Читать книгу Poland: A history - Adam Zamoyski - Страница 12

The Jagiellon realm was theoretically a Roman Catholic kingdom like every other in Christendom, yet the majority of its population was not Catholic. Large numbers of Christian Slavs living within its borders practised the Orthodox rite, acknowledging the Patriarch of Constantinople rather than the Pope. Another group of Christians who paid no heed to Rome were the communities of Armenians living in the major cities of south-eastern Poland.

A significant proportion of the population was not Christian at all. The Jewish community multiplied each time there was an anti-Semitic witch-hunt in other countries, and its numbers soared in the decades after the expulsions from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1496. If visiting foreign prelates were shocked to see synagogues in every Polish township, they were hardly less so to see mosques standing on what was supposed to be Christian soil. These belonged to the descendants of Tatars who had settled in Lithuania in the fifteenth century and become loyal subjects of their adopted country. Many of them had been admitted to the ranks of the szlachta but clung to the Islamic faith. By the mid-sixteenth century there were nearly a hundred mosques in the Wilno, Troki and Łuck areas.

One of the conditions of the union between Poland and Lithuania in 1385 had been the conversion of that country to Christianity. But, formal gestures apart, little had been done to bring this about, and 150 years later, Grand Duke Zygmunt Augustus recorded that ‘Outside Wilno…the unenlightened and uncivilised people generally accord that worship which is God’s due, to groves, oak-trees, streams, even serpents, both privately and publicly making sacrifices to these.’ A hundred years after that, Bishop Melchior Gedroyc noted that he could hardly find in his diocese of Samogitia ‘a single person who knows how to say a prayer or make the sign of the Cross’.

That the Polish hierarchy had failed to impose religious observance on the population is not altogether surprising. According to a special arrangement, its bishops were appointed not by the Pope but by the King of Poland, who submitted his candidates for Rome’s approval. When this was not forthcoming it was ignored. In 1530, for instance, Pope Clement VII violently objected to the anti-Habsburg and pro-Turkish policy of the Primate Archbishop Jan Łaski, and insisted King Zygmunt dismiss him on pain of excommunication. But no action was taken.

The King was guided by political considerations when appointing bishops and this led him to choose either powerful magnates whose support he needed, or, more often, trusted men of his own. These were drawn from his court, which was imbued with a humanistic and empirical spirit. A high proportion of his secretaries was of plebeian stock, and Zygmunt felt no compunction in ennobling those, like his banker Jan Boner, whom he favoured. This favour transcended creed as well as class. The Jew Abraham Ezofowicz, whom Zygmunt elevated to the rank of Treasurer of Lithuania, did convert to Christianity, albeit the Orthodox rite, before being ennobled, but his brother Michał remained a practising Jew when he was elevated to the szlachta in 1525—a case without parallel anywhere in Christian Europe.

Most of the bishops were at home in this milieu. The Polish clergy were no more debauched than those of other countries at this time, and possibly less so—the last quarter of the fifteenth century saw the foundation of no fewer than eighteen new fundamentalist and strict Franciscan monasteries in the provinces of Mazovia and Małopolska alone. What did set them apart was an unusual element of realism in the face of other religions and of candour with respect to corruption. Bishop Krzycki, for instance, left a poem concerning the gossip that surrounded a fellow bishop caught in the act of lowering a girl from his bedroom window in a net. ‘I fail to see what shocks everyone so,’ the poet-bishop wrote, ‘for no one can deny that the Gospels themselves teach us to use the Net of the Fisherman.’ Krzycki wrote much erotic verse before he became bishop, and this did not affect his career any more than it did that of another, who ended up as Prince-Bishop of Warmia.

Jan Dantyszek was a good example of what the times could offer a clever man. A plebeian by birth, he entered the king’s service, becoming a secretary and later a diplomatic envoy. After a life which took him around Europe and brought him into contact with Francis I of France, Henry VIII of England, assorted popes, Ferdinand Cortes, Martin Luther, with whom he formed a friendship, the Emperor Charles V, who tried to keep him in his service, and Copernicus, who became a close friend and protégé, Dantyszek settled down to his episcopal duties with a degree of worldly wisdom.

