In the XIV century, when in eastern Russia Moscow believed itself to be the embryos of a unified Russian state, coups took place in the west that incline the other half of Russia to political and social alienation from the Russian world. In the first quarter of this century, the Lithuanian prince Gedimin, the son of Vitenes, a man of extraordinary talents, conquered the Belarusian and Volyn cities, with their lands, expelled from Lutsk the main prince in the Volyn land Leo, then in 1319-20. on the Irpeni River (Kiev province) he defeated the princes of the house of St. Vladimir who had united against him, seized Kiev and Pereyaslavl with their lands. The consequence of these conquests was that the princely house of St. Vladimir completely lost its significance in the west. Some princes fled, others were relegated to the level of subordinate rulers, and their place in the sense of appanage princes was replaced by princes of Lithuanian origin. Gediminas divided the Russian domains he had conquered between his children and relatives; in Volhynia he became prince Lyubart, in Novogorodok Koriat, in Pinsk Narimunt; in Kiev, Prince Montvid was appointed as Gedimin's henchman, and so on. These Lithuanian princes adopted Orthodoxy and the Russian nationality, and their nearest offspring became Russified to such an extent that there were no signs of their former origin in them. This revolution was essentially only a dynastic one; but the difference between the order of affairs under the princes of the house of St. Vladimir and under the princes of the Gediminas' house was that the princes of the Lithuanian house depended on the grand duke, who was in Lithuania, and with their inheritances were subordinate to him. The Polotsk and Vitebsk lands were already under the rule of the princes of the Lithuanian tribe, who probably reached the reign of their choice, and later these lands submitted to Gediminas, and then were already under the rule of the princes of his family.

Following the conquest of the Russian lands by Gediminas, another coup took place in Chervona Rus. Upon the death of the main prince of this land, a direct descendant of King Danil, Yuri II, the Galician and Vladimir boyars called for Prince Boleslav of Mazovia, a descendant of Danil Galitsky in the female line; but this prince converted to Catholicism, as a result of which he showed disdain for the Orthodox faith, surrounded himself with foreigners and mistreated the Russians; he was poisoned, and in 1340 the Polish king Casimir, as an avenger for Boleslav, took possession of Lvov and all Galician land, as well as Volyn, but after that he had to endure a long struggle with the Russians who were defending their independence. The main figure in this struggle from the Russian side was the prince of Ostrozh, named Danilo, otherwise Danko: he was a descendant of Roman, one of the sons of Danil Galitsky; his hatred of Polish rule was so great that Danilo Ostrozhsky directed the Tatars to Poland. Together with him was the son of Gediminas Lubart, baptized under the name of Theodore. After a long bloodshed, Casimir held only part of Volhynia. Since then, the lands that came under the rule of Poland remained with her forever and began to gradually accept Polish influence in their internal structure of life and language.

Gedimin's son, Grand Duke Olgerd, expanded the Russian possessions inherited from his father: he annexed the Podolsk land to his state, driving out the Tatars from there. Rus subject to him was divided between the princes, whom, however, Olgerd, a man of strong character, held in his hands. In Kiev, he planted his son Vladimir, who gave rise to a new family of Kiev princes, who ruled there for more than a century and are usually called Olelkovichs, from Olelko, or Alexander Vladimirovich, Olgerd's grandson. Olgerd himself, who was twice married to Russian princesses, allowed his sons to be baptized into the Russian faith and, as the Russian chronicles say, he himself was baptized and died a schema-monk. Thus, the princes who replaced the clan of St. Vladimir in Russia became the same Russian in faith and in the nationality they adopted, as were the princes of the clan that preceded them. The Lithuanian state bore the name of Lithuania, but, of course, it was purely Russian and would not cease to remain completely Russian for the future if the son and successor of Olgerd in the grand dignity of Jagiello (otherwise Jagiello) in 1386 did not marry the Polish queen Jadvigo. As a result of this marriage, he converted to Catholicism, became a zealous defender of the newly adopted faith and, indulging the Poles, patronized both the spread of the Catholic faith in the Russian lands and the introduction of the Polish people in Russia. At this time, the embryo was laid for the phenomenon, which subsequently for many centuries was a distinctive feature of the mutual relations of Russia and Poland. The concept of faith closely merged with the concept of nationality. Those who were Catholic were already Poles; those who considered themselves and called themselves Russian were Orthodox, and belonging to the Orthodox faith was the most obvious sign of belonging to the Russian people. Jagiello was a man of soft heart, weak will and limited mind. He left Lithuania and Russia to the management of his cousin Alexander Vitovt, who was distinguished by ambitious plans, but at the same time inevitability to bring them to the end. Vitovt constantly hesitated and fell into contradictions, dreamed of the independence of his Russian-Lithuanian state, but he himself adopted Catholicism in the cut with the Russian people, who firmly stood for Orthodoxy, yielded in everything to the Poles and peacefully allowed their claims. Jagiello granted the Lithuanian and Russian landowners those free, independent rights that removed their lazy duties - the rights that the Poles enjoyed in their homeland. But Jagiello extended these advantages in Lithuania and Russia only to those who accepted the Roman faith. In 1413, the first union of Lithuania with Poland took place. Poles and Lithuanians pledged to consult with one another when choosing rulers, not to undertake wars alone without the other, and to come to congresses for general advice on their mutual affairs. Having concluded such a treaty, Vytautas after that incessantly made attempts to destroy it, dreamed of a Russian-Lithuanian state, but did not achieve it and nevertheless remained in history one of the most important preparators of the enslavement of Russia by Poland. The Russians did not tolerate him, realizing that the state he wanted to create would not be Russian. Vitovt's brother Svidrigello (otherwise Svidrigailo), who preserved the Orthodox faith and was married to the Tver princess Iuliana Borisovna, did not treat the Russian people in this way. This man, like Vitovt, was guided by his own ambition, but surpassed the first in intelligence and loyalty to his gaze. His goal was to become an independent Russian-Lithuanian sovereign, independent of the Polish king, but he realized that for this he needed to go along with the Russian people. For half a century, Svidrigello fought with Poland, being at the head of the Russian people, who were very attached to him for a long time. This struggle took place during Vitovt's lifetime; after the death of the latter, Svidrigello became the Grand Duke of Lithuania, also as an assistant to Jagell, which Vitovt was, but did not double and hesitate, like Vitovt, and immediately began to openly act as an independent Russian sovereign, and attempted to take away from Poland those Russian possessions that were attached to it directly. The Poles, in contemplation with the Lithuanian masters who converted to Catholicism, overthrew Svidrigell, and instead of him Vitovt's brother, a Catholic Sigismund, was appointed Grand Duke of Lithuania, who recognized himself in fief dependence on Poland. But Rus was for Svidrighella. A stubborn, bloody struggle continued for several years not only against the Poles, but also against the Lithuanians, the supporters of Sigismund; finally, Svidrigello himself, who had already entered old age, was tired of leading her, and moreover, both his actions and circumstances deprived him of support in the Russian people.

