Chapter 8

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealthas a Political Space: Its Unity and Complexity*
Satoshi Koyama

Introduction
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita) was one of thelargest states in early modern Europe. In the second half of the sixteenth
century, after the union of Lublin (1569), the Polish-Lithuanian state
covered an area of 815,000 square kilometres. It attained its greatest
extent (990,000 square kilometres) in the first half of the seventeenth
century. On the European continent there were only two larger countries
than Poland-Lithuania: the Grand Duchy of Moscow (c.5,400,000 square
kilometres) and the European territories of the Ottoman Empire (840,000
square kilometres). Therefore the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was
the largest country in Latin-Christian Europe in the early modern period(Wyczański 1973: 17–8).
In this paper I discuss the internal diversity of the Commonwealth in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and consider how such a hugeterritorial complex was politically organised and integrated.

*

This paper is a part of the results of the research which is grant-aided by the‘Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research’ program of the Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science in 2005–2007.

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1. The Internal Diversityof the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Poland-Lithuania before the union of Lublin was a typical example of acomposite monarchy in early modern Europe. ‘Composite state’ is theterm used by H. G. Koenigsberger, who argued that most states in earlymodern Europe had been ‘composite states, including more than one
country under the sovereignty of one ruler’ (Koenigsberger, 1978: 202).
Later J. H. Elliot developed this concept and described early modern
Europe as ‘a Europe of composite monarchies’ (Elliot, 1992). The
territories of composite monarchies were united by feudal or dynastic
relationships. Rulers of composite monarchies did not completely remove
the local institutions and customs of their component territories and often
allowed local elites to govern their own subjects, provided that they
accepted the superior authority of the monarch.
The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania wereunited by the Jagiellonian dynasty according to the Union of Krewo(1386). From then both countries were ruled by the same dynasty, buteach country maintained its own legal system and local customs. Before
the union of Lublin the nobility of Poland and Lithuania organised theirDiet separately.
In the Baltic region, the Duchy of Prussia was subjugated to thePolish king as a feudal vassal in 1525 after the secularisation of the
Teutonic Order. Feudal subordination of the Duke of Prussia to the Polishmonarch continued to 1657. In Livonia, the Order of Sword wassecularised in 1561. The southern part of its territory became thevassalage of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the Duchy of
Courland and Semigalia, and the northern part of Livonia became thecondominium of the Commonwealth in 1569.
In the same year, the dynastic bond between Poland and Lithuania
was transformed into a constitutional relationship by the Acts of the
Lublin Diet, which described the Polish-Lithuanian state as a‘Commonwealth of Both Nations’ (Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów).
After this new union, the nobility of Poland and Lithuania elected theirmonarchs by common royal election and convened the Diet together. The
noblemen of each country could acquire landed properties in the other partof the Commonwealth. From the constitutional point of view the- 138 -

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relationship between both countries was strengthened. Though the
Jagiellonian dynasty ended in 1572, the Commonwealth of Both Nations
continued to the end of the eighteenth century. On the other hand, theunion of Lublin did not abolish the institutional individuality of each partof the Commonwealth completely. Each country kept its own treasury andarmed forces. The hierarchy of public offices was organised in Poland andLithuania separately (Dembkowski 1982: 175–94). The Polish-LithuanianCommonwealth after the union of Lublin became a polity, which might becalled a ‘composite republic of the nobles’ rather than a ‘composite
monarchy’, because the throne was elective and the royal prerogative wasrestricted to a large extent by the privileges of the nobles.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was also a country inhabitedby various ethnic groups, speaking different languages and having diverse
creeds. There were at least three official languages in thisCommonwealth: Latin, Polish and Ruthenian (proto-Ukrainian and
Byelorussian). Poland-Lithuania was the eastern periphery of the‘Republic of Letters’, in which Latin was a common language of theintellectuals. Knowledge of this classical language was necessary for theszlachta to take an active part in the parliament, the judicial court or the
royal secretariat. In the sixteenth century, Latin language education was
popular among the townspeople as well. Even women learned reading andwriting in Latin. In his book Polonia (1578), Marcin Kromer, the bishop
of Warmia and a humanist, wrote:
All people, both the poor and the rich, both the noblemen and theplebeians, above all the townsmen, make efforts to send their children toschools, to give them an education, and to accustom them to Latin fromearly childhood. . . . Even in Italy, it would be difficult to find so many andvarious people, who can communicate in Latin. Also girls of the nobility andthe townspeople learn to read and write in Polish and even in Latin, both intheir home and in the monasteries (Kromer 1901: 49).

