Libertys Folly:Polish Lithuan

Jerzy Tadeusz Lukavski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136103728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

In the closing years of the 18th century, the old Polish state paid the price of over 100 years of ungovernability in political extinction. Between 1772 and 1795 an area of Eastern Europe larger than France was divided among Russia, Prussia and Austria. At the very time that monarchial absolutism seemed to be collapsing in Western Europe, the dismemberment of the Polish "noble democracy" affirmed absolutism's triumph in the East. Bringing together Polish scholarship previously inaccessible to English-speaking readers, the author examines the economy, the society and the institutional structure of early modern Poland and analyzes her loss of national sovereignty in the light of Poland's lack of political centralization and dynastic strength. Not only does this book illuminate a much neglected area of European history, and assist those trying to make sense of Poland's heritage, it also provides much comparative material for students of early modern history in general. Furthermore no reader could fail to be struck by the parallels in the problematic relationship between Poland and Russia in the 18th century and today.

Part I

The structures of the unreformed Commonwealth

Eighteenth-century Poland: introduction

In the closing years of the eighteenth century, extinction was the price paid by the Polish state for its many weaknesses. Between 1772 and 1795 an area of eastern Europe bigger than France was divided among Russia, Prussia and Austria. Only in 1794, far too late, did the Poles attempt anything resembling determined national resistance to the voracity of their neighbours. At the very time that monarchic absolutism seemed to be collapsing in the west, the dismemberment of the Polish ‘noble democracy’ affirmed absolutism’s triumph in the east.

The ‘Poland’ of the eighteenth century was a complex organism even by the complex standards of the ancien régime. Its grandiose official title, Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów, Polskiego i Litewskiego – the Commonwealth of the Two Nations, the Polish and the Lithuanian – only hinted at the realities. There were many more ‘nations’ than two, yet only one that counted, cutting across all other divisions: naród szlachecki, the nation of the nobility, or szlachta. In twentieth-century terms, its origins were ethnically diverse, comprising Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Germans and even Tartars, Jews and Scots. In truth, it was Polish. The polonisation and assimilation of other ethnic elites was largely completed by the end of the sixteenth century. Their language and culture became Polish. Non-Polish tongues were for peasants and petty townsmen. The Germans were the exception, but their numbers among the nobility were insignificant, running to a few hundred families in the western and northern fringes. German remained their mother-tongue, Polish their fluent second language.

In 1772, Polish-speakers accounted for only half of the total population of 14 million or so. From an ethnic or linguistic point of view, Lithuania’s prominence existed only in the Commonwealth’s title. The Lithuanian speech was confined almost entirely to roughly a million peasants, occupying only a third of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania itself and only a fraction of the Commonwealth’s area, 87,000 out of 733,500 square kilometres. They were far outnumbered by 5 million or more Russian-speaking peoples, Ukrainians in the south-east and Byelorussians in the east. The Poles themselves were the largest single ethnic grouping but, even at over 6 million, they comprised less than half the total population. Three-quarters of a million Jews were scattered throughout the Commonwealth. Most towns of any significance contained a greater or lesser German element. In the vassal duchy of Courland along Lithuania’s northern border, a Germanic nobility ruled some 300,000 Latvian peasants. Small groups of Tartars, Armenians, Greeks and, on the lower Vistula, descendants of Dutch Mennonite settlers, completed the more noteworthy ingredients of the Rzeczpospolita’s ethnic mix.

