The White Eagle & the Knight: A Polish AAR

[Cromwell]

A very bad time for poor old Karol to die, the country really could have done with an adult heir for the first succession of the post sejm era. Still at least the army is loyal to the royal family and has rediscovered its strength in a nice little war in Germany.

 

[HistoryDude]

Well, a civil war is coming...

Let's see how Poland-Lithuania handles it...

 

[Great Mantis]

The Saxon war proved a surprising boon. The courtly politics is very interesting, I wonder how influential Gosiewski will actually be on her young husband once this new rebellion is (hopefully) crushed?

 

[Specialist290]

At least Karol Ferdynand got one last chance to do what he loved before he died. Perhaps he'll never be one of the Commonwealth's most beloved monarchs, but in many respects he was exactly what the country needed after such terrible strife.

Svitrigaila's reign isn't off to the best of starts, what with a pretender uprising popping off right as he assumes the throne, but I have a feeling this would-be usurper is less of a real threat than he would imagine himself. The young king's stats line, combined with his ties to a famed military house, have me predicting that we're going to see the Commonwealth try to flex its muscles once more -- perhaps even some expansion eastward at the expense of the Russians or the Crimean khans is in order?

 

[generalis Julius Caesar]

Not again ....

 

[Riotkiller]

When will these nobles learn?

 

[Nikolai]

Not the best stats on that king.

 

[slothinator]

It's fortunate that a strong queen was available for a regency so soon after the elective monarchy was abolished, I'm sure many in the Sejm were howling in anger at the news.
Oginiski has a tough war ahead of him, with the Commonwealth reinvigorated and the nobles still licking their wounds from the last civil war I don't expect Svitrigaila to be unseated anytime soon.

 

[Legosim]

Another great update! Really enjoy the way you weave in the in-game personality traits into the story.

 

[theauthor]

You know despite the grim take on commonwealth financial in story methink the actual economy isn't actually that bad considering commonwealth size and already mid playthrough timeframe means commonwealth economy should still going strong even with debt especially if the army fundings are cut.

 

[RossN]

Svitrigalia I Lanckoronski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1636 to 1642.)​

Part Seventeen: Svitrigalia I & the Jadwiga Regency

The fortunes of the Lanckoronskis seemed cursed in the early Seventeenth Century. The long regency of Queen Viltautė Premyslovci ended with the coronation of her son Svitrigaila in 1636 and the dowager queen could hardly have expected she'd outlive her son. As it was the luckless Svitrigaila would not see his twenty second birthday, dying suddenly in October 1642.

During his brief reign Svitrigaila had been a secretive and shadowy figure. In person he was pale and serious, belying his youth. At his death the Swedish ambassador at court that he had never once seen the young monarch laugh, or summon more than a moonlight ghost of a smile. Svitrigaila had wisely left the swift crushing of the Oginiski revolt to his more experienced generals but the scant surviving letters and personal accounts suggest the boy king might have grown into a fine soldier himself. He evidently found time for personal pursuits as Jadwiga Gosiewski was already pregnant when they were married (a matter that would later cause great discomfort for King Michal II). Yet for all his potential, and the fascinated theories historians have conjured up about the destiny of the Commonwealth had he lived Svitrigaila's reign was constrained by certain foreign and domestic realities; the Danish-Ottoman alliance held firm, preventing any adventurous diplomacy to the north or the south and making expansion anywhere else unappetising. The King also had to face a revival of the pirates of Rügen as those irrepressible buccaneers once more menaced the Baltic [1].

Svitrigaila's death was so unexpected (he died after the briefest of illness in his his bedchambers) that many suspected foul play. The first of the alleged murderers was Svitrigaila's widow, Queen Jadwiga. The queen consort certainly had the opportunity to do away with her husband and could look forward to a long regency, ruling on behalf of her young son Michal II. Jadwiga had always been thought ambitious, and in the cut-throat world of the polish aristocracy the Gosiewski clan had many enemies. The whispers about her distant Jewish descent became something louder than whispers among the professionally paranoid and the ever envious. It was easy enough to - once one had accepted the idea of Jadwiga as a murderess - to see in her an adulteress and dark rumours spread that Michal's father was another man at court.

