- Prehistory to the 18th century
- The early modern age
- Independence and the 20th century
The less-accessible Lithuanians, living in dense forests and swamplands, managed to withstand the foreign incursions and preserve their independence. In 1236 a chieftain, Mindaugas, united several tribes into a Lithuanian political entity. In 1251 he accepted Roman Christianity, and in 1253 he joined the western political hierarchy through coronation at the hands of a papal legate. Ten years later, however, he was assassinated, and the Lithuanians reverted to their traditional nativistic paganism.
It is quite likely that another chieftain, Traidenis, founded the dynasty that subsequently became known as that of Gediminas, who acceded to the throne about 1315 and ruled until his death in 1341 or 1342. Although Lithuanian expansion into the lands of the Kiev realm, which had been destroyed by the Mongols, had begun in the 13th century, it was Gediminas who carved out the empire that became known as historic Lithuania, including more or less the area of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, and northwestern Ukraine. Eastward expansion continued under Gediminas’s successors, Algirdas and Kęstutis, who divided the realm between them. In 1370 Great Prince Algirdas besieged Moscow. The eastward expansion provided resources for the Lithuanian state in its resistance to assaults from the Teutonic Order in the west.
The success of a small non-Christian people in carving out and maintaining an extensive empire testifies to the political skill of its ruling princely caste as well as to the policy of wide autonomy and religious toleration. Lithuanian princes frequently intermarried with the ruling families of the East Slav principalities that fell under their sway and often accepted Orthodox Christianity.
After Algirdas’s death, strife between his son Jogaila on the one hand and Jogaila’s uncle Kęstutis and Kęstutis’s son Vytautas on the other, coupled with growing pressure from the Teutonic Order, presented the Lithuanians with the need for an ally. The choice was between Moscow, which would entail the acceptance of Orthodoxy, and Poland, which would require the adoption of Roman Catholicism. In 1385 Jogaila reached agreement with Poland. He married the 12-year-old Queen Jadwiga and acceded to the Polish throne as Władisław II Jagiełło; Lithuania thus became a part of the Latin Christian world. Subsequently, Jogaila made peace with his cousin Vytautas, who became ruler of Lithuania.
Vytautas renewed the policy of eastward expansion but suffered a defeat in 1399 at the hands of the Golden Horde (lands and peoples of the western Mongol empire) in the Battle of the Vorskla River. The successful campaign in 1410 against the Teutonic Order, however, permanently removed the threat from that quarter; on July 15, 1410, a Polish-Lithuanian army inflicted a crushing defeat on the Teutonic Order at Tannenberg (Grünwald), from which the order never recovered. Vytautas continued the policy of expansion in the east. During his reign the Lithuanian state reached its apogee, extending from the Baltic to the Black seas.
In the long term the acceptance of Roman Catholicism pushed Lithuania culturally toward the West. Such development alienated the East Slav principalities, which increasingly came under pressure from Orthodox Moscow. Simultaneously, the cultural Polonization of the Lithuanian nobility began. Increasingly, a gap developed between the Lithuanian-speaking peasantry and their Polonized overlords, analogous to that between German barons and indigenous peasants in Latvia and Estonia.