Wielka Emigracja po 1831

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 454-458:

Not all Poles stayed around to see how matters would develop after 1831. Already during the insurrection, some insurrectionists abandoned the Kingdom of Poland and made their way to the west. After the November Insurrection, a mass exodus of Poles ensued to France, Belgium, and Britain. There were so many Poles in western Europe that this came to be called the Great Emigration (Wielka Emigracja). The term wielka can mean large—which it was. Somewhere in the vicinity of ten thousand Poles became political émigrés in Paris and elsewhere. But wielka also means great. It was a great generation, comprised of the leading Polish intellectual lights as well as dedicated cadres of insurrectionists. Among those former were the great Romantic poets—the so-called Bards: Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Zygmunt Krasiński. Mickiewicz, incidentally, had managed to escape from Russia to the west right before the November Insurrection.

Also in emigration was a young composer from Warsaw, Fryderyk (French: Frédéric) Chopin. Son of a Polonized emigrant from France, Fryderyk was in Vienna when the insurrection broke out and made the reverse journey. The young Chopin, whose musical genius would (among other things) popularize Polish dances such as the polonaise, the mazurka, and the krakowiak, channeled his anguished reaction to the loss of the November Insurrection into his famous, and moving, Revolutionary Étude.

Only in emigration did Polish Romanticism—in literature even more than in music—develop to its full potential. Polish literature of this period is interesting not only for its intrinsic value but for what it represented to Polish society in that period. When politics failed (as they clearly did in 1830–1831), poetry took its place. Poland went from being led by generals wielding sabers to generals wielding pens.

These newfangled generals led a cultural campaign. Their task was to produce a vibrant literary culture that would unite all the lands of the former Commonwealth as well as enrich the Polish spirit. Here the Polish Romantics were influenced by thinkers like Herder, famous for his conception of the Volksgeist, which can be translated as the spirit of the people or nation or as national character. In this vision, the people or nation was viewed increasingly as the common man.

This proved to be one of the most important periods of Polish literature, if not the most important (which surely could be argued). And Adam Mickiewicz—the young poet introduced earlier—is the most famous of the Polish Romantic poets. Indeed, he is the most famous literary figure in all of Polish history. Thus it is interesting to consider the opening line of his most famous work, the epic poem Pan Tadeusz. Expressing the longing of the émigré for the country he has left behind, it begins with the invocation, “Lithuania! My fatherland!” Writing in Polish, this poet who hailed from the territory of today’s Belarus, considered Lithuania his homeland. This suggests that this quintessentially Polish poet reflected ideas of Poland and Polishness that were hardly straightforward—ideas more redolent of the former Sarmatian, Commonwealth realm. Polish and provincial culture (brought to life in the Lithuanian landscape) were one in this depiction of a soon-to-be-lost Sarmatian idyll in its encounter with the transformations of the Napoleonic era. Indeed, it is a Polish peculiarity that national self-definitions were often forged at its margins—in the borderland realm increasingly referred to in the nineteenth century as the Kresy.

Paris proved a seedbed for all kinds of ideas about Poland’s past, present, and future. The émigrés were obsessed with “the Polish question,” a question not limited to the regaining of national sovereignty. Lacking independent statehood, Poles had to answer some other crucial questions as well. They increasingly had to choose, consciously, to be Poles, as this was no longer a choice of state identification. But what, then, was Polishness? How was one to define Poland, or who was a Pole? How to justify being—let alone becoming—Polish, in a world of imperial dominance?

Again, the poet spoke. Or, rather, wrote—although it should be added that Mickiewicz also spent the period from 1840 to 1844 lecturing on Slavic literature at the Collège de France, his lectures often electrifying his audience. Consider his Books of the Polish Nation and the Polish Pilgrimage. Mickiewicz believed that the Poles had a mission of universal significance. In his messianic vision, Poland was the Christ of Nations, suffering for the rest of the world. “But on the third day,” he wrote in true biblical style, “the soul shall return to the body, and the Nations shall arise and free all the peoples of Europe from slavery.” Mickiewicz also saw a special role for his nation in the Slavic world. The future of Europe lay with the Slavs—and the Poles, not the Russians, were Slavdom’s natural leaders, who would fight against the perceived evils of civilization.

Despite his liberal use of biblical phrasing, Mickiewicz’s Roman Catholicism was hardly orthodox. The Pole was conflicted in his relationship to the See of Peter. He, like many others, was outraged that the Vicar of Christ should side with the partitioning empires and condemn the Polish insurrection. Furthermore, Mickiewicz fell under the spell of Andrzej Towiański, a leader of a mystical cult; this experience did little to strengthen his connection to the Roman Catholic Church of his day.

Mickiewicz and the Romantics focused their attention, in exile, on the Polish nation, seeking to determine what in the Polish past was significant, and whether the nation had a historical mission. Theirs was an ideal vision of the nation, focusing more on the body politic—the potential masses of Poles—than on any future territorial incarnation. The Poland of the Romantics was one of the mind. They believed that their nation did have a mission, which was to bring universal freedom to Europe. In this mission lay all hope for Poland. Only if Poles fought for universal freedom could they be considered worthy of regaining independent statehood. Their national stance, thus, was an active and engaged one. The purpose of Polish Romantic literature, furthermore, was to embolden and inspire the nation as well as strengthen national consciousness, without which there could be no gains. In an age when generals wielding sabers had failed, the Romantics saw themselves as generals wielding pens.

Life in Poland's Partitions, 1795

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 421-424:

Life under the three empires took on distinctly different forms. If regionalism was a problem earlier, it now threatened to become even more intractable. Although the three partitioning powers prided themselves on being enlightened states, each approached the new territories and new subjects differently. Thus, a new layer of regionalism was superimposed on the old ones. The newly acquired population was incorporated into each of the partitioned territories in different ways. Each empire was further diversified and internationalized—perhaps in ways even the partitioning powers had not anticipated. Likewise recall that, although the final partition of Poland came only in 1795, already since 1772 certain parts of the country had come under foreign rule, which left the territories further differentiated.

Prussia became a much more heterogeneous entity, although it sought to dilute the concentration of Poles in the newly acquired territories. The Prussian state took over the Crown lands, which it sold to German landowners; German bureaucrats took the place of Polish officeholders. No municipal self-rule or noble assemblies were allowed under Prussian rule. A Protestant power, Prussia also took over properties belonging to the Roman Catholic Church. Religious issues complicated the picture. Prussia truly became a multiethnic and multidenominational state. It was faced with either dealing with, or doing away with, diversity.

Prussia eventually undermined the Polish nobles by taking away their privileges. The position of their peasants was strengthened. The position of Jews was changed beyond recognition, their corporate rights undone. Rather, Friedrich the Great delineated two types of Jews: those who were to assimilate and in the process receive civil rights and those who did not have these rights and would be expelled from the province. This facilitated a relatively rapid Germanization of the first group—certainly compared to the two other Central and East European empires.

The situation in Austria looked quite different. Under Maria Theresa and especially Joseph II, various reforms were implemented—reforms that could be considered enlightened. But under Francis I, scarred by the events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic periods, reaction ensued. Seeking to centralize power, the Habsburgs took away various privileges of the Galician nobility. Indeed, many nobles suffered dreadfully under Austrian rule: if they were not able to provide proof of nobility—something that was difficult for many an old noble family fallen on hard times—they were reduced to the status of peasants. This déclassé nobility was clearly the worst off, although the burden of taxation reduced further nobles to penury. The peasants came to fare slightly better, as they were protected by legislation and the amount of time they spent working for the landlord was regulated. Jews were obliged to take German surnames and serve in the military (like members of all the estates), but their communities still had jurisdiction over religious matters. Although a staunchly Catholic power, Austria clearly did not trust its own population: witness the strong censorship of newspapers and other printed materials in the empire. The province would remain backward, socially as well as economically.

The territories that came under Russian rule—the most extensive of the lot—were the most ethnically diverse. The easternmost lands were inhabited by people we would now call Belarusians and Ukrainians (but which then were most likely termed Ruthenes or even Russians), Lithuanians, Tatars, and Jews. Poles were mainly noble landowners. It was Polish (Sarmatian) culture that had long radiated out through the entirety of the Commonwealth and that still carried weight.

Paradoxically, these lands witnessed little initially in the way of reforms. Even the old courts and laws were maintained. The nobles within the Russian Empire initially were not as inconvenienced as were nobles under Austrian and Prussian rule, except for the fact that Crown lands were taken over. By contrast, peasants found Russian rule more onerous: now classified as serfs, they were the chattel—that is, the personal property—of the landholders, who could do with them as they wished. Furthermore, they would eventually be subjected to Russia’s onerous military service: recruits were taken for a period of twenty-five years.

The biggest problem for the Russians related to religion. The imperial authorities would do away with the Uniate (Greek Catholic) religion in the 1830s, forcing Uniates to convert to Russian Orthodoxy. As the partitions provided Russia with her first real encounter with large Jewish populations, she decided to restrict them to a region that would become known as the Pale of Settlement; this swath of land was more or less coterminous with the boundaries of the former Commonwealth. Unlike their coreligionists elsewhere, Jews, thus, could not penetrate further into the heart of the empire, that is, into Russia proper.