The sudden death of King Svitrigaila and the regency of Queen Jadwiga, October 1642.
​

Queen Jadwiga was not about to collapse under the weight of gossip, however hateful. She was the daughter of the great Zygfryd Gosiewski, the general who had rescued the royalist cause from disaster and defeat and she was made of sterner stuff. She rallied her own supporters, including much of the professional soldiery of Poland and Lithuania for whom the Gosiewski name was talismanic. A caramilla of generals made up the regent's inner court and if her habit of playing favourites with the soldiers only added to the vicious gossip about her appetites in the bedchambers it still gave Jadwiga a ring of steel to protect herself and her son.

Jadwiga's determination was impressive but from a dynastic point of view the early death of Svitrigaila was an unmitigated disaster. The boy king had no brothers and no uncles and while there were distant legitimate Lanckoronskis the the ranks royal family were thin. It was no great portrait of hereditary monarchy to have two succession crisis and underage monarchs in a row and the republican nobles in the Sejm would have been something other than human if they did not feel a glimmer of joy at the royal difficulties. The wounds of the civil war remained too fresh to cause a national crisis, at least immediately, but the sharks could scent blood in the water.

Much later historians would question the image of Jadwiga's decade long regency as a "failed reign". The Commonwealth remained prosperous, even with the needling attacks of the German pirates. The Polish and Lithuanian universities compared favourably with any in Europe and cultural and spiritual was advanced - the Seventeenth Century was the time of the Polish Baroque when poetry in both Latin and Polish reached new heights. However the reality was a pale shadow next to the myth of an unpopular queen-regent. The simple truth was that much of the szlachta that had grudgingly ceded absolute power to the royal dynasty bristled at watching that same power wielded by a woman with not a drop of royal blood in her veins.

In December 1643 a league of nobles revolted in Nowy Sacz. The magnate rebels under the leadership of one Albertas Pulaski demanded the restoration of the old powers of the Sejm, including the right to elect a king. Within weeks an army, some thirty five thousand strong flocked to Pulaski's banner, mostly the sons of those who had fought on the side of the Sejm in the civil war.

The Pulaski rebellion of 1643.​

The Pulaski rebellion was a shock but the Queen retained the support of the Army, the same loyalists who had crushed Oginiski in 1637. Much more frightening was the question of how many in the Commonwealth sympathised with the rebels even if they drew short of picking up a musket. The dynastic royalist faction was weaker in 1643 than it had been in decades.

In October 1644 the Army was still gathering to crush Pulaski. Alarming reports of Russian discontent in Psków required men to be kept in the north east to put down any revolt there [2]. A delegation from the Sejm travelled to Wilno and demanded the restoration of old privileges to the szlachta. Though their demands fell short of those pushed by the actual rebels, and they loudly protested their loyalty to "our young King and his mother by God's good grace" it would have have taken a fool not to see the threat behind their protestations, and Queen Jadwiga was far from that.

The regent refused the nobles, noting that as she was merely guarding the interests of her son she could not possibly agree to such a significant measure on his behalf. It was as much a twist of the truth as those professions of loyalty to the death, but the regent was not willing to show weakness at such a difficult time and she knew that many of her own natural allies - the city burghers, the clergy, the military - stood against any special favours for magnates whose fickleness was proverbial.

The 'loyalist' nobles were not happy but there was no further exodus in favour of Pulaski. Too many of the older senators could recall the civil war to start a new one in favour of an idealistic hothead.

The long predicted 'Russian' separatist rising erupted in the mid-summer of 1645 in Psków. If the rebels hoped Russia proper would come to their aid they had sorely misread the international situation as the Tsar was faced with the struggle of his life against Denmark and the Ottomans [3]. The royalist armies put down the rebels with appropriate ruthless before finally being able to turn against Pulaski and his acolytes. It took until the second half of 1647 before the malcontent magnates were driven from Nowy Sacz and Kraków. Albertas Pulaski himself was taken alive but wounded on the battlefield and hanged in public in Kraków, as a sign from an exhausted government that enough was enough.

After all these domestic troubles it was almost a relief to be drawn into a foreign war. The German principalities had yet again fallen out amongst themselves and in 1650 Mecklenburg, now ruled by Duke Albercht appealed to the Commonwealth for aid against Wolgast and Hamburg. Ancient alliances compelled the regent to agree but Jadwiga was perhaps also hoping that an easy foreign war would revive a patriotic unity in Poland-Lithuania. Certainly she was correct in her guess that the indolent Imperial court in Prague would not interfere in Northern Germany.