The conversion of Poland by Mieszko I had been primarily an act of political wisdom which had brought him status and security within the Christian world. The usefulness of the Christian Church had subsequently revealed itself more than once, helping to reunite the country in the thirteenth century, and to outmanoeuvre the Teutonic Order in the fourteenth. But this had been accompanied by an unwelcome extension of its influence and wealth. And the Church’s foreign connections no less than its persecution of movements such as the Hussite heresy made the szlachta uneasy.

An institution which raked in bequests, exacted tithes, and contributed nothing in taxes to the state was bound to be unpopular. By the sixteenth century, the Church owned just over 10 per cent of all arable land in Wielkopolska, 15.5 per cent in Małopolska, and 25 in Mazovia. The share owned by the crown in the same provinces was 9, 7.5 and just under 5 per cent respectively. The Church wielded political power through its bishops who sat in the Senate and through its tribunals, which exercised jurisdiction over those living on its lands, and kept attempting to exercise it on wider areas. This power was also potentially at the disposal of Rome, a state often allied with Poland’s enemies. The Church was therefore a focus for a number of the szlachta’s phobias. The following is a typical complaint, uttered by a deputy during a Sejm debate of the 1550s.

The gentlemen of the clergy summon us, citing their titles and invoking some foreign, Romish law, contrary to the laws and freedoms of our Realm, attempting to extend their jurisdiction and that of their master, the Roman Pope, which jurisdiction we, not finding it in our statutes, neither can nor will bear; for we know no other jurisdiction than the supremacy of his majesty the King our master.

The tone and the sentiments expressed are characteristic of a ‘national Catholicism’ which was the spiritual heir of Hussitism. Many of the Bohemian followers of Hus had taken refuge in Poland, and their ideas were well known to writers such as Biernat of Lublin (1465-1529), who denounced the discrepancies between the Scriptures and the practices of the Church.

In view of all this, it is not surprising that when Martin Luther nailed his famous declaration of war on the Papacy to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, setting off a chain reaction which was to shake the whole Christian world, he produced little more than a tremor in Poland. His teachings rapidly penetrated northern and western areas, enthusiastically received by the preponderantly German population of the towns, but elsewhere they met with little response.

Calvinism was another matter. Enhanced by its more sympathetic Francophone associations, it rapidly gained ground all over the country. The democratic spirit of Calvinism which placed the lay elder on a par with the minister could hardly fail to appeal to the instincts of the szlachta, while the absence of pomp and ceremony from its rites made it a pleasingly cheap religion to support.

By the 1550s a dominant proportion of the deputies to the Sejm were Protestants. But their number is not representative of the population as a whole, since the most ardently Catholic palatinates often returned Protestant deputies. By 1572 the Senate provided a similar picture. Of the ‘front-bench’ seats, thirty-six were held by Protestants, twenty-five by Catholics and eight by Orthodox, which again meant only that many magnates had converted to Calvinism. It was they who provided the conditions for its growth in Poland. The Oleśnicki family founded a Calvinist academy in their town of Pińczów, which became the foremost centre of Calvinist teaching and publishing in that part of Europe, referred to by the faithful as ‘the Athens of the North’. Similar centres were established on a smaller scale by the Leszczyński family at Leszno, and the Radziwiłł at Nieśwież, Birże and Kiejdany.

Although they gained an ascendancy, the Calvinists never managed to control the Protestant movement in Poland. The northern cities stood by Luther; Anabaptists seeking refuge from persecution in Germany appeared in various areas of the country in the 1530s; and in 1551 Dutch Mennonites set up a colony on the lower Vistula.

The Protestant sect which produced Poland’s most significant contribution to Christian philosophy was the Arians. Expelled from Bohemia in 1548, they settled in Poland, where they were known as ‘Czech Brethren’ and later Arians, since two of their fundamental beliefs—the human nature of Christ and the rejection of the Trinity—were first voiced by Arius at the Council of Nicea in AD 235. They also came to be known variously as Anti-Trinitarians, Polish Brethren and Socinians.

Theirs was a rationalist and fundamentalist response to the teachings of Christ, whom they held to be a divinely inspired man. They were pacifists, opposed to the tenure of civic or military office, to serfdom, to the possession of wealth, and to the use of money, believing as they did in the common ownership of all material goods.

