Grand Duchy of Lithuania

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a European state that grew from a Baltic tribal union in the thirteenth century into one of the largest realms in Europe, traditionally founded under Mindaugas, who was crowned the first King of Lithuania in 1253 before the state's later rulers adopted the title of grand duke. Under grand dukes including Gediminas, Algirdas and especially Vytautas the Great in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the duchy expanded deep into the former lands of Kievan Rus, at its height stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and encompassing much of present-day Belarus and Ukraine alongside Lithuania itself. The duchy entered a personal union with the Kingdom of Poland through the 1386 marriage of Grand Duke Jogaila to the Polish queen Jadwiga, a partnership that deepened over the following two centuries and was formalized into a single state, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, by the Union of Lublin in 1569. The Grand Duchy retained a distinct legal and administrative identity within that Commonwealth until the Commonwealth's own final partition in 1795, when its territory was absorbed primarily into the Russian Empire.