Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
- Major Events:
- Battle of Warsaw
- Key People:
- Andrey Mikhaylovich, Prince Kurbsky
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, dual Polish-Lithuanian state or “Commonwealth” (Polish: Rzeczpospolita) that was created by the Union of Lublin on July 1, 1569. During its existence it was one of the largest countries in Europe. While Poland in the mid-16th century occupied an area of about 100,000 square miles (260,000 square km), with some 3.5 million inhabitants, the Commonwealth at its largest point in the early 17th century comprised nearly 400,000 square miles and some 11 million inhabitants. As such, it was a multiethnic country inhabited by Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Germans, Jews, and small numbers of Tatars, Armenians, and Scots. It was also a multifaith country, with Roman Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims living within its boundaries. Certain communities lived under their own laws; the Jews, for example, enjoyed self-administration through the Council of the Four Lands.
The term Poland was used for both the entire state and the strictly Polish part of it (though the latter was officially called the Crown). The Commonwealth gradually came to be dominated by the szlachta (gentry), which regarded the state as an embodiment of its rights and privileges. Ranging from the poorest landless yeomen to the great magnates, the szlachta insisted on the equality of all its members. As a political body it was more numerous (8–10 percent) than the electorate of most European states even in the early 19th century.
Throughout most of Europe the medieval system of estates evolved into absolutism, but in the Commonwealth it led to a szlachta democracy inspired by the ideals of ancient Rome, to which parallels were constantly drawn. The szlachta came to see in its state a perfect constitutional model, a granary for Europe, and a bulwark against the territorial ambitions of Russia. Its inherent weaknesses in finance, administration, and the military were ignored.
Origins of the Commonwealth
In the middle of the 16th century the Livonian Order (formerly the Order of the Brothers of the Sword), whose territory embraced Estonia, Livonia, Courland, and the islands of Dagö (Hiiumaa) and Ösel (Saaremaa), was tottering. 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 from which the English, Dutch, Swedes, Danes, and Germans obtained their grain, timber, and most of the raw products of Lithuania and Moscow. Poland and Moscow as the nearest neighbors 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 Estonia while Ivan the Terrible ravaged Livonia, Sigismund II Augustus, to whom both the master of Livonia and the archbishop of Riga (brother of the duke of Prussia) had appealed more than once for protection, intervened decisively. At his camp before Riga in 1561 the last master of the Livonian Order and the archbishop of Riga gladly placed themselves beneath Sigismund’s protection. By a subsequent convention signed at Wilno (Vilnius) on November 28, 1561, Livonia was incorporated with Lithuania, and Courland, as a new Protestant duchy, became a fief of the Polish crown, with local autonomy and freedom of worship.
The danger to Lithuania, revealed in the Livonian War with Ivan the Terrible, must have convinced Sigismund II of the necessity of preventing any cleavage in the future between his Polish and Lithuanian dominions. A personal union under one monarch had proved inadequate, and Sigismund had no heirs. A further step must be taken—the two independent countries must be transformed into a single state. The principal obstacle was the opposition of the Lithuanian magnates, who feared to lose their dominance in the grand principality if they were merged with the Polish szlachta. When matters reached a deadlock in 1564, 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. The death in 1565 of Mikołaj Radziwiłł (the Black), the chief opponent of the union, further weakened the Lithuanians, but the negotiations, reopened at the Sejm (legislature) of Lublin in 1569, at first also led only to rupture.
It was then that Sigismund executed his masterstroke. Suddenly, of his own authority, he formally incorporated Podlasia, Volhynia, and the province of Kyiv into the kingdom of Poland, whereupon deputies from these provinces 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 Sejm, and the union was unanimously adopted on July 1, 1569. Henceforth the kingdom of Poland and the grand principality of Lithuania were to be one inseparable and indivisible body politic. 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; it was not abolished till 1791, four years before the final partition of Poland.
