occurred. Although the judges might have required from Kosmowski the payment of the penalty stipulated in the original contract for “alleging doubt concerning the letter,” they chose to keep the peace simply by reaffirming the contract’s legality, “leaving it in force for all time”

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and adding to it a declaration concerning the care of the infant Stanisław: “First, since he, Kosmowski, also has other small children begotten with his other wife, the child Stanisław is to remain with Mr. Kwas´nicki, or with Mrs. Kwas´nicka, his grandmother, until ten years, and this to include the time he has lived with them since his birth. And after the passage of ten years, he is to be apprenticed, with the knowledge of his father.” The court gave both parties two weeks in which to bring the goods and money stipulated in the original contract to the court for registration “so that, since this is a case involving an orphan, the least thing mentioned in the letter of conciliation not be lost . . . , and the child enjoy in the future the things or money left him by his mother.” Kosmowski would marry again, a certain Agata Tomaszewska, who bore him a daughter, Zofia. He had died by 1647, and Agata married one Aleksander Charytonowicz. The judges of the chapter now assigned legal guardianship of Kosmowski’s eldest sons, Jan and Jakub, to their maternal grandfather, Wincenty Skrocki, and of Stanisław to his maternal grandfather, Piotr Kwas´nicki. Presumably, the child Zofia remained with her mother and stepfather.70 The judges may well have acted in accordance with the Lithuanian statute. They did not appoint legal guardians, in the strict sense of the term, for Kosmowski’s children until he had died. They simply stepped in to make sure that Stanisław received his mother’s portion, as the law required. But in what was perhaps an unusual move—I have not encountered any others like it—they removed Stanisław from his father’s home to the care of his maternal grandparents, and perhaps specifically that of the grandmother. This was not guardianship. Children received guardians upon their fathers’ death, not their mothers’. The judges may have improvised a little in this case. I do not know why it came to their attention. The jurisdic∧ tion was rather small—the judge, Father Zabin´ski himself, resided a few houses over at Castle Street 1.0971—so perhaps the canons knew something of the private lives of the citizens living under their jurisdiction. Or perhaps Kosmowski and Kwas´nicki took the initiative, coming to Jasin´ski with a proposed solution to their problem. Although the details differed slightly across the four main jurisdictions encountered in the streets of Wilno, the concepts of legal age and guardianship played prominent roles in all of them. The Third Lithuanian Statute defined the age of majority for boys as eighteen and for girls as thirteen, so it is likely that Kwas´nicki was to remain in control of Stanisław’s inheritance for some years after his apprenticeship, and the “ten years” was either a mistake (the scribe wrote “do lat dziesia˛tka” [“until ten years”], when he should have written “do lat dziecia˛tka” [“until the child come of age”]), or it referred only to the age at which Stanisław was to be apprenticed. Assuming Stanisław was born the year of his mother’s death (1634), he would now have been about thirteen years old and still in need of a guardian according to Lithuanian law.72 The fact that his older stepbrothers Jan and Jakub still required guardianship suggests that the births of the sons (and the deaths of the mothers) had come in relatively quick succession: three children born to Kosmowski between 1629 at the earliest (eighteen years before the date of this final decree) and 1634 at the latest (the year of Kwas´nicka’s death).

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This was a case of preemptive intervention. Regina Kwas´nicka’s dowry, though modest, suggests that she was not of the poorest: after all, in addition to her clothing, she did possess some articles of greater value—a little gold and a little silver. The judges had stepped in to make certain that Stanisław, no doubt also a future tailor or haberdasher, retained his mother’s portion as his modest start in life. Kosmowski’s objections most likely had to do with the legalities of specific aspects of the apportionment and not with basic principles or with the solution of leaving Stanisław in the care of his maternal grandparents. Hard-nosed materialism could certainly coexist with sentimental concerns for a child yet in diapers. It is interesting to note that the canons thought the infant needed a female relative to see to his upbringing, and that they intervened, somewhat paternalistically, to order the domestic affairs of their subjects. Or perhaps they were simply giving the stamp of legality to a solution improvised by the baby’s father and grandparents that aimed at making the best private use of what those paternalistic structures had to offer.

Figure 5 Jan Bułhak, photograph, Skop Street (looking from its mouth on Upper Castle Street), 1912. Matulyte˙ 2001, 287.

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“That I Might Have Provisions in My Old Age” A Wilno general (generał, i.e., a general bailiff for the nobles’ land and castle courts) named Jan Dziblewski owned two houses across the street from each other on “the little side street off Skop Street” (that was how it was described in the sources), at numbers 47.03 and 48.03. His name figured on several extant depositions (kwity) from the period, including those surrounding the altercations with Wilno Calvinists in 1639–1640.73 Collecting such testimony was the main job of a general. Dziblewski and family were citizens of the Monwid Altar and of the Roman Catholic Chapter. Dziblewski had two daughters, both of whom lived in the Skop Street neighborhood with their husbands. One of them seems to have had a problem marriage. On 20 April 1649 a certain “Lord Jan Mikołajewicz Szkil, a cobbler” came before the lower instantiation of the Wilno Roman Catholic Chapter and “told his tale and plaintively protested” against his wife, “Lady Jewa Dziblescanka Szkilowa, a cobbler’s wife,” that she, “the aforementioned Lady Szkil, living in discord with her husband, made declarations of vengeance and boasts upon the health of him, her spouse, at various times in the past and at present and has not ceased making them.”74 The main reason for the marital trouble, according to Szkil, was the fact that “he refuses to allow his wife to lead a dissolute life and to maintain debauchery in his dwelling.” As a result of his resolute defense of domestic order “he has suffered harm to his health at the hands of dissolute loose people known and familiar to her.” The last straw for this long-suffering husband had come about a week earlier, on the night of 11 April 1649 “when people were already quieted in sleep, wishing now to bring to final effect and to execute that evil undertaking and those impious plans of hers, the aforementioned spouse of his, with conscious intent, at her instigation and permission, several people, having broken into his dwelling unexpectedly, wished to slash him, and perhaps even to kill him, such that he was barely able to flee and take refuge.” (The syntactic misdirections are typical of the genre, especially in this particular legal venue.) Szkil registered his complaint as a first step in potential further litigation, concluding his protestation (or perhaps that was the work of the court recorder) with an abbreviation any reader of the genre could have completed: “wishing to have recourse to law . . .” The ellipsis in the original was to be supplanted by “he submitted this his protestation to the official books to be recorded” or any of a few other frequently met variations on that theme. Three and a half months later, on 2 August 1649, the frustrated profligate, Lady Szkil, appeared before the same capitular canon with her own complaint against her ill-used husband.75 The charge was wife beating: The aforementioned Szkil, today, at a morning hour, it could have been 11 by the clock, having come drunk to the house of his aforementioned wife and there in her house, the property of Lady Dziblewszczanka, belonging to the jurisdiction of the Wilno chapter on Skop Street, without any fault on her part, not saying anything to her, just as soon as he

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had broken in, with conscious intent, did beat her with a staff cruelly and mercilessly about the ears, the head, the shoulders, such that at that very time, in that very hour, the aforementioned plaintiff came [to show] in the Office [i.e., the chapter court] the great bruises heavily gorged with blood, and among other signs she showed her left arm, on which arm [she showed] also a wound swollen and flowing all around it with blood and her shoulders and sides all cruelly and mercilessly beaten.

Premeditation—“with conscious intent”—is a familiar legal concept. The phrases “without any fault on her part” and “not saying anything” were also a part of the legal rhetoric of the time. They and variants such as “expecting nothing bad” and “without giving any cause,” asserted the innocence of the plaintiff and the unprovoked nature of the crime in question. As was usual in cases of physical violence, the official servants were dispatched to the home of the injured party to assess the veracity of the allegations and the state of the wounds: “which beating is recorded, described together with the protestation and added to the record.” Had this complaint been brought before the castle court and not the Catholic chapter, the “servant of the Office” dispatched to make the conspectio could have been her father, General Jan Dziblewski. By 28 May 1654 (about five years after the mutual complaints of husband and wife), Ewa Dziblewska seems to have been a single woman, whether abandoned or a widow is unclear. On that day she returned to the court to register a complaint against her sister Dorota and her brother-in-law Matiasz Sawaniewski, who, like their father, was a “general of His Royal Majesty.”76 Thirteen days earlier, on 15 May 1654, the Sawaniewskis had entered Jan Dziblewski’s will into the acta of the Wilno chapter. Dziblewski had provided for himself a sort of old-age pension and healthcare plan—“so that I might [have] in my old age provision in viands, as well as clothing and the upkeep of my garments” was how he put it. He did this by willing to Dorota and Matiasz one of his two houses on the little street off Skop Street (the one at 47.03 on the more pungent side of the street nearer the river) and by allowing the couple to live in it while he was still alive in exchange for their continued care of his person. He would be living, after all, right across the street from them at 48.06.77 The will was dated 6 November 1652, about a year and a half before it was entered into the acts. Ewa Dziblewska complained that her sister and brother-in-law had perpetrated a fraud. She may have had a point. It is, in fact, a little odd that the will was entered into the acts so long after it was written and witnessed. Jan Dziblewski had died—without a will, in Ewa’s argument—in Wilno “during the pestilential air” at which time Ewa, “fleeing the Lord’s scourge and punishment,” had left the city. From other sources we know that Wilno was visited by plague in the fall of 1653.78 Sawaniewski had remained with his father-in-law and— this was the crux of the allegation—used the opportunity to lay claim to his possessions. The chapter seems not to have favored Ewa’s claim. She was, after all, in possession of a small house in the neighborhood, around the corner from her father’s house on Skop Street proper (49.03).79 In fact, their properties may have backed onto each other. Perhaps she had

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received it from him as a part of her dowry when she married. Her husband Szkil, as we saw above, had attributed his wife’s churlishness to the fact that he would not allow any dissolute living in “his residence,” but her subsequent complaint was more forceful on that issue: the event had taken place “in her house, the property of Mrs. Dziblewszczanka.” Part of Dziblewski’s motivation in making Sawaniewski the beneficiary of his will was that “I had promised and bound myself to give 200 Lithuanian k in ready dowry money, which dowry I have not surrendered until this day.” Testators often used deathbed reckonings to set right precisely these sorts of debts. Ewa, so it would seem, had been given a proper dowry when she married; Dorota had had to wait until the final dispositions. Perhaps Ewa was the older daughter. In any event, thirteen days before she made her allegations, on 15 May 1654, the same day Sawaniewski had registered Dziblewski’s will with the higher instance of the Wilno chapter court, Ewa Dziblewska also made an appearance before that body to register the sale of her “half a little wooden house” on Skop Street to His Grace, Mr. Jakub Miglin´ski Michalewicz, lieutenant of the castle of His Majesty the King, and his wife, Mrs. Halszka Tołkaczówna, making the Miglin´skis neighbors of Cecylia Kostromska/Win´ska.80 (The acta suggest she was heard just ahead of her brother-in-law.) The reason she sold the house was certainly lack of funds, but it also had to do with the fact that she had left Wilno the year before to avoid the plague, “wherefore that building had to succumb to ruin and plunder, as it now stands.” These were not exactly impoverished people. After all, Dziblewski owned two houses and had perhaps settled a third upon his older daughter at the time of her wedding. But the neighborhoods at the foot of the castles were poorer than others, and the houses in question were quite modest. The building on the river bank at 47.03 in which the Sawaniewskis were to set up house was wooden and contained nothing but “chambers two.” The one across the street at 48.03 where the general had expected to spend his last days before the plague carried him off was likewise a wooden house of only two chambers but with a stable for twenty horses (perhaps a requirement for the job). Ewa Szkilowa’s house at Skop Street 49.03 was also wooden, with four chambers, a stable for four horses, and a basement.81 Generals, although by definition members of the gentry, occupied the lowest reaches of the szlachta and sometimes entered that society only thanks to their office.82 They were among the early modern forerunners of the intelligentsia and made their modest livings only thanks to the fact that they were at least minimally literate. Dziblewski put his care in the hands of his married daughter and her husband (also a general) not necessarily because of doubts about Ewa’s reliability but because he owed a dowry to Dorota, and also because Ewa was now a single woman.

“So That There Not Be Further Suspicion about Us” At issue finally in Ewa Dziblewska’s case, the reason she was forced to sell her house, was the difficulty single women faced in their attempts to function as heads of households. Society and the courts viewed the situation as unnatural. Single women were not supposed to be

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heads of households, and even widows faced distinct (if surmountable) challenges. As they made their preparations for the journey to the next world, husbands sought to make provisions for their widows and orphans that would offer them some protection before the law and in society. Such provisions took the form of property and money, as well as guardians and curators to help manage them. One such case had occurred two houses down from the “half a little wooden house” Ewa Dziblewska sold to Jakub Miglin´ski in 1654. The address was Skop Street 49.05. It was there, twenty-two years earlier, on 12 February 1632, that Paweł Kotlik, “wheelwright, burgher of the Monwid Altar,” had put his name to his last will and testament.83 He was in fact literate, at least literate enough to write his own name, if somewhat clumsily, and he had acquired some modest wealth—above all, three little houses, all of them in the poorer neighborhoods of the chapter and related ecclesiastical jurisdictions clustered around the little branch of the Wilenka at the foot of the castles. Modest, but still—he had three of them! The purpose of his will was to prevent the occurrence of “all conflicts, disagreements, and discords after ∧ my death between my wife, Lady Ewa Zórawska, and our children, Adam Kotlik and Anna Kotlikówna Bartoszowa Zare˛bina, and other of my friends, kin, neighbors, and relatives, over my poor belongings.” Seeing that “none of my neighbors, kin, or relatives aided or of∧ fered succor to me in my needs and afflictions, except for my dear spouse, Lady Ewa Zórawska, and having experienced very great respect from her, both during my happy life with her, my spouse, for no little time, as well as great solicitude, labors, and many other acts of kindness during this my present severe illness,” he decided to leave all three houses to her as well as all his movable property—“that is, silver, pewter, copper, brass, and every sort of domestic implement”—barring all kin and in-laws from claims upon his property. Unlike Magdeburg law, which allowed spouses to inherit a certain portion of each other’s estates, the Lithuanian statute that was binding for the nobles’ land and castle courts—and apparently also for the chapter—made it difficult for husbands and wives to bequeath to each other property in perpetuity. In fact, it was forbidden. Still, couples sometimes sought ways to circumvent the ban. Spouses often left their goods to each other for lifetime use (including usufruct), often with the stipulation that the “lifetime use” (doz∧ywocie) would cease if the spouse remarried. Upon the death (or remarriage) of the remaining spouse, the estate would revert to the original property owner’s heirs, frequently to be settled upon a son or some other close male relative.84 As we have seen, the chapter court adhered to the provisions of ∧ the Lithuanian statute, and Kotlik adopted the strategies employed by the nobles. Zórawska was to have the use of her husband’s houses and movable goods for the duration of her life. During her lifetime, their son Adam would have the free right of residence with her “but only if he were to hold his mother and my spouse in all honor and respect.” Upon her death, the real estate would fall to the son “by natural law.” From this eventual inheritance, Adam was to give his sister 200 Lithuanian k, “and she is not to trouble him for a greater sum from this house.” Here again, it would seem likely that the father had already provided a dowry for his daughter and did not feel a need to consider her further in his will.

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∧ After Zórawska’s death the movable property was to be “divided evenly”—presumably this meant between the two children—with the exception of “the kettle and the alembic, which are to remain with the houses.” Kettles and alembics were used to produce the beer that the members of the household drank as their normal daily beverage and the vodka that was sold to help maintain the household. Such equipment was thus frequently seen as an ∧ integral part of the real estate. Further, upon Zórawska’s death two silver belts were to be the lot of the daughter Anna. If the son, Adam Kotlik, “should marry and depart this world without heirs,” the executors were to sell the houses and to return to his wife—“should he have one”—her dowry. The rest of the money was to go to the Bernardine Fathers, to the Roman Catholic Holy Trinity Church (an important local hospital institution), and to the hospital at the Catholic Church of St. Mary Magdalene (located in the immediate neighborhood at the end of Skop Street) “so that they pray to the Lord God for my soul, that of my wife, and my son.” Son-in-law Bartosz Zare˛ba, it would seem, was to take responsibility for providing for the soul of his own wife, Kotlik’s daughter Anna. At the very end of this disposition of goods we learn that son Adam was to receive—apparently immediately upon his father’s death—“the workshop of the wheelwright’s trade, and also all my gowns and clothes.” Kotlik chose two Skop Street neighbors—tailor Jan Kostromski (whose first wife had been one of the “poor maidens” provided a dowry by the local Roman Catholic charity) and weaver Ambroz∧y Marcinowicz (in 1636 the owner of the Skop Street house at 49.03 that eventually became the property of Ewa Dziblewska), both also Roman Catholics—to be the executors of his will and guardians of his minor son. Kotlik’s testament offers a few glimpses into the life of what seems to be a caring and well-functioning family of some modest means. He thanked his wife for their life together (while making a few complaints by way of comparison about the behavior of the more extended family), and he sought ways to care for her after his death. He made certain that his hard-earned though modest wealth would ultimately pass to his lone male heir, making provisions for that son’s professional future on the assumption that he too would become a master of the wheelwright’s trade. And he admonished him to “honor and respect” his mother, making a veiled threat that he could be thrown out of the house if he did otherwise. Some things went right, others not quite. As we learn from a deed of sale that Kotlik’s widow registered in the acta of the Wilno chapter on 11 May 1640 (eight years after her husband’s death), Adam Kotlik had indeed become a wheelwright and was in fact married. But he and his brother-in-law, ironsmith Bartosz Zare˛ba, had abandoned their wives and mother: Having deserted me, their mother, who is an invalid and has no deliverance from any source, since for several years now I do not leave my chamber, likewise also having abandoned their wives, they have departed the city of Wilno without notice. Being admonished for such a long time by me, and even by Their Graces themselves, the Fathers of the Wilno Chapter, and being soundly showered with letters at no little cost, wandering from place to place around various villages and towns, it is not known where they live, they do

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not return to us and to the aforementioned house, against the will and commandment of Their Graces, and they do not give, and do not wish to give, any sign of life to me their mother and wives, or to the Brother officials.85

The Office, the canons of the Wilno chapter, again took a paternalistic interest in the case, no doubt partially seeing their role as falling somewhere between those of marriage council∧ lors and the marriage police. But they were also functioning as landlords. Zórawska “owned” (i.e., had the right of usufruct of ) the house on Skop Street for the duration of her lifetime. But she also paid a kind of rent/tax to the jurisdiction to which the house belonged, in this case to the Wilno chapter and its Monwid Altar. In 1636 the house at Skop Street 49.05 was a wooden structure with “six chambers, a forge, a shed, a basement full of water, a brewery.”86 By 1640, the house, “especially because it was without a master of the house, [had] quite declined in its structure and fallen into ruin; moreover, it was encumbered with debts by [her] son, Adam Kotlik.” This situation gave rise to problems for the abandoned women, because “both the Office as well as the neighbors [the renters of chambers in the house in question] have great suspicion concerning [them], the white sex [i.e., women] living in the house without a man and without a master of the house.” And in fact, “[they] were commanded to sell the house without fail by an official admonition [of the chapter].” The two women heeded the admonition: And thus, seeing to it that there not be further suspicion about us, and that the house not rot to the bitter end and succumb to ruin, whereby the rent would decline for His Grace the Father Priest of the Monwid Altar, as well as for Their Graces the Fathers of the Chapter, and we would have lost our source of nourishment, wherefore, unable to maintain this house on our own, to provide for it and to pay the rents, and having such a consent and permission, both from His Grace the Father Priest of the Monwid Altar, as well as from Their Graces the Fathers of the Wilno Chapter, we sold this above-mentioned house irrevocably and in perpetuity for the removal of debts and for our source of nourishment.

If Lithuanian law made it impossible for husbands to bequeath property to wives in perpetuity, then how—the question naturally arises—were Kotlik’s widow and daughter in a position to sell the house? The deed of sale from which I have been drawing the second part of this narration provides some clues. The two women guaranteed the buyers that both we ourselves, in our own names and in those of the aforementioned Adam Kotlik, wheelwright, and Bartosz Zar˛eba, ironsmith, [the latter two who have been] cut off from this house by a decree of Their Graces [the canons of the Wilno chapter] on account of their dissolute life, as well as [in the names of ] all our neighbors, kin, and relatives, and especially of strangers, are not to, and will not be able to make any hindrance or obstacle in the tenancy of this house.

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In other words, the chapter, as the holder of jurisdiction over this house, saw itself in a position to take title away from the eventual owner, Adam Kotlik, and to give it to his mother, at least to the extent that she now had clear title to transfer ownership to the buyers. The remainder of the contract contained detailed language about how and in what legal forums the sellers undertook to guarantee the clear title of the buyers, Jan Kostromski (one of the witnesses of Kotlik’s will) and his second wife, Cecylia Szymakowska, as well as their heirs, to the possession of the house should anyone from the seller’s side challenge it. This was the standard legalese of the time, and all wills and deeds of property specifically removed any future claims from “neighbors, kin, relatives, and strangers.” But the boilerplate took on more urgency in this case in view of the sellers’ somewhat tenuous claim to ownership. In fact, the sale was never successfully challenged. As we have seen, tailor Jan Kostromski moved down the street from 49.08 to the Kotlik house at 49.05 in 1640. His widow, Cecylia Szymakowska, bequeathed the Kotlik house to her daughter Justyna Kostromska, who still owned the house at her death in 1696.

“Wishing to Have a Place to Nestle My Head in My Old Age” Across Castle Street, more or less at the latitude of Skop Street, was Bernardine Street, which was also under the chapter jurisdiction. Here, at 53.04 Bernardine Street, lived boilermaker Adam Mikołajewicz. On 17 April 1639, he put his name to a last will and testament, which his widow Zofia Gałuszczanka would bring to be written into the chapter acta on 10 May.87 He decided to draw up his testament, knowing that “all things created by God on Earth and man himself . . . are subject to decay, . . . taking care lest wary death catch me unawares, though I am at the moment, by God’s visitation, in weak health, nonetheless with good memory and a sound mind.” The purpose was one of the usual ones: “so that, after my departure from this world, no squabbles and disturbances over my property, both immovable and movable, arise between my dearest spouse and my in-laws and kin, as well as my sister Zofia, who is in the state of matrimony with Mikołaj the white-leather tanner.” He left clear title to—not just lifetime use of—his house on Bernardine Street, together with the household brewery and his boilermaking shop, as well as “pewter, copper, silver, gold, my gowns,” to his “dearest spouse, Zofia Gałuszczanka Adamowa Mikołajewiczowa, for her kind and faithful living with me and her sincere and courteous service, both in health and in my sickness.” He removed his sister as well as all kin and in-laws from any claim, settling his remaining wealth upon Wilno Catholic churches and hospitals, and asking to be buried across the street with the Bernardines. He named two neighbors as executors of his will and as the guardians of his widow: Krzysztof Zyburtowski (Skop Street 49.11) and Stanisław ∧ Zurowicz (Mill Street 50.08). Two other neighbors acted as witnesses: organ maker Korneliusz Krapoliusz (just across the street at Bernardine Street 52.03) and tailor Józef Nacewicz (next door at Bernardine Street 53.05).88

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But Zofia Gałuszczanka seems to have been able to look after herself. In fact, the reason Mikołajewicz left the house to her in perpetuity was probably because it was hers in the first place. As we learn from another document of almost ten years later (18 May 1648), Gałuszczanka had been married before.89 Her first husband, Jan Stefanowicz, had also been a boilermaker. Together they had purchased the Bernardine Street house in 1610. It burned twice—in fact, most of the city burned in 1610, so it was most likely destroyed the first time almost immediately after they bought it—and twice she would rebuild “at her own no little expense.” After Stefanowicz’s death, she had, along with Adam Mikołajewicz, “annulled the not insignificant debts of my first spouse.” In 1636, her Bernardine Street house was a wooden structure containing “two chambers—one of which including an alcove—a shop, a boilermaker’s forge, brewery, bath, shed for a few horses.”90 After Mikołajewicz’s death in 1639, Gałuszczanka had the misfortune, or bad judgment, to marry a certain Wacław Ambroz∧ejewicz, occupation unknown (at least to me). In any event, by 1648 she was—as her complaint had it—“in [her] dotage and already in an advanced age, abandoned by [her] spouse, Wacław Ambroz∧ejewicz, who has been living in Min´sk for a few years, and bereft, on account of him, in all of [her] poverty, and not having any source of maintenance and succor in [her] old age.” Thus, being yet in good health, she began to look for a road to survival for a single woman of some years—for, as she put it, “a place to nestle [her] head in [her] old age.” She did this, first, by proving clear title to the Bernardine Street house and, second, by removing all claims to it by “my spouse, Wacław Ambroz∧ejewicz, his children and kin, who, in my old age, having deprived me of my entire poor pittance, has abandoned me for some years now and does not wish to and does not take any pains for me.” Her solution was to transfer ownership of the house to a younger couple, who throughout all the years nourished me, as a reward for their services and no small expense, which they did for me and do not cease to do, encouraging them to further effort and care for me in my dotage and advanced age, so that, until my death, I might have provision and a place to nestle my head with them, and after my death also the burial of my body with the Bernardine fathers in Wilno next to my dear first husbands.

The couple and their heirs were to receive clear title and the ability to do with the house what they would—as the boilerplate of the time had it, “to rule and dispose of it as their property and to give, bequeath, sell, exchange it with whom they will, to build, brick, and enjoy all fruits of commerce.” This included, of course, the stipulation that the obligatory rents of four k were to be paid to the chapter “every year, on Michaelmas [29 September], together with the other citizens [of the chapter].” The recipients of this largesse were “noble Lord Stanisław Pisanka and his lady spouse, Lady Anna Ambroz∧ejewiczówna, my niece [on the sister’s side].” (The largesse was not

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without conditions, of course, since the goal was “to encourage them to further effort and solicitude.”) Gałuszczanka appeared before the court in 1648 as “Mrs. Zofia Gałustówna Adamowa Mikołajewiczowa, a boilermaker’s wife,” as if denying legal status to that third marriage. She was illiterate. Her witnesses were again her close neighbors, some of them signatories to her second husband’s will: Korneliusz Krapoliusz, organ maker from across the street (52.03); neighbor on the one side, Józef Nacewicz (53.05); and another who signed his name in German and in German script as “Ludewichtt Fakinetth,” a painter, who also owned a house in Bernardine Street.91

“Upon Whom the Lord God Visited Incomplete Health and Reason” Just across the street from Zofia Gałuszczanka, at Bernardine Street 52.03, lived a certain Gertruda Szulcówna. She was the wife of our organ maker, Korneliusz Krapoliusz, and mother to four daughters. Although apparently German, the couple was Roman Catholic. Korneliusz had died either at the very beginning of the period of exile or sometime before the family fled Wilno. In any case, she—“Gertrudt Cornelschin, Orgelbauerin von der Willde, wittib [Gertrud, former wife of Korneliusz, organ maker’s widow from Wilno]”—figured alone as head of the household among the Vilnans of all confessions who had sought asylum in Lutheran Königsberg during the Muscovite occupation.92 Szulcówna rebuilt their bricked house on Bernardine Street, “already being in the widowed state, after the death of my lord spouse, Krapoliusz Korneliusz, after the ruination and burning [of our house] by the enemy Muscovite, at no small cost and with great expense, by my own labor.”93 Perhaps she was the first to have the house bricked. In 1636 it was still a wooden structure, containing “two chambers, a workshop, a basement, a brewery, a stable for one horse, a second for hay, a shed for six horses.”94 Szulcówna was a determined woman. She did not remarry, and she would live and conduct her own affairs as a single woman at least until January 1671, when she put her name to her last will and testament. Or rather, she had her legal guardian put his name to it, as she was illiterate. Her entire estate—all that “the Lord God has deigned to give me upon this miserable vale of the world, from the labor of my hands and bloody sweat”—was the “little bricked house” on Bernardine Street, together with a few household furnishings, including the beer kettle in the brewery, some linens, and some clothing. It was difficult—as we know from the cases of Ewa Dziblewska, Ewa Kotlikowa, and Zofia Mikołajewiczowa—for a single woman to manage a household. And yet many widows did just that, surviving, some indeed prospering, for many years. Szulcówna was one of them. As was customary and foreseen by the Lithuanian statute, Szulcówna named guardians for her daughters. Three of them had been married, and two of them were still in the company of their husbands. Perhaps the third had been widowed or abandoned by 1671. Szulcówna left her entire estate “to my dearest four daughters, by name, Lady Anna Gramel, Miss Elz∧bieta, Lady Katarzyna wife of Tusyn [the “Toussen Begien” who had arrived in Königsberg

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by 1656 with a previous wife], Lady Zuzanna wife of Antoni, on account of their well-disposed and faithful attendance, for their exertions and diligent care during my illness.” In fact, the married daughters would not have had to receive legal guardians other than their husbands, the “natural guardians” of married women.95 Szulcówna saw her married daughters and their husbands as informal guardians of the unmarried daughter. Her intent was that the legal guardians exercise a kind of check on the behavior of her daughters and sons-in-law. The beer kettle formed an integral part of the real estate and was to be sold with the house, which Szulcówna thought might fetch in the neighborhood of 2,000 zł. The three married daughters had all received dowries and were thus to be contented each with one-fifth of the proceeds. As for “Miss Elz∧bieta,” not only had she not married, but “the Lord God had visited upon [her] incomplete health and reason.” Still, she too seems to have ministered, as she was able, to her mother’s needs in her final illness. In any event, her mother included her along with the other daughters in her words of gratitude. Many of the provisions of the will were crafted to provide care for Elz∧bieta for the rest of her life. Szulcówna entrusted her daughter “to the guardianship above all of the Lord God, and then of her other sisters and Their Lords, the guardians.” In lieu of a dowry, “Miss Halszka”— from this point forward Szulcówna used the diminutive form of Elz∧bieta in referring to her daughter—was to receive 300 zł, plus the 50 zł given her by her godmother (and apparently held in trust by her mother up to that point). In addition, she was to receive two-fifths of the proceeds from the sale of the house “so that she might be able to have her subsistence from this.” The linens and clothing, “all of this of my own good will, remembering her infirmity/ incompetence [niedołe˛z∧nos´´c ], I grant and bequeath to my daughter Halszka.” The inventory was short but specific: old bedclothes, namely ten pillows, two old featherbeds, with covers and coverlets, twenty skeins of yarn, four sashes, four hand towels, four sheets, three of them with lace and one without lace, four shirts and all the other white linens, an old turquoise dress, a cherry-red woolen undercoat lined with old fox fur, an old black camlet petticoat and an old, unlined camlet undercoat, an old, black, half-velvet cap with marten-fur edgings.

“Miss Halszka, the poor orphan,” was “to be done no harm.” The guardians were to see to it that “every year Miss Halszka was to receive provision [i.e., food and drink] and clothing from these several hundred złotys.” When the linens and clothing bequeathed to her by her mother “should become tattered,” then the older son-in-law, Mr. Gramel, was to provide new garments out of the principal sum. Szulcówna’s circle of friends included one influential German Catholic: burgomaster Mikołaj Rychter, who would appear in German circles, both Catholic and Protestant.96 He signed the testament in her stead (since she was illiterate), and he was one of the witnesses of the document. Probably he was also one of the guardians, although the promised list of

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those individuals does not appear in the acta. Szulcówna would ask to be buried in the Bernardine cemetery on which her property abutted. Perhaps her family, like the Ludewichtt Fakinetth, who had placed his German signature next to that of Krapoliusz in witnessing Gałuszczanka’s deed, was drawn by the congregation of German Catholics at the Bernardines’ nearby Church of Saint Anne.97

Topographies of Poor Relief Brian Pullan has offered one formulation of the “standard questions” that invite attention in “any analysis of poor relief in any early modern European society.” They include • the motives for providing poor relief • the means by which poor relief was to effect social improvement • the extent to which it was to bring spiritual benefits to the giver and to the recipient of alms • the extent to which poor relief was administered discriminately • the extent to which poor relief was the concern of churchmen versus laymen • the relationship between state action and private initiative.98 The consensus of the last decades of research has been that the expected differences along confessional lines do not appear in practice. We do not find, to use extreme formulations, mostly indiscriminate, individual almsgiving in Catholic societies, more for the salvation of the almsgiver than for the good of the poor, organized (however loosely) by Church institutions; nor do we find that rationalized, centralized poor relief, organized by the state or municipality for the good of the poor and of society was a monopoly of Protestant communities. As Pullan put it, generalizing upon his conclusions on Venetian poor relief: “General attitudes to the poor were often determined by a rather similar mixture of pity and fear, of genuine humanity and brutal paternalism, and by a similar determination to eliminate criminals and social parasites—whether a given society had remained Catholic, or whether it had severed its allegiance to Rome.”99 Still, one senses in Pullan’s discussion of Venice a reluctance to abandon all notion of confessional particularity, and five years later, in a short study devoted to Catholic poor relief, he was phrasing the same idea more cautiously: “The conclusions of every local study are clouded by the suspicion that its people were acting, not as Catholics, but as Parisians, or Lyonnais, or Venetians.”100 Here he noted, however, some important differences (Protestant societies did not include pilgrims among recipients of alms, for instance), and, in a cautious revision of the currently accepted revisionism, he returned to the traditional “hoary question,” rephrasing it, more provocatively than hitherto, as a strong suspicion about Catholic particularity:

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Can we find in Protestant Europe—and before the days of General Booth—a situation in which the practice of mercy becomes a tactic at once in a personal quest for Christ and a war against sin, a campaign for the conquest of souls conducted by lay brotherhoods and sisterhoods, clerically inspired and bent on self-sanctification through the salvation of others in the greatest possible numbers?

As Pullan has suggested, Protestant cities may sometimes have transformed monasteries into hospitals and redirected their budgets for charitable uses, but Catholic cities “extended monasticism and imposed it upon the poor.”101 Catholic attitudes toward good works could easily be incorporated into “rationalized” systems for the delivery of poor relief: giving to the Monti di Pietà of Renaissance Venice not only made for more effective care of the impoverished; it also maximized the “store of merit” accumulated by the almsgiver.102 To what extent can we answer questions like these for early modern Wilno? Our assessment will be intricately linked with our view of the ways in which seventeenth-century Wilno society (or societies) functioned. My working assumption has been that poverty in seventeenth-century Wilno—as in other early modern European cities—was both marginalized and “verticalized.” Early modern cities did not have the sorts of social zoning that characterize their modern counterparts.103 Still, Kiechel, our German visitor to the city, did note the existence of a “better” district in the still largely wooden Wilno of 1586, in which two “more fashionable streets or ways” formed a notable exception: the houses there were mostly bricked, and prosperous German Lutheran merchants inhabited them. As we have seen, the streets in question were probably Castle Street and German Street. Fifty years later the city was more thoroughly bricked, but those two centrally placed streets, both leading to the town hall, remained the location of some of the largest and most opulent town houses. Conversely, poor people tended to crowd the smaller, usually wooden structures just inside the city walls and in the suburbs. As elsewhere, we find these poorer settlements clustered under the royal castles in Wilno, in Skop and Bernardine Streets under the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Chapter, but also across the little branch of the Wilenka from them. And the Antokol and Szerejkiszki suburbs were not the only sites of poverty. Occasional stories in the magistracy court documents give the impression of similar penury and squalor in Transfluvia and in the suburbs outside the other town gates where some of the lowlier and dirtier trades had concentrated. Indeed, in some instances practitioners of those trades (e.g., butchers) had been banned to those locations from within the city walls. In other cases, some of the dirtier trades gravitated naturally to the banks of the Wilenka on the northern edge of the city and the Wilia to the north and west, the waters of which they dirtied through their work (furriers, tanners, papermakers).104 These areas were still mostly wooden at the end of the seventeenth century. But in addition to finding a home on the margins, in early modern cities poverty often lived side by side with wealth—or rather, above and below wealth, in attics and basements,

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perhaps also in courtyard outbuildings and little rooms off gates to houses. Thus poverty was not only marginalized; it was also verticalized. Here, too, we are at the mercy of anecdotal evidence from sources like protestations that allow us to situate the neighbors in specific houses. And even when we do encounter the neighbors in the extant sources, it is difficult to form an impression of their wealth. Still, protestations involving owners and neighbors, some of them containing quite drastic descriptions of violent acts and allegations of witchcraft and other deviant behavior, may lend some credence to the suspicion that relatively affluent owners of buildings lived across the wall with poorer renters, whom they occasionally sought to remove from their buildings by going to court. After all, an apothecary, a tailor, a tailor’s widow, a baker, a cobbler, an embroiderer, and a furrier were all living in rented chambers in the Castle Street house of apothecary Jarosz Jabłko (1.37), right next to a house owned by Radziwiłł princes, important dignitaries of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and— most important—one in which they resided while in Wilno (1.38).105 There were separate neighborhoods where wealthy, middle-level, and modest Lutherans congregated, Catholic nobles and Catholic poor, setting themselves apart not only from other confessions but also from other groupings of co-confessionals defined by estates and professions. But just as we found confessional exceptions to the rule among owners and neighbors, so we also sense the presence of modest, perhaps also impoverished, renters of attics, basements, and outbuildings in better neighborhoods, as well as nobles residing temporarily during trips to the capital in places like Skop Street. In examining poor relief, among other issues, Joke Spaans has argued that the “pillarization” (verzuilung) that occurred in Holland in the nineteenth century—the division of society into separate, self-governing communities peacefully coexisting side by side—offers clues to understanding Dutch religious toleration in the seventeenth century.106 She points to two main facets of life in the Republic. First is the highly decentralized nature of that state: “Arrangements were concluded at a local, rather than a central, level.” Second is the fact that the Dutch Reformed Church “probably never encompassed a clear majority of the population,” which made it “an ambiguous partner of the political power in the construction of a confessional state.” The result, she argues, was “a society that was free and ordered.” Spaans comes to the conclusion “that it was not Erasmian tolerance or magisterial laxity”—the two parameters that had shaped the discussion in the past—“that produced public recognition and relative freedom for dissident groups”; rather, the main cause was “a rather strict disciplinarian regime and a considerable amount of social engineering.” As R . Po-Chia Hsia notes in his introductory appreciation of Spaans’s essay, “This genius in mapping social topography ensured that religious and civil identities were anchored in separate spaces, which allowed for a nuanced articulation of the individual, the communal, and the civil in different representations.”107 Centralized forms of poor relief in seventeenth-century Wilno, such as those delivered by the beggars’ corporation and the guilds, were not founded on such notions. These sodalities brought together all of Christian Wilno, or at least that is what their statutes indicate. In all

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other regards, the statute of the beggars’ corporation resembles other Catholic plans for centralized, rationalized poor relief: begging and individual almsgiving were limited but not entirely banned; pilgrims might be included as recipients of aid; able-bodied men were excluded and put to work; a beggars’ altar was established in a Catholic church. The differences here were that the recipients of this sort of aid were of all five Christian confessions represented in the Wilno landscape and that all five confessions were brought together in one beggars’ corporation. Church-related poor relief would naturally tend toward parallel structures separated by confession, and there are many indications that priests and pastors sought to use hospitals and other eleemosynary programs as confessionalizing tools. But there are also indications that these goals were difficult to achieve and that they were not necessarily the goals of all involved (perhaps not even of all the clergy involved) with these institutions. The Calvinist synod of 1642 had to call for a purge of non-Calvinist residents of their newly relocated Wilno hospital. This was just two years after the Wilno Calvinists had been banned from within the walls and forced to reestablish their church, school, and hospital just outside. We may wonder how successful the clergy was in its attempts to distinguish the sheep from the goats among the poor Calvinist widows. The Uniate metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus´ Antoni Sielawa conducted a similar purge of the hospital at the Uniate cathedral Church of the Most Pure [Virgin] in 1652, although its goal was to weed out able-bodied malingerers and not, for instance, the crypto-Orthodox.108 Catholic and Uniate hospitals were at least partially administered by the magistracy, and we know of at least one instance when a Lutheran merchant was overseeing one of the more important Catholic poorhouses. Lutheran merchants gave to Catholic hospitals not only out of charity and perhaps the desire that the poor pray for their souls but also so that “the poor people of [our Lutheran] confession might find refuge [there].”109 All the churches also organized bursae for poor students, although the Catholic institutions were the most numerous and best endowed. Catholics and Lutherans, under the rubric of the Mons Pietatis, established banks to lend at modest interest to poor parishioners, and the other confessions provided similar services, if under different names, through their confraternities.110 Presumably, most borrowers were expected to be parishioners of the church administering the loan, but there may have been exceptions here. The attitudes of Orthodox and Uniate Vilnans toward poverty and charity remain especially elusive. According to tradition, the Orthodox of Muscovy did not stigmatize the poor, and they viewed charity as a purely voluntary and private matter, eventually in overt opposition to Western—Protestant, but also Catholic—approaches.111 It is unclear to what extent this opposition functioned in the minds of Ruthenian Vilnans. But even if such attitudes were a part of local Ruthenian identity, and this cannot be ruled out, we may certainly suspect that in this matter, as in so many others, the Uniates at Holy Trinity and the Orthodox at Holy Spirit were busy emulating and competing with each other, and with their Catholic and Protestant neighbors, in creating networks of hospitals and brother- and sisterhoods to aid the poor.

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Jewish institutions largely paralleled the Christian ones.112 The hospital, or hekdesh, was similarly both a poorhouse and a place to care for the sick. Like their Christian counterparts, they were part religious institutions, part secular, administered by overseers called gabbaim, appointed by the kahal. Polish-Lithuanian Jews formed funeral brotherhoods (chevroth kadisha) and charitable brotherhoods (chevroth tsedaka). They laid down rules for the behavior of Jewish beggars, and they established societies for endowing impoverished Jewish brides.113 In addition to reflecting the attitudes of the Jewish community toward poverty and charity, these institutions also served, for example, to deter poor Jewish girls from converting to Roman Catholicism in exchange for an alms or a dowry (with or without a Gentile husband). The Mons Pietatis first grew up as a reaction to, and in competition with, Jewish bankers to whom poor Christians sometimes turned in need.114 I have found no contemporary Wilno voices on this question. Still, it is possible that the various Christian loan funds we encounter in seventeenth-century Wilno arose in similar circumstances. In any event, Christian wills and testaments indicate that Jews and Christians held goods in pawn for each other (in both directions!), and they suggest that this kind of Jewish-Christian lending may have played some role in individual attempts to provide for economic survival, perhaps in both communities. In all communities—including here the Tatars115—it is likely that the most important type of poor relief, at least at the practical level, was of the thoroughly decentralized self-help sort. Most studies of poor relief have not included “improvised poor relief ” in their analyses. Robert Jütte’s work of 1994 remains an important exception here. I see no reason to exclude these sorts of personal retirement accounts and private health care funds from the context of the Montes Pietatis, guild boxes, and other more institutionalized delivery systems. I would guess that many Vilnans sought to make use of as many sources as possible in time of need. Improvised poor relief is one context in which to assess the extent to which the relatively peaceful coexistence among the confessions and religions in Wilno was founded upon something like pillarization. The five stories about self-help I chose to recount here came from two related neighborhoods under one jurisdiction, that of the Roman Catholic Chapter. More important, they played themselves out in a set of interrelated human networks, all of which seem to have been nearly exclusively Roman Catholic. Other such stories could probably be situated in nearly exclusively Lutheran, Calvinist, Orthodox, and Uniate networks. This might suggest something like the pillarization of Wilno society, and there are good reasons to suspect that this aspect was one important facilitator of religious toleration in Wilno. But there were also many networks (and neighborhoods) built across confessional lines. Uniates and Orthodox shared a neighborhood around Subocz Street and elsewhere, and they frequently intermarried and looked to each other for guardians and executors of wills. Lutherans and Calvinists lived across from each other on upper Castle Street, intermarried, and chose each other as godparents and guardians. Surprisingly frequent—and here is where we are able to do some limited quantifying—were the appearances of non-Catholic godparents

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at the baptisms at Wilno’s Roman Catholic parish Church of St. John (and the parents of the babies in question were both Catholic in most cases). Even Jews may have been tempted to look across boundaries of religion in their attempts to help themselves. At least that is the inference I draw from a decree of the Holy Community of Cracow (Kazimierz) that “if a person desire to appoint gentile guardians [apotropsim], he must be opposed and all possible punishments applied.”116 So yes, Vilnans congregated and organized their self-help around pillars. But they also formed constellations of pillars, some more frequently and easily than others, but all combinations were possible. Godparenthood was not only, perhaps not even primarily, about religious upbringing: it was also about forming networks of people in a “relation of formal amity,” who could be called upon in time of need.117 Wilno’s religious toleration depended upon the willingness of confession-specific communities and networks to live peaceful lives in parallel, but it also stemmed from the willingness of families and individuals to look beyond confessional limits for aid to material and physical well-being and from the willingness of people of another confession to provide it. This should not cause us to be blind—to return now to Pullan’s “cloud of suspicions”—to possible differences, subtle or not, in the expectations of individuals and confessional communities about the social and spiritual goals of poor relief, even if all made use of the same institutions and strategies. An evaluation of last wills and testaments will shed further light on this issue. Is it only coincidence that several of the cases of “indiscriminate almsgiving” I have come upon—to all “the poor who lie about the streets and beg for money”—are found in the wills of Roman Catholic Vilnans?118 Still, when Lutheran Andrzej von Embden gave to the Catholic hospital in Antokol, we have to ask whether he was acting only as a patron of Lutheran paupers. Or was he building a better civil society? Or did he harbor some expectation of salvation, his own and that of the recipients of his largesse? In spite of the opposing Catholic and Protestant teachings on good works (and, no doubt, the development of Orthodox and Uniate positions on these questions in response to the Protestant-Catholic debate), it is hard to rule out any of these motivations in individual Vilnans, and we will find certain unexpected “Catholic remnants” (or perhaps syncretisms) in the attitudes of Protestant Vilnans in their preparations for death, including in their provisions for posthumous almsgiving.

~ c ha p t e r f ou rt e en~

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ompa funebris (funereal pomp) was the order of the day at the castle church in Wilno on 20 July 1592. The wife of the palatine of Wilno and hetman of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was to be laid to her eternal rest. She—Katarzyna z Te˛czyna Radziwiłłowa—was a Roman Catholic. Her husband, Prince Krzysztof Mikołaj Radziwiłł “the Thunderbolt” (1547–1603), the son of Mikołaj Radziwiłł “the Red,” was the leading patron of the Lithuanian Calvinist Church in its second generation. Presiding over the ceremonies was Father Stanisław Grodzicki (1541–1613), a Jesuit and a vociferous confessional polemicist, one of the stricter doctrinalists in the first generation of Jesuits native to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.1 It was they, among other orders, who made the Roman Catholic reconquest of the Polish-Lithuanian elites a central part of their mission.2 Grodzicki used the occasion to lecture a captive audience—one that included a certain number of Calvinists—on the nature of purgatory and the differences between Roman Catholic and heterodox teaching on the subject. When he published his sermon soon after the event, he dedicated it not to the bereaved Radziwiłł but to Prince Lew Sapieha, then chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, who would eventually succeed Radziwiłł in the offices of palatine of Wilno and hetman. Sapieha was in fact the son-in-law of the deceased and the widower, married to their daughter, Halszka (Elz∧bieta) Radziwiłłówna.3 And although he had made the journey from Eastern Orthodoxy through Calvinism to Roman Catholicism— or perhaps precisely because of this biographical fact—Grodzicki chose to identify him only as “a constant and ardent Catholic.” Moreover, he made no mention of the dedicatee’s relationship to the deceased. In his dedicatory preface, Grodzicki set the stage for the battle of homilies that was to arise from the event.4 Present at the funeral, in addition to Sapieha (and no doubt the widower, although Grodzicki kept silent on this issue), had been “intruders [who had] insinuated themselves among the listeners.” The “intruders” were, of course, co-confessionals of the grieving husband, chief among whom was Calvinist pastor Andrzej Chrza˛stowski (ca. 1555–1618), Krzysztof Radziwiłł I’s “court minister” in Birz∧e. According to Grodzicki, the minister soon thereafter—the title page tells us it was on 26 July 1592, six days later— preached a sermon to the flock in Wilno rebutting Catholic teaching on purgatory, which he

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published under the title Psychotopia: Or, the Purgatory of Father Stanisław Grodzicki (Wilno, 1592). That work was dedicated to Radziwiłł. The nitpicking with which Grodzicki began his self-defense betrays some unease over the profound differences that were at play here. Chrza˛stowski had claimed that Grodzicki had worked on his sermon for three and a half months. It seems likely that he had indeed spent some time in preparation for the event, given the lengths to which he went to deny this mundane allegation. After all, Grodzicki insisted to Sapieha, “just how could I have done this, not knowing whether I was to give the sermon at this funeral, indeed whether this funeral was to take place in Wilno or somewhere else (since there were various reports about this).” Just four days before the funeral, a servant of Radziwiłł had approached Grodzicki, and “somewhat before that”—the phrase is perhaps purposefully vague—the bishop’s assistant had come to the academy on a mission. He brought back the news that the Calvinist prince wished to have “someone ex Societate nostra [from our Society] give the sermon.” Thus the pastor had turned “four days into almost the same number of months.” What is more, Grodzicki made a special point of the fact that he had in fact preached without a written text, “for this is nothing new with me.” It was only in response to the Calvinist minister’s printed attempt at a refutation of Catholic doctrine that he had felt moved to produce a written text “from memory, from a few little notes that I had made for myself.”5 The stakes were clearly high for the two clergymen, as one would expect in the context of ultimate matters such as death and the afterlife. Grodzicki’s published sermon took up fortyfive quarto pages, to which was appended a sixty-six-page refutation of Chrza˛stowski’s Psychotopia entitled A Weighing of the Psychotopia. He followed it up with a Second Sermon on Purgatory (Wilno, 1593), which he published the next year on the occasion of the funeral for Albrycht Radziwiłł (1558–1592), who was Krzysztof ’s cousin and the Roman Catholic son of the first patron of Lithuanian Calvinism, Mikołaj Radziwiłł “the Black” (1515–1565). (All the Lithuanian Calvinist patriarch’s children would revert to Roman Catholicism.) Doctrine on purgatory ought to have had direct influence on practices surrounding preparations for death, for the ritual of death itself, for funerals and burial, and for the further relationship between the living and the dead. The crux of the differences here was the Protestant rejection of the efficacy of works and the assertion that the Christian was justified by faith alone, solely through the unmerited grace of God. As a result, Lutherans and Calvinists— and some of the Orthodox polemicists in the period immediately following the 1596 Union of Brest—would argue that purgatory was a Roman Catholic innovation and that therefore there was no need for prayers (and no need to pay for Masses) for the souls of the dead. The prayers were in fact useless.6 Roman Catholics and Uniates (and, as we will see, the actual practice of the Orthodox) held just the opposite—that there was some third place, whatever it was called and whether or not it was a place of purging fire. Thus requiem Masses and other liturgies and prayers for the dead and commemorations were an important part of life and something for which people made provisions in their wills. This remained the case after the Tridentine reforms.7

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To return for a moment to the scene in the castle church. Grodzicki argued before that audience—or at least in the printed version of the sermon—that “from the beginning of the world, almost all the peoples, Jewish, pagan, Catholic, apostate, Mohammedan” made some sort of offerings for their dead: prayers, alms, torments of the body. All believed in the temporary purification of the souls of the sinful dead, and “all prayed for them, either to false gods, or to the true God.” As visible proof of the inconsistency of heterodox teaching, Grodzicki took his audience on an imaginary walk to the local Lutheran cemetery, where the gravestones were full of epitaphs, that is to say, tablets, or funereal pictures (for among other wonders the new faiths have brought it about that people, having cast images and commemorations of the lives of Christ the Lord and His saints out of their churches, have set up pictures of their parents or kin, with descriptions of their lives) usually with this inscription in German at the end: Welcher selbe Gott genedig sei, that is, “for whose soul may the Lord God be merciful.”8

This was something all Vilnans could see for themselves—Grodzicki, so it would seem, had done so—by taking a stroll in the Saxon garden located just beyond Wilia Gate. Grodzicki had noted, somewhat scornfully, the presence of non-Catholics at a Catholic funeral. His Jesuit colleague Jakub Wujek—their tenures at the Wilno Academy had not quite overlapped—had argued that “our Catholics sin when they dare to have contact with heretics in matters that have to do with the faith, being at their baptisms, weddings, and funerals.”9 Albrycht Stanisław Radziwiłł (1593 or 1595–1656), chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, memoirist, and propagator of the cult of the Virgin—he was the Roman Catholic grandson of Mikołaj Radziwiłł “the Black”—had worked out a compromise: he wrote in his diaries that it was his practice to accompany the funeral processions of his non-Catholic acquaintances only as far as the church doors and then, as a good Catholic, to turn his back and return home. But he also noted, with a certain amount of disdain, that many of his fellow Catholics took full part in heterodox funeral services, probably, he thought, out of a desire to ingratiate themselves with the likes of his cousin Krzysztof Radziwiłł II (d. 1640), palatine of Wilno, grand hetman of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and patron of Lithuanian Calvinists in the third generation.10 Krzysztof II was the son of the Katarzyna z Te˛czyna whose Roman Catholic funeral had been held by the Jesuit Grodzicki. Similar ties bringing Vilnans of various confessions together at the hour of death were not limited to noble families. Among burghers as well, relationships based on blood, kinship, neighborhood, and membership in secular corporations (the guilds, for example) gathered Vilnans of various confessions around deathbeds, at funerals, and in processions to final resting places. Still, the stakes were great, and we will see a range of attitudes and practices— from the most exclusionary to the most inclusive—reflected in wills and other pieces of evidence. Among the questions to be considered in this chapter are the rhetorical norms for the

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writing of wills across the confessions and religions; the circles of friends, guardians of surviving minor children, curators of widows, executors and witnesses of wills whom the dying gathered around their deathbeds—either literally or by naming them in the will; the rules worked out for public funeral processions of members of the various communities through the streets of Wilno from places of death to the churches and in some cases, from churches and temples to intra- and extramural gardens or cemeteries; and the provisions for bequests of property and for last rites and posthumous commemorations that Vilnans made for themselves in their final days and hours.

Testamentary Rhetoric Although there was some variation within the limits of the literary genre of the will, that range was narrow. Not all rhetorical building blocks were present in every case. Still, there was a certain predictability to the progression of what was frequently a lengthy prologue.11 A catalog of an ideal type of testamentary rhetoric might go something like this: an invocation to God; an acknowledgment that while all are mortal, no one knows the time and circumstances of death; a declaration that things not committed to writing will eventually sink into oblivion; a statement of purpose, typically to avoid conflict between the survivors; a dispensation of one’s soul to God, with requests for forgiveness of sins, and of one’s body to the earth. All of these set the stage for detailed provisions for bequests of property to individuals and institutions and the naming of guardians, curators, executors, and witnesses. This second part, of course, was quite different in each individual case, and usually much longer than the prologue. The reader is struck more by sameness than by difference in the sometimes quite detailed prologues. In fact, if we skip over the hints provided by the names of the “author” of the testament (most of the dying were aided by a notary, which complicates the question of authorship), these texts arouse a certain suspense in the reader as to the confession—indeed, sometimes as to the religion—of the testator. In rare instances a separate statement of religious belief was inserted between provisions for the soul and for the body. But in most cases we discover confessional allegiance only in a laconic instruction that the deceased be interred, “according to Christian rite, honorably and fittingly,” in a particular Wilno church. In some cases, knowledge of the confession of the church in question is simply assumed. This rhetorical leveling creates a first impression—a partially mistaken first impression, I argue—of sameness across the confessions in attitudes toward and preparations for death and the afterlife. A brief survey of prologues to wills drawn from the various communities both reveals the rhetorical leveling and points to some of the differences that will become more pronounced further on in my discussion and to which I devote more attention in subsequent sections. “In the name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the One God in the Holy Trinity. May this matter remain for eternal memory”: thus did Calvinist merchant

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Jakub Desaus II (Castle Street 1.26) begin his will of 13 November 1675. Uniate salt merchant Afanas Otroszkiewicz, who lived in the suburb outside Sharp Gate, had his will of 5 April 1666 entered into the same books of the Wilno bench: “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.” Soon thereafter his Orthodox widow, Katarzyna Kuryłowiczówna Otroszkiewiczowa, would have her own will of 18 November 1666 placed in the identical acta: “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.” Roman Catholic wheelwright Paweł Kotlik, burgher of the Roman Catholic Chapter jurisdiction (Skop Street 49.05), who signed his will on 12 February 1632, began, “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, the one God in the Trinity. Let this be to the execution and completion of all things written below in this testament of mine. Amen.” And his neighbor in the chapter jurisdiction, Anna Rejchowiczówna Emplowa (Skop Street 49.06), Lutheran widow of organist (or perhaps organ builder) Hans Empel (Hempel), had her own will of 19 May 1655 written into the acta of the Monwid Altar (the lower instance of the chapter jurisdiction) in spite of the fact that she made provisions for the burial of her body according to Saxon rite and in the Saxon cemetery: “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, God the One in the Trinity. Amen.”12 Lutheran minister Je˛drzej Schönflissius would emphasize just this community of belief in his funeral sermon for longtime burgomaster Jakub Gibel (Castle Street 2.13): He died as a Christian. Perhaps someone will think: “But he was a heretic.” Oh, for God’s sake, judge nothing before its time, until the Lord should come. That is not your judgment. Lord Jesus will judge us. Is this a heretic who confessed God the One in the Trinity? And this is no less a consolation in view of the coming resurrection.13

The minister seems to suggest that Vilnans of all Christian confessions who believed in the same God in the Trinity could expect the same resurrection in the body. The first reason for putting testamentary dispensations into writing had precisely to do with that eternity, with those unending years for which the will was to make provisions. Calvinist merchant Jakub Desaus II spelled it out: “Since all things that can be found under the sun are subject to change and decay with time, so also all human matters not explained properly and delimited in writing fall from memory in future time.” And he would go on to elaborate, “Considering and seeing that there is nothing in this world more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than its time and hour . . .”14 The reason was similar for Roman Catholic Paweł Kotlik: I, Paweł Kotlik, wheelwright, citizen of the Monwid Altar, confess with this testament of my last will that, knowing the changeability of this miserable world and the uncertainty in it of all human matters, in which every living man is more certain of nothing more than death, but the time and end of his life is hidden from his eyes and knowledge, likewise also understanding well that all human matters and decisions, not made certain and

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stipulated in writing, in time come to oblivion together with the change of human ages, whence various perplexities, disagreements, and hatreds arise, [therefore I make this will]. 15

Both Vilnans were paraphrasing a commonplace that appears in the writings of various Doctors of the Church. St. Augustine wrote in his Narration on Psalm XXXVIII, “Wherever you turn, all things are uncertain: only death is certain. . . . You are born: it is certain that you will die. And in this, although death itself is certain, the day of death is uncertain. Among these uncertain things, while only death is certain, yet its hour is uncertain.”16 And St. Anselm wrote in his Meditation VII, “Nothing is more certain than death, nothing more uncertain than the hour of death” (Nihil certius morte, nihil hora mortis incertius).17 This phrase, or variations upon it, appeared time and again in testaments of Vilnans of all five confessions.18 Vilnans besought God not to judge them according to their merits but to forgive them their many sins. Similar phrasings appear in a responsorium found in the Roman Catholic Office of the Dead—“Lord, do not judge me according to my deeds”—which was itself based loosely on Psalm 25:7: “Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions: according to thy mercy remember thou me for thy goodness’ sake, O Lord.” Similar entreaties were also a part of the Eastern-rite liturgy. Lutheran minister Je˛drzej Schönflissius described the preparations that merchant and immigrant from Antwerp Andrzej von Embden I (Castle Street 2.14) made for his death in 1628 in these terms: The Lord placed a dangerous sickness upon him, such a sickness that the doctors were unable to understand or to prevent. And so, feeling weaker from one day to the next, confessing his sins to God, he poured hot tears over them, he called and sighed to God, [asking] that He treat him not according to his justice, but according to His infinite mercy. He consoled himself with the sole merit of his Savior, after confession there followed holy absolution and the taking of the most holy Sacrament, which he received with great devotion.19

There might seem to be an undercurrent in this particular instance of Lutheran teaching on justification through God’s grace alone, without regard for merits or works. In fact, I do find the same commonplace in the wills of two other Lutheran Vilnans. Barber-surgeon Jerzy Dames (Rudniki Street 15.19) asked of God in his will of 7 April 1655 that “not remembering the greatness of my sins, but rather having forgiven [them] mercifully according to His infinite mercy and for the sufferings of His Son, Jesus Christ, He might deign to receive [my soul] to His glory.”20 His neighbor across the street, Wilno horodniczy Piotr Nonhart (Rudniki Street 12.06), asked in his will of 14 February 1633 that God, “not treating me according to His holy justice, but having forgiven my heavy sins according to His infinite mercy, might deign to be a merciful God and receive me to His holy glory.”21

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But I also find close variants of the same phrases in the wills of three Roman Catholics: musician Jan Baranowski and his wife Justyna Kostromska (Troki Street 33.02) in their wills of 4 October 1685 and 28 December 1696, as well as that of burgomaster Mikołaj Kliczewski (Subocz Street) from 8 January 1667. And I find similar phrases in one Orthodox will, that of burghess Anastazja Polikszanka Dziedzin´ska (Subocz Street 78.06) from 10 September 1675.22 Thus here, too, in an area that could be theologically sensitive, we find a certain rhetorical sameness across the confessions. These kinds of phrases were, after all, a familiar part of both Roman Catholic and Eastern-rite worship. Lutheran and Calvinist Vilnans, however, no doubt heard the phrase “merits” and “sole merits (of God)” differently than their non-Protestant neighbors did. One subtle but notable difference is the fact that, with the exception of Catholic musician Jan Baranowski, the nonLutherans, both Roman Catholic and Orthodox, coupled the plea to “God’s majesty” for mercy and grace with invocations of the saints. This was lacking in the testaments of the Protestants. Orthodox burghess Dziedzin´ska, for example, begged the “intercession of His Mother, the most holy Virgin Mary, God’s angels, and all my patron saints.” Indeed, the nonProtestants seem to have seen the possibility of obtaining the desired divine mercy and grace as being directly dependent upon that intercession. This difference—subtly expressed in the formulaic prologues—becomes more striking in the detailed provisions of non-Protestant Vilnans for funeral masses, endowed religious commemorations of the deceased over the months and years following their deaths, and other provisions whose goal was to ensure that the living say prayers for the souls of the dead. The reader of an imaginary anthology of the prologues to testaments of Vilnans of all five confessions would be struck first by the rhetorical sameness: variation only within narrowly defined generic boundaries and little or no indication of confessional allegiance. The prologue to the testament signed 27 July 1690 by Roman Catholic salt merchant Mikołaj Szczasnel Sienkiewicz, who resided in the suburb beyond the Troki Gate, is both typical of the genre and an example of some of the range of its permitted rhetorical variations: I, Mikołaj Szczasnel Sienkiewicz, burgher and salt merchant of Wilno, born of my father Jakub Szczasnel Sienkiewicz, squire [ziemianin, a gentryman of limited noble rights] of ´sk, who had his estate prior to Muscovy [i.e., before His Royal Majesty’s palatinate of Min ´sk and Radoszkowice, having observed on a daily the Muscovite invasion] between Min basis that people, flowing away like water from this transitory world, pass over to the other eternity on a sailing voyage from which there is no longer any return, and also having this in mind—that death is a certain port, but there is no information about when and who will be ordered to arrive in it, and since every man, both in the flower of life and in old age ought to be ready for that sea voyage, however as they commonly say, old men stand with one leg in the grave and the other on earth—therefore I, too, having my advanced years by the grace of the Lord Most High, not waiting until death trips up my other leg, to the contrary, wishing that, having found me prepared, it [i.e., death] might bring

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me happily in its ship to the desired port of eternity, and since for a different readiness the disposition belongs to me of the things entrusted to me by the Lord God yet during my lifetime, fearing that death might suddenly fall upon me, although I am not bedridden, nonetheless, since old age itself is a sickness [senectus ipsa morbus—from Terence’s Phormio, 575], I dispose of my things in this manner, with this written testament for all time after my departure, whether it come soon or late.23

The rhetorical sameness across the confessions is no doubt partially due to shared visions of the transitory nature of life on earth, the ubiquity of death, the necessity to provide for surviving family members, the desire for a proper funeral, and the need to prepare one’s soul for the journey into eternity. But that sameness is also due to the use of a limited pool of trained notaries (most likely themselves of a range of confessions) who provided legal aid to Vilnans as they prepared for death. And yet those notaries were apparently sensitive to differences in the attitudes of their clients, which they tried to reflect in the wills they drafted. I end this section with a short collection of formulas from Tatar wills registered in the Wilno castle court. My point here is that this community of testamentary rhetoric embraced not only Wilno’s five Christian confessions but also the Muslim Tatars. (I have not found any Jewish will registered with the Christian courts.) In the will of a Tatar woman named Abrahimowa, dated 6 August 1598, we read “that in this world there is nothing more certain for every man than death, for the healthy person must expect sickness, and the sick awaits death.”24 In a testament of 31 December 1643,

Figure 6 Franciszek Smuglewicz, drawing of the interior of the Wilno mosque, 1786. Dre˙ma 1991, 373.

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we find “I, Islam Abszamieciewicz . . . first of all commend my soul to Almighty Lord God, and my body to the ground, which my wife is to bury according to our Mussulman rite.”25 A testament from 2 April 1663 began, “In the name of my God, the Creator of heaven and earth, may this matter remain for eternal memory. Amen. I, Adam Adrachmanowicz Rafałowicz, . . . observing . . . that all things on earth are transitory and change with time, only those that are made manifest in writing remain in temporal memory with people, [make my will known].”26 And finally, from a testament of 6 April 1687: Knowing that the life of man, based on an eternal decree of God, having been born, must die and come to the inexorable end . . . I, Miłos´cia Baranowszczanka Ismailowa Adzikiczowa, wife of the mullah of Gudziany [make the following provisions]. . . .  And when the Eternal Lord, in time, by His will, should deign to summon me from this miserable vale of the world to His holy glory, I commend my sinful soul, which was given to me by the Lord God, unto the merciful hands of that same Lord and His holy Providence, having the certain veritable hope that He, as my Lord and merciful Creator, having forgiven my sins, will deign to receive me to His glory and will count me among His chosen saints; my sinful body, when it will be separated by divine decree, I commend to the earth, as it is made of earth, and it is to be buried by my dear husband according to the Mussulman rite in the tombs at the mosque in Gudziany.27

Other than the references to the Mussulman rite and to mosques, there is little here that would alert the reader to the fact that the testators were non-Christians. In the rest of this chapter, I examine the ways in which Vilnans nonetheless drew close ties with some of their neighbors, thereby excluding others, through their final dispensations; and I seek manifestations of confessionally determined differences in attitudes toward death and salvation.

