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

It was middling and great nobles, those wealthy enough to own at least one or two villages with good access to ports and navigable rivers (principally the Vistula and its tributaries), who benefited most from the exports of raw materials, fuelled by growing demand from western and Mediterranean Europe. It is unlikely that more than 2.5 per cent of total Polish grain production was exported, even at its height at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most grain was sold on the internal market. But this, coupled with the extension of seigneurial demesne and their growing powers over the peasantry, the lack of strong central government, the remarkably peaceful conditions which prevailed in most of Poland proper (that is, excluding the Rus’ territories exposed to Tatar incursions), all induced a sense of well-being, prosperity and self-confidence, which in popular szlachta mythology was to mark out the sixteenth century as a kind of Golden Age. The principal beneficiary, in material terms, was the port of Danzig, through which the great bulk of Polish exports went. Indeed, Danzig, dealing mainly with Dutch traders from Amsterdam, may have accounted for some 70 per cent of the Baltic grain trade as a whole. The city had a network of agents buying up, arranging credit and taking orders for luxury goods throughout much of the Crown. Most nobles however, showed little interest in commerce or maritime ventures per sc: they were quite content for the world’s merchants to beat a path (as they saw it) to their farms and demesnes. All they had to do was to squeeze more out of their peasants. And if grain could not be sold, timber and cattle could be.

During the reign of Sigismund I, the tensions within the noble estate took on more definite contours with demands by the lesser nobility for ‘Executio TegunT, the ‘Execution of the Laws’, or full implementation of old laws supposedly designed to protect the szlachta. As a bonus, the same laws allowed them to strengthen their own position vis-a-vis non-nobles. The movement waxed and waned throughout the sixteenth century, to reach a sustained crescendo during the 1550s and 1560s. The starting point was legislation enacted by the Sejm of 1504, insisting that all alienations and pledging of royal demesne should cease; the competence of the great offices of state was more distinctly defined and the first steps were taken against multiple office-holding by individuals. A prominent demand was that the king should provide for the defence of the realm out of his own resources, if necessary by resuming royal demesne alienated to great magnates and royal creditors. This ought, conveniently, to spare the szlachta the burdens of taxation. These restrictions on alienation of demesne and multiple office grants (the so-called incompatibilia) aimed to curb the ability of royal councillors to enrich themselves and accumulate excessive political influence.

Particularly in its early phases, ‘Executio Legum’ was driven, as much as anything else, by in-fighting among the great nobles themselves - as individuals such as bishop Jan Laski, chancellor of the Crown after 1503, sought to do down their rivals and to bolster their own position by playing to the szlachta gallery. Notionally, as much as one-fifth of the Crown and Lithuania counted as the Jagiellonians’ direct patrimony. Jagiello, almost from the moment he was chosen king, began alienations on a huge scale, to win political support and to raise cash for his wars. There was some justification for szlachta suspicions of misuse of their monies. They rightly suspected that their grants of the extraordinary land tax, the pobor, were actually spent on ends other than military (barely 10 per cent of the 1485-6 military subsidy was spent on troops; most of the rest went on court and administrative outlays). On the other hand, the diversion of such funds testified to the parlous state of the royal finances.