I 68 Giedrė Mickūnaitė fortunes similar to the Greek one for the Trojans;” 55 “she was not called a queen, but a Muscovite, did not have a dower in Poland, and did not live long there; she left for Lithuania and perished there.”56 Predictably, in Muscovy she was praised in every aspect. For example, the Book of Royal Degrees 57 states: “Helena stems from the root of the apostle-like Vladimir of the steadfast faith, and is related to him by the sixteenth degree. She inherited the true Christian law and love for pious deeds from her most devoted parents. She was indifferent to the Latin charms followed by her husband, whom she loved dearly, yet withstood in his unlawful will, and refused to adopt the Latin rite. She merited the beauty, glory, power, and perishable goods of this world for nothing else except for the love of God, and she always spoke with divinely-enlightened words. She pushed away all those who, despite the shame of God, flattered her, thus once again confirming her firm adherence to the Orthodox faith, and she expelled all Jews, the murderers of God, from the land of Lithuania.”58 While the expulsion of Jews in spring 1495, in the aftermath of Alexander’s and Helena’s marriage, invites for more thorough research,59 the non-perishable goods are closer to the focus of this essay. Records from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries tell of two icons of the Mother of God believed to have been brought by Helena from Muscovy. Both were taken to Russia during the First World War and have been considered lost ever since. This loss is even greater since none of the nine icons listed among Helena’s accoutrements can be identified today, although it includes just two icons of the Virgin and Child.60 Perhaps this is not merely a numerical coincidence? According to historian Albert Wijuk Kojałowicz, SJ (1609–77), the Greek-Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity in Vilnius had a miracle-working icon of the Mother of God, which Helena had brought as part of her dowry. Its value can be estimated from the fact that the Muscovites 55 Albert Wijuk Kojałowicz, Historiae Lituanae pars posterior, seu de rebus Lituanorum, a coniunctione Magni Ducatus cum Regno Poloniae ad Unionem eorum Dominiorum libri octo (Antwerp, 1669), 264. 56 Dyaryusze sejmów koronnych 1548, 1553 i 1570 r., ed. Józef Szujski, Scriptores rerum Polonicarum, 1 (Cracow, 1872), 215. 57 On the genre, function, and contexts of the books, see “The Book of Royal Degrees” and the Genesis of Russian Historical Consciousness, eds. Gail Lenhoff and Ann Kleimola (Bloomington, IN, 2011). 58 Polnoe sobranie russkihh letopisei, vol. 21.2, Kniga Stenenaya tsarskogo rodosloviya (11–17 stepeni grani) (St Petersburg, 1913), 573. 59 Upon the orders of Alexander, Jews were expelled from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in May 1495 (the decrees are known from references in other documents only) and invited to return in 1503 (the general privilege from April 1503, known from later transumpta, Sergei A. Bershadskii, ed. Russko-evreyskii arkhiv. Dokumenty i materialy dlya istorii evreev v Rossii, vol. 1, Dokumenty i registry k istorii Litovskikh evreev (1388–1550) (St Petersburg, 1882), no. 40, 63–64). Although the marriage and the expulsion were very close in time, scholars generally denied causality of the two events (e.g., Krzysztof Pietkiewicz, Wielkie Księstwo Litewskie pod rządami Aleksandra Jagiellończyka: studia nad dziejami państwa i społeczeństwa na przełomie XV i XVI wieku (Oświęcim, 2014), 191). Recently, however, Arvydas Maciulevičius has convincingly argued that the Muscovite interests to fight the Judaising heresy lay behind the expulsion, Arvydas Maciulevičius, “Kodėl 1495 m. iš Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystės buvo išvaryti žydai? Apie žydų išvarymo sąsajas su judaizavimo judėjimu,” in Istorijos šaltinių tyrimai, vol. 5, ed. Artūras Dubonis (Vilnius, 2014), 57–83. For discussion of this issue in English, see Arvydas Maciulevičius, “The 1495 Expulsion of the Jews from Lithuania and the Judaising Movement in Russia: Was there a connection?” https://vu-lt.academia.edu/ArvydasMaciulevi%C4%8Dius [accessed July 7, 2023]. 60 St Petersburg, Library of Russian Academy of Sciences, MS 32.4.21, ff. 7r and 15v; Martin, “Gifts for the Bride,” 125.
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