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Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

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  1. Introduction
  2. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—also called the Commonwealth of Both Nations, Poland-Lithuania, the Commonwealth, or, pars pro toto, simply Poland—was at first a dynastic (till 1569) and then a federal multiethnic and multireligious union of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, lasting from 1386 to 1795. At its height, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, it became one of the largest (territorially), most populous, and politically most powerful of early modern European states, exhibiting , democratic, and religiously tolerant tendencies. Militarily, it stopped the encroachment of the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald (Tannenberg) in 1410, turned back the Baltic ambitions of Russia’s Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible) in the Livonian Wars (1558–1582), and took a leading role capping the march of the Ottoman Empire with the famous victory at Vienna in 1683. Culturally, the Commonwealth became a border region and a bridge between the Latin civilization of central and western Europe (Poland-Lithuania boasted the second oldest central European university, in Kraków, and was the birthplace of Nicolas Copernicus, the father of modern astronomy) and the Orthodox and even Islamist leanings of the eastern and southern European periphery, creating fascinating mixes of Byzantine and baroque influences in artistic and folk expressions (the conglomerate Sarmatian “culture” of the Polish nobility, or szlachta, fits into this category). Religiously, the Commonwealth displayed a degree of toleration and freedom unusual for its times, guaranteed by the 1573 Confederation of Warsaw, and it became a haven for Christian dissidents and sectarians, as well as most of the world’s population of Jews (By some estimates, 80 percent of the world’s Jewry lived in 17th-century Poland). Politically, the idiosyncratic system of Commonwealth polity refuses immediate classification, but it included an elective and limited monarchy, a bicameral Diet (Sejm) with a Senate (Senat) and a Chamber of Deputies (Izba Poselska), a noble democracy, and high levels of political decentralization. Though united in the person of the monarch and their chief representative institution, Poland and Lithuania both maintained their own armies, treasuries, and state functionaries. Wracked eventually by the Counter-Reformation, a foreign-dependent and declining agricultural economy based on the persistence of serfdom, the rising currents of absolutism and authoritarianism among its neighbors, spreading political anarchy among its ruling magnate classes, and military disasters at home (the Cossack Uprising of 1648, the Swedish Deluge of 1655–1660, among others), the Commonwealth declined, disappearing entirely to the Three Partitions of Poland (1772–1795) engineered by Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Today, the Third Polish Republic sees itself as a successor state to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its traditions.
  3. General Histories
  4. Studying and classifying the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is itself an exercise in historiography. Perhaps as with no other country can the date of a scholarly book’s publication tell so much about its content as in the case of Poland-Lithuania. General histories of Poland-Lithuania, and the earlier Kingdom of Poland, appeared already in the universalist and theocratic-minded histories of the 15th and 16th century, giving way to more mature, more secular, and topical accounts of the Polish Renaissance that held the mixed-constitution polity the best in the world. After the Partitions new chronicles on the Commonwealth written by both the victors (the historians of the partitioning powers) and the vanquished (a new generation of Polish historians) appeared. Romantic, soul-searching, and document-oriented Polish-penned histories attempted to both illuminate the times of greatness and explain the reasons for the Commonwealth’s demise. In the works of the foreign 19th-century historians, both Hegelian and Marxist, the mixed constitution of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became a fatal anachronism: the political liberties it offered to, after all, a sizable stratum of its citizens simple uncapped anarchy, and its religious and social toleration—a lack of a developing national “character.” It is easy to forgive the 19th-century positivist historians their interpretations; it is also easy to understand many of the pre-1989 tracts of Anglophone scholarship, which saw in the post–World War II Peoples Republic of Poland an existence so marginalized and attached to its Communist overlords as to be nearly worthless of serious scholarly inquiry. The weak deserve no history; the subaltern cannot speak. Poland-Lithuania was therefore mostly ignored in American undergraduate and graduate texts. Beginning in the 1980s, however, and definitely after 1989, when Polish events helped to topple European Communism, when a shock-therapy of capitalism turned a moribund political corpse into one of the most healthy and productive European economies of the early 21st century, and when Polish culture rejoined its Western roots and economic and military structures, the reasons for this about-face, both short- and long-term, had to be explained. Incipient democracy cruelly ambushed by foreign authoritarianism, and not hapless anarchy replaced by centralizing authority, became the new postmortem of the Commonwealth. After 1989, Poland found its history, and Europe found Poland. The following works represent only the last sixty or so years of historiography; they are, in effect, the last vestiges of the previous, Communist school of Polish research, as well as its Western-published antithesis, and the major representatives of the current, pro-Commonwealth vision. From this perspective, Topolski 1976 can be seen as the height of Marxist interpretations of Polish history, while Wyrozumski, et al. 1979 became one of the last major productions of Communist Poland, a four-volume work still replete with socialist ideology and Marxist structure. Reddaway, et al. 1950 was an early post–World War II Anglophone attempt to preserve a version of polish history unadulterated by the Stalinist-era political changes taking shape in eastern Europe. The two works by Davies (Davies 2001, Davies 2005) served as a reintroduction of Polish history to English-language readers at a time when the currents of democratic change in Poland did not yet achieve their historic inevitability. Jasienica 1997 is a popular Polish account from the author who popularized the expression “Commonwealth of Both Nations.” It is the leading work in the Polish school of thought that treats the Union of Lublin of 1569 in a negative light. FinallyZamoyski 1995 is a fine English-language introductory history of Poland, not averse to nationalistic turns of phrase. Stone 2001 is a more developed study that looks at the Commonwealth from the perspective of its ethnic, religious, and cultural building blocks.
  5. Davies, Norman. Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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  7. Originally written in 1983, during the height of General Jaruzelski’s martial law in Poland, this book portrays Polish national sensibilities in view of historic developments. Though most of the work concerns itself with post-1795 events, and only a single chapter deals with the Polish-Lithuanian state, the analysis of Commonwealth’s cultural and political legacy is suggestive as the groundwork for more recent developments.
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  9. Davies, Norman. God’s Playground: A History of Poland. Vol. 1, The Origins to 1795. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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  11. In many ways a landmark book, first published in 1984, this multifaceted exposition is the first part of a two-volume introduction to both the history of Poland and its place in the history of Europe. Like Jasienica, Davies takes the position that beginning in the late 16th century the Lithuanian portion of the Commonwealth began to be perceived as a drain on the Republic’s strength.
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  13. Jasienica, Pawel. Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów. Vol. 1, Srebrny wiek. Warsaw, Poland: Świat Książki, 1997.
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  15. The first of three volumes. The work provides a well-received, essay-style account of the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1572 to 1795, written during the 1960s by a well-known journalist of the anti-Communist opposition who popularized the expression “Commonwealth of Both Nations.” The account is, in many ways, negative in scope, emphasizing the political mistakes of the Commonwealth’s leaders, not the least of which was the union between Poland and Lithuania in the first place.
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  17. Reddaway, W. F., et al., eds. The Cambridge History of Poland: From Origins to Sobieski(1696). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1950.
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  19. An English-language collection of essays by prominent Polish (and non-Polish) historians, begun in 1936, that finally saw print following the devastations of World War II. This work is not only a monument to its authors, some of whom did not survive the war, but also to an attempt to formulate a Polish history available to the English academic reader at the time such history was being rewritten by the new social realities of the People’s Republic of Poland.
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  21. Stone, Daniel. The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.
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  23. This book takes a regional approach and concentrates on the ethnic and religious members of the Polish-Lithuanian composite state (Lithuanians, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, Balts) to explain—from ground up, as it were—the necessary components that made the Commonwealth a wealthy, militarily powerful, and socially and religiously stable (though diverse) polity until the middle of the 17th century.
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  25. Topolski, Jerzy, ed. Dzieje Polski. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1976.
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  27. Presents a synthesis of Polish history written entirely from the perspective of the “Marxist method of research,” which sees class conflict as the balance of Polish national experience, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the product of class exploitation, and communism as the only progressive theory offering the culmination of Polish national and social aspirations.
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  29. Wyrozumski, Jerzy, Józef Andrzej Gierowski, and Józef Buszko. Historia Polski. 4 vols. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1979.
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  31. One of the last major compilations of Polish history made during the Communist era, this four-volume set (till 1505, 1505–1764, 1764–1864, and 1864–1948) follows the Marxist interpretation of history all the way to the establishment of the Polish People’s Republic. The second volume looks in detail at the culture, society, and economy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, while the third brings its story to its final act (1795).
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  33. Zamoyski, Adam. The Polish Way: A Thousand Year History of the Poles and their Culture. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1995.
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  35. A fine attempt by Zamoyski (himself a scion of a preeminent old Polish clan) to meander between often condescending foreign works and Polish apologia (though even he is sometimes partially guilty of the latter), this beginners-level popular portrayal of the more than a thousand-year history of the state and the nation is rich in facts and seamlessly weaves culture and politics, history and tradition.
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  37. Comparative Studies
  38. No country, no matter how particular, exists in a political and economic vacuum, and neither did the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The trends and currents that dominated it all bore comparisons and meaningful connections with the region, the continent, and the world. The Polish scholars in exile, as well as post-1989 Polish writers, sought to establish Polish history as part and parcel of the Western European, Christian experience, while Anglophone writers were mostly more concerned with drawing out of the Commonwealth images of separation—its economic backwardness in relation to more “developed” Western states, and the questions surrounding its failure as a state compared to other available models—before becoming more receptive after communism’s demise in Eastern Europe. Today, the integrationist model is very much in the ascendancy, as evinced byBiskup and Zernack 1983, which offers an integrated picture of Poland and Germany as part of a European political and economic system, and by Kirby 1990, which integrates Poland-Lithuania, through its possessions of Gdańsk (Danzig), Elbląg (Elbing), and others, into the larger Baltic system of trade. Braun 1985 is particularly interested in positing Polish medieval and early modern developments as a part of the general Christian Europe, a strategy best served by the work’s presentation of Polish contributions to the development of Pan-European and Christian legal and social thought. Wandycz 1992 tries to integrate the entire region within a Western-style medieval framework, showing east-central Europe’s inseparateness from Western historic models. Snyder 2004 turns east and looks to the common experiences of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the basis for the development of the modern national and ethnic identities of Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians, thus stressing the Polish role in cultural exchanges between East and West. Kamiński 1993 and Zernack 1994 propose the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a viable (and perhaps historically more progressive) alternative republican model to Russian-style despotism, and discuss why despotism eventually triumphed in that part of Europe. In Butterwick 2001, Anglophone scholarship gives a revised answer as to the reasons for the Commonwealth’s 18th-century destruction. The concept of anarchy is remolded into the inability of the state to co-opt its politically empowered elites in defense of the republic.
  39. Biskup, Marian, and Klaus Zernack eds. Schichtung und Entwicklung der Geselschaft in Polen und Deutschland im 16. Und 17. Jahrhundert: Parallelen, Verknüpfungen, Vergleische. Wiesbaden, West Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983.
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  41. The effort of a well-publicized meeting of Polish and West German historians in Toruń (Thorn) in 1981, this collection of essays focuses on the Polish-German context, as well as the Polish-German-European context, in relation to the establishment of political and social elites, church-state interactions, and trading and economic systems of the early modern period.
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  43. Braun, Jerzy, ed. Poland in Christian Civilization. London: Veritas, 1985.
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  45. A collection of more than a dozen essays, originally written in the 1960s, looking at themes and events involving the acceptance of Western Christianity by Poland in the 10th century, the Catholicization and the political union with Lithuania, as well as the religious Union of Brest between Catholicism and Orthodoxy in 1596.
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  47. Butterwick, Richard, ed. The Polish-Lithuanian Monarchy in European Context, c. 1500–1795. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan 2001.
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  49. A series of wide-ranging essays that take an analytical look at the composition and make-up of the Polish-Lithuanian mixed constitution and its relation to other European models in an attempt to answer the question of the country’s 1795 demise. A particular culprit becomes the Commonwealth’s inability to establish new political and military systems to marshal its treasury and manpower resources
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  51. Kamiński, Andrzej Sulima. Republic vs. Autocracy: Poland-Lithuania and Russia, 1686–1697. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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  53. Showcases the differences in political and social development, as well as the differences in socioeconomic conditions, in the Polish and Russian states that turned one into a republic, and the other into an autocracy.
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  55. Kirby, David. Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Baltic World, 1492–1772. London: Longman, 1990.
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  57. A general and ambitious narrative of the Baltic world from the end of the 15th century to the end of the 18th, covering political, economic, social, religious, and military developments from the entirety of the Baltic littoral, including Denmark, Sweden, Muscovy, Livland, Kurland, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Hansa.
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  59. Snyder, Timothy. The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
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  61. A magisterial, if controversial, work that basically traces the post-1989 success of Poland and its neighbors Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine to coexist peacefully (in opposition to many Balkan states), as well as their shared legacies—historical, linguistic, and social—as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 16th–18th centuries. Includes a panegyric to Polish foreign policy farsightedness following the collapse of the Communist state.
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  63. Wandycz, Piotr. The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present. London: Routledge, 1992.
  64. DOI: 10.4324/9780203417409Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  65. A general overview of the east-central European region (the modern nations of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic and Slovakia) from their acceptance of Western Christianity (which integrated the region with Western Europe religiously and culturally) in the Middle Ages all the way to the rapid political developments of the early 1990s.
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  67. Zernack, Klaus. Polen und Rußland: Zwei wege in der europäischen Geschichte. Berlin: Propyläen, 1994.
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  69. On one hand, this work presents an attempt to synchronize the political and social developments in Poland-Lithuania and the Empire of Muscovy to show deep lines of relevance and interrelation, and, on the other hand, it portrays both states as representative of two completely different political ideologies: republicanism and autocracy. Why autocracy eventually won out over republicanism is discussed.
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  71. Reference Works
  72. Those researching Poland-Lithuania have recourse to some bibliographic, demographic, and cartographical reference works (though only a few in English) that can ease their studies. Davies 1977 was a good late-1970s bibliography on works about Poland in English, and one that presented the dearth of the field at that time. Luckily that situation has been considerably improved.Gieysztorowa 1968 answers some interesting questions regarding the Commonwealth’s demographics, and Gieysztorowa’s research has mostly held up. Lerski 1996 presents a perfectly workable dictionary of Polish history in English, while Pogonowski 1988, in atlas form, offers the expansion and contraction of Polish borders through time.
  73. Davies, Norman. Poland Past and Present: A Select Bibliography of Works in English. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977.
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  75. A major attempt to present a bibliography of Polish history at a time when such bibliographies in the English language hardly existed. Outdated now, it nevertheless contains many interesting and nearly forgotten positions and references.
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  77. Gieysztorowa, Irena. “Research into the Demographic History of Poland: A Provisional Summing-Up.” Acta Poloniae Historica 18 (1968): 5–7.
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  79. A short work on Polish demography of the Commonwealth period, showing that ethnic Poles never made up more than 40 percent of the Republic’s population, and that Catholicism did not pass the 50 percent mark.
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  81. Lerski, Jerzy J. Historical Dictionary of Poland, 966–1945. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1996.
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  83. A fine introduction to Polish history, culture, and society from the beginning of the Polish state to the end of World War II. The citations include many prominent figures and ideologies of the Commonwealth period.
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  85. Pogonowski, Iwo Cyprian. Poland: A Historical Atlas. Rev. ed. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1988.
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  87. A work comprising more than 160 maps and charts that shows the vicissitudes of Polish history, well represented by the expansion and contraction of Polish and Polish-Lithuanian historical frontiers.
