“Litwo, ojczyzno moja! Ty jesteś jak zdrowie;
ile Cię trzeba cenić, ten tylko się dowie,
Kto Cię stracił.”
“Lithuania, my homeland, you are like health, only one who has lost you can know your value,” so goes the opening line of Adam Mickiewicz’s (1798 – 1855) national epic poem, Pan Tadeusz (1834). But how could this phrase lamenting the loss of Lithuanian statehood speak to a Polish national narrative? The answer lies in the late 14th century, for it is then that the Kingdom of Poland and the Duchy of Lithuania started on the path to join and eventually become the formidable entity known as the Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569 – 1795).
The death of Kazimierz III Wielki (Casimir III the Great; 1310 – 1370) spelled the end of the Piast Dynasty. Without an heir, his throne passed to a nephew, Ludwik Węgierski (Louis I of Hungary; 1326 – 1370), who was also the king of Hungary. Ludwik’s daughter, Jadwiga Andegaweńska (Hedwig of Poland; c. 1373 – 1399), would go on to be crowned as the first female Polish monarch in 1384. The queen regnant (like Britain’s Elizabeth II, equivalent in rank to king) married the very recently baptized Lithuanian duke, Władysław Jagiełło (c. 1351 – 1434) in 1386, thus affirming a Polish-Lithuanian Union and starting the mighty Jagiellonian Dynasty. The union was desperately needed if both nations were to push back against the Teutonic Order. This German military monastic order had taken over Prussia, a region in what is now northern Poland and southern Lithuania and was poised to expand into both realms. Jageiłłó’s Catholic baptism rendered the Teuton’s missionary imperative to Christianize (and overtake) the pagan Lithuania moot. Krzyżacy, or the “Knights of the Cross,” as the German order is known in Polish, did not give up easily. Their retreat from the Prussian stronghold of Marienburg (pol. Malbork) came only after a rousing Polish-Lithuanian victory in the Battle of Grunwald in 1410. Though Malbork didn’t fall to Jagiełło’s forces, the knights were weakened and by the middle of the 15th century, control over most of Prussia was ceded to the Polish kingdom. Those curious to see the world’s largest castle can still visit the mighty Malbork, today a tourist attraction and UNESCO world heritage site in northern Poland.
Jan Matejko’s epic painting, the Battle of Grunwald (1872 – 1878). The original is held by the
National Museum in Warsaw.
Poland and Lithuania of the 15th century; map included in Tymowski et al. Note that the Black Sea is in the lower right hand corner of the map.
Jagiełło’s second son, Kazimierz IV (1427 – 1492) cemented the return to dynastic rule when he assumed the Polish throne in 1447, three years after his older brother Władysław, king of Poland and Hungary, perished in the Battle of Varna, a joint Polish-Hungarian effort against the Ottoman Empire. Kazimierz, under whose reign the Teutonic Order was finally vanquished, oversaw a period of great expansion. It is important to note, however, that despite the almost two centuries of Jagiellonian rule, the Polish throne was decided by election, even if sometimes this vote simply ratified the ascendancy of an obvious direct heir to the throne.
During the Commonwealth period, Poland, already quite multicultural, gained in ethnic and religious diversity. Renewed access to sea routes in the northern Pomerania allowed trade to flourish and goods flowed up the Wisła (Vistula) River to the city of Gdańsk (Danzig). Timber (necessary to sustain the oceanic expansion of Western European states), furs, and increasingly into the following centuries, grain, flowed to the West. At home, food production expanded, especially given the agricultural development of Lithuanian lands made possible by the union. Kraków, the Jagiellonian capital until 1569, became not only an important political and economic hub, but also continued to grow as a center of learning with the re-establishment of the Uniwersytet Jagielloński (Jagiellonian University) in 1400 (originally founded in 1364). The 15th century also saw the emergence of literary Polish, which was used throughout the kingdom, and art developed both in relation to Western European and Eastern influences. By the time Kazimierz IV died in 1492, Poland was well positioned to attain its 16th-17th century Golden Age.
Wawel Castle in Kraków. This was the seat of one of the Polish state until the late 16th century, when the capital moved to Warsaw. Photo by Tomasz Warszewski (Adobe Stock #517333178).
