The years of the life of the prince in k Ostrozhsky. Konstantin Ostrozhsky - statesman and commander. Ostrogsky interesting facts
Nobel Laureate in Literature
- Bulak-Balakhovich Stanislav
commander of the Belarusian People's Army - Vasilkovsky Oleg
Head of the BNR diplomatic mission in the Baltic States - Genyush Larisa
"a bird without a nest" - poetess, keeper of the BPR archive - Duzh-Dushevsky Claudius
national flag design - Kondratovich Kyprian
Minister of Defense of the BNR - Lastovsky Vaclav
Prime Minister of the BNR, Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR - Lutskevich Anton
Sergeant of the Rada of the Minister of BNR - Lutskevich Ivan
cultural trader of Belarus - Lyosik Yazep
Chairman of the Rada of the BPR, Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR - Skirmunt Roman
elite of the Empire and Prime Minister of the BNR
Belarusian People's Republic
one of the creators of the modern literary language, the author of the anthem "Pursuit"
humanist, educator, heretic, church reformer
- Mindovg (1248-1263)
King of the Prussians and Litvins - Voyshelk (1264-1267)
son of Mindovg, who annexed Nalshany and Diavoltva - Schwarn (1267-1269)
son-in-law of Mindovg and son of the king of Russia - Viten (1295 - 1316)
"invent a coat of arms for yourself and for the whole princedom of Lithuania: a knight of a zbroyna on a horse with a sword" - Gediminas (1316-1341)
in. prince who united Lithuania and the Principality of Polotsk - Olgerd (1345-1377)
in. prince who gathered all Belarusian lands into a single state - Jagiello (1377-1381)
in. Prince of Lithuania and King of Poland. Union of Krevo - (1381-1382)
"Oath of Keistut" and the first mention of the oral Old Belarusian language - Vytautas (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)
first elected king and c. prince - Stefan Batory (1575-1586)
liberator of Polotsk from Ivan the Terrible and patron of the Jesuits - Zhigimont III Vase (1587-1632)
king of the swedes, ready, wends - Stanislav II August (1764-1795)
the last king and c. prince - Jagiellons
nine Slavic kings
Grand Dukes of Lithuania
nobility and fundators of the Red Church in Minsk.
priest and Belarusian nationalist, prisoner of the Trostinets camp
and the Belarusian epic "Song of the bison"
Commandant of the Kremlin, defender of Smolensk
castellan of Gartha, right hand of Gediminas
rebel 1830 and 1863, sculptor
Prince Nal'shansky and Pskov
ethnographer, economist, founder of the Belarusian national historiography, compiler of the Map of the Settlement of the Belarusian Tribe
first diplomat of the Republic of Ingushetia in Japan, author of the first Russian-Japanese dictionary
philomath, litvin, insurgent, scientist
"eternal wanderer", astronomer and artist
general of Middle Lithuania, the last knight of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
elders and governors of Minsk, funders of the development of the historical center of Minsk
Kostrovitsky coat of arms Baibuza and Vonzh
Jaska Haspadar's pad Wilni, national hero
ethnographer, academician, compiler of the "Map of the settlement of the Belarusian tribe"
national hero of Belarus, Poland and the USA
sculptor
"belarus numar adzin va ўsіm svetse"
cornet from Orsha, the hero of the "Trilogy"
Archbishop of Polotsk, "St. Apostle of Unity"
colonel "lisovchikov"
Princes Ostrozhsky
defenders of the Grand Duchy and founders of Orthodoxy
There are two versions about the origin of the Ostrozhsky family. According to the first, they descended from the princes of Galicia, according to the second version, they were descendants of the Turov-Pinsk princes.
hero of the battle of Orsha
Prince Ostrozhsky Konstantin Ivanovich (1460 - August 10, 1530) - Lithuanian commander from the Orthodox Ostrozhsky family, headman of Bratslav, Vinnitsa and Zvenigorod (1497-1500, 1507-1516, 1518-1530), headman of Lutsk and marshal of Volyn land (1507-1522) , kashtelyan Vilna (1511-1522), voivode Troksky (1522-1530), great Lithuanian hetman (1497-1500, 1507-1530).
The great commander of the wars with Muscovy 1487-1537, which determined the modern eastern border of Belarus. He became famous for his victories over the Tatars. He settled captive 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 issued a universal about his appointment as Pan of 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 biggest defeat since the Battle of Vorskla. Ostrozhsky, along with many military leaders, was taken prisoner.
In 1506, after 6 years of captivity, the prince agreed to serve the Russian sovereign (according to Karamzin - "under the threat of the dungeon"). In 1507, under the pretext of inspecting the troops entrusted to him, Ostrozhsky left Moscow and fled to Lithuania. He was returned to his former eldership and the position of marshal of the Volyn land, thanks to which Ostrozhsky became the chief military and civilian commander of all Volhynia. He was again approved by the great hetman of Lithuania.
He remained in my memory as the winner in the battle of Orsha - the battle on September 8, 1514 during the war with Muscovy of 1512-1522, in which the 30,000th army of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania fought, defeated the 80,000th Moscow army and stopped Moscow expansion for 250 years.
The Great Hetman was the backbone of the Greek Church in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania - favors 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 Volhynia were grouped: Prince. Vishnevetsky, Sangushki, Dubrovitsky, Mstislavsky, Dashkov, Soltan, Gulevich and others.
With his support, Metropolitan of Kyiv, Galicia and All Russia Joseph II Soltan received a charter from King Sigismund I, which guaranteed the independence of the Greek clergy from secular power.
Konstantin Ostrozhsky was the founder of the Trinity and Prechistenskaya churches in Vilna. The Mikhailovsky Church in Synkovichi is also associated with his name (according to the time of construction and architectural similarity with the Trinity Church).
Ostrozhsky Konstantin (Konstantin-Vasily) Konstantinovich
fundator of education
Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich Ostrozhsky (also Vasily-Konstantin; 1526-1608) - head of the Ostrozhsky family, headman of Vladimir and marshals of the Volyn land (1550-1608), governor of Kyiv (1559-1608), patron 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-Slutsky family, descendants of Grand Duke Olgerd. The last representative of the family - St. Righteous Sofia Slutskaya - Sofia Yurievna, Princess Slutskaya (1585-1612), wife of Janusz Radziwill. Catholic, canonized by the Orthodox as the Righteous. Her relics are kept in the Holy Spirit Cathedral in Minsk.
He took an active part in the signing of the Articles of Henry, was a central figure among the defenders of Orthodoxy at the conclusion of the Union of Brest. He took care of the development of education, publishing books, establishing schools, providing patronage to scientists. He founded the Ostroh Printing House. Pioneers Ivan Fedorov and Pyotr Mstislavets worked in it, who 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 pillar 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 carry the cultural heritage and traditions of their country.
http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enc_biography/97011/Ostrogsky be-x-old.wikipedia.org
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en.wikipedia.org
In the 14th century, when in eastern Russia Moscow considered itself the embryos of a single Russian state, revolutions took place in the west, inclining the other half of Russia towards 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 the main prince in the Volyn land of Leo from Lutsk, then in 1319-20. on the Irpen River (Kiev province), he defeated the princes of the house of St. Vladimir who united against him, took possession of 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. Other princes fled, others were reduced to the rank of subordinate rulers, and their place in the sense of appanage princes was replaced by princes of Lithuanian origin. Gediminas divided the Russian possessions conquered by him between his children and relatives; in Volyn he became prince Lubart, in Novogorodok Koriat, in Pinsk Narimunt; in Kyiv, Prince Montvid was appointed assistant to Gediminas, etc. These Lithuanian princes adopted Orthodoxy and the Russian nationality, and their closest offspring became Russified to such an extent that there were no signs of their former origin in them. This coup, in essence, was only dynastic; but the difference between the order of affairs under the princes of the house of St. Vladimir and under the princes of the Gedimin house was that the princes of the Lithuanian house depended on the Grand Duke, who was in Lithuania, and with their destinies were in his fief submission. The Polotsk and Vitebsk lands had previously been under the rule of the princes of the Lithuanian tribe, who probably reached the reign by choice, and subsequently these lands were subordinate 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 chief prince of this land, a direct descendant of King Danil, Yuri II, the Galician and Vladimir boyars called for Prince Boleslav of Mazovetsky, a descendant of Danil of Galicia in the female line; but this prince converted to Catholicism, and as a result 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 Volhynia, but after that he had to endure a long struggle with the Russians who defended their independence. The main figure in this struggle on the Russian side was Prince Ostrozhsky, named Danilo, otherwise Danko: he was a descendant of Roman, one of the sons of Danil Galitsky; his hatred for the Polish rule was so great that Danilo Ostrozhsky led the Tatars to Poland. With him at the same time was the son of Gediminas Lubart, baptized under the name of Theodore. After a long bloodshed, Casimir kept 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.
