30

Parliamentary Government

Throughout his career Łaski promoted the idea of the monarchy working through the sejm to achieve its ends. Sigismund, however, turned away from the course set by Alexander and Łaski to base his rule largely on the council. Łaski was removed from the chancery in 1510, when he was raised to the archbishopric of Gniezno, which left him free to adopt a role as tribune of the szlachta. Nevertheless, after Nihil Novi and the printing of his statute it was no longer so easy for the council to carry on its business far from prying eyes. Thirst for knowledge of the law grew, and growing awareness of the law lent szlachta politics a sharper edge. The government now had to explain itelf and its policies if it wished to secure its aims. From the 1520s statutes and tax edicts were regularly printed and distributed on the initiative of Piotr Tomicki, vice-chancellor from 1515 to his death in 1535. Tomicki began publishing the letters drawn up in the chancery addressed to the szlachta, sejmiks, and senators, in which the king summoned individual sejms, outlined his legislative programme, and sought support.¹ His aim was to ensure that the chancery controlled the wording of statutes, but he could not control the interpretations that were put upon them. While it is only from the reign of Sigismund August that diaries of sejm sessions survive, reports of sejms were made by envoys to their sejmiks, while certain interested parties, such as the Danzig council, started sending observers who kept verbatim accounts of sejm debates, although before 1569 they concerned themselves largely with Prussian affairs.²

As sejms grew more frequent and reports of their activities circulated more widely, political activists and sejmiks began scrutinizing the actions of the king, his ministers, and his councillors in the light of the written law to which they were subject. Yet this development afforded considerable opportunities to the king not simply to escape the chains with which his councillors sought to bind him, but to secure a radical solution to the monarchy’s chronic fiscal problems. The disastrous 1497 Moldavian campaign, which confirmed that the noble levy was worthless, forced politicians to confront the problem of raising and paying professional units to aid the Lithuanians against Muscovy, and to provide more effective defence against Tatar raids. It was to combat the latter that a permanent, if small, professional army known as the common defence force (obrona potoczna) was established in 1499, although it only became properly institutionalized after 1520.³ Its numbers remained small: from as few as 400 to a maximum of just over 3,000; it numbered on average 1,000–2,000 between 1548 and 1563. Although a 1525 statute assigned much of the responsibility and the costs to the front-line palatinates, in the dangerous years after Mohács 3,364 cavalrymen were recruited in 1528 and 4,452 were raised for the 1531 Obertyn campaign. The rich starosties of the Ruthenian palatinate could not cope, and the burden had to be spread across the kingdom, which required regular taxes and therefore regular meetings of the sejm.⁴

As the expanding European economy began to experience price inflation, public finances were ill equipped to face the challenges. Casimir was less munificent than his elder brother, but despite his parsimonious reputation by 1492 over half the massive royal domain—some 25–30 per cent of Poland’s land—had been alienated, and a considerable proportion of royal income diverted to pay off creditors.⁵ John Albert signed 131 mortgages on royal lands in his short reign; at nearly fourteen per annum this was a rate fifty percent higher than that of his father. He left debts of 28,000 florins to seventeen creditors, of whom the largest was the Cracow banker Johann Boner, owed the colossal sum of 15,000 florins, which did not include the debts of Casimir and Frederick. Alexander paid off 46,500 marks between 1502 and 1504, but if this relieved the immediate pressure, it did nothing to confront the structural problems.⁶

These were serious, but not insurmountable. The Jagiellons are often accused of profligacy, and of blindly alienating royal land. Yet given that the royal government was served by no extensive bureaucracy, the system was more rational and effective than is often allowed. Far from thoughtlessly alienating royal estates, Casimir and his sons acted in a hard-headed manner, deriving the best terms they could for the myriad complex loans they raised. Royal properties bestowed as collateral for loans, or to provide payment or reward for services rendered, were disposed of with considerable attention to detail. Grants were made according to three broad categories: life tenures (gołe dożywocia); tenures for service or reward (ad fideles manus; do wiernych rąk, literally ‘to faithful hands’), and mortgages (zastawy). Within these categories, there were considerable variations, which the chancery watched carefully. Life tenures in which recipients received all the estate’s revenues were relatively rare before 1492, and were used sparingly, since the monarchy sought to avoid losing control of estates for an uncertain period, and since it could be difficult to prevent holders passing on tenancies: some royal estates, particularly in the Ruthenian palatinate, were all but hereditary, although in these cases the holders were obliged to maintain castles and other defensive structures, and to raise troops in time of need. If whole starosties, estates, or villages were occasionally granted to favoured recipients as life tenures it was far more common for grants to be of portions of a village, and sometimes even of as little as a single hide of land; these were usually made not for life but for an indefinite period ‘at the king’s pleasure’.⁷

Grants ‘to faithful hands’ were more common. In their simplest form, a contract was drawn up in which the income to be drawn by the holder was specified, as were his obligations to the treasury in rent: contracts often included detailed registers, village by village, listing all the inhabitants and the rents in cash and kind they were to pay; provision was often made for the holder to bear the costs of administration, and to provide for the king on any visits he made to his estates. If in principle such contracts were in the king’s interests, the difficulty of administering them ensured that they were still relatively rare, and grants declined after 1500.⁸

The majority of leases were granted in return for loans. The problem was that although some mortgage contracts provided for the amortization of the debt (zastaw do wytrzymania/do wydzierżenia) to ensure the estate returned to treasury control when the debt was paid off, most were granted for use ‘until redemption’ (zastaw użytkowy/zastaw do wykupienia). Given that the treasury lacked the resources to buy out its creditors, the latter were difficult to redeem. Amortized mortgages were far more favourable to the treasury, especially since amortization rates were relatively high—from 3.3 to as much as 11.8 per cent, which meant that the debts were paid off relatively rapidly, within five to ten years. The government lacked the administrative resources to monitor them, however, and they were initially used sparingly—only one such contract is known for Małopolska before 1450—although they became more common: under Alexander amortized contracts were issued to a value of 18,957 marks, compared with contracts until redemption worth 88,165 marks. While this represented an encouraging 18 per cent of mortgages, only six such contracts are known to have been issued under Sigismund.⁹

By 1506 many of the monarchy’s most lucrative sources of income, including the salt mines of Wieliczka and Ruthenia, had been alienated. The system had reached its limits as inflation ate into the income the monarchy derived from the fixed terms on which its lands were leased. Piecemeal audits were occasionally carried out, but rarely revealed the extent to which leaseholders were profiting. By the 1480s, Casimir’s income from the royal lands had sunk to an exiguous 6,600 Hungarian ducats per annum despite the incorporation of Royal Prussia, when the monarchy acquired the Order’s estates, which constituted some fifty per cent of the province’s land. The royal treasury was drawing rents almost exclusively from the newly acquired Mazovian palatinates of Rawa and Płock, since all but a tiny handful of its estates in Wielkopolska and Małopolska had been alienated: in 1506 the king had direct control of a mere nineteen complexes of estates. When treasurer Andrzej Kościelecki took office in 1509 he found the princely sum of 61 złoties in the royal coffers.¹⁰

