The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  His plans were frustrated by his victorious army. Escaping control, it pillaged towns, massacred inhabitants, despoiled churches and monasteries. The famous Monastery of Jasna Gora, near Częstochowa, stoutly resisted siege; this success, regarded as a miracle, aroused the religious ardor of the populace; the Catholic priests appealed to the nation to expel the impious invaders; peasants led the way in taking up arms; the garrison that Charles had left in Warsaw fled before the advancing crowd; John Casimir was restored to his capital (June 16, 1656). The Tatars turned against Russia, and Russia, preferring Poland to Sweden as a neighbor, signed a truce with Poland (1656). The sudden death of Charles X led to the Peace of Oliva (May 3, 1660), ending the war between Poland and Sweden. In 1659 the struggle with Russia was resumed. After eight years of chaos, campaigns, and vacillations of Cossack loyalty, the Peace of Andrusovo (January 20, 1667) ceded Smolensk, Kiev, and the Ukraine east of the Dnieper to Russia. This division of the Ukraine endured till the first partition of Poland (1772).

  Tired of war and the liberum veto, John Casimir abdicated the Polish throne (1668), retired to Nevers in France, and lived a quiet life of study and prayer until his death (1672). His successor, Michael Wisniowiecki, fought a disastrous war with the Turks; by the Peace of Buczacz (1672) Poland acknowledged Turkish sovereignty over the western Ukraine, and pledged an annual tribute of 220,000 ducats to the sultans. In that war Poland discovered the military genius of Jan Sobieski; and when Wisniowiecki died (1673), the Diet, after the usual costly delay, elected Poland’s greatest King (1674).

  Jan—now John III—was already forty-four years old. He had had a propitious origin as son of the castellan (military governor) at Cracow; his mother was the granddaughter of the Polish general Stanislas Zólkiewski who had captured Moscow in 1610; Jan had arms in his blood. Education at the University of Cracow, travels in Germany, the Netherlands, England, and France, with almost a year in Paris, made him a man of culture as well as of martial courage and skill. In 1648 his father died, shortly after being chosen to represent Poland at the Peace of Westphalia. Jan hurried home, and joined the Polish army in action against the Cossack revolt. When the Swedes invaded Poland, and John Casimir fled, Sobieski was among the many Polish officials who accepted Charles X as King of Poland, and for a year he served in the Swedish army. But when the Poles rose against the invaders Sobieski came back to his national allegiance, and fought so well for his country that in 1665 he was made commander in chief of the Polish armies. In that year he married the remarkable woman who became half of his life and molder of his career.

  Maria Kazimiera, of royal French blood, was born at Nevers in 1641, and brought up in France and Poland. At Warsaw, when she was thirteen, her vivacious beauty inflamed Sobieski, then twenty-five. But the fortunes of war took him away, and when he returned he found her married to Jan Zamojski, a noble debauchee. Neglected by her husband, Maria accepted Sobieski as her cavaliere servente. Apparently she kept her marriage vows, but she promised to marry Sobieski as soon as she could have her union with Zamojski annulled. The husband made this unnecessary by dying; the lovers were soon wed; and their long love became a legend in Polish history. Many Polish women rivaled the French in combining classic beauty of features with an almost masculine courage and intelligence, and a penchant for making or guiding kings. From the day of their marriage Maria began to plan the elevation of Sobieski to the throne.

  Her love was sometimes unscrupulous, as love can be. In 1669 Sobieski seems to have accepted French money to support a French cardinal against Wisniowiecki. After Michael’s election Jan joined other nobles in plots to depose the King as a coward unfit and unwilling to defend Poland against the Turks. He himself led his men to four victories within ten days. On November 11, 1673, the day of the King’s death, Sobieski routed the Turks at Khotin in Bessarabia. The achievement made him a logical candidate for a throne that only the most resolute arms could now maintain against foes on every side. To reinforce logic he appeared at the electoral Diet at the head of six thousand troops. French money played a part in his election, but this was quite in the mores of the age.

  He was a king in body and soul as well as in name. Foreigners described him as “one of the handsomest and best-built men” in Europe, “of proud and noble visage, eyes of light and fire,” 6 physically strong, venereally assiduous, mentally curious and alive. His natural acquisitiveness was spurred by the extravagance of his beloved Marysienka, but he often atoned for a parsimonious Sejm by paying his soldiers out of his own pocket, and selling his property to buy them guns. 7 He deserved all that he took, for he saved both Poland and Europe.

