Poland: A history

One cannot substitute the terms ‘nobility’ or ‘gentry’ for szlachta because it had little in common with those classes in other European countries either in origin, composition or outlook. Its origins remain obscure. Polish coats of arms are utterly unlike those of other European nobles, and lend weight to the theory that the szlachta was of Sarmatian origin. They were also held in common by groups of families, which suggests clan-based origins. The attitude of the szlachta begs analogies with the Rajputs of India or the Samurai of Japan. Like both of these, and unlike any other gentry in Europe, the szlachta was not limited by nor did it depend for its status on either wealth, or land, or royal writ. It was defined by its function, that of a warrior caste, and characterised by mutual solidarity and contempt for others.

‘The Polish gentry,’ writes the contemporary historian Długosz, ‘are eager for glory, keen on the spoils of war, contemptuous of danger and death, inconstant in their promises, hard on their subjects and people of the lower orders, careless in speech, used to living beyond their means, faithful to their monarch, devoted to farming and cattle-breeding, courteous to foreigners and guests, lavish in hospitality, in which they exceed other nations.’ But the outlook of the szlachta was changing, largely under the influence of economic factors.

The Vistula and its tributaries provided a natural conduit for all Poland’s overseas trade, effortlessly concentrating the country’s agricultural produce at the port of Gdańsk. This was also the point of entry for imports, of herrings from Scandinavia, salt from western France, and cloth from Holland, Flanders and England. The Teutonic Order had used its position straddling the lower Vistula to promote its own exports at the expense of Polish trade and to impose heavy duties on inbound goods. Its defeat and removal from the area in 1466 altered the situation radically. Trade with England through Gdańsk quadrupled, and by the end of the century the number of ships calling there had risen to eight hundred a year, most of them bound for Bruges.

Increased demand for grain as populations grew in western Europe raised prices, while the rapid expansion of seaborne trade pushed up those of timber and other forest produce by some 4,000 per cent. Polish landowners responded by intensifying production. Meadows were drained, scrub woods cut back, and acreages under cultivation increased, but while there was no lack of land available, there was a shortage of people to work it.

Most szlachta estates were worked by peasant tenants who paid part of their rent in labour. The size of their holdings and the rent varied enormously around the country, but as a general illustration one can take an example from 1400: the annual rent for a unit of seventeen hectares (forty-two acres) was fifteen grosze (the price of a pig or a calf) and a few bushels of grain, plus twelve days’ work a year by the tenant in the landlord’s fields—using his own implements and horses, usually at the busiest times.

The dramatic fall in the value of the coinage in the early 1400s halved the real value of money-rent received from tenants, while the productivity of a day’s work did not fluctuate. And money was useless to the landlord in view of the shortage of casual labour in the countryside, exacerbated by the drift of the poorest peasants to the towns. It therefore made sense for the landlords to transform money-rent into purely labour-rent: they needed cheap labour they could depend on in order to develop what was turning into a cash-crop agricultural economy, and they used their political muscle to ensure they got it.

In 1496 the Sejm passed measures preventing peasants moving to the towns. Tenants who wished to move to a different area were obliged to put their tenancies in order, pay off all dues, and to sow the land before they left. The economic effort involved was so prohibitive that they were in effect tied to the land, unless they absconded, which was not easy in the case of whole families. Those who owned their land were not affected by this legislation. Nor were the inhabitants of free villages, sometimes referred to as ‘Dutch settlements’. These had arisen in areas where a landlord, eager to found new villages on unexploited land, enticed peasants (often of foreign origin) to settle by offering them advantageous terms, set down in special charters. There were tenants rich enough to employ casual labour to perform the labour-rent on their behalf, but even their resources were strained when, in 1520, the Sejm increased the labour-rent from twelve to fifty-two days per annum. The legal position of the peasants was further weakened at about the same time, when they lost their right of appeal to other courts and could only seek justice in manorial courts, in which their landlords sat as magistrates.

The ease with which the szlachta could promote its economic interests by political means did not encourage notions of thrift, risk and investment, and spawned a rustic complacency that set it aside from other European elites. This is the more unexpected as fifteenth-century Poland was essentially an urban culture. While land provided the majority with a livelihood, it was not the only or even the predominant source of wealth for the magnates, whose estates were not large by the standards of the barons of England or the great lords of France. So far, only the Church had managed to build up extensive latifundia through the monastic orders and the dioceses, which made prelates such as the Bishops of Kraków the richest men in the land.