A solution had to be found, and it was through the sejm that Alexander and Sigismund sought it. For the sejm could approve extraordinary taxation to meet the costs of Poland’s increasing military obligations and provide the means by which the monarchy might regain control over the royal domain. Given the szlachta’s reluctance to agree to annual musterings of the noble levy, the king was able to raise extraordinary taxes that partly fell upon the szlachta, exempt from ordinary taxes since 1374, apart from the poradlne, the value of which was waning partly because of inflation, and partly because of under-declaration owing to the lack of effective means for registering land values in a volatile market. Apart from the poradlne, the principal ordinary taxes consisted of customs dues (cła), from which the szlachta were exempt, the stacyjne, raised from towns and some monasteries, the ‘Jewish rent’ (czynsz żydowski), 200 złoties per annum raised from Jewish communities across the kingdom, and annual sums paid by Danzig (2,000 florins), Thorn, and Elbing (400 florins each).¹¹

The szlachta responded. Of thirty-five sejms that met between 1506 and 1540, twenty-seven agreed taxes. Only five called for the noble levy, reflecting a general preference for taxation rather than the levy, which involved nobles in the direct costs of mustering, while the burden of taxation fell substantially on other social groups.¹² Yet the notion that the szlachta paid no tax—still common in general works—is a travesty. Nobles indeed wished to limit the taxes they paid, on the basis that they were obliged to defend the realmin wartime. Since the costs of turning out in the levy were substantial, the szlachta were in principle willing to replace in any individual year the obligation to serve with the payment of taxes in lieu, although the 1514 sejm rejected Sigismund’s plan for a relucja, in which the obligation to serve would be abolished in return for a permanent tax to support a professional army. A similar scheme proposed by Łaski in 1529, the mons pietatis, which envisaged a permanent tax on royal, noble, and ecclesiastical estates, was also rejected. This was only partly because the obligation to serve in the levy was still closely bound up with szlachta identity and was a useful argument in favour of noble tax exemptions. The szlachta was willing to pay extraordinary taxes in time of need; it was suspicious, however, of any permanent, ordinary tax that could be raised without sejm agreement. The citizens were not about to surrender their hard-won right to be consulted.

The principal tax agreed at all of Alexander’s sejms and most of Sigismund’s was the hide tax (łanowy), raised on hides of cultivated land on the same basis as the poradlne, which was still collected in years the hide tax was levied. Between 1507 and 1543 the hide tax was collected at various rates, from a lowest tariff of 6 groszy per hide in 1508 and 1511 to a highest of 24 groszy in 1520 and 1538. Rates of 8 groszy were levied by three sejms; 10 groszy by one; 12 groszy—the most common rate—on thirteen occasions; 14 groszy on one occasion; 16 groszy on two occasions; 18 groszy on four occasions; and 20 groszy on two occasions. Although the hide tax was usually paid by tenant farmers, on six occasions (1520, 1525, 1526, 1527, 1531, and 1532) payment was shared equally between tenants and their noble landlords. The tax was paid in full by the szlachta zagrodowa—nobles who farmed their land directly without dependent peasants.¹³

Taxes were agreed on six of the seven occasions in Sigismund’s reign when the sejm met in the king’s absence (1514, 1517, 1529, 1534, 1535, 1542).¹⁴ They were usually supplemented by other extraordinary taxes, including the szos, a property tax levied on towns at 4 per cent and occasionally higher; the excise (czopowe) on beer and wine, and extraordinary customs duties. A 1507 council edict—confirmed by the 1509 sejm—introduced a ‘new duty’ (nowe cło), a permanent tax on the export of oxen, hides, wax, honey, fish, and horses, that brought in far more than the ‘old duty’ (stare cło), regularly yielding a quarter and more of the treasury’s annual income. Although the szlachta had been exempt since 1496 from the szos, the excise, and from duties on products produced on their manors, they were increasingly involved as middlemen in the rapidly developing cattle trade, and were liable for the new duty on all animals not raised on their manors, which were overwhelmingly devoted to arable, not pastoral farming.¹⁵

In the light of the rates paid in the hide tax, and the regularity with which the sejm levied it on the lands that they owned or farmed directly, the szlachta cannot be accused of avoiding tax, even if they sought to minimize their exposure and used their dominance of the legislature to shift as much of the burden as possible onto other estates. Although the hide tax was largely paid by their tenants, sejm control meant that the taxation burden on farmers was kept relatively low. In 1504, in addition to a hide tax at a rate of 12 groszy, the sejm agreed a levy of customs duty that suspended all exemptions, and imposed a rental tax (czynszowy) that was paid by all social orders. It was levied at ten per cent on the lands of the king and the royal family, and on royal estates held by any individual on whatever basis, and at a rate of five per cent on hereditary noble and clerical estates. A similar tax of one quarter of the rental value, and one eighth of the tithe, was levied at Sigismund’s coronation sejm in 1507.¹⁶ In 1520, when the sejm met at Bydgoszcz in the presence of the levy, summoned to fight in the 1519–21 war against the Order, it agreed a poll tax, to be paid by all inhabitants of the kingdom, ecclesiastics and laymen; commoners and nobles, at rates that took account of social position and property holdings: the primate paid 300 złoties; other Polish bishops paid 100; Ruthenian bishops paid 50; the castellan of Cracow paid 60—plus 20 as hetman and 10 as starosta of Kazimierz—palatines paid 50 złoties, castellans 10; payment by the nobility was determined by the extent of their landholdings and the number of their peasants. Wealthier nobles paid half a złoty; tenant farmers paid 1 grosz; smallholders and cottagers paid half a grosz.¹⁷

The extent of extraordinary taxes agreed after 1500, however, encouraged support for the idea that the king should not have to turn every year to the sejm for money when he possessed such a large and lucrative domain. The price for the substantial taxes and the suspension of szlachta immunities agreed by the 1504 sejm was the acceptance of limitations on the free disposal of the royal domain and support for its revindication. Previous efforts had failed, thanks to fierce resistance from dignitaries and council members, the system’s main beneficiaries. This was not the first attempt to place limits on the royal prerogative with regard to the domain. Jagiełło promised in privileges issued in Cracow (1386) and Piotrków (1388) not to appoint foreigners or members of the royal family to judicial starosties. In 1440, as part of the struggle between Oleśnicki’s faction and its opponents, a statute was issued banning the alienation of those royal estates and revenues reserved to the Cracow procurators (wielkorządcy) for the upkeep of the royal court and household, or lands granted to Jagiełło’s widow Sonka.¹⁸ The Nieszawa privileges banned the mortgaging of judicial starosties or the revenues assigned to their incumbents. In 1460 Casimir confirmed the 1440 edict concerning the Cracow procurators, extending the principle to cover the territory of Bełz on its 1462 incorporation into the kingdom, and to the palatinate of Sandomierz in 1478.¹⁹ He raised a tax at the 1447 sejm to liquidate the mortgages on several royal estates, a ploy used again in 1453 to repurchase Kamianets from the Buczackis, and in 1465, to recover estates from the Odrowąż, whose domination of the Ruthenian palatinate had provoked discontent among the local szlachta.²⁰

