Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (50 page)

Throughout Sigismund-August’s reign, no stable peace was achieved with Muscovy. The fifth Muscovite War had ended in 1537 with a truce, not a treaty. The grand duchy had been strengthened by a second victory at Orsha in 1564 during the Livonian crisis, and by gaining direct access to the sea at Mittau and Riga; but Moscow had also gained its first ever foothold on the Baltic at Narva. Further hostilities were awaited.
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By the mid-1560s, the most pressing concern by far was the imminent extinction of the Jagiellonian dynasty. Sigismund-August was convinced that his death would bring chaos if the grand duchy were not integrated with Poland. The
Sejm
, which assembled in Lublin three days before Christmas in 1568, had been convoked for the express purpose of forging a constitutional union between kingdom and grand duchy. Sigismund-August was in a hurry. This was the fourth such meeting in five years, and was attended by both Lithuanian and Polish representatives; the arguments were well rehearsed. The common danger from Muscovy, the exposure of the south-eastern provinces to the Tartars, the convergence of political cultures and the inadequacy of existing military and financial practices all pointed to the necessity of fundamental change. But there was added urgency. The king’s third marriage had failed definitively. Divorce was impossible. A legitimate heir could not be born. The Jagiellons were sure to die out.

The king-grand duke, tired and sick, roused himself for the last great effort of his life. He alone could break the barriers to reform. In the last decade, he had tried many devices to unify mechanisms in the two parts of his realm. In 1559 he had instituted a
Sejm
for the grand duchy, and in 1564 provincial
sejmiki
or regional assemblies of nobles on the Polish model. At the same time he surrendered all of his prerogatives which limited the nobility’s property rights, and extended full legal privileges to Orthodox gentry. He knew, of course, that habits do not change overnight. He knew that the Lithuanian representatives were fearful of Poland’s greater numbers, and had been selected by the magnates under threat of punishment. He watched at Lublin how the three leading Lithuanians – Mikołaj ‘the Red’ Radziwiłł, Jan Chodkiewicz and Ostafi
Wołowicz – simply ordered the rest of their delegation to keep silent. After one month of formalities, and a further month of crossed purposes, the king summoned Radziwiłł and Chodkiewicz to appear in person and explain themselves. When they fled in the night he reacted angrily. Over the following days three provinces of the grand duchy – Podlasie, Volhynia and Kiev – were incorporated into the kingdom by royal decree. Two Podlasian officers, on refusing to swear allegiance to the Polish Crown, were promptly stripped of their posts. The implication was clear: if the Lithuanian lords refused to behave like Polish noblemen and debate the issue openly, the king would turn on them with all the fury of former Lithuanian autocrats.

In April the leading lords of the Ukraine
*
– Ostrogski, Czartoryski, Sanguszko and Wísniowiecki – took their places in the Senate (the upper chamber of the
Sejm
). On 17 June 1569 Chodkiewicz himself reappeared, and, in the name of his peers, tearfully implored the king ‘not to hand them over to the Polish Crown by hereditary will, to the slavery and shame of their children’. Sigismund-August replied, also in tears: ‘God dwells where Love is, for such is his Divine Will. I am not leading Your Lordships to any forced submission. We must all submit to God, and not to earthly rulers.’ It was the moment of decision. Chodkiewicz accepted the terms of the proposed Union. The Senate rose to its feet and roared its thanks. Poland and Lithuania were to be joined together, ‘freemen with free, equals with equal’.
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There was to be one
Rzeczpospolita
, one ‘Republic or Commonwealth’; one indivisible body-politic; one king, elected not born; one currency, and one
Sejm
, whose deputies were to form the state’s most powerful institution. The Lithuanians were to keep their own law, their own administration, their own army, and the titles of their princely families.

The king-grand duke laboured incessantly on the details for hours on end, day after day. ‘These are great matters,’ he said, ‘which are to last for centuries; they require long deliberation and good counsel.’ Finally, on 1 July 1569, the Act of Union was sealed. Standing hat in hand, and surrounded by the clergy, Sigismund-August received the oaths of loyalty from each of the signatories. Then, he led the entire assembly to the church of St Stanisław, knelt before the altar and sang the
Te Deum
in a strong voice.
⁷⁴

In Muscovy, Ivan IV, angered by news of the Union of Lublin, hastened to one of the crimes which earned him the name of ‘Terrible’. Novgorod, like the new Poland-Lithuania, despised Moscow’s autocratic tradition. Forged letters were produced to show that the archbishop and governor of Novgorod were guilty of treasonable contacts with Sigismund-August. The tsar administered punishment in person. The inhabitants of Novgorod were systematically seized and killed in batches of 500 or 1,000 every day. In five weeks, Russia’s most civilized city was depopulated and reduced to a smouldering heap. Ivan returned to Moscow to prepare the cauldrons of boiling oil and the meat hooks which were to chastise some hundreds of Muscovites suspected of sympathizing with Novgorod. What future for the ‘Republic of goodwill’ with such a neighbour?

Sigismund-August’s last years were tinged with remorse. His constant appeals for love and harmony were bred by the fear that love and harmony were in short supply. In 1569 the
Sejm
insisted on debating his marital affairs and rose on 12 September without attending to his requests. The provisions for drafting electoral procedure, for creating a central treasury and for preparing judicial reforms were postponed. ‘You see that I am a servant of Death,’ he had told them, ‘no less than Your Lordships. If you do not pay heed, then my work and Yours will be turned to nought.’
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They paid little attention.

