Cracow, the royal capital of ancient Poland: its history and antiquities/Modern Times

by Leonard Jan Józef Lepszy

MODERN TIMES

MODERN TIMES

CRACOW is the town which earliest and most easily of all in Central Europe passed under the influence of the new Italian architecture. Already in the reign of Casimir Jagello (1447-1492) we see the dawning of a new epoch, characterized by deeper insight into and critical appreciation of the literature of antiquity. There is lively intercourse both with Italy and with Hungary, where messengers of
52. "WALL STREET." the new learning had already appeared. The susceptibility and the imitative instinct, which are both among the most essential qualities of Polish national character, secured to the new ideas an eager reception and complete success. The first humanists came to Poland; besides the prelate and virtuoso Gregory of Sanok, mentioned before as professor of philology in the University, there came to the royal court a poet banished from Rome, Philip Callimachus Buonacorsi. He educated the young princes; when, later on, they ascended the throne, he became their favourite adviser. Some German scholars also resorted to Cracow: Thomas Murner, the Bavarian historiographer, John Aventinus, John Virdany, mathematician, Henry Bebelius, and others. Conrad Celtes, the laureate herald of humanism, lectured in the University of Cracow in 1489, and founded the Societas Vistulana; this was joined by the Silesians, John Sommerfeld and Laurence Corvinus, by Ursinus, a zealous champion of the new ideas, by Valentine Eckius of Switzerland; also by two Englishmen, Coxus and Licorianus.^[1] The house of the learned Rudolph Agricola the Younger became a centre of culture where the votaries of humanism met to hear his lectures, reading out their own works and debating. Public oratorical contests became exceedingly popular, in fact an everyday practice, and had a great influence on literature. During the two short reigns of John Albert (1492-1501) and Alexander (1501-1506) the current of humanism grows continually stronger. Besides the works of art, of which we shall speak presently, this is manifested in classical Latin constantly gaining ground and becoming not only the language of literature, but also of general intercourse. In the long reigns of King Sigismund the Old (1506-1548), and of his son, Sigismund Augustus ( 1548-1572), the German element is to some extent supplanted by the Italian, and the native Polish middle-class gains in strength. The immigration of numerous Italians, occasioned by the marriage of Sigismund I to Bona Sforza, gave the town a wholly new aspect. The melodious language of Italy was heard in the streets, in some of the churches Italian songs were sung, at court the band played Italian airs. The city records are full of documents written in Italian, and Italian artists are at work in building up the monumental structures of the Renascence, which are among the first works in that style on our side of the Alps. Soon the Italian element blended with the Polish, and the very next generation are Poles in all respects. The prelates, who either reside at Cracow or occupy its episcopal see, rival the royal court in favouring literature and the arts. Thus the illustrious Canon Erasmus Ciolek (d. 1522) builds a magnificentissimum palatium for himself, calls learned men of Italy and Spain to his side, and employs miniature painters in illuminating MSS. Another famous ecclesiastic, Bishop Peter Tomicki (d. 1535), equally distinguished as statesman and scholar, being one of the most zealous humanists, reformed the University, of which he was professor, on Renascence lines. Several occupants of the Cracow see followed his example. Thus, Bishop Samuel Maciejowski (d. 1550) assembled in his castle at Pradnik, near Cracow, the very flower of humanist society; the debates of these circles supplied ample literary material to Lucas Gornicki for his Polish Courtier, written in imitation of Castiglione's Cortegiano. The immediate successors of Maciejowski, Bishops Zebrzydowski (d. 1560) and Padniewski (d. 1572) kept up the literary salon he had established, and the most eminent writers of the time, Kochanowski, Gorski, Nidecki, Montanus, and others, were frequently inspired in their work by these conversations. The patricians of the town, owing to their high intelligence and great riches, were able to hold their own in social rivalry with the ruling class. They are still in close relations with and of great influence at the royal court. The two Boners, father and son, are, in the true sense of the word, ministers of finance to King Sigismund I. The king's secretaries, being patrician's sons, such as Decius, Nidecki, Górnicki, Kromer, are all eminent men of letters. The rich citizens pay homage to the spirit of the new era; they build their private houses in Renascence style, on the model of the royal castle, and on the fronts of them they put, for inscriptions, Latin sentences from classic authors, cut in stone or marble, of which many are still legible. Outside the town they build magnificent villas, such as that of Justus Decius in Wola Justowska, or modest manor-houses, where they spend the summer. Their richly endowed daughters are often married to nobles and princes. The presence of so many distinguished representatives and protagonists of humanist science and culture at Cracow created an intellectual atmosphere and made the town one of the centres of Occidental civilization. The unbroken relations of Polish scholars with the heads and leaders of European learning are reflected alike in science, poetry, and historiography. The printing-press of Cracow attained to a high level of excellence. In 1503, the printer Caspar Hochfeder, of Metz, came to Cracow at the suggestion of a wealthy bookseller, Haller by name. This John Haller, a native of Rothenburg on the Tauber, then established a printing-press in his own town house, in 1525, and a paper-mill at Pradnik. His example prompted a good many others to do the like; Hermann Viëtor (who established his printing-office in 1510), Matthew Scharffenberg, Florian Ungler, and others, succeeded in keeping up the high reputation of Cracow printing for two centuries. The public institutions of the town were mostly reformed and reorganized; thus, the hospitals, which had existed since the thirteenth century were, in the sixteenth, enlarged and practically founded anew.