  His foreign policy was simple in aim: to drive the Turks into Asia, or at least to repel their attacks upon the bastion of Western Christendom at Vienna. In this effort he was harassed by the alliance of his ally France with the Sultan, and by the attempts of the Emperor to embroil him in Turkish wars; Leopold I hoped thus to leave Austria free to appropriate Danubian or Hungarian territory to which both Austria and Poland laid claim. Treading angrily through the maze, Sobieski longed for the freedom to plan policy and issue directives without being subject at every step to the Sejm and the liberum veto. He envied the power of Louis XIV and the Emperor to make decisions definitely and to issue orders accordingly and immediately.

  Soon after his election he undertook to recover the western Ukraine from the Turks, who had now advanced as far north as Lvov. There, with only five thousand cavalry, he defeated twenty thousand Turks (August 24, 1675). By the Treaty of Zuravno (October 17, 1676) he compelled the Turks to surrender their claim to tribute, and to acknowledge Polish suzerainty in the western Ukraine. He felt that the opportunity had come to expel the Ottoman power from Europe. He appealed to Leopold to join with him in war à l’outrance against the Turks; but Leopold objected that he had no assurance that if he sent his armies to the east, Louis XIV would not attack him in the west. Sobieski begged France to give Austria such assurance; Louis refused. 8 Sobieski turned more and more toward alliance with Austria. When French agents tried to bribe the Sejm against him, he exposed their plot and published their secret correspondence. In the resultant reaction against France the Sejm signed (April 1, 1683) an alliance with the Empire. Poland was to raise forty thousand men, the Empire sixty thousand. If Vienna or Cracow should be besieged by the Turks, the other ally would come to the rescue with his entire force.

  In July the Turks moved toward Vienna. In August Sobieski and the Polish army left Warsaw with the declared purpose “to proceed to the Holy War, and with God’s help to give back the old freedom to besieged Vienna, and thereby help all wavering Christendom.” 9 The finest spirit of medieval chivalry seemed restored. The Poles reached the beleaguered capital just in time; disease and hunger had already decimated its defenders. Sobieski in person led the combined armies of Poland and the Empire in one of the most crucial engagements in European history (September 12, 1683). Half of the twenty-five thousand Poles who had followed him in the crusade died in battle or on the way.

  He returned to Poland in triumph and disappointment. Warsaw received him proudly as the hero of Europe, but he had been rebuffed by the Emperor in his hopes of marrying his son to the Archduchess of Austria. To secure a kingdom for his son he attempted the conquest of Moldavia; he won all the battles except against weather and accident, and came back empty-handed.

  Amid the turmoil of politics, and in the intervals of war, he made his court the center of a cultural revival. He himself was a man of wide reading: he had studied Galileo and Harvey, Descartes and Gassendi, he had read Pascal, Corneille, and Molière. While supporting the Catholic Church as a matter of state policy, he extended religious freedom and protection to Protestants and Jews; 10 the Jews loved him as they had loved Caesar. He had the will, but not the power, to save from death a freethinker who had expressed some doubts as to the existence of God (1689); 11 this was the first auto-da-fé in Polish history. Poland continued to produce her own poets, but to import most of he
r major artists. Waclaw Potocki wrote an epic on the Polish victory at Khotin; Wespazian Kochowski composed similar epics, and a Polish psalmody in poetic prose; and Andrzej Morsztyn, after translating Tasso’s Aminta and Corneille’s Cid, showed in his lyrics the influence of French and Italian poetry in Poland. Sobieski encouraged the French influence, admiring everything in France except its politics. He brought French and Italian painters and sculptors to work in Warsaw. He engaged architects, chiefly Italian, to build baroque palaces at Wilanów, Zólkiew, and Jaworów. Sumptuous churches were erected during his reign: St. Peter’s in Wilno, and in Warsaw the churches of the Holy Cross and the Benedictine nuns. Andreas Schlüter came from Germany to carve decoration for the palace at Wilanów and the Krasiński Palace in the capital. Amid these Western influences in art, Eastern influence predominated in dress and appearance: the long cloak and the broad and colorful waistband, and mustaches turned up like double scimitars.

  The old age of the King was darkened by the rebelliousness of his son Jakob, the intransigence of his wife, and his failure to have the monarchy made hereditary in his family. The liberum veto stood always over his head. He could not improve the condition of the peasants, for their masters dominated the Sejm; he could not compel the rich to pay taxes, for the rich were the Sejm; he could not keep the factious nobles in order, for they refused him a standing army. He died of uremia on June 17, 1696, not, as story has it, brokenhearted, but saddened by the decline of his beloved country from the pinnacle of heroism to which he had raised it.

  The Diet passed over his son and sold the crown to Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony, who easily transformed himself from a Protestant to a Catholic to become Augustus II of Poland. He was a character in his own right. History calls him Augustus the Strong, for he was an athlete in body and bed; legend credits him with 354 illegitimate children. 12 In January, 1699, he signed at Karlowitz a treaty by which Turkey yielded all claim to the western Ukraine. Feeling safe now in south and east, Augustus listened to Patkul, and allied Poland with Denmark and Russia for the partition of Sweden.

  III. RUSSIA TURNS WEST: 1645–99

  Each of the conspirators could allege some excuse and provocation. Sweden’s Charles X had besieged Copenhagen and tried to conquer Denmark. He had invaded Poland and captured her capital; and Gustavus Adolphus had so strengthened Swedish power in Livonia and Ingria that he could defy Russia to launch a boat on the Baltic without Sweden’s consent. The imprisoned Russian bear gnawed its claws at the sight of all exits closed in the west, all outlets to the Black Sea shut off by the Crimean Tatars and the Turks. Only eastward could Russia move—into Siberia; and that seemed the way to hardships and barbarism. The comforts and graces of life beckoned Russia to the west, and the West was resolved to keep Russia Oriental.

  When Alexis Mikhailovich Romanov became czar Russia was as yet overwhelmingly medieval. She had not known Roman law, or Renaissance humanism, or Reformation religious reform. Under Alexis Russian law received a new formulation (the Ulozhenie of 1649), but this merely codified existing laws based on absolutism and orthodoxy. So it remained a criminal offense to look at the new moon, or play chess, or neglect church attendance, in Lent. These and a hundred other crimes were punished by the knout. Alexis himself, though personally amiable and generous, was fanatically pious; often he spent five hours a day in church, making on one occasion fifteen hundred obeisances. 13 He delighted in feeding the beggars who gathered around his palace, but he punished severely all political or religious dissent, taxed his people heavily, and allowed exploitation of the peasantry and corruption in the government to go to such lengths that revolts broke out in Moscow, Novgorod, and Pskov, and, above all, among the Cossacks of the Don. One of these, Stenka Razin, formed a robber band, pillaged and killed the rich and made himself master of Astrakhan and Tsaritsyn (now Stalingrad). He set up a Cossack republic along the Volga, and at one time threatened to take Moscow. He was captured and was tortured till he died (1671), but his memory was cherished by the poor as a promise of revenge against the landlords and the government.

  Even in this medieval milieu some modern influences appeared. The wars with Poland involved more frequent contacts with the West. Diplomats and merchants came in rising number from what the Russians called “Europe.” The River Dvina and the ports of Riga and Archangel saw increasing trade with Western states. Foreign technicians were called in to develop mines, organize industries, and manufacture armament. An entire colony of immigrants grew up, about 1650, in a quarter of Moscow; Germans and Poles brought a touch of Western literature and music to this settlement, and provided Latin tutors for rich Russian families. Alexis himself maintained a German orchestra. He allowed his minister Artamon Matveev to import Western furniture and French manners, even to the social mingling of women with men. When the Russian ambassador to the Grand Duke of Tuscany sent Alexis descriptions of Florentine dramas, operas, and ballets, Alexis allowed the building of a theater in Moscow and the presentation of plays, chiefly Biblical; one of these, Esther, preceded Racine’s play of that name by seventeen years. Feeling that he had sinned in attending these performances, Alexis mentioned them to his confessor, who permitted him the new pleasures. 14 Matveev married a Scottish lady of the famous Hamilton family; they adopted and brought up a Russian orphan, Natalia Naruishkina; Alexis took her as his second wife.

