Class 9. Polish Power and Cossack Revolution (2)
you'd fish with this person, and that's what you would do.
You travel the entire time if you were king.
It's kind of interesting.
And so they would have to campaign
to become kings of Poland.
And what do you do?
What do you promise people?
Well, you say things like,
okay, if I agree to give you a privilege
in exchange for taxes.
So there are no regular taxes.
Now think about how the state's gonna operate.
There are no regular taxes.
Every time a tax is levied on the nobility,
the monarch has to give them something.
But the nobility has a sense
of its own interests and is smart.
And unlike the monarch who's kind of a,
it's in a one-off situation,
the nobility is thinking long term.
And so what do you trade the taxes for?
You trade them for rights.
You say, okay, we'll pay taxes as a one-off,
but in exchange, we are gonna get rights
and these rights last forever.
And they're gonna last forever because we're
gonna have pieces of paper
with beautiful cursive and wax, right?
Okay, that's not really why, but they did have that.
But, you see the notion, you see the logic here, right?
And so those rights then only accumulate over time.
And so then there's another logic to this, okay?
The other logic to this besides election is that there
are a few very powerful families,
most of them, Lithuanian or Ukrainian, actually.
A few powerful nobles who are called magnates,
M-A-G-N-A-T-E, magnates.
Magnateria was the Polish word for this group.
That if you think oligarchy today, you won't be far off.
So, and the king would be in many ways less powerful
than these most powerful nobles
who would tend to own hundreds of thousands of acres
and have tens of thousands of serfs
and be able to raise private armies
of their own when they wanted to.
And so, if you're the king,
you need to counterbalance the force of these magnates,
of these great nobles.
And so what do you do?
Again, you give rights to the nobility as a whole.
You try to bring the lesser nobility,
the middle nobility over to your side.
And so in order to do that, you give them rights.
So some of these rights as they accumulate over time,
are listed on your sheet.
There's the Czerwinsk Privilege of 1422,
which is about property rights, very familiar concept.
And it's a big concept, right?
Property rights is a very important thing.
Again, remember the difference in Muscovy.
In Muscovy, if you die, I can just decide
that your property is gonna go to somebody else.
I mean, you don't even have to die,
but you don't have to do me the courtesy of dying.
I can just decide.
But if you die, you'll only own the property
in a contingent way.
Whereas in 1422, the Polish nobility
is already arranged for something,
which it looks very much like property rights at Czerwinsk.
1430, they get the right that they
cannot be imprisoned for no reason.
Again, you might be thinking, or you might not
be thinking depending on where you come from,
what your background is.
That doesn't seem like a big deal,
but that's a very, very big deal.
In the English tradition that will be known
later as habeas corpus,
that you can't just imprison somebody
without giving a reason.
Again, the difference between this and Muscovy is stark.
So these basic rights that you can have property
and that your body can't just be put behind bars
for no reason, that establishes a fundamental kind
of political, let's call it, dignity, okay.
So, and then a third thing which happens,
and this is under Casimir the Jagiellon.
I think I listed these characters on your sheet.
Casimir the Jagiellon ruled
in the middle end of the 15th century.
He encouraged the lower nobility
to create local parliaments.
Very big deal.
Because when you talk about how this is something
which is cool about the early modern period.
When you talk about how there's like democracy
or assemblies, you have to look very carefully
to see what's meant by this.
Because very often, and the Cossacks
are a good example of this,
very often when you say, okay, there was popular approval,
there was voting, there was an assembly,
what's really meant is like, one guy gets to stand up
on a chair or at the top of a palace, which is even cooler,
and like, shout out what's gonna happen.
And then ideally with a spear, you know,
and then everyone else says, yeah, right?
And so like, in this form of democracy, you're like,
your role is reduced to saying, yeah!
You don't have to do that.
Actually, you know, definitely don't do that actually,
'cause like, we'll all regret it later if you do.
But, so acclimation is one form of participation, right?
And traditionally, the king and the royal council in Poland,
in the capital, which at the time was Krakow,
they would announce a decision and then there would
be like a lot of shaking of spears and shouting.
And that would be approval, right?
But under Casimir the Jagiellonian, the idea was that you can,
you as the nobility can organize yourself
into local parliaments, which were called Sejmikis
or dietines in English.
Very awkward word, diet sounds like a regimen of eating.
But a diet is another name for a parliament.
And then the diminutive of a diet,
a little diet is a dietine, okay?
You definitely learned something today, right?
A dietine, so if you wanna tell your friends, like,
I'm just going on diet, only on Thursdays,
you can call it dietine.
And they'll be like, wow, what's a dietine?
And you can say, well, my History of Ukraine class,
I learned that under Casimir the Jagiellon,
the minor Polish nobility was encouraged to organize itself
into local assemblies, which were called dietines.
Okay, now you know, you'll never forget.
