Teoria herulskiego pochodzenia Litwinów Wojciecha Wijuka Kojałowicza. Z dziejów jednej historiografi cznej mistyfi kacji

ENThroughout the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, different views on the origins of Lithuania and the Lithuanians coexisted. The theory of ancient Roman descent of the Lithuanians had the most followers. Particularly popular was a chronicler’s tale known as the legend of Duke Palemon, the leader of the Roman knights who reached Lithuania, the supposed ancestors of the Lithuanian nobility. In the mid-seventeenth century, a new theory was put forward by the Lithuanian historian and theologian, the Jesuit Wojciech Wijuk Kojałowicz (Lithuanian: Albertas Vijūkas-Kojelavičius). He believed the Lithuanians descended from the Heruli people, known from sources from the third to sixth centuries. In the Renaissance, some scholars developed rather fanciful notions about the survival of a small Herulian community in Mecklenburg. The Viennese humanist Wolfgang Lazius mistakenly identified the contemporary Latvian text of the Lord’s Prayer as in the Herulian lan guage. Lazius’s error misled Kojałowicz, who considered Lithuania and the neighbouring Baltic countries to be the ancient homeland of the Heruli and their language identical to that of the Lithuanians and Latvians. He, therefore, challenged the theory that the Lithuanians descended from the ancient Romans but borrowed from it the legend of Palemon, modifying it significantly. According to Kojałowicz, the Herulian tribe of the Alans, supposedly native to Lithuanian lands, was joined in the tenth century by descendants of the Heruli from Italy who had settled there in ancient times.These descendants were Palemon and his knights, thus transferred from antiquity to the Middle Ages. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Kojałowicz was a great authority for Lithuanian historians, but their attitude to his theories varied greatly. The Lithuanian nobility was eager to accept the tenth-century Italian migrants as their ancestors but refused to acknowledge their Herulian descent. They preferred instead to see them as descendants of the ancient Romans. The reserved reception of Kojałowicz’s theory in Lithuania contrasts with the avid interest it enjoyed among Prussian historiographers. It also inspired scholars studying the history of Livonia. During the Enlightenment, critical historiography questioned the credibility of Kojałowicz’s theory. By the end of the eighteenth century, it had practically been forgotten. It was revived in a modifi ed form in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century and enjoyed great but short-lived popularity then. It was invented as a completely new theory, with the pioneering concept of Wojciech Wijuk Kojałowicz having fallen into oblivion. Keywords: Heruli (Herules), legendary history of Lithuania, Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Wojciech Wijuk Kojałowicz.

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