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

Even in victory, the szlachta were divided over these foreign ventures. The Sejm refused to endorse Stefan Batory’s plans for resuming the Russian war in 1584 and to many, his unexpected death in December 1586 was a relief. His Vasa successors, Sigismund III and Wladyslaw IV (1632-48) looked to Habsburg support, which they hoped would help clinch their plans for hereditary rule in Poland - and/or make good their claims against Sweden. Sigismund III, son of John III of Sweden and Sigismund Augustus’ formidable sister Catherine, had been brought up a staunch Catholic in a Lutheran country. Elected king of Poland in 1587, he succeeded in Sweden as hereditary king in 1597, to be deposed within two years in favour of his uncle, the future Charles IX. Fishing for international support, the Vasas followed Batory in making concessions to the Hohenzollerns over Ducal Prussia, until in 1618 Sigismund III assigned the duchy’s reversion to the collateral Brandenburg line.

The Vasas’ Swedish preoccupations brought a chain of misfortunes on Poland-Lithuania. The Poles had elected Sigismund III partly with the expectation of ‘recovering’ Estonia, filched, as they saw it, by the Swedes during the wars with Ivan the Terrible. Sigismund only agreed to the transfer in 1600, after his dethronement in Sweden. Poland ground itself down in an unavailing effort to expel the Swedes. After 1626, Gustavus Adolphus carried the war into Polish Prussia. The six-year truce of Altmark of 1629 left Riga and the bulk of Livonia in Swedish hands and northern Poland devastated. Wladyslaw IV modernized the army and then found the szlachta would not let him use it. In 1635 they insisted, over the king’s objections, on extending the truce for another sixteen years.

A frustrated Wladyslaw looked to the Cossacks of the Ukraine. Sigismund Augustus had used these lawless frontiersmen as a counterforce to the perpetual Tatar raids. Batory had made use of their sterling infantry. In their stronghold of Sicz, on the lower Dnieper, they elected their own military leader, or hetman, and their own army council. They fought the Tatars; they raided the Black Sea littoral. In 16 14 they attacked Trebizond and Sinope; in 1615, they burned the suburbs of Constantinople. For all their reassurances to the Porte, Polish kings were simply unable to control these restless fighters. In an effort to curb their destabilizing raids, the Sejm had agreed to ‘register’ and pay those in the Commonwealth’s direct military service, thereby removing the economic need for such activities. This, however, accounted for only a fraction of those who regarded themselves as Cossacks. The szlachta spurned the aspirations of those on the register, let alone those excluded from it, to be counted as nobles. The drive to exploit the fertile soils of the Ukraine, ‘Poland’s Indies’, and the systematic imposition of labour-services provoked a series of uprisings, suppressed with increasing difficulty. After the defeat of the 1637 rising, the Cossacks were formally degraded to ‘a commonality of peasants’, save for a register of 6,000.

This treatment of a disaffected martial element was ill-considered, if understandable in the context of the times. Flushed with successes against Muscovy and the Porte, the szlachta were reluctant to admit that they owed much to the support of the Cossacks - at Khotin, in 1621, there were at least 20,000 of them, the bulk of the rank-and-file of the Commonwealth’s army. Those petty nobles who chose to retain their religion, especially in the surroundings of Kiev and the trans-Dnieper territories, where polonization had made nothing like the progress it had further west, were indeed looked down on as second-rate citizens. There seemed little point, amid a vigorous Catholic Reformation, in according truly equal rights to the schismatics of Orthodoxy, particularly when the most truly powerful landowners had gone over to Catholicism. In the vigorous colonization drives which they pursued in the early decades of the century, sugh magnates preferred to give posts of responsibility to Polish, Catholic nobles, often incomers, rather than to their ‘lesser’ Orthodox confreres. These thus lost out twice over: by increasing exclusion from the offices of state and also by exclusion from the private enterprise which marked these territories around the middle and lower Dnieper. To many of the petty nobles of the area, descendants of the boyar servitors of the Rus’ princes, the newcomers brought alien ways, political oppression, violence and instability, not least in the constant feuding between the great magnates who were trying to grab as much land as they could in the region and whom the monarchy was powerless to restrain.