The Polish-Lithuanian Republic (1569-1795) was one of the largest and most populous states in Early Modern Europe, yet in 1795, its last remnants were partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Here we take a look at the reasons why this mighty power ended up so weak that the neighbours who once feared it could now consume it.
The Noble Republic
The reason why Poland-Lithuania was called a Republic, even though it had a king, was because that monarch shared power with the fiercely independent nobles, and was very often treated as their equal. During one of the many interminable blood feuds between noble families, the king summoned a perpetrator to the Sejm (parliament) to explain himself, but received a curt refusal: "I am not a slave but a Polish gentleman". Writers have long blamed the decentralised political system of Poland-Lithuania – that is, the way that power was dispersed across many people and institutions – for its weakness.
Even before the union of Poland and Lithuania in 1569, both countries had powerful and independent nobles. Poland already had the legal principle neminem captivabimus, the rule that no noble could ever be arrested by the king without a court verdict. On the other hand, the royal courts could not intervene in cases between nobles and their serfs. These two laws illustrate how nobles had autonomy from the crown, but enormous power over the people. Once Poland and Lithuania joined together, the rights of the nobility only grew.
One of the most well-known features of Poland-Lithuania was that the nobility elected their king. All nobles could vote, and they stuck to the principle of unanimity: a king was only elected when all the nobles present agreed. To win them over, kings promised to maintain or expand the independence of the nobles. The very first elected king signed an agreement called the Henrician Articles (after his name, Henry of Valois), which guaranteed the privileges of the nobles and signed away most power to the Sejm. All kings thereafter, right up to the end of the Republic, had to sign the Henrician Articles.
The Sejm, rather than the king, was the true apex of the state. As with royal elections, legislation was passed by unanimity rather than by majority. All nobles present had to agree for the legislation to be passed. Of course, this meant that a single noble could prevent a new law, and in fact they could dissolve the session, nullifying any legislation that had been passed over that whole sitting of the Sejm. That is the famous Liberum Veto - veto just means ‘I do not allow it’ in Latin (Polish nobles were exceptionally well-educated in Latin). When everyone was acting in good faith, passing legislation was therefore a delicate act, with layers of compromise and negotiation. However, it meant anyone acting in bad faith could easily prevent the state from carrying out a policy, as in 1652, when a veto exploded any hope of a united response against the Cossack Rebellion. Agents of powerful nobles or foreign powers could, and did, abuse it. Between 1582–1762, 53 Sejms (almost 60%) were dissolved or broken up. Less famous, but arguably even worse, was that most nobles saw their local Sejmik (little Sejm) as more important than the central Sejm, and felt quite free to ignore any legislation the Sejm did pass if their Sejmik did not agree. It was a vicious cycle: as the central government weakened, the Sejmiki (plural of Sejmik) had to take on more responsibility, so the central government lost more responsibility, and so the central government weakened.
The Polish-Lithuanian nobility’s obsession with unanimity was because of their obsession with equality. Not equality between all people, but between nobles. Whereas nobles in England made up about 2% of the population, in Poland-Lithuania it was up to 9%. The upshot of this was that many had only a tiny amount of land, or none at all - in 1670, there were over 400,000 landless nobles. Although these landless nobles were often not much better off than a serf, they insisted on their legal equality with all nobles, no matter how rich and powerful, and invented the bizarre ideology of Sarmatism. The exact meaning is confused, but they were claiming special descent from the Sarmatians, who supposedly occupied Poland in ancient times, to distinguish the nobility from the common people, and associated the Sarmatians with their ideas of Golden Freedom: personal independence, lawlessness, and a kind of chivalry. This was not an ideology that would support reform in favour of a more powerful central state.