Deathbed Communities Some testaments and their accompanying documents set the scene by putting the testator in his or her deathbed and naming the people standing or sitting around it. This was frequently the case with the wills recorded in the horodnictwo. These documents regularly turned the moment into a small drama. In an entry for 25 November 1639, we read, Before me, Jerzy Urdowski, notary appointed by His Grace Lord Paweł Podchocimski, the horodniczy and budowniczy of Wilno, being bidden to record the testament and last will ´ski, citizen of both the horodnictwo and the derewnictwo [forof famous Lord Matys Lipin estry authority] of Wilno, as well as of Their Graces the priests of the Wilno [Roman Catholic] Chapter, where, at my summons, having come to the house of the aforemen´ski, which lies on the river Wilia in Antokol under the jurisdiction of tioned Lord Lipin

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both the Wilno horodnictwo and of Their Graces the priests of the chapter, and having found him, although visited by the Lord God with a severe illness of the body that confined him to his bed, and yet still of sound mind and memory and with complete understanding, I asked him about his final will, and he declared it in this manner before me, in the presence of many honorable people, trustworthy neighbors from the area, namely . ´ski, Lord Wojciech Wnorowski, Lord Jakub Orłowski, Lord Bartosz Lord Wojciech Zabin Jacewicz, Lord J˛edrzej Juriewicz, and Lords Michał and Andrzej Szwander as well as Lord [H]anus Meler.28

Not all testaments created such a literal circle around the testator’s deathbed. Still, almost all of them established networks of people who were asked to accompany the dying to death’s door, to see to the material and spiritual dispensations expressed in the will, and in general to provide for the needs of the survivors. These were the guardians of minor children, curators of widows, executors and witnesses of wills, named in the will and almost always chosen by the testator himself or herself. We first encountered this document in an investigation of one marriage network. A careful consideration of who these people were and what specific tasks were assigned to them adds to our picture of the networks of kith, kin, and neighbors with which seventeenthcentury Vilnans surrounded themselves in death. In the case cited above, Lipin´ski asked his wife to have him buried “in fitting fashion and according to the Catholic rite in the Church of St. Peter,” the local parish church in the Antokol suburb where the couple resided. As executors of his will and guardians of his widow he appointed two of those standing at the deathbed, Wojciech Wnorowski and Jakub Orłowski, asking them to take pains “that they not allow anyone to do her wrong, and that they intercede for her, should it be necessary.” In addition to a long list of specified debts to which his widow was to attend, the executors were to see to it that she receive his entire estate, including three houses in Antokol, “on account of her spousal service and love and on account of the mutual labor of their own hands.” But they were also to insist upon one important stipulation: “that she not marry any Saxon [i.e., Lutheran] or Evangelical [i.e., Calvinist]; and if she should do so, then she is to give up everything, and those houses and all the movable goods are to be given over to the church and hospital [i.e., the Roman Catholic Church of St. Peter in Antokol] by the gentlemen executors.” An identification of the participants in the drama adds a certain urgency to the dying husband’s dispensations. His wife, Barbara Szwandrówna, was probably a convert from Lutheranism—either that, or he was insisting that his Lutheran wife, should she remarry, once again choose a Catholic spouse. In any event, as we have seen, she came from a Lutheran family; listed last among those standing at her husband’s deathbed were three from that circle: her brothers Michał and Andrzej Szwander, and Hanus Meler, the latter of whom, as we discover, was the current husband of their stepmother. All three men were chamois tanners and Lutherans. Indeed the horodnictwo, especially on the River Wilenka in

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Szerejkiszki, was an area of specifically Lutheran tanner concentration.29 The guardians Lipin´ski chose for his widow, Wnorowski and Orłowski, seem to have been Roman Catholics. I am arguing from silence here: they remain all but anonymous to me, and their names do not appear on any lists of Lutherans or Calvinists. Widow Szwandrówna would indeed heed her first husband’s dying admonition and choose a Roman Catholic when she got around to remarrying. In fact, she did not have to look far: she chose the Bartosz Jacewicz who was also standing at her husband’s deathbed. A little over ten years later, on 19 July 1650, he would have his own will drawn up, instructing his wife to see to his burial at the same local Roman Catholic Church of St. Peter in the Antokol suburb. Jacewicz would place no such restrictions upon whom his wife might marry after his death. He named three guardians for her: Marcin Fonend, Jan Kleparski, and Andrzej Szwander. The last was, again, one of Barbara’s Lutheran brothers. The first, “Mertin Vonenden” (also spelled Merttin von Endt, Martin von Emden), was also a Lutheran.30 Jan Kleparski seems—again, this is an argument from silence—to have been Roman Catholic. The patterns we see here are typical. Vilnans chose guardians for widows and minor children from family and neighbors, usually from the set of citizens of the jurisdiction to which they themselves were subject. They chose either within their own social group or from those somewhat more highly placed. They took confession into consideration, regularly choosing from their own religious communities. But they might also look beyond—as they did for marriage partners, godparents, and friends. In cases of mixed marriages, they occasionally made accommodations for the spouse’s confession. Whether or not the Lipin´skiSzwandrówna and Jacewicz-Szwandrówna unions were confessionally mixed, she clearly came from Lutheran circles, and her husbands took this into account—Lipin´ski by specifically disinheriting her should she marry a Protestant but also by including members of her Lutheran circle among the witnesses of his will; Jacewicz by choosing a majority from her own circle as his widow’s guardians. Other local networks within which the Szwanders and Hanus Meler participated suggest that Lipin´ski’s concerns that his widow might choose a Protestant husband were not without basis. Lutherans were a presence in the neighborhood, and the confession may have exerted a pull upon non-Germans. On 7 March 1647, in the period between the deaths of Barbara Szwandrówna’s two husbands, Lutheran chamois tanner Hanus Meler (one of the witnesses to Lipin´ski’s will) had gone in similar fashion to summon the notary of the horodnictwo to his wife’s bedside. She was Anna Jodkiewiczówna. Since she expected to be leaving a husband behind among the living and had no minor children, she felt no need to name executors or guardians: her husband would continue to be the legal actor for the family and its estate. She did, of course, ask for witnesses of her will, and they were an interesting group: “Ioannes Maius, medicinae doctor,” was—judging by his offering of 48 zł to the church in 1640—a rather well-to-do Lutheran medical doctor;31 Mikołaj Rychter was a Catholic with German ties who would eventually become burgomaster; Henryk Mones, a Calvinist who would eventually marry a Lutheran, would hold a number of magisterial and royal appointments; Jan Gronostajski,

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most likely a Roman Catholic, was a general bailiff for the nobles’ castle court); Andrzej Hoffman (Castle Street 2.05) was a Lutheran barber-surgeon; Matiasz Zawoniewski and Jan Mickiewicz were both also generals, probably Roman Catholic.32 The Melers, we learn from the will, lived in the Szerejkiszki suburb, a favorite place to live and work for these Lutheran chamois tanners, who no doubt polluted the little branch of the Wilenka River that separated the suburb from the city proper with the waste products of their trade. We also learn here that Jodkiewiczówna was the stepmother of Regina Szwandrówna (wife of Lutheran Jan Krejtner33), Michał Szwander, Andrzej Szwander, and Barbara Szwandrówna (then wife of Bartosz Jacewicz). Michał Szwander was probably married to a Lutheran: his wife’s name was Maryna Goltsmitówna. In any event, we are in largely Lutheran circles here, and in spite of her Slavic name, Jodkiewiczówna was also a member of that congregation and would ask for the burial of “my body according to the Augsburg confession in which I die, . . . in the Saxon cemetery beyond Wilia Gate.” As did many others, Jodkiewiczówna wrote into her testament the right to revoke or amend it if she did not die right away. But unlike most, she did rise from her deathbed, and a year and a half later, on 7 November 1648, she brought notary Jerzy Urdowski to her house in Szerejkiszki to record the testament of her husband, Hanus Meler.34 He named two citizens of the horodnictwo as executors of his will, “His Royal Majesty’s locksmith Adam Bajer” and his wife’s stepson, chamois tanner “Andrys Szweiner” (Andrzej Szwander). Both were Lutherans.35 As guardian of his widow he named the highest secular authority of the jurisdiction, “His Grace, Lord Paweł z Brylewa Podchocimski, horodniczy and budowniczy of Wilno,” who, as we know, was a Calvinist married to a Lutheran and a member of the elite. Jodkiewiczówna drew up a second will of her own half a year later on 7 May 1649.36 She named four Lutherans, all from higher social reaches, as executors—Doctor Jan Majus (“Ioannes Maius”), Jerzy Sztrunk II, Marcin Fonend, and Krzysztof Horn. Since she was illiterate, she asked Lutheran barber-surgeon Andrzej Hoffman to serve as her curator and to sign and affix his seal for her. Witnesses were neighbors, a mix of Lutherans and Catholics similar to those she chose for her first testament. A survey of the neighborhoods reveals similar pictures throughout the city. The elites of upper Castle Street chose Lutherans or Calvinists or occasionally a mixture of members of the two confessions, for guardians for their children, much the same way they chose marriage partners and godparents. Jan Sztrunk II (Castle Street 2.10) named Lutheran family members as guardians of his minor children on 15 May 1643. They were his brother Jerzy Sztrunk II and two brothers-in-law, Tomasz and Jakub Gibel, brothers of his wife Halszka (Elz∧bieta) Giblówna (Castle Street 2.12 and 2.13).37 Calvinist Henryk Mones, whose second wife, Sara, was the Lutheran daughter of Marcin Sztrunk (brother of Jan II and Jerzy II), would choose only Lutheran guardians in his will of 1666: son-in-law Jan Sztrunk III (Mones and his daughter had married Sztrunk cousins); Dr. Paweł Meller (he was the second husband of Halszka Giblówna, widow of Jan Sztrunk II, and thus the stepfather of Jan Sztrunk III); and jurist Arnolf Zaleski.38 Calvinist wine merchant Ludwik Bekier (d. before 29 April 1658), who was a brother-in-law of

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Jan and Jakub II Desaus (Castle Street 1.26), would choose one from each confession: his Calvinist brother-in-law Jakub Desaus and Lutheran Marcin Rejn II, both merchants.39 The connections in this last instance would seem to have less to do with confession (both husband and wife were Calvinist after all) and more to do with the ease with which the Lutherans and Calvinists of Castle Street formed alliances, and perhaps also to do with business ties. Both Bekier and Rejn were merchants; perhaps Rejn was also a wine merchant. He came from the more thoroughly Lutheran Glass Street neighborhood of middle-level merchants and artisans. He was the son of pewterer Marcin Rejn, who had himself chosen three Lutheran guardians with strong connections to that neighborhood when he drew up his own will on 13 May 1647. These were merchant Joachim Rejter (father-in-law of Jan Buchner) and two barber-surgeons—Jerzy Dames (Glass Street 20.05, although he resided in another house at Rudniki Street 15.19) and Andrzej Hoffman (Castle Street 2.05).40 The “paternal little bricked house on Glass Street” was still in the possession of Marcin Rejn II in 1668.41 Lutheran swordsmith Melchior Ilis (Glass Street 21.03) left a Lutheran widow and three young daughters. He named two Lutheran guardians for them on 18 May 1663: merchant Jerzy Gross (son-in-law of Andrzej Hoffman, who would enter Ilis’s will into the acta) and haberdasher Piotr Szretter.42 In Ilis’s will we discover that he had served in turn as guardian for his next-door neighbor, soap boiler Adam Afanasowicz (Glass Street 21.04), together with two other Lutherans from the neighborhood—goldsmith Job Bem and “Lord Tym.” Bem lived in the house at Glass Street 18.11 in 1636.43 Lord Tym, we discover from another document, was merchant Henryk Tym, who frequently occupied the office of lay senior among the Lutheran congregation.44 This would seem to be a case of a non-Lutheran husband—the name Afanasowicz, which could suggest he was a Ruthenian, shows up nowhere in Lutheran rolls—who chose guardians for his wife who were both of the neighborhood and of the same confession as that wife. She was Małgorzata Kreczmerówna, perhaps a sister and daughter of the various Kreczmers who appear on Lutheran church records.45 She would go on to marry one of her guardians, Lutheran merchant Henryk Tym.46 In similar fashion, the modest Catholic artisans of the chapter jurisdiction of Skop and Bernardine Streets would take on the duties of guardianship for each other. On 12 February 1632, boilermaker Paweł Kotlik (Skop Street 49.05) asked tailor Jan Kostromski (Skop Street 49.08) and weaver Ambroz∧y Marcinowicz (Skop Street 49.03) to be executors of his will and guardians of his survivors. Kostromski would buy the house from Kotlik’s widow in 1640.47 Sometime shortly before 1642, tailor Stanisław Malcewicz (Skop Street 49.12) chose as guardians for his minor children tailor Jan Kostromski (now at Skop Street 49.05), tailor Tobiasz Rodziewicz (Skop Street 45.04), and gunpowder maker Tomasz Winkiewicz, who lived a bit farther away (although still in the same jurisdiction) at Bernardine Street 53.02.48 Clearly neighborhood and citizenship in the jurisdiction but also professional ties played a role in these choices, in addition to confession—all were Roman Catholic. Next let us examine a few Ruthenian cases, mostly from Subocz and Horse Streets. On 2 June 1648, Orthodox merchant Hieronim Ozarzewicz, whose “paternal bricked house”

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was on Subocz Street, named two guardians from the neighborhood: Uniate councillor Samuel Filipowicz (Subocz Street 79.08) and a cousin on his father’s side, Hrehory Omelianowicz.49 The latter was probably Orthodox and the son of the “church clothier” (cerkiewski sukiennik) Omelian Hrehorowicz, who owned a house in the lane off Subocz Street in 1636 (77.04), and whose descendants (presumably including our Hrehory Omelianowicz) were ensconced there by 1642.50 In any event, Ozarzewicz was quite definitely Orthodox and would ask in his will to be buried at the nearby Brotherhood Church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit. Filipowicz’s brother-in-law Jan Wasilewicz Kostrowicki lived next door to Hrehory Omelianowicz. When Filipowicz drew up his own will on 8 February 1663, he named as guardians for his minor children, in addition to his wife Regina Kostrowicka and his son Andrzej Filipowicz, two of his brothers-in-law, the aforementioned councillor Jan Kostrowicki and his brother, Daniel Kostrowicki. And as guardian of his wife he named Wilno municipal notary Symon Kazimierz Kurowicz.51 The Kostrowicki family had been Orthodox, but any men who pursued careers in the magistracy after 1666 would have had to have been at least pro forma Uniate. We have seen that they were thoroughly implicated in Subocz Street circles. The Kurowicz family house had been nearby at Sawicz Street 71.13. The family was certainly Ruthenian, perhaps Uniate: the house had been bequeathed to the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity by 1636.52 Filipowicz gathered as witnesses to his will a wider group, all with ties to the municipal ruling elite: in addition to Symon Kurowicz, a Jan Hyjacynt Kurowicz, perhaps a relative of the latter; Catholic burgomaster Aleksander Romanowicz (he was a convert from the Greek religion);53 Catholic burgomaster Marcin De˛bowski; councillor Grzegorz Kostrowicki (a resident of Subocz Street, certainly Uniate in his older years, perhaps a relative of Filipowicz’s widow); and yet another brother-in-law (in fact, they had been brothers-in-law by two different routes at various times), Kazimierz Kostrowicki.54 The final witness of Filipowicz’s will, future councillor Stefan Kuszelicz, brings us into the Orthodox circles of Horse Street. He was the son of an Orthodox couple, Fiedor Kuszelicz (Kuszyło/Kuszela) and wife Eudokia Ihnatowiczówna (Horse Street 5.16). He seems to have been Orthodox until sometime after 1666, when he would have had to convert to the Uniate Church for the sake of his career. On 22 September 1665, he brought to the magistracy for a second entering into the acta a copy of one of the many prewar documents that had been lost during the Muscovite occupation. This was the testament of Orthodox merchant Piotr Tros´nica, who had married one of Stefan’s cousins from across the street, Polonia Kuszelanka, the daughter of his uncle, Abram Kuszelicz.55 Tros´nica would eventually own the house of his father-in-law at Horse Street 8.09.56 The version of the will, dated 14 January 1653 but entered by Kuszelicz in 1665, omits mention of guardians (perhaps it was a purposely faulty copy), but we know from another document from before the war, dated 20 May 1655, that Tros´nica had appointed two of them: Orthodox merchant Krzysztof Sokołowski (he was Stefan Kuszelicz’s brother-in-law) and Filipowicz’s brother-in-law Kazimierz Kostrowicki, who was either Uniate or Orthodox.57 Sokołowski owned houses on Sharp, Rudniki, and Horse Streets.58

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Tros´nica’s circles were definitely Ruthenian, but they included both Uniates and Orthodox. He would ask to be buried “in the Church of the Holy Spirit of the Greek religion . . . honorably and in Christian fashion.” But one of his brothers-in-law, to judge by the rhetoric of his own testament of 8 March 1666, was apparently one of the more ardent Uniates. On that day—this was just before the royal decree limiting participation on the Greek side of the magistracy to Uniates—burgomaster Jan Kukowicz, who lived in the house of his father-inlaw in the side street up from Subocz Street facing the back gate of the Jesuits’ St. Kazimierz Church and monastery (75.04), wrote, As I always remained in the holy Greek faith that is in Holy Unity with the holy [Roman] Church, so now, too, remaining in that same faith, I desire to die [in it], believing whatever the Holy Catholic Church believes.  .  .  .  And since I became during my lifetime a brother, however unworthy, in the Brotherhood of the Most Holy immaculately conceived Virgin, now as well I wish that my sinful body be buried in the brotherhood crypt.59

Kukowicz’s circles were largely Uniate, but in spite of the deathbed rhetoric insisting on exclusive allegiance to the Uniate Church, he did not entirely exclude the Orthodox from participation in them. In addition to his brother-in-law Piotr Tros´nica, there was also Orthodox councillor Paweł Sien ´czyło (Subocz Street 78.07)—the one who would be accused of collaborating with the Muscovite occupying forces—from whom, “for my own needs during the exile [in Königsberg], I borrowed 30 zł and against which I pawned with him six strings of my wife’s pearls.”60 I end with one last example from a mixed marriage. We met Uniate burgomaster Stefan Lebiedzicz in our discussion of education. His wife, Marta Paszkiewiczówna, was a Calvinist. The couple had three children, “Stefus´,” apparently a Uniate like his father, who seems to have died in childhood, and two Calvinist daughters, Halszka and Katarzyna. They would live to adulthood. From the posthumous inventory of his estate conducted on 27 September 1649 we learn that he had appointed two guardians from his wife’s (and his daughters’) confession: Calvinists Henryk Mones and Michał Baranowicz.61 In short, Vilnans created communities around themselves at the hour of their death using much the same criteria they employed when they sought marriage partners or godparents for their children. Here, too, their choices were based on a mix of considerations that included— in addition to confession—ties of affection and respect, neighborhood and jurisdiction, profession and social standing. But the central question still remains: Did confessional allegiance imply differences in attitudes and expectations surrounding that death?

The Good Death On 7 August 1664, at the request of Stefan Radkiewicz, executor of the estate of Stefan Rabcewicz, a deputation from the Wilno magistracy headed by two councillors, the Roman

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Catholic Bartłomiej Cynaki and the then still-Orthodox Prokop Dorofiewicz, came to the deceased’s house “in the side street off Rudniki Street heading toward [the Church of ] St. Nicholas” to make an official inventory of the estate and enter it into the acta.62 Both councillors would rise to hold the office of burgomaster and Cynaki, an immigrant from Italy, that of the wójt, the pinnacle of municipal power.63 The deceased, Stefan Rabcewicz, had been a Roman Catholic merchant. He had long been an elder of the Congregation of the Assumption at the Jesuits’ Church of St. Kazimierz,64 and his posthumous provisions were to Roman Catholic institutions throughout Wilno (plus a bit for the Uniates). The guardian of his estate, Stefan Radkiewicz, was apparently a Uniate: he was the brother-in-law of the Uniate burgomaster Jan Kukowicz mentioned above, and he had a son who was a Basilian monk at the Church of the Holy Trinity; the family house stood between the Guests’ House and the Church of the Holy Trinity, which was a heavily Ruthenian neighborhood.65 As in many of the testaments and inventories of Wilno’s Roman Catholics and Ruthenians, both Uniate and Orthodox, much attention would be devoted here to funeral preparations and posthumous commemorations. The relative silence on this issue in Protestant documents points to a fundamental difference between Vilnans of the two larger camps at the moment of death: the Protestant abolition of purgatory had rendered useless prayers for the souls of the dying and the dead. As Craig M. Koslofsky has argued, “the Reformation transformed the funeral more profoundly than any other ritual of the traditional Church, radically reshaping the human encounter with death in the Protestant tradition.”66 By 1525, in Lutheran practice, holy water and consecrated oil (the “sacramentals”) had been eliminated, but auricular confession and the taking of Communion would remain as part of preparation for death.67 The good Protestant death (and funeral) had become something, at least in theory, quite different from the more traditional beliefs and practices to which the Catholic and Ruthenian neighbors still adhered. The rise of the Protestant funeral sermon—after 1650 the “culmination of the ritual”—also gives us a good picture of at least what the clergy thought of as the normative good death for Protestants, and we will have occasion in a moment to examine some of those written for Wilno’s elite.68 It is primarily through wills and inventories that we can confirm the expected: that Wilno’s Catholics adhered to beliefs in purgatory and that the Ruthenians, who did not use the name of purgatory or believe in the purging fire, nonetheless thought in terms of some intermediary place or stage between death and consignment to hell or reception into heaven.69 All of them, Catholics, Uniates, and Orthodox, trusted in the efficacy of the prayers of the living to God, Christ, the Virgin, and the Saints for the souls of the departed. Catholic Vilnans no doubt retained traditional practice: the dying and the living were brought together in a ritual that included the Holy Sacrament, Extreme Unction, confession of sins, perhaps a Mass, the reading of the penitential Psalms, and certainly the prayers of clergy and lay, family and friends, for the soul of the dying. The practice would have been structurally quite similar for the Uniates and Orthodox: confession of sins, absolution, and a liturgy.70

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Most of our Wilno documents say little more about the process of dying, if they mention it at all, than the fact that the person was sick, for a long or a short period, and that a certain portion of the estate had been spent on doctors and medicine. The “Register of Expenses for the Funeral of the Deceased Lord Michał Kulbowicz, Merchant and Citizen of Wilno” that was conducted 20 January 1681 tells us that his wife had paid 15 zł to the Jesuits’ apothecary shop, 48 zł to a certain Ulf “for the wine that the deceased himself took during his illness,” and 20 zł to a certain Lidert “likewise for wine during the illness.”71 The deceased was Roman Catholic; the two wine merchants, judging by the names, may have been Lutherans— perhaps the Wolfgang Dietmahn and the Davidt or Chriestoff Liedert found in the lists of Lutheran offering givers for those years.72 The executors of the will of Orthodox burghess Anastazja Witkowska Gilewiczowa (Horse Street 8.02) noted in the inventory of her estate done 19 October 1684 that they had spent 100 zł “for medicine from the Jesuit Fathers’ apothecary shop, for Mr. Meller and [other] doctors, and also for the barber-surgeons.”73 Paweł Meller, as we know, was a Lutheran, as were probably some of the other doctors and barber-surgeons. Unlike other such documents, which put together in one list all expenses connected with the death of the testator, the inventory of the estate of Roman Catholic Stefan Rabcewicz separated out the “Expenses during the Deceased’s Illness” and made it clear that prayer for his soul should begin while he was still alive. The list began in familiar fashion: 126 zł to the doctor; 102 zł, 15 gr to the apothecary; 63 zł to Mr. Satryb, the barber-surgeon (this was the Krzysztof Zatryb/Chriestoff Satrieb, the Roman Catholic exception to the rule, who was nonetheless married to a Lutheran and spent much of his time in Lutheran circles); and 10 zł to the servant of that barber-surgeon. But at this point, the list turned to a series of alms to religious institutions, intended to ensure that they begin to say prayers and masses for Rabcewicz’s soul as he lay dying: alms to the Castle Church (the amount is illegible), to the Discalced Carmelite fathers (17 zł, 15 gr), to the Dominicans (28 zł), to the “Basilians” (in this case, the Uniate Ruthenian fathers: 17 zł, 15 gr), to the Franciscans (22 zł), to the Calced Carmelite Church of All Saints (3 zł), to the Jesuit Church of St. John “for holy Masses during . extreme unction” (3 zł), to Zyrmuny (a village in nearby Lida County—perhaps Rabcewicz had some family connections there) for Masses (1 zł).74 The prayers and Masses were no doubt to reach a crescendo at the moment of Rabcewicz’s death. The Lutheran “reformation of the dead”—as Craig Koslofsky calls it in the title of his book on Lutheran teaching and practice—began with the deathbed scene. As in Roman Catholic practice, the dying were surrounded by family, friends, and clergy, but the ritual focused not on prayers for the soul but on providing the strength to die peacefully in the knowledge that salvation would come solely through unmerited divine grace; it was also an occasion to give consolation to the living and to remind them of their own mortality.75 Luther had argued in 1521 that the funeral Mass was not for the dead (intercession) but for the living (consolation).76 Each of Je˛drzej Schönflissius’s funeral sermons for the Lutheran elite of Castle Street gives us a glimpse of what he, and perhaps also his Lutheran parishioners, saw

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as the good death. And in spite of a certain rhetorical sameness and some autoplagiarism, they offer a few details about individual deathbed scenes. Something like a normative version of the good Lutheran death is to be found in Schönflissius’s funeral sermon for a fourteen-year-old girl. On 8 April 1638, “at the Saxon cemetery in Wilno,” as the title page of the printed version tells us, he delivered a funeral oration over the body of Zofia Majerówna; she had died on Palm Sunday, which had fallen on 5 April that year. She was the daughter of “once glorious and honorable Lord Jan Majer, barber-surgeon of Wilno, a worthy man, held in high esteem not only in this city of Wilno, but also among great people, senators, etc.” He had most likely been a Calvinist.77 His widow, “Lady Maryna,” had remarried. Her new husband was Lutheran barber-surgeon Andrzej Hoffman, and the family lived in the “Majer bricked house” at Castle Street 2.05. (This was the scene of the affront to Hoffman’s honor, inflicted in 1675 by a skirt-lifting renter.) The account of Majerówna’s death merits extensive quotation: Seeing that she was becoming weaker from day to day, she asked her Lady Mother to send for me. When I came to her, she demanded of me that, by my pastorly duty, I hear her confession and absolve her. That very hour she acknowledged her sins with great contrition and lament, taking consolation first in God’s mercy, and then in the sole merit of her Savior Jesus Christ. After holy absolution, oh, with what great piety did she receive the Most Holy Sacrament, with which she strengthened her afflicted and fainting soul! When I visited her frequently in that illness of hers and consoled her with the Word of God, I never tired of seeing the great constancy that I witnessed in her piety, . . . how she prayed from the bottom of her heart in that illness of hers to the Lord God, sang Psalms and little pious songs [piosneczki naboz∧ne], and whatever she pronounced, it was all to the point, words so serious that all marveled at them. True, at first in that illness of hers she asked her Lady Mother to make diligent effort for her health, but then, when her pains troubled her more, she began to loathe this world. And seeing that the final limit was drawing ever nearer, she summoned me to her again and prepared herself for the Most Holy Sacrament, with which she provided herself for that last little trip [ostatna dróz∧ka] last Thursday. She herself chose the words of Job for exposition at the funeral. . . .  And seeing her grieving and weeping mother, she comforted her, saying “O, my dearest Lady Mother, I see that you are so sad that I am now leaving you through an early death. Were it possible, I would like to stay with you, but since my Bridegroom, Christ Jesus, wishes to have me with Him, do not, I beg you, envy me this happiness. I will be better there now than here, for in this world there is nothing good. Nothing but depravity, evil examples, filthy words, a young person can easily go bad. But in heaven, the Lord God willing, I will be safe from all that there. Here is labor, there respite, here oppression, there rest, here sorrow, there joy, here death, but there there will be eternal life. There, God granting, I will stand in the rank of the modest maidens who were not defiled with uncleanliness (Revelation 14:4), there I will be clothed with

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a white robe (Revelation 7:9, 19:8),” etc. But were there few such serious words? I do not know whence she took them, most certainly the Holy Ghost spoke through her, about which the Lord Jesus said: “For the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say [Luke 12:12].” We also had not long ago a young maiden who was very discriminating in her twelfth year, who, as she was dying, uttered many serious words, but if truth be told this one outdid her in her piety. But this is not a wonder, for she was older. This, too, is worthy of consideration, that as this young maiden died, taking leave of her Lady Mother, she said to her in my presence and that of others,: “O, my dearest Lady Mother, I am leaving you now, but after all you will not lose me. I will be waiting for you there in heaven; there, God granting, you will see me again. I thank you for the honorable and Christian upbringing you gave me. Let the Lord God bless you here bounteously and console you in this sorrow with His Holy Ghost.” Then she summoned her lord stepfather to her and said to him: “I surrender you, too, my Lord Father, to the Lord God, beseeching you that you respect my dearest Lady Mother and console her in this heavy grief. May the Lord God by His mercy bless you bounteously as well.” And having caught sight of her brother standing by her and crying, she said to him: “My dear brother, I admonish you to fear the Lord God, to serve Him faithfully, to hold your mother in honor, to love and respect her, etc., and thus the Lord God will bless you bounteously and will lengthen the days of your life on earth.” Having taken her leave of everyone in the house, she said: “Now I turn to you, my dear Jesus. Shorten, I beg you, these sufferings of mine, take me to You. I have already made myself ready with those wise virgins and have prepared my lamp (Matthew 25). Lead me, O my Bridegroom, with you to that eternal marriage.” And so, Lord Jesus, having mercifully hearkened to her cry, last Sunday at one o’clock at night, sent her a happy little hour [godzineczka szcze˛´sliwa], to Whom she gave up her little soul [duszyczka], having spent fourteen years on earth. True, it was a short life; just when she had begun to live in earnest, death took her. In her were fulfilled the words that I just now explicated: “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down [Job 14:1–2].”78

It is unimportant whether or not this is exactly what happened—the identifications of citations from the Bible (those given here in parentheses and brackets) were Schönflissius’s marginal additions, and no doubt the words themselves were embellished. More pertinent here, her death may not have been quite so serene. But the point is that the account tells us what the pastor thought was the good Lutheran death, and a central part of his purpose here, in addition to praising the deceased and consoling the survivors, was to teach his flock how they should die: peacefully, as if falling asleep, without prayers said for their souls, confident in their faith, in the presence of family, neighbors, and pastor, consoling the surviving, admonishing them to live a good life in the expectation of reunion in heaven.79 The frequent use of double diminutives (e.g., godzineczka, tiny little hourlet) indicates that the subject of the narration was a child, but the qualities of her death—this was the whole

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paradoxical point of the encomium—were those expected from adults. She died assisted by her minister, who functioned as a professional guide, not as a mediator, although—as Susan Karant-Nunn has pointed out—Lutheran ministers still stood in a superior relationship to their parishioners. She was surrounded by family, friends, and neighbors. She confessed her sins, received a kind of absolution, took Holy Communion, and sang some songs and Psalms—probably not the penitential Psalms, “desperate pleas for God’s mercy by people mired in wretchedness,” which were supplanted in post-Lutheran usage by more consoling texts.80 Then it was she who consoled the living and admonished them to look forward to death and their reunion in the other world. Majerówna’s neighbor at Castle Street 2.09, Zuzanna Nonhartówna, Lutheran wife of Catholic nobleman Jerzy Chreptowicz, “died peacefully in the Lord” on 9 December 1645. She would be buried in the Lutheran church on the Nonhart estate in the village of Gojcieniszki on 6 February 1646, on which occasion Schönflissius again gave a funeral sermon “before a sizable gathering of worthy people.” She had taken sick during Advent when she had come to visit her sons in their dwelling in Wilno and had quickly returned to her extramural manor—perhaps it was the Chreptowicz palace in Łukiszki. Seeing that the illness was getting worse and worse, she sent for Schönflissius “on the day of the conception of the Virgin Mary [8 December], . . . and she confessed her sins to the Divine Majesty with heartfelt contrition and bitter tears.” In spite of the fact that she was weak, she performed her religious duties on her knees, and then she “conversed with [Schönflissius] about many things, and she said and thought everything about death.” She regretted she had not yet drawn up a will and promised to do it the next day, “which she would certainly have brought to completion if death had not suddenly blocked that road for her.” Schönflissius used his funeral sermon to bolster claims to speak as the executor of her orally conveyed final wishes. Nonhartówna’s death was both exemplary in its peacefulness and yet not ideal, not simply because of its suddenness—in official Lutheran teaching the violent or unexpected death, even if still feared in popular opinion, “conferred no disadvantages upon the soul”81—but because one important aspect of preparation for death, the written and witnessed last will and testament was missing: “Those who were with her did not expect such a sudden death, for it happened with her as if someone had blown out a candle. And thus on 9 December of the preceding year she said farewell to this world and fell asleep peacefully in the Lord, having reached the age of 49.”82 The good Lutheran—indeed, this was a frequent motivation cited by testators of all confessions—was to draw up a proper will in good time.83 Jerzy Sztrunk I, the patriarch of the Wilno branch of the family, who lived next door at Castle Street 2.10, was struck with paralysis by the Lord God some four weeks before he died in the summer of 1634. The cause of his illness was partly old age (“for senectus ipsa morbus”— Schönflissius, too, liked the saying from Terence’s Phormio [575]) and partly “heartfelt sorrow after the departure of his dear wife, whom he recalled and over whom he poured bitter tears.” The couple had been married thirty-eight years, and he had been a widower for three by the time of his death. Sztrunk was “very patient and pious in that illness of his.” Even though

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he had been partially struck dumb by that paralysis—apparently he had had a stroke— Sztrunk amazed his neighbors by “finishing all the words, as much as he could” when Schönflissius said the Lord’s Prayer with him. He, too, died an exemplary death: And since we saw that he was headed toward death, we besought the Lord God that He give him a peaceful departure from this world. And having heard out our cry and his sighing, He called him to His glory last Wednesday, between three and four in the morning, to whom in dying he gave up his soul, and thus, having lived seventy-four years, he peacefully fell asleep in the Lord.84

Sztrunk had been sent by his parents from Kowno (Kaunas) to Wilno as a young boy to serve an apprenticeship in the house of Lutheran merchant Piotr Fonderflot, the stepfather of future burgomaster Jakub Gibel, with whom he would grow up. Gibel owned the house a bit farther down at Castle Street 2.13, and he would survive his former housemate by a little over three years, dying on 13 November 1637.85 He had been ill for thirteen years: “True, he would often walk or ride [forth during that time], but he did not have perfect health.” The illness had become more severe a year before his death. Gibel’s death also took place in the presence of family, friends, and neighbors: How patient he was in that illness of his! We who visited him frequently were able to see clearly how bravely and modestly he bore everything, and he asked the Lord God that He not place upon him more than he could bear. And so, before his death, seeing that his illness was becoming more and more severe, he gave thought for his soul, and, having summoned me to him, he confessed his sins to the Divine Majesty with great sorrow and laments.

Once he had received holy absolution, he took the Most Holy Sacrament, and, in spite of his weakness, he fell to his knees and “kneeled as long as it took to do the entire religious service.” Unlike Nonhartówna, Gibel had made an “orderly testament and set his house in order” (2 Kings 20:1; Isaiah 38:1). He, too, died the good death: And since he was bearing the severe and cruel pains on his body, he begged God piously for a peaceful death, that He shorten his pains. And He, having heard out his piteous moans and pious sighing, sent him a happy hour, when on Friday (two weeks have passed), which was 13 November, at four in the morning, he fell asleep in the Lord and rendered his soul unto His hands. He had a very peaceful death, at which there were no terrors and no complaint.

Schönflissius once again emphasized the exemplarity: “God grant us, too, such a peaceful death.”

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Their neighbor, immigrant from Antwerp and Lutheran merchant Andrzej von Embden I (Castle Street 2.14)—much like the villagers in David Sabean’s 1984 essay entitled “Communion and Community”—“had absented himself for quite some time from the use of the Holy Sacrament” because he was in a state of enmity with members of his community.86 Schönflissius exploited the occasion to warn his parishioners against those who “scorn the Holy Sacraments, and so postpone atonement until the final moment, only when their soul stands in their throat, of necessity, when their heads ache [od niewoli, kiedy głowa boli; it rhymes in Polish], do they send posthaste for the minister.” Although Schönflissius rather praised than blamed von Embden, he did make him into a sort of cautionary tale for procrastinators: Thus, I say, he, too, for quite some time, did not bear witness to his Christianity through use of the Holy Sacrament, but there were obstacula [obstacles] that blocked the road for him to do this. For when I admonished him once by my preacher’s obligation and office, asking about the reason, he enumerated for me quite a few incidents with various people, and he said: “When I put this in order, as I hope to bring this to a close in short order, then I will be reconciled with the Lord my God.”

Sabean’s findings for village life in the early modern Duchy of Württemberg help put von Embden’s thinking in a context of similar behavior: One could not go to Communion with an agitated heart . . .  . In such a state one was unworthy and liable to bring down judgment on oneself. In almost every case, the agitated heart was the outcome of a quarrel, a running dispute, or a libel action. . . . Conflict was a civil matter to be settled in courts, and during the time that a matter was pending, no meal of reconciliation was possible. The sacrament could not bring a peaceful heart; rather a peaceful heart was a precondition for taking the sacrament.87

Von Embden had put himself right with his Lord and his neighbors in time, but just: “And so, shortly thereafter, in that sickness of his, he received the Holy Sacrament.” The rest of the story followed the plot of the good Lutheran death. Von Embden, feeling that he was getting weaker by the day, sent for the German preacher (the Wilno Lutheran church usually had at least two ministers—one who preached in Polish, Schönflissius in those days, the other in German), to whom he confessed his sins, and after receiving absolution, he took Holy Communion. This may well have been that first return to the Sacrament after the hiatus. Schönflissius’s admonitions would seem to suggest as much. The Polish pastor visited his parishioner frequently during his illness, and all marveled how modestly he bore the terrible pains. Three days before his death, in Schönflissius’s presence, von Embden turned to his wife and said, “Oh, dear wife, it is almost time for me to part from you. Do not be saddened by my death,

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for we all must go that way. Be consoled by the fact that God is the merciful guardian of poor widows.” And then, on the following Friday in the afternoon, “having taken his leave of his own [people], he peacefully fell asleep in the Lord.” Up and down the block, the Lutherans of upper Castle Street—this was Schönflissius’s theme—had died the good death. We know little about Calvinist practice in Wilno, but small hints suggest what we see in other aspects of their lives—an attenuation of Genevan austerity and some elements of syncretism, not only with the Lutherans but even with the Roman Catholics.88 In an entry in the Calvinists’ Communion register for 31 August 1684, the pastor noted that Reinhold Bizynk, who had a Lutheran wife, had taken the Holy Sacrament that day and that he had “prepared [him] for death [dysponowałem na ´smierc´] . . .  in praesentia [in the presence] of many of the Augsburg confession.” Other entries in the same ledger tell of Communion as a part of Calvinist last rites in Wilno, presumably taken in all cases in the house of the dying.89 Calvin was reluctant to allow this Catholic practice: the Eucharist was brought through the streets to the houses of the dying in Basel but not in Geneva.90 The differences between Protestant and non-Protestant deaths were both subtle and of crucial importance. All of the dying were surrounded by family, friends, and neighbors. All received ministrations of clergy, confessed their sins, took part in religious services, and received Holy Communion, although only the Roman Catholics received Extreme Unction and the sacramentals. Probably non-Protestants, too, were desirous of a peaceful death, of “falling asleep in the Lord.”91 But with death, the Protestant was fully removed from the world of the living and went alone to await divine mercy or judgment. The non-Protestant remained in death in intimate contact with the living through wakes, proximity of burial (at least in seventeenth-century Wilno), and, above all, through the crescendo of prayers by the living for the souls of the decedent at the time of death and the continuance of those prayers at prescribed moments immediately thereafter and over the years.92

Funeral and Burial At the moment of death—whether it came in the context of a sort of crescendo of prayers and laments in Catholic and Ruthenian houses, with tapers and consecrated water and oil, or in the quiet observance of a simplified ritual and mutual comforting in Protestant circles, where the candles were mostly metaphors and the Christian was supposed to die “like a candle going out”—bells began to ring again, many of them for the Catholics and Ruthenians; perhaps only one, and perhaps only for members of the elite, for the Protestants.93 The bells had already rung when the Catholic or Ruthenian priest set out through the streets with the equipment for administering the last rites and Communion. Although some Protestant ministers may have objected or at least frowned, there is evidence that the simple faithful insisted on some modest ringing of bells as Communion was carried to the sick; certainly there was similar ringing to announce the death and to prepare the community for

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the funeral.94 The significance of the ringing, however, had become different across the confessions. In all cases, the bell was a signal that death was imminent or had occurred and that now preparations for a funeral service and a burial would begin. But for the Catholics and Ruthenians, it was also a call to say prayers for the soul that now found itself in purgatory or some other place, where such entreaties were both necessary and efficacious. For Protestants, who had abolished the “third place,” it was treated as a reminder to the living that the bell tolled for all of them. All confessions then washed the body of the deceased and placed it in a shroud in the house.95 Lutheran funerals in Wilno—contrary to practice in other cities where the wait was not more than a day—seem to have taken place, on the whole, on the third day after death unless there was some reason for further delay.96 Ariès notes testators’ requests for burial after some time, in some cases three days, as a “precaution” against hasty interment.97 A threeday delay seems to have been the norm for less prominent Lutheran Vilnans who were buried locally. Perhaps Wilno was influenced here by the custom in some Hanseatic cities of holding funerals on the third day after death.98 Schönflissius often gives us just enough information to infer this. Jerzy Sztrunk (Castle Street 2.10) died on 16 August 1634 and was buried on 19 August.99 Andrzej von Embden (Castle Street 2.14) died on 1 September 1628 and was buried on 4 September.100 Zofia Majerówna (Castle Street 2.05) died on 5 April 1637 and was buried on 8 April.101 But Nonhart and Nonhartówna—members of the elite, with claims to gentry status— were both buried in the family’s country estate of Gojcieniszki (Belarusan Hajcjuniški, a village twenty-eight miles south of Wilno), and after considerable delay. Nonhartówna (Castle Street 2.09) died on 9 December 1645 and was buried only on 6 February 1646.102 Her father had died on 18 February 1633. A “funeral oration” (oracja pogrzebna) was held in the house of the deceased in Wilno (Rudniki Street 12.06) on 14 March; the next day, on the first leg of the journey, in Soleczniki Wielkie, there was a “funeral sermo” (sermon pogrzebny) from Ecclesiastes, chapter 7, during the morning prayers; finally, that same day a “funeral sermon” (kazanie pogrzebne) based on First Corinthians, chapter 15, was delivered over the body before the burial in Gojcieniszki.103 That burgomaster Jakub Gibel was buried two weeks after his death—even though this took place in the local Wilno cemetery—may have had to do with his standing as a member of the upper reaches of the Wilno magistracy for a few decades. There was the usual public procession—for Lutherans there was always some sort of procession since their cemetery was beyond the walls—but this one drew much attention and was the object of some unrest: “It was a pitiful sight, when your body, as it was being carried to the grave, was wrenched and flayed, when your coffin was cast into the gutter, stones cast against it, and—what was more pathetic—when your face was hideously wounded by a stone.”104 Presumably the funeral was delayed so that more in the city could take part in the public solemnity, which certainly included processions of the various lay corporations (magistracy, Communitas mercatoria, guilds) through the streets from the Lutheran church to the extramural cemetery.

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Protestant wills gave little or no indication about what sort of ceremony the individual testator had requested; they simply stated the desire for a “fitting and decent” Christian burial according to the Saxon/Augsburg rite or according to the Evangelical (i.e., Calvinist) rite and the place of interment. Lutheran merchant Jan Sztrunk II (Castle Street 2.10) asked on 15 May 1643 that his “body be given over to the ground honorably and buried in the crypt of the deceased Lord Jakub Gibel, burgomaster of Wilno of glorious memory, [his] very dear father-in-law, according to the Augsburg Confession in which [he dies], in the Saxon cemetery beyond Wilia Gate.”105 Calvinist merchant Jakub Desaus II (Castle Street 1.26) asked on 13 November 1675 that his “sinful body, as dust and earth, be given over to the earth . . . at the Wilno [Calvinist] church [zbór] in the grave of [his] father according to the Christian rite.”106 Calvinist noblewoman Anna Prokopowiczówna Aleksandrowa Czyz∧owa, who lived “beyond Troki Gate on the left-hand side as you go to the Bricked Bridge,” asked her stepson on 27 November 1652 to see to it that her sinful body be buried “according to Christian custom and ancient Church rite as fittingly as possible here in the Evangelical church of Wilno according to [her] means.”107 Anna Rejchowiczówna, a Lutheran citizen of the Roman Catholic Chapter and the Monwid Altar and the widow of organist Jan Empel (Skop Street 49.06), asked her sister on 19 May 1655 to bury “[her] sinful body in our Saxon church [kos´ciół] in the usual place in the Christian manner.”108 That sister, Katarzyna Rejchowiczówna (she lived in “the little street that goes to the [Orthodox] Church of St. Ivan” 56.05), had first been married to a Lutheran but then for some years to a Calvinist, with whom she helped serve the temporal interests of the local Reformed church. She would ask her son by the first marriage on 25 April 1658 to have her body buried “honorably, according to his means in the Saxon cemetery in the city of Wilno and according to Christian custom.”109 Protestants were concerned that they be buried “fittingly and honorably” (as were also non-Protestants), but for the most part they left the rest to their ministers. Koslofsky has noted that in spite of great local variation, the “common elements of all honorable funerals” in early modern Germany could still be identified: “the tolling of church bells, the communal funeral procession led by clergy, the singing of funeral hymns and burial among the Christian dead.”110 Except for an isolated mention of a marble gravestone and some other directions, few Protestant wills in Wilno went into any further details about the funeral and burial. Some of the more modest Roman Catholics and Ruthenians left similarly simple directions. Boilermaker Paweł Kotlik (Skop Street 49.05) asked his wife, son, daughter and sonin-law on 12 February 1632 to make certain that his sinful body be buried “honorably in the Church of the Holy Trinity that is in Wilno . . . according to our manner and the order of the Christian Catholic Roman Church.”111 Anastazja Polikszanka (Subocz Street 78.06) asked of her second husband, Stanisław Dziedzin´ski, on 15 March 1671 “that he deign to bury my sinful body, as earth to earth, . . . in the [Orthodox] Church [cerkiew] of the Holy Spirit.”112 But the great majority of Catholic and Ruthenian testators left some indications of what they expected from their funerals. Above all, they expected prayers to be said for their souls.

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Typical of the minimal sort of statement was the testament of Roman Catholic furrier Bazyli Zawiski, dated 16 September 1689, who lived beyond Troki Gate: And so, I begin first with my soul, which, since it was redeemed by the precious blood of my Savior, I commend unto His merciful hands. And my body, as earth, I give back to the earth, and I ask my wife that it be buried honorably and fittingly in the [Roman Catholic] Church of the Holy Spirit at the monastery of the reverend Dominican fathers, and I urgently demand that she not forget to bring succor to my soul through prayers and alms.113

I will return to the question of alms later—Protestants gave to the poor as well. The point here is the sort of funeral service Vilnans expected for themselves: all non-Protestants expected Masses or liturgies and commemorative services and above all prayers for their souls. Testators with greater means often went into greater detail, or—more frequently—posthumous inventories of their estates allow us to infer more specific things about their funerals after the fact. People of the baroque age had two models to choose from: some clearly expected pompa funebris, while others could explicitly reject it.114 “Without any worldly pomp” (bez z∧adnej pompy ´swieckiej) was a phrase frequently met; it made more of an impression, of course, in the testaments of the elites, since they—if they had so wished—could have afforded the other option. In his testament of 17 March 1691, Orthodox merchant Jan Radzkiewicz (Subocz Street) asked “[his] dear wife that she bury [his body] in the Christian manner at the [Orthodox] Church of the Holy Spirit in Wilno that is in Orthodoxy [błahoczestie], without any worldly pomp, only on a bier, with a divine service.”115 Roman Catholic burgomaster Mikołaj Grzegorzowicz Kliczewski (Subocz Street) had “established an altar over the course of some time and at [his] own expense” in the Church of the Discalced Carmelites at Sharp Gate; after the ruination of the altar during the Muscovite occupation of the city he had paid 500 zł to have it restored. On 19 August 1667, he would ask to be buried beneath “his altar”—but “without any worldly pomp.”116 In his testament of 22 July 1689, Orthodox merchant Paweł Kossobucki would ask to be buried “after [his] death, without any worldly pomp and unnecessary ceremonies and cost, just so long as there be good satisfaction of the invalid poor and the monastic priests, . . . according to the order and rite of the Holy Greco-Ruthenian Church and of the local Wilno Brotherhood Church of the Holy and Vivifying Spirit in [his] own crypt, which was established by [him] and where [his] first deceased wife lies.”117 (And he would ask his second wife to make certain that if he died during his business travels, his body would be brought back to Wilno for final burial.) Ignat and Stefan Dubowicz, father and son, both burgomasters, were converts from Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism. Both would become generous patrons of the Discalced Carmelites at Sharp Gate, which seems to have been a focal point for such converts. On 16 July 1657, from his exile in rural Bobcin´ during the Muscovite occupation of the city, Stefan Dubowicz (Market Square 3.25) would ask

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“urgently” that “[his] sinful body be buried in the church of the reverend Discalced Carmelite fathers, . . . without unnecessary undertakings and without a sermon.”118 But the more frequent choice for those of means in the seventeenth century was to plan for quite elaborate funeral services and burials. The clearest picture of these events arises from a reading of the funeral expenses frequently detailed in posthumous inventories. The estate of Orthodox burghess Anastazja Witkowska (Horse Street 8.02), widow of merchant Jan Gilewicz, was the object of a lengthy and detailed posthumous inventory conducted on 19 October 1684. (It was her sister, Maryna Witkowska, who would be charged with committing bigamy at the beginning of the Muscovite occupation of Wilno almost thirty years earlier.) The inventory included a subsection entitled “A Register of Burial Expenses.” We find here some provisions for postfuneral prayers and commemorations, discussed in the final section of this chapter. But mostly it provides information that allows us to imagine her funeral. She paid 50 zł to the “father monks”—other entries indicate that these were clergy of the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit—who were no doubt to hold the main funeral service; 60 zł to the “youths for candles, rugs, lamps, and the crypt”; 32 zł, 15 gr to “singers”; 9 zł to “bell-ringers for ringing”; 6 zł to the “sacristan for arranging for handles and tassels and the placing of the catafalque”; 13 zł “to two students for reading the Psalter” (perhaps at the home of the dying Gilewiczowa); 7 zł “to the carpenter for making the coffin and upholstering it”; 6 zł “to the founder for tablets”; 4 zł, 15 gr for “450 Danziger nails”; 1 zł for “two shocks of smaller [Danziger nails]”; 1 zł, 10 gr for “a little piece of braid”; 1 zł for “five shocks of Słuck nails”; 8 gr for four shocks of simple nails”; 10 gr for “½ shock of slat nails for the catafalque”; 3 zł for “two priests and a third deacon for performing divine services over the body at home”; 2 zł for “linen for lining the coffin”; 1 zł, 24 gr “for nine pounds of tallow for lamps”; 8 zł “for the poor, by the hands of Michał, the deceased’s shopkeeper” (there were later provisions for alms that had to do with prayers to be said well after the funeral; this seems to have been for participation in the funeral); 4 zł for “four carriers [dragarze] for carrying the body to the church”; 2 zł to “six boys who helped them”; 2 zł for “two servants of ∧ the Merchants’ [Corporation] for service and delivery of little cards”; 1 zł for “Z ydanowicz, likewise for delivering little cards to Their Graces, the Lord members of the magistracy”; 3 zł “to His Grace the Lord notary of the [Merchants’] Communitas for writing up the little cards, for wine”; 3 zł “to the hospital for preparing the picture that stood at the head [of the catafalque]”; 18 zł, 10 gr for a large number of candles (the exact number is illegible); 20 gr “to the tailor for making clothes for old Lady Michałowa.” This part of the inventory ended with a subtotal: “The sum facit [makes] 240 zł, 22 gr.” Much of this seems to have to do with preparations for the funeral. But the inventory continued with information from a “Register of What Was Taken from the Shop for a Coat [czamara] for the Deceased Lady Gilewicz and for the Upholstering of the Coffin, As Well as for Mourning Clothes,” much of which had to do with the funeral itself. Here the estate spent 45 zł for “eleven and a quarter ells of black material for the coat”; 8 zł for “a piece of Swabian linen for a shirt”; 2 zł, 15 gr for “18¼ ells of Danziger pall for the

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mourning clothes for Sir Jan Witkowski, the brother of the deceased”; 6 zł, 15 gr for “three ells of Danziger cloth for the livery for Lady Michałowa, the aunt of the deceased”; 20 zł for “five ells of wide, black baja [a type of thick, soft cloth] for a kontusz [the traditional long robe of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility] for the shopkeeper”; 18 zł for “six ells of black camlet for upholstering the coffin”; 8 zł for “pall for upholstering the chamber and the benches in the church”; 47 zł, 29 gr for “42½ pounds of wax candles.” The total expenditure for things connected with the funeral and its preparation (i.e., excluding provisions for postfuneral commemorations) came to 409 zł, 6 gr. This was a considerable sum. The annual salary of a teacher in Lwów in those years was 200 zł, that of the municipal clock maker 156 zł.119 This prosaic list of items and expenses allows us to hear the bells and the singing and to see the richly decorated church, the upholstered coffin, the deceased in her fine burial clothes lying in a well-appointed coffin, the accompanying family and clergy, including her shopkeeper in his brand-new mourning kontusz. We can also see, smell, and feel the warmth of the many candles. In this case, we should probably imagine a funeral cortege that was led by priests from the Orthodox Holy Spirit Church only, where all the bell ringing was to be done and where the final service and burial took place. The place of burial was marked by some sort of iron tablet, no doubt with a text and the name of the deceased, probably in Cyrillic. Perhaps it was also marked by the image that stood at the head of the catafalque during the funeral. The posthumous inventory of the estate of Catholic merchant Stefan Rabcewicz with which I began the preceding section tells the story of another major public event.120 The register of “Funeral and Other Posthumous Expenses” began by setting the auditory stage, and it was impressively loud: “26 zł, 15 gr for bell ringing for four days to the [Church of the] Holy Trinity”; “18 zł for bell-ringing for four days to the Bernardine fathers”; “18 zł for bellringing for four days to the Dominican fathers”; “18 zł for bell-ringing for four days to the [Church of ] All Saints.” No one in Wilno could have been ignorant in those days of what had happened, and—this was no doubt what the deceased expected—many of them would have said a prayer. And there was much more bell ringing. Although in these cases no time period was specified, the amounts allotted suggest that these churches were also to ring their bells for four days: “18 zł to the Discalced fathers for bell ringing”; “22 zł, 15 gr to [the Church of ] St. Kazimierz for bell ringing”; “18 zł to [the Church of ] St. John for bell ringing.” Thus the bell ringers of seven intramural Roman Catholic churches—those of the Calced and Discalced Carmelites, Jesuits (two different institutions), Bernardines, and Dominicans, with the hospital Church of the Holy Trinity at the head of the list—would have been kept busy (and had sore hands) for four days after Rabcewicz’s death. The fact that it was the hospital church that occupied the place of honor emphasizes the purpose of the bell ringing: the poor were to lead the citizenry in praying for Rabcewicz’s soul. Further, Rabcewicz paid 30 zł for “Holy Masses to various [Roman Catholic] churches”; 20 zł for “40 Masses celebrated over the body”; 7 zł for the reading of the Psalter; 40 zł for “eight ells of silk taffeta for an overcoat”; 8 zł for tassels, 6 zł for handles, 12 zł for nails,

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4 zł for trimming, and 5 zł for the coffin itself; 5 zł for tablets; 9 zł for candles at the Church of the Holy Spirit; 4 zł for “borrowing pall to upholster the chambers”; 3 zł for the shroud; 25 zł to “the [Uniate] Basilian Fathers for the procession and for Masses celebrated at the body”; 10 zł to the Bernardines “for the procession,” 10 zł to the Dominicans, 6 zł to the Carmelites, and 10 zł to “St. John” (i.e., to the Jesuits); 60 zł to the Franciscans “for the music and with everything”; 10 zł “to the servants who sat by the body for three days and carried the body”; 6 zł for the sermon; 4 zł to the Dominicans for ecclesiastical robes (kapy); 6 zł to His Grace Father Słupski; 25 zł “for fish for the wake”; 18 zł for spices; 15 zł for three barrels of beer; 10 zł for vodka for four days; 2 zł to the tailor for making the coat; 2 zł for a pound and a half of incense; 5 zł for a gallon of wine “for the Mass in the church and at home”; 25 zł “to the poor for a dinner with everything and an alms”; 4 zł for an offering; 16 zł for “6 large candles that burned by the body”; 3 zł for yellow candles; 6 zł for linen for the mourning clothes; 135 zł for cloth “for mourning clothes for everybody”; 3 zł to the cook; 16 zł to the tailor for sewing the mourning clothes; 30 zł for a barrel of mead for the wake. This, too, was a sumptuous affair. Four days of bell ringing from an array of intramural Roman Catholic and Uniate churches. Forty Masses said over the deceased’s body. Forty was a number accorded a certain mystical significance in Eastern-rite Christianity, and, while not unknown in the West, Rabcewicz’s request for forty Masses may owe something to his obvious familiarity with Ruthenian ways, particularly the sorokoust (the forty divine liturgies said over forty days beginning with the day of death).121 Participants in the wake partook of fish, spices, beer, vodka, and mead. Processions were led through the streets of Wilno by the fathers of the three usual mendicant orders—Bernardines, Dominicans, and Carmelites— plus the Jesuits of the Church of St. John. The Basilian fathers (no doubt Uniate in this instance) with their distinctive robes, ritual, and chant would have sung Church Slavonic Masses over the body and joined in the public procession. There were candles, incense, and a funeral sermon. Perhaps Roman Catholics in Wilno also buried their dead three days after death: the carriers sat by the body for three nights before they took it to the church, and the bells rang that entire time, for four days, beginning with the moment of death and ending after the funeral. We see here that notable Roman Catholics also asked for funeral sermons. Rabcewicz was not alone among Roman Catholic Vilnans in calling for clergy, monks, Church Slavonic singing, and liturgies from the Eastern rite. In some cases there may have been an older family tradition of allegiance to Ruthenian ways; in other cases perhaps we are dealing with a mixed marriage. But in others it may simply have been a feature of life in this highly mixed city. The estate of Roman Catholic merchant Michał Kulbowicz was the object of an inventory on 18 January 1681. It, too, contained a lengthy and detailed “Register of Expenses for the Funeral.”122 In addition to a series of services from Roman Catholic clergy, he allotted 9 zł, 6 gr “to Ruthenian singers” and 1 zł, 15 gr to the “father protopope” (probably Uniate) for divine services. All indications are that Kulbowicz’s wife, Anna Druhowinianka, was a

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Ruthenian. Her name, the names of the tutores (the legal guardians that her husband chose for her in his will, Jakub Stefanowicz and Józef Z˙agiewicz), and the name of her second husband (Hrehorij Eliaszewicz) all point to Ruthenian circles.123 Some hints of syncretisms across Wilno’s Christian confessions in the realm of funeral practices begin to emerge from these materials. The funeral sermon may have been a Lutheran specialty, but Calvinists, Roman Catholics, Uniates, and Orthodox sought to emulate it more and more frequently. Further, there may have been a general tendency to bury on the third day after death. This was clearly the case with Wilno’s Lutherans, who, in other cities, tended to bury sooner. Calvinists in the Swiss centers buried almost immediately, within twelve to twenty-four hours.124 But in Wilno they may have emulated their Lutheran neighbors. Calvinist minister Baltazar Łabe˛dzki, who published funeral sermons for five members of the Winhold family, gives us some glimpses into local usage, including deviations from Genevan norms. His sermon for Korneliusz II, former traveler to the Low Countries and France and ultimately husband of Katarzyna Giblówna, tells us that he died on 31 May 1638 at age thirty-nine and that this funeral took place three days later.125 The entries for bell ringing (four days, including the day of his death) indicate that Rabcewicz’s Roman Catholic funeral took place three days after his death; it included a funeral sermon and the participation of Uniate clergy. Perhaps Wilno’s Ruthenians followed similar patterns.

Last Journeys The dead made a final journey that took them from the place of death, typically the home setting, often first to the church for a funeral service and then to the place of burial, where a second service might take place. Members of the elite—we see this on several occasions with burgomasters’ funerals—were accompanied by large and ostentatious public processions that included guild members in their guild dress and under a guild banner. Such processions were of necessity multiconfessional, and unrest often accompanied them, not all of it necessarily based on confessional difference. Much of it was motivated by tensions and conflicts between guilds and not among the confessions. We have already heard of unrest during the funeral procession for Lutheran burgomaster Jakub Gibel in 1638. Schönflissius seems to imply a confessional component to the tumult, but this was this not necessarily the sole or main cause. On 5 July 1667, the tailors’ guild brought a complaint against the brotherhood of salt merchants over a riot that had taken place during the recent public funeral procession for Roman Catholic burgomaster Mikołaj Grzegorzowicz Kliczewski.126 Both corporations were confessionally mixed, and confession seems not to have played any role in the altercation. The tailors complained “in common, both the Roman and the Greek side,” that one of their elders had been physically assaulted by members of the salt merchants’ guild when he and other tailors came “to the sorrowful act of the funeral of His Grace, Lord Burgomaster

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Kliczewski, with their candles and stood, as ancient custom and the pertinent law command, by the very body.” In this case, the language of the protestation suggests that it was sociopolitical pecking orders among the guilds, and not matters of confession, that were at stake in the altercation. More modest individuals would be accompanied to their final rest by smaller groups of clergy, followed by family and neighbors. It is hard to know whether derision accompanied the journeys of these less ostentatious processions. The records are silent on this question, which might suggest that they were mostly uneventful. As we have seen, Vilnans were watchful over the slightest slight to honor, and they were quick to litigate. There was an important distinction between the Protestants and the non-Protestants when it came to these final journeys. As late as the late seventeenth century, most Roman Catholic, Uniate, and Orthodox Vilnans—at least those who lived within the walls and who left records in documents like wills—were buried either in an intramural church or in the adjacent churchyard. In larger cities of northwestern Europe, shortly before the Reformation, cemeteries began to be established beyond city walls for reasons of order and hygiene. The process would gain momentum in Catholic communities in the seventeenth century, but it took on early and marked urgency in Protestant cities in the sixteenth, where the dead were banished beyond the walls for reasons that also included the new theology in addition to urban planning. In rejecting the notion of intercession by the living for the dead, the Protestants also separated them physically.127 It is unclear to me whether the Lutherans and Calvinists of Wilno buried their dead beyond the walls in the seventeenth century for reasons of order, hygiene, and theology or simply because municipal authorities no longer permitted them to bury in the churchyard. The Lustration of 1636 tells us, however, that the Calvinists used to bury their dead—that is, sometime between the establishment of their church within the walls in the 1560s and the time of the surveys (the later 1630s)—in the intramural churchyard, yet another example of the distance of Lithuanian Reformed practice from the dictates of Geneva. The seven houses at Calvinist Church Street 54.03–54.09 contained a plot of land donated by the castellan of Wilno and chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania Ostafi Wołłowicz “for a hospital and for the burial of the dead, which [by 1636] has been turned into buildings.”128 I have not encountered references to Lutheran burials in the churchyard, but perhaps they, too, had deviated from Protestant norms at an earlier time and had buried some deceased congregants in the churchyard. In any event, this segregation in death meant that Roman Catholic, Uniate, and Orthodox Vilnans were taken from their place of death, usually their homes, to the church for a funeral and then buried more or less on the spot, either in the church or in the churchyard. The Lutherans buried their dead in the Saxon garden outside Wilia Gate, the Calvinists in their own garden outside Troki Gate. The Lutheran church remained on German Street. The Calvinists were required by royal decree to remove their church, including school and hospital, from its place near the Bernardines after the violence of 1639. From 1640 they gathered and worshipped in a new location just outside the walls, near their old cemetery. This meant that

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Lutherans and Calvinists made longer processions, either first to their place of worship, or—and the funeral sermons I have seen suggest that this may have been another possibility—directly from their homes to the gardens, where the funeral service and sermon was held.129 Whether or not a funeral service was held in the church, Lutherans and Calvinists regularly processed through the streets of Wilno and through Wilia and Troki Gates, respectively. The longer processions and the fact that the majority of the participants would have been Protestants would certainly have drawn attention and could have offered a scene of conflict. One such procession became the subject of a series of complaints registered in the castle court of Troki. The Catholic side complained that the castle court of Wilno, administered by a client of the Calvinist Radziwiłłs, poet Daniel Naborowski, “favored the Calvinists” and refused to enter their protestations in the books of that jurisdiction.130 For this reason they had been forced to seek a hearing in the Troki castle. In the period between the riots against the Calvinist church in October 1639 and its banishment beyond the walls in June 1640, the Calvinists accompanied the body of the cupbearer of Oszmiany Aleksander Przypkowski from the still intramural Calvinist church to their cemetery (we can re-create the path from subsequent Roman Catholic protestations). He had died on 1 August 1639 in Przypkowice but would be buried (reburied?) only on 25 March 1640 in Wilno. Thus, it would seem, a funeral was held in the intramural church, probably with a funeral sermon, before the congregants headed to the cemetery beyond Troki Gate. According to one of the protestations entered 14 March 1640 by bishop of Wilno Abraham Woyna, the widow, Katarzyna z Wilczków, “frivolously and shamelessly . . . had her husband buried on a holy day contrary to custom, from eight o’clock to ten and later.” (The twentyfifth of March 1640 was both the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is fixed, and Judica or Passion Sunday, the fifth Sunday in Lent, a week before Palm Sunday.) The servants of Krzysztof Radziwiłł II kept the coffin on ostentatious display, with a guard of Polish and German foot soldiers in uniform and with loaded weapons in front of the Jesuits’ Church of St. John. There they “accosted the students [of the Jesuit Academy], and they jostled the people who were coming out of the church, they beat on drums right during the sermon, they played on pipes and made a racket for more than two hours, even though they had been discreetly admonished [not to do that]”. Not satisfied with this, they proceeded “along a street that was never customary,” past four Roman Catholic churches, stopping to make further disturbances in front of the Dominicans’ Church of the Holy Spirit just at the moment of the elevation of the Most Holy Sacrament.131 This description comes as a part of a concerted and ultimately successful effort on the part of the Roman Catholic hierarchs to have the Calvinists removed from the city, and it should be taken with a large grain of salt. Still, it gives us some idea of what the funeral procession of a Calvinist notable might have looked like. And it gives us a parade route: from the Calvinist church up Bernardine Street to Castle Street and the Church of St. John. Then along the artery from that church to Troki Gate (St. John Street, Dominican Street, Troki Street), past

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the churches of the Holy Spirit, Holy Trinity, and the Blessed Virgin Mary on the Sands. It is, in fact, difficult to understand how this alleged “street that was never customary” could be anything other than the usual path between these two points. The series of Catholic complaints does suggest, however, that Vilnans had a sense of normal paths for funeral, and no doubt other, more mundane processions through the streets of Wilno. Here, too, Lithuanian Calvinists demonstrated Lutheran, even Catholic deviations from Swiss practice. Funerals in Bern banned gravestones, bells, sermons or prayers, church services, and almsgiving. Basel, subject to Lutheran influences, allowed processions and sermons. In Geneva, gravestones appeared only in the nineteenth century. A Basler visiting Geneva in the seventeenth century remarked that they died there “like dogs” (wie die Hünd).132 Lithuanian Calvinists buried their dead in much “more civilized” fashion with rituals reminiscent of those of their neighbors of other confessions. A description from the Lithuanian Calvinists’ synod of 1629 tells of funeral processions in Słuck led by the school rector, its teaching staff, and the pupils, all singing hymns to accompany the body to the cemetery.133 The Lutherans would have proceeded from their houses to the church on German Street (unless they went directly to the cemetery, which may have happened in some cases). The elites would have gone down Castle Street through Market Square and turned right into German Street. The middle-level sorts from the Glass Street neighborhood could have gone through the Jewish neighborhood to German Street. From the church they would have proceeded up German Street to its continuation in Wilia Street and through Wilia Gate to the Saxon garden. Tatars lived in the Łukiszki suburb overlooking the River Wilia and buried their dead at the nearby mosque. Although some of the Jews of seventeenth-century Wilno lived in the suburbs, most lived within the walls and many of these in the neighborhood at the center of town in Jewish Street, Meat Shop Street, and environs. They buried their dead in the Snipiszki suburb on the other side of the Bricked Bridge over the River Wilia. Their path would have begun in the footsteps of their Glass Street Lutheran neighbors, but once beyond the gate, they would have continued in that direction to the bridge. Some sort of public procession of Jews through the streets of Wilno and the suburbs accompanying their dead to the cemetery must have been a common occurrence in Wilno. The hospital Church of the Holy Trinity had a concession for the Bricked Bridge and collected a toll from all who passed over it in support of their poorhouse establishments. The Jews of Wilno had a royal privilege (granted in 1642 by Władysław IV and reconfirmed in 1669 by Michał Korybut Wis´niowiecki) that gave them the right, as a corporation, to accompany their dead across the bridge to the cemetery without paying the usual tax.134 We have already seen how bishop of Wilno Mikołaj Stefan Pac sought in 1682 to lay down rules for Roman Catholic processions through the streets with the Host on the way to visit sick and dying parishioners. His purpose there—through a ban on progressions through the Jewish neighborhoods—was to avoid both desecration of the Sacrament and occasions for anti-Jewish violence.

