Poland

TEN

Morbus Comitialis

Polish diplomatic missions were notorious throughout seventeenthcentury Europe for their splendour. The ambassadors would enter the foreign capital preceded by regiments of private troops and servants decked out in lavish liveries, surrounded by attendants on prancing horses saddled and tacked with gold-embroidered velvet adorned with semi-precious stones, and followed by more detachments of often exotic household troops. When he entered Istanbul in 1622, Prince Krzysztof Zbaraski was accompanied by two regiments of Hungarian infantry and followed by page boys in Circassian dress, bodyguards in Roumelian costume, a troop of Cossacks and forty mounted musketeers.

In 1633 Rome was treated to the spectacle of Jerzy Ossoliński’s embassy, consisting of some three hundred riders and ten camels decked out in feathers, gold and pearls. When Krzysztof Opaliński’s cavalcade entered Paris in 1645 to collect Władysław IV’s bride, Louise Marie de Gonzague, his horses were intentionally loosely shod, so that their solid gold horseshoes scattered the cobbles of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine as a gesture to the populace of the city. Both camels and gold horseshoes became de rigueur in subsequent embassies, and numbers went up as well. In 1676 Prince Michał Czartoryski took no fewer than 1,500 retainers on his embassy to Moscow. In the following year Jan Gniński strained the arrangements made by his Turkish hosts, one of whom quipped that he had brought too many to sign a peace, and too few to fight a war.

Both as a measure of Poland’s wealth and as a symbol of its diplomatic ascendancy, these displays were highly misleading. They obscured the fact that the Commonwealth had no chancellery which could formulate a foreign policy, and gave the impression that Poland was a country of immense wealth, which was far from being the case.

While the sixteenth century saw the beginnings of capitalism take root in the West, most of Central Europe had drifted into what might best be described as industrial agriculture. Poland exported foodstuffs, cattle, wax, hemp, timber, flax, charcoal, pitch, iron and other raw materials, and only a few low-quality finished goods, such as beer, rope and cloth. It imported finished products of every description and a quantity of colonial goods. It was the sort of trading pattern that places Third World countries at the mercy of industrialised nations. The carriage of goods was predominantly in foreign hands, which meant that a large part of the profit was made outside the country. Of the ships leaving Gdańsk with Polish exports in 1585, for instance, 52 per cent were Dutch, 24 per cent Friesian, and 12 per cent English. The real marketplace for Polish grain was not Gdańsk but Amsterdam, whence it was re-exported to Spain and other countries.

While timber and other ships’ stores remained in high demand, particularly from the Dutch, who had no source of their own, and the English and Spanish, who had depleted their forests, the grain trade began to decline in importance as prices of grain on western European markets fell steadily; smaller countries such as England and the Netherlands learnt to grow more intensively and to supplement their diet with rice and eventually the potato.

The twenty years of war in the middle of the century had a dramatic effect. Grain exports through Gdańsk in the early 1600s averaged 200,000 tonnes per annum, reaching some 250,000 tonnes in the bumper year of 1618. The figure for 1651, after three years of Cossack unrest, was only 100,000 and two years later this had fallen to 60,000, which remained the average yearly figure for the rest of the century. The import of colonial goods through Gdańsk went up by 10 per cent between 1615 and 1635, and then shot up by 50 per cent between 1635 and 1690. Only in the case of Gdańsk are such comprehensive figures available, and it is impossible to ascertain the position for other ports like Elbląg, or for overland trade with Germany and Muscovy, where the balance was more favourable. The wars also had a catastrophic effect on the export of cattle and horses reared in the south-eastern areas of the Commonwealth.

The mid-century wars were disastrous in other respects. The casualties were not in themselves remarkable, except in the southeastern areas. The Tatars led many thousands off into slavery and Tsar Alexey deported large numbers to colonise newly conquered areas of Siberia, but the most destructive invaders were the Swedes. The wholesale razing of crops, the burning of villages and towns, and the removal of cattle brought about famine, compounded by plague. The results were devastating. Between 1600, when the population of the Commonwealth stood at over ten million, and 1650 there had been an increase of 23 per cent, but in the ten years between 1650 and 1660, it fell by at least a quarter, to below the original ten million mark. Population density in the Polish heartlands of Wielkopolska, Małopolska and Mazovia had reached 26.3 per square kilometre by 1650, but by 1660 it was down to 19.9. With war and famine destroying their villages, people wandered the countryside in search of less badly affected areas. Food production fell to disastrous levels. By 1668, when the situation had stabilised, 58 per cent of arable land on szlachta estates was lying fallow, while the figures for Church estates and royal lands were 82 and 86 per cent respectively.

