21

Nieszawa

The terms that the Poles had granted to the Prussians were generous, but the rewards were substantial. The incorporation of Royal Prussia transformed the union state by securing control over a substantial swathe of the southern Baltic coast. Possession of Danzig and Elbing was later to galvanize the Polish economy by providing access for Polish grain to the markets of western Europe, which from the early sixteenth century experienced population growth, the development of new financial mechanisms, and, after 1550, stimulation from the influx of silver from the New World. In 1466, however, Poland was mired in economic stagnation. Although the relatively sparsely peopled lands of east central Europe did not suffer as badly as western and southern Europe from the Black Death, Poland was not entirely untouched. Population growth slowed, but its upward trajectory was not reversed, and by the mid fifteenth century the disparity between the density of settlement in Poland and western Europe had eased. There are problems in calculating that population, for the figures vary depending upon the borders used by historians, who have not always escaped the shadow of the anachronistic criteria adopted in Communist Poland, which included Mazovia, Prussia, and even Silesia according to the borders of 1945, and, less anachronistically, Red Ruthenia, although it was no longer part of Poland after 1945. One estimate suggests that the population in the reign of Casimir III (1333–70) reached two million at a density of 8.3 per square kilometre, but it includes Mazovia, whose princes recognized Casimir’s overlordship, but not that of the Polish kingdom, or of Louis of Anjou.¹ Kuklo excludes Silesia, but includes Mazovia and Prussia: the result is an estimated population of 1.25 million in 1000, with a density of five per square kilometre, growing to 2 million (eight per square kilometre) in 1370, and 3.4 million in 1500 at a density of 13, or 6.5 million including the grand duchy, which brings the density of the union state down to 6.²

The population rise before 1350 depended substantially on inward migration, particularly of German settlers, who were offered generous terms and who brought German law—largely Magdeburg or Culm law—with them. German law, with its strong village communities based round the village headman or sołtys—from the German Schulz or Schultheis—was a useful tool for nobles wishing to attract the labour without which their lands were worthless. New settlements of Polish peasants were established on German law, which was also introduced to many—though by no means all—existing villages. By 1333, 300 villages had been established on German law in Wielkopolska, and 280 in Małopolska; over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, 250,000 German migrants settled in Poland.³

The stream was abruptly halted by the Black Death, whose catastrophic effects elsewhere meant that demand for the products of the Polish economy collapsed after 1350. It was not just the supply of migrants that dried up: capital flows were just as abruptly halted, and the Polish economy suffered from a shortage of specie. Population stagnation meant that the internal market could not compensate. These unpromising economic circumstances affected the development of socio-economic structures within Poland, and lay behind the political challenges faced by Jagiełło at Czerwińsk in 1422, and by Casimir at Cerekwica and Nieszawa in 1454. For if a narrow group of magnates—particularly from Małopolska—prospered in the early decades of Jagiellon rule, they did so through the generosity of the needy Jagiellon monarchs, who had pawned, mortgaged, alienated, or donated royal lands to the great lords—mostly from Małopolska—who dominated Polish politics, in return for political support or cash in hand. The practice accelerated in the last years of Jagiełło’s reign, as he alienated villages and estates in an attempt to secure recognition of his sons’ hereditary rights to the throne—one third of all mortgages he issued in Poland were granted between 1424 and 1434—and during the reign of Władysław, who sought to raise money for his crusading ventures through alienations on a massive scale.⁴

Royal supporters benefited substantially. Families such as the Koniecpolskis, Odrowąż, and Kurozwęckis built up huge complexes of royal estates effectively under their control until the unlikely day when the king could redeem his debts. Their control of the key local office of starosta—which was remunerated by the royal estates attached to the post—enabled them to dominate local politics: a glaring example was the tight grip of the Odrowąż over Red Ruthenia. According to Długosz, the fear that Bolesław of Mazovia would not be so generous, and, not feeling bound by the agreements of his predecessors, would seek to reclaim royal lands, ensured that Małopolskan magnates were lukewarm or hostile to the prospect of his becoming king.⁵ Casimir represented less of a threat, but his strong position after his coronationmeant that he was able to reverse the trend in the early years of his reign. The outbreak of war in 1454 saw the problem return, however: if between 1447 and 1455 there were 243 alienations, there were 324 in the four years between 1456 and 1460. Over a quarter (27.7 per cent) of entries in the crown metryka, the chancery archive, between 1447 and 1492 were mortgages on crown estates.⁶

