Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  One of the characteristics of the commonwealth’s nobility was their distaste for titles: in theory, they were all equal, whether aristocrat or lowly squire. Hence, unlike the rest of Europe, there were no native counts, earls or dukes. Nonetheless, one of the ways in which the king had overcome the doubts of the Lithuanian magnates in 1569 was by allowing most of them to keep their princely titles. (The offer was not available to the kingdom’s greatest lords, like the Zamoyski or the Potocki.) Two categories existed. The old Ruthenian title of Knyaz was reserved for descendants of the Rurikid, Gediminid and Rogvolodichi ruling houses. The Latin titles of princeps and dux had usually been awarded either by the pope or by the Holy Roman Emperor. Both, after 1569, passed into Polish as ksia˛ze, ‘prince’. The Ruthenian princely families included the clans of Giedroyć, Puzyna, Sanguszko, Sapieha and Czartoryski. The imperial and papal princes were headed by the Radziwiłłs, who had been granted the honour twice. Henceforth, almost all of these names were the magnati magnatorum – the ‘greatest of the great’.

  Within the Rzeczpospolita’s dual framework, the leaders of the grand duchy were eager to maximize their freedom of action. To this end, state laws were reviewed, and in 1588 a third version of the grand duchy’s law code was published. This Third Lithuanian Statute had been in preparation since the Union of Lublin. The committee which prepared the drafts was drawn from a cross-section of nationalities and religions, and seems to have intended a collation of Polish and Lithuanian laws. But the moving spirit of the exercise was Prince Lev Sapieha (1557–1633), Lithuanian chancellor from 1581; and the end product was clearly designed to preserve the grand duchy’s special interests. Its fourteen chapters were approved by Sigismund Vasa in the first year of his reign, confirmed by the joint Sejm and printed in Vil’nya in 1588. Its third chapter, which states that no lands would be ceded to anyone, defiantly introduces the corporate concept of the grand duchy’s nature. The relevant passage brims with defiance:

  RAŹDZEŁ TRECI: ‘Ab šlachieckich volnaściach i pašyreńni Vialikaha Kniastva Litou˘skaha.’ My, Haspadar, abiacajem, taksama, i śćviardžajem toje za Siabie j našcˇiadkau˘ Našych… My, nia budziem nikomu nijakim cˇynam bajarau˘, ślachtu dy ichnayja majontki, abšary i ziemli addavać…

  CHAPTER THREE: ‘On the Freedoms of the nobility and the development of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.’ We, the Haspadar, the Ruler, by custom and by confirmation, for Ourselves and Our heirs, and by the Oath that We took with all the assemblies of all the lands of the Grand Duchy… Art. 5. We declare for all time, and undertake to preserve, that We like our forebears… will never hand over to anyone, by any act, the property, territories and lands of the boyars and nobles.78

  Religion posed the greatest challenge. The Rzeczpospolita took shape in the year of the St Bartholomew’s Eve massacre, when 20,000 Protestants were murdered in Paris. Much of Europe was ablaze with wars of religion. In Warsaw, the nobles of the newborn commonwealth, exceptionally, formed a solemn league to avoid violence through religious differences. And so it proved. Although the Counter-Reformation was to recover much lost ground from the Protestants, in the commonwealth it could only do so by peaceful means. In Lithuania, a chain of Jesuit colleges established at Vil’nya, Polatsk, Dorpat, Orsha and Vitebsk was particularly successful in revitalizing Catholicism, and conflict between Catholics and Orthodox was rare. The threat was mainly external. Muscovy persisted in its efforts to draw the Ruthenians away from Byzantine Orthodoxy and to persuade them to recognize the authority of the patriarch of Moscow. After decades of such harassment, the majority of Slav Orthodox bishops summoned a Church Council at Brest in 1596 and formed a new Greek Catholic Church, which was to preserve the Slavonic liturgy while adopting papal supremacy.79 Henceforth, the Orthodox community in the grand duchy was to be divided, as in Ukraine, between ‘Uniates’ and ‘Disuniates’. The Uniates were in communion with Rome; the disuniates continued to recognize the patriarch of Constantinople. Even so, simple Orthodox believers were sometimes reluctant to accept the Greek Catholics. St Jozephat Kuntsevich (1580–1623), Uniate archbishop of Polatsk, was murdered in Vitebsk by an angry mob and cast into the Dvina. The Ukrainian Cossacks, who often rampaged into the Rzeczpospolita, were also fierce defenders of the old Orthodoxy. The Orthodox martyr St Athanasius of Brest (d. 1648) appears to have been murdered by Catholics in retaliation for the Cossacks’ misdeeds.

