Poland

SEVEN

Democracy versus Dynasty

There was nothing oriental about the man the Poles chose as their new king in 1573. Nor was he the most likely candidate for the throne of the multi-denominational Commonwealth. A few months before the Confederation of Warsaw passed its act on religious freedom, Henri de Valois, younger brother of Charles IX of France, took an enthusiastic part in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestants.

The first election went remarkably smoothly. At the news of Zygmunt Augustus’s death a Convocation Sejm gathered to thrash out the details. The candidates were Ernest of Habsburg, Henri de Valois, Ivan IV of Muscovy, and the two outsiders John III of Sweden and Stephen Bathory of Transylvania. A key figure was the late king’s sister, Anna, the last surviving member of the Jagiellon dynasty. Many took it as read that the successful candidate would marry her, thereby cementing his position on the throne and emulating the precedent set by Jagiełło himself, an assumption which Anna did much to further. Others, including the majority of the Senate, suspected her ambition and saw her as an obstacle to establishing a new dynasty. Apart from being no beauty, Anna was well over fifty years old.

This did not stand in the way of the cunning agent of Henri de Valois, Jean de Monluc, Bishop of Valence, who laid siege to her affections on behalf of his master, assuring her that the Prince, twenty-eight years her junior, was consumed with passion for her.

Ivan IV’s candidature had been suggested on the grounds that the rising power of Muscovy might best be rendered harmless in the same way as that of Lithuania had. If Poland could tame Jagiełło, then perhaps the Commonwealth could do the same with the Tsar. But Ivan the Terrible was not an alluring prospect, and even the most sanguine supporters of the idea had to admit that it was unrealistic.

Some 40,000 szlachta turned up at Warsaw to vote, accom panied by as many servants and attendants, all armed to the teeth. To the astonishment of the foreign observers present, no shot was fired or steel bloodied in spite of the contentious issues involved. Henri de Valois was elected by an overwhelming majority, and a delegation was despatched to Paris.

Henri received the news as he was laying siege to the Protestants of La Rochelle, and hurried back to Paris to meet the delegation of eleven dignitaries and 150 szlachta who arrived from Warsaw on 19 August 1573. They were not there in such force just to impress the Parisians, which they did with their exotic clothes, their jewellery and their painted horses. Henri de Valois had to be fully acquainted with the conditions of his employment and obliged to accept them before he placed a foot on Polish soil. At a ceremony in Notre Dame on 10 September attended by the entire French court, he swore to observe the Acta Henriciana, named after him, laying down the constitutional obligations of the monarch, and the Pacta Conventa, which listed his personal undertakings.

The ceremony went smoothly until he came to the article in the Henriciana concerning religious freedom. He tried to mumble his way through, missing out the clause in question. The Poles, who had been alert to such a contingency, drew his attention politely to the fact that he had overlooked a clause. He demurred, but the head of the Polish delegation, Hetman Jan Zborowski, stepped forward, booming: ‘Si non iurabis, non regnabis!’ Henri swore. The French royal family were not going to let an oath stand in their way, and Charles IX was even prepared to listen to the socalled Postulata Polonica, in which the Sejm admonished him on his treatment of French Protestants.

Henri de Valois and his entourage travelled to Poland overland and arrived in the middle of an exceptionally cold winter. The tight hose and light jerkins of the Frenchmen were no match for the climate, and by the time the royal party reached Kraków they were frozen and depressed by the sight of the snowy wastes. The King and his new subjects were in many respects ill-matched. The mincing, scented young man, with his earrings and his codpieces, came as something of a shock to the robust Poles. In spite of this, and although he showed unwillingness to be bound by the Pacta Conventa, he was not unpopular. He was gallant towards Anna Jagiellon, though he made no move in the direction of marriage, and went out of his way to charm and captivate those he saw as the most important figures. But on 30 May 1574 Charles IX died unexpectedly, and Henri became King of France.

His intention was to keep both crowns, a course of action favoured by some magnates, who assumed that they would be free to rule in his absence, and it was agreed that he would set off for France in the autumn. But Henri made his own plans. On the night of 18 June he slipped out of Kraków and left the country.

