“This vile world is constructed in such a way, that even the most tender sighs may never replace statistics”, observed Bolesław Prus in one of his essays. The author knew what he wrote about, because he supplemented his income from writing by working in the statistical office founded by Jan Bloch, a railway tycoon. Could statistics shed a new light on the assessment of the elections of the rulers of Commonwealth?
The “Free” election does not have a good reputation amongst historians. Although the fact it has been widely condemned seems to be based on rational analysis of the events surrounding the subsequent elections, the historian has an obvious advantage over contemporary witnesses of the events, for the historian knows the future course of history. And in this case the future course – the downfall of the Commonwealth – was not conducive to the affirmation of political institutions in the Polish-Lithuanian state. Almost no historian can agree with the opinion of the 17th century Polish poet, Maciej Sarbiewski, who wrote that “...only them [Poles and Lithuanians] use the two most beautiful and precious treasures that the state can have: freedom of actions and that of speech, for they alone choose their king.” The creators of the Constitution of 3 May also contributed to the cause. In the Chapter VII of the Constitution, devoted to the King and The Executive Authority the following excerpt can be found: “Disastrous experience of interregnums periodically overturning the government, [...] the sealing forever of avenue to the influences of foreign powers [...] having indicated to our prudence that the throne of Poland be passed on by right of succession.”
The critical opinion of the Commonwealth’s reformists became firmly established as the main opinion of the historians, as well as in the public opinion shaped by schools and university textbooks. In order to confirm such assessments, opinions of Piotr Skarga and Sebastian Petrycy, Polish writers critical towards free election are often cited. It is hard to defend the institution while faced with such authority, even though its unusual character caused both interest, as well as amazement of the foreigners.
The fact that there was an elective throne was not surprising at that time. The Austrian emperors were chosen by election from the Habsburg family, the cardinals elected popes, the doges of Venice and kings of Denmark were also elected. Even in the Commonwealth, the rulers were chosen by election from within the Jagiellonian dynasty. The contemporary witnesses were mostly shocked by the fact that since 1573 the elections had aviritim character, which meant that every nobleman could take part in them.
Heart of Darkness
The issue of the king’s election was a subject of discussions even during the reign of Sigismund Augustus. The projects, which were proposed assumed that the king would be elected by the sejm. The electoral committee also caused some controversy. In the wake of still unresolved struggle between the senatorial magnates and the nobility (szlachta) represented in the lower chamber it was an important issue. As it often was in Poland, the issue was not resolved in time. As a result, the new political institution was to be formed and shaped during the interregnum, and this is when the viritim election was agreed upon. Each of the factions believed that it would allow them to realise their particular goals.
Locating the elections in Warsaw can be defended rationally – after all, it lies roughly in the centre of the state. The representatives of Małopolska and Royal Prussia could easily reach the city via the Vistula River, only the Lithuanians and representatives of Wielkopolska had to use expensive and slow road transport.
There was also another reason for selecting Warsaw as the place of elections – and it was clearly calculated. One did not need a visionary in order to predict how big of a force the Mazowsze nobility would be during the elections, especially given the fact they made up at least 20% of the province’s residents. What is more, in most part they were impoverished, and as such they could be easily subject to manipulation. The papal nuncio, Commendoni, who witnessed the election of Henri de Valois in 1573, was glad that the Masurians, who strongly upheld Catholicism, would counterbalance the influence of the Protestants. On the other hand, the Protestants used stereotypes ridiculing the Masurians in their propaganda, claiming that they were bold and willing to fight, but cowardly at the same time; talkative, stupid and pious, and finally, mentally challenged. Their poverty limited their political horizons.
“When a dog sits on one heritage, it has to put its tale on the other one”, they said. A popular folk song described the people as well: “I’m a Masurian, a rich Masurian, with beautiful attire[...] I also have a yellow festive żupan, my great-grandfather fed the cattle while wearing it. [...] I also have a sharp sword, dented after several fights I fought against peasants”. It would be enough to add a “stick” and a “helmet made of lupine leaf” to complete the spiteful opinion about the looks of typical resident of Mazowsze region. The opinion about their personalities was not the best either. According to Wespazjan Kochowski from Sandomierz, who wrote in the second half of the 17th century, “A snake that bit an evil Masurian in his leg and drank his blood died because of it, and the Masurian still lives”. It is not hard to find similar, more or less mean proverbs and poems, showing the vices of other parts of the Commonwealth, however those about the Masurians were popular in the entire country. The historians, critical of the institution of election, contributed to it by transferring these anecdotes from the domain of historical ethnography to mainstream political history.
