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CHAPTER 3THE CATHOLIC REACTION, AND THE VALOIS AND BÁTHORY ELECTIONS, IN POLAND.
TOWARDS
the end of the sixteenth century the vast Polish Republic was one of the most
interesting actual and potential factors in European politics. Originally a
small and struggling military monarchy, wedged in the midst of hostile and
oppressive neighbors, who excluded her altogether from the sea, Poland's
dynastic union with the still vaster Grand-Duchy of Lithuania (1386) was the
beginning of a fresh period of expansion; and during the following two
centuries, under the ambitious impetus of the great Jagiello Princes, she
gradually grew to be the mightiest State in Eastern Europe. In 1387 Red Russia,
and, in 1431, Podolia, were definitively incorporated
with her other territories. By the end of the fifteenth century the almost
perpetual warfare between the Republic and its most dangerous and persistent
enemy, the Teutonic Order, had terminated in the collapse of the Knights and
the restitution to Poland of all the territory of which they had deprived her.
A subsequent attempt of the Grand Master, Albert of Brandenburg, to reconquer West Prussia was defeated; and, by the Compact of
Cracow (1525) Albert was recognized as Duke of Prussia under the suzerainty of
Poland. Six-and-twenty years later the Order of the Sword also fell completely
to pieces after a long decay, and the last Grand Master, Gotthard Kettler, ceded Livonia to Poland and did homage for Semigallia and Courland, which latter was erected into a
semi-independent duchy under Polish protection. Poland had now reached the
height of her power and territorial extension, her domains embracing the whole
of the vast plain which lies between the Baltic, the Oder, the Carpathians, the
Dniester, and the Dnieper. She had thus recovered her northern seaboard, and
even touched the Black Sea towards the south. She was therefore indisputably
the foremost of the Slavonic States, and, after the Spanish monarchy, the most
considerable Catholic Power in Europe. Her political significance, however, was
mainly due to the fact, that, since the battle of Mohàcs (1526) and the fall of the Hungarian kingdom, she had become the one permanent
barrier against the rising tide of Ottoman aggression.
Heresy and Reform in Poland [1424-1554
From the churchman’s point of view, the Polish Republic in the sixteenth century was equally interesting and important. It marked the extreme limit of Catholicism towards the east, and, situated as it was midway between Greek schismatics and German heretics, might well be regarded and utilized as a battleground against both. Hitherto Poland had given the Holy See but little anxiety. Hussite influences, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, had been superficial and transitory. The love of orthodoxy proved stronger, in the long run, than fellow-feeling for a kindred race. The Edict of Wielun (1424), remarkable as the first anti-heretical decree issued in Poland, crushed the new sect in its infancy; and it was with the general approval of the nation that the five Hussite preachers, who had found a temporary refuge at the castle of Abraham Zbaski, were publicly burnt to death in the market-place of Posen. Lutheranism, moreover, was at first regarded with grave suspicion by the intensely patriotic Polish gentry, because of its German origin.
Nevertheless,
the frequent and extremely severe penal edicts issued against it during the
reign of Sigismund I (1506-48), who in this respect, be it remarked,
anticipated the action of the clergy, seem to point to the fact that the heresy
was spreading widely throughout the country.
Sigismund’s
motives in opposing the Reformation were mainly political; and certainly the
violent outbreaks of the sectaries at Cracow, 1518 and 1520, to say nothing of
the civil war resulting from the revolt of Danzig in 1526, seemed to justify
his suspicions that the new doctrines were not merely anti-Christian but
anti-social. For a time, therefore, the Protestants had to be cautious in
Poland proper, but they found a sure refuge in Prussia, where Lutheranism was
already the established religion. Duke Albert gladly welcomed the Polish
Reformers at his Court, and the newly erected University of Königsberg,
where Polish printing-presses were speedily set up, became a seminary for
Polish ministers and preachers, one of the ablest of whom, Jan Seklucyan, was actually the Duk’s chaplain.
While
Lutheranism was thus threatening the Polish Church from the north, Calvinism
had already invaded her from the west. Calvinism, indeed, rather recommended
itself to the Poles as being of non-German origin; and it is a curious
coincidence that, in 1539, the same year in which Catharine Zalaszowska,
the wife of a town-councilor of Cracow, was burnt for propagating Lutheranism,
Calvin should have dedicated his Commentary on the Mass to the young
Crown-Prince Sigismund Augustus, from whom Protestantism expected much in the
future. Meanwhile conversions to Calvinism, among the higher classes in Poland,
became more and more frequent. In 1544 Stanislas Lutomirski, Canon of Konin,
openly embraced the Helvetian Confession. A still more notable defection was
that of Jan Laski, nephew of the Primate, who, after studying abroad and
cultivating the acquaintance of Erasmus and other humanists, returned home,
took Orders, and, favored by his uncle, was already on the road to high
preferment, when, immediately after another European tour, he suddenly and
publicly professed the tenets of the Reformers, married, and ultimately, though
himself holding advanced views, sought to establish a union of the Reformed
Churches. It is characteristic of the confusion of the times that, although no
longer a celibate, he still retained the rich canonry of Gnesen,
nobody daring to deprive him of it till he voluntarily relinquished it in 1542.
1542-8] Calvinism. The Bohemian Brethren
We hear
of crowded Calvinist conventicles in Little Poland,
from 1545 onwards, which were regularly attended by several of the Canons of
Cracow and other eminent Church dignitaries, among them being the Franciscan Lismanini, Queen Bona’s confessor, who propagated heresy
under the very eyes of his Bishop.
Calvinism
continued to spread throughout the country during the latter years of Sigismund
I, and was publicly professed by many Catholic priests, some of whom carried
their congregations along with them. One of the most notable of these renegades
was Andrew Prazmowski, Prebend of the church of St John at Posen, who, banished by Bishop Izdbienski,
found an asylum with the powerful magnate Raphael Leszczynski at Radziejowice in Cujavia,
where he organized a Calvinistic community. Young Nicholas Olesnicki,
too, who had been expelled from the Paulinist Order,
and many other Protestant ministers, preached and taught beneath the protection
of the Karwonskis, the Filipowskis,
and other powerful families; but above them all towered Stanislaus Orzechowski, one of the most accomplished young humanists
of the day. The son of a country notary and a Ruthenian priest’s daughter, he was sent abroad for the education denied to him at home,
and studied with distinction at Vienna, Wittenberg, Venice, Padua, and Bologna.
At Wittenberg he readily adopted the doctrines of Luther and Melanchthon; but,
during his subsequent residence at Rome, Cardinal Contarini succeeded in reconverting the impressionable youth to Catholicism. On his
return to Poland he was persuaded by his father to adopt a clerical career as
being the most profitable, but his views grew more and more heterodox, and he
presently came forward as the ardent advocate of a married clergy, and many of
his fellow-priests followed his example by taking unto themselves wives.
Another sect which ultimately found even more favor in Poland than the
Calvinists, was that of the Bohemian Brethren.
We first
hear of them in Great Poland in 1548, and here they found a temporary protector
in the magnate Andrew Gorka. A royal decree promptly
banished them to Prussia, where, beneath the aegis of Duke Albert, they soon
increased so rapidly as to be able to hold their own against the Lutherans.
Thus, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the Reformers had gained a firm
footing in Poland, though, during the life of the old King, they had to
exercise caution. To the last Sigismund continued to pursue them with severe
penal statutes, and we even hear of isolated cases of the burning of heretics
not members of the nobility. Nay, the very importation of heretical books was
made a capital offence. On the other hand, it is extremely doubtful whether any
regular attempt was ever made to execute these persecuting decrees.
Sigismund Augustus and the szlachta [1548
On April
1, 1548, Sigismund I died after a troubled but not inglorious reign of
forty-two years, leaving the scepter to his only son, Sigismund Augustus, now
in his twenty-eighth year. The Protestants generally entertained great hopes of
the new monarch. Brought up by and among women, under the eye of his refined
Italian mother, Queen Bona, he had from his infancy been imbued with the
speculative humanizing spirit of the Renaissance, and was of a disposition
gentler and more pliable than his father’s had been. He was known to be
familiar with the writings of the leading Reformers, and to delight in
religious discussions; he was surrounded by Protestant counselors; and, most
promising symptom of all, he had become enamored of Barbara, daughter of Prince
Michael Radziwill (Black Radziwill),
the all-powerful chief of the Lithuanian Calvinists. On the other hand, it was
not so generally known that Sigismund Augustus was by conviction a sincere,
though not a bigoted Catholic; and nobody suspected that beneath his diplomatic
urbanity lay a patriotic firmness and statesmanlike qualities of the first
order.
Indeed, the young King had need of all his ability to cope with the extraordinary difficulties of the situation. Poland was at this time on the threshold of a period of political transition of an almost revolutionary character, the most remarkable feature of which was the elevation to power of the Polish szlachta, or gentry. In Poland, as elsewhere, the growth of political liberty was originally due to the impecuniosity of the Sovereign. The proverbial extravagance of the bountiful Jagiello Kings had encumbered at last even their vast estates, and they were consequently compelled to depend more and more upon the nobility and gentry for aids and subsidies. Naturally, such accommodation was not to be had for nothing, and the price which the monarchs paid for it was the liberal bestowal of special rights and privileges on the popular representatives. Thus in the course of the fifteenth century an elaborate parliamentary system grew up in Poland, although for a long time the szlachta, still uncertain of its own strength, permitted its “elder brother” the Senate, or Royal Council, composed of the wealthier magnates and prelates, to monopolize the chief dignities of the State. But as, towards the beginning of the sixteenth century, the parliamentary representation became more thorough and extensive, and the Sejm, or Diet, was dominated by the lesser gentry of Great and Little Poland, and especially by the grey-coated squires of the well-to-do and populous central province of Masovia, whose chief town, Warsaw, was now becoming a formidable rival of the old coronation city Cracow, the szlachta began to assert itself despotically and to look askance at all privileges except its own. For it must not be forgotten that the new representative movement was never popular in the full sense of the word, stopping short, as it did, at the gates of the towns and the huts of the peasantry.
