I am Ozymandias – 1751-1778
In the aftermath of the Treaty of Odessa, the Boyarka was in an understandably triumphal mood. From the 1750s, the aging Radoslav I, already 62 at the end of the war, would commonly be titled Radoslav the Great by his acolytes. Despite his advancing years, the Tsar was eager to use his greatly enhanced political capital to both solidify his empire’s newly acquired dominance in Europe and further his domestic political agenda that had been neglected during the war years. On the diplomatic front, a close alliance was agreed with the Netherlands in 1753 – which importantly gave Polish merchants access to Dutch colonial markets in Africa and the Caribbean and saw Dutch technicians travel to the east to aid Poland’s technological development. A further treaty was agreed with Skotland-Italy in 1759 in which both parties agreed to come to the other’s aid in the event of an attack by the Holy Roman Empire, although the pact would be invalid in the case of offensive wars or conflicts with any other parties. While these acts solidified Poland’s strategic partnerships from the Wars of the Italian Succession, their manoeuvres in the southern Balkans would do more to actively expand their influence. There the Poles played a diplomatic long game – seeking to sow discord between two pro-German states in Crusader Anatolia, which ruled most of Greece, and Serbia over Serbia’s over lordship of large ethnic-Greek territories in Asia Minor and Thrace, not least Constantinople itself. Over time, Crusader Anatolia would slowly begin to drift away from Vienna’s orbit, and grow ever closer to Kiev.
Domestically, in the aftermath of his military victories Radoslav sought to escalate his conflict with the traditional forces in Polish society in his drive towards secularism and enlightened modernity. Most lastingly, he introduced a sweeping reform of the empire’s system of law with the Radoslavian Code, made law in 1757. Legal minds among the Tsar’s supporters had been concocting ideas of reform since the early years of his reign two decades previously, yet until the 1750s the state had lacked the governing capacity, focus and determination to put anything into place. The Radoslavian Code superseded all existing systems of law – doing away with the patchwork legal system that differed between different regions, religious and ethnic communities across. It sought to enshrine a clear set of universal and rational laws and legally defining every tier of Poland’s social hierarchy from the serfs to the Princely classes. This attempt to bureaucratise the social structure in particular was a vast administrative undertaking that would take decades to finalise as families underwent lengthy attempts to prove their noble lineages and secure the privileges this entailed.
More colourfully, Radoslav also increased his efforts to encourage western and secular customs. Infamously, he instituted a tax on all bearded men. This was an act of open aggression against the empire’s religious communities. Conservative Muslims and Jews, for whom facial hair had religious significant and was a sign of their piety, and particularly the Hasidim – for whom a shaven face was genuine sacrilege. The Tsar saw the bearded faces of the empire’s men as a visible sign of its social backwardness, who disappearance would contribute to the sort of modern imperium he desired. The tax itself would prove extremely difficult to enact in practise, many state agents choosing not to enforce it at all for fear of violent confrontations with pious communities.
The Tsar would also take a more active interest in the internal affairs of the Jewish Orthodox Church. Since his earlier days in power, Radoslav’s coterie had been filled with followers of the Reform faction of Orthodoxy. However, even with imperial patronage the Reform Jews’ limited popular support outside or urban areas had limited their ability to take greater control over the church hierarchy – which was governed by democratic structures instituted during the 16th century Hasidic ascendancy. The existing moderate conservative religious leadership avoided active conflict with the monarchy, but nonetheless acted as an influential break on the Tsar’s autocratic authority – quietly resisting the drive to push religion from Polish society, question the empire’s fundamental Jewish nature or deprive believers of their freedom of religion. The Rabbinate swirled with sceptics and open opponents of Tsarist autocracy and was the clear centre of his political opposition. By the 1760s, Radoslav’s patience had begun to weary and he began to deploy his agents to actively interfere in the church – applying heavy pressure on Rabbinical councils to elect Reformist to more senior clerical positions and suppressing critical Rabbis.
