Poland: A history

Poland: A history Adam Zamoyski A substantially revised and updated edition of the author's classic 1987 book, 'The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and their Culture', which has been out of print since 2001.No nation's history has been so distorted as that of Poland. In 1797 Russia, Prussia and Austria divided the country up among themselves, expunging Poland’s sovereignty from history, casting it as a backwater that needed civilising. But as Adam Zamoyski’s thrilling history shows, the country they had wiped off the map had been one of Europe’s largest and most varied in cultural and religious traditions, with one of the boldest constitutional experiments ever attempted. Its destruction initiated a series of struggles that culminated in the two world wars and the Cold War. Today, Poland has been restored to its rightful place as one of the most vigorous nations of Europe, and is perfectly captured in this full revision Adam Zamoyski's classic ‘The Polish Way’. POLAND A HISTORY ADAM ZAMOYSKI Copyright (#ulink_02be54dc-f636-572b-9ae4-3c7691618288) HarperPress An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) Published by HarperPress 2009 Copyright © Adam Zamoyski Ltd 2009 The Polish Way published by John Murray in 1987 Adam Zamoyski asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Cover shows detail from a parchment scroll of 1605, showing a member of the Husaria, the Polish winged cavalry A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publciation Source ISBN: 9780007282753 Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007322732 Version: 2017-04-25 Table of Contents Cover (#ude79d91c-b4ba-532d-8c15-6e4fbaa6b068) Title Page (#uaef1b316-2f44-5bea-9a35-03b155d3a644) Copyright (#u398dc9a9-f530-5e0f-9b6b-0c3d7def3a4f) MAPS (#ub1e8bd83-1b65-5f47-8675-5d2e6a3d8b4d) TABLES (#ue11da63c-b705-53bb-ad84-53cda6ec2179) NOTE ON POLISH PRONUNCIATION (#u608d6e56-70ee-564f-84da-396be2034666) PREFACE (#u6a1945ca-c193-5ff9-9f7d-bd42abb4452b) ONE: People, Land and Crown (#uf36d141e-5afe-5432-9b48-0c658d47c546) TWO: Between East and West (#u536cd0ed-73ce-558b-b55a-15c6c94927cf) THREE: The Jagiellon Experience (#u4c638513-9b47-5f1c-a007-d26752ac4ed1) FOUR: Religion and Politics (#u925b2d89-3e88-5264-9ad3-1695582508f2) FIVE: Kingdom and Commonwealth (#u2d0f815c-b591-502a-a28d-d032819e5ca4) SIX: The Reign of Erasmus (#uf6624e3c-6f46-5223-b60c-b3c41c17aff0) SEVEN: Democracy versus Dynasty (#u3d28323b-274c-5105-be0c-d1a77cae6883) EIGHT: Champions of God (#litres_trial_promo) NINE: A Biblical Flood (#litres_trial_promo) TEN: Morbus Comitialis (#litres_trial_promo) ELEVEN: The Reign of Anarchy (#litres_trial_promo) TWELVE: Renewal (#litres_trial_promo) THIRTEEN: Gentle Revolution (#litres_trial_promo) FOURTEEN: Armed Struggle (#litres_trial_promo) FIFTEEN: Insurgency (#litres_trial_promo) SIXTEEN: The Polish Question (#litres_trial_promo) SEVENTEEN: Captivity (#litres_trial_promo) EIGHTEEN: Nation-Building (#litres_trial_promo) NINETEEN: The Polish Republic (#litres_trial_promo) TWENTY: War (#litres_trial_promo) TWENTY-ONE: The Cost of Victory (#litres_trial_promo) TWENTY-TWO: Trial and Error (#litres_trial_promo) TWENTY-THREE: Papal Power (#litres_trial_promo) TWENTY-FOUR: The Third Republic (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) By The Same Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) MAPS (#ulink_873c54d4-9bb5-5639-ab7b-95d9d0784723) TABLES (#ulink_4845e2f6-193f-5dc8-8929-0ccb0dd45c14) NOTE ON POLISH PRONUNCIATION (#ulink_1420ad50-193a-524b-8c30-2105238fa297) Polish words may look complicated, but pronunciation is at least consistent. All vowels are simple and of even length, as in Italian, and their sound is best rendered by the English words ‘sum’ (a), ‘ten’ (e), ‘ease’ (i), ‘lot’ (o), ‘book’ (u), ‘sit’ (y). Most of the consonants behave in the same way as in English, except for c, which is pronounced ‘ts’; j, which is soft, as in ‘yes’; and w, which is equivalent to English v. As in German, some con—sonants are softened when they fall at the end of a word, and b, d, g, w, z become p, t, k, f, s, respectively. There are also a number of accented letters and combinations peculiar to Polish, of which the following is a rough list: ? = u, hence Krak?w is pronounced ‘krakooff ‘. ? = nasal a, hence s?d is pronounced ‘sont’. ? = nasal e, hence ??czyca is pronounced ‘wenchytsa’. ? = ch as in ‘cheese’. cz = ch as in ‘catch’. ch = guttural h as in ‘loch’. ? = English w, hence Boles?aw becomes ‘Boleswaf, ??dz ‘Wootj’. ? = soft n as in Spanish ‘ma?ana’. rz = French j as in ‘je’. ? = sh as in ‘sheer’. sz = sh as in ‘bush’. ?? = as rz (—?? is the accented capital). ? = A similar sound, but sharper as in French ‘gigot’. The stress in Polish is consistent, and always falls on the pen—ultimate syllable. PREFACE (#ulink_0c458734-2087-5736-b389-d62c24e633dc) The idea that a historian should radically alter his view of the past over the space of a couple of decades is, on the face of it, preposterous. But when I reread my history of Poland, The Polish Way, first published in 1987, which I meant to revise and update for a new edition, I became convinced of the contrary. History did not, as some have argued, come to an end in the intervening two decades, but they have completely changed the perspective. When I sat down to write that book, few people in western Europe, let alone further afield, had any idea of where Poland lay, and fewer still had any sense of its having a past worth dwelling on. Given that history is made up of an intricate interaction of land, people and culture, Poland presented unique problems. How was the historian to approach a country whose territory had expanded and contracted, shifted and vanished so dramatically, which currently existed as an almost random compromise resulting from the Second World War, and which lay within the imperial frontiers of another power? How was he to treat a people which, from ethnic, cultural and religious diversity had been purged by genocide and ethnic cleansing into a homogeneous society? How to represent a culture which had been largely obliterated, whose remains survived only underground or in exile? Matters were made no easier by the fact that the entire geo—political space in which Poland existed was also in an unnatural state of suspension, with Germany divided, Russia a bureaucratic totalitarian monstrosity, and the areas inhabited by the Lithuanians, Belorussians and Ukrainians a kind of limbo. Although the election of a Pole, Karol Wojty?a, to the Holy See as Pope John Paul II, the dramatic rise of Solidarno?? and a number of books and articles published in the West, along with increased travel, had recently brought Poland into the consciousness of greater numbers of people, it was not until the collapse of the Soviet project in 1989 that the situation began to alter significantly. It was only then that Poland and the other countries of the region came back to life as political entities. And that fundamentally altered the way in which they are perceived. The concurrent process of globalisation and the huge shifts in economic and military power taking place around the world have also made it easier for the historian to represent a foreign country to his readers. The fact that what were then viewed as ‘developing countries’ (with all the condescension that term implied) are now emerging as the major players of the future has radically altered attitudes in the hitherto dominant nations of the West. Put simply, the historian has less to explain and fewer prejudices to break down. But the real significance of the events of 1989 only began to make itself felt later. When I was writing my book, Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain. Crossing it was an awesome and bizarre experience for anyone brought up in the West—the coils of barbed wire, the watchtowers, the machine guns aimed at the traveller and the ubiquitous guards with their Alsatian dogs were richly redolent of Nazi concentration camp and Soviet gulag. Not surprisingly, since this absurd barrier was one of the last surviving vestiges of a long historical process that had reached its apogee in the twin abominations of Soviet communism and German fascism. Only two hundred years before, the whole area between the Rhine and the Dnieper had been inhabited by a variety of peoples with wildly differing cultural, religious and political affiliations, organised into an equally variegated miscellany of empires, commonwealths, kingdoms, duchies, principalities, republics, bishoprics, city states, baronies and lesser sovereignties. In a process that began with the eighteenth-century partitions of Poland, these polities had been subjugated and then reorganised into a small number of highly competitive states and the peoples inhabiting them into largely fictitious nations which saw their survival in Darwinian terms. This initiated a struggle that culminated in the two world wars and the Cold War. If the Iron Curtain disfigured Europe physically, the process which had led up to it had distorted history even more fundamentally. No history more so than that of Poland, which was the first and greatest casualty of the process. Two years after Russia, Prussia and Austria had divided the country up among themselves, on 26 January 1797 they signed a convention containing a secret article which stressed the absolute ‘necessity of abolishing everything which might recall the existence of a Polish kingdom in face of the performed annihilation of this political body’. In this spirit, the Prussians melted down the Polish crown jewels, the Austrians turned royal palaces into barracks, and the Russians grabbed everything they could lay their hands on and shipped it out, particularly documents. All three rewrote history to give the impression that Poland had never been a fully sovereign state, only a backwater which needed civilising. Throughout the nineteenth century the Poles who struggled to reverse this process and recover their independence were generally viewed in the West as troublemakers impeding the orderly march of progress. In the twentieth century, by contrast, when they once again fell victim, to the Soviet Union, they came to be seen as reactionary and backward because of their resilience to supposedly progressive doctrines such as communism. Looking back on the way history was written in the twentieth century, particularly in its middle decades, one cannot avoid being struck by how deeply politicised it was. Not only did nationalism or dominant state orthodoxy select and distort facts; various interpretations of Marxist theory reinvented them to suit visions of the future. Not surprisingly, considering the country’s position at the geographical and ideological interface of such disputes, Poland’s past received the full treatment. And given that it was a battleground for political and nationalist passions of great intensity, it was impossible, even for supposedly uncommitted historians in faraway universities, to write about it entirely dispassionately. That did not change until the disintegration of the Soviet experiment robbed the most vociferous combatants of their arguments. What was not immediately apparent even at that point was that the disintegration of the Soviet Union held a deeper significance: it marked the end of the era of state-based Darwinism that had begun with the rise of Prussia in the early eighteenth century (arguably even earlier). This model had been discredited by the Great War and was abandoned by most of Europe after 1945, as one country after another divested itself of its national pretensions and imperial attributes to pool its sovereignty in the interests of a united Europe. But the Soviet Union remained wedded to the old mindset of paranoid nationalist/ideological struggle for dominance. Its implosion released the nations of East Central Europe from this, and although large sections of society within those nations, particularly in the Balkans, are still affected by it (for understandable historical reasons), most of the inhabitants of the area have been able to, or even been obliged to, take an entirely fresh view of the past. This mirrors an analogous process that has been taking place in Western societies. While most young Britons would probably still enjoy watching a 1940s war film glorifying British pluck and derring-do, the overwhelming majority might as well, for all their empathy, be watching an Arthurian romance or a piece of science fiction, and the concept of laying down their lives for their country is largely alien to them. The same is even more true of the French and Germans, while to young Italians the very myths of the Risorgimento, the founding faith of their country, now appear laughable. The majority of the population of the European Union now thinks in terms of societies rather than nations. Histories written a few decades ago now appear strangely obsessed with political achievements, dominions established, battles won—in essence, with national success. They can seem embarrassingly patronising on the subject of all those who did not win out according to the rules of the day. Those rules have changed, and this is particularly welcome to the historian of Poland. In the early modern period, the Poles failed spectacularly to build an efficient centralised state structure and they paid the price, being swallowed up by their more successful neighbours. The history of Poland has therefore, up until now, been written as that of a failed state. Like some distorting lens or filter, that failure coloured and deformed the historian’s view of the whole of Polish history. He is now no longer, as he was only a couple of decades ago, writing the history of an enslaved and to all intents and purposes non-existent country. There is a great difference between writing up a bankrupt business and writing up one that has been through hard times and turned the corner. He is no longer writing the history of a state that failed, but of a society that created a social and political civilisation of its own, one which was occluded by the success of a rival model (now utterly discredited) but whose ideals are close to those the world values today. All this convinced me that I could not just brush up and update The Polish Way. But since I still stand by that book, as far as it goes, and indeed its basic structure, I did not see any point in beginning a new history of Poland from scratch, and used that earlier book as the basis for this one. At the same time, I have so thoroughly reworked the text, removed so much of the old and added so much that is new, that I had no qualms about submitting it under a new title. Some readers may be surprised to find no references to sources in the text. This is an essay rather than a textbook. It is based on wellknown and undisputed facts, and is not in any sense meant to break new ground. I therefore saw no reason to clutter the text with numbers, which many readers find off-putting. I owe a debt to Mi?osz Zieli?ski, who helped me research the recent past, and to Jakub Borawski, who helped me place it in perspective. I should like to thank my editors Richard Johnson, who gave me invaluable support when I began to entertain doubts about the venture, Arabella Pike, who took the project over with enthusiasm, and Robert Lacey, whose editorial skills are nonpareil. I must also thank Shervie Price for reading the text and making useful suggestions, and my wife Emma for her sensible comments and her love. Adam ZamoyskiLondon, 2009 ONE People, Land and Crown (#ulink_20cc64dd-1db7-5df7-9779-4504004ba1a3) In the Middle Ages, when people favoured simple explanations, Polish folklore had it that the German nation had been deposited on this earth through the rectum of Pontius Pilate. Sadly, the Polish nation boasts no such convenient and satisfying founding myth, and its origins were something of a mystery even to its neighbours. While most of Europe evolved from the Dark Ages in mutual interaction, with Celtic monks from Ireland carrying the religion of Rome to Germany, and Vikings from Scandinavia linking England and France with Sicily and the Arab world or sailing down the rivers of Russia to Kiev and Constantinople, the area that is now Poland existed in a vacuum. Along with eastern Germany, Bohemia and Slovakia, it had been settled by a number of Slav peoples. Roman merchants who had come from the south in the first century in search of amber, the ‘gold of the north’, had recorded that they were unwarlike and agricultural, living in a state of ‘rural democracy’. The most numerous of these peoples even took their name from their trade, being known as ‘the people of the fields’, Polanie in their language. There is some evidence that in the sixth century the area was overrun or partially settled by Sarmatians, a warrior people from the Black Sea Steppe, who may have provided a new ruling class, or perhaps only a military caste for the Polanie. Be that as it may, the Polanie were cushioned from the outside world by other Slav peoples. To the north, the Pomeranians (Pomorzanie, or people of the seaboard) and others were linked by Viking trade with much of Europe and the Arab world. To the south, the Vislanie of the upper Vistula were alternately attacked and evangelised by Christian Moravians. To the west, the Lusatians and the Slenzania of Silesia warred and traded with the Germans and Saxons. Sheltered by this buffer zone, the Polanie remained undisturbed throughout the eighth and ninth centuries. The Polanie shared a common language with the other western Slavs which differed slightly from that spoken by the Bohemians or Czechs to the south-west and that of the eastern Slavs of Rus. They also shared a common religion based on much the same pantheon as other Indo-European cults, worshipped through objects in nature—trees, rivers, stones—in which they were held to dwell, and less so in the shape of idols, or in circles and temples. As practised by the Polanie, this religion was neither organised nor hierarchical, and was not a politically unifying force. What set the Polanie apart from their sister peoples were their rulers, the Piast dynasty established in Gniezno at some time during the ninth century. Throughout the second half of the ninth century and the beginning of the tenth, these princes gradually extended their sway over neighbouring peoples. Most of these were under some kind of pressure from the outside world, which made it easier for the Piast princes to assume control, and by the middle of the tenth century they reigned over a considerable area. This dominion was described in the first written source of any worth, by Ibrahim Ibn Yaqub, a Jewish traveller from Spain, who noted that the ruler, Prince Mieszko, had imposed a relatively sophisticated fiscal system, and exercised control through a network of castles and a standing army of 3,000 horsemen. It was these troops and castles that Otto I, King of the Germans, encountered in the year 955. Otto had won a series of victories over his eastern neighbours and fortified his boundaries with a string of bastion-provinces known as marches. He then crossed the Elbe. As he advanced eastward, routing small bands of Slav warriors on the way, he eventually came up against something resembling an army and a system of defences. For the Polanie, the period of isolation had come to an end, and Prince Mieszko could no longer ignore the outside world. He could even less afford to do so after 962, when Otto was crowned Roman Emperor by the Pope. This was a largely symbolic act, but one charged with significance, and Mieszko, who was aware of the political and cultural benefits Christianity had brought his Czech neighbours of Bohemia, appreciated this. Only by adopting Christianity himself would he be able to avoid war with the Emperor, and at the same time provide himself with a useful political instrument. In 965 he sought the approval of Otto and married the Bohemian Princess Dobrava. The following year, 966, Mieszko and his court were baptised. The Duchy of Polonia became part of Christendom. Mieszko nevertheless continued to pursue his own aims, even where they conflicted with those of the Empire. One of these was to gain control of as much of the Baltic coast as possible. He invaded Pomerania, but this led to confrontation with the Margrave of the German northern march, who was attempting to conquer the area for the Empire. Mieszko defeated him at Cedynia in 972 and reached the mouth of the Oder in 976. The Margrave called on his new master Otto II for assistance, and the latter mounted an expedition against the Poles. Mieszko defeated him too in 979, and became master of the whole of Pomerania. He con—tinued to advance along the coast until he joined up with the Danes, who had been extending their dominion eastward. He ensured good relations with his new neighbours by giving his daughter ?wi?tos?awa in marriage to King Eric of Sweden and Denmark (after Eric’s death, she would marry Swein Forkbeard, King of Denmark, and bear him a son, Canute, who visited Poland in 1014 to collect a force of three hundred horsemen who would help him reconquer England). The first ruler of Christian Poland was a remarkable man. Consistently successful in war, Mieszko did not neglect diplomacy, involving powers as distant as the Moorish Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain in his schemes. His last enterprise was to invade and absorb the lands of the Slenzanie. There in 992 he drew up a document, Dagome Iudex, laying down the boundaries of his realm, which he dedicated to St Peter and placed under the protection of the Pope. The Pope was to prove immensely useful to Mieszko’s son and successor, Boles?aw the Brave, who carried on his work with flair. In 996 a monk called Adalbertus (originally Vojteh, a Bohemian prince) appeared at Boles?aw’s court. As he had been sent by Pope Sylvester I on a mission to evangelise the Prussians, a non-Slavic people inhabiting the Baltic seaboard to the east of the mouth of the Vistula, Boles?aw received him with due honours before sending him on his way. The Prussians made short work of putting the missionary to death. On hearing the news, Boles?aw sent to Prussia and bought the remains of the monk for, allegedly, their weight in gold. He then laid them to rest in the cathedral at Gniezno. When Pope Sylvester heard of this, in 999, he canonised Adalbertus. He also took the momentous step of elevating Gniezno to the level of an archbishopric, and creating new bishoprics at Wroc?aw, Ko?obrzeg and Krak?w. This effectively created a Polish province of the Church, independent of its original tutelary German diocese of Magdeburg. It also strengthened the Polish state, as ecclesiastical networks were prime instruments of communication and control. In Poland, the first parishes were established beside castles which were centres of royal administration, a connection between religious and temporal power which is enshrined in the etymology of the Polish word for ‘church’—ko?ci??, which derives from the Latin castellum. The new Emperor Otto III had been a friend of Adalbertus, as well as of Pope Sylvester, and in the year 1000 he came on a pilgrimage to the saint’s shrine at Gniezno. His visit is described by the chronicler Gallus, who wrote: Boles?aw received him with such honour and magnificence as befitted a King, a Roman Emperor and a distinguished guest. For the arrival of the Emperor he prepared a wonderful sight; he placed many companies of knights of every sort, and then his dignitaries, in ranks, every different company set apart by the colours of its clothes. And this was no cheap spangle or any old stuff, but the most costly things that can be found anywhere on earth. For in Boles?aw’s day every knight and every lady of the court wore not linen or woollen cloth, but coats of costly weave, while furs, even if they were very expensive and quite new, were not worn at his court unless lined with fine stuff and trimmed with gold tassels. For gold in his time was as common as silver is now, silver was as cheap as straw. Seeing his glory, his power and his riches, the Roman Emperor cried out in admiration: ‘By the crown of my Empire! What I see far exceeds what I have heard!’ And taking counsel with his magnates, he added, before all those present: ‘It is not fit that such a man should be titled a prince or count, as though he were just a great lord, but he should be elevated with all pomp to a throne and crowned with a crown.’ Taking the Imperial diadem from his own brow, he placed it on the head of Boles?aw as a sign of union and friendship, and for an ensign of state he gave him a nail from the Holy Cross and the lance of Saint Maurice, in return for which Boles?aw gave him the arm of Saint Adalbertus. And they felt such love on that day that the Emperor named him brother and associate in the Empire, and called him the friend and ally of the Roman nation… Otto had come not only to pray at the tomb of his saintly friend. He needed to assess Poland’s strength and establish its status within the Holy Roman Empire. He was impressed by what he saw, and decided the country must be treated not as a tributary duchy, but as an independent kingdom, alongside Germany and Italy. As soon as Otto was succeeded by the less exalted Henry II this independence came under threat. Neither German nor Bohemian raison d’?tat accommodated the idea of a strong Polish state, and a new German offensive was launched, supported by Bohemia on the southern flank, and some pagan Slavs in the north. Boles?aw defeated Henry in battle. He then brought diplomatic pressure to bear on Bohemia by a timely alliance with the Hungarians, and on Henry himself by arranging a dynastic alliance with the Palatine of Lorraine. Pressed from all sides, Henry was obliged, at the Treaty of Bautzen (1018), to cede to Poland not only the disputed territory along the Elbe, but the whole of Moravia as well. Like his father, Boles?aw was not a man to rest on his laurels, and when an opportunity for action arose, he took it. He had married his daughter to Prince Svatopolk, ruler of the Principality of Rus. When Svatopolk was ousted by rebellion from his capital in Kiev, Boles?aw intervened on his son-in-law’s behalf. He took the opportunity of annexing a slice of land separating his own dominions from those of Kiev, the area between the rivers Bug and San, which rounded off his own state in the east. The Polish realm was now large by any standards, and its sovereign status seemed beyond doubt. To stress this, in the last year of his life, 1025, Boles?aw had himself crowned King of Poland in Gniezno Cathedral. But his death revealed that the empirebuilding policies of Mieszko and Boles?aw had outstripped the means of the nascent state, which could not digest their conquests at this rate. At the same time, strong regionalist tendencies made themselves felt with the accession of Boles?aw’s son Mieszko II. While he attempted to hold together his dominions, jealous brothers obtained the support of Kiev by promising to cede the lands between the Bug and San rivers, and that of the Empire by offering to give back areas annexed by Boles?aw. They had little difficulty in toppling Mieszko, and he had to flee the country in 1031. The unfortunate man was then set upon by some Bohemian knights who, according to the Polish chronicler, ‘used leather thongs to crush his genitalia in such a way that he would never sire again’. Although he managed to return and regain his throne, Mieszko died in 1034, leaving the country divided. His son, Kazimierz I, was hardly more successful, and he too had to flee when civil war broke out. Duke Bretislav of Bohemia took advantage of this to invade. He seized Gniezno, whence he removed not only the attributes of the Polish crown, but also the body of St Adalbertus (Wojciech in Polish), which put in jeopardy the very survival of Poland as an independent unit. At a moment when boundaries were theoretical, cultural distinctions imperceptible and concepts of nationhood in their infancy, the first Czech chronicler, Cosmas of Prague, and his Polish contemporary the monk Gallus, both saw the other nation as the worst enemy of his own. This raises the question of what we mean by terms such as ‘Poland’ at this point in history, let alone by ‘Poles’, ‘Germans’ and ‘Czechs’. Frontiers, such as they were, were fluid, changing each time one ruler or another asserted his rights by force. Ethnic distinctions did not impose any deeper loyalty, and Germans fought amongst themselves more often than they fought Slavs, while the Slavs were constantly at war with each other. Nor were they well defined. When the Germans occupied the lands up to the Oder, they absorbed so much Slav blood that the population of what would become Brandenburg, the cradle of German racial myths, was heavily mixed. When the area later known as Mecklenburg became part of the German world, the Slav ruling classes became the German aristocracy. On the other hand, the rulers of Poland repeatedly intermarried with Germans. Fig. 1 The early Piast Kings. (Only the more important members of the dynasty are shown. Dates given are those of reigns. The family tree continues on pages 24-5.) The underlying conflict that ranged the Poles against Bohemia and the Empire was over the question of Poland’s position in the Christian world. For a century and a half after Otto III had sanctioned Boles?aw the Brave’s royal ambitions, Poland’s status remained uncertain, with the Empire repeatedly trying to place it in the position of a vassal state, and Poland struggling to preserve its sovereignty. The ebb and flow of this struggle is reflected in the way Polish monarchs are variously referred to as dux, princeps or rex in contemporary Western sources. In spite of its own internal dissensions and wars, the Empire was the theoretical arbiter on such questions. The Polish monarch could strengthen his position by building up his own power, by seeking the support of other countries and by alliance with the Pope against the Emperor. The problems involved are clearly illustrated by the hundred years after the death of Kazimierz I in 1058. After regaining his throne in 1039, Kazimierz had made Krak?w his capital. Gniezno, the centre of Wielkopolska (Greater Poland), the land of the Polanie, needed a strong boundary along the Oder and Polish domination of Pomerania in the north and Silesia in the south. Krak?w, the capital of Ma?opolska (Lesser Poland), was likely to be more affected by what happened in Kiev than what was going on in Pomerania. Both Kazimierz, who was married to the sister of the Prince of Kiev, and his son Boles?aw II, the Bold, who also married a member of that royal house, had turned their eyes to the east and Boles?aw occupied Kiev twice on his uncle’s behalf. At the same time, Hungary was emerging as an important factor in Polish affairs. It was an obvious ally against both Bohemia and the Empire. It was also an element in a great web of papal diplomacy aimed against the Empire, stretching from Poland to Spain. One of the benefits of joining this alliance was that the Pope granted Boles?aw a royal crown, with which the latter crowned himself in 1076. The fiery king’s friendship with the Papacy came to grief only three years after this event. Less than a century after his namesake had made such mileage out of a saint, Boles?aw lost his throne over one. A number of magnates, including Stanis?aw, Bishop of Krak?w, had started to plot against him. When Boles?aw uncovered the conspiracy he reacted with violence, putting to death several of the conspirators, including the Bishop. This aroused widespread indignation, and the unfortunate King was obliged to abandon his throne to his brother W?adys?aw Herman. The killing of the Bishop (who would be canonised in 1258) undermined the prestige of the Polish dynasty, and in 1085 the Emperor Henry IV allowed the Duke of Bohemia to crown himself King of Bohemia and Poland. Although this was a purely symbolic act, it was an affront to W?adys?aw. At home, W?adys?aw was unable to curb the rising power of local lords, who stipulated that Poland should be divided between his two sons at his death. But when this came, in 1102, the younger son, Boles?aw the Wrymouth, drove his brother out of the country. As his name suggests, he was an ugly man, but he was extremely capable, and quickly earned the respect of his subjects, in spite of his determination to rule with a strong arm. He was aided in this by his military prowess. In 1109 he won a victory over the Emperor and the Duke of Bohemia at the Battle of Psie Pole near Wroc?aw, forcing them to renounce their claims to Polish territory. He also invaded Pomerania, where a gradual German incursion had over the years weakened Polish influence. He recaptured the area up to and well beyond the Oder, as far as the island of R?gen. The last years of his reign brought defeat during expeditions in support of his Hungarian allies, provoking renewed Bohemian invasions. A group of nobles took advantage of the situation, forcing Boles?aw to make a political testament which carved Poland up into duchies. Each of his five sons was to rule over one of these. Pomerania, whose dukes were closely related to but not of the main Piast line, was given equal status. The eldest son, W?adys?aw, was to reign in the small but theoretically paramount duchy of Krak?w as well as his own and exert suzerainty over the others. Thus when Boles?aw the Wrymouth died in 1138, the country embarked on a political experiment designed to compromise between regionalist tendencies and an underlying sense of kinship and political unity. Ironically, considering the frequent interruptions in the succession and the consequent fragmentation of the realm, this sense of unity was based primarily on the Piast dynasty. They had established over eighty castle-towns by the end of the eleventh century and endowed market towns with royal charters granting rights and protection. They encouraged the replacement of barter with their own coinage, and provided the security necessary for the development of international trade routes through the country. Cities such as Krak?w, which became the capital in 1040, Sandomierz, Kalisz, Wroc?aw, Pozna? and P?ock flourished. Another unifying element was the Church, which was instrumental in the spread of new technologies and of the Romanesque style in architecture. It was also central to the spread of culture and education, providing as it did technical expertise, administration and schooling for would-be priests and young noblemen. The arrival of the Benedictines, whose monastery at Tyniec on the Vistula dates from the second half of the eleventh century, and later of the Premonstratentian and Cistercian orders, added impetus to this process. Most of the cathedrals had schools attached to them, and through the institution of the Church it was possible for Polish students to travel to other counties in search of learning. A local Latin chanson de geste made its appearance, and between 1112 and 1116 the first Polish chronicle was written in Krak?w by Gallus, probably a Benedictine monk from Provence. A distinction must be drawn between the great impact of the Church’s educational and even political activities, and the con—siderably lesser one it produced at the strictly religious level. Pagan cults survived the official conversion of the country in 966, and the next two centuries witnessed several major revivals, during which churches were burnt and priests put to death. The pagan survivals were particularly strong in areas such as Pomerania, which maintained a measure of autonomy in the face of pressure to submit to either Polish or Imperial overlordship. The Church could do little about this in the face of a general lack of zeal, which is well illustrated by the Polish response to Rome’s summons to the Crusades. Apart from Prince Henryk of Sandomierz, few heeded it. Duke Leszek the White explained in a long letter to the Pope that neither he nor any self-respecting Polish knight could be induced to go to the Holy Land, where, they had been informed, there was no wine, mead, or even beer to be had. There were other reasons for staying at home, since there were troublesome pagans on Poland’s own frontiers in the shape of the Prussians and Lithuanians. But little was being done to convert them, and this lack of zeal was characteristic. A major motive propelling European knights across the seas to fight crusades in Palestine and the Baltic (and settlers to follow them) was the population explosion of the Middle Ages which produced overcrowding in some areas. The far from populous Poland felt no such need for expansion, and her rulers welcomed the immigration of Jews, Bohemians and Germans who provided useful services. The realm continued to fragment after the death of Boles?aw the Wrymouth in 1138 had transformed it into five duchies. The eldest of his sons, W?adys?aw, made an attempt at reuniting it from his position as ruler of Krak?w, but he came up against the resistance not only of his brothers but of most of the local lords as well. Over the next hundred years successive dukes reigning in Krak?w proved less and less able to enact the formal suzerainty which went with the position, and eventually abandoned the attempt altogether. The various branches of the royal family established local dynasties, in some cases subdividing the original five duchies of Wielkopolska, Mazovia-Kujavia, Ma?opolska, Sandomierz and Silesia into smaller units in order to accommodate their offspring. There was more to such fragmentation than sibling rivalry. Regional lords and the larger towns yearned for autonomy, and the trend towards devolution went hand in hand with a demand for wider power-sharing. W?adys?aw of Wielkopolska, also known as Spindleshanks on account of his bony legs, made a valiant attempt to reassert his authority as Duke of Krak?w, but powerful barons forced him to grant them substantial prerogatives by the Privilege of Cienia in 1228, thirteen years after a similar document, the Magna Carta, had been extorted from a king of England. There was nevertheless a marked difference between the barons of England and the magnates of Poland. The power of an English or French lord at this time was held from the crown and fitted into a system of vassalage. This feudal system was never adopted in Poland, except with respect to some nobles who had migrated from western Europe. This set Polish society apart from the rest of the Continent in fundamental ways. The highest estate were the gentry, the szlachta, who inherited both status and land. They were obliged to perform military service for the king and to submit to his tribunals, but they were the independent magistrates over their own lands. They upheld the customary laws of the country, the Ius Polonicum, based entirely on precedent, and resisted attempts at the imposition of foreign legal practices by the crown. Beneath the szlachta were a number of estates, including the w?odyki, who were knights without noble status, and the panosze, who formed a kind of yeoman class. The peasants were mostly free and able to rise to a higher status. While the land they tilled belonged to the sovereign, they enjoyed defined rights. A small number were enserfed, but these gained greater personal freedom during the first half of the thirteenth century, and were not generally tied to the land as in western Europe. The adoption of the three-field system at the beginning of the thirteenth century and the agrarian boom it brought about differentiated between those who had land and those who did not. Those who did grew richer, those who did not were revealed to have nothing to offer except their labour. Thus while they gained greater personal freedom and legal protection, the poorer peasants were caught up in the mesh of economic bondage. The cities were, literally, a law unto themselves. Most of them had been either founded by or endowed with special charters which gave them a measure of autonomy. As they grew, they attracted foreigners—Germans, Italians, Walloons, Flemings and Jews—whose presence served to increase this independence. The Germans imported with them the Ius Teutonicum, which was first adopted for Silesian towns in 1211, and subsequently, in the modified form of ‘Magdeburg Law’, for others all over Poland. These laws, which regulated criminal and civic offences and all trade practices, meant that the area within a city’s walls was both administratively and legislatively in another country from that lying without. The citydwellers evolved as a separate class having nothing in common with the others. The same was true of the growing Jewish community, which was granted a royal charter by Boles?aw the Pious in 1264, the Statute of Kalisz. This recognised all Jews as servi camerae (servants of the treasury) and afforded them royal protection. It was the first of a number of such privileges which were to turn them into a nation within a nation. Since there was no framework of vassalage there were no natural channels for the exercise of central authority. Royal control therefore depended not on a local vassal as elsewhere in Europe, but on a functionary appointed by the king. He was known by his function, and his title of Castellan (Kasztelan) derived from the royal castle from which he exercised judicial, administrative and military authority on the king’s behalf. There were over a hundred of these castellans administering the Polish lands by 1250, but their importance waned along with central authority when the country was divided. In terms of power, they began to be superseded by the ministers of the individual dukes, the Palatines (Wojewoda). This divergence from European norms is significant. Unlike Bohemia, which had faced similar challenges and choices, Poland had not been fully absorbed into the framework of European states. One consequence of this was that it remained more backward. But it maintained a greater degree of independence. And while it was divided into duchies it remained more uniform and cohesive as a society than many others, because it was not subjected to the mixed overlordships that placed large tracts of geographical France under the sovereignty of the king of England, areas of Germany under that of the French dynasty, or Italy at the mercy of a succession of Norman, French and German warlords. It was probably this that ensured the survival of Poland as a political unit. TWO Between East and West (#ulink_e7e20746-70d3-5ba8-8411-801812a5c95c) In 1241 the horde of the legendary Genghis Khan, now commanded by his grandson Batu, broke over eastern Europe in a great wave. It overran and put to fire and sword the principalities of southern Russia and then divided into two. The larger force swept into Hungary, the other ravaged Poland. The knighthood of Ma?opolska gathered to face it at Chmielnik, but were swamped and massacred. The Duke of Krak?w, Boles?aw the Chaste, fled south to Moravia. The Tatars sacked Krak?w, then rode on westwards into Silesia. Here Duke Henryk the Pious had massed all his own forces, as well as those of Wielkopolska, a contingent of foreign knights, and even the miners from his goldmines of Z?otoryja. On 8 April 1241 he led them out of the city of Legnica to face the oncoming Tatars. His forces were defeated and Duke Henryk himself was hacked to pieces. Happily for western Europe, the Tatars veered south to rejoin their brothers in Hungary and there news reached them of the death of their Khan Ugedey. They abandoned their westward advance and rode back whence they had come. Although they never again attempted a conquest of Europe, they would keep the whole of Russia under their yoke for the next three centuries and continued to harass Poland. In 1259 they sacked Lublin, Sandomierz, Bytom and Krak?w. They returned in 1287, wreaking similar devastation. The horror of these raids was vividly captured in chronicle, legend and song, and is kept alive to this day in the hourly trumpet-call from the tower of St Mary’s Church in Krak?w, which breaks off in the middle to commemorate the Tatar arrow that cut short the medieval trumpeter’s call. And it established the barbaric eastern infidel as a bogeyman in the Polish political mind. The Tatar incursions showed up the vulnerability of a country divided. Although there was a community of interest, there had been no coordination of action, and regional militias were defeated one by one. Just as the Tatar threat died away, this vulnerability was beginning to be demonstrated on the other side of the country, where the other great bogeyman of modern Polish history was born, swaddled in steel marked with the black cross. At a time when Poland had already been a Christian state for two hundred years, much of the southern and eastern Baltic coastline was still inhabited by pagans and was the scene of a fierce struggle carried on by Denmark, the Scandinavian kingdoms, Brandenburg and the Polish Dukes of Gda?sk-Pomerania and of Mazovia. Denmark, Brandenburg and other German princes vied with each other to conquer the area which would be known as Mecklenburg, with its valuable port of Liubice (L?beck). Further east, where the Baltic coast curves northwards, the Danes and Scandinavians were making inroads into the lands of the Lithuanians, the Latvians, Lettigalians and Semigalians, and the Curonians. In between, the Poles battled against the Prussians, another Baltic people. The motives were the desire for land and trade, thinly disguised as missionary by local bishops who could not afford to have the Church excluded. This changed when St Bernard of Clairvaux started preaching the crusade all over Europe. It was he who persuaded Pope Alexander III to use north European crusaders in northern Europe rather than the Middle East, and to issue, in 1171, a bull granting the same dispensations and indulgences to those who fought against the heathen Slavs or Prussians as to those fighting the Saracens. The advantage of a crusade was that any local duke who launched what was in effect a private war against his enemies could, by making an arrangement with his bishop, recruit foreign knights who would come and fight for him as unpaid soldiers. And the fruits of this crusade whetted the appetites of Danes, Poles and Germans alike. Although the first northern crusade was a failure, the heathen Slavs in Western Pomerania were gradually subjugated by the Germans and the Danes over the next fifty years. Throughout the early 1200s the Dukes of Mazovia made inroads into Prussia, but this only provoked counter-raids from the Prussians. A methodical military takeover of the area was needed, and the only armies which could take up such a challenge were the military orders, the most famous of which, the Templars and Hospitallers, had proved their efficacy in Palestine. The Bishop of Riga had, in 1202, formed the Knighthood of Christ, better known as the Sword Brothers, to help him conquer and evangel—ise the Latvians. With the approval of Duke Konrad of Mazovia, the Bishop of Prussia followed suit by founding Christ’s Knights of Dobrzyn as the regular army of the Polish ‘mission’ to Prussia. But this was too small to cope with the task. A more radical solution was called for, and so, in 1226, Konrad of Mazovia took a step whose consequences for Poland and for Europe were to be incalculable. He invited the Teutonic Order of the Hospital of St Mary in Jerusalem, known as the Teutonic Knights, to establish a commandery at Che?mno and help him con—quer