They gained many converts—up to about 40,000 adherents practising in some two hundred temples scattered throughout the country. Their spiritual centre was Raków, where they established an academy, visited by students from all over Europe. It was here that the Raków Catechism was published, the work of Fausto Sozzini (Socinius), a nobleman from Siena who sought refuge in Poland and became one of the leading lights of the movement. The two most prominent Polish Arians were Marcin Czechowicz and Szymon Budny, the second of whom made a fine translation of the Bible into Polish and was also responsible for a rapprochement with the Jews, which produced some curious results.

The Jewish community had also been affected by the spirit of the times. The expulsions from the Iberian peninsula had brought many distinguished Spanish scholars to Poland, and in 1567 a Talmudic academy was founded at Lublin, with the eminent Solomon Luria as rector, which enriched the religious debate. The Jews were by no means united, as there were considerable colonies of Karaites in eastern Poland who accepted only the Bible and rejected the Talmud.

The Arians made many converts from the ranks of Talmudic Jews, while a number of Arians and Calvinists converted to Judaism. It was one of these converts, ‘Joseph ben Mardoch’ Malinowski, who played the most incongruous part in this religious inter action. It was he who put the finishing touches to the Hebrew original of The Fortress of the Faith, a Karaite catechism by Isaac ben Abraham of Troki, which was subsequently published in a number of countries, and was later rediscovered by Voltaire, who believed it to be the greatest demolition of the divinity of Christ ever written.

In other countries the established Church reacted with violence to the slightest departure from dogma, let alone to apostasy. The reaction of the Polish hierarchy was pragmatic, often cynical, sometimes vehement, but never hysterical. Bishop Drohojowski of Kujavia, a region profoundly affected on account of its many German-dominated towns, went out of his way to meet prominent Lutherans and sanctioned their takeover of the Church of St John in Gdańsk since most of the parishioners had gone over to the heresy. Elsewhere in his diocese he allowed the sharing of parish churches by Catholics and Lutherans.

A considerable proportion of the clergy were genuinely interested in the reform of the Church. The Christians of the Orthodox rite had always enjoyed three of the demands of the Protestant movement: the marriage of priests, the use of the vernacular in the liturgy, and communion in both kinds. The Protestant demands were therefore less shocking and novel in Poland than in other Catholic countries. It was not uncommon for Catholic priests to emulate their colleagues of the Orthodox rite by having common-law wives, and these were keen to regularise their position and legalise their broods. Stanisław Orzechowski (1513-66) married while Canon of Przemyśl, and defended his action in a long debate with his bishop and with Rome, published in pamphlet form.

Apart from the practical demands concerning marriage and the vernacular, Luther’s revolt aroused strong feelings among the clergy against the medieval practices of the Church. Marcin Krowicki (1501-73) left the priesthood and published his Defence of True Learning, a fiercely anti-clerical work in which the Papacy is referred to as the whore of Babylon. Bishop Uchański, on the other hand, did not forsake a career which was eventually to make him Primate of Poland, but nevertheless wrote vituperative diatribes against the practices of the Church. In 1555 he declared himself in favour of the marriage of priests, communion under both kinds and the use of the vernacular. He also mooted the idea of a joint synod of all confessions in Poland, to bring about reconciliation on common ground. When the King promoted him to the bishopric of Kujavia the Pope refused to ratify the appointment, but neither the King nor the Polish hierarchy took any notice.

King Zygmunt the Old (1506-48) felt that the religious debate was none of his business. He came under considerable pressure from Rome and from those of his own bishops who were in favour of stamping out the heresy. He was even reproached by Henry VIII of England for not taking a more energetic line against the Protestants. Whenever this pressure became overwhelming, he would take some action to satisfy the zealots, but his edicts were invalid without the approval of the Sejm. His attitude is summed up in the words of his successor, who shared it fully. ‘Permit me to rule over the goats as well as the sheep,’ he told one Papal envoy who was demanding arrests and executions.