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As a part of the renegotiation of the Calvinist presence and behavior in Wilno after their relocation in 1640 beyond the walls, the city’s Reformed ministers were specifically granted the right to visit the sick within the walls and to conduct funeral processions. Those processions, however, now had to take place without singing and music. Further, Calvinist pastors were not to dress in any way reminiscent of Catholic priests, in order to avoid confusing the Catholic flock.135 Part of the Calvinist ritual in Wilno—in contradiction of Calvinist teaching and practice at the centers of the movement—included bringing Communion to the dying. Wilno’s Lutherans and Calvinists—if they wished to be buried locally—had only one choice each in the seventeenth century. The Uniate elite all seem to have desired to be buried at the Church of the Holy Trinity. I have not found any seventeenth-century requests for burial elsewhere, for instance at the Cathedral Church of the Most Pure Virgin. Perhaps the Uniates, too, had only one choice by this time. We know, however, that Wilno’s Ruthenians had had many more choices in times past. In 1636 the house on the “Street Going to the [Orthodox] Church of St. Ivan” 55.02 contained a “spacious plot of land, on which quite a number of dead people were buried, since, as the owner said, this used to be an Orthodox church.”136 After 1596, Wilno’s Orthodox had one place of burial, at the intramural Church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit. Roman Catholics had many choices. We find a variety of motivations: proximity (which usually also meant the choice was the local parish church); family traditions; availability (some gave a ranked list of choices); professional ties (guild altars, for example); membership in religious brotherhoods. Naturally, more than one of these criteria could be at play when Roman Catholic Vilnans chose final resting places. The widow of organ builder Korneliusz Krapoliusz, Gertruda Szulcówna (Bernardine Street 52.03), desired in 1671 to be buried right next door at “the Bernardines.”137 She probably meant the Church of St. Anne, which gathered the local German Catholics. Her neighbor at Bernardine Street 53.04, boilermaker Adam Mikołajewicz, had asked in 1639 for burial in the same place.138 Andrys Helmer lived under the chapter jurisdiction as well but a bit farther away, at Skop Street 49.07. He was a self-described foreigner, yet another of the local Roman Catholic Germans, and he, too, would request burial at the Church of St. Anne (he identified the church by name, not by its order).139 His neighbor at Skop Street 49.05, wheelwright Paweł Kotlik, asked in 1632 to be buried around the corner in the other direction, at the hospital Church of the Holy Trinity. Tailor Jan Kostromski, as we know, would buy the Kotlik house in 1640, and it would long remain in the possession of his daughter, Justyna Kostromska, wife of musician Jan Baranowski. That couple had “moved up” to the noble neighborhood and were living at Troki Street 33.02 toward the end of their lives. Both asked to be buried, Jan in 1685 and Justyna in 1696, at the Franciscan Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the Sands, which was just around the corner from them. Ignat Dubowicz (7.03) and his son Stefan (Market Square 3.25), both burgomasters and converts from Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism, became patrons of the Church of St. Teresa of the Discalced Carmelites at Sharp Gate and asked to be buried there, the former in 1636, the latter in 1657.140

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A mixed marriage could lead to burial in different churchyards for husband and wife. As we have seen, Uniate salt merchant Afanas Otroszkiewicz asked in the spring of 1666 to be buried at the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity. In the fall of the same year, his wife, Katarzyna Kuryłowiczówna, clearly drawing on the assistance of the same notary, would request burial across the street at the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit.141 Afanas had asked his Uniate wife to see to his Orthodox burial. Both had been married before. If they were asking to be buried with their first spouses, they did not broach the topic in their testaments. Finally, who attended these funerals? We may suspect they brought together some significant part of the circles of family, friends, and neighbors who had surrounded the deceased in life and that they were mono- or multiconfessional in reflection of those networks. Jesuit priest Stanisław Grodzicki had referred to the Calvinists, especially the Calvinist clergy, present at the Roman Catholic funeral of Radziwiłłowa, as “intruders.” Still, the clergy of Wilno must have been rather familiar with the sense of looking out at the congregation and finding individuals there from the other confessions, especially during funeral services. Many of the statutes for Wilno’s guilds, most of which were confessionally mixed, specifically required all the brethren to take part in the funeral of a brother, regardless of religious considerations. In articles of 30 May 1579, the weavers’ guild, which shared power among Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, and Ruthenians, stipulated, If any of the brothers or sisters, that is, a master, his wife, child, or some apprentice of this brotherhood or guild should die, then three masters and three journeymen are to carry the body, and all the others are to walk after the body, and they are to adorn the funeral, as the final Christian act of service, with their presence. And if anyone should refuse to do this, or should not come to the funeral at the appointed hour, such a one is to be punished by the fine of one gr.142

The goldsmiths’ articles of 1627—they shared power between Catholics and “another religion” (almost all of the latter Lutheran)—set a penalty of 4 Lithuanian gr for absenting oneself from any funeral or quarterly requiem Masses.143 The cap makers’ guild enacted a statute on 3 December 1636, in which power was shared equally between those of the Roman and those of the Greek religion. Only the Romans were required to attend Corpus Christi processions and attend to the guild altar at the Bernardines, but all were to take part in the funerals of guild members, or at least of their masters: When any of the masters of the cap and hatmakers’ craft should die, the younger brethren will be obliged to dig the hole and put the body in the hole and carry it on the bier, and others are to accompany the body with honor, all together, both Greeks and Romans to the [Roman] church, as also from the Roman side to the [Greek] church, and bury it fittingly. And if anyone should be absent from the funeral, he is to pay 4 gr to the guild as a penalty, and if he should not be there a second time, he is to give 8 gr, and for the third

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time he is to give 16 gr, and if he should not come a fourth time, he is to be punished by imprisonment by the magistracy at the request of the elders until he makes satisfaction.144

In articles of 28 May 1639, the weavers, who now shared power equally between brothers of the Roman Catholic and the Augsburg confessions, made arrangements for non-Catholics to buy out of service to the guild altar, but they required all members to take part in all funerals.145 The tanners shared power equally among the Roman, Greek, and German (i.e., Lutheran) faiths. In articles of 30 March 1672 they demanded “that if any should be absent from a requiem Mass or from accompanying the dead in a procession, or whenever an elder orders them to carry the body of a deceased brother, or a candle, such a one is to be fined four gr for each act of disobedience.”146 And other guilds—hat makers, glaziers, coopers, fishermen, wheelwrights, white-leather tanners, and masons—made other requirements that, at the least, would have brought nonCatholics into Roman Catholic funeral services.147

Final Dispensations The bequests provided in last wills and testaments provide information on two points that are of special interest in this book: the confessional constellations that Vilnans created through their almsgiving and provisions they made for commemorations and the expectations they had for the effects of those bequests. Some Vilnans made bequests only within their own confession. At least one of them placed special emphasis on this fact. This was Orthodox merchant Paweł Kossobucki (Market Square), who in his will of 2 July 1689 stipulated that his grants to Ruthenian institutions throughout the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were to be limited to those that were “Orthodox, not being in the Union.” He was, in fact, unusual in both regards: most gave to more than one confession, and most limited their giving to Wilno, with occasional small bequests to one other place closely connected with their family. Kossobucki gave to the Holy Spirit Church in Wilno (several separate gifts to various altars and congregations), to the church and monastery in Kronie, to the church and hospital in Połock, to the church and brotherhood monastery in Dzisna, to the church and monastery in Kupiatycze, to the church and monastery in Nowydwór, and to the church and monastery in Markowo.148 We see here a clearly programmatic support of Orthodox—and only Orthodox—institutions and throughout the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Kossobucki’s business connections would appear to have covered the same areas, and he may well have had connections with the Orthodox merchants of that name who made Połock their home.149 Stefan Karas´, royal secretary, “administrator of the wójt’s office of Wilno,” and burgomaster, was a Roman Catholic living in the family house at Horse Street 8.05. In the will he

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signed on 22 February 1684 he made bequests that were uniquely Roman Catholic and—here he was closer than Kossobucki to the local norm—uniquely Vilnan. He gave varying amounts to the Roman (as distinct from the Uniate) Church of the Holy Trinity, to St. Stephen, to St. Peter, to St. Nicodemus, to St. John, to St. Kazimierz, to the Dominicans, to the Bernardines, to the Franciscans, to the Calced Carmelites of the Brotherhood of the Holy Scapular, and to the Discalced Carmelites.150 In spite of his clear connections, apparently amicable enough, with the Ruthenians of his Horse Street neighborhood, his bequests excluded all but Roman Catholic institutions. His house was next to the Uniate Salcewicz family, and he had connections with the Uniate Ohurcewiczes (bencher Andrzej Ohurcewicz was a witness of his will), both families with presences in the magistracy.151 The Dubowicz family had made the journey from Orthodoxy, through the Uniate Church, to, in at least two cases, Roman Catholicism. The patriarch, burgomaster Ignat Dubowicz (7.03), put his name to a will on 24 December 1636. He was most generous toward the church where he wished to be buried—the Discalced Carmelites’ Church of St. Teresa at Sharp Gate—to which he also bequeathed “my own bricked town house in Market Square [4.06] that lies across from the bread stands.” In addition, he gave considerable sums to the hospital at the Church of St. Nicodemus (1,000 zł) and to the Jesuits at the Church of St. Kazimierz (400 zł). He also left “several properties” to his son Aleksy “a monk of the Order of St. Basil [in this case, Uniate] or to the Basilian Fathers in his person of the monastery of the Holy Trinity in Wilno.” But this seems to have been more a bequest to a family member, and the church played a role here solely because the recipient was a monk (and the future archimandrite of the monastery).152 In all other regards, he displayed the exclusive thinking of the convert to Roman Catholicism, and he limited his gifts to institutions of that confession. Another of Ignat’s sons, Aleksy’s brother Stefan, signed his own will in exile on 16 July 1657.153 He gave his money somewhat more widely but again only to Roman Catholic and Uniate institutions, although he clearly gave it to the Uniate churches, hospitals, and monasteries themselves and not simply to his brother. He gave to the Dominicans, three Jesuit monasteries, the Franciscans, the Calced Carmelites, the Canons Regular (Augustinians), the Bonifratelli, the Bernardines, the “Uniate Basilians” (he specified Uniate because in the use of many of the time, “Basilian” could refer to the Orthodox, whom he wished to exclude here), the Discalced Carmelite nuns, the Uniate nuns, and to “various hospitals in the city of Wilno.” Judging by the long and specific list that preceded this, I think it is safe to exclude the Orthodox and Protestant hospitals from consideration here. At the other end of the social scale among testators, Roman Catholic boilermaker Adam Mikołajewicz, who lived under the jurisdiction of the Wilno chapter at Bernardine Street 53.04, focused all his generosity on Catholic institutions in his will of 17 April 1639 and again all of them in Wilno. In addition to the Bernardines, where he asked to be buried (at the Church of St. Anne), he made bequests to the Franciscans and Dominicans and to the hospitals at the Churches of the Holy Trinity, Mary Magdalene, St. Stephen, St. Peter, and St. Nicodemus.154

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Roman Catholic burgomaster Mikołaj Kliczewski lived on Subocz Street. Although he lived in a heavily Ruthenian neighborhood, his family circles—they included the Gawłowickis and the Szperkowiczes—were largely Roman Catholic. Perhaps it was the tie of neighborhood that brought him into the same constellations as converts like the Dubowiczes. (It is from his will that we learn of the death of Stefan Dubowicz at the hands of “bandits” during the exile after 1655.) He, too, would be buried at the nearby Discalced Carmelite Church of St. Teresa at Sharp Gate, at the altar he had himself paid to have built. In his will, signed 8 January 1667, he made bequests to a wide range of Roman Catholic, but also Uniate, institutions, all of them in Wilno and throughout its suburbs. These included gifts to the hospitals of the Church of St. Stephen in the Rudniki suburb and of the intramural Church of the Holy Trinity; to the Church of “Their Graces, the Father Dominicans of the Wilno Monastery, where lie [his] parents, [his] brother Lord Wawrzyniec, and [his] older sister, Lady Anna Grzybowa, and other friends”; separately to the Brotherhood of the Rosary at that same Church of the Holy Spirit; to the Church of St. Nicholas (one of the oldest in Wilno), “for its renovation”; to the sacristy at the Wilno parish church (i.e., the Jesuits’ Church of St. John); to the “greater congregation of Their Graces the Lord students [of the academy]”; for the “dress [oche˛dóstwo] of Their Graces the Father Jesuits who are in the Collegium at St. John”; to the Jesuits of the Church of St. Kazimierz; to the novitiate (at the Church of St. Ignatius) of the Jesuit fathers; to the Franciscans (of the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the Sands); to the (Calced Carmelite) Church of All Saints; to the Bonifratelli; to the Bernardines; to the Brotherhood Conceptionis Beatissimae Virginis [of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin] at that same church; to the Church of St. Anne; to the nuns of “the old convent in the Transfluvia suburb”; to the nuns of the Church of St. Michael; to the Bernardine nuns at the Church of St. Catherine; to the Church of St. George; to the Church of St. Peter; to the hospital at that same Church of St. Peter; to the Augustinians who have their church in the Transfluvia suburb; to the hospitals of the Churches of St. Nicodemus, the Ruthenian (i.e., Uniate) Holy Trinity, the Ruthenian Most Pure, the Ruthenian St. Peter in the Transfluvia suburb; to the Discalced Carmelite nuns of the Wilno convent. As far as I can tell, Kliczewski included every single Roman Catholic and Uniate institution in his deathbed grants, both within the walls and in the suburbs. And he pointedly, if silently, omitted Orthodox, Lutheran, and Calvinist churches and hospitals.155 Unlike Kossobucki, others of the Greek rite saw themselves as belonging to a very local, Vilnan, pan-Ruthenian world. My impression from reading the available extant sources is that this was the more frequent pattern. Whether they were themselves Uniate or Orthodox, they gave to institutions from both Ruthenian confessions, excluding both the Protestants and the Roman Catholics, with whom the Uniates were supposed to have been in communion. This is one of the more surprising results of fleshing out neighborhoods and networks in seventeenth-century Wilno. Contrary to the descriptions of the confessional polemicists— who themselves lived, wrote, and printed in Wilno and sometimes described local events in

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the struggle between the Uniate and the Orthodox churches after 1596—Ruthenian Vilnans themselves were more than happy to bring the two warring camps together. Orthodox merchant Siemion Jakubowicz Czaplin´ski had been a member on the Greek side of the first Merchants’ Guild’s sexagintavirate in 1602.156 He lived in a house on the eastern side of Market Square (4.03), where we still find a Greek presence in 1636 and 1639. He drew up his last will and testament on 3 June 1630, which means that his adult life had played itself out against the backdrop of the introduction of the Union of Brest, the Uniate confiscation of Orthodox churches in Wilno, the establishment of the new Orthodox Holy Spirit Monastery and Church, the altercations between Orthodox burghers and the Uniate metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus´ Hipacy Pociej, the tensions over the “illegal” reestablishment of the Orthodox hierarchy in 1620, and the pamphlet wars of the early 1620s that were initiated from the Wilno presses. He died before King Władysław IV could recognize the Orthodox hierarchy and impose a relatively peaceful compromise. And yet his deathbed bequests were to both Greek religious communities. He asked to be buried “according to Christian custom in the [Orthodox] Church of the Holy Spirit, in the crypt of my brother, the deceased Jachim Sawicz” (an Orthodox merchant). He bequeathed sums of money to the fathers (100 zł) and to the nuns (50 zł) at that same church. He also gave 20 Lithuanian k to the hospital at that church, as well as 10 zł to the altar of St. Constantine “where our crypt is . . . at the Church of the Holy Spirit.” But his gifts to the Uniates were equally impressive, if not even more generous. He gave 400 Lithuanian k to the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity against the house in which he was living, “under this condition, that the fathers of the Holy Trinity are never to take this sum, rather they are to take the interest on this sum, 40 k every year, and pray to God for my soul constantly, publice [publicly] and privately.” In addition, he gave 20 k to the nuns at the Uniate Holy Trinity; and he gave various sums to Uniate hospitals—10 k to the Holy Trinity, 5 k to the Holy Most Pure, and 5 k to St. George in the Rossa suburb.157 Councillor Samuel Filipowicz (Subocz Street 79.08) was Uniate well before this was a necessary choice for Ruthenian men who wished to pursue a career in the magistracy. He asked on 8 February 1663 to be buried in the crypt of the Brotherhood of the Most Holy Virgin at the Church of the Uniate Holy Trinity, and he left 40 k for the adornment of the image of the Most Holy Virgin that was found there. Further, he gave 10 k to the nuns’ convent and 10 k to the hospital, both at the Church of the Holy Trinity, as well as 10 k to the hospital at the Uniate cathedral Church of the Most Pure. He also forgave a debt that the Orthodox fathers of the Church of the Holy Spirit had incurred in buying a “piece of garden” from him, granting it to them “for all eternity, where they are to pray to the Lord God for my soul.” In addition, he bequeathed 20 k to the nuns’ convent and another 20 k to the hospital at the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit.158 And note that this document was written shortly after the liberation of Wilno, when, as some documents would suggest, the Orthodox and Orthodox institutions could have been under a cloud of political suspicion.

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Two years later, on 18 November 1664, Filipowicz’s neighbor in the St. Kazimierz Alleyway, Kondrat Parfianowicz, put his signature to his own will. He was an Orthodox merchant. He and his wife—she was Dorota Rzepnicka, daughter of Orthodox burgomaster Stefan Rzepnicki—had returned from exile by the summer of 1660 when they purchased the house in question.159 He asked to be buried at the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit “according to Christian usage . . . moderating expenses and spending in view of these lamentable current times.” He set aside 150 zł for the “reverend father monks at the Church of the Holy Spirit for the funeral, sorokoust [forty-day commemoration] and sobotnik [Saturday commemoration].” In addition he gave 40 zł to the nuns at that church and 25 zł to its hospital. But he also had a daughter, “Marusia” (Little Maryna), who was being kept by the nuns at the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity where she herself hoped to join the order. To her he bequeathed the handsome sum of 1,000 zł. But if she should die a layperson, then half that sum (still a considerable amount) was to go to “the reverend order of those same nuns, and the other half to her brothers and sister who were born to my first marriage” (with Rzepnicka—the widower had remarried rather quickly). Separately from his bequest to his daughter, he donated 25 zł to the nuns at the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity and 10 zł to its hospital.160 Other neighbors, Orthodox councillor Paweł Sien ´czyło and wife (Subocz Street 78.07), would be accused of treasonous collaboration with Muscovite forces during the occupation. They had sought asylum in Königsberg but soon returned, and Sien ´czyło’s will of 16/26 January 1661 would be recorded in the Muscovite-controlled Wilno castle, where, it was alleged, they were living and aiding the occupiers. The document was in fact given an Old Style date, which happened only during the occupation of the city and usually only in documents directly controlled by the Muscovites. But there are some questions here. We know of the will only because it would later be registered in the books of the Wilno magistracy. Moreover, the picture given by the range of bequests—again, all of them local—is remarkable in its openness to the other confessions. Sien´czyło did not specify in which church he was to be buried. He wrote simply, “My sinful body I commend to the earth, whence it was taken; let earth return to earth.” We may surmise from other indications here (he deposited some of his wealth during the occupation with the monks of the Orthodox Holy Spirit Monastery) and from the fact that the family remained Orthodox (his brother Grzegorz would make his final bequests there161), that the “earth” he had in mind was at the Church of the Holy Spirit. But the range of his giving verged on the indiscriminately broad: And what is more, upon which this entire testament of mine depends, living for such a long time in this world, and not having done anything good for my soul, and not having anything with which I could show myself at that terrible Divine Judgment, therefore, I bequeath a certain amount to all the Ruthenian churches [cerkwie] and all the Roman churches [ko´scioły], as well as to all the Ruthenian cloisters [klasztory] and the Roman cloisters [klasztory]. . . . And I bequeath 50 zł to all hospitals, both Ruthenian and Roman.

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Ten k to all the widows and other poorer people, let them pray for my soul to the Lord God. I also ask my dear brothers that, having removed 3,000 zł from my remaining estate from the various bequests, and having found some good man, they give him that sum, and that he, having found a chamber suitable for this, whether at his house or somewhere at the [Orthodox] church, or having built one, that he maintain and feed from year to year twelve poor people (who are unable to earn a living) from the interest from this money.162

In seventeenth-century Wilno, where among all the Ruthenian institutions there was only one Orthodox complex, that of the Brotherhood of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the use of plural forms included, by definition, the Uniate churches, monasteries, and hospitals. The use of the plural for the Roman institutions is less clear. He may not have meant to include the Protestants, but he did not specifically exclude them, and his almsgiving seems to have been of the indiscriminate sort and may have included all Vilnans in need and the institutions that sought to meet their needs. This is remarkable—the will of an Orthodox man under a cloud of suspicion of treason, first registered with Muscovite authorities at a time when by decree of the tsar there were to have been no Uniates in the city. Lutheran swordsmith Melchior Ilis (Glass Street 21.03) put his name to his will on 18 May 1663, shortly after his return to Wilno from the family’s place of exile in Königsberg. He asked his guardians to see to it that his “sinful body be buried fittingly in the customary place according to the rites of our Augsburg religion.” After providing funds (an unspecified amount) for his funeral and for his surviving family, he laid out further provisions: “The Lord guardians are to dispense immediately after my death, without any delay, 10 zł each to all the hospitals that are in Wilno at this time, both in the city and in the suburbs, and 20 zł separately to our Saxon hospital.”163 Since he did not explicitly exclude Greek-rite institutions here, I can only conclude that he meant what he said: “to all the hospitals that are in Wilno at this time, both in the city and in the suburbs.” In his will registered 3 July 1665, Lutheran wine merchant Hanus Magdeburger made bequests to the Lutheran hospital, the Catholic Holy Trinity hospital, and the Catholic Joseph and Nicodemus hospital.164 Two other Lutheran wills reveal a sense of local German solidarity that reached across the Lutheran-Catholic divide. Chamois tanner Hanus Meler, who lived under the jurisdiction of the horodnictwo in the Szerejkiszki suburb, signed his will on 7 November 1648. He asked to be buried “fittingly, not sparing the necessary cost, according to the Christian custom of the rite of the Augsburg confession in the customary place.” His bequests were quite specific, and the amounts, and their ordering, are revealing: 200 zł to the Saxon church; 25 zł to the Saxon hospital; 25 zł to the “German hospital of the Roman religion”; 5 Lithuanian k to the hospitals at the Roman Catholic Churches of Mary Magdalene, SS. Joseph and Nicodemus, St. Stephen, and the Holy Trinity. He also set aside 100 zł “for a marble stone over [his] grave,”—perhaps with a text in German, although the will was in Polish. This is the only specific information I have found concerning how Protestants provided for their funerals and burials.165

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Merchant and burgher of Wilno Baltasar Tander—I have no information on where he resided in the city—had his will drawn up on 22 January 1669. He asked his wife to see to it that his “sinful body be buried in the customary place in our garden according to the custom of our Augsburg religion.” He provided 10 zł to the hospital of our church and another 10 zł “to the second German hospital of the Roman religion under the title of St. Martin.”166

Buying Intercession and Other Ultimate Considerations Roman Catholic and Ruthenian Vilnans were not only engaging in acts of charity when they made bequests to the infirm and poor; they also expected that the recipients of their generosity would add their voices to the chorus of commemorations praying for their souls. What about the Protestants? Lutheran merchant and burgher of Wilno Piotr Klet lived on St. John Street, “near the Scotsmen” (podle Szotów), which must refer to the “Scottish shops,” across from which stood the Desaus family house at Castle Street 1.26.167 This would mean he lived near the intersection with Castle Street and not close to Glass Street, where other middle-level Lutherans were concentrated. He did, however, own a second house on that street. On 9 February 1667 he signed his will, asking his son Michael to have his sinful body “buried fittingly according to the Augsburg confession in the customary place in the Christian manner.” He allocated 10 k “to our church of the Augsburg confession”; 10 k to the hospital at that church; “also 2 k to Catholic hospitals, that is to St. Stephen and to the Holy Trinity, so that they might pray to the Lord God for my soul.”168 I have italicized the final phrase because it raises the question of what Lutherans expected in return for what must be seen as a sort of almsgiving. The theology of Lutheran death, with its banishment of purgatory, and the practice of Lutheran rationalized forms of poor relief would have us believe that these good merchants and artisans were acting out of a sense of civic responsibility when they provided for poor people who were not necessarily only of their own religion. This is certainly what the clergy claimed. Schönflissius wrote of merchant Andrzej von Embden (Castle Street 2.14) that when he “gave a bounteous alms [hojna˛ jałmuz∧ne˛] to poor Lazaruses” by contributing generously to the building of the Roman Catholic hospital at the Church of St. Peter in the Antokol suburb, he did so “so that poor people of our confession might also find refuge there.”169 The italics are again mine. Schönflissius tells us exactly the reason for von Embden’s almsgiving: it was civic responsibility and the support of one’s own, nothing more. An argument that the Lutheran flock shared this view might be made on the basis of the evidence for a sense of German solidarity that crossed the LutheranCatholic divide: Meler and Tander, it might be argued, were not interested in prayers for their souls; they wished to aid fellow Germans. But I wonder whether this is all that was at play here. Luther had called in 1520 for the reduction or abolition of “anniversaries, processions, and Masses for the dead.”170 A good Lutheran (to say nothing of a good Calvinist) had no need for the purchase of prayers of

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intercession. Would Schönflissius have approved of Klet’s bequest to the Roman Catholic hospitals “so that they pray to the Lord God for my soul”? And how are we to interpret Ilis’s apparently indiscriminate almsgiving “to all the hospitals that are in Wilno at this time, both in the city and in the suburbs”? Lutheran Anna Rejchowiczówna, widow of organist Hans Empel (Skop Street 49.06), included in her will of 1655 provisions for money to be paid “to the poor . . . so that they pray to the Lord God for my soul.”171 I suspect that even in the second half of the seventeenth century, the Lutheran faithful of Wilno harbored somewhat secret, perhaps not clearly articulated, beliefs in the efficacy of prayers for the souls of the dead and a desire to be the object of them when the time came. Perhaps, in addition to remnants of old ways of thought, we are also dealing here with the limited syncretisms that grew up in the Grand Duchy and its capital, where so many confessions, religions, languages, and peoples were brought into everyday contact.172 The desire for securing the prayers for one’s soul from one’s neighbors reached on occasion across the lines of religion. In a document recorded on 2 March 1594 with the Wilno castle court, “Tatar of Wilno County, dervish Czelebir Chadczy Murzycz, qa-d.-ı [Islamic judge] of all Tatars of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania,” freed from servitude a Christian servant he had bought by the name of Iwaszko Pietrowicz. Among other provisions, the qa-d.-ı “wrote” (the document was recorded in Chancery Ruthenian), “I, the above-mentioned dervish, do make free, and acknowledge that this Iwaszko Pietrowicz is such, and I release him to freedom from this eternal servitude; and he—may he pray to the Lord God for my soul.” Murzycz, we read in Ruthenian at the end of the document, had “signed his name in Arabic letters.”173 Iwaszko himself must have been Ruthenian. Still, differences are clear. Lutherans rarely said more about how they were to be buried than “honorably and fittingly,” occasionally adding some generalities about the expense— usually they were to be buried “according to my meager wealth.” Meler’s “not sparing expense” and the specific allocation of 100 zł for a marble grave marker is unusual, both in its hint of funereal pomp (but just how much money did a chamois tanner have to spend on his funeral when he was leaving a widow behind?) and in its specificity. This minimal statement about the testator’s wishes for his funeral is the exception among the Protestant burghers: Lutherans assumed either that their survivors would know how to bury them or that their clergy would take over the arrangement of details. The range of choices was quite limited and usually not deemed worth comment in wills. Catholics and Ruthenians, as we have seen, often went into great detail about just how they were to be buried. The provisions were to continue in perpetuity, in some instances, in lists of commemorative Masses. Orthodox merchant Paweł Kossobucki (Market Square), who died in 1689, was one of those who asked to be buried “without any worldly pomp and unnecessary ceremonies and costs, just so long as it be with the good satisfaction of the invalid poor and the monastic priests.” But this did not at all mean that he did not wish to have liturgies said for his soul and that of his deceased family members for some time into the future. He demanded that liturgies be sung and that his soul be prayed for “on a daily basis

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for one entire year, beginning with my death, excepto [with the exception of ] only Sundays.”174 Others provided for commemorative Masses on a regular schedule of the anniversary of their death and in perpetuity. The Orthodox—at least in Muscovy—had their own rhythms: three, nine, twenty, and forty days after death; and they substituted elaborate commemorative liturgies and feasts and the reading of names during the liturgy at regular intervals for gravestones.175 The wills of Orthodox and Uniate Vilnans frequently mentioned sorokousty and annual liturgies. We have seen certain elements of syncretism. Orthodox burghess Anastazja Witkowska Gilewiczowa seems to have provided for a gravestone (the “tablets”) to mark her burial site at the Church of the Holy Spirit. Not only the local Lutherans but also the Calvinists adhered to more conservative, Catholic elements of funeral ritual and may have retained some desire for prayers for the souls of the dead. And yet the documents suggest certain differences across the confessions, chief among which was the divide between modest Protestant ceremonies and more opulent Roman Catholic and Ruthenian funerals. Throughout her investigation of the reformation of ritual, Susan Karant-Nunn returns to the slippage between, on the one hand, popular beliefs, fears, and expectations and, on the other, the dictates of clergy. Such considerations may in fact bring us back in the other direction on occasion toward some supraconfessional levelings in the ways laypeople faced death in Wilno. Orthodox burghess Katarzyna Otroszkiewiczowa, the wife of Uniate salt merchant Afanas Otroszkiewicz, who lived in the suburb beyond Sharp Gate, asked in 1666 that her body be surrendered “as earth to the earth [our] mother” (a ciało jako ziemie˛ ziemi matce oddaje˛).176 The reading is jarring, and I had long resisted transcribing the manuscript reading that way, but I finally came to the conclusion that that was what I was seeing. I have since become more convinced that my eyes were not playing tricks on me. In a Muscovite will of 1693, Pekla Matveevna Vasilixa wrote, “And I, the above-named [slave of God], knowing myself to be closer to death than to life, henceforth entrust my soul to the hand of the Lord God and my body to His holy mother earth [ego sviatoi zemli mattse] from which I was created.” Daniel Kaiser comments, “It is barely conceivable that a confessor would suggest that the earth was anyone’s ‘holy mother.’ More likely, Pekla Vasilikha had absorbed that theology from her mother’s milk.”177 Perhaps the same could be said of Otroszkiewiczowa. But are we then to suppose that Lutheran royal doctor and memoirist Maciej Vorbek-Lettow had a Ruthenian wet nurse? He would write in his will of 27 June 1663, “Having first surrendered my sinful soul unto God, once it has been severed from my body, . . . [I yield] my body unto the earth as to [its] mother.”178 Or are we dealing with another manifestation of syncretisms across the confessions of Wilno and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania?

Epilogue: Conflict and Coexistence

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ersions of the warning given voice by Brian Pullan in his study of poor relief have come to mind throughout my work on this multiconfessional city: “The conclusions of every local study are clouded by the suspicion that its people were acting, not as Catholics, but as Parisians, or Lyonnais, or Venetians” (or Vilnans).1 I have attempted not to minimize the differences and distinctions, and indeed the conflicts, that structured life for the inhabitants of early modern Wilno. And yet the picture that has taken shape has tended to emphasize collaboration, coexistence, syncretisms, and crossings of confessional, sometimes even religious, boundaries—in short, a general sameness. Part of this is due to the rhetorical uniformity of the sources that have been my window on this world, and I have attempted to find the real differences obscured by the stylistic monotony. But another, essential, aspect, I would argue, lies in the consensus of some important segment of all the confessions and religions that certain compromises were required, if only for the sake of peace and prosperity. Being right about religion would have to yield some of its absoluteness to the common civic weal. This has not been, however, a story of precocious ecumenism, of the tolerance only imagined by a few contemporary thinkers, which would become a central topic of more general debate only with the Enlightenment. This has been a story of toleration, of finding a set of practices—some of them implicated in violence or at least in adversarial relationships—that allowed individuals and communities to coexist, sometimes cheek by jowl with people who were hated or at the very least considered incorrigibly pig-headed. I begin these concluding assessments by sketching anatomies of the violence that were also an important part of this coexistence. These yield a picture of what have been called communities of violence, of the creation of a functioning society predicated in part precisely on participation in adversarial relationships (from physical violence and name calling to litigation) that were partially ritualized, controlled, rule-based, and routinized. Early modern cities—at least those in which more than one confession, ethnicity, or religion found a home—formed a continuum of practices of toleration ranging from greater exclusion (for example, relegation of the domicile and/or religious practice of the minorities beyond the city walls, whether in suburbs or neighboring estates) to greater inclusion (parity arrangements of various sorts). I end with an assessment of Wilno’s place on this continuum, both on the European scale and more locally in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

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Figure 7 Franciszek Smuglewicz, drawing of the interior of the Wilno main synagogue, 1786. Dre˙ma 1991, 290.

Anatomies of Violence In the late winter and very early spring of 1635, over the period from 5 to 26 March, the castle court of Wilno received multilateral, sometimes repeated and elaborated protestations concerning a recent anti-Jewish riot.2 Echoes heard in those acta reveal that the magistracy (whose books for that period are for all practical purposes lost to us) also received related complaints. The extant sources tell us this much. On 5 March general bailiffs for the castle court Jan Gronostajski and Stefan Gromacki, accompanied by two nobles, as required by the Lithuanian statute, summoned by the bailiff (szkolnik) of the Jews of Wilno “for the inspection of injured Jews, . . . came to a bricked townhouse on German Street in the city of Wilno, to the dwelling of the Jews.”3 There they found Izrael Zielkiewicz lying on his bed with “two harmful wounds cut into the left side of his head; he asserted that they were cut by a saber, and he presented a dolman bloodied from that wound.” Then the two bailiffs and two nobles went to a house on Jewish Street and entered another Jewish dwelling where they found Lewek Mojz∧eszowicz, likewise wounded by a saber cut on the left side of his face. The two Jews “asserted that this had happened to them, here in the city of Wilno, on Jewish Street, at the hands of the servants and court secretaries of Lord Bartłomiej Gawłowicki, notary of the burgomasters and councillors of Wilno, namely Lord Piotr Łazarowicz and other of his assistants.”

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Two days later, on 7 March 1635, the same two bailiffs for the castle court—accompanied this time by three nobles and summoned by “the elders of the entire congregation of the Jews of the city of Wilno, by Lord Michał Fajtelewicz, by Juda Abramowicz, and by the bailiff Aszor Józefowicz”—came to the main synagogue to survey the destruction done in it. The survey took up several pages, registering damage to the main synagogue itself (i.e., the men’s synagogue), then the “women’s synagogue” (białogłowska szkoła), then the “lesser synagogue and the anteroom, where the bailiff Aszor Józefowicz lives.”4 The inventory was as detailed—and as procedurally correct—as any conducted by Wilno courts of the posthumous estates of burghers and nobles for probate purposes. The sum for the damage to the various synagogues was assessed at 1,685 Lithuanian k, 36 gr. The Christian bailiffs and their noble entourage then went to private Jewish dwellings, first to the “Stułba house,” on Jewish Street. (The Lustration of 1636 had placed it at the corner of Jewish Street and German Street, with an address of German Street 27.08).5 In this house, the court functionaries inventoried the damage done to four Jewish households and assessed a money value: to the dwelling of Hercyk Tonchonowicz (1,017 k, 48 gr); that of Jachim Mojz∧eszowicz (562 zł, 15 gr); that of Aron Judycz (detailed values were given but without a sum for the entire damage); and that of Hersz Judycz (47 k). Then the bailiffs went to the “house of Antoni [Krot], the apothecary, beyond [the Church of ] St. Nicholas” (St. Nicholas Street 28.06). This was below German Street, some distance from the other crime scenes but, as we have seen before, among the houses envisaged for Jewish settlement. Here they found damage to the possessions of Hackiel Natanowicz assessed at 20 k. The inventories of damage to private property were just as detailed as those for the various synagogues. Here, too, the Jewish plaintiffs laid blame for the events at the feet of Gawłowicki and Kliczewski. That same day, 7 March 1635, “Their Graces, the Lord Academics [i.e., students of the Jesuit Academy] of Wilno, all of them uniformly,” complained before the castle court that they had been the object of dishonoring words.6 Harm to their honor had come in the form of claims that the students had taken part in an anti-Jewish tumult the day before, 6 March 1635, at four in the afternoon. This could not have been the case, the plaintiffs asserted, because at that hour “Their Graces, the Lord Academics, all of them [emphasis added], were in the schools.” The protestation was directed here not at the Jews themselves (in fact, on this occasion there was no allegation that it was the Jews who had made the complaint against the students—that would come later) but at the real perpetrators of the violence: “the rabble and the common people,” who had “stolen not a little property from the Jews . . . and beaten the Jews themselves as well.” A longer Jewish protestation registered in the castle court that same day (7 March 1635) filled in the details of the events that had led to the beating of Izrael Zelikowicz and Lewek Mojz∧eszowicz and the plundering of Jewish property.7 It was directed once again against Bartłomiej Gawłowicki and Mikołaj Kliczewski but now also against the wife of city councillor Jan Wojsznarowicz. The Jewish plaintiffs alleged that the entire magistracy, “having become angered without cause at the aforementioned Jews,” had determined to lay waste to the

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synagogue and to drive the Jews—“poor people whom they forbid dwelling, food, trade, and shops”—from the city of Wilno. The language of the protestation conformed to rhetorical norms. “Having forgotten the fear of God, human shame, and the penalty prescribed in common law in the constitutions for such transgressors,” at the command of the accused magistrates, “servants, . . . the common people, merchants, artisans, and other loose people living in Wilno” attacked and robbed the innocent Jews as they were burying one of their deceased in “their garden” (the Jewish cemetery in the Snipiszki suburb beyond the Bricked Bridge). Then, on 4 March 1635 (it is unclear whether the cemetery incident was the same day, but it would seem so), servants of Gawłowicki and his son-in-law Kliczewski lay in waiting to attack Jews at midnight “in the streets, . . . in various places.” Specifically, Gawłowicki’s “servants or assistant notaries caught sight of Jews as they walked on the corner of German Street, entering Jewish Street,” and it was then that Zelikowicz and Mojz∧eszowicz were attacked, “without giving the least cause.” At that time the “licentious and rebellious persons . . . made an ‘answer and boast’ with the consensus of the entire Wilno magistracy,” promising “not only to beat and kill the Jews themselves, but to demolish the tabernacle, the synagogue, the bricked and wooden houses, and to take all their treasures and possessions.” The promise was fulfilled, according to the Jewish complaint, on 6 March at 4 in the afternoon. At that time, the accused magistrates “incited a tumult, and the common people of the city of Wilno, merchants and other artisans, . . . as well as some other sort of menial people, various rabble living on the street in Wilno without any occupation, unknown to the Jews,” robbed and destroyed the synagogues. It was here that the new accused person, the wife of the Wilno councillor Jan Wojsznarowicz, entered the story. She was “standing in her window,” and since she lived at the corner of German Street and Jewish Street (German Street 27.07),8 directly across the street from the now Jewish Stułba house, she had a good view of the proceedings. As she watched the unfolding tumult, she called from her window: “Leave those poor Jews alone. Go rather to the richer Jews. There you will acquire treasures from them.” Yet that same day, 7 March 1635, the same court bailiffs (Gromacki and Gronostajski) registered a report attesting to attempts of the magistracy to maintain the peace.9 Roman Catholic burgomaster Jakub Sienkiewicz (Market Square 4.01) and Orthodox burgomaster Filip Sien´czyło (Subocz Street 78.07)—here, too, Greek-Roman parity obtained—accompanied by the bailiffs and their noble (and this time also commoner) entourage, went “on the morrow” after the tumult (i.e., 7 March, the same day as the report was written into the acta) to survey the damage done to the synagogue. The noble and commoner entourage of the bailiffs was to serve on this occasion not only as witnesses but also as peacekeepers: “with great danger to their health and that of their servants and the town hall guard,” they “walked many times through Jewish Street making certain that licentious people did not gather and assemble.” The magistrates ordered several guilds (goldsmiths, tailors, cobblers, as well as butchers, locksmiths, and pewterers) to stand as armed guards at the town hall and to make regular surveys of the streets in order to prevent any further violence.

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The next day, on 8 March 1635, the Jews of Wilno entered another, shorter protestation concerning the attack on the Jewish cemetery and the “boasts” upon Jewish health and property.10 The main difference from previous documents was that the perpetrators were, once again, “excessive people, licentious rabble, who had forgotten the fear of God and the severity of the common law prescribed against licentious people,” but this time they seem to have acted on their own. In any event, no charges were leveled here against any named or unnamed magistrates. Slightly over two weeks later, on 23 March 1635, magistrates Bartłomiej Gawłowicki and Mikołaj Kliczewski appeared before the castle court to lodge a complaint against the Jews of Wilno.11 The latter, “on their own, or at someone’s direction,” had “attacked the honorable life and good reputation” of the plaintiffs. They had done so by entering charges that the plaintiffs had fomented anti-Jewish riots with the castle court. The stakes were potentially high, since the plaintiffs had been accused, at least indirectly, of “being unmindful of the superior authority of His Grace, the King, Our Gracious Lord.” Part of their defense was the fact that Gawłowicki himself (Kliczewski’s father-in-law and thus presumably the alleged ringleader) had not been in Wilno when the crimes were committed, and thus he could not have known what had taken place. Not only were the plaintiffs not the cause of the violence against the Jews, but as magistrates they were sworn defenders of the municipal peace. ´ski and Jan GroThe following day, on 24 March 1635, castle court bailiffs Mateusz Kolczyn nostajski, with the usual accompaniment of two nobles, were summoned to the Wilno academy to hear the Jesuit prefect’s inquisition of three Jews, elders Lewek Łazarowicz and Juda Abramowicz and bailiff Aszor Józefowicz.12 The father prefect asked them, “Lord Jews, tell me now, in the presence of these Lord general bailiffs and the nobles, whether His Grace the father rector of the Wilno academy was, together with me, the cause of the destruction of your synagogue.” (The Jews had allegedly gone to the town hall, to the court of the magistracy— although usually not a preferred forum for Wilno’s Jews, perhaps a court more sympathetic to complaints about student behavior than the castle court—on the “previous Wednesday,” which would have been 21 March, to make their official complaint.) To this, the Jews responded, “We do not say this of Your Grace and of His Grace the father rector.” The prefect continued: “You must admit that if I, sent by His Grace the father rector, had not come with several of Their Graces, the Lord Academicians, to your defense, you would certainly have been destroyed, and other of your bricked and wooden houses would have been destroyed, and the Jews themselves would have been killed.” To which the Jewish delegation replied that this was indeed the case but then noted that succor had come only after the harm had been done: “Nonetheless we thanked Your Grace at that time and held you for our defender, and we thank Your Grace now, but if Your Grace had come to us more quickly, we could have avoided that harm.” Finally, two days later, 26 March 1635, the Jewish elders registered a complaint with the castle court against councillor Jan Wojsznarowicz. It was, so they alleged, not enough that his wife had egged on the rebellious crowds during the riot, but Wojsznarowicz then ran into the Jew Juda Abramowicz

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here in Wilno, on German Street, in front of the bricked house of Lord Jaksztela [this was bencher Jan Jakszteła, whose house was at German Street 26.10, i.e., directly across the street from Wojsznarowicz’s own house13], across from Jewish Street, where without having any cause he began to revile [him] and to make harsh boasts in these words: “You sullied my wife’s honor in the books of the castle court of Wilno, but it is your luck that I myself was not in Wilno at that time, for I would certainly have had a hundred or more Jews drowned. But know for certain that we will destroy and eradicate all of you from the city of Wilno in a short time.”

A second document enacted that day provided the testimony of Wilno general bailiff Józef Bortkiewicz: he had heard these same words of Wojsznarowicz because he had happened to be returning from a friend’s house on St. Nicholas Street to his own lodging somewhere in the Skop Street area (podzamcze, the “under-the-castle-area”) and had reached the intersection with German Street on his way to Jewish Street just as the councillor was making his threats to the Jewish elder.14 I will address the outcome of all this litigation in the next section. What interests me here are the constants we find across other anti-Jewish tumults. First, the usual suspects. These include the magistracy; the merchants, artisans, and common people; the students; and the loose people. All of them come up throughout the Jewish complaints, and all but the voiceless (i.e., the common people and the loose people), come forward to defend themselves against the various charges. We see here the litigious dance of the accused coming forward to declare that they were shocked to hear that anything untoward had happened and to countercharge the Jews with defamation for including them in the complaints. Particularly touching are the students’ assurances that they could not possibly have been involved in the events because school was on at the time in question. And we watch the backpedaling of the Jewish complaints: the perpetrators had slowly become no longer the magistrates or the students but just some unknown commoners working on their own. The Jews acknowledged the help of the academy but suggested ever so cautiously and hesitantly that the help would have been greater if it had come a bit sooner. All parties were seeking to use the courts to pursue their claims or to cover their readily perceived legal vulnerabilities. Obscured in all this is the familiarity of the various parties with each other. Councillor Wojsznarowicz lived at the entrance to Jewish Street, and he could recognize (and accost) a specific Jewish elder when he caught sight of him on the street. Moreover, the violence was scripted. Here, the first incident, the sign that a tumult was gathering, took place in the Jewish cemetery. But the riot itself began when the Christian mob found two Jews at a perceived (although in Wilno highly porous) boundary between predominantly Christian and predominantly Jewish settlement as the Jews were entering Jewish Street from German Street. A Jewish complaint from the year before, 4 April 1634, told of a similarly structured attack on the Jewish cemetery. It had occurred “in their Jewish cemetery, in the garden beyond the Bricked Bridge, across the River Wilia, during the burial of a deceased Jew, by many various

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shopkeepers, artisans, common people, and various people, at the incitement of Their Lords the Burgomasters, Councillors, and the Entire Council of the city of Wilno.”15 On 13 February 1673, Jewish bailiffs Aaron Lewkowicz and Mojz∧esz Jakubowicz brought a complaint, this time before the court of the magistracy, against a group that included members of that body: “Their Graces, Lords Bartłomiej Tukan, Józef Bonfili, Italians, and their other companions, the servants and retinue of His Grace, Lord Bartłomiej Cynaki, secretary of His Royal Grace, burgomaster of Wilno, administrator of the customs of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.”16 The protestation described in some detail the ritualistic initiation of the tumult: In the current year, one thousand six hundred seventy-three, the twelfth day of the month Februarii [of February], the aforementioned Lord Italians, having undertaken evil council, harmful to poor people, having dressed themselves up in some sort of strange, neverbefore-seen garb, in turbans, Turkish style, with masks on their faces, contrary to the custom of this city [emphasis added], around ten people, and offering the occasion and incitement to the common people for tumults to the great and unbearable harm of the plaintiffs, driving back and forth several times on two sleighs on German Street, purposefully passing [the entrance to] Jewish Street, seeking a cause and an occasion for a tumult, they ordered their sleigh drivers to beat the Jews with their whips on their faces, their eyes, which they did indeed do.

The scene and the dramatis personae were the same: the Christian-Jewish boundary at German and Jewish Streets; the magistrates, who gave incitement to riot to the street rabble, thereby causing harm to the persons and wealth of the Jews (“poor people”). The rest of the protestation provided a description of the riot on Jewish Street. The appended conspectio gave the official in situ survey of the harm to bodies and property. But what none of these protestations point out is that the events regularly took place during Carnival or Lent or coincided with clearly marked moments in the annual remembrance of Christ’s birth, passion, death, and resurrection (and usually it was His passion and death). For our masked Italians, Carnival had begun on 3 February. The twelfth of February 1673 was the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, which fell that year on 15 February. The Jews of Wilno certainly knew that their foes were in Carnival mood, but they went out of their way to make them and the event appear strange, something foreign to the city. Tukan, Bonfili, and Cynaki were indeed Italians and Roman Catholics. But Bonfili was married to a local Lutheran. Michał Szwarc was in fact a Lutheran himself, probably of German extraction. More important, they were just as much a part of the city as were others who had taken citizenship there; Cynaki would reach the pinnacle of municipal power—the office of the wójt, which he held from 1680 to 1683.17 The Jews in their complaint attempted an appeal to nativist sentiment in the rest of their audience among the magistrates.

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Other outbreaks of violence can be located with similar precision in the Church calendar. A document from the Wilno castle court dated 21 May 1593 tells of a decree of the chief tribunal court of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania against Wilno burghers Jan Balaszko, Tomasz Dygon´, Jan Obugiel, Jan Lenartowicz, and Jurij Olsun in the matter of “the destruction of their Jewish school” (szkoła, i.e., synagogue) in the previous year, on the Day of the Lord’s Ascension.18 That feast is celebrated on the sixth Thursday after Easter, which in 1592 fell on 7 May. In this case, the Jews themselves had used the Church calendar to date the outbreak of violence. In other cases, as in the description of the riotous Italians, the season remained hidden in plain sight, a part of the deeper background. The attack on the Jewish cemetery in 1634 took place on 3 April, which that year was the Tuesday before Palm Sunday. The series of events of the following year took place on 4–6 March. In 1635 Ash Wednesday had fallen on 21 February; thus the outbreak of violence came two weeks (twelve and fourteen days) into Lent. On 29 March 1666 Jewish elders complained of violence on Jewish Street.19 The tumult had been instigated by named elders of the elite salt merchants’ guild “at the common council and incitement of all the merchants of the salt merchants’ profession.” All told, around eighty had taken part in the beating and looting, in addition to “some ten castle dragoons.” Ash Wednesday had fallen that year on 10 March; thus the riot occurred nineteen days into Lent. Violence against Christian “minorities” was similarly scripted. In a reassessment of the events of 1639–1640 that led to the destruction of the Calvinist church and private Calvinist property, as well as to the removal of that sanctuary and its hospital and school to a spot beyond (just beyond!) the city walls, Urszula Augustyniak has characterized the “antidissident excesses” in Wilno (as well as in Cracow) as—until about 1613—“a constant ‘ludic’ element, inscribed in folklore.” She notes that competition surrounding religious rituals (in which she includes baptisms, funerals, Masses, liturgies, and other religious services, as well as processions, above all Corpus Christi), “and especially in the periods of Easter and Christmas,” offered occasions in Wilno, as in other European cities, for municipal unrest that was motivated at least in part by tensions among the confessions. There are records of such events in Wilno for the Christmas season of 1597, for Easter Monday of 1599, and for Corpus Christi of 1623. Augustyniak notes the structural sameness in tumults across the targeted minorities—against the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit on Easter Saturday and Sunday 1598, against the Jewish cemetery and synagogue in March 1635, against the Calvinist church in 1591, 1611, 1639, but also against the Roman Catholics in Lutheran Torun´: “They occurred according to a uniform scenario. They all lasted two days; on the first it came to attacks of students upon the place of worship and school of the attacked confession under whatever pretext. . . . On the second day of the tumults, the common people joined the students, robbing the houses and shops of the ‘adversaries.’ ”20 One might quibble about some of the details: in the anti-Jewish riots of March 1635, the first day saw the attack on individuals in the cemetery and on Jewish Street; the attack on the

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synagogue took place the second day, together with the looting by the common people (with a day of apparent peace in between); the alleged student participation (the students denied it) came on the second day; in this case, the szkoła was the place of worship, the synagogue (the Yiddish shul). Still, the general point holds: the structural components of the drama along with the lists of dramatis personae remained remarkably constant. The students, especially the “mendicant” students—the “Jesuitical rogues” (hultaje jezuiccy), those who lived in the bursae for poor students and subsisted in part by begging—were always available to be used by Church authorities. They were outsiders, seen as intruders by the burghers, an “element difficult to identify and to control.”21 They were resented and feared by Vilnans of all confessions (including Roman Catholic) and religions. A large and largely unexploited collection, “Papers of Litigation of the Wilno Academicians with the Dissidents, Orthodox, and Burghers of Wilno” covering the period 1598–1762, contains numerous protestations and reprotestations over student behavior.22 I agree with Augustyniak that a central element in the events of 1639–1640 was a dispute over property boundaries, that the local Catholic church authorities found the Wilno Calvinist complex—walled and defended by an armed guard, “as no fortress in our land is so well equipped,” as one contemporary complaint had it—an intolerable presence right across from a Bernardine convent and a stone’s throw (or arrow’s flight) from a Bernardine monastery and two Bernardine churches. It was also, as she notes, indeed “an attractive plot in the center of the city.” The Uniate cathedral Church of the Most Pure and the old Church of the Savior were not much farther away, and the Catholics could count on Uniate support in their efforts. The location of the intramural Calvinist church was, next to the noble estate of a part of its congregation, a central source of resentment among Vilnans, which helps in part to explain why the local Lutherans (mostly nonnobles) were left more or less in peace (in spite of the printed Jesuit lampoons), while the Calvinists were under periodic physical attack.23 Although Augustyniak does not put special emphasis on this aspect, by placing an “argument over a property boundary” (konflikt “o miedze˛”) at the heart of her story, she is asserting another structural similarity. As Janusz Tazbir pointed out in the conclusions to his classic study of the annihilation of the Arian capital, in Wilno, as in Raków the year before, “a minor incident” (the destruction of a cross in a disputed border area in Raków, the stray arrows allegedly shot from the Calvinist church in Wilno at the neighboring Benedictine complex) “was exploited with the goal of the destruction of an entire heterodox center.” As Tazbir notes, the strategy in Wilno in 1639 “could have been drawn from the Raków events” of 1638. There were, however, notable differences, as Tazbir is well aware. Given the strength (in 1639, still!) of the Radziwiłł patronage of the Lithuanian Calvinist Church, although the methods were similar, the goals of the Catholics in Wilno were of necessity much more limited: the liquidation of only one enclave of the Reformation (and a rather late accomplishment at that, if we look at the patterns in Cracow, Lublin, or Poznan´), without any hope at that point of extending the campaign to private cities like the Radziwiłłs’ Kiejdany.24

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The focus on the nobles that lies at the heart of these perceptive essays by Augustyniak and Tazbir calls for the story to end at this point, with the extermination of the Arian capital and the removal of the Wilno Calvinists. True, the status of the Calvinist church of Wilno had changed: it was now extramural, its ministers now had to abide by certain rules of dress and behavior as they ministered to their flock in their houses within the walls, and parishioners now had to walk to a suburban spot for worship. But for many of them, that walk would now be shorter, and it was certainly familiar—it was, after all, the site of their old cemetery—and Calvinists remained a modest presence in the city. The Desaus family, to choose one Calvinist burgher network in Wilno, retained their house at Castle Street 1.26 decades after the looting of their property in 1639 and the removal of the Calvinist church in 1640, after the depredations of the Muscovite occupation, and after charges of collaboration with the Swedes and attempts at the confiscation of the same house. As we have seen in protestation after protestation, violence was a part of daily life in early modern Wilno. Most of it was minimal and had nothing to do with confessional or religious difference. That which did have a confessional or religious aspect, whether or not we perceive some instrumentalization of religion, played itself out, for the most part, according to rules. I see no reason to suspect that the ludic component of the sorts of violence that contained some religious motivations disappeared in the early seventeenth century. The weekly and annual calendars of worship, the scheduled and unscheduled ritual processions all continued to provide opportunities for municipal violence. We should imagine Wilno Jews and Tatars but also Lutherans, Calvinists, and Orthodox (perhaps also Uniates?), displaying nervous caution every year during Roman Catholic Carnival and Lent. But the striking thing about Wilno is that violence seems not to have passed beyond “acceptable levels” (name calling, derision, rock throwing) with any regularity. Part of what made the system work may have been the great diffusion of the confessional landscape: it is easier to focus on an “other” if there is only one “other.” This made the Christian-Jewish tensions a constant. It made the opposition between Catholics and non-Catholics much more complicated, since there remained four variants of that “other.” The picture that emerges here is a version of what David Nirenberg has called “communities of violence.” He argues in his pathbreaking study of the persecution of minorities—in his case, Jews and Muslims in fourteenth-century France and the Crown of Aragon—that there is “no reason why convivencia need designate only harmonious coexistence.” Writing against both the “lachrymose” and the “optimistic” historiographic schools, he notes that “violence was a central and systemic aspect of the coexistence of majority and minorities.” In short, “convivencia was predicated upon violence; it was not its peaceful antithesis. Violence drew its meaning from coexistence, not in opposition to it.” As in late medieval France and Aragon, so also in seventeenth-century Wilno “the majority of altercations took place within religious communities, not across them.” Those that did occur across the boundaries of religious communities regularly took the form of “ritualized aggression.” One central aspect to this constant “background static of violence” was recourse to violent words—name calling and its rule-based extension and culmination in litigation.25

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Communities of Litigation In most cases, we know of the events of violence to person, property, and honor only because the wronged individuals and groups came themselves or sent representatives before the various legal jurisdictions of Wilno in order to bring charges against the alleged perpetrators of that violence. This was another aspect of the communities of violence, one even more highly rule-based, in which the penalties were mostly monetary and the possible benefits considerable. It was an important part of what held the community together. Early modern Poland-Lithuania was a litigious place, and—although all who could afford going to court could, and probably most did, seek the legal advice of notaries or lawyers— some knowledge of the law and of the rhetorical expectations of various forensic genres seems to have been widespread.26 People went to court to defend honor as often as health and property. The nobles may have felt otherwise, but the broad recourse to the courts by burghers of all social strata, as well as by Jews and Tatars, suggests that nearly everyone in seventeenth-century Wilno felt he had honor to defend or lose.27 In this regard, Jews and Tatars, although clearly identified as such, were just as much Vilnans as were the Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Orthodox, and Uniates when they pressed their claims, side by side, in front of the Wilno courts. The participation of all—five Christian confessions, Jews, and Tatars—in the litigious life of the city reflected another kind of integration. The way in which Jews were identified before all jurisdictions—“infidel Zelman Izakowicz, Jew of Wilno” (niewierny Zelman Izakowicz, z∧yd wilen´ski)—suggests both acceptance and rejection. They were not accorded titles, as were the Christians, indicating their membership in a particular estate; nor were they identified by profession, as nonnoble Christians were. But they were identified, as were the burghers, as being “of Wilno.”28 Thus Jews and Tatars, next to their Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Orthodox, and Uniate neighbors, were engaged in what has been called “continuous litigation,” a process that, Edward Muir has argued, helped build civil society in early modern northern Italy. It was one of the mechanisms of integration that allowed a place as diverse as Wilno to function in relative peace.29 Adam Teller has argued that not just the peaceful path of litigation but also active participation in the culture of violence of early modern Poland-Lithuania (“thefts and murders”) was an indication of Jewish integration. Others have also noted that Jews sometimes initiated violence against Christians.30 Sometimes the purpose of the multilateral litigation seems to have been to stake out positions, both offensive and defensive, should the case go to any further stages or to any higher instances. Sometimes we see concrete, peacekeeping results, introduced by the king or by the magistracy or an individual judge. The protestation over the destruction of the (wooden) synagogue in 1592 was followed by King Zygmunt III Vasa’s foundational privilege for the Jews of Wilno dated 1 June 1593, which gave them for the first time the right to purchase dwellings in Wilno, to live, worship, and engage in commerce there—and to rebuild the

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synagogue, as well as a ritual bath. The long series of multilateral lawsuits over the attack on the cemetery, the synagogue, individual Jews, and Jewish property in March 1635 that I surveyed above took place during the work of a commission formed in 1633 led by Father Marcjan Tryzna, then spiritual referendary of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The task of that body was to facilitate the buying and selling of houses in the streets allotted for Jewish settlement in a manner that protected the interests of both buyer and seller in the individual transactions, both Christians and Jews. The immediate response to the violence of 1635 was the directive to include gates to the Jewish settlement, which were to be under Jewish control. It is quite another matter that, as we have seen, no gated Jewish community was created in the process, and Jews and Christians continued to live in some of the same houses throughout much of the city. The tensions were there on a daily, weekly, and annual basis, ready for exploitation. Extant litigation may suggest that minor violence became more extreme in the few years after new kings succeeded to the throne. The negotiations at the time of election of Sejms often included reconfirmations of Jewish and burgher privileges. Perhaps the years immediately following witnessed some testing of them by all parties.

Tolerating the Intolerable In a book devoted to religious conflict and the practice of toleration in early modern Europe, Benjamin Kaplan shifts the focus in the study of the rise of early modern tolerance away from the elites and the intellectuals, who have long been the center of attention and whose place in the story has been that of precocious forerunners of the Enlightenment. What about the others, he asks, the nonelites and nonintellectuals of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries? With the fragmentation of Christendom into the confessions, the nonelites had to deal directly with the issue of coexistence with the unlike-minded on a daily basis. “For them,” Kaplan writes, “tolerance had a very concrete, mundane dimension. It was not just a concept of policy but a form of behavior . . . a pragmatic move, a grudging acceptance of unpleasant realities, not a positive virtue.” He—as have others, and as have I, throughout this book and elsewhere—prefers to refer to this set of practical strategies as toleration rather than tolerance. This attitude is Janus-faced: in it tolerance and intolerance are “dialectically and symbolically linked.” By the act of tolerating, those who allowed the others to live among them, whatever the rules set out for their behavior, “made powerful, if implicit, claims about the truth of their own religion and the false, deviant character of others.”31 The questions Kaplan identified as those providing an “elaborate set of arrangements and accommodations” that made coexistence in mixed societies possible are among those that have structured this book: Where would the various groups worship? How would they pay for their churches and pastors? Who would educate their children, and with what curriculum? How would

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charitable funds be distributed? How would public events be solemnized? Whose holidays would be celebrated? How would the powers and spoils of governance be shared, if at all? What rights and privileges would each group have? . . . Did they intermarry? If so, how would their children be raised? Did they live in the same neighborhoods? Employ or buy goods from one another? Belong to the same guilds and clubs? Drink in the same taverns? Attend each other’s weddings and funerals? To what extent did they form distinct subcommunities and subcultures?

Kaplan notes that “very different patterns” in the structuring of toleration and coexistence could result “depending on the answers to these questions.”32 The strength of his book lies in its subtle assessment of the range of strategies elaborated in various early modern European cities and in the placement of a set of specific city-cases on a sort of continuum ranging from open inclusivity (for some limited set of confessions) at one extreme to grudging toleration of hidden, private practices somewhere in the middle and finally to exclusion of all minorities at the other end. Where does seventeenth-century Wilno fit on this scale? To what extent is it an extreme case? The comparison with patterns in western Europe and the Holy Roman Empire is easier, in part because we have some of the necessary detailed case studies. The comparison with east-central European cities is more difficult, in part because of a general lack of such studies and in part because many of them, like Wilno, exhibit a much greater degree of diversity than those found farther west—even than the so-called parity cities of the Holy Roman Empire that permitted the open practice of two confessions in one city and made arrangements for the sharing of secular power and obligations. I begin with a phrase from Kaplan’s introduction that sounds self-evident in the context of his argument but becomes fraught with questions once we turn to Wilno: “In [toleration’s] very enactment the people doing the tolerating [emphasis added] made powerful, if implicit, claims about the truth of their own religion and the false, deviant character of others’.”33 The people doing the tolerating—who were they in the Lithuanian capital? The answer is not so unequivocal as it might seem. The Roman Catholics of Wilno—with the exception of the period of the Muscovite occupation—enjoyed the support of Roman Catholic monarchs and magnates and the growing presumption that they belonged to the city’s default religion, the one to which all others had to defer and for the practices of which the others had to make daily, weekly, and annual accommodations. And yet the tenacity of Greek-Roman parity arrangements, in place since 1536 and continuing to the end of the Grand Duchy, in spite of the limitation of magistracy positions to Roman Catholics and Uniates after 1666, meant that at least in theory two confessions—and the Uniates clearly did not think they were the same as the Roman Catholics—enjoyed equal rights in seeking the highest municipal offices (with the exception of the wójt, who had to be a Roman Catholic). The other three confessions began as more equal partners, with Lutherans, Calvinists, and Orthodox holding the office of burgomaster and councillor right up to the limitation of 1666, when they

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were relegated to the category of the tolerated. And yet that toleration—everywhere outside the magistracy—was rooted in practices elaborated over the course of more than a century, when the tolerated confessions enjoyed participation in civic power. This meant that Greek and Roman or Catholic, Ruthenian, and Saxon—to pick only two configurations—continued to share power in the guilds and elsewhere. Lutherans and Calvinists, in particular, managed to obtain high offices without the stepping-stone of participation in the magistracy. Before 1640, no member of the five Christian confessions of Wilno was forced to practice Auslauf, the system whereby the tolerated lived within the city walls but were allowed, or forced, to practice their religion elsewhere, either openly by proceeding en masse, perhaps singing hymns as they went, or clandestinely, slipping one by one through the gates to open places of worship in the suburbs or nearby estates. A classic example of this was the relationship between Lutheran Hamburg and neighboring Altona, a town subject to the Danish Crown until 1864, which offered residence and open practice of religion for Jews (both Ashkenazim and Sephardim), Roman Catholics, Calvinists, Mennonites, and after 1747, otherwise “heretical” sectarians. Many members of the minorities preferred to live in tonier Hamburg and make the short walk to their places of worship.34 Nor were any of the Wilno confessions forced to practice religion privately or domestically. The settlement of the Treaty of Osnabrück at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, one of two agreements that formed the Peace of Westphalia, had granted the jus reformandi (right of reformation) to sovereign princes and established three possible statuses for tolerated Churches. As Joachim Whaley put it in his study of religious toleration in Hamburg, “The dominant religion alone enjoyed the exercitium religionis publicum”; other Churches with rights recognized before 1624, the terminus chosen by the framers of the treaty, were granted exercitium religionis privatum; those unrecognized in the given principality or city in 1624 were allowed only exercitium religionis domesticum. Whaley continues, “Public worship meant churches with spires and bells; private worship meant chapels without either; domestic worship meant prayers in the family home and the right to visit churches in a neighboring estate”35 (in other words, Auslauf ). Private worship might mean the use of “hidden” chapels (most often hidden in plain view) with entrances off side streets, without obvious markings of a place of worship; it might take place in a room, perhaps quite large, or in a structure used also for other purposes or in the residence of a foreign diplomat. In the case of Hamburg, the imperial residences provided places of worship within the walls for Roman Catholics, and the Dutch and Prussian residences offered them for the Calvinists.36 In 1700 in Amsterdam alone there were twenty Catholic schuilkerken (clandestine churches), six Mennonite, and at least four other confessions with at least one each.37 As Kaplan has noted, both Auslauf and the pretense of privacy “preserved the monopoly of a community’s official church in the public sphere” even as they pointed out the fictional qualities of that monopoly.38 The only examples of something like Auslauf in Wilno concerned the Tatars and the Calvinists, and for the latter only after 1640. The Tatars, unlike the Jews, had no right of

414

epilogue

residence within the city walls. The one possible exception I have found only confirms the general pattern. Tatars would have returned at day’s end from any business they had in Wilno to their settlement in the Łukiszki suburb, a short walk to the River Wilia from within the walls. Here they had their wooden mosque, school, and cemetery. The Calvinist case after 1640 is closer to that of Hamburg-Altona. The Reformed might continue to reside within the walls, but they would now walk to their new place of worship outside the walls, as did the Calvinists of Hamburg in Altona. But the differences remain greater than the similarities. In removing the Calvinists from their old seat, King Władysław IV was simply acceding to lesser demands to remove what was perceived and represented as a foreign body from among a small, highly concentrated cluster of Roman Catholic and Uniate churches and cloisters within the walls. He did not agree to greater demands to suppress Calvinists’ worship entirely in the capital of the Grand Duchy. He allowed them to rebuild their church, school, and hospital at the site of their old cemetery. The Calvinist complex was thus now extramural but only barely. And the walls of Wilno—never very imposing physically—meant little legally. This was nothing like the boundary between Imperial Hamburg and Danish Altona. It wasn’t even anything like the relegation of Cracow’s Jews in 1495 to Kazimierz, a nearby suburb with its own town hall, separate legal jurisdiction, and its own walls. Wilno’s “suburbanites” were just as much subject to its town hall as the “townies,” and Calvinists who lived both inside and outside the walls were treated equally. I am aware of no incorporated suburbs of Wilno in the seventeenth century akin to Cracow’s Kleparz or Kazimierz. Wilno’s small number of Calvinists continued to practice their religion openly and their pastors to minister openly to the needs of the intramural sick and dying, even though they now had to follow new rules of dress and conduct (no garb similar to that of Catholic priests, no singing to accompany funeral processions within the walls). The difference in the distance individual Calvinist families had to walk to church before and after 1640 was of no significance. The one documented allegation of clandestine intramural worship after 1640 was investigated at the time and proved false. A step toward open recognition of equal rights for more than one confession was to be found in the “biconfessional” cities, best known in the Holy Roman Empire. Here systems of parity and/or simultaneum—the shared use of one church, either by dividing the time for scheduled services or by physically dividing the church and providing for literal simultaneity— allowed the orderly functioning of collectivities with two equally (at least in theory) but, more important, openly recognized confessions. Biconfessionalism was, as Kaplan writes, “in many ways . . . the opposite of Auslauf or of worship in a schuilkerk.” Those solutions were “based on evasion and denial” and allowed both the tolerators and the tolerated to “accommodate religious diversity without acknowledging or coming fully to terms with it.” In this, biconfessionalism provided a stark contrast: it was “based on a full and open recognition of religious divisions.”39 While the best known, most thoroughly studied, and most stable arrangements were those created as a result of the Peace of Westphalia for Augsburg, Biberach, Ravensburg, and

conflict and coexistence

415

Dinkelsbühl, Kaplan notes similar arrangements for French and Dutch cities, including the simultaneum of “Libertines” and Catholics in the Jacobskerk of Leiden in 1578.40 Kaplan highlights the sort of community of violence (without using the term here) that parity, like simultaneum, helped to create: “While it practically encouraged squabbling, it imposed rigid, narrow parameters on conflict.”41 He further finds two basic models for biconfessionality: the liberal, individualist model (the Netherlands, for example), and the corporatist model (Augsburg). In the first, toleration was accorded the individual and included the right to belong to no religious community or to belong to it only in part. In the second model, toleration was granted to legally defined confessional communities, and full membership in one of them was required of the individual.42 Wilno offers an early and particularly tenacious and complicated case of parity arrangements. The Greek-Roman parity system worked out for the magistracy in 1536 predated by far those of the Imperial cities following the Peace of Westphalia but also those of France in 1563–1564, introduced in the wake of the first religious war in that country—Kaplan’s choice for the first parity experiment—that created mi-partie consulates (magistracies) with equal representation of Catholics and Huguenots.43 Although their world would become more complex with the arrival of Lutherans in 1555, Calvinists in 1563, and Uniates in 1596, Vilnans continued to divide it into Greek and Roman sides, now assigning the newly created confessions to one or the other. Only the guilds would employ further articulations in their parity arrangements, sometimes separating the Saxons, or Germans on occasion, into a separate category. The sense that the Roman Catholic side tolerated and that all the rest were merely tolerated would strengthen over time. Still, the Uniates would jealously guard against Roman Catholic intrusions on Greek seats in the magistracy after the restrictions of 1666, insisting on Roman-Greek parity, if now in a more limited form. And in spite of attempts at imposing similar restrictions in the guilds, old habits of parity arrangements held fast even in the later part of the century. What makes Wilno unusual, then, is the open inclusion of four other confessions, in spite of pretensions on the part of Roman Catholics to dominance. There were not “two confessions in one city” but five, members of which must have been adept at negotiating a landscape of subtly and constantly shifting oppositions. No doubt Jews and Tatars were aware of articulations in the local Christian world that must have added complexities to the Christian-Jewish and Christian-Muslim opposition that was otherwise so straightforward and binary. Whether Wilno adhered to the liberal, individualistic or the corporatist model of multiconfessionality must remain an open question. Recorded examples of attempts of clergy to enforce attendance, the presence of intruders at religious services, the documented cases of people who wished to be buried Lutheran but without leaving any trace of themselves in church ledgers—all this might suggest a certain laxity. The sheer range of choices and the interconfessional ties of family and neighborhood may have facilitated movement of individuals back and forth across the divides. We have seen evidence of some significant crossover participation in

416

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the Lutheran-Calvinist, Lutheran-Catholic, and Orthodox-Uniate constellations. Individual cases suggest that movement in all directions within the Christian spectrum was possible. A comparison of Wilno with Lwów is instructive. The capital of the old principality of Galicia and the largest city in Red Ruthenia was of similar size and importance. Most important here, the two royal cities were of similar diversity. In Lwów the main features of the ethnoconfessional landscape were Roman Catholics, Ruthenians (Orthodox until 1700/1708, Uniate thereafter), Armenians (in union with Rome in a process beginning in 1630), and Jews (with two separate communities). (Protestants were either absent or invisible.) The Armenians and Jews enjoyed certain autonomies and structures of self-governance guaranteed by royal privileges. The Ruthenians, by contrast, never managed to achieve even their minimal goal of the limited autonomy accorded the Armenians, to say nothing of parity with the Roman Catholics in the magistracy, the guilds, and the marketplace. Occasional royal admonitions in support of the Ruthenians were simply ignored by the Catholic-dominated municipal corporations. The most the Ruthenian side (by now, long Uniate!) was able to achieve was rare, isolated, individual participation in city governance in the last decades of the Commonwealth (Lwów became the capital of Hapsburg Galicia with the first partition of Poland-Lithuania in 1772) and sporadic evasion of restrictions on commerce and residence. Catholic Lwów seems to have been more successful at keeping its Ruthenians on Ruthenian Street than was Wilno at keeping its Jews on Jewish Street. The restrictions on the Ruthenian presence in the public sphere seem draconian in comparison with any of the rules negotiated for encounters in the streets and squares and gates of Wilno: in Lwów, sixteenth-century bans on Ruthenian bell ringing during Catholic services and on Ruthenian processions in priestly garb and with candles anywhere outside Ruthenian Street were still in force in the late seventeenth. In short, only the Roman Catholics—most of them Polish immigrants— enjoyed full political and economic rights.44 The basic difference can be traced to conditions in the Polish Crown and in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Lwów was conquered in 1340 and made directly subject to the Crown. The grant of Magdeburg law in 1356 to German and then Polish immigrant populations was never extended to the autochthonous Ruthenians. The latter sometimes viewed themselves as a conquered population. In the course of litigation in 1599, the Ruthenian side would complain before the castle court, “Neither the Lwów Armenians nor the Jews have such ties with the Poles as has our Ruthenian nation. And yet they enjoy their rights more fully than do we. Having come to us, Rus´, yet with us Rus´, in Rus´, they [the Poles] do not wish to live in accordance with our rights and decisions.”45 Wilno, by contrast, was more Polonized than Polish. Its habits of coexistence predated the conversion of the Grand Duchy to Christianity. Its formalized system of parity established in 1536 simply wrote old tendencies into law. Poles, Lithuanians, and Belarusans will continue to argue about the nature of the unions that made of the Grand Duchy a yokemate with the Polish Crown (was it a marriage facilitated by affinity, a shotgun, or convenience?), but it would never have occurred to Vilnans to see themselves as citizens of anything but the

conflict and coexistence

417

Grand Duchy or as having been conquered by the Crown. The attempts from above to rein in Wilno’s broadly inclusive parity system in 1666 seem late and ad hoc. In spite of the reference to the Cracovian model in the royal decree of 1666—“ad instar Krakowa” [after the fashion of Cracow]—no Vilnan could have imagined that life in the capital of the Grand Duchy would suddenly resemble that of the old seat of Polish kings. The types of political, social, and religious restrictions that accompanied the belated and only partially successful CounterReformation that came to the Crown in the course of the seventeenth century must have been the envy of the Jesuits who came to Wilno from beyond the borders of the Grand Duchy. More detailed case studies will be necessary, but work like that of Stefan Rohdewald on Połock suggests not only solutions but also some closer points of comparison among the royal cities of the Grand Duchy, as well as some shared differences from Polish cities. Particularly familiar to Vilnans would have been the ways in which a variety of confessions were brought together in parity structures in municipal and guild governance in Połock and the ways in which participation in Roman Catholic public processions such as Corpus Christi was negotiated for the entire city. Over its early modern history, Połock at times resembled Wilno in its power sharing across the confessions and at times differed markedly in its intermittent forcing of the Orthodox into clandestine and semiclandestine worship.46 The basic similarity was this: the cities of the Grand Duchy had to find strategies for the coexistence of a range of confessions; those of Poland had become, for all practical purposes, monoconfessional—Roman Catholic in the Crown lands, Lutheran in Royal Prussia—by the early seventeenth century.47 Scholarship has begun to take note that “on account of weak royal rule and powerful regional estate bodies, . . . in the east-central European historical region [we find] at most a ‘decentralized and pluralistic’ confessionalization—if one wishes to adhere to the concept of confessionalization [at all].”48 Michael Müller has argued that continued adherence to a secular constitutional system guaranteeing rights and freedoms to estates attenuated the victory of the Counter-Reformation, allowed for considerable regional variety in confessional diversity, and blocked confessionalization processes analogous to those found in the Holy Roman Empire and farther west, with the possible exception of the three large Royal Prussian cities of Danzig, Thorn, and Ebling, where a version of Lutheran confessionalization took root.49 What holds for the belated and partial confessionalization of the Polish Crown applies in much greater measure to the cities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, including—an extreme case among royal cities—Wilno, where concepts of “interconfessionality, transconfessionality, and intraconfessional plurality”50 will have more resonance. Some have suggested abandoning the paradigm in its more top-down, etatist versions and returning to concepts of Konfessionsbildung (“formation of confessions,” as in Ernst Walter Zeeden’s classic work of 1965) or “confessional cultures.”51 Habits, customs, and royal grants and privileges contributed to the creation of a city in which petty violence, though a feature of daily life, was rarely confessionally motivated, kept in check by a populace quick to litigate and trustful of the various courts available to them.