The union definitely shifted Poland’s political center of gravity eastward. It also addressed the threat of Russia to the long and naturally defenseless eastern frontier. Warsaw was appointed one of the meeting places of the joint Sejm, thus preparing the transfer of the capital from Kraków to Warsaw. The union was the last great historical act of the Jagiellon dynasty; it established a political structure that, with growing consolidation, seemed to bear in it the promise of empire.
Era of the elective kings
The childless Sigismund II Augustus died suddenly in 1572, and domestic affairs were in bad condition. The Union of Lublin, barely three years old, was anything but consolidated, and in Lithuania it continued to be unpopular. Worst of all, there was no recognized authority in the land to curb its jarring centrifugal political elements. Civil war was averted by the confederation of the gentry throughout the entire country and by the decision to hold the election viritim—that is, with all the nobles and squires participating in it. A national convention assembled in Warsaw in April 1573 for the purpose of electing a new king, and five candidates for the throne were already in the field. Lithuania favored the Russian tsar Ivan IV. In Poland the bishops and most of the Roman Catholic magnates were for an Austrian archduke, while the strongly anti-German szlachta were inclined to accept almost any candidate but a German.
It was easy, therefore, for the adroit and energetic French ambassador, Jean de Monluc, bishop of Valence, to procure the election of the French candidate, Henry de Valois, duc d’Anjou. Well provided with funds, he speedily bought over many of the leading magnates, but he was regarded askance by the Protestants. The religious difficulty in Poland, however, had meanwhile been adjusted to the satisfaction of all parties by the Compact of Warsaw (January 28, 1573), which granted absolute religious liberty to all non-Roman Catholic denominations without exception. Finally, on May 11, 1573, the Sejm in Warsaw elected Henry king of Poland.
Henry de Valois (1573–74)
The election had been preceded by a reform of the constitution, which resulted in the Henrician Articles converting Poland from a limited monarchy into a republic with an elective chief magistrate. The king was obliged to convoke the Sejm every two years, and in the periods between sessions he was to be advised by a group of senators. Should the king fail to observe any one of these articles, the nation was ipso facto absolved from its allegiance. Whatever its intrinsic demerits, the disastrous fruits of this reform were largely caused by the geographical position of Poland, and it must be remembered that Poland alone with England preserved the tradition of parliamentary government in the increasing absolutist Europe of the time. Besides constitutional restrictions, the new king had to undertake certain personal obligations called Pacta Conventa.
Henry reached Poland on January 25, 1574, and was crowned in Kraków on February 21. His reign lasted just 14 months. The tidings of the death of his brother Charles IX of France determined him to exchange a thorny position for what he hoped would be a flowery throne, and at midnight on June 18, 1574, he literally fled from Poland to become Henry III of France. The king’s escape caused dismay, and trouble broke out while the country was awaiting his return; finally an interregnum was proclaimed. In November 1575 the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian II was advanced as a candidate to the throne. The szlachta, at the suggestion of prominent noble Jan Zamoyski, chose a prince of Transylvania, Stephen Báthory. To strengthen his claim to the throne, Báthory married Anna, the last surviving princess of the Jagiellon dynasty.
Stephen Báthory (1575–86)
Báthory focused his energy on two vital objectives: the maintenance of Poland’s access to the sea by way of Gdańsk and the defense of its newly gained farther seaboard in the northeast against the rising power of Moscow. Gdańsk, on Báthory’s election, began to intrigue against him with the emperor Maximilian (until his death in October 1576) and with Russia and Denmark. Báthory, who had the able and strenuous support of his chancellor Zamoyski, conducted a campaign against Gdańsk by land and sea and finally enforced its complete submission to his rule.
Before peace was made with Gdańsk, Ivan the Terrible had raided Livonia once more. Báthory, using infantry rather than cavalry and calling peasants and burghers to arms together with the gentry, achieved in the operations against Russia the great military triumphs of his reign. In three successive expeditions he fought his way northeastward as far as Pskov, and in desperation the tsar asked Pope Gregory XIII to intervene and conclude an armistice. As a result of Báthory’s victories, Poland pushed Russia entirely away from the Baltic and regained sway over nearly the whole of Livonia.
