Gediminas
Grand Duke of Lithuania (1316-1341)
Gediminas (c. 1275 – December 1341) was Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1315 or 1316 until his death in 1341. Gediminas is traditionally considered the founder of Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania (see: Iron Wolf legend). During his reign, he brought under his rule lands stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. The Gediminids dynasty he founded and which is named after him came to rule over Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia.
Biography
Origin
Gediminas was born in about 1275. Because written sources of the era are scarce, Gediminas' ancestry, early life, and assumption of the title of Grand Duke in c. 1316 are obscure and continue to be the subject of scholarly debate. Various theories have claimed that Gediminas was either his predecessor Grand Duke Vytenis' son, his brother, his cousin, or his hostler. For several centuries only two versions of his origins circulated. Chronicles—written long after Gediminas' death by the Teutonic Knights, a long-standing enemy of Lithuania—claimed that Gediminas was a hostler to Vytenis; according to these chronicles, Gediminas killed his master and assumed the throne.
“Gediminas” enters the record as grand Duke of Lithuania (1316-1341). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gediminas, Grand and Duke can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Gediminas” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Gediminas, Grand and Duke provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q244852. VIAF identifies the subject as 244378682. The Library of Congress control number is n94017942. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1275, 1341, 1315 and 1316.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gediminas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.