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It was a city in which confessions and religions occupied spaces that were defined but allowed considerable overlap and crossing in various directions and contexts; in which many had—and probably all knew someone who had—kith, kin, or neighbors from across one or more of the confessional divides; and in which difference was a more or less grudgingly tolerated aspect of coexistence. This was not exactly the same thing as the “indifferentism” that some revisionists have sought to establish as a corrective to, and in some cases in opposition to, the top-down statism of confessionalization paradigms.52 We may wonder, for instance, how to interpret the case of Uniate salt merchant Afanas Otroszkiewicz, who was willing to marry an Orthodox burghess by the name of Katarzyna Kuryłowiczówna and to share a house with her in the suburb outside Sharp Gate, but when it came time, shortly before their deaths in 1666 for the two to draw up their wills, the one wished to rest eternally in the hallowed ground of the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity and the other chose the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit just across the street.53 The two establishments had been the focal points of the intense confessional-political debate between Uniates and Orthodox in the city, the pamphlet wars on occasion spilling over into alleged physical violence. Does their case bespeak confessional indifferentism? Or zeal? Or are we dealing with types of allegiances and accommodations that are not adequately described in such terms? One imagines the surprise of a visitor from outside, even from as nearby as the Polish Crown lands, perhaps the royal quartermaster himself (if he was not a local), as he registered the cacophony of the bells; the competing and intersecting religious and secular processions; the variety of dress, grooming, and speech patterns, and the occasional, more or less gentle, mutual derision; the simultaneity of feasting and fasting; the sense of passing from neighborhood to neighborhood, in each of which one set of customs might predominate but tokens of all varieties might be present, at times in the same family; and above all the sense that all this variety could be expressed publicly and in all corners of the city. Would a Polish visitor have marveled any less than our Ulmer, Samuel Kiechel, at a city in which, so it must have seemed to the outsider—and only partly erroneously—“all the religions, companies, and sects have libertatem conscientiae [freedom of conscience], in which no one is hindered?”

~ a p p e n d i x a~

Selected Streets and Areas Treated in the Text

English

Polish

Lithuanian

Augustinian Alley

zaułek Augustian´ski

Bernardine Street

´ska ul. Bernardyn

Augustijonu˛ gatve· Bernardinu˛ gatve·

Bishop Street

ul. Biskupia

Calvinist Church Street

ul. Zborowa

Dominican Street

ul. Dominikan´ska

German Street

ul. Niemiecka

Glass Street

ul. Szklanna

Horse Street

ul. Kon´ska ul. Z·ydowska

Jewish Street

Universiteto gatve· Šv. Mykolo gatve· Dominikonu˛ gatve· Vokiecˇiu˛ gatve· Stikliu˛ gatve· Arkliu˛ gatve· Žydu˛ gatve·

“The Little Street Leading to the Orthodox/Uniate Church of St. John the Baptist” (later, Literary Alley)

“Uliczka ku Cerkwi s´w. Iwana” (later, Zaułek Literacki)

Literatu˛ gatve·

Łotoczko Street

ul. Łotoczko

Latako gatve·

Lower Castle Street

ul. Wielka Zamkowa

Market Square

Plac Rynkowy

Didžioji gatve· Rotuše·s aikšte·

Meat Shop Street

ul. Jatkowa

Mill Alley

“Uliczka od Młynu Królewskiego”

Rudniki Street

ul. Rudnicka

Savior Street

ul. Spaska

Sawicz Street

ul. Sawicza

Sawicz/Bakszta Street

ul. Sawicza/ul. Bakszta

Sharp Street

ul. Ostra

Skop Street

ul. Skopowa

M. Antokolskio gatve· Šiltadaržio gatve· Ru¯dninku˛ gatve· Išganytojo gatve· Savicˇiaus gatve· Bokšto gatve· Aušros Vartu˛ gatve· S. Skapo gatve· (Continued)

420

appendix a

English

Polish

Lithuanian

St. Kazimierz/Casimir Alley

zaułek s´w. Kazimierza

St. Ignatius Street

ul. s´w. Ignacego

Šv. Kazimiero gatve· Šv. Ignoto gatve·

St. John Street

ul. s´w. Jana

Šv. Jono gatve·

St. Nicholas Street

ul. s´w. Mikołaja

Tatar Street

ul. Tatarska

Šv. Mikalojaus gatve· Totoriu˛ gatve·

Transfluvia

Zarzecze

Užupis

Troki Street

ul. Trocka

Upper Castle Street

ul. Zamkowa

Traku˛ gatve· Pilies gatve·

Wilia Street

ul. Wilen´ska

Vilniaus gatve·

~ a p p e n d ix b~

Genealogical Tables

Sztrunks and Gibels Jerzy II (d. 1657) + Sara Engelbrechtówna (d. 1660)

Barbara + Krzysztof Eperieszy (d. 1664?)

Sztrunk

Jan I + Anna Korsakówna

Katarzyna + 1. Szymon Engelbrecht (d. before 1636) 2. Reinhold Witmacher

2. Jan

Marcin + ?

Sara + Henryk Mones

2. Marcin

Jerzy (1561–1634) + Barbara Karejówna

Krszysztof II “de Sztrunk” Helena + Andrzej Szreder Krszysztof I + Katarzyna Puszówna (d. 1655)

Jakub + Maryna Ginielówna Barbara + Kazimierz Gieldowd Zofia + Stefan Bielski

.

Elzbieta Giblówna + 1. Jan Sztrunk II (d. 1643) 2. Paweł Meller (d. 1685)

1. Jerzy 1. Andreasz 1. Jan III “de Sztrunk” + Barbara Monesówna

Halszka (b. 1668) Katarzyna (b. 1675) Anna (b. 1677)

Jakub Jan

Gibel

Tomasz (d. 9 IX 1660) + Anna Engelbrechtówna

Krystyna + Paweł Podchocimski (d. 1657) Sara + Ferdynand Ror Jakub Katarzyna + Aleksander Szwykowski Helena

Tomasz + Katarzyna Dochnowiczówna

Jakub (1569–1638) + Krystyna Fonderflotówna

Jakub (before 1631–ca. 1648) Katarzyna + Korneliusz II Winhold (1600–1638)

Korneliusz III (b. and d. 1635) Jan (b. and d. 1637) two daughters

422

appendix b

Buchners and Rejters Regina + Samuel Kalendar (d. 1656) Michał (d. 1657)

Buchner Marcin (d. before 1652) + Regina Stegnerówna (d. 1685)

Maryjanna (d. 1656) + Frydrych Cylich (d. 19 VII 1660) Anna (d. before 1667) + Jakub Tropp (d. 1691–1701)

Jan Buchner (d. after 1707) + Krystyna Rejterówna

Maryjanna + 1. Jakub Auszwicz 2. Franciszek Rutych

Rejter Joachim (d. 1671–1673) + Krystyna (d. after 1677)

Paweł Dorota + Andrzej Fonderflot (d. after 1677)

Katarzyna (d. after 1707) + Andrzej Pe arski (d. 1703–1705) Zuzanna + 1. Dawid Lidert 2. Rejnhold Fonderenda

genealogical tables

Dorofiewiczes and Kostrowickis Aleksander (d. 1679) + Marianna Safijanówna

Dorofiewicz

Anastazja + Krzysztof Ihnatowicz (d. before 1668)

Barbara + Afanas Iwanowicz (d. before 1673)

Katarzyna + Roman Sobolewski Bazyli (d. before 1667) + Regina Szycikówna Zaleska

Krystyna + Bazyli Filipowicz See Filipowiczes

Dorota + Samuel Filipowicz (d. 1663)

Domicella + Roman Kołczanowicz

Marta Dorofiewiczówna + Kazimierz Kostrowicki

Kostrowicki

Jan + Helena Juszkiewiczówna

Bazyli Daniel + Ewdokija Sofronowiczówna

Regina + Samuel Filipowicz (d. 1663)

See Filipowiczes

423

424

appendix b

Filipowiczes Andrzej (1) Anna (1) + Stefan Migura ? (1) + Hrehor Fiedorowicz Samuel (d. 1663) + Dorota Dorofiewiczówna (1) Regina Kostrowicka (2)

Helena (2) Marianna (2) Józef (2) Daniel (2) Bazyli (2) Jan (2)

Regina

Abbreviations

ADB

Allgemeine deutsche Biographie. 56 vols. Leipzig (1875–1912) Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (Main Archive of Ancient Acts, Warsaw) Arxiv Jugo-Zapadnoj Rossii, 35 vols. in 8 parts (Kiev, 1859–1914) Archiwum Radziwiłłów (Archive of the Radziwiłł Family) in the AGAD Akty, izdavaemye Vilenskoju arxeografiˇc eskoju komissieju, 39 vols. (Wilno, 1865–1915) Biblioteka Czartoryskich (Library of the Czartoryski Family, Cracow) Biblioteka Narodowa (National Library, Warsaw) Biblioteka Ordynacji Zamojskich (Library of the Zamojski “Ordination” in the collections of the BN) BUJ, B Biblioteka Uniwersytetu Jagiellon ´skiego (Library of the Jagiellonian University, Cracow), Berlin ´skie Zbiory (manuscripts from the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz) GStA PK Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulburbesitz (Berlin-Dahlem) LMAB Lietuvos Mokslu˛ Akademijos Biblioteka (Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, Vilnius) LNMB Lietuvos Nacionaline˙ Martyno Mažvydo Biblioteka (Martynas Mažvydas Lithuanian National Library, Vilnius) LVIA Lietuvos Valstybe˙s Istorijos Archyvas (Lithuanian State Historical Archive, Vilnius) ML Metryka litewska NDB Neue deutsche Biographie, 24 vols. to date (A–Schinkel) (Berlin, 1952– ) NKPP Nowa ksie˛ga przysłów i wyraz˙en ´ przysłowiowych polskich, ed. Julian Krzyz˙anowski, 4 vols. (Warsaw, 1969–1978) ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols. (Oxford, 2004) PL Patrologiae cursus completus, bibliotheca omnium SS. patrum, doctorum, scriptorumque ecclesiasticorum sive Latinorum, sive Graecorum, Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844–1880) PSB Polski słownik biograficzny, 47 vols. to date (Cracow, 1935– ) RGADA Rossijskij Gosudarstvennyj Arxiv Drevnix Aktov (Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, Moscow) VL Volumina legum: Przedruk Zbioru praw staraniem XX. Pijarów w Warszawie od roku 1732 do roku, 10 vols. (1793; repr., Warsaw, 1980) VUB Vilniaus Universyteto Biblioteka (Library of Vilnius University, Vilnius) AGAD AJuZR AR AVAK BCz BN BOZ

Notes

Introduction 1. Cited according to Klinkowski 1936, 135. The entire travel account was edited by K. D. Harszler (1866). The report from Wilno is found on pp. 102–5 in that edition. All translations are mine. 2. See Rykaczewski 1864, 143. 3. Ibid., 89–90 (emphasis added). 4. See Kot 1958. ˘ 1983, 32–33. 5. Koršunau 6. See Nirenberg 1998; Muir 1999; Kaplan 2007. For overviews of the problem and the literature on confessionalization, see Hsia 1989; Reinhard 1977; Reinhard and Schilling 1995; Schilling 1995, 2002, 2004; Brady 2004; Gorski 2003. For confessionalization in east-central Europe, see Bahlcke and Strohmeyer 1999. For a survey of the literature and some revisionism in the direction of “interconfessionality, transconfessionality, and intraconfessional plurality,” see Greyerz et al. 2003. 7. In the view of Marceli Kosman (1978, 44), “the Grand Duchy was then [in 1385, the year of the Union of Krewo that led to Jagiełło’s conversion, his marriage with Queen Jadwiga of Poland, and the federation between the two states] a multiethnic and multiconfessional state in which the question of tolerance had been shaped favorably for more than a century.” See also Kosman 1978, 69; 1972a, 1973. Among handbooks treating early Lithuanian history, see Ochman´ski 1990; Kiaupa 1995 (English version Kiaupa 2000); Gudavicˇius 1999; Błaszczyk 2002. On the rise of the pagan Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the first half of the fourteenth century, see Rowell 1994. For histories of Wilno in the late medieval and early modern periods, see Balin´ski 1837; Kraszewski 1840–1842; Kracˇkovskij’s 1893 introduction to vol. 20 of AVAK; Vasil'evskij 1872–1874; Łowmian´ska 1929b (now reedited in Łowmian´ska 2005); Kowalenko 1925–1926 and 1927; and Jurginis, Merkys, and Tautavicˇius 1968. Of crucial importance for the history of the Wilno magistracy and the local elite in the seventeenth century are the recent works of Aivas Ragauskas, among which his 2002 “collective biography of the ruling elite” occupies the most prominent position. 8. On the topic of Polish immigration to Lithuania, see Jurkiewicz 1995; Turska 1982; Kosman 1981, 1992a, 1992b; Topolska 1987; Szybkowski 1998. For later immigration see the article and monograph by Agnius Urbanavicˇius (2005a and 2005b) devoted to the “new citizens of Wilno (1661–1795),” as well as his 2009 edition of the collected entries for those new citizens from the contemporary acta. On the history of Polish-Lithuanian relations, see Błaszczyk 1998, 2007. 9. Studies devoted to the problem of the ethnic composition of seventeenth-century Wilno have been based primarily on lists of names and their etymologies. These works prompt questions— to the extent that we accept the proposed etymologies—as to what degree these lists were typical for the entire population of the city and whether it is possible to equate etymons with ethnicities

428

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

notes to pages 6–7

or seventeenth-century concepts of Polishness, Lithuanianness, Ruthenianness, and Germanness with those of today. Among those taking part in this type of discussion, see Karge 1917, 1918; Ippel 1918; Doubek 1929; Chodynicki 1925; Łowmian´ska 1929a, 1929b, 1930; Doubek 1930; Morzy 1959; Zinkevicˇius 1977. On the “social structure” of early modern Wilno, see Križitauskas 1979. On Lithuanian Tatars in the early modern period, see Borawski 1980, 1981, 1983, 1992; Borawski and Sienkiewicz 1989; Muchln´ski 1858; Sobczak 1984; Szyszman 1933; Kryczyn´ski 1937; Zakrzewski 1989a, 1989b, 1992; Tyszkiewicz 1989. On the history of the Łukiszki suburb, see Joge˙la, Meilus, and Pugacˇiauskas 2008. We will encounter one Tatar—an “Obduła” (Abdullah, thus apparently unbaptized)—among owners of houses within the walls. Thus the generally accepted notion of a ban on intramural Tatar settlement may need some qualification. On Lithuanian Karaim, see Szyszman 1933, 1980; Geiger 1853; Mann 1935; and, most recently, Ga˛siorowski 2008. ML 78 (RGADA 389.78), 250v. On the Jews of Wilno, see Beršadskij 1886–1887; Klausner 1988; Cohen 1992. For the earlier period, Klausner and Cohen drew on Beršadskij, whose study was based on primary sources. On Jews in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, see Šiaucˇiu¯naite·-Verbickiene· 2009. On the events of 1639–1640, see Zwolski 1936; Wisner 1993; Kosmanowa 1996; Augustyniak 2006. See Kot 1958. Among them, Samuel Przypkowski (d. Königsberg, 19 June 1670), Andrzej Wiszowaty (d. Amsterdam, 29 July 1678), and Stanisław Lubieniecki (d. Hamburg, 18 May 1675). On these three figures, see Chmaj 1927, 1957; Tazbir 1961. On the “radical Reformation” in English, see Wilbur 1945, 1952, and Williams 2000. Teplova and Zueva 1997, 202. On the Christian confessions in early modern Wilno and their interrelations, see Adamowicz 1855; Schramm 1969; Kosman 1972a, 1973, 1978; Ragauskas 2002 (on the “religious affiliation” of the members of the ruling elite, see especially pp. 153–69). Wilno became the capital city of the Ruthenian debates in the early years of the polemic over the Union of Brest, where Jesuit, Uniate, and Orthodox printing houses produced a constant stream of theological treatises, political and social reports and diatribes, and personal invective. On printing in Wilno in those years, see Anuškin 1962, 1970; Abramowicz 1925; Kniha Belarusi 1986; Kawecka-Gryczowa 1959; Jaroszewicz-Pieresławcew 2003. For a collection of essays on Orthodox printing houses throughout the Commonwealth, including Wilno, see Mironowicz, Pawluczuk, and Chomik 2004. Among more recent works on the Union of Brest, see Gudziak 1998; Łuz∧ny, Ziejka, and Ke˛pin ´ ski 1994; Gudziak and Turhii 1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1997. Among works devoted to the polemical literature, see Brückner 1896; Tretiak 1912; Grabowski 1916; Kosman 1973; Ševcˇenko 1996. For the texts of Jesuit satires directed against the Wilno Lutherans, see Nowak 1968. On these documents, see also Ragauskas 2004. Sources are few and difficult to evaluate, and estimates have differed radically—between fourteen and forty thousand (Łowmian ´ ska 1929b, 77; 2005, 223; and Tamulynas 1982). All have agreed— again, with few sources to support their claims—that the Muscovite siege and occupation of the city in 1655 cut the number in half, and that the rest of the seventeenth century was a period of slow and incomplete rebuilding before the next great urban crisis of the Great Northern War at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The lists of Lutheran heads of households who gave offerings to the local church from before and after 1655 suggest that this assessment may, in fact, be close to the truth. As to the absolute numbers, among other indicators—for instance, comparison with a more densely settled Cracow and suburbs with better demographic data (Belzyt 1999, 73–135)—the

notes to pages 8–10

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

429

1636 and 1639 Lustrations of the city’s intramural houses suggest a number closer to twenty thousand. On the basis of these documents, both Paknys (2006, 16–18; 2007, 90) and Meilus (2010, 135–36) accept this figure for those years. Further work with the Catholic baptismal records, the Lutheran offering roles, and the Lustrations may help to make these numbers somewhat more precise. On the decline in the use of the Tatar language among Lithuanian Tatars, see Szapszał 1932; Drozd 1999, 30–39. Łowmian ´ ska 1929b, 17; 2005, 164–65. See Werdt 2006 for a perceptive and wide-ranging study of the importance of urbanization in the “occidentalization” of the eastern lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late medieval and early modern periods. See Kowalenko 1925–1926, 369; Schramm 1969, 20–24; Zbiór 1843, 53; Dubin ´ ski 1788, 54. On the structure and function of the Wilno magistracy, see Ragauskas 2002; on the office of the wójt, pp. 73–86. Also Križitauskas 1977. This was generally the case, although Ragauskas (2002, 166–69) notes a few isolated instances where Lutherans and Calvinists occupied Greek positions in the magistracy. See LVIA SA 5104, 304v–310r, printed in AVAK, 10:299–310. We will meet both men and their circles at several points later in this book. Until recently, it seemed that the only surviving list of the Greek and Roman members of the sexagintvirate, or sixty-man governing board, was that for 1602—the year that body first convened—published by Władysław Kowalenko as an appendix to his article of 1925–1926, 1927. Jurate˙ Kiaupiene˙ (2003) has now published a second list, this one for 1629, based on materials preserved in the Lithuanian Metryka (ML). On the Communitas mercatoria, see also Łowmian ´ ska 2003. We have no such list for the period after 1666, but the fact that the royal decrees of 1666 spoke only and specifically of the magistracy in limiting participation to Roman Catholics and Uniates suggests that the Merchants’ Guild might have continued to receive members from the other confessions. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12 (1636) and BUJ, B Slav. F. 15 (1639). I offer here warm words of thanks to Dr. Zdzisław Pietrzyk, now director of the library of the Jagiellonian University (Cracow), who brought these documents to my attention in the summer of 1998. The Polish-language Lustration of 1636 has now become the basis of an edition, with Lithuanian translation, commentary, and valuable apparatus, by Mindaugas Paknys (2006). Władysław IV came to Wilno five times in the course of his reign, arriving on 24 June 1634, 5 March 1636, 27 January 1639, 22 November 1643, and 19 March 1648. (See Dorobisz 1996, 67.) The first Lustration bears a date on the title page: “during the presence of His Majesty the King in the year 1636.” It is possible to assign a date to the second Lustration on the basis of a series of data. I mention only two such examples. Burgomaster Jakub Gibel died 13 November 1637 (Schönflisssius 1638b, Eiiir). In the Lustration of 1636, we find the burgomaster himself in his house on Castle Street, but in the second Lustration we find his widow. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 13v; Paknys 2006, 97, 216–17; and BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 8r. In turn, “Master of the Hunt of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania” (it was Piotr Karol Dołmat Isajkowski) was still alive during the second Lustration (and we find the name elsewhere, BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 20v), and we know he died on 27 May 1640 (Lulewicz and Rachuba 1994, 211). Paknys (2006) chose a system of assigning addresses somewhat at variance with mine. He numbers the houses 1 to 703 in the order the quartermaster surveyed them. I decided early on to divide the survey into the segments suggested by the quartermaster’s prose. For a chart of equivalencies between the two numbering systems, see Frick 2008, 583–87. ˇ aplinskas 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2005; On the streets of Wilno, see also Maroszek 1999, C Jurkštas 1985. For more on the history of individual houses/addresses in archival sources, see the twelve volumes of Dre˙ma 1998–2006.

430

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

notes to pages 10–14

For guidebooks to Wilno over the years, see Kirkor 1859, 1880; Remer (n.d.); Venclova 2001. For a biographical dictionary of names associated with Wilno, see Venclova 2006. For a study of Wilno in the modern period as a “city of strangers,” see Briedis 2009. For these quotes and those in the following paragraphs, see Smail 1999, 11:2, 11–15, 85, 127–29. LMAB F43-218, 209v; Frick 2008, 84. On Getkant’s map and other aspects of the early modern cartography of Wilno and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, see Rewien ´ ska 1995; Alexandrowicz 1994, 1989 (on Getkant, 223–25). For Łowmian ´ ska’s map of seventeenth-century Wilno streets, see Łowian ´ ska 1929b, 202–3; 2005, 330–31. In his reviews of Paknys 2006 and Frick 2008, Elmantas Meilus (2008, 2010) has noted the omission of a few houses, some of them because they were of questionable location. Although these details will be important to note, I have adhered in this book to the addresses used in Frick 2008. The general outlines of the neighborhood maps and the location of people within them remain valid, and the two books can be used more smoothly in tandem. See Alexandrowicz 1989, 169. It is reproduced in the set of maps that accompanies that book, as well as in AVAK, 20 (no page numbers). The Rejestry podymnego from 1690 are edited in Rachuba 1989. First attempts to employ the Lustrations to present a picture of life in seventeenth-century Wilno— with little or no attention to the coexistence of the confessions and religions—are to be found in Paknys 2007 and 2006 (9–82). The standard introduction to and overview of the “history of the Polish state and law” remains— for the period from the second half of the fifteenth century to the end of the Commonwealth in 1795—Kaczmarczyk and Les´nodorski 1966. On the Wilno horodnictwo in particular, see Łopacin ´ ski 1939. The word horod (castle) stems from Ruthenian, although it functioned in the Polish of the time. Its Polish cognate was gród. The so-called castle and land courts (sa˛d grodzki i ziemski) were the courts of the nobles. They were something quite different from the horodnictwo, the citizens of which were usually the suburban poor. A general drainage of the ground water begun in 1642 would suggest we should not think of them as flooded throughout the century. See Jurginis, Merkys, and Tautavicˇius 1968, 160. Landed Tatars were regularly described as strenuus (vigorous), nobilis (noble), pan (lord), ksia˛z∧e (prince). For example, the book of the Brotherhood of St. Anne at the Bernardine church dedicated to the same saint (LVIA 1135.4.472); the book of the Brotherhood of St. Joseph at the Discalced Carmelite Church of St. Joseph the Bridegroom (LMAB F43-20732); the book of the Brotherhood of the Immaculate Conception of the Most Holy Virgin at the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity (LMAB F22-75). LVIA 606.1.102, 34r–35r. (In each case I take into consideration only the seventeenth century.) LVIA 606.1.103, 84r–85b. LVIA 604.10.2. They are extant for two-year periods beginning in 1640, 1652, 1662, and 1664 (?) and then for two-year periods beginning in 1667 until 1691 plus 1701. LVIA 1008.1.42, LVIA 1008.1.19. LMAB F40-67. LVIA 604.19.94, 604.19.95, 604.19.96, 604.19.97. LVIA 1135.4.478. LVIA 606.1.102, 1r–24v, 606.1.103, 68r–74r. LVIA 604.10.1, 604.19.95. LVIA 1135.4.483. LVIA 606.1.102, 28r–33r, 606.1.103, 81r–82v. LVIA 606.1.102, 26r–v, 606.1.103, 2r–48v. See Skocˇiljas 2009 on the late (beginning mid-seventeenth century), slow, and fragmentary adoption of the practice of keeping baptismal, marriage, and death records among the Orthodox

notes to pages 14–16

54.

55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

431

of the Kievan Metropolitanate. He suggests (p. 28) that the Uniates emulated the Orthodox here. I wonder whether that was the case, especially in a place like Wilno, close to the center of reforms of the Uniate Basilian Order in the post-Tridentine spirit in the early seventeenth century. Perhaps in emulation of the Uniates, the Orthodox of Wilno began keeping such records a bit earlier here. But in any event, I have been unable to find any of these books. A son of the Wilno Lutheran burgher elite by the name of Karol Libert had left town ca. 1650, perhaps on a tour of the universities of western Europe, which several of the important local sons would continue to do in the seventeenth century, especially those from families with business dealings and ties of patronage to the nobles. When he returned to Wilno in 1667 and attempted to follow up on debts owed by Radziwiłł patrons to the estate of his now deceased father, he was told by “Their Graces, the Lord Notaries of the city of Wilno, by other Their Graces, Lord Officials, as well as by citizens of that same city,” that “there are none of the official books of acta that existed ante hostilitatem [before the war].” See LVIA SA 5335, 477r–478r; Frick 2008, 324–25. On Wilno during the Muscovite occupation, see Meilus 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, and most recently the large document collections in 2011a and 2011b; Rachuba 1994; Storožev 1895a, 1895b; Gerasimova 2012; and chapter 12 below. The acta of the magistracy for the seventeenth century are organized in two series: LVIA SA 5097– 5120 for the books of the burgomasters’ and councillors’ court and LVIA SA 5333–5342 for the lower instance of the court of the bench. The series are not, however, entirely consistent in their organization, and we find, for example, protestations clearly identified as “entered into the books of the noble court of the Wilno bench” among the first series. One large volume of the acta of the court of the burgomasters and councillors from the period of the Muscovite occupation (1657–1662) is preserved in Moscow (RGADA 1603.12.14); it has been published in Meilus 2011. For the seventeenth century, these are volumes 8 to 20 of the Acta Capituli Vilnensis preserved in LMAB F43-216 to F43-228 (old identifiers: VKF-450 to VKF-462). LMAB F17-280 and F43-590. LVIA SA 4563 (1619–1621); LVIA SA 5361 (1623–1700); LVIA SA 5364 (1679–1702); and LVIA SA 5365 (1621–1708). Extant acta (again, only for the seventeenth century) are preserved in LVIA SA 4205 to 4210 (for the land court) and LVIA SA 4591 to 4707 (for the castle court), in both cases with significant gaps in the series. LVIA SA 5111, 883–84; Frick 2008, 533. Two Confessions in One City was the title of Paul Warmbrunn’s classic 1983 study of “the coexistence of Catholics and Protestants in the parity imperial cities of Augsburg, Biberach, Ravensburg, and Dinkelsbühl from 1548 to 1648.” See also François 1991; Kaplan 1995 for studies of the coexistence of two confessional groups in one city. See the statute of the haberdashers’ guild from 22 July 1633 at Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 186. See Wujek 1579–1580, 1:118–19: “Likewise a Christian must not be joined in marriage with people of another faith, for example, with Jews, pagans, heretics.” See the guidebook to Calvinist ritual published under the title Agenda . . . in Danzig in 1637. It was to be binding for Reformed clergy and their flocks in both the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. S´ leszkowski 1621, 12v. Women, minor children, and clergy could not appear before the magistracy court as “legal actors.” It is worth noting that Jewish men of age did appear as actors in the magistracy court, and that Jewish women and children were represented there by Jewish guardians. See the case of March 1675 (LVIA SA 5337, 19r–26r), in which Natan Józefowicz served as curator for Sara Kopyłowiczówna, widow of Fisiel Fajbisiewicz, and Bernat Kopylewicz (presumably the widow’s brother) served as tutor of Fajbisiewicz’s son.

432

notes to pages 20–29

Chapter 1 1. Radziwiłł 1980a, 520. 2. Radziwiłł 1980b, 117–18. 3. On triumphal entries in contemporary western Europe, see Chartrou-Charbonnel 1928; Strong 1984; Bryant 1986; Mitchell 1986; Wisch and Munshower 1990. On the topic in early modern Poland-Lithuania, see Szczerbicka-S´ le˛k 2002. A detailed description of the entry of Władysław’s father, King Zygmunt III Waza, into Wilno on 24 July 1611 is preserved in BCz IV/106, 125–35. 4. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 46r; Paknys 2006, 137, 242; BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 26v. On Ferri, see Szweykowska, Szweyskowski, and Patalas 1997, 117–19. In his versified guide to Warsaw of 1643, Adam Jarze˛bski writes, “It is difficult to overpraise BALTASARO, / Even in Rome such a soprano is raro” (1974, 91). 5. On opera at the court of Władysław IV Waza, see Chynczewska-Hennel 2006, 204–24, which is largely based on eyewitness reports of papal nuncio Mario Filonardi (nunciature 1636–1643). 6. Radziwiłł 1980a, 549. 7. The translatio and the accompanying ceremonies are described in detail on the basis of Filonardi’s letters to Rome in Chynczewska-Hennel 2006, 191–96. See also Rabikauskas 2002. 8. One would assume that the royal quartermaster made his visits to cities before the king’s arrival. Paknys (2007, 89) writes that internal evidence such as specific names and the offices linked to them suggests that the Lustration of 1636 was recorded in the second half of March, a couple weeks after the king’s arrival (although he does not cite the evidence). 9. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 2r; Paknys 2006, 85, 209. 10. See BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 2r–20r; BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 1r–11r; Paknys 2006, 85–104, 209–21. 11. Kawecka-Gryczowa and Tazbir 1998, 424. 12. On the history of the Church of St. John, see Dre˙ma 1997. For the history of the Academy in this period, see Piechnik 1984, 1983, 1987. 13. On the Ostrogski family, including a chapter on the hetman, see Kempa 2002. 14. According to legend, this was the site of the font where Tsar Peter the Great had Alexander Pushkin’s African great-grandfather Hannibal baptized. 15. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 48r–v; Paknys 2006, 139–40, 243. 16. See Paknys 2006, 94. 17. See the attempted confiscation (for alleged treason during the midcentury wars) of “the house of that same Desaus on Castle Street, lying ex opposito [across from] the Scottish shops [kramów szockich].” See LVIA SA 5097, 102v; Frick 2008, 24. 18. On Wilno burghers as clients of the Radziwiłłs, see Ragauskas 2001b. On the paths of the Wilno burghers into the Lithuanian szlachta, see Ragauskas 1997; Frick 2006a. 19. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 20v–30r; BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 11v–16v; Paknys 2006, 104–15, 221–27. Another source (LVIA SA 5096, 208r–209r) tells us, for example, that the Braz∧ycz Town House,” which the quartermaster registered at Market Square 3.13, is actually in the first block of German Street. 20. LVIA 458.1.37, 4r–27v. 21. The quartermaster regularly distinguished between “shops” and “stores”; many houses had some of both. The store most likely had to be bricked, could be a place to sell things, but might also be a cellar storage place; the shop might be nothing more than a stall, but it was always a place for selling and buying products at retail. On the shops of Wilno in the period, see Samalavicˇius 1980. 22. On the relationship of the Communitas mercatoria to the magistracy and the ruling elite, see Łowmian ´ ska 2003. 23. On Dubowicz’s role, beginning in the mid-1620s, in funding the establishment of the Discalced Carmelites in Wilno, see Wanat 1979, 280–81. 24. See the contract between two sets of Orthodox parties granting the arenda (lease) of the Lesser Bourse in 1663 at LVIA SA 5102, 134r–136r; Frick 2008, 153–55.

notes to pages 29–36

433

25. LVIA 610.3.103, 1v–12v; Frick 2008, 156–69; LVIA SA 5340, 224r–31v; AVAK, 9:508–18. ˇ aplinskas 2002, 255–61. On early Cyrillic printing in Wilno, see Kawecka-Gryczowa 1959, 26. See C 146–60, 175–80, 224–30, 241–48; Jaroszewicz-Pieresławcew 2003. 27. It stretches credulity to imagine twenty-seven houses along this segment, but the Lustrations of 1636 and 1639 quite clearly put them here. 28. “Along the right side” looking at the street from the top, where the quartermaster had begun “along the left side”—in other words, actually along the other, left side of the street, looking at it now from his current vantage point at the city wall. This interpretation is supported by several of the named owners whose presence on one or the other side of the street can be verified from other sources. 29. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 30r–45v; BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 17v–26r; Paknys 2006, 115–36, 228–41. 30. This was the scene of the Basilian monastery turned prison in the play Forefathers’ Eve, Part III of 1832 by Polish Romantic bard Adam Mickiewicz, as well as the place of the poet’s own incarceration in 1823. 31. On the architectural complex and the icon and its cult, see Kałamajska-Saeed 1990. 32. The title of the royal functionary who oversaw the provisions for the court’s horses was owiesny. 33. The Lustration of 1636 tells us of the house at 7.03—“in which he himself lives.” See BUJ, B Slav F. 12, 33v; Paknys 2006, 49, 230. 34. See Frick 1995, 57–58; Kawecka-Gryczowa 1959, 55–65; Jaroszewicz-Pieresławcew 2003, 100– 106. 35. LVIA 458.1.592, 141v, 142v. 36. For the wills of the Otroszkiewiczes, see LVIA SA 5335, 80v–82v; Frick 2008, 246–48; and 215v–217v; Frick 2008, 248–50. For Kochan ´ ski’s will and posthumous inventory, see LVIA SA 5103, 635r–636v and 609r–614r; Frick 2008, 251–56. For Wasilewska’s will, see LVIA SA 5339, 510r–v; Frick 2008, 2614 and a second copy at LVIA SA 5115, 625r–626r. For the record of the witnesses to the altercation in the Rossa suburb, see LVIA SA 5111, 177–79; Frick 2008, 257–59. 37. One house in the 1636 survey, three in that of 1639. Since Dominican Street (sometimes also called Holy Spirit Street) would be surveyed in its entirety, top to bottom, at a later point, he must have been thinking of houses in the street that headed from the intersection with Jop Street toward St. John Street (and continued into Bishop Street). In other usages, the block of Glass Street between Jewish Street and Dominican Street would also sometimes be called Holy Spirit Street, but that cannot be the usage here: these houses have already been accounted for. 38. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 45v–60v; BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 26v–35r; Paknys 2006, 136–55, 241–54. As I am not certain where the “pipe” in question was located, the location of houses on these back alleyways (29.01–30.08) must remain approximate. Was this perhaps the wooden pipe that brought water to several intramural houses from the Wingier springs? On the early history of the Wilno waterworks, see Jurkštas 1990. 39. On the Lutherans of Wilno and the foundation of the church, see Adamowicz 1855, 22–30. 40. Krzysztof Kocer lived in the house at German Street 26.01 in 1636. A complaint registered by Glin ´ ska and Libert’s son in 1667 tells us that Kocer was by then, and probably much earlier, his stepfather. See LVIA SA 5335, 477r–478r; Frick 2008, 324–25. Libert Sr. signed the Lutheran financial record in 1628. See LVIA 1008.1.112, 41v. Records of Kocer’s offerings to the coffers of the Lutheran church for 1667, 1669, 1671, 1673—and they were not much: 3, 0, 0, and 0 złotys, respectively—tell us of his confessional allegiance. See LVIA 1008.1.42 95v, 115r, 125v, 140v. 41. See Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 160–61 for a royal privilege for the house on German Street next to the Kiszka house. 42. On Vorbek-Lettow’s invention, or at least re-creation, of his family’s noble lineage, see Ragauskas 1997; Frick 2006a. 43. At a minimum, we find four more goldsmiths living in Glass Street, in addition to those noted in the Lustration, some of them members of a “dynasty” of practitioners of the trade living in the ∧ family house: the Roman Catholics Augustyn and Marcin Z egalin ´ ski, Lutherans Job Bem (Böhm)

434

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

notes to pages 37–39

and Jakub Sznejder, the Calvinist Jan Grekowicz, and the apparent Ruthenian (judging by the name) Bazyli Omelianowicz. See Laucevicˇius and Vitkauskiene˙ 2001, 301–2, 187–88, 210–11, 252; LVIA SA 5104, 592r–593v, 377r–378r; Frick 2008, 513–14; LVIA SA 5109, 433; BOZ 803, 452. See, most recently and most interestingly on the cross-confessional cult of Jozafat Kuncewicz, Rohdewald 2010. For a general overview of the history of the “Jewish quarter,” see Piechotka and Piechotka 1991. See the use of the term “ghetto” in Tollet 1991, 272 (English version, Tollet 1993, 46). Beršadskij 1886, 6 (10): 137; 1887, 7 (3): 84. For an overview of types of Jewish settlement in Polish-Lithuanian towns and cities, see Hundert 1984, 25–34. See also Fram 1997, 22–23. The excurses in Petersen 2003, 60–62, 68–72, and 75– 78 comparing the situation in Lwów with that of other crown cities are especially good on this issue. For examples from responsa concerning where Jews should and should not settle, see Fettke 1986, 84–91. Most recently on the removal of the Jews of Cracow to neighboring Kazimierz at the end of the fifteenth century, see Zaremska 2010. On Jews in the cities of early modern east-central Europe, see Goldberg 1996. ML 78 (RGADA 389.78), 250v–251r. See also Beršadskij 1887, 7 (3): 82. AVAK, 29:25. Beršadskij 1887, 7 (3): 95–96. The street (ul. Jatkowa in Polish, also known as Mozeryjska, Mozyrska, etc.) was the site of meat shops well before the Jews settled there. A 1536 decree had removed the butchers’ stalls from Market Square to this parallel street one block over “on account of such stench and filth” (Zbiór 1843, 50). In 1636, one of the Jewish houses on Meat Shop Street (19.06) contained—among other outbuildings and in addition to a stable for four horses—a wołownia, or “cattle shed” (BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 48r; Paknys 2006, 139, 243). Beršadskij 1887, 7 (4): 67–70. This decree established a flat “wage” (pensja), a tax to be paid to the magistracy by the Jews of Wilno as a corporation. A curiosity: the magistracy was to keep up the municipal water pipes, but individual Jewish owners of houses that had connections to the pipes were to pay annual fees, as did their Christian neighbors. “Income from the Gentlemen Burghers Who Have Water in their Houses” is one of the interesting lists of names in the annual financial records of the city of Wilno where a few individually named Jews do appear next to Christians. See, e.g., LVIA 458.1.19, 20v, which tells us of “the Jew, Jakub Mojz∧eszowicz,” and “the Jewess, wife of Marek, widow,” both of whom paid 4 k in 1663. On the early history of the Wilno municipal water system, see Jurkštas 1990. Beršadskij 1887, 7 (6): 60–63. The magistracy claimed (with some exaggeration) that in addition to the castle and episcopal jurisdictions, there were more than twenty others. Spokesmen for the magistracy informed the king in 1644 that “there is not one municipal jurisdiction, rather there are as many jurisdictions as there are monasteries, which is the number of havens for crafty people” (see Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:233). For a nice evocation of the appeal of the jurydyki in early modern cities for those seeking to avoid the reach of the law and the guilds, see Friedrichs 1995, 30–32. Beršadskij 1887, 7 (6): 67. Ibid., 71–72. Ibid., 7 (8): 104. Ibid., 102. AVAK, 29:27. The topic deserves more study. For an investigation of the practical effects of such an exclusionary privilege, see Goldberg 1974. For the petitions to the tsar and the decree that Jews should be relegated to the suburbs, see Rachuba 1994, 68–69; Meilus 2000, 101–2; Kraszewski, 1840–1842, 2:125.

notes to pages 40–48

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80.

81. 82.

435

Piechotka and Piechotka (1991, 70) cite—without identifying a source—privilege granted by Zygmunt I in 1527, but I have been unable to find it. It is not in Dubin´ski 1788. In any case, if such a privilege was granted then, it seems not to have gone into effect. See Storožev 1895a, 134. See RGADA 1603.12.14, 518–9; Meilus 2001,457. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 55v, 57v. On the term, see Góralski 1988, 230. It was the Polish equivalent for the Hebrew shammash. For the constitution in question, see VL, 5:209. LVIA SA 4691, 476r–v; Frick 2008, 313. Rachuba 1989, 37–42. As Gershon David Hundert has suggested (1984, 31), it is entirely possible that individual Jewish families felt safer living among Christians than in the area of concentrated Jewish settlement. It was there, after all, that the recorded tumults against the Jews of Wilno took place. A survey of Kras´nik done in 1631 found the wealthiest Jews living not in Jewish Street but as isolated families among the town’s Christians. On the “high degree of violence—violence that both sides originated, which [characterized Orthodox-Jewish relations, but] was not typical of relations between the Jews and the Catholic and Uniate Churches,” see Kalik 2003, especially 229, 231, 232. See Rachuba 1989, 59. BUJ, B Slav F. 12, 60v–72r; BUJ, B Slav F. 15, 35r–40v; Paknys 2006, 155–70, 254–64. Paknys 2006, 157–58. See Wisner 1993, 95. On Rakowski, see the entry by Mirosław Nagielski and Tadeusz Wasilewski in PSB, 30:517–19. BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 37r. Paknys (2006, 160, 257) is surely in error when he translates dom obduły as apleistas namas, or “abandoned house.” There is no such adjective in Polish, and Obduły is capitalized in the manuscript (just like, e.g., dom Jakuba—“Jacob’s house”). LVIA 458.1.592, 142v, 143v. LVIA SA 5340, 202r–203v; Frick 2008, 363–64; LVIA SA 5339, 22r–v; Frick 2008, 362. LVIA SA 5107, 70v–72v; Frick 2008, 368–70 (emphasis added). AVAK, 28:410–12. Among Vilnans in possession of wiciny, which they no doubt moored on the Wilia in Łukiszki were Orthodox merchant Krzysztof Sokołowski (LVIA 610.3.103, 10v; Frick 2008, 166) and Catholic merchant and burgomaster Mikołaj Kliczewski (LVIA SA 5333, 537r, 540r; Frick 2008, 557, 560). Elites owning property in Łukiszki included Lutheran burgomaster’s daughter Elz∧bieta (Halszka) Giblówna (LVIA SA 5337, 149r; Frick 2008, 59); Orthodox merchant Paweł Kossobucki (LVIA 610.3.103, 7v, 12r; Frick 2008, 163, 168); Uniate burgomaster Bogdan Zakrzewski (LVIA SA 5333, 241v; Frick 2008, 175); Orthodox merchant Grzegorz Sien ´ czyło (LVIA SA 5116, 46r; Frick 2008, 538); Orthodox burghess Akwilina Stryludzianka Dorofiewiczowa (LVIA SA 5333, 254v; Frick 2008, 544); Orthodox merchant Samuel Matwiejewicz (LVIA SA 5099, 129r; Frick 2008, 571); and Calvinist burgomaster and postmaster of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (among his other titles) Henryk Mones (LVIA SA 5334, 358v–361v). Tyszkiewicz 1989, 228. On the history of the Łukiszki suburb, see Joge˙la, Meilus, and Pugacˇiauskas 2008. Established by palatine of Wilno Wojciech Moniwid (Albertas Monvydas) in 1420. See Kurczewski 1910, pt. 1, 14, 276, and pt. 2, 267. Kurczewski erred in identifying Moniwid as the “Lithuanian hetman.” That office was established only at the end of the fifteenth century. See Lulewicz and Rachuba 1994, 40. An “Inventory of the Moniwid Altar” (still existing in 1814 under the Russian partition of Poland-Lithuania and shortly after Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow through Wilno!) claimed the foundation had taken place in 1422. See LMAB F43-19960, 2r–v. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 72r–77r; BUJ, B Slav. F 15, 40v–43v; Paknys 2006, 171–79, 264–69. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 76r.

436 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98.

99.

100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

notes to pages 48–60

Ibid. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 75v. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 75r; LMAB F43-590, 58r, 64v–65r, 72v, 78v; LMAB F43-223, 15r. On the Wilno horodnictwo, see Łopacin ´ ski 1939. From a court case involving violence in the Transfluvia suburb registered 7 March 1687 (LVIA SA 5339, 508r; Frick 2008, 492), but similar formulas appear often in documents from neighborhoods with a high “student” population, such as Skop Street. LMAB F43-590, 80v. LMAB F17-280, 65r; Frick 2008, 383. LVIA SA 5364, 105r; Frick 2008, 443. On the unrest of 1639–1640, see Zwolski 1936; Wisner 1993; Kosmanowa 1996; Augustyniak 2006. AVAK, 20:335 (emphasis added). Examen obrony1621, 13–14; AJuZR, vol. 1, pt. 8, 569–570. Smotryc'kyj 1622, 38v–39r; 1987, 501. On Smotrycki’s place in the polemic, see Frick 1995. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 77r–82v; BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 44r–47r; Paknys 2006, 179–86, 269–73. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 77v. In 1671, Uniate Metropolitan of Rus´ Gabriel Kolenda went to court in Wilno to attempt to reclaim Uniate (previously Orthodox) properties in the vicinity of the old Calvinist church. See AVAK, 20:398–452. A map of the allegedly Uniate properties produced in the course of the litigation for Metropolitan Kolenda (Mappa Jurydyki Metropolitan´skiej) is discussed in Alexandrowicz 1989, 169, 243. It is reproduced in the addenda (Mapy i Plany) to that work. According to Morzy (1959, 28 and 45), all furriers were Greek in the early sixteenth century; they were still heavily so in the seventeenth century, but now the guild was mixed. See Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:364, and AVAK, 10:81 for a statute of 1669 that foresaw the election of annual elders, two each from the Romans and the Greeks. A record book of the burials of German Catholics at the Church of St. Anne (beginning 1668) is to be found at LVIA 604.10.2. The rolls of Lutheran offerings for 1640 listed two carpenters (Tischler), both of them named Hans. See LVIA 1008.1.42, 10r. On the baths, see LVIA SA 5109, 188–89; Frick 2008, 489–90, and LMAB F43-221, 61v–62v; Frick 2008, 495–96. On the paper mills of sixteenth-century Wilno, see Łowmian ´ ski 1924. LVIA SA 5109, 123–25; Frick 2008, 491–92. It was called Sawicz Street by the quartermaster and many of his contemporaries. Later it became known as Bakszta Street. Judging by the steep topography and the lack of houses in any recent times at the end of this street, it seems unlikely that the houses continued right up to the barbican. But this is what the quartermaster seems to indicate, and I have drawn the map more or less according to his indications. Paknys 2006, 192. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 83r–97r; BUJ B Slav. F. 15, 47r–52v; Paknys 2006, 186–204, 274–85. The bill of sale is recorded at LMAB F20-495, 1r–v; Frick 2008, 516–18. On the early modern office of the municipal executioner in Wilno, see Obst 1913. On Matwiejewicz, see LVIA SA 5099, 129r–130r; Frick 2008, 570–72; AVAK, 9:489–91. See Vigarello 1988 for a history of western European concepts of cleanliness. See also Ashenburg 2007; Smith 2007.

Chapter 2 1. See Rohdewald 2005, 191, for the similar use of the term (Ruthenian, sused) in Połock, related ultimately to German usage of the word Beisassen. 2. BUJ, B Slav F. 12, 55v; Paknys 2006, 147–48, 249.

notes to pages 60–67 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

437

Rachuba 1989, 37. Ibid., 58. On the ovens and hearths of Wilno burgher houses, see Samalavicˇius 1984. Dubnov 1914, 118–19. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 59r; Paknys 2006, 153, 252. Beršadskij 1887, 7 (4): 68; AVAK, 29:4. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 2r; Paknys 2006, 85, 209. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 76r; Paknys 2006, 177, 268. BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 42v; Paknys 2006, 176, 267. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 21v–22v; Paknys 2006, 105–6, 221–22. Dorobisz 1996, 67. On music at the court of Władysław IV, see Feicht 1928–1929; Szweykowski 1958; Szweyskowska 1987; Szweykowska, Szweykowski, and Patalas 1997. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 45v–54v and 58v–59v (Paknys 2006, 136–47, 152–53, 241–48, 252–53), including the Glass Street residence (18.05) assigned to Baltazarek (i.e., “little Baltazar”), His Royal Majesty’s “descantist.” BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 46r; Paknys 2006, 137, 242. On Gierke Sr., including some photographs of his extant work, see Brensztejn 1923; Klimka and Ragauskas 2001; and the entry by Aleksander S´ niez˙ko in PSB, 7:443. That he was Lutheran we learn from the record of offerings to the local church made by “Iackob Gercke, Uhrmacher” in 1640 and by “Jacob Gierkiewicz, Uhrmacher” in 1662 and 1664. LVIA 1008.1.42 10r, 57v, 75r. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 47r–v; Paknys 2006, 139, 243. See Brückner 1930, 627. See the deed of sale at LVIA SA 5340, 193r–194v; Frick 2008, 287–89. I have not discovered any Jews among this group of royal musicians, but perhaps there were some. Rachuba 1989, 37–42. Ibid., 60–62. “Description of the house of the now deceased Jarosz Jabłko, apothecary, 9 March 1652, currently owned by daughter Cecylia Jabłkówna and husband Joannes Brentell, cannon founder to His Royal Majesty,” LVIA, SA 5096, 590v–591r; Frick 2008, 34–35. From the “Official Report” (Kwit relacyjny) of “generals” Stefan Gromacki and Krzysztof Towz˙yn, found in LNMB F93–1714, 3r–v; Frick 2008, 488–89. The protestation is registered at LVIA SA 5333, 420r–421r; Frick 2008, 321–22. “Johann/Hans Norweg” took Communion in the Calvinist church in the 1680s. See LVIA 606.1.103, 2r, 3r, 3v, 4v, 6r, 6v, 8r, 8v, 9r. “Ambrosius Meyer” made his rather significant contributions to the Lutheran church in the period 1662–1667 (16 zł, 18 gr; 37 zł; 10 gr), after which—just a couple years after the events in question—he left the church, the town, or this world. See LVIA 1008.1.42, 56v, 73v, 95r. It is registered at LVIA SA 5333, 314r–315r; Frick 2008, 28–29, and it was printed in AVAK, 20:361–62. This according to memoirist Vorbek-Lettow (1968, 218). See his last will and testament, registered at LVIA SA 5337, 107r–108r; Frick 2008, 29–32. Among many other indications (e.g., baptismal records), Desaus’s will identifies him as a Calvinist without doubt: he asked to be buried “at the [Calvinist] church [przy zborze] in Wilno in my father’s crypt according to the Christian rite.” Hartman gave rather generous offerings to the Lutheran church, always in the vicinity of 24 zł for two-year periods (in the years 1662–1675), and his wife continued to contribute at that level in the years 1675–1683. See LVIA 1008.1.42, 74r, 115v, 125v, 140v, 157r, 172r, 193r, 212r. On dueling among Wilno burghers, see Ragauskas 2002, 402–3. See the funeral sermon for Majer’s daughter, Zofia Majerówna (Schönflissius 1638b). The house is called “Majer’s” (majerowska) in the Lustrations of 1636 and 1639, although Hoffman (Ofman) is listed as the owner. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 11v–12r; Paknys 2006, 95, 215–16. It is registered at LVIA SA 5337, 76r–77r; Frick 2008, 40–41.

438

notes to pages 68–76

32. See the names of Leszczewicz and Rychter in the Catalogue of Names of the Elders of the Congregation of the Assumption at the Church of St. Kazimierz of the Society of Jesus (LMAB F138–1712, 287 and 321) as well as Leszczewicz’s will (LVIA SA 5338, 496r–499v).

Chapter 3 1. It is recorded at LVIA SA 5337, 119r–120r; Frick 2008, 118–19. 2. See Ariès 1962, 398–99 for a classic statement. For considerations of the lack of specializations of rooms, the lack of corridors, and the sleeping and eating arrangements necessitated by the layout of seventeenth-century houses, see Flandrin 1979, 92–97, 98–102, 102–10. On domestic interior architecture in early modern Wilno, see Paknys 2007, 97–100; Samalavicˇius 1979, 1987; Paknys 2000. 3. It is recorded at LVIA SA 5337, 293r–v; Frick 2008, 132. 4. LVIA SA 5105, 459v; Frick 2008, 526. 5. His father, Korneliusz Winhold II, was still on his tour of the schools of western Europe in March 1621. (See his letter from Paris, AGAD, AR V 17465, 19–20; Frick 2008, 15–17.) We learn from a funeral sermon for his father from 1638 (Łabe˛dzki 1638b, 10v) that his parents had married in 1622. 6. AVAK, 20:339–41. 7. See the Third Lithuanian Statute, sec. 4, art. 9, “The Duties and the Office of the Bailiff.” Šamjakin 1989, 147. 8. AVAK, 28:171–72. 9. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 59r; Paknys 2006, 153, 252. 10. See Baron 1976, 132, 379. The Third Lithuanian Statute of 1588, sec. 12, art. 9, “The Jew, Tatar, and Every Mussulman Is Not to Be Appointed to Office and Is Not to Have Christian Servants” (Šamjakin 1989, 316) forbade Christian women to serve as wet nurses in Jewish and Tatar households. But Andrzej Zakrzewski (2000, 199) has noted that, at least in the eighteenth century, the bans of all secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions on such contact were frequently ignored, and the only practical penalty was an additional tax paid by the offending Christian servant. 11. Dubnov 1909, 93. 12. By contrast, the Cracow kahal made a regulation absolutely forbidding Jews “to hire a nonJewish maid as a servant to sleep in a Jew’s house by night, on pain of five shillings for maintenance of the synagogue, and any resulting confusion [Heb. bilbulim, i.e., suspicion and rumor mongering] shall be the employer’s own responsibility.” Cited according to Cygielman 1997, 90. 13. Dubnov 1909, 89. 14. AVAK, 28:408 (emphasis added). 15. See Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:275. 16. LVIA SA 4668, 254r. 17. Beršadskij 1887, 7 (3): 98. 18. Cited according to Cygielman 1997, 75–76. 19. LVIA SA 5109, 188–89; Frick 2008, 489–90; LMAB F43–221, 61v–62v; Frick 2008, 495–96. The annual financial records of Wilno listed tax payments from the “Jewish bath” (łaz´nia z∧ydowska), for example, in 1680 for 10 zł. LVIA 458.1.37, 2r. 20. Beršadskij 1887, 7 (5): 27. 21. Ibid., 8 (6): 62–63. The Va'ad of the Four (Crown) Lands, meeting at the Lublin fair in 1607, resolved, “No person should make it his custom to drink in the Gentile taverns, and any person who does so customarily shall be numbered among the worthless and reckless. He shall not be

notes to pages 77–83

439

honored with the title of rabbi or Chaver, nor shall he receive any appointment in the community.” Cited according to Cygielman 1997, 276. By contrast, the Lithuanian Va'ad excluded only “married Jewish men” from the role of “habitués of non-Jewish drinking houses.” See Dubnov 1909, 89.

Chapter 4 1. See Roeck 1989 on the history of Augsburg in the period “between the conflict over the calendar and [the establishment of] parity” and Warmbrunn 1983, 359–86, for a comparison of the local conflict on the issue of the calendar in four imperial cities (Augsburg, Dinkelsbühl, Biberach, Ravensburg). Battles were waged in the 1580s over the calendar in places under Polish-Lithuanian rule, if only for a short period, and as nearby as Riga. Tarvel 2011, 63–64. 2. See NKPP, 3:101. 3. Aleksander Brückner (1990, 506) notes an official act dated—without comment, thus presumably Old Style—20 October 1582, followed by one dated 1 November 1582 “according to the corrected calendar.” Thus, at least in this record book, the notary made the jump of ten days following either 21 or 22 October 1582 according to the Old Style. 4. On the Gregorian reform of the calendar and the history of its acceptance and rejection in early modern Europe, see Coyne, Hoskin, and Pedersen 1983; Duncan 1998, 209–32; Richards 1998, 239–56. 5. On the Tatars, see Zakrzewski 1992, 122. On the Jewish calendar and its effect on Jewish culture in early modern Europe, see Carlebach 2011. 6. See the letters from the Wilno Orthodox Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit to Calvinist Krzysztof II Radziwiłł. AGAD, AR II, 843 and 889. 7. Dubin´ski 1788, 149; Zbiór 1843, 138. 8. Dubin´ski 1788, 149–51; Zbiór 1843, 139–40. 9. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:321. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 1:45. 12. Ibid., 1:160. 13. Ibid.,1:292. 14. Ibid., 1:321. 15. To choose only one example from the many, in an article confirmed in 1689, the cobblers’ guild, in which Romans, Ruthenians, and Saxons shared power, undertook to serve the altar of St. Anne at the Dominicans’ Holy Spirit church. See Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:452, and AVAK, 10:108. 16. Dubin´ski 1788, 149; Zbiór 1843, 137–38; Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:104. 17. See, for example, AVAK, 20:518–19, where a business transaction as late as 29 September 1725 between a Jew and a Ruthenian concerning a Wilno property specified repeatedly that various deadlines were “according to the Roman calendar.” 18. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:172. 19. AVAK, 9:245–47. 20. See the contemporary Catholic complaint, printed in “Actum Commissiey w Wilnie” 1818, 92, “that the sentry at the gates takes away from the students the pierogies sent to them by their mothers, and searches their carts, that they record the students’ names.” 21. AVAK, 8:600–601. 22. Cited according to Baron 1976, 91. 23. Ibid., 92. The bracketed glosses are Baron’s. The Fast of 9 Av or Tisha B’Av (Baron wrote Ab), which usually falls in August, commemorates the tragedies that had befallen the Jewish people,

440

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

notes to pages 83–93

above all the destruction of the first and second temples. It is preceded by three weeks of increasing mourning and marks the culmination of a nine-day period of restrictions on food, drink, and dress. See Linder 1987, 262–67. AVAK, 28:42–43. See Duncan 1998, 209–32. Sipayłło 1997, 85. Akta 1915, 38. Ibid., 22. LMAB F40-1136, 73. Kosman 1973, 259. AGAD, AR IV, koperta 311, 365 (12 June 1624). Schönflissius 1638b, Eiiir. Grodzicki 1589, 9. Ibid., 27. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:172. My argument is supported by the list of names of guild members who presented this statute to the Wilno magistracy. I find here no obvious Ruthenians but quite a few identifiable Saxons and two Scottish Calvinists, next to a couple of Roman Catholics: Hermanus Marquarth, Jan Zalesky ∧ Pigulka, Girgex Fertner, Grigier Kolsan, Zygmunt Z eligmacher, Esaias Prus, Dawid Lorencowicz, Joseph Bohaterowicz, Hornus Rantel, Alexander Helmbeg, Karol Libert, Jakub Mor, Symon Bernatowicz. See Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:173. Agenda 1637, 19. Ibid., 252. Ibid., 252–53. Ibid., 246–47. Ibid., 244. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 254. See Dworzaczkowa 1997, 79. Łaszcz 1594, A1r. Ibid., C3v–4r. Nowak 1968, 297. Ibid., 292–93. Smotryc'kyj 1621, 111; 1987, 454. Grodzicki 1589, 12–13. On Sakowicz, see the article by Mirosław Szegda in PSB, 34:343–45; Golubev 1893, 9–26; Frick 1994. Sakowicz 1642, A1v. Ibid., A4v. Łaszcz 1603, 114–15. Tylkowski 1685, 86. Smotryc'kyj 1628, Bivr–Cir; 1987, 634. Dubowicz 1644, 86–87. Sakowicz 1640, E1v–2v. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 184. It is worth noting that when he was in Wilno, Vorbek-Lettow resided in the German Street house (26.03) he had inherited from his father, right next door to the old Kiszka house (26.04) that was one of the two original Jewish houses in the city. LVIA SA 5111, 267; Frick 2008, 107. AVAK, 29:37–38.

notes to pages 93–98

441

63. Ibid. 29:123. In January 1682 the palatine of Wilno was the Roman Catholic Michał Kazimierz Pac, who was also then the grand hetman of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He died on 3 April of that year. See Rachuba 2004, 112, 196, 704. The house in question may have been that at Castle Street 2.29, which Pac had bought in 1637. See Paknys 2006, 103. 64. AVAK, 29:123–24. In other words, Sobieski was attempting here to reassert the medieval notion that Jews were servi camerae nostrae (servants/serfs of our chamber) in a time when magistracies were often attempting to negotiate directly with the local Jewish communities. See Petersen 2003, 21–27, 72–75. 65. LVIA SA 5111, 266–69; Frick 2008, 106–8. The tailors had frequently complained of unfair competition from nonguild tradesmen and Jews. See Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939,1:180– 81. Dziahilewicz seems to have been a Roman Catholic, but he was probably born Orthodox; in any event, he came from a family that maintained ties to Orthodoxy. He was the son of merchant Stefan Dziahilewicz and Anastazja Kuszelanka, both Orthodox. And he had a stepbrother who was an Orthodox monk in the Wilno Holy Spirit monastery. But he would marry a Roman Catholic burgomaster’s daughter, Konstancja Bylin ´ ska. And the extant fragment of his will seems to suggest that he died a Roman Catholic. See LVIA SA 5107, 73r–v; LVIA SA 5110, 612v–613v; LVIA SA 5339, 53r–54v. 66. The text is taken from Kurczewski 1910, pt. 1, 161–62. 67. Corpus Christi processions often gave rise to Catholic-Protestant unrest in the cities. For a discussion of one of the best-known cases—one that occurred in Wilno in 1611—see Tazbir 1993a, 90–105. For restrictions placed upon Jews during Corpus Christi processions in Lublin, see Teller 2001, 22. For a recent study of the use of the secular courts to police Roman Catholic religion and punish sacrilege in early modern Poland-Lithuania, see Teter 2011. 68. AVAK, 28, 407–8. For privileges to Christian butchers and limitations on Jewish trades, see Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:196, 394. For a discussion of conflicts between Christian and Jewish butchers in Lwów, including a similar complaint that Jewish butchers not only sold retail to Christians but did so on Sundays, see Fettke 1986, 100–102. 69. LNMB F93–1698, 1v; Frick 2008, 477; LNMB F93–1697, 1v; Frick 2008, 475–76. 70. AVAK, 20:330. 71. AVAK, 28:410 and 412. The Lustrations of 1636 and 1639 tell us that there was a wołownia, a cowshed (perhaps also slaughterhouse), Jewish-owned and operated, on the lower west (lefthand) side of Meat Shop Street, near the intersection with German Street (19.06). See BUJ, B Slav F. 12, 48r; BUJ, B Slav F. 15, 27v; Paknys 2006, 139, 243. 72. The phrase is taken from the title of Fram’s 1997 investigation of the compromises and negotiations he has found in his reading of rabbinic responsa between halakhah (Jewish law) and the needs of everyday life in early modern Poland-Lithuania. But the general mode of approach to the problems lends itself well to a study of daily interactions between members of all the confessions and religions of seventeenth-century Wilno. 73. See Muchlin ´ ski 1858, 16–17. 74. Dohrn-van Rossum 1996, 206, 209, 210. Dohrn-van Rossum is particularly evocative on the bell tower as a focal point, symbol of municipal honor, identity, welfare—and potential focus of dishonor through the removal of the bells. He notes that the municipal bell tower could serve as a watchtower, arsenal, archive, or prison; that the scales were often nearby (200–211); and that in addition to bells marking sacred time, there were bells to call to market (241–51), to school, including Jewish schools (251–60), and to work (289–9). On merchant’s time and church’s time, see Le Goff 1980. On the opposition between the rural “natural” day and the city man-made day, see Thompson 1993 and Landes 2000, 75. On the centrality of bells to city life, see Landes 2000, 76ff. On bells and their relationship to sound and meaning in the nineteenth-century French countryside, see Corbin 1998. 75. BUJ, B Slav F. 12, 61v; Paknys 2006, 157, 255.

