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

When the Turks finally attacked Austria and besieged Vienna in 1683, Sobieski appreciated that he could recover lost territories only by alliance with the Habsburgs. The victory which the combined Polish and Imperialist forces won under his command at Vienna, on iz September 1683, was - for Poland and its king - a mirage. Crucified by domestic politics, Sobieski was always in a position of weakness - made only worse by relations with Muscovy. Between 1676 and 1681, Tsar Feodor’s government actually went to war against the Turks in an unsuccessful bid to push them from the right-bank Ukraine and impose Russian suzerainty. The Russians even warned that, unless the Poles finally agreed to convert the Andrusovo armistice into a definitive peace, they would realign with the Turks. The Poles had little choice but to give way. The treaty of Moscow of 6 May 1686 finally confirmed Andrusovo. Kiev was definitively lost. Moreover, the Russians secured the role of protectors of the position of the Commonwealth’s Orthodox - in effect, giving the tsars the right to intervene in Poland’s domestic affairs. For Sobieski, it was one of the worst humiliations of his reign - but so dire was Poland’s situation, that he had no option but to ratify the treaty. At least it obviated a Russian invasion, but Moscow’s ineffectual campaigns against the Crimean Tatars brought Poland no direct benefits. Polish military efforts for the rest of the war were largely restricted to unhappy thrusts into Moldavia. Their expeditions helped weaken Turkish resistance in the Balkans, but it was primarily thanks to Imperialist successes that the Poles finally regained Kamieniec, Podole and the right-bank Ukraine at the peace of Carlowitz in January 1699 -after Sobieski’s death.

Sobieski sought solace during his last years in accumulating a massive private fortune and beautifying his private residences. He died on 17 June T696, in his beloved palace of Wilanow, outside Warsaw, almost as despised as his two predecessors. The rivalries and unpopularity of his sons doomed their bids for the throne. The energy of the Wettin elector, Frederick Augustus I of Saxony, his cynical conversion from Lutheranism to Catholicism and his paying off of the army’s arrears, assured him of the throne over his dithering French rival, the prince of Bourbon-Conti.

The new king, hereditary ruler of the wealthiest state of the Holy

Roman Empire, schemed to weld Saxony and Poland into a new northern power. Along with the young tsar Peter 1, he envisaged relieving the teenage Charles XII of Sweden’s Baltic empire. Swedish Livonia would become a Wettin principality. Augustus invaded Livonia in February 1700, using Saxon troops stationed in Lithuania supposedly to keep the peace between the Sapiehas and their opponents. In November 2700, the Sapiehas were resoundingly defeated by their rivals, but the hopes that Augustus had of exploiting their discomfiture were dashed by his own troops’ miserable performance against the Swedes and the crushing rout of the Russian army at Narva by Charles XII in the same month. The Poles’ attempts to persuade Charles that Augustus’ attack was nothing to do with them found no sympathy. For five years, Charles pursued Augustus, hoping to terrorize the Poles onto his side. In January 1704, Charles even stage-managed the election, by a rump of a few hundred szlachta, of his own puppet king, Stanislaw Leszczynski. Much of the time, Charles was fighting Saxon or Russian, rather than Polish troops, many of whom were kept waiting in the wings, living off the land, while their commanders, the hetmani, awaited the outcome of the conflict. Rival confederacies supported the two kings, and once more civil war took hold.

Only in 1706 did Charles judge the international situation right to strike Saxony itself and force Augustus to abdicate as king of Poland. He was reinstated by grace and favour of Peter the Great, following the Swedish disaster at Poltava in July 1709. While Charles had bogged himself down in Poland, Peter had rebuilt Russia’s army. After Poltava, he used it to impose his protectorate over Poland, which was to remain a liberty-addicted, unreformed Commonwealth, a massive security buffer along Russia’s western border. Peter was satisfied with what he extracted from Sweden at Nystad in 172 r: Karelia, Ingria, Estonia and, most valuable of all, Livonia - once Poland’s own. The Rzeczpospolita counted for so little that it did not even participate in the peace talks.

Throughout the war, extra-parliamentary assemblies struggled to maintain some kind of army and raise some kind of taxation. The ‘General Assembly’ of 1710 optimistically voted an army 64,000 strong. In fact, supply depended on a combination of looting and ad hoc decisions by local sejmiki. The hetmani acted as regional