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    Published : 2024-02-20
    Vol. 71 No. 2sp (2023)

    Stanisław Leszczyński’s Election and the Lublin Nobility in 1704

    Wiesław Bondyra

    https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5813-777X

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh237102s.9

    Abstract

    As soon as the Swedish army entered the borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Third Northern War, attitudes towards the invader and towards King August II Wettin became polarised among the nobility. The monarch, who did not really understand and did not want to understand his Polish and Lithuanian subjects, was accused of provoking a commonly unwanted war, of concluding an alliance with Russia without the consent of the Parliament and of notoriously violating the rights and freedoms of the nobility. Some of the nobility of Greater Poland and Mazovia, in the established Warsaw Confederation, finally announced their renunciation of allegiance to Augustus, and king Charles XII of Sweden, in a parody of the 1704 election, forced the appointment to the throne of Stanisław Leszczyński, completely submissive to the dictates of his protector. Faced with the unbearable and brutal Swedish occupation, the vast majority of the gentry of Lesser Poland, including those of Lublin, sided against the invaders and on the side of the existing ruler by forming a general Sandomierz Confederation in response to the events in Warsaw. The nobility of the Lublin Voivodeship faithfully stood by Augustus, questioning the legality of his dethronement, and thus also the unlawful election of a successor, and in such nefarious circumstances. Nonetheless, some of the key magnates, such as the Tarło and the Lubomirski families, gradually began to move to the opposing camp. Although no major military clashes took place in the voivodeship during the ongoing war, due to its geographical location it was still affected by the ruinous consequences of the movement, stationing and repressive actions of both foreign, i.e. Swedish, Saxon and Russian armies, as well as their own Polish-Lithuanian troops, representing the two warring factions. This situation was not changed even by the abdication of August II (imposed by the Swedes) in 1706, as the majority of Lublin’s nobility still refused to recognise Leszczyński’s rule until the unexpected defeat of the Swedes at Poltava in 1709 and the flight of the “anti-king” from the country.

    Keywords:

    Great Northern War, Lublin Voivodeship, nobility, sejmiks, royal election of 1704, civil war, war damage



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    Roczniki Humanistyczne · ISSN 0035-7707 | eISSN 2544-5200 | DOI: 10.18290/rh
    © The Learned Society of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin & The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Faculty of Humanities


    Articles are licensed under a Creative Commons  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)