Enmity, Dispute, and Noble Community in the Late Medieval Kingdom of Poland: Evidence of the Rus’ palatinate, 15th-beginning of 16th centuries By Yuriy Zazulyak Submitted to Central European University Department of Medieval Studies In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy CEU eTD Collection Supervisor: Professor Janos M. Bak Budapest, Hungary 2008 0 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT It gives me a pleasure to acknowledge my great indebtedness to all those who offered essential support during the time it took to write my thesis. Above all, I would like to express my special and deep acknowledgment to Professor Janos M. Bak, my supervisor. His continual support, insightful commentaries, and stimulating criticism were vital in all stages of my work. I owe special debts of gratitude to Judith Rasson for correcting and improving my Academic English writing. Without her generous assistance this work has never been completed. I would also like to thank Gabor Klaniczay, Gerhard Jaritz, Joska Laszlovszky, Thomas Wünsch, Piotr Górecki, Paul Hyams, with whom I had opportunities to discuss various questions and problems related to my work. CEU eTD Collection 1 Table of contents Introduction 4 1. Ex bonis nobilibus fures effecti: Noble violence and its representation in the Late Medieval Kingdom of Poland 23 2. Galicia and its Nobility in the Later Middle Ages 41 3 Statute law and criminal justice in the Late Medieval Kingdom of Poland 50 4. The legal process and litigation 62 4.1 Summons and beginning of the litigation 62 4.2 Bailiffs 68 4.3 Pleading the case, petitioning and the court debate 76 4.4 Delays 82 4.5 Appeals and transfer of cases 83 4.6 Knowledge of law and the practice of interrogation 89 4.7 Attorneys 106 4.8 Court sentence and its execution 109 4.9 Super tali re dubia periculosum est iuramentum: The uses of oath-taking in the disputing process 115 4.10 Ego huic inscripcione non credo, … ipse scribere potuit, quod voluit: Writing and dispute 129 5. Royal captains and the administration of justice 143 5.1 Captains and the system of governance in the Late Medieval Kingdom of Poland 143 5.2 Captains and the royal donation policy in the fifteenth century 144 5.3 The captains’ competence and its legislative regulation 145 5.4 Emergence of the office of captain in Galician Rus’ 150 5.5 Iudicium terrestre in Sanok: Captains, nobility and local justice in the 1420s-1430s. 152 CEU eTD Collection 5.6 Instruments of conflict regulation: Pledges of peace 156 5.7 Instruments of conflict regulation: Surety 162 5.8 Captains’ personal attendance of court sessions 165 5.9 Extension and abuses of captains’ authority 167 6. Noble enmity and violence: People and patterns 175 6.1 Pledges of peace and intensity of inimical relationships 176 2 6.2 Enmity and neighborhood 179 6.3 Diversity of experience: winners and losers of noble enmities 182 6.4 George Strumilo and his enmities 185 6.5 Toleration of noble violence 190 6.6 Toleration of crime and ambiguities of noble honor 195 6.7 The limits of noble violence 197 6.8 Enmity and its legal implications 198 6.9 Enmity and slander in court 200 7. Public threats and uses of emotions in noble enmities 207 8. Noble violence and plebeian voices 216 9. Peacemaking and private arbitration 243 9.1 Arbitration and official courts 244 9.2 Peacemaking and ties of solidarity: The case of the Korþaks’ arbitrations 248 9.3 Arbitration and local powerholders 254 9.4 Labour of arbitration 257 9.5 Peacemaking and the dynamics of enmity 271 Conclusions 276 Bibliography 280 CEU eTD Collection 3 Introduction I intend to investigate nobles’ enmity and dispute in late medieval Poland. I start with the premise that enmity and dispute played key roles in shaping the ethos and identity of member’s of the noble estate. In my approach to noble enmity I will view violence and litigation as two major ways to redress wrongs and restore a shaken balance of justice in interpersonal relationships. The main aim of the investigation is to approach noble enmity and conflict as complex social phenomena, interpreting them as points of intersection of different aspects of social reality, including structures of governance and justice, the social and family network, power relations, statute law, mental attitudes and so on. Chronologically this work covers the period from the middle of the fifteenth to the early sixteenth century. This period started with a crisis for the Polish monarchy, which affected many aspects of the social life, and manifested itself, first of all, in a weakening of the social order and system of justice. Therefore it is important to explore the possible repercussions of this crisis at the local level and to analyze how disputes were settled under the worsening conditions of the exercise of justice. Another important point is that the fifteenth century was a time when statute law gradually established itself as the main instrument