Poland–Lithuania, 1600–1660

King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania since 1587, Sigismund had also been King of Sweden until the Swedish estates deposed him in July 1599. He never gave that crown up. At the Sejm of March 1600 he proclaimed Estonia part of the Commonwealth, as his election terms had promised, and so made his family quarrel the Commonwealth's war.

Duke Charles, regent in Stockholm and king from 1604, had already driven the Polish garrisons out of Estonia. In August 1600 he landed with some 10,000 men and overran almost all of Polish Livonia except Riga.

Krzysztof Mikołaj Radziwiłł, called Piorun, the Thunderbolt, grand hetman of Lithuania and head of the Calvinist Radziwiłłs, struck back with Jan Karol Chodkiewicz and broke a Swedish army at Kokenhausen (Koknese) in June 1601. When the Crown army arrived he handed over his troops and went home; he died in 1603.

Jan Zamoyski, Grand Chancellor and Grand Hetman of the Crown, had won Sigismund his throne in 1587–88 and had since become his sharpest critic, above all of his Habsburg dealings. He served all the same. Coming north from Moldavia with about 12,000 men, he retook Wolmar and Fellin in 1601–02; then, ill, he went home in 1602 and never commanded again.

Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, field hetman of Lithuania, carried on the Livonian war with little money from the Sejm. He took Dorpat in 1603, and on 27 September 1605 at Kircholm his 3,600 men, most of them hussars, broke Charles's army three times their size and saved Riga. The grand hetmanship of Lithuania followed; the war went on.

Prince of Wallachia since 1593 and master of Transylvania since 1599, Michael the Brave invaded Moldavia in April 1600 and took its capital, Iași, on 6 May. For a few months he ruled all three principalities. He drove out Ieremia Movilă, the prince Zamoyski had set on the Moldavian throne in 1595.

Zamoyski led the Crown army into Moldavia in the autumn of 1600, with Żółkiewski and Chodkiewicz under him. He beat Michael at Bucov on the Teleajen, put Ieremia back on his throne and made Ieremia's brother Simion prince of Wallachia. From that victory he went north to the Swedish war.

Ieremia Movilă ruled Moldavia again from September 1600 until his death in 1606, a client of the Commonwealth who still paid tribute to the sultan. His family married into the Polish and Ruthenian nobility: his daughter Raina wed Michał Wiśniowiecki, and his nephew Petro Mohyla would grow up in Żółkiewski's household.

Piotr Skarga, the Jesuit Sigismund made his court preacher in 1588, was the loudest voice of the king's Counter-Reformation. His Sejm Sermons of 1597 warned of disorder and division, and he championed the Union of Brest of 1596, which brought the Kyiv metropolitan and several of his bishops under Rome.

Hypatius Pociej, a former castellan who had become Bishop of Volodymyr in 1593 with Ostrogski's backing, helped carry the union to Rome. The king named him Metropolitan of Kyiv in 1599 and the pope confirmed him in 1600. He spent his remaining years building the Uniate church against Orthodox resistance, and survived an attempt on his life in 1609.

Prince Konstanty Wasyl Ostrogski, voivode of Kyiv and the greatest Orthodox magnate, had backed Pociej's rise and once talked of union himself, but not on these terms. He held a rival Orthodox council at Brest in 1596, paid for polemics against the union and kept his Ostroh Academy teaching. A runaway who claimed the Muscovite throne first sought shelter with him. He died in 1608.

Szymon Szymonowic, Zamoyski's poet, helped him found the Zamość Academy, opened in 1595, and its press, and from 1601 brought up his son Tomasz. The Academy schooled men who reappear in this story, Adam Kysil and Sylvester Kosiv among them. Szymonowic's Idylls appeared at Zamość in 1614.

In December 1605 Sigismund married Constance of Austria, sister of his late first wife Anna and of the archduke who would become Emperor Ferdinand II. She built a Habsburg faction at once, marrying her ladies to powerful nobles and steering appointments, and bore him Jan Kazimierz and Karol Ferdynand, the brothers who would contest the throne in 1648.

Urszula Meierin had come to Poland in 1592 in the household of Sigismund's first queen. She brought up the royal children, ran the court's purse under Constance and sat in on audiences, and she used her hold on the king to place favourites. Nobles called her a 'minister in a skirt'; the royal secretary Jan Szczęsny Herburt called her an obscene favourite.

Mikołaj Zebrzydowski, voivode of Kraków and a Catholic, took up the opposition once Zamoyski, who had always refused to take arms against the crown, died in June 1605. In 1606 he called the nobility to a rokosz, a lawful armed protest. Its articles accused Sigismund of favouring Jesuits and foreigners and of reaching for absolute power, and demanded his deposition.

The elder Janusz Radziwiłł, Piorun's son and Ostrogski's grandson, a Calvinist with a grievance against the king, joined Zebrzydowski and was made marshal of the rebel assembly at Lublin in 1606. Catholic and Calvinist rebels stood together: the quarrel was about power more than faith.

Jan Szczęsny Herburt, once Zamoyski's man and the king's secretary, turned against Sigismund and wrote for the rebels. After the royal victory at Guzów he was seized and held prisoner from 1607 to 1609.

Stanisław Żółkiewski, field hetman of the Crown, had been Zamoyski's protégé, was related to the Zebrzydowskis and shared some of the rebels' complaints. He still sided with the king, and in July 1607 he and Chodkiewicz beat the rebels at Guzów. At the Sejm of 1609 the king accepted the rebels' apologies and punished none of them.

A young man claiming to be Dmitry, the son of Ivan the Terrible who had died at Uglich in 1591, turned up in the Commonwealth around 1603, first at Ostrogski's court, then with the Wiśniowiecki princes. In March 1604 Sigismund received him in Kraków and gave him quiet backing but no army; the pretender became a Catholic to win the Jesuits.

Jerzy Mniszech, voivode of Sandomierz, took the pretender under his protection, won the king's tacit consent and raised his army near Lwów, commanding it himself when it crossed into Muscovy in October 1604. Dmitry promised to marry his daughter Maryna, to give her Novgorod and Pskov, and to give Mniszech Smolensk and a million złoty.

The invasion made slow headway against Tsar Boris Godunov until, on 23 April 1605, Boris died suddenly. His sixteen-year-old son Feodor lasted weeks: the boyars deposed him on 1 June and the Godunovs were killed. On 20 June the pretender rode into Moscow, and in July he was crowned Tsar Dmitry.

Maryna Mniszech was married to Dmitry by proxy in Kraków in November 1605, with Sigismund present, and in person in Moscow on 8 May 1606, after a Polish embassy led by Mikołaj Oleśnicki and Aleksander Gosiewski had escorted her there. She was tsaritsa for nine days.

