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Their headquarters, located in Venice after the fall of Acre so as to be ready for future crusades in the Holy Land, was quickly moved to Marienburg in Prussia in 1309. Prussia now became not a crusading outpost, but a state, and it would settle its disputes with neighbours not through Papal courts but on the battlefield. In concert with its ally John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, the order invaded Poland. The Silesian Duke Bolko of Świdnica held off the Bohemians while Władysław marched against the order and defeated it in a costly battle at Płowce in 1331. Too weak to pursue his advantage, he did not manage to reassert a Polish ascendancy in Pomerania or Silesia, where the German hegemony persisted. Nevertheless, by the time of his death in 1333, Władysław the Short had managed to reunite the central provinces and to establish at least nominal control over a number of other areas. His son Kazimierz III (1333-70), known as the Great, was able to carry through this process and to place the sovereignty of Poland beyond question.
In this he was assisted by an unusually favourable conjunction of circumstances. As a minor ice-age reduced yields and ruined harvests throughout much of Europe, Poland basked in a more than usually warm and temperate spell, which produced not only bumper crops but also conditions in which Mediterranean fruit could be grown and wine produced. While the Hundred Years’ War devastated the richest lands in western Europe and wrought financial havoc as far afield as Italy, Poland was spared lengthy conflicts. Finally, as the entire Continent was engulfed by the plague of 1348, the Black Death, most of Poland remained unaffected. The populations of England and France, of Italy and Scandinavia, of Hungary, Switzerland, Germany and Spain were more than halved. Poland’s grew, partly as a consequence of conditions elsewhere. The depredations of the plague were accompanied by widespread famine, which provoked an exodus from towns, and refugees roamed Europe in search of food and a safe haven. In addition, the need for a scapegoat had provoked the greatest wave of anti-Jewish atrocities in medieval history, and terrified survivors also fled, mainly eastwards. All were welcomed in Poland, which insisted only on a period of quarantine.
Kazimierz was a fitting ruler for these halcyon days. Physically handsome, with a broad forehead and a remarkable head of hair, he was a regal figure, combining courage and determination with the tastes of a voluptuary. He launched a building programme which, along with the cathedrals of Kraków and Gniezno and churches all over the country, gave rise to sixty-five new fortified towns, the fortification of twenty-seven existing ones, and fiftythree new castles. He also rerouted the Vistula at Kraków, and constructed a canal linking the salt-mines of Wieliczka with the capital. In 1347 he codified the entire corpus of existing laws in two books: one, the Statute of Piotrków, for Wielkopolska; one, the Statute of Wiślica, for Małopolska. He reformed the fiscal system, created a central chancellery, and regulated the monetary situation with the introduction in 1388 of new coinage. In the towns, he established guilds and extended Magdeburg Law. He granted a separate law to the Armenians living in Polish cities and gave the Jews their own fiscal, legal, and even political institutions.
These measures laid the foundations of a new boom. Polish cities gained considerable numbers of merchants and skilled artisans, while the influx of Jews provided them with banking and other facilities. This stimulated industry. Newly-discovered deposits of iron, lead, copper, silver, zinc, sulphur and rock salt were exploited and mining techniques improved. The traditional exports of grain, cattle, hides, lumber and other forest produce were supplemented by manufactured goods such as finished cloth, which was carried as far west as Switzerland.
Contact with the outside world was increasing, largely thanks to the Church, whose activity, both missionary and educational, brought foreign clerics to Poland and sent Polish ones abroad, some, like the friar Benedictus Polonus, as far as the capital of the Mongol Khan Guyuk in 1245, but most to study, particularly at the universities of Bologna and Paris. King Kazimierz exerted a personal influence on the development of learning and culture, and laid the foundations of the flowering of the next century by establishing, in 1364, a university at Kraków. Coming just after the foundation of the Charles University of Prague and before those of Vienna and Heidelberg, this was the second such academy in central Europe. Unlike most English, French and German universities, which evolved from religious institutions, it was based on the Italian models of Padua and Bologna, which were secular establishments.
