It was Poland’s fifth Piast king, Mieszko I (921-992), who made the choice. He was a Slav leader of a Slav people, and the most natural thing would have been for him to turn eastward, to ally himself with what certainly seemed the superior power of Constantinople, and to opt for that Christian tradition as an inevitable part of the bargain. But Mieszko did not.
In the year 965, Mieszko married Roman Catholic Princess Dubrovka from Roman Catholic Bohemia. Clearly, however, his decision went much farther than a simple political alliance. In fact, it went farther even than his own baptism, in the year 966. For not only did he set about the conversion of Poland to Christianity. By a solemn pact—the Piast Pact of 990 A.D.—he made the entire nation and state of Poland over to the ownership of the Holy See of Peter, in the person of Pope John XV.
Mieszko’s act was one of those fateful decisions made by key people of history under the pressure of concrete events, and according to their understanding of the issues at stake. Their problem is usually an immediate one. Their choice is practical. But the effect of what they do decides the fate and fortunes of unborn generations. Mieszko’s decision was of this kind.
We have every reason to believe that Mieszko foresaw at least in outline what consequences would follow his choice. Any examination of the circumstances in which he made the donation consecrated in the Piast Pact convinces one that it was done primarily for religious and spiritual reasons. By an act of such enormous improbability as the Piast Pact, Mieszko was saying in effect that only Christ could assure the Poles of safety; that not only was the Roman See the center of the world, but its titular head was as well the titular overlord of the world; and that the Petrine authority of the Pope was God’s authority. The Rome of the Popes was where the Poles would look for inspiration, leadership and authority.
Predictably, not everyone agreed with Mieszko. As always in known cases of mass conversion, there remained a solid core of the original religion—the paganism Poland’s Slavs had brought with them in their long trek from beneath the shadows of Mount Elbrus in the steppe lands between the Black and Caspian seas. The supreme god of the Caucasians, represented for them by towering Mount Elbrus, had traveled outward with them over all of Europe, metamorphosing into Wodan of the Germanic peoples, Odin of the Norsemen, Zeus of the Greeks, Jupiter of the Latins, Perun of the Russians.
We do not know what name the pre-Christian Poles gave him; but by 1038, less than fifty years after Mieszko’s Piast Pact, the tribal cult of that pagan god erupted against conversion to Christianity. So virulent was the revolt that historians have called it a return to paganism. That it was not. But it was a costly cleansing of the Poles as a people; and, for a time, most of what had been achieved in the first few decades of Polish Christianity was destroyed in a last flick of the old serpent’s tail as it protested eviction from its long-held position among the Poles.
When it was over—and it was over quickly—by Polish choice and by Polish armed force, Poland was securely lodged in the West as Europe’s eastern anchor. It shared that western commonwealth of the peoples in territories now called France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Austria, Germany, the five Scandinavian countries, England and Ireland. All were directly and exclusively formed by the missionizing emissaries of the Roman Church and its head, the Bishop of Rome. For, attributed to him and claimed by him were not only the spiritual and religious regulation of those peoples, but also supervision of all sociocultural and political structures. As spiritual leader and political overlord, the Pope was the preeminent—often disputed, but persevering—keystone in that portion of ancient Europe.
The peoples living there—even the xenophobic natives of England—could and did circulate throughout their lands with relative ease. The peoples of that western territory shared the same holy days, cultural symbols, educational sources (mainly Greco-Roman), food, living habits and social and political structures. Intermarriage was common. Trade, commerce, banking, the arts, moral standards and laws, the sciences, such as they were—all these strategies of living were homogeneous at least in their broad lines.
It was in that context that the foundational traits of Poland were formed. There would never be another eruption of paganism among the Polish people. Since that time, in all its seesawing fortunes, neither the nation nor any freely chosen government of Poland would ever repudiate the overlordship of the man who occupies the throne of Peter. The orientation of Poles to Rome became a national trait that has never been eliminated. And that fact alone came, in time, to mark a special destiny for these people and their land, and a specific geopolitical outlook for generations of its leaders.
The choice made by Mieszko I and declared with such depth in the Piast Pact determined the two main directions in which the spirit and the attitudes of his nation would develop. Their orientation toward Rome—their romanitas, as the Poles called it—became the force that molded the vertical pillar and the horizontal plane of their national identity.
Vertically, romanitas was the means of the ascent of the Polish mind and soul to God. For Poles, Rome was truly the Eternal City on the Hill; it showed them the source of their safety and their salvation in life and in afterlife. In spirit and in attitude, Poles transcended all time and space within their Christian ambition to regard God’s Heaven as the ultimate reason and goal of all earthly life.
On the horizontal plane, meanwhile, the romanitas of the Poles joined the practical life and fortunes of Poland with those of the See of Peter as a visible power spread throughout the world. The place where those vertical and horizontal planes of life met and formed a cross was the motherland of Poland. This was to be the geographical place on earth where the heavenly and the territorial joined to fashion the Roman Christian ideal.
In the shadow of that cross, the Poles would build a sociopolitical model that must rank as the eighth wonder of the world. Upon that cross, the Poles themselves would again and again be crucified. With that cross as their guarantee as a nation, the Poles would never die.