In many countries the Reformation had social and political overtones. In Poland it was above all a constitutional issue. As the Papal Nuncio’s secretary noted after witnessing the debates of a Mazovian sejmik, the assembly seemed staunchly Catholic when the discussion turned on the faith, the sacraments and the sacred rites, but when the talk was of the privileges of the clergy, a number of ‘Protestant’ voices could be heard, and when it came to the subject of the Church’s immunity from taxation, the entire assembly appeared to have become fanatically Calvinist. In 1554, Bishop Czarnkowski of Poznań sentenced three burghers to death by fire for heresy, but they were rescued by a posse of mostly Catholic szlachta. The same bishop later sentenced a cobbler to the same fate, and this time over a hundred armed szlachta of all denominations, led by the foremost magnates, laid siege to the episcopal palace and freed the condemned man. On one or two occasions, the ecclesiastical courts managed to execute the sentence before anyone could take preventive action. In 1556 Dorota Łazewska, accused of stealing a host from a church and selling it to some Jews for alleged occult rites, was burnt at the stake in Sochaczew. The execution caused uproar, and this came in time to save the lives of the three Jews who were to be burnt on the next day. They too were saved by the intervention of Catholic as well as Protestant szlachta. As Jan Tarnowski pointed out, ‘It is not a question of religion, it is a question of liberty.’

All were agreed that there could be no liberty while a body independent of the parliamentary system was able to judge people, and the ecclesiastical tribunals’ jurisdiction was duly annulled by act of the Sejm in 1562. Two years later, when a young Arian, Erazm Otwinowski, snatched the monstrance from the prelate during a religious procession in Lublin, threw it on the ground and stamped on the Blessed Sacrament, shouting obscenities, he was brought before the Sejm tribunal. This body, made up of Catholics and Calvinists, heard the case and agreed broadly with the defence, ably conducted by the poet Mikołaj Rej, who argued that if God was offended, God would punish, and as for Otwinowski, he should be ordered to pay the priest ‘a shilling, so he can buy himself a new glass and a handful of flour’ with which to repair the monstrance and bake a new host.

At a time when torture and death awaited anyone caught reading the wrong book in most European countries, such dispassionate adherence to the notion of the primacy of individual rights over all other considerations was extraordinary. But neither the Catholic nor the Protestant leaders were happy with this state of affairs. There was a general desire to reach consensus and to decide on a state religion. At the Sejm of 1555 a majority of deputies demanded the establishment of a Church of Poland with rites in the vernacular, the right of priests to marry and communion under both kinds, to be administered by a Polish Synod independently of Rome. The prospect of a break with Rome loomed, but the King of Poland was no Henry VIII.

Zygmunt Augustus, the only son of Zygmunt the Old, was a melancholy figure. Painstakingly educated—some say debauched—by his mother Bona Sforza, he was dubbed ‘Augustus’ by her and brought up to rule accordingly. She was a forbidding creature. The first cousin of Francis I and a close relative of Charles V, she had been brought up at the court of her father the Duke of Milan, which had an evil reputation for intrigue and poison. In an unprecedented move, she arranged for Zygmunt to be elected and crowned heir to the throne during his father’s lifetime. But she did not contribute to his happiness, and he did not live up to her ambitions.

In 1543 he married Elizabeth of Habsburg, daughter of the Emperor Ferdinand I, who died only two years later, allegedly poisoned by Queen Bona. He then fell in love and eloped with Barbara Radziwiłł, the sister of a Lithuanian magnate. Only four years after this marriage, which was opposed by virtually everyone in Poland for a variety of reasons, Barbara Radziwiłł died, and again the Queen Mother was suspected of using her Milanese skills. After considering at length the possibility of marrying Mary Tudor, in 1553 Zygmunt married his first wife’s sister, Katherine of Habsburg, widow of the Duke of Mantua. It was a disastrous marriage. The epileptic Queen physically repelled him and, unlike the others, she did not die—perhaps because Queen Bona, feeling more unpopular than ever, had loaded herself up with gold and jewels and fled to Bari in Italy where, appropriately enough, she was herself eventually poisoned.

