EDUCATIONAL TRAVELS OF LEW SAPIEHA AND HIS SONS TO THE UNIVERSITIES OF GERMANY, THE NETHERLANDS AND ITALY IN 1570–1630

Abstract

The article considers the features of educational travels of magnates of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to universities of Western Europe in the second half of the XVI – first half of the XVII century on the example of educational travels of Lew Sapieha, Jan Stanislav Sapieha, Krystof Mikalai Sapieha, Kazimir Lew Sapieha. The special attention is given to the features of their educational travels and their impact on further activities. A stable tradition of traveling of the representatives of the Sapieha family to European universities began with Lew Sapieha. The information about his education is very scant due to the lack of family archives of the second half of the XVI century. However, numerous epistolographic sources from the educational travels of his sons Jan Stanislav, Krystof Mikalai and Kazimir Lew Sapieh allow us to reconstruct their travels with great accuracy. The eldest son, Jan Stanislav, studied in Vilna, Braunsberg, Würzburg, Paris, Padua, traveled to the Holy Roman Empire and Italy, studied law, rhetoric, perfected the art of public speaking, studied languages. Krystof Mikalai and Kazimir Lew began their education at the Vilna Jesuit Academy, and in 1621 went on a travel, the main points of which were Munich, Ingolstadt, Leuven, Bologna and Padua. In addition, they spent a lot of time traveling around the Spanish Netherlands, where they visited military camps, watched the course of the Thirty Years’ War, met with Spanish aristocrats and military leaders. Letters of Lew Sapieha’s sons to their father, Lavrenty Kosmovsky, tutor Jan Stanislav, as well as brothers’ epistles to each other and some other letters were used to reconstruct their travel. This allowed not only to make a detailed travel itinerary for each of Lew Sapieha’s sons, but also allowed to trace the logic and features, disadvantages and advantages of each trip. And besides, it gave an opportunity to learn about the illnesses of Jan Stanislav and Krystof Mikalai, the great difficulties in communication between Western Europe and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the first half of the XVII century and ways to solve this issue.