In 1386, Yagello of Lithuania married Queen Jadwiga of Poland and was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church. Almost at once the spirit of Lithuanian rule began to change as men trained in the Roman Catholic faith came to high positions in the state. The result was shown in the lessening of Orthodox influence. As the decades passed, the influence of Poland grew and finally the Ukrainian provinces of Lithuania were definitely brought under Poland and the central Polish system. This brought with it an increase of Polish and Latin schools. Many of the leading nobles adapted themselves to the new regime, and since religion was the chief distinguishing criterion, most of them definitely became Roman Catholic, and commenced to speak Polish, to live in the Polish way and to adopt the manners of their social equals in Poland. All this could not fail to react badly upon the Ukrainian population, which was still devoutly Orthodox but which was rapidly being stripped of its nobility and its educated class. Thus the sixteenth century bade fair to see the definite extinction of Ukrainian hopes and aspirations and even existence. The Ukrainian population was rapidly being reduced to an inchoate mass of illiterate peasants and townspeople without an intelligentsia and even without any educated clergy. Yet these expectations were not fulfilled. In the same century there came a revival, at first small in scope and often deficient in method, but yet vitally important to the preservation of the national and cultural identity. This revival concerned itself with education. There spread through the Ukrainian lands a desire to create schools for the people to counter-balance the Polish schools. Since there was already pressure for a union of the Churches, which had won the support of several of the leading bishops, the new schools adopted a severely Orthodox point of view. Their leaders were convinced that a knowledge of the new learning could not fail to weaken the position of the Church. They did not realize that much of the new learning was itself the result of the contact between the scholars who had fled to the West after the fall of Constantinople and the traditional wisdom of the West. The education became purely religious with very little regard for secular subjects. At the same time, insofar as it was possible, the leaders sought to spread a knowledge of the older forms of the Church Slavonic and gave little heed to the attempts that were being made to adapt this language to the living speech of the people.