Some of these ethnic divisions were to prove of considerable importance. The patriciates and bourgeoisie of the towns of Royal, or Polish, Prussia and, to a much lesser degree, of western Poland, consisted largely of German-speaking Lutherans. Their relations with the szlachta were marked by mutual mistrust, envy and resentment. Inside the towns, similar stresses existed between the patriciates and the Polish-speaking lower orders. A Calvinist and Lutheran and mainly germanophone noble minority resented its exclusion from most public office by a Catholic, Polish and usually culturally inferior noble majority. For Ukrainian and Byelorussian peasants, the economic burdens imposed by the nobility were aggravated by religious grievances. By 1772, Poland’s once-thriving eastern Orthodox denomination was reduced, partly by genuine missionary activity but all too often by varying levels of intimidation, to at most half a million believers, scattered across Lithuania and the Ukraine. In the eyes of the szlachta, the Catholicism of the majority of Byelorussian and Ukrainian peasants was second-rate: not their own, Latin, western Catholicism, but the Greek Catholicism of the religious union of 1596, whose rites and prayers were often indistinguishable from the Orthodox original. While the Uniate (Greek Catholic) laity chafed at its feudal burdens, the clergy resented its poverty and the allocation of the choicest benefits to its more privileged Latin counterpart. The divisions between the main Christian denominations were transcended by hostility to the Jews. The peasantry hated them as oppressors, a role for which they were unavoidably shaped as commercial agents of the nobility. The nobility despised them because they were Jewish and because they could not do without them. Non-Jewish townsmen resented their entrepreneurial skills and their often apparently privileged economic position.

The Polish–Lithuanian state was an enormous hybrid which had failed to develop the organization and machinery necessary to cope with its diversities and size. It owed its territorial extent primarily to the expansion of the duchy of Lithuania in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The original Lithuanian state swelled eastwards from the Niemen basin into Russia, almost to the gates of Moscow and south and south-east to the shores of the Black Sea. It was a flawed mixture of peaceful and armed expansion into a military void left by the wreckage of the old Kievan state, the civil wars of the Russian principalities and the devastation of the Mongol invasions. Lithuania’s westward thrusts had been rebuffed by the stronger state of the Teutonic Knights and by the kingdom of Poland. It expanded to the south and east not so much through its own strength, but rather because there was nothing to stop it.

The Polish kingdom’s own territorial development was not unlike Lithuania’s, albeit less spectacular. Between the late twelfth and early fourteenth centuries, Poland lost territory in the north-west to Brandenburg, in the north to the Teutonic Knights and, finally, Silesia in the west to the House of Luxemburg. The Thirteen Years War of 1454–66 permitted the Poles to recover Royal, western Prussia and to reduce the Teutonic Knights’ residual state in East Prussia to vassal status. In 1657, Poland had to relinquish its suzerainty over East Prussia, which had long since passed to the Hohenzollern rulers of Brandenburg. The recovery of western Pomerania and Silesia, with their substantial Polish and Slavic-speaking populations, exceeded the kingdom’s capacities. From the fourteenth century onwards, expansion towards the south-west and the Ukraine remained the easier option.

The path of least resistance generally followed by Poland and Lithuania in their external expansion also prevailed in domestic affairs. In Poland proper, a succession of foreign rulers, frequent regencies and royal minorities allowed great magnates and lesser nobles alike to bargain for ever wider rights and privileges, in a cumulative process which was to be reversed only in the fading years of the Commonwealth. After 1386, Poland and Lithuania were brought together under the rule of the Grand Duchy’s Jagiellonian dynasty. The tensions and occasional interruptions of this essentially personal union were no obstacle to the great Lithuanian lords extracting concessions on the Polish pattern from their Grand Dukes.

The union gradually developed institutional features. In the sixteenth century, Lithuania came to base its governmental, administrative and judicial structures largely on Polish models. Its unfortunate wars with Muscovy, in which it lost huge swathes of territory, exposed its military dependence on Poland. The lesser Lithuanian nobility looked to the privileges of the Polish szlachta as a barrier against the oppressions of their great lords. The Polish gentry saw in their Lithuanian fellows allies against the arrogance of their own magnates. The Lithuanian nobility copied Polish cultural, as well as institutional, forms. In 1576, a contemporary observer, Augustyn Rotundus, could already describe the Lithuanian language as the preserve of the peasantry. The nobility spoke Polish.

