Sarmatism

views updated

SARMATISM

SARMATISM. Sarmatism grew out of Renaissance theories about the genealogy of the Slavs. It developed into a peculiarly Polish-Lithuanian way of viewing the world and the place of the Commonwealth in it, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it came to describe aspects of a way of life associated with the gentry. Sixteenth-century Polish historians, drawing on classical and medieval notions of geography and cartography, elaborated a myth of the Sarmatian homeland of the Slavs in general and the Poles in particular. The myth came to have several components; it identified Sarmatia with the Jagiellonian Commonwealth of the Two Nations and prized the Commonwealth's political system as superior to all others, and it limited the Sarmatian ethnogenesis to the political nation, that is, the gentry (or szlachta )of Poland-Lithuania, thus excluding the burghers and peasants, who were seen in extreme cases as members of another "nation."

Polish Sarmatism passed through a number of phases. In its initial period, from the reign of Stephen Báthory (ruled 1575–1586) to the death of Władysław IV (ruled 1632–1648), the original Renaissance components focusing on the historical genealogy of the Sarmatians were reworked in a new, baroque context. At first, Sarmatism—which divided the gentry from all other inhabitants of the Commonwealth—served to unite a multiethnic and multiconfessional "noble nation." We soon find, however, the beginnings of a new divide between the "foreign," cosmopolitan culture of the magnates and the nativist, peculiarly Sarmatian identity of the gentry, especially the middling and poorer gentry. This division would deepen in the second, peak period of the development of Sarmatism (from 1648 to the death of King John III Sobieski in 1696), with the growing servitude of the peasantry and the further weakening of the cities. In this period, the Sarmatian myth was consolidated, taking on mystical and messianic colorations. Sarmatism now became the way of life and the worldview of a traditional, exclusive, xenophobic, more decidedly Catholic landed gentry. It emphasized gentry hospitality, patriarchal values, grandiloquence, and ostentation. There were certain paradoxes here; for one, a nation that saw itself as the bulwark of Christendom (antemurale christianitatis) eagerly adapted eastern (Turkish or Tatar) elements in custom, dress, lifestyle, and language.

The zenith of Sarmatism coincided with the beginning of the decline of the Commonwealth. In fact, some later blamed the fall of Poland-Lithuania on certain aspects of Sarmatian culture—gentry anarchy, the overly jealous defense of personal freedom at the expense of royal power and the common weal, even gentry ostentation and love of speechifying. The rule of the Saxon kings Augustus II the Strong and Augustus III in Poland-Lithuania (1697–1763, a period later known as the "Saxon Night") was characterized by a certain "Sarmatian degeneracy." Reactions against Sarmatism that began in the 1740s (with Stanisław Konarski and other Piarists, as well as the Jesuit Franciszek Bohomolec) gained momentum under Poland's last king, Stanisław II August Poniatowski (ruled 1764–1795). There was a growing division between a western-looking reform movement, which followed models of the Enlightenment and included burghers and peasants in its purview, and a traditional, now backward, gentry, which still equated Sarmatian values with patriotism. The latter group was exemplified by the participants in the Confederation of Bar in 1768–1772.

Sarmatism lived on after the partitions, especially in petty gentry circles in the east (in Lithuania and Belarus, but also Ukraine), and it became the object of romantic nostalgia following the failed November Uprising (1830). Some still find elements of Sarmatian mentality in modern Polish worldviews.

See also Aristocracy and Gentry ; Augustus II the Strong (Saxony and Poland) ; National Identity ; Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795 ; Poland to 1569 ; Poniatowski, Stanisław II Augustus .