Thread by @Irkutyanin1

New Thread About Norman Davies 2 Volume History of Poland: God’s Playground, a source recommended to me by nearly every book I’ve checked out about Russian history concerning Poland or the Baltic Crusader histories of William Urban.

To start off, here is Davies philosophy of history and the state of Polish English language scholarship circa 1979.

Interestingly he notices the Communist government takes the old nationalist school (obscuring population transfers) and talks about “American parallels” in decline

The book opens with the genesis of preserved polish sources. What’s interesting is that both style and form were in flux, while the chronicle was more thoroughly established in Rus’ both as a undisputed form of history and as a city imperative.

The development of modern polish historiography corresponded with the complete destruction of Poland.

The Stańczyk group of exiled polish historians in Germany intensely disliked romanticism in Poland’s context, because it was the institutions of PLC that pulled it down.

The rebirth in Patriotic “history” in Poland came at a time Marxist history showed signs of intense stagnation. The Roman Catholic Church and the Communist Party both appealed to neat presentations of the continuity of Poland in fierce competition.

The triumph of Catholicism, and what now for history?

(God’s Playground became official reading in most Polish universities)

Geography of Poland.

Her historic core of Wielkopolska, Małopolska, Mazovia and Kujawy. Davies foreshadows the importance of the soils.

Geography and preliminary ethnography of Non Polish areas controlled by the PLC.

Davies lays out his definition of ethnicity, explaining why a history of Poland only concerning the ethnic heartland is ahistoric and not “national” in the Commonwealth era.

This is where I figured he was going with the national comments earlier. I don’t think it makes complete sense myself. But there is the problem of Polish history, and categorization. An “ethnic history of Poland” is certainly possible, but it isn’t what Davies is going for.

The difficulty in establishing the ancient origins of Poles. The area around west Małoposka bordering Slavic heartlands of Galicia-Volyn May have been the entry point of the Slavs into Polish core. Potentially Celtic Krakow-Vistula mound culture?

The massive old forests of Poland as well as the population density.

Poland until recently was never a country that had abundant access to coast line and ports. Comparatively, the Rus’ trade on the central river systems and early Navy was much more pronounced.

Mythical and rear tribal creation of the Poles. According to Davies, the Ottonian supremacy and expansion was one big political factor in the conversion of Mieszko I, who may have even had limited fealty to the emperor, driving him to petition the pope for a separate bishopric.

The calculated effect for the Polish Kingdom paid off, though Bolesław I had to put down a massive Slavic pagan uprising, he was not going to suffer the fate of the Wends and other pagan Slavs/Balts in the 300 years of Ostsiedlung crusading in Pomerania to Livonia.

The state of Piast Poland’s liturgical and political status was in great flux in the early history of Poland. Fluctuating between imperial vassal and complete independence.

Liturgy had mixed Slavonic Moravian and Latin influences and bishops were caught in the power struggles.

The relation of Christian Poland to the empire meant that wars were sustained against pagan Slavs, and German settlers came into frontier territories faster than Poles in Vistula and Silesia cities.

German Talmudic Jews came into contact with Khazar Karaite survivals.

The disorder of the Polish Kingdom lead to political fragmentation and a ceaseless contest for West Slavic lands by the Germans.

Meanwhile the Imperial Elector Bohemia almost integrated Poland into the empire several times. Probably also explains survival of vernacular liturgy.

This page on its own is fascinating. The Anonymous Gaul considers Galicia-Volyn a Rus’ conquest of West Slav Lachs.

The Rurikid invasions of Poland put Casmir on the throne and might have been the pressure against the full incorporation of Poland into the HRE despite hostility.

In the nadir of the Polish “fracturing” the middle Piasts were met by the biggest threat of the Germans yet. A Holy Order whose evangelization conquests guaranteed their land while being independent of imperial dynastic politics.

The Knights expansion was legally unchallengeable

But at the point most of Poland looks like it’s about to be eaten by the Bohemian electorate, Poland has two last great Piast Kings. Władysław I Łokietek wages a war for Krakow and Wełikopolska against the Czechs and Germans from 1288-1314. The Czech Prezrmyslid Dynasty destroyed

Casmir the Great actually lost almost as much claimed territory as he gained, but he did something all other Piasts couldn’t do by making Poland “legal”. The Teutonic Order got Danzig, Imperial Bohemia got Silesia.

In exchange Casmir invaded and conquered Galicia-Volyn.