Prussia. The Teutonic Knights, founded at Acre in Palestine on the model of the Templars, were attracted by the idea of a mission nearer home. They thought they had found one in Hungary, where they were given the task of holding the Tatars at bay, but King Andrew II of Hungary grew wary of their ambitions and shortly expelled them. They could see the advantages of the Polish offer, but this time the Grand Master Hermann von Salza was determined to guarantee their future. He obtained documents from the Emperor Frederick II and a bull from Pope Gregory IX authorising the order to conquer Prussia and thereafter to hold it in perpetuity as a papal fief. Before he realised what he had let himself in for, Konrad of Mazovia discovered that the lease he had granted the order on the territory of Che?mno had become a freehold. Hermann von Salza, who still kept his sights on the Holy Land, originally saw the Prussian theatre of operations as a sideshow. He despatched a few knights there in 1229, and a further contingent took part in a crusade into Prussia in 1232-33, preached by the Dominicans, in which several Polish dukes, the margraves of Meissen and Brandenburg, the Duke of Austria and the King of Bohemia took part, along with hundreds of German knights. The order’s involvement grew when, in 1237, it took over the Sword Brothers. And it was encouraged to take a greater interest in the area by successive Popes, whose wish to see the conversion of the pagan Balts was complemented by a desire to bring as much of northern Russia as possible into the fold of the Roman Church. This placed the order in a position to organise annual forays (reysas) against the pagans for kings, princes and knights who wished to acquit themselves of the duty to bear arms for Christ. These reysas were like safaris for the visiting grandees, who not only fulfilled their crusading vows but enjoyed a good campaign. They also took away a favourable impression of the order, which they subsequently expressed by giving it grants of land in their own countries and by supporting it diplomatically. At the same time, the increase in crusading activity in the region created tensions and problems of its own, as it was now drawing in not only Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the Polish duchies, but also the emerging state of Lithuania and the Russian principalities of Novgorod and Muscovy. By 1283 most of Prussia had been conquered. Although it was settled by a considerable number of landless Polish and German knights, it was the Teutonic Order that ruled the province. It established a formidable stronghold at Marienburg, a number of castles throughout the territory and a port at Elbing (Elbl?g) to carry trade from the province. It proved an efficient administrator, as monastic discipline precluded venality and its structure provided a degree of continuity which dynastic states (with their disputed successions, minorities and likelihood of feckless or incompetent rulers) lacked. The knights’ rule was relatively benign to begin with. They favoured voluntary over forced conversion of the autochton—ous population, and were pragmatic enough to use local pagans to fight alongside them when necessary. But repeated revolts and apostasies made them take a more jaundiced view with time, and the autochtones were gradually all but exterminated. Fig. 2 The division and reunification of Poland under the later Piasts In the space of fifty years, the Prussian nuisance on the Mazovian border had been replaced by a well-ordered state. This did not in itself represent a threat to the Polish duchies. But it was one of a series of developments that would. A century earlier, in 1150, the last Slav prince of Brenna died, to be succeeded by a German. The March of Brandenburg, as it then became, encroached eastwards, driving a wedge between Slav states on the Baltic, where the outflanked Prince Bogus?aw of Szczecin was forced to accept German overlordship, and those to the south, like the small principality of Lubusz, which was annexed to Brandenburg outright. In 1266 Brandenburg took Santok, and in 1271 Gda?sk, thus extending its own territory to that of the Teutonic Order. The Poles retook both Gda?sk and Santok in the following year, but they would never push the German advance back to the river Oder. From the stronghold they had set up at Berlin on the river Spree in 1231, the margraves of Brandenburg looked eastward, and they would seize every opportunity to extend their dominion in that direction. At the same time, settlers from all over Germany came in search of land and opportunity, usually well received by Polish rulers, and by the end of the thirteenth century not only Silesian and Pomeranian cities such as Wroc?aw and Szczecin, but even the capital, Krak?w, had become predominantly German. In Silesia and Pomerania, the influx of landless knights and farmers from Germany also made itself felt in rural areas, radically affecting the will as well as the ability of local Piast rulers to stand by a disunited Poland. Like so many small shopkeepers, these minor rulers had to pay tribute to whoever was strong enough to impose protection. One by one the princes of Pomerania, outflanked by German states and undermined by the German ascendancy in their cities, particularly Hanseatic centres such as Szczecin and Stargard, had to accept the German Emperor instead of the Duke of Krak?w as their overlord. This process weakened the greater Polish duchies as well, as a result of which even their independence came under threat. In 1300 King Vaclav II of Bohemia was able to invade Wielkopolska, and with the blessing of the Emperor have himself crowned King of Poland. If the experience of the Tatar invasions had provided a powerful argument in favour of reuniting the Polish duchies into a single kingdom, this was given added weight by increasing resentment of the encroaching Germans and foreigners in general. After Bohemia’s capture of Krak?w with the connivance of some of the townspeople in 1311, the Polish troops which retook it the following year rounded up all the citizens and beheaded those who could not pronounce the Polish tongue-twisters they were made to repeat. It was also supported by the Church. Until now, this had not played a political role, merely an administrative one. Under the early Piast kings, the bishops had been little more than functionaries with no power-base of their own. The devolution of the country into separate duchies changed this, as the individual dukes needed the support of their local bishops. These were quick to perceive that if the Polish duchies were absorbed into Bohemia or Germany, the Polish Church would lose its autonomous status, and they took steps to counter the creeping Germanisation. At the Synod of ??czyca in 1285 the Polish bishops adopted a resolution that only Poles could be appointed as teachers in church schools. After the canonisation of Stanis?aw, the Bishop of Krak?w put to death by Boles?aw II and recognised as patron of Poland in 1253, the monk Wincenty of Kielce wrote a life of the saint in which the alleged miraculous growing together of his quartered body is described as prophetic of the way in which the divided Poland would become one again. Similarly patriotic sentiments can be detected in the chronicle of another Bishop of Krak?w, Wincenty Kad?ubek, written in the first years of the thirteenth century, and in the more reliable Kronika Wielkopolska, written by a churchman in Pozna? in the 1280s. The message was taken up by some of the dukes, who decided to abandon the hereditary principle and to elect from their number an overlord who would rule effectively in Krak?w. Henryk Probus of Silesia was the first to be chosen in this way, and on his death in 1290 the Krak?w throne was given to Przemys? II of Gniezno, who was actually crowned King of Poland in 1295, but was assassinated two years later by agents of Brandenburg. He was succeeded in 1296 by a prince of the Mazovian line, W?adys?aw the Short, who was to become one of the most remarkable of Polish kings. The Bohemian invasion of 1300 forced W?adys?aw to flee the country for a time, and he went to Rome in search of allies. As his sobriquet suggests, he was a small man, but he knew what he wanted and how to get it, laying his plans with skill. The Papacy was locked in one of its perennial conflicts with the Empire, and therefore looked kindly on the anti-Imperial Polish prince. W?adys?aw sought the support of Charles Robert of Anjou, the erstwhile King of Naples and Sicily who had just succeeded to the Hungarian throne. With the Pope’s support he sealed an alliance by marrying his daughter to the Angevin. Having also secured the cooperation of the princes of Halicz and Vladimir he set off to reconquer his realm from the Czechs. In 1306 he took Krak?w and in 1314 Gniezno, thus gaining control of the two principal provinces, while a third, Mazovia, recognised his overlordship. In 1320 he was crowned King of Poland, the first to be crowned at Krak?w. By making an alliance with Sweden, Denmark and the Pomeranian principalities, W?adys?aw forced Brandenburg on to the defensive while he dealt with the Teutonic Order, which was in a difficult position. The fall of Acre to the Saracens in 1291 had deprived it of its headquarters. The indictment in 1307 of the Templars, on whom the Teutonic Knights were closely modelled, their subsequent dissolution and savage persecution, were a chilling warning to any order which grew too powerful. W?adys?aw lost little time in taking the Teutonic Order to a Papal court not only on charges of invasion and rapine, but on more fundamental questions of whether it was fulfilling its mission. The Papal judgement went against the order, but the very fact that the Knights had been cornered brought about a subtle change in their attitude. Their headquarters, located in Venice after the fall of Acre so as to be ready for future crusades in the Holy Land, was quickly moved to Marienburg in Prussia in 1309. Prussia now became not a crusading outpost, but a state, and it would settle its disputes with neighbours not through Papal courts but on the battlefield. In concert with its ally John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, the order invaded Poland. The Silesian Duke Bolko of ?widnica held off the Bohemians while W?adys?aw marched against the order and defeated it in a costly battle at P?owce in 1331. Too weak to pursue his advantage, he did not manage to reassert a Polish ascendancy in Pomerania or Silesia, where the German hegemony persisted. Nevertheless, by the time of his death in 1333, W?adys?aw the Short had managed to reunite the central provinces and to establish at least nominal control over a number of other areas. His son Kazimierz III (1333-70), known as the Great, was able to carry through this process and to place the sovereignty of Poland beyond question. In this he was assisted by an unusually favourable conjunction of circumstances. As a minor ice-age reduced yields and ruined harvests throughout much of Europe, Poland basked in a more than usually warm and temperate spell, which produced not only bumper crops but also conditions in which Mediterranean fruit could be grown and wine produced. While the Hundred Years’ War devastated the richest lands in western Europe and wrought financial havoc as far afield as Italy, Poland was spared lengthy conflicts. Finally, as the entire Continent was engulfed by the plague of 1348, the Black Death, most of Poland remained unaffected. The populations of England and France, of Italy and Scandinavia, of Hungary, Switzerland, Germany and Spain were more than halved. Poland’s grew, partly as a consequence of conditions elsewhere. The depredations of the plague were accompanied by widespread famine, which provoked an exodus from towns, and refugees roamed Europe in search of food and a safe haven. In addition, the need for a scapegoat had provoked the greatest wave of anti-Jewish atrocities in medieval history, and terrified survivors also fled, mainly eastwards. All were welcomed in Poland, which insisted only on a period of quarantine. Kazimierz was a fitting ruler for these halcyon days. Physically handsome, with a broad forehead and a remarkable head of hair, he was a regal figure, combining courage and determination with the tastes of a voluptuary. He launched a building programme which, along with the cathedrals of Krak?w and Gniezno and churches all over the country, gave rise to sixty-five new fortified towns, the fortification of twenty-seven existing ones, and fiftythree new castles. He also rerouted the Vistula at Krak?w, and constructed a canal linking the salt-mines of Wieliczka with the capital. In 1347 he codified the entire corpus of existing laws in two books: one, the Statute of Piotrk?w, for Wielkopolska; one, the Statute of Wi?lica, for Ma?opolska. He reformed the fiscal system, created a central chancellery, and regulated the monetary situation with the introduction in 1388 of new coinage. In the towns, he established guilds and extended Magdeburg Law. He granted a separate law to the Armenians living in Polish cities and gave the Jews their own fiscal, legal, and even political institutions. These measures laid the foundations of a new boom. Polish cities gained considerable numbers of merchants and skilled artisans, while the influx of Jews provided them with banking and other facilities. This stimulated industry. Newly-discovered deposits of iron, lead, copper, silver, zinc, sulphur and rock salt were exploited and mining techniques improved. The traditional exports of grain, cattle, hides, lumber and other forest produce were supplemented by manufactured goods such as finished cloth, which was carried as far west as Switzerland. Contact with the outside world was increasing, largely thanks to the Church, whose activity, both missionary and educational, brought foreign clerics to Poland and sent Polish ones abroad, some, like the friar Benedictus Polonus, as far as the capital of the Mongol Khan Guyuk in 1245, but most to study, particularly at the universities of Bologna and Paris. King Kazimierz exerted a personal influence on the development of learning and culture, and laid the foundations of the flowering of the next century by establishing, in 1364, a university at Krak?w. Coming just after the foundation of the Charles University of Prague and before those of Vienna and Heidelberg, this was the second such academy in central Europe. Unlike most English, French and German universities, which evolved from religious institutions, it was based on the Italian models of Padua and Bologna, which were secular establishments. While he lavished care on domestic projects and encouraged education and the arts, Kazimierz did not neglect foreign affairs: he inherited a kingdom of 106,000 square kilometres, and left one of 260,000.He warred with John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, over rival claims to Silesia, finally defeating him in 1345, one year before the unfortunate blind king lost his ostrich feathers to the Prince of Wales at Cr?cy. He then turned his attention to the east. The Tatar invasions of the previous century had annihilated the Principality of Kiev, and the smaller Russian principalities were only allowed to survive at the cost of yearly tribute to the Tatars, who had settled in southern Russia. Two such principalities, those of Halicz and Vladimir, were adjacent to Poland’s south-eastern border. Both were dynastically connected with Poland, and after the princes of Halicz died out, in 1340, Kazimierz incorporated their lands into his own dominion. This elongation of Poland to the south-east was inevitable and permanent. The move of the Polish capital from Gniezno to Krak?w three hundred years before was now beginning to affect Polish policy significantly. The king viewed his dominions from a different vantage point, and the most pervasive influence at court was that of the magnates of Ma?opolska, the ‘Krak?w Lords’. There was more at stake in this eastern theatre than territorial gain. The disintegration of Kiev had left a power vacuum into which Poland was inevitably drawn, all the more so since another power was taking more than a passing interest in the area—Lithuania. The Lithuanians were a Baltic people like the Prussians and the Latvians, between whom they were settled. Long after their kindred Latvians and Prussians had been subjugated by the Sword Brothers and the Teutonic Knights respectively, the Lithuanians continued to defy all attempts at conquest. They were ruled by a dynasty well suited to the situation, prepared to make peace and accept token Christianity from the order to gain support against the Russians of Novgorod, and from Novgorod to defeat the order. Their conduct of policy was so wily and volatile that none of their neighbours could ever rest easy. After the d?b?cle of Kiev, the Lithuanians annexed vast tracts of masterless land. In 1362 their ruler Grand Duke Algirdas defeated the Tatars at the Battle of the Blue Waters, and in the following year he occupied Kiev itself. In less than a hundred years the Lithuanian state had quadrupled in size, but while this made it more formidable to its enemies, it endeared it to none and enmeshed it in problems which, for once, were too great for its rulers. They could not hope to administer the huge area populated with Christian Slavs by whose multitude they were to be eventually swamped. Their seizure of these lands had brought them into conflict with the Tatars on one front, while the Teutonic Knights were straining all their resources to crush them on the other. The Russian principalities were hostile, while the Poles, who now shared a long frontier with Lithuania, were growing tired of sporadic border raids. Lithuania needed an ally. The problem of which to choose was the most pressing issue facing Grand Duke Iogaila when he came to the Lithuanian throne in 1377. And that same year had placed Poland in a dilemma, for different reasons. Kazimierz the Great had died in 1370. Although married four times, he had no heir, and left the throne to his nephew, Louis of Anjou, King of Hungary. King Louis attended his uncle’s funeral and then went back to Hungary, leaving his mother, the late king’s sister, to rule in his name. She could not rule without the support of the more powerful nobles of Ma?opolska, the ‘Krak?w Lords’. They exploited this opportunity to assume a greater share not only in the running of the country, but in the definition of its very status. A new concept of the Polish state had been evolving from the beginning of the fourteenth century whose gist was that sovereignty should be vested not in the person of the monarch, but in a specific geographical area, the Corona Regni Poloniae, an expression meant to embrace all the Polish lands, even those which had fallen under foreign domination. In 1374 the Polish nobles wrested from King Louis the Statute of Ko?ice, which stressed the indi visibility of this patrimony, and stipulated that no part of it was his to give away. They were looking to a future which remained uncertain, since Louis, too, had no male heir. He did, however, have two daughters. He had married the elder, Maria, to Sigismund of Luxembourg, and intended him to take the Polish throne. The younger, Hedwig, was betrothed to Wilhelm of Habsburg, who was to have Hungary. But when Louis died in 1382, the Krak?w Lords refused to bow to these wishes and made their own plans. They rejected the already married Maria and brought her ten-year-old sister Hedwig, Jadwiga in Polish, to Krak?w, where in 1384 she was crowned emphatically king (rex). The chronicler D?ugosz noted: ‘The Polish lords and prelates were so taken with her, so greatly and sincerely loved her that, almost forgetting their masculine dignity, they did not feel any shame or degradation in being the subjects of such a gracious and virtuous lady.’ In fact, they saw her principally as an instrument, and they disregarded her feelings entirely. When young Wilhelm of Habsburg turned up to claim his betrothed, she was locked in the castle on Wawel hill. After fruitless efforts to see her he left, and she was prepared by the Polish lords for the bed of another: they had found a husband for her in Iogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania. The idea of a union between Poland and Lithuania had germin—ated simultaneously in both countries. On 14 August 1385 a basic agreement was signed at Krewo. This was followed by more specific pledges at Wo?kowysk in January 1386, and at Lublin a few weeks later. On 12 February, Jagie??o, as his name had crystallised in Polish, entered Krak?w, and three days later he was baptised as W?adys?aw. On 18 February he married Jadwiga, and on 4 March was crowned King of Poland. THREE The Jagiellon Experience (#ulink_c1c7b5ca-022b-5499-9ea2-14f3d4943d20) Queen Jadwiga died young, having borne her husband no heir. Yet the fruits of her marriage to W?adys?aw Jagie??o were prodigious. In the first instance, it sounded the knell for the Teutonic Order: with the conversion of Lithuania the need for crusading vanished, and with it the whole raison d’?tre of the Knights in Prussia. The union of two enemies whom the order had often played off against each other in the past only compounded this. The order responded by trying to undo it. W?adys?aw Jagie??o unwittingly helped when he installed his fiercely ambitious and unaccountable cousin Vytautas (Witold) as regent in Lithuania. Vytautas championed pagan separatist opposition to the union with Poland, at the same time accepting baptism and the alliance of the order. But while the order continued to intrigue with Vytautas and negotiate with W?adys?aw, it could not hope to avoid confrontation with the Polish-Lithuanian alliance indefinitely. When this came in the war of 1409-10, it resulted in the devastat ing defeat of the Order on the battlefield of Grunwald (Tannenberg) by a combined force under the command of W?adys?aw and Vytautas. The battle was one of the longest and bloodiest of the Middle Ages. The Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen and all the order’s officers but one lay dead on the field, and the whole of Prussia was there for the taking. Much to the exasperation of the Polish commanders, W?adys?aw reined in the pursuit and in the treaty signed later he demanded only a thin strip of land to be ceded to Lithuania, and nothing for Poland, while taking a vast cash indemnity from the order for himself. A decade later the knights made war again, were again defeated, and again got away with insignificant losses. In 1454 a revolt against the order by local knights and cities, aided by Poland, initiated a war which dragged on for thirteen years. The knights were defeated, and were once again spared, by the Treaty of Toru? in 1466. Poland took the coastline around Gda?sk and Elbing, the province of Warmia (Ermland), and even the stronghold of Marienburg, but did not suppress the order, which moved its capital to K?nigsberg and retained the rest of its dominions as a vassal of the king of Poland. Such forbearance might seem surprising, particularly as the Teutonic Knights were ruthless in war, raping and murdering, and even burning churches. There were, however, factors involved in the relations between Poland and the order that touched on a religious debate of European proportions. The Teutonic Order had representatives and friends at every court, and was a master of propaganda. Its first line of attack had been that the betrothal of Jadwiga to Wilhelm of Habsburg had been consummated and that her marriage to W?adys?aw Jagie??o was therefore bigamous. It also argued, with some justification, that the alleged conversion of Lithuania was a sham, and that