ABSTRACT
The traditional division between the middle Ages and modern times is largely conventional. In the cultural, artistic, and intellectual sphere the Renaissance – understood as a rebirth of cultural achievements of the Greek-Roman world – and humanism as the literary movement had reached great heights in the fifteenth century. East Central Europe shared in the Renaissance and Reformation, making its own contributions to both. In the political-constitutional sphere there was a growing divergence between Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia on the one hand and the West and Muscovy on the other. Constructing a model of a capitalist world economy in the sixteenth century, Immanuel Wallerstein postulated the existence of a core, a semi-periphery, and a periphery that played specific economic roles, developed divergent class structures, and consequently profited unequally from the working of the system. The events in the Commonwealth and in Muscovy occurred almost simultaneously with the Letter of Majesty of Rudolf and the accord among estates in Bohemia.
