Читать книгу Poland: A history - Adam Zamoyski - Страница 11

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.

The dramatic fall in the value of the coinage in the early 1400s halved the real value of money-rent received from tenants, while the productivity of a day’s work did not fluctuate. And money was useless to the landlord in view of the shortage of casual labour in the countryside, exacerbated by the drift of the poorest peasants to the towns. It therefore made sense for the landlords to transform money-rent into purely labour-rent: they needed cheap labour they could depend on in order to develop what was turning into a cash-crop agricultural economy, and they used their political muscle to ensure they got it.

In 1496 the Sejm passed measures preventing peasants moving to the towns. Tenants who wished to move to a different area were obliged to put their tenancies in order, pay off all dues, and to sow the land before they left. The economic effort involved was so prohibitive that they were in effect tied to the land, unless they absconded, which was not easy in the case of whole families. Those who owned their land were not affected by this legislation. Nor were the inhabitants of free villages, sometimes referred to as ‘Dutch settlements’. These had arisen in areas where a landlord, eager to found new villages on unexploited land, enticed peasants (often of foreign origin) to settle by offering them advantageous terms, set down in special charters. There were tenants rich enough to employ casual labour to perform the labour-rent on their behalf, but even their resources were strained when, in 1520, the Sejm increased the labour-rent from twelve to fifty-two days per annum. The legal position of the peasants was further weakened at about the same time, when they lost their right of appeal to other courts and could only seek justice in manorial courts, in which their landlords sat as magistrates.

The ease with which the szlachta could promote its economic interests by political means did not encourage notions of thrift, risk and investment, and spawned a rustic complacency that set it aside from other European elites. This is the more unexpected as fifteenth-century Poland was essentially an urban culture. While land provided the majority with a livelihood, it was not the only or even the predominant source of wealth for the magnates, whose estates were not large by the standards of the barons of England or the great lords of France. So far, only the Church had managed to build up extensive latifundia through the monastic orders and the dioceses, which made prelates such as the Bishops of Kraków the richest men in the land.

The magnates only started accumulating property on a large scale at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Jan of Tarnów (1367-1432), Palatine of Kraków, built up an estate of one town, twenty villages and one castle. His son, Jan Amor Tarnowski, Castellan of Kraków, increased this to two towns and fifty-five villages—more than doubling it in the space of fifty years. Jan of Oleśnica, father of Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki, only had one village in 1400, yet by 1450 his other son owned fifty-nine, along with a town and a castle.

Taken alone, the revenues from such estates were not great enough to support rampant ambition. The magnates were obliged to supplement them by lucrative or influential public office, and by various business ventures, such as mining, in which fortunes could be made with a little influence at court and some capital. It was necessary first to obtain a concession from the crown, which owned all underground deposits. Personal capital or that of specially set up joint-stock companies was then used to employ engineers and build machines to work the mines, which were among the deepest in Europe. These were ambitious operations, but the rewards were abundant—salt, sulphur, tin, lead, zinc, and even gold. It was only by being on the spot that noblemen could make fortunes, and the great families of the fifteenth century based themselves in or near the cities. In this, as in other things, they were more akin to the civic magnates of Italy than to the regional nobility of France or England.

The cities were not large. Only Gdańsk, with 30,000 inhabitants, could rival those of western or southern Europe. Kraków had a paltry 15,000; Lwów, Toruń and Elbląg 8,000; and Poznań and Lublin only some 6,000. What they lacked in numbers they made up in diversity. Kraków was a Babel in which German pre dominated in the streets over other languages, while patrician circles rang with Polish, Italian and Latin.

One consequence of the Jagiellon forays into Hungary and southern Europe was that for the best part of the century their dominions bordered the Republic of Venice, opening up new vistas for Polish society at a decisive juncture in its relationship to the rest of Europe.

The previous century had radically altered the balance between Poland and the more developed countries of Europe. As a consequence of the Black Death, the population of the Continent fell by some twenty million during the fourteenth century, and it took the whole of the fifteenth to make up this loss. Poland’s population did not drop significantly during the fourteenth, and rose sharply during the fifteenth. The gap also narrowed in economic terms, and Poland was attract ing people as well as capital from other parts of Europe.

