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

By David A. Frick

In the mid-seventeenth century, Wilno (Vilnius), the second capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was home to Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Ruthenians, Jews, and Tatars, who worshiped in Catholic, Uniate, Orthodox, Calvinist, and Lutheran churches, one synagogue, and one mosque. Visitors regularly commented on the relatively peaceful coexistence of this bewildering array of peoples, languages, and faiths. In Kith, Kin, and Neighbors, David Frick shows how Wilno’s inhabitants navigated and negotiated these differences in their public and private lives.

This remarkable book opens with a walk through the streets of Wilno, offering a look over the royal quartermaster’s shoulder as he made his survey of the city’s intramural houses in preparation for King Władysław IV’s visit in 1636. These surveys (Lustrations) provide concise descriptions of each house within the city walls that, in concert with court and church records, enable Frick to accurately discern Wilno’s neighborhoods and human networks, ascertain the extent to which such networks were bounded confessionally and culturally, determine when citizens crossed these boundaries, and conclude which kinds of cross-confessional constellations were more likely than others. These maps provide the backdrops against which the dramas of Wilno lives played out: birth, baptism, education, marriage, separation or divorce, guild membership, poor relief, and death and funeral practices. Perhaps the most complete reconstruction ever written of life in an early modern European city, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors sets a new standard for urban history and for work on the religious and communal life of Eastern Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780801467523

Book preview

Introduction

In the summer of 1585 a Lutheran merchant of Ulm named Samuel Kiechel (1563–1619) set off on a four-year journey, which led ultimately to the Holy Lands, following a bewilderingly aimless route that passed through Bohemia, Brandenburg, the Low Countries, England, Scandinavia, Poland-Lithuania, Muscovy, Vienna, Rome, and Sicily. In the second summer of his wanderings, at the beginning of July 1586, he sojourned for eleven days in Wilno, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and, as such, the second capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after Cracow, then still the seat of the Polish Crown. There he noted, in addition to the city’s poor water, bad and little beer (schlimm wasser, schlecht und gering bier), aspects of physical and confessional topography:

The houses are generally all built of wood and covered with boards, with the exception of two of the most fashionable streets or ways, in which to the greater extent Germans and others live as merchants, who then also have their own church and pastor, whose salary they pay among themselves. In addition to the Martinists [i.e., followers of Martin Luther], the city has also many sorts of religions and sects, all of which have their churches and public exercitia [exercises], such as papists, Calvinists, Jesuits, Ruthenians or Muscovites, Anabaptists, Zwinglians, and Jews, who also have their synagogue and place of gathering. Then there are also the heathens, or Tatars, and all the religions, companies, and sects have libertatem conscientiae [freedom of conscience], in which no one is hindered.¹

Kiechel’s comments belong to a small subgenre of reports from Wilno, in which visitors offered the outside world sometimes breathless accounts of the fantastic multitude of confessions and religions, either marveling at the relatively peaceful coexistence of the city’s inhabitants or abhorring it. In either case, exaggeration often belonged to the rhetorical repertoire.

Among the chief exaggerators was papal nuncio Cosma de Torres (1584–1642, nunciature 1621–1622), who wrote in a report to Rome that although the Reformation had already lost much ground among the nobility, or szlachta, "there are not few [heretics] among the common people, especially in Wilno, where one can count up to sixty different sects, and it is often possible to come upon a home in which the father belongs to one, the mother to another, and the children to yet another."²

One of Torres’s predecessors in the nunciature, Germánico Malaspina (1550–1603, nunciature 1592–1598), had reported with some concern in 1598 on the situation in the bishopric of Wilno, where there are up to one hundred thousand villagers who do not know the Our Father, many idolators, Mohammedan Tatars, in addition to schismatic Ruthenians and Armenians, also heretics of various sects, and the nuncio is not permitted to take a stand. Still, Malaspina, unlike his more alarmist successor, showed a certain openness to exploiting the situation for the good of the Church. Especially worthy of attention, in his view, were the mixed marriages of Catholics with heretics, and vice versa, which—though forbidden by canon laws and usually not permitted by the bishops—were sometimes given tacit blessing by prelates, who look the other way. Malaspina was not entirely critical of the practice, since almost always the Catholic converts the heretical spouse to his or her faith. Thus, he concluded, hierarchs should consider well whether to forbid such unions.³

In fact, it was Kiechel who had gotten it about right, although a few minor corrections are in order here. Muscovites were certainly present in the form of traveling merchants dealing in furs and forest products, and they may well have worshipped with the local Ruthenians. (Ruthenians were the Orthodox citizens, and after the Union of Brest of 1596 the Orthodox and Uniate citizens, of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—ancestors of Belarusans and Ukrainians.) But the Muscovites had no church of their own in the city, and no one from the region would have confused them with Ruthenians. Further, there was one local Calvinist church with Polish and German congregations, but there was no division of that community into partisans of Geneva or Zürich. The Jesuits were indeed present in 1586, but they were newcomers at that time (having been introduced to the city only in 1569) next to the long-established Franciscans, Dominicans, and Bernardines. In the seventeenth century they would be joined by Calced and Discalced Carmelites, Brothers Hospitallers of St. John of God (Boni Fratelli), Canons Regular of St. Augustine (Augustinians), and Canons Regular of the Lateran Congregation. Finally, the Anabaptists had made a brief appearance in the Wilno confessional landscape in the 1570s, but they soon disappeared.⁴ Still, Kiechel’s sketch of the confessional landscape was largely accurate. And with the addition of the Uniate Church in 1596, it would hold for the seventeenth century as well.

Our pilgrim from the Danube paid much less detailed attention to the ethnic landscape, noting the Jews and Tatars and, among Christians, only the Germans and Ruthenians, whom he identified with the Lutheran and Orthodox confessions, respectively. But the situation was more complicated. There were Germans (at least from our modern point of view) among the Calvinists and the Roman Catholics, Scottish merchants and tradesmen among the first, a range of other ethnicities among the second. Vilnans were not blind to what we could call ethnic difference, but they, like Kiechel, sometimes drew the lines somewhat differently than we do, and they always included aspects of religion and confession in their sometimes shifting and overlapping taxonomies.

