24: The Reformation Period
<< 23: Early History of Poland || 25: The Cossacks >>
HITHERTO the Republic had given the Holy
See but little anxiety. Hussite influences, in the beginning of the 15th century, had been
superficial and transitory. The Polish government had employed Hussite mercenaries, but
rejected Hussite propagandists. The edict of Wielun (1424), remarkable as the first
anti-heretical decree issued in Poland, crushed the new sect in its infancy. Lutheranism,
moreover, was at first regarded with grave suspicion by the intensely patriotic Polish
gentry, because of its German origin. Nevertheless, the extremely severe penal edicts
issued during the reign of Sigismund I., though seldom applied, seem to point to the fact
that heresy was spreading widely throughout the country. For a time, therefore, the
Protestants had to be cautious in Poland proper, but they found a sure refuge in Prussia,
where Lutheranism was already the established religion, and where the newly erected
university of Königsberg became a seminary for Polish ministers and preachers.
While Lutheranism was thus threatening the Polish Church from the
north, Calvinism had already invaded her from the west. Calvinism, indeed, rather
recommended itself to the Poles as being of non-German origin, and Calvin actually
dedicated his Commentary on the Mass to the young krolewicz (or crown
prince) Sigismund Augustus, from whom protestantism, erroneously enough, expected much in
the future. Meanwhile conversion to Calvinism, among the higher classes in Poland, became
more and more frequent. We hear of crowded Calvinist conventicles in Little Poland from
1545 onwards, and Calvinism continued to spread throughout the kingdom during the latter
years of Sigismund I. Another sect, which ultimately found even more favour in Poland than
the Calvinists, was that of the Bohemian Brethren. We first hear of them in Great Poland
in 1548. A royal decree promptly banished them to Prussia, where they soon increased so
rapidly as to be able to hold their own against the Lutherans. The death of the
uncompromising Sigismund I. came as a great relief to the Protestants, who entertained
high hopes of his son and successor. He was known to be familiar with the works of the
leading reformers; he was surrounded by Protestant counsellors, and he was actually
married to Barbara, daughter of Prince Nicholas Radziwill, "Black Radziwill,"
the all-powerful chief of the Lithuanian Calvinists. It was not so generally known that
Sigismund II. was by conviction a sincere though not a bigoted Catholic; and nobody
suspected that beneath his diplomatic urbanity lay a patriotic firmness and statesmanlike
qualities of the first order. Moreover, they ignored the fact that the success of the
Protestant propaganda was due rather to political than to religious causes. The Polish
gentry's jealousy of the clerical estate, whose privileges even exceeded their own, was at
the bottom of the whole matter. Any opponent of the established clergy was the natural
ally of the szlachta, and the scandalous state of the Church herself provided them
with a most formidable weapon against her. It is not too much to say that the condition of
the Catholic Church in Poland was almost as bad as it was in Scotland during the same
period. The bishops were, for the most part, elegant triflers, as pliant as reeds, with no
fixed principles and saturated with a false humanism. Some of them were notorious
evil-livers. "Pint-pot" at Luski, bishop of Posen, had purchased his office for
12,000 ducats from Queen Bona; while another of her creatures, Peter, popularly known as
the "wencher," was appointed bishop of Przemysl with the promise of the
reversion of the still richer see of Cracow. Moreover, despite her immense wealth (in the
province of Little Poland alone she owned at this time 26 towns, 83 landed estates and 772
villages), the Church claimed exemption from all public burdens, from all political
responsibilities, although her prelates continued to exercise an altogether
disproportionate political influence. Education was shamefully neglected, the masses being
left in almost heathen ignorance and this, too, at a time when the upper classes were
greedily appropriating the ripe fruits of the Renaissance and when, to use the words of a
contemporary, there were "more Latinists in Poland than there used to be in
Latium." The university of Cracow, the sole source of knowledge in the vast Polish
realm, still moved in the vicious circle of scholastic formularies. The provincial
schools, dependent upon so decrepit an Alma Mater, were suffered to decay. This criminal
neglect of national education brought along with it its own punishment. The sons of the
gentry, denied proper instruction at home, betook themselves to the nearest universities
across the border, to Goldberg in Silesia, to Wittemberg, to Leipzig. Here they fell in
with the adherents of the new faith, grave, earnest men who professed to reform the abuses
which had grown up in the Church; and a sense of equity as much as a love of novelty moved
them, on their return home, to propagate wholesome doctrines and clamour for the
reformation of their own degenerate prelates. Finally the poorer clergy, neglected by
their bishops, and excluded from all preferment, took part with the szlachta
against their own spiritual rulers and eagerly devoured and imparted to their flocks, in
their own language, the contents of the religious tracts which reached them by divers ways
from Goldberg and Königsberg. Nothing indeed did so much to popularize the new doctrines
in Poland as this beneficial revival of the long- neglected vernacular by the reformers.