The eastern border of the Commonwealth was also the eastern limit of the‘Gutenberg Galaxy’, where type-printing technology came into wide use(Tazbir 1989: 23–5). Only after the annexation of the left bank of the
Dnieper and Kiev in 1667 was Russia affected by some elements of
Latin-Christian culture through the Ukrainian elite, who had been

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educated in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Western Europe(Raeff 1982: 32–3; Aleksiun et al. 2004: 230–1).
The Polish language had two functions in the multi-ethnic
Commonwealth (Litwin 1993: 184–5). For Poles, Polish was their mothertongue. In the central part of the Kingdom of Poland (Little Poland, Great
Poland and Mazovia), where not only the szlachta but also the peasantry
and many of the townspeople spoke Polish, it functioned as a common
language integrating local society vertically. Another function of thePolish language was to integrate the upper strata of the whole
Commonwealth horizontally. From the sixteenth century onwards, Polish
was used as the official language of the Commonwealth, and it became alingua franca for almost all noblemen from the Baltic coast to the step
frontier north of the Black Sea during the next century.
Ruthenian, the third official language of the Commonwealth, wasused only in the eastern territories of the Commonwealth (Volhynia,
Ukraine, part of Red Ruthenia, Podolia and the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania). In these regions the peasantry and the townspeople spoke
Ruthenian, while the nobles were often bilingual (Ruthenian and Polish)
or polonised linguistically. At the end of the seventeenth century, theofficial use of the Ruthenian language came to an end and all judicial actsbegan to be written in Polish.
German was also used commonly, above all in the region near theBaltic shore and the western regions of the Polish Kingdom. In the bookabove aforementioned text Marcin Kromer pointed out:
Today not only merchants and craftsmen from Germany live in many
towns, but there are also towns and villages where almost all inhabitants
speak German. . . . Poles also willingly learn German, taking into
consideration the wide use of this language and the close contacts withGermans (Kromer 1901: 39).

Ethnic minorities living in the Commonwealth also had their own
languages. Peasants in the north-western part of the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania spoke Lithuanian. Jews spoke Yiddish and used Hebrew inreligious ceremonies. Jewish and Armenian merchants were often
multilingual.
As for religion, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was amulti-confessional state. Roman Catholics accounted for less than half of- 140 -

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the population of the Commonwealth in the second half of the sixteenth
century. Its territory was crossed by the line dividing the churches ofRome and Byzantium. In the south-eastern part of the Polish Kingdom
and the eastern part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the population of
Orthodox faith was dominant. Armenians also had their separate dioceses
and enjoyed wide freedom of worship. In the sixteenth century the
influence of the Reformation reached Poland and Lithuania. Lutheranism
was accepted mainly in the cities with German populations in the northern
and western part of the Polish Kingdom, whereas Calvinism spreadamong the nobility of Little Poland and Lithuania. The Czech Brethren
and the antitrinitarians, who had been persecuted in their mother countries,
also took refuge in Poland and Lithuania. The Confederation of Warsaw(1573) guaranteed peaceful coexistence among Christian denominations
including the Roman Catholics, the Greek Orthodox and various
Protestant churches. In the seventeenth century the Commonwealth wascalled an ‘asylum of heretics’ for its wide-ranging religious tolerance(Tazbir 1973: 29, 90–7). The Commonwealth also had many
non-Christian inhabitants. Jews made up about 10 per cent of the
population in the eighteenth century. There were also some Moslems(Tartars) who had established mosques in Lithuania.
We can distinguish two strata in the social structure of thePolish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The ruling estates, which include thenobility, the Catholic hierarchy and wealthy townsmen, form the upper
stratum. The members of this stratum enjoyed various privileges andcould communicate with each other in their common languages (Latin andPolish, sometimes Ruthenian). Below the horizontally united upper
stratum, there was another world of the lower estates (the townsmen andthe peasants). This lower stratum consisted of small local communities
with diverse languages and faiths. It was difficult for these subject
communities to communicate laterally, because they lacked common
languages and did not share the same cultural codes. This two-layer
structure of the Polish-Lithuanian society corresponds to the general formof the social structure of agrarian societies presented by Ernest Gellner in
his Nations and Nationalism (Gellner 1983: 9–11; Mączak et al. 1996:87–8).

