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

During the wars, John Casimir and his queen, Louise-Marie de Gonzague, made no secret of their hopes of strengthening royal power. Though they dallied with the thought of reforming the veto, their attention focused on securing the succession. The childless couple looked above all to Louis XIV of France. The Great Conde; his son, the duke of Enghien; the French client Philip Wilhelm, duke of Neuburg - all were seriously considered. Once the immediate pressures of the ‘Deluge’ eased, the king and queen pushed for election in the king’s own lifetime. The Polish nobility and Poland’s neighbours were equally alarmed. The court’s efforts to destroy its chief opponent, Jerzy Lubomirski, provoked rebellion. Its defeat at Mqtwy on 12 July 1666 cost the royal army 4,000 casualties; the king barely escaped with his life. Only Lubomirski’s own death the following year put an end to his plotting, but his memory lived on to the end of the Commonwealth - to most, an exemplary defender of noble liberties against royal absolutism. The embattled John Casimir abdicated on 16 September 1668, to die in France in 1672.

Even at John Casimir’s election, prognosticators saw in his Latin title Toanncs Casimirus Rex’ the legend Tnitium Calamitatum Regni’ - the beginning of the calamities of the realm. The wars devastated huge swaths of the Commonwealth, inflicting damage to match anything in the Germany of the Thirty Years War. The szlachta greeted with suspicion the king’s vow in April 1656 to alleviate the oppressions of the common people - the peasantry and townsmen fighting so vigorously in the guerrilla war. Pressures on the peasantry intensified as landlords tried to reconstruct their devastated properties; the ruined towns became an even feebler political and economic force.

The szlachta had borne the brunt of Khmel’nytskyi’s fury. So too had their proteges, the Jews, who dominated the commerce of Ukrainian settlements, in the wake of the szlachta's colonization drives. Though the figures remain hotly disputed, up to 10,000 Jews may have perished during the Cossack rebellion; many more would have been massacred without the protection of magnate militias. However, amid the decay of commercial and urban life, the Jews, unconstrained by medieval guild regulations, more entrepreneurial, and actively encouraged by their noble patrons, were able to consolidate and expand their already strong position in Polish commercial life, particularly in the smaller townships. Even in the many royal towns which forbade Jewish settlement, the Christian guilds found themselves frequently on the defensive, as Jewish traders settled in suburbs or noble-owned enclaves beyond municipal jurisdiction. Even in the Polish Ukraine, the Jews were rapidly restored. Nowhere in Europe were there so many Jews as in Poland-l.ithuania (around a million by the 1770s). But their dominance of much of commercial and economic life, their distinctive faith and culture, also gave rise to resentment, envy and hatreds which have never fully been excised.

The wars eroded Poland’s toleration, even if they did not destroy

Map 4 The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

it. The Swedish Lutheran and Russian Orthodox invasions were seen as a religious war. Protestants were convenient scapegoats. Although the treaty of Oliva safeguarded continued public Lutheran worship in Polish Prussia, elsewhere it was a different tale. Most great magnates had long converted to Catholicism -Boguslaw Radziwill, the last great Calvinist patron, died in T669. And although mainstream Protestantism was too deeply rooted to be eradicated, its lesser fringes could be picked off. After all, the Warsaw Confederacy of 1573 had been a compromise, a grudging safety valve to prevent civil collapse. The open-ended consensus to preserve peace ‘among those who differ and dispute in religion and rite’ had been matched by no specific commitments towards non-Catholics. The bishops remained overwhelmingly hostile to wider toleration; the vast majority of the szlachta remained Catholic. The 1573 agreement had had only limited effect in preventing sporadic religious violence in the towns. As the network of Jesuit colleges thickened (i t schools in 1599, 46 by 1700, 66 by 1773), as elected kings looked to the Church to provide them with support, so the Counter-Reformation began to take its toll. As early as 1638, the antitrinitarian school and printing-press at Rakow in western Poland had been closed, following charges of blasphemy. Confessional war left little room for mutual tolerance. The 1658 Sejm ordered the exile of all antitrinitarians.