Europe: A History (113 page)

The
Rzeczpospolita
—‘Republic’ or ‘Commonwealth’—which came into being at the Union of Lublin (1569) resulted partly from the lack of a royal heir and partly from the threat of Muscovite expansion. It was an early form of
Ausgleich
between Polish and Lithuanian interests. The
Korona
or Kingdom of Poland
accepted the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as an equal partner, though it took over the vast palatinates of Ukraine in compensation. The Grand Duchy retained its own laws, its own administration, and its own army. The dual state was to be governed by a common elective monarchy and by a common
Sejm
or Diet. The ruling
szlachta
who designed this system of noble democracy reserved a dominant role. Through their regional assemblies or
sejmiki
(dietines), which controlled the central Diet, they ran taxation and military affairs. Through the
Pacta Conventa
or ‘agreed terms’ which they attached to the Coronation Oath, they could hire their kings like managers on contract. Through their legal right of resistance embodied in armed leagues or confederations, they could defend their position against all royal machinations. Through the principle of unanimity, which governed all their deliberations, they ensured that no king or faction could override the common interest. This was not the system of general anarchy which prevailed in the eighteenth century. Whatever its faults, it was a bold experiment in democracy that, in the era of absolutism and religious strife, offered a refreshing alternative. The reputation of the
Rzeczpospolita
among fellow-democrats should not depend on the jaundiced propaganda of its later assassins.

In the eighty years which separated the Union of Lublin from the general crisis of 1648, the
Rzeczpospolita
fared better than its neighbours. Baltic trade brought unaccustomed wealth to many noblemen. The cities, especially Danzig, prospered mightily under their royal charters. The Counter-Reformation, though vigorously pursued, did not cause open strife. The nobles, though they brought government to a halt during the great
rokosz
or ‘legal rebellion’ of 1606–9, did not usually push the paralysing practices of a later age to extremes. They usually elected kings who were resistant to the bishops and to the ultramontane, pro-Habsburg faction. Foreign wars were fought either on the periphery or on foreign territory.

The monarchy, though run by kings of varying talent, retained its general authority. Admittedly, the first elected king, Henry Valois (r. 1574–5) was an unmitigated disaster; but he fled after four months, to inflict his person on his native France, and was not mourned. The next, the vigorous Transylvanian Stefan Batory (r. 1576–86), reasserted respect and drove the complicated machinery of the state into effective action. His successful war against Ivan the Terrible in 1578–82 brought possession of Livonia. The third king, the Swede Sigismund Vasa (r. 1587–1632), suffered many vicissitudes, but outlived both the
rokosz
and Poland’s unsettling intervention in Muscovy in 1610–19. His two sons, Władysław IV (r. 1632–48), the sometime Tsar, and John Casimir (r. 1648–68), the sometime Cardinal, experienced respectively calm and chaos.

The chain reaction of calamities which marked John Casimir’s reign erupted from an almost cloudless sky. In 1648–54 the rebellion of the Dnieper Cossacks under Bogdan Chmielnicki (Khmelnytsky), which brought a murderous army of Cossacks and Tartars right up to the Vistula, left a swathe of butchered Catholics and Jews across Ukraine. It linked peasant fury to the very real political, social, and religious grievances of the eastern provinces. It was virtually suppressed by the time a despairing Chmielnicki turned to the Tsar for aid. The Muscovite
invasion of 1654–67, which brought death and destruction both to Lithuania and to Ukraine, aroused the strategic anxieties of the Swedes. The double Swedish invasion of 1655–60, which was known in Poland as
Potop
or ‘the Deluge’, overran both the Kingdom and the Grand Duchy and drove the King into exile and the magnates into treason. Only the monastery of Jasna Góra at Częstochowa, whose Black Madonna deflected Swedish cannon-balls with miraculous ease, was able to resist. The accompanying invasions of the Transylvanians and the Brandenburgers pushed the country close to total collapse. But Poland recovered with marvellous resilience. The Muscovites were halted; the Swedes were rounded up; the Prussians were bought off. In 1658 Hetman Czamecki could even afford to go campaigning against Sweden in Jutland. The Treaty of Oliva (1660), which settled the demands of the Republic’s western neighbours, ended the Vasa feud, confirmed the independence of Ducal Prussia, and promised better times.