On 17 May 1606 the boyar Vasily Shuisky led the rising that stormed the Kremlin and killed Dmitry, then took the throne himself. Maryna and her father were spared and held in Muscovy. Killing the pretender did not break the networks behind him.

In July 1607 a second man calling himself Dmitry appeared at Starodub. Polish and Lithuanian soldiers of fortune flocked to him; in 1608 he beat Shuisky's army at Bolkhov and set up a rival court at Tushino outside Moscow. When Shuisky released the Mniszechs that year, Maryna went to Tushino and recognised him as her husband.

Aleksander Józef Lisowski had led a mutiny of unpaid troops from the Livonian war in 1604 and fought for the rokosz. After Guzów he was an outlaw at home, so in 1607 he took 200 men into the second Dmitry's service. His band grew into thousands and took Kolomna, Suzdal and Kostroma for the pretender.

Pressed by the second Dmitry, Shuisky signed an alliance with Charles IX at Vyborg in February 1609 and hired Swedish troops. Jacob De la Gardie led some 5,000 men, mostly Finns, toward Moscow with the tsar's young kinsman Mikhail Skopin-Shuisky, relieved the Trinity monastery and broke up the camp at Tushino. Sigismund's Swedish enemy was now inside Muscovy.

Sigismund took the Muscovite–Swedish pact as grounds for open war. In September 1609 he crossed the border with the royal army and laid siege to Smolensk, which Muscovy had taken from Lithuania in 1514. Many of the second Dmitry's Polish followers left Tushino to join him.

Lew Sapieha, Grand Chancellor of Lithuania, had wanted this war since 1607 as the moment to settle accounts with Moscow, and marched with the king. He soon lost faith in the siege and opened his own talks with Shuisky's boyars; after Klushino he worked hard, against the king's will, for Władysław's candidacy.

Żółkiewski, with a fraction of the army, met the Russian and Swedish relief force at Klushino on 4 July 1610. Most of De la Gardie's mercenaries went over to the Poles and the Russian army broke. The boyars deposed Shuisky, and Żółkiewski marched on Moscow to treat with them.

Prince Fyodor Mstislavsky led the Seven Boyars who ruled Moscow after Shuisky's fall. On 27 August 1610 they agreed with Żółkiewski to accept Sigismund's son Władysław as tsar, on condition that he become Orthodox, and in October they let Polish troops into the Kremlin. Mstislavsky would later chair the assembly that elected Michael Romanov.

Władysław, fifteen, was tsar-elect on condition that he become Orthodox and come to Moscow. Sigismund refused: he would not let his son convert, and meant to take Muscovy for himself and the Catholic Church. Władysław never went. He kept the title, and the claim, until 1634.

When Żółkiewski left Moscow in the autumn of 1610, taking the deposed Shuisky to Poland, Aleksander Gosiewski, Sapieha's former client, took command of the garrison. As the boyars' deal collapsed, Moscow rose in March 1611; the garrison fired whole districts in the street fighting and most of the city burned. In 1612 Gosiewski handed the Kremlin to Mikołaj Struś and went home.

In the autumn of 1611 Kuzma Minin, a butcher of Nizhny Novgorod chosen by the townsmen to manage their money, raised and paid for a new militia to free Moscow. The townsmen offered its command to Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, who was recovering from wounds taken in the March rising.

Pozharsky took the command on condition that Minin stay beside him to run its money. In August 1612 the militia reached Moscow just as Chodkiewicz arrived with a supply column for the starving Kremlin; in four days of fighting, with Dmitry Trubetskoy's Cossacks, they turned him back.

Mikołaj Struś, a colonel who had fought at Klushino, commanded the Kremlin garrison from June 1612. With Chodkiewicz beaten off and his men starving to the point of cannibalism, he agreed to terms, and on 7 November 1612 the garrison surrendered; the besiegers' Cossacks killed many of the prisoners, and Struś was held captive in the Chudov monastery.

In February 1613 an assembly of the land, with Mstislavsky in the chair, elected sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov tsar. His father, Filaret, was still a prisoner in Poland. The new dynasty sat on the throne Władysław still claimed.

Meletius Smotrytsky, son of the rector of Ostrogski's academy at Ostroh, schooled there and at the Jesuit academy in Vilnius, joined the Orthodox brotherhood of Vilnius. In 1610 he published Thrēnos, the lament of the Eastern Church over her degenerate sons, in Polish under the name Theophil Orthologus. Sigismund read it in the camp before Smolensk and ordered the edition seized and its author arrested.

Władysław still called himself tsar. In 1617 he marched on Moscow to make the claim good, with Chodkiewicz in real command and Lew Sapieha among his councillors. Short of money and men, he sent Sapieha back to the Sejm of 1618, which gave him less than he hoped for.

In 1618 Petro Sahaidachny, hetman of the Zaporozhian Host, led some 20,000 Cossacks north, taking Livny and Yelets on the way, and joined Władysław outside Moscow. Their night assault on the city on 10–11 October failed.

Sapieha reached the camp in October and took part in the talks; Jakub Sobieski was among those who signed. The truce of 11 December 1618 gave the Commonwealth Smolensk and the Chernihiv and Seversk lands for fourteen and a half years and exchanged prisoners, so that Michael Romanov's father Filaret came home to rule beside his son. Władysław kept his claim.

Anna Vasa, Sigismund's sister, a Lutheran at a Catholic court, was made starosta of Brodnica in 1605 and of Golub in 1611, revenues that kept her own court. She studied herbal medicine, kept her own apothecary and paid to print the work of a Kraków botanist.

Szymon Syreński (Syrenius), physician and professor at the Kraków Academy, spent some thirty years on a Polish herbal describing 765 plants. He sent it to the printer in 1611 and died that March; dedicated to Anna and paid for by her, it appeared in 1613.

When Pociej died in July 1613, Joseph Velamin Rutsky, a convert from Calvinism, succeeded him as Uniate metropolitan. He built the Uniate church from its monasteries, reorganising the Basilian monks, and promoted his closest disciple.

Josaphat Kuntsevych, a merchant's apprentice in Vilnius whom Rutsky had drawn into the union, became a monk, then in 1617 coadjutor and in 1618 Archbishop of Polotsk. He set out to win the towns by taking over their churches, closing Orthodox ones and using the king's officials against the dissenters.

In October 1615 Halshka Hulevychivna, a Volhynian noblewoman once married to Pociej's son Krzysztof, gave her house and land in Kyiv for an Orthodox monastery, a hospital and a school for children of all estates. The Kyiv brotherhood grew around her gift.

Job Boretsky, who had taught at the Lviv brotherhood school, became the first rector of the Kyiv school in 1615–18, then abbot of St Michael's monastery. He drew the Cossack hetman Sahaidachny to the brotherhood; in 1620 Sahaidachny and the whole Zaporozhian Host enrolled in it.