The tone of Kiechel’s description of a peculiarly Vilnan convivencia—one in which "all the religions, companies, and sects have libertatem conscientiae [freedom of conscience], in which no one is hindered in the open, public practice of religion—suggests that he belonged to the admirers of the city’s multiconfessionalism. One of the most frequently cited eulogists of toleration in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, vice-judge of the Nowogródek palatinate Teodor Jewłaszewski (1546–1617), would look back nostalgically at the end of his life—from the fallen circumstances of the early seventeenth century (the vice-judge could not know what the rest of the century would bring!)—upon the golden age of his sixteenth-century prime. Born Orthodox in the Belarusan hamlet of Lachowice in the Nowogródek palatinate, he received his first learning in Cyrillic letters and ultimately chose Ruthenian as the language of his memoirs in old age, although he would also become literate, no doubt also conversant, in Polish and Latin, and he claimed to be able at least to read Hebrew letters, if not precisely Hebrew or Yiddish texts. An early convert to the Lithuanian version of Calvinism, Jewłaszewski would nonetheless spend his public and semiprivate life among colleagues and patrons of all confessions. He would write in his memoirs that he had been living in Wilno in 1566, helping to assess the capitation tax, where [he] had the great delight of listening to the Word of God in the Christian church [zbor, i.e., the Calvinist church] during the time of learned ministers. At that time, Jewłaszewski had enjoyed the great grace" of Roman Catholic prelates.

With obvious satisfaction and some humor he related an event that had occurred not so long ago at the table of Wilno Roman Catholic canon Bałtromiej Niedźwiedzki. Present at the dinner in Wilno were servants of then cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini (1536–1605), the future Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605), who was visiting the Lithuanian capital. Aldobrandini had been made cardinal and a papal legate a latere in 1586, and in 1588 he was dispatched to the Commonwealth to conduct delicate negotiations, the crowning achievement of which was a restitution of peace between Poland-Lithuania and the Habsburg monarchy and the release from captivity of the Habsburg contender for the Polish throne; his assignment had also been to see to it that the successful candidate, King Zygmunt III Vasa, kept the Commonwealth loyal to Rome. The members of the cardinal’s retinue (his Italian servants) were greatly astonished to discover at some point late in the evening that, unaware of their fellow guest’s identity, they had been enjoying pleasant hours of food, drink, and conversation with a Calvinist. In a more general assessment of this topic in his life’s experience, Jewłaszewski wrote, In those days, difference in faith made not the least difference in love among friends, for which very reason that era seems golden to me from the point of view of this age, where even among people of one faith duplicity has overtaken all, and do not even ask about love, sincerity, and truly good conduct among those who differ in faith.⁵ The anecdote about supper at the canon’s table was intended as an exemplum contrasting not only the golden and the iron ages in Lithuania but also customs on the peripheries—in the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania—with those at Europe’s confessional centers, particularly in Rome.

Kith, Kin, and Neighbors attempts to provide answers to some of the questions these eyewitness accounts pose or at least suggest. What was the relationship between the physical map of early modern Wilno and its confessional and ethnic topographies? How different was seventeenth-century Wilno from other European cities of the day? To what extent did the victory of the Counter-Reformation in Poland-Lithuania—received notions about the degree and nature of that victory will be put to the test here—minimize difference in Wilno and serve to impose separation of the confessions and religions or to put them on a more hostile footing? How did Vilnans—lay citizens as well as their clergy—negotiate confessional differences in structuring public and more private life, from citywide lay sodalities to mixed households and shared chambers, even shared marriage beds?

I have chosen to focus on Wilno in this study of how a multiethnic and multiconfessional early modern city functioned for a number of reasons. One is the distinctiveness of the place. As the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Wilno was, in the early modern period, among the most important cities in the zone of transcultural communication between the Romano-Germanic (and partly Slavic) world of Reformation and Catholic Reform on the one hand and Orthodox Slavdom on the other; this zone ran from north to south, through the eastern lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and on into the Balkans. The city was the scene of daily interactions among a bewildering array of versions of those two larger cultural spheres. But I have also chosen Wilno because the sources available, as patchy as they may be in certain spots, provide a particularly good laboratory for observing the how of coexistence.

The object of inquiry throughout is the daily interactions among people of different confessions and cultures in Wilno in the seventeenth century. Those who come to these matters from the point of view of high culture, envisioning the situation through the prism of interconfessional polemics—and Wilno was one of the more important centers for the production of such pamphlets in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—may expect to find unceasing battles among the adherents of the five Christian confessions recognized in Wilno, as well as among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Such tensions certainly existed, but they arose not only against the background of confessional and cultural differences. The authorities sought solutions allowing people to live and work together, and individual Vilnans themselves sought peaceful and sometimes amicable contacts with the members of other groups. This cannot have been easy; it required various compromises not only from the more weakly situated minorities but also from the dominant Roman Catholics. And it did not take place without sporadic outbreaks of tumults. Nonetheless, this coexistence—even if, or perhaps precisely because, it took place in the context of regulated background violence and litigation—long remained the norm. What did that normalcy look like? How did it function?

In the course of my research I have come to several conclusions. One is that aspects of David Nirenberg’s argument about fourteenth-century Iberia have relevance for seventeenth-century Wilno—not only were convivencia and violence not mutually exclusive opposites, but well-policed communities of violence were central to the coexistence of confessions. Further, as in the civil society of Edward Muir’s early modern northern Italy, Vilnans kept the peace among themselves in part through a process of continuous litigation, through which they defended property, health, and—perhaps above all—honor against constant challenge from their neighbors. Moreover, as Benjamin Kaplan has recently argued, toleration—the nitty-gritty everyday practice of living with neighbors some may have considered benighted and destined for hell—had no necessary connection with the ideals of tolerance espoused by a few precocious members of the early modern elites; it was, in fact, often the opposite of tolerance. And, finally, as students of religion and society in early modern east-central Europe acknowledge, paradigms of confessionalization are of limited usefulness and must be modified in coming to terms with the multiconfessionalism of places like seventeenth-century Wilno.⁶

I point to aspects of these arguments throughout this book and return to a sustained discussion of them in the epilogue as I attempt to locate Wilno on the map of early modern European toleration. In short, the reader should not be surprised to discover that the kith, kin, and neighbors of my title were sometimes of the same confession or religion and sometimes of different ones and that they both coexisted in relative peace and fought and litigated with each other according to well-established rules of engagement. This book seeks to understand patterns, behavior, and rules of multiconfessional, multiethnic, and multicultural coexistence.