The King’s behaviour raised the delicate constitutional question of whether there was now an interregnum or not. In the autumn, letters were despatched to the newly crowned Henri III of France, one from the Polish senators and deputies, one from the Lithuanians. The Poles gave him an ultimatum—if he did not present himself in Kraków by 12 May 1575 the throne would be declared vacant. The Lithuanians merely pleaded for his return. Henri replied that he had every intention of keeping the Polish throne, and suggested sending his younger brother the Duc d’Alençon as viceroy.

The Poles would have none of it, and called a new election. The experience of the first had considerably dampened the optimism of the voters, and only some 10,000 turned out. The magnates saw an opportunity of settling the question themselves as they had always aspired to do. The Senate conducted its own election and chose the Emperor Maximilian II, but as they gathered in Warsaw Cathedral to sing the Te Deum, the szlachta set up howls of protest. It was then that a minor candidate at the first election, Stephen Bathory, Duke of Transylvania, was suggested, and on 14 December 1575 he was acclaimed king. Stephen reached Kraków on 23 April of the following year, and was married to Anna Jagiellon and crowned on 1 May. He arrived in Poland without finery, accompanied only by a couple of regiments of Hungarian infantry. He dutifully bedded Anna, making it clear that he did not take the Polish throne lightly. A forthright man and an able commander, he knew how to pick men who would serve him well. He appointed a new Chancellor, Piotr Wolski, and a new Vice Chancellor, Jan Zamoyski, who was to become a close partner in all his enterprises and a mainstay of his rule.

But he was in a difficult position, as Maximilian brokered an alliance with Muscovy and succeeded in getting the city of Gdańsk to declare for him. King Stephen marched north to Gdańsk, but although he defeated the army sent out head him off, the prospect of a long siege was not alluring. Tsar Ivan had invaded from the east, and the international situation was looking ugly. The King therefore lured Gdańsk back to the fold with a number of trading concessions, and switched his attention to problems that had been brewing unchecked for decades while the Poles had been absorbed by their religious and political debates.

Dramatic shifts in power had been taking place around Poland since 1515, when King Zygmunt the Old, the Emperor Maximilian I and the Jagiellon King Władysław of Hungary and Bohemia had met at Pressburg (Brno) to discuss the future of East Central Europe. The two Jagiellons were then in possession of the areas coveted by the Habsburgs, but Władysław’s son Louis had no heir, and it was in order to avoid a war that the three met. The issue was settled amicably. It was agreed that Hungary and Bohemia would pass to the Habsburgs if Louis produced no heir, in return for which the Habsburgs bound themselves to eschew their traditional policy of supporting the Teutonic Order and other enemies of Poland. But other questions were left unresolved.

The last Slav prince of Szczecin-Pomerania, Bogusław X, had no heir and wished to switch his allegiance from the Empire to the Polish crown, but the issue was not addressed, and when he died his duchy reverted to the Empire. There was a similar situation in Silesia, where the towns and much of the gentry were German, but the rural population Polish. The area was still ruled by Piast princes, some of whom, like Jan III of Opole, spoke no German. They were vassals of the Bohemian crown, worn by Władysław Jagiellon. When his son Louis was killed in 1526 at the Battle of Mohacs his crown passed to the Habsburgs, so that when Jan III died in 1532 his principality of Opole went to them. Although several of the Piast dynasties in Silesia survived to the end of the following century, the area had drifted beyond Poland’s field of influence.

At about the same time, the territory of the Teutonic Order also came up for the taking. Monastic orders were seminally affected by Luther’s teachings, and Grand Master Albrecht von Hohenzollern (who was King Zygmunt’s nephew) and most of his knights came under Luther’s spell just as Poland defeated them again, in 1520. Since neither the Vatican nor the Empire would support the apostate knights, there was nothing to prevent Zygmunt from winding up the redundant crusading state and incorporating it into his kingdom. Instead, he sanctioned its transformation into a secular duchy hereditary in the Hohenzollern family, who became vassals of the Polish crown. Cardinal Hosius called the King ‘a madman who, being in a position to crush the vanquished, prefers instead to show mercy’. Even the court fool Stańczyk taunted the King on his folly, taunts which would be fully justified in time.

