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either powerful magnates whose support he needed, or, more often, trusted men of his own. These were drawn from his court, which was imbued with a humanistic and empirical spirit. A high proportion of his secretaries was of plebeian stock, and Zygmunt felt no compunction in ennobling those, like his banker Jan Boner, whom he favoured. This favour transcended creed as well as class. The Jew Abraham Ezofowicz, whom Zygmunt elevated to the rank of Treasurer of Lithuania, did convert to Christianity, albeit the Orthodox rite, before being ennobled, but his brother Michał remained a practising Jew when he was elevated to the szlachta in 1525—a case without parallel anywhere in Christian Europe.

      Most of the bishops were at home in this milieu. The Polish clergy were no more debauched than those of other countries at this time, and possibly less so—the last quarter of the fifteenth century saw the foundation of no fewer than eighteen new fundamentalist and strict Franciscan monasteries in the provinces of Mazovia and Małopolska alone. What did set them apart was an unusual element of realism in the face of other religions and of candour with respect to corruption. Bishop Krzycki, for instance, left a poem concerning the gossip that surrounded a fellow bishop caught in the act of lowering a girl from his bedroom window in a net. ‘I fail to see what shocks everyone so,’ the poet-bishop wrote, ‘for no one can deny that the Gospels themselves teach us to use the Net of the Fisherman.’ Krzycki wrote much erotic verse before he became bishop, and this did not affect his career any more than it did that of another, who ended up as Prince-Bishop of Warmia.

      Jan Dantyszek was a good example of what the times could offer a clever man. A plebeian by birth, he entered the king’s service, becoming a secretary and later a diplomatic envoy. After a life which took him around Europe and brought him into contact with Francis I of France, Henry VIII of England, assorted popes, Ferdinand Cortes, Martin Luther, with whom he formed a friendship, the Emperor Charles V, who tried to keep him in his service, and Copernicus, who became a close friend and protégé, Dantyszek settled down to his episcopal duties with a degree of worldly wisdom.

      The conversion of Poland by Mieszko I had been primarily an act of political wisdom which had brought him status and security within the Christian world. The usefulness of the Christian Church had subsequently revealed itself more than once, helping to reunite the country in the thirteenth century, and to outmanoeuvre the Teutonic Order in the fourteenth. But this had been accompanied by an unwelcome extension of its influence and wealth. And the Church’s foreign connections no less than its persecution of movements such as the Hussite heresy made the szlachta uneasy.

      An institution which raked in bequests, exacted tithes, and contributed nothing in taxes to the state was bound to be unpopular. By the sixteenth century, the Church owned just over 10 per cent of all arable land in Wielkopolska, 15.5 per cent in Małopolska, and 25 in Mazovia. The share owned by the crown in the same provinces was 9, 7.5 and just under 5 per cent respectively. The Church wielded political power through its bishops who sat in the Senate and through its tribunals, which exercised jurisdiction over those living on its lands, and kept attempting to exercise it on wider areas. This power was also potentially at the disposal of Rome, a state often allied with Poland’s enemies. The Church was therefore a focus for a number of the szlachta’s phobias. The following is a typical complaint, uttered by a deputy during a Sejm debate of the 1550s.

      The gentlemen of the clergy summon us, citing their titles and invoking some foreign, Romish law, contrary to the laws and freedoms of our Realm, attempting to extend their jurisdiction and that of their master, the Roman Pope, which jurisdiction we, not finding it in our statutes, neither can nor will bear; for we know no other jurisdiction than the supremacy of his majesty the King our master.

      The tone and the sentiments expressed are characteristic of a ‘national Catholicism’ which was the spiritual heir of Hussitism. Many of the Bohemian followers of Hus had taken refuge in Poland, and their ideas were well known to writers such as Biernat of Lublin (1465-1529), who denounced the discrepancies between the Scriptures and the practices of the Church.