For the recipients, royal land became a vital part of their property holdings and a means of avoiding the worst effects of the partible inheritance normal under Polish law. Wealthier, politically influential families were better able to weather economic stagnation after 1386; the first half of the fifteenth century therefore saw a marked diversification of the noble estate, as the small group of families at the top—particularly from Małopolska—grew richer, while the fortunes of middling and lesser landowners declined as the effects of partible inheritance spread through the generations. By 1450 population growth was strong enough to affect the size of landholdings among the middling and lesser nobility negatively, but not strong enough to offset the effects of the collapse of migration from western and central Europe. The shortage of labour and the stagnant economy meant that it was difficult for nobles without access to royal lands to mitigate the effects of partible inheritance through the capital-intensive means of founding new villages, as their forebears had done in the age of expansion before 1350.⁷

For the elite, while times were also hard, access to royal land was crucial for maintaining a family’s position. Jagiełło’s outright donation of the town of Nowa Góra in the district of Cracow to Jan Tęczyński, castellan of Cracow, at some point between 1398 and 1402—the transaction is known through its 1512 confirmation—did much to preserve Tęczyński fortunes after Jan’s death in 1405, when his lands were divided among the three sons of his first marriage. He made provisions in his 1402 will against the need to provide dowries for his three daughters and any daughters of his second marriage; in the event the second marriage produced only sons, who played no role in the bitter disputes over the Tęczyński inheritance that followed. Nowa Góra, apart from the town itself, possessed five villages and lucrative lead mines that helped sustain the family fortunes until its final extinction in 1637.⁸

The funds generated enabled Tęczyński’s grandson, also Jan (1408–70), successively palatine of Sandomierz, palatine of Cracow, and castellan of Cracow, to reconstitute his grandfather’s holdings, dispersed in a 1414 family agreement. He was helped by the death of his uncles without male heirs, but his efforts were complicated by the provisions made for his own brothers in 1414, and for the widow of his uncle, Nawój, who died—deeply indebted—in 1422, which enabled Jan to administer all the family domains until a new division in 1438 with his brother Andrzej established two main Tęczyński lines.⁹

The struggles of the Tęczyńskis were repeated across the spectrum of Polish noble society from rich to poor. As family holdings fractured, the shortage of specie meant that it was increasingly difficult for middling and lesser nobles to raise money through credit, mortgage, pawning, or sale to pay debts and consolidate holdings. Landowners could gather complexes of estates into blocs, but consolidation complicated provisions for children, and even contiguous villages and estates were often treated as separate entities, which gave more flexibility to debt-ridden nobles whose immovable property was their chief asset. Without access to royal grants or leaseholds, most families struggled to maintain their holdings, and were often unable, unlike Jan Tęczyński the younger, to buy back from family members or creditors estates that had formed part of the protoplast’s patrimony. A widening gap developed between the ordinary nobility and the wealthy magnates at the top of the system: the ratio of dowries offered by the two groups in the palatinate of Sieradz grew from 1:5 in 1400 to 1:10 by 1450, and 1:65 by 1500.¹⁰