While he lavished care on domestic projects and encouraged education and the arts, Kazimierz did not neglect foreign affairs: he inherited a kingdom of 106,000 square kilometres, and left one of 260,000.He warred with John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, over rival claims to Silesia, finally defeating him in 1345, one year before the unfortunate blind king lost his ostrich feathers to the Prince of Wales at Crécy. He then turned his attention to the east.
The Tatar invasions of the previous century had annihilated the Principality of Kiev, and the smaller Russian principalities were only allowed to survive at the cost of yearly tribute to the Tatars, who had settled in southern Russia. Two such principalities, those of Halicz and Vladimir, were adjacent to Poland’s south-eastern border. Both were dynastically connected with Poland, and after the princes of Halicz died out, in 1340, Kazimierz incorporated their lands into his own dominion.
This elongation of Poland to the south-east was inevitable and permanent. The move of the Polish capital from Gniezno to Kraków three hundred years before was now beginning to affect Polish policy significantly. The king viewed his dominions from a different vantage point, and the most pervasive influence at court was that of the magnates of Małopolska, the ‘Kraków Lords’.
There was more at stake in this eastern theatre than territorial gain. The disintegration of Kiev had left a power vacuum into which Poland was inevitably drawn, all the more so since another power was taking more than a passing interest in the area—Lithuania.
The Lithuanians were a Baltic people like the Prussians and the Latvians, between whom they were settled. Long after their kindred Latvians and Prussians had been subjugated by the Sword Brothers and the Teutonic Knights respectively, the Lithuanians continued to defy all attempts at conquest. They were ruled by a dynasty well suited to the situation, prepared to make peace and accept token Christianity from the order to gain support against the Russians of Novgorod, and from Novgorod to defeat the order. Their conduct of policy was so wily and volatile that none of their neighbours could ever rest easy. After the débâcle of Kiev, the Lithuanians annexed vast tracts of masterless land. In 1362 their ruler Grand Duke Algirdas defeated the Tatars at the Battle of the Blue Waters, and in the following year he occupied Kiev itself.
In less than a hundred years the Lithuanian state had quadrupled in size, but while this made it more formidable to its enemies, it endeared it to none and enmeshed it in problems which, for once, were too great for its rulers. They could not hope to administer the huge area populated with Christian Slavs by whose multitude they were to be eventually swamped. Their seizure of these lands had brought them into conflict with the Tatars on one front, while the Teutonic Knights were straining all their resources to crush them on the other. The Russian principalities were hostile, while the Poles, who now shared a long frontier with Lithuania, were growing tired of sporadic border raids. Lithuania needed an ally. The problem of which to choose was the most pressing issue facing Grand Duke Iogaila when he came to the Lithuanian throne in 1377. And that same year had placed Poland in a dilemma, for different reasons.
Kazimierz the Great had died in 1370. Although married four times, he had no heir, and left the throne to his nephew, Louis of Anjou, King of Hungary. King Louis attended his uncle’s funeral and then went back to Hungary, leaving his mother, the late king’s sister, to rule in his name. She could not rule without the support of the more powerful nobles of Małopolska, the ‘Kraków Lords’. They exploited this opportunity to assume a greater share not only in the running of the country, but in the definition of its very status.
A new concept of the Polish state had been evolving from the beginning of the fourteenth century whose gist was that sovereignty should be vested not in the person of the monarch, but in a specific geographical area, the Corona Regni Poloniae, an expression meant to embrace all the Polish lands, even those which had fallen under foreign domination. In 1374 the Polish nobles wrested from King Louis the Statute of Košice, which stressed the indi visibility of this patrimony, and stipulated that no part of it was his to give away. They were looking to a future which remained uncertain, since Louis, too, had no male heir.
He did, however, have two daughters. He had married the elder, Maria, to Sigismund of Luxembourg, and intended him to take the Polish throne. The younger, Hedwig, was betrothed to Wilhelm of Habsburg, who was to have Hungary. But when Louis died in 1382, the Kraków Lords refused to bow to these wishes and made their own plans.
