Poland полностью

While they still paid lip service to the principle of equality by addressing each other as ‘brother’, the gap between the magnates and the poorest two-thirds of the szlachata, the bene nati sed non possessionati, had grown immense. The szlachta was also growing increasingly mongrelised. Legislation aimed at preventing the upward mobility of other classes was almost impossible to enforce, and plebeians continued to marry or assimilate into the szlachta with little difficulty. The king ennobled Polish and foreign soldiers, particularly Scots and Frenchmen. Any Jew who converted to Catholicism was automatically ennobled. The attendant differences of outlook were compounded by the sheer size of the Commonwealth. The fear of Tatar raids felt by someone who lived east of Lwów seemed overstated to an inhabitant of Wielkopolska; the Livonian’s anxiety about Muscovite intentions was of little concern to a landowner from Mazovia; and a nobleman from Podolia felt more out of place in Gdańsk than he would in Istanbul. Increasingly, regional political viewpoints held by factions in the Sejm obstructed the passage of legislation of national benefit.

The political culture of the electorate and its deputies was not what it had been, and their level of education had declined considerably. The Jesuit colleges now confined themselves to inculcating into their pupils a religious mindset and enough Latin and Rhetoric to enable them to drone on for hours at political meetings. Foreign travel, the panacea of sixteenth-century Poles, became less common and its effects more dubious. Those who had gone abroad in the 1550s had returned with an education and a collection of books. Those who travelled in the 1650s were more likely to bring back pictures and venereal disease. Gradually, the whole exercise came to be seen as pointless and pernicious, while foreigners and their ways were increasingly viewed as suspect. Even Polish cities, being full of imported manners, were widely regarded as dens of wickedness and depravity—as well as being the preserve of moneyed plebeians.

The contrast between the purity of country life and the wickedness of the court and the city is a recurring theme in contemporary European thought and literature. In Poland the contrast was between the alleged perfection of the szlachta’s way of life in the country and any other. While local sejmiks continued to be well and vociferously attended, royal elections, which entailed a journey to Warsaw, drew fewer and fewer voters as time went by—no more than 3,500 in 1648 and 5,000 in 1674.

The parliamentary process suffered as a result of all these factors, which made it easy to manipulate by a handful of magnates. The Lithuanian deputies in particular were often little more than placemen elected by docile sejmiks in the presence of the local magnate’s armed gangs. The Lithuanian magnates were so powerful that they were indulged by successive kings, with the result that by the middle of the seventeenth century their position was un—assailable. It then became virtually impossible to deny a small group of families all the offices they wanted. The pattern of increasing oligarchy developing in Poland was only a pale reflection of the situation in Lithuania. In Poland, certain families felt one of the offices to be their preserve, but they did not simultaneously covet the others. The Lubomirski family obtained the staff of Marshal four times and the baton of Hetman once. The Zamoyski managed three Chancellors and one Hetman, the Leszczyński three Chancellors, the Potocki four Hetmans. In Lithuania, the magnates had the whole country sewn up. Between 1500 and 1795 the Radziwiłł held the Marshalcy five times, the Chancellorship eight times, the baton of Hetman six times, the Palatinate of Wilno twelve times, and the second most important Palatinate in Lithuania, Troki, six times. Such people felt little compunction to respect the niceties of the Polish constitution, and all too often used it for their own ends.