Poland

EIGHT

Champions of God

When the tower of Kraków’s Town Hall had been rebuilt in 1556 a copy of Erasmus’ New Testament was immured in the brickwork. When the same tower was repaired in 1611 the book was replaced by a Catholic New Testament, along with a picture and a relic of the first Polish Jesuit to be canonised, St Stanisław Kostka. The symbols could hardly have been more apt. One vision of life was replaced by another, the spirit of enquiry by one of piety, humanist principles by post-Tridentine conformism, and if Erasmus had been the beacon for all thinking Poles in the 1550s, the Jesuits were the mentors of their grandchildren.

Yet the Catholic Church had to tread warily as it set about the reconquest of Poland, as the battle lines criss-crossed society in the most confusing way. When Cardinal Aldobrandini, the future Pope Clement VIII, visited Wilno in 1588, he was astonished at a dinner given by a Catholic canon that the principal guest was a Calvinist, Judge Teodor Jewlaszewski of Nowogródek, whose father was the Orthodox Bishop of Pińsk, and whose son was brought up as an Arian. In such situations it was not feasible to be rigoristic. Even the bigoted Zygmunt III grudgingly had to allow his Lutheran sister Anna to install a Protestant chapel in the Royal Castle.

The most fervent Catholics tended to feel that they were, as the saying went, ‘born noble, not Catholic’; the political solidarity of the szlachta far outweighed religious loyalties. When the King had a Protestant book seized in 1627, there was immediate uproar. The Arian Samuel Przypkowski voiced the proto-Orwellian sentiments of the majority of the szlachta when he raged: ‘The next move will be to institute torture for having thoughts…Our cause is bound to the cause of common freedom by a knot so tight that the one cannot be separated from the other.’

The progress of the Counter-Reformation was slow. The number of Protestant chapels dwindled by some two-thirds in the last third of the sixteenth century, and the Protestant majority in the Senate in 1569 shrank to a handful by 1600. The fact that a fervently Catholic king favoured those of this faith when making appointments was no doubt one reason. But it was not until 1658 that the Arians were banished, for having refused to bear arms at a time of national peril and allegedly siding with the enemy. In 1660 the Quakers were expelled from their colony near Gdańsk, whence they set sail for America. In 1668 the Sejm ruled that nobody could leave the Catholic Church for any other on pain of exile, and in 1673 admittance to the szlachta was barred to non-Catholics. None of these measures prevented anyone from practising the faith of his choice, and there was a twilight zone between what the Sejm decreed and what even the most zealous Catholic officer of the law was prepared to implement against a fellow citizen.

Yet the drift back to Catholicism coincided with a change of intellectual climate and a spiritual reawakening, reflected in, among other things, a spectacular resurgence of monasticism. The Dominican Order, for example, numbered no more than three hundred brothers in forty communities at its lowest point in 1579. Twenty years later there were nine hundred brothers, and by 1648 there were 110 large communities. Between 1572 and 1648 the number of monasteries in the Commonwealth rose from 220 to 565. The same period saw the foundation of new contemplative or ascetic orders such as the Benedictine nuns of Chełmno and the Barefoot Carmelites, starting a mystical tradition in Polish religious life that had seldom been in evidence before.

This was in large measure the work of the Jesuits. Their principal instruments in the battle for the soul of Poland were the colleges they established all over the Commonwealth, of which there were nearly forty by the mid-seventeenth century. They were free, they accepted Arians, Calvinists and Orthodox as readily as Catholics, and the teaching was of a high standard. The Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English and French priests who taught in them added an element of cosmopolitanism which the poorer szlachta appreciated. In 1587, twenty-three years after the first Jesuit had set foot in Poland, the Jesuit College of Wilno had some sixty priests and novices teaching over seven hundred pupils. ‘There have always been and there still are in the classes of this college very numerous sons of heretics and schismatics,’ explained the Rector, Garcias Alabiano. ‘Their parents send them to our schools solely to learn the Arts, and not to be taught the Catholic Faith. However, by the Grace of God, not one of them has to this day left without abjuring his parents’ errors and embracing the Catholic Faith.’