Such was the starting point. It would not be the ending point. The arrangement ratified in 1795, and reaffirmed in 1797, proved less permanent than the partitioning powers might have imagined.

Kościuszko in Poland

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 404-407:

The last third of the eighteenth century had initiated an increasingly painful spiral of action and reaction. Catherine’s trampling of Polish religious sensibilities led to the Confederation of Bar, which in turn resulted in the first partition. That shock propelled Poles to contemplate the series of reforms that culminated in the Constitution of May 3, 1791. The reaction to this was the Targowica Confederation and the second partition. Despite the Russian terror and intimidation, however, not all Poles were resigned to this fate.

One of these Poles was Tadeusz Kościuszko. Hailing from the region of Polesie (in the vicinity of today’s Belarus), Kościuszko was one of the poor but deserving young noblemen who received an education from the reform-minded Piarists, as well as at the Knights’ School in Warsaw. After a brief period spent in France (where he studied further) and elsewhere in western Europe, Kościuszko headed across the Atlantic in 1776. The Pole offered his services to George Washington and the Continental Congress. Kościuszko’s arrival was timely, and his services were both needed and appreciated by the Americans fighting for their independence. The Pole was given a commission and put to great use his skill as both a military engineer and a field commander. Among other things, Kościuszko fortified and defended places such as Philadelphia, Saratoga, and West Point, thus enabling these locations to withstand British attack. For his contributions to the American victory, the Polish nobleman was given United States citizenship and was promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the U.S. Army before returning home in 1784.

Having secured a position in the Polish army as of 1789, he fought on the side of King Stanisław in August 1792. However, upon learning the summer of 1793 that the king had acceded to the Targowica Confederation, General Kościuszko resigned his commission and left the country. France awarded him honorary citizenship. While in emigration, he was prevailed upon to return to rump Poland to lead a national insurrection.

With his eye-opening experience in America as well as Poland, Kościuszko was the right person for the job. He was convinced that the Poles had to fight a new type of war, one in which the entire citizenry rose to defend their country. In other words, he sought to mobilize the entire population of Poland—all estates, all regions. The challenge of getting burghers and peasants as well as nobles to join the fight did not escape Kościuszko. He admitted himself, “we must awaken love of our country among those who hitherto have not even known that they have a country.”

Kościuszko, thus, was a man with a mission. Although given dictatorial powers to lead the national rising, the general was not one to abuse them. This is seen from the oath he gave in Kraków on March 24, 1794, when he took control of the rising that would bear his name. Kościuszko swore he would use the dictatorial powers invested in him “only for the defense of the integrity of the frontiers, the gaining of sovereignty for the nation, and the establishment of universal freedom.” He truly was an anti-magnate.

The all-powerful military commander set about gaining support from all sectors of society. An important source of manpower had to be the numerous peasantry. While in Kraków, Kościuszko conscripted local peasants, who—given their lack of other weapons—turned their scythes into bayonets and joined the battle for Polish freedom. (A lack of arms and ammunition was a big problem for the insurrectionists.) Fighting alongside what remained of the Polish army, such peasants—it was hoped—would be the mainstay of Kościuszko’s insurrectionary forces. Having over the course of several weeks assembled an army of some four thousand regular troops and two thousand peasant scythe men, Kościuszko set north to engage the Russians in battle.

The two forces met near the village of Racławice on April 4. The Russian army was in for a surprise. The first battle of the Kościuszko Insurrection would look like nothing the Russians had ever fought. The Polish military commander employed tactics inspired by his experience in America. While the regular troops engaged the Russians, the fearless peasant scythe men raced out from behind them and toward the Russian cannons. They captured a dozen cannon and caused disarray and dismay among the Russians, who hastily retreated—if not before taking heavy losses. The Russians also left behind much-needed ammunition and arms.

Kościuszko’s secret weapon—the Polish peasant—proved decisive at the battle of Racławice. After the battle, the military commander famously ennobled several peasant scythe men, the most notable of whom was Bartosz Głowacki, for their bravery. Kościuszko also donned the traditional peasant cloak as a sign of recognition of what this new and vital part of the nation had achieved. Still, for numerous reasons this did not result in an influx of peasant scythe men. The following month, Kościuszko would issue a proclamation at Połaniec that gave the peasants personal freedom and reduced their labor dues for the duration of the insurrection. Like the potent image of peasant scythe men defending their country, the picturesque symbolism of a nobleman in peasant garb was but a first step in breaking down the barriers that had separated the two estates.

Kościuszko embraced the peasant out of conviction, not out of convenience. This, after all, was the man who had freed his own peasants upon his return to Poland and later would bequeath the property and money he had in the United States to free as many American slaves as was possible, charging his friend Thomas Jefferson to execute this, his last will and testament. Not for nothing did Jefferson famously call Kościuszko “the purest son of liberty.”

Poland's Constitution of 1791

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 390-391:

The Constitution of 3 May 1791 was a portentous achievement. The shock of the partition of 1772 had led various inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Both Nations to conclude that reform was imperative. Long leery of change, the nation nonetheless had to change its priorities. As the reformer Stanisław Staszic observed and the Constitution’s preamble gently echoed, the fate of the nation had to take precedence over the Golden Freedoms; its continued existence should trump any considerations of individual comfort.

With Russia—and the Russian army—preoccupied elsewhere in 1788, the Commonwealth was able to avail itself of an unprecedented window of opportunity. The Great Seym not only provided stimulating years of dogged discussion of the country’s fate. It also enabled reform-minded national activists to flesh out a new framework—the framework that was pushed through that fateful May day in 1791.

The May 3 Constitution as Enlightenment, Polish Style

Presented as an emergency measure, Europe’s first constitution was craftily constructed. The tone of urgency that sounded in the Seym on May 3 was echoed in the preamble of the document, which declared that the new constitution was the only way to provide “for the general welfare, for the establishment [ugruntowania] of liberty, [and] for the salvation of our Fatherland and its borders.” Comprised of eleven articles, the Constitution first enumerated the country’s social framework, before elucidating the new shape of the government. In the process, centuries of native tradition were laced with innovations redolent of the Enlightenment, with elements based on the French, English, and American examples.

The innovations were seen above all in the altered nature of the government. While the will of the people was declared to provide all authority, there was no talk of a classical republic, as there had been in the sixteenth century. Rather, the focus was on the modern three powers of government: the legislative, judicial, and executive. (In this it was not unlike the U.S. Constitution, promulgated only several years earlier.) Set to meet every other year, the traditional bicameral Seym remained the locus of legislative authority. However, it would rely upon majority vote: the liberum veto and confederations were outlawed.

No less radical from the Sarmatian perspective were changes concerning the “supreme executive authority,” that of the king. There would be no more royal elections viritim. The monarchy was to become hereditary, not in the (non-existent) family of Stanisław August Poniatowski but in the Saxon Wettin dynasty. Furthermore, the king would have a small royal council (the so-called guardians of the laws)—essentially a cabinet of ministers—to aid with the execution of the laws as well as countersign the king’s actions. The competency of individual members of the royal council would extend to education, the police (here understood more as a ministry of the interior), war (defense), and the treasury; and each of these realms would have its own commission in the Seym. The new form of government was, in essence, a modern constitutional monarchy.

Reconstructing Rothenburg

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 150-153, 162-163:

By establishing its place on the tourist map of Europe, Rothenburg ob der Tauber connected itself to an international network through which it built up a stock of admiration and affection. Although that was an intangible kind of capital, it turned out to be the saving of the enterprise. If John McCloy’s mother had not been one of the many foreigners who visited Rothenburg before the darkness closed over Europe in the 1930s, and took spell-casting pictures home with them, the whole of the town might have suffered the same fate that the American bombers visited on four-tenths of it.

One of the artists inspired by images of Rothenburg ob der Tauber was Adolf Hitler, who had initially hoped to pursue a career as a painter. On a visit there in 1934, a few weeks after adopting the title of Führer, he recalled how he had seen many pictures of Rothenburg in his youth, and had greatly enjoyed drawing the town himself. A few years later, he made funds available for the preservation of the town walls, stretches of which were in danger of collapse. His affection for Rothenburg was shared by the Nazi movement in general, for whom the ‘Germanest’ (‘deutscheste’) of towns became something of a pilgrimage destination.

The feeling was mutual. Rothenburgers took to Nazism even before the party took power. At the election in July 1932, when the Nazis became the party with the most seats in the Reichstag with 37 per cent of the national vote, they took 60 per cent of the vote in Rothenburg. After Hitler became Chancellor the following year, Rothenburgers flocked to join his National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Two-thirds of the town’s population became members. Unlike Würzburg, whose Catholic traditions and associated political sympathies dampened enthusiasm for the radical new National Socialist movement, Rothenburg was a small Protestant town in a relatively poor part of Germany. In that respect it fitted the profile of Nazi-supporting localities, but it was more than merely typical. Rothenburg had a very special place in the landscape of the Third Reich.