The magnates only started accumulating property on a large scale at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Jan of Tarnów (1367-1432), Palatine of Kraków, built up an estate of one town, twenty villages and one castle. His son, Jan Amor Tarnowski, Castellan of Kraków, increased this to two towns and fifty-five villages—more than doubling it in the space of fifty years. Jan of Oleśnica, father of Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki, only had one village in 1400, yet by 1450 his other son owned fifty-nine, along with a town and a castle.

Taken alone, the revenues from such estates were not great enough to support rampant ambition. The magnates were obliged to supplement them by lucrative or influential public office, and by various business ventures, such as mining, in which fortunes could be made with a little influence at court and some capital. It was necessary first to obtain a concession from the crown, which owned all underground deposits. Personal capital or that of specially set up joint-stock companies was then used to employ engineers and build machines to work the mines, which were among the deepest in Europe. These were ambitious operations, but the rewards were abundant—salt, sulphur, tin, lead, zinc, and even gold. It was only by being on the spot that noblemen could make fortunes, and the great families of the fifteenth century based themselves in or near the cities. In this, as in other things, they were more akin to the civic magnates of Italy than to the regional nobility of France or England.

The cities were not large. Only Gdańsk, with 30,000 inhabitants, could rival those of western or southern Europe. Kraków had a paltry 15,000; Lwów, Toruń and Elbląg 8,000; and Poznań and Lublin only some 6,000. What they lacked in numbers they made up in diversity. Kraków was a Babel in which German pre dominated in the streets over other languages, while patrician circles rang with Polish, Italian and Latin.

One consequence of the Jagiellon forays into Hungary and southern Europe was that for the best part of the century their dominions bordered the Republic of Venice, opening up new vistas for Polish society at a decisive juncture in its relationship to the rest of Europe.

The previous century had radically altered the balance between Poland and the more developed countries of Europe. As a consequence of the Black Death, the population of the Continent fell by some twenty million during the fourteenth century, and it took the whole of the fifteenth to make up this loss. Poland’s population did not drop significantly during the fourteenth, and rose sharply during the fifteenth. The gap also narrowed in economic terms, and Poland was attract ing people as well as capital from other parts of Europe.

This process was mapped out in cultural terms. In the north, Flemish architects originally brought in by the Teutonic Order and the Hanse left their mark in the churches, town halls and city walls of Gdańsk and other cities. In Poznań, Warsaw and Kalisz, the Flemish style was mitigated by local variants—themselves marked by Franconian and Burgundian examples of an earlier age. In Kraków the most remarkable cross-breeding took place, dominated at first by a strong Bohemian influence which was superseded by that of German artists, most notably by one of the greatest sculptors of the Middle Ages, the German Veit Stoss, who settled in Kraków in 1477.

Polish thought and literature remained encased in the limits of medieval parochialism, their primary expression being religious verse. The only notable prose to be written at the time were the annals of Jan Długosz, a church canon and tutor to the royal family, begun in 1455. Długosz was a creature of the Middle Ages. As he painstakingly wrote his last Annales in the 1470s, he took every opportunity to carp at what he saw as the newfangled ideas and practices invading the venerable cloisters of medieval Kraków. His successor as tutor to the royal family could not have presented a greater contrast, or better summed up the transformation taking place in Poland. He was Filippo Buonaccorsi, a native of San Gimignano in Tuscany obliged to flee after incurring the Pope’s displeasure, was a leading humanist and, from 1472, a professor at the University of Kraków.

Although it had been founded by the Piast Kazimierz the Great and lavishly endowed by the Angevin Queen Jadwiga, it had come to be known as the Jagiellon University. It was under this dynasty that it received funds necessary for expansion and the patronage of kings who recognised its uses. Foreigners from as far afield as England and Spain came to study or teach in its halls, while native graduates went abroad to widen their learning, one of them, Maciej Kolbe of Świebodzin, becoming rector of the Paris Sorbonne in 1480. During the reign of Kazimierz IV (1446-92) some 15,000 students passed through the university, including the major dignitaries, prelates and even soldiers of the time.