Perhaps the most tragic expression of the ‘Golden Freedom’ was the rokosz. A rokosz was a sort of confederation, which in Poland-Lithuanian law meant a temporary grouping of nobles to achieve some specific objective. In a country where power was so dispersed, it made sense for local nobles to take matters into their own hands. For example, a confederation was formed in 1655 with the aim of driving out the invading Swedes. However, a confederation could be formed to resist the royal government with force of arms. That did not just mean rebellion, it meant a legal rebellion. In the case of a rokosz, where in 1606 and 1662 the confederates’ rebellion spiralled out of control, it was legalised civil war. These were terrible wars that wracked the Republic, yet it was all perfectly legal, and so led to no changes to the constitution.
The cards were strongly stacked against reform. Not only did kings struggle with the Liberum Veto, confederations, and the Golden Freedom, they could not even ally with the lesser nobles to cut the major nobles down to size. This is what happened in states like Prussia, where the lesser nobles became military officers and civil servants. In Poland-Lithuania, the major nobles co-opted the minor ones, especially after devastating wars with the Cossacks, Muscovy and Sweden in the late 17th/early 18th centuries. The major nobles had reserves of cash, and they used it to buy up the wrecked lands of the now penniless lesser nobles. Minor nobles served in the private retinues and armies of major nobles, instead of for the government.
There was another argument against reform. That is, when the going was good, Poland-Lithuania seemed a better place to live than its neighbours. In the late 16th and early 17th century, the Republic avoided the horrific civil wars that blighted its neighbours, like the Thirty Years’ War in the Holy Roman Empire (1618-48), the English Civil Wars (1642-51), the French Wars of Religion (1562-98), or Muscovy’s Time of Troubles (1598-1613). Poland-Lithuania had its share of glories, too, like the reign of Stephen Báthory (reign 1576-86) and the victory of Jan Sobieski against the Ottoman Empire at the Gates of Vienna (1683). The Republic avoided royal tyranny and the extremes of religious conflict. Yet, by the 18th century, the same system was in headlong decline and mocked by famous writers like Voltaire and Montesquieu, while its neighbours recovered and thrived - especially Muscovy, which became the vast Russian Empire.
The problem was that the system was only fit for good times. Kings with powerful personalities, like Stephen Bathory and Jan Sobieski, could cover up its internal weaknesses for a time, but it was not a system that could survive serious pressure. What were those pressures?
The Grain Trade
The Danzig grain trade funded the magnificent lifestyles and palaces of Poland-Lithuania’s nobility, but it also sowed the seeds of the state’s weakness. Poland-Lithuania exported huge amounts of grain in the 16th and 17th centuries. Nobles arranged for their grain to be barged down the rivers from the Polish interior to Danzig (Gdansk), a major port where the Vistula river meets the Baltic sea. A whole genre of romantic literature sprang up about punting log rafts across the countryside, avoiding rapids and shallows and under-water snares, to be met by merchants on the famous Green Bridge. But there was money, as well as poetry, in the Danzig grain trade. Prices in western Europe were much higher than in Poland - in 1650s Holland, double – so foreign merchants had every reason to come to Danzig. On an average day during the height of the trade, there might be 500 ships waiting in the docks. Many of these merchants were Dutch, but they would export as far away as Portugal, or even North Africa.
Grain did make Poland-Lithuania rich. The most distinctive Commonwealth architecture belongs to this period: luxurious manor houses combining indigenous Polish styles with renaissance fashions. Many have been lost because they were built primarily of wood, so have since burned down, but great examples still dot the countryside, like the (brick) Leszczyński Castle at Baranów Sandomierski. They are famous for lavish internal furnishings, like Persian carpets, hunting trophies, oil paintings, and cloth of gold. Elizabeth I of England was deeply concerned with trade and diplomacy with Poland for good reason: in her day, it was an economic powerhouse.
The trouble was that a single export is never sustainable. When a country relies on one product, its economy collapses whenever their overseas customers are no longer willing to pay so much for it. Prices did not remain so high as the 17th century wore on, while the Commonwealth was ravaged by wars and instability, not least the war of 1648-60, in which perhaps a quarter of all people in Poland-Lithuania died. Grain prices recovered, and so did the Polish countryside, but it was hard to reconstruct the old relationship between foreign ships, Danzig merchants, and Polish nobles. Nobles would not send the barges if they did not have a guaranteed buyer at the end, but ships would not turn up if there might not be grain to buy. The chain was broken and never fully repaired.
