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THE POLISH SZLACHTA and THEIR STATE King Sigismund Augustus

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THE POLISH SZLACHTA and THEIR STATE King Sigismund Augustus CHAPTER ONE THE POLISH SZLACHTA AND THEIR STATE King Sigismund Augustus (Zygmunt August), the last of the Jagiellonian dynasty on the Polish-Lithuanian throne, died on 1 July 1572. Several months later the noble deputies who gathered at the Sejm which was to elect his successor prepared a kind of constitution, laying down the insti- tutional framework of the Rzeczpospolita, a state commonly known in English as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (also referred to as the First Polish Republic or the “Republic of the Two Nations”). This act was subsequently known as the Henrician Articles, after Henry of Valois, the fijirst elected monarch coerced into signing it. It provided a legal confijirma- tion of the fact that this vast country sprawling over more than 800,000 km2 was the possession not of its king, but of its noble estate. Yet this single act, signifijicant as it was, did not actually mark the beginning of the history of the noble Republic: it was more the culmination of a certain stage, representing an efffort to safeguard against any future attempts to disrupt the existing system of governance or to upset the distinctive politi- cal consensus that had emerged between the kingdom’s ruler and its subjects—or to describe the true state of afffairs more accurately, between the nation’s caste of governors and their co-ruler, since by that time the szlachta held more of a sovereign sway within their own state than the king himself. The history of the szlachta’s rule had in fact begun much earlier, as the foundations of the noble Republic’s political system stretched back to at least the 15th century. One might even be tempted to trace it further back to the personal union between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1385, which had imparted a certain preliminary ter- ritorial shape to the future Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and had moreover fijirst installed the Jagiellonians on the Polish throne. Seeking to achieve their own political and dynastic objectives, the Jagiellonian mon- archs had been forced to make successive concessions to their noble sub- jects. Throughout Europe, rulers were granting various prerogatives to the noble estate, or at least to certain strata thereof. But the rights granted to the Crown nobility in the 15th century by King Ladislaus Jagiello (Władysław Jagiełło) and then by his son Casimir Jagiellon (Kazimierz 4 chapter one Jagiellończyk) did more than just elevate the nobility as a privileged class; they laid the foundations of civil rights for the nobles. While it is admit- tedly quite anachronistic to use the term “civil rights” here to describe these medieval privileges, it nevertheless seems apt in view of the fact that one of these rights was the famous neminem captivabimus nisi iure victum privilege (1433), stating that no member of the nobility could be impris- oned or have his assets confijiscated without a valid court verdict against him. This was, therefore, akin to the Habeas Corpus Act introduced in English law nearly 250 years earlier—although in the Polish case it applied only to a single estate. This right, defending the nobility’s freedom against unauthorized infringement by the ruler, constituted not just a guarantee of civil liberty but also the basis for political liberty, since an individual so protected was free to speak their mind about the ruler’s deeds and policies without having to fear repression. Successive prerogatives continued to increase the nobility’s hand in political decision-making—King Casimir Jagiellon made the concession (in the Nieszawa statutes of 1454) not to impose any new taxes or to raise an army through levée-en-masse without the szlachta’s consent. The nobility became increasingly active in self- governance, encompassing more and more domains of life, and meetings convened by the szlachta took on greater political signifijicance. At this stage these were still somewhat informal gatherings of knights from the province where the king happened to be present, but they marked the early beginnings of representative self-governance. Although it is true that a gathering convoked in Piotrków in 1493 is conventionally regarded as being the fijirst true Sejm of the Polish Crown, i.e. the fijirst representative body to which the nobles of various lands sent elected deputies, the Sejm assembly held in Radom in 1505 is undoubtedly a more important water- shed date in the history of the Polish noble Republic: it was here that the principle of nihil novi sine omnium consensu (nothing new without the consent of all) was formulated. This important act of law, adopted and proclaimed by King Alexander Jagiellon, stated: Because general laws and public acts apply not to individuals but to the whole nation, therefore from now on nothing new that would be detrimen- tal or burdensome to the Commonwealth, or harmful or injurious to anyone, or that would be intended to alter the general law and public freedom, may be decided by us [the king] or our successors, without a common consensus of senators and landed deputies. This law, later known as the Nihil Novi Act, would become, for nearly 300 years, the foundation of the idea that the state should be understood as the common good of its citizens, who have the right to determine its .
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