ABSTRACT
The claim that the Grand Duchy was an empire entails research questions about its beginning and end. On 6 July, contemporary Lithuanians celebrate the beginning of the Lithuanian state, commemorating the crowning of Mind-augas as the first and only king of Lithuania in 1253. After the fall of the Golden Horde, when several Tatar political entities fought one another for supremacy, their khans continued to consider themselves the suzerains of all of Eastern Europe. They treated the rulers of the Grand Duchy and Muscovy as merely the governors of lands under Tatar suzerainty. These rulers had to pay for the right to administer the "Tatar lands", otherwise the Tatars believed they could extract tributes themselves, by looting these lands and taking part of their populations captive. The Lithuanian state could not expand during the internal fighting in the years after the death of Mindaugas.
