29
Mielnik’s failure became all too apparent after Alexander’s death in Vilnius on 19 August 1506. He had been incapacitated for over a year after suffering a stroke in June 1505. He was not quite 44, but over the following months five further strokes paralysed his left side. Although by November he was able to stand unaided and even ride a horse, in May he suffered a relapse. His condition was not helped by a doctor summoned from Cracow, who prescribed frequent baths and the consumption of copious quantities of wine, which no doubt rendered his last days more bearable, but which probably hastened his end.1
The dynasty’s position had weakened since 1501. Frederick died in March 1503 aged only 35, and Elizabeth Habsburg followed him into the grave in August 1505. In Alexander’s testament of 24 July 1506 he left his considerable fortune to Sigismund, whom he designated his ‘only heir and successor to him and his patrimony in the kingdom and the grand duchy’.2 Having scuppered Mielnik, Alexander was asserting on Sigismund’s behalf the dynasty’s hereditary claims, not just to Lithuania, but also to Poland.
Sigismund’s designation allowed the Lithuanians to seize the initiative. Alexander’s favourite Mykhailo Hlynsky, his position strengthened by his victory over a Tatar force at Kletsk on 5 August, led the Lithuanian council in a public demonstration that Mielnik was no more. In an act pregnant with symbolism, Alexander was interred not as he wished in Cracow beside his father and brothers, but in Vilnius cathedral; he remains the only king of Poland buried there.3 Hlynsky did much to clear Sigismund’s path to the throne. Sigismund, aware that some Cracow lords favoured Władysław, negotiated with Wielkopolskan politicians, who did not. As soon as he heard of Alexander’s death he hurried to Hrodna, where he met Hlynsky, who supported Sigismund in what amounted not to a coup against the union, as Wojciechowski claims, but a rejection of Mielnik.4 Envoys were summoned to a sejm to elect a new grand duke. The Polish council, while careful to reassure Sigismund that Lithuania was his patrimony, sent Mikołaj Firlej, ensign of Cracow, to Vilnius to protest at the hasty interment, to remind the Lithuanians of the union treaties, and to request them not to act unilaterally.5 He was bluntly told that on account of the dangers facing Lithuania, both internal and external, they could not delay. On 20 October, Sigismund was declared ‘hereditary and natural lord’ and grand duke and prince of Lithuania by the ‘unanimous will’ of princes and lords from all the grand duchy’s lands.6
There is no doubt that this was an election. It was politically useful, however, for the council to stress that Sigismund was their hereditary and natural lord, and to emphasize Lithuanian tradition against Mielnik. Yet to do so was not a separatist act. There were no rivals within the dynasty. Władysław had ceded his hereditary rights to Lithuania to Sigismund in 1503, and showed no interest in advancing his claims or those of his son, while as contemporary commentators noted, if the Poles might have elected Władysław or Janusz II of Mazovia, the prospect of the former, who would have to rule four realms, was not enticing, while the Mazovian Piasts were no more attractive than they had ever been.7 It was therefore highly unlikely that the Poles would do anything other than accept the fait accompli and elect Sigismund, which they duly did on 8 December 1506, although he was pointedly reminded that he had no hereditary rights to the Polish throne, and that the council had chosen him because of his personal qualities, and because the Poles had a right of free election that they wished to pass on to their descendants.8
Once again, Polish incorporationist claims were impossible to uphold, as the Polish acknowledgement that Lithuania constituted Sigismund’s patrimony implicitly recognized. The Lithuanians might have rejected Mielnik’s stipulation of a common election, but they sent envoys to the Polish election sejm, even if they turned up late.9 Implicitly, however, they accepted Mielnik’s underlying principle. Sigismund was to rule both realms, and there was to be no grand duke in Vilnius. Casimir’s long reign, and the increased powers granted to the council by Alexander in 1492 had demonstrated that Lithuania could be governed without a separate grand duke in a system that suited the narrow group of dignitaries who formed the inner council.
