The White Eagle & the Knight: A Polish AAR

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Poland and her neighbours in 1444.​

Introduction

Modern Poland was born at the very end of the Tenth Century when the pagan chieftain Mieszko I converted to Christianity. The clever and determined ruler became the first Duke of Poland, forging a strong Christian state in Eastern Europe with the help of his wife Dobrawa, daughter of the Duke of Bohemia. Their son Bolesław the Brave became the first King of Poland.

For four hundred years the Polish-Bohemian Piast Dynasty ruled Poland through periods of prosperity and near disaster. In the early Eleventh Century the kingdom nearly collapsed under Mieszko II and it would not be until decades later that Bolesław II restored the power of the crown, only to lose it almost at once to the votality of his barons. The next two centuries saw division and turmoil. That came to an end with Kazimierz III or Casimir the Great, the last of the Piasts to rule as a hereditary monarch who refounded Poland as a great and stable realm. His nephew and successor, Louis the Hungarian was already ruler of Hungry and Croatia when he took the Polish throne in 1370. Like his uncle before him Louis had only daughters and in order to see one of his daughter Mary or Jadwiga inherit he was prepared to recognise the privileges of his boisterous nobles with the Privilege of Koszyce.

Louis's efforts could not prevent civil war erupting over the succession after his death in 1382 and it was only after bloodshed and destruction that Jadwiga took the throne as 'King of Poland'. Jadwiga would die young but she did marry the newly Christianised Grand Duke of Lithuania Jogaila and it would be his children that would eventually take the Polish crown.Through all this strife Poland had remained stubbornly independent and distinct, her aristocrats the proudest in Europe, her cities large and wealthy and her armies formidable.

It was just one such army that the Jogalia's son Władysław, then King of Poland led on crusade against the Ottoman Turks in 1444. It would be on the crusade that he would meet his nemesis and Poland be once again cast into uncertainty...

The Battle of Varna, 10 November 1444.​

 

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Kazimierz (or Casimir) IV Jagegiellon, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.​

Part One: King Kazimierz IV Jagegiellon


On 10 November 1444 three kingdoms lost their monarch when one man died. Władysław III, the young crusader king of Poland, Hungary and Croatia fell in battle beneath the ancient walls of the fortress city of Varna. The headstrong warrior prince was the most famous and grand of the thousands who lost their lives in one last quixotic attempt to defeat the Muslim Ottoman Empire and drive the Turkish sultanate from Europe. That dream lay shattered among the broken bodies of Varna and it was little consolation that Ottomans were too bloodied and exhausted by their triumph to pursue the retreating crusaders. A ragged stream of Christian warriors, many half dead from frostbite eventually reached the Hungarian border carrying their tale of defeat.

The disaster at Varna shocked all Christendom but it was felt worst of all in those lands that had lost a king. Hungary and Croatia at least had a Regent waiting in the wings, the great hero and general John Hunyadi who had marshalled the remnant's of Władysław's army and returned home with his grandeur undimmed. The succession in Buda might be disputed but with a man like that around the kingdom remained stable. Less fortunate was Władysław's original kingdom and homeland of Poland. There was no legendary general here. Instead the destiny of Poland lay in the hands of her clergy and her nobles and like nowhere else in Europe they had the power to conjure or banish a new king with a simple vote. In particular it was the aristocrats, grandees and other notables of the Sejm who would elect a new monarch to replace the childless Władysław.

The Sejm (meaning "gathering") of Poland that assembled in Kraków in the gloomy Winter of 1444 and throughout 1445 was not yet the formidable, numerous and codified body it would grow into. At this stage the magnates and pretty barons were still unsure of their power and still quarrelled among themselves more often than not. The szlachta or nobility of Poland had always been proud and ambitious but it had only been in the previous century that they had officially become part of a semi-permanent council or parliament. The szlachta after much debate turned to offer the crown to the late king's brother, Kazimierz (or Casimir) Jagiellon, the Grand Duke of Lithuania. The Lithuanian dynasty had been involved in Poland since the marriage of Grand Duke Jogaila to the much mourned Queen Jadwiga of Poland in 1386. Jogaila, born a pagan had taken the Polish name Władysław and converted to Catholicism and when he died in 1434 his Polish crown had passed to his elder son Władysław III and his Lithuanian crown to his younger son Kazimierz. Now fate seemed to have reunited the two thrones.

If the Polish grandees expected another Władysław III - a man with little interest in anything beyond being a perfect Christian knight - they were doomed to disappointment. Kazimierz was eighteen years old and his formal education had been sparse and he lacked the martial ability of his brother. Yet he was neither fool nor weakling and in his four years ruling in the Lithuanian capital of Vilinius he had faced a nobility that could almost match that of Poland for confidence and indeed aped their cousins to the west shamelessly when it came to language, fashion or religious practice. The young Grand Duke was a man with a mind like mountain stream; rapid, untamed and powerful. Overcoming the limits of his education he had taught himself the habits and wisdom of a scholar, mastering the many tongues of his sprawling Grand Duchy. The traits that had driven Władysław III to become a paladin had left his brother with a horror for corruption. It also left him a tough negotiator.

Though the election of monarchs was not unknown elsewhere in Europe the Polish system was unique.​

For the entirety of 1445 and deep into the new year the negotiations had proceeded. For most of this time Kazimierz had remained in Vilnius, a fine and stately city in her own right even if she could not compare to glittering Kraków with her many churches, her bustling streets and her university. In his stead the Grand Duke had sent his envoys with stiff terms regarding the powers of the crown. The Sejm, peppery body of nobles that it was pushed back and publicly toyed with the idea of electing a noble son of Poland to the crown. It was all a dance of course; Kazimierz knew that the Sejm wished to keep the old alliance with Lithuania just as the Grand Duke knew he would have to accept the peacock bluster of the szlachta. Early in 1446 the two sides finally came to terms they could both accept and Kazimierz travelled to Kraków to be crowned King of Poland by the Archbishop of Gniezno, the same man who had been his tutor when he had been a boy.

His election and coronation out of the way King Kazimierz began his reign in Poland by marrying Princess Camelia of Moldavia. Camelia was the sister of Prince Roman of Moldavia. Moldavia politics were infamous, full of treachery and intrigued that would have dazed a Venetian but the Poles had been drawn into this world in 1445 when the Sejm gifted Roman with soldiers to take his family's throne. Kazimierz disdained Roman personally, finding him a shadowy and obscure individual who wielded the knife too readily but he honoured the alliance that left Moldavia a loyal march of the Polish Crown. The marriage to Princess Camelia was a way of cementing that alliance and also cannily avoiding marriage with a great family of Poland (and angering all the rest.) Mercifully Princess Camelia proved most unlike her brother. In the late Summer of 1446 when she arrived in Kraków she was recently turned twenty 'fair of face and fair of temper' as a local chronicler put it. The soon to be Queen Consort of Poland did indeed seem popular for when she entered the city in her red and cloth of gold finery with her battalion of attendants, soldiers and servants there was much commotion among the crowd. Some of the celebration may have something to who Camelia's guards were; many among them were sons of Poland who had departed to win his throne and their return guarding a princess was greeted by the onlookers as a good omen for the beginning of the reign.

The royal court in 1446.​

The King was assisted in his early reign by three chief courtiers who added their experience to Kazimierz's native cunning and strong will. Bishop Rytwianski, a significant theologian would later earn the King's great gratitude my smoothing over relations with the Pope regarding the Queen's faith (as a Moldavian she was Eastern Orthodox, like many of Kazimierz's subjects.) Aleksy Mniszech and Stefan Benyowski were both 'tame' members of the szlachta. Mniszech, a clever and loyal statesman excelled at putting forth the monarch's will to his more prickly peers. Benyowski in contrast had no grasp of tact whatsoever but was a successful career soldier who brought many insights into army reform.

Kazimierz early reign was spent dealing with domestic issues, including steering a steady path between the szlachta, the clergy and the burghers of the cities. The elevation of the Bishop of Poznan to the rank of Cardinal (thanks to the silver tongue of Bishop Rytwianski) and the King's crackdown on the sale of minor titles of nobility were significant events during these years though they would be overshadowed by foreign affairs as the 1450s began.

Sprawling across the southern edge of the Baltic Sea like a dreaming dragon was the Teutonic Order, a strange mix of a knightly-monastic warrior brotherhood ruling over rich German speaking seaports and tough Prussian peasants. The knights had been enemies of old of both Poland and Lithuania and the Polish Crown had long claimed land now ruled by the Teutonic Order. In May 1452 the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order had arrogantly and unwisely claimed indisputably Polish Poznan as a Teutonic fief. In return King Kazimierz ordered his Chancellor the ever present Aleksy Mniszech to 'revive' a Polish claim to the handsome and prosperous city of Kulm (called Chełmno by the Poles) near the Vistula. Neither claim rested on the most stable ground as the Papacy drily noted when the representative of the Teutons and the Poles arrived in Rome. What made the Polish claim stronger on the ground if not in law was the character of the city which was overwhelmingly Polish. On 21 July 1452 war broke out. A Polish army under General Bartlomiej Ossolinski invaded Prussia proper while a second army under the King's direct command marched west towards the Teutonic fiefs of Dramburg and Neumark in the Holy Roman Empire and the Teutonic ally of Stettin [1].

The War of 1452. The disputed Kulm (or Chełmno) is marked with yellow hatching.​

At the Battle of Tuchel on 17 September 1452 General Ossolinski defeated a army sent east from Stettin to aid the Order. The Germans under Walter Behm had in fact marched to relieve the siege of Kulm but that city had already fallen to the Poles with little resistance. Ossolinski's cavalry ambushed the German infantry among the dark spruce of the Tuchel Forest, riding down and lancing many before Behm could rally his forces and signal a retreat. The Germans retreated deeper into eastern Prussia while Ossolinski began his siege of the town of Tuchel proper. Tuchel, a strong and stubborn town would withstand a siege of almost a year before surrendering to the Poles in August 1453.

The Battle of Tuchel, 17 September 1452.​

Meanwhile King Kazimierz had taken first Dramburg, then Neumark and the Hanseatic city of Stargard on the River Ina. Reaching Stettin he began the longest siege of the war which would last all the way until January 1454. On 23 January Count Jocaim of Stettin, a tall man grown gaunt from hunger and exhaustion surrendered to Kazimierz. The Polish troops were in little better condition, having suffered through the snows and rains of two hard winters in camp. In return for much gold and silver the Count of Stettin bought his way out of the war leading to some grumbling back in Poland that Kazimierz had not simply annexed Stettin which had an old Polish past. The King had considered it but decided against such a move lest he needlessly anger the Emperor. For the same reason both Dramburg and Neumark would be returned to the Teutonic Order at the end of the war.

With the west secure the King turned east to link up Ossolinski who had already overrun most of Prussia. The Teutonic Order, fearing the greater numbers of the Poles had avoided direct battle and retreated ever east hoping to link up with their brothers-in-arms the Livonian Order. A great Teutonic-Livonian army besieged the Lithuanian city of Polockas and Kazimierz marched east to meet them. Other events would intercede long before he reached them however.

The Lithuanian nobles, though independent and querulous had always supported their Grand Duke. It was therefore a shock to Kazimierz when they suddenly rose in revolt at Trakai on 1 July 1454 (the same day Königsberg surrendered to Ossolinski.) The Lithuanian nobles were led by Petras Denhofas and their discontents stemmed from the viceroys Kazimierz had left in Vilnius to rule the Grand Duchy in his name while he reigned in Kraków. So many discontented nobles joined the revolt that Kazimierz was forced to combine his own army with Ossolinski and fight the rebels. It was at Trakai on 1 September that the Poles crushed the malcontents in a battle larger and bloodier than any against the Teutons or Livonians. Petras Denhofas was among the fallen, killed in a failed cavalry charge that came within an ace of capturing Kazimierz. The surviving ringleaders paid a sharp price for their treason but many lesser nobles would be pardoned and brought back into the fold; the Grand Duke had no intention of depriving Lithuania of the very men he needed to defend and rule her [2].

For the Teutonic Order and the Livonian Order the Dehofas Rebellion had been the last hope of diverting the Poles. The Battle of Trakai left them in a desperate position, growing worse due to the outbreak of war with Denmark. On 27 October 1454 the Teutonic Order sent a peace proposal to the King, at the time leading his army into Livonia. The knights surrendered Kulm (or Chełmno) and emptied out their treasury in a successful bid to persuade Kazimierz to the peace table.

The end of the war, 27 October 1454. More Polish, Lithuanian, Mazovian and Moldavian soldiers died of exposure and fever during the hard winters of 1453 and 1454 than in battle.​

As with the peace with Stettin the previous year there were murmurings in the Sejm that the monarch who had proved so tough a negotiator during his election seemed too generous at the peace table. With all of the Teutonic Order under Polish control the King perhaps could have demanded more land. Kazimierz thought differently. The Dehofas Rebellion had revealed his authority might be more fragile than once suspected and the thought of annexing many cities riddled with malcontents was not an enticing one. He was also aware that the Danes might be a formidable foe if they swallowed all of Livonia so it was better to leave the Teutonic and Livonian Orders as a shield until he was ready to deal with them.

Poland emerged from the war slightly bigger and much richer. Using the tribute from Stettin and the Teutonic Order Kazimierz ordered the construction of new churches in Kraków and Poznan to celebrate the victory, and at the urging of his wife was able to aid Roman of Moldavia. The immediate aftermath of the war saw a drive towards government reform as the monarch fresh from the glow of victory attempted to steer a new course with his nobles both in Poland and Lithuania. As part of this effort he spent the Spring of 1455 in Vilnius, painstakingly negotiating a new government to keep order in the Grand Duchy. In some ways the politicking involved was more tiring than the campaign trail itself and despite the finery of the occasion the monarch was believed to be ill when he left the capital of the Grand Duchy to return to Kraków.

The army, marching under countless colourful banners and standards and laden with baggage made slow progress west and was trapped by a late Summer thunderstorm near the city of Tarnów. The King, who despite his weariness had insisted on riding his horse through the city to greet the cheering crowds who had assembled for him was 'near drowned'. By the morning he had a clear fever. Alarmed, his aide-de-camp overruled Bishop Rytwianski (the senior member of the royal council with the army) when the theologian urged they return to Tarnów. Instead the army pushed on towards the capital and the monarch's personal physicians.

Kazimierz, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania died on the night of 15 September 1455. Given his youth and general good health his sudden death provoked all sorts of suspicions of foul play that had seen his poisoned but in the centuries since no one has conjured up a viable suspect or convincing conspiracy. Kazimierz had his critics but from all accounts he was popular among both Poles and Lithuanians and even the Lithuanian nobles who had intrigued with Dehofas appeared to have reconciled with their Grand Duke. He would be widely mourned.

With no surviving legitimate children Kazimierz had willed his thrones to his older cousin Aleksander Karol Jagiellon. The Sejm however had other ideas...

Poland and Lithuania at the death of Kazimier IV, 1455. ​

Footnotes:

[1] The Grand Duchy of Lithuania fought a largely separate war against the Teutonic ally the Livonian Order during this period that resulted in no territorial change.

[2] Lithuania loomed large on any European map and her army was a fine one but the Grand Duchy was plagued by cultural and religious disunity and barbarian and quasi-barbarian neighbours to her east. The largely pro-Polish, Catholic Lithuanian nobles were not simply the backbone of the army they were the only thing preventing the state from collapsing.

 

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A stylised representation of John of Brandenburg (Jan I Kazimierz von Hohenzollern) receiving word from Bishop Rytwianski that he has been elected to the Polish Crown.
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Part Two: John of Brandenburg

John of Brandenburg or as he was officially known in Poland, Jan I Kazimierz von Hohenzollern was not an obvious heir to the Polish throne. In 1455 he was already forty three years old, several years older than the man he would replace. He had lived almost his entire life in Germany at the court of his cousin Prince-Elector Friedrich II of Brandenburg. A tall and well built man with a rich auburn beard beginning to run to silver he left a vivid impression on first encounter, which was not always to his benefit for this German prince was notoriously loose lipped especially when he was in his cups (which was often.)

The Nineteenth Century Polish historian Karol Piotrowski [1], who rarely had a good word to say about anyone who wasn't Polish and who had an axe to grind about German involvement in his homeland famously damned John as an:

'...Obscure German princeling who found himself alone and adrift in a country with little notion of what to achieve or even of how it had been decided he take the crown...'

The historian's unkind words contain a grain of truth. John of Brandenburg was not a reigning prince at the time and though he had allowed his name to be put to the vote his election by the Sejm appears to have surprised just about everyone including the Brandenburger himself. Conventional wisdom held that Prince Aleksander Karol Jagiellon, the cousin of the late King Kazimierz was the obvious choice. However the szlachta felt differently and they had reasons of their own for looking beyond the kind-hearted but colourless Prince Aleksander. As indisputably German as he was John of Brandenburg did have a Polish connection on his mother's side making him a blood member of the old Piast line. More to the point and in direct contrast to Aleksander John was not merely a 'obscure German princeling'. Rather he was a renowned and experienced soldier who had fought in the last crusade against the Hussites of Bohemia and in the ill-starred expedition against the Turks where he had met and befriended King Władysław III.

This splendid and gallant knight with his heavily accented Polish and his train of severe faced German attendants arrived in Kraków on the last day of 1455. Officially the Sejm had yet to make its final vote but it had been obvious for weeks which way the wind was blowing. A combination of nobles from across Poland had backed the Brandenburger and the dejected partisans of Prince Aleksander had discovered that even the Lithuanian nobles representing the Grand Duchy were more in favour of continuing the union with Poland under John of Brandenburg than Aleksander Karol Jagiellon who had never wielded a sword in anger in his entire life.

Certainly for the Lithuanians (bordered by the avaricious Muscovites) a warrior Grand Duke had a simple and direct appeal but the Polish desires were more complex. The notoriously headstrong nobles may have supposed a knight like the German would sympathise with them. Conversely they may have felt choosing a foreigner would grant them a monarch with no power base of his own in the country. There have also been theories that the Elector of Brandenburg bribed the Sejm likely without his cousin's knowledge with John of Brandenburg being famously incapable of keeping a secret to himself. Whatever the truth 'Jan I Kazimierz von Hohenzollern' would be crowned King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania in 1456.

The succession of Jan I Kazimierz von Hohenzollern (or John of Brandenburg as he is better known to history) as King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.​

The new monarch true to his history proved a man interested in reforming and enlarging the army. As a knight himself John of Brandenburg was inclined to favour cavalry and the role of the nobility and ironically given his later reign he was much praised for reinforcing the aristocratic ideal of the Polish army. Between 1456 and 1460 the permanent army grew by six thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry many provided by the szlachta. The new army was likely originally built up against either Bohemia or Hungary, neither nation having much favour with the Poles. However a different if familiar enemy soon appeared.

The Teutonic Order had survived her war with Poland but by the 1450s it was clear to all that the monastic state was dying. Many knights had fallen in the war and against the Danes in the doomed effort to defend Livonia from Scandinavian greed. The disastrous wars had seen a sharp rise in taxes to attempt to fill an empty treasury and lure in new recruits to a depleted body of men. The merchants of the cities, particularly the great trading port of Danzig chafed under the fading rule of the Grand Master. Joining them were some of the lesser nobles who had also grown tired of the Order. Beginning in early 1460 the discontent erupted into rebellion - and a plea for aid.

The 'Prussian Confederation' (blue) in revolt against the Teutonic Order (grey), November 1460.​

John of Brandenburg had little personal enmity against the Teutonic Order. If anything his instincts as a standard bearer for chivalry might have made him more sympathetic towards the Order. Nevertheless the King of Poland (and Grand Duke of Lithuania) had solemnly sworn before God to reign over his people when he had been crowned by the Archbishop of Gniezno. Poland had an historic interest and an historic duty towards the Prussians and if the Teutonic Order had grown tyrannical and inept his own duty was clear. When the envoys of Syndic Kaspar, the young burgomaster of Danzig who led the revolt arrived in Kraków bearing letters in German, Polish and Latin they found a receptive monarch in the Wawel Royal Castle.

In return for pledging their loyalty to the Polish Crown the 'Prussian Confederation' [2] begged John to intercede against their 'common enemy'. Initially the weary envoys, travel stained and hungry after their dangerous journey had hoped for gold or perhaps soldiers, similar to efforts the Poles had sent to help Roman of Moldavia win his principality. To their surprise and delight John of Brandenburg drew his sword and swore by Saint Adalbert that they should have the full strength of the Polish and Lithuanian crowns behind them. The King knew that the Sejm would never stand back and allow the Teutonic Order to crush the Prussians.

John was right about the Sejm but in the weeks it took the Polish council to officially decide policy the war was nearly over. On 18 November 1460 the Teutonic knights ruinously defeated a rebel army before the walls of Marienburg. By the time Poland officially joined the war a month later Danzig itself was under siege. John's first ambition was to save the rebel capital and he marched to the relief of Danzig with eleven thousand men while General Bartlomiej Ossolinski with ten thousand moved on the Teutonic capital of Marienbug. The final and smallest force of eight thousand was sent to the distant port of Memel to aid the Lithuanians who had swiftly moved against the strategic city.

The Poles were delayed by a very wet late winter and early spring which turned the roads into mud traps for an army baggage train and heavy cavalry. It would not be until March that the King and his forces neared Danzig. The Teutonic commander, the Hochmeister Egon von Ungern-Sternberg refused to retreat even while faced with a larger enemy force. The city of Danzig was nearing surrender and if he abandoned his siege now the war was as good as lost. On 5 March 1461 the two forces clashed near the small town of Praust (Pruszcz to the Poles) immediately to the south west of Danzig proper. John of Brandenburg, an old hand at campaigning had deliberately slowed his advance to allow his exhausted troops time to recover and also to scout out firmer ground for his knights to ride on. Von Ungern-Sternberg on the other hand seems to have simply assumed the Poles would be worn down and largely discounted the Polish superiority in heavy horse.

The Battle of Danzig, 5 March 1461.​

Unlike in the contemporary war in France where the English and French still fought over Bordeaux and the knights fought dismounted, the knights of eastern Europe with less mass arrow fire facing them still favoured the steed. Thus when John of Brandenburg's knights easily routed and 'rolled up' their Teutonic counterparts the Teutonic infantry collapsed swiftly. Within four hours the enemy was fleeing and almost half the chivalry of the Order lay dead or taken prisoner. The following day the King of Poland road in splendour through the city gates to the cheers of the republic's inhabitants, a train of miserable captured knights behind him.

After the Battle of Danzig the surviving Teutonic force had retreated east, losing more men in a desperate nocturnal crossing of the Vistula. Unfortunately for them the demoralised and disorganised bands of soldiers reached Marienburg only to find themselves surrounded by Bartlomiej Ossolinski's soldiers who had begun their siege of the Teutonic capital. After the briefest of skirmishes in which eight unlucky Poles became casualties von Ungern-Sternberg and his surviving forces surrendered.

The Battle of Marienburg, 11 March 1461.​

The Battle of Marienburg decided the course of the war but it didn't end it. The Teutonic Order stubbornly held out behind their city and fortress walls. Even when Marienburg herself fell in June the Order remained in the war, buoyed along by their alliances with Stettin and Lüneburg [3]. Throughout the whole of 1462 the Poles and their allies would be engaged in the unglamorous but vital work of besieging towns. Stettin, which had already fallen to the Poles in the last war finally surrendered on 1 January 1463 bring the war to a close. A tiny rump Teutonic state was permitted to survive but the Order's days as any sort of power had clearly ended.

The Prussian War (or Danzig War as it is also called) had added lustre to the King. John of Brandenburg was an ideal leader to fight such a war; conscious of the importance of chivalry and relentlessly honourable he won the lasting affection of the Danzigers who promptly erected a statue to the King in their city. He also won the esteem of the Lithuanian nobility. John, whose Polish left something to be desired never succeeded in mastering the Lithuanian tongue, but he was ever aware that he wore two crowns and at the end of the war it was at his insistence that the town of Memel go to the Grand Duchy in recognition of their contribution to the war. The 'Prussian Confederation', functionally just the city state of Danzig and her dependencies at this point helped themselves to Ermland. In exchange most of the contents of the Teutonic treasury flowed to Poland.

The King's relationship with the szlachta was also, at this point, good. The monarch had led a successful war and his stance on the army, which favoured the traditions and privileges of the knightly caste had directly benefited many of the Polish nobility.

Initially at least the King's approach found favour with the szlachta and many won glory and fame during the Prussian War.
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Even as the war drew to a triumphant close cracks had begun to emerge beneath this outwardly successful picture. In February 1462 in the middle of the war the royal adviser and statesman Count Aleksy Mniszech died of natural causes in Kraków. Mniszech had held a variety of royal offices during the reigns of both Kazimierz IV and John of Brandenburg but his great importance was his unofficial role of envoy between the Sejm and the Crown. A rotund and unmartial man with a taste for Italian art and French mistresses Mniszech was an odd fit among the Polish magnates but he had developed a knack for phrasing even the most demanding of requests with exquisite grace. The statesman had always been ready to step in to fix any potential break between the King and the nobles. A xenophile himself he was particularly adept at preventing cultural confusion between a German King and his Polish (and Lithuanian) subjects becoming a problem.

So useful was Count Mniszech that he drafted much of what would eventually become the Peace of Thorn even though it was not signed for almost a year after his death. The passing of Mniszech left the King relying ever more on Bishop Rytwianski, a shrewd man and capable politician but one's whose insights was directed more towards the clergy and the burghers than the nobles. Though other men could occupy the offices that Mniszech had the man himself was irreplaceable.

The Peace of Thorn, signed in early 1463 confirmed the allegiance of most of Prussia.
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In March 1463 another pillar of the Polish state fell away with the death of General Bartlomiej Ossolinski from old age. Ossolinski had not been an overt politician and he had in some ways receded into the background with the arrival of this knightly king but he had been greatly respected and unshakably loyal. John of Brandenburg, of similar vintage to the general had been close to the man and often visited Ossolinski's impressive if unhandsome castle in Lwów. There had even been talk, though it came to little of August von Hohenzollern, the King's illegitimate son, sole male child and heir presumptive marrying Ossolinski's daughter [4].

Though it had been planned long before the grand tournament at Kraków that took place in April of that year was dedicated to the memory of the fallen general. It proved a splendid affair, drawing knights from as far afield as Castile and England and the monarch, a great lover of the chivalric code spent lavishly on the tourney. It was an immense celebration filled with dazzling tents and clothes, huge feasts, music, jousting and games. To his chagrin the King found himself advised by all his court not to take part in the jousts himself; John was then fifty one years old and though in splendid health it seemed unwise to test that health.

Instead the knights of Poland and Lithuania found themselves represented at the tourney by August von Hohenzollern. Clad in a red tabard with the white polished eagle stitched in cloth of gold and carrying the silk banner of the Grand Duchy he drew all eyes even amongst all the magnificence. The royal scion, a well liked and intelligent young man performed well and if the ultimate honours went to a Hungarian knight August won much admiration - and several hearts from the female observers.

It was the high point of John's reign.

The Great Polish Tournament of 1463, one of the grandest and one of the last such displays of chivalry in Europe.
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Footnotes:

[1] Baron Karol Piotrowski (1818 to 1879) was perhaps the defining and most popular historian of modern Poland and though his vast Historia Imperium Polskiego (1859) is now much criticised for its biases and assumptions not even Piotrowski's greatest critics can question the level of scholarship the historian brought to his subject. By all accounts Piotrowski was a difficult man whose grudges were engraved on granite but without him Polish history would be immensely poorer.

[2] The 'Prussian Confederation' was the official name of the state in rebellion against the Teutonic Order but most contemporaries (and many historians) simply referred to it as 'Danzig', recognising the economic, cultural and political importance of the seaport.

[3] In contrast to the previous war the Livonian Order remained neutral, still exhausted after coping with a Danish invasion.

[4] John of Brandenburg had two surviving daughters by a previous marriage and at least two illegitimate daughters. His second marriage to Jadwiga of Mazovia remained childless, though by all accounts affectionate.

 

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John of Brandenburg as King of Poland. Even his critics generally admit his dedication to the ideals of knighthood.​

Part Three: The Magnate War


In Poland as across Christendom there was always a tension between the nobles, the clergy and the merchants. The sheer power and sense of independence from the szlachta made them a headache for even the most politic of kings and whatever his other virtues John of Brandenburg was not a practised politician. In July 1464 the King became ensnared in a power feud that swiftly tumbled into outright revolt.

The origins of the Kujawy Revolt lay in a fundamental difference of understanding between the King and his nobles. John of Brandenburg was respectful of the privileges and duties of nobility but he also had come to the throne with views shaped in Germany at the court of his cousin the Prince-Elector Friedrich. John held that the King was the true ruler of the nation and that in the end his word was law beneath only God. A good king kept the strata of society in harmony but also expected to be obeyed. In contrast the szlachta considered themselves near equals of the monarch. A mere baron in Poland had a sense of himself that would humble a French duke. This sense of importance and the peculiar sensitivity it engineered was only heightened by the fact the nobles had elected the German in the first place. There was a feeling whether justified or not that the monarch owed special favour to his nobles.

The missing part of all this was the late Aleksy Mniszech. Without his politicking the posturing of both sides was just a little too sharp. Perhaps the King would have supported the Church in any case but his scolding of the szlachta would at least have been moderated.

The tensions in Kujaway that led to Zygfrid Ostroróg's rebellion.​

Zygfrid Ostroróg was a wealthy baron in Kujawy with family or personal connections across much of Poland. A solidly built, almost ponderous man in his middle years he was not a brash young hothead but widely seen as a reliable and honourable nobleman. When he raised the standard of revolt against the 'tyranny' of the King he immediately drew much sympathy, and with that sympathy came volunteers. Within weeks Ostroróg would be at the head of an army some thirteen thousand strong, their ranks swollen with gentry, even if the majority of the szlachta remained loyal to their monarch. Ostroróg soon overran the area.

John of Brandenburg may have had difficulty understanding his nobles but he understood war. Once the initial shock passed the King swiftly marshalled the royal army. On 30 October 1464 the two sides met at Kujawy and the royalists shattered the rebel line. Many of the rebel nobles - Zygfrid Ostroróg among them - were killed by an expert cavalry charge led by Prince August von Hohenzollern, whose knights outmanoeuvred the enemy under the cover of a morning fog. The King emerged from the affair with his reputation enhanced and for a time the szlachta turned quiet, unwilling to challenge John's authority, even the memory of Zygfrid Ostroróg did not entirely vanish with his death [1].

Intitially at least the Sejm seems to have favoured August von Hohenzollern succeeding his father.​

Having put down the revolt and with the ringleaders dead the King was characteristically generous with those lesser barons who repented and requested pardons. The monarch even received encouraging talk from the Sejm that his son had their support as heir. On 1 September 1464 while the rebellion was still going on the Sejm met in Kraków and with the most independent minded barons in actual revolt easily had a majority declare for August as their preferred heir. It seemed that the ship of state had been righted but once again both monarch and szlachta had misjudged each other; John was grateful for the Sejm's loyalty but he considered it exactly that. Loyalty. The Sejm for their part did have a faction of genuine royalists and those who admired August but many others saw their declaration for the prince as being a quid pro quo arrangement.

Early in 1465 August von Hohenzollern departed for Lithuania to spend the next few years as his father's representative in Vilnius. August liked the Grand Duchy and they him, and he would marry into the Lithuanian aristocracy [2]. While August's time in the Grand Duchy proved successful it perhaps weakened his support in Poland proper, removing the popular prince from direct contact with the szlachta.

In the mid-1460s the unofficial leader of the szlachta was a forty-something baron from Sieradz by the name of Karol Ferdynand Koycki. Unusually for a noble of Poland he was a cosmopolitan figure with a Hungarian wife and interests across the continent - much like the King he was an enthusiastic observer of the Chivalric code. Tall and gaunt, clever and sophisticated and with a taste for finery he was almost the polar opposite of the bluff Ostroróg but he shared a strong belief in the privileges of his class. Unlike Ostroróg he had remained loyal during the revolt and thought himself John of Brandenburg's friend. It therefore fell to him to propose the so-called 'Nieszawa Privileges' to the monarch. This set of demands had been drawn up by the nobles after their recognition of August von Hohenzollern and on 15 October 1466 they presented their demands to John. It was a well coordinated piece of political theatre as Koycki and a dozen other senior members of the Sejm rode into Kraków in their best finery and flanked by attendants. With great ceremony and (and characteristic arrogance) they demanded an audience with the monarch.

The so-called 'Nieszawa Privileges', John's refufasl of which began the Magnate War.​

The Brandenburger was shocked, and then outraged. Once again the tensions between the differing expectations threatened to flare into violence. Even an a-typically well travelled noble like Karol Ferdynand Koycki simply felt the King owed an obligation to the szlachta. Coldly and crisply John of Bradenburg refused to sign the proposed privileges and then ordered the delegation of the szlachta from his hall (some sources claim he threatened to have them whipped but this is likely a fabrication.) Shaken the nobles scattered back to Sieradz and their leader's stronghold. For the second time in two years John of Brandenburg found himself faced with a noble revolt.

The 'Magnate War' or the 'Koycki Crisis' as it has also been called was much more serious than the business with Ostroróg. That had been mostly a matter of lesser gentry; Koycki drew many significant aristocrats to his standard. The royalist forces were mostly composed of Lithuanians, Danzigers, Mazovians, the Church, the burghers and a minority of loyalist nobles. John's greatest advantage was that most of those who were currently serving in the army remained loyal to the Crown. The King had more than proven himself as a soldier and a commander to win their respect.

For the rebel nobles it was axiomatic that they win popular enthusiasm among the wavering loyalists and the truly non-committed. On 1 December 1466 Karol Ferdynand Koycki issued the 'Edict of Sieradz' - essentially a declaration of war aims - in which he called upon the King to 'restore the just and rightful privileges promised to nobility and gentry of Poland upon his election.' The Edict has proven controversial ever since with those who supported the monarchy or at least a strong centralised government insisting the 'Nieszawa Privileges' went beyond any concessions that might have promised by John. Those historians more sympathetic towards the szlachta have defended their 'interpretation' of the promises made in 1456. As Baron Karol Piotrowski noted:

'By any measure Jan I Kazimierz was being called upon to grant the magnates additional powers and his reaction explicable... however the nobles sincerely believed the German prince owed a debt of gratitude towards them and his refusal, as they saw it, to honour his debt drove them to war.'

Both sides of the civil war argued that they represented the true Poland against treachery, though nearly every foreign court recognised John of Brandenburg as being right if perhaps unwise. The Pope back the Polish King, though he 'whispered rather than shouted his endorsement'.

The first clash came at Sieradz in the New Year. The rebels had managed to gather a large force, some twenty thousand strong and though the King's army was larger still it took many anxious weeks to assemble the men. Sieradz itself was one of the oldest towns in Poland, a bustling market town and the site of castle built but Kazimierz the Great. It was also close to the capital of Kraków. The stakes could not be higher and a royal defeat here could have meant John's support rapidly unravelling. On 26 January John and his forces crossed the frozen River from the north, outflanking the waiting rebel forces. The King had similar numbers of cavalry to his opponents but superior numbers of infantry and he made a diversionary attack on the town of Sieradz proper, hoping to lure off the enemy. The gambit worked and the royalists fell upon the rebel infantry. Koycki realised his error and circled to save his soldiers but never managed to regain the initiative. What followed was a very bloody battle that ended with the rebels withdrawing from the field. Both sides had suffered sharp casualties and though the King had won the day it was hardly the decisive blow he might have hoped for.

Koycki abandoned Sieradz and in a daring move went straight for the capital, allowing word to be spread ahead of him that the King had been defeated. Fortunately for the King the ageing Bishop Rytwianski was present in Kraków. Speaking forcefully he swayed the demoralised citizens into keeping the gates closed against Koycki. With his gambit failed Koycki's nerve seems to have failed him and when the royalists caught up on 12 February the nobles and their followers disintegrated in a panic. During the rout thousands of the rebels died, many drowning fleeing across the Vistula. Karol Ferdynand Koycki himself was taken alive, dragged senseless and injured from beneath his dead horse.The surviving traitors surrendered by the thousand.

After the Battle of Sieradz (28 January 1467) the rebels moved on the capital - and the King followed.​

Immediately after the battle the King and the Sejm met to discuss the fate of those nobles who had survived the rebellion. The arch-traitor himself would have to die, that much was certain but Bishop Rytwianski in his last significant role before his death in 1468 persuaded the embittered and disillusioned monarch to pardon some of the minor adherents. John eventually allowed most to go free but Karol Ferdynand Koycki and three others were executed that summer while another half dozen magnates were exiled.

John would rule until his death in 1473 and saw no more significant threats to his throne. The only war of any consequence that saw his intervention was a brief and successful expedition against Teutonic rebels in Danzig territory in early 1473. Otherwise the Polish monarch remained aloof, even when war erupted between the Hungarians and the Ottomans Turks, a conflict that drew in the Hapsburg Empress Maria Therseia. While relations between the Poles and Hungarians were poor (and relations with Austria not much better) John of Brandenburg was a crusader of old and had he trusted his nobles he might have joined such a war. But of course he could not trust the szlachta.

In 1473 both Poland and Lithuania were prosperous and settled. Objectively John of Brandenburg was at his most powerful with a tame Sejm and loyal vassal states in Danzig and Moldavia. His reputation as a warrior and a chivalric paragon was undimmed in Europe beyond his borders. Yet these last few years the king had retreated in on himself, no longer the garrulous knight of old but a sombre and near silent man growing old beyond his years. On 28 August 1473 he died of natural causes while in Przemysl on his way back from fighting the Teutonic rebels in Prussia. He was sixty years old.

No King of Poland (or Grand Duke of Lithuania) has divided opinions like Jan I Kazimierz. To his many critics he was at best a foreigner at sea attempting to navigate Polish politics. It is no coincidence he is better known as 'John of Brandenburg' to history than by his actual title as later Polish commentators often emphasised his Germanness. Those scholars sympathetic towards the ideal of an empowered Sejm or a romantic appreciation of the szlachta have been even more negative, sometimes shifting the view of John away from simply being out of his depth and into being a malevolent tyrant.

Against this school that castigates John he has also enjoyed defenders. His statue still stands in Danzig, honouring the King who had saved the Baltic cities from Teutonic rule. His repudiation has also remained far higher in Lithuania where he was seen as the man who granted the Grand Duchy the rich seaport of Memel. He has also always had adherents in Poland proper who consider him unfairly judged, stressing the annexation of territory, the humbling of the Teutonic Order and the overall prosperity of his reign.

Ultimately John of Brandenburg won a Pyrrhic victory. While he might have forced the nobles to defeat on the battlefield he could not wrest control of the Sejm from them and it was the Sejm that decided who sat of the thrones of Poland and Lithuania. Once the old monarch was gone they swiftly recovered their power and their voice.

The death of John of Brandenburg, 28 August 1473​

Footnotes:

[1] It has been difficult to separate the myth from the reality with Zygfrid Ostroróg as he almost at once became a martyr to his cause, or at least what has been perceived to be his cause.

[2] The idea that Prince August and Maria Therseia were 'almost married' creating an Austrian-Hungarian-Polish union has been a popular one in fiction but there is no evidence whatsoever that it was seriously considered by either the Poles or the Austrians.

 

[RossN]

Michal I von Mecklenberg, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.​

Part Four: Michal I von Mecklenburg

Different historians of Poland have called the Sejm of 1473 both 'the shining example of the patriotic nobility controlling their kingdom's fate' and 'an act of corruption and betrayal that would have shocked Ancient Rome'. Suffice to say the decision of the magnates to give the crown to Michael von Mecklenburg, uncle to Count Magnus II of Mecklenburg is one of the most contested evens in Polish history. Even at the time the magnates knew they were making a contentious decision as the Sejm convened after John of Brandenburg was held not in Kraków, whose citizens were thought to be partisans of August von Hohenzollern, but in Lublin. Here with a haste that suggested they had planned long beforehand a slim majority of the representatives voted to make 'Michal I' King of Poland.

The behind the scenes dealings and no doubt hefty bribes involved remain opaque but the official reasons for rejecting Prince August for the throne revolved around his birth, which had been out of wedlock. Several great nobles who had only nine years before had praised August von Hohenzollern now shuddered at the idea of a bastard on the Polish throne. The very fact that this argument arose revealed the weakness of a case against August's character or ability. The true reason was that the Sejm, free from the direct control of John of Brandenburg was now shouting it's authority in a voice all Christendom could hear as well as enjoying a little posthumous revenge on the late monarch.

August still had his supporters even in the Sejm who fought his case bitterly but his chief stronghold was Lithuania. Almost as soon as his father died the Lithuanian nobles had gathered in Vilnius to proclaim the prince Grand Duke. Only a delay in gathering the magnates from across the vast Grand Duchy allowed representatives from Kraków to reach Vilnius before August was officially proclaimed. It took a mixture of bribes, threats and eventually the reluctant acquiescence of August von Hohenzollern himself to prevent the Lithuanians declaring the union with Poland dissolved. Michal would rule as Grand Duke and the union would be preserved. August was reluctant to throw his states into civil war with the hungry Muscovites and Danes looking on. He was perhaps also sanguine about the man the Sejm looked to instead - who was after all much older.

King Michal I to give him his Polish title was already fifty four years old when he was crowned. In personality and history he was not unlike a less demanding and proud version of his predecessor, being a gallant knight who in his greying years was less inclined to personal combat. The von Mecklenburgs were petty Germa princes but they had wealth and with their Pomeranian origins at least some tie to Poland. Michal himself even had a Polish wife, though she had died before he took the throne. As he arrived to a sullen reception from the citizenry in Kraków few may have expected him to last long. In fact he would reign until 1482 and oversee some significant changes in the Kingdom and the Grand Duchy.

Given his seasoned nature and generally easy going manner the monarch was content to leave much of his rule to the senior members of his court. Men like the master of the mint Bartomiej Gurowski, the sinister spymaster Slywester Czapski and the reform minded general Mariusz Zebrzydowski represented the rise of prominent voices of the szlachta. In contrast with his predecessor Michal would have little difficulty with his Polish nobility during his reign at least in part because they already ran so much.

Scarcely had Michal been crowned when he was faced with trouble in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The city of Klaipėda (Memel) had been annexed by Lithuania from the crumbling Teutonic Order but the bustling port was home to a diverse and headstrong population with little affinity to the Grand Duchy they found themselves a part of. Adding to these difficulties was religious difference. During the waning days of Teutonic rule the port had become a bastion of Fraticelli heresy and in February 1474 the people revolted. Later that same year there was a revolt in Lwów by quixotic separatists looking to re-establish the old Grand Duchy of Halych-Volhynia. The Ruthenian populace of Lwów hoped that with the Polish army busy restoring order in Klaipėda they would face little resistance from the King.

Michal was not the soldier John had been but he was not without experience and in the crisis he proved capable of crushing two near simultaneous revolts, winning grudging respect even in Lithuania. The new king found his position strengthen and in 1474 felt secure enough in authority and wealth to refuse the opportunity to sell titles to wealthy commoners. Michal was no son of Venice when it came to politics but he knew enough to see that keeping the support of the szlachta was the only way to keep power.

The legitimacy scandal of 1476.
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Aiding the monarch, from a certain point of view, was a scandal that erupted in 1476 over the background of his maternal grandmother. While it was embarrassing to be revealed to have such 'common' ancestry (especially given the momentous fuss the Sejm had made over August von Hohenzollern's illegitimacy) it gave Michal a certain legitimacy with the Poles, and urged by advisor the spymaster Slywester Czapski the monarch acknowledged the scandal that whatever else linked him by blood to Poland.

Despite the humbling of the Teutonic Knights they still held land in Prussia, including their capital of Marienburg. The temptation to snap up these territories was always strong, especially with the active connivance of the Danzigers who feared any form of Teutonic restoration, implausible though that might seem. In April 1477 the Poles declared war.

Compared to the great clashes of previous years this was a one sided war. The King led the Polish army to the successful sieges of Marienburg and Dramburg while a rare but spectacular 'naval' battle of sorts took place in the Vistula Lagoon that saw a fleet of vessels hastily acquired from the Danzigers defeat the Knights. As neither the Poles nor the Teutonic Order had a navy the clash was fought on the decks of fishing boats and merchant ships where the chances of death by drowning was a likelier fate than death by sword.

The Battle of the Vistula Lagoon, April 1478 saw a clash between 'Polish' (actually mostly Prussian) and Teutonic naval forces.
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Due largely to the stubbornness of the Livonian Order who had loyally come to the aid of the Teutonic Knights the war dragged on until December 1478, though few major battles took place in the second year. In fact it was the peace negotiations that saw the most stark confrontation - between the Poles and the Lithuanians. The previous war had seen the Grand Duchy acquire the port of Memel or Klaipėda as it was now and many in Lithuania had sought further land in the Baltic state. They were to be disappointed; when the Treaty of Marienburg was signed on Saint Stephen's Day the only territorial concessions were the remaining Prussian territories of the Teutonic Order which transferred to the Polish crown [1]. The Lithuanians received nothing.

The borders of Poland and Prussia after the Treaty of Marienburg in December 1478. Malbork (formerly Marienburg) and Ostróda (formerly Osterode) were annexed by Poland.
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There was method in this madness. The Danes had become a formidable power in the Baltic and still further weakening the Livonian Order could only benefit them. The Polish Sejm had no intention of aiding a kingdom that at best was a trading rival. Therefore the Livonians were allowed to escape with their lands intact but their treasury empty. The Lithuanians seethed but for the moment there was little they could do.

In this period Prince August von Hohenzollern was an ever present concern for the King and the Sejm. The son of John of Brandenburg had accepted the decision of the nobles in 1473 and played little to no active part in politics but he remained very popular in the Grand Duchy. His brother-in-law Vytenis Oginskis was one of the most vocal of the Lithuanian nobles, always straining at what he and many of his fellows saw as a Polish yoke on the proud barons and princes that lived east of the River Bug. A great tall man with a passion for falconry (at one stage he was said to own more birds of prey than the King of France and the Emperor combined) Vytenis Oginskis was a natural leader for the malcontents in the Grand Duchy. It was Oginskis that proved the greater threat to the von Mecklenburg consensus. In October 1482 he would lead a revolt, swiftly gaining support from his fellow Lithuanian nobles. The administration in Vilnius remained loyal to the Polish crown but the resources commanded by the rebels were formidable.

The revolt of Vytenis Oginskis in October 1482 saw some fifteen thousand discontented Lithuanians gather to the pretender's banner.
​

Ever since historians have attempted to divine whether Oginskis was acting on behalf of his brother-in-law or not. The rebel's followers declared him Grand Duke of Lithuania but were silent on the question of the Polish throne. Given Oginski's close relationship with August von Hohenzollern many have suspected that the Lithuanian rebel intended to hold the Grand Duchy under the authority of his brother-in-law as King of Poland. August, who spent the entire war at his estates near Kiev may have hoped that the revolt would inspire a similar revolt by sympathisers in Poland proper. If so he was to be disappointed. Poland did not rise and even much of the Grand Duchy remained loyal to the House of Meclenburg. King Michal may not have been loved but even many critics shuddered at the thought of civil war such as had convulsed England and France within living memory.

With the loyalty of any Lithuanians suspect it was the Polish army that the King marched. Under the leadership of General Iwan Komorowski the Crown forces met Oginski outside the walls of Vilnius on 22 December 1482. The rebel army was much the smaller of the two, thanks in part to losses from attrition during the harsh winter but the pretender had high confidence in his men over the Poles, still weary after their long expedition. Despite the advice of some of his supporters who urged him to fall back into the vast hinterland of the Grand Duchy and rally more men to his cause Vytenis Oginskis gave battle. The Lithuanian knights, their brilliant banners flying behind them charged with lances set against the centre of Komorowski's lines. The Poles buckled but did not break and swiftly turned on the collapsing Lithuanian flanks, encircling them.

The Battle of Vilnius, 22 December 1482.
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The Battle of Vilnius was a decisive victory for the Crown forces. Vytenis himself fell on the field, slain according to popular legend by a blow from a footman's axe as he sought to escape from under his fallen horse. Most his lieutenants fell with him, or surrendered themselves to the victors as the rebellion collapsed within the space of an hour. Vilnius had been a crueller battle than most for the defeated thanks to the weather with many wounded freezing to death in the snow.

One man who was not present at the battle but heard about it swiftly was August von Hohenzollern. The prince who had remained at Kiev learned the news early in the year and at once abandoned his lands. After a lonely and difficult journey across foreign soil he would make his way to Rome and exile. Even with the death of Vytenis Oginskis no real proof ever emerged that he was conspiring with his brother-in-law but he quite reasonably did not wish to take his chances with a victorious King Michal. In truth he need not have worried, at least on that score.

The King had already been frail that autumn and had remained in Kraków while he deputised Iwan Komorowski as his commander in the field. By late November he was fading fast and the Sejm hastily assembled to discuss the inheritance. It was another August that at once emerged as the favoured candidate; Prince August von Mecklenburg the thirty five year old son of King Michal. August of Mecklenberg was not without his flaws; he was known to be indulgent when it came to wine and mistresses. Nevertheless he had no true enemies among the szlachta and there was a strong feeling that he would accept the judgements of the Sejm rather than try and rule through his own force. Most importantly he was the son of the current monarch and there was at least some sincere sentiment for Michal among the Polish nobles.

On the morning of 29 December 1482 King Michal died. Few would consider him a great ruler but under the circumstances he had proven a reliable and largely benign ruler. He had little understanding of Lithuania but that charge with less excuse could be laid at the feet of his Polish ministers like Gurowski, Czapski or Zebrzydowski. Undoubtedly the power of the Crown had declined during his reign but he had managed to avoid a crisis confrontation with the Sejm. He had succeeded in passing the throne to his son.

The new monarch would be crowned with great ceremony, though he would soon discover the Sejm expected a reward for their loyalty to his dynasty...

The death of King Michal I, 29 December 1482.​

Footnotes:

[1] A rump Teutonic Order survived inside the borders of the Empire while many of the German speaking nobility left Prussia would soon adapt to their new rulers, forming a distinctive strand within the greater Polish aristocracy.

 

[RossN]

August II von Mecklenberg, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.
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Part Five: August II von Mecklenburg

The reign of August II was brief and unhappy. Save for the fact it ended with the monarch's abdication and the collapse of the Polish Mecklenbergs it might have been forgotten altogether, an ellipses between the eras of more significant figures. Yet at the very end of 1482 such a future would not have seemed inevitable or even likely. The new king was approved by the entire Sejm and inaugurated with great ceremony in the new year.

August by all lights was an amiable and even handed ruler. The few first hand accounts that survive hardly paint him in glowing colours, more as a drunk with a wandering eye but there is no suggestion even among his many critics that he was the stuff of tyranny. In fact a stronger king would probably have rejected the so called 'Augustan Articles' and the Pacta Conventa that August found himself forced to sign in 1483.

The 'Augustan Articles' (sometimes confusingly termed the 'Henrician Articles' after their chief author the Polish baron Henryk Miłosz) were a series of laws -effectively a permanent constitution - greatly limiting the power and authority of the Polish monarch and enshrining the supreme authority of the Sejm. Already very powerful by the standards of neighbouring countries the Polish nobles would effectively become the true rulers of the country with the King (or Queen) reduced to little more than a figurehead. The Pacta Conventa which August was also required to obey was a document unique to every individual monarch, outlining the promises and duties of that particular ruler.

The Pacta Conventa and the 'Augustan' (or 'Henrykia') Articles.
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The extent of the privileges demanded (and received) by the szlachta was a thunderbolt that rolled and echoed across Europe. Even Polish observers especially among the burghers and clergy seemed to have been taken aback by quite how far the nobles had pushed. August found that even before he had time to adjust to life in Wawel Royal Castle the legs had been cut away from him. He was the least significant man in his own court. The true ruler of Poland at this point was probably Andrzej Herburt, the Royal Chancellor. A much respected philosopher and intellectual whose writings were acknowledged across the continent Herburt was a strong adherent of a powerful Sejm but also enjoyed good personal relations with the royal family stemming from his appointment by King Michal I. Initially this balancing act seemed to work and Poland was both stable enough and strong enough in 1483 for the King (on the advice of the Sejm) to send Polish troops to the aid of Venice in their war against the Turks [1].

Unfortunately for August - and for many who benefited from the current system - the unity of the Sejm was beginning to crack.

Poland was not alone in having a powerful nobility. France had been torn apart for generations by the machinations of her dukes and was only now recovering from the Hundred Years War. The princely houses of the Holy Roman Empire made their counterparts in France look like the Apostles. What set Poland - and Lithuania - apart was the size and sense of common class of the nobility. The szlachta were a very numerous and it was this caste of warrior-landowners that enjoyed power rather than a handful of great princes. The Polish nobility were passionate and ferociously proud of their ancestry and their names. The best had a paternalistic regard for the peasantry, a pious tolerance for the clergy and a frigid understanding of the burghers. Their grudges were engraved in granite and when not united by common class cause could spill beyond the realm of pure politics.

The impact of young Lukasz Malski on this world was immediate. The eldest son of a baron from Poznan and a mother of remote Piast ancestry Lukasz was an exceptionally sharp minded youth. His father's imagination had rambled no further than the edge of his estates but when Lukasz inherited the family holdings at the age of just fifteen he already had grander ambitions. Lukasz was a fine swordsman and rider and he could be charming but his great genius lay in organisation and planning. The extensive family estates near Poznan had been bolstered by shrewd family alliances and other measures that some more traditional nobles may never even have thought of. By the August of 1484, though technically still a minor he was one of the most powerful nobles in all of Poland.

Later events invariably colour the boyhood of Lukasz but from very early on he seems to have become a magnet for those who had once supported the House of Hohenzollern. This seems to date back to his father who had been one of the nobles who voted for John of Brandenburg but Lukasz was able to work this family loyalty without tying his star to the fallen figure of August von Hohenzollern in his exile.

For King August II the rising power of this precocious baron was an existential threat. The monarch was not lost to the pleasures of the banquet and the bedroom that the rise of powerful men was invisible to him. The 'Augustan Articles' had been a truly painful moment for a prince who might have been German by birth and upbringing but had spent so many years in Poland. August clung to his weakened throne like a shipwrecked mariner to a shattered spar.

1484 was an unusually fevered summer with many of the rich fleeing the rich aroma of the cities for the cleaner climes of the country. In the decimated royal court of Kraków rumours swirled even if the breeze never did. In such an atmosphere the shadow of a powerful baron assumed monstrous proportions. On 24 August in response to a lurid ad almost certainly false tale of treasonous meetings with Hohenzollern envoys the King acted on his nerves and ordered the baron's arrest.

The (attempted) arrest of Lukasz Malski, August 1484.
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The monarch has been criticised by generations of historians for his actions in 1484, but he has had defenders. Surprisingly one of those defenders has been the famous and famously partisan Nineteenth Century historian Baron Piotrowski. Piotrowski loathed the 'German era' of Polish history and was a great admirer of Lukasz Malski but he was able to empathise with the beleaguered Polish monarch:

'[August II] was not a strong king but had he simply stood back Lukasz Malski would have ended up as dictator of Poland in power if not in title. He attempted to shore up what authority he had and what authority the crown still had... he failed and history has judged him harshly but he would have been a paltry man indeed had he never tried.'

Regardless of the wisdom or even necessity of arresting Lukasz the manner in which the orders were carried out was farcical. The duty was entrusted to a quartet of knights, three of whom turned out to be sympathisers of the errant baron and the fourth of whom was a drinking crony of August II who managed to arrive far too late to accomplish anything other than be taken prisoner when he reached Poznan. By that point Lukasz Malski had already raised his banner in revolt and supporters were flocking to his aid.

The pretender and his army lay siege to Poznan across the winter of 1484 to 1485.
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The Polish Civil War of 1484 to 1489 was a disaster for the szlachta as a collective group even if individual members did very well out of the business. The Polish nobility split in two over the pretender and the legal monarch. Young though he was Lukasz still cut a more impressive figure than the hapless August von Mecklenberg. He was clever and capable, a fine and brave knight and he was able to convincingly portray himself as a noble son of Poland like so many in the Sejm. He was also able to catch a feeling, exaggerated by later historians but present in some embryonic form, of Polish patriotism. Lukasz literally spoke the language of the szlachta and did so without the looming presence of a German accent overshadowing every turn of phrase.

King August II could offer few of the personal reasons for loyalty, but he did have one great advantage. He was the legally elected King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. The Sejm had elected him partly because they dreaded a strong king. Lukasz Malski threatened to be exactly that and no one could determine whether he would be first amongst equals or a true monarch seeking to restore the authority of the crown.

Besides the pretender and the King two other men had roles on the margins of this drama. August von Hohenzollern lived still, enjoying a dignified if shabby flicker of existence in Rome as the guest of a Pope who treated him as something less than a prince and more than a problem. From his house along the Tiber, the gift of a wealthy Italian mistress the former heir to Poland and Lithuania held court with a caramilla of diehards. He would not personally return to Poland for the rest of his life but he was in contact with Lukasz Malski after the baron rose in revolt [2].

More important even than the exiled prince was Andrzej Herburt, the Royal Chancellor. A much respected intellectual Herburt gave a shimmer of dignity to the royal court absent from the monarch himself and his support bolstered August II. His death from a summer fever in May 1487 was a fatal blow to the King's cause. All at once many of the nobles, finding themselves having to fight for August II alone deserted him for the pretender's camp.

Even with all the woes afflicting the King he may have survived had the army only been ready. Unfortunately for August many of the finest and most disciplined soldiers were still absent fighting the Turks in Istria and Dalmatia for Venetian gold. August II was forced to rely on those men who had remained, frequently of parsimonious quality. With the forces at his command August II was very reluctant to face his foe in the field even as Poznan surrendered to the rebels and Lukasz Malski began a steady march towards Kraków. The rebels would not encounter serious opposition until the Battle of Wieluń on 3 August 1488 when an army of Danzigers attempted to relieve the siege of Kraków. The result was a swift victory for Lukasz Malski.

Before Wieluń the King had already abandoned the capital for Lwów and in August 1489 with the Lukasz Malski in possession of Kraków the Sejm took advantage of this to depose the nominal monarch. On 1 September August II, faced with the inevitable abdicated his throne and with the acquiescence of the pretender and his forces departed Poland for the court of the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna. If anything the ruined monarch was probably relieved that his thankless and loveless stewardship of Poland and Lithuania had passed to another.

Back in Kraków the Sejm was still in service. Lukasz Malski had very properly withdrawn from the city and made camp on the far bank of the Vistula. The colourful banners and tents of the pretender were visible from Wawel Royal Castle and on a good day there was a sparkle in the distance as the sun reflected a forest of spearheads, lances and pikes. The Polish nobility only had to venture outside to glimpse the sole serious candidate for the throne. Throughout the debate the partisans of Lukasz Malski stressed his noble reputation, of how he had been forced to take up the sword by the provocation of August II, of how he and he alone could restore the dginity of Poland (and across the river those banners fluttered in the wind...

Astonishingly when voting commenced a half dozen barons voted for Aleksander von Mecklenberg, the cousin of August II and his nominal heir. This was perhaps less a diehard loyalty to the German princes than it was a desperate attempt to avoid surrender. This was the paradox of Lukasz Malski; the young baron was the very epitome of the szlachta but he would be a very strong King. The majority of their fellows swallowed such misgiving and voted to give the crown to Lukasz Malski. On 29 September 1489 the first Polish born monarch in decades took the throne.

The coronation of Lukasz I Malski, 29 September 1489.
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Footnotes:

[1] The Polish soldiers would see much service but ultimately proved insufficient to win the war for the Venetians and after the bloody Battle of Friuli in 1487 the survivors would begin the slow journey home, laden with gold, scars and stories.

[2] August von Hohenzollern would never again set foot in Poland or Lithuania as a living man, but after his death in 1501 King Lukasz repatriated his remains to be buried with appropriate ceremony in a crypt next to his father.

 

[RossN]

Lukasz I Malski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1489 to 1524.)
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Part Six: Lukasz I Malski

Lukasz I was a very young monarch. When he was made or made himself King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania he was still some months from his twentieth birthday and would rule until 1524. By tradition he has been seen as the dividing line between Medieval Poland and everything that came later and it would become more and more difficult for later historians to unravel the man from the myth.

Contemporary accounts of Lukasz at his coronation described a handsome young man, uncommonly tall with grey eyes and a long nose. He was a fine horseman and finer swordsman but though he was considered honourable there was scant room in his life for chivalric romance. Royal tournaments that had once so dominated court life all but vanished and with them the gorgeous silk tents, the celebrated music and the aura of excitement around the jousts. Instead the new King favoured intimate affairs; dances, hunting with his favourites and above all falconry. An obsessive perfectionist in so many ways the monarch rarely seemed happier than when off hawking with the birds he had trained himself from the egg.

From the start Lukasz was formally respectful of the Sejm, gracefully awaiting their offer of the throne and then negotiating terms on his own Pacta Conventa not all that different from his predecessor. He agreed to the Augustan Articles with all their constraints on royal power. If he was nothing else Lukasz I was a member of the szlachta and was at pains to stress his role as simply the first among equals. And yet... the new King came to the throne with far greater resources than poor August II. His own wealth, retained as a baron in his own right was considerable. Half the important families of Northern Poland were tied to Lukasz through marriage or ancient alliance with his kin. The monarch was legally as limited a king as his predecessor but his hidden power was immense; like a Caesar of old his true strength lay in patronage.

Lukasz's predecessor's had ignored Lithuania save as a source of trouble but the new Grand Duke visited Vilnius to be crowned there early in the new year. Lukasz's Lithuanian was middling at best ('the Grand Duke approached every word like a huntsman stalking a boar' as one local chronicler put it) but the obvious effort he made to reach out to his subjects in the east earned him goodwill as did the simple fact that he was not a Mecklenberg. While in Vilnius the Grand Duke fell ill but with characteristic energy he turned this unexpected detainment in Lithuania to his advantage. During May and early June Lukasz was deep in conference with the Lithuanian Sejm, initially holding court from his bedchambers but later after recovering his strength in the Palace of the Grand Dukes.

Livonia in 1490.
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Lithuania loomed larger than royal Poland on the map but the Grand Duchy was poorer, less populated, more diverse and more troubled. Whether it was discontent from the Ruthenians who made up so much of the common people, religious differences between the Western and Eastern Churches or the hulking shadow of Muscowy and her warlike princes Lithuania was not a stable land. The Grand Duchy had expanded with the annexation of Klaipėda (formerly Memel) in 1463 giving the Grand Duchy a gateway to the Baltic but the German speaking seaport proved as problematic as she was prosperous, with the tensions sometimes erupting into open revolt over the years and blood running through the streets. The Lithuanian Army was large but scarcely changed since the days of Vytautas the Great and infamously backwards by the standards of Mitteleuropa (though not perhaps when compared with the Muscovites or the khanates to the East.)

For Lukasz all these issues required attention but there was one element that outshone them all in his conversations with the Lithuanian nobles: Denmark. The Danish kingdom had become the preeminent power in the Baltic and conquered a slice of Livonia. It seemed only a matter of time before the Danes swallowed the rest. The Livonian Order was certainly far too feeble to prevent them. One solution was to ally with the Knights but had Lukasz proposed that every baron in the Grand Duchy would have risen against him. The Lithuanians had fought the Livonian knights in their misty pagan past and if the fire altars and the songs to old and shadowy gods had given way to Christian churches and hymns the Lithuanians recalled their ancient grudges. It was to prevent Denmark gaining greater control that Lukasz went to war against the Knights, but there was a whisper of settling old scores to the backing of the Lithuanian nobles.

The Livonian Order had begun life as an offshoot of the Teutonic Knights, bringing the sword and the cross to the pagans of Livonia [1] and they had survived the disaster of their parent organisation. A smattering of German knights ruled over a population of Livonians, Estonians, and Baltic peoples. The true centre of German culture and wealth was Riga, a Hansa seaport and one of the richest and perhaps the fairest city on the Baltic Sea. Michael Hildebrand, the archbishop of Riga was carefully neutral in the politics between the Knights, the Danes and the Lithuanians, conscious of the sack of his city by John of Brandenburg. In 1490 the cleric sought to steer the Grand Duke away from war. He was unsuccessful but as the letters flew between Riga and Vilnius the good archbishop was at least promised Riga would be spared fighting. Lukasz may have been concerned about attacking an independent archbishopric but the truth was a free and wealthy Riga friendly to Poland-Lithuania was a useful thing to have for any number of reasons.

The Landmiester of the Livonian Order was not so fortunate. Siegfried I von Wittelsbach owed his position to his glorious family name rather than his martial ability or even his leadership skills. Perhaps no master of the weakened Knights could have stood against the Poles and Lithuanians but a wiser diplomat could perhaps have sought vassalage rather than total surrender. Lukasz had shown himself willing to turn to the pen rather than the sword when needed. Unfortunately Siegfried chose a course that was either admirably stoic or remarkably dullwitted, refusing to even meet with Lukasz's envoys. Unfortunately for him the only ally the Knights possessed was distant Mecklenberg - and despite some excitement in Kraków there was no sign of that distant German princedom stampeding to regain Poland and Lithuania by force of arms.

The war began in July 1490 and lasted for over two years. To their credit the Knights fought well, accepting battle with the Polish-Lithuanian armies only when faced with no choice and letting two bitter winters do much of their work for them. Thousands of Poles, Lithuanians and Mazovians froze to death in the Lettgallen alone as they besieged the formidable Dünaburg Castle for almost a full year. Illness, as frequent a companion to a marching force as the gaudily dressed 'army wives' and the flocks of bonepickers looting the battlefields also took its grim share. Adding to the woes the Germans of Klaipėda had proved themselves as quarrelsome as ever towards the end of the war, rising in a revolt that diverted many of the Grand Duke's finest soldiers.

Despite all these problems Lukasz could draw upon far more resources than his enemies, including at sea. Danzig was a loyal vassal of Poland and the city state placed her fleet at the use of the Polish monarch. Joined by the small Lithuanian fleet they bottled the Livonian cogs in their harbours, ending the possibility of aid from the Empire before it began.

Eventually Lukasz succeeded in bringing the Knights to battle and the last heirs of the Teutonic crusaders fell on the field outside Dorpat. In October 1492 the surviving member of the Order surrendered. As with the Teutonic Knights in Polish ruled Prussia they would mostly carry on as secular nobility loyal to the Polish and Lithuanian crown, forming a culturally distinct Baltic-German minority in the wider Polish-Lithuanian aristocracy.

The immediate question was whether Livonia would go to Poland, Lithuania or be ruled as an independent vassal state (a proposal of the archbishop of Riga who helped negotiate the peace.) The monarch was firmly in favour of centralising power and unifying his scattered realm so the question of vassalage vanished almost before it could be raised. That left Poland and Lithuania and the monarch favoured the Grand Duchy.

Lithuania in 1493, after the Treaty of Vilnius.
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The Sejm was less than thrilled at the idea of surrendering territory to the 'junior' party in the union but Lukasz was more than capable of pushing his view through. Lithuania had a historical claim on Livonia, was far better placed to actually control the land and it had been the Grand Duchy that had originally pressed for war. Folk memory and partisan historians have always attributed to a romantic streak of Lukasz, that the Grand Duke had fallen in love with his other realm. There maybe have been something to that for his interest in Lithuanian culture was lifelong but Lukasz I was also a shrewd and hard headed prince. Since the fall of the Hohenzollerns Lithuania had been drifting from Poland, only the fear of the Danes and Muscovites keeping the union alive. By handing over the conquered territory to the Grand Duchy the monarch won their lasting loyalty.

After the Treaty of Vilnius that ended the war Lukasz wintered in his Lithuanian capital before returning to Poland and affairs there. He would be back later in 1493 to see the coronation of his new wife Michalina Piast of Mazovia in Vilnius. During this second expedition the Grand Duke and his consort would visit not just Vilnius but the great cities of Minsk and Kiev, even if the latter was just a shadow of it's glorious medieval past. The monarch's obvious interest sparked rumours and in some quarters alarm that he intended to create a 'Grand Duchy of Ruthenia' centred on Kiev but ultimately this came to nothing. As with much else Lukasz's expeditions had a dual purpose. He wished to retain the goodwill of the Lithuanians while also signalling to the Muscovites that however much Polish attention might be focused elsewhere they had not forgotten and would not forget their eastern territories.

The Lithuanians were delighted at the annexed territories but they did not integrate into the Grand Duchy without some difficulty. In November 1499 the Baltic inhabitants of Cēsis (or Wenden as the German speakers called it) rose in revolt. Lukasz, unable to leave Poland due to domestic matters in his Western kingdom sent Emil Przyjemski one of his most trusted generals with a strong army of footmen and knights [2]. The revolt proved short lived as the Polish army crushed them in the spring but it was a humbling experience for the Lithauanian nobles. So too was the brief ascendancy of Jonas Albertas Alseniskis, a Lithuanian baron and descendant of fallen royalty who in 1512 made a play for the Lithuanian throne. That year had seen an unusually poor winter and the pretender, charismatic and ambitious was able to raise an army of hungry serfs and malcontent lesser nobles driven by promise of land and gold. Jonas Albertas would meet his death and defeat in battle on a rainy February in 1513 and he and thousands of his followers fell before the walls Vilnius.

As these incidents showed the Grand Duchy remained turbulent but throughout the overwhelming majority of the nobles and people remained loyal and sincerely devoted to Lukasz. Self interest and cultural affinity tied Lithuania to Poland but it was the actions of the monarch that breathed life into the union between Kraków and Vilnius. During the later decades his reign Lukasz's visits to his Grand Duchy became rare simply because Poland demanded more of his attention but retained his interest in and sympathy for the Grand Duchy. When he died in 1524 the union he left behind - and Lithuania with it - were stronger and richer than ever before.

The Battle of Vilnius, 20 February 1513.​

Footnotes:

[1] Livonia's medieval name of 'Terra Mariana' (Latin for the "Land of Mary") had its roots in the Livonian Crusades of centuries past.

[2] Romantic depictions of Lukasz-era Poland and Lithuania tended to depict the monarch leading an array of splendid winged hussars but in fact the most famous soldiers of Poland lay two generations in the future. The army of of Lukasz I like so much else was in that twilight phase between the medieval world of the heavy cavalry and the road ahead to the Rennaisance.

 

[RossN]

Michalina of Mazovia, Queen-Consort of Poland and Lithuania.​

Part Seven: Lukaszian Poland

The secret behind Lukasz I's success was simple. At the start of his reign the young King always allowed the Sejm at least the appearance of supremacy. A baron himself he knew how his peers thought and felt and that their dignity was a precious commodity. For their part most of the Polish magnates were willing to play along with the illusion that the power balance had not shifted. Very properly the monarch brought his laws before the diet and they equally properly debated them - and then passed them. Even the Livonian concession was pushed through with only grumbling rather than armed revolt.

Like an early Roman emperor dealing with the Senate much of the Polish king's authority lay not in strict laws and precedents but in a web of patronage. Many of the great barons had tied their star to Lukasz and his family long before he had rebelled against the luckless King August II. Others joined his banner during the war itself. Rather than the feeble resources attached to the Polish crown Lukasz drew his true strength and connections from his baronial past. With his followers among the szlachta and the memory of his own rebellion the King was able to wield great power in the Sejm without appearing to act tyrannical.

Lukasz also proved a shrewd judge of character. Most of the royal council had survived from the previous regime and the new King was generous to those who had been capable under the ill-starred August II. The most significant of these early men and the longest lasting was Mariusz Jaroslawski, a one-eyed baron who served as the Crown's chief of spies for two decades. The saturnine baron was not widely loved in Kraków - whispers abounded as to what misfortune had cost him an eye and darker whispers still circled as to what he did in his monarch's name. While the King was away in Lithuania Baron Jaroslawski was not (officially) regent in Poland, that post belonging to a less troubling figure. Nevertheless until his death in 1503 he was a constant presence in Lukasz's shadow, a crooked moon to the King's sun.

More constant even than Baron Jaroslawski at the royal court was the Queen Consort. Michalina Piast of Mazovia was a decade older than her husband when they wed in 1493. A tall woman with auburn hair and grey-green eyes she had been famed for her beauty in her maidenhood but as she had grown older other talents had emerged. Michalina lacked her husband's instinctive gift for administration and organisation but as a silver tongued diplomat she had few equals. Though the luckless August II had a wife she had been phantasmal presence in an already weak monarchy, a mousy woman who made no mark in her brief time in the limelight. Michalina restored the glamour and soft power of a royal spouse, and as much as Lukasz may have wooed her for political reasons the two soon formed a close bond.

In October 1496 the easy relations between the monarch and the Sejm suffered their first great crisis. At the beginning of his reign Lukasz had refused to offer titles for sale to wealthy burghers and other non-noble riff raff. This along with his considered etiquette towards the szlachta had encouraged the Polish nobles to assume their king was as one with them on noble privileges, careful understandably of his own power but a conservative baron at heart. That year several of the greatest magnates had drawn up a petition to approach their monarch, effectively shifting the balance even further towards the nobles. It seems that it genuinely did not occur to them that Lukasz may have refused.

The Petition of Piotrków of 1496 threatened to drive a wedge between monarch and Sejm.
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The Petition of Piotrków (sometimes erroneously termed the Statutes of Piotrków) certainly showed the szlachta had recovered whatever confidence had been lost with the fall of August II but the nobles most likely had no intention of pushing an unwilling Lukasz to a confrontation. The King, made aware of what he was being asked to do before he was officially presented with the Petition marshalled his supporters in the Sejm, calling in favours and leaning on the waverers. Eventually after a stormy meeting of the nobles at Piotrków the royal faction had its way and the privileges were dropped. Outright rebellion had been avoided but the stability of the kingdom had been damaged and would take time to repair.

What the szlachta did not know was that however proud the monarch was of his roots as a baron Lukasz had greater designs for Poland and Lithuania. His experiences in the Grand Duchy had impressed upon the King that Poland could not survive as a great power on the splendour of her knights alone. The Kingdom needed to be centralised and rich and that meant bringing greater authority to the crown, even at the risk of angering the barons. Specifically it meant integrating the Duchy of Mazovia and the Prussian Confederation centred around Danzig.

Danzig [1] was one of the wealthiest of the Baltic seaports, the outlet for most of Poland's foreign trade. A proud, sometimes difficult city of beautiful buildings and sharp minded men the port was a bustling mix of the German, Polish and the Kashubian. The Syndic (or mayor) was one of the most powerful and richest individuals in Poland. Danzig (and all Prussia) was a vassal of the Polish Crown but Lukasz aimed further, to make the port as much part f Poland as Lublin or Kraków herself.

The negotiations which began in earnest the year after the Piotrków crisis were delicate in the extreme. Much of the documentation has not survived the ravages of time (and some perhaps was deliberately destroyed even in that era) but what is known is that Baron Rafal Branicki was the King's man in Prussia from at least May in 1497. The Poles had a difficult task; Danzig was doing well out of her independence and there was little appetite for surrender to the culturally different Poland. Branicki - and beyond him the King - used a carrot and stick argument. A Danzig integrated into Poland proper could wield greater authority in the kingdom, especially as thanks to Lukasz's efforts to defeat the Petition of Piotrków great offices of state and the higher clergy remained open to men beyond the ranks of the szlachta. Lukasz was also able to promise that the unique privileges of the port and the other towns and rural areas of Prussia would be respected, pointing to the generous treatment of the Baltic German nobility of Livonia that he had won as Grand Duke of Lithuania. On the other had there was always the possibility that the next monarch elected by the Sejm would be less sympathetic to the Danzigers and the Prussians and look to press their authority on the Baltic city state by colder means.

Queen Michalina's grace, charm and razor sharp mind proved a great boon to her husband's wooing of Danzig and Mazovia.
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For a decade the waltz continued. The King, having painfully rebuilt his bridges with his nobles could only proceed with great care lest he provoke another crisis. Here the talents of Queen Michalina proved vital. A princess from an ancient bloodline raised in Warsaw she knew little of the Prussians and their world, but she was a canny diplomat. The Queen's advice peppered many of the letters sent by Lukasz. Thanks to them both the wooing succeeded and in May 1507 Danzig and other Prussian towns formally integrated into the Kingdom of Poland. The monarch had managed to reassure his nobles that such a move would not threaten them and was vital to Polish security and prosperity.

In contrast to Danzig the integration of Mazovia ran smoothly and openly. The ancient duchy had been an independent vassal for centuries but the extinction of the Piast male line had made re-incorporation into the Kingdom of Poland an expected, even welcome outcome. Michaliana herself as eldest daughter of the last duke provided a legal and symbolic link to the old line and the new and there was no opposition in the Sejm. In March 1511 the duchy was reintegrated into Poland proper.

Most Poles and certainly the King remained strongly traditional Catholic despite talk of reform and even heresy from the west.
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Early Sixteenth Century Poland was prosperous enough and confident enough to take these expansions and reforms with ease. This was the time when Nicolaus Copernicus (born in the city of Toruń) became well known and when very artists of the Polish School began to make their mark on the face of Europe. Renaissance Poland was a culturally diverse and politically vibrant society, her great cities, universities and guilds bustling with Catholics, Orthodox and Jewish burghers. The King, who was a devout Catholic who venerated the Virgin Mary was also tolerant to a fault. He had several notable Ruthenian ministers, Jewish courtiers and, most controversially, Protestants, at the royal court.

Lukasz's tolerance has won both praise and criticism from historians.
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The Reformation which began at the turn of the century at first seemed a distant event to a Poland more concerned by the Danes, the Muscovites and the Turks than the malcontentism of German theologians. The country was aware of the strange shifts in points of Europe, including the heresy of the English king in founding his own separate church apart from Rome. In 1510 this sense of distance ended when a theologian of Kamieniec by the name of Kazimierz Grabowski translated the Bible into Polish. From that point on a small but vocal Polish Protestant community existed under the tolerant gaze of the monarch. In 1518 one of these Protestants, the great artist Bartosz Nowak gained a place in the King's own household as the court painter.

Lukasz's tolerance was personal and sincere but it was also pragmatic. Orthodox Christians and Polish Jews, two minority faiths who made up a far greater number of his subjects than Protestants had become a vital element of Polish prosperity and strength. A grand campaign against the heretics would have upset the delicate balance of loyalties in the kingdom and as yet the numbers of malcontents was small. Some more traditional Catholic historians have taken issue with Lukasz's stance [2] but for so prudent a monarch to have acted otherwise would have been unthinkable.

Peace and prosperity brought problems of their own.
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By 1524 the King had reigned for thirty five years and was showing increasing signs of ill health. The great court banquets and balls, originally begun as an alternative to the old world of the joust and tourney had grown ever more elaborate, obscuring the ruler behind masques and revels. The great wealth of Poland and - with a few exceptions - her long stability had provoked a certain decadence and the King, who had suffered from gout for years and had fractured a leg while riding was no longer the slim figure of his boyhood. Lukasz's mind remained sharp he could still be roused for a good day of hawking with his beloved birds but for a man once driven by perfectionism he had become indolent and weary. Even his marriage, though by all accounts still happy had failed to provide him with a legitimate male heir who lived beyond infancy.

One of the great questions of Polish history has been that of Lukasz's inheritance. Had there been a prince of the blood many historians believed Lukasz would have pushed to restore Poland as a hereditary monarchy. Not necessarily through changing a law, for the King always worked with the constitution as it was rather than as might have liked but simply by concentrating the great wealth and power of his faction in the Sejm. That was something the tired monarch could not or would not do for his three daughters so even as continued living and Poland continued prospering the future was already beginning to move away from him.

Lukasz I died on the morning of 24 September 1524, after a fever brought about by a chill won while inspecting soldiers of the guard on parade. The monarch was buried in Kraków with great and solemn ceremony. His widow and his daughters Elżbieta, Agnieszka and little Krystyna dressed from crown to sole in mourner's black rode through streets filled with weeping people. As the Archbishop of Kraków conducted the service many in the cathedral who had known only Lukasz during their adult lives must have wondered what would come next. Already there were undercurrents in the Sejm that a candidate more attuned to the nobles be chosen.

Lukasz I was a highly successful monarch of both Poland and Lithuania who exposed the strengths and weaknesses of the elective monarchy and powerful Sejm. By personal ability and resources and by existing family connection he had become a far more powerful monarch than the crafters of the Polish constitution might have imagined. At the same time his personal genius only went so far. In a world where the szlachta kept a tight control of the succession there remained limits to the achievements of even a great king.

The death of King Lukasz I Malski, 24 September 1524.

The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the death of Lukasz I.
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Footnotes:

[1] Though much Polish (and other languages) was used in the city German was the primary tongue in trade and politics and so the German name is used to refer to the independent city state.

[2] Lukasz has also been accused of standing by while Catholic Hungary was half consumed by the Muslim Ottoman Empire. While perhaps more could have been done Hungary was not an ally of Poland during this period and partisans of the Polish monarch could point to the fact that if Poland had not aided neither had she taken advantage of Hungary's disaster - which was more than could be said for their co-religionists in Bohemia.

 

[RossN]

Europe in 1524.​

Appendix: Europe in 1524

The great shift in Fifteenth Century Europe was the end of the Hundred Years War. Buoyed by the startling career of "The Maid of Orléans", the hard work of the gallant French soldiery and the cunning and planning of King Charles VII France had driven the English from their shores by the end of the 1460s.The demise of Burgundy as an independent power and the integration of Brittany and the other quasi-independent feudal enclaves had created a rich, powerful and centralised state that was almost recognisable from the weakened and splintered kingdom of a century before.

By the early years of the Sixteenth Century France was unquestionably the strongest state in Christendom. Under King Louis XIV the French even holds a toehold on the land of their traditional foe across the English Channel. If the French have any problems they are problems brought about by success as Louis finds himself beleaguered by pleas to deal both with the advancing Turks and with the heretics across the Rhine, and most recently drawn into a contest with the Sultan over Southern Italy.

The later half of the Sixteenth Century was a melancholy age for England. After the loss of France the kingdom was wracked by civil war as the Plantagenet dynasty collapsed. After decades of chaos the Tudor dynasty gained control and England has seen a modest revival of fortunes, regaining some lost territory in Ireland. King Henry VIII has even become an unlikely champion of the Protestant faith as England has steered her own path towards reform. However with the French still so long and King Louis's garrisons yet in Devon England will have difficulty surpassing her old rival.

To the south Castile has expanded, swallowing most of Portugal and all of Granada and pushing on into Morocco. King Enrique VI rules a strong and rich kingdom from Madrid and is also monarch of Aragon. Should the two crowns be united into one centralised state the resulting Iberian empire might even challenge France for dominance - though as yet the courts of Paris and Madrid remain friendly.

The disappearance of Burgundy from the maps and the extinction of that talented and troublesome dynasty has left the Low Countries in a confusion that only recently has emerged from French dominance into the rival republics of the Netherlands and Friesland. Small as they are both merchant dominated republics are rich and ambitious and eye each other like starving wolves.

In theory the Holy Roman Empire should be the strongest of the Christian powers, but her scores of feuding princes and city states make the imperial unity fragile at best. To the evil of feudal ambition has been added that of religious difference and in 1524 the Empire is more fragmented than it has ever been, despite the strong Hapsburg hand of the Empress Maria Theresia who reigned for half a century between 1465 and 1515 and was succeeded by her grandson the Emperor Franz. Austria remains rich and powerful at least, though even here the Habsburgs have to contend with Bohemia.

For a land cursed with religious division long before the arrival of the Protestant Reformation Bohemia has enjoyed remarkable success. Her invasion of Hungary in the 1490s while that kingdom was still reeling from her defeat by the Turks shocked Christian Europe but the ambitious Bohemian monarchs dismissed such concerns. In 1524 Bohemia has few friends but fewer of her rivals are willing to test her. Currently the regent Queen Anne Elonore von Wittelsbach seems more inclined to diplomacy than war but that may change once her seven year old son Vratyslav comes of age. As for the shattered Hungary the chances of her recovering against her old enemy seem even slimmer than those of England against France.

In a mirror of the contest in the Low Countries Northern Italy is a battleground between the rival republics of Milan and Venice. The Venetians, still stinging from the loss of much of their eastern trade and their fleet against the Turks are desperate to recover their strength by conquest in Italy but the Milanese are every bit as ambitious and two of the loveliest, richest city states in Europe seem determined to carry their feud to the end.

Far to the north Denmark has enjoyed a prospering century, unifying with Norway and gaining a foothold both in the Eastern Baltic and in Scotland. In a surprising move the Danish Oldenburgs have 'gone native' with King Christoffer IV (known as 'Christoffer the Kind') who spent much of his youth in Karelia adopting many mannerisms from that region. Sweden has chosen her own path under the Forstena dynasty and King Erik XIV has pursued a friendship and alliance with Poland against their mutual rivals and enemies the Danes and the Muscovites.

The great principality of Muscovy stretches deep into the far flung wastes of the east and under a series of clever and ruthless princes has conquered most of her neighbours. The Grand Kniaz in 1524 is Ivan IV and his malevolence and lust for territory marks him well as a true Rurikid. Only Lithuania's union with Poland has prevented him eyeing Vilnius, and perhaps even that will not keep him or his successors away for ever.

There is only one non-Christian power in Europe but it is a mighty power indeed. The Ottoman Empire straddles two continents. Ambitious, rich, populous and with perhaps the strongest single army and navy in the world the Sulnate is not - yet - all powerful but of the European states only France is willing to challenge the Muslim empire of Mahmud I.

Beyond Europe proper lie the Muslim states of North Africa and the Near East, but beyond some trade and the Moroccan enmity with Castile their interaction with Christian Europe is slight, save for the counterbalance the Mamluks make to the Ottomans which perhaps has stalled the Sultans turning all their attention to the Danube. Further still explorers have brought enticing tales of new sea routes to the Orient or even previously undiscovered lands though as yet these far flung discoveries have had little impact on European politics or wealth.

European religion in 1524.
​

The Protestant Reformation had begun in Central Europe at the turn of the century, gathering pace and fire as it spread through Germany and finding a surprisingly strong early foothold in England where dynastic squabbles and merchant interests proved fallow ground for a break with Rome. Another surprising stronghold was the Balkans where the threat of the infidel and the disastrous failure of the Venetians, Austrians and Hungarians to counter the Turkish advance had shaken confidence in the Curia.

No one reformer dominated the reaction against the Roman Catholic Church. Men like Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwngli and William Tyndale in their various states were inspired by each other but drew on local issues and frustrations and sometimes provided very different answers. English 'Anglicanism' replace the Pope with the King of England but still retained much of the old Church. In contrast in those areas of the Balkans that turned Protestant the break was sharp and near complete. Even in states that remained overwhelmingly Catholic pockets of Protestants appeared, as we have already seen in Poland.

Not all Europe was beset by heresy. The old faith remained strong in Scandinavia, France, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. As of 1524 the cleave between the reformers - themselves split into different factions - and those loyal to Rome has not yet led to religious war on a massive scale but it seems likely that it will, especially in those states that were enemies to begin with such as England and France.

 

[RossN]

Jan II Olbracht Lanckoronski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1524 to 1536.)​

Part Eight: Jan II Olbracht Lanckoronski

Jan Olbracht Lanckoronoski was a baron like his predecessor and was even distantly related to the late King Lukasz. That was more or less the only points of similarity between the two men. The new King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania was a stolid, conservative soldier, intelligent and capable but no visionary. At forty two years old when he took the throne Jan II was already a familiar figure to the Sejm. His rise was because he had no enemies and crucially, little land and influence of his own. The Lanckoronoskis had estates near Toruń in what had once been territory belonging to the Teutonic Order and Jan himself had a Prussian-German mother, an exotic touch he tended to downplay in contrast to his predecessor. By the time he took the throne Jan was already a widower with a legitimate adult son Prince Henryk.

Any hopes the new monarch may have had that the Sejm would be gracious and grateful crumbled even before his official coronation. Jan II found himself forced to sign the same pledges the two previous kings had been required to make and nobles haughtily informed him that no more funds for soldiers would be available. His known conservatism, his Polish piety and his reputation as a gallant knight stood him little favour with a szlachta ravenous to restore their privileges. It was almost a return to the days of King August II.

In an early disappointment the Sejm flexed it's muscles over the monarch.​

Fortunately Jan was a stronger, cleverer man than August II had been and as sharply as his dignity was affronted he was determined to rule as well as he might. His predecessor had signed an alliance with Sweden with a view challenging Denmark or Muscovy at some point. Jan went one better. In April 1532 he married Princess Margareta of Sweden. Queen Michaliana, now enjoying a rather glamorous old age at court had brought vivacious consorts back into fashion and if nothing else the King could feel a sense of accomplishment there. The fact that the Swedish princess was nearly two decades younger than her husband had been a spur to the immortal art of the court gossip and there was a strong rumour that Jan had originally supposed Margareta for his son rather than himself prior to studying her portrait.

Prince Henryk was a different man to his father. Twenty year younger than his father the Crown Prince gave an impression of calmness rather than the military stiffness that cloaked the King. He even accepted the loss of his potential bride with equanimity and the presence of a stepmother three years his junior with dignity despite the inevitable avalanche of bawdy comments and suggestive jokes at court. What really set him apart was his interest in Prussia and the Prussians; particularly in the cities. The great seaport of Gdańsk, that heady mix of German, Pole and Balt was the focus Vistula river trade. Rich, exciting and cosmopolitan the city appealed to many Poles who tired of the pomposity and narrowminded self interest of the szlachta.

The difference between the two almost came to a crisis in October 1532. The new Swedish monarch King Gustav I had ambitions of dominating the Baltic and shifting the balance of power away from the Danes. The Poles were simply sympathetic towards that but Gustav's ambitions towards Riga were far more problematic, especially as war between Sweden and the Hanseatic League loomed. The city of Riga was a key port for the Lithuanian trade and under King Lukasz relations between Riga, Kraków and Vilnius had enjoyed a sort of benign neutrality. In 1532 the monarch and the Sejm found themselves having to decide between maintaining that neutrality or siding with the Swedes.

Sweden and Poland-Lithuania (green) against Riga and her allies (red) at the outbreak of war in 1532.​

The Riga War of 1532 to 1534 was fought mostly by Swedes and Germans [1] but it saw the rise of two factions in Poland that for the first time pushed different visions of the kingdom's future to the fore. Jan II and most of the conservatives in the Sejm held the Traditional or Easterner view [2]. To their minds the main enemy was Muscovy and the Swedish alliance was primarily to ward off against Denmark (and perhaps help against the Muscovite princes.) Jan may have had roots in the Baltic German nobility but like most Polish barons he knew little and cared less about the universe of merchants and sailors.

In opposition this were the Baltic or Westerner faction. This view was particularly strong in Gdańsk, the rest of Prussia and Courland and tended to see Denmark and Sweden as Poland's most significant rivals and potential enemies. The Baltic faction scarcely cared about the Muscovites and many of them were not even that interested in Lithuania. Their dream was of Poland as seapower with links to the Hansa and Riga either a friendly ally or an actual tributary. Some historians have categorised Prince Henryk as a partisan of this faction. Certainly he was sympathetic towards the Prussians in a way his father was not and he strongly opposed the annexation of Riga by Sweden but he was also a proponent of Lithuania (as we shall see in time.)

Despite his misgivings about aiding Sweden Prince Henryk did advise his father at the start of the war that the royal fleet should make sail to blockade Riga. The 'Królewska Marynarka Wojenna' of 1532 was a motley collection of ships, mostly elderly, inherited from the Prussian Confederation years before. So overlooked and ill served by funding was the fleet that many in distant Kraków were surprised to learn there even were warships that flew the standard of the white eagle. The vast majority of the szlachta had no interest in the sea and it hardly helped that the lingua franca used by the navy was Baltic German. It was only in that October that Poland gained her first official admiral, a soldier baron by the name of Mariuz Cetner who had seen service with the King on his expedition to Moldavia in 1526 [3]. An amiable and handsome noble said be some to be the best rider in Poland Baron Cetner had never so much as set foot in a boat before but he was loyal and hard working and his wife hailed from Gdańsk. In the absence of other options that would have to do.

With the Swedish fleet predominantly fighting the German ships it was up to the Poles to deal with Riga. Baron Cetner raised his standard aboard the barque Jonge Tobias and led his force of four sailing ships and six galleys east along the Prussian coast. The cold Autumn winds favoured the Poles and soon the enemy port was in sight. Though Mariuz Cetner had bands of soldiers under his command his objective was to blockade Riga, not take her by sword.

The Battle of the Gulf of Riga, 14 July 1533.
​

The royal ships and their Riga counterparts finally clashed on the morning of 14 July 1533. The city - under siege from Swedish and Lithuanian soldiers had grown desperate enough to try and break through the blockade by force and her fleet engaged Center and his vessels in the Gulf of Riga. In numbers the sides were a match with ten Polish ships and a lone Lithuanian galley against eleven of the enemy. However the odds lay with the Poles for despite the even numbers nearly half the ships of Riga were converted merchant cogs, their decks crammed with what soldiers could spared from the besieged seaport. With the wind and their backs and their oars slicing through the brine the Poles routed their enemy within the hour, with six of the enemy slipping below the waves after being rammed or running themselves onto the rocks trying to escape their hunters. The barque Johan and the galley Barbara both surrendered to the Poles after a ferocious fight in close quarters becoming the first ever prizes taken by the Królewska Marynarka Wojenna. Mariuz Cetner returned to Gdańsk the hero of the hour, the arrival of his ships serenaded by church bells. In the days ahead even the most landbound of nobles would grudgingly admit the sailors and ships had done well.

Despite the disaster at sea Riga stubbornly held on, bolstered by the continued resistance of her allies. It would take another year until she finally surrendered and the greatest seaport in the eastern Baltic was in Lithuanian hands. But not for long. On 11 June 1534 the Archbishop of Riga negotiated a peace with Sweden and Poland-Lithuania. It was not a cheap peace, with Riga's treasury all but emptied and a stiff tribute imposed but crucially the city remained independent. King Gustav may have wanted more but with the city in Lithuanian hands and some canny diplomacy by the Poles he had, effectively, been bought off in a way that saved face.

An even more delicate act of policy was the secret treaties negotiated with the Archbishop of Riga after the war that allied Poland (and Lithuania) to Riga. These had been pushed by the Baltic faction in the Sejm, anxious to safeguard the eastern Baltic from any more Swedish adventures. This placed Jan II in a grim position, given his own ties to the Swedes but he was eventually persuaded that should war eventually happen between Sweden and the Hansa the terms of the treaties were so vague that the Polish Crown was not committed either way. The King swallowed his scruples and accepted the judgement of his advisers, rather than provoke a public crisis.

Unfortunately for the monarch a crisis appeared anyway.

The Nowak Crisis of 1536.​

For almost twenty years the famed Lublin born painter Bartosz Nowak had been the court artist in Kraków. A gifted observer of human life Nowak was perhaps the finest portrait painter east of the Rhine and north of the Alps and had enjoyed much celebrity and considerable influence. The only thing more admired than his skill with the brush was his skill with the gentler sex and there were delightfully scandalised rumours that among his feminine admirers was Princess Agnieszka Malski, second daughter of the late King Lukasz. Unfortunately he had a greater sin than that for Bartosz Nowak was a vocal Protestant.

The election of Pope Innocentius VIII in 1533 had brought a new zeal to the Roman Catholic Church. The new pontiff, formerly Cardinal Pietro Cattaneo was a tough minded theologian and partisan of the Castilians (his election was universally regarded as a sharp rebuff to the French crown.) Innocentius took a sharp line against the schismatic movements running rampant in Germany, England and the Balkans and soon his gaze fell upon the Polish court, nominally loyal to Rome but home to a famous heretic. At the end of 1535 he sent an envoy directly to the Polish king.

It was an extraordinarily difficult moment for Jan II. On a personal level he was friendly with the artist and cognisant of his reputation. Still he was King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania and had his dignity and position to weigh like a merchant at his scales. The new Archbishop of Kraków, Krystian Jazlowiecki urged Jan to accept the Papal Demand lest the traditional Polish tolerance for free expression of religion turn the kingdom into a second Germany.

And then Jan II died.

It was last day of March 1536 and seeking relief from the troubles at court the old soldier had taken the opportunity to inspect a regiment of freshly recruited cavalry outside Kraków. Military matters had always been more to his liking. While visiting he had struck some observers as looking unusually tired but no one expected to find him lifeless the following morning, having seemingly passed away in his sleep. He was fifty four.

Jan II is not one of the more widely recalled Polish monarchs and what is recalled is negative. This may be unfair. He had inherited a prosperous realm and for the most part it had continued to prosper. He had walked the tightrope of keeping both Sweden and Riga friendly, even if most of the actual diplomacy was conducted by other hands. He had not scrapped the Navy which in the 1520s had been a serious topic of debate in the Sejm. Even in the business with Bartosz Nowak circumstances had been forced on him. Perhaps he was not a great king but he was a dignified and dutiful one.

The Sejm almost immediately elected Crown Prince Henryk to the throne in what was to prove very contentious circumstances. Even before Jan II had his funeral his son and heir would be faced with open rebellion...

The death of King Jan II, the succession of King Henryk and the beginnings of the Nalecz revolt, April 1536.​

Footnotes:

[1] Specifically Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck.

[2] These terms are anachronistic and are used by historians to describe broad 'blocs' rather than political parties as such.

[3] There was a 'Southern' faction that held that Poland should be more active in opposing the Ottomans but save for this brief expedition to crush a rebellion in Moldavia in 1526 this faction was limited in influence and never numerous.

 

[RossN]

Henryk I Lanckoronski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1536 to 1554.)​

Part Nine: Henryk I Lanckoronski

Henryk the First, one of the greatest of Polish kings gained his throne by the skin of his teeth and kept it only by force of arms.

The monarch already had made his mark before he was elected. As Crown Prince he had been an active player in Polish politics. At thirty three he had fought in battle, acted as his father's representative in Gdańsk and Vilnius and even travelled abroad, to Sweden, before becoming King. A man of middling build, dark hair and ice-green eyes the new ruler of Poland and Lithuania was exemplified by his calmness. Even near disaster never seemed to disrupt his stiff upper lip.