The son of Gediminas, 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. Russia, subject to him, was divided between the princes, whom, however, Olgerd, a man of strong character, held in his hands. In Kyiv, 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, 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 as a hermit. Thus, the princes who replaced the family of St. Vladimir in Russia became just as Russian in faith and in the nationality they adopted, as were the princes of the family 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 in the future, if the son and successor of Olgerd on the grand ducal dignity of Jagiello (otherwise Jagiello) in 1386 did not marry the Polish queen Jadwiga. As a result of this marriage, he converted to Catholicism, became a zealous champion 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 germ of a phenomenon was laid, which later for many centuries was a distinctive feature of the mutual relations between Russia and Poland. The concept of faith closely merged with the concept of nationality. Whoever was a Catholic was already a Pole; who considered himself and was called Russian, he was 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 control of his cousin Alexander Vitovt, who was distinguished by ambitious plans, but at the same time, by the inability to bring them to the end. Vitovt constantly hesitated and fell into contradictions, thought about the independence of his Russian-Lithuanian state, but he himself accepted Catholicism in the context of the Russian people, who firmly stood for Orthodoxy, yielded to the Poles in everything and pacified their claims. Jagiello granted the Lithuanian and Russian landowners those free, independent rights, which relieved them of their fief duties, the rights that the Poles enjoyed in their own country. But Jagiello extended these advantages in Lithuania and Russia only to those who accepted the Roman faith. In 1413, the first connection between Lithuania and Poland took place. The Poles and Lithuanians undertook to consult one with the other in choosing rulers, not to undertake wars one without the other, and to gather at congresses for general advice on their mutual affairs. Having concluded such an agreement, Vitovt after that constantly 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 preparers for the enslavement of Russia by Poland. The Russians did not tolerate him, realizing that the state he wanted to create would not be Russian. The brother of Vitovt Svidrigello (otherwise Svidrigailo), who retained the Orthodox faith and was married to the Tver princess Juliana Borisovna, did not treat the Russian people in the same way. This man, like Vitovt, was guided by his own ambition, but surpassed the first in intelligence and fidelity of sight. 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 against Poland, being at the head of the Russian people, who were very attached to him for a long time. This struggle took place during the life of Vytautas; after the death of the latter, Svidrigello became the Grand Duke of Lithuania, also as Jagiello's assistant, which Vitovt was, but did not double and hesitate, like Vitovt, but immediately began to openly act as an independent Russian sovereign, and attempted to take away those Russian possessions from Poland that were attached to it directly. The Poles, in collusion with the Lithuanian lords who converted to Catholicism, overthrew Svidrigell, and instead of him, Vitovt's brother, the Catholic Sigismund, who recognized himself as a fief dependent on Poland, was appointed Grand Duke of Lithuania. But Russia was behind Svidrigella. A stubborn, bloody struggle continued for several years not only against the Poles, but also against the Lithuanians, supporters of Sigismund; finally, Svidrigello himself, already entering old age, was tired of leading it, and, moreover, both his actions and circumstances deprived him of support among the Russian people.
The descendants of Fyodor Ostrozhsky, who fought for the independence of Russia for so long, remained loyal to Poland, just as in general the Russian upper class, which saw inexhaustible benefits for itself in uniting with Poland, was faithful to it. In addition to the unconditional right to own their family estates, paying almost nothing to the treasury, the Russian lords, in accordance with Polish custom, received state property, called elderships, for life, with the obligation to give a quarter of the income from them for the maintenance of the army and the support of 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 faithful servant of the Polish king, who was captured by Ivan III and then avenged his captivity by the defeat inflicted on the Moscow army near Orsha. Hostility towards Orthodox Moscow and faithful service to the Catholic king did not prevent him from being famous for Orthodox piety. He generously built and decorated Orthodox churches, at the same time he started schools for children at the churches and, thus, laid the foundation for Russian enlightenment.
His son Konstantin Konstantinovich was the governor of Kiev and one of the most distinguished and 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 did not differ either in military exploits or state deeds; on the contrary, from contemporary letters of the Polish kings, we learn about him that he incurred reproaches for negligence in protecting the voivodship entrusted to him, left the Kyiv castle in a sad state, so that Kyiv could constantly be devastated by the Tatars; in addition, he did not pay taxes following 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 Ostrozhskaya by force. Some features of his life show in him a vain and vain pan. He possessed great wealth: in addition to the family estates, which included up to eighty cities with several thousand villages, he owned four huge elderships granted to him in southern Russia; his income reached a million zlotys a year. Under such circumstances, Konstantin Konstantinovich paid a large amount to one castellan only for the fact that twice a year he had to stand at his chair during dinner; for the sake of originality, he kept a glutton at his court, who surprised the guests by eating an incredible amount of food at breakfast and dinner. Not so much the personal abilities of Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich, but his brilliant position gave him great importance and placed him at the center of the mental activity that arose at that time in Russia. Like the nobles of his time, he showed himself to be a supporter of Poland, at the famous Sejm of 1569 he signed the annexation of Volyn and the Kiev province to the Polish kingdom for eternity, and by his example he greatly contributed to the success of this matter. Being 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 Ostrogsky had sent him Motovil's work and made friends with the Jesuits. “O my beloved sovereign,” Kurbsky wrote to him, “why did you send me a book written by an enemy of Christ, an assistant to the Antichrist and his faithful servant? With whom are you friends, with whom do you communicate, whom do you call for help! .. Accept me, your faithful servant, advice with meekness: stop making friends with these adversaries, crafty and evil. No one can be a friend of the king if he makes friends with his enemies and holds him like a snake in his bosom; I beg you three times, stop doing this, be like your forefathers in the zeal of piety. Thus, this Russian pan succumbed to the Jesuit machinations. 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, Radziwill, he wrote an instruction that he should not go to the church, but advised him to go to the Calvinist meeting and called them followers of the true law of Christ. However, his passion for Protestantism came from the fact that the illustrious prince saw the Christian deeds of the Protestants. Ostrozhsky respectfully pointed out that they had schools and printing houses, that their pastors were distinguished by good morals, and opposed them with the decline of church deanery in the Russian church, the ignorance of priests, the material self-will of archpastors, and the laity's indifference to matters of faith. “The rules and statutes of our church,” he said, “are despised by foreigners; our co-religionists not only cannot stand up for God's church, but even laugh at it; no teachers, no preachers of God's word; everywhere the smoothness 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 pan and prompted Ostrozhsky to become, to some extent, the engine of the intellectual and religious revival in Polish Russia. Probably, Kurbsky's convictions and reproaches greatly contributed to this mood. Ostrozhsky respected Kurbsky; Ostrozhsky sent him various essays for viewing, and, among other things, a wonderful book by the Jesuit Skarga "On the One Church", written on purpose with the aim of preparing the union. Kurbsky returned this book to Ostrozhsky with the same reproaches as Motovil's work; for his part, Kurbsky sent his translated from the Latin "The Conversation of John Chrysostom on Faith, Hope and Love", 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 homeland, tried with all his might to oppose them, as well as the dominance of the Polish language. When Ostrozhsky, who liked Kurbsky's writing, advised to translate it into Polish for greater distribution, Kurbsky rejected this proposal: their "Polish barbaria". Not only with the speech of Slavic or Greek, and with their favorite Latin, they can not cope. Then among the Russian lords it became a custom, for the sake of enlightenment, to entrust the upbringing of children to the Jesuits. Kurbsky spoke with praise in general about the desire to teach children the sciences, but he did not see any use from the Jesuits. “Already many of the parents (he wrote to Princess Chertorizhskaya) of the families of princely, gentry and honest citizens gave their children to study the sciences, but the Jesuits did not teach them anything, but only, taking advantage of their youth, turned them away from orthodoxy.” Judging by Kurbsky's letters to various people, one can probably assume that this Moscow fugitive had a strong influence on the activities of Prince Ostrogsky in the field of protecting the faith and reviving book education, since he was constantly in close relations with Ostrogsky.