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2. The Integrity of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealthin the Eyes of the Contemporaries
How did the contemporaries of the early modern Polish-Lithuanian state
understand the integrity of their Commonwealth? The intellectuals of thesixteenth century had a geographical awareness of the unity of thePolish-Lithuanian state. Marcin Kromer described his country as follows:
Poland reminds us of a bent bow, the string of which is slightly drawn
back and stretched to the south and to the northwest to some degree. The
frame of the bow makes a curve toward the north and the southeast.
If one includes new acquisitions such as Polesia, neighbouring Ruthenia,
Volhynia, Podolia, Livonia, the Duchy of Prussia, Lithuania including
Samogitia, and Byelorussia which borders on Russia or Muscovy (and allthese territories already compose one kingdom), Poland reaches muchfurther to the east and the north (Kromer 1901: 15).

Kromer recognised the geographical location of the Commonwealth andwas conscious of its territorial shape. R. T. Marchwiński points out thatwhen writing his book Polonia Kromer used maps made by Polishcartographers, Wacław Grodecki and Bernard Wapowski (Marchwiński
1997: 21–9).
In the next century, in a book also entitled Polonia (1632), Szymon
Starowolski explained the integrity of the Commonwealth by the common
laws and privileges:
Poland, which was called European Sarmatia by the ancients and is now
under the rule of the most prudent king Zygmunt III, comprises eightprovinces,1 which are partly different from each other in customs, laws andlanguage. On the other hand, all provinces without exception are equal intheir way of life, the privileges of liberty, and the attainment of honor in the
Commonwealth. They are tied by laws of relationship with each other(Starowolski 1976: 59).

‘Liberty’ (libertas; wolność) is an essential concept which unites theregions with different customs and faiths. In the preface to the code of1Great and Little Poland, Lithuania, Ruthenia, Prussia, Mazovia, Samogitia, Pomerania
and Livonia.

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laws edited by Jakub Przyłuski (1553), Stanisław Orzechowski, asixteenth century humanist, stated:
Liberty, which is the highest of all goods, is the property of your clan andyour family. It is so vast and so great that in comparison, the liberty of othernations would be unbearable servitude for us. Admiring the sweetness of thisliberty many provinces joined you and submitted to your rule, not but due toyour military strength, but due to the greatness of your liberty . . .
. . . Though customs, laws and even the God of these people are not thesame, your glorious liberty caused all people in the Kingdom to accept thesame law (Orzechowski 1972: 99–100).

This ‘glorious liberty’ means the privileges of the Polish, Lithuanian and
Ruthenian nobility (szlachta). They regarded themselves as ‘free citizens’(liberi cives) in a ‘free Commonwealth’ (libera Respublica) (Opaliński
2005: 233). As ‘free citizens’, the szlachta had the right to elect theirmonarch, to participate in the local diet (sejmik), to send deputies to theDiet (sejm) and to express their opinions on public matters freely. If themonarch violated the laws of the ‘free Commonwealth’ and the privilegesof ‘free citizens’, the nobility could protest against it and even refuse toobey the royal authority.
The Polish-Lithuanian concept of ‘Commonwealth’ (Respublica;
Rzeczpospolita) was based on the ancient Greek and Roman republicmodel. Political authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth century often
quoted or paraphrased the definitions of respublica in Aristotle’s Politica
and Cicero’s De Re Publica. The Polish-Lithuanian nobility regarded‘mixed monarchy’ (monarchia mixta), which combined monarchical,
aristocratic and democratic elements in one polity, as an ideal form ofgovernment. An anonymous author of a political pamphlet at the
beginning of the seventeenth century said:
What is the free Commonwealth (libera respublica)? That is a
Commonwealth in which not one, but three estates always govern and rule
together, no estate stands higher than another one, and these estates govern
by common law. . . . In this free Commonwealth, nobody can decideanything without free will and consensus of all three estates. This
Commonwealth is composed of three methods to govern, i.e. monarchy,
aristocracy and democracy (Czubek ed. 1918: 403).

