Poland

From LoveToKnow 1911

POLAND (Polish Polska, Ger. Polen), (see Poland, Russian, below), a country of Europe which till the end of the 18th century was a kingdom extending (with Lithuania) over the basins of the Warta, Vistula, Dwina, Dnieper and upper Dniester, and had under its dominion, besides the Poles proper and the Baltic Sla y s, the Lithuanians, the White Russians and the Little Russians or Ruthenians.

We possess no certain historical data relating to Poland till the end of the 10th century. It would seem, from a somewhat obscure passage in the chronicle compiled from older the progenitors of the Poles, originally established on the Danube, were driven from thence by the Romans to the still wilder wilderness of central Europe, settling finally among the virgin forests and impenetrable morasses of the basin of the upper waters of the Oder and the Vistula. Here the Lechici, as they called themselves (a name derived from the mythical patriarch, Lech), seemed to have lived for centuries, in loosely connected communities, the simple lives of huntsmen, herdsmen and tillers of the soil, till the pressure of rapacious neighbours compelled them to combine for mutual defence. Of this infant state, the so-called kingdom of the Piasts (from Piast its supposed founder), we know next to nothing. Its origin, its territory, its institutions are so many insoluble riddles. The earliest Polish chroniclers, from Gallus in the early 12th century to Janko of Czarnkow 1 in the 14th, are of little help to us. The only facts of importance to be gleaned from them are that Prince Ziemovit, the great-grandfather of Mieszko (Mieczyslaw) I. (962-992), wrested from the vast but tottering Moravian Empire the province of Chrobacyja (extending from the Carpathians to the Bug), and that Christianity was first preached on the Vistula by Greek Orthodox missionary monks. Mieszko himself was converted by Jordan, the chaplain of his Bohemian consort, Dobrawa or Bona, and when Jordan became the first bishop of Posen, the people seem to have followed the example of their prince. But the whole movement was apparently the outcome not of religious conviction, but of political necessity. The Slavonic peoples, whose territories then extended to the Elbe, and embraced the whole southern shore of the Baltic, were beginning to recoil before the vigorous impetus of the Germans in the West, who regarded their pagan neighbours in much the same way as the Spanish Conquistadores regarded the Aztecs and the Incas. To accept Christianity, at least formally, was therefore a prudential safeguard on the part of the Slavonians. This was thoroughly understood by Mieszko's son Boleslaus I. (992-1025), who went a considerable step farther than his father. Mieszko had been content to be received on almost any terms into the Christian community, Boleslaus aimed at securing the independence of the Polish Church as an additional guarantee of the independence of the Polish nation. 'to' Christi- It was Boleslaus who made the church at Gnesen in Great Poland a national shrine by translating thither the relics of the martyred missionary, St Adalbert of Prague. Subsequently he elevated Gnesen into the metropolitan see of Poland, with jurisdiction over the bishoprics of Cracow, Breslau and Kolberg, all three of these new sees, it is important to notice, being in territory conquered by Boleslaus; for hitherto both Cracow and Breslau had been Bohemian cities,-while Kolberg was founded to curb the lately subjugated Pomeranians. Boleslaus was also the first Polish prince to bear the royal title, which seems to have been conferred upon him by Otto III. in 1000, though as Boleslaus crownedKjn,. himself king a second time in 1025, it is evident that he regarded the validity of his first coronation as somewhat doubtful. He was primarily a warrior, whose reign, an almost uninterrupted warfare, resulted in the formation of a vast kingdom extending from the Baltic to the Carpathians, and from the Elbe to the Bug. But this imposing superstructure rested on the flimsiest of foundations. In less than twenty years after the death of its founder, it collapsed before a combined attack of all Poland's enemies, and simultaneously a terrible pagan reaction swept away the poor remnants of Christianity and civilization. For a time Poland proper became a smoking wilderness, and wild beasts made their lairs in the ruined and desecrated churches. Under Boleslaus II. (1058-1019) and Boleslaus III. (1102-1139) some of the lost provinces, notably Silesia and Pomerania, were recovered and Poland was at least able to maintain her independence against the Germans. Boleslaus III., moreover, with the aid of St Otto, bishop of Bamberg, succeeded in converting the heathen Pomeranians (1124-1128), and making head against paganism generally.

The last act of Boleslaus III. was to divide his territories among his sons, whereby Poland was partitioned into no fewer than four, and ultimately into as many as eight, principalities, many of which (Silesia and Great Poland, for instance) in process of time split up into still smaller fractions all of them more or less bitterly hostile to each other. This partitional period, as Polish historians generally call it, lasted from 1138 to 1305, during which Poland lost all political significance, and became an easy prey to her neighbours. The duke of Little Poland, 1 Archdeacon of Gnesen 1367: vice-chancellor of Poland; d. c. 1387.

HISTORY]

sources by Nestor, a monk of Kiev (d. c. 1115), that 3' who generally styled himself duke of Poland, or dux totius Poloniae, claimed a sort of supremacy among these little states, a claim materially strengthened by the wealth and growing importance of his capital, Cracow, especially after Little Poland had annexed the central principality of Sieradia (Sieradz). But Masovia to the north, and Great Poland to the north-west, refused to recognize the supremacy of Little Poland, while Silesia soon became completely germanized. It was at the beginning of this period too, between 1216 and 1224, that Pomerania, under an energetic native dynasty, freed herself from the Polish suzerainty. Nearly a generation for the first time on the confines of Poland. The Polish princes opposed a valiant but ineffectual resistance; the towns of Sandomir and Cracow were reduced to ashes, and all who were able fled to the mountains of Hungary or the forests of Moravia. Pursuing his way to Silesia, Batu overthrew the confederated Silesian princes at Liegnitz (April 9), and, after burning all the Silesian towns, invaded Hungary, where he routed King Bela IV. on the banks of the Sajo. But this marked the limit of his triumph. Exhausted and diminished by the stout and successful opposition of the Moravians at Olmiitz, the Tatars vanished as suddenly as they had appeared, leaving a smoking wilderness behind them.

Batu's invasion had an important influence upon the social and political development of Poland. The only way of filling up the gaps in the population of the ravaged land was to invite foreign immigrants of a superior class, chapmen and handicraftsmen, not only given to peace ful pursuits and accustomed to law and order, but Cities. capable of building and defending strong cities. Such immigrants could naturally be obtained only from the civilized west, and on their own terms. Thus it came about that the middle class element was introduced into Polish society for the first time. Immediately dependent upon the prince, from whom they obtained their privileges, the most important of which were self-government and freedom from taxation, these traders soon became an important factor in the state, counterpoising, to some extent, the influence of the gentry, enriching the land by developing its resources, and promoting civilization by raising the standard of comfort.

Most of these German citizens in process of time were absorbed by the Polish population, and became devoted, heart and soul, to their adopted country; but these were not the only Germans with whom the young Polish state depressed the land, and, at this very time, another enemy appeared in the east - the Lithuanians.

This interesting people, whose origin is to this day the most baffling of ethnographical puzzles, originally d welt amidst the forests and marshes of the Upper Niemen. Thanks to the impenetrability of their fastnesses, they preserved their original savagery longer than any of their neighbours, and this savagery was coupled with a valour so tenacious and enterprising as to make them formidable to all who dwelt near them. The Russians fled at the sight of them, "like hares before hunters." The Livs and Letts were as much the prey of the Lithuanians "as sheep are the prey of wolves." The German chroniclers describe them as the most terrible of all the barbarians. The Lithuanians first emerge into the light of history at the time of the settlement of the Teutonic Order in the North. Rumours of the war of extermination conducted against their kinsmen, the wild Prussians, by the Knights, first woke the Lithuanians to a sense of their own danger, and induced them to abandon their loose communal system in favour of a monarchical form of government, which concentrated the whole power of the state in a single hand. Fortunately, too, at this crisis of their history, the Lithuanians were blessed with an altogether exceptional series of great rulers, who showed themselves fully capable of taking care of themselves. There was, for instance, Mendovg (1240-1263), who submitted to baptism for purely political reasons, checkmated the Teutonic Knights by adroitly seeking the protection of the Holy See, and annexed the principality of Plock to his ever-widening grand duchy, which already included Black Russia, and formed a huge wedge extending southwards from Courland, thus separating Poland from Russia. A still greater prince was Gedymin (1315-1342) who did his utmost to civilize Lithuania by building towns, introducing foreigners, and tolerating all religions, though he himself remained a pagan for political reasons. Gedymin still further extended the limits of Lithuania by annexing Kiev, Chernigov and other old Russian principalities.

At the very time when Lithuania was thus becoming a compact, united, powerful state, Poland seemed literally to be dropping to pieces. Not even the exhortations of the popes could make her score of princes unite for mutual defence against the barbarians who en vironed them. For a time it seemed highly probable that Poland would be completely germanized, like Silesia, or become a part of the new Bohemian Empire which Wenceslaus II. (crowned king of Poland in 1300) had inherited from his father, Ottakar II. From this fate she was saved by the valour of Wladislaus Lokietek, duke of Great Poland (1306-1333), who reunited Great and Little Poland, revived the royal dignity in 1320, and saved the kingdom from annihilation by his great victory over the Teutonic Knights at Plowce in 1332. The whole reign of Wladislaus I. was indeed an unceasing struggle against all the forces of anarchy and disintegration; but the fruits of his labours were richly reaped by his son Casimir III. the Great (1333-1370), Poland's first great statesman in the modern sense of the word, who, by a most skilful system of matrimonial alliances, reintroduced isolated Poland Casimir III. into the European system, and gave the exhausted country an inestimably beneficial breathing space 1333-4370. of thirty-seven years. A born ruler, Casimir introduced a whole series of administrative and economical reforms. He was the especial protector of the cities and the peasants, and, though averse from violent measures, punished aristocratic tyranny with an iron hand. Casimir's few wars were waged entirely for profit, not glory. It is to him that Poland owed the important acquisition of the greater part of Red Russia, or Galicia, which enabled her to secure her fair share of the northern and eastern trade. In default of male issue, Casimir left the Polish throne to his nephew, Louis of Hungary, who ruled the country (1370-1382) through his mother, Queen Elizabeth, Wladislaus Lokietek's daughter. Louis well deserved the epithet of "great" bestowed upon him by his contemporaries; later (1241) the Tatar hordes, under Batu, appeared Sword. had now to deal. In the first year of the 13th century, the Knights of the Sword, one of the numerous orders of crusading military monks, had been founded in Livonia to "convert" the pagan Letts, and, in 1208, the still more powerful Teutonic order was invited by Duke Conrad of Masovia to settle in the district of Kulm (roughly corresponding to modern East Prussia) to protect his territories against the incursions of the savage Prussians, a race closely akin to the Lithuanians. Conrad has been loudly blamed by Polish historians for introducing this foreign, and as it ultimately proved, dangerous element into Poland. But the unfortunate prince had to choose between dependence and extermination, for his unaided resources were powerless against the persistent attacks of the unconquerable The Prussians. The Teutonic Order, which had just been expelled from Hungary by Andrew II., joyfully accepted this new domicile, and its position in the north was definitely established by the compact of Kruschwitz in 1230, whereby it obtained absolute possession of the maritime district between Pomerania and Courland, and southwards as far as Thorn. So far were the Poles from anticipating any danger from the Teutonic Order, that, from 1243 to 1255, they actually assisted it to overthrow the independent Pomeranian princes, the most formidable opponents of the Knights in the earlier years of their existence. A second Tatar raid in 1259, less dangerous, perhaps, but certainly more ruinous, than the first invasion - for the principalities of Little Poland and Sandomir were systematically ravaged for three months - still further but Poland formed but a small portion of his vast domains, and Poland's interests were subordinated to the larger demands of an imperial policy which embraced half Europe within its orbit On the death of Louis there ensued an interregnum of two years marked by fierce civil wars, instigated by duke Ziemovit of Masovia, the northernmost province of Poland, the daughter of Louis the Great and the granddaughter of Wladislaus Lokietek, had an equal right, by inheritance, to the thrones of Hungary and Poland. By an agreement with the queen mother of Hungary at Kassa in 1383, the Poles finally accepted Jadwiga as their queen, and, on the 18th of February 1386, greatly against her will, the young princess, already betrothed to William of Austria, was wedded to Jagiello, grand duke of Lithuania, who had been crowned king of Poland at Cracow, three days previously, under the title of Wladislaus II.