The greatest casualties were the towns. At the beginning of the century, Gdańsk was still by far the largest, with 70,000 inhabit—ants, followed by Warsaw (30,000), Kraków (28,000), Poznań and Lwów (20,000), Elbląg (18,000), Toruń (12,000) and Lublin (10,000). Of the other nine hundred or so townships throughout the Commonwealth, most had between five hundred and 2,000 inhabitants. In all, about a quarter of the population lived in towns. The Swedish army looted and torched the towns it entered, with the result that between 1650 and 1660 the urban population of the Commonwealth declined by up to 80 per cent.

The major towns had long been under pressure from private towns belonging to magnates or the Church, losing much of their business as agents for the produce of the country and as providers of finished goods to the locality. They were poorly represented and heavily taxed. After the wars, which destroyed much of Warsaw, Kraków, Poznań, Lublin and Wilno—the latter was put to fire and sword for seventeen days by Alexey in 1655—they found it difficult to rebuild. Such investment as was forthcoming was lavished on the private towns by their solicitous owners. But these private towns could not replace the older ones in one crucial respect. They were functionally limited to the exploitation and the provision of essentials to a given area, and there was little scope for enterprise or investment by individual merchants or manufacturers. They never grew into centres of finance and credit which could generate their own wealth and industry, yet the older towns were in no position to carry on this function as before. Only the magnates, the Church and the crown were capable of promoting industrial development, but they were neither motivated nor equipped for the job.

Elective monarchs tended to regard the Commonwealth not as part of their patrimony, to be cared for and enriched on behalf of their descendants, but rather as a sinecure to be enjoyed and a means to enhance their own glory or further the cause of their dynasty. It was only when it had become clear to Zygmunt III that his son would succeed him that he began to care for the economy of the Commonwealth. In 1624 he set up new steelworks at Bobra and Samsonów, and a few years later modernised the royal mines. Władysław IV, who felt dynastically attached to Poland, took an active part in its industrial development, but even where the will existed, the means often did not, as the Commonwealth did not have a proper fiscal regime in place.

The greatest areas of economic activity were the landowning szlachta’s home and export sales, which were exempt from tax—ation; the large Jewish community, which assessed, collected and paid its own taxes without outside supervision, with predictable results; and the greatest financial centre of the Commonwealth, the city of Gdańsk, which benefited from extensive immunities. In short, they were hardly taxed at all.

The main body of Treasury revenue was from a plethora of taxes inherited from medieval times which were unproductive and complicated to collect. The crown’s income from royal lands and starosties was susceptible to venality on the part of administrators and beneficiaries. All special taxes or surcharges, as well as the rates at which existing taxes were assessed, had to be voted on a oneoff basis by the national Sejm. The result was that in the first half of the century the Commonwealth’s revenue was only slightly higher than that of Bavaria, and about one-tenth that of France. Any suggestion of reform, however, raised hackles throughout the political nation, and not only because it did not wish to be taxed.

By the 1650s almost everywhere in Europe the state, in the form of the court or of administrative institutions, was concentrating power, taking it over from regional institutions and elites, which were transformed in consequence into court or service nobility. In Brandenburg, in Prussia, in Denmark and in Sweden, assemblies and noble estates which had kept a check on the power of the state had gradually been forced to cede their rights to increasingly absolutist central authority. The Polish political nation had always been suspicious of the state and of any concentration of power, and it had been an article of faith for it to keep its own weak.

Any attempt by the crown to reinforce its authority and increase the power of the state would therefore lead to direct confrontation with the szlachta. And the chances of success were slight. There was no administrative body in the Commonwealth able to guarantee continuity and provide a new king with organs of power, and even the army had slipped away from under the crown’s control as the hetmans treated it more and more as their private domain. Since the reigning monarch was only a temporary incumbent, loyalty to the crown did not necessarily mean loyalty to the king. Each one had to build up his following and his own power base. The convention of life tenure, which had crept into practice at the end of the sixteenth century, meant that an incoming monarch might have to wait for years before he could place men he trusted in important posts. As well as representing his only method of exerting control, the king’s right of appointment was his main source of influence. With the rise of the oligarchy of magnates, however, it grew increasingly difficult for him to exercise this freely. Jan Kazimierz found it impossible to promote his ablest soldier, Stefan Czarniecki, to the rank of Field-Hetman when this fell vacant, because it was coveted by the powerful Jerzy Lubomirski.