The germs of the intellectual and religious movement in Polish-Lithuanian Russia appeared at the beginning of the 16th century. The Polochanin Skorinna translated the Bible into Russian and printed it in Czech Prague, due to the lack of a printing house in Russia. In the middle of the 16th century, Protestantism spread in Lithuania contributed to the literary awakening of Russian speech. In 1562, there was a printing house in Nesvizh, and Simon Budny, famous in his time, a man of great learning, printed a Protestant catechism in Russian. A little later, the Lithuanian hetman Grigory Alexandrovich Khodkevich founded a printing house in his estate Zabludovo; the typographers Ivan Fedorov and Pyotr Mstislavets, who had left Moscow, arrived there to see him: they printed there, in 1569, an explanatory Gospel, a large folio. It was the work of the famous Maxim Grek, later reprinted in the same form in Moscow. But Khodkevich's printing house was, apparently, only a temporary panorama whim. After the death of Grigory Khodkevich, the heirs did not support the institution. The typographer Ivan Fedorov moved to Lvov, and then to Ostrog, and it was here that a printing house was founded, laying a firmer foundation for literary and book printing in southern Russia. In 1580, the Slavic Bible was printed for the first time on the orders of Ostrozhsky. In the preface to the Bible, on behalf of Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich Ostrozhsky, it was said that he was prompted to this work by the sad state of the church, trampled on everywhere by enemies 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 the countries of the Slavic family and language, Ostrozhsky could not find a single correct list of the Old Testament and finally received it only from Moscow through the mediation of Mikhail Garaburda. At the same time, Prince Ostrozhsky communicated with Rome, with the islands of the Greek archipelago (with the Candians), with the Patriarch of Constantinople Jeremiah, with Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian monasteries in order to get copies of the Holy Scriptures from there, both Hellenic and Slavic, and wished to be guided by the advice of people, versed in writing. The first printed Bible published by Ostrozhsky constitutes an epoch in Russian literature and in general in the history of Russian education. The Bible was followed by a number of publications, 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 the priest Vasily and printed in 1588: this book served as a refutation of the work of Skarga, published in Polish under almost the same title, and was intended to protect the Eastern Church against the reproaches made by the adherents of the Latin Church. Here questions are considered that constitute the essence of the difference between churches: about the procession of the Holy Spirit, about the power of the pope, about unleavened bread, about spiritual celibacy, about Sabbath fasting. 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 should they object to the convictions of the Western clergy, who then launched their propaganda among the Russian people. The Ostroh printing house also printed several books of religious content: “The Sheets of Patriarch Jeremiah” and “Dialogue of Patriarch Gennady” (in 1583), “Confession on the Procession of the Holy Spirit” (1588). In 1594, Basil the Great's book "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 the main school in Ostrog and, in addition, several schools in his possessions. The rector of the main Ostroh school, the ancestor of higher educational institutions on Russian soil, was the Greek scientist Kirill Lukaris, who later received the rank of Patriarch of Constantinople. In addition to Ostrog, Prince Ostrogsky opened a printing house in the Derman Monastery.
At the same time, another important engine for the awakening of intellectual life in Russia was the establishment of brotherhoods, partnerships with moral and religious goals, which included without distinction people of all classes, but certainly belonged to a single church. Such brotherhoods began to emerge from imitation of Western ones. The first of these brotherhoods in Polish Russia, which received historical significance, was Lvov, founded with the blessing of Patriarch Joachim of Antioch, who visited the Russian region in 1586. Its main goals were the upbringing of orphans, charity for the poor, assistance to the victims of various misfortunes, the ransom of prisoners, the burial and commemoration of the dead, help during public disasters - in general, charity work. Members had their own specific gatherings and each contributed six groschen to a common mug. Then, under the brotherhood, a school, a printing house and a hospital were started by the townspeople. In addition to the Holy Scriptures, Slavic grammar was taught at the school along with Greek, and for this purpose a Hellenic-Slavic grammar was compiled and printed, in which the rules of both languages were comparatively expounded. Private teaching was restricted: everyone could only teach their own children and family members. Following 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, Lvov was granted seniority. The mere fact that people of all classes came together in the name of the patristic faith, the improvement of morality and the expansion of the range of concepts, had an effect on raising the spirit of the people. Patriarch Joachim, establishing the Lvov brotherhood, entrusted him with supervision over the fulfillment of their spiritual duties, as well as over the piety and good morals of both the clergy and the laity; in this way the clergy became dependent on the public court of secular people: this was completely opposite to the views of the Western clergy, who always jealously tried to ensure that people who do not belong to the clergy 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 deeds. But the foundation of brotherhoods was not to the heart of the Russian highest spiritual dignitaries either. Bishop Gideon of Lvov immediately entered into a hostile relationship with the Lvov brotherhood.
The structure of the Orthodox Church in Russia, subject to Poland, was in a sad state. 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, endearing themselves to royal courtiers. Bishops and archimandrites ruled church estates with all the privileges of court and arbitrariness of the secular lords 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 inappropriate to their dignity. . There were examples that noble pans asked the king for episcopal and rectory places for themselves and, remaining uninitiated, used church bread, as they were then expressed. One contemporary notes: “The rules of the Holy Father do not allow ordaining a priest younger than thirty years of age, but we sometimes allow a fifteen-year-old. 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 he is entrusted with the church order. Bishops, archimandrites, abbots had brothers, nephews, 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, “take away oxen and horses from poor villagers, tear out monetary tribute from them, torture them, torment them with work, suck the blood out of them.” The lower clergy were in extreme humiliation. Poor monasteries were converted into farmsteads, the lords set up kennels in them for their hunting, and the monks were ordered to keep dogs. Parish priests endured both from the bishops and from secular people. The lords 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 get angry at 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 remarks, was a perfect peasant in his upbringing; did not know how to behave decently; there was nothing to talk about with him. The title of presbyter reached such contempt that an honest person was ashamed to enter it and it was difficult to say whether the priest was more often in church or in a tavern. Often they served divine services in a drunken state with seductive antics, and usually the priest, while performing the divine 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, preserved pagan views and beliefs, celebrated pagan festivities according to their great-grandfather 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, a favorite of King Sigismund III, even scoffed at the liturgical language of the Russian Church in such expressions: “What kind of language is this? Philosophy, theology, and logic are nowhere taught there; there can’t even be grammar and rhetoric on it! Russian priests themselves are unable to explain what they read in church, and are forced to ask others for explanations in Polish. This language is 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 center of rebirth not in the clergy, but outside of it, in worldly life. The brotherhoods were to become the main instrument of this revival. Patriarch Jeremiah, passing through southern Russia in 1589, approved the rights of the Lvov 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 for the brotherly one, left it behind supervised the episcopal court and, on the complaint of the brotherhood, imposed a ban on the Lvov Bishop Gideon Balaban. Balaban turned to the Lvov Roman Catholic Bishop, and the first of the then Russian bishops declared his desire to obey the pope.
During his stay in southern Russia, Patriarch Jeremiah deposed the Kievan Metropolitan Onesiphorus the Girl under the pretext that he had previously been a bigamist, and instead of him consecrated Michael Ragoza, already, apparently, set up 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, an immoral man and even accused of the most vile atrocities, such as robberies, rapes and murders, as his exarch (viceroy).
The Russian clergy was very dissatisfied with the patriarch because he gave the brotherhoods such power and put the clergy under the supervision of the laity: in addition, they complained about him for various requisitions from the Russian clergy: obeying the Turkish authorities, the patriarchs and the Greek saints in general were in such a position, that they needed alms collected in Orthodox lands. “We are such sheep,” said the Russian spiritualists, “which they only milk and shear, and do not feed.”
The next year after the departure of Jeremiah, the Metropolitan gathered in Brest a synod of Orthodox bishops. Everyone began to complain about the burden of dependence on the patriarch and grumbled about the brotherhood, especially the Lvov brotherhood, which, according to the charter of Patriarch Jeremiah in 1593, was under the direct jurisdiction of the patriarch. “How,” said the hierarchs, “some gathering of bakers, merchants, saddlers, tanners, ignoramuses, who think nothing of theological matters, are given the right to judge the court of the authorities established by the church and draw up sentences on matters relating to the church of God!” Everyone came to the conclusion that it is best to submit, instead of the Patriarch of Constantinople, to the Pope.
In 1593, in place of the deceased bishop of Vladimir, Adam Potii was appointed, who until that time was a secular pan and bore the title of Brest castellan. He had already been seduced from Orthodoxy into Catholicism, then feignedly converted to Orthodoxy with the intention of devoting himself to the cause of the union. He was a man of impeccable morals, he seemed pious, and he himself started a brotherhood in Brest. Ostrogsky respected him, moreover, Potii was related to Ostrogsky. The king, giving him the place of bishop, had in mind precisely that Potius could persuade the mighty Russian nobleman.
