TOWARD THE HISTORY AND GENEALOGY OF THE RUTHENIAN NOBILITY OF THE KOLOMYIA DISTRICT: WITNESSES OF A 1419 AGREEMENT AND THEIR FAMILY CONNECTIONS

Abstract

The article analyzes evidence from early fifteenth-century sources concerning the composition, origins, and subsequent fate of certain families of the Ruthenian nobility of the Kolomyia County in the Galician Land. The point of departure for the study is an act of 1419 granting the village of Bereziv to three brothers, preserved in a later transcript entered in one of the books of the Galician castle court. Although this document has survived only in the form of a copy, its authenticity raises no doubts, and its content retains valuable information on the history of the local nobility at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The publication focuses on the list of nobles who acted as witnesses to this transaction, their localization, social status, origin, and possible identification in other fifteenth-century sources, in particular in the lists of the vassal oath sworn to the Polish king Władysław II Jagiełło in 1427, in other surviving charters of the period, as well as in the records of the Galician land court. On the basis of a comparative analysis of the documentary material, an attempt is made to reconstruct the family ties and the history of landed property of a number of noble families of Ruthenian origin, including the owners of Deliatyn and Turka, Korshiv and Lisky, Debeslavtsi, Khlibychyn, and Kniazhdvir, as well as several lesser-known individuals mentioned only incidentally in the sources. Particular attention is paid to problems of identification caused by distortions of personal names and toponyms in later copies of the document, as well as to the informative value of this type of source for prosopographical and genealogical research. The article demonstrates that a considerable part of the Ruthenian nobility of the Kolomyia County recorded in the first third of the fifteenth century either lost their estates in the following decades or saw their male lines die out, which led to the disappearance of these families from later written sources. The proposed reconstruction expands our understanding of the early history and genealogy of the local nobility and уточifies the personal composition of the Ruthenian nobility in the Kolomyia County at the beginning of the fifteenth century