These developments had serious implications for a military system based on the obligation of noble landowners to serve and equip themselves in time of war. Moralists might decry the declining martial qualities of the szlachta, but economic stagnation had not so much sapped the szlachta’s military vitality or its attachment to the ideal of the nobility as a warrior class, as rendered it incapable of sustaining its obligations. The division of the Polish kingdom after 1138 into appanage duchies helped prevent the spread of feudal law on the western European pattern: the increasing number of petty Piast dukes preferred to keep direct control over their nobles, rather than allowing the construction of hierarchies of vassalage. Their policies stimulated the development of the noble heraldic clans, with their emphasis on kinship and horizontal links, and prevented the downgrading of the legal rights of collateral lines that elsewhere accompanied the strengthening of vertical ties of vassalage. Since noble status was inherited by all children of nobles, the szlachta—already large in 1370 by European standards—continued to grow. The entrenching of allodial rights to land held technically under ‘knightly law’ (prawo rycerskie) with the obligation to serve the prince directly prevented the spread of feudalism on the western European pattern, with its emphasis on obligations to serve one’s superior in the feudal hierarchy. This deprived the royal government of the intermediate vassals who helped to mobilize the armies of western Europe, although it also meant that Poland did not suffer from the problem of bastard feudalism. In Poland, the challenge to royal power came more through collective resistance.¹¹ The strike of the noble levy at Czerwińsk in 1422 established a pattern: its success in securing the extension of privileges was a lesson for the ordinary nobles who shouldered the burden of warfare, but saw the rewards go to a small group of wealthy lords.

The lesson was not forgotten by those summoned to fulfil their military obligations in 1454. It was no accident that the challenge came from the Wielkopolska levy that assembled at Cerekwica in September. For if Małopolskan politics had been dominated for generations by a small group of wealthy magnates, there were few magnates in Wielkopolska, where it was the middling szlachta, most of whom owned but one village, that predominated; apart from church lands, most properties were considerably smaller than in Małopolska, something that was also true of royal estates, which meant that they were not as lucrative for the Wielkopolskan elite as they were for their Małopolskan counterparts.¹² Anticlericalism was growing among the Wielkopolskan nobility, resentful of the wealth of the church, especially of the large estates accumulated by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and of their tax privileges. Jagiełło did not challenge Małopolska’s political domination: although he was a peripatetic king, he usually visited Wielkopolska only once a year to hear legal cases and to hunt. Władysław III, before leaving for Hungary, appointed Wojciech Malski as governor of Wielkopolska and outraged many by replacing the popular native starosta general, Stanisław of Ostroróg, with Krzesław Kurozwęcki, a Małopolskan magnate, but was forced to reverse his decision in 1443. The Wielkopolskans did not share Małopolskan enthusiasm for Władysław’s Hungarian adventure, even if many served on his crusade in search of profit or place.¹³

Matters improved somewhat at the start of Casimir’s reign, as he challenged the power of Oleśnicki and the Cracow lords. In 1451 Casimir outraged Oleśnicki by granting precedence on the royal council to Oporowski, the Wielkopolskan primate, despite Oleśnicki’s status as a cardinal; two years later he blocked Oleśnicki’s candidate to replace Oporowski in favour of Jan Sprowski, a Wielkopolskan.¹⁴ Despite these favourable signs, and although the Wielkopolskan nobility had always been more favourably disposed towards war against the Order, resentment built up over a generation and more, and the problems of fulfilling their military obligations ensured that the szlachta gathering in Cerekwica were in militant mood.

The origins of the political standoff in the autumn of 1454 lay in Casimir’s refusal, following his accession, to confirm the grants of privileges made by his predecessors despite the promises he had made before his coronation. He declined to do so at the Piotrków assembly of August 1447, where he merely confirmed several individual points and stressed his judicial powers.¹⁵ By 1453, with Casimir still refusing a general confirmation of privileges, feelings were running high. Those who gathered at Piotrków for another general assembly were in militant mood, determined to counter what many saw as the king’s willingness to use his support among the highest government dignitaries to ignore the law. Casimir might have neutralized the ageing Oleśnicki, but now he faced a new challenge. Although the most militant muttered about dethronement, and there were calls for confederation and the formal withdrawal of obedience, Casimir, who displayed an ‘iron will’ according to Długosz, managed to disarm the opposition. He had to confirm the privileges granted by his predecessors, but he did so in very general terms, without the detailed reaffirmation and extension of privileges that Jagiełło had been forced to concede in 1430.¹⁶