Not having time to persuade Ostrozhsky, the bishops came several times to interpret, and in 1595 they made a proposal to the pope about the union and elected Potius and Lutsk Bishop Cyril Terletsky as ambassadors to Rome on this matter. Potii informed Ostrogsky about this and reminded him that Ostrogsky himself was the first to speak of the union.
Ostrozhsky became angry, wrote to Potius that the Bishop of Vladimir was a traitor and unworthy of his rank, and on June 24 he wrote and sent a (probably printed) message to all the Orthodox inhabitants of Poland and Lithuania, praising the Greek faith as the only true faith in the world, and announced that the chief leaders of the true of our faith, imaginary shepherds: the metropolitan and bishops, turned into wolves, apostatized from the eastern church, “attached themselves to the western ones” and intended to tear away from the faith all the pious “local region” and lie into destruction. “Many,” Ostrozhsky expressed himself, “from the inhabitants of the local region of the state of His Majesty my king, obedient to the saint of the Eastern Church, consider me the initial person in Orthodoxy, although I myself consider myself not great, but equal to others in orthodoxy; for this reason, fearing not to be guilty before God and you, I inform you of what I probably learned about, wanting to stand with you at the same time against adversaries, so that with God's help and with your diligence, those who prepared nets for us , themselves caught in these networks. What could be more shameful and lawless if six or seven villains have rejected their shepherds, from whom they were appointed, consider us to be dumb cattle, dare to arbitrarily tear us away from the truth and lead us into destruction along with them?
Ostrozhsky asked the king to open a cathedral, which would be attended not only by the spiritual, but also by the secular. The king, caring about the success of the union, wrote a convincing letter to Ostrozhsky, urging him to stick to the union, and most of all pointed out that the Greek Church was under the rule of such a patriarch, who received his dignity at the behest of the infidel Mohammedans. In accordance with the prevailing Roman Catholic view that spiritual matters should be the property of only spiritual ones, Sigismund did not want to allow a congress of secular persons on matters of faith, which not only Ostrozhsky wanted, but the bishops themselves, faking Ostrozhsky, declared a request to the king for the same. The king wrote: “Such a congress will only complicate matters; to take care of our salvation is the duty of our shepherds, and we must, without interrogation, do as they command, because the Spirit of the Lord has given us their leaders in life. But such convictions only irritated Ostrozhsky, since all this offended, among other things, his panorama pride, which inspired him to strive to be the first among his co-religionists.
Seeking permission from the king for a congress or council of secular people on matters of faith, Ostrozhsky and one of his courtiers sent an invitation to the Protestant cathedral in Torun to jointly oppose papism. The Orthodox prince wrote in such terms: “All who recognize the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are people of the same faith. If people had more tolerance for each other, if people looked with respect as their brothers praise God each according to their own conscience, then there would be fewer sects and rumors in the world. We must agree with everyone who only moves away from the Latin faith and sympathizes with our fate: all Christian confessions must defend themselves against "papers". His royal majesty will not want to allow an attack on us, because we ourselves may have twenty, at least fifteen thousand armed men, and Messrs. papezhniks can only surpass us in the number of those cooks whom priests keep instead of wives.
This message became known to the king, and he ordered Ostrozhsky to be reprimanded for disrespectful comments about the faith professed by the king, and especially for hinting at cooks.
Threats about the possibility of appearing to thousands of armed men had an important meaning. The spirit of willfulness dominated in Poland. The laws acted weakly, and instead of resorting to their protection, people who felt strong behind themselves dealt with their rivals themselves. Noble lords kept armed detachments from the gentry: raids on estates and yards were commonplace. Pans arbitrarily intervened even in the affairs of neighboring states. Daring men of all kinds formed gangs, the so-called "willful kups", and carried out various outrages. In southern Russia, the Cossacks grew from year to year, especially developed after successful campaigns in the Crimea and Moldavia. It was replenished with Russian people from estates: hereditary lords and crowns (given to the lords in the form of elders), and through such an influx of fugitives who went to the Cossacks in opposition to the will of the lords, it acquired a hostile mood towards the lords and the gentry in general. In addition to the Cossacks, recognized in this rank and under the command of a senior or hetman, gangs were made up of the common people, calling themselves Cossacks, under the command of special leaders; such gangs, at the opportunity, easily joined real Cossacks and were ready to work with them to the detriment of their owners. In 1593, the Cossack hetman Kryshtof (Christopher) Kosinsky raised an uprising. The Cossacks attacked the owner's yards, ruined them, destroyed the gentry's documents. Kosinsky took possession of the Ukrainian cities and Kiev itself, thanks to the negligence of Ostrozhsky, the former Kiev governor: he, as we said, had long been, but unsuccessfully, reproached by the kings for the fact that the Kyiv castle remains neglected. Kosinsky invaded Ostrozhsky’s estates and demanded an oath 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 difference in estates, everyone would be equal and rule with equal land rights. 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 Volhynia, so that all people of the gentry rank took up arms against the enemy, who demanded an oath and violated the rights of the king and the state. Ostrozhsky gathered all the gentry who were in his vast estates, entrusted his superiors to his son Janusz and moved them against the rebel. Kosinsky failed, undertook to renounce his command over the Cossacks, and freed from trouble, he 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, self-willed, under the command of Severin Nalivaik, whose brother Damian was a priest in Ostrog. Nalivaiko had a deep-rooted hatred for the gentry, due to the fact that Pan Kalinovsky, in the town of Gusyatin, took away the farm from Nalivaikov's father and the owner himself so beaten off that he died from beatings. Nalivaiko planned to continue the work of Kosinsky at a time when the bishops were about to subordinate the Russian Church to the pope and when Ostrozhsky in his message urged all the Orthodox inhabitants of the Kingdom of Poland to resist the intrigues of the bishops. Nalivaiko began in Volhynia, and his uprising this time took on a somewhat religious tone. He attacked the estates of bishops and laity who favored the union, took Lutsk, where the anger of the Cossacks turned on the supporters and servants of Bishop Terletsky, turned to White Russia, took possession of Slutsk, where he stocked up with weapons, took Mogilev, which was then burned by the inhabitants themselves, captured in Pinsk the sacristy of Terletsky and took out important parchment documents with the signatures of clergy and secular persons who agreed to the union; Nalivaiko robbed the estates of the Bishop's brother Terletsky, taking revenge on him for the bishop's trip to Rome. Some Orthodox lords pacified Nalivaika out of hatred for the emerging union. Suspicion fell on Prince Ostrozhsky himself, since his brother Nalivaika lived on his estate, and this brother, the priest Damian, turned out to have horses that belonged to Pan Semashko, robbed by Nalivaik. Ostrozhsky himself, in his letters to his son-in-law Radziwill, wrote: “They say that I sent Nalivaika away ... Well, if anyone, then these robbers bothered me the most. I entrust myself to the Lord God! I hope that he, who saves the innocent, will not forget me either.” There is no reason to believe that Ostrozhsky actually patronized this uprising, especially since, just before the appearance of Nalivaik on Volhynia, Ostrozhsky warned the pans about self-willed people, complained that they were ruining his estates, gave advice to the Commonwealth to take active measures as soon as possible and put out the fire before it had time to spread.
In the winter of 1595-1596, Nalivaiko joined forces with the Cossack hetman Loboda, and the uprising began to take on rampant proportions. The king sent hetman Zolkiewski 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: discord arose between them; Nalivaiko overthrew Loboda from hetmanship, killed him, became hetman himself, and was in turn overthrown, extradited to the Poles and executed by death in Warsaw.
When, thus, the Poles were engaged in taming the uprising of the Russians, which partly took on the character of a struggle against the union, in Rome the envoys from the Russian clergy, the bishops of Vladimir and Lutsk, 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 Roman Catholic teaching. At the beginning of 1596 they returned to their homeland. Here, opposition from the brotherhoods and from Ostrozhsky awaited them. In the Vilna brotherhood, the “Book of Cyril about the Antichrist” was published, composed by Stefan Zizaniy. The book was directed against papism; it proved nothing more or less than that the pope is the antichrist about whom the prediction was preserved, and the time of the union is the time of the antichrist's kingdom. This book was eagerly read by the clergy and literate laity. The king, hearing of its success, was very angry, ordered the book to be banned, and its author and his two accomplices to be seized and imprisoned. The Lvov brotherhood, for its part, opposing the undertakings of the union, so frightened their bishop that Gideon decided to retreat from the union and filed a protest in court, in which he assured that if he signed the consent to the union on an equal basis with other bishops, he himself did not know what business, because he signed a white paper, and on this paper, after his signature, something was written that he did not want.