In August 1619 Constance's brother Ferdinand of Habsburg was elected emperor while Bohemia was in revolt against him. That autumn Gabriel Bethlen's Transylvanians took Pressburg and, with the Bohemian rebels, closed on Vienna.

Sigismund kept the Commonwealth out of the war but let the Lisowczycy, the mercenary band Lisowski had built before his death in 1616, ride to his brother-in-law's aid. Under Walenty Rogowski they beat Bethlen's commander George Rákóczi at Humenné on 22–23 November 1619, and Bethlen had to abandon the siege of Vienna.

Gabriel Bethlen, Calvinist Prince of Transylvania and the sultan's vassal, made peace with Ferdinand in January 1620 and asked Sultan Osman II for help against the Commonwealth whose horsemen had struck him. The sultan agreed; Cossack raids on Ottoman shores and Polish meddling in Moldavia had already strained the peace.

Gaspar Graziani, a Dalmatian-born diplomat the sultan had made Prince of Moldavia in 1619, opened talks with Sigismund for an alliance. When the Porte ordered him removed he massacred the envoy sent to depose him and called on the Crown hetmans. He brought only a handful of troops, and his own boyars murdered him in his flight in September 1620.

Żółkiewski, seventy-three, grand hetman and grand chancellor since 1618, took a small army into Moldavia with his field hetman Koniecpolski. At Cecora on the Prut, from 17 September 1620, an Ottoman–Tatar army besieged their camp; Bethlen's Transylvanians were in it. The retreat broke on 6–7 October; Żółkiewski was killed and his head sent to the sultan.

Iskender Pasha, beylerbey of Özi (Ochakiv), commanded the Ottoman and Tatar army at Cecora. His victory let Tatar raiders loose on Podolia and Volhynia and persuaded Osman II, urged on by Bethlen, to march the next year with the main Ottoman army.

Stanisław Koniecpolski, field hetman of the Crown and Żółkiewski's son-in-law, was taken prisoner in the rout and held in the Seven Towers at Istanbul. Among the captives was a young Cossack, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, whose father had died in the battle. The Crown had lost both its hetmans at a stroke.

In 1621 Osman II led the main Ottoman army north in person to punish the Commonwealth. Chodkiewicz entrenched at Khotyn on the Dniester and waited for the Cossacks; from 2 September the sultan's assaults broke on the camp.

Chodkiewicz died in the camp on 24 September, worn out, and his second in command, Stanisław Lubomirski, held it for the last two weeks. Exhausted and short of food, Osman agreed to talk; the Treaty of Khotyn of 9 October left the border on the Dniester and Moldavia to the sultan. In 1622 the janissaries he blamed for the failure deposed and killed him.

Jakub Sobieski, a Sejm deputy who had signed the Deulino truce, served in the camp as the Sejm's commissioner to Chodkiewicz and kept a Latin diary of the siege, printed in 1646, on which Wacław Potocki later built his epic of Khotyn. His son Jan would be king.

Unregistered Cossacks angry at the Rastavytsia settlement of 1619 unseated Sahaidachny and made Yakiv Borodavka hetman. He held the mace from mid-1620, raided Moldavia after Cecora, and in June 1621 a Cossack council confirmed him and agreed to fight the Ottomans if the Commonwealth paid them and freed their church.

Sahaidachny went to Warsaw with the Cossacks' terms, then to Khotyn, where he found Borodavka had not brought the army. Riding to fetch it he was wounded in an ambush; the Cossacks gave him back the mace, and on 1 September he brought some 40,000 men into the Dniester valley beside Chodkiewicz. During the siege the Cossacks beheaded Borodavka. Sahaidachny died in April 1622.

Theophanes III, Patriarch of Jerusalem, was travelling home from Moscow, where in June 1619 he had enthroned Filaret, freed by the Deulino truce, as patriarch. In Kyiv in 1620 Sahaidachny and his Cossacks welcomed him, and under their protection he consecrated a new Orthodox hierarchy for the Commonwealth, in secret and without the king's consent.

Theophanes consecrated Job Boretsky Metropolitan of Kyiv in 1620, with six bishops. The Commonwealth now had two hierarchies, Uniate and Orthodox, claiming the same sees, and the government treated the new one as unlawful. Boretsky defended it in his Protestation of 1621.

Smotrytsky was among the new bishops, made Orthodox Archbishop of Polotsk, the see Kuntsevych already held for the union. He rallied the towns of the archdiocese against Kuntsevych, and by 1621 they had all turned against the Uniate archbishop.

Gustavus Adolphus, Charles IX's son and king since 1611, struck while the Commonwealth's army was at Khotyn. He landed near Pärnu in August 1621 and took Riga on 25 September, the great Livonian port Chodkiewicz had saved at Kircholm.

Krzysztof Radziwiłł, Piorun's younger son, field hetman of Lithuania since 1615 and a Calvinist opponent of Sigismund, had some 1,500 men against the Swedes. In November 1622 he signed a truce at Mitau without the king's or the Sejm's leave, which deepened his quarrel with Sigismund.

In July 1625 Sigismund gave the grand hetmanship of Lithuania not to the field hetman Radziwiłł but to Lew Sapieha, now sixty-eight and no soldier, whose wife was Piorun's daughter. Sapieha left the fighting to deputies; his son's defeat at Walmojza in January 1626 pushed him toward another truce.

With two archbishops claiming Polotsk, Kuntsevych pressed harder, seizing churches and having Orthodox priests arrested. In March 1622 Lew Sapieha, himself a champion of the union, wrote to rebuke him for violence that endangered the state. On 12 November 1623, at Vitebsk, Orthodox townspeople killed him with an axe and threw his body into the Dvina.

In January 1624 Sapieha presided over the royal commission at Vitebsk. It sentenced 93 people to death, most of them in their absence, confiscated property, pulled down the town hall and the Orthodox churches, and stripped the town of its rights, which were given back only under the next king.

Smotrytsky left Polotsk after the murder for Constantinople and the Holy Land, by some accounts troubled by his share in the killing and by what he saw of the Orthodox patriarchates. Back in Kyiv in 1625, he was already turning toward the union with Rome he had attacked in Thrēnos.

Prince Krzysztof Zbaraski, Master of the Horse of the Crown, went to Istanbul as grand envoy in 1622 to confirm the Khotyn peace with the government that had killed Osman. His embassy, paid largely from his own purse, dazzled the city, and it ransomed the prisoners of Cecora for 30,000 thalers, Koniecpolski among them.

Samuel Twardowski rode with Zbaraski as secretary of the embassy and turned the journey into verse, The Important Embassy of Prince Krzysztof Zbaraski, printed in 1633. Contemporaries called him the Polish Virgil.