The good years of grain exports disguised the problems with Poland-Lithuania’s economy, and even exacerbated them. First, the vast majority of the money earned went in the pockets of merchants, and nobles preferred to use their share to buy luxury goods rather than invest in infrastructure or domestic industry, so the money trickled back out. Poland-Lithuania remained completely reliant on its agriculture.
To harvest ever more from this one source of income, the nobility intensified their exploitation of the serfs. While Poland and Lithuania had serf economies in the Middle Ages, in the Early Modern Period (15th and 16th century), they legalised draconian rights of the nobles over their serfs. They ordered their serfs to work, unpaid, on the noble’s plot of land for more and more days. They extended control over the marriage of serfs and their education. Most importantly, they prevented serfs from leaving without their consent - in some places, only one serf a year was allowed to leave the village. Historians call this tightening up ‘the Second Serfdom’. Not only was Second Serfdom very bad for the serfs, but in the longer-term it was also bad for the country itself. Unlike in West Europe, ordinary people could not invest their property, migrate to towns, or educate their children. That is one important reason why Poland-Lithuania could not diversify its economy into commerce and manufacturing. Nobles only drove their serfs harder as the grain trade declined, in a futile attempt to make up for their diminishing profit, so both the rise and fall of the grain trade worked to keep Poland-Lithuania’s workforce bound to the land - not to mention miserable.
Lack of investment and the rigours of serfdom meant the Commonwealth’s economy was not flexible, it had no alternative except to continue to export grain, and so its fate was tied to the price of agricultural goods abroad. In the 18th century, Poland-Lithuania’s neighbours grew richer than it ever was.
Interference & Partition
On 10 October, 1794, Tadeusz Kościuszko lay bleeding from two pike wounds, while the Russian forces swept over the remnants of his forces. They called Kościuszko the ‘hero of two continents’ for his valiant actions in both the American Revolutionary War and the last attempts of Poland-Lithuania to retain its independence. The former was successful, the latter was not. A story goes that the wounded Kościuszko said "Finis Poloniae" ("the end of Poland") as he was captured. He probably did not say that, but it was. The next year, the Polish-Lithuanian Republic was formally wiped off the maps, its former lands now appearing inside the borders of Austria, Prussia, and Russia. The conquering powers even agreed not to mention Poland in the names of their new territories. Officially, the Republic was no more.
This was the Third Partition, so called because those same conquering states had already consumed most of Poland-Lithuania already, in the First (1772) and Second (1793) partitions. Over the preceding century or so, the surrounding states of Russia, Prussia, and Austria had all developed armies and economies that far outstripped Poland-Lithuania’s. How they came to agree on the three partitions is complicated diplomatic history, but the essential logic is simple: a weak Poland-Lithuania benefitted them all, so they were compelled to take more and more control every time it showed a glimmer of independence. With such neighbours, a country could not afford to be weak.
It is true that Poland-Lithuania suffered serious troubles in the late 17th and early 18th century from which it struggled to recover, and we have seen how its economy and institutions struggled to develop. However, all of its neighbours had severe problems throughout their history, and wars in the 1700s nearly reduced Austria (1740-8) and Prussia (1756-63) to insignificance. We need to answer why Poland-Lithuania struggled to recover and reform.