  To most Europeans in that Age of Monarchy, a royal election sounded like a contradiction in terms. But in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as in the Holy Roman Empire, it was a fundamental constitutional procedure for centuries. All nobles were entitled to participate, providing an electorate of 5 to 6 per cent of the population. They were required to attend armed and mounted, and between 30,000 and 40,000 would gather on the Wola Field near Warsaw, staying there until a unanimous decision was obtained. Some of the magnates, like the Radziwiłłs, would bring along a regiment or two, and a battery of artillery, to help win over the opposition. They were choosing a man who would automatically become grand duke as well as king of Poland.

  The first election, in 1573, passed off quietly, but it produced a dud from France. Henry de Valois fled to Paris three months after his coronation, having succeeded to the French throne. The second election in 1576 was a procedural shambles, provoking civil war. But it eventually produced a brilliant warrior and statesman from Transylvania – Stefan Batory – who brought the rebellious elements to heel, and devoted much energy to the grand duchy’s foreign policy. The third election, in 1587, initiated a series of kings from the Polish-Swedish Vasa dynasty:

  Henryk Walezy (Henri de Valois) (r. 1573–4)

  Stefan (Stephen) Batory (Istvan Bathory) (r. 1576–86)

  Zygmunt III Waza (Sigismund III Vasa) (r. 1587–1632)

  Władysław IV Waza (Ladislas IV Vasa) (r. 1632–48)

  Jan Kazimierz Waza (John Casimir Vasa) (r. 1648–68)

  By custom, the Catholic primate of Poland presided over the state during the interregnum between the death of a king-grand duke and a successor’s coronation.

  Batory’s war against Moscow in 1579–82 aimed to recoup the grand duchy’s losses and to put an end to the constant wrangling over Livonia. The Muscovites had taken advantage of Batory’s other preoccupations, principally in suppressing the revolt of Danzig, and had overrun almost all of Livonia; a response was called for. Most of the fighting took place along the eastern border, where the Russian city of Pskov was besieged by a huge force, which built a wooden city outside the walls to survive the winter. The Russian chronicler saw it as a trial of strength between two opposing religious faiths:

  The siege of Pskov began in the year 7089,* in the month of August and the 18th day, on the feast of the holy martyrs Frol and Laurel. The Lithuanian people started to cross the river and to appear before the city with their regiments… The king himself came before Pskov. In that same month of August on the 26th day, on the feast of the holy martyrs Adrian and Natalya, this man, the Lithuanian king, drew close… like a wild boar from the wilderness.80

  The purpose of the operation was to cut off Moscow’s line of communication with Livonia. The tsar wrote to the pope, complaining that Batory was ‘a Turkish employee’. The pope responded by sending a Jesuit legate, Possevini, to see if there was any chance of compromise. But the siege continued, even though cavalrymen were frozen dead in their saddles. The Poles and Lithuanians, having put their strategic garrotte into place, were not going to relent until the tsar conceded. His position secure, the ‘much-proud Lithuanian King Stephan’ left the ‘evil-hearted and greatly-proud chancellor-Pole’, Jan Zamoyski, in command. Negotiations began in the presence of Possevini. At the Peace of Yam Zapolski (January 1582), Moscow abandoned the whole of Livonia, and returned Polatsk to Batory. The besiegers hung on at Pskov until the tsar’s commissioners handed over the keys to all the Livonian castles:

  And so, by the great and ineffable grace of the Holy Trinity, of our helpers… from the whole family of
Christ… by the intercessions of the great miracle-workers… by defenders of the God-preserved city of Pskov, by the leaders in Christ… of the whole Russian land… by the prayers of the true-believing and God-loving Grand Duchess Olga… and of all the saints; by the Lord the tsar, the true-believing grand duke, Ivan Vasil’evich, beloved of Christ, who holds all Russia in his patrimony; indeed, by all God’s wonders, the city of God with all its people was saved from the Lithuanian king…

  Then, on the fourth day of February, the Polish hetman and lord chancellor moved off with all his array to the Lithuanian land. In the city of Pskov, the gates were opened. And I, having completed this story in all its fullness, have brought it to its end.81

  Thus did the Muscovites record a severe defeat. They would not regain another viable opening onto the Baltic, a ‘window on the West’, for 120 years.

  The Vasa period started on a note of continuity because the successful candidate of 1587, the Swedish Prince Sigismund Vasa (Zygmunt Waza), was the son of a Jagiellonian mother. But the Swedish connection proved deeply conflictual. As leader of the defeated pro-Catholic party in the Swedish civil war, Sigismund lost control of his native country and fell into long-running hostility with his victorious Protestant relatives, not least over control of Livonia. Once again, the grand duchy was exposed. What is more, the outbreak in 1606 of a noble revolt in Poland, the Zebrzydowski Confederation, demonstrated that it was perfectly legal to take up arms against the king if strict rules were observed. A baleful precedent was set for the Lithuanian magnates. In 1621, the Swedish Vasas took over Livonia by force of arms, leaving the Rzeczpospolita only the province of Letgalia at Dunabourg, on the grand duchy’s northern border.