After Khotyn the Commonwealth, under pressure from the Porte, wanted the Cossacks back in their place: fewer on the paid register and no more raids on Ottoman lands. By 1625 thousands of Khotyn veterans stood outside the register, and Marko Zhmailo, their hetman, led some 20,000 of them against the Crown.

Koniecpolski, ransomed home in 1623, led a commission and then about 12,000 men against Zhmailo in the autumn of 1625. He caught the Cossack camp by Lake Kurukove on 26 October, but his cavalry charge bogged down in the marsh and the fight turned into a siege.

After days under siege the Cossack officers deposed Zhmailo and chose Mykhailo Doroshenko to negotiate. The Kurukove agreement of 5 November 1625 set the paid register at 6,000 under an elected hetman, granted amnesty and forbade raids on the Ottomans and dealings with foreign powers. Doroshenko kept it until 1628, when he died in Crimea fighting for Khan Mehmed III Giray.

In 1626 Gustavus landed at Pillau in Ducal Prussia, took the towns of the Vistula delta and set his ships to taxing the trade of Danzig, the Commonwealth's great grain port.

Arend Dickmann, a Delft-born shipmaster living in Danzig since 1608, entered Sigismund's service in 1626. Named admiral of the small royal fleet four days before the battle, he led it against the blockading squadron off Oliwa on 28 November 1627, captured the Swedish flagship Tigern and was killed aboard her by a cannonball. The blockade lifted, but not for long.

Koniecpolski had come north in the autumn of 1626. For three years he harried the Swedish lines with too few men to drive the invaders out.

Emperor Ferdinand sent an imperial corps under Hans Georg von Arnim, a Lutheran who had once fought for Gustavus against Russia. In June 1629 at Trzciana (Honigfelde) he and Koniecpolski routed the Swedish cavalry and nearly took Gustavus. Unpaid, Arnim's men mutinied or went home; two years later he fought beside Gustavus at Breitenfeld.

Axel Oxenstierna, Chancellor of Sweden, had raised the money and men for the Prussian landing and, as governor-general of occupied Prussia from 1626, turned conquest into revenue. The Prussian tolls he collected would help pay for Sweden's war in Germany.

Hercule de Charnacé, Richelieu's envoy, came to bring the two kingdoms to terms, so that Gustavus could turn on the Habsburgs in Germany. He helped broker the truce, and in 1631 negotiated the alliance under which France paid part of the cost of Gustavus's army.

Jakub Zadzik, Bishop of Chełmno and Grand Chancellor from 1628, led the Commonwealth's delegation; Jakub Sobieski kept its diary. At Altmark on 26 September 1629 they signed a six-year truce: Sweden kept Riga and Livonia north of the Daugava, the Prussian coastal towns and two thirds of the tolls of the Commonwealth's ports. Gustavus took his army into Germany the next summer.

Petro Mohyla, son of the Moldavian prince Simion Movilă and nephew of Ieremia, had grown up in Żółkiewski's household after his father's murder in 1607. He turned to the church, and by 1628 was archimandrite of the Kyiv Caves Monastery, the leading Orthodox house in the Commonwealth.

In July 1627 Smotrytsky secretly submitted to Rome. Hiding his conversion, he urged the Orthodox bishops, Boretsky and Mohyla among them, toward reunion. At the Kyiv council of 1628, where Cossacks threatened him with death, his arguments were rejected and he was accused of heresy. He ended his days in the Uniate monastery of Derman, a titular archbishop.

Hryhorii Chornyi led the registered Cossacks after Doroshenko's death, recognised by the Crown while the unregistered majority looked to Taras Fedorovych. In early 1630, on Koniecpolski's instructions and with the royal commissioner Adam Kysil, he struck 300 Zaporozhians off the register.

In March 1630 Taras Fedorovych, hetman of the unregistered Cossacks, led some 10,000 men up from the Sich. They seized Chornyi, tried him before a Cossack court and executed him, overran the Crown troops quartered in the Dnieper towns and made Pereiaslav their base.

Koniecpolski crossed the Dnieper against them with an army stiffened by German mercenaries, sacking rebel towns on his way. Three weeks of fighting around Pereiaslav brought neither side victory, and he opened talks with the Cossack officers.

The Pereiaslav agreement of 1630 raised the paid register from 6,000 to 8,000 and kept Kurukove's restraints. Taras and the dissatisfied left for the Sich; the officers who had settled elected Tymish Orendarenko hetman, and Koniecpolski confirmed him.

Sigismund died in Warsaw on 30 April 1632, forty-five years a king and thirty-three years a claimant to Sweden. The crown was elective, so his death opened an interregnum.

On 8 November 1632 the nobles elected his eldest son, Władysław IV. More tolerant than his father, he agreed that year, urged by Orthodox nobles such as Adam Kysil, to give the Orthodox church back its lawful hierarchy, removed the sitting Orthodox metropolitan and had Petro Mohyla chosen in his place.

Moscow struck during the interregnum. In October 1632 Mikhail Shein, who had held Smolensk against Sigismund in 1609–11 and then spent years a prisoner in Poland, laid siege to it again for Tsar Michael. Aleksander Gosiewski, the old Kremlin commander, now voivode of Smolensk, held it against him for ten months.

Krzysztof Radziwiłł, field hetman of Lithuania and a supporter of the new king, spent months around the besieged city with Lithuania's weak army, slipping men and supplies inside until the king arrived, then helped close the ring on Shein. In 1635 Władysław made him the grand hetman Sigismund had passed over.

Władysław marched east himself, broke the siege in the autumn of 1633 and surrounded Shein's army. Shein surrendered in February 1634 and was executed in Moscow. That June, at Polyanovka, Władysław gave up his claim to the tsar's throne for 20,000 roubles and kept Smolensk.

Elected metropolitan in Warsaw in 1632 and consecrated at Lviv in 1633, Mohyla merged his Latin school at the Caves Monastery with the brotherhood school Hulevychivna had endowed, founding the Kyiv college that would carry his name. He wanted an Orthodox church that could answer Rome with its own learning and printing.

Sylvester Kosiv, a Ruthenian noble schooled at Vilnius, Lublin and Zamość, came at Mohyla's request to teach in the new school and became its prefect. In 1635 he defended its Latin learning in his Exegesis and became Bishop of Mstsislaw, the only Orthodox see in the Grand Duchy.

Gustavus Adolphus was killed at Lützen in 1632, leaving his daughter Christina, not yet six, queen of Sweden. A regency led by Axel Oxenstierna governed for her, with Sweden's armies tied down in Germany and weakened after Nördlingen in 1634.

Richelieu sent Claude de Mesmes, comte d'Avaux, to keep Poland from reopening the war on Sweden's flank, since France needed Swedish arms in Germany. He guided the talks that Chancellor Jakub Zadzik led for the Commonwealth, with Krzysztof Radziwiłł beside him.