Svidrigello armed the Lithuanians and Russians against himself with cruel executions of his ill-wishers, sometimes committed on the basis of one suspicion; so, by the way, he, suspecting the Smolensk bishop Gerasim, his former favorite, of relations with Sigismund, ordered to burn him alive. In all this struggle between the Russians and the Poles, one of the Russian princes Fyodor, or Fedko Ostrozhsky, tirelessly acted in concert with Svidrigell, but Svidrigello began to suspect him of treason; Svidrigello ordered this comrade of many years of struggle and wandering to be imprisoned. Fedko, freed by the Poles, made peace with the Polish king. Svidrigell was left alone in Lutsk. The new Polish king, the son of Jagell, Vladislav (called Varna in history, on the occasion of his death in a battle with the Turks near Varna, in 1444) dealt a decisive blow to Svidrigell's assassination attempts with his relationship to the Russian people and the Russian faith. Until now, the Poles have seized power in Russia through violence from year to year. King Vladislav Jagiello built churches, endowed them with estates, distributed lands and positions to Catholics, founded cities and villages in Russia, inhabited them with Poles and gave them privileges that the inhabitants of old Russian cities and villages did not have. Then there was the so-called Magdeburg Law, which consisted of various benefits, which introduced the well-known system of self-government and, along with it, the German division of urban artisans and merchants into workshops, in accordance with their occupations. This right was given only to new cities inhabited by Catholics - Poles and Germans. The latter at that time settled a lot in Russia. The settlers of the new villages were exempted from various payments and duties, from which there was no exemption for the old Russian villages. Zemyans (former landowners boyars) were equal in rights with the Polish gentry and were exempted from various payments, but only when they accepted Catholicism; in this case, they served in the army with a salary, and while remaining in Orthodoxy, they did not receive it. Accepting the Catholic faith, the Russians, like the Lithuanians, lost their nationality and almost turned into Poles. The entire population of western Russia was thus divided into privileged and unprivileged, and the last were the Orthodox inhabitants of the Russian lands. Vladislav Yagell's successor, Vladislav II (1434), began to act in a different spirit than his father, although for the same purpose. He extended the privileges and privileges enjoyed by the Russian zemyans of the Latin faith to all Russian zemyans without exception. This was the beginning of the reconciliation of Russia with Poland and the main reason that Svidrigell's plans could no longer find the former sympathy, since the Russian people, who constituted the power of the region, felt for themselves the benefits of rapprochement with Poland, instead of seeing in it a hostile beginning, as it was before that time. In 1443, King Vladislav II gave a charter, according to which he equated the Russian Church and the Russian clergy with the Roman Catholic in all rights. Thus, on the part of the Orthodox clergy, hostile movements ceased. Sigismund, the former Grand Duke of Lithuania, was killed by the princes of Chertorizh in 1443; but Svidrigello could no longer regain the great reign, remained in Lutsk inactive and died at a ripe old age (in 1452). The new Lithuanian prince after Sigismund was the son of Jagel, Kazimir. The following year, 1444, he was elected king of Poland, and during the entire continuation of his long reign in Lithuania there was no longer a separate Grand Duke. Casimir acted in everything in the spirit of Polish politics; although he did not openly persecute the Orthodox faith by violent means, he contributed to the spread of Catholicism and introduced all the signs of the Polish system to the Russian lands. The earthlings received the broadest rights: they became, so to speak, full sovereigns on their estates. Instead of appanage princes, henchmen to the Grand Duke, voivods and kashtelians were introduced, following the Polish model, appointed for life. Thus, by the way, in Kiev, in 1476, after the death of Prince Mikhail from the clan of Vladimir Olgerdovich, the governors began. This position was received by noble persons. The princes, the descendants of Gediminas and St. Vladimir, became independent rulers in their estates on a par with the Polish masters: they possessed enormous wealth, and the entire Russian land, especially the southern one, was in the possession of a few clans, such as the Ostrog, Zaslavsky (which made up another branch of one house with 0strozhsky), Vishnevetsky and Zbarazhsky - descendants of Olgerd, Chertorizhsky, Sangushki, Voronetsky, Rozhinsky, Chetvertinsky and others. In Russia, the aristocracy began to dominate. The rest of the people were more and more dependent on her. The owners had the right to judge their subjects and did not allow the king to interfere in their government. The cities, which were largely filled with Jews, received Magdeburg law one after another, but, with the power of the aristocracy, could not be protected from the arbitrariness of powerful nobles. The Polish order more and more belonged to the right of the upper class, and this led the Russian land dwellers to a closer rapprochement with Poland. After Casimir, Lithuania and Poland for some time had separate rulers in the person of the Polish king Jan Albrecht and his brother, the Grand Duke of Lithuania Alexander. But this lasted a short time; Soon after the death of Albrecht, Poland and Lithuania again united under the rule of Alexander, who was elected the Polish king, and since then there have been no separate Grand Dukes in Lithuania. At this time, the condition of the lower class of the people, the so-called kmetey or claps, became more difficult. The pans were not ashamed of the more ancient custom of not transferring flakes from one land to another, and often completely deprived them of their land; thus, the lower class, the farmers, found themselves landless, and thus enslaved by those who owned the land. Land ownership could only be the property of people of the gentry rank. In the 16th century, Poland and Lithuania were ruled by kings one after another: Sigismund I and his son Sigismund Augustus. The rights of the gentry have reached their extreme limits. Pans' subjects were completely removed from the patronage of the king. The position of a non-deluded person was humiliated to such an extent that, according to the Lithuanian laws included in the collection called the Lithuanian Statute, a nobleman who killed someone else's clap or even a free person, but not a nobleman, was punished only by the payment of a penalty (anniversary). Although the same right was granted to all people of gentry origin, both rich and poor, in reality this equality could not be maintained, despite the disproportionate wealth of the landowners: the mass of free gentry became, in essence, subordinate to the noble lords, who possessed vast expanses of land and hundreds, even thousands of settlements. At this time, Poland, both in geographical position and in living conditions, which stood closer to Rus to Western Europe, where the era of spiritual revival began, was much higher in mental education than Rus, and the Russian gentry naturally obeyed its civilizing influence. While the Poles had a Krakow academy, many schools, scientists and poets remarkable in their time appeared, acquaintance with Latin literature was widespread, communication with Western enlightenment was not interrupted - darkness reigned in Polish and Lithuanian Rus, almost no educational measures were taken. in the area of \u200b\u200btheir nationality. Southern and Western Russia stood in this respect even lower than the northeastern one, where at least ancient monuments of Slavic literature were preserved and where from time to time, as we have seen, more or less remarkable fruits of mental work appeared. For a long time, we see nothing in Polish and Lithuanian Rus, except for official papers written in a language that testifies to the ever-increasing influence and rocnostva of the Polish language. Thus, in the 16th century, a special Russian written language was formed, representing a mixture of the ancient Slavic church with the folk local dialects and the Polish language. Polish influence dominated this language more and more and finally brought it to the point that it became almost Polish, only with the retention of Russian phonetics. The influence of the Polish was reflected in common speech: Polish words, expressions and phrases began to enter the common language of the Little Russian and Belarusian branches. At the same time, Polish customs and attitudes began to penetrate into Russian high society; Thus, Polish-Lithuanian Rus adopted a special physiognomy that distinguished it from northeastern Rus, not only by its ancient ethnographic differences, but by its strong proximity to Poland, and in the future, obviously, a perfect fusion of western and southern Rus with Poland was being prepared.

The descendants of Fyodor Ostrog, who had fought for the independence of Russia for so long, 1 remained loyal to Poland, just as the Russian upper class in general, who saw an inexhaustible benefit for themselves in union with Poland, was loyal to it. In addition to the unconditional right to own their ancestral estates, paying almost nothing to the treasury, the Russian lords, in accordance with Polish custom, received state property, called the elders, as a lifetime possession, with the obligation to give from them a quarter of the income to support the army and support the fortifications. All this naturally tied them to the country from which such benefits flowed for them.

The great-grandson of Fyodor Ostrozhsky, famous for his struggle for Russia against Poland, was the famous Konstantin Ivanovich, the Lithuanian hetman, a loyal servant of the Polish king, who was captured by Ivan III and then avenged for his captivity by the defeat inflicted on the Moscow army near Orsha. Enmity towards Orthodox Moscow and faithful service to the Catholic King did not prevent him from being famous for Orthodox piety.2 He generously built and decorated Orthodox churches, at the same time started schools for children at the churches, and thus laid the foundation for Russian enlightenment.

His son Konstantin Konstantinovich was a Kiev governor and one of the noblest and most influential lords of Poland and Lithuania for more than half a century, and moreover in the most glorious and eventful era of Polish history. He was not distinguished by either military exploits or state deeds; on the contrary, from the modern letters of the Polish kings, we learn about him that he incurred reproaches for negligence to defend the voivodeship entrusted to him, left the Kiev castle in a sad situation, so that Kiev could constantly be subjected to ruin from the Tatars; moreover, he did not pay the taxes that came from his elders. In his youth, as they say, he declared himself in domestic life in a not entirely plausible way: so, by the way, he helped Prince Dimitri Sangushka to take away his niece Ostrog by force. Some features of his life show in him a vain and vain gentleman. He possessed enormous wealth: in addition to his family estates, which included up to eighty cities with several thousand villages, he owned the huge four elders granted to him in southern Russia; his income extended to one million zlotys per year. In such a situation, Konstantin Konstantinovich paid a large sum to one kashtelian only for the fact that he had to stand behind his chair twice a year during dinner; for the sake of originality, he kept a glutton at his court, who surprised his guests by eating an incredible amount of food at breakfast and lunch. It was not so much the personal abilities of Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich, as his brilliant position gave him great importance and placed him at the center of the intellectual activity that arose at that time in Russia. Like the nobles of his time, and he showed himself to be a supporter of Poland, at the famous Diet of 1569 he signed the annexation of Volhynia and the Kiev province to the Polish kingdom for eternity, and by his example he greatly contributed to the success of this business. As a Russian, and considering himself Russian, he, however, submitted to the influence of Polish education and used the Polish language, as his family letters show. Remaining in the faith of his fathers, Ostrozhsky, however, inclined towards the Jesuits, let them into his possessions and especially caressed one of them, named Motovil: this is clearly seen from Kurbsky's letters to him. The Moscow exile reproached Ostrozhsky for the fact that Ostrozhsky had sent Motovil's work to him and was friends with the Jesuits. "O my beloved sovereign," Kurbsky wrote to him, "why did you send me a book written by the enemy of Christ, the assistant of the Antichrist and his faithful servant? With whom you are friends, with whom you communicate, whom you call for help! .. Accept from me, servants of your faithful, advice with meekness: stop making friends with these foes, evil and evil. No one can be a friend of the king if he befriends his enemies and holds a snake in his bosom; I pray you three times, stop doing this, be like your forefathers by the zeal of piety. "Thus, this Russian gentleman succumbed to the Jesuit intrigues. Subsequently, it is noticeable that Ostrozhsky succumbed to the influence of Protestantism. In one of his letters to his grandson, the son of his daughter, Radzivill , he wrote an exhortation that he should not go to the church, but advised him to go to the meeting of Calvinists and called them followers of the true law of Christ. His passion for Protestantism, however, came from the fact that the famous prince saw the Christian deeds of Protestants. Ostrozhsky respectfully pointed to the fact that they had schools and printing houses, that their pastors were distinguished by their good behavior and opposed them with the decline of church deanery in the Russian Church, the ignorance of the priests, the material willfulness of the archpastors, the indifference of the laity to matters of faith. "The rules and regulations of our church," he said, " in contempt among foreigners; our fellow believers not only cannot stand up for God's church, but even laugh at it; no teachers, no preachers of God's word; everywhere the gladness of hearing the word of God, frequent apostasy; I have to say with the Prophet: who will give water to my head and a source of tears to my eyes! "

Some Russian people took advantage of this mood of the noble gentleman and prompted Ostrozhsky to become, to some extent, the engine of the intellectual and religious revival in Polish Russia. Probably, the convictions and reproaches of Kurbsky contributed much to this mood. Ostrozhsky respected Kurbsky; Ostrozhsky sent him for viewing various works and, by the way, a wonderful book by the Jesuit Skargi "On the One Church", written on purpose with the aim of preparing a union. Kurbsky returned this book to Ostrozhsky with the same reproaches as the work of Motovil; for his part, Kurbsky sent the "Conversation of John Chrysostom about Faith, Hope and Love," translated from Latin by him, and was angry with Prince Ostrozhsky when the latter reported Kurbsky's translation to some Pole whom Kurbsky called "an unlearned barbarian who imagined himself a sage." ... The Moscow exile, seeing the growing influence of the Jesuits in his new fatherland, tried with all his might to oppose them, as well as the domination of the Polish language. When Ostrozhsky, who liked Kurbsky's writing, advised translating it into Polish for greater dissemination, Kurbsky rejected this proposal: "If not a few scientists agreed," he wrote, "they are not able to literally translate the grammatical subtleties of the Slavic language into their "Polish barbaria". Not only with Slavic or Greek speech, and they will not cope with their favorite Latin. " Then, among the Russian masters, it became a custom, for the sake of enlightenment, to trust the upbringing of children to the Jesuits. Kurbsky spoke with praise in general about the desire to teach children the sciences, but he saw no use from the Jesuits. "Already many of the parents (he wrote to the princess of Chertorizhskaya) clans of princely, gentry and honest citizens gave their children to study sciences, but the Jesuits did not teach them anything, but only, using their youth, turned them away from orthodoxy." Judging by the letters of Kurbsky to various persons, one can probably assume that this Moscow fugitive had a strong influence on the activities of Prince Ostrozhsky in the field of preserving the faith and reviving book education, since he and Ostrozhsky were constantly in close relations.

The embryos of the intellectual and religious movement in Polish-Lithuanian Rus appeared at the beginning of the 16th century. The Polochanian Skorinna translated the Bible into Russian and published it in Czech Prague, in the absence of a printing house in Russia. In the middle of the 16th century, the spread of Protestantism in Lithuania contributed to the literary awakening of Russian speech. In 1562 there was a printing house in Nesvizh, and the famous at one time Simon Budny, a man of great learning, published the Protestant catechism in Russian 3. A little later, the Lithuanian hetman Grigory Alexandrovich Chodkevich founded a printing house in his estate Zabludov; the printers Ivan Fedorov and Pyotr Mstislavets who had left Moscow arrived there: they printed there, in 1569, an explanatory Gospel, a large folio. It was the work of the famous Maxim the Greek, later reprinted in the same form in Moscow. But Chodkevich's printing house was, as you can see, only a temporary lord's whim. After the death of Grigory Chodkevich, the heirs did not support the institution. The printer Ivan Fedorov moved to Lvov, and then to Ostrog, and it was here that a printing house was founded, which laid a firmer foundation for the literary and printing business in southern Russia. In 1580, the Slavic Bible was printed for the first time by order of Ostrog. In the preface to the Bible, on behalf of Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich Ostrozhsky, it was said that he was prompted to this cause by the sad position of the church, trampled by enemies from everywhere and tormented without mercy by merciless wolves, and no one is able to resist them due to the lack of spiritual weapons - the word of God. In all countries of the Slavic family and language, Ostrozhsky could not find a single correct copy of the Old Testament and finally received it only from Moscow through the mediation of Mikhail Garaburda. At the same time, Prince of Ostrog communicated with Rome, with the islands of the Greek archipelago (with the Kandyan), with the Patriarch of Constantinople Jeremiah, Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian monasteries in order to get from there copies of the Holy Scriptures, both Hellenic and Slavic, and wished to be guided by the advice of the people, versed in scripture. The first printed Bible published by Ostrozhsky constitutes an era in Russian literature and, in general, in the history of Russian education. The Bible was followed by a number of editions, both liturgical books and various works of religious content. Among them, an important place is occupied by the book "On the One True and Orthodox Faith and the Holy Apostolic Church", written by priest Basil and published in 1588: this book served as a refutation of Skarga's work, published in Polish under almost the same title, and was intended to protect Eastern Church against reproaches made by supporters of the Latin Church. Here the questions that constituted the essence of the differences between the churches are considered: about the procession of the Holy Spirit, about the power of the Pope, about unleavened bread, about spiritual celibacy, about the Sabbath fast. This book was of great importance in its time, because it introduced the essence of those questions that were to become the subject of live competitions; Orthodox readers could learn from this book: what and how they should object to the convictions of the Western clergy, who then launched their propaganda among the Russian people. The Ostroh printing house also published several books of religious content: "Sheets of Patriarch Jeremiah" and "Dialogue of Patriarch Gennady" (in 1583), "Confession of the Procession of the Holy Spirit" (1588). In 1594, the book of Basil the Great "On fasting" was published in a large folio, and in 1596 "Margaret" by John Chrysostom. At the same time as the printing house, in 1580, Ostrozhsky founded his main school in Ostrog and, in addition, several schools in his domain. The rector of the main Ostroh school, the ancestor of higher educational institutions on Russian soil, was the Greek scientist Cyril Lukaris, who later received the dignity of the Patriarch of Constantinople. In addition to Ostrog, Prince Ostrozhsky opened a printing house in the Derman monastery.

At the same time, another important driver of the awakening of mental life in Russia was the establishment of brotherhoods, associations with moral and religious purposes, which included, without distinction, people of all classes, but certainly belonged to the same church. Such brotherhoods began to emerge from imitation of Western ones. The first of these brotherhoods in Polish Rus, which acquired historical significance, was the Lviv one, founded with the blessing of Patriarch Joachim of Antioch, who visited the Russian land in 1586. His main goals were the upbringing of orphans, the charity of the poor, assistance to the victims of various misfortunes, the ransom of prisoners, the burial and commemoration of the dead, help during social disasters, in general, deeds of good. The members had their own definite gatherings and each contributed six pennies to the general circle. Then, under the brotherhood, a school, a printing house and a hospital were opened by the bourgeoisie. In addition to the Holy Scriptures, the school taught Slavic grammar along with Greek, and for this purpose a Hellenic-Slavic grammar was compiled and published, in which the rules of both languages \u200b\u200bwere comparatively stated. Private teaching was limited: everyone could teach only their own children and family. On the model of the Lvov brotherhood, the Trinity Brotherhood was established in Vilna, and then brotherhoods began to be founded in other cities. Of these, the elders were given to Lviv. The mere fact that people of all classes converged among themselves in the name of the paternal faith, the improvement of morality and the expansion of the range of concepts, had an effect on raising the people's spirit. Patriarch Joachim, establishing the Lviv brotherhood, entrusted him with supervision over the fulfillment of their spiritual duties, as well as over the piety and good nature of both the clergy and the laity; thus, the clergy became dependent on the public judgment of secular people: this was completely opposite to the views of the Western clergy, which always jealously strove for people who did not belong to the clergy to blindly obey the instructions of the spiritual, and did not dare to talk about matters of faith, otherwise as under the guidance of the spiritual, and did not dare to condemn their actions. But the Russian highest spiritual dignitaries did not like the founding of brotherhoods. Vladyka Gideon of Lvov immediately became hostile to the Lvov brotherhood.

The structure of the Orthodox Church in Russia, subject to Poland, was in a sad situation. The highest spiritual dignitaries, coming from noble families, instead of going through the ladder of monastic ranks in accordance with Orthodox customs, received their places directly from the secular rank, and, moreover, not by trial, but by connections, thanks to the patronage of the strong or through bribery, having won over the royal courtiers. Bishops and archimandrites ruled church estates with all the privileges of court and arbitrariness of the secular nobles of their time, kept armed detachments, according to the custom of secular owners, in case of quarrels with neighbors they allowed themselves violent raids and in their home life led a lifestyle that was completely unbecoming of their dignity ... There were examples that noble lords asked the king for episcopal and abbot places for themselves and, remaining uninitiated, used church bread, as they said then. One contemporary remarks: "The rules of the Holy Father do not allow ordaining priests under thirty years of age, but in our country they sometimes admit fifteen. He does not know how to read in warehouses, but he is sent to preach the word of God; he did not manage his house, but the church order is entrusted. " The rulers, archimandrites, and abbots had brothers, nephews, and children who were given church property for management. The luxurious life of the highest dignitaries led to the oppression of subjects in church estates. "You," the Athos monk denounced the Russian bishops, "rob the poor villagers of oxen and horses, rip out monetary tributes from them, torture them, torment them with work, suck blood from them." The lower clergy were in extreme humiliation. Poor monasteries were converted to farms, the rulers set up kennels in them for their hunting, and the monks were ordered to keep dogs. Parish priests endured both from the rulers and from the secular people. The rulers treated them rudely, arrogantly, burdened them with taxes in their favor, punished them with imprisonment and beatings. The secular owner of the village appointed in it such a priest as he pleased, and this priest did not disagree with the clap in relation to the owner; the master sent him with a cart, drove him to his work, took his children into the service. A Russian priest, a contemporary notes, was a perfect peasant by his upbringing; did not know how to behave decently; there was nothing to talk to him about. The title of presbyter reached such contempt that fair man I was ashamed to join it and it was difficult to say: where the priest was more often, in church or in a tavern. Often the service was conducted by them in a drunken state with seductive antics, and usually the priest, performing the service, did not at all understand what he was reading, and did not even try to understand. With such a state of the clergy, it is clear that the common people lived their ancient pagan life, retained pagan views and beliefs, sent pagan festivals according to their great-grandfather's customs and did not have the slightest idea about the essence of Christianity, and the upper class began to be ashamed of their belonging to the Orthodox religion; Catholics supported this false shame with all their might. The Jesuit Skarga, the favorite of King Sigismund III, even sneered at the liturgical language of the Russian Church in such expressions: "What kind of language is this? It is not taught anywhere in philosophy, theology, or logic; it cannot even have grammar and rhetoric! Russian priests are unable to explain what they read in church, and are forced to ask others for explanations in Polish. From this language - nothing but ignorance and delusion. "

Under the conditions of that time, it was only possible to raise the falling church and popular piety by forming the focus of revival not in the clergy, but outside of it, in worldly life. Brotherhoods were to become the main instrument of this rebirth. Patriarch Jeremiah, passing through southern Russia in 1589, approved the rights of the Lviv brotherhood and even expanded them: he freed the brotherhood from the dependence of the local ruler and from any other secular and spiritual authority, did not allow any other Orthodox school in Lvov, except the brotherly one, left behind him supervision over the episcopal court and, at the complaint of the brotherhood, imposed a ban on the Lviv bishop Gideon Balaban. Balaban turned to the Roman Catholic bishop of Lviv, and the first of the then Russian bishops declared a desire to obey the pope.

During his stay in southern Russia, Patriarch Jeremiah deposed the Metropolitan of Kiev Onesiphor the Girl under the pretext that he was a bigamist before, and instead dedicated Michael Ragoza, already, apparently, rigged by the Jesuits. The patriarch was wrong about this man. But he was even more mistaken in that, without giving full power to the metropolitan, he appointed Bishop Kirill Terletsky of Lutsk as his exarch (governor), an immoral man and even accused of the most heinous atrocities, such as robbery, rape and murder.

The Russian clergy were very dissatisfied with the patriarch for giving the brotherhoods such power and putting the clergy under the supervision of the laity: in addition, they also complained about him for various extortions from the Russian clergy: obeying the Turkish authorities, the patriarchs and, in general, Greek saints were in such a position that they needed alms collected in the Orthodox lands. "We have such sheep," the Russian clergy said, "which they only milk and shear, not feed."

The next year after Jeremiah's departure, the Metropolitan gathered a synod of Orthodox bishops in Brest. Everyone began to complain about the burden of dependence on the patriarch and grumbled about the brotherhoods, especially the Lvov one, which, according to the letter of Patriarch Jeremiah in 1593, was under the direct jurisdiction of the patriarch. "How," said the bishops, "some gathering of bakers, merchants, saddlers, tanners, ignoramuses, who think nothing of theological matters, are given the right to condemn the court of the authorities established by the church and draw up sentences about matters concerning the Church of God!" All came to the conclusion that it is best to submit, instead of the Patriarch of Constantinople, to the Pope.

In 1593, in the place of the deceased Vladimir bishop, Adam Potiy was installed, who until that time was a secular master and bore the title of Brest kashtelian. He had already been seduced from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, then pretended to convert to Orthodoxy with the intention of devoting himself to the cause of union. He was a man of impeccable morality, seemed pious and he himself started a brotherhood in Brest. Ostrozhsky respected him, moreover, Potiy was related to Ostrozhsky. The king, having given him the seat of bishop, meant precisely that Potius could persuade the mighty Russian nobleman.

Potiy entered into correspondence with Ostrozhsky and, without starting a speech about union himself, conducted the matter in such a way that Prince Konstantin Ostrozhsky was the first to speak about it. Sorting out all sorts of means to correct the church order, Ostrozhsky stopped at the unification of the eastern church with the western one. But Ostrozhsky did not want at all the kind of union that Roman propaganda dreamed of. Ostrozhsky recognized the Orthodox Church as universal and not national; Ostrozhsky considered it correct to unite churches only in such a case when it was started in other Orthodox countries, and therefore suggested that the Vladimir bishop go to Moscow, and send the Lvov bishop to the Volokhs for a meeting on the unification of churches. In the types of Ostrog, the purpose of the proposed connection was the founding of schools, the education of preachers and, in general, the spread of religious enlightenment. Ostrozhsky could not conceal to Poti his longstanding inclination towards Protestantism; Ostrozhsky noticed, among other things, that much should be changed in church rites, sacraments, in church administration, and, as he put it, human inventions should be separated. Potiy replied to this to Ostrozhsky: "The Eastern Church performs its sacraments and rituals correctly; there is nothing to condemn or to deplore; I will not go to Moscow: with such an assignment there you will get under the whip. king. "

Not having time to persuade Ostrozhsky, the bishops gathered several times to interpret, and in 1595 they made a proposal to the Pope about union and elected Poti and Lutsk Bishop Kirill Terletsky as ambassadors to Rome on this matter. Potiy informed Ostrozhsky about this and recalled that Ostrozhsky himself was the first to raise the speech about union.

Ostrozhsky got angry, wrote Potius that the Vladimir bishop was a traitor and unworthy of his dignity, and on June 24 he wrote and sent (probably printed) a message to all Orthodox inhabitants of Poland and Lithuania, praised the Greek faith as the only true one in the world, announced that the main leaders of the true of our faith, the imaginary shepherds: the metropolitan and bishops, turned into wolves, departed from the eastern church, "venerated the western" and thought to tear away from the faith all the pious "local area" and lie to destruction. “Many, - expressed Ostrozhsky, - from the inhabitants of the local region of the state of His Majesty my King, obedient to the holy Eastern Church, consider me the initial person in Orthodoxy, although I myself consider myself not great, but equal to others by Orthodoxy; for this reason, fearing not to be guilty before God and you, I inform you about what I probably learned, wanting to stand together with you against the adversaries, so that with God's help and with your diligence, those who have prepared nets for us, themselves into these nets What could be more shameful and lawless if six or seven villains rejected their shepherds, from whom they were appointed, consider us to be dumb brutes, dare to unauthorizedly tear us away from the truth and lead us into destruction with themselves? "

Ostrog asked the king to open a cathedral, which would be attended not only by the spiritual, but also by the secular. The king, worried about the success of the union, wrote a convincing letter to Ostrog, persuading him to adhere to the union and most of all pointed out that the Greek Church is under the rule of such a patriarch who receives his rank at the behest of the unfaithful Mohammedans. In accordance with the prevailing Roman Catholic view that spiritual matters should be the property of spiritual ones alone, Sigismund did not want to allow a congress of secular persons on matters of faith, which not only Ostrog wanted, but the bishops themselves, counterfeiting Ostrog, made a request to the king about the same. The king wrote: "Such a congress will only complicate matters; it is the duty of our pastors to take care of our salvation, and we must, without questioning, act as they command, because the Spirit of the Lord gave us their leaders in life." But this kind of convictions only irritated Ostrozhsky, since all this offended, among other things, his master's vanity, which inspired him to be the first among his fellow believers.

Seeking permission from the king to attend a congress or council of secular people on matters of faith, Ostrog with one of his courtiers sent an invitation to a Protestant cathedral in Torun to jointly oppose papism. The Orthodox prince wrote in such terms: "All who recognize the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are people of the same faith. If people had more tolerance for each other, if people watched with respect as their brothers glorify God, each according to their own conscience , then there would be fewer sects and opinions in the world. We must converge with everyone who only moves away from the Latin faith and sympathizes with our fate: all Christian confessions must defend themselves against the “papezhniks.” His royal majesty will not want to allow attacks on us, because we ourselves may have twenty, at least fifteen thousand armed men, and gentlemen can surpass us only in the number of those cooks whom the priests keep instead of wives. "

This message became known to the king, and he ordered Ostrozhsky to write a reprimand for disrespectful comments about the faith that the king professes, and especially for hinting at cooks.

Threats about the possibility of appearing to thousands of armed men had an important meaning. A spirit of willfulness prevailed in Poland. The laws were weak, and instead of resorting to their protection, people who felt strong behind themselves dealt with their rivals. Noble lords kept armed detachments from the gentry: raids on estates and courtyards were commonplace. The pans arbitrarily interfered even in the affairs of neighboring states. Udal people of all kinds formed gangs, the so-called "willful kupy", and carried out various outrages. In southern Russia, the Cossacks grew stronger every year, especially after the successful campaigns in the Crimea and Moldavia. It was replenished with Russian people from the estates: hereditary pans and crown (given to the pans in the form of elders), and through such an influx of fugitives who left for the Cossacks in opposition to the will of the pans, it acquired a hostile mood towards the pans and the gentry in general. In addition to the Cossacks recognized in this rank and under the command of a senior or hetman, gangs of the common people were formed, calling themselves Cossacks, under the command of special leaders; such gangs, at the opportunity, easily adhered to real Cossacks and were ready to act at the same time with them to the detriment of their owners. In 1593, the Cossack hetman Krishtof (Christopher) Kosinskiy revolted. The Cossacks attacked the owner’s courtyards, ruined them, and destroyed noble documents. Kosinsky took possession of the Ukrainian cities and Kiev itself, thanks to the negligence of Ostrozhsky, who was a Kiev governor: he, as we said, had long been, but unsuccessfully, reproached by the kings for leaving the Kiev castle in neglect. Kosinsky invaded the estates of Ostrog and demanded an oath of allegiance from the gentry and the people: Kosinsky clearly expressed his intention to tear Russia away from Poland, destroy the aristocratic order in it and introduce a Cossack system in which there would be no distinction of estates, everyone would be equal and the same right land. The danger threatened Poland with a political and social upheaval. The king appealed to the gentry of the southern Russian governors of Bratslav, Kiev and Volyn, so that all people of the gentry rank would take up arms against the enemy, who demands an oath for himself and violates the rights of the king and the state. Ostrozhsky gathered all the gentry who were in his vast estates, entrusted it to the superiors of his son Janusz and sent them to the rebel. Kosinsky failed, pledged to renounce his superiors over the Cossacks, and freed from trouble, again started an uprising, but was killed near Cherkasy. Grigory Loboda was elected his successor in the dignity of hetman. Then, in addition to the Cossacks, who were under the command of Hetman Loboda, another Cossack militia appeared, headstrong, under the command of Severin Nalivaik, whose brother Damian was a priest in Ostrog. Nalivaiko harbored an inveterate hatred of the panting, due to the fact that Pan Kalinovsky in the town of Gusyatin took away the farm from Nalivaikov's father and beat the owner himself so that he died of beatings. Nalivaiko decided to continue Kosinsky's work at a time when the bishops were going to subordinate the Russian Church to the Pope and when Ostrozhsky, in his message, urged all Orthodox inhabitants of the Polish kingdom to resist the machinations of the bishops. Nalivaiko began in Volhynia, and this time his uprising acquired a somewhat religious connotation. He attacked the estates of bishops and laity who favored the union, took Lutsk, where the Cossacks' malice turned to the supporters and servants of Bishop Terletsky, turned to Belaya Rus, seized Slutsk, where he stocked up with weapons, took Mogilev, which was then burned by the inhabitants themselves, captured in Pinsk Terletsky's sacristy and took out important parchment documents with signatures of clergy and secular persons who agreed to union; Nalivaiko robbed the estates of the brother of Bishop Terletskiy, revenge on him for the bishop's trip to Rome. Some Orthodox nobles peacefully allowed Nalivaik out of hatred for the emerging union. Suspicion fell on the prince of Ostrog himself, since his brother Nalyvayki lived on his estate, and this brother, priest Damian, had horses that belonged to Pan Semashk, robbed by Nalivaik. Ostrozhsky himself wrote in his letters to his son-in-law Radziwill: "They say that I sent Nalivaika ... If anyone, then these robbers worried me most of all. I entrust myself to the Lord God! I hope that he, saving the innocent, will not forget me too. ". There is no reason to believe that in fact Ostrozhsky patronized this uprising, especially since before the very appearance of Nalivaik on the Volyn land, Ostrozhsky warned the gentlemen about the headstrong, complained that they were ravaging his estates, gave advice to the Commonwealth to take more active measures and extinguish the fire before it could spread.

