ABSTRACT
When John Casimir was elected to the Polish throne, following his brother Wladislaw IV, in November 1648, one month after the end of the Thirty Years War, he became ruler of the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania: some 350,000 square miles inhabited by some 7 million people, less than half of whom were Poles. East of the Bug and San rivers were Lithuanians, White Russians and Ukrainians, though many of the nobles in these eastern regions were Polish. The Jews, perhaps 5 per cent, were to be found mainly in the east and in the towns. There were also Germans, recent immigrants from the war zones. These were lands of peasants and gentry, of extensive grain lands, forests, marshes and steppes. Even townspeople were often farmers as well, while the szlachta, or gentry, were remarkably numerous, about 1 in 20 of the population. ‘Noble’ status extended often to freeholders, living remote and simple lives in their single-storey wooden houses, modest in estate but not in the pride derived from former colonizing times when knights had claimed equality with their lords. Certain great magnates with vast estates towered above the mass of the szlachta but all were equal in law and constitutional rights. There were no peers, no Polish titles; though some were called ‘Prince’, it was an honorific title only. A crucial problem of government was the discrepancy between the social and political status of the gentry, with incomes often little above those of their peasants. They tended to seek the protection of the great families; this made even more dangerous the power that they could exercise through their voting rights in the diet.