That place was inscribed principally through the activities of the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) organisation, which strove to instil National Socialist values in the German people through recreation and exercise. Kraft durch Freude – KdF for short – offered ideological tourist excursions to the town it described as ‘an everlasting witness to the glorious German history of the Middle Ages, a shining monument to German community in olden times’. Rothenburg became a theatre in which Nazi illusionists conjured the spectacle of an ideal folk community magically preserved within its walls, where modern Germans would believe they were ‘seeing a fairy tale of a long-gone golden age resurrected’, as the Nazi party newspaper put it. Among the steps that the town took to enhance the magic was the institution of a Christmas market, without which the fairy tale would not have been complete.

As well as providing affordable domestic holidays for Germans of modest means, KdF made a point of reaching out to members of the ‘Volk’ on the edge of the Reich or beyond its borders. The first contingents came from lands in the west. Under the peace settlements that followed the First World War, the Saar region had been placed under the control of the League of Nations. In 1935, voters in the territory opted to be reunified with Germany, by a majority of over 90 per cent. KdF transported Saarlanders to Rothenburg, where the organisation encouraged them to recharge their feelings of national pride and community. It also brought people from the Rhineland region, which was barred to military forces under international treaties. Hitler sent his troops into it the following year, to huge national acclaim.

From the opposite direction, a thousand Austrians came on a ceremonial day trip after their country was incorporated into the Reich in 1938, marching into the town from the railway station to be greeted by ranks of Nazis chanting ‘Sieg Heil’. They departed in the same fashion after seeing the town’s quintessentially Germanic sights, completing an occasion hailed by the local newspaper as the ‘deepest expression of connection between people of the same tribe and same blood’. Germans from the Sudetenland made a similar procession after the Reich seized the region from Czechoslovakia later that year.

The Reich’s revanchist ambitions further east were implicit in the organisation of visits from Danzig and the Memel territory. Danzig had been designated a Free City, kept separate from both Germany and Poland under the protection of the League of Nations, because it found itself in the corridor through Baltic Prussia that gave Poland access to the sea. Memelland was a strip of eastern Prussia that Germany had been obliged to give up under the Versailles Treaty in 1919; Hitler strong-armed the Lithuanian government into returning it in 1939. The symbolism of the trips was clear enough: the Reich had brought its people to the ideal German home town, and soon enough they would be living in the homeland as well, once its borders were extended to embrace them.

Rothenburg also offered the Nazi regime a means to project soft power abroad, in the form of the Shepherd Dancers, a group founded in 1911 to revive a local tradition on the basis of a historical claim dating back to 1517. They danced at the Albert Hall in London, and paraded through Hyde Park bearing the Third Reich’s swastika flag. Back home, they performed in the market square for crowds on excursions from the huge Nazi rallies in Nuremberg, less than two hours away by train. Although there was no question of imposing the standard Nazi urban ensemble – a grand avenue, a vast assembly space, a massive Party building – as Hubert Gross had planned to do in Würzburg, there was no need. Rothenburg was homely, but on a scale that tended to the monumental. Its houses’ proportions spoke of burgher prosperity; its main streets were straight and wide enough for marching columns. And if there was no space for the Nazi cohorts within the walls, they could always camp beneath them. The location was popular with the Hitler Youth, which at one point massed 1,400 of its members, drawn from more than 27 countries, in a tent city along the base of the town’s fortified perimeter.

...

One of  [the town’s former Nazi mayor, Friedrich] Schmidt’s initiatives as a councillor was an attempt to revive the Christmas market, which had lapsed since its inception during his term as mayor in the 1930s. He was assisted in the bid by Ernst Unbehauen, the artist who had made the antisemitic ‘warning’ plaques that had been installed at the town’s gates....

A person would not have to be a fascist or an ultranationalist to agree with Unbehauen that brash modern advertisements should be kept off Rothenburg’s streets. Conservation societies in historic towns all over Europe would sympathise with his view and applaud his efforts. But in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, denying the twentieth century had a subtext that went beyond Unbehauen’s personal record as a Nazi and an antisemitic propagandist. A town that looked as though the twentieth century had not happened offered an enticing illusion to Germans who wanted to pretend that the century’s fourth and fifth decades had not taken place. Joshua Hagen, the American historian who has examined Rothenburg’s career as ‘the most German of towns’, observes that ‘in the 1950s and beyond it came to represent opportunities for relatively untroubled engagement with Germany’s past’. People could follow the town’s history as far as the twentieth century ‘and then fast-forward to 1950, because as the tourist guides will tell you, nothing happened. It was asleep, timeless, and nothing ever changed.’

German vs. Polish War Damage

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 126-128, 130-131:

["Bomber"] Harris believed that the bombing campaign against German cities, together with the Soviet struggle against Hitler’s forces in the east, would bring the war to an end in 1944, sparing the Western Allies from having to mount an invasion. The Ministry of Economic Warfare provided him with a table of a hundred German towns, compiled from Bomber’s Baedeker data, rating them according to their economic importance. He crossed them out one by one as his planes worked through the list. Although the campaigns did not have the effect that he had predicted, they continued after the D-Day invasion in June 1944, and were sustained almost up to the moment at which Germany finally surrendered.

During those last terrible months before the clock stopped at Stunde Null, Allied bombers made sure that they had left few German cities unvisited. The major targets had all been struck over and over again; minor potential targets now attracted increasing attention from the mission planners. With hindsight, speculative remarks in the Bomber’s Baedeker entry for Pforzheim read like a death sentence upon the Black Forest town and its inhabitants, who specialised in making jewellery and watches. ‘These industries were formerly carried out largely in the homes of the individual workers,’ the report observed, ‘and it may be said that almost every house in this city is a small workshop . . . As was the case in the 1914–1918 war, most of the factories and workshops of Pforzheim will have now been turned over to the manufacture of precision parts for instruments, small-arms components, fuzes, clockwork movements and similar products . . .’

In his post-war report on Bomber Command’s operations, Harris rewrote the Baedeker’s presumption into a statement of fact. As if the RAF’s reconnaissance aircraft could see through roofs and ceilings, the chief of Bomber Command asserted that ‘almost every house was a small workshop engaged in the production of instruments, small arms and fuzes’. Every house was therefore confirmed as a legitimate target, and so was everybody in it. The RAF bombed the town towards the end of February 1945, raising a firestorm. ‘Hardly a building remained intact,’ Harris claimed: the accepted figure for the extent of the destruction is 83 per cent. He noted that Pforzheim had a population of 80,000, but not that the raid killed 17,600 of those inhabitants. It was the third highest toll from an Allied raid in Europe, after the firestorms that left 18,500 dead in Hamburg and 25,000 in Dresden. The scale of the whole campaign is indicated by the estimate of 350,000 for the total death toll.

In hindsight, looking back along a timeline in which the war against the Third Reich ended in May, the attacks carried out against modest German towns in February and March seem to defy any strategic justification. Pforzheim and Würzburg were the most horrific instances of bombing that was, in Richard Overy’s measured judgement, ‘evidently punitive in nature and excessive in scale’. At the time it may have looked different to many on the Allied side, after the Western Allies’ slow progress towards German territory and the Reich’s deployment of new weapons, including the V-2 ballistic missiles that represented a new technology for bombing cities. The first American troops did not manage to get across the Rhine until early March, little more than a week before the climax of the British raids on Würzburg. In January, Britain’s Bombing Directorate had advocated inducing ‘a state of terror by air attack’. Hitherto, the RAF had euphemistically talked of attacking ‘morale’. Now the word ‘terror’ was slipping into the Allies’ usage, as they cast about for ways to win the war.

Even with hindsight, and even with decades in which to reflect upon how to locate right and wrong in the history of the air war against Germany, the campaign poses questions that are intractable even when they are answered. The period of reflection seemed to last until almost the end of the century, and then the books began to appear. Peter Johnson wrote his memoirs, subtitled Reflections and Doubts of a Bomber, which were published in 1995. The writer W.G. Sebald produced a series of essays that came out in 1999 under the title Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air War and Literature). Lighting his argument with firestorm scenes, he criticised his fellow German authors for having failed to write about the bombing war in a satisfactory fashion, or at all. Then, in 2002, came Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand (The Fire), the best-seller that thrust the Bombenkrieg, and German suffering, to the forefront of national public debate about the Second World War. Written by a freelance scholar-journalist, Der Brand was not an argument about morality or a detached academic summation of events in their broader context. It was a literary enactment of agony, its testimony unbearably eloquent, and a lament for loss. To describe it as repetitious is not to deprecate its narrative structure, but to recognise the depiction of similar horrors in city after city as an assertive act of remembrance. Professional historians criticised its standards of scholarship, while acknowledging its literary power. Pushing its readers onward through inferno after inferno, Der Brand insisted that their gaze should be fixed upon the lives consumed in the fires, and the agonies in which those lives ended.

...