The general nature of the confirmation did not appease noble discontent. Yet there was little hope that ordinary nobles could secure their aims at a general assembly. Such assemblies had met increasingly frequently since 1386, but they lacked any institutionalized procedure or form. Although ordinary nobles turned up in varying numbers, the magnates dominated proceedings, and the ordinary nobility took little direct part. Decisions were taken by a narrow group of office-holders and dignitaries, and communicated to the general assembly.¹⁷ If there was political division among the magnates, the ordinary nobility could play a role, if only the negative one of howling down unpopular proposals or raucously acclaiming popular ones. Although historians routinely speak of the ‘ordinary nobility’ as if it were a cohesive force with a common interest, the szlachta was riven with local rivalries, and individuals often had links, whether of clientage or other forms of obligation, to wealthier nobles. It was difficult, therefore, for it collectively to seize the political initiative.

By 1453, however, ordinary nobles across the kingdom were resentful of the way in which the governing elite of office-holders—and the principal beneficiaries of royal largesse—closed ranks around the king at moments of crisis to block szlachta demands. The coming of war in 1454 gave ordinary nobles the opportunity to voice their concerns. When the Wielkopolskan levy gathered in September at Cerekwica its mood was mutinous. The szlachta had been called away at harvest time, a circumstance that highlighted the extent to which the obligation to serve had become oppressive. One issue encapsulated the wider problems. For all that the concept of the corona regni suggested that the Prussian lands, whose incorporation the levy was to defend, had remained part of the realm after their illegal annexation in 1308–9, for those gathered at Cerekwica the war was to be fought outside Poland’s borders; they therefore demanded payment of five marks per lance for their military service as stipulated in the Koszyce privileges. The failure to make such payments in the wars against the Order highlighted the more general problem of enforcing compliance upon rulers who conceded privileges under pressure but failed to honour them. The general confirmation of privileges in 1453 did not allay these fears.

The course of events leading to the promulgation of the so-called privileges of Nieszawa, the last great set of general privileges granted to the szlachta, was complex. The normally garrulous Długosz relates the Cerekwica events in a couple of lines. Having criticized the levy for its lack of discipline, and for burning and looting church property, he merely states that Casimir pacified the szlachta by confirming old privileges, without even hinting that new privileges were issued; he passes over in silence subsequent events in the camps of the Małopolskan levy at Opoki and Nieszawa.¹⁸ Textbooks routinely refer to the ‘privileges of Nieszawa’, since historians long believed that the privileges issued for Wielkopolska at Cerekwica were subsequently replaced by a general privilege issued for the whole kingdom at Nieszawa. The original of this general privilege had disappeared, although it was apparently confirmed by John Albert in 1496, and was incorporated into Jan Łaski’s 1506 digest of Polish law.

Bobrzyński realized that no general privilege was issued in 1454, but a series of privileges for individual provinces and territories: it was only in 1496 that John Albert consolidated them into one general privilege, which he then confirmed.¹⁹ Bobrzyński’s thesis was contested, but was confirmed in 1957 by Roman, whose painstaking reconstruction of the 1454 events revealed a much more complex reality. The crisis indeed began at Cerekwica, where Casimir, having declared war on the Order, had no room for manoeuvre: if the Wielkopolskans refused to fight, he would be unable to aid the Bund, and his credibility would be destroyed. Casimir therefore consented to a radical set of privileges, whose pointed language—in places bordering on the offensive—revealed the extent of Wielkopolskan anger at the cosy cartel of largely Małopolskan magnates that ran Polish politics. Royal judges were bluntly told to base their verdicts on the law, and not dream them up out of their own heads. Casimir was obliquely criticized, being told to rule wisely, with the implication that he had not yet learned how.²⁰

The anti-magnate tenor was encapsulated in two key passages. The first clause stipulated that palatines, castellans, dignitaries, and high local officials were henceforth barred from serving as starostas in a measure that sought to ensure that the principal royal officers at the local level were more accountable to the local political community. It was clause 18, however, that formed the document’s centrepiece. In it Casimir promised that:

in order that in future the republic might be more soundly governed, we desire and . . . decree that henceforth no new measures should be decided through private counsel, nor any [military] campaign be undertaken in whatever way without the consent of assemblies of the local landed community, but that all new matters should first be decided and approved by assemblies of the local communities.²¹