The council faced a difficult task. The Muscovite truce was due to expire in 1509, but Sigismund—encouraged by Tatar promises to attack Muscovy—issued a peremptory demand in 1507 for a return to the 1492 borders that sparked a war which may only have lasted a year, but which demonstrated the incapacity of the Lithuanians to recover by force what they had lost, as well as the unreliability of the Tatars, who changed sides halfway through. An ‘eternal’ peace was signed on 8 October 1508, in which Lithuania regained a sliver of territory around Lubuch, but few expected it to last. The war demonstrated that the council was no united, harmonious body, but was shot through with rivalries. The loss of favour by Hlynsky after 1506—despite his leading role in Sigismund’s election—in part because of Sigismund’s suspicions over his close relations with Alexander’s widow Helena, and in part because of his bitter rivalry with Jan Zaberezhynsky, revealed the tensions. Hlynsky’s murder of Zaberezhynsky on 2 February 1508, his failed rising, and his flight to Moscow did not, however, resolve them, and divisions remained over attitudes towards the union.
Breaking the union was impossible. Five thousand Polish troops were paid off in 1508, but eternity lasted a mere four years, and war returned with new intensity in 1512. In the ten-year conflict that followed, Lithuania lost Smolensk in July 1514, in Ivan’s greatest military triumph. Kostiantyn Ostrozky’s victory at Orsha on 8 September restored Lithuanian pride, but it was to be a century before Smolensk was recovered. The council had governed Lithuania without much difficulty during the long, peaceful years of Casimir’s reign, but war was different. Large amounts of money were needed to pay the Polish professionals. Neither the inner nor the outer council could hope to impose the necessary taxes without the support of wider noble society. Thus general sejms with representatives from across the grand duchy became ever more frequent.
The demands upon society were considerable. The 1507 Vilnius sejm agreed to the registration of all noble estates for the purposes of defence, and to introduce a new tax, the ‘silver tax’ (серебщизна/serebshchyzna), to be raised on the basis of inventories of ploughed land at a rate of 6 groszy per horse-plough, and 3 groszy per ox-plough. Those who farmed without possessing a plough also paid 3 groszy.10 In 1514, in a vain attempt to save Smolensk, the sejm agreed to raise 7,000 Polish troops; in order to pay for them, it levied a poll tax at a rate of 1 grosz from a peasant, 2 groszy for a boyar, and 1 złoty from officeholders, lords, and prominent nobles.11
These were not permanent taxes, but had to be agreed on every occasion they were levied. The constant need for money to pay for war helped to institutionalize the embryonic Lithuanian parliamentary system, although as yet it was still dominated by the council. Ad hoc local assemblies did occasionally meet, but there was no institutionalized system comparable to the one that emerged in Poland after 1454, and envoys were nominated by local officials or magnates. Nevertheless, the substantial demands placed upon Lithuanian society in these years, and the increasing frequency of sejms began to create a sense of common interest and political community among the noble masses, especially after the establishment of the new military registers in 1528, and the frequent musterings of the levy that followed.12
These developments gradually loosened the grip of the narrow inner-council oligarchy in Lithuania, but it was not until later that their effects became clear. In Poland the process was much quicker following the establishment of the two-chamber sejm after 1493. A sign that times were changing was the failure to ratify the conditions imposed upon Alexander at Mielnik in 1501. For he had not just been presented with a treaty of union. He had also received notification of his election shot through with reminders that it was not by succession, but by free election that kings ascended the Polish throne.13 It had been accompanied by a petition that was a barely disguised attack on John Albert’s treatment of Piotr Kurozwęcki, and an encomium to the necessity and virtues of counsel. The demands may have been couched as a petition, but were effectively the terms Alexander had to accept to win the throne. On 25 October 1501 he had sworn to uphold the Mielnik articles, as they are most properly known, which were prepared on the basis of the petition.14 Traditionally, they were termed the privileges of Mielnik, and condemned as an attempt to entrench a narrowly oligarchic political system dominated by the council. Yet the Mielnik articles, together with the union treaty, represent a coherent and rational attempt to give institutional and legal form to late medieval concepts of the mixed form of government that drew its inspiration from the works of Aristotle, Aquinas, John of Salisbury, and Aegidius Romanus. In the preamble Alexander