The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

History, Memory, Legacy

Andrzej Chwalba, Krzysztof Zamorski, Andrzej Chwalba, Krzysztof Zamorski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000203998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This volume provides a fresh perspective of the history and legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as the often-disputed memory of it in contemporary Europe.

The unions between the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania have fascinated many readers particularly because many solutions that have been implemented in the European Union have been adopted from its Central and Eastern European predecessor. The collection of essays presented in this volume are divided into three parts – the Beginnings of Poland-Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Legacy and Memory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – and represent a selection of the papers delivered at the Third Congress of International Researchers of Polish History which was held in Cracow on 11-14 October 2017. Through their application of different historiographical perspectives and schools of history they offer the reader a fresh take on the Commonwealth's history and legacy, as well as the memory of it in the countries that are its inheritors, namely Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine.

An exploration of one of the biggest countries in Early Modern Europe, this will be of interest to historians, political scientists, cultural anthropologists and other scholars of the history of Central and Eastern Europe in the Early Modern period.

1 The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

History-Legacy-Memory

Antony Polonsky

The theme of our conference was ‘Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów. Historia-Dziedzictwo-Pamięć.’ It sought to examine what the nature of the ‘First Republic’ was, how its memory was preserved in the years that followed its partition and the extent to which it has influenced the history and present-day politics of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus which have emerged on its territory. In my brief essay, I should like to examine first some of the changes in our understanding of the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in recent years. This state, which lasted more than two and a quarter centuries from the union of the Polish Kingdom with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1569, has given rise to a large historical literature both in Poland and abroad and I can only sketch out some of the most important developments. I should like then to examine how the legacy of this state has affected developments among Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Jews since 1795 and particularly in the ‘long nineteenth century.’ Finally, I will ask what its legacy is today among these different groups and the states they have established.

History

In my discussion of the historiography of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, I should like to concentrate on its first century and, in particular, on the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century. This crisis highlighted the weaknesses of the Commonwealth which led, more than a century later, to its partition: the political, social and economic dominance of the Polish noble estate, the szlachta; the exclusion of other classes from social and political power; the weakness of the elected monarchy; the first use in 1652 of the liberum veto; and the increasing alienation of non-Catholics, above all the Greek Orthodox Cossacks. Although the crisis, which caused the loss of the Ukrainian lands east of the Dnieper and of Kiev, did not lead to actual partition of the country by its Muscovite and Swedish invaders, it did lead to large-scale depopulation and widespread destruction of property, which had to be made up for partly by greater fiscal exactions leading to constitutional problems. Attempts to reform the constitution, whether in the late seventeenth century or at the end of the eighteenth century, during the reign of Stanisław August, did not succeed and were followed by the partition of the country between 1772 and 1795.

Discussions of the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whether in Poland or among non-Polish historians, have largely played out within the framework established in the late nineteenth century. The ‘Kraków historical school’ saw this as the consequence of the internal weakness of the republic and the determination of the szlachta and magnates to retain their privileged position. In contrast, the Warsaw school saw the partitions as the consequence primarily of the aggressive behaviour of the country’s neighbours, above all Prussia and Russia, who were aided by Austria. In recent years, political backwardness and the failure of modernization have also been stressed. One valuable contribution has been that of Robert Frost in his article, ‘The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Military Revolution.’ In it he examines to what extent the developments described by Michael Roberts in his seminal lecture of 1955 on this revolution apply to Poland-Lithuania. Roberts’s claim that such a revolution took place lies not in the importance of particular tactical changes introduced by particular commanders or even because of the vastly enlarged armies which emerged in the seventeenth century, but in the impact of these developments on governments and states at the time. In his view, the military revolution stands “like a great divide separating medieval society from the modem world.”¹ In Roberts’s words:

It remains true that purely military developments of a strictly technical kind did exert a lasting influence upon society at large. They were the agents and auxiliaries of constitutional and social change; and they bore a main share of responsibility for the coming of that new world which was to be so very unlike the old.²

It was thus changes in response to military demands which helped bring about the emergence of more effective, centralized systems of government:

Where absolutism triumphed … it did so because it provided the response to a genuine need; and though an army might be useful for curbing aristocratic license, it was but an accessory factor in the general political situation which produced the eclipse of the Estates.³

This theory of the military revolution fits neatly into the model of European development which sees all important changes on the road to ‘modernization’ as essentially taking place in northern and western Europe. On the surface, there appears to be much to support such a view; indeed, the fate of Poland-Lithuania seems to provide clear evidence in favour of a military revolution: the dominant power in East Central Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century, it could not keep up with the pace of change. As the rest of Europe moved toward more permanent, professional armies based on infantry and firepower, Poland-Lithuania clung obstinately to its outdated cavalry and continued to rely on ad hoc formations made up of noble amateurs. The victories of Sobieski over the Turks in the 1670s and 1680s merely disguised Polish weaknesses by triumphing over an enemy who had also failed to respond to new patterns of warfare. When Peter the Great succeeded in reforming the Russian army in the early eighteenth century, Poland-Lithuania was virtually defenceless. By the time the ‘Silent Sejm’ limited its forces to 24,000 in 1717, in an age when its neighbours could quickly raise armies of well over 100,000, the Commonwealth’s days as a great, or even a second-rate power, were clearly over.