Besides the nations already mentioned (Poles, Germans, Italians), the Jews formed a large part of the town's population. Most of them had fled, or were descended from such as had fled, from Germany because of the religious persecutions of the Middle Ages. Certain quarters of the city were assigned to them; but being pushed from these in course of time by the growing flood of Christian population, they chose the suburb of Kazimierz for their habitation, and founded an almost purely Jewish community. There they still have their old synagogues (illustration 53), their interesting cemeteries with characteristic tombstones of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their own particular societies, hospitals, and Hebrew schools; they speak
53. INTERIOR OF THE JEWISH SYNAGOGUE AT KAZIMIERZ.
(Fifteenth Century.) among themselves a peculiar jargon, being a mixture of other languages, especially German and Polish; they keep their own literature and the national costume. All these peculiarities give its distinctive, Oriental character to this, perhaps unique, relic of medieval town life: a Ghetto in a modern European city.

After the reign of Sigismund August (the last of the Jagellons), during which the Reformation had gained a transitory ascendency, and after a short stay of Henry of Valois, who forsook his Polish kingdom for the crown of France, the heroic Stephen Báthory, Duke of Transsylvania, was elected King of Poland in 1576. The renowned conquests he won in the north and east were all solemnized by triumphal entries into the capital. The Jesuits at that time preached patriotism and loyalty to the monarch; they took a leading part in national education, literature, and religious life, and it was by their means chiefly that the rise of Protestantism was ultimately checked by Catholic reaction. At Cracow they also took care of such poor as were ashamed to beg. The great writer and preacher Peter Skarga, a member of this Order, founded the "Mercy Society" connected with a bank called "Mount of Piety" (Mons pietatis), which has survived all misfortunes of the town. The citizens did not fare very well at this period; the nobility jealously kept hold of their monopoly of political rights, and it was their want of economic sense that brought to pass the pernicious laws of 1565, by which Polish merchants were forbidden to export their wares, the import of foreign merchandise being at the same time greatly facilitated. The nobility only wanted to get all they required at the lowest possible price, and generally to regulate prices at their own sweet will. In spite of these hard times Cracow would have been able to maintain its high level by means of the accumulated resources of centuries, if King Sigismund III (of the Swedish Vasa dynasty) had not ultimately lowered the town's importance by transferring his residence to Warsaw.