Báthory, a skilled politician, knew how to make the most of the important minority groups, the Ukrainian Cossacks and the Jews. The Cossacks were largely runaway serfs, who had organized themselves into a sort of military republic on the vast and scantily inhabited plains of Ukraine, stretching from the southeast of the monarchy toward the Black Sea along the Dnieper River. The Cossack community had been drawn into the Polish military system under Báthory’s predecessors by registration and pay and had already been granted exemption from taxation, as well as their own jurisdiction. Báthory, who needed them for his Russian wars, confirmed and enlarged these privileges. His successors used the Cossacks against the Russians, Turks, and Tatars.
The privileges which the Jews had obtained from former kings were augmented; from Báthory’s day until 1764 the Polish Jews had a parliament of their own, meeting twice a year, with powers of taxation. It was also chiefly in the interest of the Jews that Báthory restricted, by special edict, the trading rights of Scottish merchants who were very numerous in Poland at the time. Among other domestic measures, Báthory reformed the Polish judicial system by the creation of a Supreme Court of Appeal for civil and penal cases. He founded, in 1579, the University of Vilnius as the first institution of higher education in Lithuania. For internal affairs Báthory knew how to strengthen his position and authority, despite the existing restrictions on royal power. Hungarian tradition and relations with the Habsburgs and with the Holy See induced him to plan a great expedition against the Turks. This project was carried with Báthory to his grave on his sudden death in 1586.
Sigismund III Vasa (1587–1632)
The Vasa period of Polish history, which began with the election of Sigismund, son of John III of Sweden and of Sigismund I’s daughter Catherine, was one of last and lost chances. The collapse of the Muscovite tsardom and the submersion of Germany by the Thirty Years’ War presented Poland with an unprecedented opportunity of consolidating, once for all, its hard-won position as the dominating power between central and eastern Europe. It might even have wrested the best part of the Baltic littoral from the Scandinavian powers and pushed Russia back for good. That this was not achieved was partly caused by the opposition of the szlachta, who continued to defend their prerogatives at the very time when the need of a strong central executive was more urgent than ever.
Other grave causes of failure were not wanting, however. One of them consisted in the very personality of the new foreign-born king. The tenacity with which Sigismund clung to his hereditary rights to the Swedish crown involved Poland in unnecessary wars with Sweden at most inopportune times. His devotion to the cause of Roman Catholicism introduced a new spirit of religious fanaticism and persecution into the atmosphere of a country hitherto distinguished for toleration. Poland’s greatest statesman of the time, Jan Zamoyski, discovered in the earliest years of the reign that the king, who had married Anna, daughter of the Habsburg Charles of Styria, was willing to surrender the crown of Poland to an Austrian archduke and to return to his native Sweden in order to bring it back to the Roman Catholic fold. Zamoyski, who had himself placed Sigismund on the throne by conquering a rival Austrian candidate, was naturally indignant. The whole affair of the king’s secret negotiations with Austria culminated in Sigismund having to answer the charges of a special “diet of inquisition” (1592)—the first time that the prestige of the crown in Poland was exposed to such a trial.
The Uniate church
It was only where the expansion of Roman Catholicism served the interests of the Polish state that Zamoyski saw eye to eye with the king’s religious zeal. Thus, he became instrumental in creating, at the Synod of Brzesc (Brest) in 1596, the Uniate church (now Eastern rite church). The Unitate church was an umbrella for the Commonwealth’s Orthodox citizens who were willing to recognize the supremacy of Rome but desired to preserve their accustomed Eastern ritual and Slavonic liturgy. The Uniate church served the purpose of drawing a large section of the population of the eastern border provinces out of the orbit of Moscow and into that of Polish influences.
By the antagonisms which soon began between Uniates and non-Uniates, the church became in itself a source of new troubles for Poland. Poland’s Roman Catholic prelates, who looked down on the Uniate church, spurred social and religious opposition and provoked anti-Polish Ukrainian nationalism. Even in Sigismund’s time, Austria, competing with Poland for influence in the eastern Balkans, began to make overtures to the Ukrainian population (represented in organized form by the military community of the Cossacks) against Poland. Austria was to resume this policy in changed form and under different conditions when it came to possess eastern Galicia.