The Church, and particularly its prelates, also encouraged the dissemination of the new ideas emanating from Italy. Piotr Bniński, Bishop of Kujavia, devoted his own fortune and that of his diocese to patronage of the arts, paying more attention to arranging symposia by humanist poets than to the spiritual duties of his position. Grzegorz of Sanok, Archbishop of Lwów, who had studied in Germany and Italy, established at his residence of Dunajów near Lwów a small court modelled on that of Urbino, nurtured by a stream of visitors from Italy. It was there Buonaccorsi first came when he had to flee his native country.

Buonaccorsi later moved to the royal court in Kraków and wrote, among other things, a set of counsels for the king, like some Polish Machiavelli. His writings, which he published under the pen name of Callimachus, his position at the Jagiellon University, and his part in founding, along with the German poet Conrad Celtis, a sort of Polish writers’ workshop, the Sodalitas Litterarum Vistulana, made him a key figure of the Polish Renaissance.

The Italian connection grew stronger as Poles travelled to study or to visit cities such as Padua, Bologna, Florence, Mantua and Urbino. Italians came to Poland, bringing with them amenities and refinements, ranging from painting to postal services. The impact was omnipresent and lasting, nowhere more so than on the language. The first treatise on Polish orthography appeared in 1440, and the Bible was first translated in 1455, for Jagiełło’s last wife, Sophia. In their search for words or expressions to describe hitherto unknown objects or sentiments, the Poles more often than not borrowed from Italian, particularly in areas such as food, clothing, furnishing and behaviour, as well as in the expression of thought. These words rapidly passed from speech into writing, and from writing into print.

The year 1469 saw the first commercial use of Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type, in Venice. The idea was taken up throughout Europe with breathtaking speed: printing presses began operating in Naples, Florence and Paris in 1471; in Spain, the Netherlands and Kraków in 1473; in Wrocław, where the first book in Polish was printed in 1475; and in London in 1476.

By the end of the fifteenth century Poland had become an integral part of late-medieval civilisation. Lithuania, on the other hand, was largely left out of the picture, contributing nothing and gaining little from its association with Christian Europe. Lithuania proper was inhabited by no more than half a million people still pagan in spirit, while the vast expanses it had taken over to the south and east were thinly populated with some two million Slavs who practised Christianity in its eastern rite. At the moment of Władysław Jagiełło’s conversion, this vast dominion boasted five stone castles, at Vilnius (Wilno), Kaunas (Kowno) and Trakai (Troki) in Lithuania; and at Kamieniec and Łuck in what had been Kievan lands. Leaving aside the more fertile south, the land produced little wealth and most of the population subsisted from scratching the topsoil with wooden implements, living in dugouts or timbered cabins.

In 1387 Władysław Jagiełło granted the Lithuanian nobles the first element of personal freedom, the right to hold property. In 1434 he extended the act Neminem captivabimus to the Grand Duchy, but it was some time before the principle was translated into practice. While Poland achieved power-sharing and representation, Lithuania continued to be ruled autocratically. While Jan Ostroróg, Palatine of Poznań, Master of the Jagiellon University and Bachelor of those of Bologna and Erfurt, applied himself in 1467 to writing a treatise on the Polish system of government and a programme for social reform, the average Lithuanian nobleman hardly knew what such words meant.

The only link between the two societies was the Jagiellon dynasty itself, and it was its interests that prevailed. Władysław Jagiełło’s loyalties, to Lithuania and to Poland, were largely subjected to his own dynastic vision. His son Władysław III, killed at the Battle of Varna in 1444 in his twentieth year, never had the opportunity to show his mettle as a ruler. Władysław’s younger brother Kazimierz IV reigned for forty-six years and established himself as a power to be reckoned with—he was, significantly, the only Pole ever to wear the English Garter. His wife Elizabeth of Habsburg bore him seven daughters, who make him the ancestor of every monarch reigning in Europe today, and six sons: one saint, one cardinal, and four kings. Kazimierz was succeeded in Poland by Jan Olbracht, a young prince with a passion for reading who drank, danced and loved hard, dressed like a peacock and worshipped pleasure. His brother Aleksander was a much-loved lightweight who died in 1506 having done little to be remembered or cursed for.

While the Jagiellons acquired a high degree of culture, they did not develop the political maturity demanded by their new role. Throughout this formative century, when the magnates and the szlachta were erecting the structure of their democracy, the Jagiellon kings failed to define the prerogatives of the crown, wasting their resources on foreign adventures instead.

