The affair had a highly detrimental effect on the political system of the Commonwealth. The szlachta had tried and failed to invoke its rights according to the constitution, which revealed how academic these rights really were. The King had been defied with armed rebellion, and as it was not ruthlessly crushed it would probably happen again. The episode highlighted a number of faults in the constitution which should have been corrected in the natural process of evolution. But the repeated interregna and rapid succession of kings had impeded the process. By the time it might have been resumed King Zygmunt was on the throne, and he had his own ideas. Opposition to these could be voiced in the Sejm, but not converted into political action. Power had been dispersed so successfully that neither the King, nor the Senate, and least of all the lower chamber of the Sejm, could act without the full support of at least one of the other two.
The King was the catalyst which made the parliamentary process function, but Zygmunt failed to understand the workings of the system, and he had fallen into the trap of thinking that the crown had no constitutional power. It did not require a Pole to see how wrong he was. As the Italian Giovanni Botero observed in 1592, ‘The King has as much power as he is allowed by his own skill and intelligence.’ Zygmunt possessed neither, and the result was a succession of fruitless and damaging collisions.
The source of the King’s power was the right to appoint the senior officers of the Commonwealth, and the bishops, palatines and castellans who made up the Senate. His influence was based on the right to grant the lucrative and prestigious starosties. He was free to appoint whomever he wished, and was under no obligation to favour the rich or powerful. Under the last two Jagiellons most of the senior officers, senators and bishops were the King’s men, many of them groomed in the royal chancellery, with the result that the crown had influence and that talent and ambition were drawn towards the royal court as an anteroom to power.
It was inevitable that elected monarchs would be driven by a sense of insecurity to seek the support of influential grandees. But while this might prove expedient in the short term, it merely compounded the King’s weakness, by building up the position of the grandees, which was growing as never before.
Between 1550 and 1650 the Firlej, Tarnowski, Tenczyński and other great houses of the Jagiellon era disappeared or declined into obscurity, making way for an oligarchy which was to dominate the life of the Commonwealth over the next three centuries—families such as the Potocki, which would produce no fewer than thirtyfive senators, three Hetmans and one Field-Hetman in less than two hundred years. Stanisław Lubomirski provides a good example of this new breed. He owned ninety-one villages, parts of sixteen others, and one town. He also held eighteen villages and two towns on lease from the crown, and a valuable starosty. With his two great castles of Łańcut and Wiśnicz, his Palatinate of Kraków, and his two Imperial titles, the Prince-Palatine no longer needed the King.
Any attempt by the crown to curb a magnate such as him would be sure to provoke widespread opposition, even from the poorest szlachta, who saw it as an attack on personal liberty. There was also the matter of the magnates’ very real physical power. Most of them had numerous retinues, and some maintained regular regiments of foreign mercenaries as well as bodyguards of landless szlachta and a pool of supporters and clients. When a quarrel between the Koniecpolski and Wiśniowiecki families led to armed confrontation, the combined strength of the two bodies facing each other came to over 10,000 men.