for regulating noble crime and dispute. Legislative initiatives were crowned by the emergence of a number of legal statutes and privileges in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. It will be interesting to clarify how this growing body of legislative texts influenced the local practice of conflict regulation and interacted with local customs. The time limits of the research are closely connected with the choice of nobility as a social group on which the study is concentrated. First, the nobility constituted the social layer which is the best known from the sources of the late medieval Kingdom of Poland. Second, it was during that very period that the political predominance of the Polish nobility was established. From this point of view, it will be particularly interesting to examine how and whether at all the rapid growth of the importance of the institutions of noble self-governance CEU eTD Collection corresponded with the practice of dispute settlement. The choice of period can be also justified by the fact that it provides an opportunity to trace possible connections between egalitarian discourse and the feuding culture of the nobility of Polish kingdom.1 1 The correlation between the wide spread of feuding and an egalitarian ethos of societies is stressed by William I. Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 185-6. Similarly, Trevor Dean has recently contended in his study of vendetta in Renaissance Italy that “…vendetta and feud were part of the aristocratic faction-fighting that flourished in the 4 In spatial terms, the study will focus on one region of the Polish Crown: Galician Rus’. This territory constitutes the western part of present-day Ukraine and the south-eastern part of Poland. Up to the middle of the fourteenth century the lands of Galicia belonged to the Halyþ-Volynian Principality, and were ruled by one of the branches of the Rurikid dynasty. During the second half of the fourteenth century they were brought into the Kingdom of Poland; after the introduction of the Polish administrative and judicial system in the 1430s, Galician Rus’ became generally known as the Rus’ Palatinate. The peripheral position of the Rus’ Palatinate on the eastern border of the Polish Kingdom can be taken as a considerable advantage in studying interpersonal violence. Some recent historical studies on medieval and early modern violence and social order have concentrated exactly on the societies situated on the periphery of the late medieval and early modern states.2 They emphasize that the borderland situation limited the opportunities for the central institutions to maintain order and exercise justice compared with other parts of the kingdoms. Some Polish scholars also assume that violence played a more crucial role in conflict resolution among the Ruthenian nobility than in other parts of the kingdom. This point of view has been recently advanced by Maria Bogucka in her analysis of crime and violence in Early Modern Poland. Emphasizing the high level of interpersonal violence observed among Ruthenian nobility during the first half of the seventeenth century, she suggests that this situation was strongly influenced by the frontier location of the Rus’ Palatinate and differed from other parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.3 Problem of dispute and violence in historiography Questions of dispute, violence, and administration of justice were one of the central subjects of research in Polish historiography of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century. Numerous works appeared during that period of time devoted to different aspects of the legal regulation of crime and punishment in medieval Polish law, as well as peacemaking and public penance involved in the settlement of enmities.4 These issues were studied mainly CEU eTD Collection republican cities.” See, his “Marriage and Mutilation: Vendetta in Late Medieval Italy,” Past and Present 157 (1997), 21. The interrelation between the preference, given to violence in the dispute settlement and the absence of a central government has been highlighted by some anthropologists. See Simon Roberts, “The Study of Dispute: Anthropological Perspective,” in Dispute and Settlement: Law and Human relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 9-10. 2 See: Daniel Lord Smail, “Factions and Vengeance in Renaissance Italy. A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, no 4 (1996), 784. 3 Maria Bogucka, “Law and Crime in Poland in Early Modern Times,” Acta Poloniae Historica 71 (1995):161- 175. 4 See, for example Przemysáaw Dąbkowski, Zemsta, okup i pokora na Rusi Halickiej w wieku XV i w pierwszej poáowie wieku XVI (Vengeance, retribution and humiliation in Galician Rus’ in the fifteenth and first half of the 5 from the point of view of legal and institutional history and they frequently lack the wider social and cultural perspective that is offered by present studies.