Across the eastern border, by contrast, Germany’s actions had created a moral framework of invulnerable simplicity for the Poles. In Warsaw the narrative was grand, tragic and unequivocal. It was easy to put together a story of urbicide planned from the start of the occupation, or even earlier (on the basis of a rumour that Friedrich Pabst had been appointed as the future Chief Architect of Warsaw more than a month before the German invasion). The so-called Pabst plan made a compelling narrative element, although in reality it may have been little more than a vanity project for a peripheral regime functionary from Würzburg. Poles embraced the story that emerged from the capital’s ruins, a sublime arc of victimhood and valour, as the story of the nation. Warsaw’s tragedy was Poland’s tragedy in its most concentrated form, reaching a peak of intensity in the Old Town’s passion of resistance, devastation and martyrdom. As it rebuilt its capital city, the whole nation created an example to be followed throughout the country, in spirit if not necessarily in form. The reconstruction of each individual Polish town or city was understood to be part of the greater national project.

No such understanding was available to Germans, for whom the very idea of a national story was fundamentally compromised. Jörg Arnold notes that Der Brand rarely even speaks of ‘Germans’ at all: ‘the locality, not the nation, is the focal point of reference’. That was the position in which the people of German cities found themselves after Stunde Null. Each town had to work out a story of its own upon which to rebuild itself.

Changing Faces of Lublin's Old Town

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 220-223:

Lublin has a long history as a site for key moments in the formation of Polish states. A congress of nobles welcomed Grand Duke Jogaila of Lithuania there in 1386, as he made his way to his royal wedding in Kraków, and proclaimed him King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland. Jogaila returned the favour by granting a range of privileges that enabled Lublin to develop as a centre of trade between the two countries he and Jadwiga had united through their marriage. The treaty of union that inaugurated the Polish-Lithuanian Republic was signed at Lublin’s castle in 1569.

By that time, the urban kernel later known as the Old Town was taking shape on the high ground opposite, as a sturdy cluster of churches and townhouses arranged around a market square and an axis running from the Grodzka Gate on the eastern side to the western Kraków Gate. With an area of ten hectares, the walled town was the same size as its Warsaw counterpart. Meanwhile the space between the castle and the town was beginning to fill with buildings, as the Jewish quarter developed on the inferior land known as Podzamcze, meaning ‘under the castle’. Jews had been prohibited from settling within the city walls in 1535, after Christian merchants objected to the competition they introduced.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the district below the castle boasted one of the most important Hebrew printing houses in the country, and provided the base for the principal Jewish authority in Poland. Around the turn of the nineteenth century it became a major centre of Hasidic Judaism, after the legendary spiritual leader Yaakov Yitzhak haLevi Horowitz took up residence on Podzamcze’s main street. He was known as the Seer of Lublin, because of his reputed ability to see into the future and across the world, and he bestowed a magical aura on the Jewish Town that remained as his posthumous legacy after his death there in 1815.

As the century went on, however, many of Lublin’s Jews were drawn to modernity instead of mysticism. Their local horizons were opened up in 1862, when they gained full citizenship and the city abolished restrictions on where they were permitted to live. ‘Through Brama Grodzka, by which they had waited for so many years, they entered Lublin again,’ wrote the historian Meir Balaban, ‘renting and buying properties for shops and homes, first on Grodzka Street and later also on the Market Square.’ The poorer incomers gradually found niches throughout almost the whole of the Old Town, which had fallen into decline after being abandoned by its wealthier residents. Those who could afford it made instead for the up and coming streets around the city’s spacious central avenue. They resembled their Christian neighbours in their dress and lifestyle, while the old Jewish quarter became even more of a world apart.

That world disappeared from the face of the earth during the Second World War. After the German invaders took control of Lublin in 1939, they ejected Jews from the townhouses around the central avenue, forcing them back to the old Jewish quarter. The Jews of the Old Town were sent there in April 1941, after the occupiers turned the former Jewish Town into a ghetto, which they liquidated a year later. Some 26,000 Jews from the Lublin region were killed at the Bełżec extermination camp, almost all of them upon arrival. Others were sent to a secondary ghetto on the outskirts of the city, Majdan Tatarski, and eventually to the nearby Majdanek camp. The Lublin extermination ended with Aktion Erntefest, Operation Harvest Festival, in November 1943. Over two days, SS squads and German police shot 42,000 Jews at Majdanek and two other camps in the region. At the outbreak of the war, some 43,000 Jews had been living in the city, out of a total population of around 120,000. Almost none of them were left alive by the war’s end.

Little was left of the Jewish Town either. The Germans razed much of it to the ground, as they did in Warsaw’s Jewish district. There, the destruction had begun as a tactic used by the occupiers in their efforts to suppress the Ghetto Uprising. In Lublin, the Germans had already emptied the houses, which they condemned on the grounds of the buildings’ poor construction standards and states of repair. Their underlying purpose was to erase the remains of Jewish presence, which in that locality dated back four hundred years.

The main street disappeared altogether, and with it the form that the Jewish settlement had found in Lublin’s topography. It had previously run along the base of the slope below the castle, its buildings jostling for space and concealing the lie of the land. Tumbledown shacks and solid edifices alike were gone, as was the warren of alleys into which Alfred Döblin had ventured. One unintended consequence was to give the Red Army a clear field of fire in front of the castle for its artillery when it fought its way into Lublin in July 1944.

Three days after the Soviet forces captured the city, the new authorities installed the provisional body that became known as the Lublin Committee, and which formed the germ of the regime that eventually became the Polish People’s Republic. This was the third key moment in Lublin’s history as a site of state formation, initiating a drive to build socialism on Soviet lines that was led by a man with local roots. Bolesław Bierut was born near Lublin and went to school in the city. His early work experience there included a job as a bricklayer’s assistant, and his presence was felt in the reconstruction of Lublin when he headed the country during its Stalinist period.

The site with the most obvious potential for symbolically loaded redevelopment was the barren plain, overlooked by the castle and the Old Town, that now lay where the main street of the Jewish district had previously been. A quadrant had been spared on the far side, where the tenement houses were in relatively good condition, and housed ethnic Poles who had been displaced by the creation of the Majdan Tartaski ghetto. Apart from that, the area formerly occupied by the Jewish Town was emptier than it had been since the Middle Ages.

For nearly ten years, the authorities’ efforts were concentrated up above, within the castle, and were devoted not to reconstruction but to the suppression of armed resistance. The castle had itself been rebuilt in the 1820s after a long twilight of ruin, its rectangular mass clad in a stern neo-Gothic facade appropriate to its function as a prison. Having served to incarcerate anti-czarist insurgents in the nineteenth century, communists between the wars and resistance fighters during the German occupation, it now held anti-communist partisans, many of whom had previously been anti-Nazi partisans. More than 30,000 prisoners were confined there during the new regime’s first decade in power. Death sentences were carried out in the cellar of a building that stood by the castle’s arched front entrance.

Changing Wilno into Vilnius

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 179-183:

The transformation of pre-war Wilno into post-war Vilnius was effected by removing those of its inhabitants who called it Wilno, the Poles who had constituted the majority of its population. Their departure followed the removal by genocide of the second largest ethnic group in the city, the Jews, who called it Vilna or Vilne. The same sequence took place in the other borderland city that Poles had held dear, known today as Lviv, which had also been inhabited largely by ethnic Poles and Jews before the war.

Vilnius’s reconstruction was principally a population project and only secondarily a rebuilding programme, especially in the Old Town. Czesław Miłosz described the pre-war city as an enclave of negative ambiguity, ‘neither Polish nor not-Polish, neither Lithuanian nor not-Lithuanian’. The aim of the reconstruction was to remove that ambiguity, remaking Vilnius as a city that was definitely Lithuanian and very definitely not Polish. It succeeded in establishing the city’s Lithuanian identity, but had to make do with concealing the ambiguities endemic to the Old Town and the surrounding districts.

Until the Nazi occupation, the heart of Vilnius’s character as a multi-ethnic city was a triangular district adjoining the central space over which the town hall presides. The historic Jewish quarter was not beyond the walls – unlike in many European cities, such as Kraków, whose Jewish residents had been sent to live in the separate township of Kazimierz at the end of the fifteenth century – but right in the middle of the city. A larger Jewish neighbourhood spread out from it across the western side of the Old Town. By 1939, according to one estimate, the central district was home to 75,000 people, of whom 35,000 were Jewish.

Many of that fraction were crammed into the overcrowded and insanitary alleys of the original quarter, which was an object of fascination for outsiders and a symbol of identity for Vilna’s Jews. During the First World War, a boy named Moyshe Vorobeychik often happened upon German soldiers painting and sketching scenes in the quarter. Some of them were notable artists in civilian life. Vorobeychik himself became a photographer, under the name Moï Ver, and produced an avant-garde album based on one of the Jewish streets. The project represented a desire shared by other young Jewish artists in the city, to innovate and embrace modernity while retaining their cultural roots. They formed a group called Yung Vilne, whose emblem was a young tree growing above one of the old Jewish quarter’s signature arches.

Max Weinreich, an eminent linguist and scholar of Yiddish, felt similarly about the relationship between learning and place. He considered that modern Jewish research needed an environment like that of Vilna, where ‘the houses and stones retain a memory’ of its Jewish cultural heritage. Weinreich was a leading figure in the YIVO institute of Yiddish studies, which continued a tradition of intellectual enterprise that had made Vilna a centre of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, in the nineteenth century. YIVO’s headquarters opened in 1933 on a broad modern street at a distance from the city centre, but the emotional heart of Jewish Vilna was still embedded in the sclerotic alleys of the old quarter. The enclave retained its allure for outsiders too, despite the warning in a guidebook by a Polish professor about ‘the typically eastern slovenliness of the inhabitants of this anti-hygienic district and its unbearable fug, which makes it impossible for a cultured European to visit these alleys, especially on hot summer days’.

