Charles X Gustav wanted to make the Baltic Sea the inner sea of Sweden. The Polish king was to be Prince George II Rakoczy, Duke of Transylvania.
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There were reformers in Poland before the times of Stanisław Augustus. The Czartoryski family and the Potocki party were already active under the Saxons. At that time, both parties were still reformatory and meant well, even the Potocki, who had a terrible reputation for actions in Poniatowski’s times, but they effectively checked one other.
Time passed by escaping into propaganda and diplomatic guerrilla wars and looking to Russia or Prussia. There was even an alliance between the king and the Czartoryski. Augustus III understood that a strong Commonwealth would raise his position among other princes of the Reich. Sejms, however, were broken off by the Potocki’s supporters for Prussian and French money so as not to strengthen their rivals. When the king and the Czartoryskis tried to confederate the sejms, threats came from St. Petersburg with the support of Berlin.
Augustus III, so that the black eagles would not remember the treaty of 1732, had to agree to Maria Theresa on the Austrian and imperial throne, disregarding the rights of his own wife, and to show courtesy to the Russian Empress Anna Ivanovna with Courland for her favorite. Although it is good that he paid partly with his claims to the throne in the Reich and the throne in a feudal land, and not with integral parts of Poland.
During the reign of Augustus III, the Commonwealth did not experience external wars until 1754, when Russian corps crossed Poland to the west going to the Seven Years’ War, not only plundering but also burning villages and towns. From these times comes the comparison of the country to an inn for foreign troops.
Under Augustus II, during the Northern War, in which the king involved the Commonwealth in 1704, not only the Swedes and Russians – allegedly supporting the Polish kings elected twice – behaved as occupiers of the worst kind. Also the Saxon army subordinated to the king of Poland did the same thing. The saying: “eat, drink and loosen your belt” concerned the times of the second Saxon.
At the beginning of the Northern War, the Swedes broke into the Commonwealth, formally not taking part in it, and captured Warsaw and Kraków. In 1702, the Swedish army defeated the Polish-Saxon forces near Kliszów, which had a symbolic dimension, because the last charge of the hussars took place there, unsuccessful. After that, the Grand Crown Hetman Hieronim Lubomirski withdrew the Polish forces, thus manifesting his attitude towards Augustus II. In the later years of the state's existence, the hussars will play the role of a “funeral army” - the name explains the tasks for which the terror of battlefields from Kirholm to Vienna were used in the 18th century.
The Polish funeral lasted longer than week-long obsequies with the participation of the funeral military. And the 1795 as the date defining the loss of statehood seems at least inaccurate.
– Krzysztof Zwoliński
– Translated by Dominik Szczęsny-Kostanecki
TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists