Poland: A history. Adam Zamoyski
labour they could depend on in order to develop what was turning into a cash-crop agricultural economy, and they used their political muscle to ensure they got it.
In 1496 the Sejm passed measures preventing peasants moving to the towns. Tenants who wished to move to a different area were obliged to put their tenancies in order, pay off all dues, and to sow the land before they left. The economic effort involved was so prohibitive that they were in effect tied to the land, unless they absconded, which was not easy in the case of whole families. Those who owned their land were not affected by this legislation. Nor were the inhabitants of free villages, sometimes referred to as ‘Dutch settlements’. These had arisen in areas where a landlord, eager to found new villages on unexploited land, enticed peasants (often of foreign origin) to settle by offering them advantageous terms, set down in special charters. There were tenants rich enough to employ casual labour to perform the labour-rent on their behalf, but even their resources were strained when, in 1520, the Sejm increased the labour-rent from twelve to fifty-two days per annum. The legal position of the peasants was further weakened at about the same time, when they lost their right of appeal to other courts and could only seek justice in manorial courts, in which their landlords sat as magistrates.
The ease with which the szlachta could promote its economic interests by political means did not encourage notions of thrift, risk and investment, and spawned a rustic complacency that set it aside from other European elites. This is the more unexpected as fifteenth-century Poland was essentially an urban culture. While land provided the majority with a livelihood, it was not the only or even the predominant source of wealth for the magnates, whose estates were not large by the standards of the barons of England or the great lords of France. So far, only the Church had managed to build up extensive latifundia through the monastic orders and the dioceses, which made prelates such as the Bishops of Kraków the richest men in the land.
The magnates only started accumulating property on a large scale at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Jan of Tarnów (1367-1432), Palatine of Kraków, built up an estate of one town, twenty villages and one castle. His son, Jan Amor Tarnowski, Castellan of Kraków, increased this to two towns and fifty-five villages—more than doubling it in the space of fifty years. Jan of Oleśnica, father of Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki, only had one village in 1400, yet by 1450 his other son owned fifty-nine, along with a town and a castle.
Taken alone, the revenues from such estates were not great enough to support rampant ambition. The magnates were obliged to supplement them by lucrative or influential public office, and by various business ventures, such as mining, in which fortunes could be made with a little influence at court and some capital. It was necessary first to obtain a concession from the crown, which owned all underground deposits. Personal capital or that of specially set up joint-stock companies was then used to employ engineers and build machines to work the mines, which were among the deepest in Europe. These were ambitious operations, but the rewards were abundant—salt, sulphur, tin, lead, zinc, and even gold. It was only by being on the spot that noblemen could make fortunes, and the great families of the fifteenth century based themselves in or near the cities. In this, as in other things, they were more akin to the civic magnates of Italy than to the regional nobility of France or England.
The cities were not large. Only Gdańsk, with 30,000 inhabitants, could rival those of western or southern Europe. Kraków had a paltry 15,000; Lwów, Toruń and Elbląg 8,000; and Poznań and Lublin only some 6,000. What they lacked in numbers they made up in diversity. Kraków was a Babel in which German pre dominated in the streets over other languages, while patrician circles rang with Polish, Italian and Latin.
One consequence of the Jagiellon forays into Hungary and southern Europe was that for the best part of the century their dominions bordered the Republic of Venice, opening up new vistas for Polish society at a decisive juncture in its relationship to the rest of Europe.
The previous century had radically altered the balance between Poland and the more developed countries of Europe. As a consequence of the Black Death, the population of the Continent fell by some twenty million during the fourteenth century, and it took the whole of the fifteenth to make up this loss. Poland’s population did not drop significantly during the fourteenth, and rose sharply during the fifteenth. The gap also narrowed in economic terms, and Poland was attract ing people as well as capital from other parts of Europe.
This process was mapped out in cultural terms. In the north, Flemish architects originally brought in by the Teutonic Order and the Hanse left their mark in the churches, town halls and city walls of Gdańsk and other cities. In Poznań, Warsaw and Kalisz, the Flemish style was mitigated by local variants—themselves marked by Franconian and Burgundian examples of an earlier age. In Kraków the most remarkable cross-breeding took place, dominated at first by a strong Bohemian influence which was superseded by that of German artists, most notably by one of the greatest sculptors of the Middle Ages, the German Veit Stoss, who settled in Kraków in 1477.
Polish thought and literature remained encased in the limits of medieval parochialism, their primary expression being religious verse. The only notable prose to be written at the time were the annals of Jan Długosz, a church canon and tutor to the royal family, begun in 1455. Długosz was a creature of the Middle Ages. As he painstakingly wrote his last Annales in the 1470s, he took every opportunity to carp at what he saw as the newfangled ideas and practices invading the venerable cloisters of medieval Kraków. His successor as tutor to the royal family could not have presented a greater contrast, or better summed up the transformation taking place in Poland. He was Filippo Buonaccorsi, a native of San Gimignano in Tuscany obliged to flee after incurring the Pope’s displeasure, was a leading humanist and, from 1472, a professor at the University of Kraków.
Although it had been founded by the Piast Kazimierz the Great and lavishly endowed by the Angevin Queen Jadwiga, it had come to be known as the Jagiellon University. It was under this dynasty that it received funds necessary for expansion and the patronage of kings who recognised its uses. Foreigners from as far afield as England and Spain came to study or teach in its halls, while native graduates went abroad to widen their learning, one of them, Maciej Kolbe of Świebodzin, becoming rector of the Paris Sorbonne in 1480. During the reign of Kazimierz IV (1446-92) some 15,000 students passed through the university, including the major dignitaries, prelates and even soldiers of the time.
The Church, and particularly its prelates, also encouraged the dissemination of the new ideas emanating from Italy. Piotr Bniński, Bishop of Kujavia, devoted his own fortune and that of his diocese to patronage of the arts, paying more attention to arranging symposia by humanist poets than to the spiritual duties of his position. Grzegorz of Sanok, Archbishop of Lwów, who had studied in Germany and Italy, established at his residence of Dunajów near Lwów a small court modelled on that of Urbino, nurtured by a stream of visitors from Italy. It was there Buonaccorsi first came when he had to flee his native country.
Buonaccorsi later moved to the royal court in Kraków and wrote, among other things, a set of counsels for the king, like some Polish Machiavelli. His writings, which he published under the pen name of Callimachus, his position at the Jagiellon University, and his part in founding, along with the German poet Conrad Celtis, a sort of Polish writers’ workshop, the Sodalitas Litterarum Vistulana, made him a key figure of the Polish Renaissance.
The Italian connection grew stronger as Poles travelled to study or to visit cities such as Padua, Bologna, Florence, Mantua and Urbino. Italians came to Poland, bringing with them amenities and refinements, ranging from painting to postal services. The impact was omnipresent and lasting, nowhere more so than on the language. The first treatise on Polish orthography appeared in 1440, and the Bible was first translated in 1455, for Jagiełło’s last wife, Sophia. In their search for words or expressions to describe hitherto unknown objects or sentiments, the Poles more often than not borrowed from Italian, particularly in areas such as food, clothing, furnishing and behaviour, as well as in the expression of thought. These words rapidly passed from speech into writing, and from writing into print.
The year 1469 saw the first commercial use of Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type, in Venice. The idea was taken up throughout Europe with breathtaking speed: printing presses began operating in Naples, Florence and Paris in 1471; in Spain, the Netherlands and