During the next five hundred years, the foundational traits of Poland were developed. Its territory expanded. At one stage, the Piast king took the throne of Prague, and conquered his way eastward as far as Kiev. Poland fought its first major battles as the bastion of Western Christianity against the Mongols; and it saw the creation of its mortal enemy—the German Monastic State in Prussia—by the German brethren known as the Teutonic Knights. The European powers recognized Poland’s political equality with France, Italy and Germany. The Poles acquired their first national patron, St. Stanislaw, together with eleven other canonized and seventy-one beatified saints. The general law of the realm was codified. In 1264, Piast King Boleslaw Pobozny—Boleslaw the Pious—granted to the Jews the General Charter of Jewish Liberties, essentially creating an autonomous and self-governing Jewish nation within Poland that was exempt from the defense of the land and that had its own courts and tribunals, based on Talmudic Law. In 1364, Krakow University was created.
So obvious was the Latinate and Roman mind in all of Poland’s foundational traits and development, that an Arab geographer writing in the middle of the twelfth century described Poland as “a country full of wisdom and of Roman wise men.” But the best—and certainly the most improbable—was yet to come.
With the death of Elzbieta Bonifacja, infant daughter of King Wladyslaw, in 1399, the Piast dynasty was at its end. Any betting man of the time with an ounce of sense and a modest amount of experience would have put his money on the side of bloody strife and contention to settle the matter of power and the crown in Poland. That was pretty much the way things were done. But any betting man who did that in Poland in 1399 would have lost his shirt.
What the Poles did do had no sociopolitical parallels in history or in their contemporary world—and precious few in our own time. They created out of the whole cloth of their view of the world a period of elected monarchs. Following that period, from 1493 to 1569, they went still farther and created a constitutional monarchy.
Finally, from 1569 to 1795, the entire process blossomed into a full-blown system of republican government—the First Polish Republic—so astounding that not for several hundreds of years would a democratic system as impressive as the Polish Rzeczpospolita be developed anywhere.
The first stage of that improbable historical transition got its start when Poland, represented by the remarkable Piast queen Jadwiga, accepted Grand Duke Wladyslaw Jagiello of Lithuania as its leader. However, the Poles had two conditions: Poland and Lithuania would unite; and the Duke would convert to Christianity. The Duke did convert, and in 1386 he married ladwiga. The more remarkable event, however, was the union of the two states.
Formalized in the Act of Union of 1413, the united territories stretched eastward to Moscow and to the Volga River. And it was this Act of Union that was the extraordinary and improbable thing. For not only was it the constitution by which the two states agreed to govern themselves as a single unit; it laid the basis for an island of civilization in the sea of warring peoples that surrounded it. Like the preamble to the American Constitution, the central statement of that Act of Union reflected and remained forever the ideal of the nation that would live by it. It was an ideal emerging from the thought and teachings of such men of the Roman Church as Thomas Aquinas, Antonois of Florence, Nicholas d’Oresme and William of Ockham, among others.
“It is known to all,” the Jagiellonian agreement declared, “that a man will not attain salvation if he is not sustained by divine love, which does no wrong, radiates goodness, reconciles those in discord, unites those who quarrel, dissipates hatred, puts an end to anger, furnishes for all the food of peace….
“Through that love, laws are established, kingdoms are maintained, cities are set in order, and the well-being of the State is brought to the highest level…. May this love make us equal, whom religion and identity of laws and privileges have already joined.”
Suddenly, a new geopolitical principle was defined. Two independent states agreed upon union through love rather than conquest. And, with that new principle, came three cast-iron consequences: No use of armed forces to conquer others, recourse to armed force only in self-defense, and enlargement of the state only through voluntary union between peoples.
The blessings on Jagiellonian Poland were as extraordinary and improbable as the Act of Union itself. It would take the other important powers of Europe three hundred years before they were capable of establishing the social organization, the legal bases and the political institutions sufficient to guarantee—at least in principle—the fundamental rights of human dignity and freedom that came to be constitutionally and civilly granted in the full flowering of the Republic of Poland.
The structural principle of the new republic—for so it was—was a political system of local legislatures (sejmik) and a national legislature (the Sejm) based on a pluralistic society and aimed at a perfect equilibrium between power and freedom. In 1494, the Sejm became bicameral, with a chamber of deputies and a senate. From that time on, organs of democracy clearly recognizable to us as our models fairly sprouted from the constitutional monarchy of Poland.
General elections were instituted—the first in the world as we know it in history. Watchdog senatorial committees were set up to attend to such worries as the rights and limitations of the Polish constitutional monarchy—only the Sejm, for example, could commit the country to war and ratify treaties—and to guard against corruption in government. A state treasury and a tax court of the treasury were established. Lower courts with elected judges led upward to a Supreme Court of Appeals, and dealt with intricate legislative, civil and religious systems based on the principle of habeas corpus, which had already been adopted by the Act of Krakow in 1433.
