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Poland Decay of the Commonwealth
Before another 100 years had elapsed, Poland-Lithuania
had
virtually ceased to function as a coherent and genuinely
independent state. The commonwealth's last martial triumph
occurred in 1683 when King Jan Sobieski drove the Turks
from the
gates of Vienna with a cavalry charge. Poland's important
role in
aiding the European alliance to roll back the Ottoman
Empire was
rewarded with territory in western Ukraine by the Treaty
of
Karlowicz (1699). Nonetheless, this isolated success did
little
to mask the internal weakness and paralysis of the PolishLithuanian political system. For the next quarter century,
Poland
was often a pawn in Russia's campaigns against other
powers.
Augustus II of Saxony (1697-1733), who succeeded Jan
Sobieski,
involved Poland in Peter the Great's war with Sweden,
incurring
another round of invasion and devastation by the Swedes
between
1704 and 1710.
In the eighteenth century, the powers of the monarchy
and the
central administration became purely trivial. Kings were
denied
permission to provide for the elementary requirements of
defense
and finance, and aristocratic clans made treaties directly
with
foreign sovereigns. Attempts at reform were stymied by the
determination of the szlachta to preserve their
"golden
freedoms" as well as the rule of unanimity in the Sejm,
where any
deputy could exercise his veto right to disrupt the
parliament
and nullify its work. Because of the chaos sown by the
veto
provision, under Augustus III (1733-63) only one of
thirteen Sejm
sessions ran to an orderly adjournment.
Unlike Spain and Sweden, great powers that were allowed
to
settle peacefully into secondary status at the periphery
of
Europe at the end of their time of glory, Poland endured
its
decline at the strategic crossroads of the continent.
Lacking
central leadership and impotent in foreign relations,
PolandLithuania became a chattel of the ambitious kingdoms that
surrounded it, an immense but feeble buffer state. During
the
reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725), the commonwealth
fell under
the dominance of Russia, and by the middle of the
eighteenth
century Poland-Lithuania had been made a virtual
protectorate of
its eastern neighbor, retaining only the theoretical right
to
self-rule.
Data as of October 1992
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