ABSTRACT
King Jan III Sobieski died on 17 June 1696, a failure broken on the wheel of his country's politics. The liberator of Vienna had been unable to clear the Turks from Polish soil. He had failed to secure the succession of any of his three sons or to conquer hereditary states for them in East Prussia or the Balkans. The magnateria had grown more, not less, powerful. The army was unpaid, demoralised and mutinous; six years had passed since the successful conclusion of a Sejm; the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, polarised between the ambitions of the great Sapieha family, its magnate rivals and a terrorised gentry was lurching towards civil war; in the depths of the Ukraine, cossack insurgents led by Semen Palij were systematically expelling szlachta settlers. Poland's neighbours, if not actively stalking its territory, were only too eager to preserve its anarchy.