Casmir III’s Major fault was that he had no legitimate male offspring despite fathering a dozen (surviving) children with 6 women.

He is deeply conflicted about handing Poland to his Nephew, the French king of Hungary, Louis of Anjou. Which would again denationalize the Kingdom.

The slightly cursed reign of Louis of Anjou in Poland was a foreshadowing trend of electing foreigners as king to avoid a local one. As a result Galicia and Mazovia (ruled by a Piast) were separated as distinct by Louis, who now held the largest state in Europe: Hungary-Poland

Louis of Anjou and his daughter Jadwiga’s “reign” in Poland was a significant domestic departure. Polish nobility former consensus without needing to consult Louis, who paid for what he wanted or Jadwiga, who was completely powerless.

The Polish Sejm sans Lithuanian grew.

The Union of Poland to Lithuania was the happenstance of geopolitics. The Teutonic order had invaded Lithuanian Samogitia in 1382.

Jaigełło’s conversion and marriage to unhappy Jadwiga Anjou prevented her marriage to imperial Hapsburgs and preserved noble power over monarch.

The Teutonic Order was undercut by Lithuania’s conversion, it lost its crusading reason, and Poland, eager to regain territories lost in the previous century, partitioned the Teutonic Order after their defeat at Tannenberg.

At Constance, Poland gained the right to evangelize Lithuania from the Order. The failure of the reformation in Poland is surprising considering it’s Hussite era confrontation with the church. But in 1463, Rome granted Poland power over bishops it would not grant Tudor England.

Jewish immigration and social standing to Poland served a few functions of the state. Beyond finance it created a quasi burgher class that, crucially, was not German.

The Jews were not put under a chief rabbi for religious conformity. This would spurn the revival of mysticism.

Jagiellon Poland, with it’s royal prerogative laxing from the mid 1400’s embarked of attempting to get the Lithuanian nobility into a common cultural and political sphere. The Golden Age of the Polish Monarchy ended up half recreating the dynastic/Magisterial relations of the HRE

The Jagiellonian dynasty held all of Central Europe at the height of its power, and rivaled the Hapsburgs. Unfortunately, reformation politics and wars proved too much coupled with Ottoman expansion. Jagiellonian Mitteleuropa was a glass behemoth. Bohemia was crucial to Charles V

У нас много людей

The Jagiellonian monster state comes tumbling down, Russians in Ducal Lithuania, Reformation in Prussia, Sweden in Livonia, Moldavian revolt and joint the Ottomans, chaos and Turkish backed Protestant crusade in Hungary, Bohemia seized by the Hapsburgs.

The Reformation, The Turk, the Teuton, and Russia combined with Sigismund-Augustus’ lack of heir forced him to attempt to hammer out a civic Poland from his remaining patchwork state in 1568. It was anti-national attempting to form a new “Polish” elite without succession crises.

Religious makeup of Poland after Lublin and Brest had solidified and the Calvinists had mostly been put down.

The high water mark for Polish Protestantism was 1560-1590, by the time this graph is relevant, Protestantism was already largely defeated.

Despite the heroic death of Wladislaw III in the Crusade of Varna, the Order spoiled enthusiasm for Crusading for the Poles

The limits of power of the bishops reflect a standoff won by the king & civic magistrate before the reformation.

Also note how large eastern dioceses are.

The annexation of Galicia and then the Union with Lithuania made 40% of the PLC Orthodox. The newly founded Moscow Patriarch made some essentially autocephalous clergy nervous, resulting in their support for Brest.

However the Cossack parishioners greatly disliked this move.

The “Tulmut of Thorn” gave Poland extremely negative international press in Protestant Europe and especially German Lutheran states. Despite being a main instigator in facilitating the Knights’ conversion, the tension was becoming sectarian, ethnic, and eventually, fatal.

The Calvinist represented the biggest reformed tendency amongst Poles themselves. They even obtained Sejm majority in the mid to late 1500’s and Calvinist stress on vernacular assisted Poland’s cultural Golden Age. The clergy were reduced, but they were the King’s unremovable men

And thanks to the alliance of the King and his bishops, as well as the Uniate project, “Polish Geneva” was not something the nobles were able to obtain. Their steam ran out, and they had the reformation’s problem of splintering churches. Split with Moravians, Unitarian heresies.

Four and a half page overview of Jewish divisions in Poland. Karaites are the longest lasting, predominantly Khazar survivals and Litvak heretics. Jews assist Calvinism in Poland (lol).

The stories of the Hasidim, Zevi and Frank.