The mental horizon of the szlachta rarely extended beyond the limits of its own particular province; and the way in which the triumphant gentry, after a brief but bitter struggle, succeeded, in the course of the sixteenth century, in depriving the great boroughs of the franchise, is one of the most melancholy pages in Polish history. Still more jealous were the gentry of the clerical estate, whose privileges far exceeded their own; and this jealousy, accentuated by a strong feeling of personal independence, was after all the principal cause of the early successes of the Reformation in Poland. Any opponent of the established clergy was the natural ally of the szlachta. But although the principal, it was by no means the only cause, the scandalous state of the Church itself seeming to excuse and even justify the far-reaching apostasy which was now to shake her to her very foundations.
It is not too much to say that the condition of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland had never sunk so low as at the time of the Reformation. The Bishops, who had grown up beneath the demoralizing influence of the corrupt and avaricious Queen Bona - elegant triflers for the most part, as pliant as reeds, with no fixed principles and saturated with a false humanism - were indifferent in matters of faith, and regarded the new doctrines rather with philosophical toleration than with orthodox aversion. Some of them were notorious evil livers. “Pint-pot” Latalski, Bishop of Posen, had purchased his office for 12,000 ducats from Queen Bona; while another of her creatures, Peter, popularly known as “the fornicator”, was appointed Bishop of Przemysl, and promised the reversion of the still wealthier see of Cracow. To many, indeed, the office of a bishop was but the occasion for amassing wealth or gratifying personal ambition; and nepotism flourished as it had never flourished before in Poland. Moreover, despite her immense wealth (in the province of Little Poland alone, she owned at this time twenty-six towns, eighty-three landed estates, and seven hundred and seventy-two villages), the Church claimed exemption from all public burdens, from all political responsibilities, although her prelates, sitting as they did in the Senate, and claiming the chief offices of the State, continued to exercise an altogether disproportionate political influence. Education was shamefully neglected, the
masses being left in almost heathen ignorance - and this, too, at a time when
the upper classes were greedily appropriating the ripe fruits of the
Renaissance, and when, to use the words of a contemporary, therwere “more
Latinists in Poland than there used to be in Latium”. The Akademia Jagiellonska, or University of Cracow, the sole
source of knowledge and enlightenment in the vast Polish realm, still moved in
the vicious circle of scholastic formularies, and clung tenaciously to methods
of teaching which had long since grown obsolete. The provincial schools
dependent upon so decrepit an alma mater were for the most part suffered to
decay. This criminal neglect of national education brought along with it its
own punishment. The sons of the gentry, denied proper instruction at home,
betook themselves to the nearest High Schools and universities across the
border, to Goldberg in Silesia, to Wittenberg, to Leipzig. Here they fell in
with the adherents of the new faith, for the most part grave God-fearing men
who professed to reform the abuses which had grown up in the Church in the
course of ages; and a sense of equity as much as a love of novelty moved them,
on their return home, to propagate wholesome doctrines and clamor for the
reformation of their own degenerate prelates. Finally, the poorer clergy, hopelessly
cut off from preferment, and utterly neglected by their own Bishops, were also
inspired by the spirit of revolt, took part with the szlachta against their spiritual
rulers, and eagerly devoured, and imparted to their flocks in their own
language, the contents of the religious tracts and treatises which reached them
by devious ways, from Goldberg and Königsberg.
Nothing indeed did more to popularize the new doctrines in Poland than this
beneficial revival of the long neglected vernacular by the Reformers.
The szlachta and
the Reformation [1548-52
Such was the situation when Sigismund II began his reign. The Bishops, desiring to conciliate a prince whose antecedents were more than suspicious, at once made a high bid for the favor of the new King by consenting to his marriage with his fair Calvinist mistress; and, on December 7, 1550, Barbara was solemnly crowned Queen of Poland at Cracow by the Primate Dzierzgowski himself. Five days later Sigismund II issued the celebrated edict in which he pledged his royal word to preserve intact the unity of the Church and the privileges of the clergy, and to enforce the law of the land against heresy. Encouraged by this pleasing symptom of orthodoxy, the Bishops, with singular imprudence, instead of first attempting to put their own dilapidated house in order, at once proceeded to summon before their Courts all persons suspected of heresy, and threaten them with various pains and penalties. The szlachta instantly took alarm. They had not uttered a word of protest when Bishop Peter had burnt the wife of a town-councilor of Cracow, an old woman of eighty, for heresy; they had regarded with supine indifference the debasement of the essentially middle-class University of Cracow by the clerical authorities, culminating, in 1549, in a wholesale exodus of the students because of the unpunished murder of one of their number in the streets by the servants of Canon Czarnkowski. But when they saw their own privileges, already confirmed and guaranteed by the King, jeopardized by the precipitancy of the ecclesiastical Courts, their alarm and indignation knew no bounds. In the midst of the general agitation the Sejm met at Piotrkow in January, 1552. The temper of the assembly may be gauged from the fact that, during the whole of the customary solemn mass before the opening of the session, the magnate Raphael Leszczynski remained covered. The debates which ensued were passionately uncompromising. Leszczynski compared the clergy to wolves in sheep’s clothing. Jan Tamowski, Castellan of Cracow, a devout Catholic all his life, inveighed bitterly against the Bishops, and denied their right of summoning the szlachta before their Courts. On this head, indeed, the whole Estate was unanimously agreed, the Catholic gentry, without exception, energetically supporting their Protestant brethren against what they considered the usurpations of the clergy. The Bishops, timid and vacillating, bent before the storm; and when the King proposed, by way of compromise, that the jurisdiction of the clerical Courts should be suspended for twelve months, on condition that the gentry continued to pay tithes, the prelates readily sacrificed their convictions in order to save their revenues. Thus began a religious interim, which, as matters turned
out, was gradually prolonged for ten years. It was at this Sejm, moreover, that Orzechowski, who had been excommunicated by the Primate for
breaking his vow of celibacy, pleaded fearlessly in favor of the marriage of
the clergy; and the Bishops, for fear of irreconcilably offending their ablest
opponent and driving him altogether into the heretic camp, annulled his
excommunication and proposed to submit the whole affair to the decision of the
Holy See.
Thus relieved from all immediate fear of persecution, and imagining, moreover, that the politic and temporizing King was secretly on their side, the Reformers began to propagate their opinions openly. Soon they felt strong enough, with the assistance of the sympathizing szlachta, to assume the offensive and molest the Catholics. Those of the Protestant gentry who had the right of presentation to benefices began bestowing them upon chaplains and ministers of their own persuasion, in many cases driving out the orthodox incumbents and substituting Protestant for Catholic services. Presently Reformers of every shade of opinion, even those who were tolerated nowhere else, poured into Poland, which speedily became the battleground of all the sects of Europe. Indeed, the Protestants soon became numerous enough to form ecclesiastical districts of their own. The first Calvinist Synod in Poland was held at Pinczow in 1550, when Felix Krzyzak was elected Superintendent. The Bohemian Brethren, too, now proceeded to evangelize Little Poland and found schools and churches, and finally, at the Synod of Kozminek (August, 1555) they formally united with the Calviniste. A Catholic Synod held the same year at Piotrkow, at which the famous Hosius, the youngest but by far the most capable and conscientious of the Catholic Bishops, appeared prominently for the first time, proved utterly helpless to stem the rising tide of Protestantism. In the Sejm itself the
Protestants were absolutely supreme, and they invariably elected a Calvinist or
even a Socinian to be their Marshal. At the Diet of
1555 they boldly demanded a national synod for the cleansing and reforming of
the Church, and presented nine points for the consideration of the King and
Senate, amounting to a demand of absolute toleration and of the equalization of
all the confessions except that of the Anti-Trinitarians. The Bishops naturally
refused to entertain this revolutionary programme; and, the King again
intervening as mediator, the existing interim was, by mutual consent,
indefinitely prolonged. The violent and unscrupulous proceedings of the bigoted Ludovico Lippomano, sent
from Rome to Poland as Nuncio in 1555, still further damaged the Catholic cause
by provoking universal indignation, the very Bishops refusing to obey him. At
the subsequent Diet of Warsaw (1556) the whole of the Izba,
or Lower Chamber, clamored furiously against “the Egyptian bondage of the
prelacy”, and demanded absolute freedom of discussion in all religious
questions. Again, however, the King adopted a middle course, and by the edict
of Warsaw (January, 1557) it was decreed that things should remain as they were
till the following Diet. At that Diet, which assembled at Piotrkow in December, 1558, the onslaught of the szlachta on
the clergy was fiercer than ever; and a determined attempt was even made to
exclude the Bishops from the Senate on the principle that no man could serve
two masters. True loyalty and patriotism, it was urged, could not be expected
from prelates who were the sworn servants of a foreign potentate, the Pope.
The King and the Senate, however, perceiving a danger to the Constitution in
the violence of the szlachta, not only took the part
of the Bishops but quashed a subsequent reiterated demand for a national synod;
and on February 8, 1559, the Diet dissolved without coming to any resolution
whatever. The King, in his valedictory address, justly threw all the blame for
the utter abortiveness of the session upon the intemperance and injustice of
the szlachta.
1559-63] Beginning of the Catholic
Reaction
The Sejm of 1558-9
indicates the highwater-mark of Polish Protestantism.