To pass legislation, the king needed the support of his ministers and other senators who made up the royal council, the Senatus Consulta, and the assent of the Sejm. And since the members of the two chambers rarely saw eye to eye, this was not always forthcoming.

The Sejm was not only the sole legislative organ and the supreme court. It had taken over many of the prerogatives normally vested in the crown, such as the right to declare war, sign peace and contract alliances. It also audited the accounts of the treasurers and held the king and his ministers to account in almost every area. Yet it was, on its own, incapable of executive action, and therefore confined itself to a largely negative role. This malfunction in the constitution, often described as a disease, morbus comitialis, exercised political writers from the late sixteenth century onwards, but there was no simple solution.

A major rethink of the constitution was hardly likely without a strong community of interest and a sense of purpose on the part of the entire political nation, the szlachta. And by the midseventeenth century there was little hope of achieving either.

While they still paid lip service to the principle of equality by addressing each other as ‘brother’, the gap between the magnates and the poorest two-thirds of the szlachata, the bene nati sed non possessionati, had grown immense. The szlachta was also growing increasingly mongrelised. Legislation aimed at preventing the upward mobility of other classes was almost impossible to enforce, and plebeians continued to marry or assimilate into the szlachta with little difficulty. The king ennobled Polish and foreign soldiers, particularly Scots and Frenchmen. Any Jew who converted to Catholicism was automatically ennobled. The attendant differences of outlook were compounded by the sheer size of the Commonwealth. The fear of Tatar raids felt by someone who lived east of Lwów seemed overstated to an inhabitant of Wielkopolska; the Livonian’s anxiety about Muscovite intentions was of little concern to a landowner from Mazovia; and a nobleman from Podolia felt more out of place in Gdańsk than he would in Istanbul. Increasingly, regional political viewpoints held by factions in the Sejm obstructed the passage of legislation of national benefit.

The political culture of the electorate and its deputies was not what it had been, and their level of education had declined considerably. The Jesuit colleges now confined themselves to inculcating into their pupils a religious mindset and enough Latin and Rhetoric to enable them to drone on for hours at political meetings. Foreign travel, the panacea of sixteenth-century Poles, became less common and its effects more dubious. Those who had gone abroad in the 1550s had returned with an education and a collection of books. Those who travelled in the 1650s were more likely to bring back pictures and venereal disease. Gradually, the whole exercise came to be seen as pointless and pernicious, while foreigners and their ways were increasingly viewed as suspect. Even Polish cities, being full of imported manners, were widely regarded as dens of wickedness and depravity—as well as being the preserve of moneyed plebeians.

The contrast between the purity of country life and the wickedness of the court and the city is a recurring theme in contemporary European thought and literature. In Poland the contrast was between the alleged perfection of the szlachta’s way of life in the country and any other. While local sejmiks continued to be well and vociferously attended, royal elections, which entailed a journey to Warsaw, drew fewer and fewer voters as time went by—no more than 3,500 in 1648 and 5,000 in 1674.

The parliamentary process suffered as a result of all these factors, which made it easy to manipulate by a handful of magnates. The Lithuanian deputies in particular were often little more than placemen elected by docile sejmiks in the presence of the local magnate’s armed gangs. The Lithuanian magnates were so powerful that they were indulged by successive kings, with the result that by the middle of the seventeenth century their position was un—assailable. It then became virtually impossible to deny a small group of families all the offices they wanted. The pattern of increasing oligarchy developing in Poland was only a pale reflection of the situation in Lithuania. In Poland, certain families felt one of the offices to be their preserve, but they did not simultaneously covet the others. The Lubomirski family obtained the staff of Marshal four times and the baton of Hetman once. The Zamoyski managed three Chancellors and one Hetman, the Leszczyński three Chancellors, the Potocki four Hetmans. In Lithuania, the magnates had the whole country sewn up. Between 1500 and 1795 the Radziwiłł held the Marshalcy five times, the Chancellorship eight times, the baton of Hetman six times, the Palatinate of Wilno twelve times, and the second most important Palatinate in Lithuania, Troki, six times. Such people felt little compunction to respect the niceties of the Polish constitution, and all too often used it for their own ends.