Thereafter, the Republic seemed to have been given space to tackle its outstanding problems. In the annual campaigns of the 1660s, the Polish cavalry steadily pushed the Muscovites back towards Russia. Then, with general recovery already in view, the King’s programme of constitutional reform aroused a disproportionate and violent reaction from the noble democrats. In 1665–7 the fratricidal strife of Hetman Lubomirski’s rebellion put an end to progress on all fronts. It produced political stalemate between the King and his opponents. At the same time it pushed the Republic into the fateful Truce of Andrusovo (1667), which handed Kiev and left-bank Ukraine to the Russians, in theory for twenty years, in practice forever. The King abdicated and retired to France, where he was buried in the church of St Germain-des-Prés. The debased coinage of his reign bore his initials, ICR: Iohannes Casimirus Rex. These were taken to stand for
Initium Calamitatum Reipublicae
, the Beginning of the Republic’s Catastrophes.

The beginnings of Poland’s distress coincided with the stirrings of power in two of Poland’s neighbours—Prussia and Muscovy.

Prussia
, which in the early sixteenth century still housed the remains of the Teutonic State, had been wasting away for decades, and stood in desperate need of radical renovation. It had lost its mission for converting the pagans through the conversion of Lithuania, its military supremacy through the defeat at Grunwald (1410), and its commercial prominence through Poland’s acquisition of Elbing, Thorn, and Danzig (1466). Its very existence was threatened by the onset of the German Reformation, and it was hurriedly transformed by its last Grand Master, Albrecht von Hohenzollern, into a secular fief of the Kingdom of Poland. A convert to Lutheranism, he dismissed the Teutonic Order, and in 1525 paid homage for his new duchy in the city square of Cracow. From the capital of Königsberg, he laid the strategy which would eventually link his possessions with those of his relatives in Brandenburg. By purchasing the legal reversion of his duchy, he ensured that the failure of his own heirs would automatically give possession to the Hohenzollerns of Berlin. The policy came to fruition in 1618: after that, one and the same Hohenzollern ruler enjoyed the twin titles of Elector of
Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, and the state of Brandenburg-Prussia was born (see Appendix III, p. 1276).

Frederick-William (r. 1640–88), the Great Elector, who spoke Polish and harboured pretensions of being ‘the first prince of Poland’, paid homage for his duchy in 1641. Fifteen years later his troops occupied Warsaw, capital of his liege, at the height of the Swedish Deluge. The Prussian army had made its début. All that was needed thereafter was a double diplomatic double-cross which wrested recognition of Prussia’s sovereign status first from the Swedes and then from the Poles. It gained formal recognition at Oliva. The Prussian spirit was on the march.

Muscovy
, whose strategy of grandeur was launched by Ivan III, held to its course with marvellous tenacity. Ivan IV (r. 1533–84), known as Grozny or ‘the Terrible’, finalized the patrimonial state which his predecessors had prepared. ‘All the people consider themselves to be
kholops,’
wrote one of the earliest Western travellers, ‘that is, slaves of their Prince.’
⁵³
By establishing the
oprichnina
—the forerunner of all subsequent Russian security agencies—he was able to set aside whole provinces for his private will and domain, and to unleash a reign of unrestrained terror. By razing Novgorod, and slaughtering almost its entire population in a blood-bath that proceeded for weeks, he affirmed Moscow’s supremacy in Russia. By destroying the power of ancient boyar clans and their
zemskii Sobor
or Council he created a thoroughly subservient, hierarchical society. By appointing the first Patriarch of Moscow he completed the separate and dependent nature of the Russian Orthodox Church, henceforth severed from all outside influences. By annexing the khanate of Kazan, where the great Orthodox cathedral of the Annunciation (1562) was raised as a monument to a Christian victory in a Muslim land, he gave notice of unrestrained imperial ambitions. Through the
razryiad
or ‘service list’ and the
pomestnyi prikaz
, the ‘bureau of placements’, he kept track of all state servants and their appointments: the forerunner of the
nomenklatura
. After such comprehensive socio-political transplants and amputations, it is not surprising that the patient fell sick.