From this time forward it began to subside, although very gradually, yet
unmistakably. The chief cause of this subsidence was the divisions among the
Reformers themselves. The almost absolute religious liberty which they enjoyed
in Poland, proved, in the long run, far more injurious to them than to the
Church which they professed to reform. From the chaos of creeds resulted a
chaos of ideas on all imaginable moral and social subjects, which culminated in
a violent clashing of the various sects, each one of which naturally strove for
the mastery. The first to sow discord among the Polish Protestants was Francis Stankar, professor of Greek at Cracow, who published a
treatise against the divinity of Christ entitled De Mediatore,
which was condemned by a Calvinist Synod in 1554. Crypto-Socinians were, however, very numerous in Poland (Socinus himself had spread his
doctrines there as early as 1551). They held at first with the Calvinists,
although their peculiar opinions gave rise to fierce debates in the Calvinist
synods. Their leaders, Blandrata, Ochino, Abyat and others, although differing more or less
widely among themselves, were loosely connected under the general term of
Anti-Trinitarians. They gradually succeeded in winning over some of the
principal Protestant ministers of Poland (e.g. Lismanini, Lutomirski, Pauli), and at last became even more
obnoxious to the less extreme Protestant sects than were the Catholics
themselves. At a Calvinistic synod held in 1562-3, things came to an open
rupture; and the Anti-Trinitarians were formally expelled from the community,
and became the objects of the most bitter persecution at the hands of their
former co-religionists. Moreover, it was a common hatred of the
Anti-Trinitarians which at length drew the hitherto fiercely jarring Calvinists
and Lutherans together. But despite the holding of a united synod of the two
Confessions at Posen (October, 1560, and November, 1561), the relations between
the two principal Protestant sects still continued to be rather fratricidal
than fraternal.
An
auxiliary cause of the decline of Protestantism in Poland was the beginning of
a Catholic reaction there. Not only the far-seeing statesmanlike monarch
himself, but his chief councilors also, could no longer resist the conviction
that the project of a national Church was a mere Utopia in view of the
interminable dogmatic disputes of the hopelessly irreconcilable Reforming
sects. The bulk of the population, moreover, still held languidly yet
persistently to the faith of its fathers; and the Holy See, awakening at last
to the gravity of the situation, gave to the slowly reviving zeal of both
clergy and laity the very necessary impetus from without. Never, indeed, was
the immense value of an independent external authority in ecclesiastical
government so strikingly illustrated as at this critical period; for there
cannot be any doubt that in the first instance it was the papal Nuncios who
reorganized the scattered and faint-hearted battalions of the Church militant in
Poland, and led them back to victory. The first of these reconstructing
Nuncios, Berard, Bishop of Camerino,
who arrived in 1560, was charged by the Pope to put an end to the paralyzing
dissensions of the Polish prelates, to enquire into the alleged heresy of the
Archbishop designate, Jakob Uchanski,
who was actually under the ban of Rome, and to induce the King to send deputies
to the Council of Trent. The diplomatic finesse of the gentle and insinuating Berard proved far more efficacious than the blustering zeal
of his predecessor. Perceiving that Uchanski was so
powerful and so popular as to be practically unassailable, he skillfully
enlisted him on the side of Rome by absolving him from all ecclesiastical
censures and warmly espousing his cause, with the result that Uchanski’s translation to the primacy was confirmed. He
also persuaded the King to send delegates to the Council at Trent, where Hosius
was already actually engaged not as a Polish Bishop, but as a Cardinal Legate.
Moreover at a Catholic synod held in 1561, he opposed all violence and
persecution, and persuaded the Bishops to respond liberally to the financial
requirements of the King. His efforts were less successful at the Diet which
met at Piotrkow in 1562. On this occasion Sigismund
completely won the susceptible hearts of the szlachta by appearing in the grey
coat of a Masovian squire. Needing the subsidies of
the deputies - for the incorporation by Poland of most of the territories of
the defunct Order of the Sword had excited the jealousy of Muscovy and the
Scandinavian Powers, and the whole north-eastern frontier of the Republic was
consequently in danger - Sigismund was prepared, as the lesser of two evils, to
sacrifice the clergy; and with his consent the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical
Courts was practically abolished, it being declared that henceforth no
confiscations consequent upon condemnations for heresy could be executed except
by the secular Courts as administered by the Starostas or provincial governors, many of whom, by the way, were Protestants. The
Bishops warmly protested, but the King was inexorable. “You must”, he said,
“take the plunge”. One result of this reverse was the recall of the Nuncio Berard, to whose incompetence the passing of such an
anticlerical measure was attributed by the Curia; and, at the suggestion of
Hosius, Giovanni Francisco Commendone, Bishop of Zante, one of the most experienced and devoted of the Roman
diplomatists, was appointed his successor.
1565-9] Recovery of Catholicism
Commendone arrived in Poland at the end of November,
1563. His earlier dispatches were anything but reassuring. The higher Catholic
clergy were described as disunited and disaffected, and strenuously adverse to
the Tridentine reforms which it was his mission to
impose upon them. The Protestants, with the audacity of perfect impunity, were
guilty almost daily of outrages against the Catholic ceremonies and religion.
The childless King, to the delight of the Protestants, seemed intent on a
divorce from his third wife (his first wife’s sister), Archduchess Catharine of
Austria, widow of the Duke of Mantua, whom he had married for purely political
reasons in 1553 - two years after the death of his beloved second wife Barbara,
when she had been crowned only six months - and who was now living apart from
him at Radom, an incurable invalid. According to Commendone,
moreover, the condition of the country parishes was deplorable. One-third of
the churches had been turned into meeting-houses; whole monasteries were
infected with heresy; in many places mass was said as rudely and clumsily as if
it were now being celebrated for the first time; the people at large were
steeped in drunkenness and debauchery. Nevertheless, these manifold
difficulties seemed to melt away at the touch of the capable and courageous
Nuncio, whose consummate tact and indefatigable energy speedily worked wonders,
especially as the King, despite the strong influence of Black Radziwill and his Calvinist surroundings, despite even the
alluring precedent of Henry VIII of England and the Scandinavian Princes, did
not press to an issue the much dreaded question of the divorce. In August,
1564, Commendone presented the Tridentine Decrees to Sigismund, who promised to accept and promulgate them; and, thus
encouraged, the Nuncio now proceeded a step further and persuaded the King to
issue an edict banishing all foreign heretics from the land, and forbidding
conversions to the new doctrines, especially to the doctrine of the
Anti-Trinitarians. These were especially designated in order to reconcile the
Calvinists to this decree, which, moreover, at first was interpreted so
leniently as to remain practically abortive so far as the latter were
concerned. At the subsequent Diet of 1565 the Protestants presented a petition
for a national pacificatory Synod; but the King
rejected it as unnecessary, inasmuch as the Council of Trent had already
settled all religious questions. He declared at the same time that he was
resolved to live and die a Catholic. But the most reassuring feature of this
Diet, from a churchman's point of view, was the presence in the izba of a zealous Catholic minority which, while willing
enough to keep the clergy within bounds, energetically protested against any
attack upon the Church’s ceremonies or dogmas. It was quite a new thing to see
the Polish gentry marshaled round a papal Nuncio and drawing their sabres, in full session, against the gainsayers of Catholic
truth. At the same Diet, moreover, Sigismund, yielding to the persuasions of Commendone and of Hosius, who had now returned to Poland,
consented to the introduction into Poland of the most formidable adversaries of
the Reformation, the Jesuits. Noskowski, Bishop of
Plock, had already indeed installed them at Pultusk;
and, after the Diet had separated, the Society was permitted to found
establishments in the dioceses of Posen, Ermeland (Warmia), and Wilna, which
henceforth became centres of a vigorous and
victorious propaganda. In December, 1565, Commendone quitted Poland, well satisfied with the results of his mission; and indeed the
Catholic cause in Poland, though still beset by many difficulties, was
henceforth free from danger.
The great political event of Sigismund’s later years, the union of Poland and Lithuania into a single State with a common Diet and executive, accomplished at Lublin in 1569, threw purely religious questions somewhat into the background; but the Catholic revival gained in strength every year, although the King continued judiciously to hold the balance between the opposing parties, and preserved order by occasionally nominating Protestants to the highest offices of State, and always preventing persecution. Moreover, a new order of bishops, men of apostolic faith and fervor, such as Konarski of Posen and Karnkowski of Cujavia, were gradually superseding the indolent and corrupt old prelates of Bona’s creation, and, under the skilful leadership of Cardinal Hosius, and with the silent cooperation of the Jesuits, were everywhere recovering lost ground. Many of the magnates were about this time reconverted to the Catholic religion, the most notable acquisitions being Adalbert Laski and Jan Siewakowski, both of whom the Protestants could ill afford to lose. The long-deferred union of the Bohemian Brethren,
Lutherans, and Calvinists (Consensus of Sandomir,
1570), points to an effort on the part of the Protestant sects to concentrate
their forces likewise; but at the same time they played into the hands of their
Catholic adversaries by their violent persecution of the Anti-Trinitarians, whom
Hosius, from motives of policy, ostentatiously took under his protection. In
the Sejm itself the attacks of the Protestants upon the Catholics grew feebler every
year, ceasing at last altogether. Nay, at the Diet of 1569 the Protestants
actually made overtures for a union with the Catholics, which the latter
postponed till the reformed sects should have become “quite agreed among
themselves as to what they really believed”. At the Diet of 1570 Sigismund,
strong in the support of a large and zealous Catholic party, rejected a
petition of the Protestants that their Confession should be placed on a
statutory equality with Catholicism, and postponed to the following Diet the
enforcement of the decrees against the Anti-Trinitarians and Anabaptists, which
were never carried out, owing to the vigorous interposition at the Diet of 1572
of Commendone, who had been sent on a second mission
to Poland in November, 1571. A few months later Sigismund II died suddenly,
without leaving any regulations as to the election of his successor. The
decease of this prudent and tolerant monarch was a serious blow to
Protestantism in Poland. Henceforth, as we shall find, the Reformers had to
deal with princes more or less hostile to them, and to abandon all hope of
domination. It remained to be seen whether they could even hold the ground they
had actually won.