Such was the situation when Sigismund II. began his reign. The
bishops at once made a high bid for the favour of the new king by consenting to the
coronation of his Calvinist consort (Dec. 7, 1550) and the king five days afterwards
issued the celebrated edict in which he pledged his royal word to preserve intact the
unity of the Church and to enforce the law of the land against heresy. Encouraged by this
pleasing symptom of orthodoxy the bishops instead of first attempting to put their own
dilapidated house in order, at once proceeded to institute prosecutions for heresy against
all and sundry. This at once led to an explosion, and at the diet of Piotrków, 1552, the szlachta
accepted a proposition of the king, by way of compromise, that the jurisdiction of the
clerical courts should be suspended for twelve months, on condition that the gentry
continued to pay tithes as heretofore. Then began a religious interim, which was
gradually prolonged for ten years, during which time Protestantism in Poland flourished
exceedingly. Presently reformers of every shade of opinion, even those who were tolerated
nowhere else, poured into Poland, which speedily became the battle-ground of all the sects
of Europe. Soon the Protestants became numerous enough to form ecclesiastical districts of
their own. The first Calvinist synod in Poland was held at Pinczów in 1550. The Bohemian
Brethren evangelized Little Poland, but ultimately coalesced with the Calvinists at the
synod of Kozminek (August 1555). In the diet itself the Protestants were absolutely
supreme, and invariably elected a Calvinist to be their marshal. At the diet of 1555 they
boldly demanded a national synod, absolute toleration, and the equalization of all the
sects except the Anti-trinitarians. But the king intervened and the existing interim was
indefinitely prolonged. At the diet of Piotrków 1558-1559, the onslaught of the szlachta
on the clergy was fiercer than ever, and they even demanded the exclusion of the bishops
from the senate. The king, however, perceiving a danger to the constitution in the
violence of the szlachta, not only supported the bishops but quashed a subsequent
reiterated demand for a national synod. The diet of 1558-1559 indicates the high-water
mark of Polish Protestantism. From this time forward it began to subside, very gradually
but unmistakably. The chief cause of this subsidence was the division among the reformers
themselves. From the chaos of creeds resulted a chaos of ideas on all imaginable subjects,
politics included. The Anti-trinitarian proved to be the chief dissolvent, and from 1560
onwards the relations between the two principal Protestant sects, the Lutherans and the
Calvinists, were fratricidal rather than fraternal. An auxiliary cause of the decline of
Protestantism was the beginning of a Catholic reaction. The bulk of the population still
held persistently, if languidly, to the faith of its fathers; the new bishops were holy
and learned men, very unlike the creators of Queen Bona, and the Holy See gave to the
slowly reviving zeal of both clergy and laity the very necessary impetus from without. For
Poland, unlike Scotland, was fortunately, in those days of difficult inter-communication,
not too far off, and it is indisputable that in the first instance it was the papal
nuncios, men like Berard of Camerino and Giovanni Commendone, who reorganized the
scattered and faint-hearted battalions of the Church militant in Poland and led them back
to victory. At the diet of Piotrkólw in 1562, indeed, the king's sore need of subsidies
induced him, at the demand of the szlachta, to abolish altogether the jurisdiction
of the ecclesiastical courts in cases of heresy but, on the other hand, at the diet of
1564 he accepted from Commendone the Tridentine decrees and issued an edict banishing all
foreign, and especially Anti-trinitarian, heretics from the land. At the diet of 1565
Sigismund went still farther. He rejected a petition for a national pacificatory synod as
unnecessary, inasmuch as the Council of Trent had already settled all religious questions
and at the same time consented to the introduction into Poland of the most formidable
adversaries of the Reformation, the Jesuits. These had already been installed at Poltusk,
and were permitted, after the diet rose, to found establishments in the dioceses of Posen,
Ermeland and Vilna, which henceforth became centres of a vigorous and victorious
propaganda. Thus the Republic recovered her catholicity and her internal harmony at the
same time.
With rare sagacity Sigismund II. had thus piloted the Republic
through the most difficult internal crisis it had yet encountered. In purely political
matters also both initiative and fulfilment came entirely from the Crown, and to the last
of the Jagiellos Poland owed the important acquisition of Livonia and the welding together
of her loosely connected component parts into a single state by the Union of Lublin.