  These Westernizing ventures aroused a patriotic reaction. Some Orthodox Russians condemned the study of Latin as an evil thing that might incline youth to un-Orthodox ideas. The older generation felt that any change in customs, faith, or ritual dislodged some stone in the social structure, loosened all, and might in time bring the whole precarious edifice down in ruins. Religion in Russia relied on liturgy as well as doctrine. Though the masses had as yet a very limited capacity to understand ideas, they could be trained in religious observances whose hypnotic repetition made for social and mental stability and peace. But the repetition had to be exact to produce the hypnotic effect; a change in the accustomed sequence would break the soothing charm; hence every detail of the ceremonial, every word of the prayers, had to remain as they had been for centuries. One of the bitterest disputes and divisions in Russian history came when Nikon, Patriarch of Moscow, introduced into the liturgy some reforms based upon a study of Byzantine practices and texts. Clerics who had learned Greek pointed out to the Patriarch many errors in the texts used by the Russian Orthodox Church. Nikon ordered a revision and correction of the texts and ritual: for example, Jesus was henceforth to be Jisus, not Isus; the sign of the cross was to be made with three fingers, not two; the number of genuflections during a certain prayer were to be reduced from twelve to four; icons showing Italian influence were to be destroyed and replaced by icons adhering to Byzantine patterns. In general, Russian ritual was to be brought into closer conformity with its Byzantine origins. Some Russian churchmen who refused to accept these changes were demoted or anathematized or sent to Siberia. Nikon’s dictatorial methods displeased the Czar, and in 1667 he was banished to a remote monastery. The Russian Church split into two factions; the official church, supported by Alexis, accepted the reforms; the dissenters (Raskolniki), or Old Believers (Staroviertsi), developed into a schismatic body, which the new orthodoxy persecuted with fire and sword. Their leader, Avvakum, was burned at the stake (1681) by order of Czar Feodor. Many Old Believers killed themselves rather than pay taxes to a government which they identified with Antichrist. This religious chaos was part of the inheritance of Peter the Great.

  The death of Alexis (1676) prepared a violent conflict among his children. By his first wife, Maria Miloslavski, he left an ailing son, Feodor (born 1662), a lame, half-blind, and half-imbecile son, Ivan (born 1666), and six daughters, of whom the ablest and most ambitious was Sophia Alekseevna inborn 1657). By his second wife, Natalia Naruishkina, Alexis begot the famous Peter (born 1672). Feodor inherited the throne, but died in 1682. The boyars, judging Ivan helplessly incompetent, wished to make Peter czar, with his mother as
regent. But Peter’s stepsisters hated Natalia, and feared to be neglected under her rule. Led by Sophia, they stirred up the Streltsi—soldiers of the Moscow garrison—to invade the Kremlin and insist upon the accession of Ivan. Matveev, Natalia’s foster father, pleaded with the soldiers to withdraw. They tore him from Peter’s grasp, killed him before the eyes of the ten-year-old boy, killed Natalia’s brothers and several of her supporters, and forced the boyars to accept Ivan as czar, with Peter as co-czar but subordinate, and with Sophia as regent. These barbarities may have shared in producing the convulsions that later disturbed Peter’s life; in any case they gave him unforgettable lessons in violence and brutality.

  Natalia withdrew with Peter to Preobrazhensky, a suburb of Moscow. Sophia governed well. She repudiated the isolation of the terem, or women’s quarters; she appeared in public unveiled, and presided without a qualm over male assemblies where old heads shook at such insolence. She had received more education than most of the men around her; she was inclined to reform, and to Western ideas; and she chose as her chief minister, perhaps as her lover, a man much won to Western ways. Prince Vasili Golitsyn wrote Latin, admired France, adorned his palace with paintings and Gobelin tapestries, and had a large library of Latin, Polish, and German books. It was apparently due to his example and encouragement that three thousand stone dwellings were built in Moscow in the seven years of his regency, whereas, before, all houses had been of wood. He seems to have planned to free the serfs. 15 Under his rule enslavement for debt was abolished, murderers were no longer buried alive, and the death penalty for seditious utterances was abolished. His work as a reformer was ruined by his failure as a general. He reorganized the army and twice led it against the Turks; in both cases he mismanaged the provisioning of the troops; they returned defeated and rebellious, and their disaffection gave Peter his cue to capture power.