Death of Sigismund Augustus [1569-1572]
The interregnum
Fortunately
for Poland, the political horizon was absolutely unclouded on the death of
Sigismund II; otherwise, the situation would have been serious, for domestic
affairs were in an almost anarchical condition. The Union of Lublin, barely
three years old, was anything but consolidated, and in Lithuania it continued
to be extremely unpopular. In Poland proper, too, the szlachta was fiercely opposed to
the magnates; and the Protestants seemed bent upon still further castigating
the clergy. Worst of all, there existed no recognized authority in the land, to
curb and control its jarring centrifugal political elements. It was nearly two
hundred years since the Republic had last been saddled with an interregnum, and
the precedents of 1382 were obsolete. The Primate Uchanski,
on hearing of the demise of the Crown, at once invited all the senators of
Great Poland to a conference at Lowicz, but passed
over the szlachta altogether. In an instant the whole Republic was seething like a cauldron. Jan Ferlej, Grand-Marshal of the Crown and the head of the
Protestant party, simultaneously summoned to Cracow a confederation of the
gentry, which received the support of the senators of Little Poland, who
resented the exclusiveness of the Primate’s Assembly. Civil war was happily
averted at the last moment by the mediation of Peter Zborowski,
Castellan of Sandomir; and a convocation or National
Convention, the first of its kind, composed of senators and deputies from all
parts of the kingdom, assembled at Warsaw, in the heart of Catholic Masovia, in April, 1573, for the purpose of electing a new
King. The Protestants had proposed Calvinistic Lublin as the place of meeting,
but were outvoted.
Meanwhile, five candidates for the throne were already in the field. Lithuania was in favor of her near neighbor, Tsar Ivan IV, whose election would have guaranteed her territories against the chronic Muscovite incursions. In Poland the Bishops and most of the Catholic magnates and senators were in favor of an Austrian Archduke. But the tyrannous and persecuting House of Habsburg was so obnoxious to the nation at large, that the szlachta was disposed to accept almost any other candidate, except a Muscovite, who came with a gift in his hand. It was therefore no very difficult task for the adroit and energetic French ambassador, Montluc, who had been sent to Poland (October, 1572) by Catharine de Medici, to promote the candidature of her favorite son, Henry, Duke of Anjou, to win over the majority of the szlachta, especially as it was notorious that Poland’s most dangerous neighbor, the Ottoman Porte, while inclined to tolerate a French Prince on the Polish throne, would certainly regard the election of an Austrian Archduke as a casus belli. Montluc, well provided with funds, had already succeeded in purchasing many of the leading magnates, notably Adalbert Laski, Palatine of Siradia, a dashing adventurer of heroic courage, but absolutely devoid of conscience in money matters. He placed his chief hopes, however, in the ignorant and credulous masses of the szlachta, in whose hands, as he acutely perceived from the first, the issues of the election really lay. He therefore devoted his energies to captivating all the lesser gentry, irrespective of religion. The Protestants were reassured by his exaggerated accounts of the tolerant policy adopted just then by the French Court towards the Huguenots, while he insinuated mysteriously to the Catholics that the French candidate, as a loyal son of the Church, would leave nothing undone to promote the glory of God. Montluc’s popularity reached its height when he strenuously advocated the adoption of the powszechne prawo glosowania, or open popular mode of election by the gentry en masse (which the szlachta now proposed to revive), as opposed to the more orderly “secret election” by a congress of senators and deputies sitting with closed doors. It was mainly due to his efforts and the impassioned eloquence of young Jan Zamoyski, Starosta of Belz, now on the threshold of his brilliant political career, that the Sejm decided in favor of the more popular method. The religious difficulty, meanwhile, had been adjusted
to the satisfaction of all parties by the Compact of Warsaw (January 28,1573),
which granted absolute religious liberty to all non-Catholic denominations (“Dissidentes de Religione”, as
they now began to be called) without exception, thus exhibiting a far more
liberal intention than the Germans had manifested in the Religious Peace of
Augsburg, eighteen years before. Nevertheless, the Warsaw Compact was
eventually vitiated by the clauses which reserved to every master, spiritual or
secular, the right “to punish according to his judgment” every rebellious
servant, even if his rebellion were entirely due to his religious convictions.
This unlimited power of arbitrary correction speedily resulted in the absolute
serfdom of the rural population; and eventually, when the Protestant
proprietors were gradually won back to the Church by the Jesuits, their
dependents were of course forced to follow their example.
Early in April, 1573, the Election Diet began to assemble at Warsaw; and across the newly-built bridge, the first that ever united the banks of the Vistula, flowed a stream of 40,000 electors, swelled to 100,000 by their retainers and dependents, hastening to pitch their tents in the plain of Kamienie near Warsaw, where the fate of the Republic was to be decided. The next fortnight was passed in fierce debates and in listening to the orations of the foreign ambassadors. The Imperial ambassador, who spoke in Bohemian, first addressed the electors in favor of his candidate, the Archduke Ernest. But, though he had a very great deal to say, he had very little to offer. Consequently the electors soon found him tedious and clamored impatiently for Montluc to speak. But it was now late, and the sagacious Frenchman, to avoid addressing a tired audience, feigned illness and postponed his harangue till the following day, when he exceeded the fondest expectations of his admirers by delivering an oration “worthy of eternal remembrance”, which took the whole assembly by storm. The speeches of the Swedish envoys which
followed were considered tame and sober in comparison, especially as they were
not reinforced by golden arguments. Nevertheless, as the prospects of the Duke
of Anjou approximated to certainty, the more cool-headed of the electors began
to feel some natural anxiety as to how far this foreign prince, the offspring
of a despotic House, would be likely to respect the liberties of the Republic.
The tidings of the Massacre of St Bartholomew had come as a shock to many,
especially to the Protestants, although to them Montluc plausibly represented the catastrophe as a spontaneous and unauthorized
endeavor of the loyal city of Paris to crush a dangerous Huguenot rebellion. It
was therefore decided that the election should be postponed to a “correctura jurum” or reform of
the Constitution; and a special Commission was appointed for that purpose. This
precautionary measure was, however, by no means to the liking of the Catholic
party; and accordingly Montluc instigated “his
praetorians”, the 10,000 enthusiastic but grossly ignorant Masovian electors, to protest energetically against any further delay. The Commission
was consequently obliged to confine itself to drawing up certain preliminary
conditions considerably curtailing the royal authority.
1573] Election of Henry of Valois
The “Henrican Articles”, as they were called, deprived the
future King of the privilege of electing his successor; forbade his marrying
without the previous consent of the Senate; required him to protect all the
religious sects equally and maintain the sady wojewódzkie, or temporal tribunals; considerably restricted
his authority as commander-in-chief; and bound him to accept a permanent
council of fourteen Senators, elected every two years by the Diet, four of
whom, in rotation, were to be in constant attendance upon him. The debates
evoked by these constitutional changes were still proceeding when the Masovian deputies, instigated by Montluc,
proceeded in a body to the pavilion of the Senate, and threatened to choose
forthwith a King of their own, if the election were postponed much longer; and,
yielding to this pressure, the Grand-Marshal Firlej fixed May 4 for the election. On that day the ten thousand Masovians voted unanimously for Henry, and their example was followed by the electors of
the Palatinates of Plock, Dobrzyn, and Podlasia, and most of the Lithuanians. On the other hand,
the Prussian and Kijowian electors voted for the
Archduke Ernest, while a large number of the electors of Great Poland and a
considerable minority of the Lithuanians demanded a Piast or native Pole, and declared for Jan Kostka, Palatine
of Sandomeria. The Henricans,
with a powerful majority behind them, now urged the Primate to proclaim their
candidate King; but this demand was vigorously opposed by the Protestant party
headed by Firlej, who formed themselves into an armed
Confederation and retired en masse from the field of election. Sabres were drawn on both sides and civil war again seemed
imminent; but negotiations were ultimately opened between the contending
assemblies; and the Protestant terms were being considered when the armed Masovian mob again surrounded the pavilion where the Senate
was deliberating, and forced on the nomination of their candidate. “Then for a
whole hour”, says an eye-witness, “there was nothing but a hurrying and a
scurrying, the beating of drums, the blaring of trumpets, the firing of guns,
and after that we all mounted our steeds, and rode off to sing a Te Deum at the
Church of St John”. Thus in the midst of intrigue, corruption, violence and confusion,
Henry of Valois was, on May 11, 1573, elected King of Poland.
A few
days later, pacta conventa,
corresponding to our coronation oath, were laid before the French ambassador at
Warsaw for signature. By these articles the King of France was to bind himself
within six months to keep on foot in Poland 4000 Saxons for service against
Muscovy. Henry was to maintain a fleet in the Baltic at his own expense; place
450,000 ducats at the disposal of the Republic; provide learned professors for
the Cracow Academy; educate one hundred of the young Polish nobles abroad;
espouse the late King’s sister, the Korolewna Anna, a
Princess eighteen years his senior, immediately after his arrival in Poland;
confirm the Compact of Warsaw, and obtain religious liberty for the French
Huguenots. Onerous and extravagant as these conditions were, Montluc instantly accepted all of them except the last,
whereupon Firlej’s party also proclaimed Henry King
of Poland; and a magnificent embassy, consisting of the leading senators of the
French party, was forthwith dispatched to France. They arrived at Paris on
August 19, after being detained for a time, on their way through Germany, by
the disappointed and vindictive Emperor. But even now their difficulties were
not over. The very ample demands of the Polish democracy seemed monstrous to
French absolutism, and it was not till after three weeks of incessant
disputation and explanation that Henry was finally persuaded to sign the pacta at Notre Dame on September 10. What he objected to most
of all was that he, who was only twenty-two, should be compelled to marry a
woman of forty, at the simple bidding of his Polish subjects. Indeed he
absolutely refused to bind himself on this head, although willing to promise
that he would never marry without the previous consent of the Polish Senate and Sejm, and with this concession the deputation had at
last to be content.
