This project came to nothing. At the end of 1659 Wyhowski was toppled by Chmielnicki’s son, who emulated his father by swearing allegiance to both the King of Poland and the Tsar of Muscovy at the same time. Muscovite forces invaded in support of the Cossacks, but both they and the Cossacks were defeated by
Polish armies at Cudnów and Polonka in 1660. Having pacified Ukraine, Jan Kazimierz moved against Muscovy, but Poland was exhausted, and as Ottoman armies hovered in the south he made peace.
There would be no room in this for Ukrainian aspirations. Chmielnicki had been so successful in demonstrating to everyone the strategic importance of Ukraine that neither the Commonwealth nor Muscovy could countenance its existence as an autonomous province, liable at any moment to subversion by the other side. By the Treaty of Andruszowo in 1667, they divided it between themselves along the Dnieper.
TEN
Morbus Comitialis
Polish diplomatic missions were notorious throughout seventeenthcentury Europe for their splendour. The ambassadors would enter the foreign capital preceded by regiments of private troops and servants decked out in lavish liveries, surrounded by attendants on prancing horses saddled and tacked with gold-embroidered velvet adorned with semi-precious stones, and followed by more detachments of often exotic household troops. When he entered Istanbul in 1622, Prince Krzysztof Zbaraski was accompanied by two regiments of Hungarian infantry and followed by page boys in Circassian dress, bodyguards in Roumelian costume, a troop of Cossacks and forty mounted musketeers.
In 1633 Rome was treated to the spectacle of Jerzy Ossoliński’s embassy, consisting of some three hundred riders and ten camels decked out in feathers, gold and pearls. When Krzysztof Opaliński’s cavalcade entered Paris in 1645 to collect Władysław IV’s bride, Louise Marie de Gonzague, his horses were intentionally loosely shod, so that their solid gold horseshoes scattered the cobbles of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine as a gesture to the populace of the city. Both camels and gold horseshoes became
Both as a measure of Poland’s wealth and as a symbol of its diplomatic ascendancy, these displays were highly misleading. They obscured the fact that the Commonwealth had no chancellery which could formulate a foreign policy, and gave the impression that Poland was a country of immense wealth, which was far from being the case.
While the sixteenth century saw the beginnings of capitalism take root in the West, most of Central Europe had drifted into what might best be described as industrial agriculture. Poland exported foodstuffs, cattle, wax, hemp, timber, flax, charcoal, pitch, iron and other raw materials, and only a few low-quality finished goods, such as beer, rope and cloth. It imported finished products of every description and a quantity of colonial goods. It was the sort of trading pattern that places Third World countries at the mercy of industrialised nations. The carriage of goods was predominantly in foreign hands, which meant that a large part of the profit was made outside the country. Of the ships leaving Gdańsk with Polish exports in 1585, for instance, 52 per cent were Dutch, 24 per cent Friesian, and 12 per cent English. The real marketplace for Polish grain was not Gdańsk but Amsterdam, whence it was re-exported to Spain and other countries.
While timber and other ships’ stores remained in high demand, particularly from the Dutch, who had no source of their own, and the English and Spanish, who had depleted their forests, the grain trade began to decline in importance as prices of grain on western European markets fell steadily; smaller countries such as England and the Netherlands learnt to grow more intensively and to supplement their diet with rice and eventually the potato.