stated—in the words put into his mouth—that it was possible not only to increase public liberty, but also to secure it, so long as he and his successors respected the law and ruled by the statutes agreed by their predecessors.15 The first article stated bluntly that a good and just prince must rule according to the laws and on the advice of his councillors, and not arbitrarily. Councillors who gave the prince unpalatable advice should not be persecuted—as Piotr Kurozwęcki had been persecuted—for their honesty and public spirit in telling him the truth, rather than what he wished to hear. If a councillor was accused of a crime by the king, the case against him should not be judged by the king and the rabble (turba malorum) of the ordinary nobility in the sejm, but by a tribunal of the senior and wisest among the king’s councillors, in a formulation that drew on conciliarist and canon law precepts.16
The Mielnik articles, while they sought to protect council interests, were far more than the simple oligarchs’ charter as which they are often portrayed. They addressed the problem of establishing the conditions under which the monarch might lawfully be resisted and even deprived of his throne should he behave tyrannically.17 The third clause stated that if the king broke his coronation oath, the community of the realm would be released from the obligation to respect its oaths of loyalty.18 It upheld the right of individual protest against royal actions and the right of the political community collectively to withdraw obedience to its elected monarch if he should act against the interests of the state and in a manner offensive to the republic in a phrase that reflected the dual conception of the polity as a state and a political community.19
Although the articles assumed that the council spoke for that political community, their political vision was broader, despite the evident contempt for mass opinion. Some were certainly informed by council concerns. Clauses five and six sought to ensure that offices and dignities were filled on council advice within two months of the death of the incumbent.20 Other clauses, however, followed Nie-szawa in seeking to limit the judicial powers of the starostas, and of the king himself. Clause four stated that cases in local land courts presided over by the king when passing through individual provinces should have a right of appeal to the sejm court. Since such cases often involved disputes about royal lands in which the starosta was a party, this was an expression of the principle that an individual—here the king—could not act as judge in a case in which he was involved: nemo iudex idoneus in casa sua. This represented the first attempt in Poland to regulate the various courts over which the king presided, in particular in his own court (in curia), and in the sejm (in conventione), and to advance the claims of the sejm court to be a high court of appeal in civil cases. It implicitly challenged the idea of the monarch as the supreme judicial authority, albeit largely on behalf of the council elite: it was only cases between the king and a senator that were automatically to be referred to the sejm court.21 Similar concerns lay behind clause fourteen, which sought to curb the independence of starostas in judicial matters by insisting that they respect leading officials and dignitaries within their jurisdiction—bishops, palatines, and castellans—and consult them, in particular in cases involving senators.22
Thus for all their concern with the role and interests of councillors as the king’s constitutionally sanctioned advisers, the Mielnik articles displayed a clear understanding of the distinction between the person of the monarch and the abstract entity of the state.23 They sought to inter the mouldering bones of patrimonial monarchy by appealing to the idea of the respublica as the political community in whose name the state operated: another clause sought to regulate royal control over the minting of coins, to ensure that the king did not manipulate the currency, but upheld the prescribed weights and quality of coins in order to serve the common good.24 In particular, the articles attacked the idea derived from Roman law that the king, while bound by divine and natural law, was above, and therefore not constrained by, the written law, and was in this sense absolute (a legibus solutus).25
The Mielnik articles were fully informed by the swirling currents of political theory in contemporary Latin Christendom. They sought to institutionalize a vision of the political community that saw the council as the natural defender of the common good. They were in that sense indeed oligarchic in their implications, an impression confirmed by the clauses that sought to set boundaries to the king’s right of appointment to office, one of his most important prerogatives, thereby establishing control of membership of the narrow political elite that—in the absence of any hierarchy of titles—had no inherited right to power and position.