In the winter of 1595-1596, Nalivaiko united with the Cossack hetman Loboda, and the uprising began to take on rampant proportions. The king sent hetman Zholkevsky against the Cossacks. The war with them stubbornly continued until the end of May 1596: the Cossacks, pressed by the Polish troops, crossed to the left bank of the Dnieper and were besieged near Luben: strife arose between them; Nalivaiko overthrew Loboda from the hetmanship, killed him, became hetman himself, and was in turn overthrown, surrendered to the Poles and executed by death in Warsaw.

When, in this way, the Poles were engaged in taming the uprising of the Russians, which took partly the character of a struggle against the union, in Rome the envoys from the Russian clergy, the Vladimir and Lutsk bishops, were received with due honor, were honored to kiss the papal foot and on December 2, 1595 on behalf of the Russian clergy read the confession of faith according to the Roman Catholic teaching. At the beginning of 1596, they returned to their homeland. Here their opposition awaited from the brotherhoods and from Ostrog. The Vilna brotherhood published the "Book of Cyril on the Antichrist", written by Stephen Zizani. The book was directed against papism; it proved nothing more or less than the fact that the Pope is that Antichrist, about whom the prediction persisted, and the time of union is the time of the Antichrist kingdom. This book was read eagerly by the clergy and literate laity. The king, hearing about its success, was very angry, ordered to ban the book, to seize and imprison its author and his two accomplices. The Lviv brotherhood, for its part, opposing the ideas of the union, so frightened its bishop that Gideon decided to retreat from the union and filed a protest in court, in which he assured that if he signed, on an equal basis with other bishops, consent to union, he did not know what business, because he signed a white paper, and on this paper, after his signature, was written what he did not want.

Ostrozhsky informed the Eastern patriarchs; at his request, protosinkella (governors) were appointed: from the Patriarch of Constantinople Nicephorus, from the Alexandrian - Cyril. The king announced that the Russian bishops should gather for a council in Brest by October 6, 1596 for the final approval of the union.

By the time appointed by the king, Ostrog prepared his own cathedral in Brest 4. This cathedral consisted of two patriarchal protossinkels, two eastern archimandrites, two Russian bishops, Gideon of Lvov and Mikhail Kopytensky, the Serbian metropolitan Luke, several Russian archimandrites, protopopees and two hundred , whom Ostrozhsky invited with him.

Protosinkellus Nicephorus presided over this Orthodox council. In accordance with the ancient customs of the ecclesiastical court, he sent a threefold summons to the cathedral of Kiev to justify his acquittal, but the metropolitan did not appear and announced that he and the bishops had submitted to the Western Church; then the Orthodox Council defrocked both the metropolitan and the bishops: Vladimir, Lutsk, Polotsk (Herman), Kholmsk (Dionysius) and Pinsk Iona.

For their part, the clergy who accepted the union repaid those who did not accept it in the same way: they defrocked the bishops of Lvov and Przemysl, the archimandrite of the Pechersk Nikifor Tur and all Russian clergy who were at the Orthodox cathedral. The verdict to each of them was sent in the following form: "Whoever considers you accursed from us in your former dignity, he himself will be accursed from the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit!"

Both sides turned to the king. The Orthodox referred to the existing decrees, asked not to count the deposed clergy in their previous rank, to take away their church estates and give them to those persons who, instead of them, will be elected. The king took the side of the Uniates and ordered the arrest of Nicephorus, with whom those who accepted the union were especially angry. Ostrozhsky took him on bail. The case about him was postponed until 1597.

This year, at the request of the king, Ostrog himself brought Nicephorus and brought him to trial by the Senate. They tried to accuse Nicephorus of spying on the part of the Turks, and of witchcraft, and of bad behavior. Hetman Zamoyski himself accused him. It was impossible to blame Nicephorus, and the Poles had no right to judge him as a foreigner. Then Konstantin Ostrog spoke to the king a sharp speech: "Your Majesty," he said, "you are violating our rights, trampling on our freedom, violating our conscience. As a senator, I not only endure insults myself, but I see that all this leads to the destruction of the Polish kingdom: after that, no one's rights, no one's freedom are protected; riots will soon come; maybe then they will think of something else! Our ancestors, taking an oath of allegiance to their sovereign, and from him also took an oath in observance of justice, mercy and protection. There was a mutual oath between them. Come to your senses, your majesty! I am already in old age and hope to leave this world soon, but you insult me, take away what is most dear to me - the Orthodox faith! Come to your senses, your majesty! I entrust you with this spiritual dignitary ; God will demand his blood on you, and God forbid me to see more such violation of rights, on the contrary, may God grant me in my old age to hear about his good health and about the best preservation of your our state and our rights! "

Having delivered this speech, Ostrozhsky left the Senate. The king sent Ostrog's son-in-law, Krishtof Radziwill, to bring back the agitated old man. "The king," said Radziwill, "regrets your grief; Nikifor will be free." The angry Ostrozhsky did not want to return and said: "Don't go sobi and Nikifor zist". The prince left, leaving poor protossinkel Nicephorus to the mercy of the king. Nicephorus was sent to Marienburg, where he died in captivity.

In 1599, Ostrozhsky, with other gentlemen and the gentry of the Russian faith, organized a confederation with Protestants for mutual protection against Catholic violence. But this confederation did not have important consequences.

Much more important in its consequences was the literary movement, which intensified after the union. The Ostrozh printing house published (in 1598) "An Inscription on the Sheet of Father Hypatius" (Potia) and Liszt, that is, epistles: eight of them, Meletius, Patriarch of Alexandria, which outlined the essence of Orthodoxy and the Orthodox people were encouraged to defend their religion. One of these messages (the third) deals with the issue of changing the calendar, a question that then very much occupied the minds. The Orthodox pastors did not like this change precisely because it was an innovation: "the news of vain men of inconsistent souls, as if the dampness is the beating of the unsteady winds." In the opinion of honest pastors, the change in Paschal brings with it overwhelming and rebellion in the church, sedition, strife, an approach to Judaism; but if this had not happened, then all the same it is not necessary to introduce "neoterism", but it is better to keep to the old days and obey the old people. (What is not the most pious and not the most reverent is in various things, together with the elders.) It was noted that the calculations on which the new calendar is based do not have strength and, after three hundred years, it will be necessary to "astronomize" and invent new changes. The ninth of the pages printed in this book concludes a letter written by Ostrozhsky to Orthodox Christians at the very beginning of the union (we spoke about it above), and the tenth is an exhortatory message of the Athonite monks. Among the books published at that time in Ostrog, the book "Apocrisis" (published at the end of 1597) 5 under the pseudonym Filaleta, written, as they say, by Christopher Vronsky, a man like Ostrog, inclined towards Protestantism, is especially important. Instead of strict submission to the spiritual authorities in the matter of faith, she preached the equal free participation of secular people in church affairs, called the doctrine of unconditional obedience to the church as Jewry and argued that secular people could, at their discretion, disobey the spiritual and depose them. In 1598, priest Vasily published a Psalter with a follow-up, another Psalter with a book of hours, in 1605 and 1606 the works of Patriarch Meletius on the subject of union, translated by Job Boretsky, and in 1607, priest Damian, brother of Nalivaik, published "A Medicine for the Poached Intention of Man", where placed the message of Chrysostom to Theodore

To the fallen and some words and verses, partly adapted to their time. In Vilna, remarkable works appeared, not only polemical, but also scientific, showing the emerging need for the education of youth; in 1596 the grammar of the Slavic language was published by Lavrentiy Zizaniy, the ABC with a short dictionary, the Interpretation of the Prayer "Our Father" and the Catechism, which set out the foundations of the Orthodox faith. Then Russian liturgical and religious-political writings were published in other places.

This was the beginning of the South Russian and West Russian literature, which later, in the middle of the 17th century, developed to a significant extent.

Ostrozhsky himself, despite the protection he offered to Orthodoxy in the emerging union, as an aristocrat for whom the Polish system represented too much dear, was far from any decisive opposition to the violence of the authorities: he held back others, teaching them patience. Thus, in 1600, he wrote to the Lviv brotherhood: "I am sending you a decree drawn up at the last Diet, which is highly contrary to popular law and most of all holy truth, and I give you no other advice than such that you patient and waiting for God's mercy, until God, by his goodness, inclines the heart of His royal majesty to not offend anyone and leave everyone with their rights. "

This advice already showed the future impotence of the Russian aristocracy in defending the paternal faith.

On a complaint from the Kiev and Bratslav provinces, the king appointed a court between the Uniates and the Orthodox at the Sejm.

Then Ragoza died: his place in the rank of Metropolitan of Kiev was taken by Hypatius Potius. Appearing with Terletsky to the court appointed by the king, he imagined that spiritual matters were not subject to the judgment of a secular court, that, in accordance with divine law, the laws of the kingdom and Christian rights, they were subject only to spiritual court. The Uniates pointed to all the privileges that existed before that time, given to the Greek church, as documents that now exclusively belonged by right only to those who recognized the Roman high priest as the head of their church. The king, with the advice of his happy lords, recognized their arguments as completely fair and promulgated a charter according to which the new metropolitan and bishops, who were under the leadership of the metropolitan, were granted the right to use their dignity, in accordance with the previous privileges given to the dignitaries of the Greek faith, to manage church estates and create spiritual court. The king did not recognize any other eastern church in the Polish Commonwealth, except for the one already united with the Roman one. All those who did not recognize the union were in his eyes no longer confessors of the Greek faith, but renegades from it. All Catholic Poland and Lithuania shared the same view with the king.

Ostrozhsky ended his life in February 1608 at a ripe old age. His son Janusz converted to Catholicism during his parent's lifetime; the other son, Alexander, remained Orthodox, but his daughters all converted to Catholicism, and one of them, who owned Ostrog, Anna-Aloisia, was distinguished by her fanatical intolerance of the faith of her forefathers.