After the Germans took control of Vilnius in 1941, they confined its Jewish population to two ghettos, one in the old quarter and one in the newer neighbourhood. The former was the smaller of the two, holding 11,000 people. It was liquidated after a month, in October 1941, leaving 29,000 people in the larger one, which was maintained until September 1943 and used as a source of labour. The ghetto inmates’ tasks included the construction of a model of Vilnius, which was produced by a team of thirty architects, engineers, draughtsmen and artists. They were forced to create a representation in miniature of the city from which they had been excluded, complete with the tiny zone where they were imprisoned in the middle of it. Four of them are known to have survived the war, but they were rare exceptions. The great majority of Vilnius’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, many of them shot by squads of Lithuanian volunteers at a killing ground in woodland outside the city. Several hundred managed to stay alive until the end of the German occupation, and a few thousand escaped – many of them involuntarily, deported by the previous communist authorities – into the depths of the Soviet Union. Nearly all of the survivors subsequently emigrated to the United States, Israel and other distant lands. Vilna, the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’, became an exile memory.

The dissolution of Wilno began with an attempt by Polish forces to recapture it. In July 1944, as the Red Army pushed westwards, the Polish underground state launched a nationwide operation to liberate cities and territories ahead of the Soviet advance. The battles of July were the overtures to the nine-week tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising, which began on the first day of August. Wilno’s political and emotional importance to the Polish cause was expressed in the codename for the Armia Krajowa (AK) assault against the city’s German occupiers: Ostra Brama, the Polish name for the Gate of Dawn. A grand and reverent window is set above the arch on the inside of the gate; through it an image of the Virgin Mary, clad in gilded silver, presides over the street below. The site is one of the most intense foci of the Marian cult at the heart of Polish Catholicism, and therefore of Polishness as it is orthodoxly conceived, venerating Mary as ‘Queen of Poland’. Thousands of silver votive offerings attest to its devotees’ faith that the image has miraculous powers. It is said that the first of the offerings came from a Polish-Lithuanian commander who led his men through the gate in an assault on the Swedes who occupied the city in 1702.

As a precedent, it was hardly auspicious. Instead of ejecting the occupiers with supernatural support from the Mother of God, the attackers were checked and forced to retreat. The assault in 1944 also lacked the miraculous intervention that would have been needed to achieve its double objective of driving out the Germans and keeping out the Soviets. After failing to overcome the German defences on the first day, and struggling to communicate with their comrades inside the city, Polish units operated alongside the Soviet forces. In the latter stages of the battle, AK troops fought their way through the Old Town to capture the city hall, and raised the Polish flag over the castle tower. It was quickly taken down by their inimical Soviet allies, who replaced it with a red one.

After six days, the Germans were defeated, and on the day after that, the Soviet leadership ordered the disarming of the AK soldiers. The ensuing arrests of Polish officers heralded a programme of repression that saw thousands detained in Vilnius as the year went on. That sent an ominous message to the Poles who comprised most of the city’s surviving population. In September, the Soviet and Polish authorities agreed terms for the removal of ethnic Poles from Lithuania to territory within Poland’s new borders. It was to be a notionally voluntary exodus, not an expulsion. Lithuanian Poles were sent away from their homes and birthplaces in railway goods trucks, but they were not herded onto the trains at gunpoint. The official term was ‘evacuation’, which suggested that the Poles were being given aid – and that they were under threat.

Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog's (1968) Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change was one of my most memorable textbooks during my early graduate work in linguistics, in a class taught by one of my most memorable professors, Derek Bickerton.

Poland's Last Royal Election, 1764

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 366-367:

[T]he outcome of Polish elections in the eighteenth century had hardly been a matter of domestic choice. The second Wettin himself owed his election to the heavy hand of the foreign coalition that saw fit to back him.

In this regard, the election of 1764 would be similar to the election of 1734. Russian troops would once again facilitate the promotion of the candidate favored by Tsarina Catherine II. The tsarina’s interference in Commonwealth affairs would come at a higher price this time, despite the fact that the other candidates put forward—the aged Hetman Branicki and an underage Wettin—were hardly attractive. Still, Catherine would have to finance the purchase of votes so as to overcome the opposition of the republicans. Taking no chances, August Czartoryski organized an armed confederation that, disallowing the use of the liberum veto, would guide the Convocation Seym to completion and even introduce some reforms. Ultimately these developments caused the leaders of the opposition, including Branicki, to flee the country.

Who was Catherine’s candidate? Like the candidate advanced by the magnate-led republicans, he was a Piast, if one with a rather unusual major qualification. Stanisław Poniatowski was the son and namesake of the recently deceased former leader of the Family. Yet his claim to fame was not solely—or even primarily—because he was related to the rich, powerful, and influential Czartoryski brothers, his uncles, who had allied themselves with Russia to secure the succession. Rather, Poniatowski attained the crown thanks to what turned out to be a happy accident: when he was in Saint Petersburg in the years 1756–1758, he had been the lover of the young wife of Grand Duke Peter—Catherine, herself.

Nearly a decade later, Catherine saw him as the perfect pawn in her game of controlling what happened in her increasingly impotent and unruly neighbor: any reforming to be done was to come at her instigation. She envisaged the Commonwealth of Both Nations [Poland and Lithuania] as a vassal state, a well-run vassal state. The tsarina’s selection of Poniatowski was supported by Friedrich II, who nonetheless preferred to keep the Commonwealth the way it was, weak and ineffectual. It was thought that Poniatowski, who incidentally had no wealth of his own (after his father’s death he was supported by his cousins) and who held only the amusing title of Lithuanian Master of the Pantry, would be a malleable and subservient Piast.

Poland's Silver Age Ends

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 329-330:

The seventeenth century had proven a mixed bag for the Commonwealth. It began on a relatively high note, with the reign of Zygmunt III Vasa that ushered in the so-called Silver Age. Mid-century, however, the Commonwealth nearly imploded, wracked by devastating invasions, civil war, and the loss of left-bank Ukraine. The country’s recovery from the [Swedish] Deluge, although noteworthy, was only partial. The nobility clung ever more tightly to its cherished Golden Freedoms and rejected anything that smacked of political reform, particularly if it might lead to a strengthening of the monarch’s position within the country. Even the triumphant, world-historical victory of Sobieski and his forces at Vienna—the high point of the century—did more for Western Christendom than for the Commonwealth itself.

The final election of the seventeenth century did not lead to the confirmation of a new Piast (or native Sarmatian) dynasty. Despite his efforts, King Jan III Sobieski proved unable to secure for his sons the Polish succession. To the contrary, the election of 1697 would mark a reversal of recent policy, which since the Deluge had given preference to candidates of noble Piast heritage. From the vantage point of hindsight, an interesting pattern emerges. Consider the elections both preceding and following the triplet of Vasa reigns. The first two elections, limited to foreign candidates, put one regrettable (Valois) and one memorable (Batory) candidate on the Polish throne. The anti-foreign backlash following the abdication of Jan Kazimierz Vasa (which marked the end of the Polish Vasa dynasty) put two Piasts (native candidates) on the Polish throne: once again, one regrettable (Wiśniowiecki) and one memorable (Sobieski) candidate.

Despite the fact that Sobieski not only had significant military victories under his belt but also had fathered sons who could contend for the throne, the electoral pendulum swung once again—out of their reach....

This clear rejection of the Sobieski heir—and, by extension, all candidates of Polish/Sarmatian noble descent—opened the doors wide to foreign involvement. This time, the results of the election ended up demonstrating to what extent the Commonwealth elections could be used in the power struggle between the various major European players.

Poland-Lithuania Shrinks

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 302-304:

The population of the Grand Duchy [of Lithuania] had demonstrated its commitment to the Commonwealth, of which they considered themselves citizens. Perhaps a creative extension of citizenship was the answer to the Cossack debacle? Not relying on divine intercession, the nobles of the Commonwealth strove to put an end to the civil war with the Cossacks via diplomatic means. They entered into negotiations with the new leader of the Cossacks, Ivan Vyhovsky. Already earlier it had become clear that his predecessor Khmelnytsky was not entirely satisfied with the outcome of Pereiaslav. Centralizing and humiliating Russian rule proved very different from the genuine autonomy the Cossacks had expected. After all, not all Cossacks were uneducated; whether they had studied at the Mohyla Academy, elsewhere in the Commonwealth, or even in the West, they had been exposed to ideas at great odds with the autocracy they now encountered. Even the Orthodox clergy of the Cossack lands, especially Kyiv, were unhappy at being subordinated to Moscow. Among other things, this dissonance and the resulting dissatisfaction led Khmelnytsky to join the other potential partitioners of Poland—Sweden, Transylvania, and Brandenburg—at the end of 1656.