The union of Poland and Lithuania as separate states under one king had been brought about by their common fear of the Teutonic Order. Five years after the death of Gedymin, Olgierd, the most capable of his seven sons, had been placed upon the throne of Lithuania by his devoted brother Kiejstut, and for the next two-and-thirty years (1345-1377) the two princes still further extended the sway of Lithuania, principally at the expense of Muscovy and the Tatars. Kiejstut ruled the western portion of the land where the Teutonic Knights were a constant menace, while Olgierd drove the Tatar hordes out of the southeastern steppes, and compelled them to seek a refuge in the Crimea. During Olgierd's reign the southern boundaries of Lithuania touched the Black Sea, including the whole tract of land between the mouth of the Bug and the mouth of the Dnieper. Olgierd was succeeded by his son Jagiello as grand duke in 1377, while Kiejstut was left in possession of Samogitia, Troki and Grodno; but the Teutonic Order, alarmed at the growth of Lithuania, succeeded in estranging uncle and nephew, and Kiejstut was treacherously assassinated by Jagiello's orders, at Krewo, on the 15th of August 1382. Three weeks later Jagiello was compelled to cede Samogitia, as far as the Dubissa, to the Knights, and, in the following year they set up against him Kiejstut's son Witowt. The eyes of Jagiello were now opened to the fact that the machiavellian policy of the Knights aimed at subjugating Lithuania by dividing it. He at once made peace with his cousin; restored him his patrimony; and, to secure Lithuania against the future vengeance of the Knights, Jagiello made overtures to Poland for the hand of Jadwiga, and received the Polish crown along with it, as already mentioned Before proceeding to describe the Jagiellonic period of Polish history, it is necessary to cast a rapid glance at the social and political condition of the country in the preceding Piast period.

The paucity and taciturnity of our sources make it impossible to give anything like an adequate picture of Old Poland during the first four centuries of its existence. A glimpse Beginnings of the Polish here and there of the political development of the Constitu- country is the utmost that the most diligent scrutiny tion. can glean from the scanty record of the early chronicles. External pressure, here as elsewhere, created a patriotic military caste, and the subsequent partitional period, when every little prince had his own separate court, still further established the growing influence of the szlachta, or gentry, who were not backward in claiming and obtaining special privileges in return for their services. The first authentic pacta conventa made between the Polish nobility and the Crown dates from the compact of Kassa (September 17, 137 4), when Louis of Hungary agreed to exempt the szlachta from all taxation, except two Polish groschen per hide of land, and to compensate them for the expenses of all military service rendered beyond the confines of the realm. The clergy received their chief privileges much earlier. It was at the synod of Leczyca, nearly a century before the compact of Kassa, that the property of the Church was first safeguarded against the encroachments of the state. The beneficial influence of the Church of Poland in these early times was incalculable. To say nothing of the labours of the Cistercians as colonists, pioneers and churchbuilders, or of the missions of the Dominicans and Franciscans (the former of whom were introduced into Poland by Ivo, bishop of Cracow,' the personal friend of Dominic), the Church was the one stable and unifying element in an age of centrifugal particularism. The frequent synods represented the whole of Poland, and kept alive, as nothing else could, the idea of national solidarity. The Holy See had also a considerable share in promoting the political development of the land. In the 13th century alone no fewer than forty-nine papal legates visited Poland, and thirty provincial synods were held by them to regulate church affairs and promote good government. Moreover the clergy, to their eternal honour, consistently protected the lower from the tyranny of the upper classes.

The growth of the towns was slower. During the heroic Boleslawic period there had been a premature outcrop of civil life. As early as the 11th century Kruschwitz, Growth the old Polish capital, and Gnesen, the metropolitan of the see, were of considerable importance, and played a Towns. leading part in public life. But in the ensuing anarchic period both cities were utterly ruined, and the centre of political gravity was transferred from Great Poland to Little Poland, where Cracow, singularly favoured by her position, soon became the capital of the monarchy, and one of the wealthiest cities in Europe. At the end of the 14th century we find all the great trade gilds established there, and the cloth manufactured at Cracow was eagerly sought after, from Prague to Great Novgorod. So wealthy did Cracow become at last that Casimir the Great felt it necessary to restrain the luxury of her citizens by sumptuary ordinances. Towards the end of the 14th century the Polish towns even attained some degree of political influence, and their delegates sat with the nobles and clergy in the king's councils, a right formally conceded to them at Radom in March 1384. Even the peasants, who had suffered severely from the wholesale establishment of prisoners of war as serfs on the estates of the nobles, still preserved the rights of personal liberty and free transit from place to place, whence their name of lazigi. The only portion of the community which had no privileges were the Jews, first introduced into Poland by Boleslaus the Pious, duke of Great Poland, in 1264, when bitter persecutions had driven them northwards from the shores of the Adriatic. Casimir the Great extended their liberty of domicile over the whole kingdom (1334). From the first they were better treated in Poland than elsewhere, though frequently exposed to outbreaks of popular fanaticism.

The transformation of the pagan Lithuanian chieftain Jagiello into the catholic king of Poland, Wladislaus II., was an event of capital importance in the history of eastern Europe.

Its immediate and inevitable consequence was the laus H. formal reception of the Lithuanian nations into the and the fold of the Church. What the Teutonic Order had Teutonic vainly endeavoured to bring about by fire and sword, Order. for two centuries, was peacefully accomplished by Jagiello within a single generation, the Lithuanians, for the most part, willingly yielding to the arguments of a prince of their own blood, who promptly rewarded his converts with peculiar and exclusive privileges. The conversion of Lithuania menaced the very existence of the Teutonic Knights. Originally planted on the Baltic shore for the express purpose of christianizing their savage neighbours, these crusading monks had freely exploited the wealth and the valour of the West, ostensibly in the cause of religion, really for the purpose of founding a dominion of their own which, as time went on, lost more and more of its religious character, and was now little more than a German military forepost, extending from Pomerania to the Niemen, which deliberately excluded the Sla y s from the sea and thrived 'Archbishop of Gnesen 1219-1220. Died at Modena 1229, wlaais- which continued to exist as an independent rinci laus ll. p p Jagiello. pality alongside of the kingdom of Poland. Ziemo Union of vit aimed at the Polish crown, proposing to marry Poland and the infant princess Jadwiga of Hungary, who, as Lithuania. at their expense. The mere instinct of self-preservation had, at last, drawn the Poles and Lithuanians together against these ruthless and masterful intruders, and the coronation of Jagiello at Cracow on the 15th of February 1386, was both a warning and a challenge to the Knights. But if the Order had now become a superfluous anachronism, it had still to be disposed of, and this was no easy task. For if it had failed utterly as a mission in partibus, it had succeeded in establishing on the Baltic one of the strongest military organizations in Europe. In the art of war the Knights were immeasurably superior to all their neighbours. The pick of the feudal chivalry composed their ranks; with all Europe to draw upon, their resources seemed inexhaustible, and centuries of political experience made them as formidable in diplomacy as they were valiant in warfare. And indeed, for the next twenty years, the Teutonic Order more than held its own. Skilfully taking advantage of the jealousies of Poland and Lithuania, as they were accentuated by the personal antagonism of Jagiello and Witowt (q.v.), with the latter of whom the Knights more than once contracted profitable alliances, they even contrived (Treaty of Salin, 1378) to extend their territory by getting possession of the province of Samogitia, the original seat of the Lithuanians, where paganism still persisted, and where their inhuman cruelties finally excited the horror and indignation of Christian Europe. By this time, however, the prudent Jagiello had become convinced that Lithuania was too strong to be ruled by or from Poland, and yet not strong enough to stand alone, and by the compact of Vilna (January 18, 1401,1401, confirmed by the compact of Radowo, March 10) he surrendered the whole grand duchy to Witowt, on the understanding that the two states should have a common policy, and that neither of them should elect a new prince without the consent of the other. The wisdom of this arrangement was made manifest in 1410, when Jagiello and Witowt combined their forces for the purpose of delivering Samogitia from the intolerable tyranny of the Knights. The issue was fought out on the field of Tannenberg, or Griinewald (July 15, 1410), when the Knights sustained a crushing defeat, which shook their political organization to its very foundations. A few weeks after the victory the towns of Thorn, Elbing, Braunsberg and Danzig submitted to the Polish king; and all the Prussian bishops voluntarily offered to render him homage. But the excessive caution of Jagiello gave the Knights time to recover from the blow; the Polish levies proved unruly and incompetent; Witowt was suddenly recalled to Lithuania by a Tatar invasion, and thus it came about that, when peace was concluded at Thorn, on the 1st of February 1411, Samogitia (which was to revert to the Order on the death of Jagiello and Witowt), Dobrzyn, and a war indemnity of 10o,000 marks payable in four instalments, were the best terms Poland could obtain from the Knights, whose territory practically remained intact. Jagiello's signal for the attack at the battle of Griinewald, "Cracow and Vilna" (the respective capitals of Poland and Lithuania) had 'eloquently demonstrated the solidarity of the two states. This solidarity was still further strengthened by the Union of Horodlo (October 2, 1413) which enacted that henceforth Lithuania was to have the same order of dignitaries' as Poland, as well as a council of state, or senate, similar to the Polish senate. The power of the grand-duke was also greatly increased. He was now declared to be the equal of the Polish king, and his successor could be elected only by the senates of Poland and Lithuania in conjunction. The Union of Horodlo also established absolute parity between the nobility of Poland and Lithuania, but the privileges of the latter were made conditional upon their profession of the Roman Catholic faith, experience having shown that difference of religion in Lithuania meant difference of politics, and a tendency Moscow-wards, the majority of the Lithuanian boyars being of the Greek Orthodox Confession.

