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Poland The Government of Poland-Lithuania
In other respects as well, the distinctive features of
Jagiellonian Poland ran against the historical trends of
early
modern Europe. Not the least of those features was its
singular
governmental structure and practice. In an era that
favored the
steady accumulation of power within the hands of European
monarchs, Poland-Lithuania developed a markedly
decentralized
system dominated by a landed aristocracy that kept royal
authority firmly in check. The Polish nobility, or
szlachta, enjoyed the considerable benefits of
landownership and control over the labor of the peasantry.
The
szlachta included 7 to 10 percent of the
population,
making it a very large noble class by European standards.
The
nobility manifested an impressive group solidarity in
spite of
great individual differences in wealth and standing. Over
time,
the gentry induced a series of royal concessions and
guarantees
that vested the noble parliament, or Sejm, with decisive
control
over most aspects of statecraft, including exclusive
rights to
the making of laws. The Sejm operated on the principle of
unanimous consent, regarding each noble as irreducibly
sovereign.
In a further safeguard of minority rights, Polish usage
sanctioned the right of a group of gentry to form a
confederation, which in effect constituted an uprising
aimed at
redress of grievances. The nobility also possessed the
crucial
right to elect the monarch, although the Jagiellons were
in
practice a hereditary ruling house in all but the formal
sense.
The prestige of the Jagiellons and the certainty of their
succession supplied an element of cohesion that tempered
the
disruptive forces built into the state system.
In retrospect historians frequently have derided the
idiosyneratic, delicate governmental mechanism of PolandLithuania as a recipe for anarchy. Although its eventual
breakdown contributed greatly to the loss of independence
in the
eighteenth century, the system worked reasonably well for
200
years while fostering a spirit of civic liberality
unmatched in
the Europe of its day. The host of legal protections that
the
nobility enacted for itself prefigured the rights
generally
accorded the citizens of modern democracies, and the
memory of
the "golden freedoms" of Poland-Lithuania is an important
part of
the Poles' present-day sense of their tradition of
liberty. On
the other hand, the exclusion of the lower nobility from
most of
those protections caused serious resentment among that
largely
impoverished class, and the aristocracy passed laws in the
early
sixteenth century that made the peasants virtual slaves to
the
flourishing agricultural enterprises.
Data as of October 1992
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