(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

Royal councillors, alarmed by the progress of ordinary nobles in carving out their liberties, seized the opportunity of John Albert’s death to secure a whip-hand. At Mielnik, in November t 50Г, they warned his brother, Alexander, ruling in Lithuania, that they would elect him king only if they themselves received the right to determine the Senate’s membership and appoint to lesser offices of state. Should the king refuse to follow policies which they were to propose, he would forfeit their obedience. Alexander, distracted by war with Muscovy, agreed - only to turn the tables at the Sejm which met in Radom in 1505. Many officials simply found it unacceptable to take orders from a senatorial council whose membership they mistrusted. The king used the resentments generated by the senators’ self-seeking misrule to rally the szlachta behind the statute known as ‘Nihil Novi’, ‘Nothing New’: ‘We have hereby affirmed for all time to come that nothing new may be enacted by Us and our Successors save by the common consent of the senators and the envoys of the constituencies.’ The place of the gentry within the parliamentary system was confirmed, as a check on the Senate. ‘Nihil Novi’ laid the cornerstone of szlachta freedoms for almost three centuries. The Mielnik concessions became a dead letter. Even so, it was not until the 1550s that the open nomination by great lords and royal dignitaries of envoys supposedly mandated by the sejmiki ceased.

The king had to work within the limitations imposed by the szlachta. Sigismund I was able to resume much alienated royal domain by more careful administration. He extended the range of customs duties, albeit at the cost of extensive szlachta exemptions. In the late 15 x0s, he was able to reform the currency. His actions lay within the acknowledged royal prerogative and could rely on wider noble support. It was otherwise when kings attempted policies which threatened noble interests directly. Sigismund I’s hopes of commuting the obligation to serve in the pospolitc ruszenie to a regular cash levy were rebuffed. The election by the Senate-dominated Sejm of 1529-30 of his nine-year-old son, Sigismund Augustus, provoked such an outcry among the szlachta that the Sejm of February 1530 banned future royal elections vivente rege - during the reigning monarch's lifetime. Sigismund I’s second wife, Bona, daughter of Gian Galeazzo Sforza of Milan, was widely suspected to be behind Sigismund Augustus’ premature elevation. As a foreigner, a woman and a representative of a wholly different political tradition, she attracted much suspicion during the reigns of her husband and son, whose clear preference for working with the lords of the Senate only heightened fears of kingly absolutism. The scandalously damaging affront to royal authority in 1537, when the pospolite rnszenie, assembled near Lwow for a punitive expedition into Moldavia, went on strike, threatened royal ministers and had to be sent home, demonstrated just what monarchs could expect if they failed to show due regard for noble sensibilities (or failed to control mischief-making senators behind the scenes). In pursuing his ambitious Baltic policies, Sigismund II Augustus had to rely on the dangerous expedient of creating facts and then hoping that the Sejm would vote the funds. It did not always do so.

Their organization and military muscle gave the lesser nobility, or ‘ordo equester’ as its more learned members styled themselves, a major advantage over other social groupings. In the course of the fifteenth century, most of the szlachta’s privileges were extended to the clergy. Senior Church positions were largely reserved for the nobility. A community of interest was produced which constant quarrels over tithe and jurisdiction shook, but could not undermine. The periodic alignments of king and szlachta prevented the emergence of a legally distinct higher nobility (seats in the Senate were not hereditary, but came only through specific offices) and, instead, helped give birth to a fiction of equality among all nobles -but which more canny over-mighty subjects learned to manipulate to their own advantage. Kings could, at best, manoeuvre between noble groupings.