The articles, like the Mielnik union, were never implemented. With their concern that councillors might be judged by the ‘rabble’ (turba malorum), they betrayed council suspicion of the chamber of envoys, and their vision of the political community was unlikely to win support from the szlachta, however well informed it might be by Aquinas and John of Salisbury. Alexander was given room to manoeuvre by the royal secretary who drafted the articles. Jan Łaski (1456–1531) came from a middling szlachta family; throughout his career he fought against the oligarchic practices of the council magnates. When drafting the articles, he inserted a clause at the end by which Alexander agreed to implement them only after his coronation. He appended his provisional seal in Mielnik, adding the important reservation that he would publish the articles under the great seal once he had examined all the kingdom’s privileges with a view to ‘augmenting and moderating them’. They were neither augmented nor moderated; instead Łaski began preparing the digest of Polish law he published in 1506, and the original document languished in the Vilnius chancery archive until it was exhumed in 1564.26
This clause launched Łaski’s career. A grateful Alexander appointed him principal secretary (1502), and then chancellor, following Krzesław Kurozwęcki’s death in 1503. It was a meteoric rise, but Alexander had much to be grateful for: Łaski gave him the opportunity to build a political consensus against the articles. In so doing, Alexander—with Łaski’s advice and encouragement—appealed to the broader mass of the community of the realm against the council oligarchs. In what proved to be the last sejm of his reign, which opened in Radom on 30 March 1505 and formally ended on 14 June, a statute was passed that institutionalized the bicameral sejm and established its central role in Polish political life. Known as ‘Nihil Novi’, it is worth paying close attention to its meaning, as it has frequently been misrepresented, and blamed for the subsequent problems of the Polish political system. Its wording reflected the way in which that system had developed since 1382:
Since the common law and public statutes affect not individuals, but the whole people, therefore in this assembly at Radom, with all the prelates, councillors, barons, and envoys of the land, we consider it to be right and reasonable, and have therefore established, that henceforth and in perpetuity, nothing new [nihil novi] should be decreed by us or our successors that is to the prejudice and inconvenience of the Res Publica, or to the injury or detriment of whatsoever private interest, or that alters the common law or public liberties, without the common agreement of our councillors and envoys of the lands.27
This statute was itself nothing new. In many respects it gave legal force to the philosophy expressed in the Nieszawa privileges: the principle derived from Roman law of quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbari debet (that which touches all should be approved by all). It did not place as many constraints on royal power as has been argued by those who see the supposed weakness of the Polish monarchy in the early modern period as one of the major reasons for Poland’s political decline. Nihil Novi was indeed a watershed that marked the establishment of a truly parliamentary monarchy in Poland, but it was not directed against the king’s executive or judicial authority; it merely sought to constrain his ability to change public and common law without consent.28 It was not concerned with the king’s sphere of authority in the regnum—that is the state—but sought to limit his ability to pass laws on his own authority that affected the public law of the respublica, which was the embodiment of the political community. He could no longer make laws affecting the liberties of the citizens, or which introduced changes to the common law (ius commune in Latin, prawo pospolite in Polish)—considered as the law that applied to the whole community—although he could make new law on his own authority in other spheres, in the realm of particular law codes that were not part of the common law, where the royal prerogative remained unaffected: in matters concerning fiefs of the crown, the royal cities, the Jewish community, peasants on royal estates, and mining. Moreover, the principle left scope for interpretation. It was by no means clear where the boundaries should be drawn, and kings continued to issue decrees and ordinances on many matters affecting the respublica, albeit with the advice and agreement of the council. So long as they could be presented as avoiding legislative innovation, they were perfectly legal under Nihil Novi, although such decrees did attract criticism, as Sigismund I discovered in 1538. While the definition of what was permissable was increasingly narrowed by appeal to the principle enunciated in 1505, this was a very slow process, and royal authority remained substantial.29
Nihil Novi is often presented as a charter for royal impotence. It was not. It established the sejm, not the council, as the primary institutional defender of the respublica and the common weal; with the publication of Łaski’s statute, Alexander and his chancellor sought further to curb oligarchic inclinations by providing the means to appeal over the heads of the council to the wider citizen body. Nihil Novi was not out of line with principles enunciated elsewhere in this period, as was traditionally argued by historians who saw Poland marching in the opposite direction to those parts of Europe where ‘New Monarchs’ were supposedly constructing the edifice known as absolute monarchy. The philosophy behind it had, indeed, more in common than is often admitted with the views on royal power of Jean Bodin, that much misunderstood parlementaire and supposed apologist for absolutism, who, while he certainly upheld the monarch’s executive authority, formed a view of sovereignty at odds with Polish tradition, and was highly critical of the Polish system, nevertheless stressed the monarch’s inability to alter public law without the consent of the community of the realm.30 The debate in sixteenth-century Europe was not concerned with establishing the unlimited authority of kings, but the areas of public life in which that authority was unlimited, and the areas in which it was not. This debate was by no means resolved in Poland in 1505. As vice-chancellor Piotr Tomicki wrote to Jan Tarnowski in 1533:
For it is the majesty of the king that by custom establishes the laws. His Majesty, despite this statute [Nihil Novi], in this sphere enjoys the exercise of full authority.31
As Tomicki hints, there were many who rejected his interpretation, but Bodin himself could not have put it better.