Swedish, Muscovite, and Turkish wars
The dispute over Sigismund’s rights to the Swedish throne began, from the earliest years of his reign, to drag its weary course of alternate victories and defeats. Having obtained the Swedish crown (1592), Sigismund III met strong Protestant opposition led by Charles IX. Charles defeated him at Stångebro in 1598 and forced him to abdicate the following year. This marked the beginning of the wars between Poland and Sweden. Initially, Estonia and Latvia were both the scene and the principal object of the strife. In the later stages, Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden moved the conflict nearer to the heart of Poland, which helped the cause of Joachim Frederick, the elector of Brandenburg, who had come into possession of Ducal Prussia. This laid the foundation of a large Protestant power on the Baltic, and the danger to Gdańsk and Poland’s grain exports roused even the gentry from their apathy. In spite of some brilliant victories by sea and land, an armistice toward the end of Sigismund’s reign was highly unfavorable to Poland.
Sigismund’s persistent Swedish ambitions, his equally persistent Austrian sympathies, and, most of all, his absolutist leanings and cherished plans for a drastic and arbitrary constitutional reform on foreign models and antiparliamentary lines occasioned in 1606 an armed revolt of the Polish gentry against their king. The rokosz (“insurrection”) was led by Mikołaj Zebrzydowski, the palatine (king’s governor) of Kraków, who was supported by the discontented Protestants. The rokosz was at last suppressed in 1607, but it left as its legacy an enforced recognition of the doctrine of the subjects’ right to depose their king (de non praestanda obedientia). After being undertaken in justified defense of the native parliamentary tradition against wholesale foreign innovations, it also had the harmful effect of blocking the way toward any and every reform of the parliamentary system.
Soon after the constitutional cataclysm of the rokosz, Poland became embroiled in prolonged wars with Moscow. The motive was partly a vague conception of a Polish-Russian union as opposed to the king’s Austrian propensities but partly also the very real desire of some border magnates for more and more land east of the Dnieper. An occasion was furnished by the extinction of the Rurik dynasty and the subsequent struggle for the throne. Notable was the emergence of one candidate—the ill-fated False Dmitry—whom certain Polish nobles and finally also the king supported. The appearance of a second and, eventually, a third False Dmitry after the fall of the first served to prolong the strife.
Throughout the campaigns against Moscow, the king found himself at variance with the gentry and with some leading Polish statesmen and soldiers of the time, most notably with Hetman Stanisław Zółkiewski. Sigismund thought of the problem only in terms of conquest, of the establishment of Roman Catholicism in Russia, and of strong monarchical rule over the united kingdoms. Zółkiewski, even at the height of military successes against Russia, had a union like that of Poland and Lithuania in mind, and he advocated tolerance of Russia’s creed and social order. The Poles actually held the Kremlin of Moscow for a time (1610–11) and once again laid siege to it (1618). Sigismund’s son Władysław was elected tsar in 1610, but he did not actually take the throne. A national insurrection in Russia and the establishment of the Romanov dynasty checked the Polish advance, and only certain territorial gains (including Smolensk), as well as a good deal of influence of Polish customs and institutions on the Russian nobility, were definite results of the struggle in Sigismund’s time. It was to be continued under his successors.
The wars with Moscow temporarily ended in an armistice at the very moment (1618) when the Thirty Years’ War broke out in central Europe. In this Poland remained officially neutral, but Sigismund’s favorable attitude toward the Habsburgs (to whom he sent unofficial reinforcements) entangled Poland in renewed and long wars with Turkey, which the later Jagiellons and their first successors had managed to avoid. A definite success was attained against the Turks at Chocim (now Khotyn, Ukraine), on the Dniester, in Bessarabia (1621), a year after Zółkiewski’s heroic death at Cecorą (now Ţuţora, Romania). The Swedish trouble began anew in the same year, and Sigismund’s long and unlucky reign ended 11 years later amid turmoil abroad and at home, setbacks to Polish power on all sides without, and seriously increased constitutional disorder within.