The most infamous example of this occurred in Warsaw on the evening of 9 March 1652, as the Sejm agreed to prolong its statutory session in order to deal with pressing business. Władysław Siciński, the deputy for Troki in Lithuania, stood up and registered his personal objection to the prolongation, before walking out of the chamber. The other deputies and the Marshal, Andrzej Fredro, believed they could not prolong the session in the face of the categoric objection of one of their number. Since it was only on the last day of the session of a Sejm that legislation voted earlier actually became law, dissolution at this point effectively annulled all the decisions taken so far. Siciński was a client of the Field-Hetman of Lithuania, Janusz Radziwiłł, who was piqued with Jan Kazimierz for not giving him the senior baton and meant to punish him for it by disrupting the Sejm so that the King could not collect any taxes or pursue any policy until the next session. It was the first time that the old principle of unanimity had been invoked in this manner, but it was not to be the last.

In the late 1650s Jan Kazimierz prepared a project for constitutional reform, in the belief that the crisis of the Swedish wars might predispose the szlachta to accept a strengthening of state power, particularly as, since he had no heir, the interregnum after his death was bound to be critical and possibly dangerous. At the instigation of the Queen, he proposed that his successor should be elected in his lifetime, vivente rege.

This was a red rag to the szlachta. Its right to elect the king was a cornerstone of the constitution, and any election carried out during the lifetime of a reigning monarch smacked of manipulation. In this instance it meant, as the Queen fully intended, that the French candidate nominated by the court would win. The szlachta were suspicious of the Queen’s influence, and the Habsburgs, who were alarmed at the idea of the Bourbons establishing themselves in Warsaw, did everything they could to whip up feeling against the proposals.

The project for parliamentary reform, which included earlier suggestions on voting by two-thirds majority, the removal of the sejmiks’ control over the deputy they had elected, a permanent annual tax, as well as the project for electing a successor vivente rege, came up before the Sejm of 1658. It foundered on minor points. The court party continued to press the issue in the following years, without success. The Queen, who believed that if all else failed a coup might be staged, was placing Frenchmen in key posts in the army. At the same time, Marshal Jerzy Lubomirski, who was in league with the Habsburgs, began to threaten rebellion if the court party persisted with its planned reforms. Following an attempt to impeach him in the Sejm, he rallied part of the unpaid army and groups of discontented szlachta and in 1665 staged a rebellion in the manner of Zebrzydowski. The court party decided to fight it out, and their troops were routed at Mątwy in 1666.

Not long afterwards, Jerzy Lubomirski came and begged the King’s pardon, which was duly granted. The whole affair had been just as pointless as the Zebrzydowski rebellion, and severely dented the prestige of the crown and of Jan Kazimierz himself. Louise-Marie died in 1667, and with his principal moral support gone, the ailing King abdicated two years later. Shortly after, he left for France, where he ended his days as Abbot of St Germaindes-Prés.

The election which followed was the first at which serious disturbances took place. The two principal candidates were Philip Wilhelm, Prince of Neuburg, the Habsburg favourite, and Charles de Bourbon, duc de Longueville. The szlachta who assembled at Warsaw were in no mood for ‘foreign autocrats’, and overwhelmingly voted for a Polish alternative, Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki, son of the fire-eating scourge of the Cossacks, Prince Jarema. The new King was in a difficult position. Resented by the disappointed pro-Habsburg magnates and despised by the former court party, who openly referred to him as ‘le singe’, his only power base was the szlachta who had elected him. But their vote had been a protest against attempts to limit their freedom and against foreign interlopers rather than a vote of confidence in him. There was little he could do except reign.

Large Tatar tchambouls hunted unmolested as the Sejm ignored alarming reports reaching it from Hetman Jan Sobieski, who was doing his best to police the south-eastern marches. In August 1667 he challenged a combined Tatar and Cossack force of some 25,000 with an army of 14,000, more than half of it made up of his own household troops, and defeated them at Podhajce. But this victory only served to obscure a storm that was brewing as the Ottoman Porte prepared a new onslaught on Europe.

In 1672 Sultan Mehmet IV invaded at the head of a substantial army, and the Commonwealth was given a rude awakening when the seemingly impregnable fortress of Kamieniec Podolski fell to his assault. It had been defended by no more than two hundred infantry and a troop of horse, and most of its cannon had remained silent, since there were only four gunners. This level of neglect was symptomatic. There was no army with which to stem the progress of the Turkish host, and Poland could do nothing but sue for peace. The Sultan imposed the humiliating Treaty of Buczacz, which detached Kamieniec with the whole of Ukraine and Podolia from the Commonwealth, and demanded a yearly tribute. This stirred the Sejm to vote money for a new army, which provoked protest from the Porte, and another Ottoman army gathered under the Grand Vizir, Hussein Pasha of Silistria.

