CLC

Czartoryski Library, Cracow

DAC

Dominican Archive, Cracow

JULC

Jagiellonian University Library, Cracow

PSB

Polski Słownik Biograficzny, Wroclaw–Warsaw–Cracow–Gdansk 1935–

Writing from Kielce on 18 October 1625 Marcin Szyszkowski, bishop of Cracow, addressed the Dominican prior of Cracow's Holy Trinity convent:

The bishop went on to censure the Dominicans for attacking the Jesuits in sermons, for undermining his authority and imperilling the public good as well as the divine cult, asking the friars to ‘be on their guard’ if they considered ‘such [behaviour] to be [compatible with true religious] perfection’.Footnote ² What had caused this rift and how should relations between the Dominicans and Jesuits in Poland-Lithuania at this time be characterised?Footnote ³ What light may they shed upon the nature and course of the Counter-Reformation there?Footnote ⁴ Historians have long identified the Society of Jesus as central to the post-Tridentine renewal of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of Catholic ‘resistance’ to them in Poland-Lithuania has never been adequately examined, with historians largely content to accept it as evidence of laxity on the part of the nobility. Yet the reality is far more complex. The period 1564–1648 was characterised by competing claims, visions and methods in the context of a long-term accommodation of clergy and laity (‘Compositio inter status’), integral to the propagation and appropriation of Catholicism; a conflict motivated by the challenge of integrating szlachta (noble) and Catholic identities. This article, contextualising and discussing the conflict between the Order of Preachers and Jesuits in Poland in this period, suggests an alternative to the traditional Jesuit-centred paradigm of the Counter-Reformation in Poland-Lithuania.Footnote ⁵

Since the mid-sixteenth century, the noble and clerical estates in Poland had been in conflict over numerous issues. The Protestant Reformation led to the dispersal of the property of the Catholic Church almost everywhere, but less so in Poland-Lithuania, where, before the Union of Lublin in 1569, the nobility already owned 60 per cent of land.Footnote ⁶ Anticlericalism focused rather on the failings of the parish clergy, often subject to stinging satires. The Church was certainly weak politically and noble power never more ascendant than when King Zygmunt ii August (1548–72), under pressure from the nobles, suspended church court jurisdiction over the laity in 1555, making the punishment of heresy impossible.Footnote ⁷ This measure facilitated the rapid growth of Protestantism, which gained legal toleration at the Confederation of Warsaw in 1573.Footnote ⁸ After the Council of Trent however, and the arrival of the Jesuits in 1564, the nobility found itself increasingly in conflict with an assertive Church, maintaining its status as the Commonwealth's official religion, and keen to reaffirm its rights and the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. The collection of tithes became a major issue in this context from 1578, as more and more nobles (Catholic and Protestant) were summoned before church courts for non-payment.Footnote ⁹ Many nobles opposed the alienation of property to the Church, increasingly frequent in the context of the massive growth of religious foundations,Footnote ¹⁰ and seen as a danger to the national defence, given that land was the main basis for raising and equipping soldiers.Footnote ¹¹ Persistent attempts were therefore made to compel church village officials to be liable for military service.Footnote ¹² For its part, the Church complained of the impoverishment of the parish clergy, noble exactions against church lands and illegal legislation on church matters. These and many other tensions, while never the sole preoccupation of noble politics, steadily escalated, coming to a head in the Sandomierz rokosz of 1606–8 – an armed confederation of some 50,000 nobles driven by many, and disparate, motivations.Footnote ¹³ The rokosz constituted the first of several attempts to reach a formal accommodation between the noble and clerical estates. The more general anticlerical grievances of the movement found outlet and specific vehemence in its attack upon the Jesuits. A wide spectrum of opinions jostled for attention in countless noble manifestos, but increasingly the Jesuits were singled out as a symbol of noble-clerical tensions, a position which suited Catholics and non-Catholics alike. A typical anti-Jesuit poem from the rokosz accuses them of tyranny, warning of their plots and ‘practices’ as a danger to a free republic. Holding them to be a threat to order, virtue and noble freedom, it blames their colleges for encouraging religious discord and violence.Footnote ¹⁴ Throughout the period Jesuits were accused of meddling in politics, undermining the Confederation of Warsaw, disturbing public peace, corrupting the king, of arrogance and deceit, avarice and false piety, and associated with absolute monarchy. In large part these views stemmed from worries about the political influence of the Habsburgs (through marriage into the Vasa dynasty), a grievance first articulated by Grand Crown Chancellor Jan Zamoyski (1542–1605); but they also reflected concern about the increasing independence and activism of the Catholic Church in the Commonwealth since the 1560s.

