Poland: A history - Adam Zamoyski

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pinpointed the principal arguments for returning to the fold, letting time do the rest. And time was on the side of Rome. In 1570 Mikołaj Sierotka Radziwiłł, son of the man who had introduced Calvinism to Lithuania and been one of its greatest financial and political supports, went back to the Church of Rome. Others followed suit, for a variety of reasons. Even the mixed marriages which the hierarchy had fulminated against worked in favour of Catholicism, since women had been largely left out of the religious debate and their conditioning led them to stand by their old faith. Jan Firlej, Marshal of Poland, had become a Calvinist, but his wife, Zofia Boner, had not. She covertly brought his sons up to love the Catholic faith, and three of the four became Catholics when they grew up. After her death, Firlej married Barbara Mniszech, another fervent Catholic. Although their son was ostensibly brought up a Calvinist, the mother’s influence prevailed, and he later became Primate of Poland. As Piotr Skarga foresaw, the country would be reconquered for Rome, ‘not by force or with steel, but by virtuous example, teaching, discussion, gentle intercourse and persuasion’.

      As Calvin grew more strident and Protestants in various European countries began to execute not only Catholics but other Protestants, the Polish prelates showed forbearance. They pointed out that Protestantism could be more repressive than Catholicism. They explained that it was not only divisive, but irresponsible, and in this they were helped by the example of the Arians.

      Under the influence of Fausto Sozzini, the Arian movement displayed a tendency to splinter while attracting all manner of dissenters and schismatics migrating from other countries. But what made the Arians really unpopular with the szlachta were the starkly political implications of their faith. ‘You should not eat bread made by the sweat of a subject’s brow, but make your own,’ they would hector. ‘Nor should you live on estates which were granted to your forebears for spilling the blood of enemies. You must sell those estates and give the money to the poor.’ Since the status of the szlachta was based on their readiness to bear arms, the Arians’ pacifism was downright subversive. (In an attempt to square the circle, their synod of 1604 allowed them to bear arms provided they did not use them.)

      With the impending extinction of the Jagiellon dynasty, Poland and Lithuania needed unity of purpose rather than dissent and refusal to take responsibility. Nevertheless, the constitutional and legal aspects of the issue were still paramount. After the death of Zygmunt Augustus the Sejm which met in 1573 under the name of the Confederation of Warsaw to shape Poland’s future passed an act whose most memorable clause ran as follows:

      Whereas in our Common Wealth there is no small disagreement in the matter of the Christian faith, and in order to prevent that any harmful contention should arise from this, as we see clearly taking place in other kingdoms, we swear to each other, in our name and in that of our descendants for ever more, on our honour, our faith, our love and our consciences, that albeit we are dissidentes in religione, we will keep the peace between ourselves, and that we will not, for the sake of our various faith and difference of church, either shed blood or confiscate property, deny favour, imprison or banish, and that furthermore we will not aid or abet any power or office which strives to this in any way whatsoever…

      The freedom to practise any religion without suffering discrimination or penalty was henceforth enshrined in the constitution. This law would be observed rigorously by Catholic kings and an increasingly Catholic population. Some illegal executions did take place, but they were few. When no criminal offence had been committed, even acts of extreme provocation went unpunished. In 1580 the Calvinist Marcin Kreza snatched the host from a priest, spat on it, trampled it, and then fed it to a passing mongrel, for which he was reprimanded by the king and told not to do it again.

      The Calvinist writer who chronicled the course of the Counter-Reformation in Poland, listing every execution or sectarian killing of a Protestant between 1550 and 1650, came up with a total no higher than twelve. During the same period, over five hundred people were legally executed for religious reasons in England, and nearly nine hundred were burnt in the Netherlands, while hundreds more suffered confiscations and attainders. This unique absence of violence stemmed partly from the Polish attitude to religion, partly from an obsession with legality and the principle of personal liberty, and partly from the fact that throughout this period Polish society concentrated on an attempt to build utopia on earth.

       FIVE Kingdom and Commonwealth

      As the heirless Zygmunt Augustus paced the galleries of the Royal Castle on Kraków’s Wawel hill dressed in mourning for Barbara Radziwiłł, his subjects thought uneasily of the future. The realm of the Jagiellons was an assemblage of territories with disparate populations, differing customs and varying forms of government coexisting within one state. They were held together by no feudal bond, administration, constitution or military hegemony, but by a consensus whose only embodiment was the dynasty itself. Its possible extinction raised the question not just of who would rule the country, but whether it would even continue to exist in its current form.

      The only thing which could prevent the realm from falling apart was a constitutional expression of the consensus which had created it. But who was to formulate this? Who represented the population of this mongrel conglomerate? The answer, as they were not slow to make clear, was the szlachta.

      By the mid-sixteenth century the szlachta included Lithuanian nobles and Ruthene boyars, Prussian and Baltic gentry of German origin, as well as Tatars and smaller numbers of Moldavians, Armenians, Italians, Magyars and Bohemians, and was diluted by intermarriage with wealthy merchants and peasants. The szlachta made up around 7 per cent of the population. Since they extended from the top to the bottom of the economic scale, and right across the board in religion and culture, they represented a wider crosssection as well as a greater percentage of the population than any enfranchised class in any European country. To be a member of the szlachta was like being a Roman citizen. The szlachta were the nation, the Populus Polonus, while the rest of the people inhabiting the area were the plebs, who did not count politically.

      While the score of patrician families and the princes of the Church attempted to establish an oligarchy, the mass of the ‘noble people’ fought for control of what they felt to be their common weal. It was they who pressed for the execution of the laws, for a clearly defined constitution, and for a closer relationship with the throne. They met with little support from Zygmunt the Old or Zygmunt Augustus, both of whom tended to seek support in the magnates. While the executionists struggled with increasing desperation to arrive at a definition of the powers of the Sejm and the role of the monarch and his ministers, the magnates stalled, meaning to take matters into their own hands when the time came.

      A complicating factor was Lithuania, whose dynastic bond with Poland would have to be replaced with a constitutional one. In spite of being granted a senate of their own (Rada) at the beginning of the century, and a sejm in 1559, the szlachta of the Grand Duchy were politically immature and dominated by their magnates. One Lithuanian family, the Radziwiłł, had shot to prominence at the beginning of the century. They accumulated wealth by means of marriages with Polish heiresses, and held most of the important offices in the Grand Duchy.

      In 1547, Mikołaj Radziwiłł ‘the Black’ (to distinguish him from his cousin and brother of Barbara, Mikołaj ‘the Red’) had obtained from the Habsburgs the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and as the extinction of the Jagiellons approached he dreamed of detaching the Grand Duchy from Poland and turning it into his own fief. But this was not likely to survive on its own: in 1547 the ruler of Muscovy, Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’, took the title of Tsar and made it clear that he meant to realise his forebears’ mission of gathering all the Russias under one crown, and his methods, ranging from boiling people in oil to putting cities to the sword, amply demonstrated the firmness of his resolve. Without Polish support, Lithuania, which had already lost Smolensk to Muscovy, would sooner or later experience them too.

      While the Lithuanian magnates and szlachta hesitated, the Poles forced the issue, by the administrative sleight of hand of transferring Lithuania’s Ukrainian lands from the Grand Duchy and annexing them to Poland. The Senate and Sejm of Lithuania and those of Poland met at Lublin on the border

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