The Livonian knights had also gone over to Luther, and found themselves in a critical position as a result. Both Sweden and Denmark, which had long-standing interests in the area, had designs on Livonia. This was also in the sights of Muscovy, which craved a coastline on the Baltic. Faced by this concert of rival interests, the Livonian knights could see no way of guaranteeing their continued existence other than by becoming vassals of the Commonwealth, which they duly did in 1561.

This deepened a conflict between Poland and Muscovy which had begun in 1512. In that year the ruler of Muscovy, Vasily III, had made alliances with the Teutonic Order and the Empire, which enabled him to field a more modern army and contributed directly to his capture of Smolensk. Although a Polish army under Hetman Ostrogski gave his forces a drubbing at the Battle of Orsza in 1514, the threat from the east would not go away. Throughout the 1550s and 1560s Ivan the Terrible made repeated attempts to slice through Lithuania to the sea.

In 1577 Ivan invaded Livonia once more, and while Lithuanian detachments managed to contain the invasion, King Stephen decided that a conclusive war was called for. In 1579 he concentrated his forces near Wilno under Hetmans Mikołaj Mielecki of Poland and Mikołaj Radziwiłł of Lithuania, and moved on Polotsk, which he quickly captured. In the following year Stephen collected an army of 30,000 which moved out in three corps, one commanded by himself, the other two by Mikołaj Radziwiłł and Jan Zamoyski. The Poles took Vielikie Luki and in the following year, 1581, besieged Pskov, which was ably defended by the brothers Ivan and Vasily Shuisky. As winter set in, King Stephen returned to Poland, leaving Zamoyski in command outside Pskov. Meanwhile negotiations had begun through the good offices of the Jesuit Antonio Possevino, acting on instructions from Rome, and on 15 January 1582 the treaty of Jam Zapolski returned the whole of Livonia, Polotsk and other areas to Poland.

The way in which he and his trusted men carried through the Muscovite campaigns is characteristic of Stephen’s reign as a whole. As he declared to the Sejm at the outset of his reign, he was ‘rex non fictus necque pictus’—a king, not a statue or a painting. He abided by the constitution, but did not hesitate to use the powers it left him. He proved something of a disappointment to the executionists, who were instrumental in his election, by failing to reinforce the role of the Sejm and rejecting their demands for reform. In 1580 he even imposed censorship on political literature, which did not endear him to the deputies, but he did manage to recover some authority and respect for the crown. His unexpected death in December 1586, after a reign of only ten years, placed this in jeopardy once more.

The Commonwealth faced its third interregnum in the space of fourteen years, which fostered a feeling of impermanence and did nothing to contribute to the orderly conduct of the next election. Although the candidates included the late king’s nephew Andrew Bathory and the new Tsar of Muscovy Fyodor, the contest was essentially between the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian and Prince Sigismund Vasa of Sweden. The Habsburg faction included all those disgruntled by the firm rule of King Stephen and was strongly supported by Rome and the money of Philip II of Spain. With the Armada about to sail against England, the Habsburgs were at the height of their aspiration to dominate Europe.

The anti-Habsburg camp lent their support to Sigismund Vasa, son of King John III of Sweden and Katherine Jagiellon, second sister of Zygmunt Augustus. The pro-Habsburg party attempted to force through their candidate, but on 19 August 1587 Sigismund Vasa was elected to rule as Zygmunt III. Three days later Maximilian invaded at the head of an army and laid siege to Kraków, but he was defeated by Hetman Zamoyski, who pursued him into Silesia and took him prisoner.

When Zygmunt arrived in Kraków to take up his throne he enjoyed the accumulated popularity of his Jagiellon forebears and sealed this by his excellent command of the Polish language. But the twenty-two-year-old King’s difficult childhood had marked his character and outlook. He was born in a dungeon where his parents had been imprisoned by the then King of Sweden Eric XIV, and the only ray of light in this dismal incarceration had been brought by Polish Jesuit priests who attended to his education. As the Papal Legate Annibale di Capua noted: ‘King Stephen was good to soldiers, this one will be good to priests.’

