Читать книгу Poland: A history - Adam Zamoyski - Страница 14

In the sixteenth century the Polish Commonwealth was the largest state in Europe, extending over 990,000 square kilometres. The nature of this vast expanse varied from the undulating landscape of Wielkopolska to the flatness of Mazovia and the dense forests of Lithuania, from the Tatra mountains to the swamps of Belorussia, from the forests and lakes of Mazuria to the wild plains of Podolia rolling away into the distance, which the Poles referred to as ‘Ukraina’, meaning ‘margin’ or ‘edge’.

The population was, at ten million, equal to that of Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, twice that of England, and two-thirds that of France. Only 40 per cent were Poles, and they were concentrated in about 20 per cent of the area. The mass of the population, the peasantry, was made up of three principal ethnic groups: Polish, Lithuanian and Belarusian or Ukrainian. The urban population too was far from uniform. The great trading emporium of Gdańsk, almost a city-state in itself, was preponderantly German. Nearby lay the smaller port of Elbląg, which had a large colony of English and Scots. Kraków had significant ones of Hungarians and Italians. Lwów, a city with an individual outlook, both politically and culturally, and the only city apart from Rome to have three Christian archbishoprics, was made up of Poles, Germans, Italians and Armenians. Six languages were recognised for legal purposes; Polish, Latin, Belarusian, Hebrew, German and Armenian.

Almost every town also had its Jewish community. In the north, where some towns enjoyed exemptions under medieval charters granted by the Teutonic Order, the Jews were confined to a specific quarter. In the rest of the Commonwealth they settled where they would, and there were quantities of small towns in the south and east in which they predominated. This Jewish community, which accounted for nearly 10 per cent of the entire population, led a life of its own, communicating almost exclusively in Hebrew or Yiddish, while the Karaite Jews spoke Tatar.

A charter of 1551 set up what was in effect a Jewish state within the state. Local Jewish communes (Kahal) sent deputies twice a year to a national assembly (Vaad Arba Aracot) which governed the whole community. It passed laws, assessed taxes, funded and regulated its own legal system and institutions, communicating directly with the crown, not the Sejm. The next hundred years saw a remarkable flourishing of this community, which grew confident and assertive. Jealous merchants in Lwów complained in 1630 of the Jews behaving ‘like lords, driving in carriages, in coaches-andsix, surrounded by pages and grand music, consuming costly liquors in silver vessels, behaving publicly with pomp and ceremony’. They were rich merchants and bankers, small traders and inn-keepers, artisans and farmers, agents, factors and surgeons. Every village had one or two Jews, every little town had its community, with synagogue and ritual baths, and its own secluded life.

The most striking aspect of the Commonwealth, particularly in view of its size and ethnic diversity, was that it had no administrative structure to speak of. The only thing holding it together was the political nation, the szlachta, and that was as disparate as the Commonwealth itself. The wealthiest could compare with any grandees in Europe, the poorest were the menial servants of the rich. In between, they might be wealthy landowners or humble homesteaders ploughing and harvesting with their own hands, barefoot and in rags, poorer than many a peasant. Their level of education, religious affiliation and ethnic origin were just as varied.

The szlachta nevertheless developed a remarkably homogeneous culture and outlook, based on two influences which might be thought mutually exclusive. The first was the discovery of ancient Rome, and the analogies increasingly made between its institutions, customs and ideology, and those of the Commonwealth. This affected the Poles’ attitude to government. It was also responsible for the abandonment of the long hair of the late medieval period and the adoption of the ‘Roman’ haircut, and the acceptance of Renaissance forms in architecture. At the psychological level it gave the Poles a sense of belonging to a European family, based not on the Church or the Empire, but on Roman civilisation.

The second influence was more nebulous but far more pervasive. It stemmed from the theory, elaborated by various writers at the beginning of the century, that the Polish szlachta were not of the same Slav stock as the peasantry, but descendants of the Sarmatians. This placed a neat ethnic distinction between the political nation and the rest of the population, the plebs. How far they really believed in it is not clear, but the myth was embraced by the multi-ethnic szlachta, who were far more at home with the ‘noble warrior’ Sarmatian myth than with the image of Christian chivalry, with all that entailed in terms of fealty and homage.

