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After 1385 Poland and Lithuania were linked in a dynastic union which was transformed into a conscious political association by the Union of Lublin of 1569. As a result of this association, the Polish tax system was introduced into Lithuania with only relatively minor changes. The revenues and expenditures of the two parts of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita or Res Publica) were kept separate, but both states frequently financed the same political ventures. This chapter presents the results of research based on a comparison between the fiscal systems of the kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and demonstrates the revenue balance between the two states in times of war. In particular, it draws upon materials found in Russian archives: among their holdings are documents from the Lithuanian Chancellery known as Metryka Litewska, which include data on the income and expenditure of the Lithuanian treasury. In general, however, the sources for Polish fiscal history are much more extensive than for those of Lithuania and for this reason the emphasis of the chapter is on Polish developments.

This chapter examines how the Jews of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth constituted the eastern region of emancipation. Jews enjoyed royal privileges in Poland from the thirteenth century. From the sixteenth century, local magnate-issued privileges replaced these as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth increasingly became a decentralized nobles' republic. Through an alliance with the magnates, Jews gained collective privileges in private market towns that gave them parity with Christian burghers. The number of Jews who enjoyed such privileges, and thereby constituted a parallel burgher estate, grew dramatically in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in the Ukraine. However, the brutal partitioning of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century would disrupt efforts at reform and complicate the transition from parity of privileges to rights.

After evoking the trials of the Roman Catholic Church at the end of the eighteenth century, the introduction briefly explains the nature of the Polish‐Lithuanian Commonwealth. It then reviews the work of the Four Years’ Sejm and its historiography, focusing on the sejm's under‐researched ecclesiastical reforms, and setting them in the contexts of both Catholicism and Enlightenment. In comparing the Commonwealth with Joseph II's Habsburg Monarchy and Revolutionary France,the question is posed of the relationship between the form of government and political outcomes, To this end a methodology for the study of political history is developed, drawing on the works of Sir Lewis Namier, Maurice Cowling, and Quentin Skinner. The sources for both the high politics and political culture of the Polish Revolution are discussed, leading to six premises for the analysis of political decision‐making in republican and parliamentary polities.

This chapter assesses how, in the 1760s, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth failed to enact reform for its Jews aside from abolishing the Council of the Lands. Jews mobilized to an unprecedented extent to face the challenges of the Four-Year Sejm (1788–92). With the first partition of Poland, the three autocratic powers—Russia, Prussia, and the Habsburg Empire—began to divide the Commonwealth's Jews. For all three powers, the privately owned magnate town was an alien phenomenon: what had been the source of many Jews' extensive privileges now started to become a long-term liability. The first partition did yield legislation that, if implemented, would have conferred some of the best political statuses in Europe. Joseph II introduced equality with other subjects for Galicia's Jews, though he hedged it with formidable restrictions. Meanwhile, Catherine II tried to make Jews full-fledged members of towns. Joseph's and Catherine's legislation belonged to the 1780s' acme of Enlightened absolutist reform.

Chapter 8, ‘The Golden Age’, compares the periods which the historians saw as the most successful eras in national history. For Lelewel, this period was to be found in the days of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Daukantas venerated the early, pagan period in the history of Lithuania, and in a more extended sense, the era before the Union of Lublin (1569). Palacký identified the pinnacle of Czech history with the Hussite movement in the fifteenth century. Kogălniceanu associated the golden age with moments of unity in Romanian history, in particular with the reign of Michael the Brave in the late sixteenth century. Horváth saw contemporary Hungary, the Reform Age (1823–48), as an exceptional era. The chapter demonstrates that the scholars reached nearly identical conclusions when defining the attributes of the golden age: these included individual and collective freedom, a tolerant environment and national unity.

The fortunes of the Commonwealth and the Church in the eighteenth century are sketched via the career of Kajetan Sołtyk (1715‐88), successively bishop of Kiev and Cracow, who in 1767 was deported to Russia for his defiance of Catherine II, subsequently became mentally ill, and was controversially confined. The king's brother, Michał Poniatowski, who ran the diocese of Cracow after 1782, sought to unite it with the primacy and archbishopric of Gniezno. The sejmiks of August 1788 encouraged the opposition and worried King Stanisław August. The instructions called for the army to be expanded, and for as much as possible of the burden to be placed on the clergy. This led the papal nuncio Ferdinando Saluzzo and the primate to consider how best to defend the Church at the forthcoming sejm. The instructions are compared with the cahiers de doléances drawn up for the Estates General in France in 1789.

The book makes three main interventions. First is the use of Jewish economic history to understand both the development of Jewish society and its relations with the surrounding world. The methodology of New institutional economics, emphasizing the connection between economic and cultural factors, is employed. Second is the study of the Jews’ economic roles in the specific context of magnate estates in eighteenth-century Poland-Lithuania. In this late feudal setting, Jews achieved enormous financial success, which they translated into improved social status and even power. This process is at the heart of the analysis here. Third is the history of the Radziwiłł family and its estates in Lithuania. From a low point at the beginning of the period, the family reached the pinnacle of its power at the end. This rise was based on increased estate incomes, the importance for which of Jewish economic activity is examined here.