Ostrozhsky informed the eastern patriarchs; at his request, protosyncells (governors) were appointed: from the Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople, from Alexandria - Cyril. The king announced that the Russian bishops should gather at the council in Brest by October 6, 1596 for the final approval of the union.
By the time appointed by the king, Ostrozhsky also prepared his own cathedral in Brest. This cathedral consisted of two patriarchal protosyncells, two eastern archimandrites, two Russian bishops, Gideon of Lvov and Mikhail Kopytensky, Serbian Metropolitan Luke, several Russian archimandrites, archpriests and two hundred persons of the gentry rank, whom Ostrozhsky invited with him.
Protosyncellus Nikephoros presided over this Orthodox council. In accordance with the ancient customs of the church court, he sent a triple challenge to the cathedral for justification to the Kiev metropolitan, but the metropolitan did not appear and announced that he and the bishops had submitted to the Western church; then the Orthodox cathedral defrocked both the metropolitan and the bishops: Vladimir, Lutsk, Polotsk (German), Kholmsk (Dionysius) and Pinsk Jonah.
For their part, the clergy who accepted the union repaid those who did not accept it in the same way: they deposed the bishops of Lvov and Przemysl, Archimandrite Nikifor Tur of the Caves, and all the Russian clerics who were at the Orthodox cathedral. The verdict was sent to each of them in the following form: “Whoever counts you, cursed from us, in your former dignity, he himself will be cursed from the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit!”
Both sides appealed to the king. The Orthodox referred to the existing decrees, asked not to count the deposed clerics in their former rank, to take away their church estates and give them to those persons who, instead of them, would be elected. The king took the side of the Uniates and ordered the arrest of Nicephorus, at whom those who accepted the union were especially angry. Ostrozhsky took him on bail. The case was postponed until 1597.
This year, at the request of the king, Ostrozhsky himself brought Nikifor 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 accuse Nikifor, and the Poles did not have the right to judge him as a foreigner. Then Konstantin Ostrozhsky delivered a sharp speech to the king: “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 this, no one's rights, no one's freedom are protected; riots are coming soon; Maybe then they'll come up with something else! Our ancestors, taking an oath of allegiance to their sovereign, and from him also took an oath in observing justice, mercy and protection. There was a mutual oath between them. Remember, your majesty! I am already in advanced years and I hope to leave this world soon, and you insult me, take away what is dearest to me - the Orthodox faith! Remember, your majesty! I entrust this spiritual dignitary to you; God will exact his blood on you, and God forbid that I see no more such violation of rights, on the contrary, may God vouchsafe me in my old age to hear about his good health and about the better preservation of your state and our rights!
Having spoken this speech, Ostrozhsky left the Senate. The king sent Ostrozhsky's son-in-law, Krishtof Radziwill, to bring back the agitated old man. “The king,” said Radziwill, “regrets your grief; Nikephoros will be free." Angry, Ostrozhsky did not want to return and said: "Come on sob and Nikifor zist." The prince left, leaving the poor protosyncellus Nikephoros to the mercy of the king. Nicephorus was sent to Marienburg, where he died in captivity.
In 1599, Ostrozhsky, with other pans and the nobility of the Russian faith, arranged a confederation with the 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 Ostroh printing house printed (in 1598) “An Inscription on the Sheet of Father Hypatius” (Potius) and Sheets, that is, messages: eight of them were Meletios, Patriarch of Alexandria, in which the essence of Orthodoxy was expounded and the Orthodox people were encouraged to defend their religion. One of these messages (the third one) concerns the question of changing the calendar, a question that then very much occupied the minds. Orthodox pastors did not like this change precisely because it was an innovation: “the news of vain men of fickle souls, like dampness by the blow of unsteady winds.” In the opinion of honest shepherds, the change of Paschalia brings in its wake overwhelm and rebellion in the church, sedition, strife, and approach to Judaism; but even if this had not happened, then all the same there was no need to bring in “neotherism,” but it was better to stick to antiquity and obey the old people. (What is not the most pious and most reverent thing is to abide in various things together with the elders.) At the same time, it was noted that the calculations on which the new calendar is based do not have strength and, after three hundred years, you will have to “astronomy” again and invent new changes. The ninth of the sheets printed in this book concludes a message written by Ostrozhsky to Orthodox Christians at the very beginning of the union (we spoke about it above), and the tenth is an admonitional message from the monks of Athos. Among the books published at that time in Ostrog, the book “Apocrisis” (published at the end of 1597) under the pseudonym of Filalet, written, as they say, by Christopher Vronsky, a man like Ostrogsky, 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, she called the doctrine of unconditional obedience to the church Judaism and argued that secular people can, at their discretion, disobey the spiritual and depose them. In 1598, the priest Vasily published a Psalter with a resurrection, another Psalter with a book of hours, in 1605 and 1606 the writings of Patriarch Meletius on the union, translated by Job Boretsky, and in 1607 the priest Damian, brother Nalivaik, published "The Medicine for the Ossed Human Intent", where placed the message of Chrysostom to Theodore
Fallen and some words and poems, partly adapted to their time. Remarkable works appeared in Vilna, not only polemical, but also scientific, showing the emerging need for the education of youth; in 1596, a grammar of the Slavic language was published by Lavrentiy Zizaniy, an ABC with a brief dictionary, an Interpretation on the prayer "Our Father" and a Catechism, outlining the foundations of the Orthodox faith. Then Russian liturgical and religious-political works were published in other places.
This was the beginning of that South Russian and West Russian literature, which subsequently, in the middle of the 17th century, developed to a significant extent.
Ostrozhsky himself, in spite of the defense he rendered to Orthodoxy in the cause of the emerging union, as an aristocrat for whom the Polish system was too dear, was far from any decisive opposition to the violence of the authorities: he restrained others, teaching them patience. Thus, in 1600, he wrote to the Lvov brotherhood: “I am sending you a decree drawn up at the last Sejm, which is highly contrary to popular law and most of all to holy truth, and I give you no other advice than just such that you are patient and waiting for God's mercy, until God, in his goodness, inclines the heart of his royal majesty to offend no one and leave everyone in their rights.
In this council, the future impotence of the Russian aristocracy in the matter of defending the patristic faith was already visible.
On the complaint of the Kiev and Bratslav provinces, the king appointed a trial between the Uniates and the Orthodox at the Seimas.
Then Ragoza died: his place in the rank of Metropolitan of Kiev was taken by Hypatius Potius. Appearing together with Terletsky at the court appointed by the king, he represented that spiritual matters are not subject to the verdict of a secular court, that, in accordance with divine law, the laws of the kingdom and Christian rights, they are subject only to a spiritual court. The Uniates pointed to all the privileges that existed until that time, given to the Greek Church, as documents that now exclusively belong by right only to those who recognized the Roman high priest as the head of their church. The king, with the advice of his plenipotentiaries, recognized their arguments as completely just and promulgated a charter, according to which the new metropolitan and bishops, who are under the primacy of the metropolitan, were granted the right to use their rank, in accordance with the previous privileges given to 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. The same view was shared with the king by all Catholic Poland and Lithuania.
Ostrozhsky ended his life in February 1608 at a ripe old age. His son Janusz converted to Catholicism during the lifetime of his parent; the other son, Alexander, remained Orthodox, but his daughters all adopted Catholicism, and one of them, who owned Ostrog, Anna-Aloysia, was distinguished by fanatical intolerance towards the faith of her forefathers.
The upper class in Poland was omnipotent, and of course, if the Russian gentry remained firmly in the faith and firmly resolved to stand for the paternal faith, no intrigues of the king and the Jesuits would be able to overthrow it.
