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

т6 A hit Polish noble (szlachcic); sketch (1776) by Jean-Pierre Norblin (1745 — 18^0). Norblin was active in Poland 7774-1804, benefiting especially from the patronage of the Czartoryski family.

warlords, regarding the troops as their own private armies. The exactions of Swedish, Saxon and Russian forces, famine and plague compounded the miseries - as bad as anything suffered during the ‘Deluge’. The devastation of the towns, the destruction of schools and churches plunged literary and cultural life into a frozen torpor.

Augustus’ quartering of Saxon troops in Poland provoked the szlachta in November 1715 to form the Confederacy of Tarnogrod in defence of its liberties. The more disciplined Saxons might have crushed the movement, had not Russian diplomats, backed by-Russian arms, brokered a settlement profitable to Peter. The treaty of Warsaw of November 1716 gave Poland new constitutional and fiscal machinery. Most Saxon troops were to be evacuated. The army was fixed at 24,000 units of pay (in real terms, perhaps half that number of men) drawn from specified, permanent revenues -no longer under the control of the sejmiki. The troops themselves were dislocated across specific crown estates. A permanent budget was thus established - to support a pitifully small force utterly incapable of resisting any invader. The so-called ‘Silent Sejm’ of i February 17 Г7 confirmed the deal, without debate, in a single day. The Commonwealth had been reduced to a de facto Russian protectorate. The threat of armed Russian intervention, encouraged by Peter’s many clients in Poland, frustrated all attempts which Augustus was to make to restore his freedom of action. That his son was to succeed him would owe nothing to the king’s efforts - it, too, would owe everything to Russia.

Above all the nobility wanted their liberties and freedoms preserved. Ever since the arrival of the Vasas on the Polish throne, almost every monarch seemed to have been plotting to destroy their privileges. The most recent and greatest threat had come from Augustus II and it had been checked. The Great Northern War was a traumatic, destructive event from which the Commonwealth had gained nothing - but it had, at least, emerged with its freedoms intact. Poland owed its physical survival above all to the protection of Divine Providence. The prime task of the nobility was to ensure that it maintained a perpetual vigilance against the monarchy, the sole real threat to its position.

Augustus 11 died in February 1733. An emotional reaction against foreign rulers and their dubious designs swept the country. A ‘Piast’, supposedly more attuned to the libertarian spirit of the nobility, was waiting in the wings - none other than the Stanislaw Leszczynski pushed onto a temporary throne almost thirty years previously by Charles XII. In exile, his daughter, Marie, had in 1726 won the European marriage sweepstake by becoming bride to Louis XV of France. Around 13,000 nobles, confident of French support, enthusiastically elected Leszczynski in September 1733. But Russia and its Austrian allv had decided that continued Wertin

rule in Poland was preferable to that of the king of Prance’s father-in-law. Russia was anxious to maintain its new pre-eminence not only in Poland, but in fractious Sweden, a shadow of its old self. Leszczynski was too closely associated with the adventure of Charles Xll to be acceptable in St Petersburg. Once Frederick Augustus 11 of Saxony promised to preserve the Polish constitution, Vienna and Petersburg went to war on his behalf. In December T733, 4,000 nobles, ‘protected’ by Russian troops, elected him King Augustus 111. Russian arms ensured his triumph. In Italy and on the Rhine, the French secured what they wanted from this War of the Polish Succession. In October 1735 the Preliminaries of Vienna delivered Austria’s satellite duchy of Lorraine to France. Leszczynski would be allowed to rule over it as nominal duke; on his death, it would pass to France; meanwhile, he could keep his title, king of Poland. No one consulted the Poles about the terms -there was little point.