The Ancestry of Gediminas: Between Legends and History

Abstract

Two versions of the origins of Gediminas developed in the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries. According to the first one, Gediminas was a stableman of Vytenis and ascended to the throne after his death. The second version, which appeared in response to the first one, claimed that Gediminas was Vytenis’s son. These versions were not only the product of imagination of their authors; they may carry fragments of the authentic tale about the origins of the Gediminids and hence historical realities, which deserve a thorough scrutiny. In the nineteenth century, the Russian historian Alexander Nikitsky added a third version based on the letter of the citizens of Riga to Gediminas of 1322, in which Vytenis was referred to as ‘your brother and predecessor’ (frater vester et antecessor): respectively, he concluded that Gediminas was Vytenis’s brother. Therefore, it is worth taking a fresh look at each of these versions and the available data on the origins of Gediminas with a fresh look.
The prerequisite for such a revision is the oldest genealogy of the sons of Algirdas provided in the late fourteenth-century Russian literary tale Zadonshchina listing the successive line of their ancestors as Skalmantas – Gediminas – Algirdas – Andrew
and Dmitri (the protagonists of the said poem). Jerzy Ochmański noticed it already in 1974. Ochmański tried to accommodate this genealogy with Nikitsky’s theory, accepting that Vytenis’s father, namely, Pukuveras-Butvydas, was also the father of Gediminas and therefore assumed that Skalmantas must have been their grandfather. However, the genealogy in Zadonshchina directly implies that Skalmantas was Gediminas’s father. As Peter of Dusburg wrote in his chronicle, that the father of Vytenis was Pucuwerus (identified with Butvydas), Vytenis and Gediminas could not be full brothers; that the fact that Vytenis was called frater of Gediminas should be interpreted rather as a clue to a more distant relationship, namely, cousinhood.
Further analysis of the genealogy of Gediminas also demands a scrutiny of the terms ‘predecessor’ and ‘progenitor’, which are used in his own letters. The term ‘predecessor’ was applied in reference to earlier rulers of Lithuania (namely, Mindaugas and Vytenis); the term ‘progenitor’ means direct ancestors. Gediminas stated that his progenitores (ancestors) had tried to establish trade relations with Lübeck and other cites of the Hanseatic League. This implies that at least two direct ancestors of Gediminas ruled Lithuania and sought to establishing relationship with Lübeck.
Considering this, the most probable ancestors of Gediminas seem to be Traidenis (1268–1281) and his successor Daumantas (1281–1285). The article tries to prove that the most likely relationship between them and Gediminas was that both of them were his grandfathers: Traidenis on the maternal side and Daumantas on the paternal. Besides that, Daumantas and/or his family must have supported Vaišalgas, Mindaugas’s son and Traidenis’s rival. Traidenis could have married off his unknown elder daughter to Skalmantas, who must have been a son of Daumantas, in order to draw the supporters of his rival to his side.