Such purchases were rare, but they revealed szlachta support for revindication of the domain. Casimir told the 1459 Piotrków sejm that if he had full control of all mortgaged royal estates, he would be able to cover all the realm’s needs, including defence.²¹ Despite his parsimony he was never able to restore the royal domain, and in Alexander’s brief reign royal estates were mortgaged to the value of 171,395 złoties to meet the Muscovite and Tatar threats; this represented no less than a quarter of all sums mortgaged before 1504, and mortgages were contracted at a far faster rate than before 1501.²²

The 1504 statute de modo bonorum regalium inscribendorum reflected general concern at the catastrophic state of the domain. It extended the principles established at Nieszawa and in the edicts of 1440, 1460, 1462, and 1478 to the whole royal domain, in an attempt to render it capable of sustaining the royal court and household, and of meeting the needs of government. It was henceforth illegal for the king to alienate or mortgage royal estates or his income from his regalian rights without sejm consent, and he could do so only if it was vital for the commonwealth.²³ The statute was almost certainly drafted by Łaski. The thinking behind it was revealed in 1507 by one of his protégés, Stanisław Zaborowski, a middling noble from the Sieradz palatinate, in his Treatise . . . on the Nature of the Laws and the Royal Domain, and on the Reform of the Kingdom and the Government of the Commonwealth.²⁴ Zaborowski probably served as a soldier in his youth, and then entered the church. He was a secretary in the royal treasury in 1505, before rising to be keeper of the treasury in 1512 or 1513, an office he held until his death; he was also a tax-collector in the Cracow palatinate in 1505.²⁵

It seems that Zaborowski took no active part in drafting the 1504 statute; nevertheless, as a treasury official he would have worked closely with Łaski, and it seems reasonable to suppose that his treatise echoes Łaski’s ideas. It was a radical document which both reflected and helped form ideas about the nature of the commonwealth. That Łaski and Zaborowski were clerics at a time when the church was coming under considerable pressure to make its own financial contribution to the realm explains to some extent the treatise’s nature, although Łaski throughout his career supported the taxation of clerical revenues, a position that angered his fellow clerics.

The treatise’s arguments are resolutely secular. It opens by stating that its author was moved to write by the tears and complaints of the poor brought on by high taxes and the devastation of the kingdom, which caused the author to ask whether the alienation of royal lands and regalian rights, whose consequences had visited ruin upon the kingdom, were legal.²⁶ The answer was blunt:

Neither kings, nor princes, nor anyone else possesses the authority to alienate or assign in any form whatsoever any properties belonging to the kingdom or attached to any of its offices . . . and if they have acted in breach of this principle, they must revoke the grant, regardless of any oath or agreement that they would not withdraw it.²⁷

Zaborowski drew on authorities from Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, and canon law, to the church fathers and modern writers, including Baldus de Ubaldis and Bartolus de Saxoferrato.²⁸ He advanced a contractual vision of the state, in which the king held his authority in trust for the wider political community: he was the administrator regni, the tutor, conservator, rector, mediator, and praepositus of the kingdom, not its proprietor. All authority was established by God to serve the common good. Thus royal lands were not the dynasty’s private property, but belonged to the community of the realm, and should be used by the king for the common good: to support the royal household, to uphold justice, and to defend the realm. ²⁹

These ideas were the common currency of contemporary republican thought. Their peculiar resonance in Poland resulted from the elective nature of its monarchy. Although the community of the realm respected the dynasty’s natural rights, kings became kings in Poland by election, and could not be crowned without swearing to uphold the laws, rights, and privileges of the realm. Zaborowski’s treatise eloquently demonstrates that ideas of patrimonial, hereditary kingship based on divine right had little purchase in Poland, where the republican ideal of a limited, constitutional monarchy bound by written as well as divine and natural law was securely established by 1500.

The Jagiellons, naturally, did not accept such notions, and Zaborowski’s treatise, however convenient its recommendations, reflected the sentiments not of the king, but of Łaski and a group within the royal administration that sought to develop a programme of political reform to release the government from the fiscal morass in which it was floundering. It is a measure of the political intelligence of Alexander and Sigismund that they recognized the political advantages the monarchy could derive from following the reform programme, while rejecting the premises upon which it was based. Thus Alexander consented to the 1504 statute on the royal domain and to Nihil Novi in 1505, and accepted Łaski’s statute, whose frontispiece was a vivid depiction of the proposition that the monarchy was bound by the law, and subject to the will of the community of the realm as gathered in the sejm (see Fig. 12).

Sigismund’s reputation has risen considerably in recent years. Previously, he was dismissed as the poorest of kings, whose nickname, ‘Sigismund the Old’ reflected the creeping senility and lack of energy he displayed towards the end of his long reign: he was 40 when he was crowned in January 1507, and 81 at his death in April 1548. Szujski, while acknowledging a certain competence in the early years, accused Sigismund of losing his way, and scolded him for allowing himself to become enthralled by the evil genius of his second wife, Bona Sforza (1494–1557), whom he married in 1518. Bobrzyński entitled the relevant chapter of his history of Poland: ‘[Sigismund’s] feeble and short-sighted policy ruins the nation’s historic mission and generates anarchy’. Wojciechowski broadly accepts this negative assessment, condemning him as a senatorial king, in thrall to the magnates and his council, who abandoned Alexander’s alliance with the ordinary nobility and who, despite his taste for Renaissance architecture, remained essentially medieval in his political outlook.³⁰

This picture is still influential, especially outside Poland.³¹ In reality Sigismund, while relying on and working through his council, was by no means its prisoner: Ambrosius Storm, secretary of the Danzig council who attended his election, reported that now decisions were taken by the king himself, instead of by the lords of the council, as in Alexander’s reign; another Prussian observer noted that he ‘listened well and spoke little’.³² He steered a careful and consistent course throughout his reign. While utilizing the considerable scope afforded him by the royal prerogative, he exploited the profound political divisions among the council elite, cautiously using the sejm to mount a determined assault on the greatest problem facing the royal government by tackling the problem of the royal domain.

Fig. 12. The estates of the Sejm. Frontispiece, Statute of Jan Łaski, 1506. Alexander, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania surrounded by senators and envoys. Woodcut in Jan Łaski, Commune incliti Poloniae Regni priuilegium constitutionum et indultuum publicitus decretorum, approbatorumque cum nonnullis iuribus tam divinis quam humanis (Cracow, 1506), Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Zbiór Dokumentów Pergaminowych, sygn. 5632. By kind permission of the Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Warsaw.