442

notes to pages 98–104

76. LNMB F93–1695, 1r; Frick 2008, 474. 77. LVIA SA 5109, 339; Frick 2008, 138; LVIA SA 5096, 440r; Frick 2008, 193; LVIA SA 5115, 266v; Frick 2008, 203; LVIA SA 5116, 47v; Frick 2008, 539. On clocks and culture, see Cipolla 2003. 78. AVAK, 20:383.

Chapter 5 1. The baptismal records of the Wilno Calvinist church note, among fathers and godfathers, the presence of Dawid Szot (Szot, Szkot = Scotsman); Jan Dawidson, Szot; Jakób Ogilbe, Szot; Jan Szot; Jakub Szkot, brother of Mr. Gałłowaj (Galloway); Jan Gałłowaj, Szkot; Forbesius, Szkot; Robert Gilbert, Szkot; Jan Eness, Szkot. See LVIA 606.1.102, 2r, 3r, 3v, 4r, 7r, 8r, 13r. On Italians and Spaniards in the ruling elite, see Ragauskas 2002, 290–93; Ragauskas 2000. There were also, of course, Italians and Spaniards, next to Czechs, Englishmen, Scotsmen, and others among the Wilno Jesuits, especially of the first generations, but this was a much more transient population. 2. The Witanie na pierwszy wjazd z Królewca do kadłubka saskiego wilen´skiego Iksa Hern. Lutermachra [Welcome upon the First Entry from Königsberg to the Wilno Saxon Body of the Reverend Luthermacher, Wilno, 1642] is transcribed with annotations in Nowak 1968, 324–30, 451–55. Nowak offers an anthology and lengthy introductory study of “Counter-Reformation satires,” several of which stemmed from and were set in Wilno. More specifically on pasquinades aimed at the Wilno Lutherans, see Ragauskas 2004. 3. Nowak 1968, 326, 452. Nowak’s notes, and my translation, are heavily indebted to an old study by Aleksander Brückner (1913). 4. Among other places, see the repeated use of this conceit in the work of Orthodox archbishop of Czernihów Łazarz Baranowicz, discussed in Frick 2003b, 45. 5. See Plokhy 2001, 103–6 and the literature cited there. 6. Nowak 1968, 328. 7. Unmasked as a crypto-Uniate at the Orthodox synod held in Kiev in August 1628, Orthodox archbishop of Połock and archimandrite of the Wilno Monastery of the Holy Spirit Melecjusz Smotrycki would write in a published protestation of threats made against him at the time: “On the morrow,” so his servant was warned, “both your master, and you with him, will be condemned as Uniates, and more than one of you will drink of the Slavuta [i.e., the Dnieper].” See Smotryc'kyj 1628, Biiv; 1987, 632; Frick 2005c, 582. See also Hrushevs'kyj 1999, 307–12, 415–16; Kempa 2003. 8. Nowak 1968, 305, 445. 9. We find “Adam Oesterman, Scharffrichter” (1679, 1681), “Johan Pauel Lübecker, Scharffrichter” (1681), “Hanß König Rossenkrantz, Scharffrichter” (1675), “Paul Scharffrichter Witfrau” (1677). LVIA 1008.1.42, 211v, 213r, 157v, 173v, 192v. 10. See Obst 1913, 14–15. 11. Nowak 1968, 327. 12. The rabbi used the Calvinist word for church in Polish, which the Reformed opposed to the Roman Catholics’ kos´ciól. On this, see Górski 1962. Wilno Lutherans regularly referred to their own local church (and the Church in general) as a kos´ciół, which was the same term the Roman Catholics used for their church. 13. Nowak 1968, 329–30. 14. In general on “ethnophaulisms” (terms of ethnic disparagement), see Roback 1944. On antisemitism in early modern Polish literature, see Bartoszewicz 1914. 15. Nowak 1968, 269. 16. Ibid., 299.

notes to pages 104–112

443

17. On Karcan, see Kawecka-Gryczowa 1959, 116–18. For a survey of anti-Tatar themes in early modern Polish literature, see Nosowski 1974. 18. On the legal status of Polish-Lithuanian Tatars, see Sobczak 1984. 19. Czyz∧ewski 1617, 12. On personal naming practices of the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars, see Jankowski 1997. 20. Czyz∧ewski 1617, 2, 4, 5–8, 15, 56–57, 44, 68. 21. Ibid., 38. 22. See Jan Białobocki (ca. 1600–after 1661), “Brat Tatar abo liga wilcza ze psem na gospodarza do ∧ czasów teraz´niejszych stosuja˛ca” of 1652, reprinted in Sokołowska and Z ukowska 1965, 583–89. 23. Czyz∧ewski 1617, 33–36. 24. Ibid., 80. 25. For an introduction to the problems of Wilno and otherwise northeastern Polish, see Kurzowa 1993. For a thoughtful assessment of the larger “linguistic landscape” of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, see Niendorf 2006, 95–119. For an investigation of processes of linguistic integration in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, see Marcinkiewicz 2000. For studies of the communicative community of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, see Bednarczuk 1999. 26. Łukaszewicz 1842, 88–89. 27. See Kaiser 1988, 15. 28. Nowak 1968, 317 (Hosen Saksen, federhuty), 273 (pludrowie). 29. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:360. 30. VUB F57-B54-2, 2v. 31. See LNMB F93-1713, 1r. 32. For a study of graffiti in early modern England, see Fleming 2001. 33. Nicholas 2003, 163–64; Camille 2001. 34. On the Winholds as clients of the Radziwiłłs, see Ragauskas 2001b. 35. Falckenheimer 1904, 30, 177; Wackernagel 1962, 184; Biržiška 1987, 61; Ragauskas 2001b, 15. 36. AGAD, AR V 17465, 17–18, 19–20. 37. For fragmentary images of them, see Frick 2008, 14–17. 38. We do have the record book for the higher instance, the Lithuanian Va'ad, which governed Jewish life in Wilno from its creation but which listed the city among the “chief communities” only in 1652. It is published in the Hebrew original with modern Russian translation in Dubnov 1909– 1915. 39. It was published in Weinreich 1927, 201–20. On the standardization of modern Yiddish, see Kerler 1999. 40. The testament is printed in AVAK, 31:186. 41. See Wajsblum 1952; Rosenthal 1966. 42. A good recent introduction to the writings and languages of the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars is to be found in Drozd 1999, 9–80. See also the introductory material in Suter 2004. On the loss of knowledge of Kipchak among the Lithuanian Tatars, see Drozd 1999, 30–31; Szapszał 1932. On eighteenth-century Polish Orientalists, see Reychman 1946–1947, 1948, 1950. 43. See Drozd 1999, 28–29. 44. See the privilege granted on 7 April 1679 by King Jan III Sobieski to the Jews of Wiłkowyszki (Vilkaviškis), a town about 160 km (100 miles) west of Wilno. It is published in Goldberg 1985, 359–66. 45. See Kalik 2001, 265. 46. GSta PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 88r, reproduced in Frick 2009, 116 (illus. 3). 47. The classic study of the replacement of Ruthenian by Polish in Lithuanian and Ukrainian legal venues remains Martel 1938. 48. LVIA SA 5334, 137v–140r; Frick 2008, 467. 49. See Bardach 1964, 339, 344, 546; Kaczmarczyk and Les´nodorski 1966, 64. 50. On some problems of literary macaronicism in Polish, see Keipert 1988.

444 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

notes to pages 112–124

LNMB F93-1701, 1r–v. See LMAB F20-495. See LVIA 1008.1.17, 11r. For a reproduction of the text, see Frick 2009, 118 (illus. 7). The extended litigation is registered at LVIA SA 5364, 57r, 64r–v. On the Wilno horodnictwo, see Łopacin ´ ski 1939. LMAB F43-218, 357r (17 April 1639). A list of Wilno guilds from 4 January 1723 glosses białoskórnicy as albi cerdones. LVIA SA 5216, 1r. LVIA SA 5115, 265r (19 October 1684). See also LVIA SA 5097, 237v (26 January 1666). LVIA SA 5333, 287r–89r; AVAK, 10:282–85; AVAK, 20:360–61; Frick 2008, 546–48. On this issue, see Frick 2005a. On this, see Bednarczuk 1999.

Chapter 6 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

Wujek 1579–1580, 2:55. Agenda 1637, 47. See ibid., 5. For studies of the place of infant baptism in early modern European societies, with extensive surveys of the state of the scholarship, see Coster 2002 (on England) and Spierling 2005 (on Calvin’s Geneva). In addition, see especially Bossy 1973, 1979, and 1984 for thoughts on the fate of baptism as a cultural institution in early modern Europe. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67. Ibid., 62, 64. Ibid., 67. AGAD AR X 125, 1. Schönflissius 1633a, C3v. See Schönflissius 1638b. I will look at this text more closely in chapter 14, devoted to death and dying. Schönflissius 1635, A1v. Łabe˛dzki 1638a, Łabe˛dzki 1635. See the entry in the Calvinist baptismal record at LVIA 606.1.102, 4r, 5r. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 66–67. Ibid., 68–69. Ibid., 122; BUJ, B Slav F. 12, 2v; Paknys 2006, 85, 209. ∧ There is a little on this topic in Z oła˛dz´-Strzelczyk 2006, 83–85. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 70. Ibid., 123. The manuscript reads quite clearly 27 February. See BCz 1857/II, 110. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 63–64. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 66–67. Ibid., 67. Dziad szpitalny, LVIA 606.1.102, 9r, 9v, 13r; babka ze szpitala, LVIA 606.1.102, 6v, 9r, 9v. On the use of peasants and beggars as godparents by members of the noble elite in Poland-Lithuania, see ∧ Z oła˛dz-Strzelczyk 2006, 84. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 68–69. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 120. The reading found in the 1968 printed edition of the memoir—Dorosiewicz (a mistaken reading of a long s for a simple f )—is incorrect.

notes to pages 124–128

445

29. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 122. 30. She gave more than 20 zł in each two-year period. LVIA 1008.1.42, k. 75v, 96v, 116v, 126v, 141v, 158r, 194r, 213v, 234v. 31. Marcin had probably died between 1640, when he was credited with an offering to the Lutheran church, and 1652, when his son Michał was the only Buchner on the rolls. Michał was the head of the family during the Königsberg exile. After the liberation of Wilno, the names of both Regina and son Jan appear. Michał had soon returned to Wilno, early in the Muscovite occupation. He was there by 30 December 1656. LVIA SA 5099, 109r. A document from 31 August 1658 tells us that he had died of the plague in Wilno the preceding year. RGADA 1603.12.14, 288–89; Meilus 2011, 306. His sister Marianna had died in Königsberg in 1656. For Regina Buchner’s testament, see LVIA SA 5339, 220r–221v; Frick 2008, 281–83. For Marianna’s testament, see LVIA 610.3.55, 2r–3r; Frick 2008, 274–76. 32. He contributed in every two-year period between 1662 and 1691, when there is a gap in the record until 1701. He averaged around 32 zł each period. His peak of 46 zł in 1683 made him the second most generous donor out of 166 Lutheran heads of household. See LVIA 1008.1.42, 57r, 75r, 96v, 116r, 126r, 141r, 157v, 172v, 193v, 212v, 232v, 249v, 264v, 284v, 305r. 33. LVIA 1008.1.42, 126r, 141r. 34. Rachuba 1989, 42. The survey of 1690 was done by quarters, without reference to individual ∧ streets, but Buchner’s immediate neighbors in that document—Tym, Z egalin ´ ski, Tymin, Pecelt, Sien ´ czyło, Barszczyn ´ ski, Hubryk, Sznejder—tell us that this is Glass Street. Other sources place all of them there, and we will encounter some of them in the discussion below. 35. GSta PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 85v: “Ich, Michel Buchner, bürger undt gewürtzkrämer von der Wilde.” 36. He gave 8 zł in 1689 and 1 zł, 15 gr in 1694. See LMAB F40-67, 451v, 455v. 37. For Jan Buchner, LVIA 606.1.102, 22r, 24v. For Krystyna Buchnerowa (by mistake identified here as “Anna”), LVIA 606.1.102, 21r. For “Miss Tropówna,” LVIA 606.1.102, 21r. 38. For Regina Buchnerowa, LVIA 604.19.95, 16v–17r, 21r, 40v, 53r, 54r, 79v, 97r, 158r, 162r–v, 177v, 236v, 255r, 307r; LVIA 604.19.96, 6r, 21v, 37v, 60v 61r, 65r–v, 70r–v, 73v, 94r, 96v, 125v, 145v, 148r, 151v, 245r, 248v, 262r, 276v, 403v. For Jan Buchner, LVIA 604.19.95, 61r, 79v, 97r, 158r, 185r, 255r, 327v; LVIA 604.19.96, 25r, 103v, 121r, 135r, 136v, 140r, 143r, 151v, 181v, 197r, 218v, 489r; LVIA 604.19.97, 118v. For Krystyna Buchnerowa, LVIA 604.19.95, 9r, 78r; LVIA 604.19.96, 65r–v, 71r, 80v, 140r, 368r. For Marianna Tropówna, LVIA 604.19.96, 100r, 103r, 111r, 116r, 129v, 143r, 155r, 197r, 214r–v, 220r. 39. For the family relationships, see the genealogical tables (appendix B). Jan Buchner’s father-inlaw Joachim Rejter was godparent to two Calvinist babies (LVIA 606.1.102, 7r, 12r); mother-in-law “Joachimowa Rejterowa” (apparently she was Krystyna, like her daughter) to one Calvinist and three Catholic babies (LVIA 601.1.102, 15v; LVIA 604.19.96, 173v, 189v, 208r); Dorota Rejterówna for one Calvinist baby (LIVA 606.1.102, 10r); Katarzyna Fonderflotówna for two Catholic babies (LVIA 604.19.95, 203v, 271r), Andrzej Pez∧arski (a Lutheran, despite of his Slavic surname) for two Catholic babies (LVIA 604.19.96, 151v, 368r); Zuzanna Fonderflotówna for two Calvinist and four Catholic babies (LVIA 606.1.102, 22r, 23r; LVIA 604.19.95, 259v; LVIA 604.19.96, 70r–v, 111r, 313r); Dawid Lidert for five Catholic babies (LVIA 604.19.96, 70r–v, 202v, 216r–v, 220r, 368r); and Rejnhold Fonderenda (the lone Calvinist in the family) for five Catholic babies (LVIA 604.19.95, 317v; LVIA 604.19.96, 129v, 198v, 247r, 271r). 40. It is unclear to me whether Safarowicz had two wives, both named Katarzyna, or whether the registrar made a mistake on one of the occasions and this is the same woman. 41. LVIA 604.19.96, 103v, 222v. 42. LVIA 604.19.96, 277v, 415r. 43. LVIA 1008.1.42, 127r, 142r, 159r, 173v, 194v, 214r, 235r, 251r, 266r, 286r, 306r. ∧ 44. Józef Z agiewicz was the guardian of the widow of merchant Jan Chalkiewicz. She was Anna Sielawianka, daughter of Orthodox or Uniate merchant Paweł Sielawa. She would go on to marry Ruthenian merchant Bazyli Sierhejewicz. See LVIA SA 5115, 152r–156v.

446

notes to pages 128–131

45. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 94v; Paknys 2006, 202, 283. 46. Orthodox merchant Krzysztof Sokołowski was married to a Maryna Sien ´ czyłówna, which suggests close ties between the Sokołowski and Sien ´ czyło families. See the posthumous inventory of Krzysztof’s estate at LVIA SA 5112, 514r–517v and his testament at AVAK, 8: 522–28. 47. LVIA 604.19.95, 204r, 214r; LVIA 604.19.96, 13r, 80v, 103v, 135r, 181v, 222v, 284v, 339r, 522r. 48. On the jus caducum in Polish-Lithuanian law, see Kaczmarczyk and Les´nodorski 1966, 301, 309. 49. The survey of 1636 tells us that the Sien ´ czyło house on Subocz Street, later in the possession of Gabriel and Grzegorz, was the property of “burgomaster Sien ´ czyło,” and Filip was the only one to hold that office. See LVIA SA 5324, 13r, 15v, 16v (Filip’s career in the magistracy); LVIA SA 5099, 328r; Frick 2008, 531 (Paweł as a bencher). 50. LVIA SA 5111, 873–90. 51. LVIA SA 5104, 460v–463r; LVIA SA 5111, 881; Frick 2008, 534; Rachuba 1989, 42. 52. See the inventory at LVIA SA 5116, 41r–49v; Frick 2008, 534–40. 53. LVIA 604.19.96, 80v (Grzegorz Sien ´ czyło, Krystyna Buchnerowa); 98r (Joachim Mejer); 205v (Jan Szrejter, Katarzyna Wentowa, Anna Ilisówna); 252v (Jan Szrejter, Krzysztof Sztrunk, Zuzanna Witówna); 181v (Jan Buchner, Jan Pecelt, Anastazja Sien ´ czyłowa); 189v (Anna Afanasowiczowa, Anna Rejterowa). 54. Rachuba 1989, 40. 55. LVIA 604.19.96, 397v. 56. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 47r; Paknys 2006, 138, 242. His contributions to the Lutheran church for 1640 and 1652 are recorded at LVIA 1008.1.42, 10r, 40v. ∧ 57. On the house and shop of Z egalin ´ ski father and son, see Laucevicˇius and Vitkauskiene˙ 2001, 301–2. 58. On the elder Omelanowicz, see ibid., 252. Also see LVIA SA 5104, 592r–593v for the Sznejder family and Omelanowicz’s place in it. 59. LVIA SA 5104, 377v; Frick 2008, 513; LVIA SA 5109, 433. 60. There were four Grekowicz family members working as goldsmiths in Wilno. They baptized their babies in the local Calvinist church and were active as lay seniors and godparents of Calvinist babies. See Laucevicˇius and Vitkauskiene˙ 2001, 210–11. See BOZ 803, 452 for a document that places Jan Grekowicz on Glass Street. 61. LVIA 606.1.102, 17r, 18v, 19r, 19v, 20r, 20v, 23r, 24r, 24v. 62. LVIA 604.19.96, 101r, 148r. 63. “Albrecht Schneider, Apodecker,” contributed 16 zł to Lutheran coffers in 1667. See LVIA 1008.1.42. He continued to contribute throughout the period, but he was no longer identified by his trade, as such information was now regularly omitted from the register. 64. On the Lutheran Sznejder goldsmith dynasty working in Wilno, see Laucevicˇius and Vitkauskiene˙ 2001, 279–80. 65. Rachuba 1989, 42. 66. We learn her maiden name and the name and title of her husband from the Calvinist baptismal record, LVIA 606.1.102, 22v. 67. LVIA 606.1.102, 24r, 22v. 68. LVIA 604.19.96, 80v, 181v, 397v. 69. LVIA 604.19.95, 273r. 70. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 51r; Paknys 2006, 143, 245. 71. The rolls of Lutheran giving carefully distinguished between the contributions of “Hans Petzelt, der Alte,” and “der Jünger.” For Melchior Ilis’s will, inventory of his estate, and subsequent litigation over it (including references to Pecelt), see LVIA SA 5333, 319r–322v; Frick 2008, 191– 92; LVIA SA 5102, 223r; Frick 2008, 292–96; LVIA SA 5119, 397r–398r; Frick 2008, 300; LVIA SA 5337, 367r–v; Frick 2008, 301. Pecelt the Younger served in the 1670s as a Dreißigman, a lay office of some significance, although less important than senior. LVIA 1008.1.408, 65; LVIA 1008.1.45,

notes to pages 131–140

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

447

8r. He was godparent to Catholic babies fourteen times, the last in 1677, which is the same year as his last contribution to Lutheran finances. After that, only “der Alte” remained on the Lutheran rolls, and the name Pecelt disappeared from the Catholic baptismal record. LVIA SA 5341, 49r–51r; LVIA 610.3.55, 3r; Frick 2008, 274–76. Nowak 1968, 301. LVIA 1135.4.478, 1r (Jerzy Krumbek, Jan Buchner), 1v (Jan Buchner), 2r (Jan Sztrunk, Krystyna Buchnerowa), 3v (Jan Reval), 5v (Jan Buchner), 6r (Jan Reval). Sas, LVIA 606.1.102, 10r, 11r, 20v; augustanae confessionis, LVIA 606.1.102, 6r; saskiego naboz∧en´stwa,10r; papiez∧nica, LVIA 606.1.102, 14v. LMAB F40-1136, 242, 252. Agenda 1637, 47. On this, see Ragauskas 2004. The pasquils against the Wilno Lutherans are published in Nowak 1968. LVIA 604.19.95, 231v. On the baptism of illegitimate babies in Calvin’s Geneva, and for a wider discussion of attitudes in early modern Europe, see Spierling 2005, 158–92. LVIA 604.19.95, 214r. LVIA 604.19.95, 212v. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 91v–92r; Paknys 2006, 199, 281; LVIA SA 5335, 116v–120r; Frick 2008, 507–12. LVIA 604.19.96, 284v, 339r. LVIA 604.19.95, 259r; LVIA 604.19.96, 355r. The copyist of Marianna Buchnerówna’s testament misread “Christoff Satrib’s” German signature as “Satrius,” but his wife’s own will provides the correct identities (as well as her first husband’s confession) and spellings. See LVIA 610.3.55, 3r; Frick 2008, 276, and LVIA SA 5341, 49r–51r. Barbara contributed in her “own” name (“Chriestof Satri[e]bsche”) to Lutheran finances. LVIA 1008.1.42, 74r, 95v, 125r, 140r. LVIA 604.19.95, 162r–v, 307r; LVIA 604.19.96, 266v. LVIA 604.19.95, 185r. Bossy 1984, 197. ∧ See Z oła˛dz´-Strzelczyk 2006, 82. See his last will and testament, recorded at LVIA SA 5339, 17r–21r; Frick 2008, 215–17. LVIA 604.19.95, 216v, 227r; 178v.

Chapter 7 1. Akta 1915, 60–61 (emphasis added). 2. Akta 1915, 7 (1612), 14–15 (1613), 22 (1614), 92–93 (1625); BOZ 803, 292 (1628), 306 (1629); LMAB F40-1136, 73 (1644), 113–14 (1647). 3. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 4r; Paknys 2006, 87, 210 (with a misreading here of Pander for Gauder [Gauter]). 4. LMAB F40-1136, 11–12. For the various versions of his name and his offices in the Calvinist church, see BOZ 803, 270; Akta 1915, 82; LMAB F40-1157, 149, 162, 184; LVIA SA 4662, 494r–v; LVIA SA 5096, 249r. He baptized his daughter Zuzanna on 30 April 1632 in the local Calvinist church. See LVIA 606.1.102, 2v. 5. In other early modern European languages we find similar usages. Compare, for example, the French use of nourrire (nourish) in the sense of “to educate.” See Flandrin 1979, 175. 6. Vorbek-Lettow wrote of his father-in-law (1968, 61), “The year 1619, 27th day of February, between nine and ten in the morning, Mr. Justus Isfeld died, the father of my spouse. He was of the Evangelical religion. . . . We buried him beyond the Troki Gate, where people of that religion are buried.” 7. Ibid., 66–67.

448 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

notes to pages 140–143

Schönflissius 1638a, D3v–D4r, A2r. On Podchocimski, see the entry by Henryk Lulewicz in PSB, 27:72–73; Kaczorowski 1996. LVIA 606.1.102, 4v. LVIA 606.1.102, 2r, 3r. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 278–79. Łabe˛dzki 1638b, 10v. Ibid., 11r. AVAK, 20:339–41. LVIA 606.1.102, 4r, 5r. Łabe˛dzki 1635, C4r; 1638a, 7v. LVIA 1008.1.42, 8v. See Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 212, 218; for the titles, see LVIA SA 5103, 76r; LVIA SA 5097, 120r–v; LVIA SA 5099, 463r. For the genealogical connections, see the unpublished parts of VorbekLettow’s memoirs at BCz 1857/II, 24, 26–27. For Halszka Monesowa as Calvinist godmother, see LVIA 606.1.102, 9v (1646), 11r (1648), 11v (twice, 1649), 13r (1650), 13v (thrice, 1651), 14r (1652), 14v (twice, 1652), 15v (1653). For the Calvinist baptisms of her own daughters, Barbara in 1677 (10v) and Zuzanna in 1648 (11r). LVIA 606.1.102, 19r, 21r, 22r. See, for instance, LVIA 606.1.103, 2r, 3v, 4v, 6r, 6v, 7r, 8v, 9r, 24r, 26r, 26v, 29v. For Jan Sztrunk III in the role of godparent for Calvinist babies, LVIA 606.1.102, 17r, 17v, 18r, 18v, 20r, 21r, 21v. But he was most definitely a Lutheran, serving as a lay senior and contributing up to 48 zł for each two-year period: LVIA 1008.1.42, 57r, 75r, 96v, 116r, 126r, 141r, 157v, 172v, 193v, 212v, 232v, 249v, 264v, 284v, 305r. And yet in the same years he also once made an offering to his wife’s Calvinist church—15 zł in 1683. See LMAB F40-67, 447v. On the charges against Jan Desaus and the attempted confiscation, LVIA SA 5097, 101r–103r, 108r–109v. Jan Desaus as godfather, LVIA 606.1.102, 19r, 20v, 32r, 32v. Jan’s brother Jakub Desaus II still owned a portion of the family house to be bequeathed in his will of 13 November 1675. LVIA SA 5337, 107r–108r. LVIA 606.1.102, 18r, 18v. He made offerings to the Lutheran church in Wilno in the 1670s and 1680s: LVIA 1008.1.42, 126r, 141v, 158r, 173r, 193v, 212v, 249v, 264v, 284v. For Katarzyna’s baptismal record, see LVIA 606.1.102, k. 13r. For the couple’s marriage record, LVIA 606.1.102, 32v. LVIA 606.1.102, 21v, 23r. LVIA 606.1.103, 2v, 3v, 6v, 7r, 7v, 9r, 26r. According to Wojciech Kriegseisen (1996, 183), Szretter promised in his old age to convert to Roman Catholicism in exchange for appointment as castellan. Such conversions were often pro forma and done in secret. For the baptism record, LVIA 1135.4.478, 4r. For the offerings to the Lutheran church, LVIA 1008.1.42, 194v, 214r, 235r, 251r, 266r, 286r, 306r. Maria Topolska (1984, 286–87, 219) makes Lebiedzicz a graduate of the Wilno Jesuit Academy and a convert to Roman Catholicism solely on the basis of the books in his posthumous inventory (most of which were in Latin and a considerable number of which were written by Roman Catholics). There is no basis for this claim. Possessing, even reading, Catholic books does not a Catholic make. Sometimes quite the opposite. Burgomaster Paweł Paszkiewicz, for example, held the office of lay senior in the Wilno Calvinist church in 1614, 1615, 1617, and 1619. See Akta 1915, 26, 34, 44, 53. LVIA 606.1.102, 3v, 4r. LVIA SA 5096, 437r; AVAK, 9:481. His estate owed 150 Lithuanian k to the Brotherhood of the Most Holy Virgin at the Holy Trinity Uniate Church, 20 k to the Uniate cathedral church, and 67 k to the Uniate hospital in the Rossa suburb. He was in possession of the “register of expenses of the Rossa hospital from 1633 to

notes to pages 143–150

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

449

1649,” no doubt serving as a magisterial overseer of that Uniate institution. See LVIA SA 5096, 441r, 441v–442r; AVAK, 9:485. See LVIA SA 5108, 499r–v; LVIA SA 5112, 257r–v. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:225. Morzy 1959, 50. The stricture against Armenians is odd, given their apparent general absence in Wilno. Perhaps the language was borrowed from statutes of other cities like Lwów, where they figured prominently. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:404–5 (emphasis added). AVAK, 29:37–38. See AVAK, 10:47; Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:192, 275; AVAK, 29:28. AVAK, 28:408. On this issue in general, see Kramerówna 1932, 265, 293. See Kapral' 2003, 222. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 29–30. On Keckermann, see NDB, 11:388–89; the entry by Bronisław Nadolski in PSB, 12:322–23; and Facca 2002. Perhaps Vorbek-Lettow misremembered the first name. There was a Joachim Oelhaf (1570–1630) who taught anatomy at the Danzig gymnasium and was doctor to King Zygmunt III Waza. But there were other scholars in the family, so perhaps Nicholas was a relative. See ADB, 24:291–92. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 30–31. Ibid., 31. Kros´niewiecki (d. 1624) was a Calvinist pedagogue and theologian. Born in Wilno, he got his first education at the local Calvinist lyceum before studies in Heidelberg, Altdorf, and Geneva, culminating in a doctorate in theology in Basel. See the entry by Stanisław Tworek in PSB, 15:342–43. Rassius (1590?–1627/1628) studied under Keckermannn in Danzig in 1604, a year or two ahead of Vorbek-Lettow. The Wilno church gave him a two-year stipend for study at the University of Königsberg in 1609, with the obligation to return to Wilno to teach upon completing his studies. Perhaps he returned to Wilno after Vorbek-Lettow’s stint in the Calvinist school? See the entry by Maria Sipayłło in PSB, 30:600. Piechnik 1983, 26–28. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 31–32. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 33–34 (emphasis added). Ibid., 35. Session 13 met 15 June 1415. For the text of the decree condemning the Czech Utraquists in general and Jakoubek of Strˇíbro in particular see Tanner 1990, 418–19. The decree does indeed contain Bruno’s reading: “although this sacrament was received by the faithful under both kinds in the early Church.” Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 31–37. The literature on Polish peregrinations to the schools is large. Marian Chachaj (1995) is particularly good on the contrasting patterns of studies and itineraries between the Catholic and the Calvinist branches of the Radziwiłł families in the seventeenth century, and he provides a good bibliography on the general topic. The classic studies are those of Stanisław Kot, most readily available in Kot 1987, as well as those of Kot’s students, such as Henryk Barycz (1938, ∧ 1969). See also Z oła˛dz-Strzelczyk 1996 on students from Poland-Lithuania who attended German academies and universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 37–38. He was the most famous of six generations of French Protestants who had left France for Switzerland in the sixteenth century and produced a number of well-known doctors and scientists. Caspar had been a student of Felix Platter in Basel and had studied in Padua (as would Vorbek-Lettow), Bologna, Montpellier, and Paris. See NDB, 1:649–50. On Platter, see Le Roy Ladurie 1997.

450

notes to pages 150–160

60. Chachaj 1995, 38–39, 50. 61. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 57. 62. Ibid., 39. Samuel Bolestraszycki-S´wie˛topełk, also a Calvinist, would become a royal secretary and, most scandalously, the translator in 1624 of Pierre du Moulin’s Héraclite, ou de la vanité et la misère de la vie humaine (Paris, 1609). The book was banned as “atheistic,” and Bolestraszycki was banished (one of the few such persecutions in Poland-Lithuania for confessional reasons before the ban against the Antitrinitarians in 1658). His return was negotiated by powerful Calvinist patrons in 1630. See the entry by Jarosław Wit Opatrny in PSB, 2:285–86. 63. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 39–40. 64. Ibid., 40. 65. Stella 1964, 75, 85. 66. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 40–41. 67. Ibid., 40–42. 68. He signed the book sometime in 1613 as “Mathias Littau, Vilnensis, Lituanus.” See Biržiška 1987, 61. His sons, as we will see later, signed the matriculation books of their own schools not as simple Vilnans (i.e., burghers), but as “nobiles Lithuani.” 69. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 40–42. 70. Ibid., 42–46. 71. Ibid., 47. 72. Ibid., 46–57. Actually, the city burned on 1 July 1610, and he had set out on 15 August, so the “anniversary” was not exact. 73. See Ariès 1962, 189–91; Le Roy Ladurie 1997, 15–64, 121–52. 74. In this source the word pauperibus (the Latin ablative of pauper) was treated macaronically as a Polish nominative, to which normal Polish inflections were added: z pauperibusami. 75. LNMB F93-1701, 1r; Frick 2008, 480. 76. See Rosenthal 1966 on the encounter between Antitrinitarian Marcin Czechowic and the Jew Jacob of Bełz∧yce, and Wajsblum 1952 on dialogues between the Karaite Isaac of Troki and Christian Hebraists. 77. For students of, and translation from, “oriental languages” in eighteenth-century PolandLithuania, see Reychman 1946–1947, 1948, 1950. 78. AVAK, 9:42. 79. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 10r–v; Paknys 2006, 93, 214. 80. See Kracˇkovskij 1893, clviii. 81. On Smotrycki’s grammar of Church Slavonic, see Anicˇenko 1973; Baumann 1958, 1956–1957; ˇ exovycˇ 1934; Dietze 1974; Dylevskij 1958; Frick 1986; Horbatsch 1974, 1964; Kociuba 1975; C Makaruška 1908; Mathiesen 1981; Nimcˇuk 1979, 1982; Pugh 1987, 1985; Sjöberg 1966; Weingart 1923; Zasadkevicˇ 1883. 82. Smotrycki’s grammar is available in a facsimile edition by Nimcˇuk (1979). The preface is on pages 2r–4v; English translation at Frick 2005c, 98–99. On Smotrycki and the Ruthenian language question, see Frick 1985. 83. On the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy of Ostroh, see Myc'ko 1990. On the Kiev Mohyla Academy, see Xyžnjak 1981, and the special issue of Harvard Ukrainian Studies published as The Kiev Mohyla Academy (1984). 84. On the “little schools” of nineteenth-century France and the distinction between the arts of reading and of writing, see Ariès 1962, 290–301. In general, on literacy in early modern (western) Europe, see Houston 1988. 85. See Yates 1972, 157; ODNB, 25:623–26. 86. The first three volumes of Ludwik Piechnik’s history of the academy (1984, 1983, 1987), largely based on previously inaccessible and unused Vatican sources, tell the story of programs, professors, students, and infrastructure from 1570 to 1730.

notes to pages 160–171

451

87. Piechnik 1983, 87–88. 88. For 1598–1635, RGADA 1603.5.1128–1153; for 1635–1648, RGADA 1603.5.1154–1200; for 1654– 1686, RGADA 1603.5.1201–1244; for 1686–1762, RGADA 1603.5.1245–1272. 89. The protestation is to be found LVIA SA 5339, 3r–4r; Frick 2008, 284–85. 90. AVAK, 29:174–77. 91. LNMB F93-1695, 1r; Frick 2008, 473–75. 92. Schönflissius 1638a, D3r–D4r (emphasis added). 93. Łabe˛dzki 1638b, 10v. 94. Falckenheimer 1904, 30, 177; Wackernagel 1962, 184; Biržiška 1987, 61; Ragauskas 2001b, 15. 95. See Israel 1998, 312. 96. AGAD, AR V 17465, 17–8; Frick 2008, 13–15. On the importation of Dutch cattle to Lithuania, see Augustyniak 2001, 57; Wisner 1969. 97. AGAD, AR V 17465, 19–20; Frick 2008, 15–17. 98. Biržiška 1987, 61, 63, 66. 99. Schönflissius 1638a, E3v. 100. Biržiška 1987, 68, 70; Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 63–64, 67. 101. Biržiška 1987, 60, 61, 64, 65, 68, 69. 102. Ibid., 71. 103. Ibid., 64. 104. For the names of the Sien ´ czyło brothers, see Paweł Sien ´ czyło’s testament of 16/26 January 1661 at LVIA SA 5099, 326r–329r; Frick 2008, 529–32. 105. Biržiška 1987, 65. 106. LVIA SA 5112, 242r–243r; LVIA SA 5112, 175r; LVIA SA 5333, 536r–543r; Frick 2008, 556–64. 107. See Frick 1995, 33; Kot 1952, 243. 108. Biržiška 1987, 61. 109. See the patriarch’s last will and testament at LVIA SA 5096, 266r–269r; Frick 2008, 220–25. 110. Biržiška 1987, 62, 63. 111. Rachuba 2009, 602; 2004, 670. 112. Biržiška 1987, 61; LVIA 1008.1.42 f. 8v. 113. Biržiška 1987, 68. 114. On the archbishop’s education, Frick 1995, 30–37. 115. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 12v–13v; Paknys 2006, 96, 97, 149, 216. 116. Meller’s wife, Halszka (Elz∧bieta) Giblówna had died by 1657, in which year, according to a protestation he registered in the acta of the magistracy, Jan Sztrunk III (son of Jan Sztrunk II and Halszka Giblówna) had received a portion of his mother’s estate—“during her lifetime, shortly before her death.” See LVIA SA 5108, 568r–569v. By 1677 we find a reference (LVIA SA 5337, 241r–242r) to “Father Chryzolog [i.e., Samuel] Weszterman, a lecturer in holy theology and currently the ordinarius praedicatorum in the Wilno monastery.” And from the text I am discussing now we learn that Meller had “adopted” Samuel Westerman more than twenty years earlier, thus ca. 1665. Meller had married Giblówna by 1648, probably as early as 1644 (AVAK, 20:344–48). Thus the adoption must have occurred in the early 1660s, when Halszka was no longer living and Meller was once again unmarried. 117. The complaint is registered at LVIA SA 5115, 508r–v; Frick 2008, 62–63. 118. They are recorded at GSta PK XX HA EM 111k., Nr. 104. I will describe this document in greater detail in chapter 11, devoted to the time of the Muscovite occupation. 119. LVIA SA 5337, 367r–v; Frick 2008, 301. The case continued at LVIA SA 5112, 471r–472r; Frick 2008, 302–3; LVIA SA 5113, 669r–v; LVIA SA 5339, 309r–310r. 120. AGAD AR V 17466, 1; Frick 2008, 18–19. 121. LMAB F40-67, 449r, 451v; Frick 2008, 26, 27. 122. LVIA 610.3.55, 3r; Frick 2008, 276.

452

notes to pages 172–180

123. LVIA SA 5333, 257v; Frick 2008, 546. 124. See Urban 1984 on the art of writing in the Cracow palatinate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and Urban 1992 on literacy in “Old Poland.” I know of no such studies for Lithuania.

Chapter 8 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Akta 1915, 14–15. LMAB F40-1136, 2–3. Wujek 1579–1580, 1:118–19. Ibid., 2:55. See Hajnal 1965, 1982, 1983; also Kaser 2001, 52–57; Fauve-Chamoux 2001, 224–25. Levin 1989, 95–98. Kaser 2001, 26, 56–57. See Szołtysek 2008; Plakans and Wetherell 2001; Kaser 2002. I thank Dalia Leinarte· for her assistance on the east-central European revisions to the literature concerning the Hajnal line. Bonfield 2001, 101–2, 104. Barbagli and Kertzer 2001, xxiii–xxvii; Bonfield 2001, 100–103, 121; Watt 2001, 129, 141–43; Wiesner 2000, 71–78. For a comparative study of marital law based on a Catholic (Freiburg im Breisgau) and a Reformed city (Basel) of southwestern German-speaking territories, see Safley 1984. On the Protestant reformation of ritual in the realm of engagement and marriage ceremonies, see Karant-Nunn 1997, 7–42. On modern marriage in Neuchâtel, see Watt 1992. On weddings and the control of marriage in Reformation Augsburg, see Roper 2001, 132–64. On courtship and marriage in Tudor and Stuart England, see Cressy 1999, 233–376. See Flandrin 1979, 131 for the quote, and 130–40 and 167–68 on the issue in general. On marriage in the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church, see also Barbagli and Kertzer 2001, xxiii–xxvii; Bonfield 2001, 96–100, 103–4. The proof text is at Ephesians 5:32. See Levin 1989, 89–98, 101; Meyendorff 1974, 196–99. Bonfield 2001, 103–4; Watt 2001, 128–29; Fauve-Chamoux 2001, 235–38. Levin 1989, 136–47, 150–53. On the Orthodox doctrine of oikonomía, see Mavrakis 1992, 260–71; Thomson 1966. One wonders about statements like that of Janusz Kuczyn ´ ski (1993, 75), who, in examining the “matrimonial quarrels” of the citizens of eighteenth-century Kielce (in Little Poland), asserted that “moral norms, as well as deviations from principles of social coexistence were uniform for the whole country, two centuries ago, as moreover they are today.” Maybe today. But earlier, perhaps even until the first half of the twentieth century, there were marked regional and local peculiarities. And the situation in Wilno may not have resembled that in Kielce. The account of Krzysztof Wiktorzyn’s marriage and wedding is registered in Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 119–20. LVIA SA 5324, 15v, 16v. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 123. François 1991, 190–203, 68–70, 221–22. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 58–59. For the marriage date, see Łabe˛dzki 1638b, 10v. For litigation over the property after the death of the younger generation, see AVAK, 20:339–41. AGAD, AR V 17465, 17–18; Frick 2008, 13–15. AGAD, AR V 17465, 19–20; Frick 2008, 15–17. For the date of Jakub’s marriage, see Schönflissius 1638a, D3v–4r. Korneliusz II was born on 25 December 1600. For the birth date, see Łabe˛dzki 1638b, 10v.

notes to pages 180–189

453

27. On the importance of topographic endogamy in the formation of city quarters, see Jütte 1991, especially 250–51. 28. The drawn-out litigation, with interruptions for entries from other cases, is recorded at LMAB F17-280, 4r–6v; Frick 2008, 392–96. 29. The record says it was 12 March, but we have already proceeded to 13 March in the acta, and the following entry was for 17 March, so this must have occurred sometime between 14 and 16 March. 30. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 74v; Paknys 2006, 175, 266. 31. On this, see Flandrin 1979, 140–45, 148–50, 156–58; Pollock 2001, 209. 32. LMAB F43-216, 223r–224r. 33. I will examine this ledger in greater detail in chapter 13 devoted to poverty and charity. 34. LMAB F43-527, 6v; BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 74r; Paknys 2006, 174, 266. 35. LMAB F43-527, 18v, 19v, 33v, 38r. 36. LMAB F43-527, 11v. 37. BUJ B, Slav. F. 12 (74r–v and 73r) and F. 15 (42r and 41r); Paknys 2006, 174, 172, 266, 265. 38. See his will, recorded 13 February 1632, in LMAB F43-26642, 1r–2r; Frick 2008, 384–86. 39. LMAB F43-527, 11v. 40. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 74v; Paknys 2006, 175, 266. For the 1640 deed of sale see LMAB F43-218, 380r–381v; Frick 2008, 387–89. 41. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 74v; Paknys 2006, 175, 267; LMAB F17-280, 107r, 110r; LMAB F43-590, 20r, 47r. 42. LMAB F43-218, 380r–381v; Frick 2008, 387–89. 43. LMAB F43-220, 355–57; Frick 2008, 404–5. 44. LMAB F43-590, 4v, 13v. 45. The case is recorded at LMAB F43-218, 422v–423v; Frick 2008, 419–21, 424v–425v; LMAB F43590, 13r, 14r–15r; LMAB F43-220, 706–11; Frick 2008, 421–24, 805–9, 419–21. 46. LMAB F43-590, 27v. 47. LMAB F43-590, 32v, 33v–34r, 36r; Frick 2008, 405–7. 48. He had purchased the house only a few months earlier from Ewa Dziblewska Szkillowa, who had acquired the house that had been registered under the name Ambroz∧y the weaver in 1636. This was the one at Skop Street 49.03. The litigation between Cecylia Kostromska/Win ´ ska and Miglin ´ ski calls them immediate neighbors—hence the supposition that the houses at 49.03 and 49.04 had by now become one address. 49. LMAB F43-590, 57r, 58v–59r, 59v–60r, 61r, 62v–63v; Frick 2008, 408–12. 50. LMAB F43-225, 770–3, 1081–1085; the quote is to be found on p. 1084; Frick 2008, 413. 51. They were recorded at LVIA SA 5113, 598r–599r and LVIA SA 5339, 273r–275v; Frick 2008, 414–17. 52. LVIA SA 5342, 1337–40; Frick 2008, 417–18. 53. Refer to the Sztrunk and Gibel genealogical tables in appendix B. 54. The account of Sztrunk’s life is found at Schönflissius 1634, C1r–C2r. On Jerzy Sztrunk I, see also Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 67, 279. 55. Jan Sztrunk II named his siblings in his testament of 15 May 1643, and Schönflissius identified Marcin as a son of Jerzy II in the funeral sermon for the latter. See LVIA SA 5117, 148r–150v; Frick 2008, 59–61; Schönflissius 1634, A1v. 56. On Jerzy Sztrunk II, see Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 69. On Sara Engelbrechtówna Sztrunkowa, see Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 67, 111, 279. Szymon Engelbrecht I accompanied Maciej Vorbek-Lettow “as far as Frankfurt am Main” as he set out in August 1610 “to foreign lands for study.” Ibid., 38. 57. Ibid., 67, 111, 279. 58. See Adamowicz 1855, 40 for a list of patrons of the Wilno Lutheran church. 59. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 62. 60. Ibid., 62; BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 13r; BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 7v; LVIA SA 5099, 33r–42v; LVIA SA 5106, 246r.

454

notes to pages 189–193

61. LVIA SA 5102, 63v–64v; LVIA SA 5104, 515v–519r; LVIA SA 5337, 149v; Frick 2008, 60. The first document calls him “noble Reinhold Witmacher, onetime councillor of Wilno, but now living in Riga under the Swede.” His name does not appear in the list of annual councillors at LVIA SA 5324. 62. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 212, 218. See LVIA 5103, 76r for the titles. Mones was the last Protestant burgomaster of Wilno, serving in the same years as Prokop Dorofiewicz, the brother of VorbekLettow’s daughter-in-law. 63. BCz 1857/II, 24, 26–27. 64. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 26–27. 65. LVIA SA 5108, 283r–v; Frick 2008, 65; LVIA 1008.1.19, 7v, 6v. For entries in books of heraldry, see Boniecki 1901, 269; Uruski 1906, 158; Starykon ´ -Kasprzycki 1935, 101; Ciechanowicz 2001, 215. 66. LVIA SA 5335, 40r–41r; LVIA SA 5106, 476r–477r. 67. Schönflissius 1638a, D3v–D4r; Schönflissius 1634, C1r. 68. LVIA SA 5104, 515v–519r. 69. Schönflissius 1638a, A2r. 70. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 91, 251, 260, 275, 278, 279, 285. 71. Ibid., 260, 279, 285; RGADA 1603.12.14, 712; Meilus 2011, 589–90; LVIA 458.4.1, 5v. 72. See the biography by Henryk Lulewicz in PSB, 27:72–73; Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 278. 73. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 278; BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 15r. 74. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 275; Rachuba 2009, 119, 177, 214. 75. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 279, 285, 288, 289. 76. LMAB F20-608, 1r–v; Frick 2008, 66–67. The royal privilege spoke of vilibus artibus (with mean arts). See Dubin´ski 1788, 118. On royal privileges for the magistrates of Wilno and their children, see Ragauskas 2002, 300–326; 1997, 25–37; Wasilewski 1991. During their Königsberg exile, on 16 February 1656, Tomasz and brother Jan would sign the oath of loyalty to the elector of Brandenburg not as Wilno burgher sons enjoying noble privileges but as landed nobles, pure and simple: “Thomas Gibel, nobilis ex districtu nowogrodensi . . . Joannes Gibel, nobilis ex districtu grodnensi.” GSta PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 73r. A “Iacobus Gibel, Bürger und Kauffman von der Wilda” would sign on the same day but with other burghers. GSta PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 85v. Was he their brother, Jakub Gibel II? 77. AVAK, 20:155–67. On the Winholds, see Ragauskas 2001b. One reservation: the wife of Kornesliuz I, Jakumina was not de domo Desausówna, as the author claims (12, 15), but Deschampsówna. See AVAK, 20:128, 129, 155–57, 205–8, 228, 229 and her autograph signature, AGAD AR V 17466; Frick 2008, 18–19. The error stems from the title page of a funeral sermon by Calvinist minister Baltazar Łabe˛dzki (1635), who cited her name, for no obvious reason, as “Deskchausówna.” 78. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 4v–5r; Paknys 2006, 88, 211. 79. AGAD AR V 17465, 30–31; Frick 2008, 19–20 (emphasis added). 80. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 58, 61. 81. AVAK, 20, 344–50. 82. Konarski 1936, 64–65. 83. LVIA SA 5324, 15v. 84. Vorbek-Lettow 1968, 86. 85. Ibid., 87–91. 86. Ibid., 88. 87. Ibid., 119–20. 88. Ibid., 62–69, 91, 119–22. 89. LVIA SA 5324, 15v, 16v. These comments serve as a supplement to the work of Aivas Ragauskas (1997), who has begun tracing the relations of Wilno burghers to the szlachta and the strategies they employed in their strivings for social advancement. In particular, he has offered a

notes to pages 194–196

90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95.

96. 97.

98. 99. 100.

101.

102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

455

compelling picture of “the path into regained or acquired nobility” taken by Vorbek-Lettow (18). See also Ragauskas 1999 and 2001b on royal secretaries and Radziwiłł clients among Wilno burghers. More generally on the social advancement of Polish-Lithuanian burghers, see Opas 1974. See Ryszard Mienicki’s biography in PSB, 3:441. By 1636 Nonhart’s own Wilno residence at Rudniki Street 12.06 had been bequeathed to the “Saxon hospital.” BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 40v; Paknys 2006, 129, 237. Schönflissius 1633b, E4r–v. Ibid., E4v–F1r. See the biography of Ke˛sztort by Aleksander Gieysztor in PSB, 12:371–72. Gieysztor calls Krystyna Nonhartówna Piotr’s niece and mistakenly makes him a Calvinist. But in his will Nonhart clearly calls Krystyna his sister, and all sources put him in the Lutheran camp. LVIA SA 4209, 33v; Frick 2008, 227. Tadeusz Wasilewski writes in his biography of Naruszewicz in PSB, 22:561 that he was married once—to Elz∧bieta Radziwiłłówna, daughter of the palatine of Nowogródek, Mikołaj—that their son Ferdynand died young, and that their daughter Izabella married Stanisław Massalski, chamberlain of Grodno. But a receipt from the elders of the Lutheran church of Wilno dated 24 June 1635 (AGAD AR X 122, 9–10; Frick 2008, 45–46) identifies Nonhart’s son-in-law as the Aleksander Naruszewicz in question (he was forester of Niemonice at the time). Nonhart’s will speaks of “grandsons and granddaughters,” identifies one of them as Marcybela, and makes a bequest to a Ferdynand Naruszewicz, so perhaps this was a grandson. LVIA SA 4209, 34r, 35r; Frick 2008, 227, 228. Naruszewicz would later marry Zuzanna Raczkówna, the widow of cupbearer of Wilno Daniel Naborowski. LVIA SA 4668, 278r–v. For the first, see the biography of Andrzej Rachuba in PSB, 35:154–55, and for the second, of Mirosław Mirecki, PSB, 27:358–63. Arent Engelbrecht named Piotr Nonhart executor of his will, calling him his szwagier (brotherin-law). We also learn here the name of Arent’s wife. See LVIA SA 5341, 276r, 275v; Frick 2008, 81–82. In his funeral sermon for Zofia Nonhartówna Chreptowiczowa, Je˛drzej Schönflissius (1646, 15) tells us her mother was Zuzanna Mrzygłódówna Mirucka. LVIA SA 4324, 16v. VL, 3:183. On the history of the Polish-Lithuanian postal system, see Zimowski 1972. See Lulewicz and Rachuba 1994, 140–41 for a list of Lithuanian postmasters general. He made offerings to the local Lutheran church in 1652, and his widow continued after the liberation of the city in the period 1667–1677. LVIA 1008.1.42, 39r, 95r, 125r, 140r, 156v, 171v. Bizing took Communion with the Wilno Calvinists in the 1670s and 1680s. LVIA 606.1.103, 2r, 3r, 5r, 5v, etc.). The offering records of the Lutherans noted his wife’s contributions for the period 1669–1691. LVIA 1008.1.42, 116v, 127r, 142r, 158v, 173v, 194v, 214r, 235r, 251r, 266r, 286r, 306r. The Calvinist pastor noted on 31 August 1684, “I disposed for death His Grace Sir Reynhold Bizynk . . . in praesentia of many of them of the Augsburg confession.” LVIA 606.1.103, 8r. Lulewicz and Rachuba (1994, 141) cite evidence that he died considerably later, 3 March 1686. On “self-ennoblement,” see Opas 1974, 474. Ciechanowicz 2001, 215. Uruski (1906, 158) says that “Kazimierz received the patent of nobility [indygenat] in 1768.” LVIA SA 5108, 283r–v; Frick 2008, 65. Refer to the Buchner and Rejter genealogical tables in Appendix B. LVIA 1008.1.42, 11r, 41v. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 85v. RGADA 1603.12.14, 288–89; Meilus 2011, 306. LVIA 1008.1.42, 11r, 41r, 57r, 75v, 96v. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 89r.

456

notes to pages 196–201

111. A certified copy from the Wilno magistracy is to be found at LVIA 610.3.55, 2r–3r; Frick 2008, 274–76. 112. LVIA 1008.1.42, 40r. 113. A certified copy from the Wilno magistracy is to be found at LVIA 610.3.56, 2v–3v; Frick 2008, 279. 114. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k., Nr. 104, 83r–v. Ertsleben’s contributions to the Lutheran Church end before 1655 (LVIA 1008.1.42, 9r, 39v); perhaps he, too, died in exile. 115. The document is recorded at LVIA SA 5335, 478r–479r; Frick 2008, 280–81. 116. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k., Nr. 104, 89r. We learn that Kalander was married to Regina Buchnerówna from Regina Buchnerowa’s will of 1685. LVIA SA 5339, 220r–221v; Frick 2008, 281–83. 117. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k., Nr. 104, 201r–v, 203r–v. On Wilno burghers as clients of the Radziwiłłs, see Ragauskas 2001b. 118. LVIA 1008.1.42, 41v. 119. It is recorded at LVIA SA 5099, 109r. 120. He is listed as a member from October 1649 of the congregation of the Assumption at the Jesuits’ Church of St. Kazimierz (LMAB F138-1712, 243). He served as the guardian of the orphans of Wilno burgomaster Stefan Dubowicz, a convert from Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism and brother of Uniate Metropolitan of the Holy Trinity Monastery, Aleksy Dubowicz. See LVIA SA 5105, 88r; LVIA SA 5103, 490r; LVIA SA 5334, 16r–19v; Frick 2008, 121–28. 121. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k., Nr. 104, 85r, 95v; BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 51r; Laucevicˇius and Vitkauskiene˙ 2001, 279–80. 122. Rachuba 1989, 42. The survey of 1690 was done by quarters, without reference to individual ∧ streets, but Buchner’s immediate neighbors in that document—Tym, Z egalin ´ ski, Tymin, Pecelt, Sienczyło, Barszczyn ´ ski, Hubryk, Sznejder—tell us that this is Glass Street. Other sources place all of them there. 123. He served as senior in 1671 and 1673. His gift of 26 zł in 1683 put him second out of 166 Lutheran offering givers for that two-year period (behind Paweł Meller, who gave 64 zł). See LVIA 1008.1.42, 126r, 141r, 232v, 234v. 124. See the signature of “Joachim Reitter von der Wilda, Bürger vnnd ein Kauffman” on the oath of loyalty to the elector of Brandenburg at GStA PK XX HA EM 111k., Nr. 104, 86v. 125. LVIA SA 5108, 108r–110r. 126. LVIA 1008.1.42, 56v, 73v, 95r. 127. LVIA SA 5108, 108r–110r; LVIA 1008.1.42, 140v, 157r, 172r, 193r, 212r, 232r. 128. LVIA SA 5115, 128r–v; LVIA SA 5340, 236r–237v; LVIA 1008.1.42, 235r, 251r, 266r, 286r, 306r; LVIA 606.1.103, 3r, 6v, 7r, 8r. 129. LVIA SA 5115, 128r–v; LVIA 1008.1.42, 125r, 140r, 156v, 171v, 192v, 248v, 263v, 283v, 304r; LVIA 1008.1.19, 6v. 130. Laucevicˇius and Vitkauskiene˙ 2001, 252; LVIA SA 5104, 592r–593v; LVIA SA 5097, 63r–64r. 131. Lutherans Marcin Buchner, Jan Sztrunk II, and Konrad Frez had wooden houses next to each other in the Gunsmiths’ suburb. See LVIA SA 5361, 79r–81r. The Sztrunks, as we know, were Castle Street denizens; both the Buchners and the Frezes had houses on Glass Street. 132. LMAB F43-590, 73r–v. 133. LMAB F17-280, 27v, 31v. 134. Nowak 1968, 322. 135. LVIA 1008.1.42, 9v, 40v. 136. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 73v/74r, 41v/42r; Paknys 2006, 173/175, 266. 137. LMAB F43-218, 380r–381v; Frick 2008, 387–89. 138. Her will is found in LVIA SA 5334, 137v–140r; Frick 2008, 469–71. The royal decree of 1640 is in AVAK, 20:329–36. For her contribution to Lutheran finances as Gierlic’s widow (“Frau Gerlicowa,

notes to pages 201–208

139.

140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172.

457

wietfrau”) see LVIA 1008.1.42, 40r (4 zł in 1652). For the Gierlices as arendators of Calvinist property see BOZ 803, 595. For a description of their house, see BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 78v; Paknys 2006, 181, 270. He was registered as owner of the house in 1636 as “Paweł Rachwicz.” BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 75r; Paknys 2006, 176, 267. Litigation over ownership of the house after his death conducted by his sister identifies his profession and makes it clear that this is the same man and house. LMAB F43-590, 58r, 60v, 64v–65r, 78r; LMAB F43-223, 15r. The will is recorded at LVIA SA 5361, 198r–199r; Frick 2008, 451–52. Unlike Rejchowicz and daughter, Szwander did contribute to Lutheran coffers. LVIA 1008.1.42, 8r, 39r. LVIA 1008.1.42, 96r. Lipin ´ ski’s will is recorded at LVIA SA 5361, 130r–131r; Frick 2008, 447–49. Jacewicz’s will is recorded at LMAB F43-221, 5r–6v; Frick 2008, 449–51. The will is recorded at LVIA SA 5361, 233r–234v; Frick 2008, 453–55. His contributions to Lutheran finances in 1640 and 1652 are at LVIA 1008.1.42, 9v. Contribution of “Hanns Kreitner” to the Lutheran Church in 1652, LVIA 1008.1.42, 40v; of “Michell Schweiner, Weißgerber,” in 1640 and 1652, LVIA 1008.1.42, 11r, 41r. LVIA 1008.1.42, 173v, 194r, 213v, 214r, 233r. Kowalenko 1925–1926, 136. Refer here to the Dorofiewicz, Kostrowicki, and Filipowicz genealogical tables in Appendix B. RGADA 1603.12.14, 191–92, 525–27, 615–18, 641–42, 642–45; Meilus 2011, 243–44, 462–63, 525–27, 543–47. The document is recorded at LVIA SA 5104, 377r–378r; Frick 2008, 513–14. Ragauskas 2002, 172–73. There are two extant copies of Filipowicz’s will—LVIA SA 5334, 58v–62r; Frick 2008, 549–53 and LVIA SA 5099, 459r–462v. It was printed at AVAK, 9:492–96. See Ragauskas 2002, 143. See the posthumous inventory of Migura’s possessions done on 25 May 1675, at LVIA SA 5109, 23–30. See Iwan’s testament of 22 April 1644, recorded at LVIA SA 5096, 266r–269r; Frick 2008, 220–25. See her testament of 23 December 1668, recorded at LVIA SA 5335, 730r–732v; Frick 2008, 567–69. LVIA SA 5103, 640r–v. RGADA 1603.12.14, 524–5; Meilus 2011, 461. For the decree, see Rachuba 1994, 66; Meilus 2001, 285–86, 293; Akty 1842, 261. LVIA SA 5103, 227r–228r; ML 114 (RGADA 389.78), 798r; Paknys 2006, 204. LVIA SA 5096, 182r–184r. LVIA SA 5115, 352r–353r. LVIA SA 5097, 237r–239r; Frick 2008, 178–80. Kowalenko 1925–1926, 136; BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 37r, 32r; Paknys 2006, 123, 117, 233, 229. LVIA SA 5105, 561r–v. LVIA SA 5107, 73r–v. RGADA 1603.12.14, 461–64; Meilus 2011, 421–23. LVIA SA 5097, 237r–239r; Frick 2008, 178–80. His last will and testament is printed in AVAK, 8, 522–28. LVIA SA 5103, 509r. The other one was for the funeral of Bazyly Braz∧ycz in 1649. See LVIA SA 5105, 560r; Frick 2008, 129. LVIA SA 5105, 46r; Frick 2008, 180–81. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k., Nr. 104, 88v. Meller had first matriculated in the summer semester of 1625, Zaleski in the summer of 1642. See Erler 1910, 288, 434; Biržiška 1987, 65, 69, 71.

458 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188.

notes to pages 208–216

GStA PK XX HA EM 111k., Nr. 104, 93v. LVIA 1008.1.42, 213r, 235r, 251r, 266r, 286r, 306r. The testament is recorded at LVIA SA 5338, 452r–453r. LVIA 1008.1.42, 116r, 126v, 141v, 158r, 173r, 194r, 213v. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k., Nr. 104, 100v, 92v. RGADA 1603.12.14, 461–64; Meilus 2011, 421–23. LVIA SA 5099, 29v–32r. Atroszkiewicz’s will is recorded at LVIA SA 5335, 80v–82v; Frick 2008, 246–48. Otroszkiewiczowa’s will is recorded at LVIA SA 5335, 215v–217v; Frick 2008, 248–50. Agenda 1637, 142 (emphasis added). Ibid., 150. See François 1991, 192, 221–22. Akta 1915, 13, 28, 40, 55, 92. LMAB F40-460, 1r–v; Frick 2008, 349–51. See the entry on Jan Alfons Lacki by Jan Seredyka in PSB, 16, 406–7. The marriage record is found at LVIA 1135.4.483, 1v. “Thomas Baders Hausfrauw” in the record of Lutheran offerings is at LVIA 1008.1.42, 194v, 266r, 235r, 266r, 286r, 206r. For records of “Christoff Schwen(nd)er(t)” in the rolls of Lutheran offerings see LVIA 1008.1.42, 156v, 171v, 192v, 212r, 231v, 248v, 263v, 283v, 304r, 304v. 189. LVIA SA 5335, 730r–732v; Frick 2008, 567–69; LVIA SA 5115, 352r–353r. 190. LVIA SA 5107, 46r–v. 191. Groicki 1953, 62. 192. Wife of Cracow town councillor Melchior Weigel, Katarzyna Weiglowa was burned at the stake on the Little Market in Cracow in 1539 for her alleged conversion to Judaism. She was one of a very small number put to death in early modern Poland-Lithuania for religious deviation. See Williams 2000, 633–34; Lubieniecki 1995, 437–38; and Tazbir 2000a. At the peak of the Reformation in Poland-Lithuania, Daniel Bielin ´ ski made the journey from Catholicism (he had been a priest) to Anabaptism to radical Antitrinitarianism and on, so it was rumored, in 1574 to Judaism before retracing his footsteps to Calvinism. We know the story only from the writings of his opponents. See Szczucki 1964, 258. 193. Czyz∧ewski 1617, 7–8. 194. LVIA SA 5105, 244r–245r; Frick 2008, 314–16. 195. As we have seen, even the Calvinist Ruthenian (Belarusan) district used the old calendar for a time in the early seventeenth century, perhaps encouraged in this by their Greek-rite neighbors. 196. Lithuanian Jewish organs of self-governance specifically warned Jews not to mock Christians. See Dubnov 1909, 38. 197. Šamjakin 1989, 315. 198. Goldberg 1986. 199. It, too, was refiled with the Wilno magistracy. LVIA SA 5105, 246r–247r. Kiersnowski (who died after 3 December 1686) was vice-judge of Starodub by the time of the alleged events in 1670. That document was published in print in Arxeograficˇeskij 1867, 195–98 and discussed in Teter 2003. 200. Goldberg 1986, 195, 199, 213–14. 201. This was contrary to normal usage in the Christian acta. Jews typically appeared in the Christian court records with name and patronymic only (following Polish and Ruthenian rules of morphology). The father was Samuel Izraelewicz (i.e., son of Izrael). His patronymic has become the family name here. Normally the surname of the generation of his children would be Samuelewicz/Samuelówna (son/daughter of Samuel). 202. The Communion record of the local Calvinist church lists the participation of at least two neophytes in the 1680s, a “Zofia converted from the Pagans” (also a “Zofia converted from the

notes to pages 216–229

459

Tatars” and a “Zofia Tatar”—apparently the same person) and a “Katarzyna converted from the Tatars.” On occasion we find both “Katarzyna Nawrocka” and “Zofia Nawrocka” taking Communion with the Calvinists (15 April 1683). Apparently they had acquired descriptive surnames from the Polish verb nawrócic´, “to convert.” See LVIA 606.1.103, 3v, 4v (for “Nawrocka”), 5r, 5v, 6r. 203. LVIA 604.19.95, 455v–456r. 204. The witnesses were Walenty Kalof (Valtin/Valentin Kalau), Paweł Meler (Paul Möller), Arnolf Zaleski, and Michał Beier (Michael Beyer), all of whom appear in the rolls of Lutheran offerings. LVIA 1008.1.42. Meler was a wealthy medical doctor, Zaleski a prominent lawyer. 205. Zuzanna was almost exclusively a Lutheran or Calvinist name in seventeenth-century Wilno. “Klineberkówna” was most likely the “Klingenbergsche” who appears in the Lutheran rolls for those years. LVIA 1008.1.42, 250r, 265r, 285r, 305v.