Two years later the college was elevated to the status of university by King Stephen, and its influence increased accordingly. By the 1620s, with the Jagiellon University sinking into clerical sophistry and that of Zamość lapsing into provincialism, Wilno had only two rivals: the Arian academies of Raków and Leszno. Raków, founded under the spiritual aegis of Fausto Sozzini (Socinius) and the patronage of the magnate Jan Sienieńki, had become the principal centre of Arian thought in the early 1600s, attracting teachers and students from all over Europe. During the next decades it gave rise to a canon of Socinian literature which was disseminated far and wide (Spinoza and Locke are among those thought to have been influenced by these writings). In 1638 two students of the academy desecrated a Catholic wayside shrine, and the ensuing scandal resulted in the closure of the academy and its press. The Brethren moved these to the estate of another Arian magnate, but they were gradually undermined by continual legal harassment from the Catholic hierarchy. The Arian college of Leszno, founded in the previous century by the Leszczyński family, was enhanced in the 1620s when the Czech philosopher Jan Amos Komensky (Commenius) joined it. His teachings were particularly influential in Holland and England, which he visited under Cromwell’s Protectorate (it was during this visit that he was invited to preside over the college of Harvard in New England). Leszno was sacked during the Swedish war of 1655, just three years before the banishment of the Arians, so by the second half of the century the Jesuit University of Wilno had no serious rival.

Between their arrival in 1564 and the end of the century, no fewer than 344 books by Jesuits were published in Poland. This literature, much of it on subjects of general interest, subtly promoted their vision, political as well as spiritual. The Jesuits ranged themselves behind the crown, particularly after the accession of Zygmunt III in 1587, and displayed marked hostility towards the szlachta. This stemmed not only from the Jesuits’ genuine sympathy for the peasantry, but also from the realisation that the real foe of Catholic absolutism was not so much the Arians or the Calvinists, the Jews or the Muslims, but the democratic Catholics who made up such a large proportion of the szlachta.

The constitution of the Commonwealth stood in the way of the Counter-Reformation and the szlachta were the guardians of the con—stitution. Little could be achieved through the power of the crown, so the Jesuits looked for other weapons. They even began to use the pulpit to incite the downtrodden to raise their heads: the spectre of a nationwide peasants’ revolt in support of the King and the Church was not a pleasant prospect for the szlachta. It never came to that. The Zebrzydowski rebellion, which voiced some unequivocal intentions where the Jesuits were concerned, frightened them. As the Jesuits attracted more and more minor szlachta into their ranks, they learnt to operate more adroitly within the system, while their schools turned out thousands of young szlachta imbued with religious, social and political principles honed by them.

The magnates were a different matter. Although they had collected wealth and office with single-minded egoism, often behaving like petty tyrants, they nevertheless entertained a view of themselves as pillars of the constitution. They were fond of likening their families to the senatorial houses of ancient Rome—to the extent, in the case of the Lubomirski, of claiming descent from Drusus (the Radziwiłł, not to be outdone, published a family tree showing Hector of Troy as their ancestor). They were, in consequence, far harder for the Jesuits to snare. But even they were tamed.

A characteristic figure in this respect was Jerzy Ossoliński, born in 1595 into an old family of substance which his generation carried into the top league. After a Jesuit education, he set off on a grand tour through Holland, England, France, Italy and Austria. He distinguished himself at the siege of Moscow in 1618, and subsequently as a diplomat before embarking on a parliamentary career. In 1631 he was elected Marshal of the Sejm, an opportunity he used to put forward a project for reform of voting procedures. In 1636 he entered the Senate as Palatine of Sandomierz, two years later he was appointed Vice Chancellor, and in 1642 Chancellor of Poland. An intelligent statesman, he inspired respect for himself and the king he served by his strong yet moderate approach, but his Jesuit upbringing showed whenever there was talk of religious toleration, and he was instrumental in the closing down of the Raków Academy.

Ossoliński was a great patron, but he lacked the civic vision of his predecessors, and created little more than monuments to himself. In 1635 he built a grand residence at Ossolin, in 1643 the magnificent church of St George at Klimontów, and then a fine Palladian palace in Warsaw. It was his elder brother Krzysztof who encapsulated the spirit that guided them both in one of the greatest pieces of self-advertisement by any Polish family—the astonishing castle of KrzyŻtopór. Built on a spectacular ground plan consisting of a number of courtyards of different sizes radiating from a central cour d’honneur superimposed on a mass of star-shaped fortifications, it looks for all the world like a beached ocean liner. The windows were ornamented with marble plaques inscribed in Latin in praise of various real and invented forebears.

