Places¶
Every place is also on The Map, with two larger insets and a table of places.
Place |
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Town on the Ašmena river; site of Žygimantas’s night coup against Švitrigaila in 1432. |
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Kujavian town where the 31 December 1435 peace confirmed the Melno borders and required the Order to end its support for Švitrigaila. |
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Skirsnemunė: Order castle on the Nemunas; site of Švitrigaila’s 1431 alliance treaty. |
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Fortified Volhynian town; center of the Czartoryski princely house. |
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Masovian monastery town on the Vistula where the allied armies crossed on the pontoon bridge, 30 Jun - 2/3 Jul 1410; the exact spot above the monastery is uncertain. |
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Place of the 1380 treaty. Appears only in Wigand and German texts; the village is not securely identified. The saga leaves it in the border wilderness. |
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Years are those of the saga’s scenes here (Vytautas’s rescue in 1382 to Pilkoji lying down in 1449); the swamp itself is far older (Book VI shows it in the 1340s). |
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Major fortified ducal center on the Nemunas; treaty site of 1432. |
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Where Jogaila died on 1 Jun 1434; he caught the cold at Medyka, listening to nightingales in late April. |
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Union of 2 Oct 1413. On the Bug, west of Volhynia; not Lutsk. |
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Record: the armies met near Trakai on 3 Aug 1382 and Kęstutis and Vytautas were lured into the camp and arrested. Trakai itself had fallen on 20 Jul. |
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Georgenburg: Order castle on the Nemunas border, repeatedly contested by Lithuania. |
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Key border fortress of Podolia; seized by Polish magnates after Vytautas’s death. |
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Royal capital of Poland; Wawel castle where Jogaila was crowned Władysław II in 1386. |
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Stone and timber fortress on the Krevyanka; dungeon where Kęstutis was murdered in 1382. |
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Historic metropolis on the Dnieper; southern seat of Skirgaila and later Lithuanian regents. |
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Crusader stronghold on the Pregel estuary; staging post for winter reisen. |
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Saga place: the old lodge in the pines across the Neris from Vilnius where the Last Flame is lit in 1387 (Book I ch. 29). Used only in 1387: Book II ch. 2 has Vytautas move the flame to the half-flooded foundations of the Trakai island castle that spring. |
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Near Johannisburg; where a small band of knights fell on Kęstutis’s camp in March 1361. |
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Volhynian royal castle; host to the European diplomatic congress of 1429. |
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Treaty of 19 Jan 1390 between Vytautas and the Order. |
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Monolithic red-brick castle on the Nogat; grand capital of the Teutonic Order. |
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Piast duchy buffering Poland and Lithuania; refuge of Vytautas in 1382. |
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Samogitian diocese seat from 1417 (Varniai only from 1470); the Medininkai castle was the Order’s raiding target in 1402; Book IV ch. 7 is set among its groves. |
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Where Jogaila, in late April 1434, stood at the edge of the forest listening to the nightingales and caught the chill of which he died at Gródek on 1 Jun (Book V ch. 12; the nightingale episode is Długosz’s). |
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Naujapilis: Teutonic castle burned by Vytautas in his 1384 defection. |
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The Noteć ford used for the invented leaf-crown encounter in Book IV; not an established site where the historical crown was seized. |
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Manor where Vytautas and Jogaila reconciled in 1392, granting Vytautas rule of Lithuania. |
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Historical battlefield by Lake Žirnajai and the Žirnaja stream, near Ukmergė. Book V places its fictional magical ford on that stream; Šventoji remains a traditional battle name, not the ford location. |
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Coastal sanctuary and sacred Birutė Hill; shrine of the amber keepers and vaidilutės. |
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Peace of Raciąż, 22-23 May 1404, at the confluence of the Drwęca and the Vistula. |
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Order castle on the Nemunas (Lith. Ragainė). The saga’s Marquard von Salzbach is its komtur (Lyck, Jan 1390; the knights he led to Vytautas at the Vorskla, 1399); Book I ch. 19 gives Vytautas the komtur Wigand von Beldersheim as godfather. |
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Order fortress built autumn 1391; its guests were seized in summer 1392 and it was destroyed. |
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Road to Jogaila’s camp (from Kęstutis’s pine hill beyond the Trakai lake) |
Book I ch. 4 “Kelionė į stovyklą”: the ducal retinue rides from the pine hill where the armies stood for two weeks to the camp near Trakai; the Beggar meets them in the afternoon, at the roadside. 2-3 Aug 1382. |
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Islet of the Nemunas, probably between Kulautuva and the mouth of the Nevėžis; treaty of 12 Oct 1398. |
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Teutonic Order fortress on the Pregel; location of Vytautas’s 1383 baptism as ‘Wigand’. |
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Ancestral seat of Kęstutis and Vytautas; peninsula and island castles among the lakes. |
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Capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; Upper, Lower and Crooked castles on the Neris. |
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Steppe river battlefield where Vytautas’s grand army was routed by the Golden Horde in 1399. |
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Sacred river valley at Vilnius; site of pagan ducal cremations and the perpetual flame. |
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Field of Tannenberg / Žalgiris; location of the great 15 July 1410 allied victory. |
Places on the map¶
29 of the 41 places have coordinates. Each of those shows a small locator map in its sidebar, and the places named on the clickable Map are links there.
With a locator map: Ašmena · Czerwińsk (monastery on the Vistula) · Dykra (swamp-forest wilderness) · Grodno · Horodło (on the Bug) · Jogaila’s camp near Trakai · Jurbarkas (Georgenburg) · Kraków · Krėva · Kyiv · Königsberg (Karaliaučius) · Lutsk · Lyck (Ełk) · Marienburg (Malbork) · Masovia (Płock / Warsaw) · Medininkai (Varniai), Samogitia · Naujapilis (Marienwerder) · Ostrów · Pabaiskas · Palanga · Raciążek (Vistula island) · Ragnit (Ragainė) · Road to Jogaila’s camp (from Kęstutis’s pine hill beyond the Trakai lake) · Salynas (island in the Nemunas) · Tapiau (Tepliava) · Trakai · Vilnius · Šventaragis valley · Žalgiris (Grunwald)
Without one (no fixed position, or off the edge of the map): Brześć Kujawski · Christmemel (Skirsnemunė) · Czartorysk (Volhynia) · Dovydiškės (unidentified) · Gródek (Horodok near Lviv) · Kamianets (Podolia) · Kęstutis’s hunting lodge beyond the Neris · Lake Ublik (Wobel), Masuria · Medyka (near Przemyśl, on the road to Gródek) · Noteć ford (Neumark / Greater Poland border) · Ritterswerder (Nemunas island near Lampėdžiai) · Vorskla river