John III Sobieski

King of Poland (r. 1674-1696)

• Born: August 17, 1629
• Birthplace: Olesko Castle, Poland (now in Ukraine)
• Died: June 17, 1696
• Place of death: Castle Wilanów, near Warsaw, Poland

In lifting the Turkish siege of Vienna, Sobieski halted the Ottoman conquest of Europe, helping to preserve Western culture and Christendom. The status of women, in particular, differs so profoundly in Christian societies from that in Islamic societies that the significance of Sobieski’s generalship to women’s equal rights in the West can hardly be overstated.

Early Life

John III Sobieski was born in Olesko Castle, near Zolkiew, then in southeastern Poland. During the first thirty years of his life, Poland was involved in two wars with Sweden, two wars with Russia, and virtually continuous strife in the Ukraine. Two reigning kings died, and two replacements were elected by the uniquely Polish system that was in 1674 to crown Sobieski himself.

Sobieski’s reputation as the most cultivated of all Poland’s seventeenth century kings, and its greatest military hero, is in the tradition of his family, which descended from Poland’s first ruler, Piast. Sobieski’s highly educated father, Jakób, was the descendant of Dinarian country squires and prosperous Lechite nobles. He had become castellan of Kraków, Poland’s highest ranking secular senator, before Sobieski was twenty. Governing and fighting, especially Turks, were Sobieski’s predictable spheres.

Sobieski’s intellect was appropriate to his remarkably large head. By middle age, his belly had expanded to match this head, which, taken with his surprisingly tiny feet, gave him rather an oval shape. The French ambassador wrote that he looked from a distance like a gigantic egg. Closer, he granted Sobieski an aquiline nose and a pleasant voice. Because of the rigors of his final campaign, Sobieski was in ill health for the last five years of his life, but for the preceding sixty-two his immense vitality had informed his every aspect. His mental capacities, his physical appetites, and his capacity for rage and for sweetness, for thoughtful and for impulsive behavior, all were exaggerated.

Through the death of an elder brother, Sobieski inherited a great estate. Like most young Renaissance Poles of his class, he concluded his studies (at the University of Kraków) by touring Western Europe (1646-1647). He then joined the Polish army, fighting a Cossack uprising in the Ukraine, an area that was to be a grief and trouble to him throughout his life.

Life’s Work

In 1569, the Ukraine was transferred from Lithuania to Poland. Lithuania had been unable to protect the Ukrainians from the Tatar troops that regularly plundered them, taking so many captives to Crimean ports for sale as slaves to the Muslims that the Ukraine had become seriously underpopulated. This underpopulation had brought refugees from Polish Lithuanian feudalism, people willing to defend themselves from Tatars for the sake of freedom from taxes and serfdom. These Cossacks evolved into a distinct people, farmers and soldiers, resistant to Polish authority. Their military ventures into Moldavia (part of modern Romania), the Crimea, and Turkey were blamed on the Polish crown, which sometimes tried to subdue them and other times employed them against foreign enemies. Between Sobieski’s birth and his first military service, the Polish army had marched against the Cossacks five times.

In 1648, Poland’s king died. The Polish nobility elected John II Casimir Vasa, a Swede with a French wife (Marie Louise), to replace him. Sobieski’s early military career was to benefit from Marie Louise’s patronage, and he was to marry a woman from her court.

Like Sobieski when he became king, Marie Louise tried and failed to reform Poland’s laws of succession. Poland’s magnates enjoyed immense power, which they guarded so jealously as to keep their king too weak to pursue Poland’s interests. Reasoning that a living king could influence the choice of his successor in favor of a son or close relative, which risked development of a despotic hereditary monarchy, the magnates would not designate a king’s successor during his lifetime. Every reign ended with a dangerous interregnum. The result was that the Vatican and Poland’s neighbors competed through bribery and intrigue to choose Poland’s kings, each of whom was then his foreign patron’s tool. Even so strong a character as Sobieski, who, like John II Casimir Vasa, began his reign with the backing of Louis XIV of France but who developed a foreign policy independent of French interests, was in the end unequal to the combination of domestic intransigence and foreign intrigue.

Casimir proved unable to achieve a compromise between the Ukrainians and Poland’s magnates, and in 1654 the Cossacks sought Russian help. Czar Alexis declared the Ukraine a Russian protectorate and sent troops against the Polish army there. Taking advantage of this, Sweden invaded Poland in 1655. Increased Swedish power on the Baltic was such a threat to the czar that he signed an armistice with Poland and directed his army against the Swedes. Sobieski continued fighting the Russians by joining the Swedish army.

The Protestant Swedes intended to destroy Catholicism in Poland. The wanton destruction, pillage, and massacres united the fractious Poles against them. In 1656, Sobieski rejoined the Polish army and took a leading part in fighting the Swedes. By the Treaty of Oliva in 1660, Sweden acquired Poland’s last Baltic territories but otherwise withdrew. Poland was in ruins and again at war with the Russians and Cossacks in the Ukraine.

In 1665, Sobieski married the ambitious French widow Marie Casimire de la Grange d’Arquien, who at once began maneuvering to make Sobieski Casimir’s successor. Marysieńka, as the Poles called her, was beautiful, brilliant, devoted to Sobieski, and one of history’s most avaricious women. Influenced by her, Sobieski in the latter half of his reign sold every possible office, amassing an awesome fortune. This cupidity, plus her foreign birth, made Marysieńka unpopular in Poland, contributing to the Sobieskis’ failure to secure Poland’s crown for their eldest son.

In 1665, through the favor of Queen Marie Louise, Sobieski was made grand marshal, rising to field commander the following year. The Cossacks, having found Russian aid against the Poles insufficient, turned to the Tatars and Turkey. The threat of Turkish intervention in the Ukraine so alarmed the czar that he made a truce with Poland (Andruszów, January, 1667). Only Sobieski recognized in time that the Tatars marching into the Ukraine that summer meant to fight Poles, not Cossacks. With an army funded almost entirely by himself, he turned back Tatar troops numbering ten times his own at Podhajce in October, 1667. In 1668, he became grand hetman. Efforts by Marie Louise to reform the crippling features of Poland’s constitution ended upon her death in 1667, and her discouraged widower abdicated. The Habsburgs’ influence prevailed in the consequent election, and Michal Wiśniowiecki was crowned in 1669.

Sobieski’s victories against the Cossacks continued, but the Seym (parliament) did not take his advice about the Turkish threat, and when Turkey invaded, Poland was forced to sign the Peace of Buczacz (1672), losing territory and, most galling, promising annual tribute. When Michal’s death (1673) nearly coincided with Sobieski’s tremendous victory over the Turks at Khotin, Sobieski became too popular in Poland for the Habsburgs’ next candidate; in 1674, with lukewarm French support, he was elected king.

Louis XIV, almost continuously at war with the Holy Roman Empire (hence Turkey’s ally), hoped to use Poland in this connection. By the secret Treaty of Jaworów (1675), Louis promised to Sobieski that he would mediate a peace between Poland and Turkey to Poland’s advantage and to subsidize a Polish campaign to recover Prussia from the elector of Brandenburg, a subsidy that would double if Poland fought Austria. The Prussian venture attracted Sobieski not only because of Poland’s interest in the Baltic but also because he wanted the Prussian throne for his eldest son, Jakób. Yet the vaunted settlement with Turkey (signed at Żórawno, 1676) left half of the Ukraine a Turkish protectorate, and Sobieski’s Baltic hopes were also disappointed. Turkey remained Poland’s greatest enemy, making Austria rather than France her natural ally. Sobieski’s initial rapport with France was also strained by Louis’s unwillingness to do as much as Marysieńka expected for her immediate and extended family. In 1683, Sobieski signed a treaty with Austria whereby either would come to the aid of the other’s capital should it be besieged by Turkey. That summer, Turkey marched 115,000 men on Vienna. Sobieski, as ranking officer, commanded the several armies that cooperated to lift the siege with half the Turks’ manpower in one of the most brilliant and important battles of European history (Battle of Kahlenberg, September 12, 1683).

Sobieski’s subsequent campaigns against the Turks, in Hungary and Moldavia, were unsuccessful. He dreamed of a “Holy League” of Christian nations to drive Turkey out of Europe, and in 1686 he signed the Treaty of Moscow whereby Poland ceded Kiev to Russia in return for Russia’s less tangible agreement to join this league. His sons competed to succeed him, while Poland’s magnates continued to be adamantly and successfully opposed to all three. The satisfactory marriage of his only daughter, Kunegunda, to the elector of Bavaria (1694) alleviated the disappointments of his final years. He died in the most lavish of his castles, the last great king of Poland.

Significance

John III Sobieski’s aims as king were to strengthen Poland’s government, especially by making the monarchy hereditary; to regain Polish territories lost in various wars; and, through his Holy League, to free Europe from Islam. Poland’s kings, who could not tax or raise armies, were further weakened in 1652 by the magnates’ successful assertion of the right of any single one of them to dissolve any session of the Seym upon demand. Moreover, when a magnate exercised this right (the liberum veto), all business conducted by the Seym up to that point was obviated. Foreign governments paid enormous sums for the timely exercise of the liberum veto. Of the Seym’s forty-four sessions during the latter half of the seventeenth century, fifteen were dissolved by the liberum veto.

Constitutional reform was doomed by the narrow self-interest of Poland’s magnates and by the vast sums Poland’s neighbors made available to any of them who would block such reforms. Poland’s inability to pacify the Ukraine, either militarily or by granting and securing justice to its inhabitants, was again chiefly a result of its weak central government. Sobieski perceived the lack and foresaw the consequences, making his administrative failures bitter. His dream of restoring Poland’s Baltic power was similarly doomed. The great accomplishment of Sobieski’s life was the deliverance of Poland from Tatar and Turk.

Bibliography

Davies, Norman. “Sobieski: Terror of the Turk, 1674-1696.” In The Origins to 1795. Vol. 1 in God’s Playground: A History of Poland. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Davies includes a chapter on Sobieski in his insightful and well-written survey of Polish history, a two-volume work many critics consider the best book on Poland in the English language.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Sobieski’s Legacy: Polish History, 1683-1983, a Lecture. London: Orbis, 1985. In addition to Davies’s lecture delivered at London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, the book contains English translations of letters and documents relating to Sobieski’s life and times.

Dyboski, Roman. Outlines of Polish History. 2d ed. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. A concise overview of Polish history.

Gronowicz, Antoni. The Piasts of Poland. Translated by Joseph Vetter. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945. A brief history of the Polish struggle for independence. Modern portions are subjective.

Halecki, Oskar. A History of Poland. Translated by M. M. Gardner and Mary Corbridge-Patkaniowska. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1966. A revised, enlarged edition of the author’s 1933 survey of Polish history. Chapter 16, “John Sobieski,” is a clear, worthwhile treatment.

Michener, James A. Poland. New York: Random House, 1983. A perfunctory fictional thread is woven through this clear, vivid history of Poland from Genghis Khan to Lech Wałęsa. Chapter 5 deals with Sobieski’s administration, especially the rescue of Vienna.

Prazmowska, Anita J. A History of Poland. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. A survey of Polish history.