After Khmelnytsky’s death in 1657, Vyhovsky reached agreement with the Commonwealth. The two parties convened in a town of the Kyiv palatinate near the border with Russia. Although lying to the east of Pereiaslav, Hadiach (Polish: Hadziacz) notably marked a move westward. The Treaty of Hadiach established the terms of the Cossacks’ return to the Commonwealth—terms that were far better than the Cossacks had ever been offered before.

Signed in 1658, this treaty has been compared to the Union of Lublin, and for good reason. The Commonwealth of Two (Both) Nations would be transformed into a Commonwealth of Three Nations—the third being a newly established Duchy of Ruthenia. Consisting of the former palatinates of Kyiv, Bratslav, and Chernihiv, the Duchy of Ruthenia would be an autonomous entity, on par with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Under the leadership of the common king, the Duchy would share a common foreign policy and send its own citizens to the Seym. A certain number of Cossacks would be accepted into the Commonwealth nobility.

The new Duchy would also retain its distinctiveness: executive power would be wielded by the hetman of the Ruthenian army, some thirty thousand strong. The Uniate Church would be disallowed on the Duchy’s territory, where the Orthodox Church would be the favored religion, its higher clergy members of the Senate. The Mohyla Academy would be treated on par with other institutions of higher learning in the Commonwealth.

In short, the Cossacks appear to have successfully won the rights and privileges they had long sought. No longer to be looked down upon, they were to be treated as an equal partner. The Cossacks would be the third “nation” of the Commonwealth—a Ruthenian/Cossack/Orthodox one.

The Seym ratified the Treaty of Hadiach the following year, marking a sea change in the mentality of the Commonwealth’s citizenry, the Polish-Lithuanian nobility. For many Cossacks back in the hetmanate, however, it was too little, too late—at least a decade too late. To be sure, power politics within the hetmanate likely helped to determine the rejection of the proposal. Vyhovsky had been acting in the name of the underage son of Khmelnytsky, Yuri, who now displaced Vyhovsky at the top of the hetmanate. Yet, might the deal still go through—be pushed through? For a moment it looked as though the Poles, who now amassed the largest army in their history—a force of some seventy to eighty thousand, and one that had a string of victories over the Russian and Cossack armies in 1660—would be able to expel the Russians from the Grand Duchy and implement the new arrangement with the Cossacks.

Ultimately, this was not to be. As a result of internal political problems, the Commonwealth was not able to profit from this impressive surge. The terms reached between Russia and the Commonwealth in the armistice of 1667 at Andrusovo were by Commonwealth accounts devastating. The armistice confirmed the Commonwealth’s loss of both the Smolensk region in the north and the Cossack lands to the south, albeit in a novel configuration. The Cossack Hetmanate itself was partitioned between the two states—the dividing line being the Dnieper River. Territories on the right bank of the Dnieper (that is, in the west) were awarded to the Poles, while the left (east) bank came under Russian rule. The Russians also reserved to themselves control over Kyiv, on the right bank of the Dnieper, ostensibly for a two-year period .... The city would never again be part of the Commonwealth. As the famous mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz observed at the time (albeit from his comfortable vantage point in the west), the “barbaric East” was on the rise.

Polish-Lithuanian Noble Mythmaking

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 269-271:

Men like Żółkiewski, who put national interests and faithful service above private gains, were becoming more rare. Nobles—especially the wealthy magnates—had few reasons to put up with what they saw as unreasonableness on the part of the king. Instead, they embraced a new idea that would knit the diverse Commonwealth nobility even closer together.

This represented an adjustment to the myth of Sarmatian origin. Already in the sixteenth century, Kromer and others had concluded that the inhabitants of Poland-Lithuania were descended from this ancient warrior people. Increasingly, this origin myth was limited to the Commonwealth’s nobility, however. The divisions between the estates solidified and became firmer—as the nobles maintained that, while they themselves were descended from the Sarmatians, the country’s commoners were not and thus were inferior in status. Already a brotherhood of privilege, the noble nation (the diversity of religious faiths and ethnic origins notwithstanding) came to be seen as a brotherhood of blood.

Sarmatian descent was seen as a distinction of another kind—a sign that the noble nation was a chosen nation, one destined for greatness. This sense of Sarmatian uniqueness had three components: economic, cultural, and political. First, that the Commonwealth was the Granary of Europe had been made amply clear to the owners of manorial estates, who in the period of peace that ensued in the 1620s promptly settled back into that still lucrative occupation. Their mission was to feed Europe, to help it thrive and, in the process, to help themselves thrive.

Second, their battlefield encounters with the infidel—here, understood as the Muscovites to the east as well as the Tatars and Ottomans to the south—had bolstered their vision of the Commonwealth as being the Bulwark of Christianity (antemurale Christianitatis)—a vision that the Baroque Church was all too happy to reinforce. This aspect of the Sarmatian myth was expanded to depict the nation as being under God’s special protection. Despite this fervent Catholicism, Commonwealth nobles increasingly embraced Eastern elements of dress and adornment. Witness the trend of having shaved heads—or heads with just a wisp of hair, just like the Moslem warriors they repeatedly fought. Thus, while the Commonwealth nobles defended Western values, their encounter with the East also shaped their identity—if only superficially.

Third, the sense that the Commonwealth’s mixed form of government, which provided the nobility with their cherished Golden Freedoms, was seen as infinitely superior to absolutist rule elsewhere. The myth of Sarmatian descent, thus, gave the nobles a sense of superiority, even invincibility, vis-à-vis the rest of Europe.

Sarmatian pride percolated down to even the poorest of nobles. Despite the exponential growth of magnate wealth during this period, the Sarmatian brotherhood was posited on noble equality. As the saying went, “The nobleman on his plot is equal to the palatine.” The thought that a landless noble might fancy himself as the peer of a magnate with his estates, court, and private army (practically a kinglet himself) nonetheless suggested that there was no glass ceiling: the possibility of upward mobility was always present, if not always likely. All it took was a happy accident of luck or patronage—an advantageous marriage, an appointment to a state office—and a clever nobleman could rise in stature. It was possible to become instantly wealthy if one married the heiress to a magnate family fortune that had been established as an indivisible inheritance (ordynacja). After all, even magnate families died out, to be replaced by new beneficiaries of the Commonwealth’s system. And even the magnates had to take care that their less wealthy noble clients—the men who hoped for that comfortable job, an education for their sons, and a decent marriage prospect for their daughters—retained their allegiance.

Catholic vs. Orthodox Slavs

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 231-235:

The war with Muscovite Russia was hardly over. Despite the accomplishments of the valiant Transylvanian [Stefan Batory], Polish-Russian relations had yet to enter into their most interesting—indeed, most incredible—phase. In the interim, another development took place, one that would have important repercussions for the battle not only for territory but also for the hearts and minds of the borderland inhabitants.

More precisely, this new development represented a war for souls. At the same time that Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy were vying for control of the Rus’ principalities, questions of jurisdiction over the Orthodox population of Eastern Europe generated sparks. This was the world of the Greek Church, adherents of Christianity in its Byzantine (that is, Eastern) rite.

Byzantine Christianity differed from the Church of Rome in a number of ways, not all of them doctrinal. Whereas in Roman Catholicism the high church language was Latin, there was no one single high church language in the Greek world: the Slavic lands had been given their own church language by the earliest missionaries to the Slavs, Cyril and Methodius. This language came to be known as Old Church Slavonic. Distinct from the spoken vernaculars of the region, it was nonetheless for the most part comprehensible to the population.

The relationship of the church and state in the East was also different than in the West. Following the pattern of Byzantium, the Eastern Church pragmatically subordinated itself to the authority of the state in which it functioned. Another seemingly obvious distinction: the Eastern churches did not owe allegiance to the pope in Rome but, rather, acknowledged the patriarch of Constantinople. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the position of the Greek Church was much diminished. This allowed for some jockeying within Eastern Christendom, especially in the East Slavic lands, where the majority of the faithful resided and the religion flourished.

To be sure, even before the Ottomans moved into Byzantium, not all was well in the Eastern Greek world further north. This in part was the result of the fact that, from its inception, the head of the Greek Church in the Rus’ lands had been the metropolitan of Kyiv. The shift of state borders that resulted in the Greek faithful residing in different states complicated the ecclesiastical picture and led various clergymen to vie with each other for influence over the faithful of Eastern Europe. To give one example: the Bulgarian clergyman who was chosen as metropolitan of the Ruthenian lands in 1415 soon found himself excommunicated by the patriarch of Constantinople, whose mind had been poisoned by the metropolitan of Moscow, who wanted this position for himself. Not until 1458 was Poland-Lithuania able to establish an independent Kyivo-Halych metropolitanate for its Orthodox population.

...

Those in the Commonwealth realized that they needed to counteract such moves. Essentially there were two options. They could either establish an autocephalous Orthodox church for the country or bring about church union—here, union with what was still the biggest force in Christianity: the Church in Rome.

The latter option won out, in part because the Church of Rome had made similar efforts in the past. First attempted in Constance, union between the Roman and Greek Churches had been achieved at the Council of Florence (1439), although nothing ultimately came of it (it is this attempt at union, incidentally, that led to the formation of an autocephalous Orthodox church in Moscow). Yet another sign that union was the direction favored by the Vatican was that, as early as 1573, a Greek College was opened in Rome as well as a Congregation for Eastern Churches.

