The literature of other countries was avidly read in Poland, and while Polish poetry may not have been read widely in other countries, the political and religious works penetrated far and wide. Modrzewski’s
Born at Toruń in 1473, the son of a merchant, Kopernik enrolled at the Jagiellon University in 1491 to study astronomy, and later joined the priesthood, which enabled him to pursue studies at the universities of Bologna, Ferrara and Padua. After returning home, he became administrator of the bishopric of Warmia, but also worked as a lawyer, doctor, architect and even soldier, commanding a fortress in the last clash with the Teutonic Order in 1520. In 1543, the year of his death, he published
Erasmus was prompted to ‘congratulate the Polish nation…which…can now compete with the foremost and most cultivated in the world’. But this could very well serve as an epitaph, for Polish participation in the cultural life of Europe had reached a peak. A crucial element was language. For centuries the native tongue had been supplemented by Latin, which enjoyed the twin benefit of being a developed instrument of communication and an international medium without which the Poles would have been utterly isolated. As the Scots traveller Fynes Moryson noted in 1593, ‘There is not a ragged boy, nor a smith that shooes your hose, but he can speake Latten readily.’ During the sixteenth century the first of these benefits dwindled as Polish rapidly evolved into a lucid, harmonious language as efficient as Latin for the expression of ideas. The second benefit of Latin also began to wane, as a general drift throughout Europe towards the vernacular tended to restrict its international usefulness. From 1543 the decisions of the Sejm were published in Polish not Latin, and the same went for legal documents. As Polish became the language of state and of literature, Polish thought became increasingly inaccessible to western Europe.
In a poem he wrote to Erasmus, Bishop Krzycki assured him that the Poles were not only reading all his works, but also passing them on ‘across the Don’. The Russian world, which never had Latin, was heavily dependent on Poland for access to classical and contemporary European literature. It was from Kochanowski’s translations of Tasso, for example, that the first Russian ones were made. The Commonwealth was also the printing house of eastern Europe. The first book, a Bible, to be printed in Belarusian was published in Wilno in 1517. More surprisingly, the first printed work in Romanian was published in Kraków, from which also came quantities of books in Hungarian. By the end of the century the printers of Wilno, Kraków and Lublin were making small fortunes from supplying eastern European markets. The Polish presses also printed the Hebrew religious texts used throughout the European Diaspora.
The Polish szlachta continued to learn Latin, but German, which had been a crucial link with the outside world until the end of the Middle Ages, gradually dwindled. Partly as a result of the Reformation, Germany’s importance as a source of culture declined for Poland. France and Spain were in the grip of the Counter-Reformation and increasingly absolutist government, which made them unattractive to the Poles. Direct links had been forged with Italy, and Poland itself had acquired most of the amenities for which it had in the past been dependent on others. If the fifteenthcentury Pole had seen himself as living on the edge of a flat earth whose centre was somewhere far away to the west, his counterpart in the late sixteenth saw Poland not as peripheral to Europe, but as central to its own world.