Kazimierz IV’s dynastically-minded foreign policy enmeshed Poland in a number of pointless and damaging conflicts. Turkey and Poland shared a common interest, and in 1439 an embassy from Murad II came to Kraków to negotiate an alliance against the Habsburgs of Austria, who had taken over Hungary. This failed to materialise, since Władysław III took Hungary himself and proceeded to make war on Turkey over Moldavia, a war which cost him his life at the Battle of Varna. Eighty years later, in 1526, Louis Jagiellon, also King of Hungary, was to lose his life in the same way. He was trampled to death in a muddy stream at the Battle of Mohacs, fighting against Suleiman the Magnificent over a Hungary which passed to Ferdinand of Habsburg after the battle.

The feud with Muscovy was equally pointless. After the Tatar invasions, the Lithuanian dukes had occupied the remains of Kievan Rus. The remaining Russian principalities were too weak to think of anything but survival, but with time Muscovy began to nurture ambitions. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the princes of Muscovy, who were linked by marriage to the Byzantine Emperors, declared their city to be Constantinople’s successor, the ‘Third Rome’, protector of the Eastern Catholic Faith, and spiritual mother of all the Russias—most of which were under Lithuanian dominion. In the fifteenth century, Poland and Lithuania could afford to ignore such posturing. Apart from their own strength, they could count on the Tatar Golden Horde to keep Muscovy in check. In the latter part of the century, however, the Golden Horde went into decline, and its stranglehold over Muscovy was broken.

The Jagiellons’ rivalry with the Habsburgs over Hungary and Bohemia also proved counter-productive, provoking a rapprochement between the Habsburgs and Muscovy, forcing Poland to sign her first treaty with France, in 1500. An English alliance was also considered, but in 1502 the Sejm rejected this on the grounds that England ‘is in a state of continual revolution’. Henry VII and Henry VIII would repeatedly angle for an Anglo-Polish alliance against Turkey but nothing would come of this, as by then Poland needed the support of Turkey, with which she eventually signed an Eternal Peace in 1533.

Whatever international advantages they may have forfeited, the last two Jagiellon kings did give their subjects and their country something of inestimable value. Zygmunt I (known as ‘the Old’), the youngest son of Kazimierz IV, succeeded in 1506 and died in 1548. His son Zygmunt II Augustus became Grand Duke of Lithuania in 1522 and King of Poland after his father’s death. Their combined reign from 1506 to 1572 displayed a certain continuity, even if their persons did not. The strong Solomon-like father was strikingly different from his glamorous, refined son who stands out, along with Francis I and Charles V, to whom he was often compared, as the epitome of the Renaissance monarch. But they both encouraged every form of creative activity and helped to institutionalise a spiritual and intellectual freedom which endured. Above all, they ensured that the murderous Reformation and Counter-Reformation never grew into anything more dangerous in Poland than an unruly debate.

FOUR Religion and Politics (#ulink_899f3f5b-f733-55e2-a660-32442375c342)

The Jagiellon realm was theoretically a Roman Catholic kingdom like every other in Christendom, yet the majority of its population was not Catholic. Large numbers of Christian Slavs living within its borders practised the Orthodox rite, acknowledging the Patriarch of Constantinople rather than the Pope. Another group of Christians who paid no heed to Rome were the communities of Armenians living in the major cities of south-eastern Poland.

A significant proportion of the population was not Christian at all. The Jewish community multiplied each time there was an anti-Semitic witch-hunt in other countries, and its numbers soared in the decades after the expulsions from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1496. If visiting foreign prelates were shocked to see synagogues in every Polish township, they were hardly less so to see mosques standing on what was supposed to be Christian soil. These belonged to the descendants of Tatars who had settled in Lithuania in the fifteenth century and become loyal subjects of their adopted country. Many of them had been admitted to the ranks of the szlachta but clung to the Islamic faith. By the mid-sixteenth century there were nearly a hundred mosques in the Wilno, Troki and Łuck areas.

One of the conditions of the union between Poland and Lithuania in 1385 had been the conversion of that country to Christianity. But, formal gestures apart, little had been done to bring this about, and 150 years later, Grand Duke Zygmunt Augustus recorded that ‘Outside Wilno…the unenlightened and uncivilised people generally accord that worship which is God’s due, to groves, oak-trees, streams, even serpents, both privately and publicly making sacrifices to these.’ A hundred years after that, Bishop Melchior Gedroyc noted that he could hardly find in his diocese of Samogitia ‘a single person who knows how to say a prayer or make the sign of the Cross’.

That the Polish hierarchy had failed to impose religious observance on the population is not altogether surprising. According to a special arrangement, its bishops were appointed not by the Pope but by the King of Poland, who submitted his candidates for Rome’s approval. When this was not forthcoming it was ignored. In 1530, for instance, Pope Clement VII violently objected to the anti-Habsburg and pro-Turkish policy of the Primate Archbishop Jan Łaski, and insisted King Zygmunt dismiss him on pain of excommunication. But no action was taken.

The King was guided by political considerations when appointing bishops and this led him to choose either powerful magnates whose support he needed, or, more often, trusted men of his own. These were drawn from his court, which was imbued with a humanistic and empirical spirit. A high proportion of his secretaries was of plebeian stock, and Zygmunt felt no compunction in ennobling those, like his banker Jan Boner, whom he favoured. This favour transcended creed as well as class. The Jew Abraham Ezofowicz, whom Zygmunt elevated to the rank of Treasurer of Lithuania, did convert to Christianity, albeit the Orthodox rite, before being ennobled, but his brother Michał remained a practising Jew when he was elevated to the szlachta in 1525—a case without parallel anywhere in Christian Europe.

Most of the bishops were at home in this milieu. The Polish clergy were no more debauched than those of other countries at this time, and possibly less so—the last quarter of the fifteenth century saw the foundation of no fewer than eighteen new fundamentalist and strict Franciscan monasteries in the provinces of Mazovia and Małopolska alone. What did set them apart was an unusual element of realism in the face of other religions and of candour with respect to corruption. Bishop Krzycki, for instance, left a poem concerning the gossip that surrounded a fellow bishop caught in the act of lowering a girl from his bedroom window in a net. ‘I fail to see what shocks everyone so,’ the poet-bishop wrote, ‘for no one can deny that the Gospels themselves teach us to use the Net of the Fisherman.’ Krzycki wrote much erotic verse before he became bishop, and this did not affect his career any more than it did that of another, who ended up as Prince-Bishop of Warmia.

Jan Dantyszek was a good example of what the times could offer a clever man. A plebeian by birth, he entered the king’s service, becoming a secretary and later a diplomatic envoy. After a life which took him around Europe and brought him into contact with Francis I of France, Henry VIII of England, assorted popes, Ferdinand Cortes, Martin Luther, with whom he formed a friendship, the Emperor Charles V, who tried to keep him in his service, and Copernicus, who became a close friend and protégé, Dantyszek settled down to his episcopal duties with a degree of worldly wisdom.

The conversion of Poland by Mieszko I had been primarily an act of political wisdom which had brought him status and security within the Christian world. The usefulness of the Christian Church had subsequently revealed itself more than once, helping to reunite the country in the thirteenth century, and to outmanoeuvre the Teutonic Order in the fourteenth. But this had been accompanied by an unwelcome extension of its influence and wealth. And the Church’s foreign connections no less than its persecution of movements such as the Hussite heresy made the szlachta uneasy.

An institution which raked in bequests, exacted tithes, and contributed nothing in taxes to the state was bound to be unpopular. By the sixteenth century, the Church owned just over 10 per cent of all arable land in Wielkopolska, 15.5 per cent in Małopolska, and 25 in Mazovia. The share owned by the crown in the same provinces was 9, 7.5 and just under 5 per cent respectively. The Church wielded political power through its bishops who sat in the Senate and through its tribunals, which exercised jurisdiction over those living on its lands, and kept attempting to exercise it on wider areas. This power was also potentially at the disposal of Rome, a state often allied with Poland’s enemies. The Church was therefore a focus for a number of the szlachta’s phobias. The following is a typical complaint, uttered by a deputy during a Sejm debate of the 1550s.

The gentlemen of the clergy summon us, citing their titles and invoking some foreign, Romish law, contrary to the laws and freedoms of our Realm, attempting to extend their jurisdiction and that of their master, the Roman Pope, which jurisdiction we, not finding it in our statutes, neither can nor will bear; for we know no other jurisdiction than the supremacy of his majesty the King our master.

The tone and the sentiments expressed are characteristic of a ‘national Catholicism’ which was the spiritual heir of Hussitism. Many of the Bohemian followers of Hus had taken refuge in Poland, and their ideas were well known to writers such as Biernat of Lublin (1465-1529), who denounced the discrepancies between the Scriptures and the practices of the Church.

In view of all this, it is not surprising that when Martin Luther nailed his famous declaration of war on the Papacy to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, setting off a chain reaction which was to shake the whole Christian world, he produced little more than a tremor in Poland. His teachings rapidly penetrated northern and western areas, enthusiastically received by the preponderantly German population of the towns, but elsewhere they met with little response.

Calvinism was another matter. Enhanced by its more sympathetic Francophone associations, it rapidly gained ground all over the country. The democratic spirit of Calvinism which placed the lay elder on a par with the minister could hardly fail to appeal to the instincts of the szlachta, while the absence of pomp and ceremony from its rites made it a pleasingly cheap religion to support.

By the 1550s a dominant proportion of the deputies to the Sejm were Protestants. But their number is not representative of the population as a whole, since the most ardently Catholic palatinates often returned Protestant deputies. By 1572 the Senate provided a similar picture. Of the ‘front-bench’ seats, thirty-six were held by Protestants, twenty-five by Catholics and eight by Orthodox, which again meant only that many magnates had converted to Calvinism. It was they who provided the conditions for its growth in Poland. The Oleśnicki family founded a Calvinist academy in their town of Pińczów, which became the foremost centre of Calvinist teaching and publishing in that part of Europe, referred to by the faithful as ‘the Athens of the North’. Similar centres were established on a smaller scale by the Leszczyński family at Leszno, and the Radziwiłł at Nieśwież, Birże and Kiejdany.

Although they gained an ascendancy, the Calvinists never managed to control the Protestant movement in Poland. The northern cities stood by Luther; Anabaptists seeking refuge from persecution in Germany appeared in various areas of the country in the 1530s; and in 1551 Dutch Mennonites set up a colony on the lower Vistula.

The Protestant sect which produced Poland’s most significant contribution to Christian philosophy was the Arians. Expelled from Bohemia in 1548, they settled in Poland, where they were known as ‘Czech Brethren’ and later Arians, since two of their fundamental beliefs—the human nature of Christ and the rejection of the Trinity—were first voiced by Arius at the Council of Nicea in AD 235. They also came to be known variously as Anti-Trinitarians, Polish Brethren and Socinians.

Theirs was a rationalist and fundamentalist response to the teachings of Christ, whom they held to be a divinely inspired man. They were pacifists, opposed to the tenure of civic or military office, to serfdom, to the possession of wealth, and to the use of money, believing as they did in the common ownership of all material goods.

They gained many converts—up to about 40,000 adherents practising in some two hundred temples scattered throughout the country. Their spiritual centre was Raków, where they established an academy, visited by students from all over Europe. It was here that the Raków Catechism was published, the work of Fausto Sozzini (Socinius), a nobleman from Siena who sought refuge in Poland and became one of the leading lights of the movement. The two most prominent Polish Arians were Marcin Czechowicz and Szymon Budny, the second of whom made a fine translation of the Bible into Polish and was also responsible for a rapprochement with the Jews, which produced some curious results.

The Jewish community had also been affected by the spirit of the times. The expulsions from the Iberian peninsula had brought many distinguished Spanish scholars to Poland, and in 1567 a Talmudic academy was founded at Lublin, with the eminent Solomon Luria as rector, which enriched the religious debate. The Jews were by no means united, as there were considerable colonies of Karaites in eastern Poland who accepted only the Bible and rejected the Talmud.

The Arians made many converts from the ranks of Talmudic Jews, while a number of Arians and Calvinists converted to Judaism. It was one of these converts, ‘Joseph ben Mardoch’ Malinowski, who played the most incongruous part in this religious inter action. It was he who put the finishing touches to the Hebrew original of The Fortress of the Faith, a Karaite catechism by Isaac ben Abraham of Troki, which was subsequently published in a number of countries, and was later rediscovered by Voltaire, who believed it to be the greatest demolition of the divinity of Christ ever written.

In other countries the established Church reacted with violence to the slightest departure from dogma, let alone to apostasy. The reaction of the Polish hierarchy was pragmatic, often cynical, sometimes vehement, but never hysterical. Bishop Drohojowski of Kujavia, a region profoundly affected on account of its many German-dominated towns, went out of his way to meet prominent Lutherans and sanctioned their takeover of the Church of St John in Gdańsk since most of the parishioners had gone over to the heresy. Elsewhere in his diocese he allowed the sharing of parish churches by Catholics and Lutherans.