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SATOSHI KOYAMAFor contemporaries the concept of ‘mixed monarchy’ was not only theideal form of government theoretically, but it represented the realconstitutional structure of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The
Chamber of Deputies (izba poselska), which was the Lower House of thebicameral Diet and represented the interests of the ordinary szlachta,corresponded to the democratic element, whereas the Senate (senat), in
which Catholic bishops and high-ranking secular officials had their seats,corresponded to the aristocratic element. The elected monarch embodied
the monarchical element in the ‘free Commonwealth’.
The concept of ‘Commonwealth’ also represented the principle ofintegrity of the Polish-Lithuanian state. Edward Opaliński mentions three
types of usage of this term in the second half of the sixteenth and the firsthalf of the seventeenth century (Opaliński 1995: 27–36).
a) It means the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania or
the whole Polish-Lithuanian state. In this case the term‘Commonwealth’ implies a community of regions united voluntarilyon the agreements with each other.
b) It means the Diet. In this usage it can indicate all three estates of
the Diet (the king, the Senate, and the Chamber of Deputies) as wellas two chambers without the king or only the Chamber of Deputies.
In the last case, ‘Commonwealth’ can be interpreted as the szlachta
as a whole who were represented in the lower Chamber.
c) It means the local diets (sejmiki). At the end of the sixteenth
century, there were 44 local diets in the Kingdom of Poland and 24 in
the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Kriegseisen 1991: 28). Eachnobleman had the right to participate in the local diet directly. In
sejmiki they elected the deputies to the Diet, the judges of the Royal
Tribunal (Trybunał Koronny) and the judges of local court. In thiscase the term ‘Commonwealth’ has an implication that the networkof local diets represents the whole community of the citizen-nobles
who monopolised the active political right in the Polish-Lithuanianstate.
On the other hand, some authors were aware of the uniqueness of thePolish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in comparison with ancient andcontemporary republics. Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro, a political thinkerof the seventeenth century, distinguished two types of Commonwealth- 144 -

THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN COMMONWEALTH(Ogonowski 1992: 30–3). One is the ‘urban Commonwealth’ (respublica
urbis), which expands its territory through the conquest and annexation of
the peripheral area by the core-city. In this type of Commonwealth it isrelatively easy to agree on the public interests, because all citizens arefrom the same city. Athens and Sparta in ancient times and the Republicof Venice belong to this type. The other is the ‘Commonwealth ofprovinces’ (respublica provinciae or respublica provincialis). The
Polish-Lithuanian state belongs to this second type. The ‘Commonwealthof provinces’ expands its territory not by conquest but by voluntary union
between regions. The extensiveness of its territories and the diversity ofpeople’s interests are characteristic of this type of Commonwealth. In
such a vast Commonwealth, when one region of the Commonwealth falls
into crisis, other regions may not be aware of the danger and loss ofpeople there. Decision by majority in the Diet is ill-suited to this type ofCommonwealth, because it enables the majority to ignore the interests of aparticular region which has gotten into difficulty and asks the nation forhelp. In this regard Fredro argues that liberum veto is necessary in the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in order to defend the ‘noble liberty’(cara libertas) of its members. The right of veto is an important bonduniting regions with different interests in the ‘Commonwealth ofprovinces’.
Fredro’s arguments tell us how the contemporaries of the earlymodern Polish-Lithuanian state recognised the relationship between theconstitution of the Commonwealth and the size of its political space.

3. The Constitutional Identity of the Polish-LithuanianCommonwealth and Its Limits
H. G. Koenigsberger describes the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as
the typical case of a ‘republic manqué’ in early modern Europe. He points
out that ‘in this vast, composite “commonwealth” the vision of liberty, theaurea libertas of the nobility, remained more narrowly class bound than in
Sweden’ and ‘it proved impossible to make the vital transition fromcity-state republicanism to commonwealth republicanism’ (Koenigsberger
1997: 59). Why did the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth fail in thistransition?

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Antoni Mączak suggests that the element of space played an
important and even decisive role in the history of the Polish-LithuanianCommonwealth. He posits a hypothesis thatthe well-known, even proverbial, weakness of modern Polish kings wascaused by a syndrome of extensive privileges acquired by the nobility
mainly during the fifteenth century, by a particular property structure(chiefly in Lithuania and the Ukraine) but also by feeble and difficult
communications between the court (the king and central offices) and thenobles with their county assemblies (the diets) (Mączak 1995: 8).

One cannot readily believe that the weakness of royal power wascaused only by the vast size of their territory and the difficulty ofcommunications, because we know of empires in which despotic rulers
wielded strong power over a vast territory with feeble communication
infrastructure. 2 The most important factor is the combination of theterritorial size of the state and the specific political culture of the nobility.
Andrzej Zajączkowski argues that the Polish-LithuanianCommonwealth was a kind of federation of local societies ofnoblemen-neighbours (Zajączkowski 1993: 66–80). The noblemen’s‘society of neighbours’ was organised around the manor house or the local
diet. Theoretically, all members of ‘society’ were equal, thoughpractically the magnates had power over the ordinary szlachta. The
federation of ‘societies of neighbours’ took the form of a pyramid, inwhich the ‘large societies of neighbours’ (sąsiedztwo wielkie) of the
magnates were placed on top of many ‘small societies of neighbours’(sąsiedztwo małe) of the middle and poor nobles. Mączak describes thissocio-political structure by using the concepts of the ‘Commonwealth ofself-government by the nobles’ (Rzeczpospolita szlacheckich
samorządów) and the ‘clientelism of the magnates’ (klientelizm
magnacki) (Mączak 2005).
2

Andrzej Nowak poses a question whether the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was anempire and suggests that the belief in the attractiveness of the Commonwealth’s politicalmodel represented the ‘Sarmatian ideological imperialism’ (Nowak 2004: 356–67).
Masaaki Sugiyama, a Japanese specialist of Eurasian history, also regards the
Polish-Lithuanian state as an empire or a quasi-empire (Sugiyama 2003: 60, 75–6). This
problem depends on how we define the term ‘empire’. If we adopt the definition of‘empire’ by the structure of metropolis (centre)/periphery, the decentralised politicalstructure of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth does not fit well with such a definition.

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In the fifteenth century, the political structure of the Polish Kingdom
began to be characterised by two phenomena. First, the townsmen did notacquire the right to represent themselves in the Diet. Second, the royalauthority could not establish a strong apparatus for local administration
under the direct control of the king. As a result the Polish-Lithuanian state
became dependent on local self-government by the nobles. Theoreticallyall members of the nobility were equal, but in reality the noble estate wasstrongly stratified. In the seventeenth century the concentration of landed
properties with the magnates advanced and many middle and poor
noblemen increasingly became dependent on their wealthier neighbours inlocal society. With the restricted royal power and without the developed
central bureaucracy, the political interests of the state were concentrated
on the local diets, where the magnates wielded power over their clients.
Each magnate pursued his own interests, and there was no commonly
shared political will among them. The Commonwealth became a loosely
federated accumulation of the magnate’s petty ‘kingdoms’ without astrong political centre. Mączak names this phenomenon as ‘dominance of
periphery’ (Mączak 1986: 134–40).
Mączak’s thesis is consistent and suggestive, but we can ask how thePolish-Lithuanian Commonwealth could continue to exist for several
centuries, if the forces of decentralisation had been stronger than thecentralising force since the fifteenth century. How was the political elite
integrated, if it did not share any common ‘political will’?
As previously stated, although Polish-Lithuanian society was
inhabited by people with various religions and languages, the ruling noble
estate could communicate through their common languages (Latin andPolish) and had a constitutional identity in common. A kind of legalism
was an important element of the constitutional identity of thePolish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Not only the nobles, but also themonarch had to obey the law of the Commonwealth. When the monarch
tried to enforce his own policy ignoring the necessary legal procedures,
the noblemen opposed him stubbornly even if the substance of this policy
was acceptable to them. I will give an example of how aristocratic
legalism prevailed over the ‘political will’ of the nobles.
In 1646, the Polish king Władysław IV planned to mobilise the
Ukrainian Cossacks and recruit soldiers for the war against the Khanate of
the Crimea and the Ottoman Empire without consent of the Diet. The
nobles, including the high dignitaries, objected to the monarch’s actions.