“Many of
us”, writes the contemporary Marcin Bielski in his Chronicle, alluding to the new King,
“promised ourselves all sorts of good things from this gentleman, and had such
an opinion of him as to make us fancy that nobody could rule us better or more
profitably. So thought we, but the Lord God ordered it otherwise”. And indeed
Catharine de Medici’s corrupt, frivolous, and despotic son was not equal to the
double duty of curbing and conciliating his unruly subjects. The Polish szlachta, who had grown up in the austerely dignified Court
of the Jagiellos, were revolted by Henry’s nocturnal
vagabondage in the streets of Cracow, by his bacchanalian debauches at the
castle, and by his indecent revels in the presence of the Korolewna and her ladies. Henry himself, moreover, nurtured as he had been in the hotbed
of luxurious absolutism, could not breathe freely in the rude and boisterous
atmosphere of Sarmatian liberty; and, with the new papal Nuncio, Vincenzo Laureo, perpetually at
his elbow and urging him to perform some great act of faith in the eyes of all
men - such, for instance, as closing the dissenting conventicles of Cracow, or publicly revoking the oath imposed upon him at Paris by the
Polish delegates, which bound him to confirm the statutes of the Diet of Warsaw
in favor of the Dissidents - the new King’s position, in view of his
obligations to the Protestants, was difficult to desperation. Indeed, the
violent scene which took place at his coronation in the Cathedral of Cracow on
February 21, 1574, three days after his arrival, convinced him that the
Dissidents would never submit tamely to any such cavalier treatment. The oaths
having been duly administered, Henry had risen to his feet again, when the
Palatines of Cracow, of Wilna, and of Sandomeria, the leaders of the Dissidents, came forward,
and with great importunity, pressed the King to confirm the oath which he had
made at Paris; but the Archbishop would hear of no such innovation, and
withstood them with high words. Thereupon Grand-Marshal Firlej rose, and, placing his hand upon the crown, insisted categorically that the
coronation oath should be recited in full before the ceremony proceeded. A
fearful tumult at once ensued. The clamor soon spread from the altar to the
choir, and thence into the nave, so that many feared a conflict, when Jan Chodkiewicz, the Palatine of Samogitia,
cried that it would suffice them “quad rex conservaret pacem et tranquillitatem inter dissidentes de religion”. The King, without taking a
set oath, thereupon confirmed what Chodkiewicz had
said, adding: “Conservare curabo”.
Against this the Archbishop protested, while the Bishop of Cujavia exclaimed “Salvis juribus nostris” and the King, “Salvis juribus vestries”. Meanwhile the Palatine of Cracow,
as Grand-Marshal of the Kingdom, quitted the chancel, and, addressing the
people in Polish, in a loud voice asked whether, the King having now done all
that it behoved him to do, it was their good pleasure
that he should be crowned? Whereupon the people exclaimed with a shout: “Crown
him! Long live the King!” and so he was anointed and crowned without further
misadventure.
Flight of Henry [1574-5
The position
of the new King between such jarring elements was therefore difficult at the
best of times, and might at any time become really dangerous. Every moment he
had reason to regret his haste in accepting so thorny a crown. For seven hours
a day he had to endure the interminable and only half-intelligible debates in
the Senate, whose president he was; while the fierce dissensions of the
coronation Diet, which assembled at the beginning of April to confirm the pacta conventa, and
in which a bare Catholic majority stood face to face with a strong and
aggressive Protestant minority, distracted and dismayed him. Moreover, his
gross partiality for his chief supporters, the powerful Zborowskis,
speedily and completely alienated from him the hearts of the gentry. At a
tournament held in his honor shortly after his coronation young Samuel Zborowski, in a fit of pique and without any extenuating
circumstances, mortally wounded Wapowski, Castellan
of Przemysl, who died a few days afterwards. The
kinsfolk of the murdered man clamored for justice, well aware that death was
the statutory punishment for the homicide of a nobleman; but the King allowed
himself to be influenced by the powerful friends of the accused, and the
sentence finally pronounced - perpetual banishment without either loss of honor
or forfeiture of goods - was received with general astonishment and
indignation, the szlachta regarding it not only as ridiculously inadequate, but as an outrage upon their
whole order. The result was a general revulsion of feeling against the entire
French party. Hundreds of pasquinades began to circulate against the King and
his following; and members of the royal suite were frequently assaulted in the
street. Yet still the King continued to lean almost exclusively upon the Zborowskis, and all the principal offices at his disposal
were bestowed upon their friends and relations. His uniform coldness towards
the Korolewna, moreover, did not tend to make him
less unpopular. He continued to stay at Cracow, in order to be nearer to France
in view of the speedy decease of his brother Charles IX, who had been long
ailing, and on June 14, 1574, a courier from the Emperor brought to Cracow
tidings of the death of that monarch. On the following morning Henry, dressed
in violet after the French custom, appeared in the Senate, received the
condolences of a deputation of magnates who there awaited him, and in solemn and affecting words, “not without tears”, declared
himself more than ever resolved to provide for the safety and glory of the Republic.
He had at first intended to act constitutionally, and obtain permission from
the Diet to revisit his native land; but the fear of a humiliating refusal led
him to change his mind at the last moment and resolve to escape by stealth.
On Friday
evening, June 18,1574, the King, having gone to bed and dismissed the Polish
gentlemen-in-waiting on the plea of weariness, issued secretly from the castle
by a little gate, and having taken horse near the stables, departed
half-an-hour after midnight, accompanied by a few French lords. He took the
shortest way to Silesia; was joined on the road by a party of French gentlemen
mounted and well armed, who had been waiting for him, and made such haste that
he had passed the frontier and entered Silesia before he was overtaken by any
of those Polish lords who, with a great company of horsemen, had set out in
pursuit two hours after his Majesty had quitted the castle. Of these only the
Count of Tenczyn, his under-chamberlain, overtook him
(about a league beyond the frontier), and, with all due submission, used every
argument to persuade the King to return. Henry excused himself with words full
of deep emotion, saying that he must needs hasten on to France, as otherwise he
ran a great risk of losing that kingdom altogether, but gave hopes that he
would speedily return, and referred Tenczyn, in the
meantime, to the letters which he, the King, had written to the Senate, and
left behind him, accounting for his sudden disappearance. A week later Henry
was dancing at a ball at Chambéry, to which place he
was pursued by a troop of cavaliers sent after him by Karnkowski,
the militant Bishop of Cujavia.
The
indignation of the Poles at this disgraceful flight was vehement and alarming.
Perjurer, swindler, craven, were the mildest epithets bestowed upon the
defaulting monarch; all who were compromised in his support went for weeks in
terror of their lives. The wealth, dignity, and influence of the Palatine of Sandomeria could not save him from insult. The Bishop of Cujavia narrowly escaped stoning in the streets of Cracow,
while the Nuncio was reviled to his face, and threatened with death or
banishment. The Senate, after a turbulent session, agreed to address a solemn
remonstrance to the King, and the Primate (Jacob Uchanski)
as interrex convoked a new Diet, which was to meet at Warsaw on August 24,
1574.
1575] The second interregnum
The Diet
of Warsaw was short and stormy. The vast majority of the deputies, both
Catholic and Protestant, were of opinion that the King was civilly dead, and
that the public safety demanded the instant election of his successor. The
majority of the Senate, however, and most of the prelates, including the
Primate, were of the contrary opinion. Meanwhile audiences were given to the
ambassadors of the competitors for the crown, no fewer than three of whom were
already in the field, viz., the Emperor Maximilian II of Germany, King John (Vasa) of Sweden, and Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara. The
Emperor, from his vicinity, dignity, and power, was most acceptable to the
Senate; but the lesser nobility declared they would rather die than accept a
German, and they found an ally in no less a person than Sultan Amurath III, who had also sent a chiaus,
or special envoy, to the Diet. The Turkish envoy, on this occasion, displayed a
tact and finesse very unusual just then with the envoys of a nation which,
invincible in arms, affected to despise the circuitous methods of diplomacy.
The Sultan well knew, he said, that there was no hope of Henry’s return. A new
King must therefore be elected, but he was not to be taken from among the
Sultan’s enemies, of whom the Emperor was the chief. Their choice must fall
upon one who would live at harmony with the Porte. His master had heard that in
the confines of Danzig there was a man in every way worthy of the royal
dignity. This was Jan Kostka, Palatine of Sandomeria. Why not elect him? Or there was the Swedish
King, or Báthory, prince of Transylvania, the Sultan’s trusty friend and ally,
renowned for his courage, integrity, and prudence. "Elect any one of these
three, and the Sultan would not only not disturb but even actively assist the
Republic".
The Diet was much flattered by the tone and manner of the chiaus. All three of the proposed candidates were agreeable to the Poles, though for different reasons. The Palatine of Sandomeria, perhaps the most popular, certainly the most powerful magnate in the land, was one of themselves. King John of Sweden was connected by marriage with the ancient and illustrious Jagiello dynasty which had ruled Poland gloriously for three hundred years. Lastly, the Hungarian, Báthory, though a stranger, could scarcely be called a foreigner, for he belonged to a nation which had much in common with the Poles, and had stood by them in weal and woe for centuries; besides, he had the additional personal recommendation of being one of the greatest captains of his age. The multiplication of candidates, however, so divided and perplexed the Diet, that no resolution could be come to; and the Nuncio’s party, aided by the machiavellian Palatine of Podolia, skillfully took advantage of the general confusion to carry through a compromise whereby King Henry was given till Ascension Day, May 12, 1575, to return and resume the government; failing which he was to be degraded and dethroned, and a new Diet convoked to meet at the little town of Steczyc, which the Nuncio dejectedly describes as the “most heretically infected hole in the kingdom”. The Steczyc Diet, which met on May 12, 1575, could in no sense be called a fairly
representative assembly. Out of more than 50,000 Polish gentlemen entitled to
deliberate and vote in the national council, scarcely 5000 made their
appearance. The Lithuanians and Prussians, however, who represented at least
one-half of the population and more than three-fourths of the territory of the
Republic, but who had consistently refused not merely to recognize but even to
attend the previous Diet, naturally disputed the validity of the present
assembly also, and merely sent a handful of delegates to protest against its
proceedings altogether. It was the almost unanimous opinion of the Diet of Steczyc that Henry of Valois, by failing to appear, had
forfeited the throne; and he was accordingly deposed on the very first day of
the session. When, however, the question arose how to fill the vacancy, the
assembly at once split up into half-a-dozen fiercely antagonistic sections;
anything like agreement was absolutely hopeless. The audiences given to the
ambassadors of the various competitors only increased the prevalent confusion.