This process was mapped out in cultural terms. In the north, Flemish architects originally brought in by the Teutonic Order and the Hanse left their mark in the churches, town halls and city walls of Gdańsk and other cities. In Poznań, Warsaw and Kalisz, the Flemish style was mitigated by local variants—themselves marked by Franconian and Burgundian examples of an earlier age. In Kraków the most remarkable cross-breeding took place, dominated at first by a strong Bohemian influence which was superseded by that of German artists, most notably by one of the greatest sculptors of the Middle Ages, the German Veit Stoss, who settled in Kraków in 1477.

Polish thought and literature remained encased in the limits of medieval parochialism, their primary expression being religious verse. The only notable prose to be written at the time were the annals of Jan Długosz, a church canon and tutor to the royal family, begun in 1455. Długosz was a creature of the Middle Ages. As he painstakingly wrote his last Annales in the 1470s, he took every opportunity to carp at what he saw as the newfangled ideas and practices invading the venerable cloisters of medieval Kraków. His successor as tutor to the royal family could not have presented a greater contrast, or better summed up the transformation taking place in Poland. He was Filippo Buonaccorsi, a native of San Gimignano in Tuscany obliged to flee after incurring the Pope’s displeasure, was a leading humanist and, from 1472, a professor at the University of Kraków.

Although it had been founded by the Piast Kazimierz the Great and lavishly endowed by the Angevin Queen Jadwiga, it had come to be known as the Jagiellon University. It was under this dynasty that it received funds necessary for expansion and the patronage of kings who recognised its uses. Foreigners from as far afield as England and Spain came to study or teach in its halls, while native graduates went abroad to widen their learning, one of them, Maciej Kolbe of Świebodzin, becoming rector of the Paris Sorbonne in 1480. During the reign of Kazimierz IV (1446-92) some 15,000 students passed through the university, including the major dignitaries, prelates and even soldiers of the time.

The Church, and particularly its prelates, also encouraged the dissemination of the new ideas emanating from Italy. Piotr Bniński, Bishop of Kujavia, devoted his own fortune and that of his diocese to patronage of the arts, paying more attention to arranging symposia by humanist poets than to the spiritual duties of his position. Grzegorz of Sanok, Archbishop of Lwów, who had studied in Germany and Italy, established at his residence of Dunajów near Lwów a small court modelled on that of Urbino, nurtured by a stream of visitors from Italy. It was there Buonaccorsi first came when he had to flee his native country.

Buonaccorsi later moved to the royal court in Kraków and wrote, among other things, a set of counsels for the king, like some Polish Machiavelli. His writings, which he published under the pen name of Callimachus, his position at the Jagiellon University, and his part in founding, along with the German poet Conrad Celtis, a sort of Polish writers’ workshop, the Sodalitas Litterarum Vistulana, made him a key figure of the Polish Renaissance.

The Italian connection grew stronger as Poles travelled to study or to visit cities such as Padua, Bologna, Florence, Mantua and Urbino. Italians came to Poland, bringing with them amenities and refinements, ranging from painting to postal services. The impact was omnipresent and lasting, nowhere more so than on the language. The first treatise on Polish orthography appeared in 1440, and the Bible was first translated in 1455, for Jagiełło’s last wife, Sophia. In their search for words or expressions to describe hitherto unknown objects or sentiments, the Poles more often than not borrowed from Italian, particularly in areas such as food, clothing, furnishing and behaviour, as well as in the expression of thought. These words rapidly passed from speech into writing, and from writing into print.

The year 1469 saw the first commercial use of Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type, in Venice. The idea was taken up throughout Europe with breathtaking speed: printing presses began operating in Naples, Florence and Paris in 1471; in Spain, the Netherlands and Kraków in 1473; in Wrocław, where the first book in Polish was printed in 1475; and in London in 1476.

By the end of the fifteenth century Poland had become an integral part of late-medieval civilisation. Lithuania, on the other hand, was largely left out of the picture, contributing nothing and gaining little from its association with Christian Europe. Lithuania proper was inhabited by no more than half a million people still pagan in spirit, while the vast expanses it had taken over to the south and east were thinly populated with some two million Slavs who practised Christianity in its eastern rite. At the moment of Władysław Jagiełło’s conversion, this vast dominion boasted five stone castles, at Vilnius (Wilno), Kaunas (Kowno) and Trakai (Troki) in Lithuania; and at Kamieniec and Łuck in what had been Kievan lands. Leaving aside the more fertile south, the land produced little wealth and most of the population subsisted from scratching the topsoil with wooden implements, living in dugouts or timbered cabins.

