Alfred Nicolas Rambaud

“ Russian became the official tongue; it even seemed as if orthodoxy was to become the ruling faith, and the victors were to be absorbed by the vanquished, and Russified by their conquest. An unexpected event turned the natural course of history. The Angevin and French dynasty in Poland had lately been extinguished in the person of Louis of Hungary, whose only heir was his daughter Hedwiga. The Polish nobles felt that the best way of putting a stop to the eternal warfare with the Lithuanians was by marrying their queen to the powerful Prince of Wilna. ”

“ For a long while Christianity had sought to penetrate by two different channels,—under the Latin form from Poland, and under the Greek form from Russia. The fierce war sustained by the Lithuanians against the military monks of the North had rendered Catholicism particularly hateful to them. Under Olgerd the people of Wilna had risen, and fourteen Franciscans were slain. On the other side the larger part of the Lithuanian conquests was composed of Russian territory, and Lithuania underwent the influence of the Russian religion as well as of the Russian language. ”

“ The emigrants from the countries already conquered would doubtless lend them new strength and energy. A wily barbarian, Mindvog, created Lithuanian unity at the beginning of the 13th century in much the same way as Clovis—by exterminating the princes. “He began,” says a chronicle, “by slaying his brothers and his sons, chased the survivors from the country, and reigned alone over the land of Lithuania.” Thence he led his savage warriors against the Russian principalities, now enfeebled by the Mongol invasions, and conquered Grodno and Novogrodek. ”