So far, the war had been a private affair. In 1609, however, Tsar Vasily Shuisky made a defensive alliance with King Charles of Sweden, who proceeded to invade Livonia. The Sejm sent Chodkiewicz with an army to oust him, but would not sanction intervention in Muscovy. Ignoring it, King Zygmunt asked for and received full crusading status from Pope Paul V (anyone taking part got full remission of sins, and anyone killed went straight to Heaven), and marched out against the Muscovite schismatics at the head of his own army. He laid siege to Smolensk and soon got bogged down. The pseudo-Dmitry was besieging Moscow with an army made up of Polish adventurers, Cossacks and Russian boyars. With the intervention of Zygmunt III, most of the Poles left him in order to join their king, with the result that the impostor had to fall back to Kaluga and, in effect, drop out of a rapidly changing picture.
Early in 1610 the Tsar’s brother Dmitry Shuisky set off to relieve Smolensk. Hetman żółkiewski made a forced march and surprised Shuisky’s army at Klushino. He won a resounding victory and pursued the fleeing remnants to Moscow, where the boyars deposed their Tsar and elected in his place Władysław, the eldest son of King Zygmunt. But such a diplomatic solution did not fit in with Zygmunt III’s plan of bringing the Catholic faith to Moscow on the tip of his sword. He continued to besiege Smolensk, the boyars waited for the arrival of Władysław, and the small Polish garrison in the Kremlin lived on borrowed time. Since they had not been paid for months, the soldiers offered the Muscovite crown jewels for sale, touting them round Europe by letter. As there were no takers, they divided them up amongst themselves.
On 13 June 1611 Smolensk surrendered to Zygmunt. He felt strong and refused to negotiate with the boyars, adamantly insisting that the whole of Muscovy must go over to Catholicism before he would consider allowing Władysław to become Tsar. There were several risings against the Polish garrison in Moscow, and in November 1612 the Poles capitulated and left the Kremlin
In February 1613 the boyars elected a new Tsar, Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov, son of the Metropolitan Bishop of Rostov, an associate of the pseudo-Dmitry. As the new Tsar was crowned (with a coronet found in the baggage of a slaughtered Polish soldier), the situation remained confused. His father was a prisoner in Poland. Maryna Mniszech and her three-year-old son were entrenched in southern Russia, supported by the Don Cossacks, and in 1618 Władysław set off at the head of an army to claim his throne, having at last gained the approval of his father. He failed to take Moscow, and in 1619 a peace was signed which returned Smolensk and other areas to Poland, and permitted Władysław to style himself ‘Tsar elect of Muscovy’.
The matter was not allowed to rest there. Taking advantage of the death of Zygmunt III in 1632, the Muscovites invaded and laid siege to Smolensk, but in September 1633 Władysław relieved the city and defeated them. In the following year peace was signed, and one of the principal Muscovite demands was that the document of Władysław’s election by the boyars in 1610 be handed back to them. Since the document could not be found in the archives, Władysław agreed to a solemn church ceremony in Warsaw, during which he abdicated all his titles and pretensions to the Muscovite throne before a delegation of boyars.
Symbols were immensely important, and they could be very telling. As King Zygmunt III lay dying only two years previously, after the longest reign in Poland’s history, he had called his son to his bedside. With the last strength of his trembling arm he placed on Władysław’s brow the royal crown of Sweden. He himself lay in state wearing the crown of Muscovy. The only crown which was his to wear, the crown of Poland, had hardly figured in his scheme of things.
EIGHT
When the tower of Kraków’s Town Hall had been rebuilt in 1556 a copy of Erasmus’ New Testament was immured in the brickwork. When the same tower was repaired in 1611 the book was replaced by a Catholic New Testament, along with a picture and a relic of the first Polish Jesuit to be canonised, St Stanisław Kostka. The symbols could hardly have been more apt. One vision of life was replaced by another, the spirit of enquiry by one of piety, humanist principles by post-Tridentine conformism, and if Erasmus had been the beacon for all thinking Poles in the 1550s, the Jesuits were the mentors of their grandchildren.