This clause had momentous implications. It was a direct response to events at the 1452 general assembly in Sieradz, where Casimir demonstrated his willingness to ignore szlachta opinion. After he again refused to confirm noble privileges, the ‘noble representatives of the community’ (nobiles ex comunitate), as Długosz put it, rejected his request for an extra year to determine the fate of Podolia and Volhynia following Švitrygaila’s death, demanding that he definitively attached them to Poland. Facing deadlock, Casimir suspended the assembly, summoning eight of his closest advisors, who promptly agreed to his proposal.²² Such actions suggested that he was willing to ride roughshod over the consensual norms of Polish political life. It was difficult for a general assembly, even one in which the szlachta deliberated separately from the lords—as in 1453—to impose its views upon the king. Only if local sejmiks needed to give their explicit consent to new measures could the ordinary nobility establish control over important decisions.

For all his bravado, it was difficult in 1454 for Casimir to resist these demands. He needed professional troops, yet he could not raise the necessary money from his own resources. The only possible means of securing the funds was through taxation, but his hands were tied by the Koszyce privileges, which limited his ability to collect taxation from the nobility to the poradlne, levied at 2 groszy per hide. This had hitherto proven sufficient, and his predecessors had been forced to seek consent for extra taxation from general and local assemblies on only two occasions since 1374: in 1404, to raise money to purchase Dobrzyń from the Order, and in 1441.²³ If the king wished to levy further taxes on the szlachta he could only do so with the consent of local assemblies, although he still had the power to impose customs duties from which the nobility was not exempt, a major point of grievance. It was such considerations that lay behind clause 18 of the Cerekwica document, whose significance lay in its stress on the need for the consent not of a general assembly (conventio generalis), but of assemblies of the local nobility, the communi terrestris: the community of landholders.

The origins of these assemblies lay in the period before the reunification of the kingdom in 1320, when, in the duchies and territories of the Polish lands, judicial bodies known as ‘general assemblies’ (colloquia generalia) of local lay and ecclesiastical dignitaries and office-holders met regularly: seventy such assemblies are known from the thirteenth century.²⁴ After 1320, and the transformation of ducal into local and provincial officials, a distinction arose between assemblies with a judicial function—colloquia in Latin, wiece in Polish—and meetings of officials to settle matters of local law and administration, termed consilia, or conventiones dominorum terrae. As the economic and political power of the lesser and middling szlachta grew, assemblies of all the local nobility, the communitas nobilium, or omnes terrigenae became common. While ordinary nobles had always attended in the retinues of the dignitaries, they soon demanded an independent role. Such consilia generalia, which in Polish came to be known as sejmiki spread throughout the Polish lands after 1382, fostered by the interregnum of 1382–6, when competing magnates appealed for support to the broader nobility.²⁵

By the 1420s, sejmiks met regularly in Wielkopolska, where they were established at the district and county level beneath the provincial sejmik, which met in Środa. In Małopolska, however, there was only a provincial sejmik, and local sejmiks were not established until the 1490s. This more decentralized structure lent an edge to politics in Wielkopolska, where the division between central dignitaries and office-holders and the ordinary nobility was explicit, as is demonstrated in the laws passed by the Łęczyca sejmik in 1418, which stated that they were passed by ‘all their lordships the dignitaries, with the agreement of the whole community’.²⁶ At the local level where the king played no part in the deliberations of these assemblies, for the most part it was easier for the local nobility to hold their office-holders to account than in the general assemblies, where royal officials and the council dominated: Długosz usually only mentions the lesser nobles at general assemblies if they turned up in significant numbers.²⁷

It is unlikely that the nobles gathered at Cerekwica thought they were instituting the constitutional revolution that many historians have discerned in the events of 1454. Although there was no formal requirement for the king to consult before he called out the noble levy, consultation was customary, as in other matters affecting the local szlachta.²⁸ It was precisely because Casimir had not consulted them before calling out the levy in 1454 that the Wielkopolska nobles were so determined to assert themselves: the 1452 general assembly demonstrated his willingness to take important decisions with the support of a narrow group of dignitaries in the teeth of szlachta opposition. It was this challenge to what ordinary nobles regarded as customary law, not any desire to innovate, that lay behind clause 18.