Since neither of his first two wives had borne him any children, the fact that Zygmunt Augustus refused to touch his third was a matter of some concern to his subjects. The extinction of a dynasty is always cause for alarm, and in this instance the alarm was all the greater as the Jagiellons were still the only real link between Poland and Lithuania. The Sejm begged the King to attend to his wife, repulsive or not, and the Primate actually went down on his knees in the chamber to beseech him either to possess her or to cast her off, breaking with Rome if need be.

The King’s behaviour at this point was critical to both the religious and the political future of Poland, yet he remained undecided. His attitude to the Reformation was ambivalent. He never showed much sympathy for the Protestant movement, but took a great interest in it, avidly reading all the dissenting tracts and treatises and accepting the dedication of works by Luther and Calvin. In 1550 he issued an anti-Protestant decree in the hope of winning support from the bishops for his marriage to Barbara Radziwiłł, but this remained a dead letter. A few years later he rebuked the Papal Nuncio for urging a firmer line towards the Protestants, and in effect forced him to leave Poland. When asked by his subjects which way they should lean in the religious debate, he replied: ‘I am not the king of your consciences.’

Unlike Henry VIII of England, Zygmunt Augustus did not want a divorce. His love for Barbara Radziwiłł had been a great passion, and her death robbed him of the will to live. He continued to carry out his duties without enthusiasm, dressed in black, and showed no desire to mould the future or perpetuate the dynasty. When pressed by the Sejm of 1555, he took the characteristically noncommittal and quite extraordinary step of referring the proposal for a national Church to Rome. He sent Stanisław Maciejewski to Pope Paul IV with the four demands of the Sejm. The Pope listened to them ‘with great sorrow and bitterness of heart’, and then rebuked Zygmunt for allowing his subjects to formulate such heretical ideas. The matter of the national Church rested there, and the reformers were, for once, unaided by provocative behaviour on the part of the Pope.

The principal weakness of the Protestant movement in Poland was its lack of unity, and the only candidate for its leadership spent most of his active life in England. Jan Łaski, nephew of the archbishop of the same name and a member of what was briefly a rich and powerful family, became a Protestant while studying abroad. He stayed in Geneva with Calvin, who praised his ‘erudition, integrity and other virtues’. In Rotterdam he drew close to Erasmus, helping him out of financial difficulties by buying his library and leaving it with him for life. He was then invited to England by Thomas Cranmer and given a pension by Edward VI, who appointed him chaplain to the foreign Protestants who had taken refuge in England. Known in England as John a Lasco, he collaborated with Cranmer on the Book of Common Prayer of 1552, but with the accession of Queen Mary he was forced to leave the country.

He reached Poland in time for the first Calvinist synod in 1554, at which he urged greater unity and a closing of ranks by all dissenters against the Catholic hierarchy. But his pleas were drowned out by disputes over minor theological and administrative questions. Łaski died in 1560, and it was not until 1570 that any kind of agreement was reached, in the Consensus of Sandomierz, but this failed to produce the sort of Protestant front he had hoped for.

The Protestant movement enjoyed the patronage of the foremost magnates, but failed to gain the support of wider sections of the population. It never touched the peasants to any significant extent, never seriously affected those towns such as Przemyśl or Lwów, which had no large German population, and left much of the szlachta indifferent, particularly in poor, populous Mazovia. Even in cases where their master went over to Calvinism the peasants clung to their old faith with surly tenacity, sometimes walking miles to the nearest Catholic church.

The Reformation in Poland was not in essence a spiritual movement; it was part of a process of intellectual and political emancipation which had started long before. The szlachta, which had done everything to curtail the power of the crown, seized eagerly on the possibilities offered by it to break the power of the Church. Straightforward anticlericalism was easily confused with a desire for a return to true Christian principles, and so was another movement in Polish politics which reached a climax in the 1550s.

A purely political reformist movement had come into existence at the beginning of the century. In spirit it was very close to the Reformation, since it placed the accent not on innovation but on stricter observance of the law, on weeding out malpractice and corruption. It was known as ‘the movement for the execution of the laws’, or simply the ‘executionist’ movement. One of its first preoccupations was that the law itself should be codified and published in clear form, and as a result much groundwork was done in the first half of the century, culminating in a number of legal reforms passed in 1578 which fixed the legal system for the next two hundred years.