In the middle of the 16th century the ancient order of the Knights
of the Sword, whose territory embraced Esthonia, Livonia, Courland, Semgallen and the
islands of Dagö and Oesel, was tottering to its fall. All the Baltic powers were more or
less interested in the apportionment of this vast tract of land, whose geographical
position made it not only the chief commercial link between east and west, but also the
emporium whence the English, Dutch, Swedes, Danes and Germans obtained their corn, timber
and most of the raw products of Lithuania and Muscovy. Matters were complicated by the
curious political intricacies of this long-coveted domain, where the grand-master, the
archbishop of Riga, and the estates of Livonia possessed concurrent and generally
conflicting jurisdictions. Poland and Muscovy as the nearest neighbours of this moribund
state, which had so long excluded them from the sea, were vitally concerned in its fate.
After an anarchic period of suspense lasting from 1546 to 1561, during which Sweden
secured Esthonia, while Ivan the Terrible fearlessly ravaged Livonia, in the hope of
making it valueless to any other potentate Sigismund II., to whom both the grand-master
and the archbishop had appealed more than once for protection, at length intervened
decisively. Both he and his chancellor, Piotr Myszkowski (d. 1591), were well aware of the
importance of securing a coast-land which would enable Poland to become a naval power. But
the diet, with almost incredible short- sightedness, refused to waste a penny on an
undertaking which, they argued, concerned only Lithuania, and it was not as king of
Poland, but as grand duke of Lithuania, and with purely Lithuanian troops, that Sigismund,
in 1561, occupied Livonia. At his camp before Riga the last grand-master, Gotthard von
Ketteler, who had long been at the head of the Polish party in Livonia, and William of
Brandenburg, archbishop of Riga, gladly placed themselves beneath his protection, and by a
subsequent convention signed at Vilna (Nov. 28 1561) Livonia was incorporated with
Lithuania in much the same way as Prussia had been incorporated with Poland thirty-six
years previously. Ketteler, who had adopted Lutheranism during a visit to Germany in 1553,
now professed the Augsburg Confession, and became the first duke of a new Protestant
duchy, which he was to hold as a fief of the Polish crown, with local autonomy and
absolute freedom of worship. The southern provinces of the ancient territory of the Order,
Courland and Semgallen, had first been ceded on the 24th of June 1559 to Lithuania on
similar conditions, the matter being finally adjusted by the compact of March 1562.
The apathy of Poland in such a vital matter as the Livonian
question must have convinced so statesmanhke a prince as Sigismund II. of the necessity of
preventing any possibility of cleavage in the future between the two halves of his
dominions whose absolute solidarity was essential to their existence as a great power. To
this patriotic design he devoted the remainder of his life. A personal union, under one
monarch, however close had proved inadequate. A further step must be taken - the two
independent countries must be transformed into a single state. The great obstacle in the
way of this, the only true solution of the difficulty, was the opposition of the
Lithuanian magnates, who feared to lose the absolute dominancy they possessed in the grand
duchy if they were merged in the szlachta of the kingdom. But, at the last moment,
the dread of another Muscovite invasion made them more pliable and, at a Polish diet held
at Warsaw from November 1563 to June 1564, which the Lithuanians attended, the question of
an absolute union was hotly debated. When things came to a deadlock the king tactfully
intervened and voluntarily relinquished his hereditary title to Lithuania, thus placing
the two countries on a constitutional equality and preparing the way for fresh
negotiations in the future. The death, in 1565, of Black Radziwill, the chief opponent of
the union, still further weakened the Lithuanians, and the negotiations were reopened with
more prospect of success at the diet which met at Lublin on the 10th of January 1569. But
even now the Lithuanians were indisposed towards a complete union, and finally they
quitted the diet, leaving two commissioners behind to watch their interests. Then
Sigismund executed his master- stroke. Knowing the sensitiveness of the Lithuanians as
regards Volhynia and Podolia, he suddenly, of his own authority, formally incorporated
both these provinces with the kingdom of Poland, whereupon, amidst great enthusiasm, the
Volhynian and Podolian deputies took their places on the same benches as their Polish
brethren. The hands of the Lithuanians were forced, Even a complete union on equal terms
was better than mutilated independence. Accordingly they returned to the diet, and the
union was unanimously adopted on the 1st of July 1569. Henceforth the kingdom of Poland
and the grand duchy of Lithuania were to constitute one inseparable and indivisible body
politic, under one sovereign elected in common, with one diet and one currency. All
dependencies and colonies, including Prussia and Livonia, were to belong to Poland and
Lithuania in common. The retention of the old duality of dignities was the one
reminiscence of the original separation. No decision, however, could be come to as to the
successor of the childless king partly because of the multiplicity of candidates, partly
because of Austrian intrigue, and this, the most momentous question of all, was still
unsettled when Sigismund II. expired on the 6th of July 1572.
