The greatest areas of economic activity were the landowning szlachta’s home and export sales, which were exempt from tax—ation; the large Jewish community, which assessed, collected and paid its own taxes without outside supervision, with predictable results; and the greatest financial centre of the Commonwealth, the city of Gdańsk, which benefited from extensive immunities. In short, they were hardly taxed at all.
The main body of Treasury revenue was from a plethora of taxes inherited from medieval times which were unproductive and complicated to collect. The crown’s income from royal lands and starosties was susceptible to venality on the part of administrators and beneficiaries. All special taxes or surcharges, as well as the rates at which existing taxes were assessed, had to be voted on a oneoff basis by the national Sejm. The result was that in the first half of the century the Commonwealth’s revenue was only slightly higher than that of Bavaria, and about one-tenth that of France. Any suggestion of reform, however, raised hackles throughout the political nation, and not only because it did not wish to be taxed.
By the 1650s almost everywhere in Europe the state, in the form of the court or of administrative institutions, was concentrating power, taking it over from regional institutions and elites, which were transformed in consequence into court or service nobility. In Brandenburg, in Prussia, in Denmark and in Sweden, assemblies and noble estates which had kept a check on the power of the state had gradually been forced to cede their rights to increasingly absolutist central authority. The Polish political nation had always been suspicious of the state and of any concentration of power, and it had been an article of faith for it to keep its own weak.
Any attempt by the crown to reinforce its authority and increase the power of the state would therefore lead to direct confrontation with the szlachta. And the chances of success were slight. There was no administrative body in the Commonwealth able to guarantee continuity and provide a new king with organs of power, and even the army had slipped away from under the crown’s control as the hetmans treated it more and more as their private domain. Since the reigning monarch was only a temporary incumbent, loyalty to the crown did not necessarily mean loyalty to the king. Each one had to build up his following and his own power base. The convention of life tenure, which had crept into practice at the end of the sixteenth century, meant that an incoming monarch might have to wait for years before he could place men he trusted in important posts. As well as representing his only method of exerting control, the king’s right of appointment was his main source of influence. With the rise of the oligarchy of magnates, however, it grew increasingly difficult for him to exercise this freely. Jan Kazimierz found it impossible to promote his ablest soldier, Stefan Czarniecki, to the rank of Field-Hetman when this fell vacant, because it was coveted by the powerful Jerzy Lubomirski.
To pass legislation, the king needed the support of his ministers and other senators who made up the royal council, the
The Sejm was not only the sole legislative organ and the supreme court. It had taken over many of the prerogatives normally vested in the crown, such as the right to declare war, sign peace and contract alliances. It also audited the accounts of the treasurers and held the king and his ministers to account in almost every area. Yet it was, on its own, incapable of executive action, and therefore confined itself to a largely negative role. This malfunction in the constitution, often described as a disease,
A major rethink of the constitution was hardly likely without a strong community of interest and a sense of purpose on the part of the entire political nation, the szlachta. And by the midseventeenth century there was little hope of achieving either.