Catholic Polish knights had been the minority at Grunwald in an army made of Lithuanian pagans, Christians of the Eastern rite, and even Muslims (the Tatars who had settled in Lithuania some time before). The order suggested that W?adys?aw Jagie??o’s army was hardly more Christian than Saladin’s. The Teutonic Knights had a point, and that point assumed importance in the context of a minor reformation which was sweeping Europe, a nationalist, anti-clerical, anti-Imperial movement whose greatest exponent was the Bohemian Jan Hus. The Hussite movement was itself connected with John Wycliffe’s Lollards in England, and both causes enjoyed considerable sympathy in Poland. Matters came to a head at the Council of Constance, convoked in 1415 to combat the Hussite heresy. The Teutonic Order saw in this a perfect forum at which to discredit Poland and reconfirm the validity of its own crusading mission, judging that if this were endorsed by Christian Europe, it would have placed itself beyond the reach of Polish attempts to destroy it. The Polish delegation to the Council of Constance, led by Pawe? W?odkowic (Paulus Vladimiri) of Krak?w University, included a number of Lithuanians and schismatics, which caused uproar and favoured the order’s case. W?odkowic ran rings around its representatives and managed to discredit it. But there was no clear-cut victory. The Teutonic Knights enjoyed wide diplomatic support, including that of the Empire, which had political objections to the Polish-Lithuanian union. The arrangement itself was under frequent review. In 1413, after Grunwald, a new treaty of union was signed at Horod?o. This attempted to bind the two states together more firmly, and was epitomised by the Polish szlachta adopting the Lithuanians as brothers in chivalry, bestowing on them their own coats of arms. In 1430, Vytautas’ successor as Grand Duke of Lithuania, Svidrigaila, undid all this by allying himself with the Teutonic Order and adopting an anti-Polish policy. Ten years later, the union was formally dissolved, but this made little difference, since the ruler of Lithuania was the son of the King of Poland, whom he succeeded in 1446, reuniting the two states under one crown. Fig. 3 The Jagiellon dynasty of Poland-Lithuania The unstable nature of the union was largely the result of incompatibility. Poland was a nationally based Christian state with developed institutions and strong constitutional instincts. Lithuania was an amalgam of pagan Balts and Orthodox Christian Slavs ruled by an autocratic dynasty. The two states pulled each other in different directions, and in the field of foreign policy it was Lithuania, or rather the Jagiellon dynasty, which pulled the hardest. It is no coincidence that the oldest extant letter from a king of England to a king of Poland dates from 1415, when Henry V begged W?adys?aw Jagie??o to assist him against the French: the union with Lithuania and the victory over the Teutonic Order had turned Poland into a major European power. And it is hardly surprising that with such power behind them, the ambitious Jagiellons should have taken advantage of the opportunities on offer. The extinction in 1437 of the Luxembourg dynasty, which had ruled in Bohemia and Hungary, heralded a new contest for hegemony in the area between two new arrivals—the Habsburgs of Austria and the Jagiellons of Poland-Lithuania. Hungary, which had been ruled successively by Anjou, Luxembourg and Habsburg, fell to the Jagiellons in 1440 when the Magyars offered the throne to the stripling W?adys?aw III of Poland, W?adys?aw Jagie??o’s eldest son. W?adys?aw did not rule long as King of Poland and Hungary. Three years after he was crowned at Buda, the young king was drawn into the anti-Turkish league, and slain at the Battle of Varna on the Black Sea in 1444. The throne of Poland passed to his younger brother, Kazimierz IV. That of Hungary went to Mattias Corvinius, but after his death in 1490 it reverted to Kazimierz’s eldest son, W?adys?aw. This W?adys?aw was king not of Poland, but of Bohemia, the Czech Diet having elected him in 1471. By the end of the century the Jagiellons ruled over about one third of the entire European mainland. Their gigantic domain stretched from the Baltic to the shores of the Black Sea and the Adriatic. In the next generation they would lose all the thrones outside Poland to the Habsburgs, and Poland would find itself none the richer for the experience of having been at the heart of a great empire. Yet, as the szlachta were quick to appreciate, there were advantages in having wayward and often absentee kings. It permitted them to assume a greater share in the running of the country, and the crown’s frequent demands for funds and armies supplied them with the levers for extorting the concessions which shaped the emerging forms of parliamentary government. The principle of government by consensus was already enshrined in practice under the early Piast kings. By the beginning of the thirteenth century this practice was established firmly enough to survive in the governance of the various provinces when the Kingdom was divided. Provinces such as Wielkopolska and Mazovia would hold an assembly called sejm, at which the entire szlachta of the district could join in discussion and vote. The consent of the sejm of every province was crucial to the process of reunification of the Polish lands, and by the time this was achieved the sejms had become part of the machinery of government. W?adys?aw the Short convoked them four times during his reign (1320-33), and his successor Kazimierz the Great (1330-70) almost as often, acknowledging them as the basis of his right to govern. The heirless death of Kazimierz and the ensuing regency of Elizabeth furnished the opportunity for one group of szlachta to steal a march on their fellows. These were the dignitaries of the realm, the castellans who had been the mainstay of royal authority in the regions, and the palatines, who had grown into virtual governors of their provinces—the provinces themselves came to be known as ‘palatinates’ as a result. Representing as they did the forces of regional autonomy, the palatines were poor instruments of royal control, and W?adys?aw the Short when reuniting the country had been obliged to bring in a new tier of royal administration, the starosta, a kind of royal sheriff, who henceforth represented the king in his area. The palatines assumed a political rather than a purely administrative role, and, in alliance with the bishops, formed a new oligarchy. Over the years, a number of them had assumed the function of royal council, and in the critical moments following the death of Kazimierz the Great they took the fate of Poland into their own hands, deciding on Jadwiga rather than Maria and choosing her a husband in W?adys?aw Jagie??o. And they made it clear that it was they who would select his successor. His failure to produce an heir with Jadwiga strengthened their hand. All the palatines and castellans were allowed a seat in the Grand Council (consilium maius), but policy-making was jealously guarded by those palatines and bishops who sat in the Privy Council (consilium secretum). A typical figure is Zbigniew Ole?nicki, Bishop of Krak?w, secretary to W?adys?aw Jagie??o, regent during the minority of W?adys?aw III and mentor of his successor Kazimierz IV. Educated, tough, absolutist in his convictions, a cardinal who was a born statesman, guided by a vision which combined his own advancement with that of Poland and the Church, he had no room in his scheme of things for a vociferous sejm. The szlachta were not fond of him or the oligarchy he stood for, and made it clear to W?adys?aw Jagie??o that he needed their support as well as that of the magnates in order to secure the succession of his son. This enabled them to extort a number of privileges and rights during the 1420s, the most important of which, granted at Jedlnia in 1430 and confirmed at Krak?w three years later, was the edict Neminem captivabimus nisi iure victum. An equivalent to the later English Habeas corpus act, it meant that nobody could be held or imprisoned without trial. This placed the szlachta beyond the reach of intimidation by the magnates and officers of the crown. Once it had become clear that the crown’s prerogatives were being ceded, the magnates and the szlachta leapfrogged each other to claim them. This race had the twofold effect of accelerating the development of the parliamentary system, and of defining the two groups which were eventually to crystallise into the upper and lower chambers. Hemmed in by the magnates, Kazimierz IV sought the support of the szlachta, which was eager to give it, at a price. The price was the Privilege of Nieszawa, granted in 1454, which stipulated that the king could only raise troops and taxes with the approval of the district assemblies, the sejmiks (lesser sejms) of the eighteen palatinates of Poland. This enshrined the principle of no taxation without representation for the ordinary szlachta, who all had a vote at these assemblies, but it also made the sejms of Wielkopolska and Ma?opolska more directly answerable to their electorate. In 1468, these decided to meet together, at Piotrk?w, and henceforth constituted the national Sejm, bringing together dignitaries of the kingdom, and the representatives of all the provinces and the major towns (Lithuania was still ruled autocratically by the grand duke, and Mazovia, ruled by a vassal Piast, kept its own separate sejm for another century). The next step came in 1493, when the national assembly divided into two chambers: the Senate, consisting of eightyone bishops, palatines and castellans, and the Sejm proper, which consisted of fifty-four deputies of the szlachta and the largest cities. The death of Kazimierz IV in the previous year afforded the new parliament an opportunity to flex its muscles and demonstrate that the existence of a natural heir to the throne did not infringe its right to choose who would rule over them. For two weeks the Sejm discussed the merits of a number of candidates, including the king’s sons and a Piast prince from the Mazovian line, and finally chose Kazimierz’s son, Jan Olbracht. From now on not even the only son of the deceased king would sit on the Polish throne before being vetted by the Sejm. After the death of Jan Olbracht in 1501 his brother Aleksander was elected, and forced to sign over yet more royal power before he could take his throne. Four years later, in 1505, the Sejm sitting at Radom passed the act Nihil novi, which removed the king’s right to legislate without the approval of the two chambers. The constitutional developments of the fifteenth century are mirrored in the legal system. The regional castellans’ courts had declined steadily in influence. Their jurisdiction was encroached upon by the starostas’ courts, which dealt with the affairs of the szlachta and their tenantry, elective courts, whose judges were appointed by the regional sejmiks, and, most of all, by the ecclesiastical courts. The latter, which originally governed those living on Church-owned lands, gradually extended their competence to cover all cases involving a cleric or Church property, as well as those with a religious dimension (marriages, divorces, sacrilege, etc.). The division of the country allowed the ecclesiastical courts to encroach on other areas, by providing what was in effect an independent legal system embracing the whole country, which proved convenient in cases where the litigants were residents of different provinces. They complemented the rising power of the Church hierarchy, and directly challenged the influence of the central legal system. This was reinforced through the new county courts (s?d ziemski), whose judges were appointed by the crown, and which had permanent executive officers. The crown also re-established its jurisdiction, through the Supreme Crown Court, over the gravest criminal and civil offences, and retained the role of supreme court of appeal. But these functions would ultimately be taken over by the Sejm. Jagiellon rule had provided greenhouse conditions for the growth of parliamentary institutions. At the death of Kazimierz the Great in 1370, Poland had been in advance of most European countries in this respect, but only 150 years later it had surpassed even England. The power of the crown was so hamstrung by a series of checks and balances that it could never be used arbitrarily. The Sejm had taken over all legislative functions. The degree of representation, with some 7 per cent of the population having a vote, would not be bettered until the British Reform Act of 1832. Yet the basis of Polish democracy was flawed at the outset, as the running had been made exclusively by the noble estate, the szlachta, and this was as restricted in its interests as it was varied in its make-up. One cannot substitute the terms ‘nobility’ or ‘gentry’ for szlachta because it had little in common with those classes in other European countries either in origin, composition or outlook. Its origins remain obscure. Polish coats of arms are utterly unlike those of other European nobles, and lend weight to the theory that the szlachta was of Sarmatian origin. They were also held in common by groups of families, which suggests clan-based origins. The attitude of the szlachta begs analogies with the Rajputs of India or the Samurai of Japan. Like both of these, and unlike any other gentry in Europe, the szlachta was not limited by nor did it depend for its status on either wealth, or land, or royal writ. It was defined by its function, that of a warrior caste, and characterised by mutual solidarity and contempt for others. ‘The Polish gentry,’ writes the contemporary historian D?ugosz, ‘are eager for glory, keen on the spoils of war, contemptuous of danger and death, inconstant in their promises, hard on their subjects and people of the lower orders, careless in speech, used to living beyond their means, faithful to their monarch, devoted to farming and cattle-breeding, courteous to foreigners and guests, lavish in hospitality, in which they exceed other nations.’ But the outlook of the szlachta was changing, largely under the influence of economic factors. The Vistula and its tributaries provided a natural conduit for all Poland’s overseas trade, effortlessly concentrating the country’s agricultural produce at the port of Gda?sk. This was also the point of entry for imports, of herrings from Scandinavia, salt from western France, and cloth from Holland, Flanders and England. The Teutonic Order had used its position straddling the lower Vistula to promote its own exports at the expense of Polish trade and to impose heavy duties on inbound goods. Its defeat and removal from the area in 1466 altered the situation radically. Trade with England through Gda?sk quadrupled, and by the end of the century the number of ships calling there had risen to eight hundred a year, most of them bound for Bruges. Increased demand for grain as populations grew in western Europe raised prices, while the rapid expansion of seaborne trade pushed up those of timber and other forest produce by some 4,000 per cent. Polish landowners responded by intensifying production. Meadows were drained, scrub woods cut back, and acreages under cultivation increased, but while there was no lack of land available, there was a shortage of people to work it. Most szlachta estates were worked by peasant tenants who paid part of their rent in labour. The size of their holdings and the rent varied enormously around the country, but as a general illustration one can take an example from 1400: the annual rent for a unit of seventeen hectares (forty-two acres) was fifteen grosze (the price of a pig or a calf) and a few bushels of grain, plus twelve days’ work a year by the tenant in the landlord’s fields—using his own implements and horses, usually at the busiest times. The dramatic fall in the value of the coinage in the early 1400s halved the real value of money-rent received from tenants, while the productivity of a day’s work did not fluctuate. And money was useless to the landlord in view of the shortage of casual labour in the countryside, exacerbated by the drift of the poorest peasants to the towns. It therefore made sense for the landlords to transform money-rent into purely labour-rent: they needed cheap labour they could depend on in order to develop what was turning into a cash-crop agricultural economy, and they used their political muscle to ensure they got it. In 1496 the Sejm passed measures preventing peasants moving to the towns. Tenants who wished to move to a different area were obliged to put their tenancies in order, pay off all dues, and to sow the land before they left. The economic effort involved was so prohibitive that they were in effect tied to the land, unless they absconded, which was not easy in the case of whole families. Those who owned their land were not affected by this legislation. Nor were the inhabitants of free villages, sometimes referred to as ‘Dutch settlements’. These had arisen in areas where a landlord, eager to found new villages on unexploited land, enticed peasants (often of foreign origin) to settle by offering them advantageous terms, set down in special charters. There were tenants rich enough to employ casual labour to perform the labour-rent on their behalf, but even their resources were strained when, in 1520, the Sejm increased the labour-rent from twelve to fifty-two days per annum. The legal position of the peasants was further weakened at about the same time, when they lost their right of appeal to other courts and could only seek justice in manorial courts, in which their landlords sat as magistrates. The ease with which the szlachta could promote its economic interests by political means did not encourage notions of thrift, risk and investment, and spawned a rustic complacency that set it aside from other European elites. This is the more unexpected as fifteenth-century Poland was essentially an urban culture. While land provided the majority with a livelihood, it was not the only or even the predominant source of wealth for the magnates, whose estates were not large by the standards of the barons of England or the great lords of France. So far, only the Church had managed to build up extensive latifundia through the monastic orders and the dioceses, which made prelates such as the Bishops of Krak?w the richest men in the land. The magnates only started accumulating property on a large scale at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Jan of Tarn?w (1367-1432), Palatine of Krak?w, built up an estate of one town, twenty villages and one castle. His son, Jan Amor Tarnowski, Castellan of Krak?w, increased this to two towns and fifty-five villages—more than doubling it in the space of fifty years. Jan of Ole?nica, father of Cardinal Zbigniew Ole?nicki, only had one village in 1400, yet by 1450 his other son owned fifty-nine, along with a town and a castle. Taken alone, the revenues from such estates were not great enough to support rampant ambition. The magnates were obliged to supplement them by lucrative or influential public office, and by various business ventures, such as mining, in which fortunes could be made with a little influence at court and some capital. It was necessary first to obtain a concession from the crown, which owned all underground deposits. Personal capital or that of specially set up joint-stock companies was then used to employ engineers and build machines to work the mines, which were among the deepest in Europe. These were ambitious operations, but the rewards were abundant—salt, sulphur, tin, lead, zinc, and even gold. It was only by being on the spot that noblemen could make fortunes, and the great families of the fifteenth century based themselves in or near the cities. In this, as in other things, they were more akin to the civic magnates of Italy than to the regional nobility of France or England. The cities were not large. Only Gda?sk, with 30,000 inhabitants, could rival those of western or southern Europe. Krak?w had a paltry 15,000; Lw?w, Toru? and Elbl?g 8,000; and Pozna? and Lublin only some 6,000. What they lacked in numbers they made up in diversity. Krak?w was a Babel in which German pre dominated in the streets over other languages, while patrician circles rang with Polish, Italian and Latin. One consequence of the Jagiellon forays into Hungary and southern Europe was that for the best part of the century their dominions bordered the Republic of Venice, opening up new vistas for Polish society at a decisive juncture in its relationship to the rest of Europe. The previous century had radically altered the balance between Poland and the more developed countries of Europe. As a consequence of the Black Death, the population of the Continent fell by some twenty million during the fourteenth century, and it took the whole of the fifteenth to make up this loss. Poland’s population did not drop significantly during the fourteenth, and rose sharply during the fifteenth. The gap also narrowed in economic terms, and Poland was attract ing people as well as capital from other parts of Europe. This process was mapped out in cultural terms. In the north, Flemish architects originally brought in by the Teutonic Order and the Hanse left their mark in the churches, town halls and city walls of Gda?sk and other cities. In Pozna?, Warsaw and Kalisz, the Flemish style was mitigated by local variants—themselves marked by Franconian and Burgundian examples of an earlier age. In Krak?w the most remarkable cross-breeding took place, dominated at first by a strong Bohemian influence which was superseded by that of German artists, most notably by one of the greatest sculptors of the Middle Ages, the German Veit Stoss, who settled in Krak?w in 1477. Polish thought and literature remained encased in the limits of medieval parochialism, their primary expression being religious verse. The only notable prose to be written at the time were the annals of Jan D?ugosz, a church canon and tutor to the royal family, begun in 1455. D?ugosz was a creature of the Middle Ages. As he painstakingly wrote his last Annales in the 1470s, he took every opportunity to carp at what he saw as the newfangled ideas and practices invading the venerable cloisters of medieval Krak?w. His successor as tutor to the royal family could not have presented a greater contrast, or better summed up the transformation taking place in Poland. He was Filippo Buonaccorsi, a native of San Gimignano in Tuscany obliged to flee after incurring the Pope’s displeasure, was a leading humanist and, from 1472, a professor at the University of Krak?w. Although it had been founded by the Piast Kazimierz the Great and lavishly endowed by the Angevin Queen Jadwiga, it had come to be known as the Jagiellon University. It was under this dynasty that it received funds necessary for expansion and the patronage of kings who recognised its uses. Foreigners from as far afield as England and Spain came to study or teach in its halls, while native graduates went abroad to widen their learning, one of them, Maciej Kolbe of ?wiebodzin, becoming rector of the Paris Sorbonne in 1480. During the reign of Kazimierz IV (1446-92) some 15,000 students passed through the university, including the major dignitaries, prelates and even soldiers of the time. The Church, and particularly its prelates, also encouraged the dissemination of the new ideas emanating from Italy. Piotr Bni?ski, Bishop of Kujavia, devoted his own fortune and that of his diocese to patronage of the arts, paying more attention to arranging symposia by humanist poets than to the spiritual duties of his position. Grzegorz of Sanok, Archbishop of Lw?w, who had studied in Germany and