Poland: A history. Adam Zamoyski
officers but one lay dead on the field, and the whole of Prussia was there for the taking. Much to the exasperation of the Polish commanders, Władysław reined in the pursuit and in the treaty signed later he demanded only a thin strip of land to be ceded to Lithuania, and nothing for Poland, while taking a vast cash indemnity from the order for himself. A decade later the knights made war again, were again defeated, and again got away with insignificant losses. In 1454 a revolt against the order by local knights and cities, aided by Poland, initiated a war which dragged on for thirteen years. The knights were defeated, and were once again spared, by the Treaty of Toruń in 1466. Poland took the coastline around Gdańsk and Elbing, the province of Warmia (Ermland), and even the stronghold of Marienburg, but did not suppress the order, which moved its capital to Königsberg and retained the rest of its dominions as a vassal of the king of Poland. Such forbearance might seem surprising, particularly as the Teutonic Knights were ruthless in war, raping and murdering, and even burning churches. There were, however, factors involved in the relations between Poland and the order that touched on a religious debate of European proportions.
The Teutonic Order had representatives and friends at every court, and was a master of propaganda. Its first line of attack had been that the betrothal of Jadwiga to Wilhelm of Habsburg had been consummated and that her marriage to Władysław Jagiełło was therefore bigamous. It also argued, with some justification, that the alleged conversion of Lithuania was a sham, and that Catholic Polish knights had been the minority at Grunwald in an army made of Lithuanian pagans, Christians of the Eastern rite, and even Muslims (the Tatars who had settled in Lithuania some time before). The order suggested that Władysław Jagiełło’s army was hardly more Christian than Saladin’s.
The Teutonic Knights had a point, and that point assumed importance in the context of a minor reformation which was sweeping Europe, a nationalist, anti-clerical, anti-Imperial movement whose greatest exponent was the Bohemian Jan Hus. The Hussite movement was itself connected with John Wycliffe’s Lollards in England, and both causes enjoyed considerable sympathy in Poland.
Matters came to a head at the Council of Constance, convoked in 1415 to combat the Hussite heresy. The Teutonic Order saw in this a perfect forum at which to discredit Poland and reconfirm the validity of its own crusading mission, judging that if this were endorsed by Christian Europe, it would have placed itself beyond the reach of Polish attempts to destroy it.
The Polish delegation to the Council of Constance, led by Paweł Włodkowic (Paulus Vladimiri) of Kraków University, included a number of Lithuanians and schismatics, which caused uproar and favoured the order’s case. Włodkowic ran rings around its representatives and managed to discredit it. But there was no clear-cut victory. The Teutonic Knights enjoyed wide diplomatic support, including that of the Empire, which had political objections to the Polish-Lithuanian union.
The arrangement itself was under frequent review. In 1413, after Grunwald, a new treaty of union was signed at Horodło. This attempted to bind the two states together more firmly, and was epitomised by the Polish szlachta adopting the Lithuanians as brothers in chivalry, bestowing on them their own coats of arms. In 1430, Vytautas’ successor as Grand Duke of Lithuania, Svidrigaila, undid all this by allying himself with the Teutonic Order and adopting an anti-Polish policy. Ten years later, the union was formally dissolved, but this made little difference, since the ruler of Lithuania was the son of the King of Poland, whom he succeeded in 1446, reuniting the two states under one crown.
Fig. 3 The Jagiellon dynasty of Poland-Lithuania
The unstable nature of the union was largely the result of incompatibility. Poland was a nationally based Christian state with developed institutions and strong constitutional instincts. Lithuania was an amalgam of pagan Balts and Orthodox Christian Slavs ruled by an autocratic dynasty. The two states pulled each other in different directions, and in the field of foreign policy it was Lithuania, or rather the Jagiellon dynasty, which pulled the hardest.
It is no coincidence that the oldest extant letter from a king of England to a king of Poland dates from 1415, when Henry V begged Władysław Jagiełło to assist him against the French: the union with Lithuania and the victory over the Teutonic Order had turned Poland into a major European power. And it is hardly surprising that with such power behind them, the ambitious Jagiellons should have taken advantage of the opportunities on offer.
The extinction in 1437 of the Luxembourg dynasty, which had ruled in Bohemia and Hungary, heralded a new contest for hegemony in the area between two new arrivals—the Habsburgs of Austria and the Jagiellons of Poland-Lithuania. Hungary, which had been ruled successively by Anjou, Luxembourg and Habsburg, fell to the Jagiellons in 1440 when the Magyars offered the throne to the stripling Władysław III of Poland, Władysław Jagiełło’s eldest son. Władysław did not rule long as King of Poland and Hungary. Three years after he was crowned at Buda, the young king was drawn into the anti-Turkish league, and slain at the Battle of Varna on the Black Sea in 1444. The throne of Poland passed to his younger brother, Kazimierz IV. That of Hungary went to Mattias Corvinius, but after his death in 1490 it reverted to Kazimierz’s eldest son, Władysław. This Władysław was king not of Poland, but of Bohemia, the Czech Diet having elected him in 1471.
By the end of the century the Jagiellons ruled over about one third of the entire European mainland. Their gigantic domain stretched from the Baltic to the shores of the Black Sea and the Adriatic. In the next generation they would lose all the thrones outside Poland to the Habsburgs, and Poland would find itself none the richer for the experience of having been at the heart of a great empire.
Yet, as the szlachta were quick to appreciate, there were advantages in having wayward and often absentee kings. It permitted them to assume a greater share in the running of the country, and the crown’s frequent demands for funds and armies supplied them with the levers for extorting the concessions which shaped the emerging forms of parliamentary government.
The principle of government by consensus was already enshrined in practice under the early Piast kings. By the beginning of the thirteenth century this practice was established firmly enough to survive in the governance of the various provinces when the Kingdom was divided. Provinces such as Wielkopolska and Mazovia would hold an assembly called sejm, at which the entire szlachta of the district could join in discussion and vote.
The consent of the sejm of every province was crucial to the process of reunification of the Polish lands, and by the time this was achieved the sejms had become part of the machinery of government. Władysław the Short convoked them four times during his reign (1320-33), and his successor Kazimierz the Great (1330-70) almost as often, acknowledging them as the basis of his right to govern.
The heirless death of Kazimierz and the ensuing regency of Elizabeth furnished the opportunity for one group of szlachta to steal a march on their fellows. These were the dignitaries of the realm, the castellans who had been the mainstay of royal authority in the regions, and the palatines, who had grown into virtual governors of their provinces—the provinces themselves came to be known as ‘palatinates’ as a result. Representing as they did the forces of regional autonomy, the palatines were poor instruments of royal control, and Władysław the Short when reuniting the country had been obliged to bring in a new tier of royal administration, the starosta, a kind of royal sheriff, who henceforth represented the king in his area. The palatines assumed a political rather than a purely administrative role, and, in alliance with the bishops, formed a new oligarchy. Over the years, a number of them had assumed the function of royal council, and in the critical moments following the death of Kazimierz the Great they took the fate of Poland into their own hands, deciding on Jadwiga rather than Maria and choosing her a husband in Władysław Jagiełło. And they made it clear that it was they who would select his successor. His failure to produce an heir with Jadwiga strengthened their hand.
All the palatines and castellans were allowed a seat in the Grand Council (consilium maius), but policy-making was jealously guarded by those palatines and bishops who sat in the Privy Council (consilium secretum). A typical figure is Zbigniew Oleśnicki, Bishop of Kraków, secretary