His first appointments made it clear that Catholics were more likely to get the best offices. He overruled the Sejm of 1589 when it attempted to reinforce the clauses on religious freedom of the Act of the Confederation of Warsaw. A casualty of this was Chancellor Zamoyski’s project for tightening up election procedure, which included limiting the interregnum to a maximum of eight weeks, introducing voting by delegation from the sejmiks (i.e. abolishing the universal vote), and, perhaps most important of all in view of later events, the introduction of majority voting. At the King’s insistence, the Primate introduced the sine qua non that all candidates to the throne must be Catholic, which guaranteed uproar in the Sejm and rejection of the whole package. To the King the causes of parliamentary reform and religious liberty were synonymous, and he would sabotage any project which smacked of either.

He had been elected largely for anti-Habsburg reasons, and the attempt by Maximilian to usurp his throne should have entrenched him in this position. Yet Zygmunt wasted little time in freeing the Archduke, marrying a Habsburg, and signing an ‘eternal peace’ with Vienna whose benefits for the Commonwealth were not apparent. His intentions were locked away behind a countenance of frigid reserve, and only began to reveal themselves with time.

Zygmunt had been reared by his religious mentors as the future leader of the Counter-Reformation in Sweden, and therefore regarded the Polish throne primarily as a means to an end. It seems he even considered the possibility of handing over Poland to the Habsburgs in return for their support in reclaiming Sweden for himself and Catholicism, a Sweden possibly enlarged by Polish possessions on the Baltic such as Livonia.

Chancellor Zamoyski uncovered evidence of the King’s machin—ations and in 1592 led the Sejm in a formal indictment of his behaviour, which amounted to breaking the Pacta Conventa and the Acta Henriciana. Zygmunt apologised and promised to behave in the future, but his subjects remained suspicious, and he grew more secretive than ever.

That same year his father John III of Sweden died, and Zygmunt determined to take up his inheritance. The Sejm allowed him to go, on condition that he returned within a year, which he did, leaving his uncle, Charles of Södermannland, as regent. The inevitable followed: Charles ruled Sweden as his own to the growing annoyance of his nephew, who went over in 1598 to reaffirm his authority, only to be humiliated. In the following year the Swedish Riksdag deposed Zygmunt, adding the proviso that his son Władysław could succeed if he became a Lutheran.

Zygmunt started a war with Sweden which led to the loss of Livonia. The Poles regained it in 1601, but four years later Zygmunt’s uncle, now Charles IX, invaded once again. The province would have fallen to Sweden had it not been for the Hetman of Lithuania Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, who took on Charles at Kircholm and worsted him. He went on to recapture the whole of Livonia, retaking Riga in 1609. The Swedish defeat was compounded by the death in 1611 of Charles IX. But he was succeeded by the under-age Gustavus Adolphus, who was to prove an immeasurably superior general, while the man appointed to rule during his minority was Axel Oxenstierna, one of the most brilliant statesmen of seventeenth-century Europe.

He would exploit Sweden’s peripheral situation during the Thirty Years’ War, which broke out in 1618, by joining in against the Catholic-Habsburg camp when there was something tangible to be gained, and keeping out when there was not. Although Poland had declared its neutrality in this conflict, King Zygmunt considered himself a member of the Catholic League ranged against the Protestant Union. He sent the Habsburgs a reinforcement of 10,000 cavalry, which contributed to their victory at the Battle of the White Mountain against the ‘Winter King’ of Bohemia. This allowed Sweden to disregard Poland’s neutrality and invade not only Livonia but Pomerania as well. In 1627 Hetman Koniecpolski defeated the army of Gustavus Adolphus on land and the Polish navy defeated the Swedish fleet at sea. Peace was eventually signed at Stumsdorf in 1635, but the Vasas’ claim to the Swedish throne would cause more bloodshed yet.

The Commonwealth itself had no part in these wars, and no reason for fighting them. The Sejm had lost control over the King’s conduct of foreign affairs, but did retain a negative influence on its outcome, since it could refuse funds for troops. Once the King’s actions had provoked foreign invasion, however, the Commonwealth had no choice but to defend itself. Thus Polish foreign policy under the three Vasa kings, Zygmunt III (1587-1632) and his sons Władysław IV (1632-48) and Jan Kazimierz (1648-68), often took the form of ambitious plans which foundered either before or shortly after being put into effect, as they enjoyed little support in the Sejm.

