In 1572, King Sigismund August died and Poland faced a completely new political situation - the first free election. Kings had already been elected, actually approved from a single dynasty, and with Zygmunt August the Jagiellonian dynasty had just expired. The situation raised concerns among the Calvinist nobility about the future. The next king could come from a country where the Inquisition was rampant, stakes burned and religious wars were the order of the day.

The dissenters, i.e. the Calvinists, and to a lesser extent the Lutherans and the Orthodox, came to an agreement and forced the passing of the Warsaw Confederation Act at the First Convocation Sejm on 28 January 1573. The Polish Brethren (Arians) and the Bohemian Brethren (Hussites) were not included among the activists for equality of faiths. These were heretics - as non-Catholic denominations were called in Catholic country - even within the womb of heretics; the Polish Brethren, for example, did not recognise the Trinity. The dissociation from the radicals constituted success. Of the more than one hundred seals read under the Warsaw Confederation Act, almost half were affixed by Catholic deputies.

The Warsaw Confederation does not speak only of peace and religious tolerance, but its spirit and letter mostly refer to these issues, and it is not without reason that it was remembered as the first act in Europe on the consensual coexistence of different religions. Among other things, you can read there;

"As there is a considerable diversity of Christian faith in the Republic of Poland, and in order to prevent any harmful unrest among the people for this reason, which we can clearly see in other kingdoms, we promise this to each other for ourselves and our descendants for ever and ever under the obligation of an oath, under faith, honour and our conscience, that we, who are different in faith, shall preserve peace among ourselves, and that we shall not shed blood for the sake of different faiths and varieties in the Churches, nor punish one another with deprivation of property, honesty, imprisonment and provocation, and that we shall not help any authority or office to make such progress by any means."

The harmful riots in other kingdoms mentioned in the text began shortly after Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, on 31 October 1517. And Poland had different experiences and traditions from those of Western countries.

After the incorporation of the Red Ruthenia by Casimir the Great, Orthodox Christians also became subjects of the Polish king, and in 1525 Sigismund Augustus allowed his fief prince in Prussia, Albrecht Hohenzollern, to convert to Lutheranism. Jews and Muslims in smaller numbers lived and had their rights in Poland. All this meant that the Polish nobility was already accustomed to religious and cultural diversity when the Warsaw Confederation was enacted. Hence, one cannot be surprised by the numerous signatures of Catholics under the act, something unthinkable - as well as the act itself - in Germany, the Netherlands, France and England, or Russia.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw Europe inundated by religious or only partly religiously motivated wars, the development of the Episcopal Inquisition and the Rome-controlled Holy Inquisition and, contrary to popular belief, it was the modern era, not the Middle Ages, that brought a large wave of witchcraft trials.

Inquisition trials of dissenters in Poland began and died out in the late Middle Ages, which is not to say that there were none, but the scale compared to the Spanish hunt for marranos or the English persecution of Catholics under Elizabeth I is incomparable, and there were no wars on religious grounds in our country at all.

The burning of witches, on the other hand, is associated with religious tolerance or intolerance indirectly and marginally, but all those tried in each country confessed "voluntarily" (under torture) to contacts with the devil, i.e. to an obvious renunciation of God, which was something much worse than heresy, which is why the Warsaw Confederation did not talk about witch trials. The putting to death of witches was done away with in Poland under Stanislaus Augustus and, for example, in Spain in the 1820s.

The backwardness of civilisation and the underdevelopment of the cities not only determined the small number of trials, but even a decent torture chamber like the one at Nuremberg could not be found in Poland. Courts in away sessions in small towns and villages had to limit themselves to stretching ponds with ropes and flogging in the river. The more than five hundred victims in the entire history of Poland cannot be compared not only with Spain, but even with Germany.

Heresies were prosecuted in Europe by the ecclesiastical courts with the help of the secular arm - this is a theory, because the arm was in fact the head. It was Catholic rulers, with the help of the apparatus of their states, who persecuted Protestants, and Protestant rulers, Catholics. Religious motives overlapped with political ones.

The Warsaw Confederation coincides with St Bartholomew's Night in Paris. The queen dowager Catherine de Medici decided to put an end to the country's devastating long war between Catholics and Protestants by marrying a princess from the reigning house of Valois to the Protestant ruler of Navarre, Henry de Bourbon. The Huguenots (Calvinists) who had come to Paris for the wedding were viciously slaughtered in numbers of around five thousand on the night of 23-24 August 1572. Catherine was among the instigators of the murder, Henry de Bourbon survived and led a rebellion against the ruling house.

The civil war in France ended in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes, in which more than a hundred strongholds were granted to the Huguenots for the eventual defence of their liberties and lives. Over the next century, Louis XIII's minister, Cardinal de Richelieu, took them back one by one, with the last one, La Rochelle, defended for fourteen months. The Huguenots emigrated, but not all of them, resulting in a procedure of 'dragonades' under the next king, Louis XIV. The dragonades were the forced quartering of the army in the homes of dissenters, where soldierly swagger was not so much tolerated as ordered. Murder, rape and devastation contributed to the desired conversion of subjects to Catholicism.