Although Sigismund frequently flouted its provisions, the 1504 constitution helped him considerably. It showed no interest in past alienations; its principal concern was to prevent them in the future. Nevertheless, in the climate it created, helped by Zaborowski’s view that all alienations of the royal domain were illegal, Sigismund put pressure on holders of royal land to reach compromise agreements in which the monarchy bought back mortgaged estates and regalian rights, and renegotiated leases. His approach was practical, sensible, and piecemeal. The 1507 coronation sejm supported revindication of royal lands, passing an act requiring those holding mortgaged royal estates or regalian revenues to present the documents in which they had been granted for scrutiny by the council; those who held them fraudulently were to be punished and would lose their holdings.³³ This declaration of intent was backed with action. Sigismund raised the funds necessary to recover the most lucrative sources of revenue, including the Wieliczka and Ruthenian salt mines, and the customs duties levied in Thorn and Elbing, by turning to wealthy bankers, in particular Boner, who was happy to extend credit in order to restore royal finances, and to the merchants of Cracow, Danzig, Thorn, and Elbing. Creditors were prepared to invest in return for appropriate rewards: the loan advanced by St Catherine’s convent in Kazimierz to repurchase the town of Sącz, for example, was repaid at 4 per cent from the proceeds of the Wieliczka salt mine. Using such means, Sigismund embarked on a sustained campaign to revindicate or renegotiate mortgage agreements and repurchase alienated estates and revenues. The aim was to liquidate grants from which the treasury derived no benefit: lifetime leases and contracts in which the holder was allowed to draw all income from the estates held, thereby earning far more than the sum originally lent. Repurchases were paid in instalments, based on the amount of the original loan. Where it was impossible to buy out such grants, the treasury concentrated on converting them into amortized agreements which—at the high rate of 10–20 per cent that was normally applied—ensured that the loan was repaid rapidly and the property redeemed.³⁴

Although the Muscovite war of 1512–22, the last war against the Order of 1519–21, endemic Tatar raids, and the intermittent Ottoman threat all required money, and led to further alienations, many of which breached the 1504 statute, Sigismund did much to restore the royal domain: according to the first comprehensive survey of royal property carried out between 1660 and 1670, in the Cracow palatinate, 23 per cent of royal villages from the period 1350–1410 had passed into private hands, whereas only 5 per cent of royal villages known from the period 1470–80 had been lost.³⁵

Reforms sought to ensure more efficient administration of the domain. There were two basic forms under which estates were granted: administration (zarząd) and lease (arenda). In the former, contracts were issued to administrators, who had to produce annual accounts; the division of income between them and the treasury was stipulated, with leaseholders receiving a salary, and the income from specified properties such as manors or mills within the complex. The remaining revenues were designated for the treasury. The treasury’s ability to monitor such contracts was, however, limited, and in many cases a straight lease (arenda) was preferred, in which the treasury set a cash rent it was to receive from the estate. This tended to favour leaseholders, since they did not have to produce accounts, and since inflation ate into the treasury’s income over long leases, but was easier to administer.³⁶

Within the limits of what was possible for early modern administrations, Sigismund’s reforms were effective enough. On average, under Mikołaj Szydłowiecki the treasury received 39 per cent of the income from estates administered according to the new principles between 1515 and 1532.³⁷ While this meant that leases on royal land were still lucrative for their holders it represented a substantial improvement on the situation before 1504, when the treasury received little or no income from many alienated estates. Szydłowiecki’s administration of the treasury was not as effective or free from corruption as might have been desired, and after his death further reforms, in which the centralization of administrative control over the domain was extended under the more capable control of Jan Spytek Tarnowski, treasurer from 1532 until 1550. With the windfall of the numerous royal estates in Mazovia following the province’s incorporation in 1529, the return of amortized estates and estates repurchased in instalments, royal income grew considerably. Inflation ate away at the value of fixed cash rents, but its effects were offset by an expansion of the domain in the great agricultural boom after 1500. If in 1470–80, royal holdings in Małopolska amounted to 349 villages in the palatinates of Cracow (199), Sandomierz (127) and Lublin (23), by 1576–81 the crown held 51 towns and 470 villages—a 36 per cent increase—in the Cracow palatinate alone.³⁸

The agricultural boom increased the profitability of royal land. Under Szydłowiecki, the treasury’s average annual income from 33 estates in Wielkopolksa, Małopolska, Red Ruthenia, and the Silesian territories of Zator and Oświęcim, was 22,591 złoties; Tarnowski increased this to an average of 39,106 złoties from 41 estates in these provinces, a rise of 73 per cent. The proportion of the net income of estates paid directly to the treasury rose from 39 per cent under Szydłowiecki to 76 per cent under Tarnowski. The income from estates administered directly by the treasury rose fourfold in the same period, from 5,653 to 22,270 złoties. Overall, the income from the royal estates—excluding Mazovia—rose from an annual average of 28,392 złoties between 1515 and 1531 to 49,756 złoties between 1540 and 1548.³⁹ The trend continued after 1548, when the treasury benefited from the income on the Mazovian estates which returned to its control on Bona’s death in 1557: they produced income of 15,180 złoties per annum in the 1540s, and an estimated 30,000 per annum between 1556 and 1566. In these years, although the income from estates in Małopolska, Wielkopolska, Royal Prussia, and the palatinate of Rawa dropped as compared with the 1540s, income from the Ruthenian territories rose from 13,966 to 26,037 złoties per annum, an increase of over 86 per cent. Including the Mazovian estates, income from the royal domain on average in these years was 89,585 złoties, which marked an increase of 215.5 per cent since the 1520s.⁴⁰

Taken together with the taxes levied by the sejm, this achievement represents a considerable consolidation of royal and central state power. The royal administration grew steadily. Although the clergy still dominated, the proportion of lay secretaries rose steadily, from 4 per cent before 1506 to 24 per cent in 1548. The figure for secretaries from the middling nobility rose from 30 to 68 per cent under Sigismund; all these trends continued after his death. That this was turning into an established bureaucratic structure is demonstrated by the proportion of secretaries who rose into the royal council and the great offices of state, which climbed steadily.⁴¹

Sigismund’s ministers had a broad and cosmopolitan education. Most studied at Cracow University, which flourished in the early sixteenth century, drawing students from across central and eastern Europe, before the flow of foreign students diminished considerably after the Reformation.⁴² While it seems that Łaski, who came from a humble szlachta background, did not attend university, he was a renowned scholar, a correspondent of Erasmus, a famed rhetorician, and patron of the arts. Piotr Tomicki took his bachelor’s degree in Cracow, where he was a contemporary of Nicholas Copernicus and his brother Andreas; like them Tomicki also studied in Bologna, where he was taught by the famed rhetorician Filippo Beroaldo and the canon lawyer Antonio da Burgos, taking his doctorate in canon and civil law in 1500; he later established the Cracow chairs of Hebrew and Greek. Jan Chojeński, bishop of Cracow and chancellor (1537–8), studied in Cracow and Siena, where he completed a doctorate in canon and civil law; Samuel Maciejowski, vice-chancellor (1539–47), bishop of Płock (1542–5), bishop of Cracow (1545–50), and chancellor (1547–50) studied philosophy and rhetoric in Padua and Bologna.⁴³ Poland was governed by men whose political ideals were formed through wide reading in the works of European humanism.