The Setting

But first, some necessary background. Wilno had succeeded Troki (Trakai) as the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by the early fourteenth century. At this time, it was the seat of a sprawling multiethnic, multiconfessional polity, the ruling elite of which were Lithuanians, one of the pagan Baltic tribes. The city itself was mixed even before the formal Christianization of Europe’s last pagan state in 1386 under the sponsorship of the Polish Roman Catholic Church. At that point, it was inhabited by pagan Lithuanians, Orthodox Ruthenians, and Catholic Germans. Orthodox culture enjoyed a certain favor in those days: Ruthenians had moved to the city after territories of what had once been Kievan Rusʹ began to come under Lithuanian rule in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, following the Mongol invasion and sacking of Kiev in 1240. (Kievan Rusʹ was the medieval east Slavic principality—converted under the rule of St. Vladimir in 988 to eastern Orthodoxy—which is claimed as the earliest antecedent of modern Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusan states.) The immigrants brought with them the Cyrillic-based Ruthenian that would become for a while the language of culture and would remain the official chancery language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, required for land and tribunal decrees until 1696. Some of the first individual cases of conversion among the Lithuanian pagan elite were to Orthodox Christianity. At this point, the pagan temple coexisted more or less peacefully with German Catholic and Ruthenian Orthodox churches. Some have located the origins of Wilno’s traditions of practical toleration in these patterns established in the preconversion period.⁷

The city would retain a significant Ruthenian presence, and the use of Chancery Ruthenian remained a mark of Lithuanian particularism long after the elite stopped using the language. Nonetheless, the conversion in 1386 of the grand duke of Lithuania, Jagiełło (Lithuanian, Jogaila; Władysław Jagiełło, Polish baptismal and given names), to Roman Catholicism brought with it a change in the attitude of Lithuanian society toward the Ruthenian aspect of its identity. The introduction of Roman Catholicism laid the foundation for four centuries of political federation between the Lithuanian and Polish states, which also opened the doors to Polish immigration.⁸ More important here, it facilitated a linguistic and cultural Polonization of the Lithuanian elite that would eventually reach to the burghers, leaving, by the early seventeenth century, the greatest concentrations of monolingual Lithuanian speakers in the countryside.⁹

The late fourteenth century also saw the arrival in the area around Wilno of numbers of Tatars and Karaim (Karaites). The Tatars, like the Jews, were not citizens of Wilno and—unlike the Jews—had received no privilege for residence within the city walls; they settled, however, with a wooden mosque and a school, in the nearby suburb of Łukiszki (Lukiškės) and were thus a part of the daily life of the city.¹⁰ Karaim (a scripture-based medieval Jewish sect that had rejected rabbinical traditions and the Talmud) found a home in Troki, a morning’s walk away, and they would play a role in the life of Wilno’s Jewish community; they thus belong only to the margins of the story of Wilno in the early modern period.¹¹ Jews were slower to gain a legal footing in Wilno than in other cities of Lithuania. In 1551 the Sejm (parliament) exempted the Wilno houses of the grand duke’s council from the jurisdiction of the magistracy, thus preparing the way for Jews to rent those noble houses within the city walls and eventually to buy them. Whereas Jews had previously prayed in private residences and small residential synagogues (shtiblekh), the first free-standing synagogue came into being in the center of the city in 1573, and in 1593, in the wake of anti-Jewish riots, King Zygmunt III Waza gave the Jews of Wilno their foundational privilege to live in certain streets and to engage in certain occupations especially since we already found [the Jews living in Wilno] on Our happy arrival here to these domains, the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.¹²

After a few false starts, the Protestant Reformation became a long-term part of the life of Wilno from the second half of the sixteenth century. Permanent aspects of the confessional landscape were the Lutherans and the Calvinists. The Lutheran complex was founded in 1555 on German Street, where it would remain. In our period it encompassed a church with spire and bells, but tucked away safely in an internal courtyard, together with a school and residences for ministers and other staff. The Calvinists worshipped in private residences in the 1560s, but by 1577 they had begun to build the complex of a church with spire and bells, school, and hospital across the street from the Bernardines’ Church of St. Michael. Following an anti-Calvinist tumult in 1639, a royal decree of 1640 would remove them to the site of their old cemetery just outside the walls, where they, too, remained.¹³ An urban Anabaptist movement with some leveling tendencies experienced a brief life in the 1570s, but it left no permanent marks on the religious life of the city.¹⁴ The Antitrinitarianism that has occupied such a prominent position in studies of the intellectual elite of early modern Poland-Lithuania—among whom we find some of Europe’s earliest and most eloquent theorists and defenders of religious tolerance¹⁵—played no direct or lasting role in the life of the city; and the precocious views they put forth concerning religious tolerance had little direct relationship with the day-to-day negotiations that Vilnans entered into as they sought ways to live with their neighbors. The Lutheran church was largely nongentry, comprising members of the city ruling elite (until a ban in 1666), plus professionals, merchants, and artisans—from the more prestigious professions (doctors, lawyers, and goldsmiths) to the dirtier trades (tanners and furriers). Its two congregations, a German-speaking majority and a Polish-speaking minority, shared the same building and sometimes the same bilingual ministers. The Calvinist church was largely noble, although some burghers do appear in its midst, especially, of course, in an urban setting like Wilno. Here it had a Polish-speaking majority and a German-speaking minority (and it was also home to a group of Scots).

In 1596, in accordance with the Union of Brest, the majority of the Ruthenian Orthodox Church hierarchy agreed to enter into communion with Rome, forming what was known as the Uniate (only much later called Greek Catholic) Church. Much of the Ruthenian flock and lesser clergy, however, rejected the move and remained, in their view, truly Orthodox and therefore heirs to all rights and privileges conferred upon the Greeks of the city and the Commonwealth. All the churches of Wilno that were Orthodox in 1595 were eventually turned over to the Uniates, and although three of them—the first [the Church] of the Resurrection of Christ, the second St. John [the Baptist], and the third the Church of St. Gregory in the suburbs—were to have reverted to the Orthodox as a result of the negotiations surrounding the election of King Władysław IV in 1632, none ever did.¹⁶ In 1598, the Orthodox began establishing a new center in the Holy Spirit Church, monastery, hospital, and brotherhood, just across the street from what would now become the leading Uniate Church, monastery, hospital, and brotherhood of the Holy Trinity. When the Orthodox hierarchy was illegally reestablished in 1620, Wilno became the scene of the debate over the status of those bishops and their flock.¹⁷

By 1650, then, this conurbation of perhaps twenty thousand inhabitants¹⁸ was peopled by Poles (or Polish-speaking people), Lithuanians, Germans, Ruthenians, Jews, and Tatars; these peoples worshipped in some twenty-three Catholic, nine Uniate, one Orthodox, one Calvinist, and one Lutheran church, one synagogue, and one mosque; they spoke Polish, Ruthenian, German, Yiddish, Lithuanian, and some Tatar;¹⁹ and they prayed or wrote learned treatises also using various amounts of Latin, Church Slavonic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and a little Arabic. Polish was certainly at the least the city’s lingua franca, and all were feeling (although many ignored) pressures and enticements to conform to a certain Polish and Roman Catholic norm. That model cannot, however, be equated in any simple fashion with the stricter confessional conditions that obtained in the lands of the Polish Crown. Wilno was approximately the size of Cracow within the walls. The walls of the city of Wilno stretched for 2.9 km (Cracow’s walls—3.1 km), and they enclosed an area of 0.8 km² (Cracow—0.6 km²).²⁰

Wilno was granted a version of Magdeburg law in 1387, and members of all the Christian confessions would eventually be eligible for citizenship. (Magdeburg law refers to variations on the set of privileges—based on those first elaborated for the city of Magdeburg—granted by a ruler, the purpose of which was to establish the nature and extent of autonomies and obligations that came with the chartering of cities and the granting to individuals of citizenship in them. The adoption of a wide range of Magdeburg and other Germanic city codes was a crucial feature of the urbanization of Poland-Lithuania in the late medieval and early modern periods.)²¹ In 1536, after a city council had been elected that was 100 percent Ruthenian or Greek (that is to say, Orthodox), the Lachs—a term that usually meant Poles but here signified all Catholics, including Lithuanians and Germans—obtained from King Zygmunt I a privilege that decreed an equal division between Greeks and Romans in all future elections to the city magistracy: benchers (ławnicy, scabinii), councillors, and burgomasters.²² The career of a member of the ruling elite progressed along that path—from service in the court of the bench to the wider council and finally to the council composed of four councillors and two burgomasters, which was elected on an annual basis. A very few would reach the pinnacle of urban power, the office of the wójt (from the German Vogt), which was reserved for Roman Catholics. Parity between Greeks and Romans remained in force at every level below that of the wójt.²³ In Wilno, the wójt was elected by the magistracy and confirmed by royal privilege. At this point (i.e., before the Reformation and before the Union of Brest), the terms Roman and Greek exhausted the range of Christian confessions represented in city government, although each term might cover more than one ethnic group. With the increasing fragmentation of Roman and Greek Christianity in the course of the sixteenth century, more and more groups would compete for seats under the Roman and Greek quotas. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, a Roman Vilnan might be Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist, and a Greek, Uniate or Orthodox.²⁴ And with the increasing political dominance of Roman Catholicism in the course of the seventeenth century, some of the groups would find it increasingly difficult to succeed. Nonetheless, the principle of Roman-Greek parity would never be broken, and individuals from marginalized groups would be elected and sworn to office in Wilno well after the victory of the Counter-Reformation.

In 1666 King Jan Kazimierz Waza passed three restrictive decrees ("ad instar [after the fashion of] Cracow") limiting the Roman seats in the magistracy to Roman Catholics and the Greek seats to Uniates. But at the same time, the king took note of the fact that Henryk Mones (a Calvinist, in fact, and not, as the king had been informed, a Lutheran) and Prokop Dorofiewicz (Orthodox) were still in the magistracy, serving in those years as annual burgomasters, and he specifically allowed them to serve out their terms.²⁵ The reference to Cracow was in fact not entirely apt. In contrast to the old capital of the Polish Crown, where the power in city government was entirely limited to Roman Catholics by the end of the sixteenth century, the Wilno magistracy would remain divided between Romans and Greeks. In spite of pressure to conform to a Polonized and Catholic norm, the elite Greeks (even if they were Uniates) were still an important presence; and these Uniates—one of the surprises of my research—often looked to Greek Orthodox rather than to Roman Catholic circles in forming family and more extended human networks. That is to say, Uniate and Catholic were distinguishable identities, and many Uniates insisted on this fact—among other ways, by forming all-Ruthenian networks that excluded Roman Catholics.

The types of parity arrangements worked out for the magistracy were reflected in a wide range of secular corporations, such as the guilds. Here, the royal intervention of 1666 limiting the categories of Romans and Greeks to those in communion with Rome had no direct bearing. One paradoxical result of the continuing adherence to Roman-Greek parity in the magistracy was that even in its more restrictive post-1666 form it could serve as a model for much broader multiconfessionalism in other city corporations. A variety of types of power sharing appeared, all of them in some way reflections of the royal decree of 1536 that had called for Roman-Greek parity. Here, too, the specifications of the way in which power was to be shared say something about the ethnic, social, and confessional makeup of the individual guilds, but they do not say anything about the relative numbers of each subgroup. Recognized groups were to be represented, but there was no thought for proportional representation. Thus, beginning just below the magisterial elite—probably in the influential Communitas mercatoria, or Merchants’ Guild,²⁶ and certainly in the guilds—the restriction of Roman and Greek categories to Catholic and Uniate did not apply, and Orthodox, Lutheran, and a few Calvinist merchants and artisans continued to play important roles in the city’s life next to their Roman Catholic and Uniate neighbors, spouses, children, and relatives.

Sources and Strategies

It is the next to that interests me in this book. How are we to gain access to these human networks? A fortunate encounter with a crucial document at an early stage in my research—the Lustration [Rewizja] of the Dwellings of the Court of His Royal Majesty (we have two such surveys, for 1636 and 1639)—determined the direction my investigations have taken.²⁷ These are at first glance thoroughly prosaic documents, compiled, it would seem, each time the king came to Wilno.²⁸ They were documents for use: their registration was the task of a royal appointee known as the stanowniczy (royal quartermaster) because it was his duty to determine where individuals from the retinues of the king and other dignitaries were to stand (stać—literally, to stand, but here, to reside temporarily, to be quartered) during the king’s presence in the city. The whole event was referred to as stanowienie gości (the standing of guests). It was one of the more onerous burdens of citizenship, and burghers presented to the authorities a privilege freeing them from the obligation (a libertacja) whenever they could. The purpose of the Lustrations determined their form and content. These were surveys of the houses (seemingly all of them) within the walls, conducted in a strictly regulated fashion, house by house, moving from the Lower Castle south along the Royal Way—down Castle Street, through Market Square, and past the town hall to the Rudniki (and Sharp) Gates. That is to say, the quartermaster set out from twelve o’clock to six o’clock—if we turn intramural Wilno’s gracefully heart-shaped contours into a simple circle—and then he progressed in his survey clockwise, going full circle from the environs of Sharp Gate (six o’clock) to those of the Subocz Gate (three o’clock).

