'Olgerd was the most powerful of the sovereigns of Lithuania. The republic of Pskow, in 1346, and that of Nowogorod, in 1349, acknowledged him for their master. In 1363, the Tartars of Pérékop (Krimea,) became his vassals. On the east, embracing the cause of the duke of Twer, he came three times, in 1368, 1370, 1373, to break his lance against the ramparts of the city of Moscow; of that city where at a later day the great generals of Poland and of Lithuania, and at last, in 1812, the Gallo-Polono-Lithuanian lances were crossed in front of the superb Kremlin! Kiegstut powerfully seconded his brother in his conquests. It was under such auspices that Olgerd, descending to the tomb, left his brilliant inheritance to Jagellon, one of his thirteen sons. Jagellon, who ascended the grand-ducal throne in 1381, ceded it to his cousin Witold, in 1386, when he went to place upon his head the crown of the Piasts, to unite his hand to that of Hedwige, and to cement forever the glorious junction of Lithuania and Poland. In 1389, he gave the government of the duchy of Sévérie-Nowogorodien and the republic of Nowogorod-the-Great to his two brothers; while on the other side, his cousin Witold, being attacked in his new conquests by the Tartars, beat them, chased a part of them beyond the Don, and transported those who fell into his hands into the different countries of Lithuania, where, instead of reducing them to slavery, he gave them possessions, with the liberty of freely exercising their religious rights. It was the descendants of those Tartars who showed themselves such worthy children of their adopted country, at the epoch of the war of independence, in 1794, and in the campaign of 1812. In this manner Witold acquired the possession, not only of the Russian territories, delivered from the yoke of the Tartars by his grandfather and his uncle, but those which were held by the other small Trans-Borysthenian Czars. Turning then his victorious army to the north, he forced the northern republics, whose fidelity he suspected, to humble themselves before him, and recognize his unqualified supremacy. In fine, Poland and Lithuania arrived, at that epoch, to such a degree of power, that the dukes of Mazovia and Russia, the Czars of Moscow, Basile, that of Twer Borys, that of Riezan, Olegh, the little Czars of Pérékop and Volga, the Teutonic masters, the Prussians and Livonians, in fine, the emperor of Germany, Sigismond himself, accompanied by his wife, and several princes, Erik, king of Denmark and Sweden, as well as the ambassadors of the emperor of the East, Paleogogus, presented themselves to Wladislas-Jagellon at Luck, in Volhynia, and held there a general congress in 1428, in which they deliberated upon the war against the Ottomans; and at which the emperor of Germany attempted in vain, by means of intrigues, to throw some seeds of dissension between Jagellon and Witold. Witold died in 1430. Kasimir le Jagellon,