But that was precisely the misfortune that this Russian gentry, this upper Russian class, which was too profitable to be under the rule of Poland, could not resist the moral oppression that then weighed on the Orthodox faith and the Russian people. Having become related to the Polish gentry, having mastered the Polish language and Polish customs, having become Poles according to the methods of life, the Russian people were unable to keep the faith of their fathers. On the side of Catholicism was the conspicuous brilliance of Western enlightenment. In Poland, the Russian faith and the Russian people were looked upon contemptuously: everything that was and responded to Russian, in the eyes of the then Polish society seemed masculine, rude, wild, ignorant, something that an educated and high-ranking person should be ashamed of. The Catholics had incomparably more means for education than the Orthodox, and therefore the children of the Orthodox lords studied with the Catholics. Incited by their teachers, who instilled in them a preference for Catholicism, having come out into the world in which they, under the prevailing spirit of propaganda, heard everywhere about the same preference, Russian youths inevitably assimilated that view of the faith and nationality of their forefathers, which they usually have on their native those who borrow something alien with the full conviction that this alien is a sign of education and gives honor and respect in the worldly environment in which they are destined to act. 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 in which their ancestors had been for many centuries when, leaving paganism, they assimilated Christianity. One by one accepted the new faith and were ashamed of the old. True, as always happens in transitional epochs, and in the era of the catholicization of the Russian gentry, for half a century and even a little longer, adherents of antiquity remained from the Russian upper class and declared their voice, but their ranks thinned more and more, and finally they were gone. ; in Polish Russia, a person who, by origin and status, belonged to the upper class, 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, a desire has been revealed to raise the Russian church and the Russian people - to create a Russian education, at least for the first time, religious, but this desire came too late for the upper class of the Russian lands united with Poland. This upper class no longer needed anything Russian and looked at him with disgust, with hostility. It turned out that the union, invented at first to lure the Russian upper class, was also not useful to him; pans without her became pure Catholics; the union remained only a means for the destruction in the bulk of the rest of the people of the signs of the Orthodox faith and the Russian people. The union became an instrument of more national than religious purposes. To accept the union meant to turn a Russian into a Pole, or at least a semi-Polish. This direction appeared from the first time and was steadily persecuted in the coming 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 rites of the Eastern Church, already at the beginning of the 17th century, the Uniate clergy began to change worship, introduced various customs that were characteristic of the Western Church and did not exist in the Eastern Church or were positively rejected by the latter ( as, for example, a quiet mass, the service of several masses on the same day on the same throne, the reduction of services, etc.). Drawing closer and 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 that the masters professed; therefore, the union in Poland became a lower faith, common people, unworthy of the upper class: as for Orthodoxy, in public opinion it became an outcast faith, the lowest, worthy of extreme contempt: it was the faith of not only peasants in general, like the union, but the faith of the worthless clap, dissimilar or incapable, due to their savagery and inertia, to rise to a somewhat higher level of religious and social understanding, it was nothing more than a pitiful confession of contemptible incredulous, for whom there is no salvation even beyond the grave.
THE CITY OF OSTROG AND THE PRINCE OF OSTROG
Thus, good and bad thoughts go through a person.
From a good mind, the soul is resurrected,
From a bad mind, the soul dies.
spiritual verse
The city of Ostrog stands on the high bank of the Vili River. In the second half of the XII century, it was part of the Vladimir-Volyn principality, in the XIII - the first half of the XIV century - Galicia-Volyn. Since the XIV century, the owners of the city began to call themselves the princes of Ostrog.
Under Ivan Fedorov, it was a fairly large city for those times, it had a hundred houses, five churches and about five thousand inhabitants, mainly engaged in crafts. The city was surrounded by a fortress wall with towers, one of them, erected more than a hundred years ago - in the XIV century, was called Murovannaya - that is, Stone, and the other, built quite recently - New or Round. Four strictly guarded gates led to the city: Castle, Wooden, Lutsk and Tatar. The center of the city was the Market Square, to which Grecheskaya, Predzamkovaya and Lutskaya streets led. The castle of the Ostrozhsky princes, built in the 13th-14th centuries, towered on Zamkovaya or, as it was also called, Red Hill. At the castle in the 15th century, the Church of the Epiphany was built in the spirit of ancient Russian architecture.
The castle kept a library collected by Prince Ostrozhsky. It contained handwritten and printed books, testifying to the variety of interests and depth of knowledge of its owner. So, among the books of Prince Ostrozhsky were a Greek-Latin dictionary published in 1562 in Basel, the tragedies of Euripides, Cicero's speeches, Sebastian Munster's "Cosmography" and others. There were also books of Moscow origin, for example, "Conversations of John Chrysostom on the Gospel of Matthew", translated by Maxim Grek. It is possible that Ivan Fedorov brought this book with him.
In Ostrog, on the initiative of Prince Ostrozhsky, a cultural and educational center was formed, which was already then called the Ostrog Academy, which included both an elementary school and a higher educational institution with a fairly extensive program. An eyewitness wrote: “The prince erected in Ostrog a school, not only of the Slavic language, but also of Latin and Greek sciences, in which he brought up numerous Russian youth, both of gentry and plebeian origin.” In addition, dialectics, grammar and rhetoric were taught at the school, the most capable of the students were sent for improvement at the expense of Ostrozhsky to Constantinople, to the higher patriarchal school.
After the Dermansky Monastery, Ivan Fedorov was especially pleased to be once again in the circle of educated and close-minded people. Here he again met his Zabludov friend Timofei Mikhailovich Annich, who had once studied at the Ostroh school, and now served as a teacher there. Elder Artemy, who was close to the Ostrog Academy, also visited Ostrog.
Among the new good acquaintances of Ivan Fedorov was the rector of the academy - Gerasim Danilovich Smotritsky. A poor nobleman, in his youth he served as a clerk, but at the same time he was diligently engaged in self-education and, in his own words, "without knowing any school", became one of the most educated people of his time. Soon after the arrival of Ivan Fedorov, a son, Maxim, was born in the Smotrytsky family. Congratulating his friend on the newborn, Ivan Fedorov did not yet suspect that Maxim Smotrytsky (who later took the monastic name Meletius) was destined to become a famous philologist, the author of the famous “Slavic Grammar” - the very book that Lomonosov would call a hundred and fifty years later “the gates of his learning” …
The niece of Prince Ostrogsky, Elzhbet, was also involved in the founding of the Ostroh Academy. Ivan Fedorov more than once happened to see at dusk in the garden of the prince's castle a sad woman in black, walking all alone. The dramatic life story of Elzbieta served as the basis for many novels and plays written in the following centuries. Surely Ivan Fedorov also heard it.
Elzhbeta was the daughter of the elder brother of Prince Ostrozhsky - Ilya. Being no longer young, Prince Ilya married twenty-year-old Beata Kostoletskaya, the illegitimate daughter of King Sigismund the Old, the half-sister of the current King Sigismund-August. Six months after the wedding, Ilya Ostrozhsky died, according to rumors - from the poison brought to him by his young wife. Before his death, he bequeathed all his untold wealth to the child whom Beata carried under her heart. He appointed King Sigismund-August, the half-brother of his wife, and his brother, Prince Constantine, as guardians of the future heir or heiress.
In 1539, Princess Beata gave birth to a daughter named Elzbieta. Elzbieta turned out to be the richest bride in all of Poland. As soon as the girl was thirteen years old, numerous suitors began to woo her. One of them was Dmitry Sangushko. Young, handsome and brave, he fell in love with the young Elzbieta. Prince Konstantin, who considered it profitable for himself to intermarry with the Sangushko family, supported the matchmaking. But Princess Beata announced that her daughter was still too young to think about marriage, and offered to wait until she came of age, which for girls in then Poland came at fifteen. However, the groom did not want to wait. Prince Konstantin volunteered to help the impatient Sangushko get a bride immediately. At the head of an armed detachment, the groom and guardian attacked the castle where Elzbieta lived with her mother, Princess Beata was locked in her room, and the castle priest married the young princess to Sangushko in the castle chapel.
After the ceremony, the young husband took Elzbieta to his family estate, and Princess Beata, blazing with anger, rushed to Krakow to the king with a complaint about her daughter's kidnappers. The king appointed a court. Neither Prince Ostrozhsky nor Sangushko appeared in court and were convicted in absentia. Prince Konstantin was deprived of guardianship, and Sangushko, if he did not immediately return Elzhbet to his mother, was sentenced to death.
Upon learning of the verdict, Sangushko ordered his wife to change into a man's dress and fled with her to the Czech Republic, where he hoped to find shelter with his relative, the Czech hetman. The king gave chase. The chase overtook the fugitives at an inn in the Czech village of Lisa. The unequal fight was short. The wounded, bleeding Sangushko was tied up, taken to the nearest town and locked up in a barn for the night, in order to be transported to Poland in the morning for the court of the king. However, the unfortunate man died before dawn.
Frightened, still not realizing that she had become a widow, Elzbieta was taken to Poznań to her mother.