Polish Catholicism survived despite dipping into the plurality at points because it, unlike the Protestants, was united. Protestants couldn’t bring themselves into decades long “coalitions against Rome.”

In addition there is the respected royal prerogative’s “stick and carrot.l

The nobility breakdown, the peasantry had been reduced to serfdom, and few freeholders were left by the late 15th century. The Jews became an estate of Poland all by themselves in a mostly victorious competition with the burghers.

The Nobility were granted land tax exemption under Louis of Anjou, and as a result rapidly ate the peasant holdings, they legalized their monopoly in the Sejm and cultivated a anti-guild relationship with the Jews. Nobles were 7-10% of population only Spain is close in figures.

The “polification” of the Lithuanian elites.

Prince Radziwill as a high noble could stand almost as a separate king, he had every agency he wanted, and even dropped Roman Catholicism for Calvinism for good measure.

Ultimately though he was in no position to resist Lublin.

Another major reason for the failure of the reformation is that the nobles were already the only ones who could become bishops, and individual bishoprics held the most per individual. Beyond Sejm seats and revenues they were huge prizes to other families see Radzwill’s cardinal ^

The division of Polish nobility reveals that few among the nobility themselves held significant amounts of land in effect this meant the free holding peasants and burghers were pushed into serfdom by Polish Quixotes, who still voted and carried wooden swords with grey hare cloaks

The Polish peasant was not only a serf, he was practically a separate ethnic group. Even the lowest hidalgo, living in a wooden shack with a coat of arms and working a serf’s labour was above them. This is why the US study of Polish peasantry was 5 volumes.

The lower nobles, however, were deathly defensive of their status, and the language of noble “equality” was codified into law. This is the equivalent to the army of striver shills that maintain American structures of power without ever seeing it themselves.

The nobility that mattered, however, dropped such pretensions of equality out of earshot from the petty nobility. They used royal Latin names once reserved for only the king, for themselves in personal documents. Massive manipulation of the minor nobles psychology.

This all lead to a steady decline in the once world renowned Polish education, where any man from Europe could come to Poland who spoke Latin and get by “as if in his own country.” The 18th century vogue of French splintered the international linguistic system of 1500’s Europe

The Vistula trade route was the antebellum economy of Europe, the massive plantations of the nobles was facilitating the biggest boom in aristocratic high culture ever seen in Poland. The Golden Age was an agricultural age, and the mood is best shown in the fourth picture.

But the gaiety of 16th century Danzig slowly gave way to a near total bankruptcy, the Vistula was no longer a river of Gold for Golden wheat.

Exporting grain and other food staples was the cornerstone of the Polish economy.

The nobility’s expansion of power and privileges over serfs were done in the name of driving up the grain exports to Western Europe, large estates ate up any land to achieve the goal of exports, as the legal rights of the peasantry, even to desert to the city, evaporated.

The Northern Wars with Sweden caused near total devastation of Polish crops from the 30 years war to Karl XII, but the Vistula trade became an agricultural Detroit (or more accurately Mississippi Delta) because of the agricultural boom in the drained marshes of Western Europe.

The city, unlike the HRE, or even European Muscovy/Novgorod, was a minor feature of medieval Poland, and the burghers, while a separate estate by virtue of German influence, were not highly valued in Poland, they were held in contempt by the nobility except German Royal Prussia.

The nobility sided with the Jews over native burghers, (who were actually German in several cities,) allowing the Jews to function as H1B Dravidians function today. They set up competing guilds that were more at mercy of the high families’ will evaporating city cohesion.

Warsaw became capital of the Vistula trade and then of Poland itself. Warsaw followed the fortunes of the giant extraction economy Poland had become, its magnificence went beyond Krakow in the good times.

Most everything described is lost now.

But Warsaw’s development followed Poland’s oligarchical power structure. Private wards, which were in fact separate tax exempt cities, were constructed by the chief land owners and politicians of the state. Warsaw was literally a contrast of ghetto and glamor in a familiar way.

All of this, while the interior completely crumbled beyond repair. The wars took their tolls, but the economic structure of Poland couldn’t readjust after the implosion of its exports and fracturing of its city commercial class, all interior cities were reduced to urban wasteland

@borpzoi @NMM20c @hansof20 @myth20c_adam

I feel these pages and the last three chapters are relevant to Greer and collapse, you have huge parallels in how the old polish nobility treated the peasantry and burghers, and foreign guilds they built up to bring them down.