1 All the chief offices of state were consequently duplicated, e.g. the hetman wielki koronny, i.e. " grand hetman of the crown," as the Polish commander-in-chief was called, had his counterpart in Lithuania, who bore the title of wielki hetman litewski, i.e. " grand hetman of Lithuania," and so on.

During the remainder' of the reign of Wladislaus II. the Teutonic Order gave Poland much trouble, but no serious anxiety. The trouble was due mainly to the repeated efforts of the Knights to evade the fulfilment of the obligations of the Treaty of Thorn. In these endeavours they were materially assisted by the emperor Sigismund, who was also king of Hungary. Sigismund, in 1422, even went so far as to propose a partition of Poland between Hungary, the empire and the Silesian princes, a scheme which foundered upon Sigismund's impecuniosity and the reluctance of the Magyars to injure the Poles. More than once Wladislaus II. was even obliged to renew the war against the Knights, and, in 1422, he compelled them to renounce all claims upon Samogitia; but the long struggle, still undecided at his death, was fought mainly with diplomatic weapons at Rome, where the popes, generally speaking, listened rather to the victorious monarch who had added an ecclesiastical province to the Church than to the discomfited and turbulent Knights.

Had Wladislaus II. been as great a warrior as Witowt he might, perhaps, have subdued the Knights altogether. But by nature he was pre-eminently a diplomatist, and it must in fairness be admitted that his diplomacy in every direction was distinctly beneficial to Poland. He successfully thwarted all the schemes of the emperor Sigismund, by adroitly supporting the revolutionary party in Bohemia. In return Hussite mercenaries fought on the Polish side at Tannenburg, and Czech patriots repeatedly offered the crown of Bohemia to Wladislaus. The Polish king was always ready enough to support the Czechs against Sigismund; but the necessity of justifying his own orthodoxy (which the Knights were for ever impugning) at Rome and in the face of Europe prevented him from accepting the crown of St Wenceslaus from the hands of heretics.

Wladislaus II. died at Lemberg in 1434, at the age of eightythree. During his long reign of forty-nine years Poland had gradually risen to the rank of a great power, a result due in no small measure to the insight and sagacity of the first Jagiello, who sacrificed every other consideration to the vital necessity of welding the central Sla y s into a compact and homogeneous state. The next ten years severely tested the stability of his great work, but it stood the test triumphantly. Neither a turbulent minority, nor the neglect of an absentee king; neither the revival of separatist tendencies in Lithuania, nor the outbreaks of aristocratic lawlessness in Poland, could do more than shake the superstructure of the imposing edifice. After the death at Varna, in 1444, of Jagiello's eldest son and successor, Wladislaus III. (whose history belongs rather to Hungary than to Poland), another great statesman, in no wise inferior to Wladislaus II., completed and consolidated his work. This was Wladislaus's second son, already grandduke of Lithuania, who ascended the Polish throne as Casimir IV. in 1447, thus reuniting Poland and Lithuania under one monarch.

Enormous were the difficulties of Casimir IV. He instinctively recognized not only the vital necessity of the maintenance of the union between the two states, but also the fact that the chief source of danger to the union lay Gas;m11 IV., g y in Lithuania, in those days a maelstrom of conflicting political currents. To begin with, Lithuania was a far less composite state than Poland. Two-thirds of the grandduchy consisted of old Russian lands inhabited by men who spoke the Ruthenian language and professed the Orthodox Greek religion, while in the north were the Lithuanians proper, semisavage and semi-catholic, justly proud of their heroic forefathers of the house of Gedymin, and very sensitive of the pretensions of Poland to the provinces of Volhynia and Podolia, the fruits of Lithuanian valour. A Lithuanian'himself, Casimir strenuously resisted the attempts of Poland to wrest these provinces from the grandduchy. Moreover, during the earlier years of his reign, he was obliged to reside for the most part in Lithuania, where his tranquilizing influence was needed. His supposed preference for Lithuania was the real cause of his unpopularity in Poland, where, to the very end of his reign, he was regarded xxi. 29 a with suspicion, and where every effort was made to thwart his far-seeing and patriotic political combinations, which were beyond the comprehension of his self-seeking and narrowminded contemporaries. This was notably the case as regards his dealings with the old enemy of his race, the Teutonic Order, whose destruction was the chief aim of his ambition.

The Teutonic Order had long since failed as a religious institution; it was now to show its inadequacy as a political organization. In the domain of the Knights the gentry, parochial clergy and townsmen, who, beneath its protection, had attained to a high degree of wealth and civilization, for long remained without the slightest political influence, though they bore nearly the whole burden of taxation. In 1414, however, intimidated by the growing discontent, which frequently took the form of armed rebellion, the Knights consented to the establishment of a diet, which was re-formed on a more aristocratic basis in 1430. But the old abuses continuing to multiply, the Prussian towns and gentry at last took their affairs into their own hands, and formed a so-called Prussian League, which demanded an equal share in the government of the country. This league was excommunicated by the pope, and placed under the ban of the empire almost simultaneously in 1453, whereupon it placed itself beneath the protection of its nearest powerful neighbour, the king of Poland, who (March 6, 1454) issued a manifesto incorporating all the Prussian provinces with Poland, but, at the same time, granting them local autonomy and free trade.

But provinces are not conquered by manifestoes, and Casimir's acceptance of the homage of the Prussian League at once involved him in a war with the desperate Teutonic Knights, which lasted twelve years, but might easily have been concluded in a twelvemonth had he only been loyally supported by his own subjects, for whose benefit he had embarked upon this great enterprise. But instead of support, Casimir encountered obstinate obstruction at every point. No patriotic Pole, we imagine, can read the history of this miserable war without feeling heartily ashamed of his countrymen. The acquisition of the Prussian lands was vital to the existence of Poland. It meant the excision of an alien element which fed like a cancer on the body politic; it meant the recovery, at comparatively little cost, of the command of the principal rivers of Poland, the Vistula and the Niemen; it meant the obtaining of a seaboard with the corollaries of sea-power and world-wide commerce. Yet, except in the border province of Great Poland, which was. interested commercially, the whole enterprise was regarded with such indifference that the king, in the very crisis of the struggle, could only with the utmost difficulty obtain contributions for war expenses from the half-dozen local diets of Poland, which extorted from the helplessness of their distracted and impecunious sovereign fresh privileges for every subsidy they grudgingly granted. Moreover Casimir's difficulties were materially increased by the necessity of paying for Czech mercenaries, the pos polite ruszenie, or Polish militia, proving utterly useless at the very beginning of the war. Indeed, from first to last, the Polish gentry as a body took good care to pay and fight as little as possible, and Casimir depended for the most part upon the liberality of the Church and the Prussian towns, and the valour of the Hussite infantry, 17c,000 of whom, fighting on both sides, are said to have perished. Not till the victory of Puck (September 17, 1462), one of the very few pitched battles in a war of raids, skirmishes and sieges, did fortune incline decisively to the side of the Poles, who maintained and improved their advantage till absolute exhaustion compelled the Knights to accept the mediation of a papal legate, and the second peace of Thorn (October 14, 1466) concluded a struggle which had reduced the Prussian provinces to a wilderness.' By the second peace of Thorn, Poland recovered the provinces of Pomerelia, Kulm and Michalow, with the bishopric of Ermeland, numerous cities and fortresses, including Marien 18,000 of their 21,000 villages were destroyed, moo churches were razed to the ground, and the population was diminished by more than a quarter of a million.

burg, Elbing, Danzig and Thorn. The territory of the Knights was now reduced to Prussia proper, embracing, roughly speaking, the district between the Baltic, the lower Vistula and the lower Niemen, with Konigsberg as its capital. For this territory the grand-masters, within nine months of their election, were in future to render homage to the Polish king; but, on the other hand, the king undertook not to make war or engage in any important enterprise without the consent of the Prussian province, and vice versa. Thus Prussia was now confederated with Poland, but she occupied a subordinate position as compared with Lithuania, inasmuch as the grand-master, though filling the first place in the royal council, was still a subject of the Polish crown. Thus the high hopes entertained by Casimir at the beginning of the war had not been realized. The final settlement with the Poles was of the nature of a compromise. Still the Knights had been driven beyond the Vistula, and Poland had secured a seaboard; and it was due entirely to the infinite patience and tenacity of the king that even as much as this was won at last.

The whole foreign policy of Casimir IV. was more or less conditioned by the Prussian question, and here also his superior diplomacy triumphantly asserted itself. At the beginning of the war both the empire and the pope were against him, but he neutralized their hostility by allying himself with George of Podvebrad, 'whom the Hussites had placed on the throne of Bohemia. On the death of George, Casimir's eldest son Wladislaus was elected king of Bohemia by the Utraquist party, despite the determined opposition of Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, whose ability and audacity henceforth made him Casimir's most dangerous rival. Sure of the support of the pope, Matthias (q.v.) deliberately set about traversing all the plans of Casimir. He encouraged the Teutonic Order to rebel against Poland; he entertained at his court antiPolish embassies from Moscow; he encouraged the Tatars to ravage Lithuania; he thwarted Casimir's policy in Moldavia. The death of the brilliant adventurer at Vienna in 1490 came therefore as a distinct relief to Poland, and all danger from the side of Hungary was removed in 1490 when Casimir's son Wladislaus, already king of Bohemia, was elected king of Hungary also.

It was in the reign of Casimir IV. that Poland first came into direct collision with the Turks. The Republic was never, indeed, the "Buckler of Christendom." That glorious epithet belonged of right to Hungary,which g p g g had already borne the brunt of the struggle with the Ottoman power for more than a century. It is true that Wladislaus II. of Poland had fallen on the field of Varna, but it was as a Magyar king at the head of a Magyar army that the young monarch met his fate. Poland, indeed, was far less able to cope with the Turks than compact, wealthy Hungary, which throughout the 15th century was one of the most efficient military monarchies in Europe. The Jagiellos, as a rule, prudently avoided committing themselves to any political system which might irritate the still distant but much-dreaded Turk, but when their dominions extended so far southwards as to embrace Moldavia, the observance of a strict neutrality became exceedingly difficult. Poland had established a sort of suzerainty over Moldavia as early as the end of the 14th century; but at best it was a loose and vague overlordship which the Hospodars repudiated whenever they were strong enough to do so. The Turks themselves were too much occupied elsewhere to pay much attention to the Danubian principalities till the middle of the 15th century. In 1478 Mahomet H. had indeed attempted their subjugation, with but indifferent success; but it was not till 1484 that the Ottomans became inconvenient neighbours to Poland. In that year a Turkish fleet captured the strongholds of Kilia and Akkerman, commanding respectively the mouths of the Danube and Dniester. This aggression seriously threatened the trade of Poland, and induced Casimir IV. to accede to a general league against the Porte. In 1485, after driving the Turks out of Moldavia, the Polish king, at the head of 20,000 men, proceeded to Kolomea on the Pruth, where Bayezid II., then embarrassed by the Egyptian war, offered peace, but as no agreement concerning the captured fortresses could be arrived at, hostilities were suspended by a truce. During the remainder of his reign the Turks gave no trouble.