So, but the, no, I don't plan these jokes.
So, but this is important because it's moving
towards representation, right?
Not just acclimation, but representation.
And these dietines then elect representatives
who go to the central diet or in Polish,
very important word in Polish,
Lithuanian too, also exist at Ukrainian, Sejm,
that's the name of the parliament,
the lower house of the parliament, the Sejm.
And so if, you know, you guys were all minor nobles
in a certain region,
you could elect one of you to go to the,
so then you actually do have something
which is like representative democracy.
And that's a step so then you can discuss your interests
over the course of the year.
You send your representative and you actually get to vote.
The voting still had to be unanimous,
which we'll talk about maybe later,
that can pose a problem,
as the European Union sometimes notices.
But, you had a vote, you actually had a vote.
You were, you were represented, okay.
In foreign policy, three questions for Poland.
Very quickly, I just want you to know about these things.
Mazovia, Mazovia is the central district of Poland.
It's where the current capital of Poland, Warsaw is.
Warsaw is not the historic capital of Poland.
The historic capital of Poland is Krakow.
Warsaw becomes the capital of Poland after 1569.
Krakow is the capital of Poland, historically.
Mazovia is only added the Poland in 1526.
So, the Dukes of Mazovia die out
and Mazovia becomes part of Poland in 1526.
Okay. just so you know.
Second thing I need you to know,
and we'll return to these guys in a couple of lectures,
the Habsburgs.
There's a very important central European family
called the Habsburgs who are going to emerge
and they're going to be in competition with the Poles for,
you know, only about half a millennium.
And they are going to, in general be making alliances
with the Russians or later,
with the Prussians against Poland.
And as a result of this rivalry,
we get these two very interesting moments that define Poland
as an East European and not a Central European country.
The first is very early, we already talked about it,
when the, the Polish king Jadwiga marries Jagiello.
Jadwiga's a she, she marries Jagiello
instead of marrying a Habsburg.
We talked about that a couple lectures ago.
Because Jadwiga marries Jagiello
instead of marrying a Habsburg,
Poland then becomes an East European country, right?
Poland and Lithuania together
instead of Poland and the Habsburg are together.
The second moment like this is 1515 and 1526,
the early 16th century, when as part of an attempt
to make peace with the Habsburgs,
there is a complicated marriage deal,
which I have to spend basically a whole lecture
explaining in my other class.
And I'm not gonna do that now,
I'm just gonna say complicated marriage deal.
The result of which is that a Pole dies in a battle in 1526.
And this is something you never wanna have happen.
His brother-in-law then inherits all of his claims.
And these include the claims to Bohemia and Hungary,
which from 1526 onward are
at least theoretically part of the Habsburg domain.
So that's the next part of Poland becoming an East European
rather than a Central European power, okay.
The third little thing in foreign affairs that again,
I just need you to note
because it's gonna become important later,
before we can get to, you know, Angela Merkel,
and you know, Willy Brandt,
and Hitler, and the Second Reich,
and the unification of Germany and all of these nice things,
we have to get to Prussia.
Prussia is the bit, the little tiny bit,
the little tiny German state originally,
which eventually will grow and expand
and unite Germany in January of 1871.
Prussia at this time in the 16th century
is a a little tiny state, which Poland recognizes in 1563.
And Poland accepts a family called the Hohenzollerns.
I didn't write that down.
The Hohenzollerns will be allowed to govern.
That family is then going to be the princes of Prussia
then the kings of Prussia, and then eventually they're going
to be the rulers of Germany.
It's under them that Germany is going to be unified.
So I just mention this because later on,
Prussia is gonna take advantage of moments
of Polish weakness to become more important
to declare itself a kingdom,
declare itself independent of Poland,
and so on and so on and so on,
until later in the 18th century,
Prussia will take part in partitioning Poland,
and then Prussia will become a great power.
It will become Germany and so on.
Okay, so that's Poland in domestic
and in foreign policy, very briefly.
What about the relationship between Poland and Lithuania?
This is also very important.
When Poland and Lithuania come together,
it raises the question of what Lithuania is
and how Lithuania is different from Poland.
On the one side, Lithuanian nobles
take something from Poland, which is the idea of rights,
a pretty important thing to take.
So the Polish noble clans adopt,
join themselves with Lithuanian noble families.
And the Lithuanian noble families take the idea
that they have rights.
Up until that point, they had not had rights.
But at the same time, Lithuania remained a distinct state
in the sense that you had to be a Lithuanian to serve
in office under the Grand Duke of Lithuania.
And here's an important one,
which we have to remember for the Cossacks later on.
In order to own land in Lithuania,
you had to be a Lithuanian.
So, and remember Lithuania at the time I'm talking about
means not Lithuania, today's Belaya Rus, all the way down
into most of what's today's Ukraine.
So in order to own land in those places,
you had to be Lithuanian, okay.