At Stuhmsdorf (Sztumska Wieś) on 12 September 1635 the Altmark truce was extended by twenty-six and a half years. Sweden kept Riga and Livonia north of the Daugava but gave back the Prussian ports, a better bargain than Altmark, though not the Swedish crown Władysław had hoped to win.

Koniecpolski, grand hetman of the Crown since 1632, meant to cut the Zaporozhian Sich off from the settled lands. In 1635 he built a fortress at Kodak on the Dnieper rapids, commissioning the French engineer Guillaume de Beauplan to construct it.

Ivan Sulyma, hetman of the unregistered Cossacks and a raider of the Ottoman coast, came back from the Black Sea in August 1635, stormed Kodak by night, killed its garrison of about 200 mercenaries under Jean Marion and razed it. Registered officers then seized him and handed him over; he was executed in Warsaw that December.

In 1637 Pavlo Pavliuk (Pavlo But), a registered colonel, raised the unregistered Cossacks after men were struck off the register. He killed registered officers, seized their artillery and called on 'all Christians' to rise against the lords.

Mikołaj Potocki, field hetman of the Crown from 1637, with loyal registered Cossacks beside him, broke Pavliuk's army at Kumeyky on 16 December. The rest surrendered at Borovytsia on 24 December on his word that they would be spared; Pavliuk was nonetheless taken to Warsaw and executed. The Host's scribe at the time was Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

In March 1638 the Sejm cut the register to 6,000, abolished the Cossacks' elected hetman and senior offices, put a Crown commissioner and noble officers over them, and declared Cossacks outside the register no better than peasants. Khmelnytsky lost his post and became a captain of the Chyhyryn regiment.

That spring Yakiv Ostrianyn, a registered colonel in the Smolensk war, led the unregistered out of Zaporizhia and called the Ruthenian people to arms. Beaten at Zhovnyn, he crossed into Muscovy with his followers and settled at Chuhuiv, where Cossacks killed him in a mutiny in 1641.

Dmytro Hunia, elected hetman after Zhovnyn, held a fortified camp on the Starets river against Potocki and Jeremi Wiśniowiecki through the summer of 1638. When it capitulated the Ordinance was enforced, and Hunia escaped to Muscovy.

In 1637 Władysław married Cecilia Renata, Emperor Ferdinand II's daughter and his own first cousin, chosen for him by the nobility. She joined Jerzy Ossoliński's pro-Habsburg circle and set herself against the king's boyhood friend Adam Kazanowski.

Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, an artillery captain in the Crown army from 1630, served under Koniecpolski in Ukraine, rebuilt Kodak in 1639 and fortified Bar. His surveys became the General Map of Ukraine of 1648 and a Description of Ukraine, first printed in 1651 and reprinted across Europe.

Adam Kazanowski, raised with Władysław and his companion on the Muscovite and Khotyn campaigns, grew to be the richest man in Poland on the king's favour, court chamberlain in 1637 and court marshal in 1643. Cecilia Renata's marriage cut his influence, and he sided with her enemies at court.

Cecilia Renata died in 1644. In 1645 Władysław married Marie Louise Gonzaga, a French princess of the Nevers line; the marriage was cold, but she gathered her own party at court and would be queen to two kings.

Jerzy Ossoliński, deputy chancellor from 1639 and Grand Chancellor from 1643, was one of the few who backed Władysław's secret plan for a war on the Ottomans, which needed money, troops and the Cossacks. In 1646 the Sejm, with Grand Hetman Potocki among the opponents, forced the king to disband the troops he had begun to raise.

Kazimierz Siemienowicz, a Lithuanian artillery engineer who had served the Dutch at the siege of Hulst, was called home in 1646 for the Ottoman war, and in 1648 became deputy to the general of the Crown artillery. With the war abandoned, Jan Kazimierz sent him back to the Netherlands, where in 1650 he published Artis magnae artilleriae, with its multistage rockets.

Daniel Czapliński, deputy starosta of Chyhyryn and a protégé of the young magnate Aleksander Koniecpolski, wanted Khmelnytsky's farm at Subotiv and the woman who lived there. In 1647 he raided it, had Khmelnytsky's son beaten in the Chyhyryn market and took Helena for himself; with Koniecpolski shielding him, neither the courts nor the king gave redress.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Host's former scribe, now a captain of the Chyhyryn regiment, had been taken prisoner with Koniecpolski at Cecora in 1620. The king's abandoned war had promised the Cossacks a larger register, and he knew of the royal letters. Late in 1647 Aleksander Koniecpolski ordered him seized and put to death.

Mykhailo Krychevsky, colonel of Chyhyryn since 1643 and godfather to one of Khmelnytsky's children, stood surety for him and won his release. In December 1647 Khmelnytsky took copies of the king's letters on the Turkish war from the registered officer Ivan Barabash and fled to the Sich.

Mikołaj Potocki, grand hetman since Stanisław Koniecpolski's death in 1646, with Marcin Kalinowski as his field hetman, marched in the spring of 1648, against the king's orders, to crush the fugitive before the Sich could rise.

John Amos Comenius, bishop of the Unity of the Brethren, had led his church into exile from Bohemia in 1627 and found refuge at Leszno in Great Poland, where he headed the gymnasium. His textbooks made him famous across Europe; in 1638 Sweden asked him to plan its schools.

Johannes Hevelius, of a Danzig brewing family, taught at the city's gymnasium by Peter Crüger, became an alderman of the Old Town in 1641 and that year built an observatory on the roofs of his houses. His Selenographia of 1647 mapped the Moon in detail, and in 1664 the Royal Society in London made him a fellow.

Islam III Giray, once a captive in Poland, had become khan in 1644 when the sultan deposed his brother Mehmed. In March 1648 Khmelnytsky came to him in Crimea and won an alliance that gave the Cossack infantry the cavalry it lacked; the khan's men took their reward in plunder and captives.

Tugay Bey, bey of Perekop, whose raiders Koniecpolski had routed at Okhmativ in 1644, led the Tatar horsemen beside the Cossacks. In May 1648 they fought together at Zhovti Vody and Korsun.

Elected hetman at the Sich in January 1648, Khmelnytsky marched north that spring with his Cossacks and the khan's Tatars to meet the Crown army.

Stefan Potocki, the grand hetman's son, in his mid-twenties, led the Crown vanguard down toward the Sich. At Zhovti Vody the registered Cossacks with him went over to Khmelnytsky and his camp was overrun on 16 May; Stefan Czarniecki was among the prisoners. Wounded and captured, Potocki died of gangrene three days later.

Ten days later, on 25–26 May, the Cossacks and Tatars caught the main Crown army at Korsun and took both hetmans, Mikołaj Potocki and Marcin Kalinowski, who were handed to the Tatars and led off to Crimea. Days before, Władysław had died in Lithuania.

With no Crown army left, the rising spread across the Dnieper lands. Maksym Kryvonis, one of Khmelnytsky's colonels, led peasant bands against noble towns; at Tulchyn his men killed some 1,500 Jews, and Jewish chroniclers remembered him as the worst of the killers. His regiment later took the High Castle of Lviv, and he died at the siege of Zamość that autumn.

Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki, voivode of Ruthenia and grandson of Ieremia Movilă, raised Orthodox but a Catholic since 1632, led his private army out of his vast lands east of the Dnieper and fought his way west, taking savage vengeance on the rising's supporters. He resented being passed over for command.

With both hetmans prisoners and the king dead, a council of senators called by Chancellor Ossoliński on 9 June named three joint commanders instead of new hetmans, and sent Adam Kysil to negotiate. The first was Prince Władysław Dominik Zasławski, heir to the Ostrogski lands, whom Khmelnytsky mocked as 'the featherbed'.

Mikołaj Ostroróg, Crown cupbearer and a learned Sejm orator, was the second; Khmelnytsky called him 'the Latinist'. Divided command ended in disaster at Pyliavtsi in September 1648, when the Crown army broke and fled, leaving its wagons to the Cossacks.

The third was Aleksander Koniecpolski, Stanisław's son, Crown standard-bearer at twenty-eight and Czapliński's protector, Khmelnytsky's 'child'. After Pyliavtsi the road west lay open, and Khmelnytsky besieged Lviv and Zamość before turning back.

Władysław had died at Merkinė on 20 May 1648, his only son already dead. His half-brother Karol Ferdynand, Bishop of Wrocław and Płock, stood for the throne promising to crush the rising, with Wiśniowiecki, the Ruthenian nobles and most of the senators and bishops behind him.

His brother Jan Kazimierz, Constance's eldest son, had been a Jesuit and a cardinal and had spent two years in Richelieu's prison. Backed by Chancellor Ossoliński, he was elected on 17 November 1648; Karol Ferdynand took the duchies of Opole and Racibórz. In 1649 the new king married his brother's widow, Marie Louise.

Adam Kysil, an Orthodox Ruthenian senator schooled at Zamość, had persuaded Władysław to restore the Orthodox hierarchy, and since 1648 had been the Commonwealth's chief negotiator with Khmelnytsky. Made voivode of Kyiv in 1649, he looked for a settlement both sides could accept, against magnates like Wiśniowiecki who wanted only war.

In July 1649 Khmelnytsky and the khan shut Wiśniowiecki and the Crown troops up in the castle of Zbarazh. They held out for six weeks, until 22 August; Daniel Czapliński was the first messenger to slip out to the king.

Jan Kazimierz marched to relieve Zbarazh and was caught crossing the Strypa at Zboriv on 15 August. That night he wrote to Islam Giray, reminding him of the kindness he had known in Poland as a captive and offering money, and the khan made his own bargain.

On 18 August 1649 Khmelnytsky had to settle on the khan's terms: a register of 40,000, the Kyiv, Bratslav and Chernihiv voivodeships under Cossack rule with their offices reserved for the Orthodox, Jews barred from Cossack towns, and amnesty for nobles who had joined the rising. Ossoliński helped shape it. It did not hold.

In June 1651 the king met Khmelnytsky and the khan at Berestechko. On the third day the Tatars fled, Tugay Bey among the dead, and the khan carried Khmelnytsky off with him. The leaderless camp held out until Colonel Ivan Bohun took command on 9 July and began a crossing of the marshes; it turned into a rout.

Mikołaj Potocki, freed from Tatar captivity in 1650, made peace with Khmelnytsky at Bila Tserkva on 28 September 1651: the register halved to 20,000 and confined to the Kyiv voivodeship, and the nobles allowed back to their estates. Potocki died that November; the Sejm never ratified the treaty.

Janusz Radziwiłł, Krzysztof's son and field hetman of Lithuania since 1646, a Calvinist married to Maria, daughter of Moldavia's prince Vasile Lupu, held Lithuania's southern front. He beat the Cossacks at Mazyr in February 1649 and pushed south toward Kyiv, threatening Khmelnytsky's rear.

Khmelnytsky sent his friend Krychevsky, captured in 1648 and now a commander of the rising, to stop him. At Loyew on the Dnieper on 31 July 1649 Radziwiłł, with Wincenty Gosiewski as his deputy, destroyed Krychevsky's army; Krychevsky, mortally wounded and taken, died on 3 August before he could be tried.

When war returned in 1651, Radziwiłł won a second battle at Loyew in July and took Kyiv on 4 August, while Khmelnytsky's main army was beaten in the west.

Nathan Hannover, a Jewish scholar at Zaslav in Volhynia, fled when the Cossacks attacked the town and became a refugee in Prague and then Venice. There in 1653 he published Yeven Metzulah, 'The Deep Mire', a Hebrew chronicle of the rising and the destruction of Jewish communities. It shaped Jewish memory of 1648, though historians now think its figures too high.

Hieronim Radziejowski, Crown deputy chancellor, had married Adam Kazanowski's widow, Elżbieta Słuszka. In 1651 the king read a letter in which Radziejowski accused him of an affair with her; stripped of office, he fought her family for her property, and in 1652 the Sejm court condemned him to infamy and exile. He went to Vienna, then to Queen Christina's court in Stockholm.

The Sejm that sat in Warsaw from January to March 1652 had the Bila Tserkva treaty and the taxes for the war before it. Its marshal was Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro. When its term ran out on 11 March with the business unfinished, the chamber was asked to sit on.

Władysław Siciński, a Lithuanian deputy from Upytė in the Trakai voivodeship, objected to the extension and left. The chamber accepted that it could not go on against his protest, and the Sejm broke up without passing a single act. It was remembered as the first liberum veto; within twenty years one voice could break a whole Sejm.

Khmelnytsky wanted a dynasty. His elder son Tymish, twenty, was to marry Ruxandra, daughter of Moldavia's prince Vasile Lupu, whose other daughter was Janusz Radziwiłł's wife. In 1652 Tymish rode for Moldavia with a Cossack army and Tatar allies to claim her.

Marcin Kalinowski, field hetman of the Crown, tried to bar the road at Batih. On 1–2 June 1652 the Cossacks and Tatars surrounded his camp; he was killed with his son Samuel, Ossoliński's son-in-law, and thousands of captured soldiers were put to death.

Vasile Lupu, Prince of Moldavia since 1634 and one of the richest rulers in the Christian East, gave Ruxandra to Tymish that summer. The match alarmed his neighbours: in 1653 his chancellor Gheorghe Ștefan, backed by George II Rákóczi of Transylvania and Matei Basarab of Wallachia, drove him out.

Tymish marched into Moldavia to restore his father-in-law, lost the battle of Finta and was besieged in Suceava. He died of his wounds there on 15 September 1653, and Khmelnytsky's Moldavian dynasty died with him.

Tsar Alexei, Michael Romanov's son, had long been asked by Khmelnytsky for protection. On 1 October 1653 an assembly of the land in Moscow agreed to take the Zaporozhian Host under the tsar and to go to war with the Commonwealth.

The boyar Vasily Buturlin led the tsar's embassy to Pereiaslav. On 18 January 1654 Khmelnytsky and his officers swore allegiance to the tsar; when they asked Buturlin to swear in turn, for the tsar, to keep their rights, he refused. Some colonels, Ivan Bohun among them, would not take the oath. The terms were settled in Moscow in the March Articles.

In the summer of 1654 the tsar's armies invaded Lithuania. Janusz Radziwiłł, made grand hetman in June, could not stop them; Smolensk fell on 23 September, and the gains of 1618 were gone.

Sylvester Kosiv, Mohyla's successor as metropolitan since 1647, had welcomed Khmelnytsky into Kyiv in January 1649. But he condemned the Pereiaslav agreement and would not put the Kyiv church under Moscow: Orthodox faith did not make him the tsar's man.

Queen Christina, who would not marry and was drawn to Catholicism, abdicated in 1654 in favour of her cousin Charles X Gustav and left for Rome.

Charles X Gustav came to a throne Jan Kazimierz still claimed, and found the Commonwealth at war with Moscow and the Cossacks. In July 1655 he invaded.

Radziejowski had urged him to attack, first at Stockholm and then at Hamburg, where the two made a pact, and he helped draw up a plan for an anti-Polish alliance of Sweden, the Cossacks and Transylvania. He rode with the invading army.

Arvid Wittenberg, a Finnish-born field marshal, led the first Swedish army in from Pomerania. At Ujście on the Noteć, on 24–25 July 1655, he met the levy of Greater Poland.

Krzysztof Opaliński, voivode of Poznań, a satirist who had attacked the Commonwealth's abuses in his Satyry of 1650 and an opponent of Jan Kazimierz, commanded there with Andrzej Grudziński. After a few hours' fighting they put Greater Poland under the Swedish king's protection. Opaliński died that December.

As Charles took Warsaw in September and Kraków in October, the Crown army went over: Aleksander Koniecpolski with some 5,000 men on 26 October, then the grand hetman Stanisław Rewera Potocki and the field hetman Stanisław Lanckoroński with 10,000 on 28 October. One of Koniecpolski's colonels who swore to the Swedish king was the young Jan Sobieski.

Janusz Radziwiłł could not hold Lithuania. On 8 August 1655 he fought at Vilnius to cover its evacuation; the tsar's army took the city and Alexei styled himself Grand Duke of Lithuania. Radziwiłł and his cousin Bogusław opened talks with Sweden.

At Kėdainiai on 17 August Radziwiłł put the Grand Duchy under Swedish protection, and on 20 October he signed a union recognising Charles X as Grand Duke of Lithuania. The step turned most of the Commonwealth's nobles against him.

Bogusław Radziwiłł, Lithuanian equerry, son of the elder Janusz and of a Brandenburg princess, negotiated with Charles X beside his cousin; the Swedes were to carve two duchies for the Radziwiłłs out of Lithuania. When Janusz died besieged in Tykocin on 31 December 1655, Bogusław took his men into Ducal Prussia to the elector.

Wincenty Gosiewski, field hetman of Lithuania since 1654 and son of the old Kremlin commander, first accepted Kėdainiai, then turned against it and made contact with the Muscovites. Radziwiłł had him arrested and handed over to Swedish custody in Prussia.

In November 1655 a Swedish force came to the Pauline monastery of Jasna Góra at Częstochowa. Its prior, Augustyn Kordecki, refused to admit a garrison, and some three hundred defenders held out until the Swedes withdrew on 27 December. The siege became a rallying cry for a Catholic resistance.

Two days later, on 29 December, Rewera Potocki and Lanckoroński, the Crown hetmans who had submitted in October, formed the Confederation of Tyszowce to fight for Jan Kazimierz and called all estates to arms. The king came back from Silesia to his army.

Stefan Czarniecki, who had defended Kraków until October 1655, waged a war of raids on the Swedish columns through the winter and spring. On 7 April 1656 at Warka he beat the margrave of Baden's relief force, and in June the king's army retook Warsaw. Jan Sobieski, who had left the Swedes in March, rode with him.

Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia under the Polish crown, joined Charles X in June 1656, and their armies beat the king's outside Warsaw on 28–30 July. In November Charles bought him with sovereignty over Prussia at Labiau.

Leopold, King of Hungary and emperor from 1658, renewed the Habsburg alliance at Vienna on 27 May 1657: 12,000 troops, paid by the Commonwealth, with Kraków and Poznań held in pawn. His army entered southern Poland that summer and retook Kraków.

On news of the Vienna alliance, Frederick III of Denmark declared war on Sweden on 1 June 1657. Charles X marched most of his army west out of Poland, and by February 1658 he had forced Denmark to the Peace of Roskilde.

Frederick William changed sides again. At Wehlau in September 1657 Jan Kazimierz, like Sweden before him, granted him Ducal Prussia in full sovereignty, confirmed at Bromberg that autumn with Wincenty Gosiewski among the king's negotiators, and the elector joined the Commonwealth. The Polish crown's overlordship of Prussia, held since 1525, was gone.

With Janusz Radziwiłł dead, Jan Kazimierz made Paweł Jan Sapieha, voivode of Vitebsk, grand hetman of Lithuania in 1656. He drove the Swedes from Lublin and in 1657 took Tykocin castle, where Radziwiłł had died.

Gosiewski escaped from Prussian captivity in the spring of 1656 and raised troops. On 8 October, with Crimean Tatars, he crushed a Brandenburg–Swedish force at Prostki in Ducal Prussia, where the Tatars captured the wounded Bogusław Radziwiłł. A month later he signed a truce with the elector.

Alarmed by Sweden's gains, the tsar turned on Charles X and in November 1656 made a truce with the Commonwealth at Vilnius, leaving Khmelnytsky out of the talks. Enraged at what he saw as betrayal, Khmelnytsky sent troops to Sweden's ally Rákóczi instead.

Mehmed IV Giray, Islam Giray's brother, came back to the Crimean throne in 1654 and changed sides: Moscow's alliance with the Cossacks made the Commonwealth his partner. His Tatars fought beside Rewera Potocki against the Cossacks and Muscovites in early 1655, and beside Gosiewski at Prostki.

George II Rákóczi, Prince of Transylvania, signed the Treaty of Radnot with Charles X on 6 December 1656: Sweden, Brandenburg, Bogusław Radziwiłł, Khmelnytsky and Rákóczi, who was to be king of Poland, would share the Commonwealth. In January 1657 he crossed the Carpathians with 25,000 men, joined by 10,000 Cossacks, and in June took Warsaw with the Swedes.

Jerzy Sebastian Lubomirski, Grand Marshal of the Crown, son of the Khotyn commander and great-grandson of Ostrogski, raided Transylvania while Czarniecki pursued Rákóczi. Left by the Swedes and his Cossacks, Rákóczi capitulated to Lubomirski at Międzybóż on 23 July 1657. That year Lubomirski was made field hetman of the Crown.

Days later the khan's Tatars fell on Rákóczi's retreating army near Trembowla, took its camp on 31 July and drove some 11,000 Transylvanians into captivity. Rákóczi had already fled; his army ceased to exist.

When Charles X came, Comenius declared for the Protestant Swedes. In 1656 Polish partisans burned Leszno; he lost his house, his manuscripts and his school's press, and fled to Amsterdam. Opaliński's school at Sieraków had used his teaching materials since 1650.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky died at Chyhyryn on 6 August 1657, six weeks before Wehlau. His son Yurii, sixteen, had been named to succeed him, but within weeks the officers gave the mace to Ivan Vyhovsky.

Ivan Vyhovsky, an Orthodox Ruthenian noble taken prisoner at Zhovti Vody in 1648 who had become Khmelnytsky's general chancellor, was elected hetman in the autumn of 1657. Senior colonels who had hoped for the mace resented him.

Martyn Pushkar, colonel of Poltava since 1648 and himself a candidate for hetman, rose against Vyhovsky in 1657 with Yakiv Barabash and beat his Cossacks and Crimean allies more than once. He was killed in battle near Poltava on 1 June 1658.

Yurii Nemyrych, a rich Kyiv noble and a leader of the Polish Brethren who had served the Swedes and helped prepare the Radnot partition, joined Vyhovsky and drafted a new union with the Commonwealth. To make it work he formally became Orthodox.

Stanisław Kazimierz Bieniewski, castellan of Volhynia and an advocate of agreement with the Cossacks, negotiated for the king. At Hadiach on 16 September 1658 they agreed that the Kyiv, Bratslav and Chernihiv lands would become a Grand Duchy of Rus', a third partner beside the Crown and Lithuania, with its own hetman, chancellor, treasury and army, and Orthodoxy equal to Catholicism.

Moscow sent Prince Aleksei Trubetskoy, a boyar who had dealt with Khmelnytsky's envoys in 1654, with a large army, and in the spring of 1659 he besieged Konotop. On 29 June (Old Style) Vyhovsky and Khan Mehmed IV Giray, with Ivan Bohun among the colonels, destroyed his advance cavalry, and he lifted the siege.

Konotop did not save Vyhovsky. The Sejm had ratified Hadiach in May without the Grand Duchy of Rus'; regiments rose against him, Nemyrych was killed by rebels, and in October Vyhovsky fled to Poland. The officers elected Yurii Khmelnytsky, and under the guns of Trubetskoy's army he signed the Pereiaslav Articles, which put Muscovite garrisons in five more towns and forbade the hetman any foreign policy.

Jan Andrzej Morsztyn, born a Calvinist and educated at Leiden, who had risen at court through the patronage of the Lubomirskis, became royal secretary in 1656 and Crown referendary in 1658. His love lyrics and the Kanikuła of 1647 made him the leading poet of the Polish Baroque.

When Charles X fell on Denmark again in July 1658, Jan Kazimierz sent Czarniecki with a Polish army to the Danes' aid; he fought the Swedes in Jutland through 1658–59, at Kolding among other places.

Jan Chryzostom Pasek, a petty noble schooled by the Jesuits at Rawa who had enlisted at nineteen, rode in Czarniecki's army to Denmark and back. Some thirty years later he wrote memoirs of these campaigns whose racy soldier's speech made them a classic of Polish prose.

Queen Marie Louise, wife to both Władysław and Jan Kazimierz, had been central to the recovery from the Deluge. Now she wanted peace with Sweden: she hoped to have a son of her kinsman the Grand Condé chosen as Jan Kazimierz's successor, which needed France and its ally Sweden.

Antoine de Lumbres, French ambassador for the Polish and Swedish treaties since 1656, mediated the talks that opened at Thorn in the autumn of 1659; France wanted Sweden kept strong against the Habsburgs. When Charles X Gustav died at Gothenburg in February 1660, the talks moved fast.

At the abbey of Oliva near Danzig, on 3 May 1660, Jan Kazimierz renounced the Swedish crown his father had lost in 1599 and accepted Swedish Livonia with Riga and the elector's sovereignty in Ducal Prussia. The Commonwealth kept Latgale. Sixty years of Vasa claims to Sweden were over.

Prince Ivan Khovansky, commanding the tsar's armies in Lithuania, was besieging the fortress of Lyakhavichy in June 1660 when Paweł Jan Sapieha's Lithuanians and Czarniecki's Poles, freed by Oliva, came to relieve it.

On 28–29 June at Polonka, Czarniecki's dragoons and a hidden cavalry regiment broke Khovansky's army while Sapieha's Lithuanians held the flank, with Pasek among the riders. Lyakhavichy was saved and the Muscovites fell back, though Vilnius stayed in their hands until the end of 1661.

In the summer of 1660 the tsar sent Vasily Sheremetev, voivode of Kyiv, with some 15,000 Russians and his Cossack allies to strike at Lwów and Kraków. Underestimating the Crown army, he was surprised at Lyubar in mid-September and dug into a fortified camp, hoping to join Yurii Khmelnytsky's Cossacks.

Grand Hetman Rewera Potocki and Field Hetman Lubomirski, with some 12,000 Tatars and Vyhovsky's 1,500 Cossacks on their side, pinned Sheremetev near Chudniv while Lubomirski turned on Yurii's approaching army. After a clash at Slobodyshche on 7 October, which some historians think was staged, Yurii opened talks.

Jan Sobieski, Jakub's son and through his mother a great-grandson of Żółkiewski, had sworn to Charles X in 1655 and come back to the king in March 1656, who made him Crown standard-bearer. He fought at Lyubar and Slobodyshche, and was one of the four royal commissioners who signed the agreement with Yurii at Chudniv on 17 October.

By that agreement Yurii Khmelnytsky brought the Host back to the Commonwealth, largely on the Hadiach terms, though the Grand Duchy of Rus' was left for the king to confirm, and never was. Abandoned, Sheremetev surrendered on 4 November and was handed to the Tatars, who held him for twenty years.

The regiments east of the Dnieper would not follow Yurii. Yakym Somko, colonel of Pereiaslav and brother of Bohdan Khmelnytsky's first wife, opposed the agreement, kept the Left Bank loyal to the tsar with Vasyl Zolotarenko, and became its acting hetman. The Hetmanate was splitting along the Dnieper.