The Jagiellonic period (1386-1572) is the history of the
consolidation and fusion into one homogeneous, political whole of numerous national
elements, more or less akin ethnologically but differing immensely in language, religion
and, above all, in degrees of civilization. But of the ancient Piast kingdom, mutilated by
the loss of Silesia and the Baltic shore, arose a republic consisting at first of various
loosely connected entities, naturally centrifugal, but temporarily drawn together by the
urgent need of combination against a superior foe, who threatened them separately with
extinction. Beneath the guidance of a dynasty of princes which, curiously enough, was
supplied by the least civilized portion of this congeries of nationalities, the nascent
republic gradually grew into a power which subjugated its former oppressors and, viewed
externally, seemed to bear upon it the promise of empire. It is dangerous to prophesy, but
all the facts and circumstances before us point irresistibly to the conclusion that had
the Jagiellonic dynasty but endured this promise of empire might well have been realized.
The extraordinary thing about the Jagiellos was the equable persistency of their genius.
Not only were five of the seven great statesmen, but they were statesmen of the same
stamp. We are disturbed by no such sharp contrasts as are to be found among the
Plantagenets, the Vasas and the Bourbons. The Jagiellos were all of the same mould and
pattern, but the mould was a strong one and the pattern was good. Their predominant and
constant characteristic is a sober sagacity which instinctively judges aright and
imperturbably realized its inspirations. The Jagiellos were rarely brilliant, but they
were always perspicacious. Above all, they alone seem to have had the gift of guiding the
most difficult of nations properly. Two centuries of Jagiellonic rule made Poland great
despite her grave external difficulties. Had that dynasty been prolonged for another
century, there is every reason to suppose that it would also have dealt satisfactorily
with Poland s still more dangerous internal difficulties, and arrested the development of
that anarchical constitution which was the ruling factor in the ruin of the Republic.
Simultaneously with the transformation into a great power of the
petty principalities which composed ancient Poland, another and equally momentous
political transformation was proceeding within the country itself.
The origin of the Polish constitution is to be sought in the wiece
or councils of the Polish princes, during the partitional period (c. 1279-1370).
The privileges conferred upon the magnates of which these councils were composed,
especially upon the magnates of Little Poland who brought the Jagiellos to the throne,
directed their policy, and grew rich upon their liberality, revolted the less favoured szlachta,
or gentry, who, towards the end of the 14th century, combined for mutual defence in their sejmiki,
or local diets, of which originally there were five, three in Great Poland, one in
Little Poland and one in Posen- Kalisz.¹ In these sejmiki the deputies of
the few great towns were also represented. The Polish towns, notably Cracow, had obtained
their privileges, including freedom from tolls and municipal government, from the Crown in
return for important services, such as warding off the Tatars, while the cities of German
origin were protected by the Magdeburg law. Casimir the Great even tried to make municipal
government as democratic as possible by enacting that one half of the town council of
Cracow should be elected from the civic patriciate, but the other half from the
commonalty. Louis the Great placed the burgesses on a level with the gentry by granting to
the town council of (Cracow jurisdiction over all the serfs in the extra-rural estates of
the citizens. From this time forth deputies from the cities were summoned to the sejmiki
on all important occasions, such, for instance as the ratification of treaties, a
right formally conceded to them by the sejmik of Radom in 1384. Thus at this period
Poland was a confederation of half a dozen semi-independent states. The first general
assembly of which we have certain notice is the zjazd walny which was summoned to
Koszyce in November 1404, to relieve the financial embarrassments of Wladislaus, and
granted him an extraordinary subsidy of twenty groats per hide of land to enable him to
purchase Dobrzyn from the Teutonic Knights. Such subsidies were generally the price for
the confirmation of ancient or the concession of new privileges. Thus at the diet of
Brzesc Kujawski, in 1425, the szlachta obtained its first habeas corpus act in
return for acknowledging the right of the infant krolewicz Wladislaus to his father
s throne. The great opportunity of the szlachta was, of course, the election of a
new king, especially the election of a minor, an event always accompanied and succeeded by
disorders. Thus at the election of the infant Wladislaus III., his guardians promised in
his name to confirm all the privileges granted by his father. If, on attaining his
majority the king refused to ratify these promises his subjects were ipso facto
absolved from their obedience. This is the first existence of tile mischievous principle
de prestanda obedientia, subsequently elevated into a statute. It is in this reign,
too, that we meet with the first rokosz, or insurrection of
¹ The Red Russian sejmik was of later origin, c.