The trend to institutional unification reached a climax in the Union of Lublin of 1569. Under pressure from the Poles (who saw in Lithuania a fruitful field of colonisation and expansion), under threat of abandonment to the tender mercies of Muscovy, under pressure from their own gentry, the Lithuanian lords had to agree not only to a much closer union with Poland – under a common Sejm, or parliament, as well as a common monarch – but to the incorporation into the kingdom of Poland of enormous areas of Lithuanian-ruled territory, notably the Ukraine. It was the Union of Lublin which marked the uneasy birth of the Commonwealth of the Two Nations.

The Union was as much one of weaknesses as of strengths. The death, without an heir, of the last of the Jagiellonian dynasty in 1572, consolidated the elective character of the monarchy. If hitherto it had been elective within the House of Jagiellon, now it was open to all comers, provided they were Catholic, male and of royal or noble blood. The succession of three kings of the House of Vasa between 1587 and 1668 and their sporadic efforts to assert royal authority, far from weakening the elective principle, increased the nobility’s attachment to it. Even under the Vasas, the szlachta studiously refused to elect a successor during the king’s lifetime. The interregnums were too valuable to abandon, for they allowed the nobles to bargain with prospective successors over the preservation and extension of their rights and privileges and, by the same token, to reduce the bounds of monarchic authority.

At about the same time that centralised, dynastic states were emerging throughout much of Europe, the emergence of such a state was rendered almost impossible in Poland–Lithuania. The Lublin Union was never total. The two major ‘provinces’ into which the newly formed Commonwealth was divided – that of Poland proper, or the Crown, Korona, and that of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – retained their separate local and central administrations, offices and dignities. Even if Lithuania’s were modelled on the Crown’s and even if ever more institutional and private links were gradually forged between the two provinces, they preserved their separate identities to the end. In turn, the prowincja of the Crown was itself divided into two provinces, pre-dating the Union: Wielkopolska (Great Poland) to the west and north and Malopolska (Little Poland) to the south and east, incorporating, after 1569, the Ukraine. Each province retained its own rights and privileges. If their practical significance tended to diminish, their constitutional significance remained an irremoveable impediment to the full integration of the Commonwealth.

Attachment to local privilege persisted at the level of the provincial subdivisions, the palatinates, counties and districts. By the eighteenth century, this local particularism lost much of its strength, except in the palatinates of Royal Prussia. Prussia was prepared to consider itself part of the prowincja of Wielkopolska when it deemed it convenient, mainly in judicial matters. At other times, it insisted on regarding itself as an autonomous province in its own right, with its own distinct indygenat or citizenship. The jurists of the Prussian towns in particular maintained that Royal Prussia was bound only to acknowledge the authority of the monarch (who, naturally, was bound to observe Royal Prussia’s extensive immunities) and was in no way bound by the legislation of the Sejm. The exact relationship of Royal Prussia to the rest of the Commonwealth remained a subject of impassioned legalist debate until it was cut short by Frederick the Great’s annexation of 1772.

Exuberant local and regional privilege was scarcely confined to Poland in pre-revolutionary Europe. But the confused interrelationships and uncertain status of the Rzeczpospolita’s constituent parts, even the undifferentiated terminology (Malopolska, Wielkopolska and Royal Prussia, Crown and Lithuania – all were or styled themselves prowincje) exemplified the failure of monarchy or Sejm to build up efficient or truly centralised administrative machinery. Poland had nothing comparable to France’s intendants or Brandenburg–Prussia’s Kriegskommissar to dictate and enforce at local level orders which the centre was often incapable of issuing. On the contrary, it was the duty of the centre to do the bidding of the localities. The envoys elected by the local noble assemblies, the sejmiki, to the Sejm were furnished with binding instructions. Sejmiki insisted on approving the Sejm’s legislation before it could come into force. The liberum veto emerged: the right of any envoy to the Sejm, or voter at the sejmik, to halt and annul all proceedings. First formally applied in 1652, the veto rapidly established itself as the keystone of Polish liberty, the triumph of the sovereignty of the individual over the sovereignty of the state.