The first elected king in Poland was Henri de Valois, who left the throne after a few months' reign on hearing of his brother's death and the French throne awaiting him. The nobility in Poland knew about St Bartholomew's Night and it is hardly surprising that Henri, before becoming Henry Walezy, was forced by Polish envoys to swear to the Warsaw Confederation. "If you don't swear, you won't rule," one Polish magnate in Paris is supposed to have told him. Henry de Valois did not renew his oath during his coronation at Wawel Castle, but he did swear in other provisions limiting his power, known as the Articles of Henry. The Warsaw Confederation, among other obligations, was sworn to by all subsequent kings of Poland after him.

It was difficult for a western European king to swear by religious tolerance. At a time of the consolidation of the role of the state, which meant the throne and the non-existence of a conception of the nation in today's sense, it was religious belief - the same for all - that was the factor most strongly unifying the subjects.

In multi-ethnic and multi-religious Poland it was the other way around - it was tolerance that united the nobility against the king. At the time of the Warsaw Confederation, the establishment of a republican system with an elected king - something like today's president - had just begun and religious feuds would have worked against the political unity of the nobility.

A similar system to that of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with a ruler (Staathouder) subordinate to parliament, was established in the Netherlands, but there the struggle of the followers of the various Christian denominations was important in establishing the principles of the system.

Dynastic marriages brought the Netherlands under the rule of the Spanish Habsburgs, maintaining autonomy. In 1566, the Calvinist North rose up against Spanish domination. The Protestants revolted against the ruling Catholics, and the mostly Catholic southern provinces joined the revolt.

The situation was exacerbated by the slaughters practised in the North by the Spanish expeditionary corps. The Northern provinces dethroned Philip II and declared themselves the Republic of the United Provinces with the position of Staathouder inherited in the Orange dynasty. The South came to terms with the Spanish court.

The reasons for the war in the Netherlands were also purely and classically political, the Spaniards were foreign here with all the consequences of that, and the Netherlands was rich and there was something to grab. However, the religious differences of the two main warring parties added fuel to the fire and motivated perseverance and valour. The rebellious North is today's Netherlands and the South is now Belgium.

At the aforementioned coastal fortress of La Rochelle, Elizabeth I, Queen of England, sent ships to the aid of the Huguenots. She was the head of the Church of England, separated from Rome, and helped all Protestants on the Continent. Domestically, she fostered an atmosphere of threat of Catholic conspiracies to bring an invasion of the Isles by the 'Papists' and when the Spanish Grand Armada actually set sail for England, it had the feel of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once the Spanish ships were repulsed, the real threat was over, which did not mean that the fining, imprisonment and beheading of Catholics in the Isles stopped.

The Church of England pronounced obedience to the Pope because Henry VIII had to change several wives while waiting for a male heir, and Rome did not recognise divorce. Under Henry VIII, the Church of England separated administratively; doctrinal differences came later. Under his successor Edward VI, persecution of the hierarchy and the faithful began. They affected the elite, while the country remained Catholic, which in Queen Mary, Edward's successor, gave rise to hopes of re-catholicising the country. The nickname 'Bloody Mary' given to the Queen by her contemporaries says everything about her methods.

Queen Mary's six-year reign was followed by her half-sister, Elizabeth I. She reigned for forty years and proceeded consistently to destroy Catholicism. Attendance at Sunday mass in Anglican churches became compulsory. Catholic worship was initially allowed in the home, later prosecuted. Anglicanism's victory over Catholicism was aided by an army of denunciators, with casualties numbering in the tens of thousands.

William Shakespeare was a Catholic, or rather a crypto-Catholic, and when he wrote in Hamlet that "Denmark is a prison" he had a very different country in mind. The suffocating atmosphere of confinement experienced by Hamlet was the author's everyday reality. The yearning for the freedom of England's eternal religion has been found by modern scholars in Shakespeare's other plays as well. They point to verse fragments of traditional songs, especially mournful ones and Catholic psalms only slightly camouflaged. SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE Shakespeare was careful in his writing. Privately, he had acquired a house in London with many secret passages and hiding places for Catholic priests. He lived out his days in peace, probably helped by connections in the highest circles and sheer luck. Other writers, such as the Polish - to keep things in proportion - Jan Kochanowski and Mikołaj Rej did not have to camouflage anything.

A Catholic, Kochanowski frequented the courts of Protestant magnates, sometimes accepting various functions, which did not undermine his position at the court of the Catholic king. A less politically active outspoken Protestant, Rej was, however, a member of parliament and a court advocate, and the Catholic magnates received him at home. In Elizabeth I's England, such things were unimaginable.

In the UK, many sentiments, let alone institutions, last a puzzlingly long time. The recent British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that he had converted to Catholicism, but this only happened after he had left the office. Had he done so earlier, and it was an open secret that he had such inclinations, Britain would probably have sunk. And seriously, there would have been a constitutional crisis, because in Britain, it is the king, or in practice the prime minister, who appoints the bishops. The nation wouldn't put up with a Catholic doing it, quite different if it was a Hindu.