The radical formulation of this principle in the Cerekwica document openly challenged Casimir and the council elite in whose hands effective power lay at national and provincial level. Although Casimir—who had little choice—agreed to the Cerekwica privileges on 15 September, the levy’s crushing defeat at Konitz three days later strengthened his hand. When the Małopolskan levy, which gathered at Opoki in November, demanded similar privileges, he was better able to resist. There were more dignitaries present, who put pressure on their clients and mediated between the szlachta and the king. Thus the demands set out at Opoki in the form of instructions, though based on the Cerekwica document, included several new points but were less radical, as were the privileges issued at Nieszawa on 10 November for the core Małopolskan lands of Cracow, Sandomierz, Lublin, Radom, and Wiślica. In these, the first clause of the Cerekwica privileges, which barred office-holders and dignitaries from being appointed as starostas—except for the starosty of Cracow—was considerably watered down: it was only to apply to palatines. Most significantly, the Małopolskan redaction omitted the vital clause 18.²⁹

Not a single dignitary put themselves forward as a guarantor of the Cerekwica privileges, and it is clear that there was opposition to them among Wielkopolskan dignitaries. This enabled Casimir to renegotiate the Wielkopolskan terms with the participation of provincial dignitaries and magnates. At Nieszawa a new set of privileges for Wielkopolska was drawn up, which were influenced by the Małopolskan redaction, although they differed on several points.³⁰ The Nieszawa redaction, though retaining much of the Cerekwica blueprint, substantially modified the controversial elements: clause one concerning the accumulation of offices was based on the Małopolskan redaction, although it added the office of castellan to that of palatine, while clause 18—clause 33 in the new redaction—abandoned the critical tone of Cerekwica and was considerably reduced in bite:

We promise neither to make new statutes nor to call out the nobility to war without having first called an assembly of the nobility to Środa.³¹

This was a significant change, not so much in terms of the basic principle, but in the fact that Casimir only consented to call a provincial sejmik, where office-holders and dignitaries exercised greater influence than in the local sejmiks. Cerekwica’s stress on the prior consent of the ordinary szlachta was omitted.³²

The process was completed in December, as the Wielkopolskan and Małopolskan redactions formed the basis for local versions compiled for the districts of the two provinces, and the issuing of privileges for Sieradz, which was not formally part of Wielkopolska, and for Poland’s Ruthenian provinces that were not formally part of Małopolska: one for Chełm, and a common one for Sanok and Przemyśl, issued in Radzyń on 11 December. No such privileges were issued for the territories of Lwów and Halych, which—unlike the other Red Ruthenian lands—did not summon the levy to fight in the Prussian war.³³ Nevertheless, two years later, at a provincial sejmik in Korczyn, both Małopolska and the Ruthenian territories were granted a version of clause 33 in the Wielkopolskan redaction, in a new set of privileges, although it only specified that the sejmiks should be consulted before the king called out the Małopolskan, Ruthenian, or Podolian levies to fight in the Prussian war.³⁴ There was no mention of consent to ‘new measures’, as in the Wielkopolskan redaction, and it was not until John Albert issued his consolidated privilege in 1496 that clause 33 in the Nieszawan redaction was applied to the whole kingdom. It was strengthened with the stipulation that consultation had to take place at the level of the district, not the provincial sejmiks, but it did not repeat the stronger wording of clause 18 in the Cerekwica redaction.³⁵