The Commonwealth, thus, was convinced to work toward union and capitalized on a desire among Commonwealth clergymen not to subordinate themselves to Muscovy—in particular, not to send their financial dues there. This became visible in the synods that took place in the town of Brest, along the internal Polish-Lithuanian border, at the end of the sixteenth century. The Greek clergy decided to support the idea of union—with qualifications. While they would recognize the authority of the pope in Rome, they were not ready to make many changes that would affect the look and feel of their religion. They were allowed to retain their distinctive Eastern rite: the liturgy in Church Slavonic, as well as other traditions, including the marriage of the clergy. A selling point for the Orthodox bishops was a further advantage specified in the act of union: they were to be admitted into the Senate of the Commonwealth, on par with the Roman Catholic bishops.

This Union of Brest, as the 1596 agreement was called, produced a new phenomenon in the Commonwealth: so-called Uniates. These were Eastern-rite Catholics, in official parlance members of the Greek-Catholic Confession of the Slavonic Rite. In other words, while they retained their traditional Eastern rite and practices, they were part of the Catholic Church.

Electing a King of Poland, 1573

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 210-212:

The interest in the election of 1573 was palpable. This was not only an opportunity to become king of the largest country in Europe. Freed of all dynastic constraints by the death of the last Jagiellon, the nobles of the federative state could elect any ruler they chose. The playing field, thus, was as level as it might ever be. This moment in Polish history represented an unparalleled opportunity for an ambitious royal foreigner to expand, in exponential fashion, his influence in Central and Eastern Europe. Thus, instead of a military campaign, there was a political campaign to be fought. And what a campaign it was! The curiosity factor itself must have been great, given that this was the first election of its kind. To borrow a metaphor from a Polish nobleman who would participate years later in the election process, the period of interregnum was a courtship dance: the Commonwealth the attractive bride, and the candidates from various countries her suitors. Each strove to make a positive impression on the father.

The Rules of the Game

Yet the matter was not that simple. Making a good impression was not entirely under the control of any given suitor, and the choice of ruler was not a personality contest. The foreign candidates for Polish king were not even to enter the territory of the Commonwealth, let alone campaign. Nor could domestic candidates be present at the election field. This was a move introduced by Jan Zamoyski during this first election—a move that resulted in the elimination of conniving magnates from consideration. Envoys would campaign, as it were, on their behalf.

There nonetheless were various ways to make an impression—some within the control of the individual candidate, some beyond. Some candidates in 1573, such as the Habsburgs, were not above trying to buy votes—nor were some nobles above benefiting from this; “wining and dining, and making promises” would become part and parcel of Commonwealth elections. In contrast to past elections elsewhere in Europe, however, it would not suffice to win over the most influential individuals, the senators—each of whom represented powerful interests within the country as a result of the offices held—or even the parliamentarians/members of the estates. Those could be numbered in the dozens—or at most, hundreds. Here (thanks again to Zamoyski, who pushed for the king to be elected viritim [in person]), one had to make an impact on a much larger, fluid assembly comprised for the most part of rank-and-file nobles. These were nobles who cared to exercise the right bestowed on them and help decide who would rule the country, but who may or may not have had much experience in governance outside of the local seymiks. 

In a way, the noble collectivity that convened during the interregnum resembled more a whole front porch’s worth of shotgun-wielding relatives than a genteel father. The prospect of an election drew some forty thousand nobles to the environs of Warsaw in April 1573. Astride their steeds, they assembled on and around an enormous field, resembling nothing more than the site of a medieval chivalric tourney. The central field, where the palatine and regional delegates convened, was marked off by a ditch and a stockade fence. The masses of noble electors gathered along its perimeter; information was relayed back and forth between center and periphery, allowing those gathered to hear the various reports on the candidates. A large wooden building stood at the end of the field. Its purpose was to protect from the elements the collected paper results of the electoral process.

Poland-Lithuania's Golden Age

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 166-169:

That Poland-Lithuania was able to rein in the natural inclination of monarchs to seek absolute power was partly the result of the country’s unique political heritage and traditions and partly the result of a unique period of efflorescence, one reflected not only in the degree to which Renaissance ideas penetrated the polity but also in the economic well-being that accompanied the Golden Age....

This Golden Age was no misnomer. Not that Polish miners had suddenly discovered a rich vein of gold. The market for gold and silver bullion was dominated by Spain, whose recent penetration of the New World had uncovered vast new supplies of these precious ores. Poland-Lithuania turned out to have ample reserves of a resource that was in great demand elsewhere in the world: grain.

The particular world conjuncture of the late fifteenth century suddenly upped the ante for the grain trade. The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century (which, incidentally, never made its way to Poland) had a significant effect on the economy of the countries in Western Europe, which upon rebounding shifted from agricultural production to animal husbandry. The population increase in the growing cities of the West, combined with the conscious decision to raise sheep for wool instead of planting seeds for grain meant that food was at a premium—a situation reflected in the so-called price revolution, which suddenly made it exceedingly profitable to engage in the export of staple foods.

It so happened that Poland-Lithuania was perfectly poised to take advantage of this situation. Not only did these lands have ample fields of grain. They now could profit in full from exporting their grain surplus via the Baltic. How? Because Poland-Lithuania now had an outlet to the sea. In earlier centuries, the Teutonic Knights had dominated the Baltic Sea coast and, with it, all sea-bound trade. This changed in the mid-fifteenth century when the population of Royal Prussia—including cities such as Gdańsk and Elbląg—opted for Polish rule. One long (thirteen-year) war and peace treaty later, Royal Prussia became part of Poland-Lithuania. After the mid-fifteenth century, the Teutonic Knights had to content themselves with the less fertile and less developed lands to the east; and even those lands, known after 1525 as Ducal Prussia, became a fief of the Crown of Poland.

In exchange for their allegiance, the inhabitants of Royal Prussia were given several important political and economic privileges. These included the right to their own regional parliament (the Prussian estates), municipal self-government for the cities, the right to trade everywhere in the vast country, and exemption from any additional tolls on the Vistula. The region’s incorporation into Poland-Lithuania, thus, had the potential to bring much benefit to the state. Gdańsk merchants could contract for Polish grain, and those supplying the grain had recourse to the growing world market for their staples, the easiest commodity for a large lowland country to produce. The result was that in the sixteenth century Poland became the main supplier of grain to Europe. Each fall, tons of golden grain—oats and rye, wheat and barley—were shipped to markets far and wide. Whereas in the year 1490, around twenty thousand tons of rye were exported, for example, nearly a century later (in 1587), the figure had risen to around seventy-one thousand tons.

Some of the grain went to destinations within the Baltic region—to places such as Lübeck or Copenhagen, Stockholm or Riga. The other (larger) half sailed through the sound. Some of the grain ended up not only in Amsterdam but also in places such as Setubal or Faro in Portugal, or even all the way to the Mediterranean.

Among the greatest consumers of Polish grain were the Dutch. Those mighty world traders hailing from a tiny waterlogged flatland could no longer feed themselves. Gdańsk itself was responsible for half of Amsterdam’s Baltic trade. But the Dutch were hardly the only foreigners present in the port Gdańsk. Germans, Frenchmen, Flemings, Englishmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, all traveled to this Baltic entrepôt in search of what Poland-Lithuania could supply. They found a sea of warehouses bursting with rye, wheat, and other grains as well as fibers (flax and hemp), forest goods (wax, honey, potash, lumber), even salted beef.

All this earned the Gdańsk merchants and their Polish suppliers a pretty penny. In the early years of this increased Baltic trade, a foreigner noted what he observed during the annual two-week long fair in Gdańsk, which began on Saint Dominic’s feast day (August 4). He saw over 400 ships arrive in the port. Yet their holds, albeit awaiting the harvest of grain, were hardly empty. They had brought to the shores of Poland-Lithuania all manner of luxury items: French wines; Spanish olive oil, lemons, preserves, and fruits; silks and other fine cloths; Portuguese spices; English cloth and tin. Reportedly the first eight days of the fair were spent loading the boats of the foreigners with Polish-Lithuanian wares, the next eight with selling luxury items (some clearly of global provenance) to the Poles. Business was booming. By mid-century, the historian Marcin Kromer was reproaching his compatriots in the Kingdom of Poland for being obsessed with luxury and splendor, and for adorning themselves in foreign fabrics and exotic leathers, in silks and purples, silver, gold, pearls, and gemstones.

Pierwszy Poniedziałek Pażdziernika

Lately I've been not just reading more Polish history, but also trying to learn enough of the language to survive this coming academic year in Poland, where Ms. Far Outlier will be working to enrich English language-learning resources at schools there, while I learn enough Polish to handle shopping, navigating public transportation, and exchanging pleasantries with neighbors. Polish is a challenge for someone whose only serious contact with Slavic languages has been via Slavic loanwords in Romanian, like a citi 'to read' (cf. Polish czytać) and a iubi 'to love' (cf. Polish lubić). But I enjoy language-learning at any age!

The title to this post encapsulates one area of difficulty for speakers of Standard Average European languages who wish to master Polish: there are few reliable cognates even in days of the week (only Sobota) and months of the year (only Marzec and Mai), and the cardinal and ordinal numbers have many inflectional irregularities. Here are glosses for the title of this post.

