The reformation in Poland

by Paul Fox

I exceedingly regret the way the Diet dissolved, especially when I reflect and see where it all tends and to what consequences such beginnings are apt to lead. Would that it might not result in destruction of our clerical estate! For we see now the most arrogant and audacious people, to whose insatiable passions there is nothing sacred or inviolable, who draw inspiration and power from their wilfulness and impunity, lie in wait for the church’s property. It is the duty of your Reverence, who are the head and primate of our clerical estate in these parts of ours, to watch diligently that their impious purposes may not be realized in our times at least.[391]

When it became evident that the king did not intend to carry out the wishes of the Diet of 1535, the szlachta of Great Poland instructed its deputies to the Diet of 1536-1537 to insist on “the execution of laws,” which included the matter of the church’s privileges. At this Diet the Chamber of Deputies raised, therefore, most violent protests against the abuses described, and vigorously demanded conformity to law and restoration of all illegally acquired benefices and church property. At the same time the Chamber demanded that henceforth the king appoint to abbacies and other lucrative church benefices only native Poles of noble birth, or plebeians of Polish nationality in the event that there are not enough candidates of noble birth to fill vacancies. The leaders in this movement were Raphael Leszczyński, Stanislaus Myszkowski, Nicholas Krzycki, and John Sierakowski, who later on became well-known champions of the Reformation movement.[392] Moreover, in 1538 the Diet passed a law, according to which anyone receiving anything contrary to statutory enactments by courting the favor of the Vatican was thereby ipso facto proscribed and his possessions were confiscated. By the same law all church dignitaries residing in Rome away from their appointments were recalled, and if they failed to return to the country within a specified time, they were to be deprived of their offices and banished, and were not to be permitted to enter the country.[393]

But high ecclesiastical offices richly endowed were after all limited in number. If the Polish nobility was to find larger access to the landed property of the church, it had to get to it in other ways, which it did. If the secular nobles were keen in buying up village mayorships, so were the Polish clergy. In fact, they were in possession of more mayorships than the secular nobles.[394] Then, too, their landed estates were further augmented by bequests of pious persons. These things were a thorn in the flesh to the Polish nobility. It sought ways and means of preventing this constant increase of church property. As early as 1510 testamentary bequests of real estate property to the church were prohibited by statutory enactment.[395] In 1534 the szlachta at its provincial diets unanimously demanded that the General Diet restrain the clergy from buying up village mayorships, with the result that in the end a law was enacted prohibiting all transfers of estates with nobility rights and privileges to the clergy whether by gift, sale, or any other method.[396] The stormy Diet of 1536-1537 went still further, demanding the secularization of all ecclesiastical estates and the sale to the szlachta of all the newly acquired lands of the clergy.[397] Nor did the nobles stop at mere demands and legislative enactments; occasionally they took matters directly into their hands. For instance, whenever and wherever there was an opportunity to seize the land of a parish priest or a prebendary, the nobles were quite ready to take advantage of it. In the sixteenth century, influenced and encouraged by the Reformation movement, the Polish nobles did not hesitate to resort to that method of dealing with ecclesiastical property, and of thus enlarging their own demesne estates.[398]

Moreover, the revival of agriculture created a demand not only for more land, but also for more labor, and cheap labor. We have already noted that farming by tenant peasants was not any more profitable to the landlords in the sixteenth century, and that there was a strong tendency to annex the peasant leaseholds to the demesne estates. But as the demesne estates increased in size the labor problem grew more acute every day. To solve it, the noble landlords began to change the status of the peasants by legislation. Thus former free peasants became gradually, as a result of a series of legislative enactments, glebae adscripti. They were not any longer free to leave their masters at will; and if they did, their masters had the right to demand their return, or to pursue them and bring them back.[399] Of a family of peasant children, only one might leave the estate on which he was born, and go to the city into service, or for the purpose of study or of learning a trade.[400] An only child was forbidden to leave the land; he had to pass into the serfdom of his parents.[401] And if a peasant youth escaped, he was to be restored to his master under penalty of forty marks.[402] Not only were the Polish peasants bound to the soil in the sixteenth century, they were now also compelled to do forced labor on their masters’ estates. In 1477 the provincial diet of “Ziemia chełmska” established one day a week of forced peasant labor on the estate of the lord. In 1520 the General Diets of Thorn and Bydgoszcz extended this local provision to the peasants on all the manors in the country.[403] Thus what had hitherto been a matter of private arrangement was now made a statutory and universal obligation. And gradually as time went on the number of forced labor was increased to two days a week and more.[404] Worst of all, under the influence of Roman law, which recognized only masters and slaves, the Polish peasants lost also their standing before the law, and were subjected wholly to the jurisdiction of their lords.[405] This removed the last vestige of the peasants’ personal rights, and made them practically the property of the aristocratic landlords.

Besides monopolizing agricultural production, the Polish nobles obtained exemption from export and import duties on all products raised on their own estates for export and on all goods imported for their own use and not for trade.[406] By this stroke they secured a monopoly advantage in trade also, and became the chief beneficiaries of all its benefits to the detriment and destruction of the Polish town population.

