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
As the heirless Zygmunt Augustus paced the galleries of the Royal Castle on Kraków’s Wawel hill dressed in mourning for Barbara Radziwiłł, 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 Radziwiłł, 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, Mikołaj Radziwiłł ‘the Black’ (to distinguish him from his cousin and brother of Barbara, Mikołaj ‘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 Kraków 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 Stanisław 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.