POLAND (HISTORY.) 



597 



most heroic patriotism. But, like all men destitute 

 of legal order and freedom, and governed by their 

 feelings, they abandoned themselves to every poli- 

 tical excess, with equal thoughtlessness and passion. 

 So far the body of the people may be called fickle, 

 and without character ; yet there has not been any 

 want of distinguished men among them, who would 

 have done honour to any republic. With youthful 

 enthusiasm they combined manly energy and repub- 

 lican elevation. In the history of Poland, the names 

 of Tarnoflski, Zamoyski, Zolkieffski, besides those 

 of heroes and statesmen of later days, are immortal. 

 Others, however, driven abroad by internal dissen- 

 sions, betrayed their country to the enemy through 

 blind party rage. Thus Poland, as a state, struggled 

 with the fundamental evils of its constitution, till it 

 fell under them. In tins republic there existed no 

 unity, although it received the name of one king- 

 dom in 1025, under Boleslaus Chrobry. The tree 

 of liberty stood without roots, till overthrown by the 

 tempest. The elective franchise was unquestionably 

 the cause of the turbulence of party. Legal order 

 and civil liberty could not thrive because of the pre- 

 vailing inequality of condition. The nobleman was 

 the only citizen. To this rude, thousand- headed 

 sovereign, its policy was by no means clear ; still 

 less did the Poles understand how to unite individual 

 liberty with public power. The nation, therefore, 

 lost one safeguard of its independence after another ; 

 first Silesia and the Oder, then the Baltic, the 

 Dnieper, and finally the Carpathians. But a state 

 which has no fixed boundaries, which is cut off from 

 the sea, and which has not the strength of internal 

 unity, will always be the prey of the ambitious po- 

 licy of its neighbours. The misfortunes of Poland 

 began when the Piasts divided the country among 

 their sons. Boleslaus III., indeed, in 1138, con- 

 ferred on the eldest, as the possessor of Cracow, a 

 kind of superiority over the other princes ; but this 

 only increased the confusion. The arrogance of the 

 hierarchy, and the inveterate hatred nourished be- 

 tween the Germans and Poles by 200 years of war, pre- 

 vented even Christianity, which was introduced into 

 Poland at the end of the tenth century, from having 

 a beneficial influence on the state of the country. 

 When, at a subsequent period, Conrad of Masovia 

 called in the Teutonic knights against the Prussians, 

 .they conquered the Baltic seaboard, from the Oder 

 to the gulf of Finland, between 1230 1404, and 

 Poland lost its northern line of defence and maritime 

 commerce. Ladislaus Lokietek, who was crowned 

 in 1305 as king of Cracow, had indeed united Great 

 Poland, on the Warta, with Little Poland, on the 

 Upper Vistula, into one whole ; but it was too late. 

 The Germans were too powerful for the Polish state. 

 His son Casimir, who on account of his wisdom as 

 alegislator, and hisexertions in civilizing the interior, 

 was surnamed the Great, was compelled formerly to 

 cede the Oder and Lower Vistula, in the peace of 

 Kalisch, in 1343. This wise prince was more suc- 

 cessful in establishing social order. He fortified the 

 towns, and freed them from the oppressions of the 

 nobility, but, on account of his love of a Jewess, 

 conferred favours on her nation, which subsequently 

 monopolized all trade, and impeded the national 

 prosperity. With Casimir (in 1370), the male line 

 of the Piasts became extinct. The nobility now be- 

 gan to barter their votes with the candidates for the 

 throne, in exchange for personal privileges, which 

 could be granted them only at the expense of the 

 whole. The union of Poland with Hungary, under 

 Louis (1370 82), was not, therefore, sufficient to 

 confirm the monarchy. More natural, and therefore 

 more permanent, was the union with Lithuania, in 

 1386 ; the Lithuanian grand-duke Jagellon having 



obtained the Polish crown by marriage and election. 

 But difference of language and manners kept the 

 Lithuanians separate from the Poles. Christianity. 

 which the former now first embraced, was not a 

 political bond, that could unite the two nations into 

 one people ; they were, however, now more power- 

 ful against their common enemy, the Teutonic 

 knights. Poland seemed to recover its natural 

 boundaries when, by the treaty of Thorn, in 1466 

 the knights ceded Culm and the Vistula, as far as 

 Elbingen, to Poland, and acknowledged the suzerain- 

 ty of the republic over the possessions of the order. 

 Livonia, also, was annexed to Lithuania in 1558, 

 and in 1561 Courland became a Polish fief ; thus 

 Poland, especially after 1569, when the Luthuanian 

 nobility, with that of Great and Little Poland, con- 

 stituted one diet, became the most powerful state in 

 the north. But by the traffic which they carried on 

 in the succession to the throne, the hereditary right 

 to which they often contested with the Jagellons, 

 the nobles acquired the entire representation of the 

 nation, to the exclusion of the rest of the people. 

 They appeared at the diets by nuncios, without whose 

 consent (from 1505) no change could be made in the 

 constitution of the state. From the native nobility 

 alone the king could name the archbishops, bishops, 

 way wodes, castellans, and ministers, who formed the 

 first estate of the realm, or the senate in the diet. 

 But the state still wanted a firm hand to keep the 

 whole together. Smolensk, the bulwark of Poland 

 on the Dnieper, was conquered, in 1514, by the 

 Russians, and religious animosity raged in the coun- 

 try ; but the dissidents (q. v.), or the Protestants, 

 with the non-united Greeks (see Greek Church), ob- 

 tained, at the diet of Wilna, in 1563, equal rights 

 with the Catholics. The extinction of the Jagellon 

 dynasty, however, in 1572, prevented this religious 

 peace from being a blessing to the Poles. From this 

 time, Poland continued an elective monarchy, till the 

 adoption of the constitution of May 3, 1791. Henry 

 of Anjou, the king-elect, swore to the first pacta 

 conventa, as a sort of charter of privileges of the 

 nobility. Thenceforward party hatred divided the 

 leaders of the nobility, and family feuds called foreign 

 arms into the country. Thus the Zamoiski party, 

 which, by the election of the Swedish prince 

 Sigismund, attempted to unite the two first crowns 

 of the north, gave rise not only to domestic dissen- 

 sion, which was in a manner legitimated by the right 

 of confederation and insurrection (belonging to the 

 nobles since 1607), but also to bloody wars with 

 Sweden, which finally gained a superiority over 

 Poland, by the peace of Oliva (q. v.), in 1660. 

 Sweden obtained Livonia, and the great elector of 

 Brandenburg (in 1657) the sovereignty of Prussia. 

 (See Frederic fVilliam.) At home all political con- 

 nexion was dissolved in anarchy, when, in the reign 

 of John Casimir (164869), the liberum veto was es- 

 tablished by law, by which the vote of a single 

 deputy could negative the resolution of all the rest. 

 From the confederation there was but a step to poli- 

 tical treason. Faction favoured the revolt of the 

 Cossacks, who, in 1654, put themselves under Rus- 

 sian protection, after which Smolensk, Kiev, the 

 Dnieper, and the part cf the Ukraine beyond it, 

 were ceded to Russia, in 1 667, by the thirteen years' 

 truce of Andrussow. King John Casimir at that time 

 foretold with truth, in his speech to the diet (July 4, 

 1661), how, by whom, and why, Poland would one 

 day be partitioned. The brave Sobieski ratified 

 those cessions in the perpetual peace of 1 686 ; on 

 the other hand, Russia engaged to assist him in con- 

 quering Moldavia and Walachia. After his death, 

 in 1696, the throne was sold to the highest bidder. 

 (See Polignac.) When the elector of Saxony (see 