King Michał fell ill, and as he lay dying in Warsaw Castle, Hussein Pasha’s janissaries prepared to cross the Dniester into a Poland which faced the prospect of a new election. The King expired on 10 November 1673, and on that very same evening Hetman Jan Sobieski drew up his troops outside the Turkish camp at Chocim. On the morrow he attacked and annihilated the Ottoman army in a brilliantly executed action, news of which travelled rapidly back to the capital. The principal candidates for the throne, Charles of Lorraine, François Louis de Bourbon, Prince de Conti, and James Stuart, Duke of York (the future James II of England), were eclipsed by the aura of glory surrounding the returning hero. The szlachta assembled on the election field voted overwhelmingly for Sobieski.

Jan Sobieski, who ascended the throne as Jan III in May 1674, was an energetic man of forty-five. From his close-cropped head and his jewelled fur cap to his soft yellow boots with their silver heels he was every inch the Sarmatian magnate, and he had all the virtues and vices that implied. Since his baptism of fire at Beresteczko in 1651 he had seen service against each of Poland’s enemies in turn. Although he had commanded a 3,000-strong tchamboul of Tatar allies against the Swedes in 1656, it was the Tatars and the Turks who were his most constant and savage foes. His forebear ear żółkiewski had been slain at Cecora, his elder brother had fallen in the massacre at Batoh; the crusade against the Infidel was part of his life. Yet he spoke Tatar and Turkish and loved the amenities of the East.

At the same time he built himself an Italianate palace and collected European works of art with discrimination. He was well read in Italian and French literature, and he was one of Poland’s best letter-writers. He wrote to his French wife, Marie Casimire de la Grange d’Arquien, every day or two for twenty years, whether he was at home or on campaign, letters full of verve as well as gallantry, referring to himself as ‘Céladon’ and his wife as ‘Astrée’ or some other heroine of French literature. This Sarmatian galant was a curious mixture: he was pious, almost superstitiously so, and managed to combine this with a strong dose of cynicism. He was greedy and not always scrupulous in his private affairs, but faultlessly correct in public life. He was as ambitious and dynastically minded as most fellow magnates—there is a portrait of his son (who was not christened Konstanty for nothing) wearing Roman costume and leaning on a classical shield bearing the Sobieski arms, inscribed with the words In hoc signo Vinces (‘In this sign you will conquer’)—yet he was not ruthless in the pursuit of his aims.

Jan III was a fine soldier, combining personal bravery and dash with tactical skill and a good strategic sense. He was strong and agile, quite capable of spending days in the saddle and nights under the stars, in spite of the obesity which came with age. In politics too he lacked neither enterprise nor vision. He calculated that the way to win the necessary authority to deal with internal questions lay through a successful foreign policy, and he set about constructing one.

As the political nation had never conceived a vision of its international role, the Commonwealth had no active foreign policy, only a reactive one, and no system of alliances. This had not presented a problem while it was strong and its neighbours weak, but the values in this equation had altered fundamentally.

In the south and east, the Cossacks and Tatars, who had in the past been no more than a minor nuisance, could now combine with the Turks or with Muscovy to create a formidable threat. An even greater threat loomed in the north—Sweden. This had in the past been engaged in a struggle against Danish and Dutch dominance of the Baltic and against Poland and Muscovy over its eastern shores, but it had come out of the Thirty Years’ War as a major player on the international scene.

Gustavus Adolphus had been drawn into the war in 1630 principally out of a need to defend Sweden’s possessions on the eastern and southern shores of the Baltic, and had in the process occupied virtually the whole shoreline. Under his successor Charles X Gustavus, Sweden went on to champion the Protestant cause and to challenge Habsburg influence in Germany, thereby engaging the sympathy and support of France. It was largely because Zygmunt III had always been perceived in Sweden as an agent of Habsburg designs on the Baltic region that the Swedes had invaded Poland.

Another threat had arisen in the shape of Brandenburg. In 1600, this sparsely populated state planted on poor, sandy soil, with no mineral deposits, no coastline and an unmanageable river system, had been diplomatically irrelevant, and its ruling family, the Hohenzollern, carried little weight with the older courts of Europe. Their only other resources consisted in a collection of rich but small dynastic lands in the west, along the border with the Dutch Republic, and a fragile connection with the former lands of the Teutonic Order in the east.

