Poland: A history. Adam Zamoyski
per cent. The actual buying power of what the szlachta had to sell went up against staple imports such as cloth, iron, wine, pepper, rice and sugar, by just over 90 per cent between 1550 and 1600. During the same period, the quantity exported more than doubled. The result was that landed Poles became a great deal richer in terms of cash to spend than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe.
This permitted increasing numbers of Poles to travel abroad, primarily in order to study. Lutherans might send their sons to Wittenberg and Calvinists to Basel, for religious reasons, but the most popular universities were those of Italy: between 1501 and 1605 Polish students consistently made up at least a quarter of the student body at the University of Padua. As they grew richer, they began to mix tourism with study. The wealthy would come back loaded with pictures and sculpture, books and works of art, and once home, set about embellishing their own surroundings along the lines observed abroad.
In 1502 Prince Zygmunt returned from his travels, bringing with him a Florentine architect who would rebuild the Royal Castle in Renaissance style. Other Italians followed in his footsteps, lured by the opportunities as magnates and prelates vied with each other to build lavish new residences, in a style that subjected Italian Renaissance architecture to the demands of the Polish climate and the pretentions of their patrons. The same instincts that fed on Sarmatism are undoubtedly responsible for the extravagance and the fantasy displayed. But the new style also reflected an attempt to give form to some of the ideals the educated szlachta had embraced. Many of the important buildings of the period are public ones, and they embody the spirit that was responsible for constructing the Commonwealth, the Polish utopia.
Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the largest, the most monumental, and the most ambitious building project of the age—the city of Zamość. And few individuals offer as complete a picture of the contradictions of the age as does it creator, who was both a child of the Renaissance and a forerunner of a new Baroque plutocracy, a libertarian and an autocrat, one of the creators of the Commonwealth, who sowed some of the first seeds of its corruption.
Jan Zamoyski was born in 1542, the son of a Calvinist minor senator. As a young man he completed courses at the Sorbonne and at the new College de France, then at the University of Padua, of which he became Rector. While there, he published a treatise on Roman constitutional history and became a Catholic. He returned to Poland with a letter of recommendation from the Senate of Venice to Zygmunt Augustus, who employed him as a secretary. He made his mark during the first interregnum, became Chancellor in 1578, and Hetman in 1581. He married, among others, the daughter of Mikołaj Radziwiłł ‘the Black’, and later the niece of the second elected king of Poland. Whether he aspired to the crown himself is not clear, but he set a pattern of autonomy which would be followed by most magnates in the next century.
On the death of his father in 1571 Zamoyski inherited four villages and the rich Starosty of Bełz. He methodically enlarged this estate, squeezing out adjacent landowners and buying out the senior branch of his family from the seat of Zamość. By 1600 he owned 6,500 square kilometres in one block, as well as lesser estates, properties in all the major cities, and thirteen lucrative starosties.
In 1580 he began to build New Zamość. It was to be an ideal Platonic city, laid out according to symbolic axes and points of reference, dominated at one end by his own palace, and at the centre by the town hall. Other major buildings included the law courts, the Catholic collegiate church, the Franciscan church, the Armenian church, the Orthodox church, the synagogue, the university, and the arsenal. The city was underpinned by a sophisticated sewerage system and surrounded by star-shaped fortifications of the most modern type.
Zamość made economic sense. It was settled by large numbers of Hispanic Jews, Italians, Scots, Armenians, Turks and Germans, who provided everything from medical facilities to a cannon foundry, from jewellery to printing presses. By endowing his domain with a capital city, Zamoyski turned it into a self-sufficient state, and all the profits, levies and dues which would otherwise have gone to the royal cities or the treasury went into his own pocket. The idea was widely copied. In 1594 the Żółkiewski family founded their administrative capital of Żółkiew, which by 1634 when it passed to the Sobieski was a flourishing centre with fifteen different guilds. Soon every magnate was building a private town for himself, a trend that undermined the position of the existing towns and cities.
Zamość is nevertheless unique. It is a model of Polish Renaissance-Mannerist style, but its purpose was not merely to achieve beauty. It was to combine functionalism with aesthetic perfection in order to create the ideal environment. Every element was of importance, and if there was one that overshadowed the others, it was probably the university, opened in 1594, which would, it was assumed, produce the ideal citizen.
This belief that utopia could be built was the product of more than a century of prosperity and security, of political self-confidence based on the civil liberties of the citizen, and of an impressive legacy of political and social thought which continued to develop and spread through the printed word. There may not have been very much awaiting publication when the first press was set up at Kraków in 1473, but by the early 1500s the urge to publish was evidenced by the proliferation of presses in provincial cities. While originally legislation demanded that all books be passed by the Rector of the Jagiellon University, the executionist movement won a notable victory in 1539 by obtaining a royal decree on the absolute freedom of the press.
Only a fraction of the existing literary heritage was in the vernacular, which was still orthographically inchoate and marked by regional variation. Atlases and geographical works published between 1500 and 1520, and works on the history of Poland that appeared in the following decades, helped to standardise the spelling of place-names. The publication of large numbers of books in Polish from the 1520s imposed uniformity of spelling and grammar. In 1534 Stefan Falimirz published the first Polish medical dictionary; in 1565 Stanisław Grzepski of the Jagiellon University published his technical handbook Geometria. The six translations of the New Testament—Königsberg (Lutheran, 1551), Lwów (Catholic, 1561), Brześć (Calvinist, 1563), Nieśwież (Arian, 1570), Kraków (Jesuit, 1593), Gdańsk (Lutheran, 1632)—constituted an exercise in Polish semantics. In 1568 the first systematic Polish grammar was compiled by Piotr Stojeński, an Arian of French origin; in 1564 Jan Mączyński issued his Polish-Latin lexicon at Königsberg; and finally, in 1594 the writer Łukasz Górnicki produced a definitive Polish orthography. Latin nevertheless continued in use, particularly in religious and political literature, both because it was a better tool for theoretical and philosophical writing, and because it was universal to Europe.
The most striking aspect of Polish thought at the time was the preoccupation with public affairs and government. The discussion on the Polish body politic was opened by Jan Ostroróg with his Monumentum pro Reipublicae Ordinatione (c.1460), which argued for a more just social and political system. It was taken up by Marcin Bielski (1495-1575) and Marcin Kromer (1512-89), who used books on the history of Poland to polemicise about the rights and wrongs of the system. Stanisław Orzechowski applied geometrical principles to constitutional projects. Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski (1503-72), Zygmunt Augustus’ delegate to the Council of Trent in 1545 and a close friend of the theologian Melanchthon, with whom he had studied at Wittenberg, published a treatise on the Polish legal system, and in 1554 a longer work, De Republica Emendanda, sketching a utopian political vision.
Most of this literature was idealistic, and, like the work of the eighteenth-century philosophes, predicated on the mirage of an ideal condition. It represented existing abuses and injustice as perversions of this condition, rather than as inherent in human affairs.
The next generation of political writers applied their ideas to specific institutions. Bartlomiej Paprocki’s O Hetmanie was an attempt to define the role and duty of the hetman; Krzysztof Warszewicki’s De Legato did the same for those engaged in diplomacy; Jakub Górski’s Rada Pańska, Jan Zamoyski’s De Senatu Romano and Wawrzyniec Goślicki’s De Optimo Senatore all lectured on the conduct of affairs of state. Although they were more practical than their forerunners they still clung to the belief that good government depended on good people rather than on strong institutions. As Zamoyski said in the speech inaugurating the university he had founded: ‘Republics will always be as good as the upbringing of their young men.’