The Mecklenberg-Wolgast War of 1650 to 1652.​

Under General Vyentis Uchanski two Polish-Lithuanian armies, each twenty five thousand strong invaded the Duchy of Wolghast in the summer of 1650. They took Kolberg and Dramburg without bloodshed in June 1650, neither town having the walls to resist even a modest siege. The Commonwealth had been here before two decades previously and by now both Germans and Poles knew what to expect.

There was more fighting at sea as the aging but respectable Commonwealth fleet faced the ships from Wolgast, driving off the German galleys and blockading the enemy ports across the winter of 1650 and 1651. The middle of the Seventeenth Century was the coldest point of the so-called 'Little Ice Age' and most of the Commonwealth's ports were iced over during the cold months, making the icy Baltic more of a threat than the human foe. At least one small mercy was that the same frost and darkness that bedevilled the Commonwealth temporarily imprisoned the pirates of Rügen.

The wintery conditions made the Commonwealth sieges of Wolgast and later Hamburg a misery even for the shivering besiegers but they had a more dangerous legacy back in the Commonwealth. A combination of a succession of poor harvests and the breakdown of relations between the szlachta and the Crown left Polish peasants worse in real terms than they had been a century before. Some local magnates were fair and just landlords but many were not and far from the royal court in Wilno they saw their subjects as slaves. In early 1651 as (false but universally believed) reports of laws reaffirming privileges of the szlachta as a whole circulated in Polock and Brzesc. In April of that year spontaneous peasant revolts exploded in each voivodeship as mobs of outraged serfs stormed the manors of their hated landlords and ran wild. It was no exaggeration to say more Poles died violently at the hands of their countrymen in spring of 1651 than died fighting the Germans in the west.

The Great Peasant Revolt of 1651.​

The Great Peasant Revolt of 1651 (the third major rebellion of the regency) appalled the regent and her opponents alike. For all their quarrels neither party wished to see the universe termed upside down by rebellious peasants and a momentary truce between the Sejm and the Crown reigned. Later there would be much blame to go around but the battles of Pollock (6 May 1651) and Brzesc (31 May 1651) saw the peasants curbed royalist and local troops kept at home from the ongoing war in Germany.

By now the young king was nearing his sixteenth birthday and Queen Jadwiga was making preparations to retire from the regency late in the year. For many in the Commonwealth the personal reign of Michal II was eagerly anticipated but there were alternative views. The whispering campaign against Jadwiga had never entirely died and the shadow gossip that she had poisoned her husband and borne another man's child reached a crescendo in 1651. For ambitious nobles who dreamed of a restored and powerful Sejm or even - whisper it - a Republic the attraction was obvious but even some amongst the dynastic faction seemed to have doubts, or at least found it convenient to have doubts. The leader of this 'royalist' opposition was Count Olbracht Siemienowicz, a great magnate from Poznan.

Count Olbracht Siemienowicz was a member of the Lanckornski family through the female line, a distant cousin of the young king. By most metrics he stood far from inheriting the throne but distant as he was his blood link was impeccable. Count Olbracht was also a moderate Protestant and through that link he attracted many of the dissenting nobles from Western Poland. In 1650 and early 1651 he was already building his faction, though it was not until late in the day that he would decide to make a play for the throne itself rather than merely acting as a kingmaker in the Sejm.

Olbracth attracted support from many, not simply because he was a charismatic leader but because any of the many who had doubts about the current govenment could read into him what they will. Those who genuinely doubted the parentage of Michal II could see in Olbracht a 'true' descendant of the Polish kings. Those who leaned against Rome saw him a champion for their cause, though Olbracht was very careful not to alienate Catholics who might after all make up most of his subjects should he win. Even some of those aristocrats who pushed for a republic where prepared to support a man who would (they believed) at least restore the Sejm.

It was an inherently unstable, even contradictory coalition but when Michal II was officially crowned in Wilno on 27 October 1651 thirty four thousand rose in support of 'King Olbracht I' in Poznan...

Michal II comes of age and officially takes the throne, 27 October 1651.

The Olbract Rebellion of 1651.​

Footnotes:

[1] Despite the presence of at least three major navies in the Baltic (the Danish armada and the smaller but still formidable Swedes and Commonwealth fleets) the German pirates seemed indefatigable. Each of the great powers blamed one or other of the others for sheltering the pirates of Rügen.

[2] Even - perhaps especially - Jadwiga's critics would acknowledge she was an intricate webweaver when it came to spies and spycraft she had particularly fine senses when it came to sorting out the truth from the chatter when it came to gossip.