The last Grand Master of the order had been a Hohenzollern cousin of the Elector of Brandenburg, and after its secularisation in 1520 he had continued to rule the province, now known as Ducal Prussia, as a vassal of the Polish crown. He was succeeded by his son and grandson, who both paid homage to the King of Poland on their succession. The Elector of Brandenburg obtained from the Polish crown the right of succession if the Prussian line of Hohenzollerns were to die out. When it did, in 1618, Zygmunt III was at war with Sweden, and a handsome subsidy from the Elector of Brandenburg, John Sigismund, eased the passage of the duchy into his line of the family. In 1641 John Sigismund’s grandson Frederick William (who would be known as the Great Elector) knelt in homage before Władysław IV at Warsaw Castle on succeeding as ruler of Ducal Prussia. Sixteen years later, in return for military support against Sweden, he extorted from a desperate Jan Kazimierz the right to rule there as a sovereign prince. There was much resistance to this in the duchy itself, where the noble estates feared the loss of their rights and appealed to Warsaw for protection, but with Habsburg support Frederick William managed to have his right to rule as a sovereign in the duchy confirmed by the Treaty of Oliwa in 1660. The duchy was thereby detached from the Polish crown and the Commonwealth. And it was obvious that the rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia would never rest until they had joined up their dominions, and that would necessitate acquiring a swathe of Polish territory and cutting the Commonwealth off from the sea. They had exploited the possibilities offered by the Thirty Years’ War and the Swedish invasion of Poland to acquire both territory and prestige, while the army they had built up meant that they were now sought after as allies.

The Polish Commonwealth’s pool of potential allies was limited by the fact that its policy was fundamentally pacific and it had little to offer in the way of an army. The Habsburgs had expended much energy in the first half of the century to bring Poland into their orbit and use it as an ally against Sweden. From the 1640s France had taken an interest in Poland as a potential ally against the Habsburgs, but the Francophile court party had failed to bring this about. Three decades later, as Louis XIV engaged in his struggle with the Habsburgs, he again looked to Poland. And Jan III saw in this an opportunity, not just to reaffirm the power of the Commonwealth and gain the prestige necessary to carry out some fiscal reforms, but also to further his own dynastic aspirations.

In 1675 he signed the Treaty of Jaworów with France, which offered to finance an invasion of Ducal Prussia (which Jan III hoped would be given to his son as a hereditary vassal duchy) while her other ally, Sweden, invaded Brandenburg. France undertook to neutralise the Habsburgs and persuade the Ottoman Porte to give back Kamieniec and other lands ceded by the treaty of Buczacz. Sweden duly went into action against Brandenburg, but the Polish forces were not able to invade Prussia because Turkey not only refused to give back Kamieniec, but launched a new offensive into Poland. The large army which had been assembled was used not against Prussia but against the Turks, who were defeated at żurawno in 1676. By the time this operation was complete, Sweden had made peace with Brandenburg, and the opportunity had passed.

In the following decade, the Sultan proclaimed a new jihad and a large Ottoman army advanced into Europe. It invaded the Habsburgs’ Hungarian provinces and, in the summer of 1683, laid siege to Vienna. This provided a fresh opportunity to gain the support of France, which welcomed the Ottoman assault on the Habsburgs and would have rewarded Poland for conniving at their defeat. But the Commonwealth could not countenance the possibility of the Porte conquering a swathe of Central Europe and taking up a threatening position along the whole of its southern frontier.

As Grand Vizir Kara Mustapha approached Vienna Jan III signed a treaty with the Emperor, and the Sejm voted a levy of 36,000 troops in Poland and 12,000 in Lithuania (which never turned up, since Hetman Jan Sapieha had no intention of assisting the King). At the end of August the fifty-four-year-old King set out at the head of his army, at the beginning of September he met up with and took command of the allied troops from various parts of the Empire, and on 12 September he routed the Kara Mustapha under the walls of Vienna.

The Turks retired in disorder, but the campaign was by no means over, and Jan III pursued the retreating Turks into Hungary. The majority of Hungarians had gone over to the Ottoman camp for anti-Habsburg reasons, and the King saw an opportunity of detaching Hungary from Austria and creating a new ally for the Commonwealth. On 7 October he lost the first battle of his life, at Parkany. Although he defeated the Turks two days later, it proved difficult to conclude the campaign. Meanwhile, opposition to further prolongation of the war was mounting at home. Once again the King, now beginning to feel his age and suffering from gallstones, had to abandon his plans.

‘Future generations will wonder in astonishment,’ King Jan lamented in the Senate in March 1688, ‘that after such resounding victories, such international triumph and glory, we now face, alas, eternal shame and irreversible loss, for we now find ourselves without resources, helpless, and seemingly incapable of government.’