The changes in Poland’s commerce and agriculture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had a very important bearing on the country’s problems of defense and finance. They disqualified the Polish nobility for warfare, and they undermined the revenues of the state. The szlachta, settled on the land, grew more attached to the soil and to the life of country gentlemen than to the camp and the discomforts of military service. Stimulated by the new commercial opportunities and the prospect for gain and enrichment, it naturally became more interested in agriculture and in exports of its agricultural products than in warfare and military expeditions. The rewards of agriculture and of commerce were greater, more certain, less hazardous, and consequently more alluring than those of war. Moreover, the changes in warfare, resulting from the invention of gunpowder, demanded the employment of new methods in the conduct of war, called for more costly equipment, which the warriors had to provide themselves at their own expense, and were fraught with greater perils to life. Naturally, therefore, the nobility grew reluctant to leave the soil, and to engage in war; and when actually called out in emergency in “pospolite ruszenie” it was far more interested in political than in military maneuvers, in extracting new privileges from the king than in vanquishing the enemy. Whether as a defensive or as an offensive force the “pospolite ruszenie” became now both physically inadequate and temperamentally unfit for war. Yet the country’s wars with the Teutonic Knights, Russia, Moldavia, Courland, and the city of Danzig, and its constant menace of Tartar invasion called for a strong and ever-ready military force to repel aggression, subdue rebellion, and to protect the borders in order to guard the country’s safety and to maintain its integrity and prestige.

These conditions created the necessity of hiring mercenaries. But mercenaries had to be paid. This called for more state funds, which, however, were very hard to raise. The old revenues, which even under ordinary conditions would have been inadequate for the new needs, were rendered all the more inadequate by the fact that their sources instead of being increased were actually diminished. This was due to a number of causes. The lavish generosity of the Polish kings, particularly the Jagiellos, greatly reduced the royal domain and the royal income therefrom. Exemption of the nobility by the Pact of Koszyce (1374) from all taxation except two grosze per łan kmiecy and by the Constitution of 1496 from all export and import duties, and of the clergy from all public burdens and responsibilities, contributed to the depletion of the royal treasury and to the weakening of the country’s defense. This evil was still further accentuated by the processes of annexing “vacant” peasant leaseholds to the demesne estates and of buying up of village mayorships by the clergy. The first withdrew the annexed peasant lands from taxation;[407] the second rendered the mayorships free from participation in the country’s defense. Out of a total number of 14,000 village mayorships, which had in the past participated in the “pospolite ruszenie,” only 2,000 still answered the call to arms by 1539, according to a complaint of the deputies at the Diet of Cracow of that year.[408] These things combined to impoverish the royal treasury, to put the king in constant financial straits, and to jeopardize the peace and security of the country.

To eliminate these difficulties and to provide adequate defense for the country, special contributions or taxes had to be voted from time to time. The demand for these special contributions grew greater and more frequent as time went on. With every year the nobility felt the burden of defense more keenly. It looked around for help and for new sources of revenue. These were by no means hard to find. The wealth and resources of the clergy presented an excellent source of defensive strength. The szlachta began, therefore, to demand the participation of the clergy in the responsibilities and burdens of public life and of the country’s defense. This resulted in a sharp conflict between the clergy and the Polish nobility, a conflict which lasted for two centuries and which found expression in the fifteenth century in the Hussite movement and in the sixteenth in the Reformation.

The Polish clergy’s privileged character respecting their participation in public responsibilities and burdens constituted the most sensitive point of difference between the Polish szlachta and the Polish Roman Catholic clergy.[409] According to Casimir’s Code the duty of participation in the country’s defense rested upon all hereditary estates of the Polish knighthood, regardless of the fact as to whether any of their owners happened to belong at a particular time to the ranks of the clergy or not.[410] Moreover, it was very early established that lands newly acquired by the church were subject to military service. A statute of 1437 provided that all church lands acquired by purchase within the last forty years and those that might be thus acquired in the future were required to render military service.[411] But throughout the fifteenth century the owners of these lands were clever and successful enough in evading these provisions and in maintaining the principle of their freedom from participation in the country’s defense. In 1506 at the Diet of Lublin they even succeeded in securing royal sanction of their freedom from rendering military service due from these lands. Gradually, contrary to the law of Casimir the Great, they extended this principle of their exemption from military service even to their hereditary lands and to village mayorships purchased by them.[412]

Naturally, the Polish szlachta rose in arms. It demanded that the mayors of ecclesiastical villages render military service as did the mayors of secular villages; that if the clergy objected, they should produce their privileges exempting the mayors of their villages from that public duty; that the Diet should prohibit the clergy from buying village mayorships; that all newly acquired ecclesiastical lands should be sold to the nobility, which was bearing the burden of public defense; that the clergy be placed on the same footing with the secular nobility in respect of participation in public defense; that their lands be secularized and the income from them be used for purposes of public defense; and that the clergy assume their fair share of special taxes levied by the diets. To be sure, all these demands were not made at once; but they were all made with varying insistence in the course of the first three-quarters of the sixteenth century.