The eloquence of these bare lists soon becomes clear. In the first place, they make it possible to draw up a map of Wilno for the years in question and to assign addresses to all the houses.²⁹ Questions remain about the precise locations of some houses in a few side streets—for instance, around the Roman Catholic Church of St. Nicholas and in the vicinity of Łotoczko Street. But in the overwhelming majority of cases I have been able to locate the houses of Wilno in 1636 (with a few supplements from the Lustration of 1639) on very precise segments of identified streets and in every case to locate a house in relationship to its neighbors. In a great many instances it is possible—although this was not the goal of this project—to draw a line of continuity—across fires, wars, renovations, and expansions—from an address in 1636 to later, even current ones. In all cases, of course, we need to think in terms of the progressive supplanting of wood by brick or the addition of another floor and of the incorporation of neighboring addresses into one larger house, especially in the general rebuildings that took place after the fires and wars that were a part of city life in the seventeenth century (and after!).

In his study of late medieval Marseille, Daniel Lord Smail writes of four competing templates employed by the various communities in the imaginary cartographies they created and used to navigate space and locate people and property in the days before urban representations from the perpendicular that take notice of streets.³⁰ It will be useful to keep them in mind as we examine the ways in which Vilnans imagined the map of their city and placed themselves and their neighbors in it. The first and most important spoke of streets, alleys, and squares, the template that would, in time, become the urban norm. This was favored by Marseille’s notaries and by our royal quartermaster. It is implicit in the usage of legal acta—deeds, bequests, testaments, even protestations—that locate people and property according to precise vicinities: "our house on the Fish Market, standing between the houses, on the one side, that known of old as the Wirszułowska, and now of His Lord Grace Aleksander Słuszka, Palatine of Mińsk, etc., and, on the other side, that of Lord Jakub Sienkiewicz, Burgomaster of Wilno."³¹ The legal acta (the term refers both to the individual documents and to the collections of them) and the Lustrations of 1636 and 1639 can be used to corroborate each other. It is a fairly straightforward task to overlay the map implicit in the Lustrations—with their numbering of houses on segments of named (or at least described) streets, alleys, and squares—upon contemporary maps such as that of Fryderyk (Friedrich) Getkant (1600–1666), a military engineer and cartographer from the Rhineland in the employ of Polish-Lithuanian rulers in the mid-seventeenth century. His outline map of Wilno’s fortifications provided the shell for Maria Łowmiańska’s reconstruction of the intramural and some suburban streets of Wilno in the middle of the century.³² That tracery of streets and location of objects, based on a reading of contemporary documents, has served as a template for my own maps. I have added a few small streets and alleyways based on the Lustrations of 1636 and 1639, which were unknown to, and unexploited by, the larger scholarly community until quite recently.³³

But although he numbered the houses as he surveyed them, it is unlikely that even the quartermaster thought in terms akin to our modern notions of street addresses. Vilnans themselves may have operated to some extent with the skeletal tracery of streets that is implicit in the Lustrations, but probably remnants of Smail’s three other templates functioned here as well. City blocks, or islands, were the preferred imaginary cartography of Marseille’s direct lords, the bishop and the Crown, and there are some indications that Wilno’s ecclesiastical authorities operated with these concepts in laying claim to their intramural and extramural jurydyki—blocks of houses possessed by ecclesiastical bodies or figures, subject to the legal jurisdiction of those entities (and not to the Magdeburg law of the town hall). The 1672 map of the Wilno jurydyka of the Uniate metropolitan overlays islands upon a crude street map.³⁴ Related concepts of parishes and quarters (in Marseille—sixains), although preferred by the lords and the city council, were completely absent from Marseille’s notarial and vernacular cartographies. Something similar can be noted for Wilno. The six quarters of houses subject to Magdeburg law and the organization of extramural noble possessions by parishes—both employed in the 1690 hearth tax register—seem not to have functioned elsewhere.³⁵

The vernacular cartographies of Marseille—those employed by Provençal-speaking artisans, merchants, professionals, and laborers—drew on two other templates: those of vicinities and those of landmarks. We will find echoes of similar concepts in the ways Vilnans located themselves within floating knots of residential sociability or centers of production or retailing that extended across several streets, alleys, or intersections (i.e., vicinities), or near landmarks (e.g., na podzamczu—in the region below the castle[s]).

I have placed the Lustration at the base of this study not because it reflects the dominant way in which Vilnans visualized their city—although I do have a sense that Vilnans could easily read themselves into such a map—but because it offers us the most complete contemporary survey of people and possessions. It will allow us to situate individual Vilnans and their stories—even if they also thought in terms of vicinities and landmarks—in the neighborhoods and human networks within which they conducted life’s business.³⁶

The kinds of things that interested the quartermaster in 1636 are of different—but equally crucial—importance to the historian of seventeenth-century Wilno. For each address, the Lustration tells us things such as the type of structure (for example, a wooden house [dom] or a bricked house [kamienica]); jurisdiction (the main ones were those of the burghers’ magistracy, the Roman Catholic Chapter, the nobles’ land and castle courts, and—in the suburbs below the two castles, which were not encompassed by the Lustration—the Wilno horodnictwo, the small jurisdiction encompassing apparently rather modest to poor houses clustered outside the city walls to the north, in the suburbs called Szerejkiszki and Antokol);³⁷ the name of current and sometimes also previous owners; the name of any other chief occupant (especially if the owner did not reside there) and the legal basis for residence (for example, he holds it by rent); who was to reside there now and who had resided there before; and—most important for the quartermaster and even more important for the citizens of Wilno—whether the owner had produced any sort of libertacja freeing him from the obligation to house guests.

