Poland

NINE

A Biblical Flood

‘Poland is like a spectator who stands safely on the seashore, calmly looking on at the tempest raging before him,’ wrote Krzysztof Opaliński, Palatine of Poznań, in 1630. With most of Central Europe caught up in the self-perpetuating butchery of the Thirty Years’ War, Poland did indeed appear remarkably peaceful and stable. When Zygmunt III died in 1632, his eldest son Władysław was elected unanimously in the space of half an hour. The prestige of the Commonwealth and its king rode high, and France repeatedly urged him to take the Imperial crown after the death of the ailing Ferdinand II, offering the necessary funds and military as well as diplomatic support. When his wife died, portraits of no fewer than sixteen princesses were sent in by other courts.

The situation changed drastically when the Thirty Years’ War came to an end in 1648. That same year the Commonwealth was shaken to its foundations by the explosion of formidable tensions that had been building up for over half a century in its southeastern reaches of Ukraine. This area of formerly Kievan lands taken over by Lithuania in the thirteenth century and transferred to Poland before the Union of Lublin in 1569 had been administratively tacked on to the Kingdom of Poland without any regard for its specific nature.

The autochtonous population of Ukraine had kept a strong sense of identity and had its own nobility, some of whom, like the Ostrogski and Zasławski, were descended from the former rulers of Kiev. They were well equipped to stand at the head of their people, both by their ancient lineage and by their immense wealth. Prince Konstanty Ostrogski (1526-1608) owned a hundred towns and 1,300 villages. Prince Jarema Michał Wiśniowiecki (1612-51) owned 38,000 homesteads, inhabited by some 230,000 of his subjects. But these princes became separated from their people by the lure of Polish culture and Western civilisation. A classic pattern of alienation evolved: it was with the best intentions that Prince Zbaraski travelled in the West and spent three years studying under Galileo, returning to Ukraine to build, fortify and improve, but his people came to view him as a traitor.

The population of Ukraine belonged to the Orthodox Church, whose hierarchy had been shaken by the fall of Constantinople and the subsequent Ottoman expansion in the Balkans, and was still in a state of disarray at the end of the sixteenth century. In 1588 the Patriarch of Constantinople paid a pastoral visit to his flock in the Commonwealth and held two synods, at Wilno and Kamieniec Podolski. Chancellor Jan Zamoyski put forward the suggestion that the Patriarch settle in Kiev and turn it into the centre of the Orthodox Church. Jesuit influence thwarted this, and the Patriarch was invited by Tsar Feodor I to Moscow. There, in 1589, he created the patriarchate of all the Russias, whose purpose was to bring under its authority the whole Orthodox Church, including that part of it which lay within the Commonwealth.

Before leaving, the Patriarch had appointed Bishop Terlecki of Łuck to represent him in Poland. Terlecki started negotiations with his counterpart the Catholic Bishop of Łuck in the hope of achieving greater recognition of his own hierarchy. These negotiations moved on to embrace wider issues and aroused the interest of the Jesuits, particularly of Piotr Skarga. After consultation with Rome, agreement was reached and an Act of Union was signed in 1596 at Brześć. By this act the Commonwealth’s Orthodox bishops recognised the Pope as their spiritual head in lieu of the Patriarch in Moscow, but kept their old Slavonic liturgy and rites, and the right of priests to marry.

The Jesuits congratulated themselves on having brought millions of wayward sheep into the fold, but many Orthodox priests and their flocks felt indignant at not having been consulted, and refused to adhere to the Union, with the result that there were now in effect three and not two Churches—Roman, Orthodox and Uniate, as those who had transferred to Rome were known. While the Roman and Uniate looked to the West, the Orthodox looked elsewhere. The Union had been designed to bind the Orthodox population of Ukraine to Poland. In the event, it had the effect of pushing it into the arms of Moscow. While the Uniate bishops continued in their efforts to bring the recalcitrant priests to accept the Union, the Orthodox hierarchy of Moscow was pulling them the other way.

The organisation of the Uniate Church proceeded slowly. It was not until the 1630s that metropolitan bishops were installed at Kiev and Polotsk, and by then the whole matter was coming under discussion once again. Władysław IV was keen to revise the arrangement within the framework of an entirely new formulation of religious freedoms. He wanted to replace the toleration of differing religions as enshrined in the Act of the Confederation of Warsaw (1573) by some form of ecumenical consensus on religious diversity. After much preparation, he managed to hold a congress at Toruń in 1645, in which Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists discussed their differences. The congress was inconclusive, but, as the King himself put it, ‘At least nobody insulted each other.’ A similar congress between the Catholic, Orthodox and Uniate Churches was planned for 1648. Meanwhile Metropolitan Mohyla of Kiev was in the process of renegotiating the Union of Brześć with Rome. But these efforts came too late.