It was a fortunate thing for Poland that, during the first century of her ascension to the rank of a great power, political exigencies compelled her to appropriate almost more territory than her primitive and centrifugal government could properly assimilate; it was fortunate that throughout this period of expansion her destinies should, with one brief interval, have been controlled by a couple of superior statesmen, each of whom ruled for nearly fifty years. During the fourteen years (1492-1506) which separate the reigns of Casimir IV. and Sigismund I. she was not so lucky. The controlling hand of Casimir IV. was no sooner withdrawn than the unruly elements, ever present in the Republic, and ultimately the casue of its ruin, at once burst forth. The first symptom of this lawlessness was the separation of Poland and Lithuania, the Lithuanians proceeding to elect Alexander, Casimir's fourth son, as their grand-duke, without even consulting the Polish senate, in flagrant violation of the union of Horodlo. The breach, happily, was of no very long duration. A disastrous war with Ivan III., the first Muscovite tsar, speedily convinced the Lithuanians that they were not strong enough to stand alone, and in 1499 they voluntarily renewed the union. Much more dangerous was the political revolution proceeding simultaneously in Poland, John !.!. where John Albert, the third son of Casimir, had Albert, been elected king on the death of his father. The 1492-1501. nature of this revolution will be considered in detail when we come to speak of the growth of the Polish constitution. Suffice it here to say that it was both antimonarchical and anti-democratic, tending, as it did, to place all political authority in the hands of the szlachta, or gentry. The impecunious monarch submitted to the dictation of the diet in the hope of obtaining sufficient money to prosecute his ambitious designs. With his elder brother Wladislaus reigning over Bohemia and Hungary the credit of the Jagiellos in Europe had never been so great as it was now, and John Albert, bent upon military glory, eagerly placed himself at the head of what was to have been a great anti-Turkish league, but ultimately dwindled down to a raid upon Moldavia which ended in disaster. The sole advantage which John Albert reaped from his championship of the Christian cause was the favour of the Curia, and the ascendancy which that favour gave him over the Teutonic Knights, whose new grand-master, Albert of Saxony, was reluctantly compelled to render due homage to the Polish king.

Under Alexander (q.v.), who succeeded his brother 1501-1506. in 1501, matters went from bad to worse. Alexander's election cemented, indeed, once for all, the union between Poland and Lithuania, inasmuch as, on the eve of it (Oct. 3, 1501) the senates of both countries agreed that, in future, the king of Poland should always be grand-duke of Lithuania; but this was the sole benefit which the Republic derived from the reign of Alexander, under whom the Polish government has been well described as a rudderless ship in a stormy sea, with nothing but the grace of God between it and destruction. In Lithuania the increasing pressure of the Muscovite was the chief danger. Till the accession of Ivan III. in 1462 Muscovy had been a negligible factor in P olish politics. During the earlier part of the 1 th P g P 5 century the Lithuanian princes had successfully contested Muscovite influence even in Pskov and Great Novgorod. Many Russian historians even maintain that, but for the fact that Witowt had simultaneously to cope with the Teutonic Order and the Tatars, that energetic prince would certainly have extinguished struggling Muscovy altogether. But since the death of Witowt (1430) the military efficiency of Lithuania had sensibly declined; single-handed she was no longer a match for her ancient rival. This was owing partly to the evils of an oligarchic government; partly to the weakness resulting from the natural attraction of the Orthodox-Greek element in Lithu ania towards Muscovy, especially after the fall of Constantinople, but chiefly to the administrative superiority of the highly centralized Muscovite government. During the reign of Alexander, who was too poor to maintain any adequate standing army in Lithuania, the Muscovites and Tatars ravaged the whole country at will, and were prevented from conquering it altogether only by their inability to capture the chief fortresses. In Poland, meanwhile, something very like anarchy prevailed. Alexander had practically surrendered his authority to an incapable aristocracy, whose sole idea of ruling was systematically to oppress and humiliate the lower classes. In foreign affairs a policy of drift prevailed which encouraged all the enemies of the Republic to raise their heads, while the dependent states of Prussia in the north and Moldavia in the south made strenuous efforts to break away from Poland. Fortunately for the integrity of the Polish state the premature death of Alexander in 1506 brought upon the throne his capable brother Sigismund, the fifth son of Casimir IV., whose long reign of gismundl., forty-two years was salutary, and would have been so 6-1548.

altogether recuperative, had his statesmanship only been loyally supported by his subjects. Eminently practical, Sigismund recognized that the first need of Poland was a standing army. The miserable collapse of the Polish chivalry during the Bukovinian campaign of 1497 had convinced every one that the ruszenie pospolite was useless for serious military purposes, and that Poland, in order to hold her own, must in future follow the example of the West, and wage her warfare with trained mercenaries. But professional soldiers could not be hired without money, and the difficulty was to persuade the diet to loose its purse-strings. All that the gentry contributed at present was two pence (groschen) per hide of land, and this only for defensive service at home. If the king led the ruszenie pospolite abroad he was obliged to pay so much per pike out of his own pocket, notwithstanding the fact that the heavily mortgaged crown lands were practically valueless. At the diet of 151o the chancellor and primate, Adam Laski, proposed an income-tax of 50% at once, and 5% for subsequent years, payable by both the lay and clerical estates. In view of the fact that Poland was the most defenceless country in Europe, with no natural boundaries, and constantly exposed to attacks from every quarter, it was not unreasonable to expect even this patriotic sacrifice from the privileged classes, who held at least two-thirds of the land by military tenure. Nevertheless, the diet refused to consider the scheme. In the following year a more modest proposal was made by the Crown in the shape of a capitation of six gulden, to be levied on every nobleman at the beginning of a campaign, for the hiring of mercenaries. This also 'was rejected. In 1512 the king came forward with a third scheme. He proposed to divide the country into five circles, corresponding to the five provinces, each of which was to undertake to defend the realm in turn should occasion arise. Moreover, every one who so desired it might pay a commutation in lieu of personal service, and the amount so realized was to be re-used to levy troops. To this the dietines, or local diets, of Great Poland, and Little Poland, agreed, but at the last moment the whole project foundered on the question who was the proper custodian of the new assessment rolls, and the king had to be content with the renewal of former subsidies, varying from twelve to fifteen groats per hide of land for three years. Well might the disappointed monarch exclaim: "It is vain to labour for the welfare of those who do not care a jot about it themselves." Matters improved somewhat in 1527, when the szlachta, by a special act, placed the mightiest magnates on the same level as the humblest squire as regards military service, and proposed at the same time a more general assessment for the purpose, the control of the money so realized to be placed in the hands of the king. In consequence of this law the great lords were compelled to put forces in the field proportioned to their enormous fortunes, and Sigismund was able in 1529 to raise 300 foot and 3200 horse from the province of Podolia alone. But though the treasury was thus temporarily replenished and the army increased, the gentry who had been so generous at the expense of their richer neighbours would hear of no additional burdens being laid on themselves, and the king only obtained what he wanted by sacrificing his principles to his necessities, and helping the szlachta to pull down the magnates. This fatal parsimony had the most serious political consequences, for it crippled the king at every step. Strive and scheme as he might, his needs were so urgent, his enemies so numerous, that, though generally successful in the end, he had always to be content with compromises, adjustments and semi-victories. Thus he was obliged, in 1525, to grant local autonomy to the province of Prussia instead of annexing it; he was unable to succour his unfortunate nephew, Louis of Hungary, against the Turkish peril; he was compelled to submit to the occupation of one Lithuanian province after the other by the Muscovites, and look on helplessly while myriads of Tatars penetrated to the very heart of his domains, wasting with fire and sword everything they could not carry away with them.

Again, it should have been the first duty of the Republic adequately to fortify the dzikie pola, or "savage steppe," as the vast plain was called which extended from Kiev to the Black Sea, and some feeble attempts to do so were at last made. Thus, in the reign of Alexander, the fugitive serfs whom tyranny or idleness had driven into this wilderness (they were subsequently known as Kazaki, or Cossacks, a Tatar word meaning freebooters) were formed into companies (c. 1504) and placed at the disposal of the frontier starostas, or lord marchers, of Kaniev, Kamenets, Czerkask on the Don and other places. But these measures proved inadequate, and in 1533 the lord marcher, Ostafi Daszkiewicz, the hero of Kaniev, which he had successfully defended against a countless host of Turks and Tatars, was consulted by the diet as to the best way of defending the Ukraine permanently against such inroads. The veteran expert advised the populating and fortifying of the islands of the Dnieper. Two thousand men would suffice, he said, and the Cossacks supplied excellent military material ready to hand. The diet unanimously approved of this simple and inexpensive plan; a special commission examined and approved of its details, and it was submitted to the next diet, which rejected it. So nothing at all was done officially, and the defence of the eastern Ukraine was left to providence. Oddly enough the selfish prudence of Sigismund's rapacious consort, Queen Bona, did more for the national defence than the Polish state could do. Thus, to defend her immense possessions in Volhynia and Podolia, she converted the castles of Bar and Krzemieniec into first-class fortresses, and placed the former in the hands of her Silesian steward, who acquitted himself so manfully of his charge r that "the Tatars fell away from the frontier all the days of Pan Pretficz," and a large population settled securely beneath the walls of Bar, henceforth known as "the bastion of Podolia." Nothing, perhaps, illustrates so forcibly the casual character of the Polish government in the most vital matters as this single incident.

The most important political event during the reign of Sigismund was the collapse of the ancient Hungarian monarchy at Mohacs in 1526. Poland, as the next neighbour of Hungary, was more seriously affected than any other European power by this catastrophe, but her politicians differed as to the best way of facing it. Immediately after the death of King Louis, who fell on the field of battle, the emperor Ferdinand and John Zapolya, voivode of Transylvania, competed for the vacant crown, and both were elected almost simultaneously. In Poland Zapolya's was the popular cause, and he also found powerful support in the influential and highly gifted Laski family, as represented by the Polish chancellor and his nephews John and Hieronymus. Sigismund, on the other hand, favoured Ferdinand of Austria. Though bound by family ties with both competitors, he regarded the situation from a purely political point of view. He argued that the best way to keep the Turk from Poland was for Austria to incorporate Hungary, in which case the Austrian dominion would be a strong and permanent barrier against a Mussulman invasion of Europe. History has 1 Pretficz won no fewer than 70 engagements over the Tatars.

more than justified him, and the long duel which ensued between Ferdinand and Zapolya (see Hungary: History) enabled the Polish monarch to maintain to the end a cautious but observant neutrality. More than once, indeed, Sigismund was seriously compromised by the diplomatic vagaries of Hieronymus Laski, who entered the service of Zapolya (since 1529 the protege of the sultan), and greatly alarmed both the emperor and the pope by his disturbing philo-Turk proclivities. It was owing to Laski's intrigues that the new hospodar of Moldavia, Petrylo, after doing homage to the Porte, intervened in the struggle as the foe of both Ferdinand and Sigismund, and besieged the Grand Hetman of the Crown, Jan Tarnowski, in Obertyn, where, however, the Moldavians (August 22, 1531) sustained a crushing defeat, and Petrylo was slain. Nevertheless, so anxious was Sigismund to avoid a collision with the Turks, that he forbade the victorious Tarnowski to cross the Moldavian frontier, and sent a letter of explanation to Constantinople. On the death of John Zapolya, the Austro-Polish alliance was still further cemented by the marriage of Sigismund's son and heir, Sigismund Augustus, with the archduchess Elizabeth. In the reign of Sigismund was effected the incorporation of the duchy of Masovia with the Polish crown, after an independent existence of five hundred years. In 1526 the male line of the ancient dynasty became extinct, and on the 26th of August Sigismund received the homage of the Masovians at Warsaw, the capital of the duchy and ere long of the whole kingdom. Almost every acre of densely populated Masovia was in the hands of her sturdy, ultra-conservative squires, in point of culture far below their brethren in Great and Little Poland. The additional revenue gained by the Crown from Masovia was at first but 14,000 gulden per annum. The four and twenty years of Sigismund II.'s reign was a critical period of Polish history. Complications with the Turk were avoided by the adroit diplomacy of the king, while the superior discipline and efficiency of the Polish armies under the great Tarnowski (q.v.) and his pupils overawed the Tatars and extruded the Muscovites, neither of whom were so troublesome as they had been during the last reign. All the .more disquieting was the internal condition of the country, due mainly to the invasion of Poland by the Reformation, and the coincidence of this invasion with an internal revolution of a quasi-democratic character, which aimed at substituting the rule of the szlachta for the rule of the senate.