In 1387 Władysław Jagiełło granted the Lithuanian nobles the first element of personal freedom, the right to hold property. In 1434 he extended the act Neminem captivabimus to the Grand Duchy, but it was some time before the principle was translated into practice. While Poland achieved power-sharing and representation, Lithuania continued to be ruled autocratically. While Jan Ostroróg, Palatine of Poznań, Master of the Jagiellon University and Bachelor of those of Bologna and Erfurt, applied himself in 1467 to writing a treatise on the Polish system of government and a programme for social reform, the average Lithuanian nobleman hardly knew what such words meant.

The only link between the two societies was the Jagiellon dynasty itself, and it was its interests that prevailed. Władysław Jagiełło’s loyalties, to Lithuania and to Poland, were largely subjected to his own dynastic vision. His son Władysław III, killed at the Battle of Varna in 1444 in his twentieth year, never had the opportunity to show his mettle as a ruler. Władysław’s younger brother Kazimierz IV reigned for forty-six years and established himself as a power to be reckoned with—he was, significantly, the only Pole ever to wear the English Garter. His wife Elizabeth of Habsburg bore him seven daughters, who make him the ancestor of every monarch reigning in Europe today, and six sons: one saint, one cardinal, and four kings. Kazimierz was succeeded in Poland by Jan Olbracht, a young prince with a passion for reading who drank, danced and loved hard, dressed like a peacock and worshipped pleasure. His brother Aleksander was a much-loved lightweight who died in 1506 having done little to be remembered or cursed for.

While the Jagiellons acquired a high degree of culture, they did not develop the political maturity demanded by their new role. Throughout this formative century, when the magnates and the szlachta were erecting the structure of their democracy, the Jagiellon kings failed to define the prerogatives of the crown, wasting their resources on foreign adventures instead.

Kazimierz IV’s dynastically-minded foreign policy enmeshed Poland in a number of pointless and damaging conflicts. Turkey and Poland shared a common interest, and in 1439 an embassy from Murad II came to Kraków to negotiate an alliance against the Habsburgs of Austria, who had taken over Hungary. This failed to materialise, since Władysław III took Hungary himself and proceeded to make war on Turkey over Moldavia, a war which cost him his life at the Battle of Varna. Eighty years later, in 1526, Louis Jagiellon, also King of Hungary, was to lose his life in the same way. He was trampled to death in a muddy stream at the Battle of Mohacs, fighting against Suleiman the Magnificent over a Hungary which passed to Ferdinand of Habsburg after the battle.

The feud with Muscovy was equally pointless. After the Tatar invasions, the Lithuanian dukes had occupied the remains of Kievan Rus. The remaining Russian principalities were too weak to think of anything but survival, but with time Muscovy began to nurture ambitions. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the princes of Muscovy, who were linked by marriage to the Byzantine Emperors, declared their city to be Constantinople’s successor, the ‘Third Rome’, protector of the Eastern Catholic Faith, and spiritual mother of all the Russias—most of which were under Lithuanian dominion. In the fifteenth century, Poland and Lithuania could afford to ignore such posturing. Apart from their own strength, they could count on the Tatar Golden Horde to keep Muscovy in check. In the latter part of the century, however, the Golden Horde went into decline, and its stranglehold over Muscovy was broken.

The Jagiellons’ rivalry with the Habsburgs over Hungary and Bohemia also proved counter-productive, provoking a rapprochement between the Habsburgs and Muscovy, forcing Poland to sign her first treaty with France, in 1500. An English alliance was also considered, but in 1502 the Sejm rejected this on the grounds that England ‘is in a state of continual revolution’. Henry VII and Henry VIII would repeatedly angle for an Anglo-Polish alliance against Turkey but nothing would come of this, as by then Poland needed the support of Turkey, with which she eventually signed an Eternal Peace in 1533.

Whatever international advantages they may have forfeited, the last two Jagiellon kings did give their subjects and their country something of inestimable value. Zygmunt I (known as ‘the Old’), the youngest son of Kazimierz IV, succeeded in 1506 and died in 1548. His son Zygmunt II Augustus became Grand Duke of Lithuania in 1522 and King of Poland after his father’s death. Their combined reign from 1506 to 1572 displayed a certain continuity, even if their persons did not. The strong Solomon-like father was strikingly different from his glamorous, refined son who stands out, along with Francis I and Charles V, to whom he was often compared, as the epitome of the Renaissance monarch. But they both encouraged every form of creative activity and helped to institutionalise a spiritual and intellectual freedom which endured. Above all, they ensured that the murderous Reformation and Counter-Reformation never grew into anything more dangerous in Poland than an unruly debate.