Władysław IV Vasa (1632–48)
Sigismund’s son Władysław, born in Poland and brought up as a Pole, enjoyed a popularity that his father had never possessed. As crown prince, he had been successful in military operations against Moscow and Turkey. On his ascension to the throne he ingratiated himself with the gentry, but essentially he collaborated with a group of nobles at his court. The “wisest of the Polish Vasas,” as he was called, intended to create a basis of public favor and confidence for the constitutional reforms that he planned. However, the international difficulties inherited from his father diverted his energies largely into channels of foreign policy. The very first years of his reign were marked by new victories over Russia near Smolensk (1634) and also by a new and much more advantageous truce with Sweden, which in 1635 withdrew from Royal Prussia.
He was less fortunate in a new conflict with Gdańsk and with its supporter Denmark, over the tolls he intended to impose on the trade of the Baltic ports. No interest in these matters was to be awakened in the gentry, and the most powerful magnates—those of the eastern border—thought more of expansion into the fertile Ukrainian regions than of sea power. Accordingly, the Polish navy, which had begun to develop in a promising manner under Sigismund II, was allowed to fall into permanent decay, and Władysław’s plans for foreign action on a large scale were unrealized. He wavered in his diplomacy between Austrian and French influences, represented by his two successive queens, and his tolerant and friendly attitude toward the Orthodox East caused serious trouble with the Vatican. His project of a great crusade against the Turks, although encouraged by the Venetian Republic and acclaimed by the South Slav nations, in the end came to nothing. He did not profit from the Thirty Years’ War, obtaining only for several years the possession of a small part of Silesia (the duchy of Opole and Racibórz), whereas his predecessors had thought of regaining all Silesia.
The chief obstacle that prevented Władysław’s Turkish plans from maturing was the impossibility of winning the help of the Ukrainian Cossacks, who had become too numerous and powerful to be willing instruments of Polish policy. Roman Catholic intolerance toward this Orthodox population, in the time of Sigismund III, had combined with the policies of Polish landowners to produce in the Cossacks a spirit of religious, racial, and social enmity against the Polish government. The Polish parliament had not kept the financial terms of its compacts with the Cossacks, and repressions inspired by the border magnates had infuriated them. Polish landlords had created immense estates and oppressed the peasants and town dwellers, enforcing on them high and unfair levies. This prepared the ground for revolutionary movements.
Already in the earlier years of Władysław’s rule (as during that of Sigismund III) terrible Cossack revolts had flared up and been unwisely punished by the abolition of ancient privileges. Now, instead of letting themselves be made the tools of Władysław’s anti-Turkish agenda, the Cossacks made common cause with the Crimean Tatars, who were the most immediate objective of the king’s crusading plans. Władysław’s reign ended amid a wave of Cossack insurrection, engineered by the sultan, assisted by Tatar hordes, and led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a country gentleman personally wronged by a Polish official. It was only the resistance of the Polish burghers of Lwów (Lviv) that stemmed the Cossack and Tatar tide from flooding the inner provinces of Poland. The defense of Lviv meant only a respite, and on Władysław’s death his brother and successor—John Casimir, the last of the Polish Vasas—found himself faced by a powerful renewal of Khmelnytsky’s attack on central Poland.