The upper class in Poland was omnipotent, and of course, if the Russian gentry remained firm in the faith and firmly decided to stand up for the paternal faith, no intrigues of the king and the Jesuits would be able to overthrow it. But that was the misfortune that this Russian gentry - this upper Russian class, for which it was too profitable to be under the rule of Poland - could not resist the moral oppression that then gravitated over the Orthodox faith and the Russian nationality. Having intermarried with the Polish gentry, having mastered the Polish language and Polish customs, having become Poles in the way of life, the Russian people were unable to keep the faith of their fathers. On the side of Catholicism was the conspicuous glitter of Western enlightenment. In Poland, the Russian faith and the Russian nationality were looked upon with contempt: everything that was and responded to the Russians, in the eyes of the then Polish society, seemed peasant, rude, savage, ignorant, something that an educated and high-ranking person should be ashamed of. The Catholics had incomparably more funds for education than the Orthodox, and therefore the children of the Orthodox nobles learned from the Catholics. Motivated by their teachers, who instilled in them a preference for Catholicism, having come out into the world in which they, with the prevailing spirit of propaganda, heard the same preference everywhere, Russian youths inevitably adopted that view of the faith and nationality of their forefathers, which they usually have in their native those who borrow something from someone else with the full conviction that this someone else is a sign of education and gives honor and respect in the everyday environment in which they are destined to apply. The descendants of Orthodox noble families who converted to Catholicism, looking back at the moral deeds of their forefathers, found themselves in the same mood that their ancestors were in for many centuries, when, leaving paganism, they adopted Christianity. One after another adopted the new faith and were ashamed of the old one. True, as always happens in transitional eras, and in the era of catholicization of the Russian gentry, for half a century and even for a little longer, adherents of antiquity remained from the Russian upper class and declared their voice, but their ranks were thinning more and more, and finally they were gone ; in Polish Rus, a person who belonged to the upper class by origin and state became unthinkable except with the Roman Catholic religion, with the Polish language and with Polish concepts and feelings. Since the time of the union in Russia, there has been a desire to raise the Russian Church and the Russian nationality - to create a Russian education, at least for the first time, a religious one, but this desire was too late for the upper class of the Russian lands united with Poland. This upper class did not need anything Russian anymore and looked at him with disgust and hostility. It turned out that the union, first invented to lure the Russian upper class, was also not useful to him; the lords without her became pure Catholics; union remained only a means to destroy the signs of the Orthodox faith and the Russian nationality in the bulk of the rest of the people. Union became an instrument of more national than religious goals. To accept the union meant to become a Pole from a Russian, or at least a half-Pole. This trend manifested itself from the very first time and was unswervingly pursued in future times until the very end of the existence of the union. Despite the fact that at first the Pope, in accordance with the decrees of the Florentine Union in the 15th century, approved the inviolability of the rituals of the Eastern Church, already at the beginning of the 17th century, the Uniate clergy began to change worship, introduced various customs characteristic of the Western Church and did not exist in the Eastern or positively rejected by the latter ( as, for example, a quiet mass, the service of several lunches on the same day on the same throne, the reduction of services, etc.). Coming more and more closer to Catholicism, the union ceased to be an Eastern church, but became something mediating and at the same time remained the property of the common people: in a country in which the common people were reduced to extreme enslavement, the faith that existed for this people, could not enjoy equal honor with the faith professed by the masters; Therefore, the union in Poland became a lower, common people, unworthy of the upper class: as for Orthodoxy, it became a rejected faith in public opinion, the lowest, worthy of extreme contempt: it was not only the faith of clapping in general, like union, but the faith of the unworthy claps, dissimilar or incapable, in their savagery and obstinacy, to rise to a somewhat higher level of religious and social comprehension, it was nothing more than a pitiful confession of despicable disbelievers, for whom there is no salvation beyond the grave.
1. Russians highly appreciated the memory of this fighter for their nationality; to this day, his body rests in the Kiev caves along with the Kiev Pechersk saints.
2. He died 70 years old in 1533. His body was buried in the main church of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, where his marble monument with a beautiful statue of a sleeping hero is still preserved in the niche of the northern wall.
3. Subsequently, this Budny converted to Arianism, wrote an Arian catechism and published a translation of the Bible in Polish.
4. Brest Cathedral is described in detail in the book "Ecthesis", published by the Orthodox in Polish in 1597.
5. Against the "Apocrisis" was published in 1600, "Anti-crisis", op. Greek-Uniate Peter Arkudy.

The page was generated in 0.07 seconds!

OSTROZHSKY Konstantin (Vasily) Konstantinovich

Ukrainian political and cultural figure

Born 1526 in Dubno (now Rivne region). Descended from the Ostrozhsky family, a wealthy and influential princely family of Ukraine in the 16th - early 17th centuries. He received an excellent education, as evidenced by his correspondence and speeches in the Senate. Remaining the only heir to his rich father, he took possession of huge estates in Volyn, Kiev, Podillia and Galicia, as well as in Hungary and the Czech Republic. From the middle of the 40s of the XVI century. in official documents, Vasily Ostrozhsky begins to be called by his father's name - Konstantin.

Prince Ostrozhsky began his political career in 1550, having received from the Grand Duke of Lithuania the post of headman of Vladimir and marshal of Volynsky. In 1559, he became a Kiev governor, which greatly contributed to the strengthening of his influence on the political life of Ukraine. K. Ostrozhsky pursued an energetic colonialist policy in the border lands of the Kiev and Bratslav regions, founded new cities, castles and settlements. The economic power of the estates and the great political influence of the prince quickly made him "the uncrowned king of Russia", who pursued a relatively independent policy in the Russian lands. In the 60s of the XVI century. he advocated the equal entry of Rus into the Rzeczpospolita. K. Ostrozhsky was one of the leaders of the opposition, did not support the union 1569 In the same year he became a senator. In 1572 after the death of King Sigismund II Augustus claimed the Polish throne. In 1574 he moved the prince's residence from Dubno to Ostrog. - The relationship of Prince Ostrozhsky with the Cossacks was peculiar. Realizing the important strategic importance of the Zaporizhzhya Sich outpost against the Turkish-Tatar threat, he tried to maintain partner relations with the Cossacks, took them into service. However, in the early 90s, he was hostile to the Cossack riots, threatened by the ramified land holdings of the princely family. During the Cossack uprising led by K. Kosinsky (1591-1593), the army of K. Ostrozhsky, despite a number of setbacks, inflicted a crushing defeat on the rebels in the decisive battle at Fifth. Subsequently, he decisively opposed the uprising of S. Nalivaiko (1549-1596).

In 1598, after the death of Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich, K. Ostrozhsky acted as a contender for the Moscow throne.

K. Ostrozhsky took care of Ukrainian Orthodoxy. During his reign, Cape Ostrog, one of the two titular centers of the diocese in the east of Volyn, became the center of Orthodox spirituality. Regarding the issue of unification of Catholics and Orthodox Christians, which was relevant at that time, the prince initially supported him. He preferred to keep this process under his own complete control. Therefore, when in 1594-1596. Some of the clergy made an attempt to conclude a church union, bypassing the prince, made its decisive opponent, sharply condemning the decision of the Brest Cathedral.

During the reign of K. Ostrozhsky, Russian culture and education received a wide rise. Around the princely residence in Ostrog, a circle (academy) of Slavic and Greek scientists, publicists, theologians and theologians was formed, which included Gerasim Smotritsky, Vasily Surozhsky, Christopher Philalet (Martin Bronevsky), Emmanuel Achilles, Luke of Serbia (Cyril of Alexandria Lukarisky Patriarch), Nikifor Parasches-Cantacuzen, and others. With the assistance of the prince, a large library was collected in Ostrog. 1575 he invited Ivan Fyodorov to organize a printing house in the princely residence. Thanks to the Ostrozh printing house, more than 20 editions were published, including the first full text of the Bible in the Slavic language (1,580). Around 1578, the Ostroh school began to operate at the academy, where, in addition to a number of the then traditional exact and humanitarian disciplines, for the first time, Latin, Greek and Church Slavonic grammars were taught in parallel. Subsequently, her experience and program were borrowed from Lvov, Lutsk and other fraternal schools.

K. Ostrozhsky founded schools in Turov (+1572) and Vladimir-Volynsky (one thousand five hundred seventy-seven). In Ostrog, a school of church singing was formed, at the Epiphany Castle Church, which had the status of a cathedral and was one of the most Orthodox churches of that time, its own icon-painting tradition arose. Several Ostrozh icons painted at that time are considered masterpieces of Orthodox icon painting.

Gradually, the prince withdrew from the political and cultural life of the country. Last years lived in the Dubna castle.

He died in 1608. He was buried in the crypt of the Epiphany Church in Ostrog.

Vasily Konstantin Ostrozhsky short biography and interesting Facts from the life of a prince, a wealthy tycoon, a Kiev governor, a cultural and political figure described in this article.

Vasily Konstantin Ostrozhsky short biography

Vasily Konstantin Ostrozhsky was born on February 2, 1526 in the city of Turov in the family of the great Lithuanian hetman. Konstantin Ostrozhsky was the only heir to his father and inherited a large estate with lands in Kiev, Volyn, Galicia and Podolia, as well as land plots in the Czech Republic and Hungary. Due to his high position in society, he received an excellent education.

In 1550, he received from a Lithuanian prince the post of Vladimir head and Volyn marshal. In the same year, Ostrozhsky married the daughter of Jan Tarnovsky (the future crown hetman), Sofia.

In 1559 the prince became the governor of Kiev. He paid great attention to the defense of his lands from the raids of the Tatars - he kept the 20-thousandth army at his own expense, and successfully repulsed the attacks of enemies. Prince Konstantin of Ostrog became famous as a commander in wars with enemies, especially distinguished himself in the battle of Orsha in 1514.
The fact is that in 1512 the prince of Muscovy Vasily III begins another war against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Zhamaitysky and Russian. Vasily wanted to get in his possession the western Lithuanian lands, Polesie, Belarus, Podillia, the territory of the Central Ukrainian lands and the Smolensk region. With wise strategic actions, he defeated the Moscow Tsar, providing the eastern front with more than 40 years of peace.