Events would come to a head in 1761 when the Kohen Gadol David VI, a long term thorn in the emperor’s side, died after 24 years at the head of Jewish Orthodoxy. Kohen Gadols were elected by senior councils of Rabbis was across the Jewish Orthodox world – although most hailed from Poland and Israel themselves. Radoslav was determined to see his close ally Noah Silverman, the Chief Rabbi of cosmopolitan Gdansk, elected and deployed all his power to assure of it. Bribes were issued, threats made, many conservative and Hasidic Rabbis were prevented from travelling to Jerusalem for the election and more junior Reform-minded replacements sent in their stead. Noah Silverman was duly chosen to lead to Orthodox church, the first Reform Kohen Gadol in Jewish history. His election was widely seen to have been rigged, and his legitimacy rejected by thousands of Rabbis. In Poland, riots broke out across major towns and cities, with mobs of Zealots attacking government offices, the homes of known Reform clergy and Christians – who remained associated with the iconoclastic Tsar in the popular imagination.
The worst consequences of the election were in Israel itself. There, with a particularly pious Jewish community, the announcement of Noah’s elevation triggered a mass popular revolt. Pious rioters took over Jerusalem – forcing the new High Priest and his allies to flee to the Lebanon. The Zealots then spread out from the Holy City to capture most of the Palestinian coastline and Damascus – before beginning a siege of the remnants of the Reform group in Beirut, where they found more support among the sizeable local Christian population than among Jews. While this fighting raged, the Arabs populations on the east bank of the Jordan rose up against Jewish rule – pushing the Israelis on to the other side of the river and establishing independent Sheikdoms. A large army of 30,000 Polish imperial troops arrived in Lebanon in 1762 and proceeded to restore order to the Holy Land, crushing the Zealots and Arabs alike. Noah Silverman had died during the fighting, allegedly killed by the Tsar’s agents who regarded him as a liability in the light of the chaos his election had caused. In the election for the new Kohen Gadol, Radoslav relaxed his interference to allow a moderate compromise candidate to rise to the High Priesthood and diffuse much of the tension in Orthodoxy.
The Israelite Crisis had acted as a clear warning on the limits of absolutism and the secularising agenda of Poland’s 18th century monarchy. Importantly, it also spurred the intellectual development of the moderate centre of Jewish Orthodoxy. While the Hasidim largely held true to practises and ideology laid down by their 16th century foundational figure of Misha Dubnow and his immediate successors, they were ill-equipped to hold together a broad coalition opposed to secularism and reformism. Yet the church centre, opposed to both the Hasidim and Reformists, had long lacked ideological foundations. This would come to an end with the rise of Kohenism, in effect a ‘High Church’ form of Jewish Orthodoxy. The Kohenists held to the supremacy of the High Priesthood and its independence from secular interference, opposition to secularism and efforts to limit the public role of Jewish Orthodoxy and the defence of traditional Jewish customs. In contrast to the Hasidim, they were less fanatical, and were indeed suspicious of the outpourings of ecstatic popular religiosity associated with Hasidism, and lacked the same revulsion to technological change and foreign influence. They would dominate the Rabbinate for decades to come.
While Poland was absorbed by European war and the clash between church and state, on the other side of the world a political drama of global importance was underway. At the beginning of the 18th century the Pasai Republic was one of the richest most powerful states in the world. From its heartland on Sumatra, the Malay-speaking Islamic Republic ruled over the Malay peninsula, Borneo, much of Java and the lesser islands of the East Indies, all of Australia, most of the Pacific islands and the western coast of North America from the Gulf of California to Alaska. In the space of a little over a decade in the middle of the century, this would all disappear.
In 1757 a Bornean warlord named Omar Kamaluddin launched a rebellion, frustrated by the domination of the Republic by Sumatran cliques. Omar met with quick success, overwhelming his home island of Borneo before moving on to the Malay peninsula, West Java and then Sumatra itself – bringing the Republican regime crashing down and proclaiming himself Sultan of Brunei. The Pasai overseas holdings uniformly rejected Omar’s claims to authority. Australia announced its independence as a free Republic, local elites in the East Indian islands established their own statelets while across the Pacific and North America the old colonial administrators established the Confederation of Pasai – that hoped to hold the empire together and one day regain the homeland.