Fig. 4 The Vasa Kings of Poland

Notwithstanding his apologies to the Sejm of 1592, Zygmunt continued on his own course, breaking the pledges he had made in the Acta Henriciana on at least three counts: contracting a marriage (twice, to a Habsburg), carrying on secret diplomatic negotiations and embarking on foreign wars, without the approval of the Sejm. In 1605 he presented the Sejm with a package of reforms that included the imposition of a permanent annual tax, the introduction of a larger standing army, the reduction of the Senate and the abolition of the lower chamber. The spokesmen of the opposition, Chancellor Zamoyski, Marek Sobieski and Field-Hetman man żółkiewski, pointed out that this was unrealistic, whereupon the King dismissed the Sejm. In the last speech he ever made, the old Chancellor told the King that he would have the absolute loyalty of his people, all the taxes he wanted and greater power if only he could bring himself to identify with the interests of his subjects and his kingdom.

The appeal went unheeded, and when the Chancellor had been laid in his grave that summer, Zygmunt called a second Sejm in the hope of having a freer hand. Another vociferous leader of the opposition, Mikołaj Zebrzydowski, Palatine of Kraków, called a rival assembly of the szlachta which threatened the King with dire consequences if he did not abide by the constitution. The Sejm sitting at Warsaw tried to hammer out a compromise, but this was scuppered by the King, who demanded the repeal of the Act of the Confederation of Warsaw which guaranteed religious freedom. More and more szlachta and some magnates such as Janusz Radziwiłł joined Zebrzydowski at Sandomierz, and with the King persisting in his demands, they voted for his dethronement in accordance with the final clause of the Acta Henriciana.

Their case was constitutionally watertight, but it required a man of greater intelligence than Zebrzydowski to spell it out and one of greater authority to rally opinion to it. While few people sided with the King, most were reluctant to raise arms against him. After some hesitation, the two Hetmans Chodkiewicz icz and żółkiewski decided to stand by him. They assembled the royal troops and defeated, or rather dispersed, the rebellion at Guzów.

The affair had a highly detrimental effect on the political system of the Commonwealth. The szlachta had tried and failed to invoke its rights according to the constitution, which revealed how academic these rights really were. The King had been defied with armed rebellion, and as it was not ruthlessly crushed it would probably happen again. The episode highlighted a number of faults in the constitution which should have been corrected in the natural process of evolution. But the repeated interregna and rapid succession of kings had impeded the process. By the time it might have been resumed King Zygmunt was on the throne, and he had his own ideas. Opposition to these could be voiced in the Sejm, but not converted into political action. Power had been dispersed so successfully that neither the King, nor the Senate, and least of all the lower chamber of the Sejm, could act without the full support of at least one of the other two.

The King was the catalyst which made the parliamentary process function, but Zygmunt failed to understand the workings of the system, and he had fallen into the trap of thinking that the crown had no constitutional power. It did not require a Pole to see how wrong he was. As the Italian Giovanni Botero observed in 1592, ‘The King has as much power as he is allowed by his own skill and intelligence.’ Zygmunt possessed neither, and the result was a succession of fruitless and damaging collisions.

The source of the King’s power was the right to appoint the senior officers of the Commonwealth, and the bishops, palatines and castellans who made up the Senate. His influence was based on the right to grant the lucrative and prestigious starosties. He was free to appoint whomever he wished, and was under no obligation to favour the rich or powerful. Under the last two Jagiellons most of the senior officers, senators and bishops were the King’s men, many of them groomed in the royal chancellery, with the result that the crown had influence and that talent and ambition were drawn towards the royal court as an anteroom to power.

It was inevitable that elected monarchs would be driven by a sense of insecurity to seek the support of influential grandees. But while this might prove expedient in the short term, it merely compounded the King’s weakness, by building up the position of the grandees, which was growing as never before.

Between 1550 and 1650 the Firlej, Tarnowski, Tenczyński and other great houses of the Jagiellon era disappeared or declined into obscurity, making way for an oligarchy which was to dominate the life of the Commonwealth over the next three centuries—families such as the Potocki, which would produce no fewer than thirtyfive senators, three Hetmans and one Field-Hetman in less than two hundred years. Stanisław Lubomirski provides a good example of this new breed. He owned ninety-one villages, parts of sixteen others, and one town. He also held eighteen villages and two towns on lease from the crown, and a valuable starosty. With his two great castles of Łańcut and Wiśnicz, his Palatinate of Kraków, and his two Imperial titles, the Prince-Palatine no longer needed the King.