The
Smutnoe Vremya
or ‘Time of Troubles’ filled the years between the death of Ivan’s son Feodor in 1598, and the accession of the Romanovs fifteen years later. With central authority in shreds, the warring boyar factions raised five ill-starred Tsars in succession; there were peasant revolts and Cossack raids; and the country was invaded by Swedes, Poles, and Tartars. Feodor’s chief minister, Boris Godunov (r. 1598–1605), a Tartar boyar, was brought down amidst accusations of killing the rightful heir. The False Dmitri I (r. 1605–6), an impostor, claimed to be Ivan’s murdered son. Having gained the support of a Polish magnate, Jerzy Mniszek, and of Mniszek’s Jesuit friends, he married Mniszek’s daughter Marina, and marched on Moscow. His brief, reforming reign came to an explosive end when he was fired from a cannon in Red Square by the followers of the next contestant, Basil Shuiskiy (r. 1605–11). Shuiskiy was in turn overthrown by another impostor, the False Dmitri II, the ‘Thief of Tushino’, who somehow managed to persuade Marina that he was her resurrected husband. Shuiskiy died in Polish
captivity. He was succeeded by the Polish Crown Prince, Władysław Vasa, whose candidature was being pressed by yet another of the boyar factions.

Though many Polish nobles, like Mniszek, had long been privately involved in the Troubles, the official policy of the
Rzeczpospolita
was to stand aloof. The King had declined to back Mniszek’s plan—despite Russian rumours to the contrary; and the Diet had warned the King against committing any money or forces beyond the limited objective of recapturing Smolensk. Hence, when the Polish army advanced on Smolensk in 1610, alongside the Swedes already in Novgorod, it had no orders to go further. However, as their commander later explained to an angry Sejm, the Poles pressed on despite instructions. With the Russian army defeated at Klushino and the road to Moscow undefended, they occupied the Kremlin unopposed. A garrison remained for a year until forced to surrender. It set Moscow ablaze before being murdered by a patriotic Russian populace rallying to Minin the butcher, Pozharskiy the prince, and Michael Romanov (r. 1613–45), the new Tsar. The Russians had found their dynasty, and their national identity. It was a ready-made subject for opera.
[SUSANIN]

Moscow’s recovery was slow but methodical. The Poles were seen off by 1619; Prince Włtdysław resigned his claim; Smolensk was recovered (1654). Under Alexei Mikhailovitch (r. 1645–76), fundamental reforms caused internal turmoil that was only partly offset by territorial acquisitions. A reform of the law, which led to the
Ulozhenie
or Legal Code of 1649 containing over 1,000 articles, perpetuated and systematized serfdom, creating conditions that underlay the vast peasant rising of Sten’ka Razin. The Church reforms of Patriarch Nikon (1605–81), who aimed both to modernize the rite and to moderate state control, provoked both the defection of the Old Believers and the ire of the Tsar. Military reforms on Western lines preceded the none too successful campaigns against Poland. In this light, the great territorial gains of the Truce of Andrusovo (1667) came as an unexpected bonus (see Appendix III, p. 1277).

Yet the acquisition of Ukraine from Poland cannot be overestimated. It gave Muscovy the economic resources and the geopolitical stance to become a great power. What is more, it came in the same generation that pushed the exploration and conquest of Siberia to the Pacific. The formula Muscovy + Ukraine = Russia does not feature in the Russians’ own version of their history; but it is fundamental. In which case the true founder of the Russian Empire was Alexei Mikhailovitch, not his more celebrated son Peter.
[TEREM]

The lengthy contest between Russia, Poland, and Sweden was deciding the fate of Eastern Europe. In retrospect, one can see that the Truce of Andrusovo of 1667 tipped the balance of power. Poland-Lithuania was being imperceptibly replaced by Russia as the dominant state of the region. Poland and Russia, however, had one thing in common. Neither allowed itself to be dragged into the Thirty Years War.

The Ottoman Empire
, the southern neighbour of Poland and Russia, reached its apogee at the same time as the Habsburgs. From the Muslim perspective, the key
development lay in the Ottomans’ decision to lead the main Sunni branch of Islam against the Shi‘ites. When Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–20) moved against Persia, he ended the sixty-year pause which followed the Fall of Constantinople. Thereafter, the conquest of the former caliphates of Damascus, Cairo, and Baghdad (1534) took place in succession. Suleiman I ‘the Magnificent’ (r. 1520–66), who added the Prophet’s tomb in Mecca to the realm, had good reason to style himself
Padishah-i-Islam
, ‘Emperor of Islam’. Many monuments, including the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, attest to the reality of that magnificence.