Hitherto the Republic had given the Holy See but little anxiety. Hussite influences, in the beginning of the 15th century, had been superficial and transitory. The Polish government had employed Hussite mercenaries, but rejected Hussite propagandists. The edict of Wielun (1424), remarkable as the first anti-heretical decree issued in Poland, crushed the new sect in its infancy. Lutheranism, moreover, was at first regarded with grave suspicion by the intensely patriotic Polish gentry, because of its German origin. Nevertheless, the extremely severe penal edicts issued during the reign of Sigismund I., though seldom applied, seem to point to the fact that heresy was spreading widely throughout the country. For a time, therefore, the Protestants had to be cautious in Poland proper, but they found a sure refuge in Prussia, where Lutheranism was already the established religion, and where the newly erected university of Konigsberg became a seminary for Polish ministers and preachers.

While Lutheranism was thus threatening the Polish Church from the north, Calvinism had already invaded her from the west. Calvinism, indeed, rather recommended itself to the Poles as being of non-German origin, and Calvin actually dedicated his Commentary on the Mass to the young krolewicz (or crown prince) Sigismund Augustus, from whom protestantism, erroneously enough, expected much in the future. Meanwhile conversion to Calvinism, among the higher classes in Poland, became more and more frequent. We hear of crowded Calvinist conventicles in Little Poland from 1545 onwards, and Calvinism continued to spread throughout the kingdom during the latter years of Sigismund I. Another sect, which ultimately found even more favour in Poland than the Calvinists, was that of the Bohemian Brethren. We first hear of them in Great Poland in 1548. A royal decree promptly banished them to Prussia, where they soon increased so rapidly as to be able to hold their own against the Lutherans. The death of the uncompromising Sigismund I. came as a great relief to the Protestants, who entertained high hopes of his son and successor. He was known to be familiar with the works of the leading reformers; he was surrounded by Protestant counsellors, and he was actually married to Barbara, daughter of Prince Nicholas Radziwill, "Black Radziwill," the all-powerful chief of the Lithuanian Calvinists. It was not so generally known that Sigismund II. was by conviction a sincere though not a bigoted Catholic; and nobody suspected that beneath his diplomatic urbanity lay a patriotic firmness and statesmanlike qualities of the first order. Moreover, they ignored the fact that the success of the Protestant propaganda was due rather to political than to religious causes. The Polish gentry's jealousy of the clerical estate, whose privileges even exceeded their own, was at the bottom of the whole matter. Any opponent of the established clergy was the natural ally of the szlachta, and the scandalous state of the Church herself provided them with a most formidable weapon against her. It is not too much to say that the condition of the Catholic Church in Poland was almost as bad as it was in Scotland during the same period. The bishops were, for the most part, elegant triflers, as pliant as reeds, with no fixed principles and saturated with a false humanism. Some of them were notorious evillivers. "Pint-pot" Latuski, bishop of Posen, had purchased his office for 12,000 ducats from Queen Bona; while another of her creatures, Peter, popularly known as the "wencher," was appointed bishop of Przemysl with the promise of the reversion of the still richer see of Cracow. Moreover, despite her immense wealth (in the province of Little Poland alone she owned at this time 26 towns, 83 landed estates and 772 villages), the Church claimed exemption from all public burdens, from all political responsibilities, although her prelates continued to exercise an altogether disproportionate political influence. Education was shamefully neglected, the masses being left in almost heathen ignorance - and this, too, at a time when the upper classes were greedily appropriating the ripe fruits of the Renaissance and when, to use the words of a contemporary, there were "more Latinists in Poland than there used to be in Latium." The university of Cracow, the sole source of knowledge in the vast Polish realm, still moved in the vicious circle of scholastic formularies. The provincial schools, dependent upon so decrepit an alma mater, were suffered to decay. This criminal neglect of national education brought along with it its own punishment. The sons of the gentry, denied proper instruction at home, betook themselves to the nearest universities across the border, to Goldberg in Silesia, to Wittemberg, to Leipzig. Here they fell in with the adherents of the new faith, grave, earnest men who professed to reform the abuses which had grown up in the Church; and a sense of equity as much as a love of novelty moved them, on their return home, to propagate wholesome doctrines and clamour for the reformation of their own degenerate prelates. Finally the poorer clergy, neglected by their bishops, and excluded from all preferment, took part with the szlachta against their own spiritual rulers and eagerly devoured and imparted to their flocks, in their own language, the contents of the religious tracts which reached them by divers ways from Goldberg and Konigsberg. Nothing indeed did so much to popularize the new doctrines in Poland as this beneficial revival of the long-negle-ted vernacular by the reformers.

Such was the situation when Sigismund II. began his reign. The bishops at once made a high bid for the favour of the new Sigis- king by consenting to the coronation of his Calvinist munddl., consort (Dec. 7, 1550) and the king five days l.,48-1572. afterwards issued the celebrated edict in which he pledged his royal word to preserve intact the unity of the Church and to enforce the law of the land against heresy. Encouraged by this pleasing symptom of orthodoxy the bishops, instead of first attempting to put their own dilapidated house in order, at once proceeded to institute pr e osecutions for heresy against all and sundry. This at once led to an explosion, and at the diet of Piotrkow, 1J52, the szlachta accepted a proposition of the king, by way of compromise, that the jurisdiction of the clerical courts should be suspended for twelve months, on condition that the gentry continued to pay tithes as heretofore. Then began a religious interim, which was gradually prolonged for ten years, during which time Protestantism in Poland flourished exceedingly. Presently reformers of every shade of opinion, even those who were tolerated nowhere else, poured into Poland, which speedily became the battle-ground of all the sects of Europe. Soon the Protestants became numerous enough to form ecclesiastical districts of their own. The first Calvinist synod in Poland was held at Pinczow in 1550. The Bohemian Brethren evangelized Little Poland, but ultimately coalesced with the Calvinists at the synod of Kozminek (August 1555). In the diet itself the Protestants were absolutely supreme, and invariably elected a Calvinist to be their marshal. At the diet of 1555 they boldly demanded a national synod, absolute toleration, and the equalization of all the sects except the Antitrinitarians. But the king intervened and the existing interim was indefinitely prolonged. At the diet of Piotrkow, 1558-1559, the onslaught of the szlachta on the clergy was fiercer than ever, and they even demanded the exclusion of the bishops from the senate. The king, however, perceiving a danger to the constitution in the violence of the szlachta, not only supported the bishops, but quashed a subsequent reiterated demand for a national synod. The diet of1558-1559indicates the high-water mark of Polish Protestantism. From this time forward it began to subside, very gradually but unmistakably. The chief cause of this subsidence was the division among the reformers themselves. From the chaos of creeds resulted a chaos of ideas on all imaginable subjects, politics included. The Anti-trinitarian proved to be the chief dissolvent, and from 1560 onwards the relations between the two principal Protestant sects, the Lutherans and the Calvinists, were fratricidal rather than fraternal. An auxiliary cause of the decline of Protestantism was the beginning of a Catholic reaction. The bulk of the population still held persistently, if languidly, to the faith of its fathers; the new bishops were holy and learned men, very unlike the creations of Queen Bona, and the Holy See gave to the slowly reviving zeal of both clergy and laity the very necessary impetus from without. For Poland, unlike Scotland, was fortunately, in those days of difficult inter-communication, not too far off, and it is indisputable that in the first instance it was the papal nuncios, men like Berard of Camerino and Giovanni Commendone, who reorganized the scattered and faint-hearted battalions of the Church militant in Poland and led them back to victory. At the diet of Piotrkow in 1562, indeed, the king's sore need of subsidies induced him, at the demand of the szlachta, to abolish altogether the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts in cases of heresy; but, on the other hand, at the diet of 1564 he accepted from Commendone the Tridentine decrees and issued an edict banishing all foreign, and especially Anti-trinitarian, heretics from the land. At the diet of 1565 Sigismund went still farther. Ile rejected a petition for a national The pacificatory synod as unnecessary, inasmuch as the Counter - council of Trent had already settled all religious questions, and at the same time consented to the 1° Poland. introduction into Poland of the most formidable adversaries of the Reformation, the Jesuits. These had already been installed at Poltusk, and were permitted, after the diet rose, to found establishments in the dioceses of Posen, Ermeland and Vilna, which henceforth became centres of a vigorous and victorious propaganda. Thus the Republic recovered her catholicity and her internal harmony at the same time.

With rare sagacity Sigismund II. had thus piloted the Republic through the most difficult internal crisis it had yet encountered. In purely political matters also both initiative and fulfilment came entirely from the Crown, and to the last of the Jagiellos Poland owed the important acquisition of Livonia and the welding together of her loosely connected component parts into a single state by the Union of. Lublin.

