THE HISTORICAL NARRATIVE of the Koriatovych brothers has been largely unchanged since the second half of the nineteenth century. Such a gloomy picture is, first of all, attributable to the sources— of which there are, indeed, only a few. Traditionally, most of the stories about the coming to power of the brothers begin with information taken from Lithuanian chronicles and annals and tell how Algirdas, along with his nephews, defeated three rulers of Podillya in the Battle of Blue Waters. The later the origin of these texts, the more “details” the stories have.

The textbook description of the events is based, many historians believe, on solid foundations in A Tale on Podillya, which is represented in several copies, the earliest of which is dated to between the 1430s and 1450s. However, the plot of the story hardly helps understand the logic of events described from the viewpoint of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and aimed at returning Podillya to the duchy, since A Tale on Podillya was written at the time of a long-lasting political, and sometimes even military, struggle with the Kingdom of Poland. But that is another story altogether.

In the nineteenth century and early twentieth, Ukrainian historiography saw several ideologically different processes happening here. Nikandr Molchanovsky defined the story as “taking of the territory” and even argued that Podillya had not been conquered at that time. For Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the arrival of the Koriatovych, the Lithuanian princes, was an occupation of Podillya. Olena Rusyna, a modern researcher, calls these events the liberation of Podillya from the hegemony of Tatars, even though the chapter with this description is titled “Lithuanian Expansion on Ukrainian Lands.”

Since the nineteenth century Polish historiography, to the contrary, has attempted to show, although not always proficiently, the Koriatovyches’ allegiance to Casimir III the Great. Almost every study on the fourteenth century has treated Podillya as a vassal state of the Kingdom of Poland since 1366. The claim has prevailed as axiomatic. The year 1366 does indicate that George and Aleksander, the elder sons of Koriat and the witnesses along with Yuri Narymuntovych (Jurgis Narimantaitis— who was, ironically, the cousin of the Koriatovych brothers on the king's document), joined Casimir's side.5 The events that followed only confirm that the Koriatovych brothers became the king's vassals.