The intellectual levels of the residents of Mazowsze was also often criticised. Marcin Bielski, who sympathised with the Protestant movement described the election of Henri de Valois in his Chronicle of Poland (Kronika Polska) as such: “The Masurians voted in great numbers on the Angevin candidate, but they could not pronounce it properly and called him a Gevin prince, and Ernest for them was none other than Rdest.” This citation is the “staple” of every historic paper concerning the first election and the elections in general.
Were people like the Masurians able to make rational political choices? The answer is obvious, and so is sentencing the free election to eternal damnation.
All of them, that is, how many?
Let us move on to the statistics. Historians, describing the election of Henri de Valois, write about 40–50 thousand participants, including 10,000 Masurians. They base their claims on reports by the French ambassador Choisnin and other witnesses. The question is whether it was possible to put that amount of people in tents, about one mile away from the electoral field in Kamionek, and what is more important, feed them for two and a half months? According to the Swedish quartermaster calculations, an army of 5,800 men needed 5.8 tons of bread, 2 tons of meat, 17 thousand litres of beer and 130,000 square meters of grass for the horses per day. Of course, the electors were not soldiers and it was easier to accommodate them in the city of thousands residents situated on a navigable river, but still it would be a huge logistical undertaking. The subsequent two elections purportedly had only 12-20,000 participants; however, we can rely only on descriptive testimonies, without the support of more mundane, but at the same time more reliable, sources.
Only since the election of Władysław IV in 1632 the claims can be backed up with more accurate numbers, based on the lists of voters – the so-called Suffragia – published in print after the election, and in the 18th century they were added (but not all of them) to the collection of parliamentary resolutions and laws, known as Volumina Legum. They were also studied by Włodzimierz Kaczorowski, Jan Dzięgielewski and the author of this article.
According to the custom, started in 1632, the king was elected on the last day of the six-week electoral sejm. The lists of electors, drawn up during the voting process were then sent to the royal office and printed. Every suffragium ended with a formula saying that the candidate was elected also on behalf of citizens whose great number left the sejm without putting down their signature after the election of a new ruler, as they could not wait, and the others who stayed home. The number of electors from the list is therefore minimal; however, it is hard to believe that the number was significantly greater. Of course, the aforementioned figure is the number of voters – gawkers, servants and the soldiers who arrived to Warsaw for the election were not mentioned. The number of electors is presented in Table 1.
The number „120” in the Index column means that in 1648 there were 20% more electors than in 1632. The numbers in column 3 and 5 should be interpreted in a similar manner.
The number of participants in the subsequent elections was not even close to those 40-50,000 who allegedly participated in the election of Henri de Valois. This seeming decrease in the number of electors should be attributed to the overestimation of the number of people who attended the electoral sejm in 1573. The population of the Crown (without Lithuania) amounted to approximately 3 million people, including 272,000 of nobility. By deducting 50% to account for women, who did not have political rights, and another 30% for the children, we come to 95,000 of adult noblemen. It is quite unbelievable that half of the Polish nobility would come to attend the election in Kamionek. A spiteful person could say that the statistic is as believable as the depictions of the electoral field printed on foreign flyers.
According to the data from the suffragia, the average number of electors did not exceed 10,000. Only three times this number was surpassed, during periods of tension. In 1669, there was a struggle between the pro-French faction, which supported the election when the previous king was still alive, which was perceived by many as a violation of freedom. In 1697, people gathered on the electoral field thanks to the Saxon and French propaganda. The election of 1733 was the last election where the noblemen tried to make a choice independent from the neighbouring countries. Only such occasions could make the crowds gather in Warsaw.
Now let us take a look at the share of Masurians in the overall number of electors. According to the data cited above on the population of the Crown in the end of the 16th century it turns out that the Masurian nobility (including nobility from Podlasie region) made up 60% of the nobility in the entire country. If that was really the case, their 20% share in the elections should not be surprising. A particular stir took place during the elections of 1648 and 1697. During the other elections the nobility from other parts of the country was more motivated to come, which can be easily seen by comparing the “Index” columns in table 1.
All of them? How many Masurians attended the elections?