The drift of Ukraine’s nobility towards Western culture was usually accompanied by a straightforward switch to Catholicism, which provided a bridge to that culture. In 1632 Jarema Wiśniowiecki, the last of the great Ukrainian lords to live entirely in Ukraine and to cling to its language, culture and traditions, converted to the Church of Rome. Despite the valiant efforts of Metropolitan Mohyla, who founded an academy in Kiev that same year, the Uniate Church was failing to hold people such as Wiśniowiecki, while Orthodoxy was rapidly becoming the religion of the lower orders. It was inevitable that these would eventually see in it a rallying point and a weapon.

The incorporation of the area into Poland in 1569 had been followed by an influx of landless Polish szlachta eager to carve out estates for themselves in this fertile and underpopulated land. They were closely followed by Catholic clergy and large numbers of Jews, for the most part brought in by Polish landowners to act as middlemen, agents, rent collectors and innkeepers—all of which made them odious to the locals. This was particularly true of the Cossacks, who found themselves in a position not unlike that of the American Indians in the nineteenth century—the newcomers were settling and farming land which they considered to be common, and pushing them further and further into frontier territory.

The Cossacks were not so much a people as a way of life. The very name ‘Cossack’ derives from a Turkish-Tatar word denoting a free soldier, and that just about defines their identity and seminomadic way of life. The spiritual home of the Cossacks of western Ukraine, the Zaporozhian Host, was the Sich, a commune ruled by elected elders on the Zaporozhe, the islands beyond the rapids of the river Dnieper. The population of the Sich was variable, as almost anyone could be a Cossack if he wished.

The Cossacks inhabited a frontier zone constantly open to attack from the Principality of Moldavia, whose rulers owed allegiance alternatively to Poland, Turkey and Hungary, or from the Khanate of the Crimean Tatars, with its capital at Bakhchisaray, which was separated from the Commonwealth by a broad stretch of no-man’sland known as the Wild Plains. The Tatars were nominally subjects of the Sultan. Every spring their raiding parties or tchambouls set off along three trails running north into Muscovy, north-west into Poland, and west into Ukraine, burning and looting as they went. They took valuables and livestock, and above all people, leaving behind only the old or infirm. They would then return to the Crimea whence the wealthy would be ransomed and the rest shipped to the slave markets of Istanbul.

Although the Tatars were a nuisance, they never represented a serious threat on their own. But they could, and sometimes did, join up with an Ottoman army marching up through Moldavia, thereby effectively outflanking any Polish defence. Ever since the 1520s, when the Turks had ousted Venice and the Knights of St John from the eastern Mediterranean and taken over much of the Balkans, Moldavia and Ukraine presented a tempting theatre for expansion. The Commonwealth was directly threatened, and responded with two moves. In 1593 a Polish expedition placed a friendly vassal on the Moldavian throne and a pax polonica was imposed on the area, affording some security to the south-eastern reaches of the Commonwealth.

The other measure taken in the 1590s was the transformation of the Cossack community of the Zaporozhian Sich into an army, defined by a ‘register’ listing the number and pay of serving Cossacks. But while ‘His Majesty’s Zaporozhian Army’ wore the title with pride, it remained unaccountable, and instead of parrying Tatar raids, the Cossacks preferred to conduct their own. They would push into the Crimea or else climb into longboats, sail down the Dnieper and molest Turkish cities on the Black Sea. In 1606 they raided Kilia, Akerman and Varna. In 1608 they captured Perekop. In 1615 they sacked Trebizond and attacked Istanbul itself.

Relations between the Commonwealth and the Porte grew increasingly sour, and in 1620 Iskander Pasha invaded Moldavia. A small Polish force under Hetman żółkiewski set off in support of the vassal prince. The Poles were defeated, żólłiewski was killed and Field-Hetman Koniecpolski was taken prisoner. Tatar tchambouls swarmed into Poland as far as Lwów, in the rear of a second Polish army which had dug in at Chocim to hold off the Turks. Although the Poles managed to drive the Ottoman forces back then and on a similar occasion ten years later, the whole area remained vulnerable.