Chapter 9 1. See Kingdon 1995 for the Genevan situation. For a discussion of marriage, divorce, and the courts of sixteenth-century Basel, see Burghartz 1999. For an overview of the debates within the Roman Catholic Church and the position of the Reformers, see Olsen 1971; Phillips 1988, 1–94; 1991, 1–27. Also Harrington 1995, 84–100; Ozment 1983, 80–99. For a study of marital law and marital disputes in the Catholic and Reformed German-speaking southwest, see Safley 1984. 2. Sochaniewicz 1929, 13. In general on the history of Orthodox teaching and practice concerning marriage and divorce, see Zhishman 1864; Vogel 1954; Rousseau 1967. Especially on divorce in the Orthodox Slavic world, although largely without reference to the Rus´ of early modern Poland-Lithuania, see Levin 1989, 114–32. 3. See the classic study on this topic in Bardach 1970 and the extensive discussion of the older literature there. 4. The complaint is recorded at LVIA SA 5337, 159r; Frick 2008, 361. 5. It is recorded at LVIA SA 5340, 202r–203v; Frick 2008, 363–64. 6. See Morzy 1959, 28, 45. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the sheep shearers and furriers were entirely Ruthenian; they would remain predominantly so in the seventeenth. 7. See his signature on the loyalty oath signed in Königsberg on 18/28 February 1656 at GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 95v. 8. His will is recorded at LVIA SA 5333, 319r–322v; Frick 2008, 291–92, and the posthumous inventory of his estate at LVIA SA 5102, 223v–226r; Frick 2008, 292–96. 9. On the litigation, see LVIA SA 5337, 367r–v; Frick 2008, 301. Other moments in the litigation are found at LVIA SA 5111, 996–1001; Frick 2008, 304–7; LVIA SA 5112, 384r–385r, 471r–472r; LVIA SA 5119, 397r–398r; LVIA SA 5339, 309r–310r; LVIA SA 5113, 669r–v. 10. LVIA SA 5112, 384r–385r. 11. Recorded at LVIA SA 5333, 482r; Frick 2008, 297–98. 12. Recorded at LVIA SA 5105, 59r; Frick 2008, 298–99. 13. LVIA 1008.1.408, 65; LVIA 1008.1.45, 8r. 14. LVIA 1008.1.42, 96r, 126r, 141r, 193v. 15. LVIA 1008.1.408, 65; LVIA 1008.1.45, 85r. 16. Rachuba 1989, 42. 17. Recorded at LVIA SA 5099, 184r–185r; Frick 2008, 113–14. 18. Recorded at LMAB F43-590, 10v–11r; Frick 2008, 401–2. 19. Recorded at LVIA SA 5335, 730r–732v; Frick 2008, 567–69. 20. Iwanowicz bought the house from Dorota Stefanówna, widow of Mikołaj Sien ´ czyło, who had acquired the house from Justyna Stefanówna, widow of Paweł Chomicz (first marriage) and Jan

460

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

notes to pages 229–235

Daniłowicz (second marriage). See LVIA 458.4.111, 73r–75v. In 1636 and 1639 Paweł Chomicz had owned the house at Subocz Street 78.03. See BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 94r and BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 51v; Paknys 2006, 201, 283. All were Ruthenians. LVIA SA 5333, 254r–257r; Frick 2008, 543–46. In 1689, two Uniate priests visited Kostrowicki in his house on Subocz Street as he lay on his deathbed. They were Fathers Michał Da˛browski and Nataniel Iwanowicz (perhaps some relative of his by now long-deceased wife?) of the Uniate Holy Spirit monastery, to which he made a bequest in their presence. See LVIA SA 5115, 352r–353r. Phillips 1988, 13–15; 1991, 6. For England, see Stone 1990, 183–230 passim, and 1993, 21–22. For Catholic Poland-Lithuania, see Kaczmarczyk and Les´nodorski 1966, 280. Kaczmarczyk and Les´nodorski 1966, 302–3. Szóstak would serve as an annual councillor in 1682. LVIA SA 5324, 21r. He was an elder of the Brotherhood of the Most Holy Virgin at the Uniate Holy Trinity Church. LVIA SA 5103, 638r–639v. On the Szycik Zaleski dynasty, see Ragauskas 2002, 172–73. Samuel is titled royal secretary in many documents; both he and his brother Stefan were so titled at LVIA SA 5115, 547r–548v. See LVIA SA 5324, 18v, 19v, 20r, 21r, 21v. During this period he was elected per revolutionem, that is to say, every six years. On election per revolutionem, see Ragauskas 2002, 58–60. A Samuel Szycik Zaleski also held the burgomaster’s office in 1693 and 1696. See LVIA SA 5324, 22r, 23v. This may have been a nephew, son of brother Stefan, also named Samuel and likewise a burgomaster and royal secretary. A contract registered at LVIA SA 5111, 1271–78 suggests the existence of such a person. The fact that the last two dates do not fit in with the elder Samuel’s elections per revolutionem supports this supposition. But this would mean that the younger Samuel held that high office without first following the usual path of advancement from bencher to annual councillor. LVIA SA 5103, 640r–v; LVIA SA 5107, 46r–v. It is on the basis of this document (LVIA SA 5324) that I have sketched the careers of Szycik Zaleski and Kostrowicki himself in the Wilno magistracy. As we read in Bartłomiej Groicki’s sixteenth-century treatment of Magdeburg law for the Polish context, those elected to the magistracy were to be, among other things, “of fixed abode in the city” (w mies´cie osiedli). See Groicki 1953, 29. LVIA SA 5096, 182r–184r; Frick 2008, 514–16; BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 93r. Jan’s patronymic registered in the first source is my sole evidence for the father’s first name. A deed of 1666 locates a certain house between that of Orthodox burgomaster Prokop Dorofiewicz and the recently deceased Filipowicz. LVIA SA 5103, 227r–228r. The survey of 1636 tells us that Paweł Dorofiewicz lived at Subocz Street 79.10. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 96v. Prokop was the oldest son. His mother’s will of 1651—the one witnessed by merchant Piotr Iwanowicz—made Prokop the executor and the first heir. Prokop had already invested his own money in repairs to the family house. LVIA SA 5333, 254–257v. By 1645 the owner of the house at 77.08 was a certain Szymon Filipowicz, no doubt the father of Samuel. ML 114 (RGADA 389.114), 798r; Paknys 2006, 204. LVIA SA 5334, 58r–62r; Frick 2008, 549–53. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 42r, 43r; Paknys 2006, 131, 133, 238, 239. Siemaszkówna’s protestation is recorded at LVIA SA 5105, 615r–v; Frick 2008, 115–16. See Kulesza-Woroniecka 2002, 31–33. And not just in Poland-Lithuania. Divorce in the modern sense (with the right to remarry) was divortium a vinculo matrimonii, but the word divortium (and its equivalents in the national languages) was often used to refer to either an annulment or a separation. See Phillips 1988, 13–15; 1991, 2. LVIA SA 5108, 220r–221v; Frick 2008, 116–17. A title in partibus named for a city in northwestern African Caesarea: this was the Roman Catholic bishop of Belarus, a suffragan, or assistant, of the bishop of Wilno. In 1672, Mikołaj Słupski held

notes to pages 236–249

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

461

the office. See his name recorded as an official in the baptismal record of the parish Church of St. John, LVIA 604.19.95, 441r. Even in Protestant lands, divorce on account of spousal cruelty or incompatibility would not become acceptable until the eighteenth century. See Watt 1992, 219–60; Monter 1980, 195–96. LVIA 1135.4.472, 102v; LMAB F43-20743, 5r. LVIA 604.19.95, 426r–v, 182v; LVIA 604.19.96, 71r. LVIA SA 5112, 143r. Kaczmarczyk and Les´nodorski 1966, 376. The complaint (with inventory) is registered at LVIA SA 5099, 133r–135r; Frick 2008, 196–99. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k., Nr. 104, 94r. The inventory is recorded at LVIA SA 5115, 262r–280v; Frick 2008, 201–12. Her testament is recorded at LVIA SA 5334, 312r–314r. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 36r; Paknys 2006, 122, 232. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 94v; Paknys 2006, 202, 283. LVIA SA 5118, 52r–v. LVIA SA 5324, 21r, 21v, 22r, 22v. See the posthumous inventory of his estate at LVIA SA 5116, 542r–555v. LVIA SA 5333, 378r–v; Frick 2008, 519–20. LVIA SA 5104, 511v–513v; Frick 2008, 520–22. LVIA SA 5107, 142r–143r; Frick 2008, 523. LVIA SA 5107, 140r–141v. Recorded at LVIA SA 5105, 358r–v; Frick 2008, 524–25. Recorded at LVIA SA 5105, 459r–460r; Frick 2008, 525–26. LVIA SA 5104, 377r–378r; Frick 2008, 513–14. LVIA SA 5107, 72v–73r. LVIA SA 5108, 349r–350r; Frick 2008, 527–28. See Levin 1989, 108–12. The protestation is recorded at RGADA 1603.12.14, 569–71; Meilus 2011, 491–92. The protestations and reprotestations, together with the recording of the deceased father’s inventory of goods, would be written into the acts over the next months, until 6 May 1661. See further RGADA 1603.12.14, 571–73, 574, 577–83, 584–85, 588–89; Meilus 2011, 492–94, 494, 497–501, 502, 504–5. It seems that the children had moved in with the couple. On 21 March, Samuel brought another protestation against his stepmother, claiming that “she had driven me away from home in the evening, saying ‘if you are going to be a spy here in my house, it is better you go away.’” See RGADA 1603.12.14, 574; Meilus 2011, 495. The stepmother’s house was in the neighborhood (“on Subocz Street, next to the gate”). See RGADA 1603.12.14, 578; Meilus 2011, 497. Bardach 1970, 293. Akta 1915, 34, 77–78, 86–87. The “clandestine marriages” and “private contracts” noted by Laurence Stone (1992) for England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and the “atypical families” described by Dalia Marcinkevicˇiene· [Leinarte·] (1999, with substantial summary in English) for late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Lithuania suggest that the picture remained far from uniform from one society to the next.

Chapter 10 1. On the guilds of Lwów, see Charewiczowa 1929; Kapral' 2003, 113–23, pp. 119–20 for long lists of guilds from which Ruthenians were excluded. 2. Main sources for this chapter are the editions of guild statutes collected in AVAK, volumes 9 and 10, and Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska's two-volume edition

462

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

notes to pages 250–258

of the acta of the Wilno guilds has long been a bibliographic rarity; volume 1 appeared in print on the very eve of World War II, and volume 2 was never produced in full. The two volumes have now been reissued in a photographic reprint with a new introduction and index by Jan Jurkiewicz in Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 2006. Page references are the same in both editions. On the guilds of Wilno (and specifically ethnoconfessional relations in them), see Chodynicki 1925; Łowmian ´ ska 1930; and Morzy 1959, especially pp. 44–48. On the procedures surrounding the election of annual elders, see Jurkiewicz 2007. On the individual guilds and industries, see Laucevicˇius and Vitkauskiene˙ 2001 and Lepszy 1933 (goldsmiths); Makowska-Gulbinowa 1924 (weavers); Łowmian ´ ski 1924 (paper mills); Brensztejn 1923 and Klimka and Ragauskas 2001 (clockmakers); Micelmacheris 1956, Petrauskiene· 1973 and 1976, and Bogušis 1976 (doctors); Bu¯tenas 1966 (apothecaries); Doubek 1929, Łowmian ´ ska 1929a, and Indriulaityte· 1996 (pewterers); Doubek 1930 (bell founders); Kowalenko 1925–1926, 1927, Kiaupa and Kiaupiene· 1992, Jovaiša 1995, Kiaupiene· 2003, and Łowmian ´ ska 2003 (merchants); Samalavicˇius 1990 (fishermen); Samalavicˇius 1993 (sawyers); Smalavicˇius 1970 (builders); Meilus 2007 (raftsmen). Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:382; AVAK, 8:144. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:420. On the establishment of trade monopolies in the Wilno guilds and competition with Jews and nonguild artisans, see Morzy 1959, 18–22, 80–87. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:442. Ibid., 1:186. Ibid., 1:250. Ibid., 1:294. Ibid., 1:318. Ibid., 1:9. Ibid., 2:46. For a study of the problem of illicit artisans’ work in early modern Lübeck, see Hoffmann 2007. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:271. Cf. the articles of the coopers’ guild enacted a few months later on 28 May 1664 for an echo of this language, ibid., 1:290. Ibid., 1:275. Ibid., 1:192. AVAK, 29:28. Kapral' 2003, 222. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:265. LVIA SA 5337, 407r–v; Frick 2008, 308–9. In general, on Jewish guild statutes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Poland-Lithuania, see Wischnitzer 1928. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:319; AVAK, 28:412. AVAK, 29:37–38. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:308 (emphasis added). Ibid., 1:401–2, 404–5. Ibid., 1:300–301. On the printing press in Lubcz of Piotr Blastus Kmita (active 1612–1629/31[?] and son Jan Daniel Kmita (active 1630[?]–1646[?]), see Kawecka-Gryczowa 1959, 127–40. See Frick 1995, 57–58, 280; Kawecka-Gryczowa 1959, 58–65; Jaroszewicz-Pieresławcew 2003, 100–106. LVIA 1008.1.42, 9r, 9v, 10r, 11r, 96r. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:158–59. Ibid., 1:432 (emphasis added). Ibid., 1:454.

notes to pages 258–267

463

33. The literature on the Confederation of Warsaw and on the theory and practice of religious toleration in Poland-Lithuania is large. Among the more important studies, with further bibliography, are Korolko 1974; Ogonowski 1958; Tazbir 1967, 1973; Wisner 1982. 34. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:314–15. 35. Ibid., 1:56–57, 109, 138–39, 279, 374. 36. Ibid., 1:322. 37. On discipline and the call to order in the guilds, see Morzy 1959, 11, 64–71; Jurkiewicz 2007, 157– 62, 167–70. 38. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:171–72. 39. Ibid., 1:42, 45. 40. Ibid., 1:74–75. 41. Ibid., 1:80. 42. Ibid., 1:209. 43. Ibid., 1:218. 44. Ibid., 1:223. 45. Ibid., 1:277. 46. Ibid., 1:321. 47. Ibid., 1:335; AVAK, 10:75. 48. Ibid., 1:374, 452–53. 49. Ibid., 1:343–44. 50. Ibid., 1:460. 51. For Tobias Krumbeich, see ibid., 1:443, 449; LVIA 1008.1.42, 266r, 286r, 306r. For Michel Engel, see LVIA 1008.1.42, 258v, 306r. 52. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:268, 288. 53. Ibid., 1:209. 54. Ibid., 1:218. 55. Ibid., 1:123, 211–12, 268–69. The same concern and the same forensic rhetorical formulas came up over and over (I give dates and page numbers, all of which are from Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, volume 1): furriers (1538), 24; weavers (1578), 69–70; weavers (1579), 76; hatmakers (1582), 91; bell founders (1595), 108; masons (1595), 114; goldsmiths (1596), 123; red- and black-leather tanners (1614), 159; haberdashers (1633), 186; salt merchants (1635), 199; cap makers (1636), 211–12; needle makers (1663), 262–63; glaziers (1663), 268–69; locksmiths (1663), 279; coopers (1664), 289; potters (1664), 299; butchers (1665), 318; tailors (1665), 324– 25; morocco tanners (1666), 337; tanners (1672), 375; also in the raftsmen’s brotherhood/guild in 1690, see Meilus 2007, 377. 56. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:70 (emphasis added). 57. On the religious obligations of the guilds, see Morzy 1959, 90–91. 58. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:221. 59. Ibid., 1:223. 60. Ibid., 1:216, 223. 61. Ibid., 1:171–73. 62. Ibid., 1:66. 63. Ibid., 1:94. 64. On the ferment in the guilds in the wake of the Union of Brest, see Morzy 1959, 32–34. 65. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:147–48. 66. Ibid., 1:157. 67. Ibid., 1:160–61. 68. Ibid., 1:147, 150–51, 157, 182. 69. Ibid., 1:224. 70. Ibid., 1:234.

464 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

notes to pages 267–278

Ibid., 1:382. Ibid., 1:174–75; AVAK, 9:20–22. AVAK, 10:389–94; Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:373. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:339. Ibid., 1:138–39. Ibid., 1:158–59. Ibid., 1:173. Ibid., 1:212–13. Ibid., 1:215. Ibid., 1:219. Ibid., 1:267 (emphasis added). Ibid., 1:282. Ibid., 1:291 (emphasis added). Ibid., 1:387. Ibid., 1:451–59. On the paramilitary functions of the guild, see Morzy 1959, 88–90. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1: 443–51; LVIA 1008.1.42, 266r, 286r, 306r. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:427–30; LVIA 604.19.96, 13r; LVIA 1008.1.42, 96v, 116r, 194r, 233r, 250v, 265r, 285r, 305v. See also Laucevicˇius and Vitkauskiene˙ 2001, 196, 292–94. AVAK, 10:373–74. Ibid., 382–85. Ibid., 387–89. Ibid., 514.

Chapter 11 1. The term “constant litigation” is that of Edward Muir (1999, especially pp. 392–400), who has sought to explain the creation of civil society in early modern northern Italian communes. 2. The document is found at LVIA SA 5337, 76r–77r; Frick 2008, 40–41. 3. LVIA SA 5337, 76r; Frick 2008, 40. 4. LVIA SA 5105, 454r; Frick 2008, 131. 5. LVIA SA 5108, 256r; Frick 2008, 102. 6. LVIA SA 5337, 159r; Frick 2008, 361. 7. LVIA SA 5112, 357r; Frick 2008, 532. 8. LVIA SA 5337, 76r; Frick 2008, 40. 9. LVIA SA 5112, 498r; Frick 2008, 256. 10. LVIA SA 5108, 573r; Frick 2008, 112. 11. LVIA SA 5108, 256r; Frick 2008, 103. 12. LVIA SA 5337, 76r; Frick 2008, 40. 13. LVIA SA 5108, 573r; Frick 2008, 112. 14. LVIA SA 5112, 244r; Frick 2008, 199. 15. LVIA SA 5112, 498r; Frick 2008, 256. 16. LVIA SA 5337, 76r; Frick 2008, 41. 17. LVIA SA 5112, 498r–v; Frick 2008, 256. 18. LVIA SA 5112, 325r; Frick 2008, 111. 19. LVIA SA 5333, 314r; Frick 2008, 28. 20. LVIA SA 5096, 624r; Frick 2008, 237–38. 21. LVIA SA 5339, 3r–4r; Frick 2008, 284–85. 22. See examples in NKPP, 3:435–36.

notes to pages 278–286 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

465

LVIA SA 5337, 76v; Frick 2008, 41. LVIA SA 5105, 454r–v; Frick 2008, 131. LVIA SA 5337, 76v; Frick 2008, 41. LVIA SA 5112, 325r; Frick 2008, 111. LVIA SA 5339, 3v; Frick 2008, 285. For accusations of witchcraft, see, for example, LVIA SA 5333, 287r–89r; Frick 2008, 546–48; LVIA SA 5337, 397r–v; Frick 2008, 117–18; LMAB F43-590, 32v, 33v–34r, 36r; Frick 2008, 406–7. For accusations of accusations of witchcraft, see LVIA SA 5112, 244r–v; Frick 2008, 199–200; LMAB F43-590, 32v, 33v–34r, 36r; Frick 2008, 406–7. LVIA SA 5105, 454r–v; Frick 2008, 131. LVIA SA 5337, 293r–v; Frick 2008, 132. LVIA SA 5337, 159r–v; Frick 2008, 361. LMAB F43-590, 61r, 63v; Frick 2008, 429–30. On the odpowiedz´, see Brückner 1990, 28–29; Łozin ´ ski 1957, 46–76; Kaczmarczyk and Les´nodorski 1966, 338, 356. LVIA SA 5112, 244r–v; Frick 2008, 200. LVIA SA 5108, 256r–v; Frick 2008, 103; LVIA SA 5108, 573r–574v; Frick 2008, 113; LVIA SA 5333, 241r–242r; Frick 2008, 175–76. For a study of litigation over honor in early modern Muscovy, see Kollmann 1999, which, in addition to its groundbreaking study of the topic, contains rich bibliographies for Muscovy and the West (excluding Poland-Lithuania). LVIA SA 5339, 111r. LVIA SA 5333, 242r; Frick 2008, 176–77. LVIA SA 5333, 244r–v; Frick 2008, 177. LVIA SA 5324, 17v. LVIA SA 5333, 408r–409r; LVIA SA 5097, 94r–v and passim. On oaths in the Polish-Lithuanian legal system, see Bardach 1964, 348–51; Kaczmarczyk and Les´nodorski 1966, 390, 416, 420, 427; Borowski 1926. LVIA SA 5337, 417r; Frick 2008, 101–2. The ban was frequently ignored. See Teter 2006, 36; Teller 2001, 23. Dubnov 1909, 35. The Hebrew text used the term shammash, or bailiff, and the Hebrew word was left in the Russian translation in Dubnov’s edition. But it may have been the case that the Christian woz´ny (bailiff) or generał (i.e., woz´ny generalny, or chief bailiff) collaborated with his Jewish counterpart in such cases. On Jews and non-Jewish courts, see also Katz 1961, 51–55. About the reverse side of the coin— Jewish attitudes toward the oaths Christians gave them—see Katz 1961, 34–35; 1993, 18–19. Baron 1976, 149. On Jewish oaths before Christian courts in Poland-Lithuania, see Bardach 1964, 351–52. On practices in German lands, see Frankel 1840, pp. 72–73 for the swine’s skin. The foundational Jewish privilege for Poland granted at Kalisz in 1264 called for Jews to be judged and to give their oaths in their synagogue. See Petersen 2003, 26–27; Goldberg 1985, 2–6. Teller (2001, 25) notes on the basis of documents from the Lublin castle court that the Christian bailiff would accompany Jews to the synagogue, where he would witness their taking of the imposed oath before the Torah Scroll. He sees here “a sign of the trust which Jews bestowed upon this [legal] system.” VUB F57-B54-3, 125r–126r; Frick 2008, 312. Cf. the similar formulas for Jewish oaths in Bartłomiej Groicki’s 1559 Polish handbook for Magdeburg law. See Groicki 1953, 60–61, 150–51. See VL, 5:209. LVIA SA 4691, 476r–v; Frick 2008, 313. See also Petersen 2003, 33.

466

notes to pages 286–290

53. Contemporary Christian observers—not averse themselves to recourse to the courts—remarked upon the eagerness with which Jews took each other to court in the Christian forums. For an example from Lublin, see Teller 2001, 25. 54. LVIA SA 5333, 378r; Frick 2008, 519. 55. LVIA SA 5112, 384r. 56. LVIA SA 5107, 50r; Frick 2008, 90. 57. LVIA SA 5333, 482r; Frick 2008, 297. For this case, see Frick 2005b, 19–20. 58. LVIA SA 5337, 407r. For this case, see Frick 2005b, 11–12. 59. See the case of Uniate Wilno councillor Samuel Filipowicz, discussed in Frick 2005a, 45–49. On the knowledge among Jews of the languages of their east European dwelling places, see Altbauer 1972; Fram 1997, 29–30. Jews learned languages not only in the marketplace. Kalik 2001, 265, notes the importance here of the ubiquitous Christian servant sharing the one heated room with Jewish masters, which facilitated the learning of Polish and Ruthenian in Jewish families. 60. LMAB F17-280, 71r. 61. For other cases brought by Jews before the chapter, see LMAB F17-280, 27v, 33v, 94v–95r, 126r; LMAB F43-590, 36v, 37r, 38r–v. For one case from the highly fragmentary extant acta of the Wilno castle court, see LVIA SA 4668, 254r; Frick 2008, 310. 62. LVIA SA 5116, 443r–444r. 63. The case is recorded at LVIA SA 5337, 19r–26r. 64. Cygielman 1997, 69. 65. See Bonfil 1994, 282: “This phenomenon, well-known to sociologists of minorities, is one more aspect of the paradoxical and contradictory nature of the Jewish condition. To obtain true social recognition within one’s group, one had first to obtain a measure of protective recognition from powerful individuals in the very society from which one felt, and was, excluded. In other words, the kind of mediation needed to attain social recognition in a society whose very raison d’être lay in separating out ‘the Other,’ tended to annul that same separatist tendency.” 66. This may have been the Szymon Piotrowicz who, by the 1660s, had become a Wilno city councillor. See, e.g., LVIA SA 5097, 288r. He was Roman Catholic. 67. LVIA SA 5096, 456r–457r. Another text also locates the street “at the rear of St. Kazimierz.” See LVIA SA 5109, 254–56.

Chapter 12 1. Memoirist Jan Władysław Poczobut Odlanicki (1987, 118) put the entry of the troops at this time as well. Vorbek-Lettow (1968, 240) had it in the late afternoon. On occupied Wilno, see Meilus 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2011a, 2011b; Rachuba 1994; Storožev 1895a, 1895b; and Gerasimova 2012. The account I have cited here is preserved in a late copy in the Teki Naruszewicza (late eighteenth-century copies of documents collected by Adam Naruszewicz to be used in work on his History of Poland), BCz IV/148, 459–70; Frick 2008, 326–30. The first part—De Vilnae occupatione narratio a Moscho Facta, Anno 1655, VIII Aug. (A Narration about the Occupation of Wilno, Done by Muscovy, 8 August 1655)—chronicles the taking of the city on 8 August 1655. The second part— the Continuatio oder Ausführlicher Bericht, was bey und nach Einnehmung der Stadt Wilda in den nechst dreyen Tagen, als den IX, X, XI Augusti vorgegangen (Continuation, or A Detailed Report on What Occurred during and after the Taking of the City of Wilno in the Next Three Days, August 9, 10, and 11)—tells the story of the prescribed three days of pillaging. The narrator does not identify the “old gray man.” The copied report clearly stems from a printed contemporary newspaper account. Maciej Vorbek-Lettow inserted a similar but not identical printed newspaper article into his manuscript memoir. See BCz IV/148, 297–300.

notes to pages 290–298

467

2. In general on the laws of pillage in war, see Redlich 1956; Howard and Shulman 1994; Lynn 1993. We find three days of pillage at the end of many battles over cities. Cf. the account of the fall of Constantinople in Runciman 1965, 145–50. Rachuba (1994, 65) and Meilus (2001, 279; 2000, 94) quote an unidentified source that says the looting lasted as long as seventeen days. The source I am using here quite clearly suggests the canonical three days. 3. Kraszewski 1840–1842, 2:50, 135. 4. Meilus 2006, 131, 140. 5. See the will of Jan Baranowski (husband of Justyna Kostromska), a musician in the service of palatine of Wilno Jerzy Karol Hlebowicz, recorded in the acts of the Wilno court of the bench, LVIA SA 5339, 273r–275v; Frick 2008, 414–17. The passage cited is on f. 273v; Frick 2008, 414. 6. See LVIA SA 5099, 246r–247r; LVIA SA 5097, 335r–336v; Frick 2008, 330–33. 7. On Dubowicz’s death, see LVIA SA 5333, 537r; Frick 2008, 557; for his will, see LVIA SA 5334, 16r–19v; Frick 2008, 121–28, and a second copy at LMAB F43-26609. 8. LVIA SA 5334, 137v–140r; Frick 2008, 469–71. 9. Sahanowicz 2003. 10. Moerner 1867, 199–200. 11. Łowmian ´ ska continued her discussion on the topic in highly polemical reviews of the work of Albert Ippel and Franz Doubek. See Karge 1918, 1917; Ippel 1918; Doubek 1929; Łowmian ´ ska 1929a; Doubek 1930; and Łowmian ´ ska 1930. 12. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 83r–90r, 91r–97v. 13. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 160r–163v, 164r–168r, 211r–237r. 14. Karge 1918. It was also published in Karge 1917. 15. Łowmian ´ ska 1929b, 88–89; 2005, 234–35. 16. Łowmian ´ ska 1929b, 91; 2005, 237. 17. There are two extant volumes of records kept by the temporary magistracy from the period of the Muscovite occupation: LVIA SA 5099 and RGADA 1603.12.14, the latter now edited in print as Meilus 2011a. Some isolated documents are to be found in LVIA SA 5097 and LVIA SA 5098. See also Meilus 2005 for a guide to extant sources on wartime Wilno preserved in Moscow’s Russian State Library (Manuscript Department, F. 178.4.6916), and St. Petersburg’s Russian National Library (Manuscript Department, F. 550, B.F. II. 85).These have been published in Meilus 2011b. 18. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 99r–101r. 19. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 141r–142v. 20. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 145r–146r. 21. See the baptismal records at LVIA 606.1.102, 7r, 8r, 13r, 14v, 15r, 16r, 16v. 22. Łowmian ´ ska 1929b; 2005, 235. 23. For the autographs of Baranowicz and Palczewski, see GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 88r. Both signed in fluent German, Baranowicz in a German hand, Palczewski in a Polish hand. Reproduced in Frick 2009, 116 (illus. 3). 24. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 87v. 25. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 84v. 26. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 87v. 27. LVIA SA 5341, 49r–51r. 28. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 92v. See Konrad Parfianowicz’s will at LVIA SA 5334, 542r–546v. The record of the house purchase is at RGADA 1603.12.14, 502–5; Meilus 2011a, 446–48. 29. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 94r. 30. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 92v–93r. For documents placing Iwanowicz in Subocz Street, see RGADA 1603.12.14, 84–86; Meilus 2011a, 182–3; LVIA 458.4.111, 71r–72r. 31. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 93v. 32. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 93r; LVIA SA 5104, 460v–463r. 33. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 92v.

468

notes to pages 298–305

34. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 94v (Michał Sznejder), 84r and 85r (Zacharias and Jakob Sznejder), Iglis (95v), Zeligmacher (95r). On the Sznejders, see Laucevicˇius and Vitkauskiene˙ 2001, 279–80. 35. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 99r–101r. 36. See Clark 2006, 121–22. 37. The will is preserved as an attested and sealed extract from the acta of the Königsberg magistracy at LVIA 610.3.55, 2r–3r; Frick 2008, 274–76. 38. See the inventory of her dowry registered by her mother on 29 December 1667 after the recent bride’s death at LVIA SA 5335, 478r–479r; Frick 2008, 280–81. 39. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 83r–v. 40. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 88v, 93v. 41. LVIA SA 5097, 335r–336v; Frick 2008, 330–33. 42. LVIA SA 5112, 357r–358r; Frick 2008, 532–33. 43. Rudomicz 2002, 94. 44. Kowalenko 1925–1926, 136. 45. LVIA SA 5324, 14r, 25v. 46. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 25v; Paknys 2006, 109–10, 224. 47. An inventory of Bazyli’s estate was conducted on 8 April 1658 in “the Lampartowicz house on Market Square [4.13], in which the aforementioned deceased Lord Korolkiewicz lived.” RGADA 1603.12.14, 213–21; Meilus 2011a, 257–61. For evidence of Fiedor’s presence in occupied Wilno (mostly as a witness to legal documents), see RGADA 1603.12.14, 260–62, 320–21, 325–26, 458– 61, 461–64; Meilus 2011a, 287–89, 327–28, 330–31, 419–21, 412–13. 48. LVIA SA 5339, 273r–275v; Frick 2008, 414–17. 49. RGADA 1603.12.14, 93–94; Meilus 2011a, 187–88. 50. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 37r; Paknys 2006, 124, 233. 51. RGADA 1603.12.14, 3–5; Meilus 2011a, 130–32. 52. LVIA SA 5099, 118r. 53. RGADA 1603.12.14, 165, 166–69; Meilus 2011a, 228–30. 54. The inventory is recorded at LVIA SA 5099, 109r. Kalander’s signature on the loyalty oath is recorded at GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 89r. 55. Bez’s contributions: LVIA 1008.1.42, 92v, 117r, 127r, 142r, 159r, 173v, 194v. On Buchner’s death in the plague of 1657, see RGADA 1603.12.14, 288–89; Meilus 2011a, 306. 56. RGADA 1603.12.14, 163–64; Meilus 2011a, 226–27. For Klet’s signature to the oath, see GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 145r. See Klet’s testament at LVIA SA 5335, 286r–288r; Frick 2008, 352– 55. See the record of the offering to the Wilno Lutheran church for 1640 of “Iackob Gercke, Uhrmacher” at LVIA 1008.1.42, 10r and those of “Jacob Gierkiewicz, Uhrmacher,” in 1662 and 1664 at LVIA 1008.1.42, 57v, 75r. 57. RGADA 1603.12.14, 253–55; Meilus 2011a, 282–83. 58. See Storožev 1895a, 134. 59. Kraszewski 1840–1842, 2:125. 60. Storožev 1895b, 144, 145, 146, 150, 151. 61. LVIA 458.1.15, 15; Meilus 2000, 102. 62. See RGADA 1603.12.14, 518–9; Meilus 2011a, 457. 63. RGADA 1603.12.14, 9, 11, 72–73, 203, 313; Meilus 2011a, 134, 135, 174, 250, 322. 64. On the jus caducum in Polish Magdeburg law, see Kaczmarczyk and Les´nodorski 1966, 301, 309. 65. LVIA SA 5104, 515v–519r; BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 13r; Paknys 2006, 96, 216; BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 7v. 66. Litigation over Gauter’s debts: LVIA SA 5096, 249r–265v, 335r. On Sztrunk, see LVIA SA 5337, 148r–150v; Frick 2008, 59–61; on Lang, LVIA SA 5102, 782r–787r; on Engelbrecht, see LVIA SA 5099, 33r–42v. 67. LVIA SA 5102, 63v–64v; Frick 2008, 64–65; LVIA SA 5104, 515v–519r.

notes to pages 306–312 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94.

95.

96.

469

Rachuba 1989, 39. LVIA SA 5106, 246r. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 86r, 89v. LMAB F40-1157, 184. LVIA SA 5097, 101r–103r; Frick 2008, 23–24. LVIA SA 5097, 108r–109v. LVIA SA 5337, 107r–108r; Frick 2008, 29–32. LVIA 606.1.102, 32r, 32v; 19r, 20v. LVIA 606.1.102, 8r–16r. LVIA SA 5099, 257r–260r. For this later stage in the litigation, see RGADA 1603.12.14, 817–30; Meilus 2011a, 622–26. LVIA SA 5111, 883–84; LVIA SA 5116, 41r–49v; Frick 2008, 534–40. For Trop’s confiscation of his brother-in-law’s property, see LVIA 610.3.56, 1r–3v; Frick 2008, 277–79. Cylich was still alive in August 1656, when his wife Marianna Buchnerówna had her will registered with the Königsberg magistracy. See the copy at LVIA 610.3.55, 2r–3r; Frick 2008, 274–76. Trop’s contributions to Lutheran finances in the second half of the seventeenth century are recorded in LVIA 1008.1.42, 57r, 75r, 96r, 116r, 126r, 141r, 157v, 172v, 193v, 212v, 232v, 249v, 264v, 284v, 305r. For Cylich the Radziwiłł client, see GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 89r, 203r. Meilus 2000, 103. LVIA 1135.4.472, 56r. LVIA SA 5333, 172r–173v; Frick 2008, 242–44. Andrzej and Marcin Kiewlicz were members on the Roman side of the first (1602) sexagintavirate of the Communitas mercatoria. See Kowalenko 1925–1926, 136. Four members of the family went on to hold the offices of town councillor (BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 41v–42r; Paknys 2006, 130, 238; LVIA SA 5333, 252r–v); burgomaster (LVIA SA 5096, 301r–302r; LVIA SA 5324, 14r); and lentwójt (also landwójt or podwójci, a plenipotentiary of the wójt; LVIA SA 5096, 301r–302r). LVIA SA 5108, 530r. LMAB F43-220, 918–22. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 141r–142v. Among those on this list whom I can place in Ruthenian circles are Grzegorz Dziahilewicz, Jan Sielawa, Mikołaj Minkiewicz, Prokop Fiedorowicz, Fiedor Stefanowicz, Doroteja Sien ´ czyłowa, and Roman Kołczanowicz. Most Ruthenians signed their names in Polish, although even in Königsberg a few used Cyrillic. RGADA 1603.12.14, 77; Meilus 2011a, 177. It is recorded at LVIA SA 5099, 132r–v; Frick 2008, 95–97, printed in AVAK, 10:273–74. See Rachuba 1994, 68; Meilus 2000, 99. The palatine’s report to the tsar, which includes the burghers’ petition to him, is printed in Popov 1894, 575–76. There we learn that the plague had broken out on 1 May 1657 and that seventy people had died in Wilno and its suburbs by 14 May. On the topic of “found wealth, hidden in the ground or some other place” (as chapter 9, article 30 of the Third Lithuanian Statute of 1588 had it), see Meilus 2004. RGADA 1603.12.14, 174–75; Meilus 2011a, 234. The “legitimate” (from the point of view of the Polish-Lithuanian authorities) palatine of Wilno since no later than 26 February 1656 was Paweł Jan Sapieha (Rachuba 2004, 195), but he was in no position to lend that sort of help here. LVIA SA 5099, 109r. Other evidence includes an accounting for the renting of individual houses in occupied Wilno that included the names of their absent owners, the names of the renters, and the amount of the rent collected. It is printed in Storožev 1895b. See the signatures of Kalander, Bez, and Buchner to the loyalty oaths at GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 89r, 85v, and 85v. Buchner and Bez appear among the financial supporters of the

470

97.

98.

99.

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106.

107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122.

notes to pages 312–316

Lutheran church of Wilno. LVIA 1008.1.42, 41v; 12r, 42r, 57r, 117r. Paciukiewicz was an “elder of the Congregation of the Assumption at the Church of St. Kazimierz of the Society of Jesus” by October 1649. LMAB F138-1712, 243. Bez was still in Königsberg on 19 August 1656 when he witnessed the will of Maryna Buchnerówna Cylichowa there. See RGADA 1603.12.14, 288–89; Meilus 2011a, 306 for a document that describes Michał Buchner as “having departed this world last year sterilliter [without issue] on account of the plague of the pestilential air.” See Rachuba 1994, 68–69 for the eighteen points the Wilno magistracy sent to the tsar for confirmation on 24 May 1658. For the text of a copy of the instructions, see Kraszewski 1840– 1842, 2:120–32. Lithuanian editors of the text based their somewhat loose translation on the version printed in AVAK: “neleis jokiems žmone˙ms [any people] savavaliouti.” See Baliulis and Meilus 2001, 485– 86. Only Kraszewski (1840–1842, 2:118) got it right. RGADA 1603.12.14, 266–68; Meilus 2011a, 291–92. See RGADA 1603.12.14, 202–5, 438–42; Meilus 2011a, 250–51, 405–8, among other passages. On the refusal of Vilnans to use Muscovite coinage, see also Meilus 2006, 140. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 92v. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 100v. LVIA SA 5324, 20v–22r. See Filipowicz’s signature to the loyalty oath at GStA PK XX HA EM 111k, Nr. 104, 93v. His will was registered twice, at LVIA SA 5334, 58r–62r; Frick 2008, 549–53; and LVIA SA 5099, 459r–462v. He had returned to Wilno in the spring of 1662 to find Ruthenian-speaking “witches” squatting in his house in the Ruthenian neighborhood of Subocz Street. The complaint about the witches is to be found at LVIA SA 5333, 287r–89r; Frick 2008, 546–48. Both documents were printed in older document collections: AVAK, 9:492–96; 10:282–85; and 20, 360–61. LVIA SA 5102, 551r. The order of names in the record of annual councillors and burgomasters for 1652 (LVIA SA 5324, 17v) suggests that Antonowicz (Antoniewicz) was Greek, either Orthodox or Uniate. LVIA SA 5339, 510r–v; Frick 2008, 261–64. RGADA 1603.12.14, 300–301; Meilus 2011a, 314. BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 20r. LMAB F251-122, 1r; LVIA SA 5333, 216r–v; LVIA SA 5097, 63r–64r. LVIA SA 5335, 732v; Frick 2008, 569; LVIA SA 5103, 620r–621r; LVIA SA 5103, 638r–639v. For the attestation of the burial, see LVIA 5105, 560r; Frick 2008, 129. To unravel the family connections, see LVIA SA 5333, 216r–v; LVIA SA 5096, 208r–209r. LVIA SA 5097, 63r–64r. On Omelianowicz, see Laucevicˇius and Vitkauskiene˙ 2001, 252. See also LVIA SA 5104, 592r–593v for the Sznejder family and Omelianowicz’s place in it. See documents from 1660 and 1677 at RGADA 1603.12.14, 502–5; Meilus 2011a, 446–48 and LVIA SA 5109, 196–201. LVIA SA 5103, 620r–621r. LVIA SA 5107, 75r–v. LVIA SA 5103, 635r–636v. For Iwanowiczówna’s will, see LVIA SA 5335, 730r–732v; Frick 2008, 567–69. For Klet’s, see LVIA SA 5335, 286r–288r; Frick 2008, 352–55. LVIA SA 5097, 118r–v, LVIA SA 5107, 73r–v. LVIA SA 5339, 53r–54v. RGADA 1603.12.14, 665–67; Meilus 2011a, 564–65. Waka was a village outside Wilno on the road to Troki. Its populace was heavily Tatar.

notes to pages 316–322

471

123. Kraszewski 1840–1842, 2:132. 124. Rachuba 1994, 66; Meilus 2001, 285–86, 293; Akty 1842, 261. Many (though not all) of those who signed the petition to the tsar in Wilno on 24 April 1658 requesting a reconfirmation of the city’s privileges were Ruthenian. Among those we have met, we find the signatures of Grzegorz Kostrowicki (Cyrillic), Krzysztof Sokołowski, Stefan Kuszelicz (Cyrillic), Michał Kuszelicz, Piotr Szóstak. See Kraszewski 1840–1842, 2:131–32. 125. Smotryc'kyj 1622, 38v; 1987, 501; Frick 2005c, 302. 126. LVIA SA 5112, 140r–142r; Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:42, 45, 75, 80, 209, 321, 335, 364, 374, 420, 440, 452; AVAK, 10: 75, 81, 88–89, 209. 127. Serhii Plokhy (2006, 216–18) notes that in Muscovite usage of the seventeenth century the adjectival form was used as a self-reference, and nouns were used to refer to the “others” (russkie ljudi vs. rusin, ljax, nemec, etc.). Ruthenian/Polish usage mirrored that. 128. LVIA SA 5102, 627v–633r. 129. RGADA 1603.12.14, 560–61; Meilus 2011a, 484–85. 130. On these years in Wilno, see Rachuba 1994, 69–72. 131. LVIA SA 5104, 484r–485r. 132. RGADA 1603.12.14, 648–49; Meilus 2011a, 549–50. 133. Plokhy 2006, 249. 134. See a document from 5 May 1657 at RGADA 1603.12.14, 87–88; Meilus 2011a, 184. 135. RGADA 1602.12.14, 681–82; Meilus 2011a, 576. The document speaks quite clearly about the “regaining” of the Wilno castle, the cessation of hostilities, and the return of the magistracy. According to Rachuba’s sources (Rachuba 1994, 71), the remaining Muscovite force mutinied only the next day, 3 December, and the king entered the city the following day. Perhaps this chronology will need to be revised in light of this document. 136. RGADA 1602.12.14, 610–13; Meilus 2011a, 521–23. 137. RGADA 1602.12.14, 615–18; Meilus 2011a, 525–27; AVAK, 9:183–84, 186–88. 138. RGADA 1602.12.14, 642–45; Meilus 2011a, 545–47.

Chapter 13 1. The document, summarized below, is found at LVIA SA 5102, 169r–172r; Frick 2008, 92–94. It bears the general title “Roboratio ordinationis pauperum,” or “Confirmation of the Paupers’ Regulation.” The text was printed in AVAK, 10:160–66. 2. LVIA SA 5102, 169r. 3. See Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:206. The version from 1745 is to be found at LVIA SA 5128, 1397r–1399r. 4. General introductions to problems and methods and to the current state of scholarship on early modern poor relief are available in von Hippel 1995 and Jütte 1994, which offer help in navigating through the extensive literature. For local studies of the Polish-Lithuanian situation, see, for example, Karpin ´ ski 1983 (on Warsaw) and Kropidłowski 1992 (on Gdan ´ sk). See also the new collections of essays on hospitals, poorhouses, charity, and social welfare in Augustyniak and Karpin ´ ski 1999 and Da˛browska and Kruppé 1998. Among the classics on poor relief in western Europe, I found especially suggestive Tierney 1959 and Pullan 1971, 1976. On early modern Russia, see works by Kaiser (1992–1993, 1997, 1998–1999, 2004). On charity in early modern Augsburg, see Safley 1997. On poor relief in Calvin’s Geneva, see Olson 1989. For a collection of essays focusing on individual west European societies, see Safley 2003. 5. The exceptions are the pages devoted to the hospitals of Wilno in Ragauskas 2002, 332–37; Kurczewski 1912, 352–68; and Łowmian ´ ska 1929b, 56–60; 2005, 202–7.

472

notes to pages 322–329

6. For some information on Jewish poor relief in other Polish-Lithuanian cities, see Cygielman 1997, especially 74–76 and 227–57, and Horn 1998. For what little we know about Tatar poor relief in the old Commonwealth, see Zakrzewski 1999. 7. The reentered document of 1663 called the organization a contubernium, which, along with fraternitas (brotherhood) and societas (society), was a common Latin term for the artisans’ guilds of early modern Poland-Lithuania. 8. See Jütte 1994, 105–25, for an introduction to the history of centralized poor relief in early modern western Europe. On the Venetian poor law of 1529 and possible Lutheran influences upon it, see Pullan 1971, 253–57. 9. On the obligations of burghers to the city of Wilno, see Łowmian ´ ska 1929b, 143–46; 2005, 286–89. 10. Wilno Jesuit Walenty Bartoszewski appended to a collection of Polish hymns that he had dedicated to the Wilno magistracy during the plague a treatise titled “Science against Pestilential Air.” Bartoszewski 1630, E2r–E4v; Frick 2008, 97–100. Among calls for general cleanliness, use of incense to fumigate rooms and clothing, methods for safe recycling of the clothes of plague victims, and “other prescriptions for subtle people” (“drink a spoonful of lemon or musk syrup every morning”) and “medicines for simple people” (“a largish piece of toasted bread with butter, drinking one’s own urine in the morning also helps”), he offered one startling piece of general advice: “Buy up a bunch of old goats, and have them walk around your dwelling, because the stench drives away the [pestilential] air.” 11. LVIA SA 5102, 171v; Frick 2008, 94. 12. LVIA 1008.1.42, 9v. The term Bettler(sche) seems to identify a recognized profession here. Other entries took parallel forms: Andrieß Hoffmann, Balbier (barber-surgeon); Jackob Giebelsche, Burgemeistersche (“burgomaster’s widow”). See LVIA, 1008.1.42, 8r, 10r. 13. LVIA 1008.1.42, 10v. 14. Inventory of Aleksander Juszkiewicz, registered 31 January 1658. See LVIA SA 5099, 158v. 15. Testament of Bartłomiej Jacewicz, registered 31 May 1652, LMAB F43–221, 6r; Frick 2008, 450. It is worth noting that this beggar’s wife (and/or female beggar) had enough money to be in a position to lend some, assuming that Heinrich Juchsche is identical with a certain Pani Hendrychowa Juchowa (“the lady [widow] of Hendrych Juch”), to whom Matys Lipin ´ ski acknowledged a debt of 95 zł as he drew up his last will and testament (in Polish) on 25 November 1639. See LVIA SA 5361, 131r; Frick 2008, 448. 16. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:456–57. The Bonifratelli were also known as the Brothers Hospitallers. Founded by St. John of God (d. 1550), they were recognized as an order of the Catholic Church in 1572. 17. Ibid., 1:111. 18. Ibid., 1:114–15. 19. Ibid., 1:436. The period of “a year and six weeks” was a conventional one frequently encountered in wills as the period a widow was allowed to remain in control of her husband’s estate before the provisions of the will would take full effect. See Karpin ´ ski 1995, 39. 20. In general on the conflict between Church and magistracy in the administration of hospitals, see Litak 1998, 15–16. On the hybrid nature of hospitals in sixteenth-century Venice—part ecclesiastic, part civic foundations—see Pullan 1971, 331–71. 21. Schönflissius 1638a, E2v (emphasis added). 22. Rachuba 1989, 36. 23. On Catholic and Uniate hospitals and poorhouses in Wilno, see Kurczewski 1912, 352–68. For information on such institutions of all confessions, see also Łowmian ´ ska 1929b, 56–60; 2005, 202–7. A document from 20 February 1665 speaks of the “Seniores et provisores Hospitalis Sancti Martini nationis germanicae” (“Seniors and overseers of the Hospital of St. Martin of the German nation”). See LVIA SA 5333, 442r–444r. 24. Ragauskas (2002, 333) has calculated that it “sometimes equaled or even exceeded the budget of the city!”

notes to pages 329–333

473

25. See ibid., 332–36. Fonderflot is on p. 333. A record of his offerings to the Lutheran church in the years 1667–1691 can be found at LVIA 1008.1.42, 96v, 116v, 126v, 141v, 158v, 173v, 194r, 213v, 234v, 250v, 265v, 285r, 305v; and of his widow in 1701 at LVIA 1008.1.19, 8v. 26. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 8r, 10v, 18r–v, 81r; Paknys 2006, 91, 213, 94, 215, 102, 219, 184, 272. Ragauskas 2002, 336–37. 27. On the Wilno Orthodox Brotherhood and its charitable function, see Mironowicz 1999, 82. 28. BUJ B, Slav. F. 12, 78v, 79r–v; Paknys 2006, 180–82, 270–1; BUJ B, Slav. F. 15, 44v–45r. 29. See Kriegseisen 1999, 118. 30. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12., 40v, 41r, 5v; Paknys 2006, 129–30, 237; LVIA 1008.1.17, 8v. 31. LVIA 1008.1.42, 186r–189v, 300r–301v. 32. AVAK, 29:500 (emphasis added). 33. Rachuba 1989, 61. 34. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 53v; Paknys 2006, 146, 248; BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 31r. 35. See Zakrzewski 1999. 36. For example, the survey of 1636 (BUJ B, Slav. F. 12, 58v; Paknys 2006, 152–53, 252) tells us that Jews were living in the Lutheran hospital house on the side street around the corner from the Lutheran church. Similarly, it is entirely possible that Christians were among the neighbors renting dwellings in the hospital houses belonging to the kahal. 37. See, for example, the testament of royal secretary Józef Antoniewicz Proniewski (a Catholic), who in 1680 bequeathed 30 zł to each of five Roman Catholic hospitals but 100 zł in general to “the poor who lie about the streets and beg for money.” LVIA SA 5337, 420r–425r. 38. Schönflissius 1628, D2r. See also Schönflissius’s sermon for Lutheran royal engineer (budowniczy) and master of the Wilno castle (horodniczy) Piotr Nonhart, whom he also praised for his generosity to the Lutheran hospital and to the hospital at St. Peter in the Antokol suburb— “although this was not of his religion.” 1633a, F2r; Frick 2008, 232–33. 39. LMAB F40-1136, 60–61; BN BOZ 803, 29–23. According to Kriegseisen (1999, 121), “the overwhelming majority of inmates of Lithuanian Evangelical-Reformed hospitals in the eighteenth century were women, above all widows.” 40. LMAB F43-527. 41. LMAB F43-527, 34v. “20 October 1646, to Miss Anna Markiewiczówna, of significant parents, father deceased, living in great poverty with her mother, marrying merchant’s servant [blank space for the name], so that she can redeem pawned articles, and for the dowry, and for the wedding party, was given 12 k.” The entry was crossed out and annotated in the margin: “She didn’t marry at this time; nonetheless, the money was given.” 42. Ibid., 17v. 43. Ibid., 23v. The job of the locularius, or łoz∧ewnik/łoz∧ownik, was to set firearms in their gunstocks. 44. Ibid., 29r. 45. Ibid. 46. For example, the grant to “Miss Cecylia Sikutowiczówna from Wilno, who is entering the convent of St. Michael in Wilno, at the recommendation of His Grace, Father Deacon and Mr. Jan Orłowski, an alms of 2 k.” Ibid., 8v. 47. LMAB F43-527, 11r. 48. Ibid., 29r. 49. Ibid., 30r. 50. Ibid., 33v. 51. Ibid., 34r. 52. Ibid., 19v. 53. Ibid., 31v. There seems to have been a shift over time toward grants to “poor noble girls.” In 1652, for example, 8 of 23 entries (or 35%) were of this sort, compared with 17 of 327 over the course of the program (or 5%). 54. Ibid., 32r.

474 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

notes to pages 333–346

Ibid., 29r. Ibid., 11v. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 74r–v, 73r; Paknys 2006, 174, 266, 172, 265; BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, 42r, 41r. See his will, entered 13 February 1632, in LMAB F43–26642, 1r–2r. LMAB F43-527, 15v. Ibid., 11v. For 49.08, see BUJ B, Slav. F. 12, 74v; Paknys 2006, 175, 266; for 49.10, see the legal transaction recording the sale before the chapter court in LMAB F43-218, 379r–381v. LMAB F43-527, 6v, 15v, 9v. The family names appear in all these entries. Ibid., 18v. See the “Register of Poor Old Men [Dziadowie] and Poor Old Women [Baby] in the Hospital of the Roman Holy Trinity Church” for 1674–1675 at LVIA SA 5097, 360r. Łukasz Abłamowicz was annual councillor in 1636 and 1642 and burgomaster only once, in 1647 (LVIA SA 5324, 15v, 16v, 17r), all of which suggests that Lady Abłamowicz might have been a widow for two decades or more by 1674–1675. See the index in Pullan 1971 for references to Venice’s “shamefaced poor.” BUJ B, Slav. F. 12, 2r–v; Paknys 2006, 85, 209. The descriptions of the houses are found at BUJ B, Slav. F. 12, 71r–v; Paknys 2006, 170, 263; BUJ B, Slav. F. 15, 42v. LMAB F43-218, 375r–376r locates Skrocki next door to Kosmowski at St. John Street 44.03. It is recorded at LMAB F43-218, 193r–195r; Frick 2008, 5–6. Their ruling is recorded at LMAB F43-218, 274r–275r; Frick 2008, 7–8. The court’s determination is recorded at LMAB F43-220, 33–37. It is here we learn the names of Kosmowski’s first wife, her father, and Stanisław’s older stepbrothers. BUJ B, Slav. F. 12, 3r; Paknys 2006, 86, 209. See chapter 6, article 1 of the Third Lithuanian Statute in Šamjakin 1989, 224–25, and LohoSobolewski 1937, on the general problem of guardianship in Lithuanian law, p. 21 on this particular issue. LNMB F93-1706, F93-1707. His complaint is recorded at LMAB F43-590, 9r; Frick 2008, 376–77. Her complaint is recorded at LMAB F43-590, 12v; Frick 2008, 377. The document is to be found at LMAB F43-590, 53v–54r; Frick 2008, 377–78. See the will at LMAB F43-221, 134r–135r/Frick 2008, 378–79. LVIA SA 5099, 246r–247r. Ewa’s deed of sale from 1654, which forms the basis of the last part of the story (LMAB F43-221, 132r–133r/Frick 2008, 380–81), tells us that her property was previously the property of Ambroz∧y Jankowski, weaver, who in 1636 owned the house at Skop Street 49.03 (BUJ B, Slav. F. 12, 74r; Paknys 2006, 174, 266). LMAB F43-221, 132r–133r; Frick 2008, 380–81. BUJ B, Slav. F. 12, 73v, 74r; Paknys 2006, 174, 266. On the office of the bailiff, see chapter IV, articles 8–11 of the Third Lithuanian Statute (Šamjakin 1989, 146–49), and Góralski 1988, 224–30. The original, with Kotlik’s signature, is to be found at LMAB F43–26642, 1r–2r; Frick 2008, 384–86. On the Polish-Lithuanian practice of doz∧ywocie, see Bardach 1964, 495–96, and Kaczmarczyk and Les´nodorski 1966, 282. On inheritance between spouses in Magdeburg law in Poland-Lithuania, see Kaczmarczyk and Les´nodorski 1966, 309. The document is recorded at LMAB F43-218, 380r–381v; Frick 2008, 387–89. BUJ B, Slav. F. 12, 74r; Paknys 2006, 174. Recorded at LMAB F43-218, 357r–359v; Frick 2008, 435–38.

notes to pages 346–354

475

88. BUJ B, Slav. F. 12, 74v, 75v, 76r, 77r; Paknys 2006, 175, 267, 177, 267, 178, 268, 178–79, 269. 89. This document, also a deed of property by what turns out to be a single woman, will be the basis of the rest of the story. It is to be found at LMAB F43-220, 489–93; Frick 2008, 439–42. 90. BUJ B, Slav. F. 12, 76v; Paknys 2006, 178, 268. 91. See the deed of sale of the Bernardine Street house of a certain Linczewski to Fakinet dated 14 May 1646 at LMAB F43-220, 249–50. 92. GStA PK XX HA EM 111k., Nr. 104, 87v. 93. See her last will and testament at LMAB F43-223, 118r–119r; Frick 2008, 431–35. 94. BUJ B, Slav. F. 12, 76r; Paknys 2006, 178, 268. 95. On the guardianship of married women, see Loho-Sobolewski 1937, 143–44. He wrote, somewhat contradictorily, “Married women were not subject to guardianship in the strict sense; for them guardianship was the power of their husbands. We were unable to find in Lithuanian legislation and practice that a husband would act as a tutor coniugalis in relation to his wife, which was the case in Crown law.” I do find, at least in the acta of the Wilno magistracy, that a husband was often seen as the “natural guardian” (opiekun przyrodzony) of his wife and would take on the role of her legal curator. See, for example, the 1663 letter of arenda for the Wilno Lesser Bourse (Mała Giełda) in which one of the owners, Regna Migurzanka, wife of Bazyli Fiedorowicz, appeared before the court “with the presence of that same husband as her natural guardian.” LVIA SA 5102, 134r; Frick 2008, 153. 96. He seems not to have been a convert: his name is missing from the rolls of Lutheran offering givers. And yet, in 1647, we find his name next to Lutherans and Calvinists as witness of the testament of a Lutheran woman, Anna Jodkiewiczówna, wife of Hanus Meler, white-leather tanner, who lived just across the little branch of the Wilenka from Szulcówna. LVIA SA 5361, 234r; Frick 2008, 454. 97. A later (probably nineteenth-century) copy of a funeral record for German Catholics at St. Anne’s beginning in 1668 is to be found at LVIA 604.10.2. 98. Pullan 1971, 630–31. 99. Ibid., 638. 100. Pullan 1976, 26 (emphasis added). 101. Ibid., 26, 34, 32. 102. Pullan 1971, 460. 103. In general on the topography of poverty, see Jütte 1994, 58–67. 104. For a topography of the Wilno professions and guilds, see Morzy 1959, 47–48. 105. BUJ, B Slav F. 12, 10r; Paknys 2006, 93, 214. 106. Spaans 2002, 85–86. 107. Hsia 2002, 3–4. 108. See AVAK, 20:358–59. 109. Schönflissius 1628, D2r; Frick 2008, 78. 110. Jesuit Piotr Skarga, a chief architect of the Union of Brest and the Polish-Lithuanian CounterReformation, had founded the Wilno Mons Pietatis in 1579. See Kurczewski 1912, 367. Mateusz Vorbek Lettow (father of Lutheran memoirist and doctor to King Władysław IV) had founded in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century a Mons Pietatis at the local Lutheran church. See Vorbek Lettow 1968, 91–94. Christian-Jewish pawning and borrowing, judging by testaments and inventories, seem to have been most intense among the middle-tier Lutherans of Glass Street who shared the neighborhood with the Jews. Perhaps this fact played a role in the establishment of what was originally a Franciscan institution, the Mons Pietatis, under that name in the local Lutheran church. 111. See especially the first two chapters of Lindenmeyr 1996, 7–47. 112. On this, see Werdt 2000.

476

notes to pages 354–360

113. Horn 1998, 48–42; Cygielman 1997, 74–76, 252–57. 114. On Jewish money lending in competition with the Monti di Pietà in Venice, see Pullan 1971, 431–621. 115. Zakrzewski 1999, 102–5. 116. Cygielman 1997, 69. 117. Bossy 1984, 197. 118. The quote is from the 1680 will of Józef Antoniewicz Proniewski, recorded at LVIA SA 5337, 420r–425r. See also the will of Catholic burgomaster and royal secretary Stefan Karas´ at LVIA SA 5339, 17r–21r; Frick 2008, 215–17.

Chapter 14 1. On Grodzicki, see Drzymała 1948, 1951; Frick 1989, 167–80. 2. Most of the historiography focuses on the Jesuits almost to the exclusion of the other orders. A dissertation by Piotr Stolarski (2008) argues that the mendicant orders, especially the Dominicans, played a quieter but no less crucial role in winning the nobles back to the Roman Catholic Church. 3. See the entry on Sapieha by Henryk Lulewicz in PSB, 35:84–104. 4. On this polemical exchange, see Kosman 1972b, 93–96. 5. Grodzicki 1592, 2r–v. 6. The literature on the history of death is large, beginning with the works of Ariès and Vovelle that focused on France with some glances at England. On the Lutheran reformation of the dead, with discussions of the literature, see Karant-Nunn 1997, 138–89; Koslovsky 2000. On Calvinist Geneva, see Rohner-Baumberger von Rebstein 1975. In general, on the early Protestant rejection of purgatory, see Fleischhack 1969, 116–34. Orthodox polemicists such as Stefan Zyzanij and Melecjusz Smotrycki borrowed from Protestant literature in their attempts to draw lines between their version of the Greek religion and that of the Uniates. The Uniate Smotrycki would offer a discussion of the Orthodox positions, arguing that the Orthodox might not call it purgatory or believe in a purgatorial fire, but they did believe in a third place for the dead and in the efficacy of prayers for their souls. The practice of Orthodox Vilnans would suggest he was right. See the entry for “purgatory” in the index to Frick 2005c for a selection of Smotryc'kyj’s writings on the subject, from both the Orthodox and the Uniate side of the divide. On the doctrine on purgatory in the Orthodox Church after the Council of Florence, see Jugie 1936. 7. On post-Tridentine Catholic teaching and practice on purgatory, see Michel 1936; Piolanti 1953; Fleischhack 1969, 135–55. 8. Grodzicki 1592, 11, 16. 9. Wujek 1579–1580, 2:55. 10. Radziwiłł 1980a, 524; 1980b, 193; Kosman 1978, 120. 11. Ariès (1982, 188–201) devotes some pages to the rhetoric of the early modern will—mostly French and English. Vovelle (1973, 56) notes that for eighteenth-century French practice, there were “almost as many formulas as notaries.” This holds true for my seventeenth-century Wilno corpus if the emphasis is put on the word “formula” and if the varieties are understood to be relatively circumscribed variations on a constant and limited set of themes. 12. For Desaus, see LVIA SA 5337, 107r; Frick 2008, 29; for Atroszkiewicz (Otroszkiewicz), LVIA SA 5335, 80v; Frick 2008, 246; for Otroszkiewiczowa, LVIA SA 5335, 215v; Frick 2008, 248; for Kotlik, LMAB F43–26642, 1r; Frick 2008, 384; for Emplowa, LMAB F43–590, 73v; Frick 2008, 390. 13. Schönflissius 1638a, E3v–E4r; Frick 2008, 74.

notes to pages 360–368 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

477

LVIA SA 5337, 107r; Frick 2008, 29–30. LMAB F43-26642, 1r; Frick 2008, 384. PL, 36:428. PL, 158:741. Among Lutherans: Arent Engelbrecht (Castle Street 2.15, 7 April 1618, LVIA SA 5341, 275v; Frick 2008, 81); Marianna Buchnerówna Frydrychowa Cylichowa (Glass Street 18.08, 19 August 1656, LVIA 610.3.55, 2r; Frick 2008, 274); Anna Jodkiewiczónwa Hanusowa Melerowa (Szerejkiszki, 7 May 1649, LVIA SA 5361, 263v–264r; Frick 2008, 457). Calvinists, in addition to Desaus: Anna Prokopowiczówna Aleksandrowa Czyz∧owa (beyond Troki Gate, 27 November 1652, LVIA SA 5096, 616r; Frick 2008, 355). Roman Catholics, in addition to Kotlik: Marta Janowiczówna Marcinowa Kiewliczowa (Rudniki Street 14.01, 7 July 1634, LVIA SA 5333, 172r; Frick 2008, 242); Andrys Helmer (Skop Street 49.07, 23 June 1648, LMAB F43-220, 504–5; Frick 2008, 396); Gertruda Szulcówna Korneliuszowa Krapoliuszowa (Bernardine Street 52.03, 19 January 1671, LMAB F43-223, 118r; Frick 2008, 431). Orthodox: Katarzyna Kuryłowiczówna Afanasowa Otroszkiewiczowa (18 November 1666, the suburb beyond Sharp Gate, LVIA SA 5335, 215v; Frick 2008, 248); Katarzyna Wasilewska Piotrowiczowa (31 July 1686, suburb beyond Sharp Gate, LVIA SA 5339, 510r–v, LVIA SA 5115, 625r; Frick 2008, 261). Uniates: Afanas Otroszkiewicz (the suburb beyond Sharp Gate, 5 April 1666, LVIA SA 5335, 80v; Frick 2008, 246); Samuel Filipowicz (Subocz Street 79.08, 8 February 1663, LVIA SA 5334, 58v; Frick 2008, 549; LVIA SA 5099, 459r). Schönflissius 1628, D2v; Frick 2008, 78. LVIA SA 5099, 15r–v; Frick 2008, 245. LVIA SA 4209, 32v; Frick 2008, 225–26. LVIA SA 5339, 273v; Frick 2008, 414; LVIA SA 5342, 1338; Frick 2008, 417; LVIA SA 5333, 536v–537r; Frick 2008, 556–57; LVIA SA 5108, 349r; Frick 2008, 527. LVIA SA 5340, 375r; Frick 2008, 358. AVAK, 31:283. Ibid., 318. Ibid., 351–52. Ibid., 486. The will is recorded at LVIA SA 5361, 130r–131r; Frick 2008, 447–49. See the names of the Szwanders (Schweiners) and Meler (Muller) on the rolls of offerings to the Lutheran church in Wilno at LVIA 1008.1.42, 8r, 9v, 11r, 39r, 41r. See his contributions to the local Lutheran church at LVIA 1008.1.42, 11r, 41r and his signature as a church steward at LVIA SA 1008.1.112, 139r. LVIA 1008.1.42, 10v. The will is recorded at LVIA SA 5361, 233r–234v; Frick 2008, 453–55. See his contribution to Lutheran finances for 1652 at LVIA 1008.1.42, 40v. It is recorded at LVIA SA 5361, 251r–v; Frick 2008, 455–56. See Bajer’s contributions to the local Lutheran church over the years from 1640 to 1685 at LVIA 1008.1.42, 8r, 39r, 56v, 73v, 95r, 115r, 125r, 140r, 156v, 171v, 192v, 211v, 231v, 248v. It is recorded at LVIA SA 5361, 263v–264r; Frick 2008, 457–58. LVIA SA 5337, 149r; Frick 2008, 60. LVIA SA 5335, 40v–41r. LVIA SA 5102, 147r–v; LVIA SA 5099, 186r–188v. LVIA SA 5096, 361r; RGADA 1603.12.14, 779–83. LVIA SA 5335, 714v. LVIA SA 5333, 322r; Frick 2008, 292. For the contributions of Gross to the Lutherans in the years 1664–1677, see LVIA 1008.1.42, 75r, 96r, 126r, 141r, 157v, 172v; for Szretter in the years 1662– 1691, 57r, 76r, 97r, 127r, 142r, 158v, 173v, 194v, 213v, 250v, 265v, 285v, 306r, 234v. On Bem the goldsmith, see Laucevicˇius and Vitkauskiene˙ 2001, 187–88. For his presence among the Lutherans, LVIA 1008.1.42, 10r, 40v.

