The Union of Lublin
Poland and Lithuania merged into a single state at Lublin on 1 July 1569, creating the largest country in Europe. They had shared a monarch since 1386, when the Lithuanian grand duke Jogaila married the Polish queen and was baptised, and the arrangement had been renewed repeatedly and remained personal — two states, two treasuries, two armies, one king. Sigismund II Augustus was the last of the Jagiellons and had no children, which is what forced the question. When he died the personal union would lapse, and Lithuania — facing Ivan the Terrible, who had taken Polotsk in 1563 — could not fight Muscovy alone. The Lithuanian magnates nonetheless resisted a full union and walked out of the negotiations. Sigismund answered by transferring Volhynia, Podlachia, Podolia and the Kyiv region from Lithuania to the Polish crown by decree — roughly a third of the grand duchy, and the richest third — and the magnates came back and signed. The Commonwealth that resulted had one elected monarch, one Sejm, one currency and one foreign policy, with separate armies, laws and administrations retained. It covered about 800,000 square kilometres and eleven million people, and was religiously the most tolerant state in Europe, guaranteed by the Warsaw Confederation of 1573. Its defect was the elective monarchy and the liberum veto, which made government progressively impossible. The transfer of the Ukrainian lands to Poland brought Polish landlords and Catholic pressure east, and produced the Khmelnytsky rising in 1648. The Commonwealth was partitioned out of existence in 1795. Belarusians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Poles all read the union differently, and the arguments about it are live.
- Year: 1569 CE
- Category: Political