In the middle of the 16th century the ancient order of the I(nights of the Sword, whose territory embraced Esthonia, Livonia, Courland, Semgallen and the islands of Dagii and Oesel, was tottering to its fall. All the Baltic powers were more or less interested in the apportionment of this vast tract of land, whose geographical position made it not only the chief commercial link between east and west, but also the emporium whence the English, Dutch, Swedes, Danes and Germans obtained their corn, timber and most of the raw products of Lithuania and Muscovy. Matters were complicated by the curious political intricacies of this long-coveted domain, where the grand-master, the archbishop of Riga, and the estates of Livonia possessed concurrent and generally conflicting jurisdictions. Poland and Muscovy as the nearest neighbours of this moribund state, which had so long excluded them from the sea, were vitally concerned in its fate. After an anarchic period of suspense, lasting from 1546 to 1561, during which Sweden secured Esthonia, while Ivan the Terrible fearlessly ravaged Livonia, in the hope of making it valueless to any other potentate, Sigismund II., to whom both the grand-master and the archbishop had appealed more than once for protection, at length intervened decisively. Both he and his chancellor, Piotr Myszkowski (d. 1591), were well aware of the importance of securing a coast-land which would enable Poland to become a naval power. But the diet, with almost incredible short-sightedness, refused to waste a penny on an undertaking which, they argued, concerned only Lithuania, and it was not as king of Poland, but as grand-duke of Lithuania, and with purely Lithuanian troops, that Sigismund, in 1561, occupied Livonia. At his camp before Riga the last grand-master, Gotthard von Ketteler, who had long been at the head of the Polish party in Livonia, and William of Brandenburg, archbishop of Riga, gladly placed themselves beneath his protection, and by a subsequent convention signed at Vilna (Nov. 28, 1561), Livonia was incorporated with Lithuania in much the same way as Prussia had been incorporated with Poland thirty-six years previously. Ketteler, who had adopted Lutheranism during a visit to Germany in 1553, now professed the Augsburg Confession, and became the first duke of a new Protestant duchy, which he was to hold as a fief of the Polish crown, with local autonomy and absolute freedom of worship. The southern provinces of the ancient territory of the Order, Courland and Semgallen, had first been ceded on the 24th of June 1559 to Lithuania on similar conditions, the matter being finally adjusted by the compact of March 1562.

The apathy of Poland in such a vital matter as the Livonian question must have convinced so statesmanlike a prince as Sigismund II. of the necessity of preventing any possibility of cleavage in the future between the two halves of his dominions whose absolute solidarity was essential to their existence as a great power. To this patriotic design he devoted the remainder of his life. A personal union, under one monarch, however close, had proved inadequate. A further step must be taken - the two independent countries must be transformed into a single state. The great obstacle in the way of this, the only true solution of the difficulty, was the opposition of the Lithuanian magnates, who feared to lose the absolute dominancy they possessed in the grand-duchy if they were merged in the szlachta of the kingdom. But, at the last moment, the dread of another Muscovite invasion made them more pliable and, at a Polish diet held at Warsaw from November 1563 to June 1564, which the Lithuanians attended, the question of an absolute union was hotly debated. When things came to a deadlock the king tactfully intervened and voluntarily relinquished his hereditary title to Lithuania, thus placing the two countries on a constitutional equality and preparing the way for fresh negotiations in the future. The death, in 1565, of Black Radziwill, the chief opponent of the union, still further weakened the Lithuanians, and the negotiations were reopened with more prospect of success at the diet which met at Lublin on the 10th of January 1569. But even now the Lithuanians were indisposed towards a complete union, and finally they quitted the diet, leaving two commissioners behind to watch their interests. Then Sigismund executed his master stroke. Knowing the sensitiveness of the Lithuanians as regards Volhynia and Podolia, he suddenly, of his own authority, formally incorporated both these provinces with the kingdom of Poland, whereupon, amidst great enthusiasm, the Volhynian and Podolian deputies took their places on the same benches as their Polish brethren. The hands of the Lithuanians were forced. Even a complete union on equal terms was better than mutilated independence. Accordingly they returned to the diet, and the Complete union was unanimously adopted on the 1st of July of 1569. Henceforth the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania were to constitute one inseparable and indivisible body politic, under one1569. sovereign, elected in common, with one diet and one currency. All dependencies and colonies, including Prussia and Livonia, were to belong to Poland and Lithuania in common. The retention of the old duality of dignities was the one reminiscence of the original separation. No decision, however, could be come to as to the successor of the childless king, partly because of the multiplicity of candidates, partly because of Austrian intrigue, and this, the most momentous question of all, was still unsettled when Sigismund II. expired on the 6th of July 1572.

The Jagiellonic period (1386-1572) is the history of the consolidation and fusion into one homogeneous, political whole of numerous national elements, more or less akin ethnologically, but differing immensely in language, religion and, above all, in degrees of civilization. Jagiellonic Out of the ancient Piast kingdom, mutilated by the Period, loss of Silesia and the Baltic shore, arose a republic 1386-1572. consisting at first of various loosely connected entities, naturally centrifugal, but temporarily drawn together by the urgent need of combination against a superior foe, who threatened them separately with extinction. Beneath the guidance of a dynasty of princes which, curiously enough, was supplied by the least civilized portion of this congeries of nationalities, ,the nascent republic gradually grew into a power which subjugated its former oppressors and, viewed externally, seemed to bear upon it the promise of empire. It is dangerous to prophesy, but all the facts and circumstances before us point irresistibly to the conclusion that had the Jagiellonic dynasty but endured this promise of empire might well have been realized. The extraordinary thing about the Jagiellos was the equable persistency of their genius. Not only were five of the seven great statesmen, but they were statesmen of the same stamp. We are disturbed by no such sharp contrasts as are to be found among the Plantagenets, the Vasas and the Bourbons. The Jagiellos were all of the same mould and pattern, but the mould was a strong one and the pattern was good. Their predominant and constant characteristic is a sober sagacity which instinctively judges aright and imperturbably realized its inspirations. The Jagiellos were rarely brilliant, but they were always perspicacious. Above all, they alone seem to have had the gift of guiding the most difficult of nations properly. Two centuries of Jagiellonic rule made Poland great despite her grave external difficulties. Had that dynasty been prolonged for another century, there is every reason to suppose that it would also have dealt satisfactorily with Poland's still more dangerous internal difficulties, and arrested the development of that anarchical constitution which was the ruling factor in the ruin of the Republic. Simultaneously with the transformation into a great power of the petty principalities which composed ancient Poland, another and equally momentous political transformation was proceeding within the country itself.

HISTORY]

The origin of the Polish constitution is to be sought in the wiece or councils of the Polish princes, during the partitional period (c. 1279-1370). The privileges conferred upon the magnates of which these councils were composed, especially upon the magnates of Little Poland, who brought the Jagiellos to the throne, directed their policy, and grew rich upon their liberality, revolted the less favoured szlachta, or gentry, who, towards the end of the 14th century, combined for mutual defence in their sejmiki, or local diets, of which originally there were five, three in Great Poland, one in Little Poland and one in Posen-Kalisz.' In these sejmiki the deputies of the few great towns were also represented. The Polish towns, notably Cracow, had obtained their privileges, including freedom from tolls and municipal government, from the Crown in return for important services, such as warding off the Tatars, while the cities of German origin were protected by the Magdeburg law. Casimir the Great even tried to make municipal government as democratic as possible by enacting that one half of the town council of Cracow should be elected from the civic patriciate, but the other half from the commonalty. Louis the Great placed the burgesses on a level with the gentry by granting to the town council of Cracow jurisdiction over all the serfs in the extra-rural estates of the citizens. From this time forth deputies from the cities were summoned to the sejmiki on all important occasions, such, for instance, as the ratification of treaties, a right formally conceded to them by the sejmik of Radom in 1384. Thus at this period Poland was a confederation of half a dozen semiindependent states. The first general assembly of which we have certain notice is the zjazd walny which was summoned to Koszyce in November 1404, to relieve the financial embarrassments of Wladislaus, and granted him an extraordinary subsidy of twenty groats per hide of land to enable him to purchase Dobrzyn from the Teutonic Knights. Such subsidies were generally the price for the confirmation of ancient or the concession of new privileges. Thus at the diet of Brzesc Kujawski, in 1425, the szlachta obtained its first habeas corpus act in return for acknowledging the right of the infant krolewicz Wladislaus to his father's throne. The great opportunity of the szlachta was, of course, the election of a new king, especially the election of a minor, an event always accompanied and succeeded by disorders. Thus at the election of the infant Wladislaus III., his guardians promised in his name to confirm all the privileges granted by his father. If, on attaining his majority, the king refused to ratify these promises, his subjects were ipso facto absolved from their obedience. This is the first existence of the mischievous principle de prestanda obedientia, subsequently elevated into a statute. It is in this reign, too, that we meet with the first rokosz, or insurrection of the nobility against the executive. The extraordinary difficulties of Casimir IV. were freely exploited by the szlachta, who granted that ever impecunious monarch as little as possible, but got full value for every penny they grudgingly gave. Thus by the Articles of Cerekwica presented to him by the sejmik or dietine of Great Poland in 1 454 on the outbreak of the Teutonic War, he conceded the principle that no war should in future be begun without the consent of the local diets. A few months later he was obliged to grant the Privileges of Nieszawa, which confirmed and extended the operation of the Articles of Cerekwica. The sejmiki had thus added to their original privilege of self-taxation the right to declare war and control the national militia. 2 This was a serious political retrogression. A strongly centralized government had ever been Poland's greatest need, and Casimir the Great had striven successfully against all centrifugal tendencies. And now, eighty-four years after his death, Poland was once more split up into half a dozen loosely federated states in the hands of country gentlemen too ignorant and prejudiced to look beyond the boundaries of their own provinces. The only way of saving the Republic from disintegration was to concentrate all its political factors into a sejm-walny or general diet. But to this the magnates and the szlachta were equally opposed, the former because they feared the rivalry of a national assembly, the latter because they were of more importance in their local diets than they could possibly hope to be in a I The Red Russian sejmik was of later origin, c. 1433.

2 In view of the frequency of the Tatar inroads, the control of the militia was r'-transferred to the Crown in 1501.

general diet. The first sejm to legislate for the whole of Poland was the diet of Piotrkow (1493), summoned by John Albert to grant him subsidies; but the mandates of its deputies were limited to twelve months, and its decrees were to have force for only three years. John Albert's second diet (1496), after granting subsidies the burden of which fell entirely on the towns and peasantry, passed a series of statutes benefiting the nobility at the expense of the other classes. Thus one statute permitted the szlachta henceforth to export and import goods duty free, to the great detriment of the towns and the treasury. Another statute prohibited the burgesses from holding landed property and enjoying the privileges attaching thereto. A third statute disqualified plebeians from being elected to canonries or bishoprics. A fourth endeavoured to bind the peasantry more closely to the soil by forbidding emigration. The condition of the serfs was subsequently (1520) still further deteriorated by the introduction of socage. In a word, this diet disturbed the equilibrium of the state by enfeebling and degrading the middle classes. Nevertheless, so long as the Jagiello dynasty lasted, the political rights of the cities were jealously protected by the Crown against the usurpations of the nobility. Deputies from the towns took part in the election of John Albert (1492), and the burgesses of Cracow, the most enlightened economists in the kingdom, supplied Sigismund I. with his most capable counsellors during the first twenty years of his reign (1506-1526). Again and again the nobility attempted to exclude the deputies of Cracow from the diet, in spite of a severe edict issued by Sigismund I. in 150 9, threatening to prosecute for treason all persons who dared to infringe the liberties of the citizens. During Sigismund's reign, moreover, the Crown recovered many of the prerogatives of which it had been deprived during the reign of his feeble predecessor, Alexander, who, to say nothing of the curtailments of the prerogative, had been forced to accept the statute nihil novi (1505) which gave the sejm and the senate an equal voice with the Crown in all executive matters. In the latter years of Sigismund I. (1 53 o - 1 54 8) the political influence of the szlachta grew rapidly at the expense of the executive, and the gentry in diet assembled succeeded in curtailing the functions of all the great officers of state. During the reign of Sigismund II. (1548-1572) they diverted their attention to the abuses of the Church and considerably reduced both her wealth and her privileges. In this respect both the Crown and the country were with them, so that their interference,if violent,was on the whole distinctly beneficial.

