LDK diduomenės genealoginės sampratos atsiradimas

Abstract

The nobility elite originated in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the time, when the country did not yet have any traditions of recording and preserving written documents; therefore, there are none or very few written sources that could describe for us the process of the birth of the nobility. After the appearance of the feudal legal system and after the codification of the system by the statutes of Lithuania, the need for nobility records has emerged. However, there was a lack of written documents in the country. The gentry took advantage of the situation, and different theories, that explained the origin of their families, appeared. Some of them were based on written sources, and some of them were based on forget documents. In the 16th century, the gentry of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania started including some very noble ancestors into their genealogical tree; in this way they were trying to prove that they had belonged to the nobility since the time of the formation of the Lithuanian State. According to such genealogical trees, quite a lot of the gentry members had ancestors that belonged to the ruling dynasty of the noble family. Their origin was usually based on patronymic and heraldry, sometimes even on the forgery of written sources. The article analyzes the causes, the importance and the purposes of this process.