Ossoliński’s embassy to Rome in 1633 was an excuse to show off. He pawned and mortgaged in order to cover his servants in gold and to caparison his horses and camels in pearls for the occasion. He accepted the title of duke from the Pope, and that of prince from the Emperor in 1634, titles which only caused the bearer embarrassment at home—the cornerstone of the constitution was the absolute equality of the szlachta, and no titles were recognised (with the exception of those accorded at the Union of Lublin to Lithuanian and Ukrainian families of Jagiellon, Rurik or other dynastic descent, such as the Czartoryski, Sanguszko, Zbaraski, Zasławski and others).

Ossoliński and his peers stopped short of enforcing religious conformism. But the original text of the Act of the Confederation of Warsaw, in which the inhabitants of the Commonwealth pledged, as equals, to respect each other’s religious beliefs and practices, was amended, to ‘graciously permit’ others to practise a different faith. The Catholic faith was, in Ossoliński’s words, ‘mistress in her own house’, while the Protestants were no more than tolerated guests. And while there was no objection to ethnic minorities practising different rites or the Livonian szlachta remaining Protestant, Poles who were Protestants began to be viewed as eccentric, even suspicious. A psychological connection had been made between Catholicism and patriotism, a patriotism made increasingly vital by the succession of wars in the first half of the century. Since these were fought against Protestant Swedes and Orthodox Russians, Jesuit and other writers began to picture the Poles as defenders of Catholicism. When the Turks and Tatars took over as the principal enemy in the following decades, it was a short step to turn the Poles into the defenders of Christendom. A powerful myth grew up of Poland as the predestined bulwark of Christen—dom, the Antemurale Christianitatis, as Machiavelli had referred to it. ‘Lord, you were once called the God of Israel,’ Jakub Sobieski prayed in the 1650s. ‘On bended knee we now call you the God of Poland, our motherland, the God of our armies and the Lord of our hosts.’

But while it affected this embattled sense of destiny, Polish society nevertheless remained highly cosmopolitan. Translations of French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish and Persian works were published with little delay, and plays by Shakespeare were performed in Poland as early as 1609. Zygmunt III kept an Italian commedia dell’arte at his court, supplemented in the 1620s by an English troupe, and during the first half of the century few courts had such good music. In 1633 Władysław IV set up a royal opera company, and Piotr Elert wrote the first Polish opera in the late 1630s.

The Jesuits themselves were responsible for much artistic patronage, including some of the best building and painting of the period. They also contributed the greatest lyric poet of the Polish Baroque, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595-1640). Most of his fellow poets devoted themselves to the subject of war, giving rise to a tradition of heroic and pathetic verse, a latterday chanson de geste inspired by the unique conditions and atmosphere in which wars against the Turks and Tatars were fought. In Ukraine or Moldavia, companies of Polish horsemen with the image of the Blessed Virgin on their breastplates and a prayer on their lips faced the Infidel in epic contest.

‘Do not disturb yourself, most beloved wife, for God watches over us,’ Hetman man żółkiewski wrote from his camp at Cecora in Moldavia on the night of 6 October 1620. ‘And if I should perish it will be because I am old and of no further use to the Commonwealth, and the Almighty will grant that our son may take up his father’s sword, temper it on the necks of pagans and, if it should come to pass as I said, avenge the blood of his father.’ The next day his army was defeated and his body hacked to pieces by Turkish janissaries. His head was sent to Istanbul, where it was displayed on a pike. What sustained such attitudes was the conviction that Poland had a special part to play in God’s scheme. This notion deeply marked the seventeenth-century szlachta, for warfare was their preserve.

The father of Polish military science was Hetman Jan Tarnowski, who published his Consilium Rationis Bellicae in 1558. He elaborated the old Hussite tactic of forming a square, a mobile fortress which could save a small army caught out in the open, and this became standard practice in all operations against Tatars and Turks. The need to move fast and to live off the land meant that Polish armies operated in divisions, while most European armies marched in a great mass until the end of the eighteenth century. Another peculiar feature was the tradition of the deep cavalry raid sweeping out ahead of the main army in a great arc behind enemy lines. The Poles were also in advance of their enemies in terms of artillery. From the Turks they had learnt much about incendiary and explosive shells, and they developed rocketry to great effect.

