Trice a Foreigner: Helena of Muscovy, Grand Duchess of Lithuania GIEDRĖ MICKŪNAITĖ In its popular understanding, marriage frequently serves as a token for conflict after compromise, the topic that the essays in this volume discuss. This stereotyped understanding might be applied aptly to the marriage of the Grand Duke of Lithuania Alexander Jagiellon (1461–1506) and Princess Helena of Muscovy (1476–1513).1 Typically of its time, this wedding was a diplomatic arrangement, set against the background of Lithuania’s huge territorial losses to Muscovy since the mid-fifteenth century. The agreement2 was concluded under the condition that Helena would retain her Orthodox faith after marrying the Catholic Alexander. Although cross-confessional marriages were generally exceptional in late medieval society, they had quite a regular precedent among the highest elites of the confessional border zones. Matrimonial policies and practices in Byzantium, where emperors married Latin wives and ‘exported’ Greek brides, have received continuous scholarly attention.3 However, examples of cross-confessional marriages in Central and Eastern Europe remain a topic of national historiographies. As for Lithuania, confessional “flexibility” seemed to be quite widespread in the marriages of grand dukes and the nobility in the Middle Ages.4 However, after the conclusion of the Union 1 Aleksandras Jogailaitis, LT/ Aleksander Jagiellończyk, PL; Elena, LT/ Helena Rurykowiczówna, PL/ Elena Ivanovna, RU/ Olena in Old Slavonic; herein I use Anglicized versions of the personal names as a compromise of numerous spellings in national traditions. 2 On Lithuania’s political and confessional situation in the fifteenth century, see Robert Frost, The Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania, vol. 1, 1385–1569 (Oxford, 2015), 309–25. For an overview of source evidence related to Helena and Alexander, see Giedrė Mickūnaitė, “United in Blood, Divided by Faith: Elena Ivanovna and Aleksander Jagiellonczyk,” in Frictions and Failures. Cultural Encounters in Crisis, ed. Almut Bues, Deutsches Historisches Institut Warschau. Quellen und Studien, 34 (Wiesbaden, 2017), 181–200. 3 For the Byzantine perspective on mixed marriages between Greeks and Latins, see Nicol Donald MacGillivray, “Mixed Marriages in Byzantium in the Thirteenth Century,” in Byzantium: Its Ecclesiastical History and Relationship with the Western World (London, 1972), 160–72 and Dionysios Stathakopoulos, Sister, Widow, Consort, Bride: Four Latin Ladies in Greece (1330–1430) (London, 2018). For the discussion of the cross-confessional exchange of brides, with more attention to the Catholic spouses of emperors, see Sandra Origone, “Marriage connections between Byzantium and the West in the age of the Palaiologoi,” Mediterranean Historical Review 10 (1995): 226–41. 4 See Stephen C. Rowell, “Pious Princesses or the Daughters of Belial: Pagan Lithuanian Dynastic Diplomacy, 1279– 1423,” Medieval Prosopography 15/1 (1994): 3–80; idem, “Whatever Kind of Pagan the Bearer Might Be, the Letter Is Valid. A Sketch of Catholic-Orthodox Relations in the Late-Mediaeval Grand Duchy of Lithuania,” Lithuanian Historical Studies 18 (2013): 47–65; Darius Baronas, “Julijona – Lietuvos didžiojo kunigaikščio Algirdo žmona ir jo vaikų motina,” Lietuvos istorijos metraštis 2 (2019): 5–39; Darius Baronas and Stephen C. Rowell, The Conversion of Lithuania. From Pagan Barbarians to Late Medieval Christians (Vilnius, 2015), 379–402.
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