If you went to a school in western Europe or the United States, you almost certainly were not taught about it. The reason is that the Commonwealth's three conquerors — the German emperor, the Russian tsar, and the Austrian emperor — wrote the textbooks.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, known to its citizens as the Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów, "Republic of Both Nations", was for most of its existence the largest country in Europe by population, and for parts of the seventeenth century the largest by area. Its capital was Warsaw. Its co-capital was Vilnius. Its currency was the złoty. Its language of state was Polish; its language of administration was, in many of its territories, Ruthenian; its language of religion was Latin or Old Church Slavonic, depending on whom one was speaking to. Its monarch was elected by the assembled nobility on a field outside Warsaw, in a procedure so suspicious of executive power that any one of the deputies of the legislative Sejm could veto any legislation by saying, in Latin, the phrase nie pozwalam — "I do not allow". That single phrase, the liberum veto, eventually paralysed the country to the point where it could not pass a budget. The fact that the Commonwealth nonetheless survived for another century and a half with that constitutional flaw is one of the more remarkable facts in European political history.
It was also, by the standards of the seventeenth century, an extraordinarily tolerant country. Catholic, Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anti-Trinitarian, Armenian, Karaite, and Jewish communities all lived under its protection, often imperfectly, often with discrimination, but compared to the religious wars that consumed France, the Netherlands, Germany and the British Isles in the same period, the Commonwealth's relative tolerance is genuinely striking. Voltaire — admittedly not a friend of Polish politics — described the country as "a republic in which Jesuits, Calvinists, Lutherans, Greeks and even Mahometans live under the same laws as Catholics". The Jewish population of the Commonwealth at its height was the largest in the world.
This volume traces the country from its formal foundation at the Union of Lublin in 1569 to its formal extinction in the Third Partition of 1795, with a coda on the long afterlife in the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw, the Polish risings, the Second Polish Republic, and modern Poland and Lithuania. Then we go and visit it.