Nihil Novi was never intended to strip the Polish monarchy of its powers. It was part of a wider process in which Alexander and Łaski sought to establish what constituted public law. For if the citizen body was to know what did, and what did not, constitute new law, it was important that it knew what the law was. Łaski conceived Nihil Novi together with his comprehensive digest of Polish law, compiled as a result of Alexander’s promise to publish all the privileges agreed to by his predecessors, which the king swore to uphold at Radom, and which was published on his orders in 1506.32 This massive compilation of the written laws that bound the kingdom, known as Łaski’s statute, was a collection of laws chronologically ordered rather than a codification, running to over 1,000 pages. Łaski sought to include all written published law; he included Casimir III’s statutes, privileges issued by past Polish monarchs, including those for individual provinces, and royal edicts, and appended Latin translations of the Sachsenspiegel and the Magdeburg Weichbild, which were widely applied in Poland, and ended with a treatise on Roman law, the Summa Raimundi.33
The printing of Łaski’s statue was an important milestone in the development of Poland’s consensual, mixed parliamentary monarchy after Alexander ordered its wide distribution, and called for it to be read out in churches across the kingdom.34 For the first time the ordinary nobility had direct access to the most important statutes on which Polish law and the Polish political system were based. The desire to limit royal power was far from the driving force behind the statute: Łaski saw better knowledge of the law as a way to improve the operation of the royal government for which he was responsible. His statute was also concerned with the administration of justice, and contained a series of measures, the processus iuris, that were accepted at Radom and which laid down the procedure to be followed for the execution of judgements by starostas and others empowered to implement the law.35 The statute introduced an important limitation on the famous principle of neminem captivabimus nisi iure victum enshrined in the 1430 Jedlnia privileges, which stipulated that nobody could be imprisoned until convicted of a crime in a court of law. Łaski introduced the important amendment that this only applied to those of good character: those recorded as criminals or of bad character in local court records could be imprisoned before a formal guilty verdict.36
The printing of Łaski’s statute together with the passing of Nihil Novi put the sejm at the heart of the political system. The establishment between 1493 and 1505 of a bicameral legislature was followed by the fixing of its composition. The upper chamber, initially still known as the council, was referred to in various formulae, as ‘praelati spirituales et saeculares’, ‘praelati et consiliarii’, or ‘praelati et barones consiliarii nostri’; it was not until 1532 that it was first officially designated as the senate. After 1495, lesser dignitaries including the chamberlain (podkomorzy), the ensign (chorąży), the steward (podstoli) and some royal secretaries and land judges still occasionally attended, but eventually its membership stabilized at 87: 9 Catholic bishops, 14 palatines, 59 castellans, and 5 government ministers—the grand marshal, chancellor, vice-chancellor, treasurer, and marshal of the court, although it increased in size with the incorporation of Mazovia between 1526 and 1529.37
Membership of the chamber of envoys was more fluid. Each province adjusted its practices to accommodate the need to hold more frequent sejmiks, as meetings of the sejm became more regular. After 1506 the Ruthenian palatinate ceased to hold separate sejmiks for the districts of Lwów, Sanok, Przemyśl, and Halych, though Chełm continued to hold its own sejmik as, in other parts of the kingdom, did the territories of Dobrzyń, Gostyń, Sochaczew, and Rawa, which, like Chełm, were outwith the palatinate structure. After 1529 there were seven sejmiks in Małopolska (including the Ruthenian palatinate), nine in Wielkopolska, and ten in Mazovia. The number of envoys varied. The palatinates of Cracow and Sandomierz sent six each in the early sixteenth century, whereas in Wielkopolska, it varied between two and seven per sejmik; the Mazovians sent two from each sejmik, twenty in all, though twenty-one turned up in 1531. A 1520 statute set the upper limit at six per sejmik; in 1531 75 attended: 26 Małopolskans, 28 Wielkopolskans, and 21 Mazovians. This was considerably more than the 45 who had attended in 1504.38 The senate was not usually so well attended: many of the minor castellans, whose voices counted for less in council debates, attended sporadically if at all, unless they were ambitious; it was not uncommon for minor castellans to be elected as envoys by sejmiks, sitting in the chamber of envoys, where their opinions were more likely to count.