He also pursued an energetic colonialist policy in the neighboring territories of Bratslav and Kiev regions, founded new settlements, cities and castles. He was unofficially called the “uncrowned king of Russia”.
Among his most important achievements is the founding of schools in Vladimir-Volynsky and Turov, the Ostrog Academy. Thanks to the assistance of Ostrozsky, a large library of Western European and Greek theological literature, dictionaries, reprints of ancient works, grammar and cosmography was collected. In 1575 Konstantin Ostrozhsky organized printing houses and invited a famous printer.
The prince did not forget about Ukrainian Orthodoxy, opposing the unification of Orthodox and Catholics and condemning the decisions of the Brest Cathedral.

At the end of his life, Konstantin Ostrozhsky was the largest landowner of the Commonwealth after the king. He owned 2,760 villages and 80 cities... On his initiative, many cities received Magdeburg Law. He settled in the Dubensky castle. Grand Duke Konstantin Ostrog died on February 24, 1608 in Ostrog.

Ostrog interesting facts

He was one of the first princes to repel the threat from Moscow to Ukraine by defeating the troops of Vasily III, Prince of Moscow.

He held the post of the Kiev governor for 49 years.

The prince founded the first two printing houses in Ukraine - in Derman and Ostrog. Ivan Fyodorovich, invited by him, created the Ostrog Bible, on which presidents swear allegiance even now, taking office.

The prince's profit was 10 million gold a year - at that time it was a huge amount. He was the richest man in the Commonwealth and all of Europe.

With 63 battles, Ostrozhsky was defeated in only 2 battles.

From January 1553 he was married to Sophia Tarnovskaya. The couple had 5 children - sons Konstantin, Yanush, Alexander and daughters Ekaterina Anna, Elizabeth.

Prince Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky, an outstanding statesman of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Russia, one of the most talented generals of his time, a zealot of Orthodoxy in Lithuania and Western Russia.

The life path of the Ostroh prince is described in an article by journalist Sergei Makhun, published in ukrainian newspaper "Day", No. 206 of November 14, 2003. Original.

It is difficult to overestimate the role of Ostrog and the glorious family of the Ostroh princes in the history and culture of Ukraine, and Eastern Europe in general.

The city, located in the very center of Big Volyn (modern Volyn, Rivne, Zhytomyr regions, the north of Khmelnytsky, Beresteyshchina, Podlasie), was first mentioned in 1100 in the Ipatiev list, when it was given to Prince David Igorevich instead of Vladimir-Volynsky. This decision of the Vitachivsky congress of the princes of Kievan Rus, on which Vladimir Monomakh insisted, was his punishment for blinding the Terebovlya prince Vasilko.

After the Mongol-Tatar invasion, Ostrog remained in ruins for a long time, until in 1325 the Lithuanian prince Gedimin gave the city to his son Lubart. In 1341 we find the first mention of the prince of Ostroh - Danil. Already his son Fedor, the headman of Lutsk, received in 1386 the confirmation of his rights to Ostrog (as well as Korets and Zaslav) from the hands of Jagail, the King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania. The pantheon of princes and princesses, as well as the list of educators, scientists, printers, church leaders and generals who lived and worked in the city, is striking.

This is the prince Fedor Danilovich- participant of the Battle of Grunwald and the Hussite Wars, canonized at the end of the 16th century with the name Theodosius; prince Vasily-Konstantin Ostrozhsky, a zealous defender of Orthodoxy, commander and founder (in 1576) of the first higher educational institution in Ukraine - the Ostroh Academy; Galshka Ostrog, the daughter of his brother Ilya, the founder of the academy, which is officially recorded in the testament (will), drawn up in 1579 in Turov; pioneer Ivan Fedorovich (Fedorov), father and son - Gerasim and Melety Smotrytsky- polemical writers, translators, theologians, philologists (M. Smotrytsky is the creator of East Slavic grammar; modern alphabets of Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Macedonians, Serbs and Bulgarians are based on the textbook "Slavic Grammar"), Ivan Vishensky- writer and polemicist; Job Boretsky- educator, church and political figure; Damian Nalivaiko - an implacable enemy of union, defender of Orthodoxy and brother of Severin Nalivaiko.

The famous hetman of the Zaporizhzhya Army also studied in Ostrog Petr Konashevich- Sagaidachny... Somewhat in the shadow of his son, Vasily-Constantine, remains the extraordinary personality of Prince Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky (1460-1530). Meanwhile, only the list of titles of the richest magnate of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Crown of Poland is striking: Hetman of the Great Lithuanian (1497-1500, 1507-1530), elder of Bratslav, Zvenigorod and Vinnytsia (1497), marshal of the Volyn land and head of Lutsk (1499 ), Kashtelian Vilensky (1513) and Trotsky (1522).

Do not forget that Ostrog in the 16th - in the first half of the 17th centuries was one of the largest cities in Ukraine, second only to Kiev, Lvov and Lutsk. And it was Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky who stood at the origins of the power of the clan. As Mikhail Maksimovich, who studied the "memorial" of the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery, proved, the Ostrog princes were an offshoot of the princes of the Turovo-Pinsk land, direct descendants of Rurik.

According to the researcher V. Ulyanovsky, the documented donated possessions, privileges and land acquisitions of the prince are: 91 cities, towns and villages. Among them - Dorogobuzh, Gorodets, Zdolbunov, Krasilov, Lutsk, Ostrog, Polonnoe, Rovno, Svityaz, Turov, Chudnov ... Konstantin Ivanovich received from the king courtyards and houses in Vilna, Minsk, Lutsk; the prince's subjects had the privileged right to exemption from duties, duties for merchants who went to the Lutsk fair (1518).

So, the prince is one of the most influential magnates of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. And although many nobles had already converted from Orthodoxy to Catholicism by the time of his hetmans, the authority of Konstantin Ivanovich was undeniable. And this authority was based not only on incomparable wealth, but also on consistency in upholding the rights of Orthodox communities and providing them with patronage support. So, for example, only in 1507, the prince presented the Derman Trinity Monastery with a handwritten Gospel, built a church in the village of Smolevichi, Minsk district, made a fundus (donation) for it, donated money for the construction of the Zhidichin monastery. From 1491 to 1530, a stone five-domed Epiphany Church was built in Ostrog, as well as the Trinity Monastery. The prince constantly transferred dishes, crosses, vestments, icons to various churches of Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus ... So it was not for nothing that Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky was buried in the main shrine of Eastern Slavic Orthodoxy - the Assumption Cathedral of the Kiev-Pechersky Monastery. His great-grandfather, Prince Fyodor (Theodosius) Danilovich, and the closest relatives of his second wife, Alexandra Semyonovna Olelkovich-Slutskaya, were also buried there. It was her father, Semyon Olelkovich, who restored this cathedral in 1470 after the invasion of the Batu hordes.

From his marriage to Alexandra, Konstantin Ivanovich had a daughter, Sofia (who died in her youth), and a son, Vasily-Constantine (1528-1608), who was considered the most ardent zealot and defender of Orthodoxy in the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. From his first wife - Tatyana (Anna) Semyonovna Golshanskaya (died in 1522) the prince had a son Ilya (1510-1539).

And yet Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky is best known as an outstanding military leader. So in A. Kalofoysky's epitaph we will find the dignity of the great hetman of Lithuania "Russian Scipio", and the papal legate in Poland Pizoni wrote: "Prince Constantine can be called the best military leader of our time, he became the victor on the battlefield 33 times ... in battle he is not inferior in courage to Romulus" (the letter is dated 1514).

The outstanding Polish chronicler of the 16th century Maciej Stryjkovsky (let's not forget that KI Ostrozhsky is Orthodox) called the hetman "the second Annibal, Pyrrhus and Scipio, Russian and Lithuanian ... a man of holy memory and extremely glorified activity." However, in addition to significant and even fateful victories for history (about them below), the prince suffered crushing defeats twice. And if, after the failure at Sokal from the Crimean Tatars in 1519, Konstantin Ivanovich quickly restored the status quo and in the winter of 1527 utterly defeated the army of the horde in the Kiev region, then the defeat of 1500 on the Vedrosh River from the Moscow army led to tragic consequences for him. In the midst of the battle, an ambush regiment of Muscovites struck on the flank and rear of the Lithuanian army - almost eight thousand of its soldiers were killed, and all the voivods, along with the prince, were captured.

Konstantin Ivanovich spent seven years in Vologda and Moscow. At first he was kept in chains, but soon John III pardoned the captive and granted him lands and two cities. Konstantin Ivanovich twice tried to escape from captivity; only the second attempt in the fall of 1507 was successful. The prince immediately returned to himself the hetman government. By the time of the war with Muscovy, the hetman actually replaced the Grand Duke of Lithuania with the broadest powers. The 1507-1508 campaign did not determine a winner.

After the signing of Eternal Peace with Muscovy, Lithuania and Poland turn their attention to the south. In 1508 near Slutsk and in 1512 near Vishnevets and Lopushna, the prince defeated the Crimean Tatars. The second victory was especially striking: having overtaken a horde with a large number of prisoners, his soldiers freed 16 thousand captives and captured 10 thousand Tatars, whom the prince resettled near Ostrog to carry out security functions (even according to the 1895 census, there were 470 Muslims in the city and county and one mosque).

Fragment of the painting by an unknown artist of the 16th century "Battle of Orsha".