@borpzoi @NMM20c @hansof20 @myth20c_adam Also the fact that these sycophantic “nobles” surrounded them in cities and cheered them on to an illusionary social benefit, participating in fake elections senior nobility had already purchased well in advance, as the hildagos are relentlessly mocked behind their backs.

The general layout of the Sejm and the Sejmniki’s nominal duties and structural function within the framework of the Polish constitution.

The Polish electorate was always essentially a legalized miniature skirmish between nobles, who elected a King with curtailed powers in relation to the magnates. While not exactly a puppet, the show to elect a king was always a bigger spectacle than what the king really did.

Important page. Poland had its own PIPAC to fund its agenda in the Sejm to pay off Senators for favor against burghers. This fed into itself because of the unique financial privileges of that estate solidifying patronage networks between the Polish Nobles and the Jews.

The right to resist was catastrophically used to settle scores amongst the Polish oligarchy, but the Rokosz against the King completely castrated royal prerogative. Now no one “led” the PLC. Structurally this was far worse than Khmelnytsky’s rebellion for the state. It was LEGAL.

The Liberum Veto became the total undoing of any national unity, the king humiliated, the Sejm also proved paralyzed to the perpetual infighting of the virtually independent magistrates of the oligarchy.

Russia basically crippled Polish foreign policy by simply buying sejmniki.

In a situation familiar to Americans or Russians of the 90’s, Poland was a state of near constant litigation, with confusing and overlapping jurisdictions, and yet it never seemed to apply to the people violating the law the most, even when explicitly condemned.

The decay of Polish nobility into complete serf extraction economy was condemned by both sides of the religious split. The Reformers wanted a national church in a republic.

Fr. Piotr Skagra saw the trajectory of the leaderless state, making a full and public condemnation of it.

After the Union of Lublin, and the birth of the constitutional king, Polish diplomacy slowly deteriorated and decentralized.

Polish magnates began sending private missions on their own behalf, to accomplish their own goals abroad, when Poland was still powerful it didn’t matter.

As the centuries went on, communication networks declined rather than improved. (cue Tom Vanderbilt train article)

The most vital disregard for critical opsec also became something flaunted and a point of pride, even as the pope himself points out how bad the problem is.

Because of this decentralization in the state to conduct a cohesive diplomatic policy, it was slow responding to new threats which it repeatedly discounted, all the while envoys engaged in these Central European University-esque white elephant diplomatic missions that did nothing

The amusing anecdotes of European diplomacy by Golden Age diplomat Christopher Warszewicki in the second photo contrasted with an equally amusing rebuke of Działynski’s mission by Elizabeth I in the third photo.

Lizzy I takes a steamy verbal dump on the Polish government system.

What characterized official missions was at its best an expensive cost sink that produced neutral results, and at its worst, had the religious non-conforming noble diplomats actively conspiring against sitting governments to their own benefit.

In the end, the Jewish estate and the now essentially independent magnates conducted their own diplomatic missions abroad instead of Poland, representing the end of the decentralizing and denationalizing trend in diplomacy

It’s no surprise such a state was unable to find allies

The first elected king, Henry of Valois is a failure, Henry developed a hatred for the Polish nobles who had elected him to keep the Hapsburgs flanked, and yet wanted to put the King in a place firmly beneath noble power.

When given the chance Henry left for France.

While the cultural Polish Golden Age constituted over ahalf century , the political and military peak of the PLC was once again headed by an energetic Hungarian, who wasn’t afraid to fight the nobles.

Bathory was Catholic, and from the Anti Hapsburg non serial killer branch.

Bathory was the only king in Polish Lithuanian history who could get the nobility to pay their taxes to finance truly national projects. He was able to turn the quagmire in Livonia into an offensive war against Ivan the Terrible. Poland was as strong as the borders suggested.

But for his troubles, Barthory was remembered as something of an autocrat himself. He was the sole monarch whose force of character and will drove against the fragmenting forces of the constitutionaly legalized oligarchy. He successes were his own, and soon undone.

Sweden’s path through the Reformation looks a lot like England’s but with a slight twist that looks like if the Stuart’s had become kings of France.

John III, like the English Church before 1649, tried to incorporate Tridentine Reforms into Swedish Lutheranism slowly.

John III’s son, Sigismund, was not only openly Catholic, but had even married a Hapsburg. He was elected king of Poland, but insulted by basically unrestrained nobles.

Before the insurrection of Charles IX and the splintering of the house of Vasa, this was their territory.