Pierwszy poniedziałek pażdziernika = First Monday of-October

I installed Microsoft's Polish keyboard and used the Polish Programmer's variant to type the text below. It allows the righthand Alt key in combination with standard letters to generate characters with diacritics. Wikipedia explains:

Nowadays nearly all PCs in Poland have standard US keyboards and use the AltGr method to enter Polish diacritics. This keyboard mapping is referred to as the Polish programmers' layout (klawiatura polska programisty) or simply Polish layout.

Here's a version of the Lord's Prayer in Polish. The syntax is pretty predictable from other European languages but the orthographic and inflectional systems are rather more challenging. The English glosses are my own.

Ojcze nasz, któryś jest w niebie,
Father our, which art in heaven,

święć się imię Twoye,
be.holy Reflexive name Thy

Przyjdź królestwo Twoye, bądź wolą Twoyą,
Come kingdom Thy, be.done will Thy

jako w niebie tak i na ziemi.
as in heaven so also on earth.

Chleba naszego powszedniego daj nam dzisiaj.
Bread our daily give us today.

I odpuść nam nasze winy,
And forgive us our guilts

jako i my odpuszczamy naszym winowajcom.
as also we forgive our culprits.

I nie wódź nas na pokuszenie,
And not lead us into temptation,

ale nas zbaw ode złego.
but us lead from evil.

Polish Vernacular Printing Begins

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 150-151:

With the Renaissance and the increasing numbers of educated Poles came a demand for publications not only in Latin but also in the vernacular.

This was a period when the publishing industry was taking off in this part of Europe. Paper mills in Poland-Lithuania dated from the end of the fifteenth century, and the first printing press was set up in Kraków in 1474, by the Bavarian Kasper Straube. Naturally, Latin books were the first to come off the press, only later to be followed by Polish-language books. The first Polish-language book to be typeset (of course, much earlier there were manuscripts laboriously written out by hand), was the popular Paradise of Souls, which appeared in 1513. It is interesting to note that a Cyrillic-alphabet book was printed in Kraków even prior to that, in 1491, and the first Hungarian-language book was printed in the same city, in 1533. The first Polish grammar book did not come out, however, until 1568.

The sixteenth century proved the Golden Age insofar as the development of writing in the vernacular was concerned. Behind the move to turn Polish into a fully developed literary language was Mikołaj Rey (1505–1569). His famous ditty proclaimed to the world (or certainly, at least, to the Polish-speaking world): iż Polacy nie gęsi, iż swój język mają (that Poles are not geese, that they have their own language). Rey himself had not received a strong classical education, which may explain why he opted to write exclusively in Polish. Still, he penned many works, especially polemical ones, with juicy anecdote and ribald humor.

Rey helped to pave the way for the preeminent poet of the Polish Renaissance, Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584). Unlike Rey, Kochanowski was well educated and more than just conversant in Latin, yet he switched to writing in Polish sometime around 1560, while serving as secretary to King Zygmunt August. Clearly well connected, Kochanowski wrote, among other things, a play for the wedding of Chancellor Jan Zamoyski in 1577. A pure Renaissance drama, The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys boasted a message of pacifism as well as the elegant Polish for which Kochanowski was to become known. He did a magnificent job of translating the biblical Psalms, published in 1579. But Kochanowski will forever be remembered as a loving and doting father—in particular of his daughter Ursula, who died at the tender age of two. Heartbroken, Kochanowski wrote a moving series of nineteen poems lamenting her death, aptly called Laments (Polish: Treny).

Mazovia (with Warsaw) Joins Poland

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 146-149:

Zygmunt’s reign did bring many positive developments, however. One important accomplishment was the ultimate incorporation of Mazovia (with its ducal capital of Warsaw) into the Crown of Poland. Regardless how odd this may seem to contemporary readers, Warsaw—despite its central location and later claims to fame—was not yet fully a part of the realm. Since the fourteenth century, Mazovia had been a fief of Poland, controlled by a branch of the old Piast princely dynasty. Bit by bit, the Crown of Poland had acquired pieces of that territory; yet it was only after the death of the last Mazovian prince, Janusz III, in 1526 that the process of incorporation was completed.

For a Polish province, Mazovia was in many ways atypical. The duchy had long eschewed battle with the Teutonic Knights to its immediate north and even maintained good trade relations with them. As of the late fourteenth century, Mazovians had played an important role in facilitating the trade of timber and naval stores coming to Baltic ports via the Narew, Bug, and Vistula Rivers. The duchy likewise assisted the transit trade of furs, wax, and honey from Lithuania as well as cattle from Volhynia. After 1500, Mazovians expanded their activities to include the grain trade. As for the social composition of the duchy, it boasted a preponderance of nobles—certainly vis-à-vis Poland-Lithuania as a whole. Some 20 percent of the population claimed a noble patent—quite a large number, though to be sure most of these were impoverished soldier-nobles. Warsaw had a provincial feel, although in the sixteenth century it was beginning its ascent, in part thanks to trade.

[It sounds as if Poland may have acquired its own equivalents of the Prussian Junker class when it incorporated Masovia into the Crown of Poland.--J.]

Although King Zygmunt managed to incorporate the remaining pieces of Mazovia into the Crown, he was less successful in pressing state and dynastic interests in the region of the Baltic Sea, this despite a very real occasion to do so. For a war fought against the Teutonic Order in 1519–1521 brought the Knights to their knees—literally. One of the most famous images in Polish history dates from 1525, the so-called Prussian Homage. A triumphant view of this grand event was painted in 1882 by the nineteenth-century Polish artist Jan Matejko, whose colorful brushstrokes lavishly rendered the scene of the former grand master of the Teutonic Knights, Albrecht von Hohenzollern, kneeling before the Polish king and publicly swearing his fealty.

Yet such a rosy view of the event—although attractive to Matejko’s contemporaries, who took especial pleasure in seeing Prussians bowing down before the Poles, even if only in the deep historical past—was misleading. Much more could have been achieved than simply having Albrecht von Hohenzollern kneel before the Polish king (who was, after all, his uncle) and resign himself to the status of subordinate. What could have marked the end of Prussia as an independent entity—had Zygmunt pursued the fight further—instead gave little Prussia a new lease on life. Recall that part of Prussia had already been incorporated into the Crown by Zygmunt’s father. This was the so-called Royal Prussia, which had sought to break away from the hold of the Teutonic Knights and turned to the Polish king for help.

What went wrong, then? Although it was a Polish fief, in this moment Prussia was permitted to undergo a notable change. No longer to be run by the Teutonic Knights, it was transformed by Albrecht von Hohenzollern-Ansbach (the aforementioned nephew of Zygmunt) into a secular state. Henceforth the last grand master of the Teutonic Order would be known as Duke of Prussia, and his successors would have hereditary rights in the lands formerly held by the Order. Not only that: the Prussia of Albrecht von Hohenzollern simultaneously embraced the views promulgated by Martin Luther, who by nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517 initiated a movement that would forever change the face of Christian Europe. This was the Protestant Reformation. Close to Martin Luther himself, Albrecht became—with Zygmunt’s permission—the first territorial Lutheran ruler and Prussia became the first Protestant state in Europe.

That this should occur without bloodshed or upheaval was in part due to Zygmunt the Old’s willingness to approve this amazing transformation of the former arch-Catholic polity—in part to keep Ducal Prussia from moving into the orbit of the Holy Roman Empire. To be sure, in the Treaty of Kraków of 1525—the first European treaty between a Catholic and a Protestant state—Zygmunt and Albrecht agreed that Ducal Prussia would come fully under Polish control on the extinction of Albrecht of Hohenzollern’s line. That only a generation later a different king would, in a pinch, exchange his hereditary rights to succession for military assistance is but one of the fateful missteps that would haunt Polish history for centuries to come, even if it could not be foreseen in 1525.

How Italy Became Włochy in Polish

Mikołaj Gliński explains in CULTURE.PL #language & literature:

As it turns out, the word Włochy is descended from the Proto-Germanic word *walhaz (itself derived from the name of the Italian tribe Volsci) which was a term for speakers of various Romance languages living in post-Roman Empire areas with whom Germanic peoples came into contact. By extension, it could also refer to foreigners in general (compare the contemporary Dutch word Waals ‘Walloon’, and the English word Welsh).

In Polish, the word, or actually one of its variants, namely Wołochy, was at first used to refer to the Romanised tribes of the Balkans (compare Vallachia [and Vlachs]). It was only later that the name, now as Włochy, was transferred to another, more Southern people, namely the Italians.

The same word root włochy also appears in another Polish word, namely włoszczyzna (‘mirepoix’). The word denotes a mix of vegetables used for cooking a flavour base for soups. This handy bundle, which usually includes carrots, parsley, celery and leek, is even today sold in most grocery shops throughout Poland.

Curious for more Polish idiosyncratic geography? Countries like Włochy, Niemcy and Węgry feature in this guide.

I was sure the Polish name for Italy had something to do with their name for other Romance-speaking remnants of the Roman Empire. Glad to see supporting evidence.