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  89. Journals
  90. The history, as well as culture and society, of Poland-Lithuania is covered by a variety of periodical scholarly publications and journals. Some, like Slavonic and East European Review, Slavic Review, and Slovo are interdisciplinary English-language publications that deal with large geographical areas that once included the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Others, like the Polish Review, are English-language journals dedicated to studying mostly Polish culture, society, and history, alone or in context, and thus include articles on the Commonwealth. Polish-language historical journals are listed here as well, notably represented by Kwartalnik Historyczny. Actae Poloniae Historica is a Polish publication written mostly in English. Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce is an example of a Polish-language historical journal entirely dedicated to the study of a particular time period—in this case the Renaissance and Reformation. Finally, there are journals, both in Polish and English, that concentrate on the experience of a particular ethnic group in Poland, or in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Lehahayer and Polin are two such journals, the first chronicling the Armenian community, the second the Jewish.
  91. Acta Poloniae Historica.
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  93. An annual Polish scholarly publication in the English language that covers both modern and premodern Polish history. Published by Wydawnictwo Naukowe Semper.
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  95. Kwartalnik Historyczny.
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  97. First published in 1887 Lwów (L’viv), this is the oldest currently published Polish scholarly historical quarterly. Nowadays, it is published by the Wydawnictwo Naukowe Semper.
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  99. Lehahayer.
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  101. A new scholarly journal, first published by Historia Iagellonica in 2010, that is wholly devoted to the history and culture of the Polish Armenian community.
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  103. Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce.
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  105. A semiannual Polish scholarly journal dedicated to questions of the Renaissance and Reformation, and their impact on Polish history.
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  107. Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry.
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  109. A journal published by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in Oregon, and established in 1986 by the Institute of Polish-Jewish Studies, is entirely dedicated to the history of the Jewish existence and experience in Poland.
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  111. The Polish Review.
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  113. A peer-reviewed New York-based interdisciplinary journal specializing in publishing English-language articles on all facets of Polish culture, including film, literature, ethnography, and history.
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  115. Slavic Review.
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  117. Published by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, this interdisciplinary quarterly devotes its pages to the study of eastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
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  119. Slavonic and East European Review.
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  121. A publication of the School of Slavonic and East European studies at University College London, theSlavonic and East European Review is a quarterly interdisciplinary journal in the fields of history, language and literature, social sciences, and cinema. Articles on Poland and Poland-Lithuania are frequently included.
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  123. Slovo. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Russian, East-Central European and Eurasian Affairs.
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  125. An interdisciplinary biannual publication of UCL (University College London) School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), originating in 1988 and produced mainly by graduate students of the university. Covers a vast array of political, social, and historical affairs of its chosen region.
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  127. Contemporary Accounts
  128. Foreign accounts of the Polish lands were already present in the 10th century, and as Poland grew in international importance, finally transforming itself into a Commonwealth and the largest of European states, foreign interest in the history and politics of the state rose as well. Still, considering Poland-Lithuania’s geographical location at the periphery of Western Europe, and considering its social and cultural mixture of Eastern and Western trends, accounts of Poland were never as numerous as those of other powers that were closer to the European epicenter, and they often concentrated on presenting the Commonwealth as an exotic, and even perhaps an esoteric, polity. However, considering the impact of Polish political thought on Europe in the early modern period, the literary, cultural, and social connections between Poland-Lithuania and the West were strong and clearly visible, as shown by Chwalewik 1968, Connor 1698, and Gintel 1971. The fact that information on Poland appeared even in the works of the Bard is brought up by Landis 1984 and the aforementioned Chwalewik 1968. Polish political thought through the eyes of foreigners is presented by Bałuk 1984, while Zawadzki 1963 shows the Polish political system and society as opined by English eyewitnesses during an intensification of Polish-English relations during the reign of Poland’s last king.
  129. Bałuk, Teresa. “Sir Robert Filmer’s Description of the Polish Constitutional System in the Seventeenth Century.” Slavonic and East European Review 62.2 (1984): 241–249.
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  131. The article describes and explains a highly erroneous English account of the 17th-century Polish-Lithuanian political system, which tries to portray Poland as a ‘true monarchy’ as opposed to a mixed-constitution federation.
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  133. Chwalewik, Witold. Anglo-Polish Renaissance Texts for Use of Shakespeare Students. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1968.
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  135. A study containing several lesser- and better-known accounts of Renaissance-era Polish-English interactions, including diplomatic accounts and speeches.
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  137. Connor, Bernard. The History of Poland, in Several Letters to Persons of Quality. London: D. Brown and A. Roper, 1698.
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  139. An account of the history of Poland written for the English audience by the royal court physician to King John III Sobieski.
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  141. Gintel, Jan., ed. Cudzoziemcy o polsce: Relacje i opinie. Vol. 1, Wiek X-XVII. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1971.
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  143. An edited assortment of medieval and early-modern foreign accounts of Poland and, later, of Poland-Lithuania, extracted from a multitude of sources, such as Jewish and Arab merchants, traveling pilgrims and clergymen, ambassadors, and adventurers.
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  145. Landis, Joan Hutton. “Shakespeare’s Poland.” Hamlet Studies 6 (1984): 8–17.
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  147. Shows the level of popular awareness of Polish matters indicated by the Polish fragments present in Hamlet and available to end-of-16th-century English readers.
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  149. Zawadzki, Wacław, ed. Polska stanisławowska w oczach cudzoziemców. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1963.
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  151. A collection of accounts on the political, social, and cultural milieu of late-18th-century Poland by foreign (especially Western) travelers, merchants, and dignitaries.
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  153. Primary Sources
  154. The vagaries of recent Polish history (national enslavement and two world wars) have not been kind to Polish historical documents. Many treasures of the past were destroyed or lost in the chaos of war. Still, many have survived, and they now serve as the basis of our knowledge of the Polish-Lithuanian past. The few presented here are just a small measure, a representation of the vast historical and cultural testament of the Commonwealth period. Chronicles of the 15th and 16th centuries are represented by Długosz 1997 and Kromer 1984, respectively. Modrzewski 1953–1960,Goślicki 2000, Skarga 1972, and Wolan 2010 form the crux of a political and social debate that raged in late-16th- and early-17th-century Poland-Lithuania as to the nature and the very definition of Polish political existence, with Modrzewski taking a secularizing approach, Goślicki looking to the Senate as guarantor of government and liberties, Skarga stressing the Catholic and monarchial element, and Wolan the champion of nobility and Protestantism. Pasek 1976 provides a well-known example of memoir, and Górnicki 1954 is an example of mirror, or courtier, literature.
  155. Długosz Jan. The Annals of Jan Długosz: Annales seu cronicae incliti Regni Poloniae. Edited by Maurice Michael. Chichester, UK: IM Publications, 1997.
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  157. An edited English-language edition of perhaps the best-known Polish medieval chronicle, from the mid-15th century. Dlugosz’s work covers the length of Polish national existence and is especially strong on the reign of Wladyslaw II Jagiello, the Lithuanian grand duke who became Polish king, the creator of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, and the conqueror of the Teutonic Knights.
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  159. Górnicki, Łukasz. Dworzanin Polski. Edited by Roman Pollak. Wrocław, Poland: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1954.
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  161. A high classic of Polish Renaissance literature, this polonized version of Baldassare Castiglione’sThe Book of the Courtier looks at the role and education of a courtier in the specific setting of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the height of its cultural development.
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  163. Goślicki, Wawrzyniec Grzymała. O senatorze doskonałym księgi dwie: W których są wyjaśnione obowiązki urzędników oraz szczęśliwe życie obywateli i pomyślność państwa (1568). Kraków: Arcana, 2000.
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  165. One of the first Polish-language translations of Wawrzyniec Goślicki’s (Laurentius Grimaldius Goslicius, c. 1635–1607) De optimo senatore, a major humanistic work of the Polish Renaissance (though not translated into Polish from its original Latin for over four hundred years) promoting the political ideal of a mixed constitution.
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  167. Kromer, Marcin. Polska czyli o położeniu, ludności, obyczajach, urzędach i sprawach publicznych Królestwa Polskiego księgi dwie. Olsztyn: Pojezierze, 1984.
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  169. A major mid-16th century (1555) account of the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom from the mythical beginnings of the Polish state to just before the Union of Lublin. A gold mine of historical facts.
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  171. Modrzewski, Andrzej Frycz. Dzieła wszystkie. 5 vols. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1953–1960.
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  173. The collected works of the famous Polish humanist Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski (Andreas Fricius Modrevius, b. 1503–d. 1572) in Polish translation (the Latin edition is available as Opera Omnia from the same publisher). Included in the collection, among Frycz’s lesser-known writings, are his classicsDe republica emendanda (1551, 1554) on ways to improve the Commonwealth (both Polish-Lithuanian and Christian) and Lascius, sive de poena homicidii on the inequality of punishing manslaughter.
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  175. Pasek, Jan Chryzostom. Memoirs of the Polish Baroque: The Writings of Jan Chryzostom Pasek, a Squire of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. Translated by Catherine Leach. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
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  177. A classic of 17th-century Polish baroque memoir literature, the writings of the Mazovian nobleman Jan Chryzostom Pasek illuminate everyday life in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in times of war and peace, and offer an insightful portrayal of the szlachta’s political and social mentality of the Sarmatian period.
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  179. Skarga, Piotr. Kazania Sejmowe. Edited by Janusz Tazbir and Mirosław Korolko. Wrocław, Poland: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1972.
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  181. A collection of eight sermons purportedly delivered in 1597 before the Polish Diet by the controversial preacher and royal confessor, Father Piotr Skarga S.J., in which he attacks noble privileges, promotes monarchical rights, and enumerates the difficulties facing the Polish Commonwealth. It has become a classic of Polish Counter-Reformation literature.
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  183. Wolan, Andzrej. De libertate politica sive civili—O wolności rzeczypospolitej albo ślacheckiej. Edited by Marcin Eder and Roman Mazurkiewicz. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2010.
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  185. This work presents the most important tract of Andrzej Wolan (Andreas Volanus, 1531–1610)—one of the most famous (or infamous) of Polish reformed humanists—in the original Latin and its 1610 early Polish-language translation of Stanisław Dubingowicz.
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  187. Diplomatic History
  188. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth maintained active diplomatic relations with all of its neighbors, in the process developing enmities and friendships that affected the rolls of history. Polish diplomatic endeavors were sometimes haphazard, and sometimes well organized and systematic, depending on the situation and need. Grabowski 2006 describes the diplomatic history between Poland-Lithuania and the Prussian state of the Teutonic Knights. Bogucka 1982 picks up the story about the diplomacy and politics behind the establishment of Ducal Prussia (the last survivor of the knightly Teutonic state) as a Polish fief, an event that would cast a long shadow on later developments in Poland and in Prussia-Brandenburg, as elucidated by Szymczak 2002. Kołodziejczyk 2000 deals with relations with the Ottoman Empire, while Podhorodecki 1987 adds the Crimean Khanate dimension. Lewitter 1968 is concerned with Russia, as is Wójcik 1959, which deals primarily with the famous Treaty of Andrusovo that divided Ukraine between Poland and Russia. Nagielski 2007 turns to contacts with Sweden over the Baltic.
  189. Bogucka, Maria. Hold Pruski. Warsaw, Poland: Interpress, 1982.
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  191. Describes the diplomatic background and history of the Prussian Homage, the 1525 tribute of Albrecht Hohenzollern to Sigismund the Old of Poland that created Ducal Prussia as a vassal state of Poland-Lithuania.
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  193. Grabowski, Janusz. Z dziejów stosunków Polski z zakonem krzyżackim w Prusach (XIII–XVI wiek). Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2006.
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  195. Besides a fine account of the political, diplomatic, and military relations between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, on one hand, and the Order of the Teutonic Knights, on the other, this work contains a nearly complete catalogue of diplomatic treaties signed by the leaders of the involved states, as well as a collection of official and personal seals used in the treaties.
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  197. Kołodziejczyk, Dariusz. Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th—18th Century): An Annotated Edition of “Ahdnames” and Other Documents. Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage 18. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2000.
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  199. Based on extensive extant documents and treaties, this work summarizes the often friendly and constructive, but sometimes violent and militant, relations between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire. The author notes that the relationship was mostly characterized by peaceful coexistence, as both states valued peace on its frontiers, and wars—even the famous ones such as Sobieski’s relief of Vienna—were an uncommon occurrence.
  200. Find this resource:
  201. Lewitter, L. R. “Russia, Poland and the Baltic 1697–1721.” Historical Journal 11.1 (1968): 3–34.
  202. DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X00002338Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  203. An account of the convoluted political and diplomatic relationship between Peter I of Russia and Augustus II of Poland, in view of the Swedish Baltic possessions at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century.
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  205. Nagielski, Mirosław, ed. Z dziejów stosunków Rzeczypospolitej Obojga Narodów ze Szwecją w XVII wieku. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2007.
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  207. This is both a diplomatic and a military account of Polish-Swedish relations in the 17th century, a century replete with wars and campaigns brought about by the raising of the House of Vasa to the Polish throne. The tome concentrates mostly on the events of the “Deluge,” or the Second Northern War (1655–1660), though there is ample material from earlier and later campaigns.
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  209. Podhorodecki, Leszek. Chanat krymski i jego stosunki z Polską w XV–XVIII w. Warsaw, Poland: Książka i Wiedza, 1987.
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  211. The relationship between the Crimean Tatars and the Commonwealth vacillated between outright war and a friendly alliance, punctuated (even at times of peace) by predatory attacks of one side on the other, even in times of peace. This is a study of this complicated relationship.
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  213. Szymczak, Barbara. Stosunki Rzeczypospolitej z Brandenburgią i Prusami Książęcymi w Latach 1648–1658 w Opinii i Działaniach Szlachty Koronnej. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2002.
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  215. An account of the brisk diplomacy between Poland and the Elector of Brandenburg during the Second Northern War era that led to the freeing of Ducal Prussia from Polish vassalage, and that laid the foundation for both the Commonwealth’s decline and the rise of Brandenburg-Prussia.
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  217. Wójcik, Zbigniew. Traktat Andruszowski 1667 i jego geneza. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1959.
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  219. An analysis of the 1667 truce between Poland-Lithuania and Russia that ended the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Instead of solidifying the friendship between the two former combatants—especially in view of the common Turkish threat—the truce reshaped the balance of power in Eastern Europe. Poland-Lithuania, which previously enjoyed a military and political ascendancy, now found itself on the defensive, from which it would never recover.
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  221. Legal and Constitutional History
  222. The Commonwealth’s constitutional make-up has been the province of considerable, mostly Polish-language, debate. To the early modern West, that constitution seemed particular, even alien, in its integration of the democratic and monarchial elements. Still, Polish political thought was studied and analyzed abroad, both by its detractors and its proponents. European writing, in hindsight of the Partitions, assumed the Polish constitution unworkable, archaic, and chaotic—and one of the reasons for the Commonwealth’s failure, with liberum veto the most egregious catalyst. Yet the Commonwealth’s legal makeup was always a work in progress, and it was quite adept at altering itself to suit the needs of the moment, as shown by many political reshufflings (the creation of the federal Commonwealth in 1569 was one of them) that also included the last-minute burst of reform that,—without the immediate invasion by foreign armies,—could and should have saved it. Backvis 1973 discusses the formation of a Polish elective monarchy following the end of the Jagiellon dynasty, with Rhode 1997 adding to our understanding of szlachta’s responsibilities during the frequent interregnums that followed a monarch’s death. Dembińska 1935 follows the 16th-century Execution movement debates that defined the nobility’s relationship with itself and the Crown.Dembkowski 1982 tackles the legal and constitutional foundations of the Union of Lublin that restructured a dynastic union between Poland and Lithuania into a federal one, while Žmuidzinas 1978 tries to legalistically define the exact nature of the union so promulgated. Michalski 1965 traces the history of Polish dietines or sejmiki, the regional assemblies quite important in the provinces, while Czapliński 1955 talks about the fateful introduction of the liberum veto as part of the Diet’s proceedings in the middle of the 17th century. Though definitely a negative influence, the liberum veto was not in itself fatal, as constitutional norms were present to circumvent it—as shown byHayton 2010, which—in an essay penned by Butterwick, and in the context of analysis of European representative institutions of the 18th century—points to the increasing vigor and achievement of the Polish Diet, supposedly so hamstrung by the noble “golden freedoms” and liberum veto.
