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 Zamość. 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 Mikołaj Radziwiłł ‘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 Bełz. He methodically enlarged this estate, squeezing out adjacent landowners and buying out the senior branch of his family from the seat of Zamość. 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 Zamość. 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.
Zamość 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 Żółkiewski family founded their administrative capital of Żółkiew, 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.
Zamość 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 Kraków 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 Stanisław Grzepski of the Jagiellon University published his technical handbook Geometria. The six translations of the New Testament—Königsberg (Lutheran, 1551), Lwów (Catholic, 1561), Brześć (Calvinist, 1563), Nieśwież (Arian, 1570), Kraków (Jesuit, 1593), Gdańsk (Lutheran, 1632)—constituted an exercise in Polish semantics. In 1568 the first systematic Polish grammar was compiled by Piotr Stojeński, an Arian of French origin; in 1564 Jan Mączyński issued his Polish-Latin lexicon at Königsberg; and finally, in 1594 the writer Łukasz Górnicki 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.