Poland suffered the consequences of the failure to build up a strong central government just as Germany did. The lands between the Rhine and the Dnieper became a battlefield and military transit route for those powers which could mobilise their resources effectively. The huge central European power vacuum that developed during the seventeenth century greatly facilitated the rise of Brandenburg–Prussia, whose location virtually dictated its annexation of other German as well as Polish territories. The Northern War of 1655–60 and the war of 1654–67 with Muscovy fully exposed the Commonwealth’s weaknesses. For a time, it seemed doomed to extinction. The Great Northern War of 1700–21 threatened to reduce it to the status of a Swedish or Russian vassal. Poland survived as little more than a wayside tavern for other states’ marauding armies.

The costs of political impotence were heavy, even before the Partitions. The mid-seventeenth-century wars came hard on the heels of a decline in western European demand for Poland’s principal export – grain. More serious was the physical damage inflicted by war and its camp-followers, famine and plague. In 1648, the Commonwealth may have had a population of some 11 million. The demographic losses of the next dozen years will probably never be determined with any accuracy. Some estimates suggest a population loss of 25 per cent, others higher still. Recovery was painfully slow and can hardly have been complete before the Great Northern War took its cut. Half a million? A million? Perhaps more? There is little doubt that the overall effect of these and other wars between the mid-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was as much a catastrophe for Poland as the Black Death (which had largely spared Poland) had once been for western Europe. At least the worst was over. The many subsequent military incursions were unable to arrest an ever more sustained recovery, until the Partitions began to impose their artificial but drastic tolls.

The szlachta reacted to the disasters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by drawing in on themselves. They were determined that their ‘Golden Freedom’ at least should survive intact. Augustus II’s clumsy attempts to impose absolutist rule by force in the confusion of the Great Northern War served only to discredit the whole idea of reform, which could come about only if the szlachta could be convinced of its necessity. The slow and necessary process of self-education began to get under way in the 1740s, picked up speed after the accession of king Stanisław August in 1764 and culminated in the reforms of the Four Years Sejm of 1788–92. None the less, the Polish nobility, and then by no means all, had only begun to appreciate the need to balance national sovereignty against individual liberty when both were snuffed out.

1

A ruling nation: the szlachta

The history of Poland–Lithuania in the eighteenth century was, as for two centuries previously, above all that of a nation of nobles. Making up around 7 per cent, of the population, the szlachta were the most numerous nobility in Europe.¹ Jean-Jacques Rousseau exaggerated when he wrote in his Considérations sur le Gouvernement de Pologne: ‘The Polish nation consists of three estates: the nobles who are everything, the townsmen who are nothing and the peasants who are less than nothing’,² but the exaggeration was understandable. Collectively and individually the aristocracy and gentry had amassed privileges which allowed them to dominate the monarchy and the rest of society to a degree unmatched by any other European nobility.

GOLDEN FREEDOM

The szlachta rejoiced in their freedom from taxation imposed without their consent, first secured in 1374. By 1505, under the terms of the statute popularly known as Nihil Novi, the monarchy accepted that it could enact no major legislation without their consent. The monarchy’s elective character was firmly established even under the Jagiellonian kings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The creation of two Tribunals, or supreme law courts, for the Crown in 1578 and for Lithuania in 1581, designed to reduce the enormous pressures on the royal courts, irrevocably placed much of the monarch’s juridical power in the hands of elected noble deputies. The nobility used statutory law to consolidate their social hegemony. Between 1496 and 1543, peasants were tied down to seigneurial land, forbidden to appeal from seigneurial courts, and obliged to perform minimum weekly labour services. Between 1501 and 1507 the nobility legislated themselves the right to export the produce of their own demesnes and to import goods f...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Note on Polish pronunciation
• Maps
• Part I The structures of the unreformed Commonwealth
• Part II Continuity and change
• Notes
• Chronological table
• Glossary of select Polish terms
• Bibliography
• Index