New Political Formations in Eastern Europe

In the eastern half of the Holy Roman Empire, Bohemia gained new status as the seat of the Luxembourg imperial dynasty, whose last representative was Emperor Sigismund. This development led to a religious and political crisis when the Hussites clashed with Sigismund. (See “The Great Schism, 1378-1417”). The chief beneficiaries of the violence were the nobles, both Catholic and Hussite, but they quarreled among themselves, especially about who should be king. There was no Joan of Arc to galvanize the national will, and most of Europe considered Bohemia a heretic state.

Farther north, the cities (rather than the landed nobility) held power. Allied cities, known as Hanse, were common. The most successful alliance was the Hanseatic League, a loose federation of mainly north German cities formed to protect their mutual interests in defense and trade—and art. For example, the artist Bernt Notke, who hailed from the Hanse town of Lübeck, painted a famous Dance of Death at Reval (today Tallinn, Estonia), another Hanse town. The Hanseatic League linked the Baltic coast with Russia, Norway, the British Isles, France, and even (via imperial cities like Augsburg and Nuremberg) the cities of Italy. When threatened by rival powers in Denmark and Norway in 1367 to 1370, the league waged war and usually won. But in the fifteenth century it confronted new rivals and began a long, slow decline.

To the east of the Hanseatic cities, two new monarchies took shape in northeastern Europe: Poland and Lithuania. Poland had begun to form in the tenth century. Powerful nobles soon dominated it, and Mongol invasions devastated the land. But recovery was under way by 1300. Unlike almost every other part of Europe, Poland expanded demographically and economically during the fourteenth century. Jews migrated there to escape persecutions in western Europe, and both Jewish and German settlers helped build thriving towns like Cracow. Monarchical consolidation began thereafter.

On Poland’s eastern flank was Lithuania, the only major holdout from Christianity in eastern Europe. But as it expanded into southern Russia, its grand dukes flirted with both the Roman Catholic and Orthodox varieties. Grand Duke Jogailo (c. 1351–1434), taking advantage of a hiatus in the Polish ruling dynasty, united both states in 1386 when he married Queen Jadwiga of Poland, received a Catholic baptism, and was elected by the Polish nobility as King Wladyslaw II Jagiello. As part of the negotiations prior to these events, he promised to convert Lithuania, and after his coronation he sent churchmen there to begin the long, slow process. The union of Poland and Lithuania lasted, with some interruptions, until 1772. (See Mapping the West.)