Sigismund's persistent Swedish ambitions, his equally persistent Austrian sympathies, but, more than all, his absolutist leanings and cherished plans for a drastic and arbitrary constitutional re form on foreign models and on anti-parliamentary lines, occasioned in 16°6 an armed revolt of the Polish gentry against their king— the rokosz (or insurrection) of Nicholas Zebrzydowski, who was supported by the discontented Protestants. The rokosz was at last suppressed in 1607, but it left as its legacy such ruinous precedents as an enforced recognition of the doctrine of the sub jects' right to depose their king (de non praestanda obedientia), and, being undertaken in justified defence of the native Parlia mentary tradition against wholesale foreign innovations, it had the harmful effect of blocking the way towards any and every reform of the Parliamentary system.
Soon after the constitutional cataclysm of the rokosz Poland became embroiled in prolonged wars with Moscow. The motive was partly a vague conception of a Polish-Russian union as op posed to the king's Austrian propensities,—but partly also the very real desire of some border magnates for more and more land east of the Dnieper. An occasion was furnished by the extinction of the Rurik dynasty in Russia, and the subsequent struggle for the throne, particularly the emergence of one candidate—the ill fated "false Demetrius"—whom certain Polish nobles, and finally also the king, supported. (See also ROMANOFFS.) The appearance of a second Demetrius after the fall of the first prolonged the strife. Throughout the campaigns against Moscow the king found himself at variance with some leading Polish statesmen and sol diers of the time, such as Zamoyski and, later, General (5.11ciew ski : he thought of the problem only in terms of conquest, of the establishment of Catholicism in Russia, and of strong monarchi cal rule over the united kingdoms, while Liikiewski, even at the height of military successes against Russia, had a union like that of Poland with Lithuania in his mind, and advocated tolerance of Russia's creed and social order. The Poles once actually held the Kremlin of Moscow for a time (16.,o), and once again laid siege to it (1617) Sigismund's son was elected tsar, and his opponent did homage to Sigismund as a prisoner. But a national insur rection in Russia and the establishment of the Romanoff dynasty checked the Polish advance, and only certain territorial gains (including Smolensk), as well as a good deal of influence of Polish customs and institutions on the Russian nobility, were definite results of the struggle in Sigismund's time. It was to be con
tinued under his successors.
The wars with Moscow temporarily ended in armistice at the very moment (1618), when the Thirty Years' War broke out in Central Europe. In this Poland remained officially neutral, but Sigismund's favourable attitude towards the Habsburgs entangled Poland in renewed and long wars with Turkey, which the later Jagiellos and their first successors had managed to avoid. A definite success was attained against the Turks at Chocim (1621), a year after ZOlkiewski's heroic death at Cecora,—but in the very same year the Swedish trouble began anew, and Sigismund's long and unlucky reign ended r years later amidst turmoil abroad and at home, set-backs to Polish power on all sides without, and of seriously increased Constitutional disorder within.
But the international difficulties inherited from his father, di verted his energies largely into channels of foreign policy. The very first years of his reign are marked by new victories over Russia and the Turk; also by a new, and much more advantageous, truce with Sweden. He was less fortunate in a new conflict with Danzig—and with her supporter Denmark—over the tolls he in tended to impose on the trade of the Baltic ports: no interest in these matters was to be awakened in the gentry, and the most powerful magnates—those of the Eastern border—thought more of expansion into the fertile Ukrainian regions than of sea power. Accordingly, the Polish navy, which had begun to develop in a promising manner under Sigismund III., was allowed to fall into permanent decay, and Wladislaus' plans for foreign action on a large scale were unrealized. He wavered in his diplomacy be tween Austrian and French influences, represented by his two successive queens ; his tolerant and friendly attitude towards the Orthodox East caused serious trouble with the Vatican; and his projects of a great crusade against the Turks, although encouraged by the Venetian republic and acclaimed by the Southern Slav nations, in the end came to nothing.