Thus the common claim that the Nieszawa privileges constituted a fundamental watershed in Polish political history through the establishment of the principle that no new laws could be enacted without the prior consent of the sejmiki is misleading, as is the contention that Casimir, despite the challenge to royal power implicit in the privileges, allied with the szlachta, seizing an opportunity to appeal to them over the heads of the magnates.³⁶ Roman’s claim that, far from representing a radical innovation, the Nieszawa privileges merely recognized that sejmiks already possessed the right to consultation that the privileges, in the traditional view, granted them, is broadly convincing.³⁷ Wielkopolskan outrage at the summoning of the levy without consultation suggests that there was an expectation that the sejmiks were normally informed of royal intentions. Roman explains the omission of this vital clause from the Małopolskan redaction by arguing that they had no need to insert such a clause because they were confident that the Małopolskan provincial sejmik already possessed these rights.³⁸ This suggestion is less persuasive, however. As he recognizes, the political structure of Małopolska was different. Without local sejmiks, the provincial sejmik was much more open to domination by the office-holding elite, which undoubtedly explains the less radical position adopted by Małopolska in 1454.

The Nieszawa privileges were nevertheless a significant milestone in the development of the Polish political system and Polish political culture, and substantially influenced the process of union. The Wielkopolska szlachta may indeed have considered consultation to be enshrined in customary law, but the monarch still had substantial prerogative powers. Casimir’s stubborn refusal to confirm the privileges granted by his predecessors—and the vague wording when eventually he did—represented a clear threat to the culture of consultation and consensus that had become embedded in Wielkopolska in particular since 1382. By raising the requirement to consult from the status of customary law to that of written law, the Nieszawa privileges laid the cornerstone of the consensual system, based ultimately on the local political communities at district level, that subsequently spread throughout the union. In 1454 Casimir was forced to accept that the monarchy had to work within the political framework provided by the sejmiks, even if the issuing of several privileges, rather than one general privilege left him considerable room for manoeuvre.

The Nieszawa privileges are often presented as a crucial stage in the process by which the Polish parliamentary system, in contrast to estates bodies elsewhere, became not just dominated by the nobility, but exclusively reserved to it. It is doubtful, however, if any such intention lay behind them. The main concern in the various redactions at Nieszawa was military, and specifically the issue of the levy, which was an obligation only for nobles. The necessity of securing consent to military expeditions was the sole focus of the clauses in the 1456 Korczyn privileges for Małopolska and the Ruthenian lands. Even in the Cerekwica text, and in the final Wielkopolskan redaction, the clause is a simple reflection of the szlachta’s desire to be consulted on matters that affected it, rather than any wish to exclude other social groups from a parliament that did not yet exist.

1 Zientara, ‘Społeczeństwo’, 95.

2 Cezary Kuklo, Demografia Rzeczypospolitej przedrozbiorowej (Warsaw, 2009), table 29, 211.

3 Christoph Schmidt, Leibeigenschaft im Ostseeraum: Versuch einer Typologie (Cologne, 1997), 41; Zientara, ‘Społeczeństwo’ 91, 107; Benedykt Zientara, ‘Melioratio terrae: The thirteenth-century breakthrough in Polish history’, in J.K. Federowicz (ed.), A Republic of Nobles (Cambridge, 1982), 37–42.

4 Jerzy Luciński, Rozwój królewszczyzn w Koronie od schyłku XIV wieku do XVII wieku (Poznań, 1970), 33–5; Anna Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa domeny królewskiej w Polsce 1504–1548, 2nd edn (Warsaw, 2007), 40–2, 45–6.

5 Annales, xii/i, 33–4; Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 46–7.

6 Kazimierz Tymieniecki, ‘Wpływy ustroju feudalnego w Polsce średniowiecznej’, RDSG, 3 (1934), 107.

7 Krzysztof Mikulski and Jan Wroniszewski, ‘Folwark i zmiany koniunktury gospodarczej w Polsce XIV–XVII wieku’, Klio, 4 (2003), 27–8.