There is a certain amount of truth in this broad outline of developments; on closer inspection, however, the question is not so simple. As Frost shows, the Commonwealth’s failure to develop effective or adequate state structures was not the result of its backwardness in military terms—that is in its supposed rejection of allegedly superior Western models—but was crucially linked to their partial adoption before 1660. The vital period was not between 1560 and 1669—the period of Roberts’s military revolution—but after 1660, when the political implications of the organizational changes necessary to support the new-style armies became all too clear. In Poland-Lithuania at least, purely military change was perfectly possible before the emergence of more effective government; it was fear of the consequences of such government which led to the Commonwealth’s deliberate rejection of the changes introduced elsewhere in Europe after 1660.

The Cossack revolt had sparked a recruitment crisis for the Commonwealth which does much to explain the military collapse of 1655. In the long term, there was only one way to solve this crisis: to expand the regular army and increase the number of mercenary units in the so-called foreign contingent (cudzoziemski autorament). In 1652, following the disaster at Batoh, when the Polish army was practically wiped out by a combined Cossack and Tatar force, the old system of a distinction between the permanent ‘quarter’ army and the additional units raised in an emergency was abolished. By the end of 1652, an army of some 32,700 had been raised in Poland, nearly half of which was made up of infantry and dragoons.

This move was a direct response to the changed military situation following the outbreak of the Cossack revolt and demonstrated that the Poles fully appreciated the need to change the whole basis of their defensive structure; it was this new, regular army which played the central role in meeting the Swedish threat after 1656. Nevertheless, despite the successes won by these forces against Swedish, Muscovite and Cossack armies, in the long term, the attempt to create a permanent military establishment more suited to defend the Commonwealth withered before it could reach maturity. That it did so was partly due to the destruction wrought by warfare after 1648, which made it impossible to raise enough money. More important were political factors: the uneasy division of power between the king and the diet stimulated endless disputes over control of the armed forces, while the decentralized system of assessing and collection of taxation, essentially in the hands of the sejmiki, proved incapable of supporting the regular army which was more expensive than the previously ad hoc formations.

The 1660s thus saw a vital watershed in the Commonwealth’s military development. The collapse of the royal plans for political reform and the abdication of Jan Kazimierz in 1668 opened the way to political anarchy with the diet paralyzed by the increasingly frequent use of the liberum veto, which ensured that it was virtually impossible to raise the taxes necessary to support a permanent military establishment. The attitudes toward the military which underpinned this political anarchy, however, had already been in place in the 1660s, when the king’s willingness to use force to back his political plans confirmed all the suspicions about royal intentions dating back to the reign of Zygmunt III (1587–1632), if not before. The greatest danger to Polish liberties, it seemed, was the Polish monarchy and its alleged desire to introduce absolutum dominium by force of arms; it was therefore vital to prevent it building up the sort of military power-base which Jan Kazimierz had attempted to construct. The defeat of his reform plans in the civil war of 1665–1667 doomed all subsequent attempts to create a large standing army in the Commonwealth and paved the way to first Russian hegemony, and then partition.

Our understanding of the role of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Rzeczpospolita has also been transformed by recent research. I would like to emphasize, in particular, the importance of Robert Frost’s magisterial The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1385–1569 published in 2015. As he clearly shows, the various documents of the union between Poland and Lithuania drawn up between 1385 and 1569 distinguish carefully between the Corona Regni Poloniae, embodying the Community of the Realm or—as it was increasingly termed—the Rzeczpospolita, and the Regnum, or the state (państwo). Thus at Krewo in 1385 it was very clearly stated that the agreement with Jagiełło was made on behalf of the Corona Regni, not the Regnum, while in Horodło, the terms were very carefully distinguished. Moreover, the successful agreement finally thrashed out in Lublin in 1569 distinguishes clearly between state and republic. When the union was being established, the Polish community of the realm had insisted that the Grand Duchy had been incorporated into the kingdom of Poland. The Lithuanians opposed this interpretation strongly, demanding that the union was one in which two states were united as equals; the dispute was only resolved when the Poles effectively accepted the Lithuanian point of view. According to the Lublin text,

the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania already form one indivisible and uniform body and are not distinct, but compos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: History- Legacy-Memory
• Part I The Beginnings of Poland-Lithuania
• Part II The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
• Part III Legacy and Memory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
• Index