The childless Sigismund II. died suddenly without leaving any regulations as to the election of his successor. Fortunately for Poland the political horizon was absolutely - unclouded. The Turks, still reeling from the shock of Lepanto, could with difficulty hold their own 1572-4573. against the united forces of the pope, Spain and Venice; while Ivan the Terrible had just concluded a truce with Poland. Domestic affairs, on the other hand, were in an almost anarchical condition. The Union of Lublin, barely three years old, was anything but consolidated, and in Lithuania it continued to be extremely unpopular. In Poland proper the szlachta were fiercely opposed to the magnates; and the Protestants seemed bent upon still further castigating the clergy. Worst of all, there existed no recognized authority in the land to curb and control its jarring centrifugal political elements. It was nearly two hundred years since the Republic had suffered from an interregnum, and the precedents of 1382 were obsolete. The primate, on hearing of the demise of the Crown, at once invited all the senators of Great Poland to a conference at Lowicz, but passed over the szlachta altogether. In an instant the whole Republic was seething like a caldron, and a rival assembly was simultaneously summoned to Cracow by Jan Ferlej, the head of the Protestant party. Civil war was happily averted at the last moment, and a national convention, composed of senators and deputies from all parts of the country, assembled at Warsaw, in April 1573, for the purpose of electing a new king. Five candidates for the throne were already in the field. Lithuania favoured Ivan IV. In Poland the bishops and most of the Catholic magnates were for an Austrian archduke, while the strongly anti-German szlachta were inclined to accept almost any candidate but a German, so long as he came with a gift in his hand and was not a Muscovite. In these circumstances it was an easy task for the adroit and energetic French ambassador, Jean de Montl.uc (d. 1579), brother of the famous marshal, and bishop of Valence, to procure the election of the French candidate, Henry, duke of Anjou. Well provided with funds, he speedily bought over many of the leading magnates, and his popularity reached its height when he strenuously advocated the adoption of the mode of election by the gentry en masse (which the szlachta proposed to revive), as opposed to the usual and more orderly "secret election" by a congress of senators and deputies, sitting with closed doors. The religious difficulty, meanwhile, had been adjusted to the satisfaction of all parties by the compact of Warsaw (Jan. 28, 1573), which granted absolute religious liberty to all non-Catholic denominations (dissidentes de religiose, as they now began to be called) without exception, thus exhibiting a far more liberal intention than the Germans had manifested in the religious peace of Augsburg eighteen years before. Finally, early in April 1573, the election diet assembled at Warsaw, and on the 11th of May, in the midst of intrigue, corruption, violence and confusion, Henry of Valois was elected king of Poland.

The election had, however, been preceded by a correctura jurum, or reform of the constitution, which resulted in the Henry of famous "Henrican Articles" which converted Valois, king, Poland from a limited monarchy into a republic 1573-1574. with an elective chief magistrate. Henceforward the king was to have no voice in the choice of his successor. He was not to use the word haeres, not being an hereditary sovereign. He was to marry a wife selected for him by the senate. He was neither to seek for a divorce nor give occasion for one. He was to be neutral in all religious matters. He was not to lead the militia across the border except with the consent of the szlachta, and then only for three months at a time. Every year the senate was to appoint sixteen of its number to be in constant attendance upon the king in rotas of four, which sedecimvirs were to supervise all his actions. Should the king fail to observe any one of these articles, the nation was ipso facto absolved from its allegiance. This constitutional reform was severely criticized by contemporary political experts. Some strongly condemned the clause justifying renunciation of allegiance, as tending to treason and anarchy. Others protested against the anomalous and helpless position of the so-called king, who, if he 'could do no harm, was certainly powerless for good. But such Cassandras prophesied to heedless ears. The Republic had deliberately cast itself upon the downward grade which was to lead to ruin.

The reign of Henry of Valois lasted thirteen months. The tidings of the death of his brother Charles IX., which reached him on the 14th of June 1574, determined him to exchange a thorny for what he hoped would be a flowery throne, and at midnight on the 18th of June 1574 he literally fled from Poland, pursued to the frontier by his indignant and bewildered subjects. Eighteen months later (Dec. 14, 1575), mainly through the influence of Jan Zamoyski, Stephen Bathory, prince of Transylvania, was elected king of Poland by the szlachta in opposition to the emperor Maximilian, who had been elected two days previously by the senate, after disturbances which would have rent any other state but Poland to pieces.

The glorious career of Stephen Bathory (1575-1586) is dealt with elsewhere (see Stephen, King of Poland). His example Stephen demonstrates the superiority of genius and valour Bathory, over the most difficult circumstances. But his 157.5-1586. reign was too brief to be permanently beneficial.

The Vasa period of Polish history which began with the election of Sigismund, son of John III., king of Sweden, was the Sigis- epoch of last and lost chances. The collapse of the mend 111., Muscovite tsardom in the east, and the submersion 1587-1632. of the German Empire in the west by the Thirty Years' War, presented Poland with an unprecedented oppor tunity of consolidating, once for all, her hard-won position as the dominating power of central Europe. Everywhere circumstances were favourable to her, and in olkiewski, Chodkiewicz and Koniecpolski she possessed three of the greatest captains of that or any other age. With all the means at her disposal cheerfully placed in the hands of such valiant and capable ministers, it would have been no difficult task for the Republic to have wrested the best part of the Baltic littoral from the Scandinavian powers, and driven the distracted Muscovites beyond the Volga. Permanent greatness and secular security were within her reach at the commencement of the Vasa period; how was it, then, that at the end of that period, only fifty years later, Poland had already sunk irredeemably into much the same position as Turkey occupies now, the position of a moribund state, existing on sufferance simply because none was yet quite prepared to administer the coup de grace? There is only one answer; the principal cause of this complete and irretrievable collapse is to be sought for in the folly, egotism and selfishness of the Polish gentry, whose insane dislike of all discipline, including even the salutary discipline of regular government, converted Poland into something very like a primitive tribal community at the very time when every European statesman, including the more enlightened of the Poles themselves, clearly recognized that the political future belonged to the strongly centralized monarchies, which were everywhere rising on the ruins of feudalism. Of course there were other contributory causes. The tenacity with which Sigismund III. clung to his hereditary rights to the Swedish Crown involved Poland in a quite unnecessary series of wars with Charles IX. and Gustavus Adolphus, when her forces were sorely needed elsewhere. The adhesion of the same monarch to the League of the Catholic Reaction certainly added to the difficulties of Polish diplomacy, and still further divided the already distracted diet, besides alienating from the court the powerful and popular chancellor Zamoyski. Yet Sigismund III. was a far more clearsighted statesman than any of his counsellors or contradictors. For instance, he was never misled by the successes of the false Demetrius in Muscovy, and wisely insisted on recovering the great eastern fortress of Smolensk rather than attempting the conquest of Moscow. His much-decried alliance with the emperor at the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War was eminently sagacious. He perceived at once that it was the only way of counteracting the restlessness of the sultan's protégés, the Protestant princes of Transylvania, whose undisciplined hordes, scarcely less savage than their allies the Turks and Tatars, were a perpetual menace both to Austria and to Poland. Finally he was bent upon reforming the Polish constitution by substituting the decision of all matters by a plurality of votes for a unanimity impossible to count upon.

When we turn to the szlachta who absolutely controlled the diet, we find not the slightest trace, I will not say of political foresight - that they never possessed - but of common patriotism, or ordinary public spirit. The most urgent national necessities were powerless to stir their hearts or open their purses. The diets during the reign of Sigismund III. were even more niggardly than they had been under the Jagiellos, and on the single occasion when the terrors of an imminent Tatar invasion constrained them to grant extraordinary subsidies, they saw to it that such subsidies should rest entirely on the shoulders of the burgesses (who had in the meantime been deprived of the franchise) and the already overburdened peasantry. In_ the very crisis of the Swedish War, the diminutive army of the victorious Chodkiewicz was left unpaid, with the result that the soldiers mutinied, and marched off en masse. Both Chodkiewicz and olkiewski frequently had to pay the expenses of their campaigns out of their own pockets, and were expected to conquer empires and defend hundreds of miles of frontier with armies of 3000 or 4000 men at most. When they retreated before overwhelming odds they were publicly accused of cowardice and incompetence. The determination to limit still further the power of the executive was at the bottom of this fatal parsimony, with the inevitable consequence that, while the king and the senate were powerless, every great noble or lord-marcher was free to do what he chose in his own domains, so long as he flattered his "little brothers," the szlachta. Incredible as it may seem, the expedition to place the false Demetrius on the Muscovite throne was a private speculation of a few Lithuanian magnates, and similar enterprises on the part of other irresponsible noblemen on the Danube or Dniester brought upon unhappy Poland retaliatory Tatar raids, which reduced whole provinces to ashes. Every attempt to improve matters, by reforming the impossible constitution, stranded on the opposition of the gentry. Take, for instance, the typical and highly instructive case of Zebrzydowski's rebellion. Nicholas Zebrzydowski, a follower of the chancellor Zamoyski, was one of the wealthiest and most respectable magnates in Poland. As palatine of Cracow he held one of the highest and most lucrative dignities in the state, and was equally famous for his valour, piety and liberality. Disappointed in his hope of obtaining the great seal on the death of Zamoyski, he at once conceived that the whole of the nobility had been insulted in his person, and proceeded to make all government impossible for the next three years. On the 7th of March 1606 Sigismund summoned a diet for the express purpose of introducing the principle of decision by majority in the diet, whereupon Zebrzydowski summoned a counter-confederation to Stenczyn in Little Poland, whose first act was to open negotiations with the prince of Transylvania, Stephen Bocskay, with the view of hiring mercenaries from him for further operations. At a subsequent confederation, held at Lublin in June, Zebrzydowski was reinforced by another great nobleman, Stanislaus Stadnicki, called the Devil, who "had more crimes on his conscience than hairs on his head," and was in the habit of cropping the ears and noses of small squires and chaining his serfs to the walls of his underground dungeons for months at a time. This champion of freedom was very eloquent as to the wrongs of the szlachta, and proposed that the assembly should proceed in a body to Warsaw and there formally renounce their allegiance. The upshot of his oratory was the summoning of a rokosz, or national insurrection, to Sandomir, which was speedily joined by the majority of the szlachta all over the country, who openly proclaimed their intention of dethroning the king and chastising the senate, and sent Stadnicki to Transylvania to obtain the armed assistance of Stephen Bocskay. Only the clergy, naturally conservative, still clung to the king, and Sigismund III., who was no coward, at once proceeded to Cracow to overawe the rokoszanie, or insurrectionists, by his proximity, and take the necessary measures for his own protection. By the advice of his senators he summoned a zjazd, or armed convention, to Wislica openly to oppose the insurrection of Sandomir, which zjazd was to be the first step towards the formation of a general confederation for the defence of the throne. Civil war seemed inevitable, when the szlachta of Red Russia and Sieradz suddenly rallied to the king, who at once ordered his army to advance, and after defeating the insurrectionists at Janowiec (in October), granted them a full pardon, on the sole condition that they should refrain from all such acts of rebellion in future. Despite their promises, Zebrzydowski and his colleagues a few months later were again in arms. In the beginning of 1607 they summoned another rokosz to Jendrzejow, at the very time when the diet was assembling at Warsaw. The diet authorized the king to issue a proclamation dissolving the rokosz, and the rokosz retorted with a manifesto in which an insurrection was declared to be as much superior to a parliament as a general council was to a pope. In a second manifesto published at Jezierna, on the 24th of June, the insurrectionists again renounced their allegiance to the king. Oddly enough, the diet before dissolving had, apparently in order to meet the rokosz half-way, issued the famous edict De non praestanda obedientia, whereby, in case of future malpractices by the king and his subsequent neglect of at least two solemn warnings there-anent by the primate and the senate, he was to be formally deposed by the next succeeding diet. But even this was not enough for the insurrectionists. It was not the contingent but the actual deposition of the king that they demanded, and they had their candidate for the throne ready in the person of Gabriel Bethlen, the new prince of Transylvania. But the limits of even Polish complacency had at last been reached, and Zolkiewski and Chodkiewicz were sent against the rebels, whom they routed at Oransk near Guzow, after a desperate encounter, on the 6th of July 1607. But, though driven from the field, the agitation simmered all over the country for nearly two years longer, and was only terminated, in1609, by a general amnesty which excluded every prospect of constitutional reform.