8 Janusz Kurtyka, Latyfundium tęczyńskie: Dobra i właściciele (XIV–XVII wiek) (Cracow, 1999), 35–62.

9 Kurtyka, Latyfundium tęczyńskie, 90–1.

10 Jan Wroniszewski, Szlachta ziemi sandomierskiej w średniowieczu (Poznań, 2001), 82.

11 Sławomir Gawlas, ‘Dlaczego nie było w Polsce feudalizmu lennego?’, RDSG, 58 (1998), 101–23; Zientara, ‘Społeczeństwo’, 146.

12 Dzieje Wielkopolski, i, ed. Jerzy Topolski (Poznań, 1969), 322; Zientara, ‘Społeczeństwo’, 146.

13 Dzieje Wielkopolski, i, 316–19.

14 Dzieje Wielkopolski, i, 319.

15 Annales, xii/i, 52–3; Abdon Kłodziński, ‘W sprawie przywilejów nieszawskich z r. 1454’, in Studya historyczne wydane ku czci prof. Wincentego Zakrzewskiego (Cracow, 1908), 247; Górski, ‘Młodość’, 14.

16 Annales, xii/i, 162–4; Kłodziński, ‘W sprawie’, 247–8.

17 Juliusz Bardach, ‘Początki sejmu’, in Historia sejmu polskiego, i: Do schyłku szlacheckiego Rzeczypospolitej, ed. Jerzy Michalski (Warsaw, 1984), 17.

18 Annales, xii/i, 209–11, 223.

19 Michał Bobrzyński, O ustawodawstwie nieszawskim Kazimierza Jagiellończyka, 2nd edn (Cracow, 1973); Stanisław Roman, Przywileje nieszawskie (Wrocław, 1957), 12.

20 Roman, Przywileje, 154.

21 ‘Ut igitur respublica in posterum sanius dirigatur, volumus et . . . statuimus, ne aliquae novae institutiones privatis consiliis statuantur, neque expeditio aliqua absque communi terrestri conventione in posterum suscitetur quovismodo, sed omnes res de novo inveniendae in conventionibus, communitatibus terrestribus prius practicatae, statuantur et laudentur.’ Quoted by Roman, Przywileje, 156. ‘communi terrestri’ is usually translated as ‘szlachta’: cf. Bardach, ‘Początki’, 32.

22 Annales, xii/i, 136; Bardach, ‘Początki’, 17, 33.

23 Bardach, ‘Początki’, 29, 30.

24 Roman, Przywileje, 109.

25 Bardach, ‘Początki’, 28–9; Kutrzeba, Korona, 64–7; Roman, Przywileje, 108–13.

26 ‘Cum consensu totius communitatis’: Bardach, ‘Początki’, 29.

27 Roman, Przywileje, 114–15.

28 Roman, Przywileje, 115–16.

29 Roman, Przywileje, 150–4.

30 Roman, Przywileje, 90–1, 145.

31 ‘Item pollicemur, quod nullas novas constituciones faciemus, neque terrigenas ad bellum moveri mandabimus absque conventione communi terrestri in Srzoda instituenda’: Roman, Przywileje, 156.

32 Roman, Przywileje, 157.

33 Wojciech Hejnosz, ‘Przywileje nieszawsko-radzyńskie dla ziem ruskich’, in Studia historyczne ku czci Stanisława Kutrzeby, 238, 242.

34 ‘Insuper expeditionem generalem versus terras Prussiae movere non debemus, nisi prius habita conventione desuper terrarum Cracoviensis, Sandomiriensis, Russiae et Podoliae’: Ius Polonicum, 299.

35 VC, i, 66.

36 Davies, God’s Playground, i, 164; Lukowski and Zawadzki, Concise History, 49; Daniel Stone, The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795 (Seattle, 2001), 28, all suggest that the Nieszawa privileges were general, and that they prevented the king from levying new taxation without the consent of the sejmiks, of which there was no mention in any of the redactions. Davies erroneously implies that it was only after Nieszawa that sejmiks began to meet: God’s Playground, i, 247, 250.

37 Roman, Przywileje, 108–37.

38 Roman, Przywileje, 119–21.