In time, the Sarmatian myth grew into an all-embracing ideology, but in the sixteenth century its influence was visible principally in manners and taste. As a result of contacts with Hungary and Ottoman Turkey various accoutrements of Persian origin were gradually incorporated into everyday use, and by the end of the century a distinctly oriental Polish costume had evolved.

The szlachta invested in things they could wear or use—clothes, jewels, arms, saddlery, horses, servants and almost anything else that could be paraded. Weapons were covered in gold, silver and precious stones. Saddles and bridles were embroidered with gold thread and sewn with sequins or semi-precious stones. It was common for a nobleman who had a number of fine horses and several caparisons to have them all harnessed and led along behind him by pages, rather than leave them at home where no one would be able to admire them. The Poles were close to their horses, which were symbols of their warrior status. They were tacked in fine harness, covered in rich cloths, adorned with plumes and even wings, and, on high days and holidays, dyed (usually cochineal, but black, mauve or green were favoured for funerals).

Another aspect of Sarmatism was the love of ceremony. Hospitality was a way of showing respect and friendship, and was rarely confined to providing adequate food and drink, although both featured in abundance. Vodka and other spirits were never served at table or in the home, where wine predominated, imported for the most part from Hungary and Moldavia, but also from France, Italy and even the Canary Islands and, in the following century, California.

The discovery of America flooded Europe with minerals and precious metals in the sixteenth century, and the eventual consequence of this was to raise prices of commodities such as food. The ever growing demand for ships had the same effect on timber, pitch and hemp. Over the course of the century, the price at which Poles sold their agricultural produce went up by over 300 per cent. The actual buying power of what the szlachta had to sell went up against staple imports such as cloth, iron, wine, pepper, rice and sugar, by just over 90 per cent between 1550 and 1600. During the same period, the quantity exported more than doubled. The result was that landed Poles became a great deal richer in terms of cash to spend than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe.

This permitted increasing numbers of Poles to travel abroad, primarily in order to study. Lutherans might send their sons to Wittenberg and Calvinists to Basel, for religious reasons, but the most popular universities were those of Italy: between 1501 and 1605 Polish students consistently made up at least a quarter of the student body at the University of Padua. As they grew richer, they began to mix tourism with study. The wealthy would come back loaded with pictures and sculpture, books and works of art, and once home, set about embellishing their own surroundings along the lines observed abroad.

In 1502 Prince Zygmunt returned from his travels, bringing with him a Florentine architect who would rebuild the Royal Castle in Renaissance style. Other Italians followed in his footsteps, lured by the opportunities as magnates and prelates vied with each other to build lavish new residences, in a style that subjected Italian Renaissance architecture to the demands of the Polish climate and the pretentions of their patrons. The same instincts that fed on Sarmatism are undoubtedly responsible for the extravagance and the fantasy displayed. But the new style also reflected an attempt to give form to some of the ideals the educated szlachta had embraced. Many of the important buildings of the period are public ones, and they embody the spirit that was responsible for constructing the Commonwealth, the Polish utopia.

Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the largest, the most monumental, and the most ambitious building project of the age—the city of Zamość. And few individuals offer as complete a picture of the contradictions of the age as does it creator, who was both a child of the Renaissance and a forerunner of a new Baroque plutocracy, a libertarian and an autocrat, one of the creators of the Commonwealth, who sowed some of the first seeds of its corruption.

Jan Zamoyski was born in 1542, the son of a Calvinist minor senator. As a young man he completed courses at the Sorbonne and at the new College de France, then at the University of Padua, of which he became Rector. While there, he published a treatise on Roman constitutional history and became a Catholic. He returned to Poland with a letter of recommendation from the Senate of Venice to Zygmunt Augustus, who employed him as a secretary. He made his mark during the first interregnum, became Chancellor in 1578, and Hetman in 1581. He married, among others, the daughter of Mikołaj Radziwiłł ‘the Black’, and later the niece of the second elected king of Poland. Whether he aspired to the crown himself is not clear, but he set a pattern of autonomy which would be followed by most magnates in the next century.

