Beetwen the Jagiellons and the Vasas: Research into Late 16th-Century Polish Parliamentarism
Beetwen the Jagiellons and the Vasas: Research into Late 16th-Century Polish Parliamentarism

Summary/Abstract: The death, without a successor, of Sigismund II August on 7th July 1572 opened the epoch of free royal elections, a new phase in the history of the Polish state, marked by a checkered pattern of individual reigns and intervening interregna. Historians specializing in the late 16th century were usually attracted by these interstices, probably because they produced a number of innovations which paved the way for the establishment of the institution of electio viritim, in which all members of the nobility were eligible to vote for the future king. The reign of Stefan Batory (1st May 1576 – 12th December 1586), which filled most of the transition period between the rule of the two major royal houses, the Jagiellons and the Vasas, seems to have had less appeal, even to the historians of law and Polish parliamentarianism. A researcher of the age of Stefan Batory has to confront a number of difficulties which are not faced by those specializing in the periods directly preceding or following that reign. The main obstacle is the dearth of source material that has been printed or is readily available in the Polish archives; moreover, the some of the items that are listed in bibliographies of various studies and monographs of that segment of Polish history are difficult to trace. A thorough sifting of the archives for documentary evidence of the Sejms of 1576–1586 has produced relatively little in all respects, i.e. the circumstances attending their convocation, the preparatory work, the actual proceedings as well their legal and political consequences. The most acute problem for any research in this field is the lack of parliamentary records, or Sejm diaries – of which there are plenty for the preceding and subsequent periods. Alternatively, a searcher of Batory’s sejms, can fi nd out what happened in those convocations from thumbnail descriptions in some contemporary chronicles or by digging up the relevant private and public correspondence, examining parliamentary speeches – some of which were printed – or by trying to infer the agenda and points of debate from the text of the acts adopted by the local sejmiks. As the main subject of my research is the legislative activity of the Polish-Lithuanian Sejm in the period 1576–1586 in the context of the legislative competences of the monarch, I extended my archive trawl to those fi les that could possibly include the text of both parliamentary and royal legislation, like the Libri Inscriptionum of the Polish Crown Register Metrica Regni Poloniae, volumes 113–133 as well as the inscriptions of the Cracow Land Register, housed at the Wawel Castle Branch of the National Archives. Another important source for the history of Sejms and the eff ects of their law-making as well as the royal legislation in the age of Stefan Batory are copies of documents that were deposited in various archives or were collected for publication. There is no comprehensive study of the Sejms convened during the reign of Stefan Batory or their legislation, nor is there much information about that chapter of parliamentary history in the historiography of the 16th century especially when compared with rese the preceding and following periods. However, over the last two decades the standstill has been broken by some scholars. Aditionally, some information about the Sejms proceedings and lawmaking during the Batory’s epoch can be fi nd in the distinct studies touching the miscellaneous aspects of that time including the biographical ones.

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