Soon the king, who now remained the only guardian of Elzbieta, found her a new groom - Count Lukasz Gurko. Both Princess Beata and Elzbieta were horrified: Count Gurko was almost forty years older than the bride, and in addition, he was famous for his vicious, despotic, unbridled disposition. Princess Beata tried to remind the king of the law adopted by their father Sigismund the Old, according to which no one can force a girl or widow into an unwanted marriage. However, the king did not want to quarrel with the powerful and numerous family of Gurko and insisted on an immediate marriage.
Elzbieta was dressed up in a wedding dress. At the last minute, the bride made a desperate attempt to escape. Having deceived the maids, she slipped out of her room and hid in a closet under the stairs. But she was quickly found, dragged to the altar by force, and, despite the fact that neither Princess Beata nor Elzbieta herself agreed to the marriage, they married Count Gurko.
All these events took place on the eve of the Diet. The next day after the wedding, the king departed for the Diet, Count Gurko was forced to follow him, leaving his wife and mother-in-law in the castle. Princess Beata immediately took advantage of the absence of her hated son-in-law. Mother and daughter, pretending to go for a walk, left Gurko's possessions, reached Lvov and asked for asylum in the Dominican monastery.
Count Gurko demanded that the king return the fugitives, but the conflict with the free city of Lvov and the Dominican brothers did not attract the king, and he, excused by being busy with state affairs, put off and put off the solution to this family problem. For several years, Elzbieta and Princess Beata lived quietly. Finally, Count Gurko lost his patience. He brought his army with cannons under the walls of the monastery and began the siege according to all the rules of military strategy. However, this was not the first time for the Dominican brothers. They successfully defended themselves, firing from cannons, no less accurately than the besiegers.
Nevertheless, Princess Beata understood that sooner or later the monastery would be taken, and she came up with a risky, but, as it seemed to her, sure way to make her daughter's marriage to Gurko invalid. She sent a secret messenger to one of the old contenders for the hand of Elzhbeta - Simeon Yuryevich Slutsky, and he, under the guise of a beggar, entered the monastery.
In the monastery church, Elzbieta was married for the third time and became the wife of Slutsky. Remarrying while her husband was alive was a serious crime, but Beata expected to refer not to the law, but to the tradition, according to which a marriage entered into with the consent of the mother annuls the previous one, concluded against her will. In addition, she intended to refer to the fact that Elzbieta herself was a Catholic, Gurko was a Protestant, and Slutsky was Orthodox. This made it possible to find fault with the formal side of the ceremony and declare the wedding with Gurko invalid.
However, the trick didn't work.
Sigismund-August finally decided that the resistance of the two women to the will of the king was insulting to the royal power, and demanded that the city elders hand over Beata and Elzbieta. The city foremen acted simply and effectively: they blocked the water pipes leading to the monastery - and the monastery surrendered to the mercy of the besiegers.
The king did not punish Elzbieta for two courage, but did not recognize her third marriage. Elzbieta was separated from her mother, and Gurko took her to his castle in Shamotuly. But then Elzbieta, who until then had been a meek toy in the hands of cruel fate, showed her character: she announced that Slutsky was her husband before God and she could not and did not want to be Gurko's wife. As a sign of sadness over the forced separation from her husband, she put on mourning, for which she received the nickname "Black Princess" from the locals.
The enraged Gurko imprisoned Elzbieta in a tower, where she spent - no less than - twelve years.
In 1573, Count Gurko died. During his lifetime, he earned such universal hatred that when the coffin with his body was taken to the cathedral for a funeral service, oncoming people threw stones at the funeral procession.
The Black Princess, who by that time was thirty-four years old, gained freedom. Neither Slutsky nor Princess Beata were already alive. Elzbieta was completely alone. Noisy light did not attract her, she preferred to settle in Ostrog with her uncle, Prince Konstantin.
Having sheltered his niece, Prince Ostrozhsky not only fulfilled his family duty, but also received considerable benefits. Elzbieta was still fabulously wealthy. Having settled in her uncle's house, she became interested in his charitable, cultural and educational activities and donated huge sums to create a hospital and academy in Ostrog.
But the sorrows and shocks experienced were not in vain for her. Contemporaries claimed that the unfortunate Elzbieta went crazy. She lived in complete seclusion in the remote rooms of the castle, only going out into the garden at dusk.
Ivan Fedorov, like all the inhabitants of Ostrog, seeing the mournful silhouette of the Black Princess, sighed about her sorrowful fate.
Elzbieta's money, coupled with the money of Ostrozhsky himself, made it possible to put the academy on a grand scale.
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The life path of the Ostroh prince is described in an article by journalist Sergei Makhun, published in Ukrainian newspaper Den, No. 206, November 14, 2003. Original .
It is difficult to overestimate the role of Ostrog and the glorious family of Ostrog princes in the history and culture of Ukraine, and Eastern Europe in general.
The city, located in the very center of Greater Volhynia (modern Volyn, Rivne, Zhytomyr regions, the north of Khmelnitsky, Beresteyshchyna, Podlyashye), 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, which Vladimir Monomakh insisted on, became 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 Fyodor, the headman of Lutsk, received in 1386 confirmation of his rights to Ostrog (as well as Korets and Zaslav) from the hands of Jogail, 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 amazing.
This is the prince Fedor Danilovich- a participant in the Battle of Grunwald and the Hussite Wars, canonized at the end of the 16th century with the name Theodosius; prince Vasily-Konstantin Ostrozhsky, zealous defender of Orthodoxy, commander and founder (in 1576) of the first higher educational institution in Ukraine - the Ostroh Academy; Galshka Ostrozhskaya, 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 printer Ivan Fedorovich (Fedorov), father and son - Gerasim and Meletiy Smotrytsky- polemical writers, translators, theologians, philologists (M. Smotrytsky - 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- the implacable enemy of the union, the defender of Orthodoxy and the brother of Severin Nalivaiko.
The famous hetman of the Zaporizhia Army also studied in Ostrog Petr Konashevich- Sahaidachny... The outstanding personality of Prince Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky (1460-1530) remains somewhat in the shadow of his son Vasily-Konstantin. Meanwhile, only the list of titles of the richest magnate of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Crown of Poland is striking: Great Lithuanian Hetman (1497-1500, 1507-1530), headman of Bratslav, Zvenigorod and Vinnitsa (1497), marshal of the Volyn land and headman of Lutsk (1499) ), the Vilna castellan (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 family. As proved by Mikhail Maksimovich, who studied the "commemoration" of the Kiev-Pechersk monastery, the Ostrog princes were an offshoot of the princes of the Turov-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 are Dorogobuzh, Gorodets, Zdolbunov, Krasilov, Lutsk, Ostrog, Polonnoye, Rivne, Svityaz, Turov, Chudnov... Konstantin Ivanovich received courts and houses in Vilna, Minsk, Lutsk as a gift from the king; the subjects of the prince 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 hetmanships, 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 did the prince present a manuscript Gospel to the Dermansky Trinity Monastery, built a church in the village of Smolevichi, Minsk district, and made a fundush (donation) for it, transferred money for the construction of the Zhidichinsky monastery. From 1491 to 1530, a stone five-domed Epiphany Church was built in Ostrog, as well as the Trinity Monastery. The prince constantly donated dishes, crosses, chasubles, icons to various churches in Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus ... So it was not for nothing that Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky was buried in the main shrine of East Slavic Orthodoxy - the Assumption Cathedral of the Kiev Caves Monastery. His great-grandfather, Prince Fyodor (Feodosy) 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 with Alexandra, Konstantin Ivanovich had a daughter, Sophia (who died in her youth), and a son, Vasily-Konstantin (1528-1608), who was considered the most ardent zealot and defender of Orthodoxy in the history of the 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 commander. So in the epitaph of A. Kalnofoysky we will find the greatness of the great hetman of Lithuania "Russian Scipio", and the papal legate in Poland Pisoni wrote: “Prince Constantine can be called the best military leader of our time, he became the winner on the battlefield 33 times ... in battle he is not inferior in courage to Romulus” (letter dated 1514).
The prominent Polish chronicler of the 16th century, Maciej Stryjkowski (let's not forget that K. I. Ostrozhsky is Orthodox) called the hetman "the second Annibal, Pyrrhus and Scipio, Russian and Lithuanian ... a man of holy memory and extremely illustrious activity." However, in addition to significant and even fateful victories for history (more on them below), the prince suffered crushing defeats twice. And if, after the failure near 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 hit the flank and rear of the Lithuanian army - almost eight thousand of its soldiers died, and all the governors, 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 prisoner and granted him lands and two cities. Konstantin Ivanovich tried to escape from captivity twice; only the second attempt in the autumn of 1507 was successful. The prince immediately regained the hetman's government. By the time of the war with Muscovy, the hetman actually replaced the Grand Duke of Lithuania with the widest powers. The campaign of 1507-1508 did not determine the winner.
