POLITICS

The rising absolutism in the West and autocracy in the East (Muscovy) represented two distinct approaches to politics. As Jeno Szucs put it, the West centralized while the East annihilated (for example, in Novgorod, whose citizens were deported en masse by Moscow in 1478). In the West the absolutist state was a compensation for the disappearance of serfdom while in the East autocracy was a device for its consolidation. In the case of East Central Europe its specific character precluded a successful initiation of the Western model. The existence of a “civil society” and a “corpus politicum” excluded the use of Eastern methods.

By the early sixteenth century Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland had all crystallized as estates-based regimes (Standestaat, as the Germans call it) with parliamentary institutions. The evolution of the system was affected by a contest for power between the king and the estates, meaning the lords and the gentry, and in the case of Bohemia also the powerful burghers. In Poland the rulers made fuller use of the gentry as potential allies against the lords only late in the century, and they failed to exploit the alliance for their benefit. Consequently a specific form of gentry democracy developed in the state, a Respublica, meaning commonwealth.

The Bohemian and Hungarian lords achieved an ascendancy over the king in the first decades of the sixteenth century, although the lords’ power was contested by the gentry, and in Bohemia the towns successfully withstood attempts to relegate them to an inferior status. In the second half of the century, the attempts by the Habsburgs to strengthen royal power produced a more balanced system. Local assemblies on the level of Land, District, or County (komitat) respectively in Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, significantly increased their fiscal and administrative powers. The Hungarian komitat especially came to play a special role in the subsequent evolution of the country.

The concept of the Crown of St Wenceslas, St Stephen, or of Poland which symbolized the symbiosis between the monarchy and the political nation, was in a sense more modern than the prevalent “proprietary dynasticism.” The political nation in Bohemia, we will recall, comprised the three estates of lords, knights, and burghers represented in the diet (snem). The estate of the clergy continued to be included in the Moravian diet. The Royal Council failed to transform itself into a second chamber. The two Jagiellonian kings, Vladislav and Louis II, found their prerogatives as supreme executive, judge, and commander-in-chief, circumscribed in practice. The Land Ordinance of 1500 (Zrizeni zemske) that provided for a more equitable distribution of offices between lords and knights further limited the royal power. The financial basis of royal power dwindled with the alienation of the king’s domain and his promises not to reclaim it. The role of the diet that voted extraordinary taxes and elected rulers increased rapidly.

The Hungarian diet crystallized into a bicameral institution, and had lords seated, along with top ecclesiastical appointees, in the upper house (the table of lords). Elected representatives of counties, delegates of free royal towns (with one collective vote), and deputies of absent magnates and bishops attended the lower chamber. Thus only the nobility, high and low, dominated the diet and could rightly claim to be the political nation. Their claim was endorsed in the Opus Tripartitum of Istvan Werboczy in 1514, which although not sanctified by the king was treated as a codification of laws. The Tripartitum declared that all nobles were equal and confirmed their privileges, including the armed-resistance clause of the Golden Bull. Theoretically they could all attend the diet in person, which emphasized the fact that sovereignty resided collectively in this natio hungarica, that was united with the state through the Holy Crown of St Stephen. The diet of Croatia was, of course, a separate institution.

The Polish diet (sejm) came closer to the Hungarian than to the Czech model. The clergy was not represented in the lower chamber, and the burghers only symbolically, a result both of the nobility’s reluctance to share its power and of a certain indifference on the townsmen’s part. Exceptionally, in the provincial assembly of the semi-autonomous Royal Prussia representatives of the large towns balanced the nobles. The mode of election through local noble assemblies (sejmik) was comparable to that in Hungary. The upper house, called the senate, was not however a hereditary domain of the lords, but consisted of a number of lay and ecclesiastical dignitaries appointed by the king for life. It attempted at first to dominate the lower chamber, but succumbed to a gentry offensive. The latter operating on the platform of “execution of the laws”—linked, as already mentioned, with the Reformation— sought to strengthen the royal power but under public supervision of the political nation. Before saying a few words about this most important trend, we need to stress the place of law in the sixteenth-century Polish Respublica.

Based on codes known as the Laski statutes, the Polish system seemed to have a number of original features, and it functioned better than those in Hungary and Bohemia. Its main principles included the protection of property against confiscation and of personal rights against arbitrary arrest (neminem captivabimus). The Nihil novi constitution of 1505 asserted that no new laws could be adopted without the approval of the diet. The emphasis on the primacy of the law was clear. Indeed, a contemporary law book asserted that “both the king and all the estates of the realm shall be subject to the law.”8 Law was to guarantee freedom, and freedom was conceived as freedom from oppression or absolutism as well as freedom to participate in the government and freedom to resist it. One must not forget, however, that freedom also meant jealously guarded privileges of the noble nation, which, as the Polish historian E. M.Rostworowski remarked, was modern in its all-national activity, but medieval in its estate-like character. One might add, however, that the term “Polish nation” was also used in sixteenth-century writings to denote all inhabitants of the country. The famous preacher Skarga stressed that the peasants were Poles of the same nation.

To return now to the “execution of the laws” movement: it strove to weaken the magnates’ ascendancy by making them return the profitable leases of the royal domain (any further alienation of it to be forbidden) and prohibiting accumulation of offices. The clergy was to share in the tax burdens; the administration of finances and justice was to be overhauled, all under the control of the gentry-run sejm. The movement offered an opportunity to the monarch to count on the gentry to strengthen his power, like the French or English rulers did, by relying on the middle class. Yet the analogy is not perfect. The gentry had political ambitions and appeared less predictable than the magnates with whom the kings were traditionally working. Toward the end of the century, with royal power seriously limited by pacta conventa and Henrician Articles (discussed later in this chapter), the magnates learned how to manipulate the noble masses for their own ends.

In the course of conflicts and polemics a new system was emerging. A contemporary political writer commented that in “our country in some strange and unusual way a mixture of three forms of government has formed.”9 The three were monarchic, aristocratic (embodied in the senate), and democratic (represented in the lower chamber). The term forma mixta came into use. The system was regarded with some pride as based on checks and balances and reflecting a gentry democratic ideology. The use of the expression “democratic” may strike us as inappropriate. But to the gentry, trained in schools in which the models of antiquity were held up as an example, Polish democracy followed that of the Roman republic, a direct democracy in the classical sense. Civis Romanus, Senatus Populusque Romanus were concepts that were both familiar and relevant. If the szlachta, a sizeable cross-section of the society from top to bottom, claimed the right to run the state in spite of being a minority let us not forget that the political electorate in France even in the 1830s comprised less than 2 percent of the population. In England it was a little over 3 percent before the 1832 reform. True, Polish constitutionalism and freedoms coexisted with serfdom and discriminatory measures against the burghers. There was a price to be paid for the Golden Age, but was it unusual? The glory and greatness of Athens and Rome was built on slavery, and so in modern times was that of the United States.