On the death of his father in 1571 Zamoyski inherited four villages and the rich Starosty of Bełz. He methodically enlarged this estate, squeezing out adjacent landowners and buying out the senior branch of his family from the seat of Zamość. By 1600 he owned 6,500 square kilometres in one block, as well as lesser estates, properties in all the major cities, and thirteen lucrative starosties.

In 1580 he began to build New Zamość. It was to be an ideal Platonic city, laid out according to symbolic axes and points of reference, dominated at one end by his own palace, and at the centre by the town hall. Other major buildings included the law courts, the Catholic collegiate church, the Franciscan church, the Armenian church, the Orthodox church, the synagogue, the university, and the arsenal. The city was underpinned by a sophisticated sewerage system and surrounded by star-shaped fortifications of the most modern type.

Zamość made economic sense. It was settled by large numbers of Hispanic Jews, Italians, Scots, Armenians, Turks and Germans, who provided everything from medical facilities to a cannon foundry, from jewellery to printing presses. By endowing his domain with a capital city, Zamoyski turned it into a self-sufficient state, and all the profits, levies and dues which would otherwise have gone to the royal cities or the treasury went into his own pocket. The idea was widely copied. In 1594 the Żółkiewski family founded their administrative capital of Żółkiew, which by 1634 when it passed to the Sobieski was a flourishing centre with fifteen different guilds. Soon every magnate was building a private town for himself, a trend that undermined the position of the existing towns and cities.

Zamość is nevertheless unique. It is a model of Polish Renaissance-Mannerist style, but its purpose was not merely to achieve beauty. It was to combine functionalism with aesthetic perfection in order to create the ideal environment. Every element was of importance, and if there was one that overshadowed the others, it was probably the university, opened in 1594, which would, it was assumed, produce the ideal citizen.

This belief that utopia could be built was the product of more than a century of prosperity and security, of political self-confidence based on the civil liberties of the citizen, and of an impressive legacy of political and social thought which continued to develop and spread through the printed word. There may not have been very much awaiting publication when the first press was set up at Kraków in 1473, but by the early 1500s the urge to publish was evidenced by the proliferation of presses in provincial cities. While originally legislation demanded that all books be passed by the Rector of the Jagiellon University, the executionist movement won a notable victory in 1539 by obtaining a royal decree on the absolute freedom of the press.

Only a fraction of the existing literary heritage was in the vernacular, which was still orthographically inchoate and marked by regional variation. Atlases and geographical works published between 1500 and 1520, and works on the history of Poland that appeared in the following decades, helped to standardise the spelling of place-names. The publication of large numbers of books in Polish from the 1520s imposed uniformity of spelling and grammar. In 1534 Stefan Falimirz published the first Polish medical dictionary; in 1565 Stanisław Grzepski of the Jagiellon University published his technical handbook Geometria. The six translations of the New Testament—Königsberg (Lutheran, 1551), Lwów (Catholic, 1561), Brześć (Calvinist, 1563), Nieśwież (Arian, 1570), Kraków (Jesuit, 1593), Gdańsk (Lutheran, 1632)—constituted an exercise in Polish semantics. In 1568 the first systematic Polish grammar was compiled by Piotr Stojeński, an Arian of French origin; in 1564 Jan Mączyński issued his Polish-Latin lexicon at Königsberg; and finally, in 1594 the writer Łukasz Górnicki produced a definitive Polish orthography. Latin nevertheless continued in use, particularly in religious and political literature, both because it was a better tool for theoretical and philosophical writing, and because it was universal to Europe.

The most striking aspect of Polish thought at the time was the preoccupation with public affairs and government. The discussion on the Polish body politic was opened by Jan Ostroróg with his Monumentum pro Reipublicae Ordinatione (c.1460), which argued for a more just social and political system. It was taken up by Marcin Bielski (1495-1575) and Marcin Kromer (1512-89), who used books on the history of Poland to polemicise about the rights and wrongs of the system. Stanisław Orzechowski applied geometrical principles to constitutional projects. Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski (1503-72), Zygmunt Augustus’ delegate to the Council of Trent in 1545 and a close friend of the theologian Melanchthon, with whom he had studied at Wittenberg, published a treatise on the Polish legal system, and in 1554 a longer work, De Republica Emendanda, sketching a utopian political vision.

