Ossoliński was a great patron, but he lacked the civic vision of his predecessors, and created little more than monuments to himself. In 1635 he built a grand residence at Ossolin, in 1643 the magnificent church of St George at Klimontów, and then a fine Palladian palace in Warsaw. It was his elder brother Krzysztof who encapsulated the spirit that guided them both in one of the greatest pieces of self-advertisement by any Polish family—the astonishing castle of KrzyŻtopór. Built on a spectacular ground plan consisting of a number of courtyards of different sizes radiating from a central
Ossoliński’s embassy to Rome in 1633 was an excuse to show off. He pawned and mortgaged in order to cover his servants in gold and to caparison his horses and camels in pearls for the occasion. He accepted the title of duke from the Pope, and that of prince from the Emperor in 1634, titles which only caused the bearer embarrassment at home—the cornerstone of the constitution was the absolute equality of the szlachta, and no titles were recognised (with the exception of those accorded at the Union of Lublin to Lithuanian and Ukrainian families of Jagiellon, Rurik or other dynastic descent, such as the Czartoryski, Sanguszko, Zbaraski, Zasławski and others).
Ossoliński and his peers stopped short of enforcing religious conformism. But the original text of the Act of the Confederation of Warsaw, in which the inhabitants of the Commonwealth pledged, as equals, to respect each other’s religious beliefs and practices, was amended, to ‘graciously permit’ others to practise a different faith. The Catholic faith was, in Ossoliński’s words, ‘mistress in her own house’, while the Protestants were no more than tolerated guests. And while there was no objection to ethnic minorities practising different rites or the Livonian szlachta remaining Protestant, Poles who were Protestants began to be viewed as eccentric, even suspicious. A psychological connection had been made between Catholicism and patriotism, a patriotism made increasingly vital by the succession of wars in the first half of the century. Since these were fought against Protestant Swedes and Orthodox Russians, Jesuit and other writers began to picture the Poles as defenders of Catholicism. When the Turks and Tatars took over as the principal enemy in the following decades, it was a short step to turn the Poles into the defenders of Christendom. A powerful myth grew up of Poland as the predestined bulwark of Christen—dom, the
But while it affected this embattled sense of destiny, Polish society nevertheless remained highly cosmopolitan. Translations of French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish and Persian works were published with little delay, and plays by Shakespeare were performed in Poland as early as 1609. Zygmunt III kept an Italian
The Jesuits themselves were responsible for much artistic patronage, including some of the best building and painting of the period. They also contributed the greatest lyric poet of the Polish Baroque, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595-1640). Most of his fellow poets devoted themselves to the subject of war, giving rise to a tradition of heroic and pathetic verse, a latterday