Many anti-Jesuit polemics survive from the rokosz onwards, but it can be hard to establish the confessional identity of their authors: the attacks focus on the Jesuits and not on Catholicism as a whole. Nevertheless, it is clear that a sizeable Catholic party associated with Zamoyski, and led by Jan Szczęsny Herburt (1567–1616), also held these opinions. Both anti-regalist and anti-Jesuit, Herburt opposed the rise of ‘absolutism’ in Church and State.Footnote ¹⁵ Broadly anticlerical, he found it politically expedient to portray the Jesuits as zealots and fanatics.Footnote ¹⁶ His views were echoed by other Catholic polemicists, who posited a contrast between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Catholics: ‘At least the old Catholics were with God, but see what the young Catholics have done? They have packed away, overturned, all the praiseworthy innovations of their Ancestors, reviled and inverted all those careful and profitable Laws of the Republic.’Footnote ¹⁷ ‘Old’ Catholics were proudly presented as upholders of the Catholic faith but also as defenders of noble freedoms and capable of living in peace with dissidents. In contrast, ‘new’ Catholics are described as supporters of clerical aggrandisement and influence, prone to hypocritical piety,Footnote ¹⁸ leading to an imbalance between Church and State:

The language of Catholic anticlericalism in a political context makes it easy to understand why Jesuits such as Piotr Skarga (d. 1612), preacher to Zygmunt iii (1587–1632), saw the rokosz's attacks on the Society as Protestant-driven.Footnote ²⁰ But it was also in his interest to downplay the size and nature of Catholic criticisms of the Society, and the very real wider tensions between the clergy and nobility. The rokosz is often seen as a key moment in the Counter-Reformation in Poland-Lithuania: an assertion of noble republican values in the face of a perceived Jesuit-facilitated absolutism. Even Jesuit scholars like Obirek, clinging to the old paradigm, are keen to portray the Jesuits' change of tactics, from regalism to pro-noble sentiment, as crucial to the success of the Counter-Reformation.Footnote ²¹ But what kind of change was happening here, and does it make sense to point to anti-Jesuit sentiment as evidence of their continued centrality to Catholic noble-clerical relations? Catholic polemicists like Herburt at first glance seem to be appealing to a vision of an earlier, consensual, Catholic culture. But they also knew full well that the Jesuits did not represent any fundamental change in Catholic doctrine or danger to noble prerogatives; they couched the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Catholicisms in such a way as to appeal to non-Catholics. Perhaps these anticlerical Catholics, as the Jesuits were keen to argue, genuinely feared greater observance and even unconsciously flirted with heresy. More likely, they pragmatically attacked the Jesuits for political reasons to maximise the likelihood of gaining wider support for broader anticlerical and anti-Habsburg grievances (not vice-versa). However they are to be understood, the distinctions made by Catholic confederates cannot be read uncritically – as accurately representing either the Jesuits or some pre-Tridentine idyll. Yet historians, falling into the trap of seeing the Jesuits and orthodox Catholicism as synonymous, which is exactly what the Jesuits encouraged, have accepted these polemical distinctions at face value, failing to ask who provided spiritual services to anti-Jesuit Catholics, and why. For varying shades of anti-Jesuit sentiment continued to be in the mainstream of Catholic noble discourse throughout the seventeenth century. And this must be seen as paradoxical if the Jesuits are regarded as the essence of an inexorable Catholic indoctrination.