The Sejm of 1536, convened after the sudden death of King Jan II was conducted with unheard of haste. Technically there was a quorum in Kraków but many noble representatives were absent, disproportionately the vast numbers of petty barons from the hinterland. Depending on ones point of view these missing magnates were either the bedrock of Polish noblity or the most hidebound, self possessed men imaginable. They viewed any move towards centralised authority and strengthening the monarchy as a sin akin to cannibalism and by their very nature they were most likely to vote against the son of a previous monarch regardless of his abilities. Instead Henryk was elected with the support of a loyalist faction of magnates and representatives from the cities, Church and Prussia - commoners and foreigners! Archbishop Jazlowiecki, now Cardinal Jazlowiecki was a loyal supporter of the new King. The prince of the Church was a commoner from Królewiec (Königsberg) and of mixed German Prussian and polish background himself he was doubly damned in the eyes of the more conservative szlachta. Immediately after his own coronation and with the aid of loyalists in the rump Sejm the King appointed Cardinal Jazlowiecki Kanclerz koronny – Chancellor of the Crown.

The Battle of Chelm, 10 July 1536.
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The response was open rebellion. The conservative nobles turned to Zygmunt Kazimierz Nalecz, a soldier of great renown, considerable ability and personal ambition. Against a weak monarch he might have done well but Henryk was far from weak. At the battles of Chelm (10 July 1536) and Belz (31 July 1536) the King crushed the pretender and his forces. Though he took a soft line on those nobles who had taken up arms and surrendered the swift execution of the ringleaders ('King Zygmunt' among them) showed that the monarch would brook no threat to his throne.

Back in Kraków the Sejm now fully established sullenly refused to fund Henryk's armies. This was their constitutional right and however irritating it was for Henryk he accepted their judgement, relying on other sources of funding [1]. Henryk gritted his teeth, drew on his masterful reserves of self control and moved on, trusting that there would soon be a measure on which he and his most difficult nobles should find common ground. It proved a shrewd guess.

Bohemia was the most aggressive state in Europe. Her kings had conquered much of Hungary and taken advantage of the decline in Viennese authority to establish a hegemony over central Germany. Nonminimally the Bohemians where Catholic, though the resilience of the Hussite movement called this into question. Religious difference did not prevent the Bohemians allying with Brandenburg, the strongest of the north German states and increasingly a bastion of Protestantism. The Elector of Brandenburg was every bit as territorial and aggressive as his counterpart to the south, and together the two states represented a formidable bloc on Poland's western frontier.

During the reigns of Lukasz and Jan II relations between Kraków and Prague had always been icy but it was not until the 1540s that the rivalry turned overtly violent. The border territory of Trenčín had passed through many hands over the centuries; Polish, Hungarian, Bohemian. The Bohemians had taken advantage of the miserable state of Hungary and seized territory from the dying kingdom at a time when much of Christendom saw the Magyars as a bastion against the Turks. In 1530 the Kingdom of Bohemia had been inherited by Mary von Habsburg, a clever and charming woman of that Austrian house who had immediately gone native in Prague and an able student of the same pragmatic and callous politics as her predecessor.

Poland (green) and her allies (blue) against Bohemia and her allies (pink) in 1543.
​

In January 1543 Cardinal Jazlowiecki (as Chancellor) addressed the Sejm on the 'Bohemian matter'. The prelate spoke on behalf of the monarch, but he spoke to many ears willing to listen to a tirade against Prague and the 'unanswerable' Polish claim on Trenčín. War against the Bohemians was a concept all Poles could embrace.

There was but one difficulty. Bohemia, perfidious and aggressive as she was remained within the Holy Roman Empire. The Emperor Franz was a nonentity, clearly the lesser to his cousin Prague but he remained the Emperor. There were some in the Sejm who feared war with the Empire but King Henryk and his closest advisers believed that with the religious schism shattering Imperial unity and Franz's own weak character the Imperial forces would not stampede to the aid of Bohemia. It proved a shrewd gamble and when war erupted on 25 January 1543 the recluse in Vienna failed to rise to the occasion.

The Bohemian War would be the first time the famed Polish Winged Hussars took to the field of battle en masse. The armies of Poland and Lithuania had long been formed around a core of heavy cavalry but in the age of the arquebus, the long pike and the dreaded Zweihänder sword [2] the knights of old had little place on the battlefield. For the Poles the solution had been a cavalryman, invariably of noble stock, armoured and armed with a long lance, a koncerz (stabbing sword), a szabla (sabre), a brace of pistols, and (later) often a carbine and sometimes a warhammer or light axe. Their most distinguishing feature, behind their gallantry and the superb horses they rode were their distinctive feathered banners that gave them their name. Few forces in Europe could withstand a charge from assembled Polish and Lithuanian horse.

In truth that reputation would be built over the decades to come. This war was not the best showcase for cavalry tactics. The mountains of Windenland [3] proved difficult on the horses and the Bohemians, and a numerical disadvantage to their Polish and Lithuanian enemies avoided open battle. Rapidly the fighting became the familiar grind of siege warfare at least in the south. For the Poles Trenčín itself would prove a challenge. The mighty fortress was built atop a hill and with a ready supply of food and water the Bohemians would last many months weathering as a siege as Polish cannon fire raked the ramparts.

Elsewhere another Polish army marched on Opole (which fell without a fight on 6 March 1543) and a third on Ratibor (which likewise bloodlessly surrendered on 17 March.) The three Polish armies combined had a total of fifty two thousand soldiers. The King himself led the Armia z Kraków in an advance on Vratislav. By the middle of June almost all of Silesia would be in Polish hands with the Bohemians abandoning anything east of the River Oder that was not already defended by stone walls.

The war in mid-1543, prior to the Siege of Berlin.
​

In July the Royal army crossed to the North into Brandenburg. Early in the war Stolp had fallen to the Lithuanians as part of the Grand Duchy’s invasion of the Electorate [4], but the monarch wished to take Berlin personally. On 22 February 1544 Berlin finally fell to the Poles after a hard siege that had seen the city moon pocked by Polish cannon fire. Four days before that Trenčín had surrendered at last.

The following month the Poles and their allies faced two rare pitched battles, though on neither field was the enemy the nominal one. At Ratibor and then Dolni Luzice rebellious peasants, despairing over their wretched war time condition had revolted. The fighting was bloody but brief and left the Poles in possession of the field. True clashes between the Poles and their allies and their enemies did still take place, but elsewhere. The Brandenburgers, leery of facing either the Poles or the Lithuanians had turned on a weaker target, fighting against the Swedes and even briefly launching a daring raid across the Baltic into Sweden proper.

By the summer of 1544 the Bohemians and Brandenburgers were desperate for peace. Queen Mary of Bohemia was no fool and she had her eyes on goals beyond the current war, even to the point of agreeing a most unfavourable peace from her point of view. On 2 August representatives from all the involved powers met in Kraków, along with those of the Emperor, the King of Hungary and Cardinal Domingo Panciera, the Patriarch of Aquileia who represented the Pope.

King Henryk naturally demanded Trenčín, but surprised many by two further resolutions. The first, popular among all save the Bohemians was that Pest, Nové Zámky and Fejér should be ceded to Hungary. All these territories had been seized by Bohemia from a prostrate Hungary a generation before and had left a permanent stain on the diplomatic reputation of Prague in foreign courts. The delighted and astonished King Márk of Hungary, a beggar among Christendom's princes now found himself the ruler of a realm restored not to full health but at least no longer in her deathbed. The other resolution was even more remarkable because it did not involve the adjustment of borders. Poland had a claim on the border territory of Neumark in the Electorate of Brandenburg and many in the Sejm pushed for annexation. Henryk refused. The monarch knew that the population of Neumark was almost entirely German speaking and Protestant. The former was of little importance as many Germans lived in Poland. The second was a greater difficulty by far. As we have seen before there were certainly Protestants in Poland but they were (mostly) tolerated because they were so harmless. To invite many thousands more, all with a grudge against the Polish Crown promised disaster.

The terms of the Treaty of Kraków, 24 October 1544.
​

Henryk was prepared to rely on his greatest resource: patience. He had already won the war and for the moment he could simply ignore the Sejm. His grace regarding Hungary and his forbearance towards Brandenburg won him praise in Paris, Vienna and Rome. He simply outlasted the Bohemian Queen and when the treaty was at last signed that October he walked away with all he wanted.

The Polish-Bohemian War had confirmed what had been suspected for many years. The Holy Roman Empire now existed as more a fiction than a reality. Within a year the inept Franz would be overthrown by his own cousin in Vienna while different branches of the Hapsburgs squabbled for the Crown and the Protestant grip on Northern Germany grew tighter. Bohemia, weakened but not broken remained a local power, as did Brandenburg. Poland was the unquestionable strongest state of Mitteleuropa but her authority rested on force of arms, money and in the case of Hungary gratitude rather than ancient bonds or rank.

There was another power, far removed from Poland and Bohemia which had benefitted from the war. Castile had swallowed the last fragments of mainland Portugal in the 1530s and under the reign of King Pedro II the royal union with Aragon had drawn closer. The obvious feebleness of the Emperor in Vienna had been observed in Madrid and from 1543 on the envoys of the Iberian monarch in Rome had lain the groundwork for an audacious claim. Pedro desired the title of Emperor. The Imperial dignity was not, technically, vacant, but the Pope, pressured to choose between the rising power that was Castile and the fading glow that was Austria surrendered to the inevitable. In early 1548 with the backing of the Papacy Pedro became the first Emperor of Spain.

Henryk could not claim such a prize. He owed his ever precarious thrones to the nobles of Poland and Lithuania and they would not countenance an emperor in Kraków. There was another option, one which had been proposed before and which had some backing among the nobles. Previously the Kingdom and the Grand Duchy had been linked with Poland as the senior party but they had still been governed as separate entities. By unifying the two states into one realm - a 'Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth' - the Poles and Lithuanians would form a powerful counterbalance to Spain and France in the West, put the fear of God into the Muscovites, challenge Ottoman ambitions and act as guardian over a sunken Germany. That at least was some of the lofty rhetoric used by the King and his faithful Chancellor Cardinal Jazlowiecki while trying to convince the Polish and Lithuanian magnates in the endless horse trading that took place in Lublin throughout 1548.

What won the day for the union was that both the monarch and the szlachta convinced themselves that they would benefit the most from the Commonwealth. When the ink was dry on the treaties and the Commonwealth was officially born on 1 October 1548 Henryk and his nobles had quite different visions of the future balance of power in their great state...

Europe in 1548 showing the two new great powers: the Empire of Spain and the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania.​

Footnotes:

[1] Largely via income from the Prussian seaports and from his holdings in the Grand Duchy.

[2] The Zweihänder so impressed King Henryk that despite the weapons growing obsolesce even in the second half of the Sixteenth Century he authorised a corps of magnificently uniformed soldiers with the dreaded swords as a ceremonial guard.

[3] Slovakia.

[4] The Lithuanian armies were at this time run separately to those of Poland with their own commanders and designs.

 

[RossN]

Vilnius or Wilno, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and later the Commonwealth, circa 1600.​

Part Ten: The First War of the Commonwealth

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth formed in 1548 was a formidable state, vast, populous and wealthy but it was not without its internal stresses. The old Kingdom of Poland, though geographically smaller held most of the Commonwealth’s people and was linked by ties of trade and diplomacy to the West. Though there were large German and Ruthenian minorities the bulk of the common people spoke Polish and thought of themselves as kin to their ruling nobility. The historic capital and cultural centre of the realm was in Kraków, a beautiful and refined city in the far west of Poland.

The vast Grand Duchy of Lithuania was more of hodgepodge, containing both splendid cities like Vilnius (or Wilno as the Poles called it) and Kiev as well as immense stretches of all but empty grassland. The Lithuanian nobles were as proud and stubborn as their Polish counterparts but fewer in number and ruling over a populace where the Lithuanians were in the minority and the Roman Church often had shallow roots. The old Grand Duchy was every bit as much the realm of the Ruthenian, Byelorussian and the Cossack as it was that of the Polish-influenced Lithuanian leaders and to the east sprawled the quasi-barbarian princedom of Muscovy, stretching back leagues into the endless territories of the furthest east.

Henryk never forgot he was both King and Grand Duke. Immediately after the declaration of the Commonwealth in late 1548 he travelled east on what was his first true visit to the Grand Duchy as monarch. There was endless work to be done integrating the two realms, their laws and their armies. There was also a new capital to select. Kraków was one of the glittering pearls of Europe but it was also very distant from the furthest borders of the Grand Duchy, or even from her centre. The Sejm favoured the small town of Warsaw a hundred and sixty miles to the north east. Warsaw had been the old capital of Mazovia and after that duchy’s incorporation into Poland it had been championed by many magnates who desired a new capital far from royal Kraków. It was true that Warsaw had advantages of her own; she was more centrally located in terms of the Commonwealth and she sat on the Vistula, the great artery of commerce and transport for Poland.

Henryk however had another city in mind as his new seat and though he passed through Warsaw and paid attendance to the Sejm on his royal progress he continued further east. His eye was firmly on Wilno, which he entered clad in the robes and coronet of the Grand Dukes in March 1549.

The Lithuanian capital had experienced moments of violence over the past century, but she had also prospered greatly on the east west trade through Riga and the Lithuanian seaport of Klaipėda (the Prussian Memel of old.) Her population had swollen, far surpassing that of Kiev or Minsk and was soon to pass even Kraków herself as the largest city in the Commonwealth. Though still mainly Lithuanian in her citizenry Wilno was growing more cosmopolitan as Poles, Jews, Germans and Ruthenians increasingly peopled her streets.

For the Lithuanian magnates Henryk’s decision to stay in Wilno brought obvious prestige and the Grand Duke at once won many allies east of the Bug. For the szlachta the movement of the royal court was a ‘difficulty’ as one historian put it with eloquent understatement. Legally the monarch was well within his rights to reside permanently in the capital of the Grand Duchy and even had he remained at Kraków the Sejm was not budging from Warsaw. Still while Henryk could do it, especially with his strengthened political capital after defeating Bohemia it left him few friends among the Polish nobles.

Henryk’s relocation had another purpose besides strengthening the Grand Duchy. The city of Riga, her citizens a shrewd and wilful mix of German, Livonian and Baltic culture had miraculously survived the turmoil of the last century by clinging tenaciously to her independence. By the 1540s she was one of the great seaports of the Baltic and vital to the Lithuanian economy. As well as a bustling market city Riga was also religiously significant with the Archbishop being the Pope’s representative in the north.

In 1549 the Archbishop of Riga was a Prussian German, one Thomas von Boyen. Von Boyen, much like his contemporary Cardinal Jazlowiecki in Poland was a throwback to the great days of the prelate princes who practiced politics as much as they preached. He had originally played the traditional game of playing Poland, Lithuania, Sweden and Denmark against each other but by the time Henryk had moved his capital to Wilno that strategy was looking insufficient. Poland and Lithuania had united and Sweden was an ally of the Commonwealth in good standing as well as being too weak in her own right to act as a patron for the city state. That left a straight choice been the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Kingdom of Denmark.

The Danish Empire in 1548.​

The Danish were at the height of their powers in the Sixteenth Century. Though Sweden had been lost to the Kalamar Union Norway had been unified with Denmark proper and the ambitious monarchs in Copenhagen had taken advantage of the weakness of first the Teutonic and Livonian Orders and then the dying Principality of Novograd to seize key territories in Livonia and the Kola Peninsula, the later giving Danish traders access across icy waters to Muscovy and the endless depths of the Russian hinterland. And there were always Danish traders. No country, perhaps not even France had benefitted so well from the decline of English power and prestige after the Hundred Years War. A collapse in English seapower had left the Baltic and the North Sea open for vessels sailing from Danish and Norwegian ports. They had won a slice of northern Scotland, holding Sutherland, Inverness and the Outer and Inner Hebrides, giving them influence in Ireland where sympathetic Gaelic princes looked to the Danes in their struggles with the English and each other.

Denmark, even with Norway and her overseas empire east of Sweden and north of Edinburgh had too small a population to fully compete with the other great powers of Christendom. In an age when twenty millions lived in France, nearly twenty million more lived in the Spanish Empire and nearly ten million in the Commonwealth [1], perhaps two and a half millions were subjects of King Frederick III. Yet despite being a fox amongst wolves Denmark’s wealth, stability and above all her navy gave her authority beyond her size.

The objective of King Henryk was to woo Riga away from any temptation to ally with the Danes. His own father had negotiated an alliance with Riga but Henryk, willing to give anything to stop the finest port in the Baltic slipping to a rival realm went further. The embassy in Riga worked themselves into a state of nervous collapse in the sorcerous arts of diplomacy, bribing, manipulating, promising, negotiating, and even when left with no other option being completely truthful with Riga.

One great embarrassment for Henryk was the actions of another close ally, King Márk of Hungary. The Hungarian court had become a bastion for Reformed preachers and it was widely known that the Queen herself was of the anti-Rome faction and that Márk was halfway to heresy. That the Hungarians, dependent on Polish force of arms for their survival flirted so readily with the malcontents was always a wrinkle in the negotiations with Arcbishop von Boyen. Fortunately the Danes failed to make any play with this and Henryk was able to persuade von Boyen to accept vassal status on 1 January 1551. A secret treaty signed at the royal castle of Troki between the Archbishop’s envoys and Count Jan Olbracht Lanckoronski (King Henryk’s cousin and heir presumptive) even promised that in the event of a war between Sweden and Riga the Comonwealth would back the city state.

With Riga secure with the Polish-Lithuanian orbit Henryk could at last turn his attention to other concerns, and their were endless other concerns. The Muscovites lacked the strength to challenge the Commonwealth but even at peace they were a sullen and untrustworthy neighbour. In Vienna the Emperor Joseph and the House of Hapsburg were swept aside in their own homeland with the Archduchy falling to a noble of Polish extraction, Count Ladislav Byszynski. Remarkably it was the Hapsburg scion in Bohemia led by Queen Mary who picked up the wreath and 2 January 1552 she was elected Empress.

These were momentous events and Henryk was forced to deal with them without his strong right arm. Cardinal Jazlowiecki, the great political prelate and devout friend of the Polish monarch died of a fever during 1551. As a confidant and a chancellor he was irreplaceable. As a friend he left the monarch with only his cousin Jan Olbracht who he could fully trust. The Cardinal’s passing also weakened the royal hand against the Sejm. In Warsaw powerful magnates, led by the Lithuanian baron Krystian Giedroyć began to exert weight on the monarch’s coffers and his appointed courtiers [2].

Sweden declares war on Denmark, 1 April 1553.
​

The eruption of foreign war in April 1553 was almost welcome in both Warsaw and Wilno as it interrupted a slow building antagonism between court and council and allowed the Commonwealth to unite against a common foe. The war had been started by the King of Sweden, Gustav I and his ambitions towards Danish Kexholm.

The first two years of the war would seemed to take place almost in two different universes. The Commonwealth invaded a Brandenburg still recovering from the previous war. The German Protestants could hardly resist the Poles and Lithuanians and by the middle of 1554 Berlin had fallen and the Electorate was mostly entirely under Commonwealth control. It was a similar story in Estonia where the Commonwealth swiftly conquered the mainland Danish territory and even (in a daring act of piracy) captured the island of Øsel. Unfortunately all this success would be more that matched elsewhere.

The Battle of the Northern Baltic Sea (15 March 1554), one of a number of Danish victories in the Baltic.
​

Denmark was a sea power, as was her her most powerful ally, the Protestant Frisan Republic (the Commonwealth was not alone in having religiously dubious alliances.) Even the Earl of Desmond in Ireland [3] had a few ships to his name. In a series of battles across the Baltic in 1553 and 1554 the Swedish and Commonwealth fleets were sent to the bottom in flaming wreckage under enemy cannonfire. By the end of 1554 the Danes and their allies had lost twelve warships, while the Swedes and Commonwealth had lost thirty six, with King Gustav’s proud navy suffering the bulk of casualties and almost being wiped out. Most of Henryk’s galleys and caravels were still aflot, but confined to float at anchor in Gdańsk. The Baltic Sea was, for the moment, a Danish lake.

The naval war hurt Commonwealth pride and stifled her trade, but it was disastrous for Sweden. The Danes ruthlessly but cannily ignored the Commonwealth invasion of Sweden and instead with Frisian aid fought a land war in Sweden. At the Battle of Kalmar in August 1553 a combined Danish-Frisian army crushed the Swedish forces so completely the whole of southern Sweden would be in enemy hands within a few months, save for the imposing fortress of Kalmar herself and her sister castle at Elfsborg. Even these great strongholds could not long hold out and in late spring of 1554 the Danes and Frisians moved on Stockholm and began besieging the Swedish capital.

Danish soldiers invading Swedish territory.​

For the Commonwealth the war was an impossible one. Her armies alone more than matched the strength of Denmark and all her allies together but they could not walk across water. The only route to help the Swedes was the long journey skirting the Gulf of Finland via Danish owned but Swedish occupied South Karelia and then into Swedish Finland and from there further north through thinly inhabited and bleak country. A very hard journey for an army that would be expected to fight at the end of it but Henryk felt it had to be done. Late in 1554 a great army of forty thousand men with cavalry and cannon were set over this hard route, with the plan to winter in the key Swedish fortress of Viborg. It was to be the last act of Henryk’s reign.

That December the Grand Duke took part in a hunting expedition in the woodlands near the royal estates of Troki. He set off early on the morning of 19 December, a cool crisp day. Hours later the party returned, their faces twisted by grief, Henryk’s body lying across the back of one of the horses. The Grand Duke’s own horse had tripped while after a stag and Henryk had broken his neck in what all present agreed was a terrible accident.

Henryk had many sons, but none legitimate and none old enough even to think of claiming the throne. That left two possible candidates: the King’s cousin Jan Olbracht and the great baron of the Sejm Krystian Giedroyć.

Even with the war against the Danes neither man was prepared to make way for the other...

The election of the King & Grand Duke at the end of 1554 would prove one of the most bitter and contested yet...​

Footnotes:

[1] All these figures are, by necessity rough estimates.

[2] Krystian Giedroyć was an unusual and controversial figure that some historians have called 'the leader of the King's loyal opposition'. A clever and ambitious nobleman who stood for the rights and ambitions of his class and loathed dynastic monarchy he also defended Henryk's name frequently and professed loyalty to the man who had done so much for the Grand Duchy of which he was part.

[3] Nominally the Earl of Desmond was a subject of the English crown. In reality he was an independent ruler who by 1553 controlled most of Ireland not directly ruled by a weakened England.

 

[RossN]

Jan III Olbracht Lanckoronski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1554 to 1566.) ​

Part Eleven: Jan III Olbracht Lanckoronski

Count Jan Olbracht Lanckoronski, the third member of the House of Lanckoronski to rule over Poland and Lithuania was not a young man even in 1554. In fact he was five years older than his predecessor and cousin, having been born in 1498 when his family were little more than petty barons. Thinning hair, crows feet and a limp from an unshakeable bout of gout characterised the man who would become King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania and monarch of the Commonwealth.

Fortunately there was more to this soft spoken gentlemen than met the eye. Jan Olbracht had effectively been the family heir for years, once it became clear that Henryk was unlikely to have a legitimate son. Even then the expectation had been that Jan Olbracht’s own son Aleksander, who had been born in 1517 would be the actual inheritor but Jan Olbracht had still learnt much and been a significant figure. Many in the Sejm supported his candidacy for the throne, even beyond those personally loyal to the Lanckoronskis. He was widely seen as an intelligent and capable man.

For others none of his fine qualities and experience could countenance the continued grip of a single dynasty on the throne, which seemed to make a mockery of the nobles privileges. At the hastily assembled election Sejm in Wilno (Henryk’s death coming so close to the winter festivities meant there was – just – a quorum of electors in the capital at the end of the year) almost half the senators either abstained or voted for Krystian Giedroyć. Jan Olbracht was elected on the last day of the old year as King and Grand Duke Jan III. Many of the malcontents accepted the vote but other nobles left for the south, suspecting correctly that the defeated candidate would raise his banner in revolt.

The pretender was based in Kijów [Kiev] and drew much of his support from Ruthenian families. Krystian Giedroyć was believed to be sympathetic to the Ruthenian people [1] and Kijów in particular, a city long passed her golden age was fervent in his cause. Within weeks nearly thirty thousand soldiers – from lesser nobles to peasants – all rallied to Giedroyć’s standard. The old capital of the Rus surrendered without fight and the pretender moved on Mozyrz.

The town of Słupsk, formerly Stolp, ceded to the Commonwealth by Brandenburg, January 1555.
​

Meanwhile the new official monarch had to deal with the war in the north. On 9 January 1555 the Elector of Brandenburg surrendered and ceded the Pomeranian town of Stolp, known as Słupsk to the Commonwealth. The negotiations had been handled by the Swedish and Jan at least would never cease to be grateful to Sweden for it. This was good news – the only good news of the first few months of Jan’s reign but it came with the headache of trying to integrate a German speaking, almost entirely Protestant city into the Commonwealth. Troops were needed to garrison it and Jan had few to spare without cutting corners elsewhere. As it was the forty thousand strong army bound for Sweden was turned around and sent towards Kijów, under the captaincy of Andrej Leszcynski, a capable general and a Lanckoronski loyalist. The monarch himself could not afford to leave Wilno where he was involved in a bitter dispute with the Sejm, which having elected him was eager to show the new king the limits of his authority.

On 1 May 1555 Hetman Leszcynski arrived at Mozyrz. The small city, on the right bank of the River Prypeć was besieged by the pretender’s army, and only difficulty in moving artillery along the sandy banks had prevented her early fall. Giedroyć, suspecting the loyalist army would be exhausted from their long march attacked, in spite of the disparity of numbers [2]. The battle, fought over a warm day with their backs to the river proved a disaster for the rebels. Leszcynski had moved fast but he’d scouted out the terrain before hand and his forces were simply more mobile than the pretender’s which laboured under a glut of cannon.

By evening it was over and though it would take three more battles to completely defeat the rebels Giedroyć was a broken force. Kijów surrendered to the loyalists and the pretender himself fell on the field outside Lwów on 21 August 1555. There would be no further challenge to Jan’s legitimacy.

The collapse of the rebellion allowed Jan to return his attention to the foreign war facing the Commonwealth and her allies, though it was not immediately obvious what he could do. The situation at sea remained impossible, and the monarch who had strong links to the seafaring city of Gdańsk (his childhood language had been German and his mother part of the Baltic German diaspora) knewthat the Commonwealth would only be throwing away the lives of their gallant sailors if they attempted to break the blockade. To their credit the Swedes had managed to hold on in Stockholm, and even retake some of the land they had lost during the previous year.

In truth few in the Commonwealth wished to fight on solely to win land for Sweden. The King, and many in the Sejm felt a moral duty to save the Swedes from going under (and a pragmatic concern that a triumphant Denmark would be even more of a nuisance), but as the war entered it’s fourth and then fifth year and neither side seemed on the verge of victory the Sejm grew ever more reluctant to send Polish and Lithuanian soldiers to the front via the long and lonely road through Swedish Finland. The other truth was that the economy of the Commonwealth was proving surprisingly resilient, even with the Prussian coast bottled up. Taxation had filled the coffers of the state and continued to do so even during the war as the overland routes and the bustling cities were scarcely affected. In 1556 Jan III had granted limited self government to the southern Cossacks and even those in nobility who saw the Cossacks as little more than sword waving barbarians saw this as a sign of strength and stability. Poland and Lithuania were booming.

On 2 January 1558 the Swedes and the Danes signed a truce at Kalmar. The Danes, distracted by a growing feud with Scotland (that would soon lead to war) had lost interest in reasserting control over Sweden, in so much as that had been their aim. The Swedes had not obtained their goals but were not anxious to keep fighting while the south of their kingdom remained under Danish control. It was a draw born of exhaustion, even if peace was very welcome in Wilno.

For the Swedish King Gustav I the war had been a personal catastrophe. Though the monarch had won some honours with the defence of Stockholm against the Danes and Frisians the plain fact was Sweden ended the war with her navy and her treasury empty. Jan III (who also had to deal with domestic worries thanks to the permanently sullen Sejm was sympathetic towards his brother king.) He was also worried that if the Royal House of Forstena collapsed, the next ruler of Sweden, whether than be Denmark or a local dynasty might see the Commonwealth as a rival rather than a friend.

On 2 April 1561 the Commonwealth officially took on Sweden’s national debt, paying off all their outstanding loans. It had taken tremendous arm twisting in the Sejm by King Jan III and his supporters to achieve this, and not only revealed the steely political ability behind the monarch’s rather quiet exterior but also just how stable and prosperous the Commonwealth had become in recent years. The King also found time to rebuild and modernise the Commonwealth navy (a project close to his heart) and enlarge the army, even over the sulking Sejm.

The payment of the Swedish debt, 1561.
​

King Gustav had little time to enjoy to his newfound solvency, as he died in November 1562 and was succeeded by his son King Karl VIII Gustav. Jan III, eager to continue good relations with the new ruler in Stockholm arranged a royal marriage between himself and Karl’s sister, Princess Ulrika Eleonora. The Swedish princess, glamorous and noticeably younger (and an inch taller) than her husband arrived in the Commonwealth in February 1562 for a lavish procession to Wilno and her marriage and coronation as Queen-Consort and Grand Duchess-Consort. The port she disembarked at was itself noteworthy as her ship landed at Riga, a city which within living memory had been at war with Sweden. Now she was tied ever more closely to the Commonwealth and would soon (in April 1565) formally integrate with the Commonwealth with special privileges to recognise her status.

Riga (or ‘Ryga’ as the Polish spelling went) was a predominately German speaking city. That other German town that joined the Commonwealth during Jan’s reign was smaller but far more troublesome. Słupsk was both fiercely independent and fiercely Protestant. The former was a local difficulty, and caused a brief but bloody revolt in 1560. The second was a broader issue.

Protestants had lived in Poland for two generations by the 1560s and outside rare events like the Bartosz Nowak affair (known as the ‘Lublin Martyr’ to Polish and Lithuanian Protestants) an unstated tolerance had been the rule. Followers of Luther and other religious reformers were simply not numerous enough to force the monarch or the Sejm to act. Even in the large cities they tended to be outnumbered by Jews, let alone Roman Catholics and only the town of Kamieniec Podolski (and now Słupsk) actually had a local Protestant majority. Elsewhere it was a faith restricted to a few burghers and petty nobles.

The conversion of Hungary from a Catholic state to a bastion of Calvinism shocked many in Poland, but the pragmatic alliance between Wilno and Pest did little to discourage the view that the Commonwealth was at the very least not oppressive against those who quarrelled with Rome. A steady trickle of emigres and refugees from France, Italy, and those parts of Germany that remained Catholic arrived in the Commonwealth. Unlike the long standing Lutheran circles the Calvinists were ambitious and zealous at looking for converts and in 1561, with the aid of the great and influential magnate Mikołaj "the Black" Radziwiłł they printed a Polish version of the Bible in Lublin.

The Radziwiłł Bible (also known as the Lublin Bible), printed in 1561.
​

Jan III was by every indication a believing Catholic loyal to the Pope, and he even helped fund the foundation of the Jesuit school, the ‘Collegium Hosianum’ the same year the Radziwiłł Bible was printed. However the monarch found the idea of the Commonwealth suffering the same sort of strife as gripped the Holy Roman Empire (sliding into outright religious war in this period) horrifying. He was not alone. Even with the overall loyalty to Rome in the Commonwealth and the wealth and prestige of the clergy (between them Poland and Lithuania had seven cardinals in the 1560s) the Church in the Commonwealth had remained much as it had for the past century, untouched both by the reforms and zealotry of the Counter-Reformation. This led to a certain corruption, but also a certain tolerance not found in France or Spain where the Church had modernised. In the Commonwealth to be a prince in crimson was in some ways to be a more powerful figure than even the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, and as we have seen with the late Cardinal Jazlowiecki many saw it as their mandate to dabble in politics.

The leading theologian in the Commonwealth was Cardinal Leonas Kamieniecki, the Archbishop of Charków [Kharkiv]. Cardinal Kamieniecki was not Polish, Lithuanian or German though he spoke all these languages but a Byelorussian originally from Minsk. He owed his unusual rank to a mix of learning and sharp political antennae. Though the appearance of openly Calvinist circles in Lublin, Łęczyca and Gniezno shook him, the Cardinal advised the monarch to stick with fines rather than try and take sterner measures. It was a leniency that they would both later be criticised for.

By the end of Jan’s reign Lutherans (and related denominations) would make up 2.1% of the Commonwealth population, while Calvinists (and related denominations) would make up 3.2%, a combined total of perhaps half a million adherents out of a total population of perhaps ten million.

A religious map of Europe in 1561.​

On the evening of 1 February 1566 the Grand Duke was enjoying a day out from Wilno with his son Crown Prince Aleksander and several friends and court favourites. The men were engaged in falconry, a sport much favoured by the monarch who regarded it as more intellectual pastime than conventional hunting, and treated his hawks as others pampered their puppies. The royal party had stayed out a little too late to let loose a new tiercel and by the time they turned back it was already growing dark. In a tragic accident, eerily reminiscent of that that slew his cousin years before Jan was climbing an incline for a better view of the surroundings when he slipped, fell and broke his neck.

King Jan III was a complex monarch, with both defenders and critics. Some historians have accused him of being spendthrift with the realm’s finances, of sinking a fortune into a fickle Sweden, of turning a blind eye to growing religious tension by kicking the can of confrontation down the road. His supporters point to his decade long peace, to the prosperity of the Commonwealth, the growth of population, the integration of Riga and his restoration of the navy. They point out something else too; for the first time in a generation the Sejm elected a monarch without armed opposition. Crown Prince Aleksander took his fathers thrones and became the fourth of the Lanckoronski dynasty to rule...

The death of Jan III Obracht and the election of his son Aleksander I, 1 February 1566.​

Footnotes:

[1] Some historians believe Giedroyć intended to carve out a 'Grand Duchy of Ruthenia' (or 'Grand Principality of Ruthenia') based around Kijów, but the evidence for this is scaty at best.

[2] Approximately forty thousand loyalists against twenty nine thousand rebels.

 

[RossN]

Aleksander I Lanckoronski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1566 to 1580)​

Part Twelve: Aleksander I Lanckoronski

Aleksander Lanckoronski, the fourth of his dynasty to hold the thrones of Poland and Lithuania was no sooner elected King when he found himself faced by a veto in the Sejm. Characteristically the Slzachta having talked themselves into electing the dynastic candidate immediately moved to remind him of the limits of his powers.

Aleksander was forty eight when he was elected and in good health, with his brown hair beginning to silver. Tall and trim like Jan III he was more robust about the shoulders, and in contrast to his predecessor much given to the hunting and riding life. As a younger man he had been an acclaimed cavalryman who had fought with the Winged Hussars at Mozyrz and he had a lifelong admiration and respect for horses.

The new monarch lacked the natural way his father had with administrative matters. Aleksander was an industrious man, seldom at a rest, but he had difficulty delegating and throughout his reign the bureaucracy of the realm became ever more byzantine, stretching from the Palace of the Grand Dukes in Wilno to the furthest corners of Poland and Lithuania. A jumble of secretaries and other functionaries buried themselves among books, maps and letters in candlelit rooms at all hours of the day. The King was better at diplomacy and soldiering and the great triumphs of his reign involved both.

By 1566 the balance of power in Europe was changing. The Kingdom of France and the Spanish Empire had (since 1563) formed a personal union under King-Emperor Phillipe VIII. The Franco-Spanish Empire (or Valois Empire) was not a unified state and there were strong reasons for assuming Spain would not permanently accept her role as the junior partner in a union led from Paris but as long as it existed Europe had a natural power in the West. In Mitteleuropa the Holy Roman Empire existed largely in name as Protestant princes aided by Calvinist Hungary fought a war against the Empress Mary von Hapsburg in Prague.

Relations between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Holy Roman Empire were tense. The Bohemians were traditional rivals of Poland, but they also led the Catholic faction. Hungary was a friend of the Commonwealth but was fighting Bohemia. Had she entered the war ravaging Germany the Commonwealth would face either betraying the Catholic faith or her loyal ally in Pest. Both King Aleksander and the Sejm embraced a cautious neutrality. The expectation – which would eventually be proven wrong – was that Bohemia and her allies would be defeated by the Protestant princes and the Commonwealth would have to deal with that.

It was a tense time in Wilno. No sooner had Aleksander been elected, before he had even been crowned the realm was gripped by a frenzy of iconoclasm inspired by events in Germany that forced the monarch to order the soldiers of the army to protect churches and cathedrals across Poland. In Lublin, the bastion of the Reformed movement the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel, the largest building in the city with a bell tower visible for many miles was the site of a pitched battle between a mob of burghers and soldiers and only the intervention of a level headed and persuasive captain of the cavalry prevented some of the wilder heads in the crowds lynching the canon.

The great riots of 1566.​

The Protestant riots of 1566 angered many Roman Catholics and the monarch lost some popularity by not cracking down on the malcontents. Aleksander, who ruled over many Greek Orthodox and Jewish subjects, and who had a Protestant wife, the German princess Evelyn Warncke [1] had no desire to sway from the general attitude of toleration, correctly suspecting the Reformist leaders would keep their heads down rather than provoke the white eagle. The religious question smouldered on, with a steady influx of Lutheran and Calvinist Germans fleeing the disastrous war to the west. The port of Gdańsk, with it’s strong ties to the Empire would become a second Lublin by the end of Aleksander’s reign, adopting the Reformist faith.

Fortunately there was one route to uniting the realm and halting (or at least delaying) the march to internal strife; foreign war. To the east of the Commonwealth sprawled the Grand Principality of Muscovy, a state seen as quasi-barbarian by most outside her borders and home to an ambitious lineage of princes. The Muscovites had conquered most of the Russian principalities (save only the shrunken and enfeebled Grand Principality of Ryzan) and before the union of Poland and Lithuania had been an ever growing threat. Whenever the Commonwealth had fought another power, as they had against Bohemia and Denmark the fear had always been that Muscovy would strike in a moment of weakness.

The Commonwealth (and Lithuania beforehand) had long feuded over their long border. The old Pskov Republic had vanished in the previous century, annexed by Muscovy as part of her expansion into lands once dominated by Novgorod. The city of Pskov, considered one of the beautiful in Russia and a rich trading town was closer to Wilno than to Moscow and possession of such an important place would weaken the Danish stranglehold on the eastern trade. The exact legal arcanary that the Commonwealth used to present a historic claim to Pskov in 1570 may have been suspect, relying on doubtful documents from the Fourteenth Century but they were popular. With a rare unity of purpose the Sejm backed the monarch when he declared war on Muscovy on 18 June 1570.

The disputed Pskov region (in light green).​

It was know in Wilno that Sweden, who had her own treaties with Moscow, would not join the Commonwealth in this struggle and Aleksander had refrained from requesting their aid, so as to not force King Karl VIII Gustav into a difficult diplomatic situation. The expectation had been that Stockholm would remain neutral. It therefore came as a shock when the Swedish ambassador called on the monarch and stiffly informed him that the Kingdom of Sweden would honour her treaty with Muscovy, and thus Sweden was at war with the Commonwealth.

The popular outrage at the "Swedish Betrayal" was instant and in Ryga, Gdańsk and Wilno Swedish merchants were attacked in the street and had their houses burnt. In the port of Klaipėda a Swedish brig that had the misfortune to be in the harbour was boarded by outraged civilians and the ship’s master lynched from his own mast. As the Swedish envoys returned to Ryga and from there sailed home their carriage had to be protected every inch of the road by Commonwealth hussars to prevent the people from rushing it. As it was they were pelted by stones one of which struck the (Polish) wife of the junior envoy and she had to be carried unconscious from the carriage to the ship.

The sheer fury directed at the Swedes, far outstripping that directed at the Muscovites, would linger after the war and Polish and Lithuanian historians have been caustic in their views of King Karl. Aleksander took a more measured view. His own stepmother was Swedish, as was his far younger half-sister and he was soldier and monarch enough to understand the extraordinarily difficult position the Swedish Crown was in, trapped between the three more powerful states of Denmark, the Commonwealth and Muscovy. The Swedes had played a weak hand well in retaining their independence, and faced with the nightmare scenario of breaking their alliance with either Wilno or Moscow, chose the party that was effectively the defender.

Of course forgiveness of Sweden was only possible because the Commonwealth won the war of 1570 to 1572, and it was a close run victory.

On 25 July 1570 Ostrov fell to the Commonwealth. Before the end of the month both Pskov herself and the fortified town of Luki to the south east would be under siege. The Commonwealth forces were divided into five armies of twenty thousand each, with three of these armies in the invasion proper, one (led by Aleksander himself) advancing on Moscow and the fifth originally guarding the distant south of the country and the important frontier city of Charków [Kharkiv]. However with the Swedes in the war the King ordered the frontier army north to aid in the thrust against Moscow. Aleksander also had the support of some twelve thousand Moldavian soldiers and in fact it was the Moldavians who first lay siege to Moscow proper as the Commonwealth forces besieged the fortress of Mozhaisk to the west.

While all this was going on the war had been fought at sea between the Commonwealth and the Swedes (the Muscovites had a fleet but it was too distant to be of use.) The Commonwealth Navy, rebuilt by King Jan III proved itself stronger than the Swedes and in clashes across the frigid waters of the Baltic sank, captured or drove the enemy from the seas. One great concern for the Commonwealth had been the Swedes landing soldiers along the lengthy Prussia coast or in Livonia and forcing the Commonwealth to turn back soldiers from the main front of the war.

Unfortunately the hard won control of the Baltic did the Commonwealth little good. The Danes, delighted to see their rival in difficulty signed a Faustian bargain with Sweden and Muscovy, allowing their armies to move across Danish territory in Livonia. Grand Prince Ivan IV did not move to relieve Pskov (which fell to the Commonwealth on 28 November), but instead marched straight for Ryga. Hetman Andrej Leszcynski, turned his weary army away from the freshly captured Pskov, marched across Livonia in the depths of winter and faced Ivan and his forces on the 14 January 1571. The Poles and Lithuanians had a slight edge in numbers, offset by their weariness but what really gave them the edge was their cavalry which rolled up the Muscovite infantry.

The First Battle of Pskov, 9-10 March 1571​

Ryga was far from the end of the war. The Muscovite monarch retreated back into Danish territory to lick his wounds. In late February the Muscovites and Swedes marched together against Pskov while two of the Commonwealth armies wheeled to stop them. The First Battle of Pskov (9-10 March 1571) was the largest clash of the war with forty thousand Poles and Lithuanians fighting almost twice that many Muscovites and Swedes. The Commonwealth forces under Baron Mariusz Branicki were forced to retreat, though not before inflicting twice as many casualties as they received. First Pskov is noteworthy as one of the largest cannon battles in history, though the immense Muscovite and Swedish artillery was of debatable use on the field.

Two days after First Pskov the Commonwealth suffered another blow when the city of Charków in the far south east was sacked by the Muscovites. Less than a week later Pskov fell for the second time in four months, this time to the Muscovites. In May Leszcynski, hoping to retrieve the situation marched against Pskov, but for once the canny old Polish general underestimated his opponents, or overestimated the resilience of his exhausted men and the Commonwealth thrust was defeated at the Second Battle of Psvo. Fortunately by this point Moscow herself had fallen and Aleksander had regrouped his armies. The sides met at Luki, south east of Pskov.

The Battle of Luki, the last major land battle of the war took place on 15 August 1571. An old fortress of Novgorod, Luki was then in Commonwealth hands and being besieged by the Muscovites under Boris von Lascy, who was subsequently killed in the fighting. Though the Muscovites had superior numbers Aleksander inflicted a sharp defeat on them, and over the next few weeks retook most of the territory lost including Pskov herself on Christmas Eve. The exhausted Muscovites agreed to a peace on 24 January 1572, signing it at Połock.

The overall costs of the First Commonwealth-Muscovite War, 1570 to 1572.​

The First Commonwealth-Muscovite War (as it would later be known) had been costly, even for the victors with nearly as many Commonwealth soldiers dead or wounded as their opponents, and almost have of these from attrition as so much of the war was fought in the bleak months of the year. Charków, one of the largest cities in the Commonwealth had, briefly, been in Muscovite hands. Against this the Commonwealth had gained Psków (as the Poles called Pskov), Ostrów and Luki and Aleksander had unified his disparate peoples. The remaining eight years of his reign would see no substantial domestic trouble. During this era the monarch would sponsor the great University of Vilnius and the faring estates of Oczaków on the mouth of Dnieper, which would become a centre of Polish and Lithuanian wine making.

The great University of Vilnius, founded during Aleksander's reign.
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There remained the problem of Sweden, and here feelings ran high. Aleksander was prepared to spend some of his hard earned political capital and negotiate a new alliance with Sweden, mere days after the Treaty of Połock was signed. As noted above the Commonwealth leader had a personal sympathy for the Swedes, but he was also aware that the Commonwealth needed friends, faced as she was with a vengeful Muscovy, a proud Denmark, an ambitious Ottoman Empire and a recovering Bohemia. The people grumbled but the King held firm and officially at least the two countries returned to their friendship, though the Swedish envoys scarcely dared go out in public in Wilno until the death of Karl and the succession of his son Prince Magnus in June 1579.

Aleksander would not outlive his counterpart long. On 4 July the King and Grand Duke passed away after a brief illness. For once the Sejm would peacefully elect a new ruler, in the form of Aleksander’s eldest son, the thirty nine year old Kazimierz Lanckoronski. Even with the traditional grumbling among the Slzachta the dynastic faction still had the majority in Warsaw, and even those had reservations about another Lanckoronski were impressed by Crown Prince Kazimierz.

The death of Aleksander I and the election of his son Kazimierz IV, 4 July 1580.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1580.

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Footnotes:

[1] The daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg, some two and a half decades younger than her husband.

 

[RossN]

Kazimierz IV Lanckoronski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1580 to 1602)
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Part Thirteen: Kazimierz IV Lanckoronski

Crown Prince Kazimierz who became King Kazimierz IV, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania was the eldest son of King Aleksander. Tall, slim and bony in the Lanckoronski tradition he was considered a clever and capable man with a wide range of talents and tastes. In his youth he had something of a reputation as a musician and a sonnet writer and is even said to have dabbled in writing plays, though no conclusively attributed work has survived. The life of the huntsman did not enthral him, though he was a skilled enough rider and he was perhaps the most travelled of all Polish monarchs, having made journeys to Rome, the Imperial Court in Prague and to Stockholm as part of his father’s rapprochement with the Swedes. He had also fought in the wars, taking a shoulder wound at the First Battle of Pskov in 1571. Another aspect of his life, less widely spread by his many admirers was the remarkable number of bastards he produced with a parade of mistresses. Despite a small army of children and a marriage to Princess Ulrika Eleonora of Sweden in 1586 none of his legitimate offspring lasted to adulthood and the dynastic heir presumptive was Kazimierz’s saturnine younger brother Prince Jogalia.

The election Sejm of 1580 saw a deceptively easy triumph for the Crown Prince. It was a triumph for the dynastic Lanckoronski faction among the senators and a personal victory for the new monarch but there was already evidence, had anyone at the time cared to look, of the growing divide in the Commonwealth that would come to a boil three decades later. The new King was most popular in the Grand Duchy, less so in Poland and, surprisingly Prussia, the original heartland of the House of Lanckoronski.

The reason was partly due to traditional Polish stubbornness with the nobles congregated in Warsaw sending a message to their master in ‘foreign’ Wilno about who really ran the Commonwealth. Geopolitics played a part too; the threat of Muscovy seemed far more real to someone in Charków than their counterpart in Kraków. The main reason for the divide however was religion. Outside of newly conquered Psków, Ostrów and Luki the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. True there was much Greek influence in architecture and in some ceremonies of the Church but by and large the Grand Duchy was uncomplicatedly loyal to Pope. A combination of two centuries of Polish influence making the Roman rite desirable and influential, hostility to the Orthodox Muscovites and the generous funding of the Grand Dukes had made Romans of Lithuanians, Byelorussians and 'Eastern' Ruthenians.

In contrast in Poland proper the ‘Western’ Ruthenians had kept much of their old faith, forming a defiant and often urban Orthodox Catholic minority in the Kingdom. In the Sixteenth Century this ancient minority had been joined by Reformists and Protestants, both with their theological quarrels with Rome. In a way almost ignored by the East of the Commonwealth, the West always more cosmopolitan, was influenced by German and Swiss preachers, and increasingly by Polish and Prussian preachers against the corruption and arrogance of the Polish Church (at least as they saw it.) That the great standard bearer of the Roman way in Mitteleuropa was the hated Bohemia did little to increase its popularity in Western Poland. The arrival of the printing press early in Kazimierz’s reign only accelerated this shift [1].

Religious divisions in the Commonwealth (outlined in red) around 1600.
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Most Polish Lutherans and Calvinists were prepared to tolerate a Catholic king, especially given the historic tolerance of the Lanckoronskis. Kazimierz personally proved an adept statesman at walking the crooked path between the Catholic majority to which he himself belonged, and the growing Protestant minority which attracted so many rich merchants and nobility who were jealous and angry about the power of the Church. Once again the prospect of a religious crisis was – temporarily – delayed by savvy leadership.