A large number of the nobility, the destruction of historical sources as a result of numerous wars and, above all, the destruction of a big part of the Crown Archive in fire during the Warsaw Uprising prevents us from identification of the participants who signed the suffragia. Even though the lists were published and used by the authors of armorials and genealogists, hardly anyone ever analysed them. The aforementioned Włodzimierz Kaczorowski analysed the lists of electors taking part in the election of Władysław IV and Jan Kazimierz, in terms of them having any official title. As it turned out, approximately 20% of the electors were officials, and as such, people who participated in the political life on local or national level.
The remains of the Crown Archive, which survived the fire during the Warsaw Uprising included the poll tax records from 1662-1676 for some of the voivodeships in the Crown. The collectors of this tax distinguished the nobility with subjects and the lower nobility, because the tax rates were different for those two groups. Among other preserved documents there was a book of records from the Mazowieckie voivodeship, which was the closest to the electoral field and its inhabitants made up the majority of the Masurian nobility present at the elections. The juxtaposition of the suffragia with the records show the political activity of the nobility from Mazowieckie voivodeship during the elections.
In Table 2, 9 out of 10 lands of the Mazowieckie voivodeship were sorted by their distance from Warsaw. The third column indicates the number of taxpayers among the nobility, listed in the poll tax records. The number is not equivalent to the number of nobility, in fact the latter could be two or even three times higher, taking into consideration the unnamed sons and relatives of the taxpayers.
The number of taxpayers juxtaposed with the list of electors allows us to draw two main conclusions. First of all, the activity of the Masurians during the elections was not especially high. Apart from the election of 1697 and in exceptional cases – such as mass participation of the nobility from ziemia różańska in the election of Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki – the election of the new king mobilised 10% of taxpayers at most, with the exception of the lands located in the immediate vicinity of the electoral field: ziemia warszawska, czerska, wyszogrodzka and zakroczymska. Moreover, the lands inhabited mostly by lower nobility were located far away from Warsaw and were mostly underrepresented.
All of them, so... who?
One can find out who frequented the electoral field on the example of the 1669 election of Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki. 1875 electors from the Mazowieckie voivodeship turned up on the electoral field, out of them 1294 could be identified, which amounts to 69% of the overall number. 34% of them were rich nobility with subjects, which accounted only for 14% of taxpayers in the entire voivodeship. As the table 2 shown, the nobility of ziemia różańska attended the election of Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki in great numbers. Even though on previous elections they were represented by no more than 80 people, this time over 600 of them appeared, mostly the lower nobility. If we remove them from the general count, the rich nobility would make up almost 50% of the electors from the Mazowieckie voivodeship. It can be therefore assumed that the social composition of the electors was significantly different from the social structure of the nobility in the voivodeship. The elections were mostly attended by people who participated in the sejmiks and were well acquainted with political matters. From time to time the elections saw groups of nobility organised by wealthy protectors – such as the nobility of ziemia różańska, but until the election of Augustus II Saxon in 1697 it was an uncommon phenomenon.
Ortega y Gasset in Wola
The historians who criticise the free election often use the argument that the demagogy, ever-present during the elections reached the politically inept representatives of the nobility and sparked xenophobia and a sense of superiority in their minds. No sensible argument could sway the poor Masurian nobleman who would mistake Ernest with Rdest. The presented statistics however show that the Masurian nobility – however great their numbers were – did not dominate the elections, and their societal profile was closer to the politically active participants of the sejmiks than to the “stupid Masurian crowd” known from spiteful satires. Taking into consideration that the rich nobility dominated among the electors coming from other parts of the country – mostly due to the cost of the travel and cost of living in the capital – it is justified to claim that, at least until 1697, the rulers ofthe Commonwealth were elected by the citizens, and not by the crowd, misguided by demagogy.
It is worth asking the question whether the electors were worse than today’s voters. They should be only condemned by the readers who cast their votes knowing all the complexities of the tax code, European institutions and monetary policy. Are we not voting for the candidate who looks nicer on the blue background and performs better gestures that demonstrate their confidence?
The late Jose Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher who died in 1955 complained about the dominance of the “mass-man” in the contemporary world. A professional, educated in only one domain, a specialist “in politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency. [...] By specialising him, civilisation has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations; but this very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his specialty”. If this is the behaviour of the today’s voter, should we condemn the electors who lived 400 years ago? Are we not arrogant?
Translation: Lingua Lab