  223. Backvis, Claude. “L’origine de la diète ‘Viritim’ pour l’élection du roi en Pologne.” Annuaire de l’Institut de Philologie et d’histoire Orientales et Slaves 20 (1973): 45–128.
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  225. Analyses the legal foundations and historical beginnings of the election diets responsible for the selection of Polish-Lithuanian monarchs.
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  227. Czapliński, Władyslaw. Dwa sejmy w roku 1652: Studium z dziejów rozkładu Rzeczypospolitej szlacheckiej w XVII wieku. Wrocław, Poland: Ossolineum, 1955.
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  229. Discusses the infamous Diets of 1652 where, for the first time, the liberum veto was utilized to “explode” or dissolve the proceedings. The work considers this development as a major reason behind the Commonwealth’s political decline beginning in the second half of the 17th century.
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  231. Dembińska, Anna. Polityczna walka o egzekucję dóbr królewskich w latach 1559/64. Warsaw, Poland: Towarzystwo Naukowe Warszawskie, 1935.
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  233. An interwar analysis of the “Execution” political movement, dealing with the proposed reform of the administration of Royal lands as a way to lessen the political power of the great nobility.
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  235. Dembkowski, Harry. E. The Union of Lublin: Polish Federalism in the Golden Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
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  237. A detailed account of the intricate negotiations that changed a dynastic Polish-Lithuanian Union into a federal one in 1569, and in the process created the largest and one of the most populous states in Europe.
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  239. Hayton, David W., James Kelly, and John Bergin, eds. The Eighteenth-Century Composite State: Representative Institutions in Ireland and Europe, 1689–1800. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
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  241. An analysis of representative institutions in early modern Europe. Though focused on Ireland, this collection of essays also includes comparative information on Poland-Lithuania, authored by Richard Butterwick, that follows the Polish sejm from a period of lethargy at the beginning of the 18th century to one of considerable reformist vigor at its end.
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  243. Michalski, Jerzy. “Les diétines polonaises au XVIIIe siècle.” Acta Poloniae Historica 12 (1965): 87–107.
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  245. An analysis of the Polish 18th century dietines, or sejmiki—regional diets responsible for their provinces and also for the elections of representatives to the Diet in Warsaw—and of their political contributions to Polish political life at the time of the Commonwealth’s decline.
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  247. Rhode, Maria. Ein Königreich ohne König: Der kleinpolnische Adel in sieben Interregna. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrasowitz, 1997.
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  249. A well-detailed analysis of the role of the lesser Polish gentry in the functioning of the Polish royal court during seven 16th- and 17th-century interregna.
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  251. Žmuidzinas, Jonas. Commonwealth polono-lithuanien ou L’union de Lublin (1569). Paris: Mouton, 1978.
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  253. A work describing the Polish-Lithuanian Union of Lublin of 1569 from a Lithuanian legalistic perspective that defines the republic as a confederation, in which both parts of the state—though united by a common king and parliament—maintained separate armies, administration, and even foreign policy.
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  255. Political Developments
  256. Before the ascension of a modern Polish nation-state, Polish nationality was considered to be cosmopolitan, federal, and showing few, if any, ethnic or religious components. To be a Pole was to be a fully participating citizen in the polity of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—namely a member of the szlachta estate. And though such participation was reserved for only a small minority of the Commonwealth’s vast (at the time) population, it still represented a greater enfranchised sample (between 8 percent and 15 percent, depending on the study) than some liberal regimes even in the 19th century. The Polish szlachta, or nobility, could be ethnically Polish, Lithuanian, German, Ruthenian, Cossack, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or Uniate (there were even a few cases of Muslim or Jewish nobles, though they did not participate in the political life), but what united them all was political equality vis-à-vis themselves and the participation in the political life of the nation. With the ascension of the szlachta as the arbiters of national politics, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—sometimes known for this very feature as the Noble Commonwealth—developed its own political theories and identity based around the notions of consensus, federalism, and noble democracy that set it very much apart from other European states, especially the ones nearby, like Russia and Prussia, where a different political ideology—that of absolutism—began to form. For a basic introduction to 16th-century Polish political thought, see Biskupski and Pule 1990. For some Polish political developments in the European context, see Evans and Thomas 1991 and Subtelny 1986. Dziewanowski 1963 and Halecki 1960 offer insight into the development of Polish federal thought. Karpiński 2008 shows the entire spectrum of the Polish-Lithuanian society—and not just the noble estate—as political actors to some extent. Finally, Backus 1963 and Halecki 1963 offer an interesting debate on whether the Polish federalist model succeeded or failed in politically unifying the Commonwealth itself.
  257. Backus, Oswald P., III. “The Problem of Unity in the Polish-Lithuanian State.” Slavic Review22.3 (1963): 411–431.
  258. DOI: 10.2307/2492488Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  259. An article suggesting the reasons for the eventual failure and disappearance of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lay in its failure to sufficiently unify its disparate constituent parts under a strongly entrenched “new monarchy” style regime. This is a representative of the theory that Poland-Lithuania fell because it did not develop into an absolutist state a la Russia or Prussia.
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  261. Biskupski, Mieczysław P., and James S. Pule, eds. Polish Democratic Thought from the Renaissance to the Great Emigration: Essays and Documents. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1990.
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  263. A collection of several essays accompanied by relevant documents from Poland’s past that illuminate the Polish democratic tradition and its pursuit, from the 16th to the 19th century. Of particular interests to the students of the Commonwealth period are the translations of the Nihil NoviConstitution of 1505, the Pacta Conventa from 1573, and the Third of May Constitution of 1791.
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  265. Dziewanowski, M. K. “Dualism or Trialism? Polish Federal Tradition.” Slavonic and East European Review 41.97 (1963): 442–466.
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  267. This article argues that the concept of a federation—as a union of smaller states aligned to oppose the ambitions of more powerful neighbors—was a particular premise of Polish foreign policy beginning already in the 11th century. Though considerably dated by now, it presents the theory of federalism as the basis of Polish policies, and includes a good footnoted bibliography of Polish interwar historiography on the subject.
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  269. Evans, R. J. W., and T. V. Thomas, eds. Crown, Church, and Estates: Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991.
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  271. A comparative work that concentrates mostly on the relationship—often stormy or symbiotic—between central European estates and the Crown, with the Habsburg monarchy being the center of attention. Additional lands, such as Poland-Lithuania, are included to show whether and how much they conformed to or diverged from the paradigms and lines of thought and deliberation set by the book’s main arguments.
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  273. Halecki, Oscar. “Federalism in the History of East Central Europe.” Polish Review 25.2 (1960): 5–19.
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  275. Professor Halecki sees the creation and development of the Polish-Lithuanian Union in the 16th century as perhaps the greatest instance of political actualization of many existing federal trends in east-central Europe in the early modern period.
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  277. Halecki, Oscar. “Why Was Poland Partitioned?” Slavic Review 22.3 (1963): 432–441.
  278. DOI: 10.2307/2492489Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  279. An article written against the theory that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was doomed from the start by not assuming a unitary, absolutist visage comparable to its 18th-century neighbors. Halecki defends the survivability of the federated model offered by the Commonwealth and points to foreign invasion, as opposed to its political and ideological structure, as the reason of the Commonwealth’s demise.
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  281. Karpiński, Andzrej, ed. Społeczeństwo Staropolskie. Vol. 1, Społeczeństwo staropolskie a polityka. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2008.
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  283. This work presents, in ten essays, political activities of various strata of Old Polish society between the 16th and 18th centuries. What distinguishes this production from other, similarly themed expositions is the inclusion (other than the obvious gentry) of bourgeoisie and even peasants as political actors. Some of the regions studied include The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Baltic lands.
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  285. Subtelny, Orest. Domination of Eastern Europe: Native Nobilities and Foreign Absolutism, 1500–1715. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986.
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  287. A description of the struggle between the entrenched nobles of eastern European lands (the book covers the nobilities of Wallachia, Hungary, Livonia, Ukraine, and Poland-Lithuania) and centralizing-minded foreign dynasties that eventually led to the period of noble revolts and the establishment of absolute monarchies in eastern Europe. The part on Poland-Lithuania deals specifically with Saxon Wettin machinations and Stanisław Leszczyński’s native struggle against them.
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  289. The Jagiellon Period (1386–1572)
  290. The dynastic union between Poland and Lithuania began in 1386, when the young Polish Queen Jadwiga (Hedvig) of Anjou married Jogaila, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, thus ushering the conversion of Lithuania to the Western rite and ensuring cooperation between the two nations for the next four centuries. Needless to say, the two royal partners who created the union and their descendants (Jadwiga died after childbirth in 1399, but Jogaila, as King Władysław II Jagiełło, went on to sire many children with his three subsequent wives) have received considerable historical attention from Polish historians, some serious and scholarly, and some bordering on romanticized. For an example of the former, see Krzyżaniakowa and Ochmański 2006. For some of the latter, there’s Halecki 1991 and Szajnocha 1969. Biedrowska-Ochmańska 1987 offers an important look at how Jagiełło’s work was perceived by his contemporaries. Jasienica 1998 is a general and popular account of Poland and Lithuania under the Jagiellon dynasty. Cynarski 2007 discusses (in Lithuanian) Jagiełło’s great-grandson, the creator of the Union of Lublin, and the last of the Jagiellon’s on the Polish-Lithuanian throne—Sigismund Augustus (Zygmunt II August)—whileBogucka 1989 talks about his mother, Bona Sforza, and her influence on importing Renaissance to Poland. Finally, Gieysztor 1998 offers a rare English-language contribution in a general discussion surrounding the formation of the union and the early development of the dual state.
  291. Biedrowska-Ochmańska, Krystyna. Władysław Jagiełło w opiniach swoich współczesnych: Próba charakterystyki jego osobowosci. Poznań, Poland: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Imienia Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu, 1987.
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  293. Wladyslaw Jagiello attained legendary status in Polish historiography. This book attempts to circumvent the myths around this truly seminal figure by looking at the accounts of his contemporaries and seeing what impression the erstwhile pagan ruler of Lithuania had on the European observer of his age.
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  295. Bogucka, Maria. Bona Sforza. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1989.
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  297. A biography of Bona Sforza, the second wife of Sigismund the Old of Poland (Zygmunt I Stary). The queen was instrumental in spreading Italian notions of the Renaissance through her new domains, laying the groundwork for a humanistic and scholarly flowering of Polish thought and culture in the 16th century.
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  299. Cynarski, Stanisław. Žygimantas Augustas. Vilnius, Lithuania: Versus aureus, 2007.
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  301. A Lithuanian-language biography of Sigismund II Augustus (r. 1548–1672), son of Sigismund the Old and grand duke of Lithuania and king of Poland, whose Lithuanian policies eventually led to the Union of Lublin in 1569 that formally established the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
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  303. Gieysztor, Aleksander. “The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, 1370–1506.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History. Vol. 7, c. 1415–c. 1500 Edited by Christopher Allmand, 734–735. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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  305. A general political background to Polish-Lithuanian relations before the Union of Lublin. The article traces Polish royal politics from the death of Casimir the Great to the ascension of Sigismund the Old (Zygmunt I Stary) to the Polish throne in 1506, and the complicated, sometimes antagonistic and competing visions of Polish and Lithuanian leaders that nevertheless kept both countries in a mutual federated embrace.
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  307. Halecki, Oskar. Jadwiga of Anjou and the Rise of East Central Europe. Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1991.
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  309. An account, published twenty years after the death of the writer, of the short reign (r. 1384–1399) of Queen Jadwiga of Poland—one of two Polish female rulers granted the title “king”—whose marriage to Lithuania’s Grand Duke Jogaila in 1386, and his conversion to Catholic Christianity as Wladyslaw II Jagiełło, marked the beginning of the dynastic union between Poland and Lithuania that created the largest, and strongest, political entity in eastern Europe for three centuries.
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  311. Jasienica, Paweł. Polska Jagiellonów. Warsaw, Poland: Świat Książki, 1998.
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  313. One of the most popular, essay-style histories of the reign of the Jagiellon dynasty in Poland (1386–1572). Jasienica concentrates on most important events and personages and is quite good at explaining diplomatic and international relations. First and foremost a political history, this account has much less on social and cultural aspects of the period than other works.
  314. Find this resource:
  315. Krzyżaniakowa, Jadwiga, and Jerzy Ochmański. Wladyslaw II Jagiełło. Wrocław, Poland: Ossolineum, 2006.
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  317. A well-researched biography of Wladyslaw II Jagiełło, the monarch famous for his crushing defeat of Teutonic Knights and for bringing Poland and Lithuania together into a personal union that foretold the federated union to come. The book presents Jagiełło as a cultured man, well versed in politics and the military arts.
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  319. Szajnocha, Karol. Jadwiga i Jagiello, 1374–1413: Opowiadanie historyczne. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1969.
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  321. A newer edition of the 1861 original, Szajnocha’a account of the complex Polish history surrounding the rise of Jadwiga of Anjou to the Polish throne and her subsequent marriage to the pagan Grand Duke Jogaila is still the romantic progenitor of more modern Polish portrayals that treat the establishment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the great political and diplomatic dowry of that marriage union.
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  323. The Elective Monarchy Period (1573–1791)
  324. Following the extinction of the Jagiellon dynasty in 1572, the Polish-Lithuanian monarchy became elective, with all those belonging to the noble estate, regardless of their actual economic situation, eligible to vote. This elective principle became the mark of the Commonwealth until its dissolution, and it has often been portrayed as both a symptom and a cause of that decline. But though the system did favor foreign candidates to the throne (nearly half of the elected monarchs were foreign-born), it also prevented absolutist tendencies, as the successful candidate had to swear by theHenrician articles and Pacta conventa that preserved religious toleration and primacy of the law. There is also no question the elections produced some first-rate monarchs who gloriously wrote themselves into the pages of history. On the other hand, there is no denying there were some outstanding failures (the election of Henri de Valois and the Wettin monarchs comes to mind), as some elective kings proved themselves unresponsive to the Commonwealth’s needs, and whose own dynastic policies engaged the Commonwealth in unwanted foreign campaigns. For better or worse, however, the sample size of the electorate ensured the elections of the Polish monarch constituted the largest systemic expression of European democracy, however limited, in the early modern period. The establishment of the elective monarchy and the first elections are seen byMączak 1987 as the decisive years in the history of the Commonwealth. The second elective monarch, the Transylvanian prince Stephen Bathory, is taken up by Besala 1992. The ascent of the Swedish House of Vasa (Waza) is treated by Wisner 2004–2008. Czapliński 1976 comments on the reign of the most successful of the Polish Vasas, Władysław IV. Frost 1993 discusses the difficult years during and after the Swedish “Deluge” (Potop). Podhorodecki 2010 is a biography of the warrior-king John III Sobieski. Finally, Lukowski 1991 and Wyszomirska 2010 look at some of developments during the Saxon era (1696–1763), with the former analyzing the stirrings of the political reform movement and the latter focusing on the nature of political writing.
  325. Besala, Jerzy. Stefan Batory. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1992.
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  327. A biography of the erstwhile prince of Transylvania, Stephen Bathory (b. 1533–d. 1586), who in 1576 became one of the most successful, respected, and powerful of the Polish elective monarchs. The book analyzes the genesis of his success, his considerable military talents that led to the victorious conclusion of the Livonian War (1558–1582), and his ability to dominate Polish diets and maintain considerable royal prerogatives even in the face of constitutional limits placed upon him by the Commonwealth’s laws.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Czapliński, Władysław. Władysław IV i Jego Czasy. Warsaw, Poland: Wiedza Powszechna, 1976.
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  331. A well-researched monograph on the life, reign, and importance of the second Vasa monarch of Poland and Lithuania, Władysław IV (r. 1632–1648). An intelligent and tolerant polyglot, a competent military leader, and a man of arts (credited with bringing the genre of opera to Poland) Wladyslaw ably repulsed Russian, Ottoman, and Swedish threats (briefly elected himself as Tsar of Russia, and holding titles such as grand duke of Muscovy and king of Sweden).
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Frost, Robert I. After the Deluge: Poland-Lithuania and the Second Northern War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
  334. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511523304Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  335. At its core the book deals with the question, “Was the fall of the Commonwealth in the 18th century inevitable?” Historians usually point to the Second Northern War (1655–1660), also known in Polish historiography as the “Deluge,” as a sign of growing Polish weakness. Frost disagrees, pointing to the successful repulse of Poland’s enemies at the time, and the real possibility of reform offered by the victory.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Lukowski, Jerzy. Liberty’s Folly: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century, 1697–1795. London: Routledge, 1991.
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  339. An interesting study of the 18th-century Polish nobility and its changing attitudes toward reform at the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s steady political decline. The work focuses on the consequences, rather than the causes, of the decline, and deals with attempts of arresting the retrograde movement.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Mączak, Antoni. “The Conclusive Years: The End of the Sixteenth Century as the Turning Point of Polish History.” In Politics and Society in Reformation Europe: essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton. Edited by Erkki I. Kouri and Tom Scott, 516–534. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
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  343. An essay that sees the years following the establishment of the Union of Lublin in 1569 and the death of the last Jagiellon king in 1572 as most formative, in both a religious and political sense, to the success of the Counter-Reformation and the establishment of a noble ascendancy in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Mączak’s findings are currently disputed by many historians, such as Robert I. Frost.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Podhorodecki, Leszek. Jan III Sobieski. Warsaw, Poland: Bellona, 2010.
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  347. A political and military biography of John III Sobieski, the famous victor from Vienna in 1683. The account traces his political and military career, his advancement in the royal administration and in the army, and his early victories over the Tatars and the Turks that cemented his place in the pantheon of the greatest military leaders of the Commonwealth and assured his election to the Polish throne in 1674. The rest of the study focuses on his campaigns and politics as the king.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Wisner, Henryk. Rzeczpospolita Wazów. 3 vols. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2004–2008.
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  351. A multivolume production from an expert in the field of the history of the Vasa dynasty in Poland-Lithuania. Wisner’s work points to the Commonwealth as still strong, but weakening and drifting away from full participation in European systems, especially as its economy begins to slide toward dependency.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Wyszomirska, Monika. Między obroną wolności a naprawą państwa: Rzeczpospolita jako przedmiot polemik politycznych w dobie panowania Augusta III (1734–1763). Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2010.
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  355. During the reign of the second Saxon monarch, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth entered a period of protracted political decline that began the first stirrings of various reform movements. Political commentary became the norm, and the image and idea of the Commonwealth was discussed and reimagined from a variety of political perspectives, all duly noted in this book.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. The Age of Reform and the Fall of the Commonwealth (1768–1795)
  358. By the 1760s the political and economic weakness of the Commonwealth made it an international joke and a plaything of foreign powers (such as Russia and Prussia), eliciting as a reaction a nationalistic (and chauvinistic) upheaval, in the form of the Confederation of the Bar, whose fall precipitated the First Partition of Poland (1772). The nature of the Confederation is discussed byBuchmann and Danilczyk 2010. Following that national debacle, Poland-Lithuania and its well-learned, enlightened monarch Stanisław August Poniatowski, ably described by Butterwick 1998 andZamoyski 1997, committed themselves to twenty years of thorough and complete reform, climaxing in the promulgation of Europe’s first modern (and the world’s second, after that of the United States) constitution, The Constitution of the Third of May (1791), which reversed most of the ills of the Republic, eliminated the liberum veto, enfranchised the bourgeoisie, created a standing army, and gave state protection to the serfs. These years of reform are analyzed by Fiszman 1997 andGierowski 1996. A case of too much too late, the sudden strengthening and modernization of their neighbor led the Prussian and Russian regimes to interfere, with Russia actually going to war in “defense of Polish Golden liberties.” In the midst of a seemingly successful defensive military campaign, the king capitulated, and the Second Partition of Poland turned the Commonwealth into a rump state (1793). Łojek 1976 discusses the reasons for the eventual failure of the reform movement, and sees foreign intervention as a main reason. The Polish answer was another Insurrection (1794), this one led by the Polish and American hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko (Tadeusz Kościuszko), discussed in Storozynski 2009. Kosciuszko’s eventual failure led to the Third Partition of Poland (1795) and the erasure of the Commonwealth from the map of Europe, an event ably dealt with by Lukowski 1999.
  359. Buchmann, Anna, and Adam Danilczyk eds. Konfederacja Barska. Jej Konteksty i Tradycje. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2010.
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  361. A series of essays that analyze the meaning of the Bar Confederation (1768–1772)—a military resistance comprising a large segment of the Polish szlachta (nobility) against the policies of King Stanisław August Poniatowski (r. 1763–1795)—as a national movement or a national uprising.
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  363. Butterwick, Richard. Poland’s Last King and English Culture: Stanisław August Poniatowski, 1732–1798. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.
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  365. A study of the English influence on late-18th-century Polish Enlightenment. The article traces how Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland and a major player in the spread of Enlightened ideology in his state, became an avid Anglophile, and how English political literature became one of the basis for the famous Polish reform initiatives of 1780s and 1790s.
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  367. Fiszman, Samuel, ed. Constitution and Reform in Eighteenth Century Poland: the Constitution of 3 May 1791. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
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  369. Describes the nature of the 1791 Third of May Constitution, its intent, and the background to its adoption. Of note is the perseverance of the idea of Commonwealth nationality as not that of ethnicity but rather of citizenship, the expansion of citizenry to include the bourgeoisie, the enlightened reforms of laws and institutions, and the enshrinement of democratic autonomy.
  370. Find this resource:
  371. Gierowski, Józef Andzej. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the XVIIIth Century: From Anarchy to Well-Organised State. Kraków: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 1996.
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  373. An account of the success of the state reform movement in Poland in the last three decades of the 18th century, which turned a militarily decrepit, politically paralyzed Polish-Lithuanian state into a modern administrative federal nation without succumbing to absolutist impulses.
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  375. Łojek, Jerzy. Upadek konstytucji 3 Maja: Studium historyczne. Wrocław, Poland: Zakład narodowy imienia Ossolińskich, 1976.
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  377. The work questions the inevitability of the fall of the Third of May Constitution in 1792, and lays the majority of the blame for its eventual failure on the inadequacies of the king in fully supporting its implementation and defense.
  378. Find this resource:
  379. Lukowski, Jerzy. The Partitions of Poland: 1772, 1793, 1795. London: Longman, 1999.
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  381. A great synthetic work that concentrates on the diplomatic, political, and military mechanisms of Poland-Lithuania’s dismemberment between 1772 and 1795.
  382. Find this resource:
  383. Storozynski, Alex. The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Age of Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009.
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  385. The first major English-language biography of the Polish American hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko (Tadeusz Kościuszko, 1746–1817), including his role in both the American Revolutionary War and the 1794 uprising against Russia.
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  387. Zamoyski, Adam. The Last King of Poland. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1997.
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  389. The latest in a recent Polish historiographical trend to historically rehabilitate Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland (1763–1795), as a politically astute realist. Throughout the 19th century the king was seen as little more than Russia’s lackey, but Zamoyski argues that the major set of reforms the king managed to push through before the national collapse allowed the ideas of Polishness and national culture and institutions to survive the partitions, and laid the groundwork for later national restoration.
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  391. Economics
  392. No discussion regarding the reasons for the Commonwealth’s eventual fall will escape debates of an economic nature. Why did Eastern Europe in general, and Poland-Lithuania in particular, develop differently (economically speaking) from Western Europe? Was this backwardness and economic dependency a sign of local effects of social stratification (the introduction of second serfdom, for instance) or of greater economic forces (perchance an economical world system)? That Poland-Lithuania developed a healthy export economy based on grain and forest products in the 16th century is beyond dispute, as shown by Attman 1973. Why such an economy turned negative and dependent in the 17th and 18th centuries needs an explanation, however, and a systemic one involving the interaction of state, society, and economy is provided by Jezierski and Leszczyńska 2003. In the economic sense, therefore, Poland-Lithuania serves as a premise and example in an ongoing historiographic debate on economic forces that spans both Europe and the world. Mączak 1985 and Chirot 1989 generally follow Wallerstein’s classic world-system interpretation (Wallerstein 1974), where the needs of the incipient capitalistic economy of Western Europe come to dominate and make dependent the agricultural-based economy of Eastern Europe. Topolski 1962 documents the general agricultural scope of this economic decline. Fedorowicz 2008 adds to the discussion by weaving in Polish-English trade relations in the Baltic. Finally, Lepszy 1957 anticipates some of the newer theories of Poland-Lithuania’s economic decline by accentuating wartime destruction of the Polish cities and countryside beginning in the mid-17th century.
  393. Attman, Artur. The Russian and Polish Markets in International Trade, 1500–1650. Göteborg, Sweden: Bothenburg University, 1973.
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  395. A magisterial work on Baltic markets that, in its time of publication, broadened considerably Anglophone knowledge of the economic history of eastern European Baltic trade. Attman shows, and his conclusions have become generally accepted, that both Russia and Poland-Lithuania enjoyed considerable export surpluses from the 16th century to the middle of the 17th century.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Chirot, Daniel, ed. The Origin of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
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  399. Papers from a 1983 conference that look at, as the title suggests, the economic backwardness of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and the Balkans, vis-à-vis the West. Most of the essays follow world-systems-leaning analysis, seeing Eastern Europe progressively becoming an adjunct of Western economies beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries. The essay on Poland-Lithuania by Kochanowicz goes against the grain, arguing internal economic developments conditioned the Polish economy.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. Fedorowicz, Jan K. England’s Baltic Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century: A Study in Anglo-Polish Commercial Diplomacy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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  403. A reprint of an 1980 work dealing with the currents of Anglo-Polish commercial relations through the English Eastland Trading Company of Elblag (Elbing) from the end of the 16th to the middle of the 17th century, when English interest moved to cheaper Russian markets.
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  405. Jezierski, Andrzej, and Cecylia Leszczyńska. Historia Gospodarcza Polski. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo Key Text, 2003.
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  407. The work covers Polish economic history from the Middle Ages all the way to modernity. The first three chapters deal with the Polish feudal economy, the economic flowering of Poland-Lithuania in the 15th and early 16th centuries, and the economic decline of the 17th and 18th centuries. The book follows a cause-effect pattern that includes complicated interrelations between the economy, the state, and society.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Lepszy, Kazimierz, ed. Polska w okresie drugiej wojny północnej. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1957.
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  411. An economically oriented account of loss and devastation dealt by the Swedish “Deluge” invasion on the Polish population, as well as the county’s agrarian and manufactory systems. The discussion raises the concept of war-caused destitution to the level of a major contributor in the continual economic decline of Poland-Lithuania in the 17th and 18th centuries.
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  413. Mączak, Antoni, Henryk Samsonowicz, and Peter Burke, eds. East-Central Europe in Transition: From the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
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  415. Though the title implies a broader approach, this is really an economically oriented account describing the economic changes in east-central Europe, with Poland as one of the major examples that turned the region into an annex of broader Western European economy, fueled mostly by demand for rye and forest products.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Topolski, Jerzy. “La regression économique en Pologne du XVIe au XVIIIe siècles.” Acta Poloniae Historica 7 (1962): 28–49.
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  419. A discussion of the appearance and reasons behind the economic decline of Poland-Lithuania between the 16th and 18th centuries.
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  421. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System. Vol. 1, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1974.
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  423. A classic of the “world-system” interpretation that sees the leading states of Europe, beginning in the 16th century, playing particular roles and taking up various niches in the emerging global capitalistic economy. According to this interpretation, the countries of Eastern Europe, with Poland-Lithuania a prime example, fell into the dependent role of raw-material exporter that accentuated its backward (compared to the West) economic nature.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Serfdom, Peasant, and Manorial Economy
  426. All economic discussions relating to Eastern Europe would be woefully incomplete without raising the specter of second serfdom (also called second subinfeudation, neoserfdom, or refeudalization). The phenomenon, which included the growth of personal responsibility of the peasant to the landlord (usually expressed in the form of pańszczyzna, robot, or corvée—or forced labor on the lord’s lands), the erosion of peasants’ hereditary and ownership rights to the land they worked, the abrogation of royal and state judiciary protections over the peasant by the noble landlord, and eventually the limits placed on the serf’s freedom of movement, came to symbolize the retrograde nature of eastern European economy vis-à-vis developing capitalistic or proto-capitalistic models in the West that finally cemented the region’s backwardness and dependency, as well as its subaltern role in Marxist or Weberian interpretations. The reasons and effects of the growth of east-central European neoserfdom have long (since the 19th century) been the province of historians. Anglophone scholarship has mostly been interested in the phenomenon from the perspective of Western economic supremacy, while eastern European historians, especially those working during the period of Communist ascendancy, saw in refeudalization either a return to a more basic type of economy or (and this embraces most of the Polish historiography on the subject) an insemination of proto-capitalistic tendencies among the members of the landowning classes that eventually produced embers of class-struggle between the exploiters and exploited that later paralleled the bourgeoisie/proletariat split. Work on peasants, the village environment, and serfdom in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in fact formed a major part of the whole Polish historical experience of the People’s Republic (1945–1989), producing a great many well-researched tomes of quality, even in spite of the necessary inclusion of the Marxist worldview. Scholarly production on the subject in the period after 1989 has been considerably reduced. Anglophone scholarship, concerned with the reasons for reinfeudation’s establishment in Eastern Europe, is well-represented by Trethewey 1974and Makkai 1975 in general, and by Kamiński 1975 for Poland-Lithuania in particular. Tymienicki 1958 adds the Polish-language view on the formation of neoserfdom. Millward 1982 provides the explanation for the economic form this refeudalization assumed. Wyczański 1960 deals with the economic dimensions of the 16th- and 17th-century Polish-style manorial economy.
  427. Kamiński, Andrzej. “Neo-Serfdom in Poland-Lithuania.” Slavic Review 34.2 (1975): 253–268.
  428. DOI: 10.2307/2495187Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  429. An important analysis and explanation of the reemergence of the phenomenon of serfdom in the Polish-Lithuanian lands of the early modern era in the context of political and economic events in the region. This article is only one of several accounts of neoserfdom in central and Eastern Europe to which this issue of Slavic Review was chiefly devoted.
  430. Find this resource:
  431. Makkai, Laszlo. “Neo-Serfdom: Its Origin and Nature in East-Central Europe.” Slavic Review34.2 (1975): 225–238.
  432. DOI: 10.2307/2495185Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  433. A general discussion on the rise of second serfdom (neoserfdom) in east-central Europe between the 15th and the 17th centuries. The author explains the neoserfdom phenomenon as an intersection of specific forces, including the decline of urban economy, the increasing need of the landlord for peasant products, and, especially in Poland-Lithuania, the abdication of the rights of the Crown and the state in legal negotiation between the peasant and the landlord, eventually leading to the lords’ monopolization of jurisdictional authority over what became their serfs.
  434. Find this resource:
  435. Millward, Robert. “An Economic Analysis of the Organization of Serfdom in Eastern Europe.”Journal of Economic History 42.3 (1982): 513–548.
  436. DOI: 10.1017/S0022050700027947Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  437. While treating the establishment of secondary subinfeudation in Poland-Lithuania and its neighbors as a political issue, the author argues that the form and organization of serfdom that developed, meaning forced corvée labor on large manorial estates, had a particularly economic root: serfs necessitated greater social and economic supervision than free renters, and such supervision was most logically and viably accomplished in a manorial setting.
  438. Find this resource:
  439. Trethewey, Richard. “The Establishment of Serfdom in Eastern Europe and Russia.”American Economist 18.1 (1974): 36–41.
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  441. Discusses the economic and the legal framework that led lands east of the Elbe River to establish manorial economy (second enserfment) after the 14th century. In Poland, one of several countries under discussion (others are Prussia, Hungary, and Muscovy), overabundance of land in relation to labor eventually caused a boom in grain trade that led to jurisdictional authority becoming firmly affixed with the nobility.
  442. Find this resource:
  443. Tymienicki, Kazimierz. “W sprawie powstania zaostrzonego poddaństwa w Polsce i Europie środkowej.” Roczniki Historyczne 24 (1958).
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  445. Discusses the beginnings of second serfdom on the Polish and central European lands, its economic sources, and its importance in the development of manorial proto-capitalism.
  446. Find this resource:
  447. Wyczański, Andrzej. Studia nad folwarkiem szlacheckim w Polsce w latach 1500–1580. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1960.
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  449. A general account of the manorial-style economy in Poland in the 16th century. Wyczański concentrates his analysis on the sources of the changing economy and on the needs fulfilled by the new systems.
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  451. Society
  452. Studies of the early modern Polish social structures have most often concentrated on their most visible element—the szlachta, or nobility—and the “Sarmatian,” or noble culture, they created. This is the subject of Bogucka 1996, while the attraction of a Sarmatian cultural worldview to other, non-noble, social elements is examined in Bogucka 1976. Bystroń 1994 and Wyczański 1993 present a more general picture of Old Polish society by inclusion of the non-noble classes. Jankowski and Klonder 2004 analyze provincial variants. Ciesielski and Filipczak-Kocur 2008 cover again the whole Commonwealth, but from the perspective of its ethnic and national mixture. Both Kuklo 2009 andKuklo 2008 are interested in demography, and especially in the family structure of Polish-Lithuanian society.
  453. Bogucka, Maria. “L’Atrtait’ de la Culture Nobiliaire? Sarmatisation de la bourgeoisie polonaise au XVIIe siècle.” Acta Poloniae Historica 33 (1976): 23–46.
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  455. An article describing the attraction noble “Sarmatian” culture held for Polish city-dwellers. The bourgeoisie, though devoid of the political rights of the gentry, to an extent assimilated the gentry’s culture, especially in dress and manners.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. Bogucka, Maria. The Lost World of the “Sarmatians”: Custom as the Regulator of Polish Social Life in Early Modern Times. Warsaw, Poland: Polish Academy of Sciences, 1996.
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  459. An answer to Norbert Elias’s “civilization” theory that the early modern state acted as the mechanism that imposed social and cultural norms on its citizens. Bogucka’s collection of essays shows that in early modern Poland—lacking a highly developed centralized state apparatus—norms of behavior were overseen by custom and tradition, derived from the intersecting agendas of the Catholic Church and the Polish nobility (szlachta).
  460. Find this resource:
  461. Bystroń, Jan Stanisław. Dzieje obyczajów w dawnej Polsce wiek XVI–XVIII. 2 vols. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1994.
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  463. Traces the major currents of established and developing customs prevalent in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Discusses their genesis, the role of forces such as religion and state in their creation, and the importance of the social and economic classes in their maintenance.
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  465. Ciesielski, Tomasz, and Anna Filipczak-Kocur, eds. Rzeczpospolita państwem wielu narodowości i wyznań XVI-XVIII wiek. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2008.
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  467. Utilizing new data and historical archives now open in the eastern lands of the former Commonwealth, this collection of essays presents the Polish-Lithuanian polity as a multiethnic and multireligious conglomerate whose culture, tradition, and political ideology was an admixture of many different strands of thought.
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  469. Jankowski, Aleksander, and Andzej Klonder, eds. Cywilizacja prowincji rzeczypospolitej szlacheckiej. Bydgoszcz: Wydawnictwo Akademii Bydgoskiej im. Kazimierza Wielkiego, 2004.
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  471. Through a collection of quality essays, this work discusses Polish-Lithuanian culture and tradition from the perspective of the major provinces of the Republic, such as Mazovia, Lesser Poland, or Greater Poland, with an eye to explain both the commonalities and the local variants.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Kuklo, Cezary. Demografia Rzeczypospolitej przedrozbiorowej. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2009.
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  475. A new study based on sociodemographic research into the culture and stratification of pre-partition Polish society, which delves deeply into the nature of Polish-Lithuanian social units, including, but not limited to, the family group.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. Kuklo, Cezary, ed. Rodzina i gospodarstwo domowe na ziemiach polskich w XV–XX wieku: Struktury demograficzne, społeczne i gospodarcze. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2008.
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  479. A series of articles focusing on changes within the construction and definition of families living on the lands of the Polish Commonwealth (but not necessarily Polish families) through six centuries, beginning with Old Polish (pre-partition) examples. The data analyzed concerns families from all social strata—peasant, burger, and noble—and several religious denominations—Catholic, Uniate, and Jewish.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Wyczański, Andrzej, ed. Społeczeństwo Staropolskie: Studiai i szkice. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1993.
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  483. A collection of essays by preeminent Polish historians of the 1970s that covers various aspects of Polish society, culture, and traditions in the period between the 16th and the 18th centuries. Social stratification, economy, peasant self-help, and urbanization are some of the themes covered. First published in 1976.
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  485. The Polish Szlachta and the Magnates
  486. By the late 16th century the polish nobility (szlachta) came in all shapes and sizes, some controlling agricultural areas comparable to European states and some possessing nothing but their noble status. Some spoke Polish, others Ruthenian or Lithuanian. Some were foreigners (Germans, French, Scots, etc.) ennobled by the Polish kings for services rendered. The one attribute shared by all was their belonging to the enfranchised class of citizens, the constructors and arbiters of a society that granted to them most political rights and responsibilities. Proud electors of the monarch (since 1573), removed from the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts (since 1560s), the only legal possessors of landed estates (since 1560s), carriers of the liberum veto (since 1652), unchallenged masters of their serfs (since 1518), holders of religious liberty (since 1573), and creators and propagators of the ‘Sarmatian’ style, the szlachta and their richer cousins the magnates came to dominate all facets of social, political, and economic life, curtailing the rights and privileges of the kings with each passing generation, and eventually turning the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into what astute observers called a “Noble Republic,” which by the 18th century decayed into a decadent version of a “magnate oligarchy.” Fedorowicz, et al. 1982 traces these developments with skill and detail. Łozinski 1957 shows the most egregious and deleterious effects of the “magnate oligarchy” in the Polish borderlands. Kersten 1977, Mączak 1982, Zielinska 1977, and Olszewski 1987 support the magnate oligarchy theory, while Kamiński 1983 opposes it. Frost 1995 challenges it as well, pointing to the vast political differences between varying strata of szlachta itself.
  487. Fedorowicz, J. K., Maria Bogucka, and Henryk Samsonowiczl, eds. A Republic of Nobles: Studies in Polish History to 1864. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
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  489. A translated collection of essays specifically targeting medieval and early modern social, political, and economic developments within the noble classes of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Polish szlachta, perhaps more so than nobles in other European states, amassed in their hands the most pronounced instruments and structures of state power, thus assuming, for better or worse, a position of political, social, and religious leadership that defined their nation’s history.
  490. Find this resource:
  491. Frost, Robert I. “The Nobility of Poland-Lithuania, 1569–1795.” In The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Vol. 2, Northern, Eastern, and Central Europe. Edited by H. M. Scott, 183–222. London: Longman, 1995.
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  493. An essay survey of the Polish-Lithuanian szlachta (nobility) of the Commonwealth period. The piece stresses the very considerable social and economic differences between the various strata that made up the Polish nobility and illustrates the struggle—political and economic—within the szlachtaitself. Challenges the theory of “magnate oligarchy,” indicating that things were far more complex than that simplistic appellation.
  494. Find this resource:
  495. Kamiński, Andrzej S. “The Szlachta of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Their Government.” In The Nobility of Russia and Eastern Europe. Edited by Ivo Banac and Paul Bushkovitch, 17–45. New Haven, CT: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies, 1983.
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  497. Another essay challenging the principle of “magnate oligarchy” in Polish affairs, this study shows how poor and middling Polish szlachta (nobility) waged an eventually successful campaign to deny the magnates a predominant role in Commonwealth politics.
  498. Find this resource:
  499. Kersten, Adam. “Les magnats, élite de la société nobiliaire.” Acta Poloniae Historica 36 (1977): 119–133.
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  501. An article that follows the theory of “magnate oligarchy,” in which the great magnates of the 18th century monopolized all social and political power within the Commonwealth, thus eventually contributing to its very dissolution.
  502. Find this resource:
  503. Łozinski, Władysław. Prawem i Lewem: Obyczaje na Czerwonej Rusi w Pierwszej Polowie XVII Wieku. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1957.
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  505. Originally published in 1904. This account has, in many ways, became a classic of interpretation of the extralegal behavior of Polish and Ruthenian nobility in 17th-century Polish Ukraine. The inability of the state and law to contain the nobility’s “golden liberty” led to anarchy and handily contributed to the eventual dissolution of the Commonwealth.
  506. Find this resource:
  507. Mączak, Antoni. “The Structure of Power in the Commonwealth of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In A Republic of Nobles: Studies in Polish History to 1864. Edited by J. K. Fedorowicz, 109–134. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
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  509. Establishes the legal and social system on which Polish magnates built their political ascendancy. A representative of the theory of the “magnate oligarchy.”
  510. Find this resource:
  511. Olszewski, Henryk. “The Essence and Legal Foundation of the Magnate Oligarchy in Poland.”Acta Poloniae Historica 56 (1987): 29–49.
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  513. Analyzes the development of the legalistic structure and basis of magnate political dominance in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. An article in support of the theory of “magnate oligarchy.”
  514. Find this resource:
  515. Zielinska, Teresa. Magnateria polska epoki saskiej. Wrocław, Poland: Zakład Narodowy Imienia Ossilinskich, 1977.
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  517. Shows how, by the time of the Saxon era (1696–1768), the premier clans of the Polish magnates achieved unprecedented political and economic power within the collapsing shell of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
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  519. Cities
  520. Studies of Polish-Lithuanian urbanization suffered because of the forty-year effect of the Iron Curtain, a lack of language skills among Western historians, and a belief that the Eastern lands lacked interest because they were relatively underdeveloped and underurbanized. The fact that from the 15th century all the way until 1791 Polish city dwellers were disenfranchised by the nobility, who perceived them as an economic threat to their developing monopoly of power, did not help. And yet the cities of the Commonwealth were of considerable importance. Though never large (the largest, Gdańsk (Danzig), boasted of only thirty thousand inhabitants in the 17th century), they were commercially and culturally rooted to the Polish economy and society. In this category of urban history, the scholar Maria Bogucka has few equals. Bogucka and Samsonowicz 1986 presents a general picture of Polish urbanization. Bogucka 2003 discusses the relationship between the Baltic trade and the city of Gdańsk (Danzig). Bogucka 1996 follows Warsaw’s history from a provincial town to the capital of a nation. Engel, et al. 1995 discusses Warsaw and Kraków. Carter 1994 talks about the economic geography of Cracow (Kraków), while Dmitrieva and Lambrecht 2000 look at Kraków in the context of other central European capitals, an approach followed by Friederich 2000and, in a more generalized way, Miller 2008.
  521. Bogucka, Maria. “Between Capital, Residential Town, and Metropolis: The Development of Warsaw in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries.” In Capital Cities and their Hinterlands in Early Modern Europe. Edited by P. Clark and B. Lepetit, 197–210. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1996.
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  523. Discusses the role of Warsaw in Polish urbanizing trends. The current Polish capital became a part of the Polish state in 1526. At first a minor provincial town, the importance of the city rested on its geographic location and its links with Gdańsk and Kraków, but its future as an 18th-century metropolis was only assured after the relocation of the royal Sejm and court.
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  525. Bogucka, Maria. Baltic Commerce and Urban Society, 1500–1700. Burlington, VT, and Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003.
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  527. Shows the importance the great commercial port city of Gdańsk (Danzig) had in both the promotion of trade and the dissemination of culture. The city, the nexus point for most trade originating from the Baltic region, also acted as a cultural magnet and helped to spread Western ideas and practices into the Prussian and Polish hinterlands.
  528. Find this resource:
  529. Bogucka, Maria, and Henryk Samsonowicz. Dzieje miast i mieszczaństwa w Polsce przedrozbiorowej. Wrocław, Poland: Zakład Narodowy Imienia Ossolińskich, 1986.
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  531. An analytical and statistical study of pre-partition polish urbanization. The authors conceptualize urban centers into categories that depend on the city’s international, national, regional, and local political, cultural, and trade importance, and then conduct a survey of the early modern Polish urban environment.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. Carter, F. W. Trade and Urban Development in Poland: The Economic Geography of Cracow, from Its Origins to 1795. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
  534. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511522222Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  535. This monograph on Kraków’s historical geography analyzes the city’s spatial effects of trade networks through time. Kraków’s early growth and importance stemmed from a significant geographical advantage as a city situated along the Vistula’s waterways on an intersection of east-west and north-south trade routes, but decline ensued, however, once alternate European trade routes became necessary with the opening of the Atlantic trade following the voyages of discovery.
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  537. Dmitrieva Marina, and Karen Lambrecht, eds. Krakau, Prag und Wien—Funktionen von Metropolen in frühmodernen Staat. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000.
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  539. Analytical and comparative, the essays in this volume focus on the role of the east-central European metropolis as more a center of cultural diffusion and economic exchange than a “motor for modernization.”
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Engel, Evamaria, Karen Lambrecht, and Hanna Nogossek, eds. Metropolen im Wandel: Zentralitaet in Ostmitteleuropa an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1995.
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  543. A series of essays covering the important mechanisms of change that propelled major east-central European cities from their medieval roots to early modern functions. Polish cities such as Warsaw and Kraków form an integral element of the discussions.
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  545. Friederich, Karin. “Cives Cracoviae: Bürgertum in frühneuzeitlichen Krakau zwischen stadtpatriotismus und nationaler Pluralität.” In Krakau, Prag und Wien—Funktionen von Metropolen imfrühmodernen Staat. Edited by M. Dmitrieva and K. Lambrecht, : 143–162. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000.
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  547. This article, a part of a larger effort covering not only Kraków but also Vienna and Prague, aims at presenting the ancient Polish capital as a major trade and production hub, and a magnet for immigration well into the 16th century, that integrated a multiethnic community into a productive economic role.
  548. Find this resource:
  549. Miller, Jaroslav. Urban Societies in East-Central Europe, 1500–1700. Burlington, VT, and Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.
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  551. Drawing on new research, this book takes a longue durée, transnational look at developments in urbanizing tendencies of east-central European states (Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland-Lithuania) that transformed primarily medieval communities into early modern cities. Economic conditions, effects of migration, politics and religious policies, and state-building are duly analyzed and presented in a pan-European context.
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  553. Peasants
  554. Much has been written about the plight of the Polish peasant under the burdens imposed by the Noble Republic and the “magnate oligarchy.” The golden age of such discourse was, of course, during the period of the People’s Republic of Poland, where the plight of the peasant could serve the didactic purpose of illuminating Marxist principles of class struggle and the evils of capitalistic exploitation. Though heavily slanted toward Marxist theory, these works often represent high-quality historical research. Newer, post-1989 accounts tend to see the peasants as something more than just victims. Instead, they are seen as actors in their own right, capable of negotiating their position vis-à-vis the church and the manor. Inglot 1970 and Tymienicki 1969 is a straightforward history of the Polish peasant, with large sections of the work concerned with the issues of refeudalization.Baranowski 1953 and Śreniowski 1955 offer a vision of cruelest submission and peasant helplessness. Rutkowski 1956 and Wyczański 1969 offer deep and meaningful presentations of the Polish village from a variety of perspectives. Ślusarska 1998 paints a more complete picture of peasants negotiating their social role, while Roczniak 2004 highlights one of the methods of resistance peasants utilized in their struggles in defense of their disappearing rights.
  555. Baranowski, Bohdan. Położenie chłopów u schyłku Rzeczypospolitej Szlacheckiej: Wybór tekstów źródłowych. Warsaw, Poland: Książka i Wiedza, 1953.
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  557. Using a slew of documentary evidence, Baranowski—a well-known historian of peasantry, folk culture, and beliefs during the communist era—presents a very negative picture of the position of exploited peasantry in the Noble Commonwealth, which was quickly tilting toward dissolution.
  558. Find this resource:
  559. Inglot, Stefan. Historia Chlopow polskich. Vol. 1, Do upadku Rzeczypospolitej Szlacheckiej. Warsaw, Poland: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1970.
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  561. A massive communist-era production that analyses Old-Polish peasantry from a variety of perspectives, with economics taking center stage. The work is very detailed on village life and culture, the social and class distinctions among peasantry itself, and its relationship (read class struggle) with the manor.
  562. Find this resource:
  563. Roczniak, Władysław. “The Polish Gromada Peasant Collectives in the Era of Re-Feudalization.” Polish Review 49.4 (2004): 1083–1102.
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  565. An analysis of modes of self-help and resistance available to Polish peasants in the era of second serfdom (15th to the 18th centuries) that revolved around the traditional features of the Gromadavillage collectives. The article presents the case that the Polish peasants were not as helpless as they are usually portrayed in relation to the ever-increasing demands of the manor, and possessed successful strategies of self-defense.
  566. Find this resource:
  567. Rutkowski, Jan. Studia z dziejów wsi polskiej XVI–XVIII w. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1956.
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  569. A well-sourced account covering the major social and economic developments that impacted the Polish village between the 16th and the 18th centuries. Much is said on the loss of peasant rights, the development of subinfeudation, and the switch to manorial agriculture. Of importance also are the chapters dealing with folk and peasant culture.
  570. Find this resource:
  571. Ślusarska, Magdalena, ed. Dwór, plebania, rodzina chłopska: Szkice z dziejów wsi polskiej XVII i XVIII wieku. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 1998.
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  573. A series of essays, written by historians, art historians, philologists, sociologists, and philosophers, attempting to revise the image of the early modern Polish village as a place of ignorance, superstition, drunkenness, backwardness, and helplessness. The authors portray the Polish peasants as active members of the village community, as thinking and rational subjects capable of comprehending their deteriorating situation, and equally capable of negotiations between themselves, the church, and the manor house.
  574. Find this resource:
  575. Śreniowski, Stanisław. Kwestia chłopska w Polsce XVII wieku, szkice. Warsaw, Poland: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1955.
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  577. A standard communist-era production emphasizing the class warfare matrix and the abuses of the nobility. Still, as with other offerings of its kind, this one is built on solid textual and documentary research.
  578. Find this resource:
  579. Tymienicki, Kazimierz. Historia chłopów polskich. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1969.
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  581. A general communist-era history of the Polish peasants. Chapters of interest for the Renaissance-period scholar include essays on peasant culture and organization, the developments of secondary serfdom and the manorial economy, and the erosion of peasant rights.
  582. Find this resource:
  583. Wyczański, Andrzej. Wieś polskiego odrodzenia. Warsaw, Poland: Książka i Wiedza 1969.
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  585. An encyclopedic scholarly introduction to all matters relating to the village of the Polish Renaissance period (15th–16th centuries), written by one of Poland’s preeminent social historians. Though permeated throughout by Marxist systemic structure, the work is well based in primary sources and presents a balanced vision of a milieu at the intersection of social and economic developments. Available in Polish online.
  586. Find this resource:
  587. On the Margins: Women, the Poor, and Criminals
  588. The role of women, the poor, and criminals in Polish society has long been debated. Even in the 19th century, Polish authors of Romanticism pointed to the purported better treatment of Polish women than those in other European states, while even earlier, European visitors called Poland-Lithuania an “Amazon society,” not only for its exoticism but also for the high role it afforded its women. Two princesses were legally declared “kings” of Poland (Jadwiga and Anna Jagiellon), while the archetype of a hic-mulier—or a woman with manly qualities—proliferated through the eastern borderlands. The question of the role and identity of the Old Polish woman and how the theory differed from reality was already taken up by Kutrzeba 1908. Bogucka 1998 and Charewiczowa 2002take the traditional theory to task and offer modern reappraisals. As to the question of others on society’s margins, the poor and criminals have their own historiography. The criminals, often portrayed as those not tied by legal bonds to others—ludzie luźni, or unattached people—were constantly a source of social fear and concern, as shown by Baranowski 1986, Grodziski 1961, andGeremek 1989. The Polish approach to poverty, on the other hand, changed over time. At first seen as holy poor with a particular role to play within the Christian society, the paupers eventually became, like criminals, a source of fear and trepidation with the coming of the Reformation.Geremek 1994 sees this as a general European trend that would eventually lead to the secularization of charitable services, beginning in the 16th century, while Karpiński 2009 analyzes the matter from a general Polish perspective.
  589. Baranowski, Bohdan. Ludzie gościńca w XVII-XVIII w. Lódź, Poland: Wydawnictwo Lódzkie, 1986.
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  591. Discusses the ludzie luźni, or “unattached people,” who did not fit any power structure within the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and thus lived on the margins of the established social order. Talks about vagabondage, marginality, and crime.
  592. Find this resource:
  593. Bogucka, Maria. Białogłowa w dawnej polsce: Kobieta w społeczeństwie polskim xvi-xviii wieku na tle porównawczym. Warsaw, Poland: Trio, 1998.
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  595. The theses that Polish women of the early modern period were generally more independent or emancipated than their Western counterparts (a theory with roots in the Romantic period) is put to the test by this thorough analysis of the role and place of women in Old Polish society.
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  597. Charewiczowa, Łucja. Kobieta w dawnej Polsce: Do okresu Rozbiorów. Poznań, Poland: Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciól Nauk, 2002.
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  599. A modern scholarly synthesis on the role, meaning, responsibilities, and representations of women in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
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  601. Geremek, Bronisław. Świat “Opery Żebraczej”: Obraz Włóczęgów i nędzarzy w literaturach europejskich XV–XVII wieku. Warsaw, Poland: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1989.
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  603. Geremek’s volume brings to life a mixed picture of fear, fascination, and repulsion inundating contemporary literary accounts of the marginal classes: the poor and the vagabonds. Examples used cover both Western and Eastern Europe.
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  605. Geremek, Bronisław. Poverty: A History. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
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  607. Ranging from Western to Eastern Europe, and mostly centered on the 15th and 16th centuries, this account of the formation of the modern concept of poverty out of the breakup and disintegration of medieval society traces the definition of poverty from something often holy and accepted to something decisively not.
  608. Find this resource:
  609. Grodziski, Stanisław. Ludzie luźni: Studium z historii państwa i prawa polskiego. Kraków: Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, 1961.
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  611. A discourse on Polish legal systems designed to deal with the phenomenon of the “unattached people,” or ludzie luźni, a term describing all those who did not fit into any existing and accepted power structure during the period of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
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  613. Karpiński, Andrzej, ed. Społeczeństwo staropolskie. Vol. 2, Społeczeństwo a przestępczość. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2009.
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  615. A major attempt at a synthesis of research delving into the nature, structure, and definitions of criminality among Polish peasants, burgers, and nobility at the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
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  617. Kutrzeba, Stanisław. Ideał i życie kobiety w polsce wieków średnich. Warsaw, Poland: Ateneum Polskie, 1908.
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  619. A major work of pre–World War II Polish historiography on the role and representation of women in Old Polish society that goes well into the Jagiellon period. This work is well known for supporting the theses that medieval and early modern Polish women were much more free and independent than their Western counterparts.
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  621. Culture, Art, and Literature
  622. Lacking natural frontiers, and geographically stuck between the East and West, Poland-Lithuania developed a particular cultural identity that betrayed affinities with all surrounding lands. Western, Christian culture dominated the Crown lands and seeped into the eastern regions, interacting with but never fully replacing the Orthodox traditions of the borderlands. The Renaissance, baroque, and the Enlightenment were all felt in Poland and transmitted further east, and a number of important European intellectual traditions originated in the Polish orbit (Copernicus and heliocentrism, for instance). All this created a particular sense of culture, art, and literature that often frustrated attempts at definition—a mix of Eastern and Western tropes led the culture to be called “Sarmatian” by its leading, noble proponents, but the character of this “culture” shifted considerably as one traveled lower on the social class ladder. Art and literature too became highly evolved and were accompanied by a myriad of folk traditions and customs. Poland-Lithuania formed a lively cultural milieu, and it acted both as an exporter and importer of social and cultural norms. A general account of Old Polish (pre-partition) culture is provided by Barycz and Hulewicz 1949. Tazbir 1986concentrates on the noble culture of the age of baroque, while Fabre 1952 does the same for the Enlightenment. Krzyżanowski 1978 and Miłosz 1983 serve as excellent introductions to Polish literature in general, while Mikoś 1996 focuses on the literature of the baroque and the Enlightenment. Knab 1999 is a general, popular account of Polish traditions and folk customs, whileRuszczycówna 1977 talks of Old Polish portraiture.
  623. Barycz, Henryk, and Jan Hulewicz, eds. Studia z dziejów kultury polskiej. Warsaw, Poland: Gebethner and Wolff, 1949.
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  625. An early post–World War II book that characterizes Polish culture according to the time period under discussion. Chapters on laws, the Sarmatian culture of the szlachta, and religious, political, and economic developments.
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  627. Fabre, Jean. M. Stanislaus-Auguste Poniatowski et l’Europe des lumières. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1952.
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  629. A work that places the Polish Enlightenment of the Poniatowski era squarely within the context and traditions of the general European movement. Second edition published 1984 (Paris: Éditions Ophrys).
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  631. Knab, Sophie H. Polish Customs, Traditions, and Folklore. Rev. ed. New York: Hippocrene, 1999.
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  633. Though not a scholarly work at all, this helpful volume, arranged by days and months, is a treasure trove of Polish customs and behavior and forms a wonderful introduction to Polish culture through time. Included are folk and high cultural traditions built around calendar events; birth, death, and marriage; and food.
  634. Find this resource:
  635. Krzyżanowski, Julian. A History of Polish Literature. Warsaw, Poland: PWN-Polish Scientific Publishers, 1978.
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  637. An analysis of Polish literature by an acclaimed Polish literary critic of the interwar period. Though the scope of this treatise covers the entire journey from the beginnings of Polish literature all the way to World War II, several chapters deal specifically with literature of the humanists and works produced during the baroque and Enlightenment era of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. There is also a chapter on Polish literature in English translation.
  638. Find this resource:
  639. Mikoś, Michael J. Polish Baroque and Enlightenment Literature: An Anthology. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1996.
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  641. A good source for the major Polish literary productions of the Commonwealth era. The treatise covers tracts of all scope, including political, artistic, and religious; personal memoirs; and mirror literature.
  642. Find this resource:
  643. Miłosz, Czesław. The History of Polish Literature. 2d ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
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  645. Before 1989 this encyclopedic work by the Nobel Prize–winning poet seemed to have been the only major study of Polish literature, from its beginnings to modernity, in English. The work covers multiple genres and many areas, and takes the reader from the medieval beginnings of Polish literature, through its Renaissance and Enlightenment flowering, and into its 19th- and early-20th-century highlight.
  646. Find this resource:
  647. Ruszczycówna, Janina. Portret polski XVII i XVIII wieku: Katalog wystawy, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, kwiecień-maj 1977. Warsaw, Poland: Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, 1977.
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  649. This work serves as a catalogue of an exhibition at the National Museum in Warsaw that featured the best examples of Polish portrait painting of the early modern period.
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  651. Tazbir, Janusz. La république nobilaire et le monde: Etudes sur l’histoire de la culture polonaise à l’époque du baroque. Warsaw, Poland: Polska Akademia Nauk, 1986.
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  653. A major volume on cultural history of Poland-Lithuania that concentrates on “Sarmatism,” or the Sarmatian culture of the Polish ruling nobility (szlachta), from the 16th to the 18th century. Both positive (constructive) and negative (destructive) aspects of the cultural identity are discussed, with the destructive elements generally taking central stage the more the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth descended toward its late 18th-century collapse.
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  655. Humanism and the Renaissance
  656. The 16th century—the age of humanism and the Renaissance—was the golden age of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Though many of the cultural norms and ideas of the Renaissance were acquired from the West, and mostly straight from Italy, enough tracts of political, social, and religious nature were born of a native pen to guarantee to Poland an established part of the Renaissance tradition. In the world of European cultural exchange, the Commonwealth often acted as a magnet for foreign luminaries, while Polish and Lithuanian writers traveled far and wide, and the printing presses of foreign capitals often reproduced Polish materials. In the process, several Commonwealth humanists acquired international fame: Wawrzyniec Grzymała Goślicki (Laurentius Grimalius Goslicius), the author of De optimo senatore, is discussed by Bałuk-Ulewiczowa 2009 andStępkowski 2009; the great Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski (Andreas Fricius Modrevius) of De republica emendanda fame is tackled by Bieńkowski 1974 and Twardowski 1921; while the Jesuit Krzysztof Warszewicki (Varsevicius), author of De optimo statu libertatis, is the subject of Ferring 1960. Barycz 1938 shows the connections between Polish humanists and their Italian studies, and Korolko 1991looks at the royal chancery of Sigismund Augustus (Zygmunt August) as a focal point of Polish humanistic production. Finally, Fiszman 1988 is a general English-language overview of the totality of the Polish Renaissance in its European context.
  657. Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Teresa. Goslicius’ Ideal Senator and His Cultural Impact over the Centuries: Shakespearean Reflections. Kraków: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 2009.
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  659. A masterful analysis of the Polish humanist Wawrzyniec Grzymała Goślicki’s magnum opus, De optimo senatorore, including its history, reception (both Polish and European, especially English), and its connection with developing notions of popular democracy as well as with Shakespeare’sHamlet.
  660. Find this resource:
  661. Barycz, Henryk. Polacy na studiach w Rzymie w epoce Odrodzenia (1440–1600). Kraków: Nakładem Polskiej Akademii Umiejetności, 1938.
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  663. An old, but still useful, monograph that shows the connection between individual Polish students in Renaissance Italy and their later literary, social, and political contributions in Poland-Lithuania. This work, like many others, establishes a clear connection between Italian precedent and later Polish Renaissance development.
  664. Find this resource:
  665. Bieńkowski, Tadeusz. Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski i problemy kultury polskiego odrodzenia: Oraca Zbiorowa. Wrocław, Poland: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1974.
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  667. A general account of the place and importance of Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski (b. 1503–d. 1572) and his voluminous production in the context of Polish Renaissance studies.
  668. Find this resource:
  669. Ferring, Robert L. “Christopher Varsevicius, Polish Renaissance Diplomat, Statesman, and Political Writer.” Polish Review 5.2 (1960).
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  671. Describing the political, literary, and social importance of a major Polish humanist of the 16th century, Krzysztof Warszewicki (b. 1543–d. 1603).
  672. Find this resource:
  673. Fiszman, Samuel, ed. The Polish Renaissance in its European Context. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
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  675. A synthetic work attempting to posit the role the Polish Renaissance played in the larger European context. Shows both the similarities of the movement with its Italian and Northern namesakes and the politically and socially driven differences.
  676. Find this resource:
  677. Korolko, Mirosław. Seminarium Rzeczypospolitej Królestwa Polskiego: Humaniści w kancelarii królewskiej Zygmunta Augusta. Warsaw, Poland: Wiedza Powszechna, 1991.
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  679. A well-researched catalogue of major and minor humanists serving at the court of the last Jagiellon king of Poland. Like his father—Sigismund the Old—Sigismund II Augustus was well known for his promotion of the Renaissance culture in his native country. His reign witnessed the production of some of the best-known humanistic and polemical tracts of the Polish Renaissance period.
  680. Find this resource:
  681. Stępkowski, Aleksander, ed. O senatorze doskonalym studia: Prace upamiętniające postać i twórczość Wawrzyńca Goślickiego. Warsaw, Poland: Kancelaria Senatu, 2009.
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  683. A series of essays (with English-language summaries) analyzing De optimo senatore—the classic work of Polish Renaissance humanism by Wawrzyniec Goślicki (Laurentius Goslicius)—from the perspective of its political message supporting a mixed-type constitution, and the work’s reception in contemporary and modern times.
  684. Find this resource:
  685. Twardowski, Jan. Jan Ludwik Vives i Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski. Kraków: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 1921.
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  687. One of the first major productions on the interdependence of Polish and European humanism showing the connections in the works of Juan Luis Vives (b. 1493–d. 1540) and his Polish contemporary, the humanist Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski (Andreas Fricius Modrevius, b. 1503–d. 1572).
  688. Find this resource:
  689. Religion
  690. In the minds of most, the Poland of today is seen as one of the most staunchly Catholic countries around. That was not the case during its existence as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where, until the 18th century, Catholicism was hardly the faith of the majority, and where the religion of Rome had to share space with Orthodox, Jewish, and Hussite beliefs prior to the Reformation, and with various Protestant sects afterward. There were even small settlements of Muslims living around the Vilna and Troki areas in the Grand Duchy, representative of Tatar warriors employed by the Crown. This religious heterodoxy prepared the Commonwealth well for the coming religious storm once Martin Luther nailed his dissent to the church doors at Wittenberg. General accounts of Christianity in Poland include Kłoczowski, et al. 1986 and Kłoczowski 2000. Polish religious toleration is ably discussed in Tazbir 1973 and Wilson 2002. Korolko and Tazbir 1980 looks at the most prominent document of religious freedom in Poland, the Warsaw Confederation of 1573.Halecki 1958 looks at Polish attempts to bring about a reconciliation between Eastern and Western Christianities, a process that eventually led to the Union of Brest (Unia Brzeska) of 1596, analyzed by Gudziak 1998 and Dmitr’ev, et al. 1996, and the creation of a Uniate Church with Orthodox rites but answerable to the pope.
  691. Dmitr’ev, M. B., B. N. Floriia, and S. G. Iakovenko. Brestskaia uniia 1596 g. i obshchestvenno-politicheskaia Bor’ba na Ukraine i Byelorussii v kontse xvi–xvii. Vol. 1, Brestskaia Uniia: Istoricheskie prichiny. Moscow, Indirik. 1996.
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  693. A Russian-language history surrounding the Union of Brześć (Brest) of 1596 that formed the Uniate Church (Orthodox in rituals and liturgy but subordinated to the pope). The complicated negotiations for the creation of the Uniate Church stemmed from the cultural and educational preponderance of Poland in the mostly Orthodox lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
  694. Find this resource:
  695. Gudziak, Borys A. Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1998.
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  697. A detailed account of the intricate political and religious maneuverings that led to the formation of the Uniate Church in 1596. The study shows how Polish Catholic influence in the Ruthenian lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania created a grassroots reformist reaction—supported by the Patriarch of Constantinople but opposed by the Orthodox hierarchy—that led to that hierarchy’s acceptance of a union with Rome.
  698. Find this resource:
  699. Halecki, Oscar. From Florence to Brest (1439–1596). New York: Fordham University Press, 1958.
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  701. Traces the continuity of the ideological program for the reunion of Eastern and Western churches from the Council of Ferrara-Florence to the Union of Brest, mostly from the perspective of the Polish-Lithuanian state and the influences the eventual union had on the Commonwealth’s religiously mixed polity.
  702. Find this resource:
  703. Kłoczowski, Jerzy. A History of Polish Christianity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  705. An English translation of a salient Polish-language tome, this history of the Catholic Church in Poland follows religious (and political) developments from the Conversion of Poland in 966 to the postcommunist postscript after 1989. Kłoczowski, an expert in the field, analyzes the impact Catholicism had on the development of Polish culture and society.
  706. Find this resource:
  707. Kłoczowski, Jerzy, Lidia Müllerowa, and Jan Skarbek. Zarys Dziejów Kościoła Katolickiego w Polsce. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1986.
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  709. A magisterial synthesis of the history of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland from 966 (the date of Poland’s conversion) to the modern era. The book discusses the beginnings, spread, and acceptance of Roman Catholicism in Poland, the church’s relationship with the established social orders (some of which it helped to shape), and the salient developmental moments from the church’s Polish history.
  710. Find this resource:
  711. Korolko, Mirosław, and Jan Tazbir. Konfederacja warszawska 1573 roku. Wielka Karta polskiej tolerancji. Warsaw, Poland: Instytut Wydawniczy PAX, 1980.
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  713. A discourse about the diplomacy and events surrounding the promulgation of the famous Confederation of Warsaw—the most clear-cut and basic article of Polish religious toleration.
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  715. Tazbir, Janusz. A State without Stakes: Polish Religious Toleration in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York: Kosciuszko Foundation, 1973.
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  717. Shows that the intermarriage of state policies (opposition to the territorial encroachment of the Catholic Teutonic Knights, for instance) and social realities (e.g., the presence of vast numbers of Orthodox subjects) was instrumental in the shaping of a particularly European brand of religious pluralism and toleration in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 16th century.
  718. Find this resource:
  719. Wilson, Kate. “The Politics of Toleration among the Szlachta of Great Poland: Rafał Leszczyński (1569–1636) and Kszysztof Opaliński (1609–1655).” Slovo 14 (2002).
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  721. Discusses the well-developed policies of religious toleration proposed and implemented by two high-ranking 17th-century Commonwealth functionaries (and political rivals), the Starost of Hrubieszów, Count Rafał Leszczyński, and the Voivode of Poznan and writer of satirical poems, Kszysztof Opaliński.
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  723. Reformation and Counter-Reformation
  724. Unlike the rest of Europe, where blood spilled in the name of a particular view of Christianity soiled and stained many a countryside, Poland remained remarkably free of religious violence. It was instead a “state without stakes,” in Janusz Tazbir’s famous words, where freedom of conscience of the enfranchised classes was even legally guaranteed by the 1573 Confederation of Warsaw, and where the whole Protestant-Catholic conflict, to use Adam Zamoyski’s formulation, “never grew into anything more dangerous in Poland than a squabble over seating arrangements at a family wedding.” In the second half of the 17th century, things began to change, however, as the advance of Orthodox Russia and Protestant Prussia and Sweden, combined with the triumph of the Counter-Reformation, began a process that turned ethnic Poles more and more toward Catholicism and intolerance. It was no accident that the first religious expulsions from Poland occurred in the 1650s. It is this question of tolerance and intolerance that is discussed in Grell and Scribner 1996. Maag 1997 offers a general account of the Reformation in a European setting, including Poland. Łubienicki 1995 is a more modern account. Schramm 1965 offers an answer as to why the Reformation failed in Poland. Tazbir 1978 gives an account of one of the most important warriors of the Counter-Reformation movement in Poland, the Jesuit Piotr Skarga, the court chaplain and confessor to Sigismund III Vaza. Teter 2006 challenges the notion that the Counter-Reformation’s victory was complete, however. Hein 1974 looks to the importance of Italian nationals in the propagation and development of Protestant ideology in Poland. Klassen 2009 examines Polish Mennonite communities.
  725. Grell, Ole Peter, and Bob Scribner, eds. Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  726. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511523328Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  727. A multiessay volume that speaks to local as well as institutionalized examples of toleration and intolerance in the European lands gripped by the Protestant Reformation. The essay on Poland-Lithuania, with an analysis of the Protestant confessionalization of Royal Prussia, bespeaks the generally irenic nature of Polish religious changes and the prevalence of institutionalized toleration.
  728. Find this resource:
  729. Hein, Lorenz. Italienische Protestanten und ihr Einfluss auf die Reformation in Polen wahrend der beiden Jahrzehnte vor dem Sandomirer Konsens (1570). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1974.
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  731. An attempt to explain the reasons for the failure of the Protestant camp in Poland-Lithuania, made up of Lutherans, Calvinists, and Antitrinitarians—and concentrating especially on the Italian dissidents such as Francesco Lismanini (the former confessor to Queen Bona Sworza of Poland) and Francesco Stancaro—to formally unite themselves in the face of renewed Catholic vitality.
  732. Find this resource:
  733. Klassen, Peter J. Mennonites in Early Modern Poland and Prussia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
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  735. Concentrates on the Mennonite community and its experiences in Poland and Royal Prussia during the European wars of religion. By looking on this “haven in troubled times” within Europe, Klassen discusses the autonomous developments within the Anabaptist community that were made possible by the unprecedented religious toleration of the 16th- and early-17th-century Polish state.
  736. Find this resource:
  737. Łubienicki, Stanisław. History of the Polish Reformation. Translated by George Huntston Williams. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.
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  739. A new translation and edition of Łubienicki’s Historia Reformationis Polonicae, originally published in Amsterdam in 1685. It sheds much light on the progression (and limits) of the Polish Reformation as seen by its eyewitnesses.
  740. Find this resource:
  741. Maag, Karin ed. The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe. Brookfield, VT.: Ashgate, 1997.
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  743. An examination of the disparate paths taken by the Reformation movement in central and Eastern Europe that includes an analysis of its eventual failure in Poland-Lithuania as well as its more lasting successes in the Polish-dominated southern littoral of the Baltic Sea.
  744. Find this resource:
  745. Schramm, Gottfried. Der Polnische Adel und die Reformation, 1548–1607. Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1965.
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  747. A classic discussion of the reasons for the failure of the Reformation in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The presentation points to the inability of the Protestant camp to make common cause with Polish nobility which, in effect, ruined the movement’s prospects. The Polish nobles, having already achieved economic and political ascendency, had no need to call on a religious justification for their independence.
  748. Find this resource:
  749. Tazbir, Janusz. Piotr Skarga, szermierz kontrreformacji. Warsaw, Poland: Wiedza Powszechna, 1978.
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  751. Discusses the influence of the Jesuit Piotr Skarga (b. 1536–d. 1612)—the court preacher to King Sigismund II Vaza (Zygmunt III Waza) and the author of Lives of Saints (1579) and the Diet Sermons(1597) jeremiads, and one of the chief architects of the religious Union of Brześć (Union of Brest, 1596)—and posits him as the most important intellectual representative of the Counter-Reformation in Poland.
  752. Find this resource:
  753. Teter, Magda. Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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  755. Offers the tantalizing theory of the Catholic Church’s incomplete victory over competing religiosities in the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The author stresses that at no point in Polish-Lithuanian history was Catholicism the religion of the majority of citizens, and that the church’s unfinished business, so to speak, at constructing a unified Catholic Christian body politic in Poland affected its relationship with both dissenters and with the Jews.
  756. Find this resource:
  757. The Jews and Armenians of Poland-Lithuania
  758. There are few more controversial topics than the history of Polish-Jewish relations, considering these two groups lived together as neighbors throughout the lifespan of Poland-Lithuania. Luckily, these relations have been rather well documented, and recent scholarly productions on Jewish life in Poland-Lithuania (which is currently enjoying a sort of a Renaissance in post-1989 Poland) have transcended and quieted some of the earlier vocal recriminations. The Armenians of Poland-Lithuania, on the other hand, have been an almost forgotten minority whose economic importance as merchants (a role they shared with Jews) is finally being recognized in a new slew of historical works. General works on the Jewish experience in Poland-Lithuania are readily available. They include Baron 1976, Hundert 2004, and Polonsky, et al. 1993. Hundert 1992, Rosman 1990, andKaźmierczyk 2002 follow the relationship between the Jews and the Polish magnates. Stopka 2000is a modern work commemorating the Polish-Armenian community, while Tryjarski 2001 deals with the Armenian experience in Warsaw.
  759. Baron, Salo Wittmayer. A Social and Religious History of the Jews. Vol. 16, Late Middle Ages and Era of European Expansion (1200–1650): Poland-Lithuania 1500–1650. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.
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  761. A major work on Polish-Jewish relations at the height of the Commonwealth period. Paints a detailed picture of Jewish life and Jewish organizations at a time of relative prosperity and stability, as the Jews belonged to a well-known, established, and recognized corporate stratum of Commonwealth society, with their own privileges and limitations.
  762. Find this resource:
  763. Hundert, Gershon. The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatów in the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
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  765. A microhistorical analysis of the Jewish community and its institutions in the middling (four thousand inhabitants) Commonwealth town of Opatów in the 18th century. As a private town belonging to Polish nobles, Opatów was particularly attractive to Jews, a segment of the Commonwealth population that contributed nearly half of its city-dwellers. The lords of Opatów extended considerable institutional autonomy and economic freedoms to the Jewish community, though such freedoms often came at a price of noble interference in communal affairs.
  766. Find this resource:
  767. Hundert, Gershon David. Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
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  769. A synthetic work presenting the main features of the Jewish community’s experience in Poland-Lithuania of the 18th century. The work concentrates on tracing the very well developed aspects of Jewish institutional structures and the community’s response to the germs of secularization and the formation of national-consciousness.
  770. Find this resource:
  771. Kaźmierczyk, Adam. Żydzi w dobrach prywatnych w swietle sądowniczej i administracyjnej praktyki dóbr magnackich w wiekach XVI–XVIII. Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2002.
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  773. An in-depth analysis, based on court documents and exhaustive research in private family archives, of the often complicated social and economic relationship between Polish Jews and their overlords and protectors, the Polish magnates in the Commonwealth period.
  774. Find this resource:
  775. Polonsky, Antony, Jacub Basista, and Andrzej Link-Lenczkowski, eds. The Jews in Old Poland 1000–1795. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1993.
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  777. A collection of high-quality essays from Jewish, Polish, Polish-Jewish, American, and Canadian scholars that covers the social, institutional, cultural, economic, and religious history of Polish Jews, with a heavy stress on the Commonwealth period (1569–1795). The importance of the collection lies in its interpretations of Jewish life in pre-partition Poland, based on Polish sources previously unavailable to Anglophone scholarship.
  778. Find this resource:
  779. Rosman, M. J. The Lords Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
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  781. From a PhD thesis, based on case studies from the Sieniawski and Czartoryski estates, arguing that the success of the Jewish community in prepartition Poland-Lithuania—a success that revolved around the establishment of a virtual self-governing autonomy that also included far-reaching economic rights and privileges—depended on the active protection given the Jewish community by the Polish magnate class.
  782. Find this resource:
  783. Stopka, Krzysztof. Ormianie w Polsce Dawnej i Dzisiejszej. Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2000.
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  785. The history of the Polish Armenians writ large. Stopka’s book serves as a reintroduction to the centuries-old history of the Armenian community in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and to its modern survivals.
