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

The reforms of the Execution movement proved inadequate. Kings felt they alone should decide what use they made of royal domain lands. The szlachta acknowledged that they (or their peasants) would pay extraordinary taxes to deal with emergencies; mainly the traditional land tax, the pohor; they were ready to pay them at higher rates; they were even prepared to accept wholly new imposts - even the highly ‘demeaning’ poll tax. But supply was rarely voted for more than twelve months at a time. In 1620, in anticipation of a Turkish invasion, the Sejm voted to increase the regular army from 1 2,000 to some 60,000 men - impressive by the standards of the time, but in 1622 scaled back to under 1 2,000. Such fluctuations were all too characteristic. Recruitment and pay inevitably lagged. Signal victories such as Kircholm over the Swedes in 1605 or Cudnow over the Russians in г660 went to waste as troops mutinied over arrears. A numerous soldatesca emerged, plundering its own taxpayers in order to survive. Kings, magnates, officers had to dig deep into their own pockets to keep troops in being and supplement them with their own private retinues. The feudal levy of the nobility, the pospolite ruszenie, usually a disastrous encumbrance, remained a significant feature of the military panoply well into the eighteenth century; if nothing else, it served as a rhetorical device which allowed the nobility to claim they were ready to sacrifice their lives and fortunes for their country, which required no other substantial form of military defence.

The Commonwealth was more a cumbersome federation than a unified state. The great magnate families who dominated Lithuania built on the compromises of the t 569 Union of Lublin to preserve a distinct political identity, even as cultural and linguistic differences crumbled. The revised codification of common law of 1588, the ‘Third Lithuanian Statute’, even contravened the Union of Lublin in barring those born outside the Grand Duchy from office -although as wide-scale Polish settlement proceeded, and as ‘Lithuanian’/‘Polish’ magnates acquired land and positions across the Commonwealth, such restrictions became meaningless. In 1673, the Lithuanian magnates secured approval for every third Sejm to meet in Grodno, in Lithuania. Yet at the Election Sejm of 1697, the mass of Lithuanian gentry dealt a blow to magnate hegemony by extending the Crown’s restrictions on multiple office-holding to the Grand Duchy. The adoption by that Sejm of Polish, in place of a hybridized Belarusian, as the Grand Duchy’s official chancery language marked the progress of cultural unification. The origin myth of a common, ‘Sarmatian’ ancestry, assiduously propagated by humanist writers, allowed very different groups to merge their identities into a wider whole - provided they were nobles. To the disgust of later nationalists, Lithuanians and Kuteni, or Rusini (nowadays, Belarusians and Ukrainians) could regard themselves as ‘Poles’ because they were also ‘Sarmatians’.