Sigismund, like his father, sought to place his own stamp on government. Just as he had turned away from Alexander’s favourite Mykhailo Hlynsky in Lithuania, so he removed Łaski from the centre of power, replacing him as chancellor in 1510 by vice-chancellor Maciej Drzewicki, and appointing his childhood friend Krzysztof Szydłowiecki to the vice-chancellorship. When Szydłowiecki became chancellor in 1515, his brother Mikołaj was appointed treasurer and the vice-chancellorship went to his brother-in-law Tomicki. Control of the council, however, was not enough. Polish politics had become considerably more complex. The szlachta’s growing prosperity meant that the wealthy elite of magnates had grown in size, and the monarchy did not have enough offices, grants of land, and favours to satisfy everyone, particularly in the light of the campaign to restore the domain, which brought confrontation with individuals and families who found their comfortable incomes from royal estates challenged, bought out, or simply revindicated.

The government was not the only power centre. The royal court’s political significance grew as Bona used her considerable private fortune to buy up and revindicate estates on her own account, partly as a means of increasing her political influence, and partly to strengthen the dynasty. By the 1540s, without taking into account her extensive Lithuanian holdings, Bona controlled 15 royal towns and 191 villages, including Sambor, then the richest royal property in Poland, with 2 towns and 80 villages. Her estates in the Cracow palatinate alone—1 town and 17 villages—yielded estimated annual revenues of 1,800 złoties. To this was added her enormous 1545 dower settlement, by which she acquired control of the whole royal domain in Mazovia: 35 towns, 258 villages, 98 manors, and 230 mills, with no fewer than 12 judicial starosties, including Warsaw. Her average revenues from Mazovia alone amounted to 10,000–11,000 złoties per annum.⁴⁴

This colossal accumulation of land by the queen did not, however, do as much as it might have for Sigismund’s authority. Although Bona had considerable influence over Sigismund, especially in his later years, they by no means always agreed on politics or on patronage, which turned the court into a centre of rivalry and intrigue. Sigismund’s trusted ministers, Tomicki and the Szydłowieckis, were lifelong enemies of Łaski who, if he had been removed from the chancellorship, still enjoyed substantial influence as primate. Łaski was close to Bona because of his opposition to the pro-Habsburg, pro-Hohenzollern policies of Sigismund, Tomicki, Szydłowiecki, and the hetman Jan Tarnowski, who saw good relations with the Habsburgs as vital for defence of Poland’s southern borders. Bona’s wealth enabled her to construct a significant clientele, which included Piotr Kmita (1477–1553), a cultured and educated man who rose to be grand marshal and palatine of Cracow, who had served the Habsburgs in his youth, but who subsequently turned against them. Bona’s main protégé was Piotr Gamrat (1487–1545), bishop of Cracow (1538–41) and archbishop of Gniezno (1541–5), whose taste for debauchery accompanied a keen political sense. As Sigismund aged, Bona’s influence over appointments grew, and she was able to advance the careers of several of her acolytes.⁴⁵

The divisions within the magnate elite were played out in the sejm. Sigismund appreciated the need for szlachta support, and was able to use it to secure some, at least, of his aims. He was no prisoner of his council: he never granted it authority to govern during his absences in Lithuania as Alexander had done, and, although he was required to take its advice, there was no requirement to follow it on anything other than matters to do with the currency under the privileges of 1422, in contrast to the supposedly patrimonial system in Lithuania, where Alexander’s 1492 privilege constrained him more closely. He did, however, rule mostly through his council, and in particular the small inner council: what the contemporary chronicler Bernard Wapowski termed the conventus optimatum. Although he was dependent throughout his reign upon its consent to taxation, Sigismund showed no great regard for the sejm, or appreciation of the possibilities of managing it to achieve his aims. Occasionally he showed open contempt, using the royal prerogative to overrule or ignore sejm decisions: in 1523 he ordered the collection of the excise after it had been rejected by the sejm, and in 1537, on council authority, he ordered the collection of the excise after a turbulent sejm in Cracow refused to agree taxes.⁴⁶

As the battles over government finance grew in scale and bitterness, and as the printing of laws and statutes increased political awareness among the szlachta, Sigismund’s style of government came under attack, encouraged by council members who felt excluded by his reliance on his favourites. Bona may have had little time for the sejm, but some of her supporters, including Łaski and Kmita, were willing to turn to the chamber of envoys, and did not treat it with the contempt of Sigismund’s coterie of ministers, such as Tomicki, who referred in his correspondence to the ordinary nobility as commoners and plebs.⁴⁷

Early in his reign, Sigismund exploited the fact that the chamber had not yet developed a strong sense of corporate identity. For all the talk of the community of the realm, it remained a gathering of delegates from the individual provinces and territories that constituted that realm; it was conceived as a conventum generalem omnium terrarum, and envoys were nuntii terrarum, or nuntii terrestres. Provincial loyalties remained strong. Envoys from Wielkopolska, Małopolska, and the Ru-thenian territories submitted separate petitions, and the sejm frequently agreed separate laws for different provinces, palatinates, and territories. Sigismund could therefore pursue a strategy of divide and rule, seeking to isolate envoys from sejmiks that opposed individual policies.⁴⁸

In the battles over taxation and the royal domain, however, the provincial barriers began to dissolve, and a growing sense of common purpose emerged. For, despite his strenuous efforts to reconstitute and rebuild the royal domain, Sigismund blatantly ignored both the 1504 statute, mortgaging and granting estates without sejm approval, and the various laws that sought to delineate the responsibilities and regulate the holding of major offices of state. These decreed that one of the two chancellors should always be an ecclesiastic, and banned appointments to either office of holders of the most lucrative bishoprics: the archbishopric of Gniezno and the bishoprics of Cracow, Cujavia, Poznań, Ermland, and Płock. The chancellorship and vice-chancellorship were declared incompatible with the offices of palatine and castellan. Sigismund also flouted the Nieszawa ban on the holding of judicial starosties by palatines and castellans.⁴⁹ Maciej Drzewicki, chancellor between 1511 and 1515, advanced in 1513 from the bishopric of Przemyśl, which he was allowed to hold, to Płock, which he was not. Krzysztof Szydłowiecki, Drzewicki’s successor as vice-chancellor (1511–15) and chancellor (1515–32), retained the castellany of Sandomierz and was promoted to the palatinate (1515) and castellany (1527) of Cracow. Vice-chancellor Tomicki (1515–35) became bishop of Poznań (1520) and then Cracow (1524).