They rejected the already married Maria and brought her ten-year-old sister Hedwig, Jadwiga in Polish, to Kraków, where in 1384 she was crowned emphatically king (rex). The chronicler Długosz noted: ‘The Polish lords and prelates were so taken with her, so greatly and sincerely loved her that, almost forgetting their masculine dignity, they did not feel any shame or degradation in being the subjects of such a gracious and virtuous lady.’ In fact, they saw her principally as an instrument, and they disregarded her feelings entirely. When young Wilhelm of Habsburg turned up to claim his betrothed, she was locked in the castle on Wawel hill. After fruitless efforts to see her he left, and she was prepared by the Polish lords for the bed of another: they had found a husband for her in Iogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania.
The idea of a union between Poland and Lithuania had germin—ated simultaneously in both countries. On 14 August 1385 a basic agreement was signed at Krewo. This was followed by more specific pledges at Wołkowysk in January 1386, and at Lublin a few weeks later. On 12 February, Jagiełło, as his name had crystallised in Polish, entered Kraków, and three days later he was baptised as Władysław. On 18 February he married Jadwiga, and on 4 March was crowned King of Poland.
THREE The Jagiellon Experience
Queen Jadwiga died young, having borne her husband no heir. Yet the fruits of her marriage to Władysław Jagiełło were prodigious. In the first instance, it sounded the knell for the Teutonic Order: with the conversion of Lithuania the need for crusading vanished, and with it the whole raison d’être of the Knights in Prussia. The union of two enemies whom the order had often played off against each other in the past only compounded this.
The order responded by trying to undo it. Władysław Jagiełło unwittingly helped when he installed his fiercely ambitious and unaccountable cousin Vytautas (Witold) as regent in Lithuania. Vytautas championed pagan separatist opposition to the union with Poland, at the same time accepting baptism and the alliance of the order. But while the order continued to intrigue with Vytautas and negotiate with Władysław, it could not hope to avoid confrontation with the Polish-Lithuanian alliance indefinitely. When this came in the war of 1409-10, it resulted in the devastat ing defeat of the Order on the battlefield of Grunwald (Tannenberg) by a combined force under the command of Władysław and Vytautas.
The battle was one of the longest and bloodiest of the Middle Ages. The Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen and all the order’s officers but one lay dead on the field, and the whole of Prussia was there for the taking. Much to the exasperation of the Polish commanders, Władysław reined in the pursuit and in the treaty signed later he demanded only a thin strip of land to be ceded to Lithuania, and nothing for Poland, while taking a vast cash indemnity from the order for himself. A decade later the knights made war again, were again defeated, and again got away with insignificant losses. In 1454 a revolt against the order by local knights and cities, aided by Poland, initiated a war which dragged on for thirteen years. The knights were defeated, and were once again spared, by the Treaty of Toruń in 1466. Poland took the coastline around Gdańsk and Elbing, the province of Warmia (Ermland), and even the stronghold of Marienburg, but did not suppress the order, which moved its capital to Königsberg and retained the rest of its dominions as a vassal of the king of Poland. Such forbearance might seem surprising, particularly as the Teutonic Knights were ruthless in war, raping and murdering, and even burning churches. There were, however, factors involved in the relations between Poland and the order that touched on a religious debate of European proportions.
The Teutonic Order had representatives and friends at every court, and was a master of propaganda. Its first line of attack had been that the betrothal of Jadwiga to Wilhelm of Habsburg had been consummated and that her marriage to Władysław Jagiełło was therefore bigamous. It also argued, with some justification, that the alleged conversion of Lithuania was a sham, and that Catholic Polish knights had been the minority at Grunwald in an army made of Lithuanian pagans, Christians of the Eastern rite, and even Muslims (the Tatars who had settled in Lithuania some time before). The order suggested that Władysław Jagiełło’s army was hardly more Christian than Saladin’s.
The Teutonic Knights had a point, and that point assumed importance in the context of a minor reformation which was sweeping Europe, a nationalist, anti-clerical, anti-Imperial movement whose greatest exponent was the Bohemian Jan Hus. The Hussite movement was itself connected with John Wycliffe’s Lollards in England, and both causes enjoyed considerable sympathy in Poland.
Matters came to a head at the Council of Constance, convoked in 1415 to combat the Hussite heresy. The Teutonic Order saw in this a perfect forum at which to discredit Poland and reconfirm the validity of its own crusading mission, judging that if this were endorsed by Christian Europe, it would have placed itself beyond the reach of Polish attempts to destroy it.
