It was not just that the Poles did not like paying for the troops. The szlachta also wished to perpetuate the idea of the levée 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 exceptionaclass="underline" 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
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 Gdańsk, almost a city-state in itself, was preponderantly German. Nearby lay the smaller port of Elbląg, which had a large colony of English and Scots. Kraków had significant ones of Hungarians and Italians. Lwów, 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 Lwów 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.