  The reign of Władysław IV brought a period of political calm, economic prosperity and social peace. The Rzeczpospolita even managed to avoid involvement in the protracted violence of the Thirty Years War in neighbouring Germany. In reality, however, deep-seated problems were accumulating.

  One of the prominent social and cultural features of Poland-Lithuania in the early seventeenth century was a phenomenon that has been dubbed the ‘noble–Jewish alliance’. In the grand duchy, as in the Ukrainian palatinates now separated from it, the wealth and influence of the landed magnates increased. And a literate class of Jewish managers, lawyers and administrators was imported from Poland to run the estates and to colonize the small towns. The Jews had often faced discrimination in the urban centres, especially from the guilds. But in the east of the state, which was less urbanized, they met fewer barriers. In Vilnius, they established a very strong community where Yiddish culture was cherished and eminent scholars of the Torah welcomed.82

  The grand duchy also provided refuge for radical religious thinkers. A group of Polish anti-Trinitarians settled at Troki, where they analysed biblical texts alongside members of the Jewish Karaites.83 The Hizzuq Emunah (‘Fortress of Faith’) of Isaac ben Abraham of Troki (1525–86), though not translated into Latin until 1681, was regarded by the philosophes of the Enlightenment as one of the founts of their thought.84 ‘Even the most determined freethinkers’, wrote Voltaire, ‘have proposed virtually nothing that cannot be found in Le Rampart de la Foi du Rabbin Isaac.’85 The Karaites of Troki would have appreciated the compliment but not the reference to one of their leading intellectuals as a rabbi.

  In those same decades, royal patronage was a chosen instrument of the Counter-Reformation no less than education. The Polish Vasas were Catholic devotees by definition – having lost their throne in Sweden for the Faith – and the preferences of the court affected the ecclesiastical alignment of the nobles. Father Piotr Skarga SJ (1536–1612), sometime rector of the Jesuit Academy at Vil’nya, confessor to the king-grand duke and the Catholic Church’s most eloquent ideologue, foresaw a day of reckoning for the sinful republic.86 Another Jesuit, St Andrew Bobola (1591–1657), who worked as a rural missionary first in Polatsk and later in Pińsk, was to be martyred in the Cossack wars.87

  Disaster struck in 1648. A Cossack rebellion in Ukraine headed by Bogdan Chmielnicki sent Cossack armies flooding westwards into Poland, and provoked a chain of further invasions. In 1654 the Muscovites joined in after reaching an understanding with the Cossacks. This development provoked Swedish armies to march both into northern Poland and into the grand duchy, where Vil’nya was occupied. The treasonable surrender of the Lithuanian grand hetman, Janusz Radziwiłł, who was contemplating a permanent union with Sweden, created shock waves of despair. In 1655 one Russian army entered Ukraine, and another invaded the grand duchy, recapturing Vil’nya from the Swedes and perpetrating a horrific pogrom. In 1655–6 the king-grand duke, Jan Kazimierz, fled to his wife’s possessions in Habsburg-ruled Silesia. These terrible years became known as the Potop, the ‘Flood’.

  During the Cossack wars, the government of the Rzeczpospolita was plagued by a form of constitutional abuse that would become notorious. In a system where the nobles were both law-makers and law-enforcers, it made good sense for the Sejm to work on the principle of unanimity; deputies had habitually held up proceedings until particular points of a bill were clarified or dropped; this liberum veto or ‘right of veto’ had served its purpose for years. Yet in 1652 a Lithuanian deputy called Siciński, acting on the orders of his Radziwiłł patron, exercised the veto in the final minutes of an overextended parliamentary session, immediately before the state budget was to be approved. In a finely calculated act of legislative vandalism, he then left the chamber without justifying his protest, and rode out into the night. The veto was judged valid, and the entire legislation of the session remained unratified. Much to the amusement of some of the grand duchy’s magnates, one imagines, an aristocratic troublemaker had demonstrated how the state could be held to ransom.