478

notes to pages 368–374

44. For his contributions to the church over the years 1652–1677, see LVIA 1008.1.42, 40v, 57r, 74v, 96r, 115v, 126r, 141r, 157v, 172v. 45. We find Tobias, among others, on the Lutheran rolls for 1640–1652 (LVIA 1008.1.42, 11v, 42r); Gottfriedt in the years 1671–1689 (LVIA 1008.1.42, 125v, 140v, 157v, 172r, 193r, 212r, 232r, 249v, 264v, 284r). Tobias (perhaps incorrectly identified in the Lustration of 1636 as Tomasz) owned the house at German Street 27.09. On this, see Paknys 2006, 151. 46. LVIA SA 5105, 340r–341v. 47. LMAB F43-26642, 2r; Frick 2008, 386; LMAB F43-218, 380r–381v; Frick 2008, 387–89. 48. LMAB F43-218, 422v; Frick 2008, 419. 49. His will is registered at LVIA SA 5333, 248r–249r. 50. LVIA SA 5096, 183r; Frick 2008, 515. 51. LVIA SA 5334, 61r–v. 52. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 89r–v; Paknys 2006, 195, 279. 53. His will is recorded at LVIA SA 5338, 50r–51v. On his conversion, see LVIA SA 5104, 576v–577v. 54. See the genealogical tables in appendix B. Filipowicz’s first wife was Regina Dorofiewiczówna, sister of Marta, who was the wife of Kazimierz Kostrowicki. 55. The will is recorded at LVIA SA 5334, 737r–739r; Frick 2008, 217–19. 56. RGADA 1603.12.14, 461–64; Meilus 2011a, 421–23. 57. LVIA SA 5099, 29v–32r. 58. LVIA SA 5112, 514r–517v. 59. LVIA SA 5335, 116v; Frick 2008, 507. 60. LVIA SA 5335, 119v; Frick 2008, 511. 61. LVIA SA 5096, 435r; Frick 2008, 187. 62. It is recorded at LVIA SA 5102, 545v–551r. 63. Ragauskas 2002, 431. 64. LMAB F138-1712, 361. 65. LVIA SA 5335, 117v; Frick 2008, 509; LVIA SA 5116, 443r–444r. We have a record of a Uniate burial in 1684 for a Jerzy Radkiewicz, perhaps a relative. See LMAB F22-75, 13. 66. Koslofsky 2000, 2. 67. See Karant-Nunn 1997, 146. 68. The quote is from Koslofsky 2000, 81. See also ibid., 107–14 on the growth in importance of the Lutheran funeral sermon. See Karant-Nunn 1997, 155–62, for an effective use of funeral sermons as a source for eliciting Lutheran “deathbed etiquette.” 69. Cf. the usage in Muscovy, Kaiser 1988, 25–26. 70. Cf. the contemporary rituals in Muscovy described in Kaiser 1988, 15–16. On the importance of “the prayers of the Church on earth and the intercession of the saints in heaven” in Byzantine theology, see Meyendorff 1974, 220–21. 71. LVIA SA 5097, 470r; LVIA SA 5111, 38. 72. LIVA 1008.1.42, 76v, 97v, 117r, 127r, 142r, 159r, 173v, 194v, 214r, 235r, 251r, 266r, 286r, 306r (Wolfgang Dittman); 240v, 157r, 172r, 193r, 212r, 232r (David Liedert); 249r, 264r, 284r, 304v (Christoff Liedert). 73. LVIA SA 5115, 279v. 74. LVIA SA 5102, 548v–549r. 75. See Karant-Nunn (1997) on the crucial importance of repentance (Buß) and devotion (Andacht) in Lutheran preparations for death (p. 159) and on the “Lutheran art of dying” (pp. 162–70). 76. Koslofsky 2000, 83–84. 77. A man by that name had been a lay senior of the local Calvinist church in 1614. See Akta 1915, 26. 78. Schönflissius 1638b, C3v–C4v; Frick 2008, 37–39. 79. Cf. Koslofsky 2000, 95: “Attended by the family and strengthened by the clergy, the ailing person sought to die ‘quite gently . . . like a person falling peacefully asleep,’ displaying an untroubled conscience and confessional security.”

notes to pages 375–383 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

479

See Karant-Nunn 1997, 150–52. Ibid., 148. Schönflissius 1646, A1r, 18–19; Frick 2008, 51. Karant-Nunn 1997, 147. Schönflissius 1634, A1r, C2r; Frick 2008, 55–56. The following discussion is based on Schönflissius 1638a, E2r–E3r; Frick 2008, 72–74. The following discussion is based on Schönflissius 1628, D1v–D2v; Frick 2008, 77–78. Sabean 1984, 46. The Calvinist reformation of the dead has drawn less scholarly attention than the Lutheran. It receives some marginal (more precisely—regional) attention in Karant-Nunn 1997. RohnerBaumberger von Rebstein’s 1975 study devoted to funeral practice in Calvinist Geneva remains the only monograph on the topic. See LVIA 606.1.103, 8r for Bizynk, as well as, e.g., 4r, 5r, 6r, 8v. Rohner-Baumberger von Rebstein 1975, 33. See Tereškinas 2005, 197, on “serene death” in seventeenth-century Lithuanian Catholic and Uniate funeral sermons. Karant-Nunn 1997, 187: “Catholic theology was not uniform . . . but the conviction of the multitudes, including many parish priests, was that the dead continued to interact with the living. . . . Lutheran and Calvinist divines, their parishioners’ preferences notwithstanding, took a different view. They made the separation of the dead from the living quite complete.” The ringing of bells by the Uniates and Orthodox of Wilno was no innovation. Cf. contemporary Muscovite practice as described in Kaiser 1988, 12. See Karant-Nunn 1997, 155. Cf. Muscovite practice in Kaiser 1988, 12. On Lutheran practice, see Karant-Nunn 1997, 179; Koslofsky 2000, 95. Karant-Nunn (1997, 171, 179) finds that Lutherans buried without delay, within a day’s time. Burial was also prompt among the Orthodox of Muscovy. See Kaiser 1988, 18–19. Ariès 1982, 399. See Kizik 2001, 190. Schönflissius 1634, A1r, C2r; Frick 2008, 56. Schönflissius 1628, A1r. Schönflissius 1638b, A1r. Schönflissius 1646, A1r. Schönflissius 1633b, A1r. Schönflissius 1638a, A1r, E1v, E3r; Frick 2008, 72, 73. LVIA SA 5337, 148v; Frick 2008, 59. LVIA SA 5337, 107r; Frick 2008, 30. LVIA SA 5096, 616r; Frick 2008, 355–56. LMAB F43-590, 74r; Frick 2008, 390. LVIA SA 5334, 138r; Frick 2008, 469. Koslofsky 2000, 94. LMAB F43-26642, 1r–v; Frick 2008, 384–85. LVIA SA 5105, 358r; Frick 2008, 524. LVIA SA 5340, 202r; Frick 2008, 363. On the avoidance of funereal pomp, see Ariès 1982, 322–24 for France and England; Tereškinas 2005, 214–17 for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. LVIA SA 5111, 1228. LVIA SA 5333, 537r; Frick 2008, 557. LVIA 610.3.103, 2v–3r; Frick 2008, 158. LVIA SA 5334, 16r; Frick 2008, 122. Hoszowski 1928, 275, 276.

480 120. 121. 122. 123.

notes to pages 383–394

The inventory is recorded at LVIA SA 5102, 549r–550r. See Kaiser 1988, 23–29, on the popularity of the number 40 in Orthodox funeral ritual. It is recorded at LVIA SA 5111, 36–38. On the Kulbowicz-Druhowinianka marriage and the tutors named, see LVIA SA 5097, 471r–474r. A certain Maryna Druhowinianka was the wife of Orthodox bencher Paweł Sien ´ czyło (LVIA SA 5099, 326r–329r). Jakub Stefanowicz was the witness of the posthumous inventory of ∧ the estate of Orthodox merchant Grzegorz Sien ´ czyło (LVIA SA 5340, 19r–22r). Józef Z agiewicz was chosen guardian of the estate of Uniate merchant Jan Chalkiewicz (LVIA SA 5115, 152r–156v). 124. Rohner–Baumberger von Rebstein 1975, 30. 125. Łabe˛dzki 1638b, A1r. 126. LVIA SA 5333, 531r–v; Frick 2008, 476. 127. On extramural burial and the divorce between church and cemetery, see Koslofsky 2000, 2–3; Rohner-Baumberger von Rebstein 1975, 28; Karant-Nunn 1997, 178, Ariès 1982, 320. 128. BUJ, B Slav., F. 12, 77v; Paknys 2006, 179–80, 269. 129. Karant-Nunn (1997, 179–80) notes that Lutherans sometimes proceeded directly from the home to the funeral service at the burial site. 130. LNMB F93-1696, 1v. 131. A copy of the protestation is to be found at LNMB F93-1710, 1r–v; Frick 2008, 483. 132. Rohner-Baumberger von Rebstein 1975, 13, 14–16, 29, 48. 133. BOZ 803, 314. 134. AVAK, 29:25. 135. LMAB F40-1136, 116; LNMB F93-1713, 1r. 136. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 78r; Paknys 2006, 180, 270. 137. LMAB F43-223, 118r; Frick 2008, 431. 138. LMAB F43-218, 357r–v; Frick 2008, 436. 139. LMAB F43-220, 505; Frick 2008, 396–97. 140. LVIA SA 5335, 12v; Frick 2008, 183; LVIA SA 5334, 16r; Frick 2008, 122. 141. LVIA SA 5335, 81r; Frick 2008, 246; LVIA SA 5335, 216r; Frick 2008, 249. 142. Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, 1:76. 143. Ibid., 1:172. 144. Ibid., 1:212. 145. Ibid., 1:219. 146. Ibid., 1:375. 147. See the articles for the following (in each instance I give dates of ratification followed by page numbers from Łowmian ´ ski and Łowmian ´ ska 1939, volume 1): hatmakers, etc. (1582, 94); glaziers (1663, 267); coopers (1664, 290); fishermen (1664, 295); wheelwrights (1674, 384); white-leather tanners (1680, 402); masons (1687, 434). 148. LVIA 610.3.103, 3v–4r; Frick 2008, 158–59. 149. See Rohdewald 2005, 289, 328, 329, 330, 337, for the activities of the Orthodox Kossobucki family in Połock. 150. See his testament at LVIA SA 5339, 18v–19r; Frick 2008, 215–16. 151. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 36v; Paknys 2006, 233. 152. LVIA SA 5335, 12r–13v; Frick 2008, 183–84. 153. We have two copies of his will: LVIA SA 5334, 15v–19v; Frick 2008, 121–28 and LMAB F4326609. 154. LMAB F43-218, 357r–v; Frick 2008, 436. 155. The passage of interest in the will is at LVIA SA 5333, 538r–539r; Frick 2008, 558–59. 156. Kowalenko 1925–1926, 136. 157. LVIA SA 5335, 308r–v. 158. LVIA SA 5334, 60r–v; Frick 2008, 552.

notes to pages 395–406

481

159. RGADA 1603.12.14, 502–5. For the signatures on the loyalty oath in Königsberg, see GStA PK XX HA EM 111k., Nr. 104, 92v. 160. LVIA SA 5334, 542r, 545r–v. 161. LVIA SA 5116, 49v; Frick 2008, 540. 162. LVIA SA 5099, 327r–v; Frick 2008, 530. 163. LVIA SA 5333, 320r, 321r–v; Frick 2008, 291–92. 164. LVIA SA 5334, 662r–663v. 165. LVIA SA 5361, 251r–v; Frick 2008, 456. 166. LVIA SA 5105, 11r. 167. For the “Scottish shops” and the Desaus house, see LVIA SA 5097, 102v; Frick 2008, 24. 168. LVIA SA 5335, 286r–287v; Frick 2008, 352–55. 169. Schönflissius 1628, D2r; Frick 2008, 77–78. 170. Koslofsky 2000, 83. 171. LMAB F43-590, 74v; Frick 2008, 391. 172. Niendorf (2006, 154–56; 2007) is particularly good on syncretisms in various “aspects of cultural contact . . . in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.” See Tereškinas 2005, 222–23 on Lutheran-Catholic syncretisms in the Grand Duchy in the “pageantry and show” of funeral processions. 173. AVAK, 31, 185–86. 174. LVIA 610.3.103, 3r; Frick 2008, 158. 175. Kaiser 1988, 26–29. 176. LVIA SA 5335, 216r; Frick 2008, 249. 177. Kaiser 1988, 9. 178. LVIA SA 2, 927v (cited according to Ragauskas 2001a, 50).

Epilogue 1. Pullan 1976, 26 (emphasis added). 2. I draw here on the documents from the Wilno castle court printed in AVAK, volume 28. Manuscript copies of some of the acta from the litigation are to be found at RGADA 1603.5.1154, 1155, and 1156. 3. AVAK, 28:140–41. 4. Ibid., 141–46. 5. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 57v; Paknys 2006, 151, 251. 6. AVAK, 28:146–47. 7. Ibid., 147–49. 8. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 57v; Paknys 2006, 151, 251. 9. AVAK, 28:149–50. 10. Ibid., 150–51. 11. Ibid., 151. 12. Ibid., 151–52. 13. BUJ, B Slav. F. 12, 56v; Paknys 2006, 149, 250. 14. Ibid., 152–53. 15. Ibid., 136–39. 16. It is recorded at LVIA SA 5106, 738r (1461); Frick 2008, 317. 17. See Bonfili’s testament and inventory. LVIA SA 5113, 583r–586r. From 1673 to 1689, Szenmanowiczówna—identified as “Joseph Bonfigly’s wife” (subsequently “widow”)—made regular offerings to the Lutheran church. LVIA 1008.1.42, 141v, 173r, 250r, 264v, 284v. We learn that Szenmanowiczówna was Bonfili’s wife in LVIA 5113, 713r–714r. Szwarc wrote his last will

482

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

notes to pages 407–417

and testament in 1676, asking to be buried “according to the custom of my religion of the Augsburg confession.” LVIA SA 5108, 476r–77v. On Italians in the Wilno magistracy, see Ragauskas 2000. AVAK, 28:42–43. Ibid., 402–3. Augustyniak 2006, 175–79. Note, however, that the attack on the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit and brotherhood school by Jesuit students took place on Easter Saturday and Sunday of 1598 according to the Eastern rite. The twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth of April 1598 are new-calendar dates for the old-calendar holy days for that year of 15–16 April. See Kosman 1978, 89, who does not point out this fact; Augustyniak also seems unaware of it. Augustyniak 2006, 180–81. They are to be found in RGADA 1603.5.1128–1272. Augustyniak 2006, 169, 169, 173–74. Tazbir 2000b, 347–48. See Nirenberg 1998, 8, 9, 245, 32, 210, 229, 127, 30–31. Not all could afford it. Oswald Balzer notes (1889, 331–32) that in 1726 the fee for filing a complaint in court in Lithuania was one zł per sheet of paper, plus other associated fees. My reading of the Wilno court cases suggests that access was easier and cheaper in some of the smaller jurisdictions such as those of the Roman Catholic Chapter and the horodnictwo. For a discussion of the place of litigation over honor in early modern Muscovite society, with extensive literature on Muscovy and western Europe, see Kollmann 1999. This is the way a Christian nonnoble would typically be introduced before the court: “Lord Matys Jodeszko, burgher and maltster of Wilno” (Pan Matys Jodeszko, mieszczanin i słodownik wilen´ski). See LVIA SA 5099, 184r; Frick 2008, 113. On the importance of notarial culture and the habit of continuous litigation for creating social cohesion, see Muir 1999, especially pp. 392–400. See Teller 2001, 28–31; Teter 2006, 33; Kalik 2003, 231–32. Kaplan 2007, 8–9. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 8. See Whaley 1985, 35–36. On Auslauf and for a few other examples, see Kaplan 2007, 161–71. Whaley 1985, 5. Ibid., 207. See Kaplan 2007, 174, and 172–97 for more cases of the (semi-)approved “secret” practice of “tolerated” religion. Ibid., 176. See ibid., 203, and 198–234 for greater detail on simultaneum, parity, and biconfessional cities. Ibid. 2007, 224; 1995, 262. On “two confessions in one city” in the four mentioned cases of the Holy Roman Empire, see Warmbrunn 1983. On Augsburg between the controversy over the calendar and the establishment of parity, see Roeck 1989. François (1991) is particularly good on the “invisible border” separating the Lutherans and Roman Catholics of Augsburg in the period 1648–1806. Kaplan 2007, 225. Ibid., 239–45. Ibid., 223. See Kapral' 2003, 95–157 on the relations of Poles and Ukrainians (i.e., Ruthenians) in early modern Lwów, especially pp. 109, 125–27, 132, 133, 154–55, and 317 on these issues. Ibid., 116. On the social groups of early modern Połock, see Rohdewald 2005, 178–357, and especially, for sake of comparison with Wilno, pp. 259–67 on the guilds, 269–90 on processions, 309–47 on the magistracy, 282–83 on the clandestine practice of Orthodoxy.

notes to pages 417–418

483

47. Ibid., 237. 48. Ibid., 27–28. 49. See Müller 1999. On confessionalization in the three major cities of Royal Prussia, see Müller 1997. 50. The title of a collection of essays edited by Kaspar von Greyerz (2003). For a series of assessments of confessionalization in east-central Europe, see Bahlcke and Strohmeyer 1999. 51. See Zeeden 1965; Rohdewald, Wiederkehr, and Frick 2007, 22–26. 52. See, in particular, Grochowina 2003; Volkland 2003; and Mulsow 2003. 53. LVIA SA 5335, 80v–82v; Frick 2008, 246–48; LVIA SA 5335, 215v–217v; Frick 2008, 248–51.

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Index

Abbreviations: A = Antitrinitarian; C = Calvinist; J = Jewish; L = Lutheran; O = Orthodox; R = Ruthenian (Orthodox or Uniate); T = Tatar (Muslim); P = pagan; RC = Roman Catholic; U = Uniate. (Successive confessions or religions in one entry indicate conversions.) GDL = Grand Duchy of Lithuania pv = by the first marriage; sv = by the second marriage; tv = by the third marriage; qv = by the fourth marriage Women are further identified as “wife of ” ( – owa/ – ina) or “daughter of ” ( – ówna/ – anka) in parentheses immediately following the family name. Unless otherwise noted, persons, places, and subjects are set in Wilno. Abrahimowa [T], 363 Abramowicz, Juda [J, elder], 402, 404 Abramowiczowa, Ewa, 122 Abszamieciewicz, Islam [T], 364 Adalbert (Wojciech), St., 87 Adzikiczowa, Miłos´cia Baranowszczanka Ismailowa [T, wife of the mullah of Gudziany], 364 Afanasowicz, Adam [R?, soap boiler, Glass Street 21.04], 368 Afanasowiczowa (Adamowa, pv), Tymowa (Henrykowa, sv), Małgorzata Kreczmerówna [L, Glass Street 21.04, Glass Street 18.11], 368 Agrippa, Jan, 167 Aldobrandini, Ippolito (Pope Clement VIII), 3 Aleksej Mixajlevicˇ [tsar of Muscovy], 39, 290, 304, 312, 316 Altdorf, 166, 168 Altona, 413 – 14 Alumnat (Catholic seminarium at Bishop Street 43.03), 44 Álvarez, Manuel, 157 . Ambrozejewicz, Wacław [RC, Bernardine Street 53.04], 347 . Ambrozejewiczowa, Zofia. See Stefanowiczowa, Zofia . . Ambrozy the weaver. See Marcinowicz, Ambrozy Ampel (Empel, Hempel), Hans [L, organist, Skop Street 49.06], 182, 200 Amplowa (Hansowa), Anna Rejchowiczówna [L, Skop Street 49.06], 182, 200 Amsterdam, 108, 165, 179 – 80, 413

Andruszkiewicz, Josephus [RC?, treasurer of the beggars’ corporation], 325 Andrzejewicz, Fiedorek [R?, student], 156, 163 Anna [T, RC], 333 Antokol suburb, 12, 49, 200, 331, 351, 355, 364 Antoniowa, Zuzanna Krapoliuszówna [RC, Bernardine Street 52.03], 349 Antonowicz, Jan [R, councillor], 314 Antonowicz, Joachim [RC], 134 Antonowiczowa (Joachimowa), Konstancja Burbianka [RC], 134 apothecaries, 26, 36, 64 Aquapendens, Hieronimus [professor of surgery at the University of Padua], 153 Aranowicz, Kałman [J, needle maker and tinsmith], 255 Archangelsk, 165 Arcimowicz, Paweł [RC, tailor, Skop Street 49.10], 184, 227 – 28 Arcimowicz, Tomasz [RC, Skop Street], 182 Arcimowiczowa, Helena. See Jurewiczowa, Helena Arcimowiczowa (pv), Szczygielska (Jakubowa, sv), Anna Lewoszówna [RC, Skop Street 49.07], 181 – 82 Ariès, Philippe, 379 Augsburg, 77, 178, 414 – 15 Augst, 151 Augustyniak, Urszula, 407 – 9 Auslauf, 413 – 14

508

index

Bader, Thomas I [RC, white-leather tanner], 143, 211 Bader, Thomas II [RC], 143 Baderowa (Thomasowa), Anna Fichtbathin [L], 143, 211 bag makers, 56 Bajer, Adam [L, locksmith, horodnictwo], 367 bakers, 64 bakszta (barbican), 31, 54 – 55, 57 Balaszko, Jan [burgher], 407 Baltzer, Bastian [L, turner], 296 baptisms: godparents from another confession, 125 – 35; practices in confessionally mixed families, 139 – 44 Baranowicz, Michał [C, merchant], 296, 299, 370 Baranowska (Janowa), Justyna Kostromska [RC, Skop Street 49.05, Troki Street 33.02], 185 – 86, 301, 346, 362, 389 Baranowski, Jan [RC, musician, Troki Street 33.02], 186, 301, 362, 389 Baranowski, Wincenty [RC, Troki Street 33.02], 186 barber-surgeons, 32, 36, 125, 144 – 45, 266; 1641 statutes of, 261, 264; exclusion of bath keepers from the guild, 252; predominance of Lutherans among, 249, 264; upkeep of guild alter at the Church of St. John [RC], 264 barbican. See bakszta Barczyn´ski, Józef [RC?, goldsmith, Glass Street], 278 – 79 Bardach, Juliusz, 247 Barszczewski, Kazimierz [RC?, gray- and whiteleather tanners, annual elder], 276 Basel, 108, 151, 165 – 66, 378; funerals in, 388 bath keepers, 252 baths, 70, 203, 206, 209; Jews and Christians in one bath house, 75; Ruthenian preference for private, in-house, 206 Batory, Stefan [king of Poland, grand duke of Lithuania], 79, 81 – 83, 159, 194, 260, 263, 284 Battle of Chocim (1621), 141 Bauhin, Caspar, 150 . Bausin, Elzbieta, 189 Bausin, Zuzanna, 189 beggars, 322; as competitors with barber-surgeons, 253 Begien, Toussen [RC, Bernardine Street 52.03], 300, 348 Begienowa (Toussenowa), Katarzyna Krapoliuszówna [RC, Bernardine Street 52.03], 296, 348 Bekier, Ludwik [C, merchant, Castle Street 1.26], 306, 367 – 68 Bekierowa (Ludwikowa), Anna Desausówna [C, Castle Street 1.26], 306 bell founders: 1595 ban on betraying guild secrets, 259 Belmacewicz, Teodor [RC?, merchant], 286 Bem (Böhm), Job [L, goldsmith, Glass Street 18.11], 129, 368

Bengin(g), Henricus (Henryk) von [RC?, haberdasher elder], 262, 271 Berdówka, 121, 123 Berkinowicz, Jan [RC, burgomaster], 186 Bern: funerals in, 388 Bernardine Gate, 50 Bernardine Street, 25, 50, 59, 180, 200, 351, 368, 387 Bernardines, 2, 7, 47, 50 – 51, 53, 344, 347, 383 – 84, 386, 389, 392, 408; Brotherhood of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin, 393 Bez (Bös), Daniel [L, M.D.], 131, 297 Bez, Zachariasz [L, merchant, Glass Street], 131, 198, 300, 303, 312 Bezowa (Danielowa), Anna Sybylla Zantówna [L], 297 Bezowa, Dorota [L], 131 Białonowicz, Benedykt [captain of His Royal Majesty, Glass Street], 286 Białonowiczowa (Benedyktowa), Marianna Ilisówna [L, Glass Street], 171, 221, 286 Biberach, 414 Biegan´ski, 191 – 92 Bielica, 121, 165 Bielski, Iwan [U, tailor, Calvinist Church Street], 65 Bildziukiewicz, Tomasz [RC, wójt, Market Square 3.01], 28, 176 Bilin´ski, Stefan [RC?, notary of the Wilno council], 177 Biržiška, Vaclovas, 165 Bishop Street, 41 – 42, 44 Bister, Faltin [C?], 296 Bizing (Bizynk), Reinhold [C, postmaster general of the GDL], 195, 378 bloodletters: as competitors with barber-surgeons, 253 Bobcin´, 292, 381 Bohdanowicz, Jan [T, suburb outside Sharp Gate], 277 boilermakers, 45, 54 Bojm, Paweł, [RC, wójt], 134, 231 Bojmowa (Pawłowa), Łucja [RC], 134 Bokszta [RC, priest], 333 Bolestraszycki-S´wie˛topełk, Piotr, 151 Bolestraszycki-S´wie˛topełk, Samuel, 151 Bologna, 152 Bonfili, Józef [RC, councillor], 406 Bonifratelli (Brothers Hospitallers of St. John of God), 2, 326, 392 – 93 bookbinders, 257; 1664 attempt to exclude all but RC members, 256; rules for public behavior, 258 Borastus, Grzegorz [L, Polish minister at the Wilno church], 148 Borecki, Hiob [O, metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus´], 91 Borkowski, Stefan [R?], 209 Bortkiewicz, Józef [RC, general bailiff], 405 Bossy, John, 135

index Brandenburg-Prussia, 298 Braunsberg, 166 . Brazycz, Bazyli [O, Market Square 4.05], 314 . Brazycz, Dmitr [O, Market Square 4.05], 314 . Brazycz, Tomasz [O?], 304 . Brazyc[z]owa [O?, widow of councillor, Kazimierz Alley 74.03], 57 Brentell, Joannes [RC, royal cannon founder, Castle Street 1.37], 63 Brentellowa (Joannesowa), Cecylia Jabłkówna [RC, Castle Street 1.37], 63 Brest: Jewish community, 37 Bricked Bridge, 42, 380, 388, 403, 405; crossing tax as income for hospital at Church of the Holy Trinity [RC], 328 – 29 Bruno, Chrystian [L, German minister at the Wilno church], 148 – 49 Brykman, Samuel [L?, non-guild goldsmith], 107 Buchner family [L, Glass Street], 212, 299 – 300, 308, 312; as godparents for non-Lutheran babies, 125 – 31 Buchner, Jan [L, merchant, Glass Street], 125 – 35, 198 – 99, 298 – 99, 368; godparent for an illegitimate RC baby, 133; godparent for Jewish convert to the RC Church, 133 – 34; Buchner, Marcin [L, merchant, Glass Street 18.08], 125, 196 – 98, 299, 312 Buchner, Michał [L, spice merchant, Glass Street 18.08], 196, 198, 295, 299, 303, 312 Buchnerowa (Janowa), Katarzyna Rejterówna [L, Glass Street], 126, 131 – 32, 198 Buchnerowa (Marcinowa), Regina Stegierówna [L, Glass Street], 125 – 26, 130, 134, 196 – 98 Budkiewicz, Franciszek [student at the Jesuit Academy], 161 Budziewicz, Bazyli [RC, weaver, Skop Street 45.12], 183, 334 Budziewicz, Tomasz [RC], 183 Budziewiczowa (Bazylowa), Anna Łomciewiczówna [RC, Skop Street 45.12], 183 Budziewiczowa (Tomaszowa), Maryna Sadykowska [RC], 183 Budziłowski, Łukasz [RC, weaver, Skop Street], 183 bunglers (partacze, non-guild artisans), 16, 73 – 75, 145, 251, 253 – 54, 265 Burakiewicz, Piotr [RC], 183 Burakiewiczowa (Piotrowa), Barbara Budziewiczówna [RC], 183 Burba, Franciszek [RC, burgomaster], 134 Burba family [RC], 32 Burchacka (Tomaszowa), Dorota Pawłówna Rejchowiczówna [L, Szerejkiszki suburb], 201 Burchacki, Tomasz [RC?, Szerejkiszki suburb], 201 Burchardt, Conradt [L, merchant’s apprentice], 196 bursae (Jesuit Academy student lodgings) [RC, Skop Street 45.06, Skop Street 45.07], 48, 156, 162 – 63, 185, 329, 353

509

butchers, 28, 46, 54, 144, 256, 351, 403; 1667 – 1668 complaint that Jewish guilds receive Christian apprentices, 145; 1667 – 1668 litigation between Christians and Jews, 95; as competitors with fishermen, 252; Christian-Jewish guild competition, 74, 252, 255; Jewish and Christian slaughtering of animals removed by decree of the Lithuanian Tribunal beyond the walls at Troki Gate, 96 Calced Carmelites, 383, 392; Brotherhood of the Holy Scapular, 392 calendars, 18; conflicts of, 77 – 92; co-existence of, 64; usage during Muscovite occupation, 198, 304, 307, 395 Calvin, John, 378 Calvinist Agenda (1637 handbook on doctrine and ritual for reformed ministers): guidance on mixed marriages, 210; on avoidance of using nonCalvinist godparents, 117 Calvinist church, 25, 51, 53, 98, 329, 387, 407 – 9 Calvinist Church Street (St. Michael Street), 25, 50 – 54 Calvinists, 1, 2, 6 – 7, 16; ban on sending Calvinist children to non-Calvinist schools, 138; deviations from Swiss practice, 388; offering registers, 13; prohibitions against marriage outside the confession, 173; royal decree removing them beyond the walls in 1640, 50, 95, 414; their liturgical calendar, 97; use of non-Calvinist godparents, in spite of ban, 132 Canons Regular of St. Augustine (Augustinians), 2, 392 Canons Regular of the Lateran Congregation, 2 cap makers and furriers, 28; 1636 statute of, 261 – 63; guild altar at the Bernardine Fathers, 269, 390 cap makers for women, 28 cap makers, coat makers, and stocking makers: 1582 statute for a monoconfessional guild [O], 266 Cardinalia [Castle Street 2.16], 41 Carmelites, 384 Carmelites, Calced, 2, 31, 236, 310, 319, 372, 392 – 93 Carmelites, Discalced, 2, 29, 31, 297, 372, 381 – 83, 389, 392 – 93 carpenters, 32, 36, 54, 272 castle and land courts, 13 castle church, 355 castle court, 29, 40, 48, 53, 83, 109, 193, 341, 363, 387, 401 – 2, 404 – 5, 407 castle court of Nowogródek, 213 castle court of Troki, 387 Castle Gate, 21 – 22, 27, 46 Castle Gate suburbs, 59 castle jurisdiction, 40, 48 Castle Street, 10, 21 – 29, 36, 41 – 42, 44, 46 – 48, 50 – 51, 53, 59, 125, 128, 135, 142, 165, 171, 187 – 96, 200, 203, 212, 335 – 36, 346, 351, 354, 367, 372, 387 – 88, 397

510

index

castles, 27, 41, 46 – 47, 238 Cathedral Church [RC], 21, 27, 46, 199, 337 Cathedral Church of St. John [RC, Warsaw], 121 Cecylia Renata [queen of Poland-Lithuania, wife of Władysław IV], 124 Ceperski, Hoszko [J of Kleck], 214 – 15 chamois tanners. See white-leather tanners Chapel of St. Kazimierz in the Roman Catholic Cathedral Church, 21 Charytonowicz, Aleksander [Chapter jurisdiction], 338 Charytonowowiczowa, Agata. See Kosmowska, Agata cheesemongers, 28 chicken stalls, 28 chief tribunal court, 407 Chmieleski, Marcin [C, professor of physics and ethics at the Wilno Calvinist lyceum], 147 Chociszewski, Tomasz [C, minister in Bielica], 121 Chodkiewicz, Krzysztof [RC, palatine of Wilno, Castle Street 1.34], 23, 66 Chome˛towska, Anna Mikołajówna [RC, Glass Street], 332 Chome˛towski, Mikołaj [RC, cobbler, Glass Street], 332 Chreptowicz, Jerzy [RC, palatine of Nowogródek, Castle Street 2.09, Troki Street 33.01], 43, 46, 119, 188, 194 Chreptowiczowa (Jerzowa), Zuzanna Nonhartówna [L, Castle Street 2.09, Troki Street 33.01], 43, 46, 119, 122, 188, 194 – 95, 375 – 76, 379 . Chrza˛stowski, Andrzej [C, court minister in Birze], 356 – 57 Church (Cathedral) of the Holy Most Pure (Virgin) [O, U], 51, 57, 353, 389; 1582 statute for altar service of the cap makers’, coat makers’, and stocking makers’ guild at, 266; hospital of, 51, 53, 393 – 94, 408 Church of All Saints [RC, Calced Carmelites], 239, 310, 383, 393; Brotherhood of the Scapular of the Most Holy Virgin, 236, 319 Church of SS. Cosmas and Damian [O, remnants at Sawicz/Bakszta Street 70.05], 56 Church of SS. Filip and Jakub [RC, Dominicans, Łukiszki suburb], 46, 194 Church of SS. Francis and Bernard [RC, Bernardines]: Brotherhood of St. Anne the One of Three, 236; conflict with the Calvinists in 1639, 95; monastery, 51 Church of SS. Joseph and Nicodemus [RC, Jesuits, outside Rudniki Gate], 392; hospital of, under partial administration of the magistracy, 328, 393, 396 Church of St. Anne [RC, Bernardines], 51, 271 – 72, 393; glaziers’ guild altar at, 255; hospital at the Brotherhood of St. Martin for German and other foreign Catholics, 54, 182, 328, 350, 389 Church of St. Catherine [RC, Benedictine nuns], 44, 393

Church of St. George [U, in the Rossa suburb], 393; hospital of, 394 Church of St. Gregory [U, in the suburbs], 7 Church of St. Ignatius [RC, Jesuit novitiate], 42, 44, 393; baptismal record, 143; baptismal record for German Catholics, 132 Church of St. John [RC, Jesuit parish church], 21, 23, 26, 34, 41 – 42, 44, 81, 126, 129 – 30, 134, 236, 264, 269, 355, 383 – 84, 387, 392-93; beggars’ guild altar, 324; Corpus Christi Brotherhood at, 185 Church of St. John the Baptist [O, U], 7; 1575 statue for cobblers’ guild service at, 266 Church of St. Kazimierz [RC, Jesuit], 29, 55 – 56, 370, 383, 392 – 93; butchers’ guild altar at, 255; Congregation of the Assumption, 371; marriage record for German Catholics, 211 Church of St. Mary Magdalene [RC], 37, 47, 392; hospital of, 328, 396 Church of St. Michael the Archangel [RC, Bernardines], 7, 48, 50 – 51, 95 Church of St. Nicholas [RC], 10, 24, 371, 393, 402 Church of St. Parasceve [O, U], 24, 54; hospital of, 329 Church of St. Peter [RC, Antokol suburb], 365 – 66, 392; hospital of, 328, 355, 393 Church of St. Peter [U, Transfluvia suburb]: hospital of, 393 Church of St. Stephen [RC, Rudniki suburb], 392 – 93; hospital under partial administration of the magistracy at the Brotherhood of St. Lazarus, 328, 396 – 97 Church of St. Teresa [RC, Discalced Carmelites], 31, 381, 389, 392 – 93 Church of the Augustinians [RC, Canons Regular of the Order of St. Augustine], 55 Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the Sands [RC, Franciscan], 45, 96, 186, 388 – 89, 393 Church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit [O], 33, 50, 55, 81 – 82, 129, 206 – 7, 210, 229, 239, 241 – 42, 245, 266, 314 – 15, 321, 329, 353, 369 – 70, 380 – 83, 389 – 91, 394 – 96, 407; church brotherhood, 32; hospital of, 394; nun’s convent at, 394 Church of the Holy Cross [RC, Bonifratelli], 328, 331 Church of the Holy Spirit [RC, Dominicans], 29, 44, 170, 220, 317, 381, 384, 387 – 88; Brotherhood of the Rosary at, 393; library of, 149 Church of the Holy Trinity [RC], 29, 42, 44, 93, 183, 267, 334, 344, 380, 383, 388, 392 – 93; hospital of, 328, 393, 396 – 97 Church of the Holy Trinity [O, U], 7, 24, 29, 33, 50, 81, 89, 206, 210, 315, 321, 353, 369, 371, 388 – 90, 394 – 95, 418; Brotherhood of the Most Holy Virgin at, 394; hospital of, partially administered by the Brotherhood of the Immaculate Conception, 329, 394, 396 Church of the Lutherans: hospital of, 396 – 97 Church of the Resurrection [O, U], 7, 24; hospital of, 329

index Church of the Savior [O, U, Ruthenian hospital church], 24, 53 – 54, 329, 408 Clay Mountain [Wilia Suburb], 46 Clement VIII [pope]. See Aldobrandini, Ippolito clock-and-watch culture, 98, 118 cloth stalls, 27 clothiers, 250 cobblers, 28, 32, 36, 45, 54, 56, 64, 80, 267, 270, 326, 331, 403; 1575 provisions for parity service to Greek and Roman altars, 265; 1579 statute of, 261; 1629 attempt to force Ruthenians to go only to a Uniate church for sacraments, 267; 1689 statute of, 258, 261; guild altar obligations at the Church of the Holy Spirit [RC, Dominicans] and participation in Corpus Christi processions, 270; statute of, 1552, 260 Cologne, 192 Comenius, John Amos, 159 Communitas mercatoria, 29, 32, 379, 382, 394; first sexagintavirate (1602) of, 203, 206 Confederation of Warsaw (1573), 258 confessionalization, 5, 16, 183, 417 – 18 confiscations of property of the heterodox, 128, 142, 189, 192, 298 consistorial court [R], 230 – 31, 234, 236 consistorial court [RC], 107 – 8, 234, 236, 284 conversion: of Jews to Christianity, 215 – 16; of Jews to Calvinism, 216; of Tatars to Calvinism, 216 coopers, 54, 391; 1664 statutes of, 262 Corpus Christi processions, 92, 251, 256, 270 – 72, 390, 407; and Protestant behavior, 94; guild participation in, 264; Jewish tinsmiths freed from participation in, 93 Corselius [professor of law at the University of Louvain], 152 Council of Constance, 149 courtship, 176 – 80 Cracow, 8, 166, 407 – 8, 414; Kazimierz suburb, Jewish community, 21, 37, 75, 355, 414; Kleparz suburb, 414 curators (legal representatives of women and children), 16, 67 – 68, 223, 235, 245, 274, 286, 288, 310, 315, 320, 343, 359, 365, 367 Cybulski, Samuel [A, RC, tailor], 333 Cylich (Zülich), Frydrych (Friedrich) [L, barbersurgeon, Glass Street], 196 – 97, 299 – 300, 308 Cylichowa (Frydrychowa), Marianna Buchnerówna [L, Glass Street], 134, 196, 299 – 300 Cynaki, Bartłomiej [RC, burgomaster, wójt], 371, 406 Czajkowski, Paweł [RC, gray- and white-leather tanners annual elder], 276 Czaplin´ski, Siemion Jakubowicz [O, merchant, Market Square 4.03], 394 Czech Brethren, Polish Church of, 84 Czuryło, Je˛drzej, 151 . Czyzewski, Piotr, 104 – 5 . Czyzowa (Aleksandrowa), Anna Prokopowiczówna [C, suburb beyond Troki Gate], 380

511

Da˛browska, Katarzyna Tomaszówna [RC], 130 Da˛browska (Tomaszowa), Marta (Marianna) Tarnawska [RC], 130 Da˛browski, Antoni [RC], 130 – 31 Da˛browski, Jerzy [RC], 130 – 31 Da˛browski, Tomasz [RC], 130 Dambrowski, Samuel [L, minister], 121 Dames, Jerzy [L, barber-surgeon, Rudniki Street 15.19, Glass Street 20.05], 129, 361, 368 Danielewicz, Piotr [Crown carver], 124 Danielewicz, Stanisław [RC, goldsmith elder], 272 Danquart (Tanguatt, Danguatt, Dankwart), Balcer [royal musician, Meat Shop Street 19.04], 62 Danquart, Jan [royal musician, Meat Shop Street 19.04], 63 Danquart, Jerzy [Meat Shop Street 19.04], 63 Danzig (Gdan´sk), 14, 46, 417; schools, 146 . Dawidowicz Mojzesz [J, elder], 40, 285 Dawidowicz, NN [T, suburb outside Subocz Gate], 276 – 78 Dawidowicz, Roman [T, suburb outside Subocz Gate], 276 – 78 de Békés, Kornyat Kasper, 194 de Torres, Cosma [papal nuncio to Poland], 1 death, 384; bell ringing, 378, 383; buying of intercession for the dead across the confessions, 397 – 99; C extramural cemetery outside Troki Gate, 386; C attitudes toward, 378; differences in visions of the “good death” across the confessions, 370 – 78; funeral and burial practices across the confessions, 378 – 85; funeral practices in the guilds, 390; funeral sermons, 385; funerals on the third day after, 379, 385; indiscriminate almsgiving among Protestants, 398; L attitudes toward, 372 – 78, 397; places of burial and paths to them for the various confessions, 385 – 91; prayers for souls across lines of religion, 398; Protestant expectations for funerals, 380; RC and R expectations for funerals, 380 – 82; RC and R expectations of prayers of intercession for the dead, 380; RC use of participation of Greek-rite Uniates in funerals, 384; sorokoust, 384, 395; syncretisms across the confessions in funeral practices, 385; testamentary bequests, 391 – 97; violence during public funeral processions, 385 De˛bowska, Anna (Marcinówna) [L], 120 . De˛bowska, Elzbieta [L], 120 De˛bowski, Marcin [L, apothecary], 120 De˛bowski, Marcin [RC, burgomaster], 369 Decampo, 192 Desaus family house [C, Castle Street 1.26], 142, 192, 306, 360, 397, 409 Desaus, Antoni [C, merchant, Castle Street 1.26], 306 Desaus, Jakub I, “the Frenchman” [C, merchant, Castle Street 1.26], 26, 192, 306 Desaus, Jakub II [C, merchant, Castle Street 1.26], 66 – 67, 278 – 79, 306 – 7, 368, 380

512

index

Desaus, Jan [C, merchant, Castle Street 1.26], 142, 368, 306 – 7 Desaus, Mikołaj [C, merchant, Castle Street 1.26], 306 Desausowa (Jakubowa I), Zuzanna Winholdówna [C, Castle Street 1.26], 192 Deschamps, 192 Despauterius, Johannes, 157 Desztrunk or de Sztrunk. See Sztrunk, Jan III and Sztrunk, Krzysztof II Dillingen, 166, 169 Dinkelsbühl, 415 divorce and separation: the doctrine and practices of the various confessions on, 218 dog-catchers, 144 Dohrn-van Rossum, Gerhard, 97 Domicki family [Horse Street 8.10], 302 Dominican Street, 34, 36, 42, 45, 387 Dominicans, 2, 383 – 84, 392 Donat, Jan Krzysztof [L?, confectioner], 278 – 79 Doro(ho)stajski, Władysław [Holy Spirit Street 32.05, Holy Spirit Street 32.06], 43 Dorofiewicz, Bazyli (Wasyli) [O, merchant, Subocz Street 76.01], 203 – 5, 243 Dorofiewicz, Daniel [O, vicar of the monastery of the Church of the Holy Spirit], 203 Dorofiewicz, Paweł [O, merchant, Subocz Street 79.10], 172, 176, 203, 205 Dorofiewicz, Prokop [O, U, burgomaster, Subocz Street 79.10], 9, 172, 177, 203 – 5, 230, 308, 371 Dorofiewiczowa (Prokopowa), Akwilina Stryludzianka [O, Subocz Street 79.10], 172, 176, 203, 229 Dorofiewiczowa (Bazylowa), Regina Szycikówna Zaleska [O, Subocz Street 76.01], 203 Downarowicz, Adam [tailor, Castle Street 2.08], 188 Drucka-Sokolin´ska (Filonowa), Jadwiga Niwierzanka [Glass Street 20.06, Glass Street 20.07], 37 Drucki-Sokolin´ski, Filon [Glass Street 20.06, Glass Street 20.07], 37 drunkenness, 70 – 71, 87 – 88, 104, 222, 226 – 28, 240, 255, 284, 340 Drzewin´ski, Lawrenty/Ławryn (Wawrzyniec) [O, cupbearer of Volhynia, Alleyway Off Subocz Street 77.06], 57 Dubowicz, Aleksy [U, archimandrite of the Holy Trinity monastery], 392 Dubowicz, Ignat [O,U, RC, burgomaster, Along the Wall Going to Horse Street 7.03], 29, 32, 381, 389 Dubowicz, Stefan [O, U, RC, burgomaster, Market Square 3.25], 292, 381, 389, 392 – 93 Ducal Prussia, 292 Dunin´ski [student at the Jesuit Academy], 82 Dutch Muscovy Company, 165 Dydykien, Krzysztof Hendrych, 143 Dydykienowa (Krzysztofowa), Halszka Lebiedziczówna [C], 143, 370 dyers, 36 Dygon´, Tomasz [RC], 407

Dyszkowska (Teodorowa), Maryna Szóstakówna [R], 310 Dyszkowski, Stefan [R, Greek council notary], 310 Dyszkowski, Teodor (Fiedor) [R], 310 Dziahilewicz, Hrehor [R], 320 Dziahilewicz, Stefan Izaak [U, RC? councillor], 93, 206, 315 Dziahilewiczowa (Stefanowa, pv), Kuczarska (Łukaszowa, sv), Anastazja Kuszelanka [R], 315 Dziblewski, Jan [RC, general bailiff, Little Side Street off Skop Street 47.03 and 48.03], 49, 340 – 42 Dziedzin´ska, Anastazja. See Orzeszycow, Anastazja Dziedzin´ski, Stanisław [RC?, Subocz Street 78.06], 71, 240 – 45, 281 Dzienicka, Halszka [RC, Jop Street], 332 Dzienicki [RC, tailor, Jop Street], 332 Dzisna, 391 education: apprenticeships, 144 – 46; C attempts to ban education outside of schools connected with the confession, 138 – 39; literacy, 171 – 72; of Maciej Vorebek-Lettow [L, royal doctor], 146 – 55; religious education in confessionally mixed families, 139 – 44; schools of Wilno, 155 – 60; tensions between students and burghers, 160 – 63; Vilnans’ peregrinations to the schools, 163 – 69 Efrosyna [RC, noble woman converted from “heresy”], 333 Elbing (Elbla˛g), 146 – 47, 166 – 69, 417 Eliaszewicz, Hrehorij [R], 385 Elisabeth Sophie [L, margravine of Brandenburg], 122 Elmer (Helmer), Andrys [RC, lutenist, Skop Street 49.07], 181, 334, 389 . Elzbieta [J, RC], 333 Embden, Andrzej von I [L, merchant, Castle Street 2.14], 124, 331, 355, 361, 377, 379, 397 Embden, Andrzej von II [L, merchant, Castle Street 2.14], 124, 188 embroiderers, 64 Empel (Hempel), Jan [L, organist/organ builder, Skop Street 49.06], 360, 380, 398 Emplowa (Hemplowa Janowa), Anna Rejchowiczówna [L, Skop Street 49.06], 360, 380, 398 Engelbrecht, Arent [L, merchant, Castle Street 2.15], 195 Engelbrecht, Szymon I [L, merchant, Castle Street 2.11], 123, 141, 150, 189 – 90, 305 Engelbrecht, Szymon II [L, merchant, Castle Street 2.11], 124, 179, 189 – 90, 305 Engelbrecht, Wilhelm [L, councillor, Castle Street 2.15], 26, 103, 120, 124, 188 – 89, 195, 305 Engelbrechtowa (Arentowa), Katarzyna Mrzygłódówna [L, Castle Street 2.15], 195 Engelbrechtowa (Szymonowa II, pv), Witmacherowa (Rejnholdowa, sv), Katarzyna Sztrunkówna [L, Castle Street 2.10 and Castle Street 2.11], 122, 142, 179, 189 – 90, 305

index Engelbrechtowa (Szymonowa I), Krystyna Vorbekówna-Lettowówna [L, Castle Street 2.11], 123, 141, 179, 188 – 89 Engelbrechtowa (Wilhelmowa), Zofia Zuchowczanka [L, Castle Street 2.15], 124 Engelbrechtówna (Wilhelmówna), Katarzyna [L, Castle Street 2.15], 120 Engler, Jan [RC, confectioner], 278 Eperyeszowa, Barbara Sztrunkówna [L], 124, 189 Eperyeszowa (Janowa), Urszula Giecówna [L], 189 Eperyeszy, Janusz [L], 189 Eperyeszy, Krzysztof [L, lord high steward of Kowno], 124, 167, 189 Ertsleben, Erasmus [L, locksmith], 197, 296, 300 executioners, 58, 101 – 2, 144, 291 Eymanówna, Anna [RC, convert from “heresy”], 333 Eyrymowicz, Andrzej [castle notary of Wilkomierz], 177 Fajbisiewicz, Fisiel [J], 287 – 88 Fajbisiewiczowa (Fisielowa), Sara Kopylewiczówna [J], 288 Fajtelewicz, Michał [J, elder], 402 Fakinetth, Ludewichtt [RC, painter, Bernardine Street], 348 Ferri, Baldasarre [castrato in the “royal music” of Władysław IV], 20 fiddlers, 45, 54 Fiedorowicz, Andrzej [R, cobbler guild elder], 270 Fiedorowicz [R?, fisherman], 57 Filipowicz, Andrzej [U, Subocz Street 79.08], 204, 369 Filipowicz, Bazyli [U, Subocz Street 79.08], 204 Filipowicz, Bazyli [R, Subocz Street 76.01], 203 Filipowicz, Samuel [U, councillor, Subocz Street 79.08], 115, 204 – 5, 233, 298, 314, 369, 394 Filipowiczowa (Samuelowa), Dorota Dorofiewiczówna [R, Subocz Street 76.01 and Subocz Street 79.08], 204 Filipowiczowa (Bazylowa), Krystyna Dorofiewiczówna [R, Subocz Street 76.01], 203 – 4 Filipowiczowa (Samuelowa), Regina Kostrowicka [R, Subocz Street 79.08], 204, 233, 369 fish market, 22, 26, 28, 54 fishermen, 55, 80, 391 Foltyn [J, Glass Street], 287 Fonbegen, Henryk [L, master of the haberdashers’ guild], 272 Fonderflot, Andrzej [L, merchant, Castle Street 2.11?], 140, 190, 198, 305 Fonderflot, Matiasz [L, merchant, administrator of hospitals for the magistracy], 329 Fonderflot, Piotr [L, merchant], 140, 164, 190, 199, 376 Fonderflot, Zygmunt Andrys [L, merchant, Castle Street 2.11], 190, 305. See Fonderflot, Andrzej? Fonderflotowa (Andrzejowa), Dorota Rejterówna [L], 198

513

Fonderflotowa, Katarzyna. See Giblowa, Katarzyna Fonend, Je˛drzej. See Embden, Andrzej von II Fonend, Marcin [L, horodnictwo], 124, 366 – 67 founders, 36, 125 Franciscans, 2, 384, 392 François, Etienne, 178 Frankfurt am Main, 150 Frankfurt an der Oder, 166 Freiburg, 166 Frezówna, Zofia [RC], 333 Friedrich Wilhelm [C, elector of Brandenburg], 292, 298 Frobenius, Michael [L, teacher at the Wilno Lutheran church school], 147 furriers, 7, 32, 45 – 46, 54, 64, 144, 268, 351; predominance of Ruthenians among, 249 Gajdziewicz, Tomasz [RC?, black- and red-leather tanners], 277 Gauter (Uphogen, Uphagen), Marcin [C, church elder, Castle Street 1.13], 305; admonished for sending his children to Jesuit schools, 138 Gawłowicki, Bartłomiej [RC, notary in the magistracy], 401 – 4 Gawłowicki, Cyprian [RC, secretary of the city scales, Rudniki Street 15.08], 168, 278 Gawłowicki, Dominik [RC, royal secretary], 168 Gawłowicki, Kasper [RC, councillor], 168 Gawłowicki, Marcin [RC, priest], 168 Gawłowicki, Stanisław [RC], 168, 235, 298 Gawłowicki, Szymon [RC, priest], 168 Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin-Dahlem, 293 Gembicki, Piotr, 124 Geneva, 2, 378; funerals in, 388 German Catholics, 348, 350 German Catholic hospital under the title of St. Martin, 396 – 97 German Street, 6, 27, 31, 34 – 42, 62 – 63, 125, 203, 351, 386, 388, 401, 403, 405 – 6 Getkant, Fryderyk (Friedrich), 11 Gibel, Jakub I [L, burgomaster, Castle Street 2.13], 26, 72, 85, 123 – 24, 140 – 41, 164, 166, 178, 188, 190 – 92, 199, 305, 328 – 29, 360, 367, 376, 379 – 80, 385 Gibel, Jakub II [L, Castle Street 2.13], 166 Gibel, Jan [L, Castle Street 2.13], 140, 166, 190 Gibel, Tomasz I [L, councillor], 140 Gibel, Tomasz II [L, Castle Street 2.12], 72, 123 – 24, 140 – 42, 165 – 66, 188, 190 – 91, 305, 367 Giblowa (Tomaszowa I, pv), Fonderflotowa (Piotrowa, sv), Katarzyna Dochnowiczówna [L], 140 Giblowa (Tomaszowa II), Anna Engelbrechtówna [L, Castle Street 2.12], 141 – 42, 190 Giblowa (Jakubowa I), Krystyna Fonderflotówna [L, Castle Street 2.13], 140, 190 Giedroyc´ [RC, Jesuit], 333 . Gieguzyn, 284

514

index

Gierke, Jakub [L, municipal clockmaker, Dominican Street 32.01], 45, 62, 98, 304 Gierkiewicz, Andrzej [RC, wójt, German Street 26.03 or 26.05], 60, 62, 298 Gierlic, Matiasz [C, Literary Alley 56.05], 200 – 201 Gierlicowa, Katarzyna. See Szefoerowa, Katarzyna Giessen, 166 Gilberdt (Gilbort), Robert [C], 296 Gilbort, David [C], 296 Gilbortówna, Regina [C], 296 Gilewicz, Jan [O, merchant, Horse Street 8.02], 237 – 39, 277, 297, 382 Gilewiczowa (Janowa), Anastazja Witkowska [O, Horse Street 8.02], 98, 237 – 39, 372, 382, 399 Ginelewicz, Matyjasz [RC, butcher], 219 Ginelewiczowa (Matyjaszowa), Jagnieszka Safinowska [RC], 219 Gissfelt, 192 Glass Street, 24, 27, 34 – 41, 45, 62 – 3, 116, 125, 129, 134, 196 – 99, 200, 308, 315, 388, 397 glassblowers, 36, 55 glaziers, 32, 391; 1663 statute demanding that Jews cease receiving Christian apprentices, 145; 1663 statute of, 262 – 63; Christian-Jewish guild competition, 74, 254 – 55; their guild altar at the Bernardine Fathers, 269 godparenting across confessional boundaries, 125 – 35; attitude of clergy toward, 132 – 35 Gojcieniszki, 124, 375, 379 Goldberg, Jakub, 215 – 16 goldsmiths, 7, 26, 36, 56, 81, 125, 144, 199, 256, 261, 264 – 66, 269, 315, 390, 403; 1596 statute of, 263; 1627 statute article on good order in the guild, 259 – 60; guild altar at the Church of St. John, 264, 269, 272; predominance of Lutherans among, 249; problem of conflicting calendars among the brethren, 86 Golliusz, Jan [C, royal secretary], 130 Golliuszowa (Janowa), Katarzyna Budrewiczówna [C], 129 – 30 Górnicki, Łukasz [RC, Wilno canon], 169 Gramel, Peter [RC, carpenter], 296 Gramelowa (Peterowa), Anna Krapoliuszówna [RC, Bernardine Street 52.03], 348 Gregory XIII [pope], 44 Grejter, Mateusz [L, goldsmith elder], 262 Grekowicz, Jan [C, goldsmith, Glass Street, Calvinist Church Street], 130 Grekowiczowa, Anna [C], 129 – 31 Grodno, 21; Jewish community of, 38 Grodzicki, Stanisław [RC, Jesuit], 85, 89 – 90, 355, 357 – 58, 390 Groicki, Bartłomiej, 213 Gromacki, Stefan [RC, general bailiff ], 401, 403 Gronostajski [His Royal Majesty’s marzipan maker, lodging at Market Square 3.05], 62

Gronostajski, Jan [general bailiff ], 73, 366, 401, 403–4 Gross, Jerzy [L, merchant, Castle Street 2.05], 274, 276 – 79, 281, 368 . Gruzewski, Jan [RC, rector and professor at the Wilno Jesuit Academy], 147 Grzybowa, Anna Kliczewska [RC], 393 guardians, 16, 349, 354, 366; Jewish use of Christians as, 288, 355, 385 Gudziany, 364 Gurska (Stanisławowa), Katarzyna Lebiedziczówna [C], 143, 370 Gurski, Stanisław, 143 Gutowski, Andrzej [L, teacher at the Wilno church school], 147 haberdashers, 251, 262; guild altar at the Bernardines’ Church of St. Anne, 271 Hamburg, 413 – 14 Hanke, Daniel [L?, merchant, Calvinist Church Street?], 64 Harasymowicz, Jakub [R], 313 Harasymowicz, Je˛drzej [R, saddler], 313 harness makers, 36, 56 Harszewski, Jan [RC], 127 Hartlib, Samuel, 159 Hartman, Daniel [L, Castle Street 1.26], 66–67, 278–79 hat makers, 268, 391 hay sellers, 28 Hecker, Nicholas [RC, Jesuit priest], 333 Heidelberg, 166 Helmer, Andrys. See Elmer, Andrys Heuel, Gotthardt [L, bookbinder], 257 Heylandt, Peter [L, harness maker], 296 Heyn, Hendrych [L?, tailor, Calvinist Church Street], 65 Hlebowicz, Jerzy Karol [RC, palatine of Wilno, German Street 26.14], 14, 36, 44, 123, 133, 186 Hlebowicz, Mikołaj [RC, castellan of Wilno, German Street 26.14], 123 Hlebowiczowa (Jerzowa Karolowa), Katarzyna Radziwiłłówna [C, Troki Street 37.12, German Street 26.14], 43, 123 Hoffman, Andrzej [L, barber-surgeon, Castle Street 2.05], 67, 221 – 23, 367 – 68, 274 – 75, 279 – 80, 299, 373 Hoffmanowa, Maryna. See Majerowa, Maryna Hołowna, Aleksander [Rudniki Street 12.10], 112 . Hołownina (Aleksandrowa), Elzbieta (Halszka) Vonlerówna [L, Rudniki Street 12.10], 112, 329 Holy Roman Empire, 15, 412, 417; biconfessional cities of, 414 Holy Spirit Street, 34, 39 Holy Trinity “Mountain,” 30, 206 Horkun, Tomasz [burgher of Kleck], 214 Horn, Krzysztof [L], 367 horodnictwo, 12, 14 – 15, 48 – 49, 108, 111, 165, 200 – 201, 212, 275, 364 – 67

index horodoniczy, 49, 119, 190 – 91, 361, 364, 367; office held by Protestants, 194 – 95 Horse Market, 314 Horse Street, 30, 32, 55, 59, 205 – 9, 212, 239, 297, 313, 368, 369, 392 Hos´ciło, Łukasz, 112 Hrehorowicz, Omelian [O, church clothier, Alley off Subocz Street 77.04], 369 Hsia, R. Po-Chia, 352 Hubryk, Zachariasz [L, merchant, Dreißigman in the church, Glass Street], 134, 221, 224 Hubrykowa (Zachariaszowa), Anna Ilisówna [L, Glass Street], 224 Huguenots, 415 Ignatius, St., 321 Ihnatowicz, Aleksander [R, U, Market Square 4.05], 98, 276, 279, 315, 317 Ihnatowicz, Krzysztof [R, Subocz Street 76.01], 204 – 5, 315 Ihnatowiczowa (Krzysztofowa), Anastazja Dorofiewiczówna [O, Subocz Street 76.01], 204 – 5 Ihnatowiczowa (Krzysztofowa), Eufrozyna Korzenkowska [R], 315 Ihnatowiczowa (Aleksandrowa), Marianna Safianowiczówna [R, Market Square 4.05], 276, 278 – 79 Ilis (Iglis), Melchior (Malcher) [L, swordsmith, Glass Street 21.03], 131, 171, 221, 198, 298, 368, 396, 398 Ilisowa (Melchiorowa, pv), Peceltowa (Janowa, sv), Katarzyna Szmitówna [L, Glass Street 21.03, 131, 171, 221 – 24, 286, indifferentism, confessional, 212, 418 Ingolstadt, 166, 168 – 69 Inkiewicz, Jerzy [RC, Jesuit, prefect of the Jesuit Academy], 161, 278 invocation of the saints: RC, R, and Protestant doctrine on, 362 ironsmiths, 125 Isfeld, Jakub [C], 123 Isfeld, Justus [C], 191 Iwan [R, furrier], 54 Iwanowicz, Afanas [R, Market Square 4.05], 276 – 79 Iwanowicz, Piotr [O, merchant, Subocz Street 78.03], 205, 212, 229, 297 Iwanowiczowa (Piotrowa), Anastazja Dobrzan´ska [O, Subocz Street 78.03], 229 Izakowicz, Zelman [J, merchant], 13, 286, 410 Izraelewicz, Hirsza [J], 213 – 14 Izraelewicz, Józef [J], 213 – 14 Izraelewicz, Lewek [J, shammash (bailiff )], 40, 285 Izraelewicz, Nochym [J], 213 – 14 Izraelewicz, Samuel [J], 214 Jabłko, Jarosz [RC?, apothecary, Castle Street 1.37], 63, 352 Jablonskis, Konstantinas, 114

515

Jacewicz, Bartłomiej (Bartosz) [RC, horodnictwo], 201 – 2, 365 – 67 Jacewiczowa, Barbara. See Lipin´ski, Barbara Jagiełło (Władysław Jagiełło, Lithuanian: Jogaila) [king of Poland, grand duke of Lithuania], 6, 312 Jaksztela, Jan [RC, bencher, German Street 26.10], 405 Jakubowa, Orszula, 73 . Jakubowicz Mojzesz [J, shammash (bailiff )], 40, 285, 406 Jakubowicz, Mejer [J, glazier?], 255, 287 Jakubowicz, Salomon [J, elder], 40, 285 . Jakubówna, Nastazja [R?, from Rózanka, servant girl in a Jewish household], 73 Jan [RC, tailor], 333 Jan Alfons Lacki [RC, starosta of Samogitia, St. John Street 31.07], 43 Jan Kazimierz [king of Poland, grand duke of Lithuania], 306 – 8, 318 – 19; 1650 reconfirmation of guild articles for haberdashers, 251; 1665 privilege for butchers to sell fish on certain days, 252; 1666 restrictive decrees for the Wilno magistracy, 8 Jankowska (pv), Polikszyna (Aleksandrowa, qv), Maryna Serafimówna [O, Subocz Street], 246 Jasin´ski, Kasper [RC, preacher at the Wilno Cathedral Church, Vicar of S´wir], 336 – 38 Je˛drzejkiewicz, Paweł [RC?, apprentice to goldsmith Michał Sznejder, Glass Street], 298 Jensen, Marcin [L, barber-surgeon], 196 Jerzy [journeyman to swordsmith Melchior Iglis, Glass Street], 298 Jerzyna [(i.e., “George’s wife”), His Royal Majesty’s washerwoman, guest in 1636 at Mill Alley 51.03], 62 Jesuit Academy (Collegium) [Bishop Street 43.05], 23, 44, 48, 81 – 82, 105 – 6, 155 – 56, 159, 168, 170, 172, 185, 187, 287, 358, 387, 393, 404 – 5 Jesuits, 1, 2, 383 – 84, 392 Jewczyc, Heliasz [RC], 214 – 15 Jewczycowa, Katarzyna Izraelewiczówna Heliaszowa [J, RC], 214 – 16 Jewie, 33 Jewish capitation tax, 40, 285 Jewish cemetery, 403 – 7 Jewish Council (Va'ad) of the Chief Lithuanian Communities, 38, 74 – 75, 283; 1628 ruling on Christian servants, 74; 1628 ruling on presence of unaccompanied Jewish women in Christian rooms, 74; 1679 ruling on dwelling in non-Jewish houses, 61 Jewish Council (Va'ad) of the Four Lands, 38, 83 Jewish guilds: 1633 privilege for furriers, haberdashers, and glaziers, 145; their attractiveness to Christian apprentices, 146 Jewish settlement, 37 – 41 Jewish Street, 41, 94, 96, 125, 388, 401, 403, 400 – 407; as lodging for the king’s music, 62 Jewish-Christian cohabitation of houses, 60 – 63

516

index

Jewish-Christian cohabitation of rooms, 73 – 76 Jewłaszewski, Teodor [O, C, vice-judge of the Nowogródek palatinate], 3 – 4 Jews, 1, 2, 6 – 7, 13, 15, 23, 37 – 41, 48, 109; cemetery in the Snipiszki suburb, 304; called to worship by criers, 97; as competitors with fishermen, 252; as competitors with the guilds, 251, 253, 256; Jewish and Christian calendars, 82 – 84; mustering for war against Muscovite invasion, 92; privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis against, 304; violence against, 92 – 95, 255, 400 – 407 Jodelewicz, Mikołaj [RC], 183 Jodelewiczowa (Mikołajowa), Maryna Budziewiczówna [RC], 183 Jodeszko, Matys [R?, maltster], 224 – 26 Jodeszkowa (Matysowa), Anna, 224 – 26 Johann Georg [L, elector of Brandenburg], 122 Jop Street, 25, 39 Józefowicz, Andrzej [RC, elder of the Brotherhood of the Scapular of the Most Holy Virgin at the Calced Carmelites’ Church of All Saints], 319 Józefowicz, Aszor [J, bailiff, elder], 402, 404 Józefowicz, Natan [J], 288 Józefowicz, Ulf [J, needle maker and tinsmith], 255 Juch, Heinrich [L, beggar], 325 Juchsche, Heinrich [L, beggars’ widow], 325 Judycz, Aron [J, German Street 27.08], 402 Judycz, Herz [J, German Street 27.08], 402 Jurewiczowa (pv), Arcimowiczowa (Pawłowa, sv), Helena [RC, Skop Street 49.10], 227 Jurewicz, Marcin [RC], 306 Julianna of Tver [O], 31 Jurgiewicz, Tomasz [RC, priest], 333 Jur(i)ewicz, Je˛drzej (Andrzej) [RC?, horodnictwo], 114, 201, 365 Jus´kiewiczowa, Łucja [RC], 133 justification: Protestant and non-Protestant doctrine on, 361 – 62 Justineapolitanus, Sanctorius [professor of the theory of medicine at the University of Padua], 153 Jütte, Robert, 354 Kaiser, Daniel, 399 Kal, Jan [RC, priest], 134 Kalander, Samuel [L, wine merchant, Glass Street], 197 – 98, 303, 312 Kalanderowa (Samuelowa), Regina Buchnerówna [L, Glass Street], 197 Kalof (Kalau), Valentin (Valtin) [L], 127 Kalofowa, Katarzyna [L?], 127 Kanecki, Piotr [RC, merchant], 317 Kanecki, Zacharjasz [RC, merchant], 317 Kaplan, Benjamin: on tolerance and toleration, 5, 411 – 15 Karaim (Karaites), 6; in Troki, 109 Karant-Nunn, Susan, 375, 399 Karas´, Stefan [RC, burgomaster, Horse Street 8.05], 136, 391

Karcan, Józef [printer], 104 Karej, Symon [L, merchant], 188 Karge, Paul, 293, 295 – 96 Karl X Gustaf [L, king of Sweden], 292 Katerla, Jan [C?], 123 Katerla, Paweł [C?, M.D.], 149 Kazanowska (Adamowa), Elisabeth Słuszczan´ska, 124 Kazanowski, Adam, 124 Kazimierz suburb. See Cracow Keckermann, Bartholomew [C, professor of philosophy and theology at the Danzig gymnasium], 147 Ke˛sztort, Sebastian Sebastianowicz [C, land judge of Samogitia], 194 Ke˛sztortowa (Sebastianowa), Krystyna Nonhartówna [L, C?], 194 Kiczka (Kietzcke), Hanus/Hans white-leather tanner), 48 Kiechel, Samuel [German Lutheran traveler to Wilno], 1 – 3, 22, 24, 36, 187, 351, 418 Kiejdany, 333, 408 Kiersnowski, Teodor [RC, steward of Nowogródek], 216 Kiev, 5, 28, 91, 158, 249, 266 – 67, 321, 353, 394 Kiewlicz, Marcin [RC, councillor], 310 Kiewliczowa (Marcinowa), Marta Janowiczówna [RC], 310 Kirdej [land court notary of Oszmiany, Sawicz/ Bakszta Street 69.17], 56 Kirdej [vice-judge of Oszmiany, Sawicz/Bakszta Street 69.18], 56 Kiszka, Jan [C, RC, palatine of Połock, German Street 26.04], 36 Kiszka, Stanisław Piotrowicz [palatine of Witebsk and starosta of Brasław, German Street 26.04], 37 Kiszka Town House [German Street 26.04], 39, 60 kitaby (Slavic-language—Polish or Belarusan— books for Polish-Lithuanian Tatars written in Arabic letters), 109 Klaßen, Hans [L?, clockmaker], 294 Kleck, 214 – 15 Kleparski, Jan [RC?, horodnictwo], 366 Kleparz suburb. See Cracow Klet, Albertus [L, St. John Street, Glass Street], 303 Klet, Piotr [L, merchant, St. John Street, Glass Street], 303, 315, 397 – 98 Kletowa (Piotrowa), Anna Makarmondówna [L, St. John Street, Glass Street], 303 Klezina, Anastazja [R?], 283 Kliczewska (Mikołajowa), Katarzyna Gawłowicka [RC], 168 Kliczewski, Mikołaj Grzegorzowicz [RC, burgomaster, Subocz Street], 168, 298, 362, 381, 393, 402 – 4 Kliczewski, Wawrzyniec [RC], 393

index Knapin´ska (Stanisławowa, pv), Kuszeliczowa (Michałowa, sv), Anna Zaleska [L], 207 – 8, 300 Knapin´ski, Johan [L], 208 Knapin´ski, Stanisław [RC], 208, 300 Knapin´ski, Tomaß [L], 208 Kocerowa, Anna. See Libertowa, Anna Kochan´ski, Teodor [U, merchant, suburb beyond Sharp Gate], 33, 315 Koczanowski [RC, Jesuit, vicar at the Church of St. John], 333 Kojrelewicz, Józef [RC, merchant, burgomaster and wójt during the Muscovite occupation], 309 – 12 Kołczan(owicz), Roman [R, merchant, Subocz Street 78.06, Subocz Street 76.01], 71, 204 – 5, 243 – 44, 281, Kołczanowicz, Demiter [R, Subocz Street 78.06], 241, 243 Kołczanowiczowa (Romanowa), Domicella Dorofiewiczó wna [R, Subocz Street 76.01], 204 – 5, 243 Kołczanowiczowa (Romanowa), Dorota Minkiewiczówna [R, Subocz Street 78.06], 240 – 41, 243 Kołczanowiczówna, Helena [R, Subocz Street 78.06], 241, 243 Kolczyn´ski, Mateusz [RC, bailiff of the castle court], 404 Kole˛da, Jan [RC?, land court notary, Sawicz/Bakszta Street 69.15], 56 Kolenda, Enoch [RC], 169 Kolenda, Gabriel [U, metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus´], 249, 267 Konarski, Szymon, 192 Kondratowicz [RC?], 287 Konfessionsbildung, 417 Königsberg, 14, 46, 50, 102, 115, 125, 128, 131, 134, 146 – 47, 166 – 69, 196 – 98, 208, 238, 240, 257, 291 – 94, 297 – 300, 302 – 6, 308, 310, 312 – 15, 348, 370, 395 – 96 Kopacz, Piotr, 124 Kornor, Jakub [RC?, horodnictwo], 201 Korolkiewicz, Bazyli [R, councillor], 301 Korolkiewicz, Fiedor [R, member of the first sexagintavirate of the Communitas mercatoria], 301 Korolkiewicz, Maciej [R], 301 Korolkiewicz, Marek [R, councillor], 301 Korolkiewiczowa [R, burgomaster’s widow, Market Square 3.22], 301 Korolkiewiczówna, Maryna, 304 Korona, Piotr [C, Castle Street 1.26], 143 Koronina (Piotrowa, pv), Szretterowa (Janowa, sv), Katarzyna Desausówna [C, Castle Street 1.26], 143, 171, 195 Korzenkowski, Jan [U, councillor], 281 – 82 Koslofsky, Craig M., 371 – 72, 380 Kosmowska (Andrzejowa, pv), Charytonowiczowa (Aleksandrowa, sv), Agata Tomaszewska [RC, St. John Street 44.04], 338 Kosmowska (Andrzejowa), Barbara Skrocka [RC, St. John Street 44.03, St. John Street 44.04], 335–39