The Swedish envoy had nothing but vague words of benevolence in his mouth. The
Muscovite envoys had neither money nor definite instructions, and were obliged
at the eleventh hour to throw themselves into the arms of the Emperor, who
could already count upon the votes of the prelacy and higher nobility. But the
Polish gentry’s ineradicable hatred and suspicion of the crafty semi-Spanish
Habsburgs defeated all the calculations of the Imperialists. No sooner were the
Archduke Ernest and his father the Emperor Maximilian proposed to the Diet by
the Senate, than the 5000 deputies rose as one man and exclaimed, “Nie chcemy Niemcza! Nie chcemy Niemcza!” (We won't have a German! We won't have a
German!). For the moment it seemed not improbable that every member of the
German faction would be put to the sword. Finally, the majority of the Polish
deputies (the Lithuanians had already seceded from the assembly) quitted the
Diet and marched in a body to the ruins of the castle of Sieciech on the banks of the Vistula. Here they strongly entrenched themselves, and for
the next four days kept up a rolling fire of musketry to terrify their
opponents. Deputations now went backwards and forwards daily between the castle
of Sieciech and the Senate, but for a long time
without the slightest result. At last, however, it was resolved that the whole
question should be referred to another Diet, a compromise very welcome to the
Imperialist party; and on June 27, 1575, after a session of twenty-six days,
the Steczyc Diet dissolved amidst the wildest
confusion, and the interrex summoned a new Diet to meet at Warsaw on November
7.
A few
weeks later the Poles were taught the evils of anarchy by a terrible lesson. In
the beginning of October, 1575, the eastern provinces of the Republic were
ravaged by a predatory Tartar horde, said to be 120,000 strong. The gentry shut
themselves up in their strongholds; the common people fled to the nearest
fortified towns, while “the scourge of God” swept over the rich plains of the
Ukraine, leaving a smoking wilderness behind them, and disappearing into their
native steppes with 55,000 captives, 150,000 horses, and countless herds of
cattle, long before the frontier palatines could rally sufficient cavalry to
oppose them. This lesson was not thrown away. At the next Diet a King was
really elected-though not the King that all the world had been led to expect.
1575] The Election Diet of Warsaw
The great
plain round Warsaw was the meeting-place of the new Diet. The Senate, anxious
for the maintenance of order, and with the warning example of the last Diet
before its eyes, had issued a proclamation limiting the retinue of each magnate
to fifty persons, and strictly forbidding the lesser nobles to carry any other
arms than the sword and halbert, without which no
Polish gentleman considered himself fully dressed. But a decree that cannot be
enforced is so much waste-paper. And so it was now. Everyone of the Palatines
who came to the Diet was surrounded by a body-guard of at least 1000 horsemen,
Cossacks, Heyduks, or Wallachs.
The gentry also came armed cap-à-pie. The prohibited arquebuses and spiked battle-axes were in everybody’s hands, and there were whole forests
of lances.
On November 7, 1575, the assembly marched in solemn procession to the cathedral, where mass was celebrated by the Primate, who accompanied the deputies back to the kolo, and, after invoking the aid of the Holy Spirit, declared the Diet opened. From November 13 to 18 audience was given to the ambassadors of the various competitors, who extolled the virtues of their principals, and sought to outbid one another for the support of the Senate and the Diet.
The Bishop of Breslau spoke first on behalf of the Archduke Ernest.
He eloquently expatiated upon the gifts, the graces, the martial virtues, above
all upon the linguistic accomplishments of the young prince. So well versed was
he in the Bohemian tongue that the acquisition of the cognate Polish language
would be a mere trifle to him. Then, too, his great experience of affairs and
his religious tolerance should not be overlooked. Where else would the Poles
expect to find a prince of such majesty and influence? The support of the
Emperor, the alliance of Spain and the Empire, the union of Bohemia, the
friendship of the European Powers - all these things were at his disposal. He
would also solemnly engage to keep inviolate the laws, the liberties, the
ancient constitution of Poland; to live at peace with the Turk; to make new and
more advantageous commercial treaties with Denmark and the Hanseatic League; to
erect new fortresses for the defence of the frontiers; to rule through none but
natives; to send one hundred noble Polish and Lithuanian youths annually to the
foreign universities; to pay the arrears due to the army and the debts owing by
the State - in short, he not only promised “mountains and seas”, as the Nuncio
expresses it, but anticipated his rivals by engaging, in the Emperor’s name, to
grant everything that any of them might subsequently offer.
Count
Francis Thurn, “with all the dignity of age and all
the vivacity of youth”, then delivered an extravagant panegyric on the Archduke
Ferdinand. According to the orator, the world had never seen the equal of this
young prince. He was the pillar, the oracle, the shining light of the House of
Austria; he spoke Bohemian like his mother-tongue; and, without disparaging the
other members of the Imperial family, the speaker would boldly assert that
Ferdinand was by far the most distinguished of them all. Thurn promised on behalf of his principal 200,000 florins towards reconstructing the
Polish fortresses; and, if agreeable to the Diet, Ferdinand would also raise
and maintain, at his own cost, a standing army of German mercenaries wherewith
to fight the battles of the Republic.
The
ambassador of John of Sweden, who had nothing to offer but an alliance against
the Muscovite, was, despite his connection with the Jagiellos,
but coldly received; whereas the spokesman of the fabulously wealthy Duke of
Ferrara, whose “indescribable love for the noble Polish nation” prompted him to
promise to restore the cathedral of Cracow at his private cost, to lead 6000
horsemen, equipped out of the revenues of his Italian estates, against the
Muscovite, to replenish the exhausted Polish exchequer, and to educate fifteen
young Poles every year in Italy, was held to have spoken much more to the
point.
Last of all came George Blandrata, the ambassador of Stephen Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, who spoke with soldierly frankness and precision. It was no time, he said, for meretricious words, but for meritorious deeds. The safety of Christendom, of which Sarmatia was the iron bastion, depended upon the prudence and concord of the Estates of Poland. It was their bounden duty to lay aside all private ends and personal animosities, and, with uplifted hands, seek the Divine counsels. The prince, his master, was animated by no vain lust of power. He was well aware of his own deficiencies, and none knew better than he that the Sarmatian diadem must always be a constant care and a heavy burden to the wearer. The orator then briefly alluded to the well-known homogeneity of Hungary and Poland; to their frequent union, fraternal concord, ancient alliances; to their time-honored fellowship in peace and war. Still more briefly he touched on the merits of his master, for whom he justly claimed all the requisites of a great soldier and statesman, adding that his ignorance of the native language of Poland was more than atoned for by his perfect command of Latin, her official tongue. Next, with great skill, he
anticipated the objection which might be taken to Báthory as being the Sultan’s
nominee. The Sultan, he said, did not command them as a master; he advised them
as a friend. If his advice were good, why not thankfully embrace it with both
arms? If they thought it injurious, however, who prevented them from rejecting
it? Finally, he promised on behalf of Báthory to preserve the national
liberties, to pay the national debt, to recover all the Muscovite conquests, to
make the frontiers of Poland invulnerable, to pay 200,000 florins into the
treasury, to wage war, not by deputy but personally, against all the enemies of
the Republic, and, if necessary, to sacrifice his life on the battle-field for
her honor and glory.
Blandrata’s oration made a profound impression upon
the Diet, and was greeted with loud applause. The Emperor’s party, which began
to despair of winning over the countless host of deputies, now placed all their
hopes on the Senate, where, chiefly owing to the skill and audacity of the
Nuncio they were very strong. Laureo, indeed, had so
far compromised himself in support of the Emperor, as to run the risk of
banishment in case of failure - nay, on one occasion, he had even thought it
necessary to obtain a special absolution from the Pope for sundry diplomatic
irregularities. Yet there is no reason to suppose that he was guided by other
than the highest motives; and, though only the most signal success could
justify his conduct as a whole, he never seems to have faltered for an instant
on his self-chosen path. To extirpate Polish Protestantism, to form a grand
league against the Turk, had all along been his objects; and the shortest cut
to them both now seemed to him to be the establishment of a Habsburg on the
Polish throne. His exertions were so far successful that, after a few days’
debate (November 18-21), the Senate by a large majority declared itself in
favor of the Emperor Maximilian.
1575] Intervention of Jan Zamoyski
But the
Diet had yet to be reckoned with. The debates in that turbulent assembly began
on November 22, and lasted till November 30. The numerous factions, which had
so long divided it, now resolved themselves into two-those who were for the
Emperor and those who desired a Piast. Most of the
Lithuanians and Prussians were for the former; but the Poles (who formed
three-fourths of the Diet) were, almost to a man, against a German, and they
found an eloquent and intrepid champion in Jan Zamoyski,
Castellan of Belz, whose intellectual superiority was
already generally recognized, and who was destined to become Poland’s greatest
Chancellor.
Jan Zamoyski belonged to one of the most ancient and
illustrious families in Poland. After completing his education at Paris,
Strasburg, and Padua, he returned home one of the most consummate scholars and
jurists in Europe. But his essentially bold and practical genius sought at once
the stormy political arena; and he was mainly instrumental, after the death of
Sigismund II, in remodeling the Polish constitution and procuring the election
of Henry of Valois. After the flight of that prince Zamoyski seems to have aimed at the throne himself, but quickly changed his mind, and
resolved to support one of his compeers. All his life long, both on the
battlefield and in the council-chamber, he was the most determined and
dangerous enemy of the Habsburgs, the rock on which all their anti-Polish
projects went to pieces.