The Polish delegation to the Council of Constance, led by Paweł Włodkowic (Paulus Vladimiri) of Kraków University, included a number of Lithuanians and schismatics, which caused uproar and favoured the order’s case. Włodkowic ran rings around its representatives and managed to discredit it. But there was no clear-cut victory. The Teutonic Knights enjoyed wide diplomatic support, including that of the Empire, which had political objections to the Polish-Lithuanian union.
The arrangement itself was under frequent review. In 1413, after Grunwald, a new treaty of union was signed at Horodło. This attempted to bind the two states together more firmly, and was epitomised by the Polish szlachta adopting the Lithuanians as brothers in chivalry, bestowing on them their own coats of arms. In 1430, Vytautas’ successor as Grand Duke of Lithuania, Svidrigaila, undid all this by allying himself with the Teutonic Order and adopting an anti-Polish policy. Ten years later, the union was formally dissolved, but this made little difference, since the ruler of Lithuania was the son of the King of Poland, whom he succeeded in 1446, reuniting the two states under one crown.
Fig. 3 The Jagiellon dynasty of Poland-Lithuania
The unstable nature of the union was largely the result of incompatibility. Poland was a nationally based Christian state with developed institutions and strong constitutional instincts. Lithuania was an amalgam of pagan Balts and Orthodox Christian Slavs ruled by an autocratic dynasty. The two states pulled each other in different directions, and in the field of foreign policy it was Lithuania, or rather the Jagiellon dynasty, which pulled the hardest.
It is no coincidence that the oldest extant letter from a king of England to a king of Poland dates from 1415, when Henry V begged Władysław Jagiełło to assist him against the French: the union with Lithuania and the victory over the Teutonic Order had turned Poland into a major European power. And it is hardly surprising that with such power behind them, the ambitious Jagiellons should have taken advantage of the opportunities on offer.
The extinction in 1437 of the Luxembourg dynasty, which had ruled in Bohemia and Hungary, heralded a new contest for hegemony in the area between two new arrivals—the Habsburgs of Austria and the Jagiellons of Poland-Lithuania. Hungary, which had been ruled successively by Anjou, Luxembourg and Habsburg, fell to the Jagiellons in 1440 when the Magyars offered the throne to the stripling Władysław III of Poland, Władysław Jagiełło’s eldest son. Władysław did not rule long as King of Poland and Hungary. Three years after he was crowned at Buda, the young king was drawn into the anti-Turkish league, and slain at the Battle of Varna on the Black Sea in 1444. The throne of Poland passed to his younger brother, Kazimierz IV. That of Hungary went to Mattias Corvinius, but after his death in 1490 it reverted to Kazimierz’s eldest son, Władysław. This Władysław was king not of Poland, but of Bohemia, the Czech Diet having elected him in 1471.
By the end of the century the Jagiellons ruled over about one third of the entire European mainland. Their gigantic domain stretched from the Baltic to the shores of the Black Sea and the Adriatic. In the next generation they would lose all the thrones outside Poland to the Habsburgs, and Poland would find itself none the richer for the experience of having been at the heart of a great empire.
Yet, as the szlachta were quick to appreciate, there were advantages in having wayward and often absentee kings. It permitted them to assume a greater share in the running of the country, and the crown’s frequent demands for funds and armies supplied them with the levers for extorting the concessions which shaped the emerging forms of parliamentary government.
The principle of government by consensus was already enshrined in practice under the early Piast kings. By the beginning of the thirteenth century this practice was established firmly enough to survive in the governance of the various provinces when the Kingdom was divided. Provinces such as Wielkopolska and Mazovia would hold an assembly called sejm, at which the entire szlachta of the district could join in discussion and vote.
The consent of the sejm of every province was crucial to the process of reunification of the Polish lands, and by the time this was achieved the sejms had become part of the machinery of government. Władysław the Short convoked them four times during his reign (1320-33), and his successor Kazimierz the Great (1330-70) almost as often, acknowledging them as the basis of his right to govern.