Italy, established at his residence of Dunaj?w near Lw?w a small court modelled on that of Urbino, nurtured by a stream of visitors from Italy. It was there Buonaccorsi first came when he had to flee his native country. Buonaccorsi later moved to the royal court in Krak?w and wrote, among other things, a set of counsels for the king, like some Polish Machiavelli. His writings, which he published under the pen name of Callimachus, his position at the Jagiellon University, and his part in founding, along with the German poet Conrad Celtis, a sort of Polish writers’ workshop, the Sodalitas Litterarum Vistulana, made him a key figure of the Polish Renaissance. The Italian connection grew stronger as Poles travelled to study or to visit cities such as Padua, Bologna, Florence, Mantua and Urbino. Italians came to Poland, bringing with them amenities and refinements, ranging from painting to postal services. The impact was omnipresent and lasting, nowhere more so than on the language. The first treatise on Polish orthography appeared in 1440, and the Bible was first translated in 1455, for Jagie??o’s last wife, Sophia. In their search for words or expressions to describe hitherto unknown objects or sentiments, the Poles more often than not borrowed from Italian, particularly in areas such as food, clothing, furnishing and behaviour, as well as in the expression of thought. These words rapidly passed from speech into writing, and from writing into print. The year 1469 saw the first commercial use of Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type, in Venice. The idea was taken up throughout Europe with breathtaking speed: printing presses began operating in Naples, Florence and Paris in 1471; in Spain, the Netherlands and Krak?w in 1473; in Wroc?aw, where the first book in Polish was printed in 1475; and in London in 1476. By the end of the fifteenth century Poland had become an integral part of late-medieval civilisation. Lithuania, on the other hand, was largely left out of the picture, contributing nothing and gaining little from its association with Christian Europe. Lithuania proper was inhabited by no more than half a million people still pagan in spirit, while the vast expanses it had taken over to the south and east were thinly populated with some two million Slavs who practised Christianity in its eastern rite. At the moment of W?adys?aw Jagie??o’s conversion, this vast dominion boasted five stone castles, at Vilnius (Wilno), Kaunas (Kowno) and Trakai (Troki) in Lithuania; and at Kamieniec and ?uck in what had been Kievan lands. Leaving aside the more fertile south, the land produced little wealth and most of the population subsisted from scratching the topsoil with wooden implements, living in dugouts or timbered cabins. In 1387 W?adys?aw Jagie??o granted the Lithuanian nobles the first element of personal freedom, the right to hold property. In 1434 he extended the act Neminem captivabimus to the Grand Duchy, but it was some time before the principle was translated into practice. While Poland achieved power-sharing and representation, Lithuania continued to be ruled autocratically. While Jan Ostror?g, Palatine of Pozna?, Master of the Jagiellon University and Bachelor of those of Bologna and Erfurt, applied himself in 1467 to writing a treatise on the Polish system of government and a programme for social reform, the average Lithuanian nobleman hardly knew what such words meant. The only link between the two societies was the Jagiellon dynasty itself, and it was its interests that prevailed. W?adys?aw Jagie??o’s loyalties, to Lithuania and to Poland, were largely subjected to his own dynastic vision. His son W?adys?aw III, killed at the Battle of Varna in 1444 in his twentieth year, never had the opportunity to show his mettle as a ruler. W?adys?aw’s younger brother Kazimierz IV reigned for forty-six years and established himself as a power to be reckoned with—he was, significantly, the only Pole ever to wear the English Garter. His wife Elizabeth of Habsburg bore him seven daughters, who make him the ancestor of every monarch reigning in Europe today, and six sons: one saint, one cardinal, and four kings. Kazimierz was succeeded in Poland by Jan Olbracht, a young prince with a passion for reading who drank, danced and loved hard, dressed like a peacock and worshipped pleasure. His brother Aleksander was a much-loved lightweight who died in 1506 having done little to be remembered or cursed for. While the Jagiellons acquired a high degree of culture, they did not develop the political maturity demanded by their new role. Throughout this formative century, when the magnates and the szlachta were erecting the structure of their democracy, the Jagiellon kings failed to define the prerogatives of the crown, wasting their resources on foreign adventures instead. Kazimierz IV’s dynastically-minded foreign policy enmeshed Poland in a number of pointless and damaging conflicts. Turkey and Poland shared a common interest, and in 1439 an embassy from Murad II came to Krak?w to negotiate an alliance against the Habsburgs of Austria, who had taken over Hungary. This failed to materialise, since W?adys?aw III took Hungary himself and proceeded to make war on Turkey over Moldavia, a war which cost him his life at the Battle of Varna. Eighty years later, in 1526, Louis Jagiellon, also King of Hungary, was to lose his life in the same way. He was trampled to death in a muddy stream at the Battle of Mohacs, fighting against Suleiman the Magnificent over a Hungary which passed to Ferdinand of Habsburg after the battle. The feud with Muscovy was equally pointless. After the Tatar invasions, the Lithuanian dukes had occupied the remains of Kievan Rus. The remaining Russian principalities were too weak to think of anything but survival, but with time Muscovy began to nurture ambitions. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the princes of Muscovy, who were linked by marriage to the Byzantine Emperors, declared their city to be Constantinople’s successor, the ‘Third Rome’, protector of the Eastern Catholic Faith, and spiritual mother of all the Russias—most of which were under Lithuanian dominion. In the fifteenth century, Poland and Lithuania could afford to ignore such posturing. Apart from their own strength, they could count on the Tatar Golden Horde to keep Muscovy in check. In the latter part of the century, however, the Golden Horde went into decline, and its stranglehold over Muscovy was broken. The Jagiellons’ rivalry with the Habsburgs over Hungary and Bohemia also proved counter-productive, provoking a rapprochement between the Habsburgs and Muscovy, forcing Poland to sign her first treaty with France, in 1500. An English alliance was also considered, but in 1502 the Sejm rejected this on the grounds that England ‘is in a state of continual revolution’. Henry VII and Henry VIII would repeatedly angle for an Anglo-Polish alliance against Turkey but nothing would come of this, as by then Poland needed the support of Turkey, with which she eventually signed an Eternal Peace in 1533. Whatever international advantages they may have forfeited, the last two Jagiellon kings did give their subjects and their country something of inestimable value. Zygmunt I (known as ‘the Old’), the youngest son of Kazimierz IV, succeeded in 1506 and died in 1548. His son Zygmunt II Augustus became Grand Duke of Lithuania in 1522 and King of Poland after his father’s death. Their combined reign from 1506 to 1572 displayed a certain continuity, even if their persons did not. The strong Solomon-like father was strikingly different from his glamorous, refined son who stands out, along with Francis I and Charles V, to whom he was often compared, as the epitome of the Renaissance monarch. But they both encouraged every form of creative activity and helped to institutionalise a spiritual and intellectual freedom which endured. Above all, they ensured that the murderous Reformation and Counter-Reformation never grew into anything more dangerous in Poland than an unruly debate. FOUR Religion and Politics (#ulink_899f3f5b-f733-55e2-a660-32442375c342) The Jagiellon realm was theoretically a Roman Catholic kingdom like every other in Christendom, yet the majority of its population was not Catholic. Large numbers of Christian Slavs living within its borders practised the Orthodox rite, acknowledging the Patriarch of Constantinople rather than the Pope. Another group of Christians who paid no heed to Rome were the communities of Armenians living in the major cities of south-eastern Poland. A significant proportion of the population was not Christian at all. The Jewish community multiplied each time there was an anti-Semitic witch-hunt in other countries, and its numbers soared in the decades after the expulsions from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1496. If visiting foreign prelates were shocked to see synagogues in every Polish township, they were hardly less so to see mosques standing on what was supposed to be Christian soil. These belonged to the descendants of Tatars who had settled in Lithuania in the fifteenth century and become loyal subjects of their adopted country. Many of them had been admitted to the ranks of the szlachta but clung to the Islamic faith. By the mid-sixteenth century there were nearly a hundred mosques in the Wilno, Troki and ?uck areas. One of the conditions of the union between Poland and Lithuania in 1385 had been the conversion of that country to Christianity. But, formal gestures apart, little had been done to bring this about, and 150 years later, Grand Duke Zygmunt Augustus recorded that ‘Outside Wilno…the unenlightened and uncivilised people generally accord that worship which is God’s due, to groves, oak-trees, streams, even serpents, both privately and publicly making sacrifices to these.’ A hundred years after that, Bishop Melchior Gedroyc noted that he could hardly find in his diocese of Samogitia ‘a single person who knows how to say a prayer or make the sign of the Cross’. That the Polish hierarchy had failed to impose religious observance on the population is not altogether surprising. According to a special arrangement, its bishops were appointed not by the Pope but by the King of Poland, who submitted his candidates for Rome’s approval. When this was not forthcoming it was ignored. In 1530, for instance, Pope Clement VII violently objected to the anti-Habsburg and pro-Turkish policy of the Primate Archbishop Jan ?aski, and insisted King Zygmunt dismiss him on pain of excommunication. But no action was taken. The King was guided by political considerations when appointing bishops and this led him to choose either powerful magnates whose support he needed, or, more often, trusted men of his own. These were drawn from his court, which was imbued with a humanistic and empirical spirit. A high proportion of his secretaries was of plebeian stock, and Zygmunt felt no compunction in ennobling those, like his banker Jan Boner, whom he favoured. This favour transcended creed as well as class. The Jew Abraham Ezofowicz, whom Zygmunt elevated to the rank of Treasurer of Lithuania, did convert to Christianity, albeit the Orthodox rite, before being ennobled, but his brother Micha? remained a practising Jew when he was elevated to the szlachta in 1525—a case without parallel anywhere in Christian Europe. Most of the bishops were at home in this milieu. The Polish clergy were no more debauched than those of other countries at this time, and possibly less so—the last quarter of the fifteenth century saw the foundation of no fewer than eighteen new fundamentalist and strict Franciscan monasteries in the provinces of Mazovia and Ma?opolska alone. What did set them apart was an unusual element of realism in the face of other religions and of candour with respect to corruption. Bishop Krzycki, for instance, left a poem concerning the gossip that surrounded a fellow bishop caught in the act of lowering a girl from his bedroom window in a net. ‘I fail to see what shocks everyone so,’ the poet-bishop wrote, ‘for no one can deny that the Gospels themselves teach us to use the Net of the Fisherman.’ Krzycki wrote much erotic verse before he became bishop, and this did not affect his career any more than it did that of another, who ended up as Prince-Bishop of Warmia. Jan Dantyszek was a good example of what the times could offer a clever man. A plebeian by birth, he entered the king’s service, becoming a secretary and later a diplomatic envoy. After a life which took him around Europe and brought him into contact with Francis I of France, Henry VIII of England, assorted popes, Ferdinand Cortes, Martin Luther, with whom he formed a friendship, the Emperor Charles V, who tried to keep him in his service, and Copernicus, who became a close friend and prot?g?, Dantyszek settled down to his episcopal duties with a degree of worldly wisdom. The conversion of Poland by Mieszko I had been primarily an act of political wisdom which had brought him status and security within the Christian world. The usefulness of the Christian Church had subsequently revealed itself more than once, helping to reunite the country in the thirteenth century, and to outmanoeuvre the Teutonic Order in the fourteenth. But this had been accompanied by an unwelcome extension of its influence and wealth. And the Church’s foreign connections no less than its persecution of movements such as the Hussite heresy made the szlachta uneasy. An institution which raked in bequests, exacted tithes, and contributed nothing in taxes to the state was bound to be unpopular. By the sixteenth century, the Church owned just over 10 per cent of all arable land in Wielkopolska, 15.5 per cent in Ma?opolska, and 25 in Mazovia. The share owned by the crown in the same provinces was 9, 7.5 and just under 5 per cent respectively. The Church wielded political power through its bishops who sat in the Senate and through its tribunals, which exercised jurisdiction over those living on its lands, and kept attempting to exercise it on wider areas. This power was also potentially at the disposal of Rome, a state often allied with Poland’s enemies. The Church was therefore a focus for a number of the szlachta’s phobias. The following is a typical complaint, uttered by a deputy during a Sejm debate of the 1550s. The gentlemen of the clergy summon us, citing their titles and invoking some foreign, Romish law, contrary to the laws and freedoms of our Realm, attempting to extend their jurisdiction and that of their master, the Roman Pope, which jurisdiction we, not finding it in our statutes, neither can nor will bear; for we know no other jurisdiction than the supremacy of his majesty the King our master. The tone and the sentiments expressed are characteristic of a ‘national Catholicism’ which was the spiritual heir of Hussitism. Many of the Bohemian followers of Hus had taken refuge in Poland, and their ideas were well known to writers such as Biernat of Lublin (1465-1529), who denounced the discrepancies between the Scriptures and the practices of the Church. In view of all this, it is not surprising that when Martin Luther nailed his famous declaration of war on the Papacy to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, setting off a chain reaction which was to shake the whole Christian world, he produced little more than a tremor in Poland. His teachings rapidly penetrated northern and western areas, enthusiastically received by the preponderantly German population of the towns, but elsewhere they met with little response. Calvinism was another matter. Enhanced by its more sympathetic Francophone associations, it rapidly gained ground all over the country. The democratic spirit of Calvinism which placed the lay elder on a par with the minister could hardly fail to appeal to the instincts of the szlachta, while the absence of pomp and ceremony from its rites made it a pleasingly cheap religion to support. By the 1550s a dominant proportion of the deputies to the Sejm were Protestants. But their number is not representative of the population as a whole, since the most ardently Catholic palatinates often returned Protestant deputies. By 1572 the Senate provided a similar picture. Of the ‘front-bench’ seats, thirty-six were held by Protestants, twenty-five by Catholics and eight by Orthodox, which again meant only that many magnates had converted to Calvinism. It was they who provided the conditions for its growth in Poland. The Ole?nicki family founded a Calvinist academy in their town of Pi?cz?w, which became the foremost centre of Calvinist teaching and publishing in that part of Europe, referred to by the faithful as ‘the Athens of the North’. Similar centres were established on a smaller scale by the Leszczy?ski family at Leszno, and the Radziwi?? at Nie?wie?, Bir?e and Kiejdany. Although they gained an ascendancy, the Calvinists never managed to control the Protestant movement in Poland. The northern cities stood by Luther; Anabaptists seeking refuge from persecution in Germany appeared in various areas of the country in the 1530s; and in 1551 Dutch Mennonites set up a colony on the lower Vistula. The Protestant sect which produced Poland’s most significant contribution to Christian philosophy was the Arians. Expelled from Bohemia in 1548, they settled in Poland, where they were known as ‘Czech Brethren’ and later Arians, since two of their fundamental beliefs—the human nature of Christ and the rejection of the Trinity—were first voiced by Arius at the Council of Nicea in AD 235. They also came to be known variously as Anti-Trinitarians, Polish Brethren and Socinians. Theirs was a rationalist and fundamentalist response to the teachings of Christ, whom they held to be a divinely inspired man. They were pacifists, opposed to the tenure of civic or military office, to serfdom, to the possession of wealth, and to the use of money, believing as they did in the common ownership of all material goods. They gained many converts—up to about 40,000 adherents practising in some two hundred temples scattered throughout the country. Their spiritual centre was Rak?w, where they established an academy, visited by students from all over Europe. It was here that the Rak?w Catechism was published, the work of Fausto Sozzini (Socinius), a nobleman from Siena who sought refuge in Poland and became one of the leading lights of the movement. The two most prominent Polish Arians were Marcin Czechowicz and Szymon Budny, the second of whom made a fine translation of the Bible into Polish and was also responsible for a rapprochement with the Jews, which produced some curious results. The Jewish community had also been affected by the spirit of the times. The expulsions from the Iberian peninsula had brought many distinguished Spanish scholars to Poland, and in 1567 a Talmudic academy was founded at Lublin, with the eminent Solomon Luria as rector, which enriched the religious debate. The Jews were by no means united, as there were considerable colonies of Karaites in eastern Poland who accepted only the Bible and rejected the Talmud. The Arians made many converts from the ranks of Talmudic Jews, while a number of Arians and Calvinists converted to Judaism. It was one of these converts, ‘Joseph ben Mardoch’ Malinowski, who played the most incongruous part in this religious inter action. It was he who put the finishing touches to the Hebrew original of The Fortress of the Faith, a Karaite catechism by Isaac ben Abraham of Troki, which was subsequently published in a number of countries, and was later rediscovered by Voltaire, who believed it to be the greatest demolition of the divinity of Christ ever written. In other countries the established Church reacted with violence to the slightest departure from dogma, let alone to apostasy. The reaction of the Polish hierarchy was pragmatic, often cynical, sometimes vehement, but never hysterical. Bishop Drohojowski of Kujavia, a region profoundly affected on account of its many German-dominated towns, went out of his way to meet prominent Lutherans and sanctioned their takeover of the Church of St John in Gda?sk since most of the parishioners had gone over to the heresy. Elsewhere in his diocese he allowed the sharing of parish churches by Catholics and Lutherans. A considerable proportion of the clergy were genuinely interested in the reform of the Church. The Christians of the Orthodox rite had always enjoyed three of the demands of the Protestant movement: the marriage of priests, the use of the vernacular in the liturgy, and communion in both kinds. The Protestant demands were therefore less shocking and novel in Poland than in other Catholic countries. It was not uncommon for Catholic priests to emulate their colleagues of the Orthodox rite by having common-law wives, and these were keen to regularise their position and legalise their broods. Stanis?aw Orzechowski (1513-66) married while Canon of Przemy?l, and defended his action in a long debate with his bishop and with Rome, published in pamphlet form. Apart from the practical demands concerning marriage and the vernacular, Luther’s revolt aroused strong feelings among the clergy against the medieval practices of the Church. Marcin Krowicki (1501-73) left the priesthood and published his Defence of True Learning, a fiercely anti-clerical work in which the Papacy is referred to as the whore of Babylon. Bishop Ucha?ski, on the other hand, did not forsake a career which was eventually to make him Primate of Poland, but nevertheless wrote vituperative diatribes against the practices of the Church. In 1555 he declared himself in favour of the marriage of priests, communion under both kinds and the use of the vernacular. He also mooted the idea of a joint synod of all confessions in Poland, to bring about reconciliation on common ground. When the King promoted him to the bishopric of Kujavia the Pope refused to ratify the appointment, but neither the King nor the Polish hierarchy took any notice. King Zygmunt the Old (1506-48) felt that the religious debate was none of his business. He came under considerable pressure from Rome and from those of his own bishops who were in favour of stamping out the heresy. He was even reproached by Henry VIII of England for not taking a more energetic line against the Protestants. Whenever this pressure became overwhelming, he would take some action to satisfy the zealots, but his edicts were invalid without the approval of the Sejm. His attitude is summed up in the words of his successor, who shared it fully. ‘Permit me to rule over the goats as well as the sheep,’ he told one Papal envoy who was demanding arrests and executions. In many countries the Reformation had social and political overtones. In Poland it was above all a constitutional issue. As the Papal Nuncio’s secretary noted after witnessing the debates of a Mazovian sejmik, the assembly seemed staunchly Catholic when the discussion turned on the faith, the sacraments and the sacred rites, but when the talk was of the privileges of the clergy, a number of ‘Protestant’ voices could be heard, and when it came to the subject of the Church’s immunity from taxation, the entire assembly appeared to have become fanatically Calvinist. In 1554, Bishop Czarnkowski of Pozna? sentenced three burghers to death by fire for heresy, but they were rescued by a posse of mostly Catholic szlachta. The same bishop later sentenced a cobbler to the same fate, and this time over a hundred armed szlachta of all denominations, led by the foremost magnates, laid siege to the episcopal palace and freed the condemned man. On one or two occasions, the ecclesiastical courts managed to execute the sentence before anyone could take preventive action. In 1556 Dorota ?azewska, accused of stealing a host from a church and selling it to some Jews for alleged occult rites, was burnt at the stake in Sochaczew. The execution caused uproar, and this came in time to save the lives of the three Jews who were to be burnt on the next day. They too were saved by the intervention of Catholic as well as Protestant szlachta. As Jan Tarnowski pointed out, ‘It is not a question of religion, it is a question of liberty.’ All were agreed that there could be no liberty while a body independent of the parliamentary system was able to judge people, and the ecclesiastical tribunals’ jurisdiction was duly annulled by act of the Sejm in 1562. Two years later, when a young Arian, Erazm Otwinowski, snatched the monstrance from the prelate during a religious procession in Lublin, threw it on the ground and stamped on the Blessed Sacrament, shouting obscenities, he was brought before the Sejm tribunal. This body, made up of Catholics and Calvinists, heard the case and agreed broadly with the defence, ably conducted by the poet Miko?aj Rej, who argued that if God was offended, God would punish, and as for Otwinowski, he should be ordered to pay the priest ‘a shilling, so he can buy himself a new glass and a handful of flour’ with which to repair the monstrance and bake a new host. At a time when torture and death awaited anyone caught reading the wrong book in most European countries, such dispassionate adherence to the notion of the primacy of individual rights over all other considerations was extraordinary. But neither the Catholic nor the Protestant leaders were happy with this state of affairs. There was a general desire to reach consensus and to decide on a state religion. At the Sejm of 1555 a majority of deputies demanded the establishment of a Church of Poland with rites in the vernacular, the right of priests to marry and communion under both kinds, to be administered by a Polish Synod independently of Rome. The prospect of a break with Rome loomed, but the King of Poland was no Henry VIII. Zygmunt Augustus, the only son of Zygmunt the Old, was a melancholy figure. Painstakingly educated—some say debauched—by his mother Bona Sforza, he was dubbed ‘Augustus’ by her and brought up to rule accordingly. She was a forbidding creature. The first cousin of Francis I and a close relative of Charles V, she had been brought up at the court of her father the Duke of Milan, which had an evil reputation for intrigue and poison. In an unprecedented move, she arranged for Zygmunt to be elected and crowned heir to the throne during his father’s lifetime. But she did not contribute to his happiness, and he did not live up to her ambitions. In 1543 he married Elizabeth of Habsburg, daughter of the Emperor Ferdinand I, who died only two years later, allegedly poisoned by Queen Bona. He then fell in love and eloped with Barbara Radziwi??, the sister of a Lithuanian magnate. Only four years after this marriage, which was opposed by virtually everyone in Poland for a variety of reasons, Barbara Radziwi?? died, and again the Queen Mother was suspected of using her Milanese skills. After considering at length the possibility of marrying Mary Tudor, in 1553 Zygmunt married his first wife’s sister, Katherine of Habsburg, widow of the Duke of Mantua. It was a disastrous marriage. The epileptic Queen physically repelled him and, unlike the others, she did not die—perhaps because Queen Bona, feeling more unpopular than ever, had loaded herself up with gold and jewels and fled to Bari in Italy where, appropriately enough, she was herself eventually poisoned. Since neither of his first two wives had borne him any children, the fact that Zygmunt Augustus refused to touch his third was a matter of some concern to his subjects. The extinction of a dynasty is always cause for alarm, and in this instance the alarm was all the greater as the Jagiellons were still the only real link between Poland and Lithuania. The Sejm begged the King to attend to his wife, repulsive or not, and the Primate actually went down on his knees in the chamber to beseech him either to possess her or to cast her off, breaking with Rome if need be. The King’s behaviour at this point was critical to both the religious and the political future of Poland, yet he remained undecided. His attitude to the Reformation was ambivalent. He never showed much sympathy for the Protestant movement, but took a great interest in it, avidly reading all the dissenting tracts and treatises and accepting the dedication of works by Luther and Calvin. In 1550 he issued an anti-Protestant decree in the hope of winning support from the bishops for his marriage to Barbara Radziwi??, but this remained a dead letter. A few years later he rebuked the Papal Nuncio for urging a firmer line towards the Protestants, and in effect forced him to leave Poland. When asked by his subjects which way they should lean in the religious debate, he replied: ‘I am not the king of your consciences.’ Unlike Henry VIII of England, Zygmunt Augustus did not want a divorce. His love for Barbara Radziwi?? had been a great passion, and her death robbed him of the will to live. He continued to carry out his duties without enthusiasm, dressed in black, and showed no desire to mould the future or perpetuate the dynasty. When pressed by the Sejm of 1555, he took the characteristically noncommittal and quite extraordinary step of referring the proposal for a national Church to Rome. He sent Stanis?aw Maciejewski to Pope Paul IV with the four demands of the Sejm. The Pope listened to them ‘with great sorrow and bitterness of heart’, and then rebuked Zygmunt for allowing his subjects to formulate such heretical ideas. The matter of the national Church rested there, and the reformers were, for once, unaided by provocative behaviour on the part of the Pope. The principal weakness of the Protestant movement in Poland was its lack of unity, and the only candidate for its leadership spent most of his active life in England. Jan ?aski, nephew of the archbishop of the same name and a member of what was briefly a rich and powerful family, became a Protestant while studying abroad. He stayed in Geneva with Calvin, who praised his ‘erudition, integrity and other virtues’. In Rotterdam he drew close to Erasmus, helping him out of financial difficulties by buying his library and leaving it with him for life. He was then invited to England by Thomas Cranmer and given a pension by Edward VI, who appointed him chaplain to the foreign Protestants who had taken refuge in England. Known in England as John a Lasco, he collaborated with Cranmer on the Book of Common Prayer of 1552, but with the accession of Queen Mary he was forced to leave the country. He reached Poland in time for the first Calvinist synod in 1554, at which he urged greater unity and a closing of ranks by all dissenters against the Catholic hierarchy. But his pleas were drowned out by disputes over minor theological and administrative questions. ?aski died in 1560, and it was not until 1570 that any kind of agreement was reached, in the Consensus of Sandomierz, but this failed to produce the sort of Protestant front he had hoped for. The Protestant movement enjoyed the patronage of the foremost magnates, but failed to gain the support of wider sections of the population. It never touched the peasants to any significant extent, never seriously affected those towns such as Przemy?l or Lw?w, which had no large German population, and left much of the szlachta indifferent, particularly in poor, populous Mazovia. Even in cases where their master went over to Calvinism the peasants clung to their old faith with surly tenacity, sometimes walking miles to the nearest Catholic church. The Reformation in Poland was not in essence a spiritual movement; it was part of a process of intellectual and political emancipation which had started long before. The szlachta, which had done everything to curtail the power of the crown, seized eagerly on the possibilities offered by it to break the power of the Church. Straightforward anticlericalism was easily confused with a desire for a return to true Christian principles, and so was another movement in Polish politics which reached a climax in the 1550s. A purely political reformist movement had come into existence at the beginning of the century. In spirit it was very close to the Reformation, since it placed the accent not on innovation but on stricter observance of the law, on weeding out malpractice and corruption. It was known as ‘the movement for the execution of the laws’, or simply the ‘executionist’ movement. One of its first preoccupations was that the law itself should be codified and published in clear form, and as a result much groundwork was done in the first half of the century, culminating in a number of legal reforms passed in 1578 which fixed the legal system for the next two hundred years. The executionists waged a war of attrition on the temporal position of the Church. It was they who gave the impetus to abolish the medieval anomaly of the diocesan courts in 1562. The Sejm of the following year saw another victory, when the Church, which had always enjoyed exemption from taxation, was forced to contribute financially to the defence of the state. Much of the executionists’ support stemmed from the ordinary person’s revulsion at having to contribute to the treasury through taxation, and they were therefore keen to see that such resources as the crown possessed were properly administered. This led them into direct conflict with the magnates, over the thorny subject of royal lands and starosties. The crown owned estates all over the country which it did not administer itself. Some were granted to individuals for services to the crown, to favourites, and even to merchants in return for cash advances. Others were granted with the office of starosta. The starostas were the linchpin of local government, the king’s officers in charge of law and order in a given locality. The starosties came with profitable estates which the incumbent was supposed to administer on behalf of the king, taking 20 per cent of the profit for himself as payment for the office he carried out. The rest went to the crown. All starosties and royal lands were the inalienable property of the crown, and reverted to it on the incumbent’s death. In practice, things worked differently. The office of starosta had degenerated into a sinecure, while the administration of the lands, which was not subject to any verification, afforded endless scope for venality, with the result that most of the revenue went not to the crown but into the pocket of the incumbent. The starosties were therefore highly sought-after; their holders could increase their revenue without any extra effort or outlay of funds and at the same time enjoy the prestige and power of the office. Influential families began to collect them, with the result that a magnate might hold up to half a dozen important starosties, and a number of other royal estates, and his family would be understandably loath to give them up on his death. Although the lands were supposed to revert to the crown, successive kings found it increasingly difficult not to award them to the son of the deceased incumbent without alienating the whole family. To all practical purposes, the starosties were therefore becoming hereditary in the richer families. This enraged the szlachta, since it both bolstered the position of the magnates and diminished the crown’s financial resources. Again and again the executionists clamoured for a return to due process and the repossession by the crown of multiply-held starosties. On this issue, however, the magnates in the Senate who normally supported the executionists against the Church would vote with the bishops against the executionists, and the king, who by the middle of the century relied more and more on the magnates for support, would cooperate with them. Only minimal success was achieved in 1563, when the Sejm decreed a general inspection of all accounts and inventories to catch out corrupt administrators. The executionist movement distracted much of the zeal which might otherwise have been concentrated on religious questions. At the same time, Catholic voters elected Calvinist deputies because they were executionists, and Catholic deputies voted with the executionist Calvinists on issues such as the demand for a national Church, the abolition of ecclesiastical tribunals, and the law forcing the Church to contribute financially to defence. Even at the height of the Reformation no Pole, be he Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist or Arian, was prepared to place religious issues before constitutional and legal ones. That is why the Reformation failed in Poland. After raging and blustering in word and print for a few decades, the Protestant movement gradually burnt itself out, while the energies which had fuelled it were diverted to political matters. The Catholic Church, which had dodged the heaviest blows and avoided confrontation, slowly went over to the offensive, as the Counter-Reformation gained strength. In Poland its progress was unsensational: no inquisition, no burnings at the stake, no anathemas, no forfeitures of property, no barring from office. It could hardly have been otherwise, given the spirit pervading Polish society and the stature of the leaders of the Counter-Reformation. The greatest of these, Cardinal Stanis?aw Hosius, was fundamentally opposed to violence and, referring to Mary Tudor, warned in 1571: ‘Let Poland never become like England.’ Hosius and his principal colleague, Marcin Kromer, were unusual among sixteenth-century Catholic prelates. Both had worked in the royal chancellery for the king before they went into the Church. Hosius then went on to play an important role at the Council of Trent. Kromer was a historian, and in his writings he demonstrated the unifying role the Church had played in Polish history. He preferred to argue with heretics rather than condemn them. Hosius favoured a similar approach, but he made a greater and more categorical statement on the matter of religion—something the Calvinists were unable to do. His Confessio (1551), a lucid reaffirmation of Catholic dogma, was one of the most powerful arguments of the European Counter-Reformation. It was translated into several languages, and between 1559 and 1583 ran to no fewer than thirtyseven separate editions in France alone. In 1564 Hosius brought the Jesuits to Poland, to reconquer the hearts, and more specifically the minds, of the Poles, and the most outstanding of them, Piotr Skarga (1536-1612), proved a worthy partner. Hosius and Skarga pinpointed the principal arguments for returning to the fold, letting time do the rest. And time was on the side of Rome. In 1570 Miko?aj Sierotka Radziwi??, son of the man who had introduced Calvinism to Lithuania and been one of its greatest financial and political supports, went back to the Church of Rome. Others followed suit, for a variety of reasons. Even the mixed marriages which the hierarchy had fulminated against worked in favour of Catholicism, since women had been largely left out of the religious debate and their conditioning led them to stand by their old faith. Jan Firlej, Marshal of Poland, had become a Calvinist, but his wife, Zofia Boner, had not. She covertly brought his sons up to love the Catholic faith, and three of the four became Catholics when they grew up. After her death, Firlej married Barbara Mniszech, another fervent Catholic. Although their son was ostensibly brought up a Calvinist, the mother’s influence prevailed, and he later became Primate of Poland. As Piotr Skarga foresaw, the country would be reconquered for Rome, ‘not by force or with steel, but by virtuous example, teaching, discussion, gentle intercourse and persuasion’. As Calvin grew more strident and Protestants in various European countries began to execute not only Catholics but other Protestants, the Polish prelates showed forbearance. They pointed out that Protestantism could be more repressive than Catholicism. They explained that it was not only divisive, but irresponsible, and in this they were helped by the example of the Arians. Under the influence of Fausto Sozzini, the Arian movement displayed a tendency to splinter while attracting all manner of dissenters and schismatics migrating from other countries. But what made the Arians really unpopular with the szlachta were the starkly political implications of their faith. ‘You should not eat bread made by the sweat of a subject’s brow, but make your own,’ they would hector. ‘Nor should you live on estates which were granted to your forebears for spilling the blood of enemies. You must sell those estates and give the money to the poor.’ Since the status of the szlachta was based on their readiness to bear arms, the Arians’ pacifism was downright subversive. (In an attempt to square the circle, their synod of 1604 allowed them to bear arms provided they did not use them.) With the impending extinction of the Jagiellon dynasty, Poland and Lithuania needed unity of purpose rather than dissent and refusal to take responsibility. Nevertheless, the constitutional and legal aspects of the issue were still paramount. After the death of Zygmunt Augustus the Sejm which met in 1573 under the name of the Confederation of Warsaw to shape Poland’s future passed an act whose most memorable clause ran as follows: Whereas in our Common Wealth there is no small disagreement in the matter of the Christian faith, and in order to prevent that any harmful contention should arise from this, as we see clearly taking place in other kingdoms, we swear to each other, in our name and in that of our descendants for ever more, on our honour, our faith, our love and our consciences, that albeit we are dissidentes in religione, we will keep the peace between ourselves, and that we will not, for the sake of our various faith and difference of church, either shed blood or confiscate property, deny favour, imprison or banish, and that furthermore we will not aid or abet any power or office which strives to this in any way whatsoever… The freedom to practise any religion without suffering discrimination or penalty was henceforth enshrined in the constitution. This law would be observed rigorously by Catholic kings and an increasingly Catholic population. Some illegal executions did take place, but they were few. When no criminal offence had been committed, even acts of extreme provocation went unpunished. In 1580 the Calvinist Marcin Kreza snatched the host from a priest, spat on it, trampled it, and then fed it to a passing mongrel, for which he was reprimanded by the king and told not to do it again. The Calvinist writer who chronicled the course of the Counter-Reformation in Poland, listing every execution or sectarian killing of a Protestant between 1550 and 1650, came up with a total no higher than twelve. During the same period, over five hundred people were legally executed for religious reasons in England, and nearly nine hundred were burnt in the Netherlands, while hundreds more suffered confiscations and attainders. This unique absence of violence stemmed partly from the Polish attitude to religion, partly from an obsession with legality and the principle of personal liberty, and partly from the fact that throughout this period Polish society concentrated on an attempt to build utopia on earth. FIVE Kingdom and Commonwealth (#ulink_19a58df9-4270-50e5-b36b-87561bef31aa) As the heirless Zygmunt Augustus paced the galleries of the Royal Castle on Krak?w’s Wawel hill dressed in mourning for Barbara Radziwi??, his subjects thought uneasily of the future. The realm of the Jagiellons was an assemblage of territories with disparate populations, differing customs and varying forms of government coexisting within one state. They were held together by no feudal bond, administration, constitution or military hegemony, but by a consensus whose only embodiment was the dynasty itself. Its possible extinction raised the question not just of who would rule the country, but whether it would even continue to exist in its current form. The only thing which could prevent the realm from falling apart was a constitutional expression of the consensus which had created it. But who was to formulate this? Who represented the population of this mongrel conglomerate? The answer, as they were not slow to make clear, was the szlachta. By the mid-sixteenth century the szlachta included Lithuanian nobles and Ruthene boyars, Prussian and Baltic gentry of German origin, as well as Tatars and smaller numbers of Moldavians, Armenians, Italians, Magyars and Bohemians, and was diluted by intermarriage with wealthy merchants and peasants. The szlachta made up around 7 per cent of the population. Since they extended from the top to the bottom of the economic scale, and right across the board in religion and culture, they represented a wider crosssection as well as a greater percentage of the population than any enfranchised class in any European country. To be a member of the szlachta was like being a Roman citizen. The szlachta were the nation, the Populus Polonus, while the rest of the people inhabiting the area were the plebs, who did not count politically. While the score of patrician families and the princes of the Church attempted to establish an oligarchy, the mass of the ‘noble people’ fought for control of what they felt to be their common weal. It was they who pressed for the execution of the laws, for a clearly defined constitution, and for a closer relationship with the throne. They met with little support from Zygmunt the Old or Zygmunt Augustus, both of whom tended to seek support in the magnates. While the executionists struggled with increasing desperation to arrive at a definition of the powers of the Sejm and the role of the monarch and his ministers, the magnates stalled, meaning to take matters into their own hands when the time came. A complicating factor was Lithuania, whose dynastic bond with Poland would have to be replaced with a constitutional one. In spite of being granted a senate of their own (Rada) at the beginning of the century, and a sejm in 1559, the szlachta of the Grand Duchy were politically immature and dominated by their magnates. One Lithuanian family, the Radziwi??, had shot to prominence at the beginning of the century. They accumulated wealth by means of marriages with Polish heiresses, and held most of the important offices in the Grand Duchy. In 1547, Miko?aj Radziwi?? ‘the Black’ (to distinguish him from his cousin and brother of Barbara, Miko?aj ‘the Red’) had obtained from the Habsburgs the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and as the extinction of the Jagiellons approached he dreamed of detaching the Grand Duchy from Poland and turning it into his own fief. But this was not likely to survive on its own: in 1547 the ruler of Muscovy, Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’, took the title of Tsar and made it clear that he meant to realise his forebears’ mission of gathering all the Russias under one crown, and his methods, ranging from boiling people in oil to putting cities to the sword, amply demonstrated the firmness of his resolve. Without Polish support, Lithuania, which had already lost Smolensk to Muscovy, would sooner or later experience them too. While the Lithuanian magnates and szlachta hesitated, the Poles forced the issue, by the administrative sleight of hand of transferring Lithuania’s Ukrainian lands from the Grand Duchy and annexing them to Poland. The Senate and Sejm of Lithuania and those of Poland met at Lublin on the border between the two states, and on 1 July 1569 unanimously swore a new act of union. At the practical level, the Union of Lublin was hardly