None of this passed unnoticed. The almost annual sejm sessions forced upon Sigismund by his need for taxation provided a regular forum for protest. The many wealthy nobles who felt excluded from Sigismund’s inner circle, both those who held office and those who did not, were happy to make common cause with the middling nobility in the sejm. Before his marriage to Bona, Sigismund had managed the sejm reasonably effectively. With his council, he still had a considerable influence over the chamber’s composition. It was customary for half the envoys to be elected by office-holders, and half by sejmiks. This meant that royal supporters were able to ensure a good number of envoys were bound in some way to the government, as courtiers, colonels, royal envoys, or tax-collectors: such men constituted 49 per cent of the 102 known envoys from Małopolska in this period, of whom 12 per cent were courtiers, and 44 per cent of 118 envoys from Wielkopolska, of whom 6 per cent were courtiers.⁵⁰ Yet opposition to this state of affairs was growing. In 1520, during the last war with the Order, the levy was called out, and a sejm summoned to Bydgoszcz. It demanded the institution of ‘sejms for justice’; these were to be preceded by sejmiks in all districts, which were to elect their own envoys, in an attempt to avoid the influence of senators at the provincial sejmiks. The chancery ignored these demands when summoning sejms. While the noble opposition occasionally sought over the next twenty years to exclude senators from envoy elections, their efforts failed, as, on the whole, did attempts to make senators elect envoys separately, as happened at the Wielkopolskan sejmik in Środa (1525) and at the 1538 Cracow sejmik.⁵¹

Despite this influence over the chamber’s composition, Sigismund found the sejm increasingly difficult to manage. Many envoys were local officials, mostly legal officials, who had a good knowledge of the law, and were responsible for upholding and enforcing it. As taxation was levied year after year, envoys expressed increasing concern with the state of the royal domain. The sejms of 1524–5 and 1527, after agreeing to the high rate of 18 groszy for the hide tax, to be paid half by tenant farmers, and half by noble proprietors, voted for a tax on income from repurchase agreements (wyderkafy), income from the farming of customs duties, leases on taverns and other rental income, and ordered an assessment of all landed estates for the purpose. This measure was aimed directly at wealthy office-holders, and was opposed by many senators, who did not wish to reveal the true extent of their incomes from royal land. Since they were responsible for overseeing the tax, very little came of it.⁵²

Thus the law—and Sigismund’s taste for ignoring it—increasingly exercised the chamber. By the 1520s, there were calls not so much for a codification of the law—envoys were reluctant to place responsibility for codification in the hands of the chancery, suspecting it would use the opportunity to rewrite the law—as for its ‘improvement and correction’. Commissions were appointed by the sejm to this end in 1511, 1519–20, 1526–7, and 1532. Although they failed to enact major reform, they built on Łaski’s work, informed legislation, and fed into the continuing process by which Polish law was published and made available to the citizen body.⁵³

Knowledge of the law stimulated concern at its functioning. Since Cracow University only trained canon lawyers before the establishment of a chair in Roman law in 1533, there was as yet no substantial body of professional civil lawyers, and nobles involved in lawsuits mostly acted for themselves. There was, however, considerable suspicion among the szlachta about Roman law, with its emphasis on the king’s role in the legal process, and claims that he was not bound by written law. Calls for correction and improvement of the law grew, and there was a marked preference for publications in the vernacular rather than in Latin, knowledge of which was widespread among the wealthier nobility.⁵⁴ Codification found support in the royal government, which desired a greater uniformity of law: Casimir III’s statutes had promulgated separate laws for Wielkopolska and Małopolska, but there was growing support for the process begun by the 1496 statute that had codified the separate privileges issued in the 1450s, and a desire to harmonize Mazovian law with the rest of the kingdom after the province’s incorporation.⁵⁵ Tomicki sought to control the process by preparing a collection of statutes from 1507 to 1523, the Formula Processus, which aimed at establishing court procedure, though it was based on Małopolskan procedures, and was only accepted by the Małopolska nobility at the 1523 sejm: the Wielkopolskans initially rejected it, suspicious that senators close to the court had corrupted it, but accepted it in 1553.⁵⁶

A similar fatemet the work of the commissions established by Sigismund in 1520 in response to pressure from the szlachta. Opposition from Sigismund and the council at the 1521 sejm meant that little was achieved, although commissions met in 1526 and 1532, as the government took control. Tomicki did not sit on the commissions, but played a large part in their nomination and in guiding their work. They produced the correctio iurium in 1532, a collection of 930 articles concerning Polish litigation law and some public law. This was put before the sejm in January 1534, but as the sejmiks had not had time properly to assess it, it was referred to the next sejm, whichmet in late 1535. Sigismund was in Lithuania and attended neither; concern was expressed at the problems faced by the judicial system in the king’s absence. The majority of the envoys, led by the Wielkopolskans, therefore rejected the correctura despite Tomicki’s efforts, on the grounds that, far from correcting the law, it sought to introduce new law, but principally because it did not represent a true execution of the law: it failed to take account of concern about the operation of the law, downgraded the status of the szlachta-controlled land courts, and largely ignored the ecclesiastical and castle courts.⁵⁷

The envoys were right to be suspicious. In publishing the text of Nihil Novi the correctura introduced subtle but important changes. The king was named supreme judge, and the term ‘envoys’ (nuntii terrestres) was replaced with proceres. Although ‘proceres’ could refer to office-holders or to the szlachta gathered in the sejm, it was suspected that it was intended to refer to a narrow group high officials, given Sigismund’s known preference for working through the council, and in the light of suggestions such as that by hetman Jan Tarnowski in 1530 that some sejm debates should take place without the envoys. If new law could be introduced by the king with the consent of ‘leading men’ rather than the chamber of envoys, and if the king were to be the supreme judge in consultation with senators, the door would be open to the firm royal government that Sigismund desired and the szlachta feared. In the absence of Sigismund and Tomicki, the proposal failed. For the chamber activists, the law required not innovation but restoration and the removal of faults that had accumulated over the years. Its publication was merely a means to an end: the execution of the common law of the realm.⁵⁸

Gradually, as envoys from the various provinces discovered a common purpose, and as the frequent sejm sessions taught them much about parliamentary strategy, ‘execution of the law’ (executio iurium in Latin, egzekucja praw in Polish) became both a slogan and a programme that formed a rallying point for many nobles and not a few disgruntled magnates. It encapsulated the concerns that had been growing since 1506. Sigismund’s authoritarian character, his preference for rule through a small coterie of ministers, his tendency to exercise his prerogative to evade and ignore sejm statutes had all caused concern, as had Bona’s aggressive repurchase of alienated royal estates. While Bona was associated with politicians such as Łaski and Kmita, who looked to the ordinary szlachta for support, and—to an extent—championed its causes, her aggressive pursuit of border disputes with private estates, and desire to recover individual properties and fields that had slipped out of the royal domain into private hands did not endear her to many among the szlachta, since poorer nobles were less able to defend themselves against her agents. The impression that revindication of the royal domain was designed to enrich the royal family rather than solve the government’s financial problems brought magnates and ordinary nobles together in an alliance against what could be presented not as the execution of the law, but as the arbitrary exercise of royal power.⁵⁹