If the Compositio inter status represents the major backdrop to dissonance in Catholic culture, the conflict between Cracow University and the Jesuits in this period provides ample evidence of its workings. Founded by King Kazimierz iii in 1364, the university enjoyed an international reputation in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as a centre of conciliarist and humanist scholarship. Nevertheless, historians consider it to have suffered a decline from around the time of the Reformation, caused principally by a lack of funds to employ the best professors and an antiquated system of promotions, and manifested in rising student indiscipline.Footnote ²² The hiatus in the university's development coincided with the arrival of the Jesuits, who soon began to rival its dominance in the educational sphere by opening their own colleges. Their academy at Wilno became a model for attempts to expand colleges in Poznań and Lwów into universities (both successfully opposed by the university, which supported academic colonies in various towns, in 1583–4, 1611–12, 1616 and 1661–2). In 1583, under pressure from the nuncio, the university rector, Adam Górski, gave his consent to a future Jesuit college in Cracow. But the university continued to look with hostility at the Jesuits' plans in Poznań, and in 1616 appealed to the king to confirm what it believed was its exclusive right to teach in Cracow. Zygmunt iii ordered this clause to be examined, but it was never found in the university's charter, and seemed to be undermined by the coexistence of the Jesuit college and university colony in Poznań. Moreover, the Jesuits had express papal permission, dating from 1571, to open schools at any location, even where there was already a university.Footnote ²³

In 1617, in the context of rising tensions, already leading to open disputes in the city, the king suggested the merger of the university with a future Jesuit college in Cracow. This prompted thirty-three academics to organise themselves into a ‘philadelphia’;Footnote ²⁴ they began systematically to obstruct the Jesuits' attempts to establish a seminary and to take control of the school attached to the university (1617–19). In 1621 Rector Najmanowicz appealed against Jesuit plans to the noble dietines at Proszowice and Opatów, lodging protests with the Cracow castle, land and consistory courts. His action began a systematic effort to politicise the dispute, which became ever more heated as dozens of anti-Jesuit pamphlets (and their replies) began to circulate among the nobility, including at diets throughout the 1620s. However, the Jesuits were not deterred, and opened their college in 1622 with royal consent, provoking a twelve-year-long running battle with the university, characterised by furious pamphleteering, inter-student and communal violence, defamation and a drawn-out adjudication by the Holy Roman Rota. In 1630 the Rota, which had issued six decrees in the order's favour between 1626 and 1630, threatened to excommunicate any party preventing the college from functioning. But in an amazing reversal of fortunes, just four years later, the new king, Władyslaw iv (1632–48), managed to secure a papal breve closing down the Jesuit college ‘for the sake of public peace’.Footnote ²⁵ How had this happened, given the weak legal position of Cracow University, and what does this conflict tell us about the Counter-Reformation?

The Order of Preachers, very closely associated with both the university and anti-Jesuit activity throughout, was central to the conflict.Footnote ²⁶ From as early as 1450, when the Dominican studium generale was incorporated into the university, the Dominicans had provided spiritual support to its students and professors. The university participated in the annual rosary procession, as well as the theological debates held on the feast of St Thomas Aquinas.Footnote ²⁷ From 1601, with the establishment of the Jesuits' Marian congregation, the university began to perceive a risk that its students might come under Jesuit influence. The fact that Jesuit schools operated free of charge (unlike the university and its preparatory school) made them very attractive. Given its dual purpose of learning and the encouragement of piety, the university needed to demonstrate its orthodoxy while seeking to maintain its independence from the Jesuits. The Dominicans proved to be natural allies.

When the Jesuit Valentinus Fabricius finally resigned from his preaching position at St Mary's parish church on Cracow's main square in March 1620 to take up the post of royal preacher (after offending nobles, burghers and academics alike with inflammatory remarks regarding the university),Footnote ²⁸ an opportunity presented itself. Rector Jakub Janidło had already prohibited university students from attending the Jesuits' congregation (June 1619), and encouraged them to attend the Dominicans' church of the Holy Trinity.Footnote ²⁹ Under pressure from Jerzy Zbaraski, castellan of Cracow, the town council elected the Dominican, Fr Piekarski, as preacher at St Mary's. Piekarski began a Dominican-led assault on the Society from the pulpit, which was to prove crucial to the formation of public opinion. At St Mary's, in May 1620, he preached against the Jesuits, accusing them of calling the Dominicans heretics. The Jesuit Jan Wielewicki recorded in his diary that Piekarski cited the words of the Apostle in another sermon at Holy Trinity church on 2 May, referring to the Jesuits as ‘enemies of the cross of Christ’.Footnote ³⁰ So offensive was his language that Canon Łukomski and the academic Sebastian Nucerinus had to remonstrate with the Dominican prior-provincial to effect a reconciliation between the orders.Footnote ³¹