The Swedish campaigns (about the middle of the seventeenth century) with their sieges—Cracow sustained one in 1655—plunderings, and fires, dealt the hardest blow to the welfare of the town and brought about its economic decadence. They also made terrible havoc among its art treasures. Many of the monuments, whether of noble or ignoble metal, were then destroyed for ever. The plague visited the impoverished town and desolated its streets; all life ceased, there was a quiet of death, a lethargy only broken sometimes by religious quarrels. Nor did the eighteenth century prove a happier era. The wars of Charles XII. brought new misfortunes; soldiers, Swedish, Saxon, Russian, and Polish, alternately occupied the town, leaving it poorer each time. The Polish Diet of 1710 decreed that a part of the contributions extorted from the town, to the amount of half a million of Polish florins, should be paid back to it by the realm. On the 17th of August, 1734, the last coronation of a Polish king took place in the Wawel, viz., that of Augustus III of Saxony and his wife, Maria Josepha. His successor, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski (who was not crowned) visited the town in 1787 and promised to give it some aid, but the whole country had grown so poor by this time that no help could be given. The war of independence, undertaken in 1794 by the great national hero, Thaddaeus Kosciuszko, and quenched in blood by the united forces of Russia and Prussia, was begun in the old capital of Poland; at Cracow General Kosciuszko had organized the first troops of his famous peasant militia, at whose head he won the glorious victory of Raclawice.

After the third division of Poland, Cracow, in 1796, fell to the share of Austria. It had hardly 10,000 inhabitants at that time; the streets looked like heaps of ruins. The wars of Napoleon awakened fresh hopes for liberty and new life in the town, especially when, in 1809, a Polish army under Prince Joseph Poniatowski entered it and added the whole of western Galicia to the independent Grand-Duchy of Warsaw which Napoleon had created—-and again, when the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, declared it a free town. This freedom of the city republic, however, was but apparent: everything was managed by the orders of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, through their agents. Three small towns and 244 villages formed the territory of the free state. Freedom from customs duties and ensuing cheapness of all articles brought about a new rise of commerce and a rapid increase of population. There were some sweeping changes in administration, regular institutions of a modern type, mostly on the French model, being established.

When General Kosciuszko died in Switzerland in 1817, his body was brought to Cracow and buried among the kings on the Wawel. But the people of Cracow wished besides to create some perennial monument of its patriotic gratitude to Poland's hero, and this was, by a happy thought, accomplished in the ancient Slavonic manner by raising a high tumulus on the broad ridge of Sikornik Hill, dominating the town and its surroundings. The "Mound of Kosciuszko" is one of the proudest landmarks of Cracow.

Political freedom, though limited, naturally gave new vigour to intellectual life; the community set to work on its organization. New societies were founded for humanitarian and scientific purposes. Thus, in 1816 the "Scientific Society" arose, later to be changed into the present Academy; its first president was the then Bishop of Cracow, John Paul Woronicz, himself a poet and lover of the arts; the Charity (1816), Musical (1818), Agricultural (1819), and other societies followed. Learning is chiefly represented by admirably industrious historians, such as Michael Wiszniewski, Joseph Kremer, A. S. Helcel, Joseph Muczkowski. New periodicals were started. A group of Cracow poets arise, whose enthusiasm is chiefly inspired by the beauties of the town and its surroundings: B. E. Wasilewski, Fr. Wezyk, and others. Important political events were not long in coming to change the face of things. When aspirations for national liberty and revolutionary currents were rising to their highest in their Polish dominions, the three Powers resolved to put an end to the independence of Cracow. On November 16, 1846, Imperial troops entered the town, and the free state was annexed to the possessions of the Austrian Crown under the name of the Grand Duchy of Cracow.