The prince still waited for satisfaction in the east and acquired a resounding all-European fame after the brilliant victory over the Moscow army near Orsha on September 8, 1514. By that time, Sigismund I had already occupied two thrones - the Grand Duke of Lithuania and the King of Poland. He gave the following order: "Abi hetman be obedient in everything, for the most obedient ones, and for the stubborn and obedient karats, nє man, like the Lord himself." The army, led by Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky, consisted of the Lithuanian feudal militia ("uyezd banners" from the Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Belarusian lands), the Polish gentry militia, mercenaries from Livonia, Germany and Hungary and the famous Polish hussars - only about 30 thousand people. They were opposed by 80 thousand Muscovites. There was no unity in the camp of their command, but this in no way diminishes the importance of the victory of the prince, who skillfully led various types of troops. So, the Lithuanian cavalry with a feigned flight lured the Muscovites to the cannons, and their left flank was pressed against the swamp and completely destroyed. The Krapivnaya River was overflowing with the bodies of Muscovites. The enemy army began to retreat in disorder. The losses of the defeated, at that time, terrible - 30 thousand soldiers, 380 governors and nobles were taken prisoner.

The Battle of Orsha for almost a century determined the status quo on the borders of the Moscow state and Lithuania (since 1569 - the Commonwealth). And her hero twice led the army through the triumphal arch - in Warsaw and Vilna. The authority of Prince Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky was so great that the most difficult cases for the court between magnates and gentry were entrusted by the king and the Diet exclusively to him. Even the aforementioned Cardinal Pizoni admitted only one flaw in him - that he was a "schismatic". The life and work of Prince Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky (unlike his son, Vasily-Constantine) have been studied too superficially, although there are many sources. Unfortunately, a holistic portrait of this outstanding politician, commander and patron of the Orthodox culture has not been created.

Nobel laureate for literature

Belarusian People's Republic

• Bulak-Balakhovich Stanislav
  commander of the Belarusian People's Army
• Vasilkovsky Oleg
  head of the BNR diplomatic mission in the Baltic States
• Geniush Larisa
  "bird without a nest" - poet, curator of the BNR archive
• Duzh-Dushevsky Claudius
  national flag sketch author
• Kondratovich Kyprian
  BNR Defense Minister
• Lastovsky Vaclav
  Prime Minister of the BNR, Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR
• Lutskevich Anton
  Head of the Rada Ministrau BNR
• Lutskevich Ivan
  kulturtrager of Belarus
• Lesik Yazep
  Chairman of the BNR Rada, academician of the BSSR Academy of Sciences
• Skirmunt Roman
  the elite of the Empire and the Prime Minister of the BNR

Bogdanovich Maxim
one of the founders of the modern literary language, the author of the anthem "Pursuit"

Budny Symon
humanist, educator, heretic, church reformer

Grand Dukes of Lithuania

• Mindaugas (1248-1263)
  king of the Prussians and Litvin
• Voishelk (1264-1267)
  son of Mindaugas, who annexed the Nalshany and Deviltva
• Schwarn (1267-1269)
  son-in-law of Mindaugas and son of the king of Russia
• Viten (1295 - 1316)
  "have invented a coat of arms for themselves and the whole principality of Lithuania: a knight of the zbroyny on horseback with a sword"
• Gediminas (1316-1341)
  at. the prince who united Lithuania and the Principality of Polotsk
• Olgerd (1345-1377)
  at. the prince who gathered all the Belarusian lands into a single state
• Jagailo (1377-1381)
  at. prince of Lithuania and king of Poland. Kreva union
• (1381-1382)
  "Keistut's Oath" and the first mention of the oral Old Belarusian language
• Vitovt (1392-1430)
  and the beginning of the "Golden Age" ON
• Svidrigailo (1430-1432)
  rebellious prince who broke the union with Poland
• Henry of Valois (1575-1586)
  the first elected king and V. prince
• Stefan Bathory (1575-1586)
  liberator of Polotsk from Ivan the Terrible and patron of the Jesuits
• Zhigimont III Vase (1587-1632)
  king of swedes, ready, wends
• Stanislav II August (1764-1795)
  the last king and V. prince
• Jagiellons
  nine slavic kings

Voinilovichi
Tuteyshaya gentry and founders of the Red Church in Minsk.

Godlevsky Vincent
priest and Belarusian nationalist, prisoner of the Trostinets camp

Gusovsky Nikolay
and the Belarusian epic "Song of the Bison"

Gonsevsky Alexander
commandant of the Kremlin, defender of Smolensk

David Gorodensky
Kashtelian Garty, Gedimin's right hand

Dmahovsky Henry (Henry Sanders)
rebel 1830 and 1863, sculptor

Dovmont
prince of Nalshansky and Pskov

Dovnar-Zapolsky Mitrofan
ethnographer, economist, founder of the Belarusian national historiography, compiler of the "Map of the settlement of the Belarusian tribe"

the first diplomat of the Republic of Ingushetia in Japan, the author of the first Russian-Japanese dictionary

Domeyko Ignacy
philomat, litvin, insurgent, scientist

Drozdovich Yazep
"eternal wanderer", astronomer and artist

Zheligovsky Lucian
General of Middle Lithuania, the last knight of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania

Hang on
headmen and governors of Minsk, founders of the development of the historical center of Minsk

Kaganets Karus and Guillaume Apoliner
Kostrovitsky coats of arms of Baibuz and Vong

Kalinovsky Kastus
Jaska Haspadar s pad Wilni, national hero

Karsky Efimy Fedorovich
ethnographer, academician, compiler of the "Map of the settlement of the Belarusian tribe"

Kosciuszko Tadeusz
national hero of Belarus, Poland and the USA

Konenkov S. T.
sculptor

Kit Boris Vladimirovich
"belarus numar adzin va asim svece"

Kmitich Samuel
Orsha cornet, hero of the "Trilogy"

Kuntsevich Iosofat
Archbishop of Polotsk, "St. Apostle of Unity"

Lisovsky-Yanovich A. Yu.
colonel "foxes"

Princes of Ostrog
defenders of the Grand Duchy and the founders of Orthodoxy

There are two versions about the origin of the Ostrog family. According to the first, they descended from the Galitsky princes, according to the second version, they were descendants of the Turovo-Pinsk princes.

hero of the battle of Orsha

Prince of Ostrog Konstantin Ivanovich (1460 - August 10, 1530) - Lithuanian commander from the Orthodox family of Ostrog, head of Bratslav, Vinnitsa and Zvenigorod (1497-1500, 1507-1516, 1518-1530), head of Lutsk and marshals of the Volyn land (1507-1522) , Vilensky Kastelyan (1511-1522), Trok voivode (1522-1530), the great Lithuanian hetman (1497-1500, 1507-1530).

Great commander wars with Muscovy 1487-1537, which defined the modern eastern border of Belarus. He became famous for his victories over the Tatars. He settled the captured Tatars on the outskirts of his cities - Tatar settlements.

As a reward for the merits of Prince Konstantin Ivanovich in the fight against Moscow and the Tatars, Zhigimont I Stary published a universal about his appointment as Pan Vilna - Ostrozhsky entered the circle of the highest nobility of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

In the war with Moscow 1500-1503 Konstantin Ostrozhsky commanded troops in the battle on the Vedrosh River. On July 14, 1500, the Lithuanian army suffered the largest defeat since the Battle of Vorskla. Ostrozhsky, along with many military leaders, was captured.

In 1506, after 6 years of captivity, the prince agreed to serve the Russian sovereign (according to Karamzin - "threatened by dungeon"). In 1507, under the pretext of inspecting the troops entrusted to him, Ostrozhsky left Moscow and fled to Lithuania. His former eldership and the post of Marshal of the Volyn land were returned to him, thanks to which Ostrozhsky became the main military and civilian commander of all Volyn. He was again approved by the great hetman of Lithuania.

He remained in his memory as a winner in the Battle of Orsha - the battle on September 8, 1514 during the war with Muscovy in 1512-1522, in which the 30-thousandth army of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania fought defeated the 80-thousandth Moscow army and stopped the Moscow expansion for 250 years.

The Great Hetman was the mainstay of the Greek Church in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania - mercies to the Orthodox, according to Zhigimont I the Old, were done for the sake of Konstantin Ivanovich. Ostrozhsky became the center around which all the strong Orthodox magnate families of Belarus and Volyn were grouped: book. Vishnevetsky, Sangushki, Dubrovitsky, Mstislavsky, Dashkovs, Soltans, Gulevichs, etc.

With his support, Metropolitan of Kiev, Galician and All Russia Joseph II Soltan received a letter from King Sigismund I, which guaranteed the independence of the Greek clergy from the secular authorities.

Konstantin Ostrozhsky was the founder of the Trinity and Prechistenskaya churches in Vilna. Mikhailovskaya Church in Synkovichi is also associated with his name (by the time of construction and architectural similarity with the Trinity Church).

Ostrozhsky Konstantin (Konstantin-Vasily) Konstantinovich
funder of education

Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich Ostrozhsky (also Vasily-Constantine; 1526-1608) - the head of the Ostrog family, the headman of Vladimir and marshals of the Volyn land (1550-1608), the governor of Kiev (1559-1608), the patron saint of the Orthodox faith.

He spent his childhood and youth in Turov. The son of the Grand Hetman of the Lithuanian Prince Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky and Princess Alexandra from the Olelkovich-Slutsk family, descendants of the Grand Duke Olgerd. The last representative of the family is St. Righteous Sofia Slutskaya - Sofia Yurievna, Princess Slutskaya (1585-1612), wife of Janusz Radziwill. Catholic, canonized by the Orthodox in the face of the Righteous. Her relics are kept in the Holy Spirit Cathedral in Minsk.

He took an active part in the signing of the Genrikh's Articles, was a central figure among the defenders of Orthodoxy at the conclusion of the Brest Union. He took care of the development of education, publishing books, establishing schools, and patronizing scientists. He founded the Ostrog printing house. The first printers Ivan Fedorov and Pyotr Mstislavets worked there, and they printed the Ostrog Bible, the first completed edition of the Bible in Church Slavonic.

PS.

Probably, today it is difficult for many to imagine such a leader - the support of Orthodoxy, who builds churches without tsybulins and defends the independence of his land from Moscow.

Probably, it would also be difficult for them to imagine that some kind of Orthodox Church would be nishchyts the cultural heritage and traditions of their country.

http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enc_biography/97011/Ostrozhsky be-x-old.wikipedia.org
be.wikipedia.org
pl.wikipedia.org
uk.wikipedia.org
ru.wikipedia.org