In one of those odd shades of history. despite the King’s deliberate attempts to avoid religious confrontation the reign of Kazimierz IV saw a huge increase in church building, predominately though not entirely in the Catholic East. The popular mannerist style with it’s tall, slender buildings, colourful facades and Italian influence spread across the Commonwealth. Besides churches this spate of building also the construction of royal castles at Charków (as part of the process of rebuilding her after the Muscovite sack), Halicz and Jedsayn. The Commonwealth population, steadily rising for at least half a century probably surpassed ten million at this point, though it would not be until the Nineteenth Century that truly reliable census figures became available. Wilno, as the royal capital grew further during this era, though other cities including Kraków, Warsaw, Minsk, Ryga, Smolensk and Psków also experienced a boom.

Most of Kazmierz's reign saw prosperity and stability for the Commonwealth - at least economically.
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Prosperity had her price. The Baltic Sea, the main trading artery of the Commonwealth to the wider world [2] was plagued from the mid-1580s onwards by pirates from Rügen. The so called ‘Piratenrepublik’ of Rügen was a buccaneer community based on the German island off the coast of Mecklenburg. The island had previously been under monastic authority but in the confusion of the Reformation and the constant wars of Northern Germany the Protestant burgers of the town of Bergen (home to most of Rügen’s inhabitants) had installed their own authority, owing nominal allegiance to the Emperor. Nominally a Free Imperial City the new republic was shamelessly piratical; unfortunately neither Sweden nor the Commonwealth could simply send a fleet to sack the island without going to war with the Holy Roman Empire. The strong suspicion in Wilno that the burghers of Rügen had cut a deal with the Danes did not help matters. Still there was little that could be done beyond patrolling the trade routes along the Livonian and Prussian coasts and boarding any suspect vessel.

The threat of piracy and the near certainty of a future war with Denmark led Kazimierz and the Sejm to a rare show of true unity around modernising the Navy. The Commonwealth Navy remained disproportionately German with Baltic German the lingua franca. It was in some respects a world of its own in the larger Commonwealth. The Polish-Lithuanian fleet could not compete in numbers with their Scandinavian rivals (at least not without a truly grand increase in shipbuilding along the Prussian and Livonian coasts) but they could at least sail the best ships available [3]. For almost a century the lumbering carrack and the stout caravel had been the main sail warships in the Baltic, aided by war galleys not all that different from those used in the Mediterranean. In the last two decades the galleon, the early frigates and the galleas replaced all these earlier ships. The galleas in particular, a large and powerful multi-masted oared vessel said to combine the best aspects of the galley and the sail warship was considered one of the most powerful breed of vessels afloat and a speciality of the Ryga shipwrights (Gdańsk, Ryga’s bitter rival among the Commonwealth seaports favoured the ocean going galleon.) Though a wary neutrality persisted between the Baltic powers throughout these decades a three way cold war kept tensions high, especially as the Navy had not forgotten nor forgiven the Swedes. Whatever the official opinion in Wilno and Warsaw the Polish-Lithuanian Navy was as prepared to sink Swedish ships as Danish ones.

An early Twentieth Century depiction of a galleass - a warship combining the strengths of a sail vessel and oarred warship.
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The Danes did not rely on their fine fleet alone to protect them. During the reign of Kazimierz IV they were in alliance with the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish sultanate was one of the most powerful states in Europe, vying with Spain and France for that honour. The Ottoman state boasted a healthy treasury, a very large population, a great fleet and a large yet disciplined army. Traditional European historians have presented the Ottoman Empire as “a vast, lurking shadow one sharp breath behind Christendom” in the words of Baron Karol Piotrowski in his Nineteenth Century tome Historia Imperium Polskiego and though this view of an ambitious Ottoman state has been much debated in recent years even revisionist historians concede most of Europe feared the Sultan. In the Sixteenth Century the Commonwealth did not directly border the Ottoman Empire but her march of Moldavia did [4].

In the end of the 1580s the Ottoman feud with their co-religionists in Egypt erupted into outright war. With the Ottomans seemingly preoccupied by the Mamluks the Commonwealth turned their eyes towards the Tatar Khanate of Crimea. The last of the Mongol states to survive in Europe Crimea was a Muslim stronghold the shared an uneasy border with the south east of the Commonwealth, itself the domain of the hotheaded and notoriously independent Cossacks. This was the “Wild Fields”, the fabled edges of Lithuania where in 1399 the Tatars had defeated Grand Duke Vytautas the Great in a battle that left a score of Lithuanian princes dead amongst the grass. The Lithuanians had never forgotten and never forgiven and now two centuries later the current Grand Duke took the opportunity to strike while the Sultan was distracted. In November 1593 the Commonwealth invaded Crimea.

The Crimean Khanate was not formidable in and of herself, but the Khan Halim I was an able warrior, and an even better propagandist. He sought aid not just from the Ottoman Empire but from Kazan and Persia too, casting the war as a clash between faiths. The result was to be a longer, bloodier war than any might have suspected.

The giant Ottoman fleet made the Black Sea a Turkish pond and even with the bulk of the Ottoman armies far away in Egypt this aided the Crimeans and their allies. Crimea proper was overrun by the Summer of 1594 but the fighting went on in Moldavia and, unexpectedly on the great eastern frontier of Lithuania where the Persians and Kazans had cut a deal with the Muscovites to cross their land. The Commonwealth found themselves caught between two fronts.

The Commonwealth-Crimean War in late 1595.
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Kazimierz, who personally led much of the Commonwealth army for the most of the war knew that the Commonwealth had to win swiftly before the lumbering might of the Ottomans turned north. The Commonwealth monarch avoided battle with the main Turkish counter-invasion of Moldavia, trying to attack divisions as they broke away. The appearance of Persian soldiers invading from the east and attacking such places as Smolensk and Minsk necessitated an even more elastic strategy as Kasimierz was forced to divide his own forces. The Polish King was prepared to rely on cities being besieged, even falling, if it was better strategy to allow to eliminate an isolated enemy force. He also knew he had one great ally in all this; the weather. The hard winters across the Commonwealth between 1593 and 1597 would kill almost as many Ottoman, Persian, Kazan or Crimean soldiers as Commonwealth musket fire and cavalry charges.

It was a brutal experience for all involved, but ultimately as daring as the Persian led expedition through Muscovy was the enemy was operating very far from their homelands and the only supplies they had were those they could plunder, or purchased from the Muscovites at exorbitant costs.

At the Battle of Witebsk on 5 December 1596 the Commonwealth defeated the main Ottoman and Persian army in the north. With the collapse of that far flung expeditionary force the enemy were finally on the retreat in the Grand Duchy. Certainly Khan Halim I seems to have believed the war was lost as a month later he surrendered. The territory of Yediskul was annexed by the Commonwealth, the Ottomans withdrew from Moldavia and the surviving Persians and Kazans were repatriated.

The overall costs of the Commonwealth-Crimean War, 1593 to 1597.
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The Commonwealth conquest of Crimea had been a nerve-wracking experience for the Poles and Lithuanians. They had won, but only at grave cost and everyone was conscious of the great power of the Ottoman Empire, which had committed only half her strength. There was also a healthy appreciation for the soldiers of the Shah of Persia and the Khan of Kazan, and an unstated decision that the Commonwealth would not in the foreseeable future anger the Muslim world.

Then there was the role of Muscovy. The Muscovities had played no direct role in the war but they had allowed the enemy to cross their terrain and by supplies from them. It was not possible for relations between Wilno and Moscow to grow worse but the war added a fresh grievance to the list.

Kazimierz’s skilled generalship and his negotiations with the Ottomans in January 1597, which allowed both sides to compromise with honour won him much praise then and from later historians, though revisionists have since questioned the price of the war to conquer one border province from the Tatars. One person who did pay the price was the monarch himself. Exhausted by his efforts Kazimierz retreated from public life and died in August 1602. The election Sejm, after a divisive session which lacked bloodshed but did have copious bribery and insults elected his younger brother the sixty year old Prince Jogaila to the thrones of Poland and Lithuania.

Kazimierz IV exemplified the strengths and weaknesses of the House of Lanckoronski. His delicate and clever domestic politics presided over a period of prosperity and his mixture of tolerance at home and aggression abroad allowed him to unite the country against an easy foreign foe. On the other hand Kazimierz, like his father and uncle before him had essentially ‘dodged’ the religious question which by the end of the century was becoming ever more of a problem. Nor had the relations between the monarch and the Sejm quite normalised with either a dominant king or a dominant parliament. Individual brilliance had let Kazimierz IV walk a tightrope, but not everyone had such assured footing...

The death of Kazimierz IV and the election of his brother Jogalia II, 2 August 1602.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1602.
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Footnotes:

[1] Perhaps not coincidentally the printing press was introduced via Protestant Mecklenburg.

[2] The Commonwealth had a few small ports in the Black Sea but the trade here was dwarfed by that of the much more populous Baltic coast.

[3] The Commonwealth Navy built their own ships but drew inspiration from others including, though few would admit it openly, the Danes.

[4] The Principality of Moldavia was historically a loyal vassal to the Commonwealth, providing a buffer between Poland and the Ottoman Empire. Though politically connected it was culturally distinct as a Romanian speaking Orthodox state.

 

[RossN]

Jogaila II Lanckoronski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1602 to 1608)

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Part Fourteen: Jogaila II Lanckoronski & Zygmunt I August Lanckoronski

The election Sejm of 1602 saw a paltry and grudging majority of the senators vote for Prince Jogaila. The old royal faction in Warsaw still had some power but the now numerous Lutheran and Calvinist Polish nobles bristled against the new monarch and only their inability to agree on a candidate between them prevented the Lanckronoski family from having to fight for their claim.

Jogaila Lanckoronski was already sixty, and a tall rather sombre man when he inherited his brother’s thrones and his reign would be brief yet significant. A reputation for malevolence has dogged Jogaila II throughout history. To Protestants and Reformed he has gone down in history as ‘Black Jogaila’ or ‘Bloody Jogaila’ or any one of a half dozen other epithets for his support of the Inquistion and his steps to roll back the movement against Rome. Even to Roman Catholics Jogaila’s reputation has been cloudy, due to his exceptionally poor relations with the Sejm and some historians even lay the blame for the wars and chaos that marked his son’s reign on Jogaila’s narrow shoulders.

In truth Jogaila II is the most shadowy of the Commonwealth’s monarchs, a half glimpsed figure between larger personalities. What is known is that he was religiously conservative and took a hard line on the question of faith, adopting the Counter Reformation. The Jesuits, a presence in Poland, Prussia and Lithuania enjoyed open favour under Jogaila and Lutheran and Calvinist courtiers found their presence unwelcome in Wilno. Still if the King’s faith was genuine and his antipathy to heresy sincere Jogaila was not conducting a war against his dissenting subjects, or foreigners for that matter. Lublin, the historic stronghold of Polish Protestantism remained intact, as did Warsaw, Gdańsk and even Kraków which had turned to the new faith during his reign. The Jesuits were far more of a presence in Gniezno and Lecyzca, places where the Lutherans and Calvinists had shallow roots, dominating via a circle of local merchants and other notables rather than popular acclaim. They did achieve surprising success in the German town of Słupsk. Half a century before the city had been a stronghold of Lutheranism but ironically the success of the Reformation in drawing away the fierier preachers to the larger and richer Prussian towns had emptied the once radical town and the Jesuits had found fertile ground for their words in a city now jealous of her neighbours.

The Counter-Reformation was not without its successes in Seventeenth Century Poland.
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The ‘Jogailan Persecutions’ tended to fall on dissenting clergy rather than on lay persons. Three bishops and at least three dozen priests faced trial for heresy and several of the most radical, who had called for the destruction of the Roman Church or were themselves involved in inciting mobs or attacking the character of the monarch suffered the death penalty. Others went into exile or were persuaded to recant. Polish translations of the Bible were banned (a law largely ignored in strongly Protestant cities and by members of the szlachta) and laws fining people for not attending Mass were introduced.

The Polish Counter-Reformation was not simply a matter of restrictions. The primary theologian of the Commonwealth was Cardinal Lukasz Kalinowski, the Archbishop of Poznan who became Chancellor of Poland in 1601. Cardinal Kalinowski was a reformer in the Roman rather than Calvinist sense, as much a foe of corruption and sloth in his own church as of heresy without it. This stern man of unrelenting dignity and honest if narrow views was the one who finally destroyed the old medieval atmosphere of Polish and Lithuanian Catholicism which had clung on in a changing world. The sale of indulgences was abandoned, the more lax clergy and monasteries sternly investigated and discipline enforced. Cardinal Kalinowski was far from the first ‘Cardinal Minister’ in Polish history, but his predecessors had been as much politicians as prelates, crimson clad princes of the Church. Cardinal Kalinowski had no interest in foreign affairs (it was said that the only places outside the Commonwealth he ever mentioned where Rome and Jerusalem) and little care for personal wealth. He was a great ally of King Jogaila and supported the monarch both because he was a man of traditional faith and because Jogaila’s bitterest enemies were Protestant or Reformed [1].

The King’s deep religious conservatism and his inability (or disinterest) in wooing disaffected members of the szlachta disguised some of his strengths in the eyes of both contemporaries and historians. The administration of the Commonwealth remained as capable as it was in his brother’s era – better indeed for Cardinal Kalinowski’s parallel efforts in the Church made many a diocese a model of efficiency. Jogaila could rely on overwhelmingly Catholic nobles of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania for support, many of whom feared, not without reason that their Polish counterparts had little regard for the Commonwealth east of the Bug.

The Massalski Affair of 1606 cost the King a minister, a friend and what goodwill he had.
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Unfortunately for Jogaila his choice in friends did nothing to help him. The Royal Secretary, during his reign was Count Maksym Massalski, a childhood friend of the King, vocal partisan of the dynastic faction and widely disliked amongst the szlachta for his tireless work in pushing the powers of the Crown. In June 1606 it emerged that the royal favourite was an embezzler and some of the most powerful voices in the Sejm demanded his dismissal – or his head. Even Cardinal Kalinowski, the monarch’s right arm insisted the royal secretary be defenestrated from his post.

Count Massalski managed to keep his head but the King was forced to dismiss him and then exile him to the Imperial court at Prague. The affair tarnished Jogaila’s reputation even among his supporters and he seems to have won little favour for abandoning his friend.

Jogaila II died in Wilno on 31 August 1608. In six and a half years as King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania he had probably not had more than a day of happiness but this strange and gloomy man, the terror of Protestants and the difficult champion of Catholics had left a mark. The Sejm now turned to his eldest son, Crown Prince Zygmunt august.

The death of Jogaila II on 31 August 1608 momentarily delayed the slide into war.​

Crown Prince Zygmunt August, then thirty eight bore almost no resemblance to his father. While Jogaila was never known to smile Zygmunt was witty and laughed long and often. The prince, a glittering rake had less difficulty than his father in being elected for even the dissenting faction in the Sejm was charmed by him, and saw in him a more tolerant monarch. The dynastic faction on the other hand was only to relieved to back a Lanckoronski.

It proved a short honeymoon. King Zygmunt had a streak of cruelty to him that did little to endear him to those who got to know him better. Sordid tales of his shabby treatment of his mistresses and latter his wife circled around Wilno and it was well known that to be a favourite at Zygmunt’s court was to walk into a world of sly and malicious gossip, dark jokes and mind games. The proud and smiling rake had a shadowy side very different to that of Old Jogaila.

Zygmunt I August Lanckoronski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.
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And yet even had Zygmunt been the most benevolent and humble of kings it would not have changed the key problems of religion and state. Zygmunt was a Catholic King of a realm with a restless Protestant minority, content to maintain the laws of his father and he was pushing for royal authority against a stubborn and angry nobility.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the affair of the Dambski family of Plock. The Dambskis were an old noble clan, distantly related to the Lanckoronskis, and more closely related to other prominent members of the szlachta such as the pro-dynastic Malskis and the pro-Sejm Sierakowskis. For generations members of the family had been representatives in the Sejm and traditionally they had been firmly in favour of noble privileges, always keen to reign in the dynastic faction. Ferdynand Dambski, the family patriarch during the reigns of Kazimierz IV and Jogaila II had held several high offices of state and had been one of the loudest calling for the fall of Maksym Massalski.

The Dambski family was largely Reformed, though they were relatively moderate on the religious question. This had allowed them to retain the respect of many magnates, even across ‘party lines’. Unfortunately respect did not buy bread and after a string of financial misfortunes including bad marriages, poor harvests and having to ransom a member of the family captured by the Ottomans during the war with Crimea the Dambskis found themselves in debt. In 1607 when the aged Ferdynand fell ill and was forced to retire to his estates at Plock the dire state of the family treasury could no longer avoided. One of the proudest noble families in Poland teetered on the edge of ruin.

King Kazimierz would likely have granted the Dambskis aid out of pragmatic reasoning. Jogaila would most likely not have, but that would have been the end of the matter. Zygmunt took pleasure in denying the noble family in public; his own pride and that of his family meant that these thorns in the Lanckoronski side be taught a lesson. The King not only snubbed the Damskis but actively toasted their creditors in Wilno. None of this was unconstitutional – the monarch was not personally involved in the Dambski debt at all – but it was an open insult to the szlachta.

Zymunt's refusal to aid the Dambskis in September 1608 paved the way for the revolt of the szlachta four years later.​

From 1608 the existing cleave in Polish and Lithuanian society grew wider. On the one side stood the King and the dynastic faction, mostly Catholic and with the support of the Jesuits, the Church and most of the east. On the other stood a majority of the Polish nobles, disproportionately Protestant and Reformed but with a healthy mix of Catholic nobles whose loyalty to their peers and their own szlachta privileges trumped any religious quibbles. In between lay much of the country that was caught between a quarrel they had little part in – Jews, the townspeople, peasants – and who fervently wished the issue could be solved without war.

The Commonwealth constitution allowed for the szlachta a certain legal form of revolt against a monarch who had broken the Golden Liberty. The rokosz was a codified version of the sentiment shared by nobles across Europe that in extremis they had the right to defend themselves against monarchical tyranny but as with everything to do with the szlachta in Poland it was taken to a new level. Bogumil Dambski (Ferdynand’s eldest son) began organising a confederation against the King, aided by Count Miesko Sierakowski, the Court Marshal of the Crown (and a man married to an illegitimate daughter of Kazimierz IV, making him the cousin-in-law of the King) and many others.

Zygmunt was aware that war was coming, even if he was perhaps misinformed about the scale of support the anti-monarchist side had. The monarch saw the clash as inevitable, probably correctly given the long standing issues between Crown and Sejm. Pranckius Malski, the Crown Grand Hetman and the King’s most senior general had advocated for a foreign war, that traditional method of unifying the realm in times of stress. Malski wanted to attack the newly created Tsardom of Russia, the successor state to old Muscovy but Zygmunt overruled his general. If the Commonwealth was spiralling into civil war then best it happen now at a moment of peace than with the realm embroiled in foreign concerns.

The King set out his plan carefully. At the start of September 1612 trusted royalist officers were instructed to arrest the known noble conspirators, cutting off the head of the revolt before it happened. The legality of this was murky but Zygmunt felt that it could be justified after the event as with the leaders of the anti-monarchists silenced the dynastic faction would have ascendancy in the Sejm.

Unfortunately for the monarch the plan was betrayed by the mistress of one of his own court guards who had szlachta sympathies. Forewarned, only a handful of lesser plotters were taken and the others had long escaped. Nor had the King been the only one planning a first shot. Throughout that summer retainers and other partisans of the Dambskis and Sierakowskis had been readying themselves in and around Wilno. Weapons, ammunition, horses... all the readiness of an army. A similar if smaller build up took place at Plock led by Bogumil Dambski.

On 2 September 1612 the rebels formally issued their demands, calling on the King to abandon his efforts to control the Sejm, to abolish the Jesuits and re-introduce religious freedom. As expected the King refused and the Commonwealth slid into open civil war...

The beginning of the Polish-Lithuanian Civil War, September 1612.​

Footnotes:

[1] There were Protestant and Reformed royalists (as in both supporters of the Lanckoronskis specifically and those who more generally supported a strong monarchy.) Even so the religious dissenters tended to be the harshest critics of the King.

 

[RossN]

The Battle of Plock, 24 November 1612.​

Part Fifteen: The Polish-Lithuanian Civil War

The nine year period from 1612 to 1621 has collectively been called the Polish-Lithuanian Civil War, but it was a series of multiple conflicts as the struggle between the nobles and the Crown brought the realm to he verge of collapse. Personal family vendettas, religious and regional tensions and outright banditry made for a confusing, bloody experience that saw some of the most prominent change sides, sometimes more than once.

In the first phase of the war the conflict was definitely between King Zygmunt and his supporters and the nobles led by Miesko Sierakowski and the Dambskis. The coalition of rebels struck hard and fast and almost ended the war before it could begin. A huge rebel army led by Sierakowski sprang up by Wilno in September 1612, defeated the unprepared and outnumbered royalists on 23 September and began besieging the capital. They also came with an ace of capturing the King and Queen but Zygmunt had departed Wilno only the afternoon before the revolt for the royal fortress of Troki to the west.

The war in and around Wilno was the key to this early war, but the royalists could not bring all their forces to bear against Sierakowski because the Dambskis were running wild in western Poland. The royalist victory at the Battle of Plock (24 November 1612) was not just a much needed boost to royalist to morale and the beginning of the end for the Dambskis but also marked the emergence of one of the greatest Polish generals in Zygfryd Gosiewski.

Gosiewski and the other royalist generals, Azulous Przebendowski, Prancikus Malski and Vytenis Patkul would prove the decisive figures for most of the war, arguably far more of a cause of early royalist success than the monarch they served. Of the group only Malski was a member of the traditional elite, a member of the schlatza himself and a noble officer whose family had been diehard supporters of the dynastic faction in the Sejm for years. The others were far more unusual, though equally gifted. Gosiewski was Jewish, at least in origin, and though his father had converted to the Roman Catholic Church before his birth rumours swirled about his true faith (both in the anti-royalist camp and among jealous royalist officers and courtiers [1].) Przebendowski, a superb cavarly officer, was the son of a rich merchant from Lublin who owed his position to an energetic sister who ranked high amongst the legions of royal mistresses. Patkul was a Calvinist landowner whose personal loyalty to his monarch won out over class and religious qualms. All of these men were brilliant in their own ways but the fact that Zygmunt was forced to depend on such eclectic people outside the normal warrior caste shows how the Crown scrambled around for loyal servants.

Two other great men played their part in the royalist cause even if neither was a combatant. Cardinal Lukasz Kalinowski remained with Zygmunt’s court. Personal relations between the monarch and the prelate were glacial but Cardinal Kalinowski was opposed to the heavy Protestant presence in the enemy camp and he dreaded the collapse of the Counter Reformation in Poland should they win.

The second great man was another outsider. Vilhelmas Grzymultoski was a Byelorussian noble from Vitebsk with a remarkable gift for diplomacy. Though he had long been a significant figure in local circles his rise to prominence was in 1616 when the King (and the rump royalist Sejm) made him Great Chancellor of Lithuania. An urbane and intellectual statesman who spoke five languages Grzymultoski effectively became monarch’s foreign secretary, able to speak to foreign courts and maintain the reputation of the government even during the darkest days of the war.

On 31 May 1613 Wilno fell to the rebels. Sierakowski accepted the surrender of the royalist garrison and managed to keep control of his soldiers so it was an occupation rather than a sack but the humiliation was and Zygmunt resolved to re-capture his capital. In July the rebels moved on Troki, leaving their own garrison to hold the capital. Zygmunt split his forces, sent twenty five thousand to besiege and retake Wilno and attacked Sierakowski at Troki.

The Battle of Troki, 17 September 1613. A disaster for the royalists that saw them suffer nearly twenty eight thousand casualties - twice as many as the enemy.
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The Battle of Troki (17 September 1613) was the greatest royal catastrophe of the entire war. The rebels under Sierakowski had taken up positions on the far bank of Lake Galvė and an attempt by the royalists to cross in boat and barge went terribly array as the small craft, groaning under the weight of men and horse got lost and ran aground in the early morning mist. Those soldiers that reached the shore found themselves attacked before they could join up with their fellows. The result was a slaughter that forced Zygmunt into full retreat and nearly saw his own younger Prince Karol Ferdynand captured by rebels before he managed to doff his armour, jump into the cold waters and swim to safety.

Troki was a triumph for Sierakowski but as gifted a tactician as the rebel leader was he was not a natural strategist. After capturing Troki itself he could have followed the weakened army under Zygmunt or pivoted to the east and struck at the royalists besieging Wilno. Instead he moved on Kowno to the west of Troki – an important fortress no doubt but not a prize that could win the war. This breathing space allowed the King to lick his wounds and regroup and Prancikus Malski to recapture Wilno for the Crown in December.