In order to have a sense of who might reasonably be quartered in a given dwelling, the quartermaster conducted a brief but remarkably telling survey of each building’s physical attributes. And since this particular quartermaster was fond of diminutives, the picture took on a certain subtlety. We learn, for example, whether we are dealing with a manor (dwór), a little manor, a wooden house (dom), a little house, a tiny little house (on one occasion), a bricked house (kamienica) or a little bricked house, or a hybrid—a wooden house with a certain number of walled (i.e., bricked) chambers (or little chambers). We can often deduce how many stories the building had (at a minimum) at the time. We survey and count chambers (izby), little chambers, and tiny little chamberlets; tavern chambers, dining chambers, landlords’ chambers; cabinets (kownaty) and little cabinets; alcoves (komory), little alcoves, and tavern alcoves; vestibules (sienie) and little vestibules; kitchens (kuchnie) and little kitchens. And in each of these cases, further qualifications were possible: bricked or of wood, with a stove or without, divided or not. Further, and in no particular order in this list, we visit (and, again, various qualifiers might be employed) chicken coops, galleries, recesses, apothecary shops, stalls and shops devoted to trade in specified goods, baths (including one little bath without a stove), basements (how many of them were divided, how many of them full of water),³⁸ breweries, bakeries, smithies, granaries, workshops devoted to various named trades, courtyards, gardens, orchards, stables, sheds, cow sheds, pantries, storage places, wine cellars.

In short, the Lustration provides the material to draw a map identifying the intramural houses of Wilno in 1636, and it makes it possible to assign several key attributes to each address: the name of the owner or chief inhabitant and of the guest assigned to the dwelling, the jurisdiction of the house, and a wide variety of physical attributes. Two crucial things are missing (for us, not for the quartermaster): the confession of the owner or chief inhabitant and the numbers, names, and confessions of the many, largely anonymous, neighbors (sąsiedzi—a technical term in the contemporary usage signifying renters of a room or rooms in one house), who lived in the chambers and alcoves of probably every address on this map. The Lustration allows me to say, for example, which neighborhoods had the most and largest stables and sheds and just how many horses they could accommodate—certainly important facts for the quartermaster and not without interest for our image of the physical map of the city at the end of the 1630s. But the document does not allow me to tie confession and ethnicity directly to this detailed physical and jurisdictional map.

This fact in itself tells us something about public discourse in seventeenth-century Wilno. When they appeared before any of the various local jurisdictions, Tatars and Jews were identified with the descriptive marker infidel (niewierny—unbeliever) followed by a name and patronymic, the term Tatar or Jew, and a qualifier of place—for example, infidel Zelman Izakowicz, Jew of Wilno.³⁹ Christians were identified by an honorific title, name, occupation or title, and place of citizenship (for example, famous Lord Michał Zienkiewicz, burgher and merchant of Wilno). Confession never played a role in such formulations of identification. And it is important to remember that we are dealing with five officially recognized Christian confessions. Perhaps everybody knew who was who, but this information was not part of the written record, and therefore we have to look elsewhere for clues. This fact in itself offers some insight into how things worked in Wilno: all Christians were Vilnans before the law, as were, in a looser sense, Jews and Tatars; which court they were subject to depended upon things like estate and place of residence.

Things connected with death—last wills and testaments, funeral sermons, burial records—provide the best evidence for confessional identity, at least for the end of an individual layman’s life, and probably there were not many last-minute conversions. Regular contributions of money—we have registers for the Wilno Lutheran and Calvinist churches—would seem equally eloquent, as would records of partaking in Communion (here for the Wilno Calvinists). Registers of inscription in religious brotherhoods also supply indicators. Other types of evidence—deathbed bequests of money and goods, baptismal and nuptial records (including service as godparent, sponsor, or witness)—are also useful. They are all, however—with the exception of Communion records—problematic to evaluate: there were some patterns of giving to institutions beyond one’s own confession, we find a certain number of mixed marriages, and there were even more cases of service as godparent or witness in a church other than one’s own. The matter is made more difficult in the last instance by the fact that the priests or ministers recording the event usually supplied only the name and extremely rarely noted the confession of the individual taking part in their services (and in consequence they passed over in silence the very presence of individuals of other confessions in their churches, as well as their participation in such sensitive rituals as baptisms).

These, then, are the sources I have used in an attempt to obtain a picture of confessional allegiance and to uncover patterns of habitation and social networking among Vilnans of various confessions and religions: last wills and testaments registered in the books of the various jurisdictions (magistracy, castle and land courts, the Roman Catholic Chapter, the court of the Wilno horodnictwo), as well as copies that made their way into other scattered collections of families and institutions; funeral sermons (especially those of Lutheran minister Jędrzej Schönflissius); records of inscriptions in religious brotherhoods;⁴⁰ records of deaths (we have them for the Calvinists, 1671–1682,⁴¹ 1687–1700;⁴² and for German Catholics, 1668–1700⁴³); records of regular offerings for the Lutherans⁴⁴ and the Calvinists;⁴⁵ baptismal records (for the Catholics at the parish Church of St. John 1611–1616, 1664–1670, 1671–1685, 1685–1692;⁴⁶ for German Catholics at the Jesuit Church of St. Ignatius 1666–1700;⁴⁷ and for Calvinists 1631–1655 and 1663–1682, 1682–1700⁴⁸); records of marriages (for Catholics at the parish Church of St. John 1602–1615, 1664–1672;⁴⁹ for German Catholics at the Church of St. Ignatius;⁵⁰ and for the Calvinists 1635–1655, 1663–1681, 1684–1700⁵¹); as well as registers of participation in Communion (for Calvinists 1663, 1682–1699⁵²).

There are obvious gaps in the documentation. We do not have, for example, registers of giving for the Catholics, baptismal records for the Lutherans, registers of Communion taking for Roman Catholics and Lutherans, etc. And above all, we sorely miss any of this sort of information for the Greeks of Wilno, both Uniate and Orthodox. This serious gap can be supplemented only fragmentarily and with great effort (and a little luck), through collecting information scattered throughout various court documents. Presumably the Uniates were supposed to keep the same sorts of parish registers as their post-Tridentine Roman Catholic brethren. The Orthodox may have begun to follow suit only in the course of the seventeenth century.⁵³ In any event, whatever records there were—and echoes of them in other jurisdictions suggest their existence—they have disappeared from Wilno archives, and I have not found them elsewhere.

