"Gutullae sanguinis Iagellonici" : Jagiellonian identity among the Princes of Poland-Lithuania in the Early Modern Period

In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and (after 1569) the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth there lived many princely families who originated (or were supposed to have originated) from the House of Gediminas, the Gediminids. Their descent from this house linked them with the Jagiellonians, who were also Gediminids and who had become the powerful royal dynasty in Poland and Lithuania until 1572 (and other European countries). Using written and visual evidence from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, this article argues that real and claimed Jagiellonian descent played a crucial role in the social and political lives of many prominent Lithuanian princely families. Consequently, the princes sought to commemorate their relationship with the dynasty by exploiting forms both of “memory storage” (that is to say documents, genealogies or panegyrics that presented irrefutable information about their Jagiellonian kinship links), and “functional memory” (which included family symbols strongly identified with the Jagiellonians). In this way the princes created their identity as members of the “royal kin of Lithuanian princes” and presented themselves as the junior collateral of the powerful dynasty. This image of the origins of these princely families was in turn transmitted to the future generations, reinforcing their collective identity and their sense of status, and promoting variously their political ambitions