Nor had the creation of the Zaporozhian Army solved the internal problems of Ukraine. The Cossacks saw themselves as loyal subjects of the king, and they had a particular affection for Władysław IV. But they were constantly at loggerheads with local authorities, the landed szlachta and the agents of large estates who kept trying to pin non-register Cossacks down to the status of peasants. In 1630 the register was raised to 8,000, but the Poles were wary of letting the Cossacks grow too strong; relatively minor grievances were regularly translated into mutinies which were an excuse for organised banditry. In 1637, after one such mutiny, the register was reduced to 6,000. A fortress was built at Kudak on a bend in the Dnieper, from which a Polish garrison kept an eye on movements in the Sich.

Instead of being admitted as the third nation of the Commonwealth, Ukraine was treated, by its own elite as well as by the Poles, as a sort of colony, and the resultant sense of deprivation engendered much bitterness. It was these simmering tensions that boiled over in the late 1640s, triggering a series of events that would abort the dream of Ukrainian nationhood and break the Commonwealth’s power decisively, to the benefit of Turkey and, above all, Muscovy.

In 1640, and again in 1644, unusually large Tatar tchambouls ravaged Podolia and Volynia. Hetman Koniecpolski managed to defeat them, but not before they had carried off multitudes into slavery. In the winter of 1645 the Tatars sent their tchambouls into Muscovy in even larger numbers, and this time Field-Hetman Mikołaj Potocki was dispatched with a Polish army to help the Muscovites, the consequence of a rapprochement which had taken place between Warsaw and Moscow. This gave rise to a plan for a joint Polish-Muscovite offensive into the Crimea, which Muscovy would then incorporate into its own dominions, followed by a similar expedition into Moldavia, which would be incorporated into the Commonwealth. Two unexpected events shattered this plan. One was that Hetman Koniecpolski, now approaching his sixtieth year, absented himself to marry for the third time. His bride, Zofia Opalińska, was not only a great heiress but also a vivacious girl of sixteen. After a brief honeymoon which the Hetman described to a friend in ecstatic terms, he died of exhaustion on 10 March 1646.

The other came in May, when King Władysław unexpectedly announced that he was going to lead a crusade to recover Istanbul, an enterprise he believed would earn him lasting fame. The Sejm was in uproar, and Chancellor Ossoliński quashed the project. But Władysław had already secretly given the Cossacks money, instructing them to double the register to 12,000 and to start building longboats. The Cossacks had set to work in high spirits. Their anger was all the greater when news reached them that the Sejm had put paid to the King’s plans. The agreed Crimean and Moldavian campaigns were less attractive to them than a royal licence to take to their boats and rampage around the southern shores of the Black Sea. It was at this point that one man and his personal grievances brought about an explosion. His name was Bohdan Chmielnicki.

Chmielnicki was born in 1595 into the landed szlachta, and although he was Orthodox, he had been educated by the Jesuits. He took part in the 1620 Moldavian campaign, and was taken prisoner by the Turks at the Battle of Cecora along with Koniecpolski. When they recovered their freedom, Koniecpolski obtained for him the post of Secretary to the Zaporozhian Army. Chmielnicki waged a personal vendetta with a Lithuanian neighbour who eventually killed his son. Failing to get justice from the local court, Chmielnicki went to the Sich, where he stirred the already indignant Cossacks into a frenzy and started negotiating with the Tatars.

The situation was not critical. The King was personally due in Ukraine, Polish forces were concentrating, and the Muscovite army had started moving south to link up with them. Hetman Potocki, however, decided that a show of strength was required, and in April 1648 he dispatched his twenty-four-year-old son Stefan with 3,500 men, half of them Cossacks, towards the Sich. Stefan Potocki was surrounded by the Zaporozhian Army under Chmielnicki and defeated, and his father was ambushed and taken prisoner ten days later at Korsuń. At this crucial moment, Władysław IV, the only man in a position to placate the Cossacks, died unexpectedly.

It was fortunate for the Commonwealth that both the Primate and interrex, Maciej Łubieński, and the Chancellor, Jerzy Ossoliński, were sagacious men. They arranged an immediate truce through Adam Kisiel, Palatine of Kiev, the only Orthodox member of the Senate, who began negotiations on a broader settlement. But hopes of an amicable resolution were dashed by Prince Wiśniowiecki, who led his own private army into the field against the Cossacks: the greatest lord of Ukraine was not interested in Ukrainian autonomy, only in putting down the rabble and restoring order. This strengthened the hand of those in the Cossack camp who wanted war rather than negotiation, and Chmielnicki bowed to the pressure.

