Poland: A history. Adam Zamoyski
by consent of his subjects, while his colleague Stanisław of Skarbimierz (d. 1431) had added that he had no right to infringe their rights. The thesis put forward by Buonaccorsi that the ruler should have absolute power and that nothing should stand in his way of acting for the greater good was confounded by the Polish constitutional jurists. After the death of Kazimierz IV in 1492, his sons and all subsequent kings of the house of Jagiello were subjected to a regular election.
Nor was the idea of choosing a foreign prince new—it was based on the precedent of the Kraków Lords approving the accession of Louis of Anjou, and their subsequent choice of Jagiello. Virtually every clause in the Acta Henriciana and most of those in the Pacta Conventa were a repetition of older privileges. This deference to precedent is reflected in the fact that there was no written constitution, merely a great body of legislation written into the statute books, swelling gradually by accretion over the centuries.
Yet if the Polish constitution evolved out of practical rather than theoretical motives, it was fashioned by a mentality which was idealistic rather than pragmatic. The parliamentary system relied to an inordinate extent on the integrity of the individual deputy and senator, and lacked procedures for ensuring correct behaviour. The Marshal of the Sejm (not to be confused with the Marshals of Poland and of Lithuania, who were the king’s ministers) was elected at the beginning of each session by the deputies, and it was his duty to keep order. Since he had no authority to silence a deputy or expel him from the chamber, the orderly conduct of debates depended in large measure on his skill in easing tensions and steering attention back to the point at issue. His job was made no easier by the ambiguities inherent in the mandate given to the deputies by the sejmiks which elected them.
In principle, the deputies were the representatives not merely of the provincial sejmiks which had returned them, but of the corporate electorate of the whole Commonwealth, and they were supposed to cast their votes as such. At the same time, each deputy was given a set of written instructions before he left for Warsaw to take up his seat. These instructions varied from general guidelines to specific orders on how to vote on certain issues. The electorate’s participation in government did not end with the election of a deputy, and he could ill afford to disregard the injunctions of his electors, since he had to face a debriefing in his constituency at the end of the parliamentary session. Sometimes deputies were instructed not to vote on any unforeseen issues without consulting their electors.
This practice tied the hands of the deputies and reduced the value of parliamentary debate, but an intelligent and experienced deputy could still vote according to his conscience and answer for it successfully to his electors. It was not until the beginning of the next century, when the electorate began to grow suspicious of central government, that the instructions became binding.
The Polish parliamentary system was more vulnerable than most, because of a principle whose perverted form, the liberum veto, was to become notorious: the principle that no legislation could be enacted without mutual consent. Some such convention originally existed in virtually every parliamentary body in Europe. It did not mean that everyone had to vote for a measure unanimously, but expressed the twin convictions that any measure not freely assented to by all lacked full authority and that no sincere dissenting opinion should be disregarded by the majority. Dissenting minorities were listened to, argued with and persuaded, and only when broad agreement had been reached (the word used was the Latin consensus) was a measure passed. In theory, a small minority, even a minority of one, could block legislation. In practice, minorities were ultimately ignored if they proved intractable.
Another curious feature of the constitution was the szlachta’s right to confederate in an emergency such as the death of the monarch, foreign invasion, or some other extremity. They would form a confederation, elect a marshal, publish their aims and invite others to join. It was a form of plebiscite, and could take place within a Sejm where deadlock had been reached; it was the one political assembly in which, for obvious reasons, strict majority voting was observed and dissent ignored.
A fundamental weakness of the Polish parliamentary system was the under-representation of the towns, and therefore of trading interests, in the Sejm. This was not so much a flaw in the constitution as a reflection of the country’s social structure. In the fifteenth century the towns, with their predominantly foreign populations enjoying a favourable administrative status, did not join in the scramble for power and thereby missed an opportunity for integrating their rights into the constitution. They had always dealt directly with the crown, which guaranteed their status, but when the crown began to abdicate its responsibilities to the Sejm, the towns were left without a champion. This was compounded by social barriers. A law passed in 1550 (mainly at the insistence of the merchants) barred members of the szlachta from indulging in trade, and soon the szlachta began to regulate admissions to its own ranks. In 1578 the Sejm passed a law taking away from the crown and arrogating to itself the exclusive right to ennoble people (except for battlefield grants of arms by the king). A law of 1497 preventing plebeians from buying noble estates closed a back door to noble status. This sort of legislation was impossible to enforce given the absence of any heraldic institution or register, but lines were being drawn. A merchant might join the szlachta by some means and thereby acquire voting rights, but when he did, he would find himself banned from practising anything except agriculture, politics and war.
A number of cities, including Kraków, Lublin, Lwów, Poznań, Wilno, Gdańsk and Toruń, were represented in the Sejm, and other towns were on occasion invited to send deputies. In theory, these had the same debating and voting rights as others, but the reality was often different. As the writer Sebastian Petrycy put it: ‘Once upon a time a donkey was asked to a wedding feast; he marvelled and licked his chops at the thought of the new unfamiliar delicacies he would be tasting, but when the day came the donkey found he was only there to carry water and kindling to the kitchen.’ The city deputies were usually intimidated by their noble colleagues and feared to say anything—with some reason, since it appears that in 1537 the Kraków deputies were physically assaulted. They often found it easier to stay away and put up with whatever taxes might be imposed, or employ the local palatine to look after their interests.
The peasants, who had also enjoyed a direct relationship with the crown, were similarly sidelined. As the judge of the supreme court of appeal, the king had been the final arbiter in all their disputes with landowners. In 1518 Zygmunt the Old was persuaded to give up his right of arbitration, and in 1578 the Sejm itself assumed the function. Since it represented almost exclusively landed interests, the peasants were unlikely to find justice here. It is worth nothing that the principles of Polish democracy were not exclusive to the Sejm, and every village had its elected communal council and officers. The squire’s functions within this, usually as local magistrate, were not feudal or proprietary, but elective.
Not all the drawbacks of the Polish constitution were specific to it. All democracy breeds its own problems, and one of these is the impossibility of carrying on a successful foreign policy when decision-making is hamstrung by the devolution of power and the force of public opinion. The element of secrecy was impossible to sustain since all Sejm debates were open to the public and all its resolutions immediately printed. Defence suffered from the same problems. No democracy likes an army, because nobody likes paying for one. In the late sixteenth century about two-thirds of the entire revenue of most European states was spent on armament, almost 70 per cent in the case of Spain. In Poland, the figure was nearer 20 per cent. In the 1480s a ‘Current Defence Force’ of 2,000 was set up to parry Tatar raiding, and in 1520 the Sejm increased the numbers slightly. In 1563 a new system of ‘Quarter Troops’ was introduced, paid for out of a quarter of all revenues from starosties, but the number of men under arms remained tiny in relation to the vast area of the Commonwealth.
It was not just that the Poles did not like paying for the troops. The szlachta also wished to perpetuate the idea of the levée en masse, which would become unnecessary if there were an adequate standing army. More important than either of these considerations was the deep-rooted conviction that a standing army was sooner or later bound to be used by the crown to enforce absolutist government. This fear of authoritarian rule was responsible for all that is most striking about the political edifice of the Commonwealth.
The salient features of this edifice were the oath of loyalty made by the incoming monarch