Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

The largest state in Europe for a century, and a republic with a king that voted itself into paralysis. The dynastic union of 1385 became a real one at Lublin in 1569, joining the Polish crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania into a commonwealth stretching from the Baltic nearly to the Black Sea. It was governed by a nobility that made up perhaps a tenth of the population, far more than anywhere else in Europe, who elected the monarch and bound him by contract before coronation. The Warsaw Confederation of 1573 guaranteed religious toleration by statute while France was massacring Huguenots. Its cavalry, the winged hussars, broke the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. The structural flaw was the liberum veto, under which any single deputy could dissolve the Sejm and annul its session - used sparingly at first and then routinely, often at foreign expense, until the legislature could not function. Cossack revolt, Swedish invasion and Russian interference followed. The constitution of 3 May 1791 tried to fix it and provoked the final partitions. Russia, Prussia and Austria erased the state by 1795. The commonwealth covered around a million square kilometres at its height, with about eleven million people. Its Jewish population was the largest in the world and held communal self-government through the Council of Four Lands. Krakow and then Warsaw served as capitals. The 3 May constitution was the second written national constitution anywhere, after the American one. Copernicus was a subject of the Polish crown.

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