Early 1614 would see the main rebel army still besieging Kowno and the emergence of a new faction in the war, if faction is the right word. The so-called ‘Particularists’ do not easily belong to more traditional categories of rebel. Mostly they were townsmen and peasants, unaffiliated with the schlatza who demanded local autonomy. The ‘Particularists’ who rose in Troki and Ryga that April seemed willing to fight Sierakowski and Zygmunt alike, though in practice their revolt favoured the noble rebels as it forced the royalists to deal with this problem first. On 4 June General Malski crushed the revolt at Ryga and six weeks later defeated the ‘Particularists’ of Troki who with a confidence bordering on delusion had marched on Wilno herself.

The Battle of Kowno, 11 December 1614. The turning point of the war.
​

The brief era of the ‘Particularists’ would foreshadow the emergence of side factions later on but in the Autumn and Winter of 1614 the main war between the nobles and the Crown continued. The royalist forces, having gathered the bulk of their strength struck the rebel army at Konow on 11 December. Though the King was present on the field he delegated active command to Gosiewiski, trusting in the talents of his general (and perhaps also concerned another defeat would cost him his crown and perhaps his head.) It was a bloody, confused fight but in the end the rebels broke and the royalists held the field.

A month later a royalist army under Patkul cornered Sierakowski and his diminished forces at Grodno and destroyed them, taking the rebel noble and most of his inner circle prisoner. When the rebel garrison at Konow surrendered on 6 February 1615 it seemed that the war was over.

Unfortunately for Zygmunt even if the official rebellion of the Sejm appeared over the realm remained truculent. In May the Protestants of Kraków revolted under the influence of the radical preacher Bogumil Radziejowski. Like the ‘Particularists’ the Kraków zealots had no strong link with the Dambskis and Sierakowski, though they did perhaps have ideological sympathy with them. It fell to the omnipresent Gosiewiski to crush this rising.

Kraków proved the first roll of the dice for a series of secondary rebellions across the Commonwealth. In September 1615 a fresh clique of nobles declared against Zygmunt in Lublin. Like the Dambskis and Sierakowski these rebels were members of the Sejm and many of the followers of the first flocked to their banners. As if this was not bad enough the same year saw an outbreak of Danziger separatism in Prussia, forcing the Crown to send soldiers to Tucola, south of Gdańsk proper.

The war in late 1616; rebel nobles in the south, Prussian separatists in the north.
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The royalist response to the new rebellions was aided by the fact that the Sejm was as hostile to separatists as to Zygmunt. In February 1616 a Slovak uprising in Trenczyn was defeated not by royalists but by forces loyal to the Sejm. The rebel nobles had sometimes conflicting aims beyond the unifying desire to overthrow Zygmunt but none of them wished for the Commonwealth to fracture.

1616 was also the year that saw the Commonwealth treasury officially exhausted. Not long before the outbreak of the war Zygmunt had increased the size of the army by twenty five thousand which almost certainly saved the Crown during the conflict but put strain on even the peacetime revenue. The war had obviously cost the Crown a fortune and on 4 March Zygmunt was forced to debase the red złoty, the golden currency of the Commonwealth. The move temporarily rescued the royalists, at a sharp cost in prestige but the money continued to flow out at a terrifying rate. In late 1617 the Crown was forced to apply for a loan by using the crown jewels of Poland as security, and a year and a half later even this proved too little to pay the shortfall and the crown jewels of Lithuania had to be used to win a second loan.

In September 1618 after a succession of local rebellions in Kraków (again) and Lwów some in the royalist camp suggested the King open up negotiations with the Sejm. Zygmunt refused point blank to speak with the enemy. The King, though in declining health (he was now fifty two and almost constantly in the field) and aware of the desperate straits of the Commonwealth treasury was determined to fight on. Beyond personal pride the monarch viewed the question as existential; if he conceded anything to the Sejm, even the most nominal of gestures his position would be ruined. The entire conflict was to determine who ruled, the Crown or the Sejm. A triumph over the Polotskian separatists at Sluck, south of Minsk in November rallied some of the waverers.

In fact by the start of 1620 the rebel nobles had grown increasing quiet. That year still saw violence, but it was in the hands of separatists in Livonia and Psków, both crushed by the royalists. Zygmunt, exhausted buy triumphant remained with his armies during the earlier part of the year. If he could not compare with the superb generalship of his officers he had at least earned a reputation for hard work, personal courage and determination that impressed many at least in the royal ranks. Even the once ubiquitous cohorts of mistresses and sycophants had faded like phantasms.

And then Zygmunt died.

The death of King Zygmunt I, 7 July 1620.
​

The King was with his army at Wilkimierz and was suffering from a summer fever that had hit him hard. On the evening of 6 July 1620 he went to sleep in his command tent and never rose.

Had Zygmunt died in 1617 or 1618 the Sejm would probably have won the war then and there. But he died in 1620 when the nobles were already beaten and they knew it. The Dambskis and Sierakowski were dead [2]. Their replacements had scant reputations and scant resources to fight a ruinous war. The royalists might have been weary too, but they had the whispers of victory in their ears and they had a new monarch. Within weeks the rump royalist Sejm elected Zygmunt’s brother the forty two year old Prince Karol Ferdynand Lanckoronski as King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania [3].

The Pacification Sejm of September 1621 that marked the end of the war.
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It would not be until September of 1621 that the rebel Sejm would concede defeat to the new monarch. In the intervening year they had suffered the humiliation of their own capital of Warsaw being seized by separatists and having to be re-conquered by the King. The negotiations would see the surviving rebels treated leniently, with some long held captives released. Karol was not his brother and lacked the streak of cruelty that might have made him rub salt into the wounds of the nobles. He also had the voices of Chancellor Grzymultoski and Cardinal Kalinowski urging restraint.

For all that and for all the sighs of relief across the Commonwealth that the war was over there was no disguising the change that had taken place. The Sejm remained, humbled and stripped of many of her powers, including the right to elect a king. Henceforth the Crown would rule Poland and Lithuania.

The submission of the Sejm before King & Grand Duke Karol I Ferdynand.
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Footnotes:

[1] The Commonwealth had a very large Jewish minority (by one estimate two thirds of all European Jews lived within Poland, Prussia and Lithuania) that tried to keep out of the war while being alternately wooed and mistrusted by both sides.

[2] Bogumil Dambski died of lingering wounds sustained at Plock while his youngest brother Władysław died of fever while a prisoner in Minsk in 1618 (their middle brother Kazimierz was a priest, did not take part in the war and survived.) Count Sierakowski was beheaded for treason in 1617 - an unusually harsh punishment which adds credence to the story Zygmunt had personally quarrelled with him over a courtesan both men were acquainted with.

[3] Zygmunt had in fact a legitimate daughter Anastazja, born around 1595 (and numerous illegitimate children of both sexes) but she was in fact married to a rebel noble and had long since gone native. After the war her uncle King Karol pardoned her and her husband and they subsequently retreated into rural obscurity.

 

[RossN]

Europe in 1621.​

Appendix: Europe & the New World in 1621

If the England of 1524 had been a weakened, isolated kingdom the England of a century later was little more than a geographical expression. A series of disastrous internal struggles and an economy that had never recovered from the defeat of the Hundred Years War had left the English almost defenceless against their neighbours. Though Anglicanism had eventually triumphed the victory proved a pyrrhic one as a war in the 1550s against the Danes and their allies directly led to the collapse of England as a power.

Surprisingly the rising power in the 'British Isles' was not Scotland, herself a realm in rapid decline, but the young Kingdom of Ireland, which had swallowed most of old England by the end of the Sixteenth Century. The FitzGeralds, the Anglo-Norman Earls of Desmond, had been the most powerful men in the Emerald Isle for two centuries but a series of adroit alliances and opportunism had made them so much more. The genius of the FitzGerald dynasty had been in finding a way to appear Irish to their Gaelic followers and 'English' to the many English malcontents and King Criomhthann III (known as 'Christopher III' to his English speaking subjects) continues that tradition. The city of Cork was now the political heart of the isles and if Ireland was not quite a great power she was a stable and perhaps ambitious one.

The great 'Valois Empire' (or rather the 'Bourbon Empire' in the Seventeenth Century) remained intact and remarkably stable. The French and the Spanish courts conducted their affairs separately, especially in the colonial sphere where there was a fierce sense of rivalry, and some dismay in France that Spain had taken more of the New World along her powerful domain in North Africa, but the Imperial dynasty kept them together. From Paris the young King-Emperor Charles de Bourbom reigns over half of Europe.

The Reformation had been born in Germany and won most of her early converts there, but it had found deep roots in Northern Italy. Between them the Republic of Milan, the Duchy of Mantua and the Serene Republic of Venice rule much of the richest and most civilised land in Europe, even if their overall importance has perhaps declined with the opening of the New World. Their counterparts on the North Sea, the republics of Friesland (or Frisia) and the Netherlands have been minor players in the continents politics, but their reach and global view may lead to impressive things for either state in the future.

In the Holy Roman Empire the Kingdom of Bohemia remains the centre of power and the current King of Bohemia, Joseph von Hapsburg is also the Emperor. Joseph, a monarch who olds court in Prague, speaks Hungarian as his mother tongue and is a Roman Catholic in a Mitteleuropa dominated by Lutherans and Calvinists. Nevertheless Bohemia (and with it both the Hapsburg clan and the Roman Church in the Empire) simply towers above the other principalities and cities of the Empire, even her arch-rival Austria. The Bohemians have even regained much of their lost land in Hungary, though Prague nervously watches the ever growing superpower to the south east.

To the north the Kingdom of Denmark remains mistress of the Baltic, though rumours persist that the current monarch, King Adolf may be the last of the Oldenberg line due to infertility. Surprisingly despite her wealth and powerful fleet the Danes have thus far displayed little interest in the New World. Rather the lure of the Baltic and mastery over Scandinavia has drawn her eye, much to the chagrin of Sweden whose position has little improved in a century.

Denmark's ally is the great Ottoman Empire. The vast Muslim state, at least as rich and sophisticated as any in Europe and home to a great and splendid army and navy has for two centuries been a source of anxiety and distrust among European powers. In truth it has to be admitted that the sultanate is not necessarily the hostile, ambitious neighbour most Christians see her as. The Sultans have generally preferred to increase their power in North Africa and the Near East at the expense of their own rival the Mamluks. Under Sultan Mustafa I, who has ruled from the Tokapi palace since 1580 it seems like the Turkish armies are on the verge of total victory over their enemies in Cairo. Constantinople has even kept up diplomatic relations with many powers in Christendom.

The other great power on the fringes of conventional Europe is the Tsardom of Russia, the enlarged Muscovy of old. The Russians were constrained to the west, facing the Danes and the Poles (separately), but the vast expanses stretching to the east offered other possibilities. The industrious young Tsar, Ivan VII has sought to woo Sweden once more to give his realm a much needed ally.

North America in 1621.

South America in 1621.​

The old Kingdom of Portugal had been eaten alive by the expansion of Spain but even if the state was extinct in the Old World it had a remarkable progeny in the New. La Plata had been founded as a colony of the Portuguese Crown in the early Sixteenth Century but for three generations has been an independent kingdom, ruled by a cadet branch of the de Avis dynasty. King Fernando IV rules a far flung state with territory in the Caribbean and a heartland spread across South America and centred on the growing city of Buenos Aires. La Plata is a cosmopolitan state, her population composed of the descendants of the original Portuguese colonists, reinforced by thousands of emigres from Spanish ruled Lisbon and Porto, mixed in Native Americans and Africans.

La Plata is the only European kingdom fully based in the New World but both France and Spain control territory there, either directly or through colonial governments. French Antarctique (in South America), Nouvelle-Flandre (in North America), Spanish Brazil and New Spain (in North America) are important colonies and it seems very likely that the Bourbon kingdoms will seek to expand them further.

The smaller European states also have a presence in the New World, including those like England and Scotland who are in decline in their own homeland. The largest of the 'minnows' are the Frisians who have established territories in South America, the West Indies and especially Canada where they control much of the growing fur trade. Their rivals the Dutch have also pushed into the far north.

Despite the presence of the European colonial powers Native Americans states still control most of North America and all of Central America. The latter has thus far been largely untouched by direct European contact and the Mayan influenced Kingdom of Tzotzil remains the mainstay of a region of small states that mostly ignore and are ignored by events beyond their region.

The religious turmoil of the Sixteenth Century had settled down in the early Seventeenth. The Roman Catholic Church, battered had splintered as it was had won a qualified victory. While the Protestant and Reformed faiths had spread widely across Central Europe and even into France none of the great powers had abandoned Rome. The serious attempts to win the Holy Roman Empire and Poland-Lithuania for Protestantism had ended in military failure so complete Hungary, a bastion of the Reformed faith was in danger of vanishing from the map. Ireland, Spain, the whole of Scandinavia and Southern Italy remained untouched by the Reformation, and under Spanish leadership in particular the Church has made headway in Iberian ruled North Africa.

The victory had come at great cost. The old unity of the Medieval Church could never be restored. Even where the Church holds sway adoption of the reforms pushed by the Council of Trent remains spotty. The Papacy itself remains too open to control by the great powers. The intricate webweaver Pope Callistus IV, the current pontiff, has proved the exception to this rule and leads an independent minded Vatican. Much to the shock of some the Pope has even shown himself pragmatic enough (or cynical enough in the view of some) to sign an alliance with Protestant Venice.

Quite separate from the troubles in the rest of Christendom the Orthodox Catholic world is represented by both tiny Moldavia and potent Russia, but fully half of the adherents of the Greek Church are under non-Christian rule in the Ottoman Empire (a situation of great frustration to Moscow!)

European religious distribution, 1621.​

 

[RossN]

Karol I Ferdynand Lanckoronski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1620 to 1629.)​

Part Sixteen: Karol I Ferdynand Lanckoronski & the Viltautė Regency


The Pacification Sejm of September 1621 brought much needed peace to the Commonwealth but certainty was another matter. The serpentine negotiations in the Palace of the Grand Dukes in Wilno had, over many weeks arrived at a formula the defeated nobles could live with. The Sejm retained many of their personal privileges, involving taxation, the right to trial, the keys to certain high offices and so on and little land exchanged hands, to the disappointment of some adventurers on the royalist side who had been licking their chops at the thought of seizing rebel property. Where the nobles lost and the Crown gained was in two key areas; the end of the power of the personal veto (a limited majority veto was allowed for some matters) and the authority to elect (and depose) the King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania.

The result of all this was still being understood in the reign of Karol I Ferdynand Lanckoronski. The new monarch, who was forty four at the time the war ended had been a loyal soldier for his brother during the rebellion, but otherwise had little in common in Zygmunt. Karol was not a rake, instead being a hard-working introvert. He was religious and a staunch Catholic but his views on recalcitrance were noticeably more merciful than his father’s. A loud or troublesome Protestant might face a sharp fine (not coincidentally a desperately needed source of income for the penniless state) but the threat of being put to the stake vanished into the history books.

The true show of colour in the royal court and a sign of the direction the realm was heading came not from the monarch but from his wife. At the beginning of 1621 Karol Ferdynand had married Viltautė Premyslovci of Kraków [1]. Poland had seen Queen-Consorts before Viltautė, but the young noblewoman beautiful and charming brought fresh life and power to the role. The Premyslovci dynasty and even Kraków herself, long past her prime and grown Protestant and embittered, experienced a revival thanks to the royal consort.

Viltautė would have made her mark in any era but the new monarchy brought her particular importance as her children would in time take the thrones of Poland and Lithuania. Though de-facto hereditary under the Lanckoronskis the Crown had legally depended on the votes of the Sejm up until now. The birth of Crown Prince Svitrigalia in October 1621 ended any faint hopes the nobles had the current King would pass without legitimate heir.

Viltautė Premyslovci, Queen-Consort of Poland & Grand Duchess of Lithuania, later Regent of the Commonwealth (regency. 1629 to 1636)
​

The 1620s offered few opportunities for the royals to exercise their strengthened powers. The treasury was not just frighteningly empty, the Crown’s creditors demanded payment. So strained were resources that what would once have been grandiose public occasions like the royal wedding or the funeral of Cardinal Kalinowski at the end of 1622 saw threadbare celebrations. The Swedish ambassador to Wilno in this period was shocked to discover the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess had been reduced to granting casks of wine from the royal cellars to local magnates and court officials in lieu of land or stipends. Everything had to go towards feeding the ravenous wolf that was the debt.

To make ends meet the single most expensive element of the Commonwealth had to be pruned. The Army could not safely be reduced in actual numbers as the thought of whole companies of career soldiers left to make their way in the world many nervous. Therefore the cuts came in other ways. Purchases of ammunition, fresh horses and other supplies fell to a bare minimum. Food, never particularly splendid for the rank and file reached new depths of quality, leading to the era the Nineteenth Century historian Count Karol Piotrowski described as “the mouse war” when the only enemy the soldiers were fit to fight with rusty swords and empty muskets were the rodents they hunted to supplement their grim diet.

The Navy might have considered their rivals on land basking in good fortune. Not only did the fleet suffer all the same deprivations as the soldiery, they had to continue using outdated and ageing ships in their Baltic patrols against the ever present pirates of Rügen. Throughout the 1620s it has been estimated that more than half the Commonwealth’s warships were unseaworthy and several had to be kept near dry dock lest they founder at anchor in the least inclement weather.

By immense national hardship the last loan was paid off in December 1625. That allowed the recovery of the Crown Jewels of Poland and the Crown Jewels of Lithuania. The treasury had begun to recover thanks to a rise in income from taxation, itself thanks to prolonged internal stability. With pressures eased Wilno once more began to resemble a proper court with seasonal revels, balls and masques.

The revival of extended court life on a scale not seen since the early days Zygmunt saw a new phase in political life in the Commonwealth. The Premyslovcis and other families that been in the royalist camp during the war sought to keep their place at court and as the favourites of the monarch. The Sejm and all the offices that it filled still existed but there were now other routes to the top.

At the end of March 1628 the domestic peace was shattered by a plea for aid from the Duchy of Mecklenburg which had become embroiled in a war with her neighbours Wolgast, Hamburg and Saxony. The enduring alliance between Poland and Mecklenburg had survived the fall of the German dynasty in Poland, the formation of the Commonwealth and the conversion of the Mecklenburgers to the Protestant faith. The small German state was not a significant player in European affairs and not as significant ally as Sweden but she was loyal and honour demanded the Commonwealth come to her rescue.

The initial attitude in Wilno was fatalistic. The Commonwealth army was, at least on paper, large enough to fight Wolgast, Hamburg and Saxony combined. The Army even had the manpower to fight Bohemia should the Emperor become involved. The question was whether the soldiers, who were still painfully rebuilding their supplies were able to fight. And could the treasury take the strain?

The answer to both questions was ‘yes’. The Commonwealth economy had recovered to the point that the armies could be kept in the field, the Navy could hastily be made seaworthy and the treasury continue to grow. Best of all the Bohemians stayed out of the war, still reeling from a recent ill-advised clash with the Ottomans that had seen much of Hungary pass into the rule of the Turks.

The Navy drew first blood, the old but serviceable ships and their crews exchanging cannon fire with the enemy in a series of clashes that saw them driven from the open Baltic. The Commonwealth fleet might not be equal to defeating the Danes but they could certainly sweep aside Hamburg and Wolghast.

It was not a war the Commonwealth had sought but once it had actually begun the King turned to it with gusto. The introvert workaholic, perpetually surrounded by papers of state and rarely emerging into daylight suddenly seemed twenty years younger in spirit, returning to the life of the soldier. When the Commonwealth armies suffered an unexpected check at the Battle of Uckermark on 6 December 1628 the monarch recovered the situation with unflagging optimism. Recovering from this early setback the Commonwealth would defeat the enemy at Stettin on 3 April 1629, opening up the entire of Wolgast for invasion.

The sudden death of Karol I and the regency of his widow Queen-Consort Viltautė.
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News of the victory at Stettin reached Wilno a few weeks later, only to be swiftly followed by another messenger who had ridden four horses to death in his haste to reach the capital. Karol Ferdynand was dead, the victim of a sudden outbreak of fever. As determined as the old soldier had been in soul his body could not keep up the strain.

The death of the monarch threw the Commonwealth into political crisis. There was a legitimate heir, but Crown Prince Svitrigalia was only seven years old. The Sejm, having lost their automatic right to elect a new king sought to vote in a regent but the Queen-Consort simply ignored them and assumed the role. Viltautė had the support of the old dynastic faction, her own prominent family and their allies, the Church and the Army. Even amongst those who had been on the losing side of the civil war dreaded a return to the conflict and eventually the Sejm gave in and recognised Viltautė as legal regent of Poland and Lithuania.

Viltautė was faced with the ongoing war, which would not draw to a close until late 1631. The Commonwealth, which was doing most of the heavy fighting on land and sea had few spectacular triumphs but simply ground down the enemy, using her superior forces and veteran soldiers. Saxony capitulated in January 1631 and the lion’s share of her treasury fell into Commonwealth hands. Suddenly the Commonwealth had financial security once more, and the final peace with Wolgast in October of that year actually passed with little notice in Wilno – so long as Mecklenburg remained intact the Commonwealth was disinterested in the minor adjustments of German principalities.

The Saxon peace of 1631 saw the Commonwealth amply repaid for her aid during the war.
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The Queen was uninterested in administration and unfamiliar with warfare and was content to leave such matters to the experts. Her particular genius was for diplomacy and what can best be described as force of personality. In many respects Viltautė’s court recalled something of Zygmunt’s, though those old enough to recall that reign noticed Viltautė, whatever her other flaws, lacked the cruel nature Zygmunt had so often indulged [2].

The immediate post-war years saw the Queen-Consort Regent draw praise and enmity. The court had regained splendour and patronage and some noble families such as Viltautė’s own Premyslovci family and the Kraków based Gosiewski dynasty achieved great power and wealth. The Gosiewskis owed their rank to their Royalist service in the civil war and especially to the famed general Zygfryd Gosiewski. The general had died in 1627 but his daughter Jadwiga was a friend of the Queen-Consort Regent. So trusted was Jadwiga Gosiewski that in 1635 Viltautė arranged a marriage between her son and the noblewoman once Svitrigalia came of age in 1637.

It was from the beginning a scandalous alliance. The bride to be was eleven years older than the boy king, and though a baptised and practising Roman Catholic there was no disguising the fact that the Gosiewiskis were of patrilineal Jewish descent and only converted to Christianity within living memory. The one thing the gossip mongers could not agree between themselves was whether Viltautė intended to remain control of the Commonwealth via her old favourite or whether the evil genius of the piece was Jadwiga who had manipulated the vain Regent into a royal marriage with the ambition of taking control herself (few gave much thought to the boy himself, too young and invisible in the interplay of court life.)

Jadwiga Gosiewski, future wife of King Svitrigaila.
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Jadwiga was not entirely without support in the broader Commonwealth. In the Army where the ‘Gosiewski’ name meant much there was instinctive sympathy for the general’s daughter. In the old noble families there was some scrambling to arrange ties with the Gosiewskis. Still there was enough opposition to both Jadwiga and the general power and wealth of the Regent that some in the Commonwealth began to turn to other options.

Agirdas Oginski was a young Byelorussian noble whose mother had been the youngest daughter of King Kazimierz IV. He was not the only grandson of a king in the Commonwealth, not even the lone legitimate such grandson but in 1635 he came to the attention of Viltautė and Jadwiga’s enemies. Oginski was young but he was older than Svitrigalia and he had no link to the court faction. For those with an axe to grind against the regency he was a viable alternative king.

A great mythology has grown up around Agirdas Oginski as the voice of the Sejm and an agent for restoring the powers of the nobility, perhaps even bringing in a republic. In fact there is no contemporary evidence for this view. In the 1630s the Sejm was a broken reed, the survivors of the anti-monarchist side too crushed to even entertain supporting a second round of the civil war. Rather, Oginski drew support from within the royalist ranks, from those who had never won favour with Viltautė or who had favour and then lost it in the ruthless world of courtier politics.

On 1 November 1636 Viltautė stepped aside from her role as regent, handing power to her still fifteen year old son Svitrigalia. The move, months earlier than predicted seemed to have been designed to catch the malcontents off guard. If so it failed; even as the young King assumed his duties (and married the twenty six year old Jadwiga Gosiewski) Oginiski and his supporters had raised their standard of revolt in Moheylew. Even with the switch to true hereditary monarchy it seemed succession was not going to be a simple matter...

King & Grand Duke Svitrigaila I assumes the throne in fact, 1 November 1636.

The marriage between Svitrigaila and Jadwiga took place simultaneously with the King's assumption of power.
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Footnotes:

[1] Kraków in this era was a centre of Protestantism but there remained a circle of Roman Catholic nobility in the city, the Premyslovcis amongst them. THey tended towards pragmatism with their largely Lutheran immediate neighbours.

[2] She may however have been an embezzler, siphoning off much more of the state coffers than she claimed both during her regency and after her son assumed the throne. However given the passage of time and the merciless nature of court gossip it is difficult if not impossible for later historians to prove this.

 

[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.