1433.
the nobility against the executive. The extraordinary difficulties
of Casimir IV. were freely exploited by the szlachta, who granted that ever
impecunious monarch as little as possible, but got full value for every penny they
grudgingly gave. Thus by the Articles of Cerekwica presented to him by the sejmik or
dietine of Great Poland in 1454 on the outbreak of the Teutonic War, he conceded the
principle that no war should in future be begun without the consent of the local diets. A
few months later he was obliged to grant the Privileges of Nieszawa, which confirmed and
extended the operation of the Articles of Cerekwica. The sejmiki had thus added to
their original privilege of self-taxation the right to declare war and control the
national militia.¹ This was a serious political retrogression. A strongly
centralized government had ever been Poland's greatest need, and Casimir the Great had
striven successfully against all centrifugal tendencies. And now, eighty-four years after
his death, Poland was once more split up into half a dozen loosely federated states in the
hands of country gentlemen too ignorant and prejudiced to look beyond the boundaries of
their own provinces. The only way of saving the Republic from disintegration was to
concentrate all its political factors into a sejm-walny or general diet. But to
this the magnates and the szlachta were equally opposed, the former because they
feared the rivalry of a national assembly, the latter because they were of more importance
in their local diets than they could possibly hope to be in a general diet. The first sejm
to legislate for the whole of Poland was the diet of Piotrków (1493), summoned by
John Albert to grant him subsidies; but the mandates of its deputies were limited to
twelve months and its decrees were to have force for only three years. John Albert's
second diet (1496) after granting subsidies the burden of which fell entirely on the towns
and peasantry passed a series of statutes benefiting the nobility at the expense of the
other classes. Thus one statute permitted the szlachta henceforth to export and
import goods duty free, to the great detriment of the towns and the treasury. Another
statute prohibited the burgesses from holding landed property and enjoying the privileges
attaching thereto. A third statute disqualified plebeians from being elected to canonries
or bishoprics. A fourth endeavoured to bind the peasantry more closely to the soil by
forbidding emigration. The condition of the serfs was subsequently (1520) still further
deteriorated by the introduction of socage. In a word, this diet disturbed the equilibrium
of the state by enfeebling and degrading the middle classes. Nevertheless, so long as the
Jagiello dynasty lasted, the political rights of the cities were jealously protected by
the Crown against the usurpations of the nobility. Deputies from the towns took part in
the election of John Albert (1492) and the burgesses of Cracow, the most enlightened
economists in the kingdom, supplied Sigismund I. with his most capable counsellors during
the first twenty years of his reign (1506-1526), Again and again the nobility attempted to
exclude the deputies of Cracow from the diet, in spite of a severe edict issued by
Sigismund I. in 1509, threatening to prosecute for treason all persons who dared to
infringe the liberties of the citizens. During Slgismund's reign, moreover, the Crown
recovered many of the prerogatives of which it had been deprived during the reign of his
feeble predecessor, Alexander, who, to say nothing of the curtailments of the prerogative,
had been forced to accept the statute nihil novi (1505) which gave the sejm and
the senate an equal voice with the Crown in all executive matters. In the latter years of
Sigismund I. (1530-1548) the political influence of the szlachta grew rapidly at
the expense of the executive, and the gentry in diet assembled succeeded in curtailing the
functions of all the great officers of state. During the reign of Sigismund II.
(1548-1572) they diverted their attention to the abuses of the Church and considerably
reduced both her wealth and her privileges. In this respect both the Crown and the country
were with them, so that their interference, if violent, was on the whole distinctly
beneficial.
The childless Sigismund II. died suddenly without leaving any
regulations as to the election of his successor. Fortunately for Poland the political
horizon was absolutely unclouded. The Turks, still reeling from the shock of Lepanto,
could with difficulty hold their own against the united forces of the pope, Spain and
Venice; while Ivan the Terrible had Just concluded a truce with Poland. Domestic affairs,
on the other hand, were in an almost anarchical condition. The Union of Lublin, barely
three years old, was anything but consolidated, and in Lithuania it continued to be
extremely unpopular. In Poland proper the szlachta were fiercely opposed to the
magnates; and the Protestants seemed bent upon still further castigating the clergy. Worst
of all, there existed no recognized authority in the land to curb and control its jarring
centrifugal political elements. It was nearly two hundred years since the Republic had
suffered from an interregnum, and the precedents of 1382 were obsolete. The primate, on
hearing of the demise of the Crown, at once invited all the senators of Great Poland to a
conference at Lowicz, but passed over the szlachta altogether. In an instant the
whole Republic was seething like a caldron, and a rival assembly was simultaneously
summoned to Cracow by Jan Ferlej the head of the Protestant party. Civil war was happily
averted at the last moment and a national convention, composed of senators and deputies
from all parts of the country, assembled at Warsaw, in April 1573, for the purpose of
electing a new king, Five candidates for the
¹ In view of the frequency of the Tatar inroads, the
control of the militia was re-transferred to the Crown in 1501.