  In 1656 and 1657 the Rzeczpospolita staged a remarkable revival. The king-grand duke returned. New troops were raised, and Catholic sentiment was aroused by appeals to fight the heretical, Protestant invaders. The Virgin Mary was proclaimed Queen of Poland. The Swedes were expelled from both the kingdom and the grand duchy, and the Muscovites pushed back. Polish-Lithuanian troops even attacked enemy positions on the Danish islands, which the Swedes had reached by marching across the ice. At Hadziacz in 1658 Cossack elders signed an agreement which appeared to end their alliance with Moscow and to initiate a tripartite Rzeczpospolita. At the Treaty of Oliwa in 1660 a general settlement of the First Northern War* was concluded, though Livonia and Ducal Prussia had to be abandoned. But then, exactly when Polish-Lithuanian forces were taking the offensive against the Muscovites, another crippling noble rebel confederation shattered the common resolve. Kiev and the eastern Ukraine were lost for ever; and in 1668, after six years of fraternal fighting, Jan Kazimierz, the last Vasa monarch, abdicated. During his reign, 25 per cent of the Rzeczpospolita’s population died of fire and sword, hunger and plague.

  The reign of Jan Sobieski (1673–96) is most often viewed, especially by outsiders unfamiliar with internal affairs, as the last grand flourish of Polish-Lithuanian power and glory. Certainly, as a fearless warrior and war leader, who had made his name as crown hetman during the Swedish wars, he put on a grand show. By breaking the Ottoman Siege of Vienna in 1683, he secured his place as one of Europe’s greatest heroes. Yet Sobieski’s foreign wars, financed by foreign subsidies, masked deep internal weaknesses. One of his most intractable problems persisted in the grand duchy, where the vendettas of the magnates ran completely out of control. While the king-grand duke battled the Turks on the Danube, the Sapieha faction battled the Pac faction in the grand duchy, and all semblance of co-ordinated government broke down. In itself, the breakdown was not terminally destructive – the Rzeczpospolita had recovered from similar episodes before – but the timing was fatal. The grand duchy was paralysed at a juncture when Swedish–Muscovite rivalry was coming to a head in the adjoining lands; any major war between Sweden’s Baltic Empire and Muscovy was bound to see the grand duchy trampled between the two.

  In 1696, on Sobieski’s
death, the official language of the grand duchy’s administration was changed from ruski to Polish. The change marked the point where the ruling nobility had become so Polonized that the grand duchy’s principal native language was no longer readily intelligible to the upper classes and to the bureaucracy. The Chancellery scribes had to make another adjustment. What for centuries had been either VKL or MDL now became WXL: ‘W’ for Wielkie, ‘X’ for Ksie˛stwo and ‘L’ for Litewskie; and Vil’nya, for official purposes, became Wilno. It was highly ironic; the Polishness of the grand duchy’s elite was intensifying at the very time when Russian influences among them stood on the brink of marked expansion.

  The era of the Saxon kings that followed Sobieski is traditionally seen as the nadir of the Rzeczpospolita’s fortunes, although some historians have sought to rehabilitate it.88 August II the Strong (r. 1697–1733), elector of Saxony, and his son, August III (r. 1733–63), accepted the Polish-Lithuanian throne in order to outflank their German neighbours and rivals in Brandenburg-Prussia. They only achieved their goal by pocketing Russian gold, by bribing electors with fake coins, by promising to convert to Catholicism, and afterwards by signing up to a permanent alliance with the tsar. In the ensuing decades, they used their new acquisition as a milch cow and dragged it into endless wars, quarrels and occupations, from which, whatever their wishes, they were impotent to escape. Formally, they held the triple title of ‘elector, king and grand duke’.

  The Great Northern War (1700–21) essentially pitted Russia against Sweden, although other powers were also involved. Peter the Great, the aspirant emperor of Russia, and Charles XII, king of Sweden, were the principal combatants. The former, a physical giant, was ‘a typical fanatic, who never questioned the correctness of his ideas’; the latter, sexually ambiguous, was eulogized by Voltaire as ‘a king without weaknesses’.89 August the Strong, however, was deeply enmeshed in the political intrigues from the start, and much of the fighting was conducted in Poland and Lithuania. His entry into the war as Peter’s ally sucked Charles XII’s army into the Rzeczpospolita, and the Swedes’ long march to destruction at Poltava in 1709 brought a trail of devastation throughout the grand duchy. The Polish-Lithuanian nobility were divided into pro-Russian and pro-Swedish factions: a Swedish placeman, Stanisław Leszczyński (later duke of Lorraine) contrived to sit on the throne between 1704 and 1709; and the subsequent arrival of the Russian army virtually turned the Rzeczpospolita into a Russian protectorate. In 1717, when Russian mediators did nothing to calm interfactional animosities, the noble deputies were driven into passing laws in silence, at a cowed Sejm that assembled under the menace of Russian guns, effectively depriving the state of the means of its own defence. Military spending was drastically curtailed. State taxation could only support a standing army limited to 18,000 men, at a time when the Prussians could field 200,000 and the Russians 500,000. The grand duchy’s military establishment was now smaller than the Radziwiłłs’ private army.