517

Kosmowska (Andrzejowa), Regina Kwas´nicka [RC, Castle Street 1.03, St. John Street 44.04], 335 – 39 Kosmowski, Andrzej [RC, tailor, St. John Street 44.04], 335 – 39 Kosmowski, Jakub [RC, St. John Street 44.04], 336, 338 Kosmowski, Jan [RC, St. John Street 44.04], 336, 338 Kosmowski, Stanisław [RC, St. John Street 44.04, Castle Street 1.03], 335 – 39 Kossobucki, Paweł [O, Market Square], 29, 381, 391 – 93, 398 Kostromska (Janowa), Maryna Arcimowiczówna [RC, Skop Street 49.07, Skop Street 49.08], 181 – 84, 334 Kostromska (Janowa, pv), Win´ska (Kazimierzowa, sv), Cecylia Szymakowska [RC, Skop Street 49.08, Skop Street 49.05], 184 – 85, 302, 342, 346 Kostromski, Jan [RC, tailor, Skop Street 49.07, Skop Street 49.08, Skop Street 49.05], 181 – 84, 227, 302, 334, 344, 346, 368, 389 Kostromski, Maciej [RC, Skop Street 49.05], 185 Kostrowicka, Anna [O?], 231 Kostrowicka (Mikołajowa, pv), Krogulicka (Bartłomiejowa, sv), Katarzyna Siemaszkówna [R?, RC], 233 – 37, 248 Kostrowicka (Kazimierzowa), Marta Dorofiewiczówna [R, Subocz Street 76.01], 203, 304 Kostrowicka (Grzegorzowa), Maryna Iwanowiczówna [O, Subocz Street?], 205, 212, 229 – 34, 297, 315 Kostrowicki, Daniel [R, Subocz Street], 204, 233, 297, 369 Kostrowicki, Grzegorz z Kostrowic [O?, U, burgomaster, Subocz Street], 193, 204 – 5, 212, 229 – 34, 297, 303, 305, 315, 369 Kostrowicki, Jan Wasylewicz [R, Alleyway off Subocz Street 77.02 – 77.03], 204, 233, 297, 304, 369 Kostrowicki, Kazimierz [R, merchant, Subocz Street 76.01], 203 – 5, 209, 233, 369 Kostrowicki, Mikołaj [R?, notary of the Communitas mercatoria], 233, 248 Kostrowicki, Wasyli [R, Subocz Street], 233 Koszewska, 115 Kotlik, Adam [RC, wheelwright, Skop Street 49.05], 342 – 46 Kotlik, Paweł [RC, wheelwright, Skop Street 49.05], 183, 334, 342 – 46, 360, 368, 389 ∙ Kotlikowa (Pawłowa), Ewa Zórawska [RC, Skop Street 49.05], 184, 342 – 46, 348 Kowalski, Piotr [horodnictwo], 114 Kowno, 292, 376 Krapoliusz, Korneliusz [RC, organ maker, Bernardine Street 52.03], 296, 346, 348 – 49 Krapoliuszowa (Korneliuszowa), Gertruda Szulcówna [RC, Bernardine Street 52.03], 296, 348 – 50, 389 . Krapoliuszówna, Elzbieta [RC, Bernardine Street 52.03], 296, 348 – 49 Krasnowicki, Zachariusz [C minister, RC], 333

518

index

Krasowska (Stefanowa), Katarzyna Maszan´ska [R?, Horse Street 5.02], 282 Krasowska (Stefanowa), Polonia Siemionówna [R, Horse Street 5.02], 281 Krasowski, Stefan [R, burgomaster, Horse Street 5.02], 281 – 82, 304 Kreczmer family, 368 Krejtner, Jan [L, horodnictwo], 202, 367 Krejtnerowa (Janowa), Regina Szwandrówna [L, horodnictwo], 202, 367 Krogulicka, Katarzyna. See Kostrowicka, Katarzyna Krogulicki, Bartłomiej [RC], 233 – 37 Kronie, 391 Kros´niewicki, Baltazar [C, professor of theology and logic at the Wilno Calvinist lyceum], 147 Krot, Antoni [apothecary, St. Nicholas Street 28.06], 61, 73, 402 . Kroze, 170 Krumbein (Krumbeich), Tobiasz Konrad [L, haberdasher elder], 262, 271 Kryłowicz, Stefan [merchant], 243 Kuczarski, Łukasz [R], 315 Kukowicz, Jan [U, burgomaster, Alley off Subocz Street 75.04], 134, 370 – 71 Kukowiczowa (Janowa), Cecylia [R, Alley off Subocz Street 75.04], 134 Kulbowicz, Michał [RC, merchant], 372, 384 Kulbowiczowa (Michałowa), Anna Druhowinianka [R, U?], 384 Kuncewicz, Jozafat, St. [U], 37 Kunigam, Bazyli Aleksiejewicz [O, Muscovite lieutenant in occupied Wilno], 308 Kupiatycze, 391 Kupicka (Balcerowa), Krystyna Chrzanowska [RC], 183, 334 Kupicki, Balcer [RC, carpenter], 183, 334 Kurowicz, Jan Hyjacynt [U?, Sawicz Street 71.13], 369 Kurowicz, Symon Kazimerz [U?, municipal notary, Sawicz Street 71.13], 369 Kuszelicz, Abram [O, member of the first sexagintavirate of the Communitas mercatoria, Horse Street 8.09], 32, 206, 208 – 9, 369 Kuszelicz, Fiedor [O, merchant, Horse Street 5.14], 206, 313, 369 Kuszelicz, Michał [O, L?, Horse Street 5.14], 206 – 8, 300, 313 Kuszelicz, Stefan [O, U, councillor, Horse Street 5.14], 33, 204 – 9, 243, 304, 313 – 16, 319, 369 Kuszeliczowa (Kuszelina, Fiedorowa), Eudokia Ihnatnowiczówna (O, Horse Street 5.14], 205 – 8, 297, 300, 313, 320, 369 Kuszeliczowa (Michałowa), Eudoksia Kryłowiczówna [O, Horse Street 5.14], 207 Kuszyło. See Kuszelicz Kuz´miczówna, Barbara [RC, from beyond the Wilia River], 332

Kwas´nicka (Piotrowa), Krystyna Wolska [RC, Castle Street 1.03], 335 – 39 Kwas´nicki (Kwasiela, Kwas´niewski), Piotr [RC, haberdasher, Castle Street 1.03], 335 – 39 Łabe˛dzki, Balcer (Baltazar) [C, minister], 120, 141, 164, 257, 385 Lachowice, 3 Lacka (Janowa Alfonsowa), Joanna Talwoszówna [C, RC, Troki Street 37.09, St. John Street 31.07], 211 Lacki, Jan Alfons [RC, starosta of Samogitia, Troki Street 37.09, St. John Street 31.07], 43, 211 Łamanowski, Jerzy Parfianowicz [O, merchant, Market Square 3.13], 315 – 16 land and castle courts, 12, 15, 23, 29, 35, 44, 48, 108, 111, 275, 343 Lang, Jerzy [L, merchant, Glass Street, 18.01], 305 last wills and testaments, rhetoric of, 359 – 64 Łaszcz, Marcin [RC, Jesuit], 87, 90 Łatecki, Andrzej [RC], 333 law of escheat ( jus caducum), 128, 192, 197, 305 – 8 lawyers, 7, 26 Łazarowicz, Lewek [J, elder], 404 Łazarowicz, Piotr [RC], 401 Lebedys, Jurgis, 114 Lebiedzicz, Stefan I [U, burgomaster, Along the Wall Going to Horse Street 7.07], 98, 143, 370 Lebiedzicz, Stefan II (Stefus´) [U, Along the Wall Going to Horse Street 7.07], 143 – 44, 370 Lebiedziczowa (Stefanowa), Marta Paszkiewiczówna [C, Along the Wall Going to Horse Street 7.07], 143, 370 Leiden, 166 – 67, 415 Leipzig, 168 Lenartowicz, Jan [RC?, burgher], 407 Leszczewicz, Jakub [RC, merchant], 68, 223, 274 Leszkiewicz, Kazimierz [RC, merchant, Rudniki Street 12.11], 278 Lewkowicz, Aaron [J, bailiff ], 406 Lewonowicz, Gabriel a.k.a. “Borodawka” (Ruthenian for ‘facial mole’) [RC?, tailor], 303 Lewonowicz, Klemens [RC?, apothecary’s apprentice], 303 Lewonowiczowa (Gabrielowa), Regina S´wienczówna [RC?], 303 Libert, Karol [L: goldsmith, German Street 26.01, 26.09], 35 Libertowa (Karolowa, pv), Kocerowa (Krzysztofowa, sv), Anna Glin´ska [L, German Street 26.01, 26.09], 35 Lida castle court, 111, 292 Lidert, Dawid [L], 199 Lidertowa (Dawidowa, pv), Vonderendzina (Rejnoldowa, sv), Zuzanna Fonderflotówna [L], 198–99 Lipin´ska (Matysowa, pv), Jacewiczowa (Bartłomiejowa, sv), Barbara Szwandrówna [L?, RC?, horodnictwo], 202, 212, 365 – 67

index Lipin´ski, Matys [RC, horodnictwo], 202, 364, 366 literacy, 171 – 72 Literary Alley (“Little Street Heading Toward the [Uniate] Church of St. Iwan [John the Baptist]”), 25, 50 – 54 Lithuanian statute, 47, 73, 338, 343, 348, 401 Lithuanian Tribunal, 21, 27, 39, 46, 111, 191 litigation, 4, 113, 184 – 85, 417; actor sequitur forum rei (the plaintiff goes to the court of the accused), 287; Christians swearing oaths, 285; constant, as a source of community, 410 – 11; Jewish attempts to litigate in Christian courts through the Jewish bailiff, 286; Jewish use of Christian legal representation, 289; Jews before Christian courts, 289; protestations, 275; rhetorical norms of protestations, 274 – 83 Little Street Going from Castle Street to the Royal Mill, (Mill or Orangery Alley), 47 – 48, 62, 201, 280, 335, 346 locksmiths, 36, 403; 1663 ban on betraying guild secrets, 259; statutes from before 1663, 261 Łomciewiczówna, Anna [RC, Skop Street 45.12], 334 loose people, 49 – 50, 160, 311 – 12, 325, 340, 403, 405 Łotoczko Street, 10, 55 – 57 Lower Castle, 10, 21 – 22, 199, 329 Łowmian´ska, Maria, 11, 293 – 96 Lubcz: as a center for publishing Protestant books from Wilno, 257 Lublin, 408 Łukaszewicz, 184 Łukian´ski, Platon [O, vicar of the monastery of the Church of the Holy Spirit], 207 . Łukiszki suburb (Lukiškes), 6, 42, 44, 46, 281 – 82, 375, 388, 414 lute makers/lutenists, 36, 181, 227 Luther, Martin, 1, 88, 131, 174 – 75, 218, 372, 397 Lutheran cemetery, 358, 360, 367, 373, 379 – 80, 386, 388, 397 Lutheran church: hospital of, 396 Lwów (L’viv), 383; Jewish guild monopolies in, 146, 254; monoconfessional guilds of, 249, 416; RC monopoly in magistracy and market, 416 Magdeburg law, 8, 280, 343 Magdeburger, Hanus [L, wine merchant], 295, 396 magistracy, 8, 12 – 13, 15, 23, 29, 32, 35, 39 – 40, 44, 47 – 48, 50, 54, 61, 63, 76, 81 – 82, 108, 111, 143, 187 – 88, 193, 197, 206 – 7, 213, 224, 231, 240, 243, 257, 260, 266, 275, 291, 303 – 4, 308, 313, 315, 325, 379, 403 – 4; 1664 confirmation of articles for fishermen, 251; administration of hospitals, 329; archive, 14 Magyar hat makers, dressmakers, stocking weavers, and clothiers: 1684 attempt to limit guild membership to RC and R, 250 Majer, Jan [C, barber-surgeon, Castle Street 2.05], 67, 120, 373

519

Majerowa (Janowa, pv), Hoffman (Andrzejowa, sv), Maryna [L, Castle Street 2.05], 373 Majerowicz, Lewek [J], 40 Majerówna, Zofia [L, Castle Street 2.05], 120, 379; as an exemplum of the good Lutheran death, 373 – 75 Majus, Jan [L, M.D.], 325, 366 – 67 Makolin´ski, Symon [RC, bird catcher], 332 Malaspina, Germánico [papal nuntio to Poland], 2 Malcewicz, Stanisław [RC, tailor, Skop Street 49.12], 184, 368 maltsters: 1552 statute of, 260 Mamonicz family [O, printers, Market Square], 30 Mansfeld, Jerzy [L], 299 Marburg, 108, 164 – 66 . Marcinowicz, Ambrozy [RC, weaver, Skop Street 49.03], 49 – 50, 344, 368 Margon´ski, Walenty [RC, prior of the Church of All Saints, Calced Carmelites], 310 Marin, Ludwik, 165 Market Square, 10, 21 – 22, 27 – 30, 32, 34, 41, 55 – 57, 59, 90, 95, 125, 203, 388, 391 Markiewicz, Aaron [J], 200 Markiewicz, Jan [O], 239 Markowo, 391 marriage: abandoned spouses, 218, 227 – 29, 240, 345; age at among Protestants, 192; annulment, 234; C divorce practice, 248; charges of bigamy, 229 – 48; Christian-Jewish, 213 – 16; confessionally mixed, 66, 139 – 44, 205, 209 – 13, 230, 299, 309, 370, 390; infidelity, 218; marital complaints, 219 – 26; O doctrine on, 175; parental arranging of, 178; prohibitions against marriage outside the confession, 173; RC and Protestant doctrine on, 174; repeated vows in mixed marriages, 216; separation and divorce, 229 – 48; spousal cruelty, 218, 235, 340; Tatar-Christian, 213; use of secular courts to regulate behavior in, 224, 226 marriage contracts in mixed marriages, 211 Marseille, 10 – 11 Marson, Karol [RC, major of His Royal Majesty], 307 Mary Magdelene Gate, 47 Masalski (Mosalski), Aleksander [RC, palatine of Min´sk, Troki Street 37.08], 43 Masner, Antoni [RC, stonemason], 69 Masnerowa (Antoniowa), Katarzyna Krakówna [RC?], 69 – 72 masons, 257, 327, 391 Mathesius, Otto [L, minister], 167 Maximilian II [Holy Roman Emperor], 194 . Mazurek, Iwan [burgher of Nies´wiez], 214 Meat Shop Street, 27, 30, 34 – 41, 96, 125, 388; lodging for the king’s music, 62 Me˛czyn´ski, Helias [secretary of the beggars’ corporation], 325 Meidel [Warsaw burgher], 176 Meilus, Elmantas, 291, 308 Meisner, Krzysztof [L, wine merchant], 299

520

index

. Mejer, Ambrozy [C, German Street 26.03 or 27.04], 65 Meler, Hanus (Anus, Hans) [L, white-leather tanner, Szerejkiszki suburb], 201 – 2, 365 – 67, 396 – 98 Melerowa (Hanusowa), Anna Jodkiewiczówna [L, Szerejkiszki suburb], 202, 366 – 67 Meller, Paweł [L, M.D.], 167, 169 – 71, 190, 217, 295, 300, 367, 372 . . Mellerowa, Elzbieta. See Sztrunkowa, Elzbieta mental illness: care for victims of, 349 merchants, 7, 16, 36; as competitors with the guilds, 251 Michałowicz, Łazarz [J, Glass Street]: complaint against Christian landlord Hans Pecelt II, 221, 287 Mickiewicz, Jan [RC, general bailiff ], 367 Miglin´ska (Jakubowa), Halszka Tołkaczówna [RC, Skop Street 49.03], 342 Miglin´ski, Jakub Michalewicz [RC, lieutenant of the Wilno Castle, Skop Street 49.03 – 49.04], 185, 342 – 43 Migura, Stefan [U, councillor, Subocz Street 76.01], 204 – 5 Migurzyna (Stefanowa), Anna Filipowiczówna [O, Subocz Street 76.01], 204 Mikołajewicz, Adam [RC, boilermaker, Bernardine Street 53.04], 346 – 47, 389, 392 Mikołajewiczowa, Zofia. See Stefanowiczowa, Zofia Milen´ska, Dorota [RC], 332 Milton, John, 159 Minandus, Joannes [professor of the practice of medicine at the University of Padua], 153 Minkiewicz, Hreory [O?, Subocz Street 78.06], 240 Minkiewicz, Mikołaj [U?, merchant, Subocz Street 78.06, Sawicz Street 71.17], 240 – 43 Minkiewicz, Piotr [U, burgomaster, Subocz Street?], 240 Minkiewicz, Wawrzyniec [RC?, Roman council notary, Subocz Street 78.06], 240 – 43 Min´sk (Mensk), 347, 362 Mitasz [Castle Street 27.11], 66 Mogilew (Mohilëu˘), 28 Mogilnicka, Katarzyna Fokitinówna [RC], 131 Mohyla, Piotr [O, metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus´], 158 Mohyla Academy of Kiev [O], 158 . Mojzeszowicz, Aleksander [J], 284 – 85 . Mojzeszowicz, Jachim [J, German Street 27.08], 402 . Mojzeszowicz, Jonas [J], 289 . Mojzeszowicz, Łazarz [J, envoy to coronation of Władysław IV], 38 . Mojzeszowicz, Lejbo [J], 284 – 85 . Mojzeszowicz, Lewek [J, Jewish Street], 401 – 3 . Mojzeszowicz, Samuel [J, envoy to coronation of Władysław IV], 38 . Mojzeszowicz, Szmula [J], 287 Mones, Henryk [C, burgomaster, postmaster general of the GDL], 9, 66, 142, 189 – 90, 195, 296, 299, 366 – 67, 370

Monesowa (Henrykowa), Halszka [C], 142, 189, 367 Montelupi (Wilczogórski), Karol [postmastergeneral of Poland-Lithuania], 195 Monwid (or Moniwid) Altar (subjurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Chapter encompassing Skop and Bernardine Streets), 47, 181, 183, 186, 340, 343, 345, 360, 380 Mora (Murray), Jakub (James) [C, goldsmith, Castle Street 1.32], 26 morocco tanners, 251; 1666 statutes of, 261 Motowicz, Jan, 50 . Mozejko, Grygier [RC], 183 Muir, Edward, 5, 410 Müller, Michael, 417 multiconfessional houses, 63 – 68 Murzycz, dervish Czelebir chadczy [qa¯d.¯ı (Islamic judge) of all Tatars of the GDL], 398 Muscovite invasion, 185, 237 Muscovite occupation (1655 – 1661), 15, 47, 50, 58, 60, 125, 128, 167 – 68, 183, 185, 198, 201, 221, 224, 237 – 38, 240, 242, 245 – 46, 348, 362, 381, 409, 412; calendar issues during, 198, 304, 307, 395; charges of treason, attempts at confiscation of property of the Orthodox and Protestants during, 305 – 9; loyalty oaths of Vilnans to the Elector of Brandenburg in Königsberg exile, 293; prisoners in Muscovy, 241; return of Jews to the city, 304; temporary Wilno magistracy, 294, 307; the “Russian man” in occupied Wilno, 309 – 16; use of Muscovite coinage during, 313; Vilnans in exile during, 292 – 300; Vilnans in occupied Wilno, 300 – 305 musicians, 20, 22, 48, 62 – 63, 301, 362, 389 Myšeckij, Danilo [O, second Muscovite palatine of Wilno], 290 – 91, 319 Naborowski, Daniel [C, cupbearer, castle judge, poet, Savior Street 58.01], 53 – 54, 387 Nacewicz, Józef [RC, tailor, Bernardine Street 53.05], 345 – 46 Nalewajko, Seweryn (Semen) [O], 101 – 2, 105 naming practices across the confessions, 122 – 25, 135 – 37 Namszewicz, Krzysztof [suburb beyond Sharp Gate], 302 Namszewiczowa (Krzysztofowa) [suburb beyond Sharp Gate], 302 Naruszewicz, Aleksander [C, royal forester of Niemonice], 194 Naruszewiczowa (Aleksandrowa), Nonhartówna [L?, C?], 194 Natanowicz, Hackiel [J, St. Nicholas Street 28.06], 402 needle makers and tinsmiths: Christians and Jews in one guild, 255 – 56 Netherlands, 415 Niedz´wiedzki, Bałtromiej [Roman Catholic canon of Wilno], 3

index Niegowicz, Marcin [C], 296 . Nies´wiez, 214 Nirenberg, David, 5, 409 nobles, 23, 48; concentration of in the St. John-Troki Street axis, 42 – 45; in the German Street neighborhood, 35 Nonhart, Piotr [L, budowniczy, Rudniki Street 12.06], 33, 43, 49, 119, 194 – 95, 329, 361, 379; sold to the Turks as a child, 194; questions about his noble status, 194 – 95 Nonhart, Stanisław [L], 194 . Nonhartowa (Stanisławowa), Elzbieta Angermundyn, 194 Nonhartowa (Piotrowa), Zuzanna Mrzygłódówna [L], 195 Norwej, Jan [L, Castle Street 26.03 or 27.04 and Castle Street 27.11], 65 – 66 Norwejowa (Janowa), Anna Nejmanówna [L, Castle Street 26.03 or 27.04 and Castle Street 27.11], 65 – 66 Nowak, Je˛drzej [RC, professor of philosophy at the Wilno Jesuit Academy], 149 Nowogródek, 213 – 14 Nowogródek palatinate, 214, 216 Nowowiejski, Krzysztof [C, landwójt of Nowogródek], 124 Nowydwór, 391 oaths, 79, 113, 182, 275, 283 – 86; Jewish, before Christian courts, 283 – 85 Obduła [T, at Troki Gate 35.06], 45 Obugiel, Jan [RC?, burgher], 407 Oelhaf, Nicholas [C, professor of medicine at the Danzig gymnasium], 147 Ogin´ska (Bohdanowa), Regina Wołłowiczówna [O, Sharp Street 10.11], 32 Ogin´ski, Bohdan [O, Sharp Street 10.11], 32 Ogin´ski, Jan [RC, castellan of Ms´cisław, Troki Street 37.13], 43 Ohurcewicz, Andrzej [U, bencher], 392 Ohurcewicz, Jan [U, councillor], 282 Olgierd [P, grand duke of Lithuania], 31 Olsun, Jurij [burgher], 407 Omel(i)anowicz, Bazyli I [R, goldsmith, Glass Street 20.02], 129, 199, 315 Omel(i)anowicz, Bazyli II [R], 129 – 30 Omel(i)anowicz, Hrehory [O?, Alley off Subocz Street 77.04?], 369 Omel(i)anowiczowa (Bazylowa I), Marianna Sznejderówna [L, Glass Street 20.02], 129, 199, 315 Orangery, 47 organists/organ builders, 25, 181 – 82, 200, 360, 380, 398 Orłowski, Jakub [RC?, horodnictwo], 201, 365 – 66 Ortisius, Jakub [RC, professor at the Wilno Jesuit Academy], 148 Orzeszyc, Teodor [O?, Subocz Street 78.06], 240 – 44

521

Orzeszycowa (Teodorowa, pv), Dziedzin´ska (Stanisławowa, sv), Anastazja Polikszanka [O, Subocz Street 78.06, suburb beyond Subocz Gate], 58, 240 – 46, 286, 362, 380 Ossolin´ska (Jerzowa), Izabella Danielewiczówna, 124 Ossolin´ski, Jerzy, 124 Ostrogski, Konstanty I [O, grand hetman of the GDL], 23 – 24 Ostrogski, Konstanty II Wasyl [O, palatine of Kiev]: his school at Ostroh, 158 Ostroh, 158, 168 Otroszkiewicz (Atroszkiewicz), Afanas [U, salt merchant, suburb beyond Sharp Gate], 33, 209 – 10, 298, 360, 390, 399, 418 Otroszkiewiczowa (Afanasowa), Katarzyna Kuryłowiczówna [O, suburb beyond Sharp Gate], 33, 209 – 10, 298, 360, 390, 399, 418 Ozarzewicz, Hieronim [O, merchant, Subocz Street], 368 Pac, Jan Kazimierz [RC, grand notary of Lithuania, German Street 27.12], 36 Pac, Michał Kazimierz [RC, palatine of Wilno], 318 Pac, Mikołaj Stefan [RC, bishop of Wilno]: episcopal letter of 1682 concerning RC processions and violence against Jews, 94 Pac, Piotr [court vice treasurer of the GDL, lodging with royal doctor Jakub Kal at Market Square 3.04], 62 Pac, Stefan, 44 Pac, Stefan [RC, vice chancellor of the GDL, St. John Street 31.05], 43 – 44 Paciukiewicz, Dawid [RC, merchant], 198, 312 Padua, 152, 166, 169 – 70 pagans, 16 painters, 36, 54 Paknys, Mindaugas, 43 Palczewski, Adam [L], 296 papermakers, 351 Parfianowicz, Daniel [R?, Along the Wall Going to Horse Street 7.05], 297 Parfianowicz, Kondrat [O, merchant, St. Kazimierz Alleyway], 297, 395 Parfianowiczowa (Kondratowa), Dorota Rzepnicka [U?, St. Kazimierz Alleyway], 297, 395 Parfianowiczówna (Kondratówna), Marusia [U, nun], 395 Paris, 151, 165, 180 Pasternak, Afanos [R, Along the Wall Going to Horse Street 7.14], 32 Pasternak, Cimofiej [R, Along the Wall Going to Horse Street 7.15], 32 Paszkiewicz [RC, priest], 333 Pawłowicz, Bazyli [R, Subocz Street 78.06], 241 Pawłowiczowa, Krystyna Minkiewiczówna [R, Subocz Street 78.06], 240 – 41 Pawłowiczówna, Anastazja [R, Subocz Street 78.06], 241

522

index

Peace of Augsburg, 15 Peace of Westphalia, 413 – 15 Pecelt, Jan (Hans) I [L, locksmith], 292, 300 Pecelt, Jan (Hans) II [L, locksmith, Glass Street], 130 – 31, 134, 221 – 24, 270, 286 Peceltowa, Katarzyna. See Ilisowa, Katarzyna Pe˛kalska (Tobiaszowa), Zuzanna Monesówna [C], 190 Pe˛kalski, Tobiasz [C, court judge, master of the royal hunt], 190 Petrowciz, Iwaszko [R, servant (serf ?) of Muslim qa¯d. Czelebir Murzycz], 398 pewterers, 403 Phienus [professor of medicine at the University of Louvain], 151 Pierchlin´ski, Stefan [RC, royal courtier and cellarer of the GDL, Troki Street 37.01], 43 Pin´sk: Jewish community, 38 Piotr [blacksmith, Mill Alley 51.03], 62 Piotrowicz, Simon [RC?], 289 Piotrowska, Barbara [A, RC], 333 . Pisanczyna (Stanisławowa), Anna Ambrozejewiczowa [RC], 347 Pisanka, Stanisław [RC], 347 Pius IV [pope]: bull of 1564 requiring confession of RC faith before matriculation at Catholic universities, 151 Placentinus [professor of surgery at the University of Padua], 153 plague in Wilno, 121, 140, 324; in 1625, 121; in 1630, 123; in fall 1653, 292, 341 – 42; in summer 1657, 196, 291, 303, 310 – 13 Platter, Thomas, 155 Pletenberg [Warsaw burgher], 176 Plokhy, Serhii, 320 Pociej, Hipacy [U, metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus´], 266, 394 Podchocimska (Pawłowa), Anna [C, Castle Street 2.19], 141 Podchocimska (Pawłówna), Anna [L, Castle Street 2.19], 141 Podchocimska (Pawłówna), Katarzyna [L, Castle Street 2.19], 141 Podchocimska (Pawłowa), Krystyna Giblówna [L, Castle Street 2.19], 124, 141, 190 Podchocimska (Pawłówna), Zofia [L], 141 Podchocimski, Paweł I Kleofas z Brylewa [C, royal doctor, horodniczy, Castle Street 2.19], 49, 124, 141, 164, 190, 195, 364, 367 Podchocimski, Paweł II [C], 141 Podchocimski, Władysław Karol [C], 141 Pohl, Wilhelm [L], 167 Poliksza, Aleksander [O, Subocz Street], 246 Poliksza, Samuel Aleksandrowicz [O, Subocz Street 78.06], 240 – 41, 246 Polikszyna (Aleksandrowa), Marianna Minkiewiczówna [O, Subocz Street 78.06], 240 – 41 Polikszyna, Maryna. See Jankowska, Maryna

Połock, 37, 391, 417 . Połubin´ska, Zuzanna. See Sapiezanka, Zuzanna Połubin´ski, Aleksander Hilary [RC, grand marshal of the GDL], 194 Poniatowski, Aleksander [RC, Jesuit, priest at the Church of St. John], 216 poor relief: among Tatars, 330, 354; attempted purge in 1642 of non-Calvinists from Calvinist hospitals/poor houses, 331; crossing of confessional boundaries in support of hospitals, 330; guardianship of minors, 335 – 39; hospitals and poor houses, 327 – 31; Jewish institutions of, 330, 354; Lutheran attitudes toward, 397; Lutheran hospitals, 329; mixing of confessions within the hospitals/poor houses, 331; Mons Pietatis, 330, 353 – 54; Orthodox and Uniate attitudes toward, 353; self-help (improvised strategies), 334 – 50, 354; the safety nets of the guilds, 326 – 27; the Wilno beggars’ corporation, 323 – 26; use of hospitals/poor houses as a confessionalizing tool, 331 – 33, 353 Popielówna, Anna [L?, fishwife, horodnictwo], 202 Poradnicz, Jan, 313 Poradniczowa (Janowa), Regina Pe˛kalska, 313 postmaster general of the GDL, office of: held by Wilno Protestants, 195 potters, 28 . Pozarko, Kazimierz [O, prisoner in Muscovy], 239 . Pozarko, Marcin [O], 237 . Pozarkowa (Marcinowa, pv), Tulkiewiczowa (Piotrowa, sv), Maryna Witkowska [O], 237 – 39, 382 . . Pozarska (Pezarska, Andrzejowa), Katarzyna Fonderflotówna [L], 198 . . Pozarski (Pezarski), Andrzej Pomian [L], 199 Poznan´, 408 Praetorius, Hieronim, 151 printers, 144 privacy: lack of in the architecture of the time, 70 – 72 Prokopowicz, Harasym [R, tailor], 239 Prokopowiczowa (Harasymowa), Anna Danielówna [O], 239 Pron´ski, Aleksander [C], 151 Pron´ski, Juliusz [C], 151 Przypkowice, 387 Przypkowska (Aleksandrowa), Katarzyna z Wilczków [C], 387 Przypkowski, Aleksander [C, cupbearer of Oszmiany], 387 public baths, 54, 70, 75, 278, 329 public processions, 18, 92 – 97, 251, 256, 264, 266 – 67, 269 – 71, 273, 358 – 59, 379 – 80, 384 – 91, 397, 407, 409, 414, 416 – 18 Puccitelli, Virgilio: his opero Il Ratto di Helena ( The Abduction of Helen), performed in Wilno in 1636, 20 Pullan, Brian, 351, 355, 400 purgatory: attitudes toward across the confessions, 356 – 57, 371

index Puszkarnia (Gunsmiths’) suburb, 200 Pütten, Wilhelm von [C], 296 Rabcewicz, Stefan [RC, merchant, Side Street off Rudniki Street], 370 – 72, 383 – 85 Rachuba, Andrzej, 291 Radkiewicz, Stefan [U, merchant, Market Square at Sharp Street], 288, 370 – 71 Radoszkowice, 362 Radziwiłł, Albrycht [RC, grand marshal of Lithuania], 357 Radziwiłł, Albrycht Stanisław [RC, chancellor of the GDL], 20, 358 Radziwiłł, Albrycht Władysław [RC, castellan of Wilno, Castle Street 1.38], 23 Radziwiłł, Aleksander Ludwik [RC, palatine of Połock, Castle Street 1.38], 23, 63 Radziwiłł, Bogusław [C, master of the stables of the GDL], 122, 196 – 97, 306, 308 Radziwiłł, Janusz [C, castellan of Wilno], 122, 306 Radziwiłł, Krzysztof I Mikołaj “the Thunderbolt” [C, grand hetman of the GDL], 355, 357 Radziwiłł, Krzysztof II [C, palatine of Wilno, Troki Street 37.12], 43, 48, 53, 82, 85, 122 – 23, 150, 171, 186, 191, 358, 387 Radziwiłł, Mikołaj Krzysztof “the Orphan” [RC, palatine of Wilno], 23, 63 Radziwiłł, Mikołaj “the Black” [C, grand hetman of the GDL], 357 – 58 Radziwiłł, Mikołaj “the Red” [C, palatine of Wilno and chancellor of the GDL], 355 Radziwiłłowa (Krzysztofowa Mikołajowa), Katarzyna z Te˛czyna [RC]: funeral of, 356, 358, 390 Radzkiewicz, Jan [O, merchant, Subocz Street], 381 Rafałowicz, Adam Adrachmanowicz [T], 364 Ragutis [P deity], 24 Rajecka (Olbrychtowa Duninowa), Regina Drucka Sokolin´ska [lodging at Market Square 3.06], 62 Rajecki, Olbrycht Dunin [land judge of Troki], 62 Raków, 408 – 9 Rakowski, Jan Wojciech [RC, palatine of Wicebsk, Troki Street 33.03], 43 – 44 Rakowski, Mikołaj, 306 Ramus, Konrad [L], 301 Ramusowa (Konradowa), Maryna Rossówna [L], 300 Rassius, Adam [C, professor of rhetoric at the Wilno Calvinist lyceum], 147 Ravensburg, 414 red- and black-leather tanners, 80; 1614 articles of, 257; guild altar at the Church of St. George [RC], 268; predominance of RC among, 249 Rejchowicz (Rachwicz), Paweł [L, white-leather tanner, Mill Alley 50.01], 48, 62, 201 Rejn, Marcin I [L, pewterer, Glass Street], 368 Rejn, Marcin II [L, merchant, Glass Street], 368 Rejter, Joachim [L, merchant], 198, 368 Rejter, Paweł [L], 198 Rendorf, Dawid [L, merchant], 165, 178 – 79

523

Rentell, Hans [L, goldsmith], 296 Rer, Piotr [L, chamois tanner], 292, 300 retailers, 251 Reybert, Jan [RC, bencher], 304 River Niemen, 46, 292 . River Niewiaza, 292 River Wilenka (Wilejka; Lithuanian, Vilnia), 15, 21, 31, 33, 47 – 50, 54, 199, 201, 257, 343, 351, 365, 367 River Wilia (Lithuanian, Neris), 21, 42, 44 – 46, 60, 304, 329, 331 – 32, 364 – 65, 388, 405, 414 Ro(h)r, Ferdynand [lord high steward of Troki], 191 Ro(h)rowa (Ferdynandowa), Sara Giblówna [L], 191 Rodziewicz, Franciszek [stocking weaver], 69 – 72 Rodziewicz, Tobiasz [RC, tailor, Skop Street 45.04], 184, 368 Rohaczewicz, Jan [RC, goldsmith], 262 Rohdewald, Stefan, 417 Roman Catholic Cathedral Chapter (Capitula), 12 – 13, 15, 24 – 25, 29, 47 – 50, 59, 104, 107 – 8, 111, 180, 187, 200 – 201, 212, 275, 287, 332, 335 – 37, 340 – 46, 351, 354, 360, 364 – 65, 368, 380, 392 Romanowicz, Aleksander [R, RC, burgomaster], 369 Romanowicz, Stefan [RC, custodian of the Bernardine monastery at the Church of St. Anne], 272 Romanowicz, Symon [RC, bencher], 277, 279 Rome, 3 Ros, Jerzy [L, tailor], 292 Rossa suburb, 33, 55, 207; use of Old Calendar in, 58 Rostock, 166 Rotkiewicz, Petrus [elder of the beggars’ corporation], 325 Royal Mill, 47 Royal Prussia, 417 Royal Way, 10, 21 Ruczowa, Halszka Sztrunkówna [C], 171 Rudniki Gate, 10, 21, 33, 156, 163, 311, 314 Rudniki Street, 30, 32, 41, 55, 59, 206, 297, 369 Rudomicz, Bazyli [R?, citizen of Zamos´c´], 301 Rudzian´ski, Melchior, 112 Rutski, Józef Weliamin [U, archimandrite of the Holy Trinity monastery, metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus´], 266, 321 Rybin´ski, Mikołaj [U, priest at the Church of the Resurrection], 24 Rycewicz, Łukasz [RC?, glazier], 255 Rychter, Mikołaj, 68, 349, 366 Rychter, Mikołaj [RC, burgomaster], 68, 134, 310, 349, 366 Rychterowa (Mikołajowa), Marianna [RC], 67, 134, 223, 274 Rzepnicki, Stefan [R, burgomaster, Along the Wall between Horse and Sharp Streets 6.03], 297, 304, 395 Sabean, David, 377 Sadowska (Janowa), Zuzanna Klineberkówna [L], 216

524

index

Sadowski, Jan [RC], 216 Safarowicz, Bartłomiej [RC], 127 – 28 Safarowicz, Szymon [RC], 127 – 30 Safarowiczowa (Szymonowa), Katarzyna Daniusiewiczówna [RC], 127 – 29 Safarowiczowa (Szymonowa), Katarzyna Wojsowiczówna [RC], 127 – 29 Safarowiczówna, Rozaria [RC], 127 Sahanovycˇ, Henadz, 292 – 93 Sakowicz, Adam [RC, administrator of the treasury of the GDL, Bernardine Street 52.01], 48 Sakowicz, Kasjan [O, U, RC], 89 – 91 Sala, Angelo [professor of the theory of medicine at the University of Padua], 153 Salcewiczowa, Anastazja Tros´nicówna [O], 209 Salfeld, Gabriel von [L, confectioner], 296 salt merchants, 183, 209, 360, 362, 385, 390, 399, 407, 418 salt stalls, 28 Samuelowicz, Mendel [J, St. Nicholas Street 28.06], 73 Sanguszko, Szymon Samuel [O, RC, palatine of Wicebsk, Troki Street 37.14], 43 Sapieha, Aleksander [RC], 151 Sapieha, Aleksander [RC, bishop of Wilno], 107, 133 Sapieha, Andrzej Stanisław [RC, starosta of Riga, Sawicz/Bakszta Street 69.16], 56 Sapieha, Fryderyk [RC], 151 Sapieha, Jan Stanisław [RC, marshal of the GDL, Holy Spirit Street 32.07], 43 Sapieha, Kazimierz Leon [vice chancellor of the GDL, Holy Spirit Street 32.07], 43 Sapieha, Lew [O, C, RC, grand hetman of the GDL], 95, 356 – 57 Sapieha, Mikołaj [RC, palatine of Brzes´c´ (Brest)], 151 Sapieha, Paweł [RC, grand hetman of the GDL], 318 – 19 Sapieha, Paweł Stefan [RC, vice chancellor of the GDL, Sawicz/Bakszta Street 70.04], 56 Sapieha, Tomasz [RC, Sawicz/Bakszta Street 70.05], 56 Sapieha, Tomasz na Holszanach [RC, palatine of Nowogródek], 194 . . Sapiezanka (Lwowa), Elzbieta Radziwiłłówna [C], 356 . Sapiezanka (Tomaszowa, pv), Połubin´ska (Aleksandra Hilarego, sv), Zuzanna Chreptowiczówna [L?, RC?], 194 . Sapiezanka (Pawłowa Stefanowa), Zofia Daniłowiczówna [RC, gate at Sawicz/Bakszta Street 72.04 – 72.05], 56 Sarbiewski (Sarbievius), Maciej Kazimierz [RC, professor at the Jesuit Academy, Latin poet], 21 Savior Gate, 50, 53 – 54, 329 Savior Street, 50 – 56 Sawaniewska (Matiaszowa), Dorota Dziblewska [RC, Little Side Street off Skop Street 47.03], 341 – 42 Sawaniewski, Matiasz [RC, general bailiff, Little Side Street off Skop Street 47.03], 341 – 42

Sawgowicz, Aleksander [C, castle court notary, Across From the Calvinist Church 57.04], 53 – 54 Sawicz, Jachim [O, merchant], 394 Sawicz/Bakszta Street, 23, 58 – 59 Sawicz Street, 27, 54, 55 – 57, 328 Šaxovskoj, Mixail Semenovicˇ [O, first Muscovite palatine of Wilno], 40, 197 – 98, 291, 304, 310 – 12, 316, 318 Scacchi, Marco, 20 Schade, Walter [L, tailor], 296 Schönflissius, Je˛drzej (Andrzej) [L, minister, author of burgher funeral sermons], 14, 85, 120, 140, 164, 188, 194, 257, 328 – 29, 331, 360 – 61, 372 – 79, 385, 397 – 98 schools in Wilno, 155 – 60 Schwenert, Christophorus [L], 211 Schwenner, Hanns [L, white-leather tanner, Szerejkiszki?], 201 Scotsmen, 2, 26; as competitors with the guilds, 251, 253 Scottish shops, 26, 397 shammash (Jewish bailiff ), 283, 285 Sharp Gate, 10, 30, 30 – 34, 47, 207, 213, 290, 297, 302, 314, 329, 381, 393 sheep shearers: predominance of Ruthenians among, 249 Sielawa, Antoni [U, metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus´], 353 Sielawa, Bazyli [U], 282 Sielec, 200, 292 Sien´czyło, Filip [O, burgomaster, Subocz Street 78.07], 128, 403 Sien´czyło, Gabriel [O, merchant, Subocz Street 78.07], 130, 134, 168, 298, 301, 304 Sien´czyło, Grzegorz [O, merchant, Glass Street 20.05, Subocz Street 78.07], 98, 128, 130, 298, 300 – 301, 304, 308, 395 Sien´czyło, Mikołaj [O, Subocz Street 78.07], 167 – 68 Sien´czyło, Paweł [O, councillor, Subocz Street 78.07, Alleyway off Subocz Street 77.01 or 77.03], 298, 304, 307, 370, 395 – 96 Sien´czyłowa (Grzegorzowa), Anastazja Sokołowska [O, Glass Street 20.05], 127 – 28, 130 – 31 Sienkiewicz, Jakub [RC, burgomaster, Market Square 4.01], 10, 403 Sienkiewicz, Jakub Szczasnel [RC, squire of Min´sk district], 362 Sienkiewicz, Mikołaj Szczasnel [RC, salt merchant, suburb beyond Troki Gate], 362 – 63 Siesicki, Kazimierz Dowmont [RC, master of the kitchens of the GDL], 317 – 18 Skaryna, Franciszek [O, printer], 30 Skiba, Jan [RC, cobbler elder], 270 Skop Street, 25 – 26, 44, 46 – 50, 59, 180 – 87, 200, 227, 334 – 35, 340 – 41, 344, 346, 351 – 52, 368, 405 Skot, Arnolt [C, M.D., Castle Street 1.21], 26 Skrocki, Wincenty [RC, St. John Street 44.03], 335, 338

index Sleidanus, Johannes, 149 Słowin´ski, Bartholomaeus [elder of the beggars’ corporation], 325 Słuck, 388 Słupski [RC, priest], 384 Słuszka, Aleksander [C, RC, palatine of Min´sk], 10 smiths, 32, 54 – 56 Smotrycki, Herasym [O], 158, 168 Smotrycki, Melecjusz [O, U, while Orthodox— archimandrite of the Holy Spirit Monastery, archbishop of Połock], 32 – 33, 37, 50 – 51, 91, 158, 168, 170; ban on his Thre¯nos of 1610, 257 Snipiszki suburb, 304, 329, 388, 403 soap boilers, 36, 125 Sobieski, Jan III [king of Poland, grand duke of Lithuania], 93, 162 Sobolewska (Romanowa), Katarzyna Dorofiewiczówna [R, Subocz Street 76.01], 203 Sobolewski, Bartłomiej [RC?, horodnictwo], 50 Sobolewski, Roman [R, Subocz Street 76.01], 204 Sokołowska (Krzysztofowa), Maryna Konstantynowiczówna [O?], 206 Sokołowski, Krzysztof [O, merchant, Rudniki Street 12.12, Sharp and Horse Streets], 206 – 9, 304, 369 Soleczniki Wielkie, 379 Sołomerecki, Bohdan [O], 168 Sołtan, Jarosław Iwanowicz [O], 24 Sołtan, Josyf II [O, metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus´], 24 Spaans, Joke, 352 St. Euphrosine of Połock, 136 St. Ignatius Street, 41 – 42, 44 St. John Street, 23, 44 – 5, 187, 387 St. Nicholas Street, 34 – 41, 62 – 63, 405 Steckiewicz (alias Polenikowicz), Marcin [RC?, merchant, St. Kazimierz Alley], 289 Stefanowicz, Jakub [R], 385 Stefanowicz, Jan [L], 221 – 22 Stefanowicz, Jan [RC, boilermaker, Bernardine Street 53.04], 347 Stefanowiczowa (Janowa, pv), Mikołajewiczowa . (Wacławowa, sv), Ambrozejewiczowa (Adamowa, tv), Zofia Gałuszczanka [RC, Bernardine Street 53.04], 346 – 48 stonemasons, 36 Strokowski, Bartłomiej [RC?, carpenter, suburbs], 276 – 77 Stryluda, Prokop [O, merchant], 172 Strzałkowska (Jacyntowa), Reina Weselówna [RC, Mill Street], 280 Strzałkowski, Jacynt [RC, Mill Street], 280 Styszewski, Matiasz [RC, tailor, Skop Street 49.08], 185 Subocz Gate, 10, 31, 33, 54, 57, 203; place of residence of municipal executioner, 58, 102 Subocz Street, 15, 27, 58 – 9, 102, 129 – 30, 202 – 6, 209, 212, 229, 247, 297, 354, 368 – 69, 381, 393 suburb beyond Rudniki Gate, 33, 239

525

suburb beyond Sharp Gate, 399 suburb beyond Subocz Gate, 58, 205 S´widerski, Tomasz [RC?, tanner], 46 swordsmiths, 36, 125 Sylvaticus, Benedictus [professor of the practice of medicine at the University of Padua], 153 synagogue, 1, 38, 402 – 3, 407 – 8 syncretisms, 398 – 99; in marriage and divorce practices, 248; Protestant avoidance of marriage during Lent, 178 Szczerbicki, Matiasz [RC?, apothecary], 303 Szczygielska, Anna. See Arcimowiczowa, Anna Szczygielski, Jakub [RC, tailor, Skop Street 49.07], 181 – 84, 334 Szefer, Antoni [L], 200, 292 Szeferowa (Anotoniowa, pv), Gierlicowa (Matiaszowa, sv), Katarzyna Rejchowiczówna [L, C?, L, Literary Alley 56.05], 111, 200 – 201, 292, 380 Szerejkiszki suburb, 12, 48 – 49, 59, 199 – 202, 351, 366 – 67 Szkil, Jan Mikołajewicz [RC, cobbler, Skop Street 49.03], 340 – 42 Szkilowa (Janowa), Ewa Dziblewska [RC, Skop Street 49.03], 340 – 44, 348 Sznejder, Albrycht I [L, goldsmith, Glass Street 18.06, Glass Street 20.02], 130 Sznejder, Albrycht II [L, apothecary, Glass Street 18.06, Glass Street 20.02], 130 Sznejder, Jakub [L, goldsmith, Glass Street 20.02], 129 – 30, 198 – 99, 296, 298, 315 Sznejder, Michał [L, goldsmith, Glass Street], 298 Sznejder, Zacharias [L, goldsmith, Glass Street 20.02], 198, 296, 298 Szolc, Dawid [L, M.D.], 169 Szóstak, Bogdan [R, bencher, Along the Wall Going to Horse Street 7.09], 314 Szóstak, Matwiej [R, Market Square 3.13], 314 Szóstak, Piotr [O, U, councillor], 231, 314 – 17 Szóstakowa (Piotrowa), Anna Korzenkowska [R], 315 . Szóstakowa (Matwiejowa), Tacjana Brazyczówna [R, Market Square 3.13], 314 Szpal, Daniel [Danzig merchant], 306 Szperkowicz, Eustachiusz [RC, burgomaster], 298 Szperkowiczowa, Zofia Ohurcewiczówa [RC], 283 Szretter, Jan [L, postmaster general of the GDL, castellan of Livonia], 143, 195 Szretter, Piotr [L, master of the haberdashers], 272, 368 Szretterówna (Janówna), Marianna [C], 143 Szretterówna (Janówna), Zuzanna [C], 143 Sztrunk, Jan I [L, merchant of Kowno], 188, 305 Sztrunk, Jan II [L, merchant, Castle Street 2.10], 124, 142, 189 – 90, 367, 380 Sztrunk, Jan III (de) [L, merchant, royal secretary, Castle Street 2.10], 66, 142, 189 – 90, 195, 367 Sztrunk, Jerzy I [L, merchant, Castle Street 2.10], 123, 167, 188, 190, 192, 199, 375 – 76, 379

526

index

Sztrunk, Jerzy II [L, merchant, Castle Street 2.10], 124, 188 – 90 Sztrunk, Krzysztof I [L, goldsmith, Castle Street 2.26], 189 – 91 Sztrunk, Krzysztof II (de) [L, goldsmith, Castle Street 2.26], 190, 195 Sztrunk, Marcin [L], 189, 367 Sztrunkowa (Janowa I), Anna Korsakówna [L], 188 Sztrunkowa (Jerzowa I), Barbara Karejówna [L, Castle Street 2.10], 188 Sztrunkowa (Janowa III), Barbara Monesówna [C], 66, 142, 171, 189 Sztrunkowa (Janowa II, pv), Mellerowa (Pawłowa, . sv), Elzbieta Giblówna [L], 72, 124, 140 – 42, 170, 189 – 90, 299, 367 Sztrunkowa (Jerzowa II), Sara Engelbrechtówna [L], 123 – 24, 189 Sztrunkówna (Janówna III), Anna [C], 142 . Sztrunkówna (Janówna III), Halszka (Elzbieta) [C], 142 Sztrunkówna (Janówna III), Katarzyna [C], 142 Szukszta, Jan [castle notary of Kowno], 292 Szulc, Jerzy [RC, lutenist], 182 Szwabowicz, Stanisław [RC?, butcher, suburbs], 276 – 77 Szwander, Andrzej (Andrys) [L, white-leather tanner, Szerejkiszki suburb], 201 – 2, 365 – 67 Szwander, Michał [L, white-leather tanner, Szerejkiszki suburb], 201 – 2, 365 – 67 Szwandrowa (Michałowa), Maryna Goltsmitówna [L, Szerejkiszki suburb], 367 Szwarc, Michał [L], 406 Szweykowski, Dawid [C, royal courtier, Troki Street 37.02], 43 – 44 Szwykowska (Aleksandrowa), Katarzyna Giblówna [L], 142, 191 Szwykowski, Aleksander [standard bearer of Nowogródek), 191 Szycik Zaleski, Iwan Hawryłowicz [O, burgomaster, Market Square 4.08 and Market Square 4.09, Sharp Street 10.14], 168, 203 – 5, 232 Szycik Zaleski, Izacy [O, RC, Bernardine monk], 204 Szycik Zaleski, Samuel [U, burgomaster, royal secretary], 168, 204 – 5, 212, 232, 308 Szycik Zaleski, Stefan [U, councillor], 204, 232 Szycik Zaleski, Zachariasz [O, councillor, Sharp Street 10.14], 57, 168, 204, 232 Szycikowa Zaleska (Samuelowa), Eudoksja Iwanowiczówna [O?], 205, 212, 232 tailors, 32, 36, 56, 64 – 65, 80, 93, 181, 227, 266 – 67, 385, 403; 1560 ban on betraying guild secrets, 259; 1665 rules on call to order, 259 Talwosz, Adam [C, castellan of Samogita], 211 Talwoszowa (Adamowa), Marianna Fra˛ckiewiczówna Radzimin´ska [C], 211 Tander, Baltasar [L, merchant], 397 tanneries, 48

tanners, 7, 46, 80, 144 – 45, 250 – 51, 351, 367, 391; 1672 ban on betraying guild secrets, 259; 1672 statutes of, 261 Tanners’ Street [Wilia suburb], 46 Tatar Gate, 42, 45 – 46 Tatar Street, 42, 44 Tatar wills, 363 Tatars, 1, 2, 6 – 7, 13, 15 – 16, 23, 46, 48; anti-Tatar pasquinade of 1617, 104 – 5; as competitors with fishermen, 252; as competitors with the guilds, 251, 253, 256; criers who called to worship, 97; settlement in Łukiszki suburb, 42, 45 Tazbir, Janusz, 408 – 9 Teller, Adam, 410 Thorn (Torun´), 407, 417 tinsmiths, 256; 1673 agreement between Jews and Christians, 93 tolerance and toleration, 411 – 18 Tołoczko, Paweł [RC, deacon of Kowno, vicar of . Gieguzyn], 284 Tomkowid, Hrehor [R?], 223, 274 Tomkowidowa (Hrehorowa), Dorota Zebertowska [RC?, Castle Street 2.05], 67 – 68, 274 – 78, 280 Tonchonowicz, Hercyk [J, German Street 27.08], 402 topographic endogamies, 180 – 209; the Buchners of Glass Street, 196 – 99; the Dorofiewiczes of Subocz Street, 202 – 5; the Kostromskis of Skop Street, 180 – 87; the Kuszeliczes of Horse Street, 205 – 9; the Sztrunks and Gibels of Castle Street, 187 – 96; the Szwanders of the Szerejkiszki suburb, 199 – 202 topographic endogamy, 26; definition, 176 Tosznicki, Afanas [R, soap boiler], 314 town hall, 10, 27, 30 – 34, 39, 206, 351; its central municipal clock, 98 Transfluvia suburb, 48, 50, 53 – 54, 57 – 59, 351, 393 Treaty of Osnabrück, 413 Troki, 5 – 6, 21, 109 Troki Gate, 34, 41 – 42, 45 – 46, 96, 380 – 81, 386 – 87 Troki Road, 21, 41 – 42 Troki Street, 36, 41, 387 Troki suburb, 46, 96, 219, 279, 380 – 81, 387 Trop, Jakub [L, captain of His Royal Majesty’s artillery of the GDL, Glass Street], 197 – 98, 300, 308 Tropowa (Jakubowa), Anna Buchnerówna [L, Glass Street], 197, 300 Tropówna, Marianna [L, Glass Street], 126, 197 Tros´nica, Piotr [O, merchant, Horse Street 8.09], 209, 369 – 70 Tros´nica, Piotr [O], 209 Tros´nicowa (Piotrowa), Polonia Kuszelanka [O, Horse Street 8.09], 209, 369 trumpeters, 45 Tryzna, Marcjan [RC, coadjutor of the bishop of Wilno, vice chancellor of the GDL, Castle Street 1.05], 25, 38, 121, 124, 411 Tukan, Bartłomiej [RC], 406

index Tulkiewicz, Piotr [O, merchant], 237 – 38 . Tulkiewiczowa, Maryna. See Pozarkowa, Maryna Tum, Jan [L?, weaver, Calvinist Church Street?], 65 Tylkowski, Wojciech [RC, Jesuit], 91 Tym, Henryk [L, merchant, Glass Street 18.11], 368 Tymowa, Małgorzata. See Afanasowiczowa, Małgorzata Tyszkiewicz, Antoni [son of the palatine of Brzes´c´ (Brest), Sawicz/Bakszta Street 69.10], 56 Ubryk [apothecary], 220, 279 Union of Brest (1596), 7, 24, 31, 50, 101, 260, 265 – 66, 329, 394 Upper Castle, 21, 331 Urdowski, Jerzy [RC?, notary for the horodnictwo], 201, 364, 367 Usłowski, Je˛drzej [L, teacher at the Wilno Lutheran school], 147 Vasilixa, Pekla Matveevna, 399 Vogt, Berent [L, deputy postmaster for the GDL], 195 Vonderendzina, Zuzanna. See Lidertowa, Zuzanna Vonderenna (Vonderende), Reynold (Reinhold) [C], 199 Vonderflot, Maciej [L], 199 Vonlar [C?], 191 Vorbek-Lettow, Aleksander Jerzy [L, German Street 26.03], 121, 124 Vorbek-Lettow, Jan [L, German Street 26.03], 167 Vorbek-Lettow, Konstanty [L, German Street 26.03], 121, 123, 167 Vorbek-Lettow, Krzysztof Wiktorzyn [L, German Street 26.03], 118, 121, 167, 172, 176 – 78, 192 – 93, 203 Vorbek-Lettow, Maciej [L, German Street 26.03 and German Street 27.04], 35, 37, 60, 66, 92, 106, 125, 140, 159, 164, 167, 169 – 70, 172, 177, 189 – 92, 195, 203, 293, 305, 399; chided by Martin Luther in Jesuit pasquinade for use of non-Lutheran god parents, 131; education, 146 – 55; on his children and their godparents, 118 – 25; on the marriage of his son Krzysztof Wiktorzyn to an Orthodox woman, 176; questions about his noble status, 193 Vorbek-Lettow, Marcin Feliks [L, German Street 26.03], 121, 123 Vorbek-Lettow, Matys [L, barber-surgeon, German Street 27.04], 36, 148, 150 Vorbek-Lettow, Paweł [L], 177 Vorbek-Lettow, Zygmunt [L, cupbearer of Starodub, German Street 26.03], 124, 190 Vorbekowa-Lettowowa (Krzysztofowa Wiktorzynowa), Anna Dorofiewiczówna [O, Subocz Street 79.10], 124, 172, 176–78, 193, 203 . Vorbekowa-Lettowowa (Maciejowa), Elzbieta Isfeltówna [C?, German Street 26.03], 118 – 19, 123 Vorbekówna-Lettowówna, Anna Felicitas [L, German Street 26.03], 121 – 23

527

Vorbekówna-Lettowówna, Elisabet Zofia [L, German Street 26.03], 118, 121 Vorbekówna-Lettowówna, Krystyna [L, German Street 26.03], 121, 123 Waka, 316 Wała, Bartłomiej [RC, salt merchant], 183 Walecki, Matys [RC?, Castle Street 1.01], 21, 62 Wałówna, Małgorzata [RC], 183 Warsaw, 21, 37, 101, 121, 176 Waserowicz, Jan [RC?, horodnictwo], 50 Wasilewska, Katarzyna [O, suburbs between Sharp and Rudniki Gates], 33, 314 wax works, 45 weavers, 55, 65, 181, 390 – 91; 1579 statute of, 260; 1604 ban on betraying guild secrets, 259; 1639 statute of, 261 – 62; guild altar at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene [RC], 268 Wejmarin, Katarzyna [L, RC], 333 Wesełowska (Filipowa), Anna Prokopowiczówna, 311 Wesełowski, Filip, 311 Westerman, Samuel [L, RC], 170 Westermanowa [L], 170 Whaley, Joachim, 413 wheelwrights, 344, 391 white-leather (chamois) tanners, 48, 59, 62, 114 – 15, 143, 145, 201 – 2, 251, 256 – 57, 276, 279, 292, 346, 367, 391, 398 white-leather tanners, glove makers, and chamois tanners: 1680 attempt to exclude all but RC members, 145, 256 Wikefort, Joachim, 165 Wikefort, Samuel, 165 Wilia Gate, 41 – 42, 45 – 46, 202, 358, 367, 380, 386 – 88 Wilia Street, 42, 44 – 45, 388 Willantz (Willatestejn], Lorentz [L, Goldsmith, elder], 272 Windziuł, Joannes [elder of the beggars’ corporation], 325 Winhhold, Korneliusz I [C, merchant, Castle Street 1.16], 178, 191, 200 Winhhold, Korneliusz III [C, Castle Street 1.16], 120, 141 Winhold, Jakub [C, Castle Street 1.16], 72, 141 Winhold, Jan [C, Castle Street 1.16], 141, 120 Winhold, Korneliusz II [C, merchant, Castle Street 1.16], 72, 108, 120, 123, 141, 164, 171, 180, 189, 191 – 92, 385 Winholdowa (Korneliuszowa I), Jakumina Deschampsówna [C, Castle Street 1.16], 171, 191 – 92 Winholdowa (Korneliuszowa II), Katarzyna Giblówna [L, Castle Street 1.16], 72, 123, 140 – 42, 178, 189 – 92, 385 Winkiewicz, Tomasz [RC, gunpowder maker, Bernardine Street 53.02], 184, 368 Win´ska, Cecylia. See Kostromska, Cecylia

528

index

Win´ski, Kazimierz [RC, Skop Street 49.05], 185 Wis´niowiecki, Michał Korybut [king of Poland, grand duke of Lithuania], 267, 272, 388; 1669 decree on Jewish settlement, 61; 1669 reaffirmation of privilege for Jewish furriers, haberdashers, and glaziers, 145, 254; 1669 reaffirmation of royal privileges for Jews, 38 – 39 witchcraft, 70 – 71, 185, 253, 279; Jewish, Christian allegations of, 284 Witkowski, Jan, 383 Witkowski, Kasper [O, merchant, Horse Street 8.02], 239 Witmacher, Rejnold [L, merchant, councillor?, Castle Street 2.11], 189, 305 Witmacherowa, Katarzyna. See Engelbrechtowa, Katarzyna Wittenberg, 166, 168 Władysław IV [king of Poland, grand duke of Lithuania], 7, 21, 38, 50, 92, 118, 121, 124, 139, 141, 176, 265, 267, 322, 388, 394, 414; 1633 confirmation of statute for tanners, 251; 1633 privilege for Jewish furriers, haberdashers, and glaziers, 145, 254; 1638 privilege to “dissident” guild members to “buy out” of guild service at RC churches, 265; 1641 decree commanding guilds to cease placing restrictions on RC members, 145; entries into Wilno, 20; his royal musicians, 62 – 63 Wnorowski, Wojciech [RC?, horodnictwo], 201, 365 – 66 Wojna, Abraham [RC, bishop of Wilno], 25 Wojna, Łukasz [royal courtier, German Street 26.15], 36 Wojna Jasieniecki, Aleksander Michał [RC, vice palatine of Wilno], 134 Wojnina Jasieniecka (Aleksandrowa), Leonora Górska [RC], 134 Wojsznarowicz, Jan [RC, councillor], 402 – 5 Wójtkowski, Tomasz [RC?, horodnictwo], 201 Wołłowicz, Eustachy [RC, bishop of Wilno], 85, 169 Wołłowicz, Ostafi [O, C, A, chancellor of the GDL], 386 Wołłowicz, Piotr [RC?, chamberlain of Troki, Sawicz Street 71.06], 56 Wołynkiewicz, Gregorius [treasurer of the beggars’ corporation], 325 women as heads of households, 342 – 50 Woyna, Abraham [RC, bishop of Wilno], 387 Wrocław, 168 Wsielub, 121 Wujek, Jakub [RC, Jesuit], 135; prohibitions against attending baptisms outside the confession, 117; prohibitions against marriage outside the confession, 173; prohibitions against participation in non-RC baptisms, weddings, funerals, 358 Würzburg, 166 Wysocka (Konstantowa), Maryna Sien´czyłówna [O, Subocz Street 78.07], 301 Wysocki, Konstanty Iwanowicz [R?], 301

. Zabin´ski, [RC, canon, Castle Street 1.09], 334, . 338 Z. abin´ski, Wojciech [RC?, horodnictwo], 337, 365 Z. agiewicz, Józef [R, U?], 127, 385 Zagiewiczówna, Anastazja [O?], 127 Zakrzewski, Bogdan Filipowicz [U, burgomaster, Horse Street 8.08], 206, 281 Zaleski, Arnolf [L, lawyer, royal secretary], 167, 208, 217, 295, 300, 367 Zamos´c´, 301 Zamoyski, Jan [RC, grand hetman of the Crown], 153 Zant (Zandt, Sandt), Jan (Johan Heinrich) [L, M.D.], 297 Zanotowa, Barbara. See Zatrybowa, Barbara Zare˛ba, Bartosz [RC, ironsmith, Skop Street 49.05], 343 – 45 Zare˛bina (Bartoszowa), Anna Kotlikówna [RC, Skop . Street 49.05], 343 – 44 Zarnowski, Jan [RC, student, Glass Street], 161, 163 Zatryb (Satriebe), Krzysztof (Chriestoff) [RC, barbersurgeon], 297, 299 – 300, 392 Zatrybowa (Krzysztofowa, pv), Zantowa (Janowa, sv), Barbara Zagierówna [L], 297 Zawiska (Bazylowa I), Agata Ginelewiczówna [RC, suburb beyond Troki Gate], 219 – 20, 279 Zawiski, Bazyli I [RC, furrier, suburb beyond Troki Gate, 45, 219 – 20, 224, 279, 381 Zawiski, Bazyli II [RC, Franciscan monk at the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the Sands], 220 Zawisza, Krzysztof [RC, grand marshal of the GDL, starosta of Brasław, Castle Street 2.11], 305 Zawisza, Krzysztof Stanisław Konstanty [RC, starosta of Min´sk and Brasław, Castle Street 2.11], 306 Zawoniewski, Matiasz [RC, general bailiff ], 367 Zeeden, Ernst Walter, 417 . Z. egalin´ska, Anna [RC, Glass Street], 129 Zegalin´ska (Marcinowa), Katarzyna Dyjakowska . [RC, Glass Street], 129 Z egalin´ski, Augustyn [RC, goldsmith, Glass Street], . 129 Z. egalin´ski, Dominik [RC, Glass Street], 129 Zegalin´ski, Marcin [RC, goldsmith], 129 Zeligmacher, Augustin [L, goldsmith, Glass Street 20.02], 298 Zeligmacherowa (Augustinowa), Anna Sznejderówna [L, Glass Street 20.02], 298 Zelikowicz, Izrael [J], 402 – 3 Zienowicz, Michał [RC?, courtier of His Royal Maj. esty, Mill Alley 51.04], 48 Z oła˛dz´ [O, priest at the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit], 177 Zürich, 2 . Z urowicz, Stanisław [RC, Mill Street 50.08], 346 Zusinel, Jan [R?, merchant], 303 Zyburtowski, Krzysztof [RC, Skop Street 49.11], 346

index Zyganty [RC, priest], 332 Zygmunt I [king of Poland, grand duke of Lithuania], 8 Zygmunt II August [king of Poland, grand duke of Lithuania], 284; 1552 confirmation of statutes for maltsters and cobblers, 260; 1568 privilege granting children of magistrates noble rights, 191

529

Zygmunt III [king of Poland, grand duke of Lithuania], 3, 6, 32, 38, 124, 194, 266, 284, 410; 1589 privilege for the school at the Church of the Holy Trinity [O, U], 157; 1592 provisions for Jewish hol. idays, 83 Z ypła, Mikołaj [R, St. Kazimierz Alley 75.04], 134