Nor were these isolated incidents. Under pressure from Stanisław Lubomirski, a leading nobleman from the palatinate of Cracow, and Jerzy Zbaraski, the burghers again elected a Dominican, Fr Erasmus, as preacher, after Piekarski's death in 1623.Footnote ³² This preacher, Wielewicki records, later turned Jan Tęczyński, the palatine of Cracow, against the Jesuits by putting forward ‘spurious’ arguments against their baptism of a Jewish boy.Footnote ³³ When university students attacked the castle and killed a nobleman, cleric and servant in 1626, many regulars, but particularly the Dominican preacher in St Mary's, ‘graviter nostros ob istos occisos pungebat’.Footnote ³⁴ Throughout the conflict, the pro-university nobility put pressure on the burghers to elect a Dominican to the preaching post at St Mary's. As late as July 1630, an outraged Wielewicki records that the Dominicans preached ‘[sermons] of the greatest invective against us … not without [causing] great offence to good and prudent people’ at the church of the Discalced Carmelites and at St Mary's.Footnote ³⁵ He particularly execrates Fr Jacek Mijakowski, Dominican preacher at St Mary's, for demanding that the Jesuits investigate sermons hostile to the Dominicans allegedly preached in the Society's church of SS Peter and Paul.Footnote ³⁶ The prominence of the Dominicans was strengthened by the fact that Prince Władysław, eldest son of King Zygmunt iii, had come under the influence of Fabian Birkowski, his own Dominican preacher in 1612–34, who while not openly hostile to the Jesuits, was a key strategic appointment for their opponents by representing an alternative to them.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, after Birkowski's retirement (1634), King Władysław iv would appoint the Dominican Jan Dionizy MoszyńskiFootnote ³⁸ as his personal preacher, by which time the university's cause had been won, with royal backing.

The establishment of the Academic Rosary Confraternity in September 1621, designed to counter Jesuit influence, and initially directed by Fr Piekarski, formalised the Dominicans' alliance with Cracow University. Members agreed to deepen their spiritual lives by praying the rosary, attending mass, making frequent confession and receiving communion. The confraternity prayed for the success of Catholic missions, for help against Turkish attacks and for inter-Christian peace.Footnote ³⁹ Meeting in the Dominican chapterhouse, it proved to be both a popular centre of piety and a weapon in the academics' armoury. Several university pamphlets emphasise the link with the Dominicans as proof that the Jesuits did not hold a monopoly of legitimate piety and orthodoxy:Footnote ⁴⁰

Another 1628 work, designed for noble consumption at the diet, emphasises the long connection between the Dominicans and university. It asserts that the Dominican studium and confraternity had always been frequented by the university's students ‘because for 150 years we have experienced nothing sinister, nothing insidious, nothing menacing’. The Jesuits' confraternity, in contrast, is blamed for inciting violence, while their colleges are described as undermining the balance between the secular and clerical estates and threatening the stability of the Commonwealth's mixed monarchy.Footnote ⁴² That the Dominican confraternity provoked Jesuit spite is evident from Wielewicki's description of its first meeting, where he notes that few received communion during the mass.Footnote ⁴³ It became an additional context for pro-university agitation when in May 1623 ‘Dominicanus iuvenis non Sacerdos, Dominica 2a post Pascha, in sacello Rosarii exhortabatur Latine Academicos, ne parcerent sumptibus et caverent, ne lupi in vestitu ovium Academiam demoliantur’,Footnote ⁴⁴ though admittedly the friar's outburst about the Jesuit ‘wolves’ was swiftly punished by his superiors. The confraternity acted as a counter-weight to the Jesuit Marian Congregation, while never preventing university students from choosing to attend the latter. In this connection, the pamphlet Obżałowanie Przeciwko Oycom Iezuitom. dating from 1623 and written by a noble alumnus of the university who presented his views at the diet, emphasises choice and the adequacy of existing spiritual provision: ‘So the Jesuits have congregations? Are there not also enough Dominican Fathers for the university students in Cracow? For the Church is nothing other than one congregation of the faithful, and from God's grace we have free exercise of faith.’Footnote ⁴⁵