After signing the "Eternal Peace" with Muscovy, Lithuania and Poland turn their attention to the south. In 1508 near Slutsk and in 1512 near Vishnevets and Lopushnya, 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 16,000 captives and captured 10,000 Tatars, whom the prince settled near Ostrog to perform security functions (even according to the 1895 census, there were 470 Muslims in the city and district and one mosque).
Fragment of a painting by an unknown artist of the 16th century "Battle of Orsha".
The prince still waited for satisfaction in the east and gained a loud pan-European fame after a 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 was obedient in everything, for I can honor obedient ones, but stubborn and disobedient karate, no less, like me, sir lord himself.” The army, led by Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky, consisted of the Lithuanian feudal militia (“county banners” from the Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Belarusian lands), the Polish gentry militia, mercenaries from Livonia, Germany and Hungary and the famous Polish hussars - about 30 thousand people in total. They were opposed by 80 thousand Muscovites. There was no unity in the camp of their command, but this in no way detracts from the significance of the victory of the prince, who skillfully led various branches of the military. Thus, the Lithuanian cavalry lured the Muscovites to the guns with a feigned flight, and their left flank was pressed against the swamp and completely defeated. 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, were terrible - 30 thousand soldiers, 380 governors and nobles were taken prisoner.
The battle near Orsha for almost a century determined the status quo on the borders of the Muscovite state and Lithuania (since 1569 - the Commonwealth). And her hero twice passed at the head of 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 Sejm exclusively to him. Even the aforementioned Cardinal Pisoni recognized only one shortcoming in him - that he was a "schismatic". The life and work of Prince Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky (unlike his son, Vasily-Konstantin) have been studied too superficially, although there are many sources. A complete portrait of this outstanding politician, commander and patron of Orthodox culture, unfortunately, has not been created.
It is difficult to overestimate the role of Ostrog and the glorious family of Ostrog princes in the history and culture of Ukraine, and Eastern Europe in general. The city, located in the very center of Greater Volhynia (modern Volyn, Rivne, Zhytomyr regions, the north of Khmelnitsky, Beresteyshchyna, Podlyashye), 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, which Vladimir Monomakh insisted on, became 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 Fyodor, the headman of Lutsk, received in 1386 confirmation of his rights to Ostrog (as well as Korets and Zaslav) from the hands of Jogail, 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 amazing. This is Prince Fyodor Danilovich, a participant in the Battle of Grunwald and the Hussite Wars, who was canonized at the end of the 16th century. with the name Theodosius; Prince Vasily-Konstantin Ostrozhsky, zealous defender of Orthodoxy, commander and founder (1576) of the first higher educational institution in Ukraine - the Ostroh Academy; Galshka Ostrozhskaya, daughter of his brother Ilya, founder of the academy, which is officially recorded in a testament (testament) drawn up in 1579 in Turov; the first printer Ivan Fedorovich (Fedorov) (read about his activities in Ostrog on p. "Ukraine Incognita", No. 176), father and son - Gerasim and Melety Smotrytsky - polemical writers, translators, theologians, philologists (M. Smotrytsky - the creator of the East Slavic grammar; modern alphabets of Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Macedonians, Serbs and Bulgarians are based on the textbook "Slavic Grammar"), Ivan Vishensky - writer and polemist; Job Boretsky - educator, church and political figure; Damian Nalivaiko is an implacable enemy of the union, a defender of Orthodoxy and the brother of Severin Nalivaiko. The famous hetman of the Zaporizhian Army, Petro Konashevich-Sagaydachny, also studied in Ostrog...
Somewhat in the shadow of his son, Vasily-Konstantin, remains the outstanding 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 the Great of Lithuania (1497-1500, 1507-1530), headman of Bratslav, Zvenigorod and Vinnitsa (1497), marshal of the land of Volyn and headman of Lutsk ( 1499), Vilna castellan (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, yielding only to Kiev, Lvov and Lutsk. And it was Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky who stood at the origins of the power of the family. As proved by Mikhail Maksimovich, who studied the "commemoration" of the Kiev-Pechersk monastery, the Ostrog princes were an offshoot of the princes of the Turov-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 are Dorogobuzh, Gorodets, Zdolbunov, Krasilov, Lutsk, Ostrog, Polonnoye, Rovno, Svityaz, Turov, Chudnov ... Konstantin Ivanovich received courts and houses in Vilna (Vilnius), Minsk, Lutsk as a gift from the king; the subjects of the prince 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 hetmanships, 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 did the prince present a manuscript Gospel to the Dermansky Trinity Monastery, built a church in the village of Smolevichi, Minsk district, and made a fundush (donation) for it, transferred money for the construction of the Zhidichinsky monastery. From 1491 to 1530, a stone five-domed Epiphany Church was built in Ostrog, as well as the Trinity Monastery. The prince constantly donated crockery, crosses, chasubles, icons to various churches in Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus...
So it was not for nothing that Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky was buried in the main shrine of East Slavic Orthodoxy - the Assumption Cathedral of the Kiev Caves Monastery. His great-grandfather, Prince Fyodor (Feodosy) 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 with Alexandra, Konstantin Ivanovich had a daughter, Sophia (who died in her youth), and a son, Vasily-Konstantin (1528-1608), who was considered the most ardent zealot and defender of Orthodoxy in the history of the 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 commander. So in the epitaph of A. Kalnofoysky we find the great hetman of Lithuania called “Russian Scipio”, and the papal legate in Poland Pisoni wrote: “Prince Konstantin can be called the best military leader of our time, he became the winner on the battlefield 33 times ... in battle he not inferior in courage to Romulus ”(letter dated 1514). An outstanding Polish chronicler of the 16th century, Maciej Stryjkowski (let's not forget that K. I. Ostrozhsky is Orthodox) called the hetman "the second Annibal, Pyrrhus and Scipio, Russian and Lithuanian ... a man of holy memory and extremely illustrious activity."
However, in addition to significant and even fateful victories for history (more on them below), the prince suffered crushing defeats twice. And if, after the failure near 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 hit the flank and rear of the Lithuanian army - almost eight thousand of its soldiers died, and all the governors, 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 prisoner and granted him lands and two cities. Konstantin Ivanovich tried to escape from captivity twice; only the second attempt in the autumn of 1507 was successful. The prince immediately regained the hetman's government. By the time of the war with Muscovy, the hetman actually replaced the Grand Duke of Lithuania with the widest powers. The campaign of 1507-1508 did not determine the winner. After signing the "Eternal Peace" with Muscovy, Lithuania and Poland turn their attention to the south. In 1508 near Slutsk and in 1512 near Vishnevets and Lopushnya, 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 16,000 captives and captured 10,000 Tatars, whom the prince settled near Ostrog to perform security functions (even according to the 1895 census, there were 470 Muslims in the city and district and one mosque).
The prince still waited for satisfaction in the east and gained a loud pan-European fame after a 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 was obedient in everything, for I can honor obedient ones, but stubborn and disobedient karate, no less, like me, sir lord himself.”
The army, led by Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky, consisted of the Lithuanian feudal militia (“county banners” from the Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Belarusian lands), the Polish gentry militia, mercenaries from Livonia, Germany and Hungary and the famous Polish hussars - about 30 thousand people in total. They were opposed by 80 thousand Muscovites. There was no unity in the camp of their command, but this in no way detracts from the significance of the victory of the prince, who skillfully led various branches of the military. Thus, the Lithuanian cavalry lured the Muscovites to the guns with a feigned flight, and their left flank was pressed against the swamp and completely defeated. 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, were terrible - 30 thousand soldiers, 380 governors and nobles were taken prisoner.
The battle near Orsha for almost a century determined the status quo on the borders of the Muscovite state and Lithuania (since 1569 - the Commonwealth). And her hero twice passed at the head of 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 Sejm exclusively to him. Even the aforementioned Cardinal Pisoni recognized only one shortcoming in him - that he was a "schismatic".
The life and work of Prince Konstantin Ivanovich Ostrozhsky (unlike his son, Vasily-Konstantin) have been studied too superficially, although there are many sources. A complete portrait of this outstanding politician, commander and patron of Orthodox culture, unfortunately, has not been created.