The gaps are also of a chronological nature, and their temporal boundaries tell something of the story of Wilno in the seventeenth century. In 1610 most of the city burned, including the town hall and the books of the magistracy. The next year the Calvinist church and its archive—spared in 1610—burned in a fire started by a tumult directed at the presence of the Reformed in the city. Thus, for all practical purposes our story begins with 1611. But for the period 1611 to 1655, the record remains extremely spotty because the city again fell victim to the fires and devastation that accompanied the Muscovite occupation in 1655 during the wars with Muscovy, Sweden, and the Cossacks. There always remains a chance that some portions of the record were taken to safety in exile, which sent Vilnans to places like Königsberg and Danzig (Gdańsk), or were confiscated by the tsarist armies, and they may yet show up in the usual unexpected places, but for us—as for one Vilnan returning to the city after the Muscovite occupation—it seems that the magistracy archive was largely lost for the period before 1655.⁵⁴ We will encounter evidence of the functioning of a temporary magistracy in Wilno even during the occupation, so the extant record for that jurisdiction picks up again right after 1655.⁵⁵ The documentation becomes relatively dense for the rest of the seventeenth century beginning with the liberation of the city and the resumption of normal magisterial functions in 1662.⁵⁶

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

The Questions

Given the extant sources available to me, the project became one of connecting a very rich source from the first half of the century (the 1636 and 1639 Lustrations), plus some relatively detailed information for the citizens of the capitula and one of its subjurisdictions from that period, as well as some spotty information for the horodnictwo, with the more thickly documented magistracy sources for the period beginning in the late 1650s. One of the stories that arises on the margins is the way in which people came back from exile—some already during the Muscovite occupation of the city, which began in August 1655, others only after the final liberation in December 1661—and rebuilt their lives at the same addresses. A document from 1688 emphasized this continuity, describing the paternal house as the bricked house [handed down] from grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents in the Sieńczyło family on Subocz Street.⁶¹ In fact, many Vilnans returned to their family homes, and the 1636 map can serve as a point of departure for a study of Wilno neighborhoods in the later seventeenth century as well.

Even if the Counter-Reformation would make considerable progress in Wilno as elsewhere in Poland-Lithuania, its victory here, as in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in general, was noticeably slower in coming and much less complete than elsewhere—even in the perception of contemporaries. Here was a case, unusual among the royal cities of the Commonwealth, where the Christian others continued to fight some of their battles within structures provided by the city’s various corporations. It was also unusual when set next to a few cities of the Holy Roman Empire, which, in the 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg, had elaborated a modus vivendi for two confessions in one city—usually by the strict separation along confessional lines of corporations, guilds, and families.⁶² What was the cause of this difference? Perhaps one answer lay in the antiquity of religious difference and coexistence in Wilno, which, after all, antedated the divisions caused by the Age of Reform by two hundred years. Perhaps another answer lay in the attenuation of binary oppositions: not two confessions in one city but five confessions and in one rather small city at that, which allowed for many types of inclusive and exclusive constellations of individuals and groups.

Did this multiplicity within the Christian landscape have an effect on the structure of Jewish-Christian and Tatar-Christian relationships? It certainly offered material for confessional and social polemicists, who could draw up constantly shifting lists of others: "merchants, Scots, Jews, and other people [i.e., nonguild members] of whatever condition [wszelakiej kondycyjej ludziom]" in one list (from the realm of conflicts between the guilds and those working outside those corporate structures);⁶³ or Jews, pagans, and heretics (from the realm of confessional conflict);⁶⁴ or Jews, Turks, Tatars, Arians, and other blasphemers of God the One in the Holy Trinity (in a discussion of the reception of converts into the Reformed [Calvinist] Church of Poland-Lithuania).⁶⁵ The author of a printed antisemitic tract from 1621 longed for the days (because his contemporaries had supposedly gotten used to the presence of these others) when—and here we find yet another list—"a Jew was a Jew, a Scot a Scot, an Armenian and Armenian, a Tatar a Tatar, and a vagabond a vagabond.⁶⁶ The sources dictate that these questions will remain partially (in the case of the Tatars—largely) in the realm of questions and hypotheses. They do grant us, however, access to some aspects of Jewish-Christian negotiations of space and interactions in public and more private spheres of life in Wilno, and the Christian-Jewish encounter is a part of the larger story throughout.

The guiding questions in my study of the day-to-day relations of the peoples of the city in this period of belated, only partial confessionalization are these: To what extent did Vilnans live in neighborhoods and form human networks (through marriage, choice of guardians and other legal representatives, enlistment of godparents and witnesses, professional association, etc.) that were confessionally and culturally bounded? In what circumstances did they cross those boundaries? What sorts of cross-confessional constellations were more likely than others, and under what circumstances?

The human networks are the most interesting and the most difficult to establish. In addition to ties of blood and marriage, seventeenth-century Vilnans built networks that included guardians (tutores or opiekunowie) officially named in wills as those responsible for holding the wealth of the deceased in a kind of trust, and the curators (curatores or kuratorzy) who represented women and children before the court of the magistracy.⁶⁷ They also included godparents (compatres or chrzestni); friends (amicii or przyjaciele)—and this was a technical term for a specific group of family advisers whose task it was to give counsel in times of crucial decisions (marriage contracts and business contracts perhaps heading the list); and finally the signatories (sigilatorii/signatores or pieczętarzy), who were asked to witness the will and to sign and affix their seals to it. These last persons were often also referred to as neighbors, good people, etc., and it is clear that one requirement was that they have citizens’ rights in the jurisdiction in which the will was being registered. But there are also indications that these individuals too were often a part of the network of friends surrounding the deceased and his or her family.

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

The Chapters

The first five chapters of this book provide the backdrops against which the dramas of Wilno lives played out. By revealing Wilno topographies, the first three chapters set the stage for much of the rest of the book. Chapter 1 begins with a journey to Wilno and through its streets, looking over the royal quartermaster’s shoulder as he made his survey of the city in preparation for the king’s visit in 1636. It provides the reader with a map of the city’s physical, confessional, and social topographies in which the subsequent thematic analyses will be situated. Chapters 2 and 3 move from the bird’s-eye view of real estate ownership in larger neighborhoods to questions of coexistence under one roof and within four walls. Who were the neighbors (i.e., subletters and renters) to whom Vilnans offered dwellings within their houses? What were the consequences of sharing private (the term will need to be qualified) spaces across confessions and religions? Chapter 4 examines the encounters of these same Vilnans in time. Members of the five Christian confessions and three religions organized their communal and more private lives according to a wide range of daily, weekly, and annual rhythms and calendars. How did this fact structure their coexistence within the walls of a city that also functioned on a clock and a calendar that were obligatory for all in certain aspects of their lives? What was at stake when matters of time and space coincided, such as during formal and less formal public processions that were connected with religious observance? Chapter 5 turns to an aspect of this constant background that must have been real to contemporary Vilnans but of which we hear only occasional echoes. What sets of ethnic, confessional, linguistic, and other stereotypes were created by, or available to, Vilnans as they perceived and represented their neighbors? Our chief source here will be the pamphlets and pasquinades produced by the dominant Roman Catholics (and largely sponsored by the local Jesuits) in attempts to marginalize Protestants, Orthodox, Tatars, and Jews.