revolutionary. It stipulated that henceforth the Sejms of both countries should meet as one, at Warsaw, a small town conveniently placed for the purpose. The combined upper house would contain 149 senators and the lower 168 deputies. Poland and Lithuania would share one monarch, not, as had been the case hitherto, de facto (because the Jagiellon elected to the Krak?w throne was already the hereditary Grand Duke of Lithuania) but de jure. The Grand Duchy was to keep its old laws, codified in the Statutes of Lithuania in 1529, a separate treasury, and its own army, to be commanded by a Grand Hetman and a Field-Hetman of Lithuania. The ministers of the crown (marshal, chancellor, vice chancellor, treasurer and marshal of the court) were joined by identical officers for Lithuania. The Union was a marriage of two partners, with the dominant position of Poland diplomatically effaced. It was the expression of the wishes of the szlachta, the embodiment of their vision of a republic in which every citizen held an equal stake. The combined kingdom now formally became ‘the Most Serene Commonwealth of the Two Nations’, ‘Serenissima Respublica Poloniae’ to foreigners. There was an obvious paradox in the co-existence of monarchy and republic, yet the Poles made a virtue out of the seeming contradiction. The political writer Stanis?aw Orzechowski claimed that the Polish system was superior to all others, since it combined the beneficent qualities of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. That it might combine their faults as well was not considered. In spite of continuous efforts by the executionists, the relationship between these three elements was never precisely defined. In principle, the Sejm was the embodiment of the will of the people, and therefore the fount of legislative power; the Senate were the custodians of the laws; the king was both a political unit in his own right and the mouthpiece of the Sejm. While the Sejm had curtailed the monarch’s personal power, it meant to invest its own in his person, thereby turning him into its executive. The would-be oligarchs in the Senate resisted this aim, while the uncertainties attendant on the Reformation and the impending interregnum made the deputies hesitate before placing too much of their power in the hands of the king. There was never any question of doing without a king. The Sejm had debated what to do on the death of Zygmunt Augustus as early as 1558. Because of the stalling tactics of the Senate, nothing had been formally agreed when, on 7 July 1572, the last of the Jagiellons died. The burning issue thus became how his successor should be chosen, and by whom. Early suggestions on procedure envisaged an enlarged Sejm, where each member would have one vote. The eleven major towns were to be represented, but not the bishops, since they were agents of a foreign power. When the time came, the Senate demanded the exclusive right to elect the new king, which brought an angry response from the szlachta. A suggestion that the entire political nation should have an equal vote was seized on by the bishops, who realised that an overwhelming majority were Catholic and therefore likely to support a Catholic candidate. The cry for universal suffrage was taken up by an ambitious young deputy to the Sejm, Jan Zamoyski, who captivated the szlachta with his rhetoric and became their tribune. With their support, he forced the proposal through the Convocation Sejm which met after the king’s death, in 1573. From now on every single member of the szlachta, however poor, was a king-maker. More than that: each one carried a royal crown in his saddlebag, for it was stipulated that only a Polish nobleman or member of a ruling foreign dynasty could be a candidate to the throne of the Commonwealth. The procedure for choosing the king was improvised at the first election of 1573. On the death of the sovereign, the Primate of Poland assumed the title of interrex, provisionally taking over the functions of the monarch, and summoned the Convocation Sejm to Warsaw. This fixed the date of the election, restated the rules, and vetted all the proposed candidates. It also set down the terms on which the king elect was to be invited to take the throne. Then came the Election Sejm, which met at Wola outside Warsaw, and to which every member of the szlachta was entitled to come. Since tens of thousands of voters might turn out, along with their servants and horses, this was often a remarkable gathering. The representatives of the various candidates set up ‘hospitality tents’ in which they plied the voters with food, drink and even money in the hope of gaining their vote. Rich magnates fraternised with the poorest members of the szlachta in order to gain their support for a favoured candidate. The centre of the Election Field was taken up by a fenced rectangular enclosure. At one end of this there was a wooden shed for the clerks and senior dignitaries, including the Marshal of the Sejm, who supervised the voting and policed the whole gathering. The electors remained outside the enclosure, on horseback and fully armed, drawn up in formation according to the palatinate in which they lived. This symbolised the lev?e en masse, the obligation to fight for the country which was the basis of all the szlachta’s privileges. It says a great deal for the restraint of the proverbially quarrelsome szlachta that the occasion did not degenerate into a pitched battle. Each palatinate sent ten deputies into the enclosure, where they and the assembled senators listened to the representatives of the various candidates make an election address on behalf of their man, extolling his virtues and making glittering election pledges. The deputies would then go back to their comrades outside the enclosure and impart what they had heard. When this had been mulled over, the voting began. Every unit was given sheets of paper, each with the name of a candidate at the top, and the assembled voters signed and sealed on the sheet bearing the name of the candidate of their choice. The papers were then taken back into the enclosure, the votes counted, and the result officially proclaimed by the interrex. The whole procedure took four days at the first election, in 1573, which was attended by 40,000 szlachta, but subsequent elections were often less well attended and could be over in a day or two. The king thus chosen could hardly entertain any illusions about Divine Right. To make sure that all remnants of any such idea should be banished from his mind, his prospective subjects made him swear an oath of loyalty to them and their constitution, as well as to a set of other conditions laid down in two documents: one, the Acta Henriciana, immutable; the other, the Pacta Conventa, drawn up specifically by the Convocation Sejm before every new election. In swearing to these, the king abdicated all right to a say in the election of his successor and agreed not to marry or divorce without the approval of the Sejm. He undertook not to declare war, raise an army, or levy taxes without its consent, and to govern through a council of senators chosen by it, which he had to summon at least once in every two years. If he defaulted on any of these points, his subjects were automatically released from their oath of loyalty to him—in other words, he could forfeit his throne if he did not abide by the terms of his employment. The king was, in effect, a functionary, the chief executive of the Commonwealth. He was not by any means a mere figurehead, but his power was not arbitrary, and he was not above the law. Although he had no aura of divinity surrounding him, the king could, and many did, build up a strong position and elicit unbounded respect and devotion from his subjects. And no elected King of Poland would suffer the fate of a Charles I or Louis XVI, however bad his behaviour. Like all others affected by the new learning of the Renaissance, the Poles had been fascinated by the rediscovery of the artistic and political culture of the Hellenic world and ancient Rome. The apparent similarities between some of their own institutions and those of the republics of antiquity tickled the national vanity. Without looking too closely at the pitfalls that led to the demise of the Roman Republic, the Senatus Populusque Polonus drew further on this model. The Polish political vocabulary bristled with terms such as ‘liberty’, ‘equality’, ‘brotherhood’, ‘nation’, ‘citizen’, ‘senate’, ‘tribune’, and ‘republic’. Like the makers of the French Revolution of 1789, the Poles increasingly borrowed the style, the symbolism and the concepts of the Roman Republic. The difference between the Poles of the sixteenth century and the French revolutionary leaders, however, was that the Polish system was based almost entirely on precedent. The notion of electing a monarch had evolved with Poland’s twelfth-century subdivision into duchies, and had attended every royal accession since. At the very beginning of the fifteenth century, Pawe? W?odkowic had put forward the thesis that the king was merely an administrator ruling the country on behalf of and by consent of his subjects, while his colleague Stanis?aw of Skarbimierz (d. 1431) had added that he had no right to infringe their rights. The thesis put forward by Buonaccorsi that the ruler should have absolute power and that nothing should stand in his way of acting for the greater good was confounded by the Polish constitutional jurists. After the death of Kazimierz IV in 1492, his sons and all subsequent kings of the house of Jagiello were subjected to a regular election. Nor was the idea of choosing a foreign prince new—it was based on the precedent of the Krak?w Lords approving the accession of Louis of Anjou, and their subsequent choice of Jagiello. Virtually every clause in the Acta Henriciana and most of those in the Pacta Conventa were a repetition of older privileges. This deference to precedent is reflected in the fact that there was no written constitution, merely a great body of legislation written into the statute books, swelling gradually by accretion over the centuries. Yet if the Polish constitution evolved out of practical rather than theoretical motives, it was fashioned by a mentality which was idealistic rather than pragmatic. The parliamentary system relied to an inordinate extent on the integrity of the individual deputy and senator, and lacked procedures for ensuring correct behaviour. The Marshal of the Sejm (not to be confused with the Marshals of Poland and of Lithuania, who were the king’s ministers) was elected at the beginning of each session by the deputies, and it was his duty to keep order. Since he had no authority to silence a deputy or expel him from the chamber, the orderly conduct of debates depended in large measure on his skill in easing tensions and steering attention back to the point at issue. His job was made no easier by the ambiguities inherent in the mandate given to the deputies by the sejmiks which elected them. In principle, the deputies were the representatives not merely of the provincial sejmiks which had returned them, but of the corporate electorate of the whole Commonwealth, and they were supposed to cast their votes as such. At the same time, each deputy was given a set of written instructions before he left for Warsaw to take up his seat. These instructions varied from general guidelines to specific orders on how to vote on certain issues. The electorate’s participation in government did not end with the election of a deputy, and he could ill afford to disregard the injunctions of his electors, since he had to face a debriefing in his constituency at the end of the parliamentary session. Sometimes deputies were instructed not to vote on any unforeseen issues without consulting their electors. This practice tied the hands of the deputies and reduced the value of parliamentary debate, but an intelligent and experienced deputy could still vote according to his conscience and answer for it successfully to his electors. It was not until the beginning of the next century, when the electorate began to grow suspicious of central government, that the instructions became binding. The Polish parliamentary system was more vulnerable than most, because of a principle whose perverted form, the liberum veto, was to become notorious: the principle that no legislation could be enacted without mutual consent. Some such convention originally existed in virtually every parliamentary body in Europe. It did not mean that everyone had to vote for a measure unanimously, but expressed the twin convictions that any measure not freely assented to by all lacked full authority and that no sincere dissenting opinion should be disregarded by the majority. Dissenting minorities were listened to, argued with and persuaded, and only when broad agreement had been reached (the word used was the Latin consensus) was a measure passed. In theory, a small minority, even a minority of one, could block legislation. In practice, minorities were ultimately ignored if they proved intractable. Another curious feature of the constitution was the szlachta’s right to confederate in an emergency such as the death of the monarch, foreign invasion, or some other extremity. They would form a confederation, elect a marshal, publish their aims and invite others to join. It was a form of plebiscite, and could take place within a Sejm where deadlock had been reached; it was the one political assembly in which, for obvious reasons, strict majority voting was observed and dissent ignored. A fundamental weakness of the Polish parliamentary system was the under-representation of the towns, and therefore of trading interests, in the Sejm. This was not so much a flaw in the constitution as a reflection of the country’s social structure. In the fifteenth century the towns, with their predominantly foreign populations enjoying a favourable administrative status, did not join in the scramble for power and thereby missed an opportunity for integrating their rights into the constitution. They had always dealt directly with the crown, which guaranteed their status, but when the crown began to abdicate its responsibilities to the Sejm, the towns were left without a champion. This was compounded by social barriers. A law passed in 1550 (mainly at the insistence of the merchants) barred members of the szlachta from indulging in trade, and soon the szlachta began to regulate admissions to its own ranks. In 1578 the Sejm passed a law taking away from the crown and arrogating to itself the exclusive right to ennoble people (except for battlefield grants of arms by the king). A law of 1497 preventing plebeians from buying noble estates closed a back door to noble status. This sort of legislation was impossible to enforce given the absence of any heraldic institution or register, but lines were being drawn. A merchant might join the szlachta by some means and thereby acquire voting rights, but when he did, he would find himself banned from practising anything except agriculture, politics and war. A number of cities, including Krak?w, Lublin, Lw?w, Pozna?, Wilno, Gda?sk and Toru?, were represented in the Sejm, and other towns were on occasion invited to send deputies. In theory, these had the same debating and voting rights as others, but the reality was often different. As the writer Sebastian Petrycy put it: ‘Once upon a time a donkey was asked to a wedding feast; he marvelled and licked his chops at the thought of the new unfamiliar delicacies he would be tasting, but when the day came the donkey found he was only there to carry water and kindling to the kitchen.’ The city deputies were usually intimidated by their noble colleagues and feared to say anything—with some reason, since it appears that in 1537 the Krak?w deputies were physically assaulted. They often found it easier to stay away and put up with whatever taxes might be imposed, or employ the local palatine to look after their interests. The peasants, who had also enjoyed a direct relationship with the crown, were similarly sidelined. As the judge of the supreme court of appeal, the king had been the final arbiter in all their disputes with landowners. In 1518 Zygmunt the Old was persuaded to give up his right of arbitration, and in 1578 the Sejm itself assumed the function. Since it represented almost exclusively landed interests, the peasants were unlikely to find justice here. It is worth nothing that the principles of Polish democracy were not exclusive to the Sejm, and every village had its elected communal council and officers. The squire’s functions within this, usually as local magistrate, were not feudal or proprietary, but elective. Not all the drawbacks of the Polish constitution were specific to it. All democracy breeds its own problems, and one of these is the impossibility of carrying on a successful foreign policy when decision-making is hamstrung by the devolution of power and the force of public opinion. The element of secrecy was impossible to sustain since all Sejm debates were open to the public and all its resolutions immediately printed. Defence suffered from the same problems. No democracy likes an army, because nobody likes paying for one. In the late sixteenth century about two-thirds of the entire revenue of most European states was spent on armament, almost 70 per cent in the case of Spain. In Poland, the figure was nearer 20 per cent. In the 1480s a ‘Current Defence Force’ of 2,000 was set up to parry Tatar raiding, and in 1520 the Sejm increased the numbers slightly. In 1563 a new system of ‘Quarter Troops’ was introduced, paid for out of a quarter of all revenues from starosties, but the number of men under arms remained tiny in relation to the vast area of the Commonwealth. It was not just that the Poles did not like paying for the troops. The szlachta also wished to perpetuate the idea of the lev?e en masse, which would become unnecessary if there were an adequate standing army. More important than either of these considerations was the deep-rooted conviction that a standing army was sooner or later bound to be used by the crown to enforce absolutist government. This fear of authoritarian rule was responsible for all that is most striking about the political edifice of the Commonwealth. The salient features of this edifice were the oath of loyalty made by the incoming monarch to his subjects, and the clause which stipulated that if he defaulted on his obligations his subjects were automatically released from their obligations to him. The latter was an obvious recipe for disaster. It amounted to a right to mutiny if the king overstepped his powers—a question open to highly subjective interpretation. But this right was never carried through to its logical end. Mutinies would take place in the spirit of this clause in 1606 and 1665, but neither of them led to the dethronement of the monarch. They were intended as a final rap on the royal knuckles to make the king desist from his plans. The release clause was only the ultimate recourse in the whole scheme of checks and balances erected in order to make sure that power was never concentrated in too few hands. It also proclaimed the basis of the relationship between king and subject. Ruler and ruled were bound by a bilateral contract which placed obligations on both and had to be respected by both. This notion of a contract between the throne and the people, the cornerstone of the constitution, was almost entirely unknown in Europe at the time—only in England were the germs of such ideas in evidence. While the Habsburgs of Austria, the Bourbons of France, the Tudors of England, and every other ruling house of Europe strove to impose centralised government, ideological unity and increasing control of the individual through a growing administration, Poland alone of all the major states took the opposite course. The Poles had made an article of faith of the principle that all government is undesirable, and strong government is strongly undesirable. This was based on the conviction that one man had no right to tell another what to do, and that the quality of life was impaired by unnecessary administrative superstructure. That such ideals should be held by people who simultaneously oppressed their own subjects, the peasants, is neither novel nor exceptional: the Greek founders of modern political thought no less than the Fathers of the American Revolution applied a similar double standard which cannot be equated with hypocrisy. SIX The Reign of Erasmus (#ulink_f6f38073-8ac6-5a61-8a1d-c03293916a75) In the sixteenth century the Polish Commonwealth was the largest state in Europe, extending over 990,000 square kilometres. The nature of this vast expanse varied from the undulating landscape of Wielkopolska to the flatness of Mazovia and the dense forests of Lithuania, from the Tatra mountains to the swamps of Belorussia, from the forests and lakes of Mazuria to the wild plains of Podolia rolling away into the distance, which the Poles referred to as ‘Ukraina’, meaning ‘margin’ or ‘edge’. The population was, at ten million, equal to that of Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, twice that of England, and two-thirds that of France. Only 40 per cent were Poles, and they were concentrated in about 20 per cent of the area. The mass of the population, the peasantry, was made up of three principal ethnic groups: Polish, Lithuanian and Belarusian or Ukrainian. The urban population too was far from uniform. The great trading emporium of Gda?sk, almost a city-state in itself, was preponderantly German. Nearby lay the smaller port of Elbl?g, which had a large colony of English and Scots. Krak?w had significant ones of Hungarians and Italians. Lw?w, a city with an individual outlook, both politically and culturally, and the only city apart from Rome to have three Christian archbishoprics, was made up of Poles, Germans, Italians and Armenians. Six languages were recognised for legal purposes; Polish, Latin, Belarusian, Hebrew, German and Armenian. Almost every town also had its Jewish community. In the north, where some towns enjoyed exemptions under medieval charters granted by the Teutonic Order, the Jews were confined to a specific quarter. In the rest of the Commonwealth they settled where they would, and there were quantities of small towns in the south and east in which they predominated. This Jewish community, which accounted for nearly 10 per cent of the entire population, led a life of its own, communicating almost exclusively in Hebrew or Yiddish, while the Karaite Jews spoke Tatar. A charter of 1551 set up what was in effect a Jewish state within the state. Local Jewish communes (Kahal) sent deputies twice a year to a national assembly (Vaad Arba Aracot) which governed the whole community. It passed laws, assessed taxes, funded and regulated its own legal system and institutions, communicating directly with the crown, not the Sejm. The next hundred years saw a remarkable flourishing of this community, which grew confident and assertive. Jealous merchants in Lw?w complained in 1630 of the Jews behaving ‘like lords, driving in carriages, in coaches-andsix, surrounded by pages and grand music, consuming costly liquors in silver vessels, behaving publicly with pomp and ceremony’. They were rich merchants and bankers, small traders and inn-keepers, artisans and farmers, agents, factors and surgeons. Every village had one or two Jews, every little town had its community, with synagogue and ritual baths, and its own secluded life. The most striking aspect of the Commonwealth, particularly in view of its size and ethnic diversity, was that it had no administrative structure to speak of. The only thing holding it together was the political nation, the szlachta, and that was as disparate