What had prompted the Dominicans to take such exception to the Jesuits? The rivalry between Dominicans and Jesuits was part of wider tensions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ elements in Catholic culture, and constitutes a key to understanding the course of the Polish Counter-Reformation. In 1560 the four mendicant orders in Poland-Lithuania had organised a ‘philadelphia’ modelled after a similar pact undertaken at the Council of Basle in 1435.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Statuta seu ordinationes quatuor ordinum mendicantium per universum regnum Poloniae (1560), agreed by the Dominican, Conventual Franciscan, Augustinian and Carmelite provincials (augmented in 1607 and confirmed in 1615), had been designed to shore up discipline during the Reformation.Footnote ⁴⁷ Mendicant representatives were to attend synods to defend the mendicant orders in case of attacks on immunities, and report back to the fathers in Cracow. A communal fund was established in Cracow, with fixed annual contributions (the Dominicans paid most – 12 florins a year), while joint action against scandalous friars was sanctioned. The agreement strongly encouraged the judicial defence of mendicant privileges, urging the employment of reliable friars to argue cases involving the orders before the diet or tribunals.Footnote ⁴⁸ Papal bulls from 1562 and 1567 had exempted the mendicants from episcopal authority in Poland-Lithuania and confirmed all their privileges.Footnote ⁴⁹ The arrival of the Society coincided with a slow encroachment by episcopal powers, with the bishops seeming to discriminate in favour of the Jesuits while asserting control over the mendicants.Footnote ⁵⁰ Clearly, by the early 1600s, the mendicant orders had weathered the storm of the Reformation and were expanding as never before.Footnote ⁵¹ Nevertheless, the university–Jesuit conflict highlights the solidarity of purpose between the mendicants and the university. Both harked back to a pre-Tridentine Catholic culture in the process of renovation, resisting not so much discipline or authority per se, as the perceived expansion of the Jesuits' role within Poland-Lithuania to the detriment of legitimate alternative structures.

While sharing a common Roman Catholic identity with the Jesuits, the mendicant orders already had their own decentralised traditions, integral to a pluralistic Catholic culture, and no more fiercely guarded than when pertaining to theology and philosophy.Footnote ⁵² The sixteenth century had witnessed the scholastic revival centred on the Dominican schools of Salamanca and Alcalá: studia attended by friars but not completely closed to secular clergy. Prompted by the Council of Trent and the Dominican Pope Pius v's elevation of Aquinas to the status of Doctor of the Church in 1567, Thomist writings began to be prescribed for the teaching of theology and philosophy at all Catholic universities.Footnote ⁵³ Simultaneously, the Franciscan order began a revival of Duns Scotus' thought. Both Thomist and Scotist schools were Realist,Footnote ⁵⁴ considered on the whole to be compatible, but in direct opposition to Ockhamist Nominalism – characteristic of the via moderna which had been a hallmark of early Protestantism. The Dominican–Jesuit confrontation centred on the Nominalist tendencies of the Jesuits, who used Aquinas, but did not always agree with him when approaching Aristotle's philosophy (for example, Suarez).Footnote ⁵⁵ In theology, these disagreements led to disputes over grace and free will between the orders (from 1588, with the publication by the Jesuit Luis de Molina of his Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis), and also to tensions about the Immaculate Conception. This last was celebrated in the feast of the Conception of the Virgin, and not declared a dogma until 1854, but it was supported by Jesuit and Franciscan theologians although traditionally down-played by Aquinas and other medieval Doctors, many of them Dominicans.Footnote ⁵⁶

This growing rivalry, which spread to Poland in the 1580s, was compounded there by the occasionally dismissive attitude of the hierarchy towards the Dominicans and other mendicants.Footnote ⁵⁷ In 1579 a letter from Nuncio Caligari to the Polish Dominican provincial Melchior Mościcki, had suggested that four Dominicans might attend the Braunsberg Jesuit seminary for their education.Footnote ⁵⁸ This was a galling notion which quickly galvanised the Polish province to reform its own studium generale based in Cracow, and contributed to the Dominicans' support for Cracow University in its long-running resistance to the Jesuits' attempted monopoly of schooling in Poland-Lithuania. The Dominicans used the ongoing conflict between the Jesuits and the university to assert their exemption from publicly celebrating the Jesuit-supported feast of the Immaculate Conception, an exemption conceded by Pope Gregory xv in 1622.Footnote ⁵⁹ Between 1622 and 1630 they also boycotted and obstructed processions led by the bishop and the Jesuits, which they claimed to be contrary to their papally-sanctioned precedence.