The heirless death of Kazimierz and the ensuing regency of Elizabeth furnished the opportunity for one group of szlachta to steal a march on their fellows. These were the dignitaries of the realm, the castellans who had been the mainstay of royal authority in the regions, and the palatines, who had grown into virtual governors of their provinces—the provinces themselves came to be known as ‘palatinates’ as a result. Representing as they did the forces of regional autonomy, the palatines were poor instruments of royal control, and Władysław the Short when reuniting the country had been obliged to bring in a new tier of royal administration, the starosta, a kind of royal sheriff, who henceforth represented the king in his area. The palatines assumed a political rather than a purely administrative role, and, in alliance with the bishops, formed a new oligarchy. Over the years, a number of them had assumed the function of royal council, and in the critical moments following the death of Kazimierz the Great they took the fate of Poland into their own hands, deciding on Jadwiga rather than Maria and choosing her a husband in Władysław Jagiełło. And they made it clear that it was they who would select his successor. His failure to produce an heir with Jadwiga strengthened their hand.
All the palatines and castellans were allowed a seat in the Grand Council (consilium maius), but policy-making was jealously guarded by those palatines and bishops who sat in the Privy Council (consilium secretum). A typical figure is Zbigniew Oleśnicki, Bishop of Kraków, secretary to Władysław Jagiełło, regent during the minority of Władysław III and mentor of his successor Kazimierz IV. Educated, tough, absolutist in his convictions, a cardinal who was a born statesman, guided by a vision which combined his own advancement with that of Poland and the Church, he had no room in his scheme of things for a vociferous sejm.
The szlachta were not fond of him or the oligarchy he stood for, and made it clear to Władysław Jagiełło that he needed their support as well as that of the magnates in order to secure the succession of his son. This enabled them to extort a number of privileges and rights during the 1420s, the most important of which, granted at Jedlnia in 1430 and confirmed at Kraków three years later, was the edict Neminem captivabimus nisi iure victum. An equivalent to the later English Habeas corpus act, it meant that nobody could be held or imprisoned without trial. This placed the szlachta beyond the reach of intimidation by the magnates and officers of the crown. Once it had become clear that the crown’s prerogatives were being ceded, the magnates and the szlachta leapfrogged each other to claim them. This race had the twofold effect of accelerating the development of the parliamentary system, and of defining the two groups which were eventually to crystallise into the upper and lower chambers.
Hemmed in by the magnates, Kazimierz IV sought the support of the szlachta, which was eager to give it, at a price. The price was the Privilege of Nieszawa, granted in 1454, which stipulated that the king could only raise troops and taxes with the approval of the district assemblies, the sejmiks (lesser sejms) of the eighteen palatinates of Poland. This enshrined the principle of no taxation without representation for the ordinary szlachta, who all had a vote at these assemblies, but it also made the sejms of Wielkopolska and Małopolska more directly answerable to their electorate. In 1468, these decided to meet together, at Piotrków, and henceforth constituted the national Sejm, bringing together dignitaries of the kingdom, and the representatives of all the provinces and the major towns (Lithuania was still ruled autocratically by the grand duke, and Mazovia, ruled by a vassal Piast, kept its own separate sejm for another century). The next step came in 1493, when the national assembly divided into two chambers: the Senate, consisting of eightyone bishops, palatines and castellans, and the Sejm proper, which consisted of fifty-four deputies of the szlachta and the largest cities.
The death of Kazimierz IV in the previous year afforded the new parliament an opportunity to flex its muscles and demonstrate that the existence of a natural heir to the throne did not infringe its right to choose who would rule over them. For two weeks the Sejm discussed the merits of a number of candidates, including the king’s sons and a Piast prince from the Mazovian line, and finally chose Kazimierz’s son, Jan Olbracht.
From now on not even the only son of the deceased king would sit on the Polish throne before being vetted by the Sejm. After the death of Jan Olbracht in 1501 his brother Aleksander was elected, and forced to sign over yet more royal power before he could take his throne. Four years later, in 1505, the Sejm sitting at Radom passed the act Nihil novi, which removed the king’s right to legislate without the approval of the two chambers.