This Introduction situates the imagination of witchcraft in early modern Poland using the image of the crossroads: the witch combines elements taken from elite culture and from local folklore, from the center and periphery of European culture. The chapter also locates this study in time and space: it is a study of witchcraft and witch-trials in the Korona, the Polish part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

This concluding chapter assesses whether the fate of the Polish Jewish refugees in each of the three major arenas in which they found themselves was really a single, interconnected refugee crisis or whether there were, in fact, three different crises sparked by a common cause: the mid-seventeenth-century wars of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Underlying all of the differences in the conditions in each of the three regions were numerous commonalities. Perhaps most important was the sense of solidarity that induced Jews to come to the aid of other Jews in distress. The term most commonly used at the time to describe this connection was “brotherhood.” The phenomena examined in this book are indeed, therefore, aspects of a single refugee crisis. The chapter then considers how large the problem was and how well Jewish society dealt with its challenges. It also highlights the effects of the refugee crisis on Jewish society, both while it was happening and in the longer term, and the importance of the crisis for the course of early modern and modern Jewish history in general.

One of the oldest established Muslim minorities in Central Europe is that of the Tatars, whose history dates back to the fourteenth century. They settled in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth mostly as mercenaries brought to fight the enemies of the country. This chapter recounts how, in return for military service, Tatars were granted land together with a social status similar to that of the local nobility. They were also granted the right to practise Islam, erect mosques etc. Subsequently, they remained an integral part of the social and military structures of the country. It was therefore natural that during the Danish cartoons affair, the state authorities in Poland supported Muslim protests against publishing the cartoons. This chapter argues that the historical role of the Tatars was the reason for their continued strong acceptance as an integrated and active citizens by present-day Polish society and by the state authorities.

This chapter investigates how the events of the second round of wars caused further waves of Jewish refugees, this time not just within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth but across Europe and Asia. On one level, it could be said that Poland–Lithuania successfully weathered the storm that began with Khmelnytsky in 1648 and ended in the Peace of Andrusów some nineteen years later. However, the price it had paid for the years of war was incredibly high, so getting the country back on its feet was a very complex operation. Poland–Lithuania's Jews, too, had suffered huge losses during the wars, not the least of which was the number of Jews who had been uprooted from their homes and forced to start new lives elsewhere, often in difficult—not to say traumatic—conditions. Beyond that, many of the refugees displaced by this second wave of wars left the Commonwealth never to come back. The chapter then details the experience of these people. It looks first at the refugees in the parts of Lithuania under Russian occupation, then at those in the westerly regions where the Swedish and Polish armies fought it out in the second half of the 1650s.

This chapter explores the complex process of returning home after spending time as a Jewish refugee. The chaos of wartime conditions meant that there was a constant stream of Jewish refugees, often in the thousands, moving from place to place within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. In such conditions, the idea of returning home at the earliest opportunity must have seemed an attractive option. Once they had decided to go back, however, the returnees faced the problem of actually gaining entrance into town. Once the Jews were back in town, they then had to reconstitute Jewish society. The third challenge facing the returning refugees was resuming their economic life. Ultimately, in social, economic, religious, legal, and possibly even psychological terms, the Jewish survivors, rebuilding their shattered lives, helped create a very solid foundation for the future growth of their communities. This was a process not without tensions and difficulties, and there was much suffering along the way. Still, as the 1650s progressed and made way for the 1660s, the Jews of Poland–Lithuania were able to position themselves for future growth and development.

Visible material remnants of ancient cultures were, for a variety of historical reasons, not particularly abundant in the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1795). The past monuments of these lands were not hewn in stone and marble but in timber, leaving behind no impressive structures to provoke the interest of subsequent generations. The dearth of material evidence did not, however, prevent generations of Polish historians and antiquarians from assigning Greco-Roman identities to local monuments. They were keen to offer tangible proof of the past glory of the land inhabited by the alleged descendants of the Sarmatians. In this paper, some of these monuments are explored, especially the Mounds of Krakus and Wanda near Cracow as well as an alleged tomb of Ovid in Vohlyna. The narratives fabricated around them as a part of the ideology of Sarmatism, a class discourse, which constructed an identity for the Polish nobility as the descendants of the ancient tribe of Sarmatians, are also examined.

This chapter explains that it is hard to say when the influx of Jewish refugees to the Holy Roman Empire from the mid-seventeenth-century wars in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth actually came to an end. The movement of Polish Jews into the empire never really stopped; it just changed character. The large wave of refugees that began to appear around 1655 seems to have continued for about a decade, particularly if the internal migration of refugees within the empire is also taken into account. These Polish Jews were fleeing not only the violence itself but also its aftermath—poverty, disease, and intensified hostility on the part of their non-Jewish neighbors. However, at some point, perhaps in the later 1660s, the waves of refugees began to be replaced by a movement of economic migration. With their country at peace and processes of reconstruction under way, Polish Jews left the Commonwealth not under duress but in the hope of bettering themselves in the burgeoning economies of the empire.

The Radziwiłł administration’s economic policy provided the framework for the Jews’ success. They identified and played key roles in the estate economy by seizing the new opportunities of the eighteenth century. This allowed them to both serve Radziwiłł interests and create an ethnically dominated economic niche in trade and arenda. This proved so important to the estate economy that the administration gave them strong support. They thus increased their market domination, and, by becoming identified with the Radziwiłł administration, amassed power and authority in estate society. This power was, however, contingent on providing the services the administration wanted. The Jews’ success in boosting estate revenues helped the Radziwiłłs, like similar magnate families, become the most powerful force in Poland-Lithuania. Jewish economic activity was thus a key factor in the development of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the eighteenth century.

A functional government, military success, economic expansion made the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a golden age for Poland-Lithuania. In this era, new Christian movements challenged the former dominance of the Catholic Church in Europe. Poland’s political culture created a climate of tolerance at odds with a broader European experience marked by religious persecution. Protestant momentum peaked in the mid-sixteenth century and receded before a revitalized Catholic Church. Catholic leaders invested in schools, a better educated clergy, and printed materials designed to nurture faith. Generous patrons lavished their wealth on artistic and architectural projects that clearly echoed aesthetic conventions in other parts of Europe.