Robert N. Bain, David Hannay and William R. Morfill

“ 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, there were “more Latinists in Poland than there used to be in Latium.” The university of Cracow, the sole source of knowledge in the vast Polish realm, still moved in the vicious circle of scholastic formularies. ”

“ Eminently practical, Sigismund recognized that the first need of Poland was a standing army. The miserable collapse of the Polish chivalry during the Bukovinian campaign of 1497 had convinced every one that the ruszenie pospolite was useless for serious military purposes, and that Poland, in order to hold her own, must in future follow the example of the West, and wage her warfare with trained mercenaries. But professional soldiers could not be hired without money, and the difficulty was to persuade the diet to loose its purse-strings. ”

“ Alexander's election cemented, indeed, once for all, the union between Poland and Lithuania, inasmuch as, on the eve of it (Oct. 3, 1501) the senates of both countries agreed that, in future, the king of Poland should always be grand-duke of Lithuania, but this was the sole benefit which the Republic derived from the reign of Alexander, under whom the Polish government has been well described as a rudderless ship in a stormy sea, with nothing but the grace of God between it and destruction. In Lithuania the increasing pressure of the Muscovite was the chief danger. ”

“ The immediate consequence of these victories was the outburst of a khlopskaya zloba, or “serfs fury.” Throughout the Ukraine the gentry were hunted down, flayed, burnt, blinded and sawn asunder. Every manor-house and castle was reduced to ashes. Every Uniate or Catholic priest who could be caught was hung up before his own high altar, along with a Jew and a hog. The panic-stricken inhabitants fled to the nearest strongholds, and soon the rebels were swarming over the palatinates of Volhynia and Podolia. Meanwhile the Polish army, 40,000 strong, with 100 guns, was assembling on the frontier. ”

“ Henceforth the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania were to constitute one inseparable and indivisible body politic, under one sovereign, elected in common, with one diet and one currency. All dependencies and colonies, including Prussia and Livonia, were to belong to Poland and Lithuania in common. ”

“ Above all, they alone seem to have had the gift of guiding the most difficult of nations properly. Two centuries of Jagiellonic rule made Poland great despite her grave external difficulties. Had that dynasty been prolonged for another century, there is every reason to suppose that it would also have dealt satisfactorily with Poland's still more dangerous internal difficulties, and arrested the development of that anarchical constitution which was the ruling factor in the ruin of the Republic. ”

“ This boundless complacency was due to policy, not weakness. The second Polish Vasa was a man of genius, fully conscious of his powers, and determined to use them for the benefit of his country. The events of the last reign had demonstrated the incompetence of the Poles to govern themselves. Any amelioration of the existing anarchy must be extra-parliamentary and proceed from the throne. But a reforming monarch was inconceivable unless he possessed the confidence of the nation, and such confidence, Wladislaus naturally argued, could only be won by striking and undeniable public services. ”

“ In the art of war the Knights were immeasurably superior to all their neighbours. The pick of the feudal chivalry composed their ranks; with all Europe to draw upon, their resources seemed inexhaustible, and centuries of political experience made them as formidable in diplomacy as they were valiant in warfare. And indeed, for the next twenty years, the Teutonic Order more than held its own. Skilfully taking advantage of the jealousies of Poland and Lithuania, as they were accentuated by the personal antagonism of Jagiello and Witowt (q.v.) ”

“ The Czartoryscy, of all men, were bound by their principles and professions to set their fellow citizens an example of fraternal concord. Yet they rejected with scorn and derision the pacific overtures of their political opponents, the Potoccy, the Radziwiłłowie, and the Braniscy, Prince Michal openly declaring that of two tyrannies he preferred the tyranny of the Muscovite to the tyranny of his equals. He had in fact already summoned a Russian army corps to assist him to reform his country, which sufficiently explains his own haughtiness and the unwonted compliancy of the rival magnates. ”

“ Incredible as it may seem, the expedition to place the false Demetrius on the Muscovite throne was a private speculation of a few Lithuanian magnates, and similar enterprises on the part of other irresponsible noblemen on the Danube or Dniester brought upon unhappy Poland retaliatory Tatar raids, which reduced whole provinces to ashes. Every attempt to improve matters, by reforming the impossible constitution, stranded on the opposition of the gentry. ”

“ The Republic was never, Poland and the Turks. indeed, the “Buckler of Christendom.” That glorious epithet belonged of right to Hungary, which had already borne the brunt of the struggle with the Ottoman power for more than a century. It is true that Wladislaus II. of Poland had fallen on the field of Varna, but it was as a Magyar king at the head of a Magyar army that the young monarch met his fate. Poland, indeed, was far less able to cope with the Turks than compact, wealthy Hungary, which throughout the 15th century was one of the most efficient military monarchies in Europe. ”

“ At this crisis Poland owed her salvation to two events—the formation of a general league against Sweden, brought about by the apprehensive court of Vienna and an almost simultaneous popular outburst of religious enthusiasm on the part of the Polish people. The first of these events, to be dated from the alliance between the emperor Leopold and John Casimir, on the 27th of May 1657, led to a truce with the tsar and the welcome diversion of all the Muscovite forces against Swedish Livonia. ”

“ A further step must be taken—the two independent countries must be transformed into a single state. The great obstacle in the way of this, the only true solution of the difficulty, was the opposition of the Lithuanian magnates, who feared to lose the absolute dominance they possessed in the grand-duchy if they were merged in the szlachta of the kingdom. But, at the last moment, the dread of another Muscovite invasion made them more pliable and, at a Polish diet held at Warsaw from November 1563 to June 1564, which the Lithuanians attended, the question of an absolute union was hotly debated. ”