Zamoyski now delivered an impassioned harangue
against the Emperor and his family. After holding up to the Diet the warning
examples of Bohemia and Hungary, the historical victims of Austria’s craft and
cruelty, he asked whether it was prudent to irritate their good friend the
Sultan, all for the sake of a decrepit old man (Maximilian II) who could not
defend them, or of a sickly youth (Archduke Ferdinand), inoculated from his
cradle with Spanish bigotry and superciliousness. Zamoysk’s speech was decisive. Despite the counter-arguments of the opposite party, the
Diet, on November 30, decided by an enormous majority to elect a Piast; and on the following day the Grand-Marshal
officially informed the Senate of their decision. Negotiations now ensued. Zamoyski, as the spokesman of the Diet, eloquently
declaimed in the Senate against the Emperor. The Polish deputies thereupon
seceded from the Diet, and, encouraged by the accession of the minority of the
Senate, sent a second deputation to the Interrex and his faction, demanding the
repudiation of the Emperor. The Senate retorted by requesting the Diet to name
its candidates, and, after some hesitation, Jan Kostka,
Palatine of Sandomeria, and Jan Tenczynski,
Palatine of Belz, were nominated. Both these noblemen
instantly declined the dangerous distinction; and the Primate, egged on by the
Imperialists to proclaim the Emperor, rose from his presidential chair, raised
the crucifix aloft, and had already pronounced the first words of the
coronation formula, “In nomine Patris”, when he was
interrupted by the more cautious of his own party, who, to avoid bloodshed,
postponed the proclamation till the following day.
By
daybreak on December 10, the field of election resembled a field of battle.
Both parties stood face to face in full panoply, behind entrenchments bristling
with cannon - the outbreak of a bloody civil war hung upon a thread. A last
attempt at a compromise was made by the Bishop of Cracow on behalf of the
Senate, while Zamoyski, at the head of a deputation
from the Diet, bitterly reproached the Imperial commissioners for sowing dissensions
in Poland. “We are determined”, cried the orator, “not to suffer the fate of
Hungary, and will on no account have a German King”. On the 12th the Senate,
perceiving the futility of further negotiation, and fearing the violence of the
armed nobility, barricaded themselves within the citadel of Cracow; but at
sunset the Primate, secretly issuing from the gates with a slender retinue,
proceeded a quarter of a league from the city to a sequestered nook, and there,
beneath the uplifted crucifix, and in the midst of a little group of Senators,
declared in the name of the Most Holy Trinity, Maximilian II of Austria, King
of Poland, by the will of the Senate and nobility of Poland and Lithuania;
then, returning with the utmost speed to Cracow, he closed the gates, planted
artillery on the walls, and thereupon sang, with chattering teeth, a hasty Te
Deum in the Cathedral.
But the
triumph of the Senate was short-lived. At sunrise next morning 7000 Polish
noblemen had assembled outside the city to protest, sword in hand, against the
election of the Emperor. The excitement was frantic, and a pacificatory deputation from the Senate narrowly escaped being massacred. The embarrassment
of the assembly, however, was at last equal to its indignation. The question
was, whom were they to elect? The Emperor they refused at any price, but no
native candidate dared to come forward against the Habsburgs. At last, when the
confusion was worse confounded, the Palatine of Cracow suddenly arose and
proposed the Prince of Transylvania. In an instant the name of Báthory, whom no
one had hitherto seriously regarded as a likely candidate, was on every lip;
and a subsequent motion by Zamoyski, that the Prince
should accept as his consort the Korolewna Anna, was
carried by acclamation. On the 14th Sieniecki, the
Grand-Marshal of the Diet, thrice put the question to the chivalry of Poland
and Lithuania: “Do ye desire Stephen Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, to be
your King?”. Whereupon the whole 7000 thrice replied as one man : “We do! We
do!”. “Then”, cried the Marshal, “I herewith proclaim the said Stephen Báthory
King of Poland and Grand-Duke of Lithuania, provided he take the Princess Anna
to wife”. Thus Poland had two Kings Elect, one supported by the Senate, the
other by the Diet. It seemed as if nothing but the arbitrament of battle could decide which of the two was the rightful monarch.
The rival candidates [1576
And now
began a sheer race for the Crown. The last act of the Diet was to dispatch a
deputation to Transylvania to congratulate Báthory on his election, and invite
him to come instantly to Poland with as much money and as many men as he could
get together. Escaping, as by a miracle, an ambush laid for them on the way by
the Imperialists, the deputation reached Stuhlweissenburg, Báthory’s capital, and delivered their message.
Stephen acted with characteristic vigor. Fortified by a friendly letter from
the Sultan, he prepared at once to take possession of his new realm, and, after
drawing a military cordon along the Austrian frontier and appointing his
brother Christopher vice-regent of Transylvania, he hastened with 2500 picked
troops by forced marches into Poland.
Meanwhile
his partisans had not been idle. By the advice of Zamoyski another Diet was summoned to confirm the decision of the Diet of Warsaw. It met
on January 18, 1576, at Jedrzejow, on the Vistula,
about ten leagues from Cracow; and here 10,000 Polish nobles, without awaiting
the Lithuanians or Prussians, confirmed the election of Stephen and Anna, sent
an embassy to Vienna forbidding the Emperor to enter Poland, and then, after a
fortnight’s session, remarkable for its unanimity and tranquility, marched in a
body to Cracow, put to flight all the Emperor's partisans, and sent another
deputation to meet the King Elect, and escort him from the frontier to the
coronation city.
Yet even now the Imperialists did not abandon all hopes. The Nuncio was the life and soul of this party. He did all that energy and adroitness could do for a badly beaten cause. He boldly pronounced the election of the Transylvanian “seditious and invalid”. He endeavored, though in vain, to cajole the Korolewna into rejecting her appointed husband, and marrying one of the Emperor’s sons. He persuaded the Primate, whose peculiar office it was to crown the Kings of Poland, to absent himself from the coronation altogether. He wrote letter after letter to the Emperor urging him to invade Poland at the head of a large army. He suggested that the Holy Father should forbid the woywode of Transylvania (as he persistently called the new King) to accept the Crown. Nay, he even sent a special envoy to Báthory himself, adjuring him by his chivalrousness, his piety, his Catholic faith to give way to his Imperial rival. A splendid embassy, headed by Adalbert Laski, had been already sent by the Senate to Vienna to announce to the Emperor Maximilian his election.
On March 23 (exactly a month later than Báthory) Maximilian II
accepted the Polish Crown in the cathedral of St Augustine, in the presence of
the Imperial family, the Court, the papal legate and the Venetian ambassador,
and took the selfsame oath which had already been taken by Stephen in the
parish church of Stuhlweissenburg. From the cathedral
the envoys were escorted to the castle, where they were pompously regaled at a
grand banquet which lasted till dawn of day, when three successive salvos from
700 cannon hailed the newly elected King. But the thunder of the artillery had
scarcely ceased when other Polish deputies from the Diet of Jedrzejow arrived at Vienna to inform the Emperor officially that Stephen Báthory was now
the lawful King of Poland; and they were speedily followed by a chiaus from the
Sultan with a letter, in which Amurath III informed
“the King of Vienna” that for the last 130 years Poland had been under the
special protection of the Sublime Porte, and that he (the Sultan) had now been
pleased to recognize his faithful servant and ally, Stephen Báthory, as King.
The Sultan added that any attempt on Maximilian’s part to disturb either the
Polish or the Transylvanian possessions of the new Prince would be regarded at
Istanbul as a casus belli, and that in such case the Pasha of Buda and the Beglerbeg of Temesvar were under
strict injunctions to cross the Austrian frontier with 100,000 men.
1576] Coronation of Stephen Báthory
In
Poland, too, Báthory was carrying everything before him. He had postponed his
coronation for a fortnight, as the day originally appointed fell within Holy
Week, so that it was not till Easter Monday (March 23, 1576) that he made his
State entry into Cracow. The procession was headed by George Banfy, captain of the Hungarian Hussars, the Palatine of
Cracow, his brother the Marshal of the Diet, and the Bishop of Cujavia, who, in the absence of the Primate, was to crown
the new King. Next rode 500 Transylvanian gentlemen, two abreast, with leopard
skins over gold and silver cuirasses. In the midst of this brilliant retinue
towered the herculean form of the monarch, distinguished by his manly carriage
and majestic gravity. He wore a scarlet damask attila,
a sable embroidered scarlet mantle, grey hose and yellow buskins. A black
heron’s plume waved from the top of his kalpag, which
was fastened by a diamond clasp. His huge bay horse, of the best Turkish breed,
had a golden bit, and its bridle was encrusted with emeralds, rubies, and
sapphires. Before the King were led three other Turkish thoroughbreds, in
scarlet housings trimmed with ermine, their saddles embroidered with the royal
arms in gold and precious stones. Each saddle was valued at 100,000 florins. Immediately
after him came 1000 Hungarian heydukes, half of them
in sky-blue, half in crimson uniforms, all veterans, not one of whom had fought
in less than ten pitched battles. They were known as the blue and red drabants, but Báthory always called them “my strength”. An
imposing array of 8000 Polish noblemen brought up the rear, at the head of whom
rode the young and handsome Tenczynski, Palatine of Belz, so gorgeously attired “that the like of it had not
been seen in Poland within the memory of man”. A glittering banderium followed him in gold and silver armor, mounted on fiery arabs.
On May 1,
after making the customary pilgrimage to the tomb of St Stanislas,
Stephen and Anne were crowned by the Bishop of Cujavia with the usual ceremonies, though not before Stephen had sternly warned the
assembled nobles and prelates that he would hold them responsible for the
possible consequences of their precipitancy. The coronation was followed by the
nuptials of the sovereigns, banquets and tourneys, the distribution of offices
and dignities (Zamoyski’s appointment to the
Vice-Chancellorship was one of the first), and the issue of circular letters
summoning a general Diet to Warsaw in the beginning of June; all who failed to
appear there at the appointed time were to be regarded as traitors and rebels.
Immediately afterwards Báthory, who was determined, he said, to show that he
was “neither a painted nor a ballad king”, set off for Warsaw to meet the Diet.
The night
before Báthory’s entry into the Polish capital the
Nuncio had been obliged to leave it. Stephen had done everything in his power
to win over Laureo; but his protests, his remonstrances, and his threats, had alike been thrown away. Laureo, though sorely troubled and dismayed, never
wavered in his allegiance to the Emperor. At last an ultimatum from the
indignant King (already on his way to Warsaw) to the obdurate prelate, bade the
latter either come and meet him forthwith or leave the kingdom. The legate
chose the latter alternative, and was escorted to Silesia by a royal
chamberlain. His banishment, however, was not for long. The sudden death of the
Emperor Maximilian at the very moment when that potentate, in league with the
Muscovite, was about to invade Poland, completely changed the face of things.