Most of this literature was idealistic, and, like the work of the eighteenth-century philosophes, predicated on the mirage of an ideal condition. It represented existing abuses and injustice as perversions of this condition, rather than as inherent in human affairs.

The next generation of political writers applied their ideas to specific institutions. Bartlomiej Paprocki’s O Hetmanie was an attempt to define the role and duty of the hetman; Krzysztof Warszewicki’s De Legato did the same for those engaged in diplomacy; Jakub Górski’s Rada Pańska, Jan Zamoyski’s De Senatu Romano and Wawrzyniec Goślicki’s De Optimo Senatore all lectured on the conduct of affairs of state. Although they were more practical than their forerunners they still clung to the belief that good government depended on good people rather than on strong institutions. As Zamoyski said in the speech inaugurating the university he had founded: ‘Republics will always be as good as the upbringing of their young men.’

By the end of the fifteenth century over 80 per cent of the 6,000 parishes in Wielkopolska and Małopolska had schools. The resultant upsurge in literacy was no doubt responsible for a literary flowering which took place at the same time. The first Polish lyric poet, Klemens Janicki (1516-43), was born a peasant but entered the priesthood and studied at the universities of Bologna and Padua, where he was crowned poet laureate by Cardinal Bembo. More typical was Mikołaj Rej of Nagłowice (1505-69), a country gentleman who wrote in robust Polish on religious, political and social issues. He was one of half a dozen notable poets, but they were all overshadowed by one figure who dominated the second half of the century.

Jan Kochanowski (1530-84) studied at Kraków, Königsberg and Padua, and then spent some years at court while considering a career in the Church. He was prolific and imaginative, and his use of Polish, a language he did more than any other to enrich, was masterful and refined. While he is best known for his lyrical verse and court poems, his rendering of the psalms of David, and above all the threnody he composed on the death of his three-year-old daughter, Kochanowski did not avoid the political subjects popular with other writers. He too was preoccupied with the good of the Commonwealth. This comes out strongly in his only attempt at drama. Although there was dramatic entertainment at court from the 1520s and a number of troupes active around the country (and, from 1610, a playhouse in Gdańsk in which English actors performed Shakespeare), it was not a favoured medium. Kochanowski’s short play The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys is the only exception. The characters in the play are not really people, but in effect the voices of collective interests, and the play is not about their feelings, but about the fate of Troy. This curious use of dramatis personae to represent the collective foreshadows nineteenth—and twentieth-century Polish drama, the mainstream of which is neither lyrical nor psychological, but ethical and political.

The state of mind defined in the words of these writers is a curious mixture of ideological bombast, emotional sincerity and healthy cynicism. The three co-exist with the two most pervasive themes. One is the almost obsessive feeling of responsibility for and compulsion to participate in the organic life of the Commonwealth at every level. The other is the quest for Arcadia. If political writing rested on the myth of an ‘ideal condition’ which had been perverted and must be restored, the literary imagination translated this into a quest for the state of innocence as epitomised by country life. This gave rise to a long tradition of Sielanki, a word the poet Szymon Szymonowicz (1558-1629) coined to express bucolic idylls. The sielanka theme haunted Polish thought and literature, sometimes assuming the aspect of a cult. Inspired by the quest for a lost innocence, which implied a rejection of corruption, it could take many forms. In the minds of the nineteenth-century Romantics, for instance, it would become confused with the quest for the lost motherland, and imply a rejection of political reality. More often, it took the form of intellectual withdrawal from the world, which at its worst exalted intellectual escapism and made the spirit of enquiry suspect.

There is a strong, if indefinable, connection between these states of mind and Poland’s place in European culture. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Poles were as widely travelled as the citizens of any nation. Polish and foreign painters, sculptors and musicians likened Polish cities and palaces to those of Europe. Kochanowski knew Ronsard, Stanisław Reszka and others were friends of Tasso, and a considerable number of Poles were closely associated with Erasmus of Rotterdam. Leonard Coxe, who taught at Cambridge and the Sorbonne before becoming professor at the Jagiellon University, remarked in a letter to an English friend that the Poles walked, talked, ate and slept Erasmus, beginning with the King, who wrote to him in a familiar style usually reserved for sovereign princes.

