Didikų Kiškų šeimos giminiavimosi tradicijos XV a. pab. – XVI a.

The noblemen Kiškas who emerged in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) during the reign of Kazimieras Jogailaitis and belonged to the elite families of the state until the death in 1654 of Jonušas, the last male descendant, has received virtually no attention of historians. The paper is not only aimed at getting the reader acquainted with the subject that has been little studied but also at assessing the status of the family within the state by analysing the marriages of the members of the first two generations of the Kiškas. Twelve males in the Kiška family lived to be of age from the days of the family’s patriarch Stanislovas Kiška (? - 1514) until the middle of the 17th e. Nine of them were given the most prestigious estates. A close look at the ranks they occupied allows to maintain that the Kiškas’ males retained the status of politicians of the highest rank from one generation to another. The status is also attested by the family's marital ties. Marriages most evidently show the social environment the family was connected with. Furthermore, marital unions give one an idea of the families with which friendly relationships were maintained and what political alliances they represented. The person who consolidated the family’s status, i.e. Stanislovas, Petras’s son, was married twice. Especially successful was his second marriage to the last descendant of the Montigirdas family Sofija, whose father, the vaivode of Trakai Petras Montigirdas, was one of the most influential dignitaries in Kazimieras’s milieu. It is difficult to say whether Montigirdas patronized his son-in-law, nevertheless one can guess that Kazimieras Jogailaitis’s attitude towards the latter was affected by the fact that the vaivode of Trakai gave him in marriage his only daughter, which convincingly proves that Montigirdas respected his son-in-law and held him in great esteem. Given that the young man did not come from a noble family, the esteem must have been based on his talents and intelligence. It was thanks to Stanislovas that the Kiškas became one of the elite families. He himself consolidated the status of the family and multiplied its possessions, which gave his children and grandchildren an opportunity for marrying into the most influential families of the GDL noblemen. At the end of Kazimieras’s reign and during the first years of Aleksandras’s reign, it was the descendants of Grand Duke Vytautas’s associates, i.c. the Monvydases, Goštautases, Radvilas, Kaesgailas, Zaberezinskises and Astikases, whose vote was decisive at the Pon? Council. Stanislovas I brought up two daughters and son Petras. The daughters married into the Radvila family and Petras espoused a daughter of Jadvyga Zaberezinskaitė and Youry Ilinich. Petras I left four oilspring, sons Stanislovas II, Petras II, Mikalojus I and daughter Sofija. Two of the sons continued the tradition of alliance with the Radvilas, Stanislovas II marrying Jonas Radvila’s daughter Ona, and Jurgis Radvila’s daughter Ona becoming the second wife of Petras II. The first wife of the latter came from a family which was no less noble, that of the Zabcrezinskis. The wives of Stanislovas’s third son Mikalojus also came from elite families, the first one being an offspring of the dukes Mstislavski- Zaslavski, and the second one a descendant of the Khodkcvič family. In terms of both, their wealth and social status, all the above families belonged to the elite of the GDL magnates, therefore it is safe to assume that the Kiška family enjoyed the same status.