The list of Poland’s sociopolitical accomplishments during the course of the fifteenth century went far beyond the merely improbable. The development and concrete application of such principles as government with the consent of the governed, freedom of religion, the definition and protection of personal rights and freedoms, general elections, and constitutional checks and balances to curb any autocratic tendencies on the part of the state, all remain enviable today.
Improbable developments in Poland were hardly over, however.
From 1520 to 1650, religious wars tore the entrails of all European countries. Virulent anti-Semitism decimated European Jewry, and in the first half of the sixteenth century, the term “Catholic” became distinct from “Christian.”
In the midst of all that, in 1569, Ruthenia—a large swath of territory in what later became the western portion of the USSR—joined Poland and Lithuania in what was called the “Unitary Republic,” or the First Polish Republic. The three territories were determined to form a single state coagulated as one family by the Christian mystery of God’s love for all his creatures.
A careful reading of the constitution promulgated by Poland’s King Zygmunt August, and of the other historical documents relevant to this Unitary Republic, demonstrates the surprising internationalism of Poland, well before anything resembling it was born in the rest of the world. These Polish creations were already grounded in a geopolitical framework that had even then progressed beyond mere transnationalist thinking.
There were no religious wars and no anti-Semitic pogroms in the Unitary Republic. Rather, there was a consciously adopted principle of religious freedom. Filled with a vast majority of Roman Catholics, the Republic practiced a form of religious pluralism and toleration still lacking in Europe and the Americas. Nor was this principle of religious freedom based on some vague theory of the rights of man. It was rooted in the specific and basic law proposed at the Council of Constance (1414-18) by a Polish delegate, Pawel Wlodkowicz: “License to convert [by preaching and example] is not a license to kill or expropriate.”
Thus, as the religion-based hate generated by the Protestant Reformation reached its height in the 1600s, the First Polish Republic was an extraordinary spectacle—a multi-ethnic and multiconfessional commonwealth based on a cosmopolitan idea of human membership in the family of nations and peoples. Poland had developed a working model of participative democracy.
So determined were the Poles to live by such principles that in 1645 at Torun, King Wladyslaw IV held the Colloquium Caritativum—the Loving Dialogue—which was exactly what it was billed to be. At a most improbable time, when religious hatred fueled wars and drove political policies in Europe, Polish Roman Catholics, Orthodox Eastern Christians and at least two Protestant sects—Lutherans and Calvinists—agreed to live and let live, to disagree unbloodily, and to foment their mutual love.
This was the classical expression of the Polish ideal, of Polishness lived on the practical—the horizontal—plane of worldly existence. This republican form of national government, aligned with the fixed orientation of Catholic Poles to Christ’s salvation through Rome, summarized for a warring world what Poles conceived themselves to be as a nation.
It was not lost on the Poles, increasingly surrounded by Protestant powers, that a certain vulnerability was present in a system of government where kings were not hereditary but elective, and where time was needed to elect a suitable and acceptable successor after the death of a reigning monarch. The vulnerability lay in the transition period between one king and the next one; in the interregnum. Given their demonstrated love of “Golden Freedom,” the Poles wanted no strongman coming in to take charge by force of arms.
To solve the potential difficulty before it became a problem in fact, in 1573 the Sejm of the Unitary Republic conferred on the Primate Bishop of Poland the right and duty to act as head of state and chief executive during the period between the death of one king and the election of his successor.
Henceforth, the Primate Bishop of Poland would fill the gap of power and authority when no legally elected head of government was seated. By parliamentary title, the Primate Bishop was Interrex. His special function as Interrex was to protect the sovereignty and the religion of the Poles from affront and danger. He repres
ented the Poles as a people, and oversaw their political and constitutional sovereignty. In times when they were deprived of their due and lawful political head, he embodied their rights and aspirations. In practical terms, he would form a regency-style government in order to further their interests.
Cut from the same cloth as the Piast Pact of King Mieszko I, which preceded it by some six hundred years, the Interrex Pact held in vigor down the centuries and still holds today. Like the Piast Pact, it would never be forgotten or broken. It was activated by the fifteenth-century Primate Bishop of Gniezno, Zbiegniew Olesnicki, by the sixteenth-century Primate Bishop, Jan Laski, and, perhaps most fatefully, in the twentieth century by Primate Bishop August Hlond, and by his successor, Stefan Wyszynski, who, besides discharging the function of Interrex in a twentieth-century and Stalinist context, was the closest mentor of Papa Wojtyla.
For those who habitually think in terms of a wall between Church and State, the concept of Interrex is unintelligible. Worse, it is even repugnant for those who think in terms of all religions as the same and who thus hold in essence that no religion is authentic or true.
Poles, however, based their reasoning on the alignment of their daily life with the vertical pillar of their faith, the alignment of the worldly with the divine that had been the hallmark of Polishness for five hundred years by this time. They rejected as an unacceptable outlook for Polishness any idea that there was no unique transcendent of a Saving God who requires worship and belief. Such a view was and would still be death for the greatness of Poland’s Catholicism, which has recently achieved a degree of civil justice and religious freedom and toleration with no contemporary models or peers on the face of the earth to imitate.
Keys of This Blood Page 65