Wladislaus IV., who succeeded his father in 1632, was the most popular monarch who ever sat on the Polish throne. The szlachta, who had had a "King Log" in SigisWladlsmund, were determined that Wladislaus should be laws " a King Bee who will give us nothing but honey" - 1632-1648. in other words they hoped to wheedle him out of even more than they had wrested from his predecessor. Wladislaus submitted to everything. He promised never to declare war or levy troops without the consent of the sejm, undertook to fill all vacancies within a certain time, and released the szlachta from the payment of income-tax, their one remaining fiscal obligation. This boundless complacency was due to policy, not weakness. The second Polish Vasa was a man of genius, fully conscious of his powers, and determined to use them for the benefit of his country. The events of the last reign had demonstrated the incompetence of the Poles to govern themselves. Any amelioration of the existing anarchy must be extra-parliamentary and proceed from the throne. But a reforming monarch was inconceivable unless he possessed the confidence of the nation, and such confidence, Wladislaus naturally argued, could only be won by striking and undeniable public services. On these principles he acted with brilliant results. Within three years of his accession he compelled the Muscovites (Treaty of Polyankova, May 28, 1634) to retrocede Smolensk and the eastern provinces lost by Sigismund II., overawed the Porte by a military demonstration in October of the same year, and, by the Truce of Stumdorf (Sept. 12, 1635), recovered the Prussian provinces and the Baltic seaboard from Sweden. But these achievements excited not the gratitude but the suspicion of the szlachta. They were shrewd enough to guess that the royal triumph might prejudice their influence, and for the next five years they deliberately thwarted the enlightened and far-reaching projects of the king for creating a navy and increasing the revenue without burdening the estates, by a system of tolls levied on the trade of the Baltic ports (see Wladislaus Iv.), even going so far as to refuse for nine years to refund the expenses of the Muscovite War, which he had defrayed out of his privy purse. From sheer weariness and disgust the king refrained from any intervention in public affairs for nearly ten years, looking on indifferently while the ever shorter and stormier diets wrangled perpetually over questions of preferment and the best way of dealing with the extreme dissenters, to the utter neglect of public business. But towards the end of his reign the energy of Wladislaus revived, and he began to occupy himself with another scheme for regenerating his country, in its own despite, by means of the Cossacks. First, however, it is necessary to describe briefly the origin and previous history of these romantic freebooters who during the second half of the 17th century were the determining factor of Polish and Muscovite politics.

[HISTORY

At the beginning of the 16th century the illimitable steppe of south-eastern Europe, extending from the Dnieper to the Urals, had no settled population. Hunters and fishermen frequented its innumerable rivers, returning home laden with rich store of fish and pelts, while runaway serfs occasionally settled in small communities beneath the shelter of the fortresses built, from time to time, to guard the 'southern frontiers of Poland and Muscovy. Obliged, for fear of the Tatars, to go about with arms in their hands, these settlers gradually grew strong enough to raid their raiders, selling the booty thus acquired to the merchants of Muscovy and Poland. Moreover, the Turks and Tatars being the natural enemies of Christendom, a war of extermination The Cossacks. against them was regarded by the Cossacks as a sacred duty. Curiously enough, these champions of orthodoxy borrowed the name, which has stuck to them ever since, from their "dogheaded" adversaries. The rank and file of the Tatar soldiery were known as Kazaki, or Cossacks, a word meaning "freebooters," and this term came to be applied indiscriminately to all the free dwellers in the Ukraine, or border-lands. As time went on the Cossacks multiplied exceedingly. Their daring grew with their numbers, and at last they came to be a constant annoyance to all their neighbours, both Christian and Mussulman, frequently involving Poland in dangerous and unprofitable wars with the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, it is not too much to say that, until the days of Sobieski, the Cossacks were invariably the chief cause of the breaches between the Porte and the Republic. We have seen how carefully the Jagiellos avoided participating in any of the crusades directed by the Holy See against the arch-enemies of the Cross. So successful was their prudential abstention that no regular war occurred between Turkey and Poland during the two centuries of their sway. The first actual collisions, the Cecora campaign of 1620 and the Khotin War of 1621 (for John Albert's Moldavian raid does not count), were due to the depredations of the Cossacks upon the dominions of the sultan by land and sea, and in all subsequent treaties between the two powers the most essential clause was always that which bound the Republic to keep its freebooters in order.

But in the meantime the Cossacks themselves had become a semi-independent community. The origin of the Cossack state is still somewhat obscure, but the germs of it are visible as early as the beginning of the 16th century. The union of Lublin, which led to the polonization of Lithuania, was the immediate occasion of a considerable exodus to the lowlands of the Dnieper of those serfs who desired to escape from the taxes of the Polish government and the tyranny of the Polish landlords. Stephen Bathory presently converted the pick of them into six registered regiments of 1000 each for the defence of the border. Ultimately the island of Hortica, just below the falls of the Dnieper, was fixed upon as their headquarters; and on the numerous islands of that broad river there gradually arose the famous Cossack community known as the Zaporozhskaya Syech, or Settlement behind the Falls, whence the Dnieperian Cossacks were known, generally, as Zaporozhians, or Backfallsmen. 1 The Cossack kosh, or commonwealth, had the privilege of electing its hetman, or chief, and his chief officers, the starshins. The hetman, after election, received from the king of Poland direct the insignia of his office, viz. the bulawa, or baton, the bunchuk, or horse-tail standard, and his official seal; but he was responsible for his actions to the kosh alone, and an inquiry into his conduct was held at the expiration of his term of office in the obschaya shkoda, or, general assembly. In time of peace his power was little more than that of the responsible minister of a constitutional republic; but in time of warfare he was a dictator, and disobedience to his orders in the field was punishable by death.

The Cossacks were supposed to be left alone as much as possible by the Polish government so long as they faithfully fulfilled their chief obligation of guarding the frontiers of the Republic from Tatar raids. But the relations between a community of freebooters, mostly composed of fugitive serfs and refugees, and a government of small squires who regarded the Cossacks as a mere rabble were bound to be difficult at the best of times, and political and religious differences presently supervened. The Cossacks, mostly of Lithuanian origin, belonged to the Orthodox religion, so far as they belonged to any religion at all, and the Jagiellos had been very careful to safeguard the religious liberties of their Lithuanian subjects, especially as the Poles themselves were indifferent on the subject. But, at the beginning of the 17th century, when the current of the Catholic reaction was running very strongly and the Jesuits, after subduing the Protestants, began to undermine the position of the Orthodox Church in Lithuania, a more intolerant spirit 1 Cf. American, Backwoodsmen.

began to prevail. The old Calvinist nobility of Lithuania were speedily reconverted; a Uniate Church in connexion with Rome was established; Greek Orthodox congregations, if not generally persecuted, were at least depressed and straitened; and the Cossacks began to hate the Pans, or Polish lords, not merely as tyrants, but as heretics. Yet all these obstacles to a good understanding might, perhaps, have been surmounted if only the Polish diet had treated the Cossacks with common fairness and common sense. In 161g the Polish government was obliged to prohibit absolutely the piratical raids of the Cossacks in the Black Sea, where they habitually destroyed Turkish property to the value of millions. At the same time, by the compact of Rastawica, the sejm undertook to allow the Cossacks, partly as wages, partly as compensation, 40,000 (raised by the compact of Kurukow to 60,000) gulden and 170 wagons of cloth per annum. These terms were never kept, despite the earnest remonstrances of the king, and the complaints of the aggrieved borderers. Parsimony prevailed, as usual, over prudence, and when the Cossacks showed unmistakable signs of restiveness, the Poles irritated them still further by ordering the construction of the strong fortress of Kudak at the confluence of the Dnieper and the Samara, to overawe the Zaporozhian community. This further act of repression led to two terrible Cossack risings, in 1635 and 1636, put down only with the utmost difficulty, whereupon the diet of 1638 deprived the Cossacks of all their ancient privileges, abolished the elective hetmanship, and substituted for it a commission of Polish noblemen with absolute power, so that the Cossacks might well declare that those who hated them were lords over them.

Such was the condition of affairs in the Ukraine when Wladislaus IV. proposed to make the Cossacks the pivot of his foreign policy and his domestic reforms. His far-reaching plans were based upon two facts, the absolute devotion of the Zaporozhians to himself personally, and the knowledge, secretly conveyed to him by Stanislaus Koniecpolski, that the whole of the Ukraine was in a ferment. He proposed to provoke the Tatars to a rupture by repudiating the humiliating tribute with which the Republic had so long and so vainly endeavoured to buy off their incessant raids. In case of such rupture he meant, at the head of 10o,000 Cossacks, to fall upon the Crimea itself, the seat of their power, and exterminate the Khanate. This he calculated would bring about a retaliatory invasion of Poland by the Turks, which would justify him in taking the field against them also with all the forces of the Republic. In case of success he would be able to impose the will of a victorious king upon a discredited diet, and reform the constitution on an English or Swedish model. Events seemed at first to favour this audacious speculation. Almost simultaneously a civil war broke out in the Crimea and the Porte declared war against the Venetian republic, with which Wladislaus at once concluded an offensive and defensive alliance (1645). He then bade the Cossacks prepare their boats for a raid upon the Turkish galleys, and secured the co-operation of the tsar in the Crimean expedition by a special treaty. Unfortunately, Venice, for her own safety's sake, insisted on the publication of Wladislaus's antiTurkish alliance; the Porte, well informed of the course of Polish affairs, remained strictly neutral despite the most outrageous provocations; and Wladislaus, bound by his coronation oath not to undertake an offensive war, found himself at the mercy of the diet which, full of consternation and rage, assem