The first few years of Austrian rule are a tale of woe in the annals of the city; it was not till the political changes leading to representative government had taken place that things grew better. The Constitutional Articles of 1867 created new and more favourable conditions for the development of arts and sciences. Art will be dealt with in the next chapter. The new municipal regulations, based on the principle of autonomy (granted in 1866), made it possible for the sometime Rector of Cracow University, Dr. Dietl, when elected President of the town, to set large reform schemes afoot for lifting the city out of the wretched situation in which it had been left by the neglect of the central government. However, the financial distress of the impoverished citizens, together with the want of manufacturing activity, this having been hindered by various obstacles and impediments, made it impossible for the town to find the means of carrying out some of those reform plans. In 1872 the Emperor Francis Joseph founded the Academy of Sciences at Cracow. The town has been ever since the centre of Polish literature and art. Methodical investigations in all domains of science were taken up on the Occidental model. Adherence to truth in historical writings was more strictly established, and mere dilettantism discouraged by criticism; the old sources of history were arranged and edited. Natural science, long neglected, made a new start, and names of experimental scientists like Wróblewski and Olszewski (who succeeded in liquifying some gases) became known all over the world. Medicine also has its eminent representatives, who not only give splendour to the medical faculty of the University, but also exercise a most beneficial influence on the reform of the town's sanitary arrangements. Let us mention one only, Dr. Henry Jordan, who founded a large park for the games and sports of youth. This unique institution has done excellent work in improving the physical and moral conditions under which young people grow up in the city.

The collections in Cracow illustrative of history and civilization are rapidly growing, chiefly by gifts from private persons desirous to contribute towards constructing a full image of the glorious past. This tendency prevailing in the public mind is fostered by the municipality, which by preserving the National Museum, fulfils its historical task, and proves a faithful guardian of the relics of civilization. Duke Ladislaus Czartoryski put his famous collections at the disposal of the community by exhibiting them, since 1880, for public inspection in buildings reconstructed after the plans of Viollet le Due. Dr. Adrian Baraniecki, with the concurrence of the community, founded the Technical Museum. In 1893, immediately after the death of the great painter Matejko, his house, at the suggestion of Professor Marian Sokolowski, was transformed, the arrangements and furniture being left unaltered, into a permanent exhibition of the masters' great historical collections. The Archaeological Cabinet, founded by Professor Joseph Lepkowski, and adjoining the University, contains many precious relics of art and civilization, ancient and modern, especially Polish. Finally, in 1902, Count Emmerick Czapski founded a museum called by the name of his family; its numismatic cabinet and collection of engravings are among the richest in Poland.

The province of Galicia bought for a heavy sum the royal castle on the Wawel from the military (who had occupied it as barracks), and made a present of it to the Emperor of Austria for residence whenever he would stay in Galicia. The liberal monarch ordained the greatest part of the castle, when restored, to contain the National Museum thus meeting the wishes of his subjects. The restoration of the castle is in progress, and at a not very distant period the precious relics of the Polish nation's glorious past will have found a worthy repository in the ancient mansion of its kings.

54. KING SIGISMUND THE OLD.

1. Leonard Cox (fl. ab. 1572), schoolmaster at Reading, Caerleon, and Coventry successively, author of an "Art of Rhetoryke" and of "Commentaries on W. Lily's Construction of the Eight Parts of Speech," translator of "Marcus Eremita de Lege et Spiritu," and of Erasmus's "Paraphrase of the Epistle to Titus" (Dictionary of National Biography). He lectured in the University of Cracow in 1518-1519 on Livy, Quintilian, and the Letters of St. Hieronymus, and in 1525-1526 on Cicero, Virgil, and Quintilian.—Erasmus Licorianus matriculated at Cracow in 1525 as "Erasmus Johannis Œmpedophillus Lycorianus, dioc. Salisburgensis, poeta t.s." This was, however, not an Englishman of Salisbury—for no such Englishman is known even to the editors of the Dictionary of National Biography—but a German of Salzburg.

   In 1526, Licorianus is mentioned in the Acta Rectoralia of Cracow University as having sued Cox for libel in the Rector's Court. The affair was connected in some way with a feud then going on between the two Polish families of Laski and Tomicki (vide Prof. K. Morawski, in his Polish History of Cracow University, II. 241 f.)—Translator's Note.