The East had never had much to offer except for Tatar raids and Muscovite maraudings, but in the course of the sixteenth century a new vista came into view beyond these nuisances. Persian and Ottoman culture began to fascinate Polish society. Apart from owning Turkish artefacts, Stanisław Lubomirski, Palatine of Kraków, also kept three eminent orientalists in his permanent entourage. Tomasz Zamoyski, son of the Chancellor and Hetman, was learning four languages at the age of eight: Latin, Greek, Turkish and Polish. By the time he had completed his early studies, he was fluent in not only Turkish, but also Tatar and Arabic. The Polish Commonwealth was turning into a hybrid of East and West, increasingly exotic but also baffling to western Europeans.
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There was nothing oriental about the man the Poles chose as their new king in 1573. Nor was he the most likely candidate for the throne of the multi-denominational Commonwealth. A few months before the Confederation of Warsaw passed its act on religious freedom, Henri de Valois, younger brother of Charles IX of France, took an enthusiastic part in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestants.
The first election went remarkably smoothly. At the news of Zygmunt Augustus’s death a Convocation Sejm gathered to thrash out the details. The candidates were Ernest of Habsburg, Henri de Valois, Ivan IV of Muscovy, and the two outsiders John III of Sweden and Stephen Bathory of Transylvania. A key figure was the late king’s sister, Anna, the last surviving member of the Jagiellon dynasty. Many took it as read that the successful candidate would marry her, thereby cementing his position on the throne and emulating the precedent set by Jagiełło himself, an assumption which Anna did much to further. Others, including the majority of the Senate, suspected her ambition and saw her as an obstacle to establishing a new dynasty. Apart from being no beauty, Anna was well over fifty years old.
This did not stand in the way of the cunning agent of Henri de Valois, Jean de Monluc, Bishop of Valence, who laid siege to her affections on behalf of his master, assuring her that the Prince, twenty-eight years her junior, was consumed with passion for her.
Ivan IV’s candidature had been suggested on the grounds that the rising power of Muscovy might best be rendered harmless in the same way as that of Lithuania had. If Poland could tame Jagiełło, then perhaps the Commonwealth could do the same with the Tsar. But Ivan the Terrible was not an alluring prospect, and even the most sanguine supporters of the idea had to admit that it was unrealistic.
Some 40,000 szlachta turned up at Warsaw to vote, accom panied by as many servants and attendants, all armed to the teeth. To the astonishment of the foreign observers present, no shot was fired or steel bloodied in spite of the contentious issues involved. Henri de Valois was elected by an overwhelming majority, and a delegation was despatched to Paris.
Henri received the news as he was laying siege to the Protestants of La Rochelle, and hurried back to Paris to meet the delegation of eleven dignitaries and 150 szlachta who arrived from Warsaw on 19 August 1573. They were not there in such force just to impress the Parisians, which they did with their exotic clothes, their jewellery and their painted horses. Henri de Valois had to be fully acquainted with the conditions of his employment and obliged to accept them before he placed a foot on Polish soil. At a ceremony in Notre Dame on 10 September attended by the entire French court, he swore to observe the
The ceremony went smoothly until he came to the article in the