The szlachta became fractious during Sigismund’s long absences in Lithuania fighting the 1530s Muscovite wars. Sejmiks were increasingly reluctant to grant sejm envoys plenipotentiary powers, and the practice of furnishing them with instructions was growing. There is evidence of sejmiks insisting that their envoys were bound by their instructions in 1530, 1533, 1534, 1536–7, and 1538.⁶⁰ Divisions were sharpening. The Piotrków sejm that opened on 25 November 1535, the second of two to meet in Sigismund’s absence, was so turbulent that primate Andrzej Krzycki called it an ‘asiatic diet’. In December it passed the first pieces of legislation calling for the ‘execution of privileges’ according to the laws of the realm. During the debates, inspection of privileges issued to the church, to cities, and to Royal Prussia was urged to ensure that they were in accordance with the law.⁶¹

In 1537 matters came to a head. Sigismund had returned to Cracow for a sejm called for 1 November 1536, which assembled eleven days late. The mood in the chamber was ugly. The sixteen-year-old Sigismund August was to swear an oath to uphold the privileges accorded to the realm by his predecessors, following his election as king vivente rege (in the lifetime of the king) in 1529.⁶² The envoys were determined to secure redress before supply, presenting a string of complaints about the ‘new duty’, Bona’s purchasing of royal estates, the appointment of foreigners to public office, and burghers owning landed estates. They demanded formal recognition of the elective nature of the throne, the freeing of the szlachta from all duties, and not just for goods produced on their estates. As the wind from Wittenberg blew in an easterly direction it amplified the szlachta’s traditional anticlericalism, and intensified demands that the church contribute on an equal basis to the defence of the realm: clerics should contribute to the noble levy, from which their village headmen should no longer be exempt; secular lands that had been placed under ecclesiastical law since 1382 should be resecularized; appeals to Rome should be abolished; annates should be used for the defence of the realm, and high church office should be reserved to those of noble birth. These proposals were far too radical for Sigismund. When he made it clear that he had no intention of appointing Gamrat chancellor the envoys—encouraged by Bona’s protégés Kmita and Krzycki—refused to take any further part in the sejm, leaving Cracow in a collective huff on 2 February and forcing Sigismund August to take his oath in the presence only of his father and the council.⁶³

Sigismund decided on confrontation, ordering the collection of the excise on council authority in March, and summoning the levy to gather at Trembowla near Lwów in early July for an expedition against Peter IV, hospodar of Moldavia, who had been at war with Poland since 1530. The policy backfired spectacularly. Mikołaj Taszycki, the Cracow land judge, called an assembly of the szlachta at Sokolniki near Lwów, which opened on 22 August and declared itself to be a rokosz, an allusion to Rákos, the location of the mass assemblies of nobles in Hungary that developed under Jagiellonian rule.⁶⁴ The assembly was regarded as a legal act of defiance by the citizen body to a king acting in breach of his oath. The rokosz could not force its programme on Sigismund, but despite the energetic scavenging of the large numbers of nobles seeking to feed themselves that earned the episode the dismissive title of the hens’ war (wojna kokosza) from royal supporters, this was not the anarchic episode that is so frequently portrayed. Its supporters, roused by the circulation of the—probably apocryphal—Rady Kallimacha, which purported to be Machiavellian advice given to John Albert by Kallimach, put their demands to Sigismund in an orderly manner, following the normal procedure for sejm debates.⁶⁵ They focused on Bona’s actions and the boundary judgements they regarded as unjust, made ‘without a summons, without a court, and outwith the law’, as Taszycki put it.⁶⁶ Sigismund defended Bona robustly, while Kmita vacillated between playing to the szlachta gallery and supporting the court. The rokosz demanded that judgements concerning the execution of the law on royal properties no longer be made solely on the basis of the chancery archives, but that documents registered in the castle, municipal, and consistorial courts should be taken into account, along with documents sworn before a notary.⁶⁷

For all that, Sigismund was willing to take the assembly seriously, treating it as a camp sejm, and seeking to persuade it—unsuccessfully—to agree taxes, he had not summoned it, and it was therefore technically illegal, as its leaders effectively admitted when they sought to downplay its significance at their trial for lèse-majesté in 1538.⁶⁸ Although they were found guilty, they were not punished, merely being bound over on oath to serve the king.⁶⁹ Thus despite the offers of help against his recalcitrant subjects from a glittering array of European monarchs, including Charles V, Ferdinand I, and Suleyman the Magnificent, Sigismund astutely lowered the temperature. The sejm that opened in Piotrków in January 1538 was stormy. Calls for Sigismund’s deposition circulated in Wielkopolska, and with the szlachta and senators at loggerheads, Sigismund defused the situation by accepting the main szlachta demands. He admitted that he had breached the law and promised that he and his successors would not do so again. He accepted the elective nature of the monarchy in a statute that outlawed elections vivente rege, and stated that elections should take place at an election sejm with the participation of senators and szlachta. The principle of Nihil Novi was reaffirmed, stressing the need for the chamber of envoys to consent to new law.⁷⁰ His concessions, including more minor measures from the rokosz programme meant that despite its tense beginning the sejm agreed the hide tax at the generous rate of 24 złoties, the highest level of his reign.⁷¹

With further concessions at the sejms of 1539 and 1540, the envoys secured their first parliamentary triumph, and the campaign for the execution of the laws gained considerable momentum. It was by no means a complete victory, however, and it remained to be seen if Sigismund and his successors would honour their promises. The atmosphere remained tense, as Sigismund’s physical and mental decline quickened, and Bona secured a considerable measure of influence over the royal government with the elevation of Gamrat to the archbishopric of Gniezno, and the promotion of her protégé Paweł Wolski from vice-chancellor to chancellor in 1538. The new vice-chancellor was another member of her clientele, Samuel Maciejowski. Her triumph was short-lived, however, as a storm of criticism greeted Sigismund’s grant of her generous Mazovian dower in 1545. By now, with Bona’s activities in Lithuania as well as Mazovia causing concern, the issue of the union began to exercise the attention of supporters of execution of the laws.

1 Anna Odrzywolska-Kidawa, Podkanclerzy Piotr Tomicki (1515–1535) (Warsaw, 2005), 79–80.

2 Uruszczak, Sejm walny koronny w latach 1506–1540 (Warsaw, 1981), 9.

3 It was referred to in the diploma granting the starosty of Lwów to Piotr Myszkowski in that year: VC, i/i, 91.

4 Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 63; Marek Plewczyński, Żołnierz jazdy obrony potocznej za panowania Zygmunta Augusta (Warsaw, 1985), 9, 61; Marek Plewczyński, ‘Liczebność wojska polskiego za ostatnich Jagiellonów (1506–1572)’,1, SMHW, 31 (1988), 28–9.

5 The Catholic church held some 15%, with the rest almost entirely in the hands of the nobility: Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August: Król polski i wielki książę litewski, 2nd edn (Cracow, 2010), 33–4.