The executionists waged a war of attrition on the temporal position of the Church. It was they who gave the impetus to abolish the medieval anomaly of the diocesan courts in 1562. The Sejm of the following year saw another victory, when the Church, which had always enjoyed exemption from taxation, was forced to contribute financially to the defence of the state. Much of the executionists’ support stemmed from the ordinary person’s revulsion at having to contribute to the treasury through taxation, and they were therefore keen to see that such resources as the crown possessed were properly administered. This led them into direct conflict with the magnates, over the thorny subject of royal lands and starosties.

The crown owned estates all over the country which it did not administer itself. Some were granted to individuals for services to the crown, to favourites, and even to merchants in return for cash advances. Others were granted with the office of starosta. The starostas were the linchpin of local government, the king’s officers in charge of law and order in a given locality. The starosties came with profitable estates which the incumbent was supposed to administer on behalf of the king, taking 20 per cent of the profit for himself as payment for the office he carried out. The rest went to the crown. All starosties and royal lands were the inalienable property of the crown, and reverted to it on the incumbent’s death. In practice, things worked differently.

The office of starosta had degenerated into a sinecure, while the administration of the lands, which was not subject to any verification, afforded endless scope for venality, with the result that most of the revenue went not to the crown but into the pocket of the incumbent. The starosties were therefore highly sought-after; their holders could increase their revenue without any extra effort or outlay of funds and at the same time enjoy the prestige and power of the office. Influential families began to collect them, with the result that a magnate might hold up to half a dozen important starosties, and a number of other royal estates, and his family would be understandably loath to give them up on his death. Although the lands were supposed to revert to the crown, successive kings found it increasingly difficult not to award them to the son of the deceased incumbent without alienating the whole family. To all practical purposes, the starosties were therefore becoming hereditary in the richer families.

This enraged the szlachta, since it both bolstered the position of the magnates and diminished the crown’s financial resources. Again and again the executionists clamoured for a return to due process and the repossession by the crown of multiply-held starosties. On this issue, however, the magnates in the Senate who normally supported the executionists against the Church would vote with the bishops against the executionists, and the king, who by the middle of the century relied more and more on the magnates for support, would cooperate with them. Only minimal success was achieved in 1563, when the Sejm decreed a general inspection of all accounts and inventories to catch out corrupt administrators.

The executionist movement distracted much of the zeal which might otherwise have been concentrated on religious questions. At the same time, Catholic voters elected Calvinist deputies because they were executionists, and Catholic deputies voted with the executionist Calvinists on issues such as the demand for a national Church, the abolition of ecclesiastical tribunals, and the law forcing the Church to contribute financially to defence. Even at the height of the Reformation no Pole, be he Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist or Arian, was prepared to place religious issues before constitutional and legal ones. That is why the Reformation failed in Poland. After raging and blustering in word and print for a few decades, the Protestant movement gradually burnt itself out, while the energies which had fuelled it were diverted to political matters.

The Catholic Church, which had dodged the heaviest blows and avoided confrontation, slowly went over to the offensive, as the Counter-Reformation gained strength. In Poland its progress was unsensational: no inquisition, no burnings at the stake, no anathemas, no forfeitures of property, no barring from office. It could hardly have been otherwise, given the spirit pervading Polish society and the stature of the leaders of the Counter-Reformation. The greatest of these, Cardinal Stanisław Hosius, was fundamentally opposed to violence and, referring to Mary Tudor, warned in 1571: ‘Let Poland never become like England.’

Hosius and his principal colleague, Marcin Kromer, were unusual among sixteenth-century Catholic prelates. Both had worked in the royal chancellery for the king before they went into the Church. Hosius then went on to play an important role at the Council of Trent. Kromer was a historian, and in his writings he demonstrated the unifying role the Church had played in Polish history. He preferred to argue with heretics rather than condemn them. Hosius favoured a similar approach, but he made a greater and more categorical statement on the matter of religion—something the Calvinists were unable to do. His Confessio (1551), a lucid reaffirmation of Catholic dogma, was one of the most powerful arguments of the European Counter-Reformation. It was translated into several languages, and between 1559 and 1583 ran to no fewer than thirtyseven separate editions in France alone. In 1564 Hosius brought the Jesuits to Poland, to reconquer the hearts, and more specifically the minds, of the Poles, and the most outstanding of them, Piotr Skarga (1536-1612), proved a worthy partner.