In addition to its peculiar economic difficulties and political arrangements, Polish-Lithuanian leaders also struggled with the cut-throat politics of the Early Modern Baltic. In 1587, the nobility elected a Swedish prince to the throne in the hope of a union between these two great Baltic powers, just like that between Poland and Lithuania. However, the end result was entangling the two powers in each other’s politics, generating many wars and lasting hostility. The result was that they could never unite as Muscovy and Prussia grew in strength. In 1647, Muscovy exploited the Cossack rebellion against the Republic to engulf the Cossacks and their lands - by 1654, Poland-Lithuania had effectively lost the Cossacks and Kyiv to Muscovy. The Swedes then feared that Muscovy would grab even more land, so they invaded Poland-Lithuania to take it first (1655). These were the wars that killed as many as half of Poland’s population, and provoked the second rokosz. With Poland-Lithuania weak, the Duchy of Prussia (a Polish vassal) broke away. Now Prussia, joined with Brandenburg (northern Germany), was all but an independent state, threatening Poland’s north.
All was not lost, Poland-Lithuania was still a large and powerful country, and they saw many of their reverses as temporary. Yet the famous King John III Sobieski (aka Jan Sobieski, reign 1674-96) did not focus on reclaiming those lands or reforming the state. It is true that he tried to align with Sweden and France to win back Prussia, but when that failed, he turned to an alliance with the Habsburg dynasty (Austria). He spectacularly rescued his Austrian allies when he defeated the Ottoman army outside Vienna in 1683, and then continued to devote Polish-Lithuanian troops to the cause of driving back the Ottomans. This markedly helped Austria and Muscovy: the eventual peace treaty with the Ottomans (1699) made them both great powers, and confirmed Muscovy’s transformation into the Russian Empire. But Polish-Lithuanian gains were tiny. Sobieski did not even demand the return of lands from Muscovy as a condition of helping, when Muscovy was in serious peril. Meanwhile, while the king was concentrating on the receding Ottomans, the state was in ever more need of reform. The Sapieha clan had more or less split Lithuania from any central control. Sobieski’s reign was perhaps the last opportunity to restore Poland-Lithuania’s lands, or reform its politics, and he did neither.
After his reign, the Republic’s neighbours were obviously dominant, and they used their dominance to crush Polish-Lithuanian attempts at reform. At the ‘Silent Sejm’ of 1717, the nobles passed a series of laws that limited the powers of the state and the size of its army, as well as legalising Russian intervention, all under the muzzles of Russian muskets. The Russians also forced the election of their chosen candidate for king several times (e.g. 1733, 1764). While Russian interference was perhaps the heaviest-handed, the Prussians did their part: when the Poles tried to build a modern customs system that would have raised much needed revenue, the Prussians built forts on the rivers to bombard Polish ships until the government cancelled the policy. Poland-Lithuania was clearly under the thumb of its neighbours.
However, these examples show that there is another side to the story. People then, as now, blamed the people of Poland-Lithuania for the failure of their state, but we can see them trying to reform again and again, and being prevented by foreign powers. Even the partitions happened precisely because people in Poland-Lithuania reacted to this blatant interference. When the Russian ambassador unilaterally arrested reformist leaders in 1768, Poland broke out into a rebellion, and Russia eventually responded by coercing Poland into the first partition (1773). The partition only stoked the fire, so that between 1788-93, while Russia was busy fighting the Ottoman Empire, the Sejm passed a massive reform programme, one that ended the Liberum Veto, abolished the restriction on army size, and even ended the tyranny of nobles over peasants. This programme is embodied by the constitution of the 3rd of May – the second codified constitution in the world, after the USA’s. Incidentally, the 3rd of May is still celebrated in Poland as a national holiday. The Polish-Lithuanian army put up a surprisingly strong resistance to the inevitable reprisals, but they were defeated by the much larger Russian forces, and the Russians led the second partition (1793). The same pattern played out again, a year later, with Tadeusz Kościuszko’s uprising meeting initial success, before being crushed by overwhelming force. After the Third Partition (1795), there was no Poland-Lithuania left to reform.
The point is that Poland-Lithuania was not doomed to fail. Poland-Lithuania faced an uphill struggle, saddled with difficult institutions and an unbalanced economy, but it could have reformed. In fact, it did, but it was too late. Its neighbours had successfully prevented change so long that, by the time the Republic seized its opportunity, it was too late.