6 Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 60; Jan Rutkowski, ‘Skarbowość polska za Aleksandra Jagiellończyka’, KH, 23 (1909), 57–8.

7 Rutkowski, ‘Skarbowość’, 13–14; Sucheni-Grabowska, Monarchia, 67–9; Luciński, Rozwój, 31.

8 Rutkowski, ‘Skarbowość’, 12–13; Sucheni-Grabowska, Monarchia, 74–82; Luciński, Rozwój, 25–6.

9 Rutkowski, ‘Skarbowość’, 16–17; Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 71; Luciński, Rozwój, 32.

10 Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 59, 274; Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 181.

11 Rutkowski, ‘Skarbowość’, 26–8.

12 Uruszczak, Sejm, 216; cf. table 1 in Sucheni-Grabowska, Monarchia, 23–6.

13 Sucheni-Grabowska, Monarchia, 24–6; Rutkowski, ‘Skarbowość’, 38–9.

14 Uruszczak, Sejm; Sucheni-Grabowska, Monarchia, 24–6.

15 VC, i/i, 214–15; Uruszczak, Sejm, 200; Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 357–8.

16 VC, i/i, 133, 199; Papée, Aleksander 83; Rutkowski, ‘Skarbowość’, 41–2; Uruszczak, ‘Sejm w latach’, 98.

17 VC, i/i, 356–66.

18 VL, i, 64–5; Jacek Matuszewski, ‘Statut Władysława Warneńczyka z 1440 r.: W procesie ograniczania królewskiego prawa dyspozycji domeną ziemską w Polsce’, CPH, 37/2 (1985), 101–20.

19 VL, i, 91; 106–7.

20 Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 47, 54–5.

21 Annales, xii/i, 332; Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 52.

22 Rutkowski, ‘Skarbowość’, 16–17.

23 VC, i/i, 130; Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 67–8; Papée, Aleksander, 84.

24 Stanisław Zaborowski, Tractatus Quadrifidus de Natura Iurium et Bonorum Regis et de Reformatione Regni ac eius Reipublicae Regimine incipit Feliciter (Cracow, 1507). References are to the modern edition: Traktat o naturze praw i dóbr królewskich, ed. Henryk Litwin (Cracow, 2005).

25 Henryk Litwin, ‘Stanisława Zaborowskiego życie, sylwetka i traktat’, in Zaborowski, Traktat, v–x.

26 Zaborowski, Traktat, 2.

27 Zaborowski, Traktat, 2.

28 For his sources, see Zaborowski, Traktat, 329–41.

29 Litwin, ‘Życie’, xliv–xlv; Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 85–8.

30 Józef Szujski, Historyi polskiej treściwie opowiedzianej ksiąg dwanaście (1880; Poznań, 2005), 167–82; Michał Bobrzyński, Dzieje Polski w zarysie (1879; Warsaw, 1974), 235; Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 403–16.

31 Davies, while recognizing his ‘style and energy’ in the early years, presents Sigismund as a cautious, conservative king: God’s Playground, i, 113. For a more positive assessment which nevertheless echoes some of these criticisms, see Jerzy Besala, Zygmunt Stary i Bona Sforza (Poznań, 2012), 630–8.

32 Quoted by Karol Górski, Łukasz Watzenrode. Życie i działalność polityczna (1447–1512) (Wrocław, 1973), 64, 88.

33 VC, i/i, 190, 191.

34 Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 70, 88–90, 99.

35 Luciński, Rozwój, 54, 58.

36 Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 206–17.

37 Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, table 10, 222.

38 Calculations based on figures in Luciński, Rozwój, 126–7.

39 Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 228–9; Sucheni-Grabowska, Monarchia, table 11, 95, a slightly higher figure for the income from Royal Prussia (10,650) as compared with 9,628 in table 30 in Obudowa, 270.

40 Calculations based on table 30 in Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 270 and table 11 in Sucheni-Grabowska, Monarchia, 95.

41 Andrzej Wyczański, Między kulturą a polityką. Sekretarze królewscy Zygmunta Starego (1506–1548) (Warsaw, 1990), 239–41.

42 Between 1501 and 1510, 1,714 foreigners and 1,501 Poles studied in Cracow: Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 143.

43 Tafiłowski, Łaski, 20–1; Odrzywolska-Kidawa, Tomicki, 61–2; Anna Kamler, Od szkoły do senatu. Wykształcenie senatorów w Koronie w latach 1501–1586 (Warsaw, 2006), 130, 136.

44 Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 149–50, 154, 183–4.

45 Maria Bogucka, Bona Sforza (Warsaw, 1989), 108–30.

46 Uruszczak, Sejm, 21, 26–8; Uruszczak, ‘Sejm w latach’, 64; Bogucka, Bona, 133.

47 Uruszczak, Sejm, 56.

48 Uruszczak, Sejm, 38–9.

49 VC, i/i, 62, 128–30.

50 Uruszczak, Sejm, 119–20.

51 Uruszczak, Sejm, 110–15.

52 VC, i/i, 432–5; VC i/ii, 14; Uruszczak, ‘Sejm w latach’, 100; Uruszczak, Sejm, 204.

53 Uruszczak, Próba, 78–81; Uruszczak, ‘Sejm w latach’, 89.

54 Uruszczak, Próba, 50–1; James Miller, ‘The Polish nobility and the Renaissance Monarchy: The “Execution of the Laws” Movement’, i, PER, 3/3 (1983), 76.

55 Uruszczak, Próba, 56.

56 Uruszczak, Próba, 105–6; Uruszczak, ‘Sejm w latach’, 103; Odrzywolska-Kidawa, Tomicki, 101.

57 VC, i/ii, 122–3, 129; Uruszczak, ‘Sejm w latach’, 103; Odrzywolska-Kidawa, Tomicki, 100–5; Miller, ‘Execution’, i, 77.

58 Uruszczak, Próba, 80–3; 187–251.

59 Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 166–9. For the origins of the execution movement see Miller, ‘Execution’, i, 65–87.

60 Grzybowski, Teoria, 76.

61 VC, i/ii, 136–40; Tadeusz Szulc, Z badań nad egzekucją praw. Podstawy ustawodawcze egzekucji dóbr, ich interpretacja i nowelizacja na sejmach za panowania Zygmunta II Augusta (Łódź, 2000), 35–7.

62 See Ch. 33, 405–6.

63 VC, i/ii, 122–3; Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 357–61.

64 Martyn Rady, ‘Rethinking Jagiełło Hungary (1490–1526)’, Central Europe, 3/1 (2005), 10.

65 Uruszczak, Sejm, 222; Władysław Pociecha, Królowa Bona, 4 vols, (Poznań, 1949–58), ii, 379–81.

66 Quoted by Sucheni-Grabowska, Odbudowa, 170.

67 Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 363–4.

68 Uruszczak, Sejm, 222.

69 Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 367–8.

70 VC, i/ii, 170.

71 Sucheni-Grabowska, Monarchia, 25; Uruszczak, Sejm, 213; Wojciechowski, Zygmunt, 368.