The literature of other countries was avidly read in Poland, and while Polish poetry may not have been read widely in other countries, the political and religious works penetrated far and wide. Modrzewski’s De Republica Emendanda was available in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian. Goślicki’s De Optimo Senatore was published in Venice, Basel and London. Kromer’s Confessio ran into several dozen editions of the original Latin text in various countries, and was translated into Polish, Czech, German, Dutch, French and English. Technical works such as Grzepski’s Geometria became part of the European scientific toolkit, as did those of Mikołaj Kopernik (Copernicus).

Born at Toruń in 1473, the son of a merchant, Kopernik enrolled at the Jagiellon University in 1491 to study astronomy, and later joined the priesthood, which enabled him to pursue studies at the universities of Bologna, Ferrara and Padua. After returning home, he became administrator of the bishopric of Warmia, but also worked as a lawyer, doctor, architect and even soldier, commanding a fortress in the last clash with the Teutonic Order in 1520. In 1543, the year of his death, he published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, in which he demonstrated that the sun and not the earth was the centre of the planetary system.

Erasmus was prompted to ‘congratulate the Polish nation…which…can now compete with the foremost and most cultivated in the world’. But this could very well serve as an epitaph, for Polish participation in the cultural life of Europe had reached a peak. A crucial element was language. For centuries the native tongue had been supplemented by Latin, which enjoyed the twin benefit of being a developed instrument of communication and an international medium without which the Poles would have been utterly isolated. As the Scots traveller Fynes Moryson noted in 1593, ‘There is not a ragged boy, nor a smith that shooes your hose, but he can speake Latten readily.’ During the sixteenth century the first of these benefits dwindled as Polish rapidly evolved into a lucid, harmonious language as efficient as Latin for the expression of ideas. The second benefit of Latin also began to wane, as a general drift throughout Europe towards the vernacular tended to restrict its international usefulness. From 1543 the decisions of the Sejm were published in Polish not Latin, and the same went for legal documents. As Polish became the language of state and of literature, Polish thought became increasingly inaccessible to western Europe.

In a poem he wrote to Erasmus, Bishop Krzycki assured him that the Poles were not only reading all his works, but also passing them on ‘across the Don’. The Russian world, which never had Latin, was heavily dependent on Poland for access to classical and contemporary European literature. It was from Kochanowski’s translations of Tasso, for example, that the first Russian ones were made. The Commonwealth was also the printing house of eastern Europe. The first book, a Bible, to be printed in Belarusian was published in Wilno in 1517. More surprisingly, the first printed work in Romanian was published in Kraków, from which also came quantities of books in Hungarian. By the end of the century the printers of Wilno, Kraków and Lublin were making small fortunes from supplying eastern European markets. The Polish presses also printed the Hebrew religious texts used throughout the European Diaspora.

The Polish szlachta continued to learn Latin, but German, which had been a crucial link with the outside world until the end of the Middle Ages, gradually dwindled. Partly as a result of the Reformation, Germany’s importance as a source of culture declined for Poland. France and Spain were in the grip of the Counter-Reformation and increasingly absolutist government, which made them unattractive to the Poles. Direct links had been forged with Italy, and Poland itself had acquired most of the amenities for which it had in the past been dependent on others. If the fifteenthcentury Pole had seen himself as living on the edge of a flat earth whose centre was somewhere far away to the west, his counterpart in the late sixteenth saw Poland not as peripheral to Europe, but as central to its own world.

The East had never had much to offer except for Tatar raids and Muscovite maraudings, but in the course of the sixteenth century a new vista came into view beyond these nuisances. Persian and Ottoman culture began to fascinate Polish society. Apart from owning Turkish artefacts, Stanisław Lubomirski, Palatine of Kraków, also kept three eminent orientalists in his permanent entourage. Tomasz Zamoyski, son of the Chancellor and Hetman, was learning four languages at the age of eight: Latin, Greek, Turkish and Polish. By the time he had completed his early studies, he was fluent in not only Turkish, but also Tatar and Arabic. The Polish Commonwealth was turning into a hybrid of East and West, increasingly exotic but also baffling to western Europeans.