Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (51 page)

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.