throne were already in the field. Lithuania favoured Ivan IV. In
Poland the bishops and most of the Catholic magnates were for an Austrian archduke, while
the strongly anti- German szlachta were inclined to accept almost any candidate but
a German, so long as he came with a gift in his hand and was not a Muscovite. In these
circumstances it was an easy task for the adroit and energetic French ambassador, Jean de
Montluc (d. 1579), brother of the famous marshal, and bishop of Valence, to procure the
election of the French candidate, Henry, duke of Anjou. Well provided with funds, he
speedily bought over many of the leading magnates, and his popularity reached its height
when he strenuously advocated the adoption of the mode of election by the gentry en
masse (which the szlachta proposed to revive), as opposed to the usual and more
orderly "secret election" by a congress of senators and deputies, sitting with
closed doors. The religious difficulty, meanwhile, had been adjusted to the satisfaction
of all parties by the compact of Warsaw (Jan. 28, 1573), which granted absolute religious
liberty to all non-Catholic denominations (dissidentes de religione, as they now
began to be called) without exception, thus exhibiting a far more liberal intention than
the Germans bad manifested in the religious peace of Augsburg eighteen years before.
Finally, early in April 1573, the election diet assembled at Warsaw, and on the 11th of
May, in the midst of intrigue, corruption, violence and confusion, Henry of Valois was
elected king of Poland.
The election had, however, been preceded by a correctura jurum,
or reform of the constitution, which resulted in the famous "Henrican Articles"
which converted Poland from a limited monarchy into a republic with an elective chief
magistrate. Henceforward the king was to have no voice in the choice of his successor. He
was not to use the word haeres, not being an hereditary sovereign. He was to marry
a wife selected for him by the senate. He was neither to seek for a divorce nor give
occasion for one. He was to be neutral in all religious matters. He was not to lead the
militia across the border except with the consent of the szlachta, and then only
for three months at a time. Every year the senate was to appoint sixteen of its number to
be in constant attendance upon the king in rotas of four, which sedecimvirs were to
supervise all his actions. Should the king fail to observe any one of these articles, the
nation was ipso facto absolved from its allegiance. This constitutional reform was
severely criticized by contemporary political experts. Some strongly condemned the clause
justifying renunciation of allegiance, as tending to treason and anarchy. Others protested
against the anomalous and helpless position of the so-called king, who, if he could do no
harm, was certainly powerless for good. But such Cassandras prophesied to heedless ears.
The Republic had deliberately cast itself upon the downward grade which was to lead to
ruin.
The reign of Henry of Valois lasted thirteen months. The tidings of
the death of his brother Charles IX., which reached him on the 14th of June 1574,
determined him to exchange a thorny for what he hoped would be a flowery throne, and at
midnight on the 18th of June 1574 he literally fled from Poland, pursued to the frontier
by his indignant and bewildered subjects. Eighteen months later (Dec. 14, 1575), mainly
through the influence of Jan Zamoyski, Stephen Báthory, prince of Transylvania, was
elected king of Poland by the szlachta in opposition to the emperor Maximilian, who
had been elected two days previously by the senate, after disturbances which would have
rent any other state but Poland to pieces.
The glorious career of Stephen Báthory (1575-1586) demonstrates
the superiority of genius and valour over the most difficult circumstances. But his reign
was too brief to be permanently beneficial.
The Vasa period of Polish history which began with the election of
Sigismund, son of John III., king of Sweden, was the epoch of last and lost chances. The
collapse of the Muscovite tsardom in the east, and the submersion of the German Empire in
the west by the Thirty Years' War. presented Poland with an unprecedented opportunity of
consolidating, once for all, her hard-won position as the dominating power of central
Europe. Everywhere circumstances were favourable to her, and in Zolkiewski, Chodkiewicz
and Koniecpolski she possessed three of the greatest captains of that or any other age.
With all the means at her disposal cheerfully placed in the hands of such valiant and
capable ministers it would have been no difficult task for the Republic to have wrested
the best part of the Baltic littoral from the Scandinavian powers, and driven the
distracted Muscovites beyond the Volga. Permanent greatness and secular security were
within her reach at the commencement of the Vasa period how was it, then, that at the end
of that period, only fifty years later, Poland had already sunk irredeemably into much the
same position as Turkey occupies now, the position of a moribund state, existing on
sufferance simply because none was yet quite prepared to administer the coup de grâce
? There is only one answer; the principal cause of this complete and irretrievable
collapse is to be sought for in the folly, egotism and selfishness of the Polish gentry,
whose insane dislike of all discipline, including even the salutary discipline of regular
government, converted Poland into something very like a primitive tribal community at the
very time when every European statesman, including the more enlightened of the Poles
themselves, clearly recognized that the political future belonged to the strongly
centralized monarchies, which were everywhere rising on the ruins of feudalism. Of course
there were other contributory causes. The tenacity with which Sigismund III. clung to his
hereditary rights to the Swedish Crown involved Poland in a quite unnecessary series of
wars with Charles IX. and Gustavus Adolphus, when her forces were sorely needed elsewhere.