Hosius and Skarga pinpointed the principal arguments for returning to the fold, letting time do the rest. And time was on the side of Rome. In 1570 Mikołaj Sierotka Radziwiłł, son of the man who had introduced Calvinism to Lithuania and been one of its greatest financial and political supports, went back to the Church of Rome. Others followed suit, for a variety of reasons. Even the mixed marriages which the hierarchy had fulminated against worked in favour of Catholicism, since women had been largely left out of the religious debate and their conditioning led them to stand by their old faith. Jan Firlej, Marshal of Poland, had become a Calvinist, but his wife, Zofia Boner, had not. She covertly brought his sons up to love the Catholic faith, and three of the four became Catholics when they grew up. After her death, Firlej married Barbara Mniszech, another fervent Catholic. Although their son was ostensibly brought up a Calvinist, the mother’s influence prevailed, and he later became Primate of Poland. As Piotr Skarga foresaw, the country would be reconquered for Rome, ‘not by force or with steel, but by virtuous example, teaching, discussion, gentle intercourse and persuasion’.

As Calvin grew more strident and Protestants in various European countries began to execute not only Catholics but other Protestants, the Polish prelates showed forbearance. They pointed out that Protestantism could be more repressive than Catholicism. They explained that it was not only divisive, but irresponsible, and in this they were helped by the example of the Arians.

Under the influence of Fausto Sozzini, the Arian movement displayed a tendency to splinter while attracting all manner of dissenters and schismatics migrating from other countries. But what made the Arians really unpopular with the szlachta were the starkly political implications of their faith. ‘You should not eat bread made by the sweat of a subject’s brow, but make your own,’ they would hector. ‘Nor should you live on estates which were granted to your forebears for spilling the blood of enemies. You must sell those estates and give the money to the poor.’ Since the status of the szlachta was based on their readiness to bear arms, the Arians’ pacifism was downright subversive. (In an attempt to square the circle, their synod of 1604 allowed them to bear arms provided they did not use them.)

With the impending extinction of the Jagiellon dynasty, Poland and Lithuania needed unity of purpose rather than dissent and refusal to take responsibility. Nevertheless, the constitutional and legal aspects of the issue were still paramount. After the death of Zygmunt Augustus the Sejm which met in 1573 under the name of the Confederation of Warsaw to shape Poland’s future passed an act whose most memorable clause ran as follows:

Whereas in our Common Wealth there is no small disagreement in the matter of the Christian faith, and in order to prevent that any harmful contention should arise from this, as we see clearly taking place in other kingdoms, we swear to each other, in our name and in that of our descendants for ever more, on our honour, our faith, our love and our consciences, that albeit we are dissidentes in religione, we will keep the peace between ourselves, and that we will not, for the sake of our various faith and difference of church, either shed blood or confiscate property, deny favour, imprison or banish, and that furthermore we will not aid or abet any power or office which strives to this in any way whatsoever…

The freedom to practise any religion without suffering discrimination or penalty was henceforth enshrined in the constitution. This law would be observed rigorously by Catholic kings and an increasingly Catholic population. Some illegal executions did take place, but they were few. When no criminal offence had been committed, even acts of extreme provocation went unpunished. In 1580 the Calvinist Marcin Kreza snatched the host from a priest, spat on it, trampled it, and then fed it to a passing mongrel, for which he was reprimanded by the king and told not to do it again.

The Calvinist writer who chronicled the course of the Counter-Reformation in Poland, listing every execution or sectarian killing of a Protestant between 1550 and 1650, came up with a total no higher than twelve. During the same period, over five hundred people were legally executed for religious reasons in England, and nearly nine hundred were burnt in the Netherlands, while hundreds more suffered confiscations and attainders. This unique absence of violence stemmed partly from the Polish attitude to religion, partly from an obsession with legality and the principle of personal liberty, and partly from the fact that throughout this period Polish society concentrated on an attempt to build utopia on earth.