Any attempt by the crown to curb a magnate such as him would be sure to provoke widespread opposition, even from the poorest szlachta, who saw it as an attack on personal liberty. There was also the matter of the magnates’ very real physical power. Most of them had numerous retinues, and some maintained regular regiments of foreign mercenaries as well as bodyguards of landless szlachta and a pool of supporters and clients. When a quarrel between the Koniecpolski and Wiśniowiecki families led to armed confrontation, the combined strength of the two bodies facing each other came to over 10,000 men.

The factors that contributed to the wealth of the magnates overlapped those that furnished them with manpower. This period saw enormous fluctuations in the supply of and demand for agricultural produce. A bumper harvest in 1618 coincided with high prices on the export market, while 1619 yielded a tiny crop accompanied by low prices and a European financial crisis. Small estates benefited only marginally from a good year and suffered severely in a bad one, often going bankrupt for lack of financial reserves. Increasing numbers of minor szlachta were obliged to sell out to the local magnate, who was the only source of cash in the area. The birth rate of the minor szlachta soared in the sixteenth century owing to improved hygiene and medical care, and the resulting numerous families only compounded the slide into penury. A sort of noble lumpenproletariat came into being, with nothing to offer except a vote and a sword. As they could not indulge in trade, they were obliged to take service. Since there was no royal army or administration that could absorb them, they sought employment with the magnates, as agents, courtiers or soldiers. A pattern of clientage evolved, and the residences of the magnates gradually took over the functions of the royal court.

The pattern varied around the Commonwealth. In Wielkopolska a higher percentage of szlachta managed to hang on to productive estates, thereby not only maintaining their own financial independence, but also thwarting the accumulation of vast latifundia. No princely states developed there, even if the real wealth of the local magnates was on a par with that of those in Lithuania or Ukraine who owned areas the size of a small country. It was here, in the eastern reaches of the Commonwealth, that the great mag—nates were a law unto themselves. Their ambitions and priorities were of no interest to the rest of the country, but their ability to carry on a semi-independent policy dragged it into disastrous adventures on more than one occasion. Possibly the most spectacular of these was a private jaunt which developed into years of full-scale war with Muscovy.

Ivan the Terrible had died in 1584, leaving two sons: Fyodor, who took the throne; and Dmitry, who was exiled to Uglich, where he was murdered in 1591, probably by Boris Godunov, who became Tsar after Fyodor died, in 1598. In 1601 Muscovy was racked by severe famine, giving rise to unrest and rebellion, and dark rumours began to circulate about Boris, about his bloody deeds, and about divine retribution.

In 1603 a runaway monk by the name of Grishka Otrepiev appeared at the court of Prince Konstanty Wiśniowiecki, Palatine of Ruthenia, claiming to be Ivan’s son Dmitry. He spun a yarn about his miraculous escape from Boris Godunov’s cut-throats in 1591, and although this was taken with a pinch of salt, his potential usefulness was quickly perceived by Jerzy Mniszech, Palatine of Sandomierz, a man whose personal ambition was exceeded only by the fortune he had made out of salt-mines. He had married off one daughter to Wiśniowiecki, and was now seeking a match for his second, Maryna. The pseudo-Dmitry agreed to marry her in return for financial and political backing. Dmitry went to Kraków and converted to Catholicism. This earned him the support of the Jesuits, who persuaded the Papal Nuncio to introduce him to King Zygmunt. The King received him graciously, granted him a pension, and permitted him to canvass support and raise an army. The impostor then tried to persuade the Chancellor and the hetmans to back him, without success, but there was no lack of adventurers willing to follow him.

In September 1604 Dmitry set off at the head of an army of 3,000 men, paid for by Mniszech. His progress was facilitated by the chaos reigning in Muscovy. Cities surrendered to him and many boyars joined his ranks. In April 1605 Boris Godunov died suddenly in Moscow, and Dmitry entered the city without a fight. He was crowned Tsar, and Maryna Mniszech arrived to take her place at his side. In May 1606 there was a rising in Moscow, and Dmitry was killed. His Polish followers were put to the sword, his wife was locked up, and his corpse was dragged by the genitals to Lobnoie Mesto, where it was cut up, burnt, stuffed into a cannon, and shot off westwards, whence he had come.