The sejm flourished after 1505 as the apex of a political system that gave institutional form to the ideal of the community of the realm. Local sejmiks were well attended: although the reports of 500 turning up to a sejmik of the Płock palatinate in Raciąż in 1528 was exceptional, attendances of 100–200 were common.39 Most were middling noblemen, the backbone of the local community, although poorer nobles also participated, especially in Mazovia. Senators could, and did, turn up to sejmik sessions, emphasizing their participation in that community, but the ordinary nobility formed its core.
Nihil Novi and Łaski’s statute completed the transformation of the Polish political system through the establishment of the sejm as a parliament in which each chamber played an equal role, together with the king, in the approval of new laws. The days of Oleśnicki, when a small group of aristocrats could dominate government, were over. Henceforth the noble masses could no longer be ignored. Kings and aristocratic politicians had to build consensus in the chamber to secure their aims. This afforded the monarchy opportunities to strengthen its authority through appealing to the chamber over the heads of their councillors if necessary. These new political realities were recognized by Alexander’s successor, Sigismund I (1506–48), who called a sejm virtually every year. This ensured that its procedures rapidly became institutionalized and its members developed a unique parliamentary culture, powerfully informed by the example of the Roman republic. As the szlachta drank deeply at the well of Renaissance humanism, the monarchy used its considerable authority to secure important reforms. Above all, the sejm’s emergence was to be crucial for the achievement of closer union in 1569.40
1 Papée, Aleksander, 107.
2 PSB, i, 60.
3 AT, i, appendix, no. 6, 20–1.
4 Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 86–7.
5 AT, i, no. 5, 8; no. 7, 9–10.
6 Stanisław Górski, ‘Commentarius rerum gestarum a Sigismundo primo, Rege Polonie, Magno Duce Lituanie’, AT, i, no. 8, 13; Любавский, Сеймъ, 149.
7 Rowell, ‘Dynastic bluff?’, 19.
8 Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 87.
9 Stanisław Górski, ‘Commentarius’, AT, no. 5, 8; no. 8, 14.
10 Łowmiański, Zaludnienie, 17–18; Любавский, Сеймъ, 179–80.
11 Любавский, Сеймъ, 198.
12 Любавский, Сеймъ, 151–70.
13 AA, no. 28, 25.
14 VC, i/i, 109–13. The best account is Ludwik Sobolewski and Wacław Uruszczak, ‘Artykuły mielnickie z roku 1501’, CPH, 42 (1990), 51–80. They talk of nine articles, but base their discussion on the text as published by Bandtkie in his 1831 Ius Polonicum. The text in Volumina Constitutionum, in which there are fifteen clauses, draws on a fuller version in Jakub Przyłuski’s Leges seu statuta ac privilegia Regni Polonia omnia (Cracow, 1553): VC, i/i, 101. Nowakowska confuses the petition with the articles and overemphasizes their impact, failing to point out they were never implemented: Church, 55–6.
15 VC, i/i, 109.
16 VC, i/i, 110; Sobolewski and Uruszczak, ‘Artykuły’, 54–5, 69.
17 ‘sed ut tirannum et hostem reputent’: VC, i/i, 110.
18 ‘extunc universum regnum sit liberum a iuramento et fide praestita’: VC, i/i, 110.
19 ‘contra statum et offensum reipublicae’: VC, i/i, 110.
