Odisėjo lynas: Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystės kanclerio Leono Sapiegos tarnai ir jų organizacija paskutiniame XVI amžiaus dešimtmetyje

ENThe article raises two challenges. The first is to discuss the household survey of approach investigate noble social environment and to find out how this approach is superior to the conception of the patronage. The second challenge is to check the household approach by specific case study conditions. For this purpose, we selected a complex source – the Grand Duchy of Lithuania Chancellor Leon Sapieha's servants' payment register. A detailed study of the magnate household approach shows that by using it we can accurately describe relationships between the magnate and people of his environment, especially the separation of the magnate's servants from political clients. We used serial household documents – the magnate's book of income and expenses. A detailed Lithuania Chancellor Leon Sapieha's 1590–1598 household book survey shows the structure, organization, and internal interactions of different magnate household segments. This source also enables the reconstruction of the magnate's servants' serving conditions, career opportunities and the circumstances of service termination. Finally, the source allows to reconstruct the features of the magnate's "frames" policy. Smaller and more concrete outcomes of this study are as follows.We investigated in detail the payment registry of the servants for almost eight years. Leon Sapieha generally hired more than 200 people, but in the given period Sapieha had a little less than a hundred. Most of them were domestic servants (housemen) and chamber servants (komornicy), and only a dozen of them belonged to the retainers (sludzy obecny) category. A large part of the retainers were coopt from chamber servants. Typical early modern clients were only those few former retainers who remained in the master's environment in direct contacts with the magnate's household (stopped receiving regular salary from the magnate's treasury). So, in the last decade of the sixteenth century as Leon Sapieha's clients may be named Jan Dziewaltowski, Stefan Loweiko, Hrehory Terlecki, and maybe even one other person. [From the publication]