Historical calendar: Anniversary of the death of the last Polish king from the Jagiellonian dynasty. It was followed by the unpleasant “Free Elections”.
Today in our Calendar we will look at the consequences of the death of King Sigismund August, or the final moments of the Polish hereditary monarchy.
Due to the increasingly probable death of Zygmunt August without a male descendant, there was a problem of succession of the Polish and Lithuanian thrones. The confirmation by Sigismund of the Old right of nobility to free king's election threatened to break the alliance of Poland and Lithuania. If the Polish nobles on the free election chose to be ruler, e.g. 1 of the Habsburgs, and the Lithuanian nobles, e.g. the prince of Moscow, there would be a dispute of interests leading to a consecutive way to the reversal of alliances and even war.
On both sides, therefore, there was a more close link between the 2 countries. Poles saw them in the form of the creation of a single state, and Lithuanians, fearing the dominance of Poland in specified a creature, only advocated the creation of a unchangeable mechanics of common government. any of the boyars even advocated returning to the hereditary monarchy phase in Lithuania, so that the large Lithuanian prince would inactive be the king of Poland in a natural way.
The legal and administrative separation of Lithuania and much poorer than Polish political culture of nobility stood in the way of unification. While in the Crown for years there have been natural and bottom-up earthly seismics, which were simply recognized and "coupled" into the state system, in Lithuania there were only large semes in crucial political matters. Possible lower-level seymites appeared there thanks to the Polish settlement and the pressures of central authorities, alternatively than from the bottom-up initiative of the public nobility.
Although a peculiar commission was established in 1551 to unify Lithuanian law in terms of bringing it closer to the Kingdom of Poland, the political culture of the knighthood could not change rapidly.
In 1565, King Sigismunt issued a statute, which he introduced in Lithuania territory seymikas and renounced any of his prerogatives to the Lithuanian Sejm, bringing him closer legally to the Polish Sejm. The forceful launch of the Seymites by the authoritative request of their functioning, as any detached reform, proved to be pure fiction, a dead recipe.
In 1563 a peculiar Crown Sejm was convened in Warsaw, to which 28 delegates from Lithuania besides arrived. The Sejm addressed the issue of a fresh union between countries. On February 12, 1564, the king enacted the Polish Kingdom with hereditary law Jagillon dynasty to regulation the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which would facilitate the election of the ruler of the combined state after his death. A joint committee was formed to prepare the principles of the fresh union. Her work rapidly found opposition to the Lithuanians.
The Polish nobles hoped to repeat the records of the unrealised municipal union from the time of Alexander Jagiellończyk, and the Lithuanian nobles advocated loose ties of both countries, as a standard only wishing to establish a common monarch and permanent Polish aid against Moscow.
On March 13, 1564, a protocol of divergences in these matters was written; a joint election of the king was agreed, the establishment of a combined parliament, the unification of offices and territorial division, and the introduction of a common defence policy. However, the parliament in Parczew, which was to approve these provisions, was boycotted by the Lithuanian side, which was represented almost exclusively by the magnates there. The Lithuanians began to make concessions only erstwhile the war with Russia during that time showed weakness of their troops, which could not cope with the Moscals without Polish help.
The nobles of both countries agreed on 1 thing – the inheritance of the throne must not be allowed, and consequently, the strong -legitimized birth- power of the monarch. Thus came the establishment of the Lublin Union and the establishment of an unfortunate institution of free election, with all its disastrous consequences.
Previous entry from our calendar is available Here.