“ Historical work has been produced by Hirschberg, Pappée, Sobieski, Czermak and others, and the histories of Polish literature by Stanislaus Tarnowski and Piotr Chmielowski are of the highest value, the former dealing more with the aesthetic side of literature and the latter with the historical. The Poles are busy in reviving their great past. Hence the enthusiasm for historical studies, and the Biblioteka pisarzow polskich, which shows us what abundance of literature was produced in Poland in the 16th and beginning of the 17th century. ”

“ On the other hand, the Poles were also to blame for the failure of constitutional government. They would agitate by means of the so-called National Masonry, or National Patriotic Society as it was afterwards called, for the restoration of the full kingdom of Poland. The nobles who dominated the diet did nothing to remove the most crying evil of the country—the miserable state of the peasants, who had been freed from personal serfdom by Napoleon in 1807, but were being steadily driven from their holdings by the landlords. ”

“ The Polish nobles, gentry and Church—the educated classes generally—were crushed. It must, however, be noted that one class of the measures taken to punish the old governing part of the population of Poland has been very favourable to the majority. The peasants were freed in Lithuania, and in Poland proper much was done to improve their position. The Russian government has benefited by their comparative prosperity, and by the incurable hatred they continue to feel for the classes which were once their oppressors. The national history of Poland closes with the rising of 1863. ”

“ Moreover, they ignored the fact that the success of the Protestant propaganda was due rather to political than to religious causes. The Polish gentry's jealousy of the clerical estate, whose privileges even exceeded their own, was at the bottom of the whole matter. Any opponent of the established clergy was the natural ally of the szlachta, and the scandalous state of the Church herself provided them with a most formidable weapon against her. It is not too much to say that the condition of the Catholic Church in Poland was almost as bad as it was in Scotland during the same period. ”

“ In Poland, meanwhile, something very like anarchy prevailed. Alexander had practically surrendered his authority to an incapable aristocracy, whose sole idea of ruling was systematically to oppress and humiliate the lower classes. In foreign affairs a policy of drift prevailed which encouraged all the enemies of the Republic to raise their heads, while the dependent states of Prussia in the north and Moldavia in the south made strenuous efforts to break away from Poland. ”

“ In the reign of Sigismund was effected the incorporation of the duchy of Masovia with the Polish crown, after an independent existence of five hundred years. In 1526 the male line of the ancient dynasty became extinct, and on the 26th of August Sigismund received the homage of the Masovians at Warsaw, the capital of the duchy and ere long of the whole kingdom. Almost every acre of densely populated Masovia was in the hands of her sturdy, ultra-conservative squires, in point of culture far below their brethren in Great and Little Poland. ”

“ In view of the fact that Poland was the most defenceless country in Europe, with no natural boundaries, and constantly exposed to attacks from every quarter, it was not unreasonable to expect even this patriotic sacrifice from the privileged classes, who held at least two-thirds of the land by military tenure. Nevertheless, the diet refused to consider the scheme. In the following year a more modest proposal was made by the Crown in the shape of a capitation of six gulden, to be levied on every nobleman at the beginning of a campaign, for the hiring of mercenaries. ”

“ In the middle of the 16th century the ancient order of the Knights of the Sword, whose territory embraced Esthonia, Livonia, Courland, Semgallen and the islands of Dago and Oesel, was tottering to its fall. All the Baltic powers were more or less interested in the apportionment of this vast tract of land, whose geographical position made it not only the chief commercial link between east and west, but also the emporium whence the English, Dutch, Swedes, Danes and Germans obtained their corn, timber and most of the raw products of Lithuania and Muscovy. ”

“ The existence of so many ecclesiastical writers was a natural feature in Polish literature; they formed the only really cultured class in the community, which consisted besides of a haughty ignorant nobility living among their serfs, and (at a vast distance) those serfs themselves, in a brutalized condition. Burghers there were, properly speaking, none, for most of the citizens in the large towns were foreigners governed by the Jus magdeburgicum. Naruszewicz has not the happy vivacity of Krasicki; he attempts all kinds of poetry, especially satire and fable. He is at best but a mediocre poet ”

“ We now come to the reign of the last Polish king, Stanislaus Poniatowski, and the few quiet years before the final division of the country, during which the French taste was all powerful. This is the second great period of the development of Polish literature, which has known nothing of medieval romanticism. The literature of the first or Renaissance period gives us some good poets, who although occasionally imitators are not without national feeling, and a goodly array of chroniclers, most of whom made use of Latin. ”

“ Unfortunately, Venice, for her own safety's sake, insisted on the publication of Wladislaus's anti-Turkish alliance; the Porte, well informed of the course of Polish affairs, remained strictly neutral despite the most outrageous provocations; and Wladislaus, bound by his coronation oath not to undertake an offensive war, found himself at the mercy of the diet which, full of consternation and rage, assembled at Warsaw on the 2nd of May 1647. It is needless to say that the Venetian alliance was repudiated and the royal power still further reduced. ”

“ Chmielnicki, by suddenly laying bare the nakedness of the Polish republic, had opened the eyes of Muscovy to the fact that her secular enemy was no longer formidable. Three years after his defeat at Beresteczko, Chmielnicki, finding himself unable to cope with the Poles single-handed, very reluctantly transferred his allegiance to the tsar, and the same year the tsar's armies invaded Poland, still bleeding from the all but mortal wounds inflicted on her by the Cossacks. The war The Russians Invade Poland. ”