[3] The Russo-Danish-Ottoman War was a source of dismay in Wilno. While there was a sharp distrust of Russia there was an even sharper fear of the Danes and Ottomans growing yet stronger and had the Commonwealth not been in such a difficult position domestically she might have intervened.

 

[RossN]

Back, and my apologies for my long absence! I hope everyone is doing well.

~~~~

A very bad time for poor old Karol to die, the country really could have done with an adult heir for the first succession of the post sejm era. Still at least the army is loyal to the royal family and has rediscovered its strength in a nice little war in Germany.

Yes, the royal family have had terrible luck at a critical time.

Well, a civil war is coming...

Let's see how Poland-Lithuania handles it...

I fear the graver troubles are still to come.

The Saxon war proved a surprising boon. The courtly politics is very interesting, I wonder how influential Gosiewski will actually be on her young husband once this new rebellion is (hopefully) crushed?

She was certainly the dominant personality but they complimented each other in some ways and I'm sorry I didn't have more time to explore that before he died.

At least Karol Ferdynand got one last chance to do what he loved before he died. Perhaps he'll never be one of the Commonwealth's most beloved monarchs, but in many respects he was exactly what the country needed after such terrible strife.

Svitrigaila's reign isn't off to the best of starts, what with a pretender uprising popping off right as he assumes the throne, but I have a feeling this would-be usurper is less of a real threat than he would imagine himself. The young king's stats line, combined with his ties to a famed military house, have me predicting that we're going to see the Commonwealth try to flex its muscles once more -- perhaps even some expansion eastward at the expense of the Russians or the Crimean khans is in order?

Sadly the son didn't last long either.

The great 'block' on Commonwealth expansion is the Ottoman-Danish alliance, which makes the Crimea and Livonia (the two obvious avenues of expansion) unpalatable. Sooner or later I suspect I'll have to deal with that.

Not again ....

And again!

When will these nobles learn?

Never!

Not the best stats on that king.

Better than Michal II.

It's fortunate that a strong queen was available for a regency so soon after the elective monarchy was abolished, I'm sure many in the Sejm were howling in anger at the news.
Oginiski has a tough war ahead of him, with the Commonwealth reinvigorated and the nobles still licking their wounds from the last civil war I don't expect Svitrigaila to be unseated anytime soon.

Oginiski's revolt was doomed even before it began but the Commonwealth has been growing increasingly unsettled.

Another great update! Really enjoy the way you weave in the in-game personality traits into the story.

Thank you! I love giving the characters some, um, character!

You know despite the grim take on commonwealth financial in story methink the actual economy isn't actually that bad considering commonwealth size and already mid playthrough timeframe means commonwealth economy should still going strong even with debt especially if the army fundings are cut.

Yes it isn't too bad, though it could be and has been better.

 

[InvisibleBison]

I have to wonder what these rebels are thinking - 34,000 troops is a lot, but without something to distract the king's forces it's not enough. Do they just not realize that? Do they think they'll be able to out-general the loyalist forces? Or do they think the righteousness of their cause will give them the victory?

 

[Nikolai]

Will the troubles never end?

 

[Cromwell]

It might not be as bad as it seems, the young King is in power now with a great many of his enemies already slaughtered.

A nice ongoing war to mean his reign will (hopefully) start with an early victory. I am hoping we are about to see one of Poland's great monarchs here.

 

[HistoryDude]

Queen Jadwiga seems to have kept the Commonwealth together, for all her faults.

King Michal II has to contend with a pretender now, though.

 

[Specialist290]

Glad to see you back, Ross

Well, Svitrigalia indeed didn't last long at all -- and with a stat line like that, I'd be tempted to dump Michal as well and let Olbracht usurp the throne, come what may. Fate has not been kind to the Lanckoronskis lately, has it?

 

[Viden]

Another king, more revolts. Turmoil seems unending.

 

[slothinator]

I'm sure the Commonwealth's nobles are kicking themselves about not having an elective monarchy anymore. Such a long regency isn't good for anyone, especially with all the rebellions.

Michal looks quite unimpressive overall so one can only hope that he will surround himself with good advisors. In the meantime, Olbracht's rebellion seems doomed to fail but it will be a good testing ground for the new king.

 

[coz1]

I've finally caught up, @RossN and I was not disappointed! Another strong work and the presentation is nonpareil. Following from here on out.