Sigismund-August relapsed into despair and insomnia. He locked himself into his castle at Knyszyn near the Lithuanian border and refused to receive his senators. He died on 7 July 1572, surrounded by a motley company of quacks, astrologers and witches, in a room hung in black in memory of Barbara Radziwiłł. His last will repeated his beautiful lifelong wishes which were so unlikely to come true:

By this our last testament, We give and bequeath to our two realms, to the Polish Crown and to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, that love, harmony, and unity… which our forebears cemented for eternity by strong agreements, mutually confirmed… And to whomsoever of the two nations shall hold firmly to the Union… We bequeath Our blessing, that the Lord God in his favour shall grant them honour and power [and] fame both at home and abroad… But whosoever shall profess ingratitude and follow the paths of separation, may they quake before God’s wrath, who in the words of the prophet, hates and curses them who sow dissension between brother and brother…
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The last of the Jagiellons was buried on Wawel Hill in Kraków. The private person of the king-grand duke was dead; his public person rode in effigy to the burial. The royal standard was broken asunder and, with the royal jewels, cast into the grave. This same act symbolized the transfiguration of the Kingdom of Poland and of the grand duchy. The late king had ruled as the hereditary monarch of two separate principalities. He was leaving them united in one elective republic.
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Within the dual
Rzeczpospolita
, the grand duchy found itself both diminished and strengthened. By losing the southern steppelands in Ukraine (see p.
262
), it was reduced to less than half its former size, and with the Ukrainian lands added to the kingdom, its relative size vis-à-vis Poland fell to perhaps 1  :  1.5. It had returned to the traditional Lithuanian-White Ruthenian base of the distant days of Mindaugas. Observers of the
Rzeczpospolita
would wonder whether, if Ukraine had been set up as a third pillar of the state instead of passing under Polish rule, the resultant triple structure might not have been more balanced. As it was, the grand duchy played a junior role in the Polish-Lithuanian partnership. Yet it possessed a guarantee of internal inviolability, and its representatives could participate in full in both the common
Sejm
and the royal elections. The so-called Noble Democracy gave the great Lithuanian lords inordinate influence.

The administrative units and regional jurisdictions of the
Rzeczpospolita
were finally defined in 1581. The grand duchy possessed its own supreme judicial tribunal, which circulated between sessions in three centres: nine palatinates, plus the Duchy of Samogitia, and Livonia. The palatinates were Vilna, Troki, Brest, Minsk, Vitebsk, Mtislav, Polatsk, Seversk and Smalensk, the latter being no more than a residual entity. Each of them was divided into
poviats
or ‘districts’, and each held its own
sejmik
or ‘regional assembly of nobles’, sending delegates to the central Diet in Warsaw with precise instructions. The Duchy of Samogitia functioned as a palatinate except that it was divided into twenty-eight ‘tracts’ instead of districts. Livonia would be handed to Sweden in 1621; Seversk in 1634 and the remnant of Smalensk in 1667 to Muscovy. The rest remained intact to 1773, or in some cases to 1795.

One of the characteristics of the commonwealth’s nobility was their distaste for titles: in theory, they were all equal, whether aristocrat or lowly squire. Hence, unlike the rest of Europe, there were no native counts, earls or dukes. Nonetheless, one of the ways in which the king had overcome the doubts of the Lithuanian magnates in 1569 was by allowing most of them to keep their princely titles. (The offer was not available to the kingdom’s greatest lords, like the Zamoyski or the Potocki.) Two categories existed. The old Ruthenian title of
Knyaz
was reserved for descendants of the Rurikid, Gediminid and Rogvolodichi ruling houses. The Latin titles of
princeps
and
dux
had usually been awarded either by the pope or by the Holy Roman Emperor. Both, after 1569, passed into Polish as
ksia˛ze
, ‘prince’. The Ruthenian princely families included the clans of Giedroyć, Puzyna, Sanguszko, Sapieha and Czartoryski. The imperial and papal princes were headed by the Radziwiłłs, who had been granted the honour twice. Henceforth, almost all of these names were the
magnati magnatorum
– the ‘greatest of the great’.

Within the
Rzeczpospolita
’s dual framework, the leaders of the grand duchy were eager to maximize their freedom of action. To this end, state laws were reviewed, and in 1588 a third version of the grand duchy’s law code was published. This Third Lithuanian Statute had been in preparation since the Union of Lublin. The committee which prepared the drafts was drawn from a cross-section of nationalities and religions, and seems to have intended a collation of Polish and Lithuanian laws. But the moving spirit of the exercise was Prince Lev Sapieha (1557–1633), Lithuanian chancellor from 1581; and the end product was clearly designed to preserve the grand duchy’s special interests. Its fourteen chapters were approved by Sigismund Vasa in the first year of his reign, confirmed by the joint
Sejm
and printed in Vil’nya in 1588. Its third chapter, which states that no lands would be ceded to anyone, defiantly introduces the corporate concept of the grand duchy’s nature. The relevant passage brims with defiance:

RAŹDZEŁ TRECI
:
‘Ab šlachieckich volnaściach i pašyreńni Vialikaha Kniastva Litou˘skaha.’ My, Haspadar, abiacajem, taksama, i śćviardžajem toje za Siabie j našcˇiadkau˘ Našych… My, nia budziem nikomu nijakim cˇynam bajarau˘, ślachtu dy ichnayja majontki, abšary i ziemli addavać…