John II Casimir Vasa (1648–68)
John Casimir was summoned to the throne from Italy, where he had lived as a priest and had become a cardinal. He was obliged to begin his reign by negotiating with his rebel subject Khmelnytsky, but Khmelnytsky’s conditions of peace were so harsh that the negotiations came to nothing. It was only after a second invasion of Poland, in 1649, by a host of Cossacks and Tatars, that the Compact of Zborów was concluded, by which Khmelnytsky was officially recognized as hetman (chief) of the Cossack community. A general amnesty was also granted, and it was agreed that all official dignities in the Orthodox palatinates of the Polish kingdom should henceforth be held solely by the Orthodox gentry. For the next 18 months Khmelnytsky ruled Ukraine like a sovereign prince. He made Chigirin, his hometown, the Cossack capital, subdivided the country into 16 provinces, and entered into direct relations with foreign powers. The Orthodox patriarchs of Alexandria and Constantinople were his friends and protectors, and Russia established relations with him. Khmelnytsky’s fortunes turned at Beresteczko (June 28–30, 1651), and the hetman, betrayed by the Tatars who had until now been his allies, was utterly routed by John Casimir. All hope of an independent or even autonomous Cossackdom was at an end, yet it was not Poland but Moscow that reaped the fruits of successive victories and defeats.
Khmelnytsky, by laying bare the vulnerabilities of the Polish republic, had opened the eyes of Moscow to the fact that its ancient enemy was no longer formidable. Three years after his defeat at Beresteczko, Khmelnytsky, unable to cope with the Poles single-handed, transferred his allegiance to the tsar Alexis Mikhailovich, whose armies, after the Pereyaslav Agreement (1654), invaded Poland and began what is known in Russian history as the Thirteen Years’ War. The Russians occupied Vilnius and a large part of Lithuania.
In the summer of 1655, while Poland was still reeling beneath the shock of the Muscovite invasion, Charles X Gustav of Sweden, on the flimsiest of pretexts, launched a war to establish a Swedish mastery over the Baltic; before the year was out his forces had occupied more than half of Poland, including Warsaw and Kraków. John Casimir, betrayed and abandoned by his own subjects (headed by the nobles of the country), fled to Silesia. Two factors would save Poland in this crisis. First, the country experienced an upsurge of patriotic and religious feeling among the peasants, townspeople, and gentry. Second, a league against Sweden was formed with the participation of Austria and reinforcements from the Tatars. The people undertook guerrilla warfare, and the famous defense of the monastery of Częstochowa by its prior Augustyn Kordecki was followed by the king’s return. John Casimir organized a new national army and undertook the recovery of almost all the Polish provinces from the Swedes, who, after a long fight, were pushed back to the sea by Stefan Czarniecki.
In addition to an alliance with Leopold I (1657), Poland secured a truce with Moscow, whose armies acted against the Swedes in Livonia. Neither the help of György Rákóczi II, prince of Transylvania, nor that of Frederick William, elector of Brandenburg, brought any relief to the Swedes. On the sudden death of Charles X, Poland seized the opportunity to address all its outstanding differences with Sweden. By the Peace of Oliwa (Oliva; 1660), made under French mediation, John Casimir ceded northern Livonia and renounced all claim to the Swedish crown. The worst setback was that Poland was obliged, by the Treaty of Welawa (Wehlau) in 1657, to renounce sovereignty over Ducal Prussia. The war with Moscow was then prosecuted with renewed energy and changing luck. In 1664 a peace congress was opened, and the prospects of Poland seemed most bright, but, at the very moment when it needed all its armed strength to sustain its diplomacy, the rebellion of Marshal Jerzy Lubomirski involved the country in a dangerous civil war. Poland was thus compelled to reopen negotiations with Moscow and to accept many of the Muscovite terms.
By the Truce of Andruszow (Andrusovo; 1667) Poland received back from Moscow Vitebsk (Vitsyebsk), Polotsk (Polatsk), and Polish Livonia but ceded in perpetuity Smolensk, Starodub, and, in Ukraine, the whole of the eastern bank of the Dnieper. The Cossacks of the Dnieper were henceforth to be divided between the dominion of the tsar and the king of Poland. Kyiv, the religious metropolis of southwestern Russia, was to remain in the hands of Moscow for two years. The “truce” of Andruszow proved to be one of the most enduring peaces in history, and Kyiv, though pledged to Russia for only two years, would never be recovered by Poland. Henceforth the political influence of Russia toward Poland was steadily to increase, although Polish culture and manners, exercised chiefly through the Academy of Kyiv, still continued to permeate Russia down to the advent of Peter I the Great.