the expense of their richer neighbours would hear of no additional burdens being laid on themselves, and the king only obtained what he wanted by sacrificing his principles to his necessities, and helping the szlachta to pull down the magnates. This fatal parsimony had the most serious political consequences, for it crippled the king at every step. Strive and scheme as he might, his needs were so urgent, his enemies so numerous, that, though generally successful in the end, he had always to be content with compromises, adjustments and semi-victories. Thus he was obliged, in 1525, to grant local autonomy to the province of Prussia instead of annexing it; he was unable to succour his unfortunate nephew, Louis of Hungary, against the Turkish peril; he was compelled to submit to the occupation of one Lithuanian province after the other by the Muscovites, and look on helplessly while myriads of Tatars penetrated to the very heart of his domains, wasting with fire and sword everything they could not carry away with them.
Again, it should have been the first duty of the Republic adequately to fortify the dzikie pola, or “savage steppe,” as The Cossacks. the vast plain was called which extended from Kiev to the Black Sea, and some feeble attempts to do so were at last made. Thus, in the reign of Alexander, the fugitive serfs whom tyranny or idleness had driven into this wilderness (they were subsequently known as Kazaki, or Cossacks, a Tatar word meaning freebooters) were formed into companies (c. 1504) and placed at the disposal of the frontier starostas, or lord marchers, of Kaniev, Kamenets, Czerkask on the Don and other places. But these measures proved inadequate, and in 1533 the lord marcher, Ostafi Daszkiewicz, the hero of Kaniev, which he had successfully defended against a countless host of Turks and Tatars, was consulted by the diet as to the best way of defending the Ukraine permanently against such inroads. The veteran expert advised the populating and fortifying of the islands of the Dnieper. Two thousand men would suffice, he said, and the Cossacks supplied excellent military material ready to hand. The diet unanimously approved of this simple and inexpensive plan; a special commission examined and approved of its details, and it was submitted to the next diet, which rejected it. So nothing at all was done officially, and the defence of the eastern Ukraine was left to providence. Oddly enough the selfish prudence of Sigismund's rapacious consort, Queen Bona, did more for the national defence than the Polish state could do. Thus, to defend her immense possessions in Volhynia and Podolia, she converted the castles of Bar and Krzemieniec into first-class fortresses, and placed the former in the hands of her Silesian steward, who acquitted himself so manfully of his charge[1] that “the Tatars fell away from the frontier all the days of Pan Pretficz,” and a large population settled securely beneath the walls of Bar, henceforth known as “the bastion of Podolia.” Nothing, perhaps, illustrates so forcibly the casual character of the Polish government in the most vital matters as this single incident.
The most important political event during the reign of Sigismund was the collapse of the ancient Hungarian monarchy at Mohacs in 1526. Poland, as the next neighbour of Hungary, was more seriously affected than any other European power by this catastrophe, but her politicians differed as to the best way of facing it. Immediately after the death of King Louis, who fell on the field of battle, the emperor Ferdinand and John Zapolya, voivode of Transylvania, competed for the vacant crown, and both were elected almost simultaneously. In Poland Zapolya's was the popular cause, and he also found powerful support in the influential and highly gifted Laski family, as represented by the Polish chancellor and his nephews John and Hieronymus. Sigismund, on the other hand, favoured Ferdinand of Austria. Though bound by family ties with both competitors, he regarded the situation from a purely political point of view. He argued that the best way to keep the Turk from Poland was for Austria to incorporate Hungary, in which case the Austrian dominion would be a strong and permanent barrier against a Mussulman invasion of Europe. History has more than justified him, and the long duel which ensued between Ferdinand and Zapolya (see Hungary: History) enabled the Polish monarch to maintain to the end a cautious but observant neutrality. More than once, indeed, Sigismund was seriously compromised by the diplomatic vagaries of Hieronymus Laski, who entered the service of Zapolya (since 1529 the protégé of the sultan), and greatly alarmed both the emperor and the pope by his disturbing philo-Turk proclivities. It was owing to Laski's intrigues that the new hospodar of Moldavia, Petrylo, after doing homage to the Porte, intervened in the struggle as the foe of both Ferdinand and Sigismund, and besieged the Grand Hetman of the Crown, Jan Tarnowski, in Obertyn, where, however, the Moldavians (August 22, 1531) sustained a crushing defeat, and Petrylo was slain. Nevertheless, so anxious was Sigismund to avoid a collision with the Turks, that he forbade the victorious Tarnowski to cross the Moldavian frontier, and sent a letter of explanation to Constantinople. On the death of John Zapolya, the Austro-Polish alliance was still further cemented by the marriage of Sigismund's son and heir, Sigismund Augustus, with the archduchess Elizabeth. In the reign of Sigismund was effected the incorporation of the duchy of Masovia with the Polish crown, after an independent existence of five hundred years. In 1526 the male line of the ancient dynasty became extinct, and on the 26th of August Sigismund received the homage of the Masovians at Warsaw, the capital of the duchy and ere long of the whole kingdom. Almost every acre of densely populated Masovia was in the hands of her sturdy, ultra-conservative squires, in point of culture far below their brethren in Great and Little Poland. The additional revenue gained by the Crown from Masovia was at first but 14,000 gulden per annum.
The four and twenty years of Sigismund II.'s reign was a critical period of Polish history. Complications with the Turk were avoided by the adroit diplomacy of the king, while the superior discipline and efficiency of the Polish armies under the great Tarnowski (q.v.) and his pupils overawed the Tatars and extruded the Muscovites, neither of whom were so troublesome as they had been during the last reign. All the more disquieting was the internal condition of the country, due mainly to the invasion of Poland by the Reformation, and the coincidence of this invasion with an internal revolution of a quasi-democratic character, which aimed at substituting the rule of the szlachta for the rule of the senate.
Hitherto the Republic had given the Holy See but little anxiety. Hussite influences, in the beginning of the 15th The Reformation in Poland. century, had been superficial and transitory. The Polish government had employed Hussite mercenaries, but rejected Hussite propagandists. The edict of Wielun (1424), remarkable as the first anti-heretical decree issued in Poland, crushed the new sect in its infancy. Lutheranism, moreover, was at first regarded with grave suspicion by the intensely patriotic Polish gentry, because of its German origin. Nevertheless, the extremely severe penal edicts issued during the reign of Sigismund I., though seldom applied, seem to point to the fact that heresy was spreading widely throughout the country. For a time, therefore, the Protestants had to be cautious in Poland proper, but they found a sure refuge in Prussia, where Lutheranism was already the established religion, and where the newly erected university of Königsberg became a seminary for Polish ministers and preachers.
While Lutheranism was thus threatening the Polish Church from the north, Calvinism had already invaded her from the west. Calvinism, indeed, rather recommended itself to the Poles as being of non-German origin, and Calvin actually dedicated his Commentary on the Mass to the young krolewicz (or crown prince) Sigismund Augustus, from whom protestantism, erroneously enough, expected much in the future. Meanwhile conversion to Calvinism, among the higher classes in Poland, became more and more frequent. We hear of crowded Calvinist conventicles in Little Poland from 1545 onwards, and Calvinism continued to spread throughout the kingdom during the latter
- ↑ Pretficz won no fewer than 70 engagements over the Tatars.
