Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0291/02918.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 42KB | 663 lines

$Unique_ID{COW02918}
$Pretitle{362}
$Title{Poland
Chapter 1B.   Poland's 'Golden Age'}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Harold D. Nelson}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{polish
poland
diet
king
nobility
commonwealth
poland's
russian
political
russia}
$Date{1984}
$Log{Painting of Cossac's Assault*0291801.scf
Figure 5A.*0291806.scf
Figure 5B.*0291807.scf
Tadeusz Kosciuszko*0291808.scf
}
Country:     Poland
Book:        Poland, A Country Study
Author:      Harold D. Nelson
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1984

Chapter 1B.   Poland's "Golden Age"

[See Painting of Cossac's Assault: Courtesy Embassy of Poland, Washington DC.]

     The late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries have been acclaimed as
Poland's "Golden Age," during which the country achieved a high level of
cultural development that was stimulated by the new spirit of Renaissance
humanism penetrating from Italy and, later, by the intellectual ferment
generated by the Reformation. It was during this time in Krakow that Nicolaus
Copernicus (Mikolaj Kopernik) first undertook the observations that led him
to his epoch-making conception of the heliocentric universe and resulted in
his treatise De revolutionibus orbium celestium (On the Movement of Heavenly
Bodies), published in 1543. Literature in sixteenth-century Poland reached a
remarkable level of sophistication that was reflected in numerous perceptive
works on political theory. Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, an enlightened thinker,
put forward a scheme for political, social, and educational reform of the
Commonwealth in his work De republica emendanda (On Improving the Republic),
in which he defended the peasants against exploitation and advocated the
equality of all citizens before the law. The poet Jan Kochanowski, whose work
was admired by Erasmus of Rotterdam, united in his verse the spirits of
Christianity and the new humanism. Although Kochanowski wrote mostly in
Polish, then considered the colloquial language of the common people, he was
also one of Europe's most distinguished Latin poets. The long series of
military victories and political successes and Poland's economic prosperity
during the period were thereby enhanced by the remarkable artistic and
intellectual achievements of Polish society.

     The society and the culture it produced were essentially aristocratic in
character and accounted for much of the pride and self-confidence exhibited
by Poland's ruling elite during the "Golden Age." Since the fourteenth century
the regional nobility had met in sejmiki (local assemblies, or dietines), each
of which the king was obliged to consult in order to obtain approval on
taxation and mobilization. The first Sejm (diet) of the "Polish nation" to
legislate for all of Poland was convened in 1493 and was composed of
deputations from the regional nobility, who voted the king a subsidy provided
by taxes levied on the towns and peasants. According to the constitution
adopted by the diet in 1505, all legislation thereafter required parliamentary
assent. Members of the noble class benefited from a impressive list of rights
and privileges confirmed by the diet, including broad freedom of expression
and immunity from unauthorized seizure of property and arbitrary arrest.
Before the end of the sixteenth century, each nobleman was enfranchised to
cast a vote in the election of his king. Because the Polish nobility comprised
so large a proportion of the country's population, Poland could be said to
have had at that time the most representative government in Europe in terms of
the level of participation in political decisionmaking allowed by its system
of aristocratic democracy. It was against this background that the Polish
nobility viewed absolutist regimes elsewhere in Europe with suspicion and
believed their nation to be the freest and most advanced in the world.

The Reformation in Poland

     Polish political freedom was paralleled by religious tolerance without
equal in Europe. While fierce persecutions and bloody religious wars raged
elsewhere, Poland was, in the words of a Polish historian, "a state without
stakes" and a recognized "haven for heretics."

     The first impulses of the Protestant Reformation were felt in the 1520s
in the German towns on the fringes of Poland and in Prussia, but Protestantism
made little headway until significant conversions were registered among the
patrician class in the Polish cities and among the nobility in the 1540s.
Although a minority in the latter group, those who adhered to Protestantism
were among the most powerful and influential members of their class. The
nobles were especially attracted to Calvinism, whose austere doctrines, unlike
those of Lutheranism, seemed to justify their opposition to royal authority
and also dispensed with the need for an ecclesiastical hierarchy. Some of the
dissidents voiced opposition to payment of the tithes required even of the
nobility or cast covetous eyes on church lands that were vulnerable to
seizure. The high tide of the Polish Reformation came in the late 1550s when
Protestants gained control of the diet, enacting legislation favorable to the
new religious dispensations and penalizing the Catholic hierarchy. Attempts
at cooperation among the Calvinists, Lutherans, Unitarians, and various
sectaries floundered, however, on the individualism that so typified the
Polish nobility. Bad relations among them and the parsimony of the leaders in
providing funds for the churches and schools needed in spreading the reformed
teachings to a more broadly based congregation severely impeded the growth
of Protestantism of all persuasions.

     Catholic nobles regained the ascendancy, and in 1564 the diet enforced
the decrees of the Council of Trent renewing Roman Catholic institutions. The
principle, tacitly recognized in Poland, that no one could be prosecuted-much
less persecuted-for religious beliefs was codified in 1573, and religious
toleration was made a cardinal legal precept of the Commonwealth. When the
last Jagiellonian king, Zygmunt (Sigismund) II August (1548-72), was urged
to initiate legislation to curb religious dissenters, he declared in the diet,
"I am not the king of your souls."

     Prostestantism in Poland was always an aristocratic and an urban
phenomenon that never touched the mass of the peasantry. By the middle of the
seventeenth century, the nobility, with very few exceptions, had returned to
Roman Catholicism. The success of the Counter-Reformation in Poland relied on
the support given to the Catholic nobles by the papacy, the determination of
able bishops, and the presence of the Jesuits, who established schools in
dioceses throughout the country.

     Religious as well as ethnic toleration was also extended officially to
Jews and Muslims. The great influx of Jews had begun in the fourteenth century
when persecutions drove thousands from Germany to seek shelter in Poland.
Kazimierz III granted them special privileges as "servants of the Treasury"
under protection of the crown. In return for acting originally as middlemen in
commerce and as estate managers, Jews were given charters of self-government
in their own communities, where they were allowed to practice their religion
freely. Their numbers grew from some 50,000 in 1500 to about 1.5 million in
1650 as Poland continued to attract Jews from other countries. As a Harvard
scholar, Professor Wiktor Weintraub, has explained: "Life was simply more
tolerable for Jews in Poland than elsewhere."

The Union of Lublin

     When the Teutonic Knights were secularized in 1525 as a result of the
Reformation, eastern Prussia had become a hereditary duchy under the last
grand master, Albert of Hohenzollern, but the area, known as Ducal Prussia,
remained a fief of the Polish crown. In 1562 Courland likewise became a
secular fief in the hands of the Protestant former grand master of the Order
of the Sword, while the defunct order's territories in Livonia reverted to the
Commonwealth. The growing threat posed to the Baltic provi