Pola

Henry of Valois, 1573-74.

The election had been preceded by a correctura iurum, or reform of the constitution, which re sulted in the famous "Henrician Articles" which converted Poland from a limited monarchy into a republic with an elective chief magistrate. The king was to have no voice in the choice of his successor. He was to marry a wife selected for him by the senate. He was to be neutral in all religious matters. He was not to lead the militia across the border without the consent of the szlachta, and then only for three months at a time. Should the king fail to observe any one of these articles, the nation was ipso facto absolved from its allegiance. Whatever its intrinsic demerits, the disastrous fruits of this reform were' largely due to the precarious geographical position of Poland, and it must be remembered to Poland's credit that she alone with England preserved the tradi tion of parliamentary government in the increasingly absolutist Europe of the time.

The reign of Henry of Valois lasted 13 months. The tidings of the death of his brother Charles IX. determined him to ex change a thorny for what he hoped would be a flowery throne, and at midnight on June 14, 1574, he literally fled from Poland. Eighteen months later, the senate elected the Austrian prince Maximilian to the throne ; but the "gentry democracy," at the suggestion of its new leader Jan Zamoyski, chose a prince of Transylvania, Stephen Bathory, assigning him for husband to the last surviving princess of the Jagiello dynasty, and enforced this election by arms.

Stephen Bathory, 1575-86.

The king elected by the "patri otic" party proved one of Poland's greatest kings. The glorious II years of his reign, too brief to be permanently effective, yet represent the high-water mark of Poland's international power, and the achievements of his genius both in foreign and domestic policy remain unsurpassed in Polish annals. (See STEPHEN, King of Poland.) With the insight of a born statesman he focussed his energy on two vital objectives : the maintenance of Poland's access to the sea by way of Danzig, and the defence of her newly-gained further sea-board in the north-east against the rising power of Moscow. Danzig, on B5.thory's election, began to intrigue against him with the German emperor, who of course supported Bithory's Austrian rival, and with Russia and Denmark. In spite of a deplorable lack of understanding on the part of the Polish gentry for the issue at stake, Bathory, who had throughout the able and strenuous support of his chancellor Zamoyski, conducted a campaign against Danzig both by land and sea, and finally enforced its complete submission to his rule.

Before peace was made with Danzig, Ivan the Terrible had raided Livonia once more. Bathory for the first time in the history of Polish warfare using infantry rather than cavalry and calling peasants and burghers to arms together with the gentry, achieved in the operations against Russia the greatest military triumphs of his reign. In three successive expeditions he pushed his way north-eastward as far as Pskov, and the tsar was fain to obtain the Pope's intervention by a promise of making Russia Catholic. As a result of Bithory's victories, Poland pushed Russia entirely away from the Baltic for a long time, and regained sway over nearly the whole of Livonia.

Brilliant as these foreign successes were, the greatness of Bathory's statesmanship is even more manifest at home. He con ciliated in a most far-sighted way, by concessions and privileges, two of the monarchy's most important minority groups : the Ukrainian Cossacks and the Jews. The Cossacks were largely runaway serfs, who had organized into a sort of military republic on the vast and scantily inhabited plains of the "Ukraine" or "borderland," stretching from the south-east of the monarchy towards the Black sea along the river Dnieper. The Cossack com munity had been drawn into the Polish military system under Bathory's predecessors by registration and pay, and had already been granted exemption from taxation, as well as their own jurisdiction. Bathory, who needed them for his Russian wars, confirmed and enlarged these privileges. His successors used the Cossacks against the Russians, Turks and Tartars; but soon the Cossacks themselves were to grow into a factor of trouble for Poland, not without serious errors of policy on the Polish side. The privileges which the Jews had obtained from former kings were augmented : from his day until 1764 the Polish Jews had a parliament of their own, meeting twice a year, with powers of taxation. It was also chiefly in the interest of the Jews that Bathory restricted, by special edict, the trading rights of Scottish pedlars, of whom as many as 30,00o were abroad in Poland at his time. Among other domestic measures, Bathory reformed the Polish judicial system by the creation of a supreme court of appeal for civil cases; and founded, in 1579, the University of Vilna as a bulwark of Western European culture in the East.