A large Polish army had assembled, including detachments of the levée en masse from the threatened areas, but this fled after a short skirmish at Piławce, and the rest of the army beat a hasty retreat. News of this fanned the flames of revolt. The beleaguered garrison of Kudak capitulated and with it vanished the last vestige of Polish order in Ukraine. Large numbers of peasants joined the Cossacks, and, abetted by Chmielnicki’s Tatar allies, they scoured the country, massacring nobles, priests, nuns and, in particular, Jews. The Moldavian custom of impaling alive caught on, and it was practised with relish as decades of tension erupted into mindless cruelty. Chmielnicki was no longer master of the situation, any more than Ossoliński was on the Polish side. Leading the crusade against the rabble were Prince Wiśniowiecki and Janusz Radziwiłł, Field-Hetman of Lithuania, both acting independently.

Rid of the mixed blessing of the levée en masse, the Polish army had dug in at ZbaraŻ, where it held off the combined Cossack and Tatar forces. Then came the first Polish success, at the Battle of Zborów, after which negotiations were reopened and agreement quickly reached. The three Palatinates of Kiev, Bracław and Czernyhów were to be declared Cossack territory, into which no Polish troops, Jews or Jesuits would be allowed. All dignitaries and officials in the area were to be Orthodox Ukrainian szlachta, and the register was to stand at 40,000 men.

Ossoliński and his more reasonable counterparts had managed to pour oil on the water once again, and Ukraine quietened down. It was not to last. In 1650 Chmielnicki accepted the overlordship of the Sultan, who named him vassal prince of Ukraine. Polish forces moved into Ukraine the following spring and in the threeday Battle of Beresteczko routed the Cossack army and its Tatar allies. A new peace was signed at Biala Cerkiew on 28 September 1651 annulling all previous Polish concessions, but while one Polish army set about pacifying the area, another which had gone to Moldavia to head off Chmielnicki’s Turkish allies was defeated and its remnants massacred at Batoh.

Władysław IV had been succeeded by his younger brother, Jan Kazimierz, a complex character with a chequered past. He was intelligent and resourceful, but he suffered from fits of depression and listlessness. His lack of charm did not help him gain the confidence of the szlachta, while many magnates felt an intense dislike for him. They also distrusted the Queen, Louise Marie de Gonzague, Duchesse de Nevers, Princess of Mantua.

Her grandfather, a friend and collaborator of Marie de Médicis, had come to Poland with Henri de Valois, and her father, the last Gonzaga Duke of Mantua, had also spent some time in Warsaw. She was brought up at the French court. In 1645, as a result of a rapprochement between Poland and France, she married Władysław IV, and after his death, his younger brother Jan Kazimierz. He was then forty, and she thirty-eight.

She and the bevy of young French ladies she had brought with her introduced French court culture into Poland, which, Cardinal Mazarin hoped, would facilitate his plan to bring the Commonwealth within the French orbit, and if possible place a Bourbon on its throne. From the outset they aroused Polish suspicions.

One faction among the magnates, including the Radziwiłł and Lubomirski families, believed in the necessity of the removal of Jan Kazimierz, and they began to plot accordingly. In the case of the Radziwiłł, it went further: the family had thought of themselves as quasi-royal for the last century, and their dream of assuming the throne of a separate Lithuania had grown into something of an obsession with Janusz Radziwiłł. Such attitudes helped destabilise the situation.

In 1654, Bohdan Chmielnicki, who had developed dynastic aspirations quite as extravagant as those of the Radziwiłł, negotiated the Treaty of Pereiaslav, placing himself under the protection of Muscovy in return for military assistance against the Commonwealth. Tsar Alexey began to style himself ‘Tsar of Great and Little Russia’. There were protests from some of the Cossacks, and the Metropolitan of Kiev announced that he for one was still a subject of the King of Poland. Alexey invaded Lithuania, defeated Janusz Radziwiłł and took Polotsk, Smolensk, Vitebsk and Mohilev, while the Cossacks reached Lublin. In the following spring he took Wilno, and titled himself ‘Grand Duke of Lithuania, Belorussia and Podolia’. Far from getting Lithuania for themselves, the Radziwiłł were now in imminent peril of becoming Muscovite subjects, and they reacted by appealing for help to the King of Sweden.

Charles X Gustavus had just ascended the throne. His country was bankrupt after the Thirty Years’ War, its only asset a huge and now redundant army. In spite of the twenty years of peace with the Commonwealth, the Swedes still dreamed of extending their possessions on the Baltic seaboard. The discontent of many Polish magnates, the confusion attendant on the Cossack and Muscovite invasions, and finally the appeal from the Radziwiłł, all paved the way for an invasion, which took place at the beginning of 1655.