The boyar Vasily Shuisky was elected to rule in his place, but that was not the end of the story. In July 1607 an even more dis—reputable impostor claiming to be the miraculously surviving Dmitry appeared on the scene (there were to be forty such pretenders between 1598 and 1613). The freed Maryna Mniszech ‘recognised’ him (her Jesuit confessor made them go through a second marriage ceremony just in case), and he became the rallying point for disgruntled Muscovites and Poles who had followed his namesake. They were joined by a number of Lithuanian magnates, including Samuel Tyszkiewicz and Jan Piotr Sapieha, nephew of the Chancellor of Lithuania.

So far, the war had been a private affair. In 1609, however, Tsar Vasily Shuisky made a defensive alliance with King Charles of Sweden, who proceeded to invade Livonia. The Sejm sent Chodkiewicz with an army to oust him, but would not sanction intervention in Muscovy. Ignoring it, King Zygmunt asked for and received full crusading status from Pope Paul V (anyone taking part got full remission of sins, and anyone killed went straight to Heaven), and marched out against the Muscovite schismatics at the head of his own army. He laid siege to Smolensk and soon got bogged down. The pseudo-Dmitry was besieging Moscow with an army made up of Polish adventurers, Cossacks and Russian boyars. With the intervention of Zygmunt III, most of the Poles left him in order to join their king, with the result that the impostor had to fall back to Kaluga and, in effect, drop out of a rapidly changing picture.

Early in 1610 the Tsar’s brother Dmitry Shuisky set off to relieve Smolensk. Hetman żółkiewski made a forced march and surprised Shuisky’s army at Klushino. He won a resounding victory and pursued the fleeing remnants to Moscow, where the boyars deposed their Tsar and elected in his place Władysław, the eldest son of King Zygmunt. But such a diplomatic solution did not fit in with Zygmunt III’s plan of bringing the Catholic faith to Moscow on the tip of his sword. He continued to besiege Smolensk, the boyars waited for the arrival of Władysław, and the small Polish garrison in the Kremlin lived on borrowed time. Since they had not been paid for months, the soldiers offered the Muscovite crown jewels for sale, touting them round Europe by letter. As there were no takers, they divided them up amongst themselves.

On 13 June 1611 Smolensk surrendered to Zygmunt. He felt strong and refused to negotiate with the boyars, adamantly insisting that the whole of Muscovy must go over to Catholicism before he would consider allowing Władysław to become Tsar. There were several risings against the Polish garrison in Moscow, and in November 1612 the Poles capitulated and left the Kremlin

In February 1613 the boyars elected a new Tsar, Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov, son of the Metropolitan Bishop of Rostov, an associate of the pseudo-Dmitry. As the new Tsar was crowned (with a coronet found in the baggage of a slaughtered Polish soldier), the situation remained confused. His father was a prisoner in Poland. Maryna Mniszech and her three-year-old son were entrenched in southern Russia, supported by the Don Cossacks, and in 1618 Władysław set off at the head of an army to claim his throne, having at last gained the approval of his father. He failed to take Moscow, and in 1619 a peace was signed which returned Smolensk and other areas to Poland, and permitted Władysław to style himself ‘Tsar elect of Muscovy’.

The matter was not allowed to rest there. Taking advantage of the death of Zygmunt III in 1632, the Muscovites invaded and laid siege to Smolensk, but in September 1633 Władysław relieved the city and defeated them. In the following year peace was signed, and one of the principal Muscovite demands was that the document of Władysław’s election by the boyars in 1610 be handed back to them. Since the document could not be found in the archives, Władysław agreed to a solemn church ceremony in Warsaw, during which he abdicated all his titles and pretensions to the Muscovite throne before a delegation of boyars.

Symbols were immensely important, and they could be very telling. As King Zygmunt III lay dying only two years previously, after the longest reign in Poland’s history, he had called his son to his bedside. With the last strength of his trembling arm he placed on Władysław’s brow the royal crown of Sweden. He himself lay in state wearing the crown of Muscovy. The only crown which was his to wear, the crown of Poland, had hardly figured in his scheme of things.