20 VC, i/i, 111.
21 VC, i/i, 111; Sobolewski and Uruszczak, ‘Artykuły’, 60–1.
22 VC, i/i, 112.
23 Sobolewski and Uruszczak, ‘Artykuły’, 66.
24 VC, i/i, 112.
25 Sobolewski and Uruszczak, ‘Artykuły’, 65–6.
26 VC, i/i, 113; Papée, Aleksander, 53–4; Stanisław Tymosz, ‘Szkic historyczno-biograficzny prymasa Jana Łaskiego (1456–1531)’, in Tymosz (ed.), Jan Łaski, 16–17; Sobolewski and Uruszczak, ‘Artykuły’, 7.
27 ‘Quoniam iura communia et constitutiones publicae non unum, sed communem populum afficiunt, itaque in hac Radomiensi conventione cum universis Regni nostri praelatis, consiliariis, baronibus et nuntiis terrarum, aequum et rationabile censuimus ac etiam statuimus, ut deinceps, futuris temporibus perpetuis, nihil novi constitui debeat per nos et successores nostros, sine communi consiliarorum et nuntiorum terrestrium consensu, quod fieret in praeiudicium gravamenque Reipublicae, et damnum atque incommodum cuiuslibet privatum, ad innovationemque iuris communis et publicae libertatis’: VC, i/i, 138.
28 For a warning against the common interpretation of quod omnes tangit as providing the basis for ideas of popular or citizen sovereignty see Constantin Fasolt, ‘Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbari debet: the words and their meaning’, in Steven Bowman and Blanche Cody (eds), In iure veritas (Cincinnati, OH, 1991), 21–55.
29 Wacław Uruszczak, ‘Sejm walny wszystkich państw naszych: Sejm w Radomiu z 1505 roku i konstytucji Nihil Novi’, CPH, 57/1 (2005), 18; Wacław Uruszczak, ‘Konstytucja Nihil Novi z 1505 roku i jej znaczenie’, in Andrzej Ajnenkiel (ed.), W pięćsetlecie konstytucji Nihil Novi (Warsaw, 2006), 16–21. For the ius commune see Konstanty Grzybowski, Teoria reprezentacji w Polsce epoki Odrodzenia (Warsaw, 1959), 245–72.
30 Grzybowski, Teoria, 141–6; Uruszczak, Sejm walny, 128–33.
31 ‘Maiestas enim regia, quae condere leges solet. Maiestas sua adversus hanc statuti dispositonem plenitudine potestatis suae utitur’: Piotr Tomicki to Jan Tarnowski, 20.III.1533, AT, xv, no. 152, 214; Grzybowski, Teoria, 141.
32 Commune incliti Regni Poloniae privilegium constitutionum et indultuum publicitus decretorum approbatoriumque (Cracow, 1506); VC, i/i, 162–72.
33 Stanisław Tymosz, ‘Statut Łaskiego i jego wpływ na inne zbiory prawa’, in Tymosz (ed.), Jan Łaski (Lublin, 2007), 87–106; Piotr Tafiłowski, Jan Łaski (1456–1531) (Warsaw, 2007), 42–3; Uruszczak, ‘Sejm w Radomiu’, 20; PSB, 18, 230.
34 Wacław Uruszczak, Próba kodyfikacji prawa polskiego w pierwszej połowie XVI wieku (Warsaw, 1979), 72; Łowmiański, Polityka, 523.
35 VC, i/i, 165–70.
36 ‘De suspectis in crimine, qui bonae fame sunt censendi, et de non captivandis bonae famae nobilibus’: VC, i/i, 138; Uruszczak, ‘Sejm w Radomiu’, 19; Uruszczak, ‘Konstytucja’, 23–4.
37 Wyrozumski, ‘Geneza’, 30–1. See Ch. 31, 374–80.
38 Uruszczak, ‘Sejm w latach’, 67, 69.
39 Uruszczak, ‘Sejm w latach’, 68.
40 Uruszczak, ‘Sejm w Radomiu’, 18–19. For the influence of classical legal concepts on the text of Nihil Novi, see Jerzy Wójtczak-Szyszkowski, ‘Terminologia prawnicza konstytucji Nihil Novi’, in Ajnenkiel (ed.), W pięćsetlecie, 27–31.