The core of the Commonwealth’s armed forces was a small body of infantry consisting of peasant levies, raised on and paid for by 25 per cent of revenue from the starosties and royal lands, and therefore known as ‘quarter troops’. In 1579 King Stephen instituted a new system under which peasants from royal lands could volunteer to become reserve soldiers, freed from all servage and dues in return for their regular training and readiness to fight, and paid when on active service. This type of infantry, known as Piechota Wybraniecka, was effective on account of its regular training in peacetime and its good morale. Lightly dressed, without helmets or armour, the men were equipped with a musket, short sword and hatchet. Only one man in eight carried a pike. In the 1550s, a Polish regiment of two hundred men could deliver 150 shots in five minutes, while contemporary Spanish brigades of 10,000 men operating in the Netherlands could only deliver 750 in the same time—ten times less on a man-to-man basis. The Commonwealth also employed mercenaries—German, Scottish or French infantry drilled on standard European lines. It could also count in the hour of need on the private armies of magnates.

The infantry was outnumbered by cavalry, and, aside from a few regiments of regular dragoons, this was based on the chivalric pattern of the knight and his squires. The szlachta who fought in the front line were known as towarzysze, or ‘companions’. Each companion would bring with him as many men as he could afford to equip, most of them poor szlachta, to make up the second and third ranks, and these were known as pocztowi, literally ‘retainers’. Companions equipped themselves and their retainers at their own expense, but received soldier’s pay when on active service.

The presence in the ranks of large numbers of volunteers, and particularly of szlachta fighting not for the cause of some king but for their own Commonwealth, gave them the same edge over their enemies as that enjoyed by the soldiers of revolutionary France in the 1790s. The gentleman-trooper carried the szlachta’s democratic principles in his saddlebag and thought of his commander and the Hetman as elder brothers.

The pride and glory of the Polish cavalry, its mailed fist, was the Husaria. The companions of the front rank carried a lance of up to twenty feet in length, which outreached infantry pikes, allowing the Husaria to cut straight through a square, and a sabre or a rapier with a six-foot blade which doubled as a short lance. Each companion also carried a pair of pistols, a short carbine, a bow and arrows and a variety of other weapons. The retainers carried much the same arsenal without the lance, while the rear rank often led spare mounts into the charge.

The Husaria wore helmets, thick steel breastplates and shoulder and arm guards, or eastern scale armour. The companions also sometimes sported wooden arcs bristling with eagle feathers rising over their heads like two wings from attachments on their shoulders or the back of the saddle. Over one shoulder they wore the skin of a tiger or leopard as a cloak. These served to frighten the enemy’s horses, and the wings had the added advantage of preventing Tatars eager for ransom from lassoing the Polish riders in a mêlée. But the main purpose of these accoutrements was to give an impression of splendour. The companions in the Husaria were young noblemen who liked to show off their wealth. Helmets and breastplates were chased or studded with gold and often set with semi-precious stones. Harnesses, saddles and horsecloths were embroidered and embellished with gold and gems.

For over a century, the Husaria were the lords of the battlefield. Kircholm (1605), where 4,000 Poles under Chodkiewicz accounted for 14,000 Swedes, was little more than one long cavalry manoeuvre ending in the Husaria’s charge. Klushino (1610), where żółkiewski with 6,000 Poles, of whom only two hundred were infantry, defeated 30,000 Muscovites and 5,000 German and Scottish mercenaries, was a Husaria victory, as was the Battle of Gniew (1656), in which 5,500 Polish cavalry defeated 13,000 Swedes. In many other battles, from Byczyna (1588) and Trzciana (1629) to the relief of Vienna (1683), the Husaria dealt the decisive blow.

Though hardly a maritime nation, the Poles did have a navy for a while. In 1560 Zygmunt Augustus licensed a total of thirty privateers to sail under the Polish ensign. He established a Maritime Commission and in 1569 launched a galleon and a frigate of the Polish navy. In 1620 Zygmunt III had a further twenty warships built, and in 1627 the Polish navy fought its only sea battle when it defeated the Swedish fleet off Oliwa. If the Poles did not like paying for an army, they liked digging into their pockets even less for a navy, which seemed an unnecessary luxury since cordial relations with England and Holland meant that Poland had maritime friends in the Baltic. The navy dwindled, and the only sailor of talent Poland produced, Krzysztof Arciszewski, became a Dutch admiral.

Victory was repeatedly achieved at low cost and with little apparent effort, and this had a pernicious effect. Increasingly, when money was needed for defence, voices were raised in the Sejm to the effect that ‘They’re scaring us with Turks and Tatars just to get money out of us,’ in the belief that if any real threat materialised it could be parried easily by the noble Polish knight, armed with the superiority of his political freedom and inspired by God. There was some truth in this, but times were changing.