The constitutional developments of the fifteenth century are mirrored in the legal system. The regional castellans’ courts had declined steadily in influence. Their jurisdiction was encroached upon by the starostas’ courts, which dealt with the affairs of the szlachta and their tenantry, elective courts, whose judges were appointed by the regional sejmiks, and, most of all, by the ecclesiastical courts. The latter, which originally governed those living on Church-owned lands, gradually extended their competence to cover all cases involving a cleric or Church property, as well as those with a religious dimension (marriages, divorces, sacrilege, etc.). The division of the country allowed the ecclesiastical courts to encroach on other areas, by providing what was in effect an independent legal system embracing the whole country, which proved convenient in cases where the litigants were residents of different provinces. They complemented the rising power of the Church hierarchy, and directly challenged the influence of the central legal system. This was reinforced through the new county courts (sąd ziemski), whose judges were appointed by the crown, and which had permanent executive officers. The crown also re-established its jurisdiction, through the Supreme Crown Court, over the gravest criminal and civil offences, and retained the role of supreme court of appeal. But these functions would ultimately be taken over by the Sejm.
Jagiellon rule had provided greenhouse conditions for the growth of parliamentary institutions. At the death of Kazimierz the Great in 1370, Poland had been in advance of most European countries in this respect, but only 150 years later it had surpassed even England. The power of the crown was so hamstrung by a series of checks and balances that it could never be used arbitrarily. The Sejm had taken over all legislative functions. The degree of representation, with some 7 per cent of the population having a vote, would not be bettered until the British Reform Act of 1832. Yet the basis of Polish democracy was flawed at the outset, as the running had been made exclusively by the noble estate, the szlachta, and this was as restricted in its interests as it was varied in its make-up.
One cannot substitute the terms ‘nobility’ or ‘gentry’ for szlachta because it had little in common with those classes in other European countries either in origin, composition or outlook. Its origins remain obscure. Polish coats of arms are utterly unlike those of other European nobles, and lend weight to the theory that the szlachta was of Sarmatian origin. They were also held in common by groups of families, which suggests clan-based origins. The attitude of the szlachta begs analogies with the Rajputs of India or the Samurai of Japan. Like both of these, and unlike any other gentry in Europe, the szlachta was not limited by nor did it depend for its status on either wealth, or land, or royal writ. It was defined by its function, that of a warrior caste, and characterised by mutual solidarity and contempt for others.
‘The Polish gentry,’ writes the contemporary historian Długosz, ‘are eager for glory, keen on the spoils of war, contemptuous of danger and death, inconstant in their promises, hard on their subjects and people of the lower orders, careless in speech, used to living beyond their means, faithful to their monarch, devoted to farming and cattle-breeding, courteous to foreigners and guests, lavish in hospitality, in which they exceed other nations.’ But the outlook of the szlachta was changing, largely under the influence of economic factors.
The Vistula and its tributaries provided a natural conduit for all Poland’s overseas trade, effortlessly concentrating the country’s agricultural produce at the port of Gdańsk. This was also the point of entry for imports, of herrings from Scandinavia, salt from western France, and cloth from Holland, Flanders and England. The Teutonic Order had used its position straddling the lower Vistula to promote its own exports at the expense of Polish trade and to impose heavy duties on inbound goods. Its defeat and removal from the area in 1466 altered the situation radically. Trade with England through Gdańsk quadrupled, and by the end of the century the number of ships calling there had risen to eight hundred a year, most of them bound for Bruges.
Increased demand for grain as populations grew in western Europe raised prices, while the rapid expansion of seaborne trade pushed up those of timber and other forest produce by some 4,000 per cent. Polish landowners responded by intensifying production. Meadows were drained, scrub woods cut back, and acreages under cultivation increased, but while there was no lack of land available, there was a shortage of people to work it.
Most szlachta estates were worked by peasant tenants who paid part of their rent in labour. The size of their holdings and the rent varied enormously around the country, but as a general illustration one can take an example from 1400: the annual rent for a unit of seventeen hectares (forty-two acres) was fifteen grosze (the price of a pig or a calf) and a few bushels of grain, plus twelve days’ work a year by the tenant in the landlord’s fields—using his own implements and horses, usually at the busiest times.
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