IN THE EARLY fifteenth century King Władysław II Jagiełło, followed by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, began to grant lands in Podillya. Since western Podillya constituted the part of the Ruthenian domain of the king after the rule of Spytek of Melsztyn and of Švitrigaila, the noblemen received landholdings on condition of personal service to the king. Vytautas continued the same policies when he received the whole of Podillya after the Battle of Grunwald in 1410 (see Chapter 7). But who wanted to take possession of new estates on the contested border? Who were those people? And what is known about them? Their names and nicknames, misspelled in Latin, and probable places of origin, used as surnames in most cases, are the only available data.

Historians have always been interested in the origin of one or another person mentioned in the documents. This area of interest, speculative enough, has been exploited by every national historical narrative in order to “discover its people” on a specific territory, aiming to confirm its right to a certain area. For this purpose, a modernized (adjusted to Ukrainian or Polish pronunciation) model of names and surnames is used. Under this line of reasoning, most of the people would be newcomers, or not from Podillya, or at least non-Ruthenians. In turn, that could serve as proof of the prevalence of a specific ethnic community among all the privileged groups in Podillya. Needless to say, peasants and most of the citizens were of local origin (except for Kamyanets), though nothing is said about the origin of peasants and only a few words can be said about citizens and their birthplaces. I will analyze the recipients of land titles in Podillya to find out where they came from in order to answer the question of their origins, and to either confirm or deny a hypothesis about the predominance of non-local noblemen in Podillya. In no way is ethnicity a determining factor. Through the analysis, I will demonstrate how a careless or incorrect modernization of the spelling of the names can distort the picture of the ethnic composition of the Podolian nobility in the first decades of the fifteenth century. Unfortunately, such misrepresentations, brought about by a Narodnik ideology, have been built into the grand narrative of Ukrainian historiography since the second half of the nineteenth century.