The Swedes rapidly made themselves masters of Pomerania and advanced into Wielkopolska. A Polish army barred their way, but was made to capitulate by Krzysztof Opaliński, Palatine of Poznań, and his colleague the Palatine of Kalisz, who officially transferred their provinces to Swedish overlordship. The enemies of Jan Kazimierz all over the country announced his dethronement in favour of Charles X. With three enemy armies operating in the country confusion reigned. Disoriented by a rumour that Jan Kazimierz had abdicated, Hetman Stanisław Rewera Potocki capitulated. Isolated groups of szlachta and small bodies of troops on their way to join the army either surrendered or dispersed. Jan Kazimierz advanced to face the enemy with a small army commanded by Stefan Czarniecki, Castellan of Kiev. In September 1655 they were defeated at żarnowiec and fell back on Kraków. The King then took refuge in Silesia, while Czarniecki tried unsuccessfully to hold Kraków.

On 22 October Janusz Radziwiłł signed an agreement at Kiejdany detaching Lithuania from Poland and placing it under the protection of Sweden. Swedish troops appeared in every province, often accompanied by magnates or szlachta who supported Charles. Since there was little to choose between one Vasa king and another, many accepted what appeared to be a fait accompli.

Charles was only interested in provinces such as Pomerania and Livonia, which would give Sweden control of the Baltic, and treated the rest of Poland as occupied territory. He and his generals removed everything they could lay hands on—pictures, sculpture, furniture, entire libraries. His troops burnt down churches, having first emptied them of everything portable, and this sacrilege incensed the peasants, who were hardly concerned as to who sat on the throne. They began to massacre lone soldiers, then lone detachments. A guerrilla war developed, with bands of szlachta and peasants making life unpleasant for the Swedes.

A handful of fortresses such as Gdańsk, Lwów, Kamieniec and Zamość continued to hold out for Jan Kazimierz, while the fortified monastery of Częstochowa fought off a siege in a manner which would pass into legend. All around the country groups of szlachta only needed a signal to take up arms for the King.

The Tatars were prescient enough to see that if the Commonwealth were defeated it would only be a matter of time before Muscovy and the Cossacks would devastate the Crimea, and Mehmet Girey therefore signed an alliance with Jan Kazimierz and despatched several thousand warriors to assist the Polish army.

In January 1656, Jan Kazimierz took the offensive at the head of the army he had rallied. Although the Swedes, assisted by a large contingent of troops from Brandenburg, managed to win the threeday Battle of Warsaw in July, fortune began to turn against them. Denmark and Holland joined the Polish alliance, and in June a Dutch fleet broke the Swedish blockade and sailed in to relieve Gdańsk. The Swedes, who had already made an alliance with the Elector of Brandenburg, now enlisted the support of the prince of Transylvania and briefly managed to reoccupy Warsaw in 1657, but they and their allies were decisively beaten in the following year, when Brandenburg switched sides and joined Poland, along with the Habsburgs. In 1660 peace was signed at Oliwa on the basis of a return to the status quo ante.

The death of Chmielnicki in 1657 had ended the Cossack threat. He was succeeded by Jan Wyhowski, a moderate who quickly brought negotiations to a head. On 16 September 1658 the Union of Hadziacz turned the Commonwealth of Two Nations into a Commonwealth of Three Nations. Ukraine was to have its own chancellor, treasurer, marshal and hetman, chosen by the king from candidates proposed by the Cossacks. It was to have its own courts, its own mint, and its own army. Several hundred Cossacks were ennobled, and the Metropolitan of Kiev and the Orthodox bishops of Lwów, Przemyśł, Chełm, Łuck and Mścisław were to have seats in the Senate. Polish and Lithuanian troops were barred from entering the three Palatinates, in which only Orthodox Ukrainians were to hold office. Ukraine was to have two universities and a number of schools, paid for by the Commonwealth.

This project came to nothing. At the end of 1659 Wyhowski was toppled by Chmielnicki’s son, who emulated his father by swearing allegiance to both the King of Poland and the Tsar of Muscovy at the same time. Muscovite forces invaded in support of the Cossacks, but both they and the Cossacks were defeated by

Polish armies at Cudnów and Polonka in 1660. Having pacified Ukraine, Jan Kazimierz moved against Muscovy, but Poland was exhausted, and as Ottoman armies hovered in the south he made peace.

There would be no room in this for Ukrainian aspirations. Chmielnicki had been so successful in demonstrating to everyone the strategic importance of Ukraine that neither the Commonwealth nor Muscovy could countenance its existence as an autonomous province, liable at any moment to subversion by the other side. By the Treaty of Andruszowo in 1667, they divided it between themselves along the Dnieper.