as the Commonwealth itself. The wealthiest could compare with any grandees in Europe, the poorest were the menial servants of the rich. In between, they might be wealthy landowners or humble homesteaders ploughing and harvesting with their own hands, barefoot and in rags, poorer than many a peasant. Their level of education, religious affiliation and ethnic origin were just as varied. The szlachta nevertheless developed a remarkably homogeneous culture and outlook, based on two influences which might be thought mutually exclusive. The first was the discovery of ancient Rome, and the analogies increasingly made between its institutions, customs and ideology, and those of the Commonwealth. This affected the Poles’ attitude to government. It was also responsible for the abandonment of the long hair of the late medieval period and the adoption of the ‘Roman’ haircut, and the acceptance of Renaissance forms in architecture. At the psychological level it gave the Poles a sense of belonging to a European family, based not on the Church or the Empire, but on Roman civilisation. The second influence was more nebulous but far more pervasive. It stemmed from the theory, elaborated by various writers at the beginning of the century, that the Polish szlachta were not of the same Slav stock as the peasantry, but descendants of the Sarmatians. This placed a neat ethnic distinction between the political nation and the rest of the population, the plebs. How far they really believed in it is not clear, but the myth was embraced by the multi-ethnic szlachta, who were far more at home with the ‘noble warrior’ Sarmatian myth than with the image of Christian chivalry, with all that entailed in terms of fealty and homage. In time, the Sarmatian myth grew into an all-embracing ideology, but in the sixteenth century its influence was visible principally in manners and taste. As a result of contacts with Hungary and Ottoman Turkey various accoutrements of Persian origin were gradually incorporated into everyday use, and by the end of the century a distinctly oriental Polish costume had evolved. The szlachta invested in things they could wear or use—clothes, jewels, arms, saddlery, horses, servants and almost anything else that could be paraded. Weapons were covered in gold, silver and precious stones. Saddles and bridles were embroidered with gold thread and sewn with sequins or semi-precious stones. It was common for a nobleman who had a number of fine horses and several caparisons to have them all harnessed and led along behind him by pages, rather than leave them at home where no one would be able to admire them. The Poles were close to their horses, which were symbols of their warrior status. They were tacked in fine harness, covered in rich cloths, adorned with plumes and even wings, and, on high days and holidays, dyed (usually cochineal, but black, mauve or green were favoured for funerals). Another aspect of Sarmatism was the love of ceremony. Hospitality was a way of showing respect and friendship, and was rarely confined to providing adequate food and drink, although both featured in abundance. Vodka and other spirits were never served at table or in the home, where wine predominated, imported for the most part from Hungary and Moldavia, but also from France, Italy and even the Canary Islands and, in the following century, California. The discovery of America flooded Europe with minerals and precious metals in the sixteenth century, and the eventual consequence of this was to raise prices of commodities such as food. The ever growing demand for ships had the same effect on timber, pitch and hemp. Over the course of the century, the price at which Poles sold their agricultural produce went up by over 300 per cent. The actual buying power of what the szlachta had to sell went up against staple imports such as cloth, iron, wine, pepper, rice and sugar, by just over 90 per cent between 1550 and 1600. During the same period, the quantity exported more than doubled. The result was that landed Poles became a great deal richer in terms of cash to spend than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. This permitted increasing numbers of Poles to travel abroad, primarily in order to study. Lutherans might send their sons to Wittenberg and Calvinists to Basel, for religious reasons, but the most popular universities were those of Italy: between 1501 and 1605 Polish students consistently made up at least a quarter of the student body at the University of Padua. As they grew richer, they began to mix tourism with study. The wealthy would come back loaded with pictures and sculpture, books and works of art, and once home, set about embellishing their own surroundings along the lines observed abroad. In 1502 Prince Zygmunt returned from his travels, bringing with him a Florentine architect who would rebuild the Royal Castle in Renaissance style. Other Italians followed in his footsteps, lured by the opportunities as magnates and prelates vied with each other to build lavish new residences, in a style that subjected Italian Renaissance architecture to the demands of the Polish climate and the pretentions of their patrons. The same instincts that fed on Sarmatism are undoubtedly responsible for the extravagance and the fantasy displayed. But the new style also reflected an attempt to give form to some of the ideals the educated szlachta had embraced. Many of the important buildings of the period are public ones, and they embody the spirit that was responsible for constructing the Commonwealth, the Polish utopia. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the largest, the most monumental, and the most ambitious building project of the age—the city of Zamo??. And few individuals offer as complete a picture of the contradictions of the age as does it creator, who was both a child of the Renaissance and a forerunner of a new Baroque plutocracy, a libertarian and an autocrat, one of the creators of the Commonwealth, who sowed some of the first seeds of its corruption. Jan Zamoyski was born in 1542, the son of a Calvinist minor senator. As a young man he completed courses at the Sorbonne and at the new College de France, then at the University of Padua, of which he became Rector. While there, he published a treatise on Roman constitutional history and became a Catholic. He returned to Poland with a letter of recommendation from the Senate of Venice to Zygmunt Augustus, who employed him as a secretary. He made his mark during the first interregnum, became Chancellor in 1578, and Hetman in 1581. He married, among others, the daughter of Miko?aj Radziwi?? ‘the Black’, and later the niece of the second elected king of Poland. Whether he aspired to the crown himself is not clear, but he set a pattern of autonomy which would be followed by most magnates in the next century. On the death of his father in 1571 Zamoyski inherited four villages and the rich Starosty of Be?z. He methodically enlarged this estate, squeezing out adjacent landowners and buying out the senior branch of his family from the seat of Zamo??. By 1600 he owned 6,500 square kilometres in one block, as well as lesser estates, properties in all the major cities, and thirteen lucrative starosties. In 1580 he began to build New Zamo??. It was to be an ideal Platonic city, laid out according to symbolic axes and points of reference, dominated at one end by his own palace, and at the centre by the town hall. Other major buildings included the law courts, the Catholic collegiate church, the Franciscan church, the Armenian church, the Orthodox church, the synagogue, the university, and the arsenal. The city was underpinned by a sophisticated sewerage system and surrounded by star-shaped fortifications of the most modern type. Zamo?? made economic sense. It was settled by large numbers of Hispanic Jews, Italians, Scots, Armenians, Turks and Germans, who provided everything from medical facilities to a cannon foundry, from jewellery to printing presses. By endowing his domain with a capital city, Zamoyski turned it into a self-sufficient state, and all the profits, levies and dues which would otherwise have gone to the royal cities or the treasury went into his own pocket. The idea was widely copied. In 1594 the ???kiewski family founded their administrative capital of ???kiew, which by 1634 when it passed to the Sobieski was a flourishing centre with fifteen different guilds. Soon every magnate was building a private town for himself, a trend that undermined the position of the existing towns and cities. Zamo?? is nevertheless unique. It is a model of Polish Renaissance-Mannerist style, but its purpose was not merely to achieve beauty. It was to combine functionalism with aesthetic perfection in order to create the ideal environment. Every element was of importance, and if there was one that overshadowed the others, it was probably the university, opened in 1594, which would, it was assumed, produce the ideal citizen. This belief that utopia could be built was the product of more than a century of prosperity and security, of political self-confidence based on the civil liberties of the citizen, and of an impressive legacy of political and social thought which continued to develop and spread through the printed word. There may not have been very much awaiting publication when the first press was set up at Krak?w in 1473, but by the early 1500s the urge to publish was evidenced by the proliferation of presses in provincial cities. While originally legislation demanded that all books be passed by the Rector of the Jagiellon University, the executionist movement won a notable victory in 1539 by obtaining a royal decree on the absolute freedom of the press. Only a fraction of the existing literary heritage was in the vernacular, which was still orthographically inchoate and marked by regional variation. Atlases and geographical works published between 1500 and 1520, and works on the history of Poland that appeared in the following decades, helped to standardise the spelling of place-names. The publication of large numbers of books in Polish from the 1520s imposed uniformity of spelling and grammar. In 1534 Stefan Falimirz published the first Polish medical dictionary; in 1565 Stanis?aw Grzepski of the Jagiellon University published his technical handbook Geometria. The six translations of the New Testament—K?nigsberg (Lutheran, 1551), Lw?w (Catholic, 1561), Brze?? (Calvinist, 1563), Nie?wie? (Arian, 1570), Krak?w (Jesuit, 1593), Gda?sk (Lutheran, 1632)—constituted an exercise in Polish semantics. In 1568 the first systematic Polish grammar was compiled by Piotr Stoje?ski, an Arian of French origin; in 1564 Jan M?czy?ski issued his Polish-Latin lexicon at K?nigsberg; and finally, in 1594 the writer ?ukasz G?rnicki produced a definitive Polish orthography. Latin nevertheless continued in use, particularly in religious and political literature, both because it was a better tool for theoretical and philosophical writing, and because it was universal to Europe. The most striking aspect of Polish thought at the time was the preoccupation with public affairs and government. The discussion on the Polish body politic was opened by Jan Ostror?g with his Monumentum pro Reipublicae Ordinatione (c.1460), which argued for a more just social and political system. It was taken up by Marcin Bielski (1495-1575) and Marcin Kromer (1512-89), who used books on the history of Poland to polemicise about the rights and wrongs of the system. Stanis?aw Orzechowski applied geometrical principles to constitutional projects. Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski (1503-72), Zygmunt Augustus’ delegate to the Council of Trent in 1545 and a close friend of the theologian Melanchthon, with whom he had studied at Wittenberg, published a treatise on the Polish legal system, and in 1554 a longer work, De Republica Emendanda, sketching a utopian political vision. Most of this literature was idealistic, and, like the work of the eighteenth-century philosophes, predicated on the mirage of an ideal condition. It represented existing abuses and injustice as perversions of this condition, rather than as inherent in human affairs. The next generation of political writers applied their ideas to specific institutions. Bartlomiej Paprocki’s O Hetmanie was an attempt to define the role and duty of the hetman; Krzysztof Warszewicki’s De Legato did the same for those engaged in diplomacy; Jakub G?rski’s Rada Pa?ska, Jan Zamoyski’s De Senatu Romano and Wawrzyniec Go?licki’s De Optimo Senatore all lectured on the conduct of affairs of state. Although they were more practical than their forerunners they still clung to the belief that good government depended on good people rather than on strong institutions. As Zamoyski said in the speech inaugurating the university he had founded: ‘Republics will always be as good as the upbringing of their young men.’ By the end of the fifteenth century over 80 per cent of the 6,000 parishes in Wielkopolska and Ma?opolska had schools. The resultant upsurge in literacy was no doubt responsible for a literary flowering which took place at the same time. The first Polish lyric poet, Klemens Janicki (1516-43), was born a peasant but entered the priesthood and studied at the universities of Bologna and Padua, where he was crowned poet laureate by Cardinal Bembo. More typical was Miko?aj Rej of Nag?owice (1505-69), a country gentleman who wrote in robust Polish on religious, political and social issues. He was one of half a dozen notable poets, but they were all overshadowed by one figure who dominated the second half of the century. Jan Kochanowski (1530-84) studied at Krak?w, K?nigsberg and Padua, and then spent some years at court while considering a career in the Church. He was prolific and imaginative, and his use of Polish, a language he did more than any other to enrich, was masterful and refined. While he is best known for his lyrical verse and court poems, his rendering of the psalms of David, and above all the threnody he composed on the death of his three-year-old daughter, Kochanowski did not avoid the political subjects popular with other writers. He too was preoccupied with the good of the Commonwealth. This comes out strongly in his only attempt at drama. Although there was dramatic entertainment at court from the 1520s and a number of troupes active around the country (and, from 1610, a playhouse in Gda?sk in which English actors performed Shakespeare), it was not a favoured medium. Kochanowski’s short play The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys is the only exception. The characters in the play are not really people, but in effect the voices of collective interests, and the play is not about their feelings, but about the fate of Troy. This curious use of dramatis personae to represent the collective foreshadows nineteenth—and twentieth-century Polish drama, the mainstream of which is neither lyrical nor psychological, but ethical and political. The state of mind defined in the words of these writers is a curious mixture of ideological bombast, emotional sincerity and healthy cynicism. The three co-exist with the two most pervasive themes. One is the almost obsessive feeling of responsibility for and compulsion to participate in the organic life of the Commonwealth at every level. The other is the quest for Arcadia. If political writing rested on the myth of an ‘ideal condition’ which had been perverted and must be restored, the literary imagination translated this into a quest for the state of innocence as epitomised by country life. This gave rise to a long tradition of Sielanki, a word the poet Szymon Szymonowicz (1558-1629) coined to express bucolic idylls. The sielanka theme haunted Polish thought and literature, sometimes assuming the aspect of a cult. Inspired by the quest for a lost innocence, which implied a rejection of corruption, it could take many forms. In the minds of the nineteenth-century Romantics, for instance, it would become confused with the quest for the lost motherland, and imply a rejection of political reality. More often, it took the form of intellectual withdrawal from the world, which at its worst exalted intellectual escapism and made the spirit of enquiry suspect. There is a strong, if indefinable, connection between these states of mind and Poland’s place in European culture. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Poles were as widely travelled as the citizens of any nation. Polish and foreign painters, sculptors and musicians likened Polish cities and palaces to those of Europe. Kochanowski knew Ronsard, Stanis?aw Reszka and others were friends of Tasso, and a considerable number of Poles were closely associated with Erasmus of Rotterdam. Leonard Coxe, who taught at Cambridge and the Sorbonne before becoming professor at the Jagiellon University, remarked in a letter to an English friend that the Poles walked, talked, ate and slept Erasmus, beginning with the King, who wrote to him in a familiar style usually reserved for sovereign princes. The literature of other countries was avidly read in Poland, and while Polish poetry may not have been read widely in other countries, the political and religious works penetrated far and wide. Modrzewski’s De Republica Emendanda was available in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian. Go?licki’s De Optimo Senatore was published in Venice, Basel and London. Kromer’s Confessio ran into several dozen editions of the original Latin text in various countries, and was translated into Polish, Czech, German, Dutch, French and English. Technical works such as Grzepski’s Geometria became part of the European scientific toolkit, as did those of Miko?aj Kopernik (Copernicus). Born at Toru? in 1473, the son of a merchant, Kopernik enrolled at the Jagiellon University in 1491 to study astronomy, and later joined the priesthood, which enabled him to pursue studies at the universities of Bologna, Ferrara and Padua. After returning home, he became administrator of the bishopric of Warmia, but also worked as a lawyer, doctor, architect and even soldier, commanding a fortress in the last clash with the Teutonic Order in 1520. In 1543, the year of his death, he published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, in which he demonstrated that the sun and not the earth was the centre of the planetary system. Erasmus was prompted to ‘congratulate the Polish nation…which…can now compete with the foremost and most cultivated in the world’. But this could very well serve as an epitaph, for Polish participation in the cultural life of Europe had reached a peak. A crucial element was language. For centuries the native tongue had been supplemented by Latin, which enjoyed the twin benefit of being a developed instrument of communication and an international medium without which the Poles would have been utterly isolated. As the Scots traveller Fynes Moryson noted in 1593, ‘There is not a ragged boy, nor a smith that shooes your hose, but he can speake Latten readily.’ During the sixteenth century the first of these benefits dwindled as Polish rapidly evolved into a lucid, harmonious language as efficient as Latin for the expression of ideas. The second benefit of Latin also began to wane, as a general drift throughout Europe towards the vernacular tended to restrict its international usefulness. From 1543 the decisions of the Sejm were published in Polish not Latin, and the same went for legal documents. As Polish became the language of state and of literature, Polish thought became increasingly inaccessible to western Europe. In a poem he wrote to Erasmus, Bishop Krzycki assured him that the Poles were not only reading all his works, but also passing them on ‘across the Don’. The Russian world, which never had Latin, was heavily dependent on Poland for access to classical and contemporary European literature. It was from Kochanowski’s translations of Tasso, for example, that the first Russian ones were made. The Commonwealth was also the printing house of eastern Europe. The first book, a Bible, to be printed in Belarusian was published in Wilno in 1517. More surprisingly, the first printed work in Romanian was published in Krak?w, from which also came quantities of books in Hungarian. By the end of the century the printers of Wilno, Krak?w and Lublin were making small fortunes from supplying eastern European markets. The Polish presses also printed the Hebrew religious texts used throughout the European Diaspora. The Polish szlachta continued to learn Latin, but German, which had been a crucial link with the outside world until the end of the Middle Ages, gradually dwindled. Partly as a result of the Reformation, Germany’s importance as a source of culture declined for Poland. France and Spain were in the grip of the Counter-Reformation and increasingly absolutist government, which made them unattractive to the Poles. Direct links had been forged with Italy, and Poland itself had acquired most of the amenities for which it had in the past been dependent on others. If the fifteenthcentury Pole had seen himself as living on the edge of a flat earth whose centre was somewhere far away to the west, his counterpart in the late sixteenth saw Poland not as peripheral to Europe, but as central to its own world. The East had never had much to offer except for Tatar raids and Muscovite maraudings, but in the course of the sixteenth century a new vista came into view beyond these nuisances. Persian and Ottoman culture began to fascinate Polish society. Apart from owning Turkish artefacts, Stanis?aw Lubomirski, Palatine of Krak?w, also kept three eminent orientalists in his permanent entourage. Tomasz Zamoyski, son of the Chancellor and Hetman, was learning four languages at the age of eight: Latin, Greek, Turkish and Polish. By the time he had completed his early studies, he was fluent in not only Turkish, but also Tatar and Arabic. The Polish Commonwealth was turning into a hybrid of East and West, increasingly exotic but also baffling to western Europeans. SEVEN Democracy versus Dynasty (#ulink_c62225f5-8328-597c-94f5-0dc23525ada4) There was nothing oriental about the man the Poles chose as their new king in 1573. Nor was he the most likely candidate for the throne of the multi-denominational Commonwealth. A few months before the Confederation of Warsaw passed its act on religious freedom, Henri de Valois, younger brother of Charles IX of France, took an enthusiastic part in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestants. The first election went remarkably smoothly. At the news of Zygmunt Augustus’s death a Convocation Sejm gathered to thrash out the details. The candidates were Ernest of Habsburg, Henri de Valois, Ivan IV of Muscovy, and the two outsiders John III of Sweden and Stephen Bathory of Transylvania. A key figure was the late king’s sister, Anna, the last surviving member of the Jagiellon dynasty. Many took it as read that the successful candidate would marry her, thereby cementing his position on the throne and emulating the precedent set by Jagie??o himself, an assumption which Anna did much to further. Others, including the majority of the Senate, suspected her ambition and saw her as an obstacle to establishing a new dynasty. Apart from being no beauty, Anna was well over fifty years old. This did not stand in the way of the cunning agent of Henri de Valois, Jean de Monluc, Bishop of Valence, who laid siege to her affections on behalf of his master, assuring her that the Prince, twenty-eight years her junior, was consumed with passion for her. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/adam-zamoyski/poland-a-history/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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