Stephen, whose orthodoxy was unimpeachable (he had before this extirpated the
Transylvanian Unitarians), had already satisfied the Pope of his perfect
devotion to the Holy See, and Laureo was now ordered
back to Poland.
It was
with no small anxiety that he looked forward to his first interview with a
monarch whom he had so grievously offended, and whose chief counselor he
regarded as his bitterest foe. Comforted, however, by “a most humane letter”
from the King, who was too great a man to bear malice and too prudent a
politician to make foes of possible friends (especially as his own position,
for the moment, was insecure and even perilous), the Nuncio returned at last to
Warsaw, where he was received with open arms. In many subsequent interviews
Stephen detailed his political plans to his new friend. He justified his hatred
of the Habsburgs by reason of the treachery with which the Princes of that
House had always treated Transylvania, and convinced Laureo that it was simply and solely political expediency which attached him to the
Sultan, but that he was resolved to break these bonds and take up arms against
the Turk to the glory of God, on the first opportunity. Of the Poles generally
he had a very poor opinion. He appreciated their valor indeed, and hoped to
make the most of their splendid military qualities; but a man of his stern
simplicity and sobriety could not fail to be disgusted with their vanity,
flightiness, and extravagance. “I do not wonder”, he said, “that Henry of
Valois escaped from them, but if ever I go it shall be by broad daylight, and
not in the dead of night”.
Policy of the new King [1576-7
All Laureo’s efforts during the remainder of his stay in Poland
were directed towards bringing about an amicable understanding between the King
and the Emperor. He exhorted Báthory “to burn all past offences in the fire of
Christian charity”, and though Stephen’s distrust of the Habsburgs remained
invincible, he consented at last to enter into a defensive alliance with the
Empire, which the Nuncio personally carried through on his way back to Rome in
August, 1578, where the zealous, though not always successful, services of the
aged prelate were rewarded by the red hat.
The
leading events of Stephen Báthory’s glorious reign
can here be only very briefly indicated. All armed opposition to him collapsed
with the surrender of the great city of Danzig, since 1454 a self-centred Free State under its own oligarchy and nominal
Polish suzerainty. The “pearl of Poland”, encouraged by her immense wealth and
almost impregnable fortifications, as well as by the secret support of Denmark
and the Emperor, had shut her gates against the new monarch, and was only
reduced (December 16, 1577) after a six months’ siege beginning with a pitched
battle beneath her walls, in which she lost 5000 of her mercenaries, and the
famous banner with the inscription “Aurea Libertas” long regarded as the palladium of the city.
Danzig was compelled to pay a fine of 200,000 gulden into the royal treasury,
but her civil and religious liberties were wisely confirmed. Stephen was now
able to devote himself exclusively to foreign affairs, which demanded equally
decided and delicate handling. In those days the Turkish Power was still in the
ascendant, and even States so important as Venice and Poland were inscribed in
the registers of the Ottoman Empire as tributaries to the Sublime Porte. The
difficulties with the Sultan were temporarily adjusted by a truce signed
November 5, 1577; and the Diet of Warsaw was at length persuaded, though not without
the utmost difficulty, to grant Stephen subsidies for the inevitable war
against Muscovy - subsidies which as usual proved totally inadequate.
1577-82] Báthory’s Muscovite campaigns
Two campaigns of wearing marches, and still more exhausting sieges, ensued, in which Báthory, although repeatedly hampered by the parsimony of the short-sighted szlachta, which could not be made to see that the whole future fate of Poland depended on the issue of the war, was uniformly successful, his skilful diplomacy at the same time allaying the growing jealousy of the Porte and the Emperor. But for the loyal support of his wealthy Transylvanian principality, however, and frequent loans raised on his personal credit from foreign Powers, he would have been unable to prosecute his sagacious Imperial policy. In 1581 Stephen penetrated to the very heart of Muscovy, and, on August 22, sat down before the ancient city of Pskov, whose vast size and imposing fortifications filled the little Polish army with dismay. But the King, despite the murmurs of his own officers and the urgent representations of the papal Nuncio Possevino, whom the Curia, deceived by the delusive mirage of a union of the Churches, had sent expressly from Rome to mediate between the Tsar and the King of Poland, closely besieged the city throughout a winter of arctic severity, till, on December 13, 1581, Ivan IV (the Terrible), alarmed for the safety of the third city in his dominions, consented to treat for peace. Negotiations were opened at Possevino’s residence near Zapoli, and resulted, January 15, 1582, after nearly five weeks of acrimonious wrangling, in the cession of Wielicz, Plock, and the whole of Livonia, to Poland, whereby Muscovy was entirely cut off from the sea, and the Polish frontier pushed further forward towards the East than it had ever been before. It is a melancholy and significant fact that Stephen Báthory’s brilliant services to his adopted country, so far from being rewarded by the dutiful gratitude of his new subjects, absolutely made him unpopular with both the magnates and the szlachta. Not one word of thanks did the King receive from the stan rycerski (estate of nobles in the Diet) for defeating Muscovy, acquiring Plock, and reviving the ancient glories of Poland, till the Chancellor Zamoyski put the whole assembly to shame by rising in their midst and delivering an eloquent panegyric in which he publicly thanked his sovereign in the presence of “this ungrateful people” for his inestimable benefits.
The opposition was marshaled round the immensely wealthy and powerful Zborowski family, which had grown to undeserved greatness and monopolized the principal dignities in the kingdom during the short reign of Henry of Valois. From the first they had treated the new King insolently. At a levée held soon after his coronation, as the papal Nuncio tells us, Marshal Zborowski, the head of the family, fell to reasoning of good swords, drew forth his own blade from its sheath, and lauded it as one of the best in the presence of Báthory, who, justly taking offence thereat, suddenly loosed his scimitar from his girdle, and beating down with it the other’s sword, flashed the scimitar in his face, remarking that it was a still better blade than his (Zborowski’s) sword. Thereupon, the Marshal, perceiving his error in unsheathing his sword in the royal presence, straightway fell upon his knees and begged pardon of his Majesty. The Zborowscy resented being set aside under the new reign in favor of more meritorious persons, and conceived a fanatical hatred of the upstart Chancellor Zamoyski in particular. Stephen bore with them for a while;
but at length their conduct became so seditious and defamatory that he was
compelled in self-defence to take notice of it. His opportunity came, when the
outlawed homicide Samuel Zborowski presumed to return
to Poland. Zamoyski at once arrested him; and he was
arraigned for high treason before a tribunal presided over by the King himself,
and after a scrupulously fair trial was condemned to death and duly beheaded at
the castle of Cracow, May 26, 1584. The Diet, which assembled on January 15,
1585, took up the cause of the Zborowscy, and its
stormy deliberations seemed to be the prelude of a civil war, the whole session
being little more than a determined struggle between law and order on one side,
as represented by the King and his Chancellor, and anarchy and rebellion, as
represented by the Zborowski faction, on the other.
Ultimately, however, Stephen prevailed; the sentence of Samuel Zborowski was confirmed; and his kinsman, Christopher, was
declared infamous and banished (February 22, 1586).
Stephen Báthory’s domestic policy, and death [1582-7
Stephen’s
policy in religious matters aimed at consolidation and pacification. Devoted
Catholic as he was, he nevertheless respected the liberties of the Protestants,
severely punished the students of Cracow for attacking their conventicles, and even protected the Jews from insult and
wrong. A man of culture himself, moreover (Caesar’s Commentaries was his
constant companion, and he revised and corrected the MS. history of his
Muscovite campaigns written by his secretary Heidenstein),
he justly appreciated the immense value of education, and, at the beginning of
his reign, entertained the ambition of reforming the University of Cracow by
placing it in the hands of the ablest scholars of the day, men like Muretus, Zabarella, and Gregory
of Valencia. His chronic poverty, due to the obstructive parsimony of the Diet,
rendered this large and liberal scheme abortive; and he was therefore obliged
to rely more and more upon the Jesuits, who happened to be the best educational
instruments at his command. He established the Order in Wilna,
Posen, Cracow, Riga, and other places, despite the protests of some of the
Catholic Bishops and all the Protestant Superintendents; and from these
seminaries, whose superiority was speedily and universally recognized (the
Protestants themselves sending their children to be educated there), issued
those “lions of the Spirit”, to use Skarga’s expression, who, in the succeeding reign, were to reconvert Poland to
Catholicism.
High
political reasons also bound Stephen Báthory to the Jesuits. They alone had the
intelligence to understand and promote his Imperial designs, which aimed at
nothing less than incorporating Muscovy with Poland, and uniting the kingdoms
of Poland and Hungary, with the object of ultimately expelling the Turks from
Europe, and settling the Eastern Question once for all. These grandiose but, in
view of the peculiar circumstances and of Stephen’s commanding genius, not
altogether impracticable designs, were first suggested by the death of Ivan the
Terrible in 1584. Stephen’s views found an ardent supporter in the new Pope,
the vigorous and enterprising Sixtus V, to whom the
King sent Sokolowski, Archbishop of Lemberg, and his own nephew, Cardinal Báthory, on a special
mission to explain his plans. The King offered, in return for subsidies
amounting to 3,648,000 ducats, to put on foot 84,000 men-at-arms for the
Turkish campaign, and 24,000 for the conquest of Muscovy, at the cost of
200,000 ducats a year for four years. The Pope thereupon despatched Possevino on a second special mission to Poland and
Russia, to pave the way for this vast undertaking; and a Diet was summoned by
Stephen to meet at Grodno, in February, 1587, to consider the whole scheme,
when the entire project was for ever dissipated by
the sudden death of Báthory, who was carried off by a fit of apoplexy on
December 12, 1586, in the flower of his age and vigor. No other Polish monarch
(not even John Sobieski) ever deserved so well of his
country. In his all too brief reign of ten years he had already approved
himself one of the foremost statesmen and soldiers of his age. Not without
reason does Poland reckon him among the most illustrious of her rulers.
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