History
State archives were begun in the 13th-century Kingdom of Lithuania. Diplomacy was greatly increased under the rule of Gediminas. During the various wars, floods, and city fires that followed, many official documents were lost. Some were impossible to trace, if these documents had not been duplicated or otherwise copied. A growing need to reproduce these documents later, and the mounting number of edicts, wills, court verdicts etc., determined the evolution of the Lithuanian Metrica.
The Lithuanian Metrica was stored in the Trakai Island Castle under the supervision of the Treasurer, until 1511. Afterwards the documents were transferred to Vilnius, and kept in what was referred to as the Lower Castle. The responsibility for safeguarding the Metrica there, was supervised by the State Chancellor. By 1569, when the regions of Podlaskie, Volhynia, Podolia and the Kiev were separated from Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and incorporated into Kingdom of Poland, the books which concerned these regions, were removed from the Lithuanian Metrica, and merged into the Polish Metrica. Due to the deterioration of the books, the State Grand Chancellor, Lew Sapieha, ordered the volumes of the Metrica to be recopied in 1594. The recopying process continued until 1607. The newly recopied books were inventoried, rechecked, and transferred to a separate building in Vilnius, with the older books remaining in the Castle of Vilnius.
Great parts of the Metrica were lost during the wars with Muscovy, and others were taken way by Swedish armies in 1656–1657. Only after the Treaty of Oliva, in 1660, did the Swedes return many books from the Metrica, but some of them were lost at sea, in the Baltic, during transport back to Lithuania.
The Metrica from Vilnius was taken to Warsaw in 1765. The books were bound, cataloged and integrated into the system that was in use, in Warsaw. According to an edict issued in 1793, the Lithuanian Metrica was to be transferred from Warsaw to Vilnius again. After the Partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Lithuanian Metrica was transferred to Russia as a war trophy and was kept in St. Petersburg. Russia gave several of the Lithuanian Metrica books to Prussia in 1799. Afterwards Prussia transferred these books to the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807. The remaining Lithuanian Metrica books in St. Petersburg were inventoried and taken to Moscow. The majority of the historical Lithuanian Metrica's books have been kept in Russia, and only a small fraction of them are in Lithuania and Poland today.
Read more about this topic: Lithuanian Metrica
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