"Papists" returned to the UK Parliament in 1829 and in 1850 the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was allowed to be restored. From the time of Elizabeth I, English Catholicism disappeared from public life becoming a private religion for almost three centuries.

The Protestant English colonies in North America took over from the metropolis the notion that a Catholic was a potential traitor, and the United States that emerged from them did not get rid of this fear for a long time. When a Catholic became president there for the first time in the 1960s, it was widely regarded as an epochal breakthrough.

Polish witches were burned under German codes. Fortunately, religious wars were not imported from the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which even before the Thirty Years' War had resulted in more than a hundred thousand victims.

Lutheranism was spreading rapidly in Germany and, in addition to the Peasants' War, suppressed by the feudals of both denominations, gave ideological fuel to the Schmalkadic War. The war erupted when some of the Lutheran princes and cities refused to return the just-secularised church estates to the emperor.

Only the Austrian states and Bavaria remained Catholic under the sceptre of the Catholic emperor, so war was inevitable. The Emperor Charles V did not recoil as he wished and had to agree to the Peace of Augsburg in1555. The principle adopted there, "cuius regio, eius religio" (whose land, his religion), remained in force in the Reich for centuries. Anyone who was of a different religion to the sovereign had two years to sell his property and move to another sovereign. The most famous resettler was Friedrich Schiller - much later, during the Enlightenment.

The Warsaw Confederation had no implementing provisions and, from its general terms, those who deny Polish tolerance may conclude that there was some reflection of the principle - whose land, his religion. Yes, there was a way for the lord to judge the peasants according to the principles he professed. There was no encouragement of conversions. Let alone the conversion of free citizens, i.e. the nobility.

There were few stakes in Poland, and shortenings by the head with quartering for religious reasons in general. Admittedly, moments of interregnum in the 16th century brought riots against Protestants, but five death sentences were handed down and carried out for an attack in Kraków on a Protestant church. During the reign of Wladyslaw IV, the Protestant congregation in Vilnius was demolished, but on the initiative of the Sejm (parliament), not the king. Wladyslaw IV initiated a colloqium charitativum (fraternal conversation) in Torun to reconcile the various believers in the Republic.

The Union of Brest of 1596, i.e. the subordination of the Orthodox Church in Rus to Rome while retaining its own rite, was voluntary among parts of the Orthodox hierarchy. Those opposed to the Union looked more and more readily to Moscow over the years. And those who joined and then withdrew faced no consequences, not even property. However, at the root of the prevailing opinion in Russia of an intolerant Poland, skilfully exploited and disseminated to the West by Catherine II, is the Union of Brest.

Poland's reputation was most tarnished in Europe by the Torun riots of 1724. In the largely Protestant city, brawls broke out between students of the Jesuit college and Lutheran youths. After one of the larger brawls, the city authorities arrested one Catholic from the Jesuits, for which the Jesuit students took a Protestant hostage. A Lutheran mob broke into the college and, despite the release of the hostage - a rumour went around that there was another - trashed the interiors including the altar in the chapel. A painting with the Virgin Mary was also said to have been burned.

Eleven death sentences were passed, of which eight were carried out. Outrage was expressed by Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Prussia, England and Russia (mostly countries where intolerance was the glue of the system, and where Peter I, Tsar of Russia, deigned to murder dissenters from the Orthodox Church personally). Prussia and England considered sending intervention troops, and the British ambassador lodged an official protest with August II. The publicity of the Torun riots later served Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to justify the Kulturkampf.

By the eighteenth century in Europe, all dissenters were already pacified and in their places so that no one needed to be punished by death, and here Augustus II, a fresh Catholic, did not exercise his right of grace wanting to please the nobility....

And as for the mentality of the nobility that August II coquetted with, one should look into the popular bible of Sarmatism, namely the works of Henryk Sienkiewicz. In "With Fire and Sword", Mr Onufry Zagłoba said of the Protestant alderman from Bełżec, Andrzej Firlej, that he was "living in profane errors, disgusting to Heaven", which is why God's disfavour was hurled by lightning at the troops he commanded. And when Firlej praised the dangerous initiative of his friends to break through the Cossack army at Zbaraż with a message to the king, Mr Zagłoba said - no longer heard by Firlej and Prince Wiśniowiecki: "And why doesn't he come out himself? He has six toes on each foot as a Calvinist, so it is easier for him to walk."

From authoritative circles in the European Union, the opinion has recently reached us that 'Poland is governed by fanatical Catholics'. Sienkiewicz has been translated into many languages, but that it has reached the desks of MEPs in addition as non-fiction?

Despite a build-up of historical setbacks, which also included a lack of good publicity, the act of the Warsaw Confederation was inscribed on UNESCO's 'Memory of the World' list in 2003.

– Krzysztof Zwoliński Translated by Tomasz Krzyżanowski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists