On the 28th of January 1573, in Warsaw, a special session of the Convocation Sejm — meeting between the death of Sigismund II Augustus and the election of his successor — passed an act called the Warsaw Confederation. Its key clause read, in Latin: "We who are different in faith will keep the peace among ourselves, and will not shed blood on account of difference of belief or church, nor will we punish anyone with confiscation of property, imprisonment or exile, nor support any sovereign or institution in such activities". The act bound every future king of Poland-Lithuania, every public official, and every magnate court to the principle of non-violent coexistence among religious communities. It was approved unanimously and entered into the constitution as one of the Henrician Articles in October of the same year. It was, by some margin, the most expansive single statement of religious toleration in any sixteenth-century European document.
What the country looked like
The Commonwealth in 1573 was the only large multi-confessional state in Europe, by a substantial margin. Its population was, in approximate terms: about 45% Roman Catholic (mostly western szlachta and townspeople); about 35% Ruthenian Orthodox (the peasantry of the eastern lands, much of the local lesser nobility of Volhynia and Kiev); about 5% Lutheran or Calvinist (a substantial part of the Polish szlachta in the Crown lands, the urban patriciate of Royal Prussia, parts of the Lithuanian boyar elite); about 5% Jewish (the towns of Kraków, Lublin, Lviv, Vilnius and a thousand smaller market towns); about 1% Anti-Trinitarian (the Polish Brethren, an indigenous radical-reformation movement based at Raków); plus smaller communities of Armenian Apostolic Christians, Karaite Jews, Muslim Lipka Tatars, Russian Old Believers, and Mennonites in Royal Prussia. None of these communities was a majority of the country. The Commonwealth therefore had no single confessional identity to defend.
This made it different in kind from every other large European state of the period. France, Spain, Portugal, England, the Habsburg domains, Sweden, Denmark and the Italian states all had a politically dominant confession to which dissenters were a problem; their religious history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the history of how that problem was addressed — usually by expulsion (the Huguenots, the Moriscos), suppression (the Spanish and Portuguese Jews), or war (the Thirty Years' War). The Commonwealth had no dominant confession capable of imposing a solution on the others. Toleration was, in part, a recognition of structural fact: the country could not be governed any other way without civil war.
The Jewish presence
The most consequential single community, in numerical and cultural terms, was the Jewish one. From the thirteenth century onward, eastern Europe — and especially the Polish-Lithuanian lands — had been the principal destination for Jewish migration from western and central Europe, displaced by the periodic expulsions of the late-medieval period. By 1600 perhaps 200,000 Jews lived in the Commonwealth; by 1764, when a partial census was conducted, the figure was about 750,000, the largest Jewish population in the world. They lived in compact communities — typically within walled neighbourhoods adjacent to the central market square of a town — and operated under their own internal legal system (the Council of Four Lands, the Va'ad Arba Aratzot, established in 1580 as a federal Jewish institution covering Greater Poland, Lesser Poland, Volhynia and Ruthenia). The council collected taxes from its own communities, allocated them to the crown, judged disputes among Jews, regulated the rabbinate, and conducted what was effectively a separate Jewish foreign policy with the Hebrew communities of the Ottoman Empire and the Sephardi diaspora.
The Commonwealth's relationship with its Jewish population was complicated. There were periodic anti-Jewish episodes — particularly during the Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648–57, in which Cossack and peasant forces killed tens of thousands of Jewish villagers and townspeople in Ukraine, possibly the largest pre-twentieth-century mass killing of European Jews. There were anti-Jewish laws and customs in many towns (the right of Jews to settle in particular towns, the regulation of trades open to them, the periodic blood-libel prosecutions). There was discrimination. But there was no general expulsion of the kind imposed in England (1290), France (1306), Spain (1492), or Portugal (1497). The Commonwealth was the only large European country, between 1500 and 1700, that did not expel its Jewish population. The Yiddish language as it survives today is substantially a product of this five-century continuous residence.
Orthodox Christians and the Greek Catholic compromise
The largest single religious community in the Commonwealth, in absolute numbers, was the Ruthenian Orthodox Christian peasantry of the eastern lands. Their bishops were under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople. They worshipped in Old Church Slavonic. Their liturgical calendar, their saints, their architectural traditions, and their parish-clergy practice (married priests, less centralised diocesan administration) all differed sharply from the Roman Catholic west. In 1596, a substantial portion of this Orthodox hierarchy — pressured by the Polish crown, encouraged by the Jesuits, and pursuing a pragmatic accommodation — entered into the Union of Brest, accepting the supremacy of the pope while retaining the Eastern liturgy. The resulting Greek Catholic (or "Uniate") Church became the largest single religious community in the Commonwealth by the late seventeenth century. It was opposed by a substantial Orthodox minority that refused union and remained under Constantinople (and, after the Pereyaslav Agreement of 1654, increasingly under Moscow). The religious split between Greek Catholic and Orthodox Ukrainians would substantially track political alignments — pro-Polish vs pro-Russian — for the next three hundred years.
The Polish Brethren
The most theologically radical community in the Commonwealth was the Polish Brethren (the Bracia Polscy), an Anti-Trinitarian group descended from the Italian Socinians, who arrived in Poland in the 1550s and 1560s and found an unusually permissive environment for their non-Trinitarian, pacifist, anti-baptist theology. They built a substantial school at Raków in central Poland, published a Latin and Polish Brethren press, and produced what became the canonical Socinian theological literature (the Racovian Catechism of 1605 was eventually translated into German, English, and Dutch and influenced the Unitarian movement throughout Protestant Europe). They were expelled from the Commonwealth in 1658, in the aftermath of the Deluge — the only large-scale religious expulsion in the Commonwealth's history, motivated by suspicion that they had collaborated with the invading Swedes (some had). The expulsion was a significant exception to two and a half centuries of broad toleration, and it presaged the slow constriction of the Commonwealth's pluralist constitution in the eighteenth century.
Languages
The four official chancery languages of the Commonwealth — Polish, Ruthenian, Latin and German — sat alongside the spoken vernaculars of perhaps a dozen further communities. Polish was the spoken language of the szlachta and the western Crown lands; Ruthenian (the ancestor of modern Belarusian and Ukrainian) was the chancery language of the Grand Duchy until 1697 and the speech of much of the eastern peasantry; Latin was the language of the church, of higher administration, and of inter-noble correspondence; German was the language of the trading cities of Royal Prussia (Danzig, Toruń, Elbląg), the urban patriciate of much of western and northern Poland, and the Lutheran communities. Lithuanian, Yiddish, Armenian, Tatar Kipchak, Karaite Tatar, Russian, Mennonite Plautdietsch, and various dialects of all of these were spoken by minority populations. A modern Czech or Hungarian visiting the Commonwealth in 1650 would have heard at least three languages spoken in a single market town. A modern Dutch visitor would have heard four. It was a genuinely multilingual country.
The multilingual, multi-confessional achievement of the Commonwealth ended, in stages, with the Counter-Reformation pressure of the seventeenth century, the expulsion of the Polish Brethren in 1658, the constraints on Protestant rights in the early eighteenth century, the partitions, and the imposed monoconfessional regimes of the partitioning powers. By 1900 the country that had once been the largest religiously plural state in Europe had been replaced by three monoconfessional empires (Russian Orthodox, Austrian Catholic, Prussian Lutheran), each pursuing its own form of religious-national homogenisation in the territories they had inherited. Most of what the Commonwealth had built in this domain was, by then, gone.
End of Chapter IV