Europe’s predatory powers, in the midst of an orgy of colonial expansion across the Americas, sensed opportunity in the Malays’ weakness. From 1761 the Germans crossed over into Pasai lands in western Mexico to begin their conquest of California. Not to be left out, the Poles launched an expedition into Alaska in 1762. The two proceeded to crush the only non-European colonial administration in the Americas, with the two armies reach one another near the Chinese-populated area around the Nootka Sound in 1766. Despite a tense standoff, with Polish and German forces clashing in the race to secure the last Asian ruled settlements, a fourth Polish-Imperial war of the century was averted by the diplomatic intercession of the Danes – who acted as a mediator in agreeing a border between the two states. The Poles reorganised their new territory into the province of Grigoria – named after the great Polish explorer who had been the first European to travel through the region around a century before – Kiev’s foothold in the Americas.
Back in Europe, Kiev was pushing towards the abolition of the autonomy of the Baltic Kingdoms. Lithuania and Estonia had both been independent Kingdoms under Polish dominion for more than a century and a half, since 1580 and 1616 respectively. The Polish government had largely been happy with this status quo that offered a buffer on its north-western frontier and avoided incorporating a large population of non-Russian Protestants into the empire. Neither of these issues concerned Tsar Radoslav. Indeed, as a Baltic-born ex-Protestant he was in many ways closer to the vassal Kingdoms than his own people and would undoubtedly benefit from a large addition to his empire’s Protestant population. Meanwhile, in the past century Denmark and Poland had ceased to be serious rivals, with the Scandinavian Kingdom’s standing relative to its mighty neighbour having fallen away significantly. The was therefore little standing in Kiev’s way as first Lithuania in 1764 and then Estonia in 1770 were annexed directly into the Polish empire.
In 1772 the Tsar, for all his claims to enlightened governance, would prove he was not above medieval barbarism. In his quest for absolute power, Radoslav had involved himself endlessly in the minutiae of his empire’s governance – closely supervising ministries right across his administration. As he grew older, turning 80 in 1769, his capacity for this intensity of work was dimming, yet he showed little inclination towards delegating power to ministers. Hoping to keep the machinery of government running smoothly, a number of high-ranking civil servants quietly rerouted decision-making power away from the Tsar and into their own hands. It was in effect a silent coup in the name of administrative efficiency. At first the Tsar, whose focus was not what it once was, appeared to be unaware of the slow drift of power away from his person. Yet once he discovered the extent to which his civil servants had undermined his control he became enraged – seeing a seditious attempt to seize power. He instituted a brutal purge of the civil service – gruesomely executing hundreds of officials and expelling thousands of alleged co-conspirators from government.
While the mighty emperor was still respected and, now more than ever, feared across his realm, he had crippled the capacity of his government. It would take many years to rebuild the strength of the bureaucracy, while an increasingly frail Tsar simply could not keep up with the burden of work he had placed upon his own shoulders. His regime would limp on for several more years until the mighty autocratic finally died in 1778, at the age of 89. Radoslav the Great was one of the last surviving members of the generation who could remember the horror of Holy Roman troops marching through the streets of Kiev. He had played an important role in the effort to change the empire’s course under the Nasedkin Tsars Sviatopolk II and Vasiliy III – most notably on the battlefield during the Eight Years War, after seizing power in the civil war that followed that conflict he had pushed the empire forward along the course set by his predecessors and lead it to become Europe’s leading power after the Wars of the Italian Succession
Despite these accomplishments, there were few rulers in Polish history so despised in their own time. The pious of all religions hated his secularising policies, and Jews in particular were suspicious of the sincerity of his conversion to Judaism in 1733 and his perceived favouritism for Christians in general and Protestants in particular, his autocratic tendencies left a cloud of fear across the elite and many commoners – with power maintained by the unstoppable force of the imperial army and the tight grip of a massively expanded state, meanwhile, as a usurper to the throne with no claim by birth right, the legitimacy of the entire House of Zvenislava was never universally accepted – with some supporting the Legitimist claims of the Lukovic descendants of Vasilko II. At the same time, for all his endless programmes of reform, Radoslav had done nothing to disturb the unending servitude of the great majority of his subjects, who remained serfs, now with their bondage more transparently established into the Tsar’s reformed law codes. With religious opposition consolidating since the 1760s, and the bureaucracy weakened by purges in the 1770s, his regime had perhaps never been weaker than at the time of his death. This left his grandson, Radoslav II, with the monumental task of maintaining and restoring the autocracy.