  786. Find this resource:
  787. Tryjarski, Edward. Ormianie w Warszawie: Materjaly do dziejów. Kraków: Ormianskie Towarzystwo Kulturalne, 2001.
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  789. A work tracing the history of Armenian cultural and economic presence in the Polish capital. The work utilizes a number of primary sources that can be a gold mine for modern ethnographic research about the still inadequately researched Armenian community in Old (prepartition) Poland.
  790. Find this resource:
  791. Lithuania and Royal Prussia
  792. The history of Lithuania, from the time of the Union of Lublin (1569), and sometimes even from the marriage of Jogailla to Jadwiga (1386), has often been subsumed within Polish-Lithuanian, or simply Polish, history. While modern Poland does claim to be the successor state to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of old, and to its cultural and political heritage, the newly independent Lithuania lays no such claims, mostly seeing its history as an independent entity end in 1569, if not even earlier. This situation has left very few historical discourses analyzing Lithuania proper during its existence as a partner with Poland, although recent Lithuanian historiographical production is fast mobilizing to fill that gap. The case of Royal Prussia, on the other hand, presents an opposite trend: for too long has Royal Prussia been treated by Western (mostly German) historiography as part and parcel of the German Baltic tradition, with no reference to its Polish experience. Incorporated into Poland by the Treaty of Thorn (Toruń 1466) that ended the Thirteen Years’ War with the Teutonic Knights, Royal Prussia remained a Polish land until the end of the 18th century. Again, some recent accounts are beginning to offer a more balanced interpretation, though the German-only theory still holds sway. Mickūnaitė 2006 builds up Grand Duke Vytautas as a great Lithuanian leader committed to Lithuania’s own road away from Poland. Rachuba, et al. 2009 provides a fascinating new standard of having chief events in Lithuania’s history analyzed by a tandem of historians, one Polish and one Lithuanian. Koch 1978 is an old-style German account, placing Royal Prussia clearly in the German cultural and social orbit. Opgenoorth 1994 and Hackmann 1996 are more recent German productions attempting to incorporate some historical balance into Prussia’s history. Serczyk and Tomczak 1989 provide a valuable historiography of the most prominent currents in Prussian research, while Friederich 2000 makes the Polish case for Royal Prussia. Finally, Van Horn 1990challenges the view of Marxist historians, East and West, that Polish overlordship, and especially the Polish landed gentry, economically destroyed the Royal Prussian cities.
  793. Friederich, Karin. The Other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland, and Liberty, 1569–1772. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  794. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511470646Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  795. A serious scholarly work that attempts to reverse centuries of Germanization of Prussian history by restoring to full historical light the complex, urban, and cosmopolitan nature of Royal Prussia as an integral territory of both the Polish Kingdom (1454–1559) and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1793).
  796. Find this resource:
  797. Hackmann, Jörg. Ostpreußen und Westpreußen in deutscher und polnischer Sicht: Landeshistorie als beziehungsgeschichtliches Problem. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1996.
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  799. An analysis of historiographic portrayal of Royal and Ducal Prussia from both the Polish and the German perspective.
  800. Find this resource:
  801. Koch, Hans W. A History of Prussia. London: Longman, 1978.
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  803. An English-language account legitimizing the “Borussian” school of Prussian historiography that minimalizes or entirely ignores the Polish aspects of Royal Prussia and traces an uninterrupted line of ideological and political progression from the Teutonic Knights through The Great Elector, Frederick the Great, to German unification and the Wilhelmine Empire.
  804. Find this resource:
  805. Mickūnaitė, Giedre. Making a Great Ruler: Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006.
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  807. A monograph on self-formation and self-representation of Grand Duke Vitautas (Witold) of Lithuania (b. c. 1348–d. 1430), the cousin of Wladyslaw II Jagiello of Poland, and the ruler of Lithuania at the time of its union with Poland. The book covers both how Vitautas managed to shape his own image in his time, and how that image, which includes both greatness and tyranny, was shaped by subsequent generations, chroniclers, and folk traditions.
  808. Find this resource:
  809. Opgenoorth, Ernst, ed. Handbuch der Geschichte Ost- und Westpreußens. Vol. 2.1, Von der Teilung bis dem Schwedisch-Polnischen Krieg, 1466–1655. Lüneburg, Germany: Institut Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1994.
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  811. A multiessay textbook on the history of Ducal and Royal Prussia from the 14th to the 17th century that focuses on questions of culture, law, religion, administration, and economics. It represents a partially successful attempt by recent German historiography to trend away from nationalistic historical interpretations, but still suffers from the exclusion of Polish sources and historiography.
  812. Find this resource:
  813. Rachuba Andrzej, Jüraté Kiaupiené, and Zigmantas Kiaupa. Historia Litwy: Dwugłos polsko-litewski. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2009.
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  815. A fascinating historiographical experiment: this volume consists of many major events in Lithuanian history described by a tandem of historians, one working from a Polish, the other from a Lithuanian historiographical perspective.
  816. Find this resource:
  817. Serczyk, Jerzy, and Andrzej Tomczak, eds. Dzieje historiografii Prus Wschodnich i Zachodnich do 1920 roku: Kierunki, ośrodki, najwybitniejsi przedstawiciele. Toruń, Poland: TNT, 1989.
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  819. An account of the development of the historiography (mostly German-language and Germanizing-in-scope) of the Ducal and Royal Prussian lands.
  820. Find this resource:
  821. Van Horn, William Dwight. “Suburban Development, Rural Exchange and the Manorial Economy in Royal Prussia, 1570–1700.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1990.
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  823. A dissertation that challenges the prevalent notion of feudal lords’ predatory policies regarding Royal Prussian cities, and holds the relations between landed nobility and the Prussian estates were more friendly and symbiotic than given credit by Marxist historians.
  824. Find this resource:
  825. The Steppe Frontier
  826. The history of Poland-Lithuania’s vast steppe frontier brims with contentious elements. Unruly “Wild Steppes,” or Dzikie Pola, the southeastern frontier, became a transitory space that saw the interaction of Western Christianity with the Eastern rite as well as an Islamic penetration in the form of the advancing Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Tatars. Lands that were ethnically mixed and included Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Cossacks, Jews, Tatars, Armenians, and others soon became enmeshed in the formation of national myths and epics. The Khmel’nyt’sky Rebellion of 1648 especially has written itself quite contentiously into three national histories, those of Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. Whereas Ukraine sees the uprising as a proclamation of its national existence, Poland sees it as a civil war where brotherly peoples (Poles, Lithuanians, and the Cossacks) failed to reach a political consensus (though such consensus was possible) and dealt each other heavy wounds that in each case festered and eventually proved fatal to both, as both eventually lost their independence to the Russian Empire. In Russian historiography, imperial and Communist, the Ukrainians were simply seen as a Russian subset that yearned to be unified with Mother Russia at all cost. All these trends are identifiable in historiography. McNeill 1964 and Wünsch 2004 provide good socioeconomic and ethnographic introductions to steppe/borderland literature. Hudzenko, et al. 1953–1954 provides the official Soviet interpretation of Ukrainian historiography, stressing the reunification elements. Hrushevsky 1999 is the Ukrainian nationalistic version of the same, stressing discontinuities in Ukrainian history from that of Russia (and by extension, from that of Poland-Lithuania as well), while Kappeler 1994 attempts a more balanced, neutral approach. Basarab 1982analyzes the historiographic complications regarding the Pereiaslav Agreement that seemingly placed the Cossacks under Russia’s protection, and Hynchewska-Hennel, et al. 2008 does the same for the Union of Hadziacz (a lost opportunity in Polish historical writings), which would have given Ukraine an equal role as a partner with both Poland and Lithuania. Finally, Kaczmarczyk 2007provides a biography of the Cossack leader who started it all, Hetman Bohdan Khmel’nyt’sky (Bogdan Chmielnicki).
  827. Basarab, John. Pereiaslav 1654: A Historiographical Study. Edmonton: University of Alberta, 1982.
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  829. A summery of scholarship and historiographical schools on the famous Pereiaslav agreement of 1654 between the Cossack Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsy and the Tsar of Russia. While Russian historians, both nationalistic and Communist, saw this as a voluntary submission and a reunification of two common peoples, Ukrainian historians have taken a very different view—that it was a temporary alliance with no transfer of sovereignty to Russia.
  830. Find this resource:
  831. Hrushevsky, Mikhailo. History of Ukraine-Rus’. Vol. 7, The Cossack Age to 1625. Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1999.
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  833. A translated, English-language edition of a major work in Ukrainian history that was originally published in 1909 by one of the intellectual fathers of the Ukrainian independence movement. The work, which for some time has formed the beginning point in Ukrainian research, notes the complicated history of the Cossacks and their relationship with their Polish-Lithuanian overlords.
  834. Find this resource:
  835. Hudzenko, P. P., et al., eds. Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei: Dokumenty i matrialy w trekh tomakh. 3 vols. Moscow, Russia: Academia Nauk SSSR, 1953–1954.
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  837. The famous (or infamous) official Russian communist-era formalization of the reunification school that offered state-sponsored and approved theses on the Cossack-Russian Pereiaslav agreement that subjugated the Cossacks to the Russian tsars.
  838. Find this resource:
  839. Hynchewska-Hennel, Teresa, Piotr Kroll, and Mirosław Nagielski. 350-lecie Unii Hadziackiej (1658–2008). Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2008.
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  841. A historical analysis and political postmortem of the Union of Hadziacz, an unfulfilled union between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, on one hand, and the Cossacks, on the other, that would have created an autonomous Ruthenian Principality as the third coequal and constituent element of a Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian state.
  842. Find this resource:
  843. Kaczmarczyk, Janusz. Bohdan Chmielnicki. Wrocław, Poland: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 2007.
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  845. A Polish-perspective appraisal of the character, abilities, importance, and meaning of Bogdan Chmielnicki (Bohdan Khmel’nyt’sky, b. 1595–d. 1657), the Ukrainian hetman and leader of the Cossack uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1648.
  846. Find this resource:
  847. Kappeler, Andreas. Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994.
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  849. A fine attempt to meander through Ukrainian history between the Scylla of the Russian Myth historiography (which sees Ukraine and Ukrainians as a part broken away and, in time, voluntarily rejoined to the Russian Motherland) and the Charybdis of Ukrainian nationalistic interpretation (which sees a modern Ukrainian nation indivisibly projected back in time and space). The first half of the work covers the early modern period.
  850. Find this resource:
  851. McNeill, William H. Europe’s Steppe Frontier 1500–1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
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  853. The work describes the closing of the pastoral nomadic frontier on Europe’s eastern periphery between the 16th and 18th centuries. A work of cultural anthropology, this book sees the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Tatars, the Polish-Lithuanian and Russian states, and the Cossacks as representatives of cultural and social forces reacting to changing, predominantly economic, conditions of the steppe agriculture.
  854. Find this resource:
  855. Wünsch, Thomas, and Andzrej Janeczek, eds. On the Frontier of Latin Europe: Integration and Segregation in Red Ruthenia 1350–1600. Warsaw, Poland: Institute of Archeology and Ethnology of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences, 2004.
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  857. A collection of essays in English and German dealing with the changing identity of Red Ruthenia (originally one of the duchies of Rus, then a Lithuanian, and then a Polish possession as part of the Commonwealth). Authors see it as a cosmopolitan destination of emigration and integration and a prominent example of an early modern European borderland.
  858. Find this resource:
  859. Military
  860. The Commonwealth had a rich military history: a roll call of its great warrior-kings and hetmans is accompanied by the names of battles that made the Polish-Lithuanian military one of the most successful in the early modern period. Grunwald-Tannenberg, Kircholm, Klushino, Chotin, and Vienna are battlefields burnt into the Polish imagination, together with that most peculiar and famous expression of the Commonwealth’s military heritage—its winged husaria heavy cavalry. Yet it was also in a military defeat—the failure of the Kościuszko Uprising—that the Commonwealth heard its death knell. From the walls of the Kremlin and Vienna to the fields of the “Deluge,” the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth truly lived—and died—by the sword. Olejnik 2004 and Olejnik 2008 are general histories of the Polish armed forces from the birth of the Polish state to the 20th century. As most accounts of their nature, these two books spend considerable time on the Commonwealth military, especially its husaria victories. Downing 1992 is a general introduction to the military revolution in eastern Europe. Frost 2000 and Oakley 1992 discuss the military developments in the long-term struggle for the Baltic. For a systemic look at Polish-Lithuanian husaria, the most famous heavy cavalry in the world, check Gembarzewski 1999. Nagielski 2002 analyzes Polish-Lithuanian battlefield tactics. Srogosz 2010 talks about the discipline failures of the 17th-century Polish-Lithuanian armies and their consequences for the locals.
  861. Downing, Brian M. The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
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  863. A book linking premodern political developments in Western and Eastern Europe (as well as elsewhere) to inherent medieval forms of constitutionalism and the states’ ability to raise larger and more modern standing armies. The work specifically discusses several combatants of the Thirty Years’ War (France, Poland, and Sweden, for instance) and the developments, both political and military, of that age.
  864. Find this resource:
  865. Frost, Robert I. The Northern Wars: War, State, and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558–1721. London and New York: Longman, 2000.
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  867. A meticulous account of the political and military struggle for Baltic supremacy between Denmark, Sweden, Poland-Lithuania, and Muscovy from 1558 to 1721. Though the work is concerned with all four northern powers, the part on Poland-Lithuania is considerable, and the details about Polish campaigns are thorough and fair. Presents the theory that, unlike other combatants, Poland-Lithuania did not undergo a military revolution, and that its eventual fall was not due to political chaos but to eventual military defeat.
  868. Find this resource:
  869. Gembarzewski, Bronisław. Husarze: Ubiór, oporządzenie i uzbrojenie, 1500–1775. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo Arkadia, 1999.
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  871. The near-mythical Polish Winged Hussars have become the representation of the Commonwealth’s many victories and her military might. Based on documentary evidence, this account attempts to recreate the look and feel of a towarzysz husarski (Hussar Comrade) as it changed over more than two centuries of service.
  872. Find this resource:
  873. Nagielski, Mirosław. Staropolska sztuka wojenna XVI–XVII wieku: Prace ofiarowane Profesorowi Jaremie Maciszewskiemu. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2002.
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  875. Describes the Polish-Lithuanian military system of the 16th and 17th centuries, or the glory years of the Republic. The account is drawn from documentary evidence and is focused not only on individual campaigns but also on systematic research into the social and ethnic structure of the Polish-Lithuanian armies.
  876. Find this resource:
  877. Oakley, Stewart P. War and Peace in the Baltic, 1560–1790. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
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  879. A discussion of the major state confrontations in the Baltic region in the early modern era that sees military action as an arm of political and dynastic policies of the belligerents. The work is an attempt at a synthesis of the conflicts—a province of eight different languages and historical schools—for the college-level Anglophone reader.
  880. Find this resource:
  881. Olejnik, Karol. Dzieje Oręża Polskiego. Toruń, Poland: Adam Marszałek, 2004.
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  883. A basic military history of Poland, with a particular stress on the Commonwealth period as the height of the “Old Polish” (system staropolski) military system that saw considerable battlefield triumphs.
  884. Find this resource:
  885. Olejnik, Karol. Historia Wojska Polskiego. Warsaw, Poland: Publicat, 2008.
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  887. The history of the Polish armed forces from the beginning of the Polish state to modernity; includes copious amounts of information concerning the military establishment, and history, of the Polish-Lithuanian armies of the Commonwealth era.
  888. Find this resource:
  889. Srogosz, Tadeusz. Żołnierz swawolny: Z dziejów obyczajów armii koronnej w XVII wieku. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2010.
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  891. A fascinating discourse on the violent and antisocial behavior in the ranks of Polish Crown armies of the 17th century. The author not only lists the most infamous examples of lack of discipline but also dwells on the systemic reasons within the army itself that led to such breakdowns.
  892. Find this resource:
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