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Albrycht Stanisław Radziwiłł, the great chancellor of the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania, wrote in his memoir (12 May 1646) that he would prefer tohave his own hand cut off rather than to sign his name and put the grandchancellor’s seal on a document permitting the illegal recruitment ofarmies . Jerzy Ossoliński, the great chancellor of the Polish Kingdom, wasof the same opinion on the refusal to sign the document, though he hadrather stood by the king’s policy. On 21 May, A. S. Radziwiłł expressed
his objection directly before the king Władysław IV explaining that the
chancellors were obliged to reject the document without it having received
the agreement of the Commonwealth (Radziwiłł 1972: 246–9). In thiscase, both of the great chancellors agreed in maintaining the principle of‘the rule of law’ against the illegal act of the king, no matter whether their‘political will’ was consistent with royal policy or not.
The constitutional identity of the Polish-Lithuanian nobles was animportant factor integrating the federation of ‘societies of neighbours’ anduniting the political elite of the Commonwealth. However there weresome limits to this unification. Vertically, it was restricted only to thenoble estate and did not include the non-privileged strata i.e. thetownspeople and peasantry. Horizontally, the Polish-LithuanianCommonwealth could not succeed in strengthening its political influence
over the Ukraine by constitutional integration (Sysyn 1985: 202–13). It istrue that there was an attempt to include the Ukrainian elite into thepolitical union of the Commonwealth in the middle of the seventeenth
century after the Ukrainian uprising led by Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi(Chmienicki). In 1658, after Khmel’nyts’kyi’s death, Ivan Vyhovs’kyi(Jan Wyhowski), the new hetman of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, and thePolish-Lithuanian Commonwealth concluded the treaty of Hadiach(Hadziacz), which granted Senate seats to the Orthodox hierarchs andassured the Cossacks of aristocratic privileges. The Hadiach Agreement
was an attempt to enlarge ‘the Commonwealth of Both Nations’ to ‘theCommonwealth of Three Nations’ (Polish, Lithuanian and Ruthenian). In
the next year Iurii Nemyrych (Jerzy Niemirycz), who was one of thedrafters of this treaty, made a speech for the ratification of the union of
Hadiach at the Diet held in Warsaw:
The value of the Polish Kingdom, which cannot be compared withanything, is the liberty. It is this liberty that drew us to this society. We are- 148 -

THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN COMMONWEALTH

born and educated in this liberty, and now join to this society as free men(Kot 1960: 71).

In this statement of a Ukrainian nobleman we can hear an echo of theapotheosis of the ‘golden liberty’ written by a Polish humanist, Stanisław
Orzechowski, one hundred years earlier.
However the concept of ‘the Commonwealth of Three Nations’ was
not accepted by the majority of the Ukrainian Cossacks. Nemyrych was
killed by them and the Hadiach union collapsed. The Ukrainian Cossacks
on the left bank of the Dnieper chose to separate themselves from thePolish-Lithuanian state and to be under the suzerainty of Orthodox Russia.
In the Ukraine, the ‘composite republic of nobles’ faced its most difficult
test. There, though the upper stratum was partly influenced by the politicalculture of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility, the force of the ethnic andconfessional identity surpassed the attractiveness of the ‘free
Commonwealth’. The Ukrainian case well illustrates the permeability of
noble republicanism and its limits in the Polish-LithuanianCommonwealth as a political space.

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