The adhesion of the same monarch to the League of the Catholic Reaction certainly added to
the difficulties of Polish diplomacy and still further divided the already distracted
diet, besides alienating from the court the powerful and popular chancellor Zamoyski. Yet
Sigismund III. was a far more clear- sighted statesman than any of his counsellors or
contradictors. For instance, he was never misled by the successes of the false Demetrius
in Muscovy, and wisely insisted on recovering the great eastern fortress of Smolensk
rather than attempting the conquest of Moscow. His much-decried alliance with the emperor
at the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War was eminently sagacious. He perceived at once
that it was the only way of counteracting the restlessness of the sultan's protégés, the
Protestant princes of Transylvania, whose undisciplined hordes, scarcely less savage than
their allies the Turks and Tatars, were a perpetual menace both to Austria and to Poland.
Finally he was bent upon reforming the Polish constitution by substituting the decision of
all matters by a plurality of votes for a unanimity impossible to count upon.
When we turn to the szlachta who absolutely controlled the
diet, we find not the slightest trace, I will not say of political foresight - that they
never possessed - but of common patriotism, or ordinary public spirit. The most urgent
national necessities were powerless to stir their hearts or open their purses. The diets
during the reign of Sigismund III. were even more niggardly than they had been under the
Jagiellos, and on the single occasion when the terrors of an imminent Tatar invasion
constrained them to grant extraordinary subsidies, they saw to it that such subsidies
should rest entirely on the shoulders of the burgesses (who had in the meantime been
deprived of the franchise) and the already over- burdened peasantry. In the very crisis of
the Swedish War, the diminutive army of the victorious Chodkiewicz was left unpaid, with
the result that the soldiers mutinied, and marched off en masse. Both Chodkiewicz
and Zolkiewski frequently had to pay the expenses of their campaigns out of their own
pockets, and were expected to conquer empires and defend hundreds of miles of frontier
with armies of 3000 or 4000 men at most. When they retreated before overwhelming odds they
were publicly accused of cowardice and incompetence. The determination to limit still
further the power of the executive was at the bottom of this fatal parsimony, with the
inevitable consequence that, while the king and the senate were powerless, every great
noble or lord-marcher was free to do what he chose in his own domains, so long as he
flattered his "little brothers," the szlachta. Incredible as it may seem,
the expedition to place the false Demetrius on the Muscovite throne was a private
speculation of a few Lithuanian magnates, and similar enterprises on the part of other
irresponsible noblemen on the Danube or Dniester brought upon unhappy Poland retaliatory
Tatar raids, which reduced whole provinces to ashes. Every attempt to improve matters, by
reforming the impossible constitution, stranded on the opposition of the gentry. Take, for
instance, the typical and highly instructive case of Zebrzydowski's rebellion. Nicholas
Zebrzydowski, a follower of the chancellor Zamoyski, was one of the wealthiest and most
respectable magnates in Poland. As palatine of Cracow he held one of the highest and most
lucrative dignities in the state, and was equally famous for his valour, piety and
liberality. Disappointed in his hope of obtaining the great seal on the death of Zamoyski,
he at once conceived that the whole of the nobility had been insulted in his person, and
proceeded to make all government impossible for the next three years. On the 7th of March
1606 Sigismund summoned a diet for the express purpose of introducing the principle of
decision by majority in the diet, whereupon Zebrzydowski summoned a counter-confederation
to Stenczyn in Little Poland, whose first act was to open negotiations with the prince of
Transylvania, Stephen Bocskay, with the view of hiring mercenaries from him for further
operations. At a subsequent confederation, held at Lublin in June, Zebrzydowski was
reinforced by another great nobleman, Stanislaus Stadnicki, called the Devil, who
"had more crimes on his conscience than hairs on his head," and was in the habit
of cropping the ears and noses of small squires and chaining his serfs to the walls of his
underground dungeons for months at a time. This champion of freedom was very eloquent as
to the wrongs of the szlachta, and proposed that the assembly should proceed in a
body to Warsaw and there formally renounce their allegiance. The upshot of his oratory was
the summoning of a rokosz, or national insurrection, to Sandomir, which was
speedily joined by the majority of the szlachta all over the country, who openly
proclaimed their intention of dethroning the king and chastising the senate, and sent
Stadnicki to Transylvania to obtain the armed assistance of Stephen Bocskay. Only the
clergy, naturally conservative, still clung to the king, and Sigismund III., who was no
coward, at once proceeded to Cracow to overawe the rokoszanie, or insurrectionists,