The union between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was both close and distant in the 15th century. It was legally formalized as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. The resulting entity was a union of two nations, albeit the political and cultural center of the Commonwealth gravitated to the korona (crown), as the Polish state was known (Lithuania was then the Grand Duchy of Lithuania). The term commonwealth, in Polish rzeczpospolita, is derived from the Latin res publica, the term rzeczpospolita refers uniquely to the Polish state. It was a political structure designed to benefit the people of a state rather than the private domain of an absolute monarch. The king was to be curtailed by law. In this period, the Commonwealth’s szlachta, or the landed nobles (8-10% of the population), understood itself as the representative class of citizens, emblematic of and responsible for the wellbeing of the nation at large. Beginning in the 16th century, the szlachta enjoyed an age of “golden freedom,” in which the nobles, regardless of rank, held great privilege in the political life of the nation. Aristocrats in the Sejm, or parliament, contended for power and legitimacy with the monarchs, significantly curbing the power of the king. The wealthiest aristocrats, the so-called magnateria (magnate families), exerted the most significant political influence, but often fought among themselves to the detriment of national unity.
16th century Poland, though not without political uproar, came to be known as a golden age. The nobles, serfs, and urbanites alike prospered until the mid 17th century Potop (Swedish Deluge) devastated the Commonwealth’s economy. In these “golden” times, the complex ethnic makeup of the two nations afforded those living in the Commonwealth religious tolerance rarely granted in other parts of Europe. It was guaranteed to all in Poland by the Warsaw Confederation of 1573. Nevertheless, throughout the golden age, the spiritual center of the nation as a political and cultural body was mainly Catholic.
Education in the Commonwealth flourished—by the middle of the century, about one third of the nobility was literate and the Commonwealth’s cities boasted hundreds of publishing houses (Tymowski et. al 124). Polish began to supersede Latin as both the official and literary language of the nation, though Latin education remained important as a language that provided access to the cosmopolitan cultures of Western Europe. Still, it belonged to the purview of the literary and social elites. From 1543, the proceedings of the representative body, the Sejm, for example, were edited in Polish, and by the end of the century, published literary works composed in Polish outnumbered those written in Latin (ibid. 125).
Monument of great astronomer Mikołaj Kopernik in his hometown, Toruń. Photo by Lukasz Janyst (Adobe Stock #142970625).
Mikołaj Kopernik (Nicolaus Copernicus; 1473 – 1543) was an exemplary figure of his times. His biography demonstrates the cosmopolitan turn of the 16th century. Born to the merchant burgher class in the northern city of Toruń, Copernicus spoke Latin, German, and Polish. He became in turn a government official, diplomat, scholar, translator, doctor, lawyer, and, of course, the astronomer who first championed a heliocentric theory of the cosmos. As a young man, he studied in Kraków, then travelled to Bologna and Padua, where he continued his education in law, before returning to Poland in the early 16th century to take on his multiple professional roles. His famous heliocentric treaty, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, completed in manuscript form years before, would go on to be published in Nuremberg in 1543 (in Latin). Today, travelers to Toruń can visit Kopernik’s house and stroll through the beautifully preserved mixture of gothic and renaissance architecture of the old town. Another bit of Toruń history: the Kopernik gingerbread company, so re-named in the 1950s, is Poland’s oldest continually operating confectioner. Kopernik is famous for their juicy, stuffed gingerbread creations, known in Polish as pierniki.
Kopernik himself was, of course, a classic Renaissance man, but this term brings us to the somewhat vexed question of the Polish Renaissance. For a long time, historians writing about Poland considered the nation in terms of its peripheral location vis à vis Western Europe, writing defensively, and so ultimately acknowledging historical narratives that consider Poland “belated” in relation to the more “developed” West. Today we know that this type of thinking privileges a master Western European narrative, preventing us from understanding Eastern Europe on its own terms. Instead of thinking about why or how Poland was “late” to the cultural rebirth experienced by Western Europe, we might consider instead how the Commonwealth in the 16th and 17th centuries functioned within its own historical context, even if the fascinating routes of socio-political developmental mapped in these centuries were diminished by the partitions of the next.
A snowy view of the Royal Castle in Warsaw, the seat of the Polish royalty since the Waza times. Photo by Drone in Warsaw (Adobe Stock #716628113).