The rest of the book—chapters 6 to 14—seeks to uncover the human networks that Vilnans formed around themselves and their families in the contexts of the physical and temporal maps sketched above. The discussion is organized around moments, the acts of the dramas in the life cycles of seventeenth-century Vilnans, from birth to death. Not all the moments are connected with transitional events such as baptism, marriage, and death. Some of them were recurrent or constant features over longer periods of life: education, work, patronage, conflict and litigation, strategies for addressing poor relief. Others were more peculiar to a given time and place. In particular, chapter 11 examines the language of the litigation that seventeenth-century Vilnans employed as a rule-based form of conflict in maintaining community; chapter 12 focuses on a moment of crisis—the Muscovite occupation of the city in the years 1655–1661 that would test Wilno’s peculiar form of convivencia and see it ultimately restored to something very much like the status quo ante. Each of these moments involved people at various stages of their own life cycles, as, for example, in the first chapter: networks here involved not only the newborn babies but also parents and the spiritual kin they selected for their children. My goal throughout these chapters is to discover to what extent and for what purposes Vilnans tended to congregate within, or move beyond, their own ethnoconfessional groups as they entered into various types of associations in the course of their lives.

Given the extant sources, reliable quantification of these phenomena will be possible only in rare instances. But numbers are not ultimately the point: what made this city work was the very fact that some members of every confession and at all levels of society were willing to enter into a variety of interconfessional alliances, many of which their priests, ministers, rabbis, and mullahs had told them to shun; and that the rest mostly tolerated the situation. In each thematic chapter, the analysis stems from a series of stories about the lives of individual Vilnans that I have pieced together from small facts drawn from highly disparate archival sources—a house address; a baptismal, marriage, or death record; some litigation; a last will and testament; the naming of guardians, executors, and friends. In addition to the court and church records indicated above, I have drawn on whatever else I could find: a few memoirs, personal correspondence, some funeral sermons, confessional polemical tracts, and prescriptive religious and legal handbooks.

Some constellations, we will discover, were more easily formed than others: Lutherans joined with Calvinists—perhaps still surprising enough to those who study those confessions closer to their geographical homelands—but Orthodox also united with Uniates, a marriage thought to be in the range of difficult to impossible by those whose knowledge is drawn largely from the contemporary polemical pamphlets. Most important, however, is the fact that all communities were represented. Seventeenth-century Wilno was no idyll: conviviality could, and did on occasion, end in a drunken brawl; neighborliness did not preclude violence—in fact it depended on its judicious regulation. Early modern Vilnans sought to lay down the rules of encounter between members of the various religions and confessions, largely with the goal of avoiding violence, but they also established rules for acceptable expressions of hostility. The epilogue will attempt to assess the general rules of encounter and to place Wilno in the continuum of early modern European cities, from the most exclusionary at one extreme to the relatively inclusive at the other.

~CHAPTER ONE~

Over the Quartermaster’s Shoulder

King Władysław IV made one of his five entries into Wilno on 5 March 1636. Chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania Albrycht Stanisław Radziwiłł (1595–1656, chancellor from 1623), a staunch Catholic and foe of the Reformation, recorded in his diary that on this occasion the King entered Wilno on a sleigh without ceremony and made his way to the Castle on foot. Having removed his hat, he dismissed all of us.¹ This nonevent was noteworthy precisely because of the lack of ceremony that usually accompanied the triumphal entry of a ruler. On the next occasion, 27 January 1639, Radziwiłł wrote, The city went to great expense in order to receive the new queen [Cecilia Renata of Austria], who had come [to Wilno] for the first time.² Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, the entry of a ruler into a city was a highly choreographed pageant, in which the ruler and his considerable entourage would be met at the gate leading to the Royal Way within the city by local corporations such as the magistracy, the merchants’ society, and the guilds, all dressed in the livery and under banners peculiar to each.³

King Władysław loved Italian opera, and on both occasions he would command more than thirty intramural houses to quarter His Royal Majesty’s music (Muzyka JKrM), which probably followed the king and his retinue through the gate during a triumphal entry. The king, his entourage, and some portion of Wilno society would be entertained on both visits by the performances of Baldasarre Ferri, an Italian castrato of some European renown, who would continue his career in Vienna after the death of his Polish patron. Little Baltazar, His Royal Majesty’s descantist (Baltazarek, Dyskancista JKrM) was the only member of the King’s music identified by name in the Lustration of 1636; in 1639, he would be identified only by his profession (and the fact that he had been quartered there the last time). He was quartered by himself, on both occasions in the house of Tyl the locksmith (in all likelihood a Lutheran) at Glass Street 18.05.⁴ On 4 September 1636, the king was a part of an audience of 521 who were entertained over the course of five hours by a production of Il Ratto di Helena (The Abduction of Helen), an Italian dramma per musica with libretto by Virgilio Puccitelli and music by Marco Scacchi, who was in the employ of Władysław IV.⁵

In addition to feasts, pageants, concerts, operas, and hunts, the king would participate during his stay in Wilno in 1636, earlier that same summer, on 5 July, in the ceremony conferring the doctoral degree in theology upon Wilno-based Jesuit Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (Sarbevius), the Christian Horace, the best known of Polish man of letters on the European stage, thanks to his Latin poetry. The ceremony took place in the Jesuits’ Church of St. John, with the newly minted doctor of theology amazing the congregation with an eloquent Latin sermon. On that occasion the king made the poet-theologian a present of a sapphire ring.⁶ On 14 August 1636 Władysław IV would participate in the long-anticipated translatio of the relics of Lithuania’s patron saint, Kazimierz, one of the king’s own Jagiellonian great uncles, to the newly completed Chapel of St. Kazimierz in the Roman Catholic cathedral church. The royal preacher Sarbiewski himself would give the sermon glorifying the Jagiellonian-Waza dynasty and its role in the defense of the Church.⁷

Triumphal entries and the sojourns of the king and his large retinue required careful preparations, central among which would have been those for the quartering of guests (stanowienie gości). The royal quartermaster probably arrived in the city by the route taken by his royal patron and other dignitaries.⁸ The usual road led from Warsaw, by way of Grodno and Troki. Then, nearing the suburbs of