by his proximity, and take the necessary measures for his own protection. By the advice of
his senators he summoned a zjazd, or armed convention, to Wišlica openly to
oppose the insurrection of Sandomir, which zjazd was to be the first step towards
the formation of a general confederation for the defence of the throne. Civil war seemed
inevitable, when the szlachta of Red Russia and Sieradz suddenly rallied to the
king, who at once ordered his army to advance, and after defeating the insurrectionists at
Janowiec (in October), granted them a full pardon, on the sole condition that they should
refrain from all such acts of rebellion in future. Despite their promises, Zebrzydowski
and his colleagues a few months later were again in arms. In the beginning of 1607 they
summoned another rokosz to Jendrzejow, at the very time when the diet was
assembling at Warsaw. The diet authorized the king to issue a proclamation dissolving the rokosz,
and the rokosz retorted with a manifesto in which an insurrection was declared to be
as much superior to a parliament as a general council was to a pope. In a second manifesto
published at Jezierna, on the 24th of June, the insurrectionists again renounced their
allegiance to the king. Oddly enough, the diet before dissolving had, apparently in older
to meet the rokosz half-way, issued the famous edict De non praestanda obedientia,
whereby, in case of future malpractices by the king and his subsequent neglect of at least
two solemn warnings thereanent by the primate and the senate, he was to be formally
deposed by the next succeeding diet. But even this was not enough for the
insurrectionists. It was not the contingent but the actual deposition of the king that
they demanded, and they had their candidate for the throne ready in the person of Gabriel
Bethlen, the new prince of Transylvania. But the limits of even Polish complacency had at
last been reached, and Zolkieswski and Chodkiewicz were sent against the rebels, whom they
routed at Oransk near Guzow, after a desperate encounter, on the 6th of July 1607. But,
though driven from the field, the agitation simmered all over the country for nearly two
years longer, and was only terminated, in. 1609, by a general amnesty which excluded every
prospect of constitutional reform.
Wladislaus IV., who succeeded his father in 1632, was the most
popular monarch who ever sat on the Polish throne. The szlachta, who had had a
"King Log" in Sigismund, were determined that Wladislaus should be "a King
Bee who will give us nothing but honey" - in other words, they hoped to wheedle him
out of even more than they had wrested from his predecessor. Wladislaus submitted to
everything. He promised never to declare war or levy troops without the consent of the sejm,
undertook to fill all vacancies within a certain time, and released the szlachta
from the payment of income-tax, their one remaining fiscal obligation. This boundless
complacency was due to policy, not weakness. The second Polish Vasa was a man of genius,
fully conscious of his powers, and determined to use them for the benefit of his country.
The events of the last reign had demonstrated the incompetence of the Poles to govern
themselves. Any amelioration of the existing anarchy must be extra-parliamentary and
proceed from the throne. But a reforming monarch was inconceivable unless he possessed the
confidence of the nation, and such confidence, Wladislaus naturally argued, could only be
won by striking and undeniable public services. On these principles he acted with
brilliant results. Within three years of is accession he compelled the Muscovites (Treaty
of Polyankova, May 28, 1634) to retrocede Smolensk and the eastern provinces lost by
Sigismund II., overawed the Porte by a military demonstration in October of the same year,
and, by the Truce of Stumdorf (Sept. 12, 1635), recovered the Prussian provinces and the
Baltic seaboard from Sweden. But these achievements excited not the gratitude but the
suspicion of the szlachta. They were shrewd enough to guess that the royal triumph
might prejudice their influence, and for the next five years they deliberately thwarted
the enlightened and far-reaching projects of the king for creating a navy and increasing
the revenue without burdening the estates, by a system of tolls levied on the trade of the
Baltic ports, even going so far as to refuse for nine years to refund the expenses of the
Muscovite War, which he had defrayed out of his privy purse. From sheer weariness and
disgust the king refrained from any intervention in public affairs for nearly ten years
looking on indifferently while the ever shorter and stormier diets wrangled perpetually
over questions of preferment and the best way of dealing with the extreme dissenters, to
the utter neglect of public business. But towards the end of his reign the energy of
Wladislaus revived, and he began to occupy himself with another scheme for regenerating
his country in its own despite, by means of the Cossacks. First however, it is necessary
to describe briefly the origin and previous history of these romantic freebooters who
during the second half of the 17th century were the determining factor of Polish and
Muscovite politics.
<< 23: Early History of Poland || 25: The Cossacks >>