An explanation and diagram of the official Jewish estate in
Poland-Lithuania, with additional notes on why they were so targeted in the Khmelnytsky uprising.

The nobility had leant out their land holdings and privileges to Jewish governors, who had to wring money from peasants

The combination of factors between absentee nobles, religious interference, runaway serfs, the mercenary attitude towards hiring soldier for personal feuds, and the way agriculture was squeezed by foreigners in Ukraine was slowly bringing the social situation to a boil.

The dynasty struggle between the two Vasa houses resulted in perpetual confrontation, although Poland was spared destruction of Germany until 1655, when it got to experience its own equivalent to the 30 years war.

Also the battle of Jansa Gora

This is an interesting bit of contention here. Davies maintains that Poland was already too weak to seriously impose Wladyslaw Vasa on Russia for any amount of long duration, the Sejm’s lack of drive, vision or urgency being the main factor, and not the boyars’ resistance.

The rebellion of Khmelnytsky finally brought the consequences of the Union of Lublin to bear, Poland has a far worse “time of troubles” as it is invaded by Russia and the Cossacks, the Swedes, The Transylvanians and on top of this Lubomirski’s Rokosz destroys the monarchy forever

Khmelnytsky’s role in Eastern European and world history. His rebellion set off a series of consequences that destroyed a teetering state with no real leadership. He is the man who gives the name to the breaking of Polish power. But is he just the man to step out from decline?

A very brief attempt at having a Hapsburg aligned Ukrainian King of Poland. Unfortunately for Michael, he was not only ill, but completely disengaged from the troubles in the ongoing “ruin” in Ukraine.

Sobieski, like Michael, was tied to the Polish Southern Frontier by birth, and unlike him animated with fierce energy. His life purpose was war against the now encroaching Turk, who had robbed Podolia, and was threatening Krakow and Lwow.

Sobieski, however, delayed attacking in the Balkans, because he was himself elected by the French interests in Poland. But the real interests of the states pulled the alliance apart, in Louis case the humiliation of the Hapsburgs, and in Sobieski’s it was to check the Ottomans.

Sobieski writes about the siege of Vienna and its aftermath.

Despite this famous victory, Sobieski’s reign did not break the trend in increasing the powerlessness of the monarchy in civil affairs. In contrast, Sobieski’s wars against the Ottomans destroyed the royal exchequer.

“They don’t listen to me when I’m alive, so why should they obey my wishes when I’m dead?”

The military success of Sobieski contrast harshly with his civil failures.

Also a note on the Stuart-Sobieski “pretenders”

The next Dynasty in Polish history is remembered as the most pathetic, the nadir of 100 years of decline that started in the Vasa age.

The Saxon electors became kings of Poland to counter a growing Prussia, and they struck a Russian alliance. Poland was a protectorate

The king, his sponsors, and the Petersburg bought nobility had no actual ties to Poland the country beyond fiscal holdings.

A result was that most action in the Great Northern War and Seven years War took place in Polish territory. Exacerbating rural and urban desolation.

Poland’s export market had completely disappeared, its cities devoid of factories, racked by sporadic ethnic violence and urban decay of the Vistula Golden Age.

It’s political class were foreigners or foreign bought. They were simultaneously eternally underwater and serf drivers

Thus began the agony of Poland. Poland was now something to be liquidated, it’s Saxon puppets were not in a position to be viable after the seven years war. All surrounding parties agreed that the continued question of Poland destabilized regional politics by being left alone.

Poniatowsky’s election precedented the to late birth of Polish nationalism, because despite with the discussion it’s partition, internal chaos seemed to be worsening. The Radziwills, Lithuanian enemies of the king, capitalized on massive ethnic upheavals in the now dead cities.

What we understand as a Polish nationalism was born from these ethnic and legal humiliations, the old Poland was quickly dying, the new Poland was illegal, belligerent, and was birthed and lived in the underground. Despite changing attitudes, the state was too weak and too late.

It’s worth remembering, in this time, the professional military in Poland at first started declining by stacking its numbers with officers and bureaucrats who rose in ratio to actual soldiers. By the time of the partitions, Poland was immobilized. Militias were formed to resist.

But militias were no replacement for the military. The Russian army, seasoned by its campaigns against the Ottoman Empire, Prussia, and Pugachev had no qualms in suppressing an insurrection that lacked coordination. Poland had died just in time for being Polish to mean something.

The parting words from the last King, who, at the last hour, threw his lot in with the new Poland and paid the price.