      In view of all this, it is not surprising that when Martin Luther nailed his famous declaration of war on the Papacy to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, setting off a chain reaction which was to shake the whole Christian world, he produced little more than a tremor in Poland. His teachings rapidly penetrated northern and western areas, enthusiastically received by the preponderantly German population of the towns, but elsewhere they met with little response.

      Calvinism was another matter. Enhanced by its more sympathetic Francophone associations, it rapidly gained ground all over the country. The democratic spirit of Calvinism which placed the lay elder on a par with the minister could hardly fail to appeal to the instincts of the szlachta, while the absence of pomp and ceremony from its rites made it a pleasingly cheap religion to support.

      By the 1550s a dominant proportion of the deputies to the Sejm were Protestants. But their number is not representative of the population as a whole, since the most ardently Catholic palatinates often returned Protestant deputies. By 1572 the Senate provided a similar picture. Of the ‘front-bench’ seats, thirty-six were held by Protestants, twenty-five by Catholics and eight by Orthodox, which again meant only that many magnates had converted to Calvinism. It was they who provided the conditions for its growth in Poland. The Oleśnicki family founded a Calvinist academy in their town of Pińczów, which became the foremost centre of Calvinist teaching and publishing in that part of Europe, referred to by the faithful as ‘the Athens of the North’. Similar centres were established on a smaller scale by the Leszczyński family at Leszno, and the Radziwiłł at Nieśwież, Birże and Kiejdany.

      Although they gained an ascendancy, the Calvinists never managed to control the Protestant movement in Poland. The northern cities stood by Luther; Anabaptists seeking refuge from persecution in Germany appeared in various areas of the country in the 1530s; and in 1551 Dutch Mennonites set up a colony on the lower Vistula.

      The Protestant sect which produced Poland’s most significant contribution to Christian philosophy was the Arians. Expelled from Bohemia in 1548, they settled in Poland, where they were known as ‘Czech Brethren’ and later Arians, since two of their fundamental beliefs—the human nature of Christ and the rejection of the Trinity—were first voiced by Arius at the Council of Nicea in AD 235. They also came to be known variously as Anti-Trinitarians, Polish Brethren and Socinians.

      Theirs was a rationalist and fundamentalist response to the teachings of Christ, whom they held to be a divinely inspired man. They were pacifists, opposed to the tenure of civic or military office, to serfdom, to the possession of wealth, and to the use of money, believing as they did in the common ownership of all material goods.

      They gained many converts—up to about 40,000 adherents practising in some two hundred temples scattered throughout the country. Their spiritual centre was Raków, where they established an academy, visited by students from all over Europe. It was here that the Raków Catechism was published, the work of Fausto Sozzini (Socinius), a nobleman from Siena who sought refuge in Poland and became one of the leading lights of the movement. The two most prominent Polish Arians were Marcin Czechowicz and Szymon Budny, the second of whom made a fine translation of the Bible into Polish and was also responsible for a rapprochement with the Jews, which produced some curious results.

      The Jewish community had also been affected by the spirit of the times. The expulsions from the Iberian peninsula had brought many distinguished Spanish scholars to Poland, and in 1567 a Talmudic academy was founded at Lublin, with the eminent Solomon Luria as rector, which enriched the religious debate. The Jews were by no means united, as there were considerable colonies of Karaites in eastern Poland who accepted only the Bible and rejected the Talmud.

      The Arians made many converts from the ranks of Talmudic Jews, while a number of Arians and Calvinists converted to Judaism. It was one of these converts, ‘Joseph ben Mardoch’ Malinowski, who played the most incongruous part in this religious inter action. It was he who put the finishing touches to the Hebrew original of The Fortress of the Faith, a Karaite catechism by Isaac ben Abraham of Troki, which was subsequently published in a number of countries, and was later rediscovered by Voltaire, who believed it to be the greatest demolition of the divinity of Christ ever written.

      In other countries the established Church

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