In these “golden” centuries, Poland’s geographic location, at the crossroads of Europe and the near East, was made evident in both the noble Sarmacja (the Sarmatian ideology) and a material culture deeply influenced by its Eastern neighbors. The term Sarmacja is derived from the name of an ancient Iranian people, the Sarmatians. In the Polish case, it refers to the blend of Western and Eastern ideas that the nobility strove to embody since they perceived themselves as the heirs to the legacy of the ancient Sarmatians. While we might look back to claims of a connection to the ancient tribes as fanciful, it is more instructive to think of this invented tradition as a clever early modern ideology designed to define the identity of two nations joined in a political union that straddled the West and East. The ideals embraced by Sarmacja included devotion to a republican political order, i.e., the Polish “golden freedom,” and religious tolerance. A strongly held sense of honor and generous hospitality towards friends, neighbors, and visitors was also a key attribute of the Sarmacja. Aesthetically, the Sarmacja emulated the styles of Eastern cultures, adopting “Oriental” dress and the hairstyles, much to the consternation of Western European visitors who associated Poles with the heathen “others” of “Oriental” culture with a mixture of fear and derision. Despite the sartorial similarity, and a sense that Polish szlachta shared an ineffable nobility of spirit with Eastern cultures that was alien to Western Europe, one of Poland’s greatest battles was fought precisely in defense of Europe against Ottoman incursions.
The most significant figure in Polish-Ottoman relations, and in 17th century Poland, is surely King Jan III Sobieski (1629 – 1696, r. 1674 – 1969), a noted statesman, scholar, and military commander. This elected monarch was one of a succession of native sons enthroned after the heirless end of the Jagiellonian Dynasty and the troubled reign of the Swedish Waza kings (on the Polish throne from 1587 – 1668). Sobieski presided over the Commonwealth after the Swedish invasions of the mid 17th century, the so-called Potop (Deluge), Hetman Bohdan Chmielnicki’s (Bohdan Khmelnytsky; 1595 – 1657) Cossack rebellion in Ukraine, and a war with Russia. These conflicts left the union diminished, both economically and geographically. The state survived, but historians note the majority of the ruling class was not sufficiently attuned to the significant geopolitical repercussions of these conflicts.
A map of the Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th/17th century. Featured as an insert in Tymowski et al.
In this context, Sobieski is remembered as one of the Commonwealth’s last formidable military leaders who stabilized the nation after a series of destructive conflicts. Wars with the Ottomans, who had pressed into the Commonwealth’s southeastern reaches (contemporary Ukraine), came to a head in the middle of the 17th century. In 1683, Sobieski travelled to Vienna with the famed husaria, a tactically brilliant cavalry unit that wore giant wings to intimidate enemies and create thundering noise on the battlefield. The husaria have been immortalized in Polish film history in Jerzy Hoffman’s Potop (The Deluge; 1974). In the video below (around the 4:27 mark), you can see a cinematic recreation of the husaria‘s charge against the Swedish invaders during the Deluge.
Sobieski took control of the European (Austrian, German, and Polish) armies, and vanquished the Ottomans, liberating Vienna from their siege. In addition to the political consequences of Sobieski’s victory, the battle in Vienna also purportedly transformed European cuisine. A well-known historical anecdote holds that Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki (1640 – 1694), a diplomat, translator, and spy for Sobieski, happened upon bags of coffee beans during one of his escapades. After the battle, he went on to open one of Vienna’s first coffee shops. Though similar establishments were known to exist in multiple European cities, none could claim such a swashbuckling origin story!
The painter Jan Matejko’s (1838 – 1893) Sobieski pod Wiedniem (Sobieski at the Battle of Vienna; 1883). The King is the painting’s focal point. He holds a missive intended for the Pope in Rome.
Despite Sobieski’s efficient leadership, the Commonwealth entered the 18th century in a weakened position. The power of the nobles, enshrined since the mid 17th century in the parliamentary mechanism of the liberum veto, led to political impasse. The liberum veto, which held that all nobles were equal, allowed any member of the szlachta to oppose the parliament’s ongoing deliberations and meant that one vote could stop parliamentary action (though vetos could be overruled). Sobieski’s parliament was already troubled by the veto, and its use would only increase in the following century, especially as aggressive neighbors realized how useful a deadlocked Polish parliament could be to their political interests. Efforts at reform that could strengthen the state came in the late 18th century with the Polish Enlightenment, but by then, foreign powers had made head roads into Polish politics that effectively stymied effective reform.
By the time that Adam Mickiewicz’s (1798 – 1855) Pan Tadeusz was published in 1834, “Lithuania, my homeland,” was a poignant cry pointing back to the promise of the Commonwealth and a powerful Poland. At its greatest extent in the early 17th century, the Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth covered almost one million square km. By the third partition of 1795, this great European state had been wholly erased from the map of the world.
Visit the History landing page for suggested learning activities pertaining to this topic.
For further reading on this topic, visit the Introduction to Poland Resource Guide.