Key to the reception of Aquinas in the Cracow context were Rector Adam Dobrocieski's reforms in 1603 of the faculties of philosophy and theology, which replaced Lombard's Sentences with Aquinas's Summa theologiae as the sole commentary for theology, while still allowing for the use of Scotist commentaries in philosophy.Footnote ⁶⁰ The period 1603–48 was marked by the reception of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian Thomism at the university, and a deepening rivalry over interpretation between the Dominicans and Jesuits. Suarez's initial popularity in natural philosophy was displaced by Dominican Thomistic Aristotelianism in the 1630s, although the Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans and Carmelites were all systematising their doctrines.Footnote ⁶¹ In this atmosphere of rivalry and competition, the Jesuits' appropriation of Aquinas and perceived encroachment on privileges was criticised and resented by the Dominicans from an early date, with the Polish friars Seweryn Lubomlczyk and Bernard Pegasius of Lublin hotly engaged in disputes about grace and free will.Footnote ⁶² Anti-Jesuit circles in Poland-Lithuania were well aware of Dominican–Jesuit rivalry. A work of noble origin from 1644, passing for a dialogue between two Jesuits (a ‘politician’ and a ‘simpleton’), recalls their sparring. The ‘simpleton’ refers to a theological debate on grace, where

Having earlier stated that the Jesuits ‘subvert’ Aquinas's doctrines,Footnote ⁶⁵ he alludes to Bernard Pegasius' triumph over King Philip iii of Spain's Jesuit confessor in a public theological debate at the Dominicans' Valladolid general chapter in 1605, when the Polish friar successfully defended the thesis, Qui quid scripsit D. Thomas verum est.Footnote ⁶⁶ Alleging Jesuit domination, the dialogue-commentator adds:

The university dispute thus had direct bearing on the development of theology and philosophy in Poland-Lithuania. Faced with the threat of intellectual marginalisation, the mendicants sought to safeguard the independence of the university and thus to preserve their specific identities centred on their Cracow studia. Older scholarship anachronistically viewed the revival of scholasticism as a retrogressive response to humanism.Footnote ⁶⁸ In fact, new research has emphasised the close relationship between the two across the late medieval, renaissance and baroque periods.Footnote ⁶⁹ The reception of Thomism at ‘late humanist’ universities was the major intellectual context to dissonance in Catholic culture in Poland-Lithuania and the rest of Europe. The mendicant orders and the Jesuits were thus participating in a transitional phase in Catholic culture: theologically, philosophically, spiritually and in terms of public support. The interaction of disparate trends unleashed by the Council of Trent (yet increasingly grounded in Thomism) made for a tension between tradition and innovation that was to characterise the whole process of Catholic renewal, and which it is unhelpful to regard as a simple struggle between ‘progress’ and ‘reaction’. This tension can be seen in numerous Dominican-Jesuit disputes over precedence,Footnote ⁷⁰ and in the boycotting of Jesuit canonisation celebrations for SS Ignatius and Francis Xavier by Zbaraski and the university (who organised rival celebrations for the Carmelite saint Teresa of Avila).Footnote ⁷¹ Beneath the real adherence to common doctrines, discipline, hierarchy and allegiance to the pope, the Catholic Church was a complex organism full of manifold rivalry and competition.

The resistance of the university and the Dominicans to the Jesuits could not have succeeded without the support of powerful Catholic nobles based in Małopolska. The dispute was so bitterly fought because it became a battleground for issues far wider than mere educational provision or a local dispute between religious orders. For many nobles, the Society symbolised absolutism: anathema to the szlachta's republican ethos. The university conflict therefore represented a political opportunity. Indeed, there are direct links between the Cracow szlachta's rokosz-era anticlericalism and those who supported the university and Dominicans a generation later.

The Catholic castellan of Cracow, Jerzy Zbaraski, is singled out by Wielewicki in his diary as the leader of the anti-Jesuit movement and as staunch supporter of the university's claims. Educated by the Jesuits at Jarosław, Zbaraski studied at Cracow University, before visiting Prague, studying law at Padua, touring Italy and possibly studying in Paris, where he imbibed anti-Jesuit feeling during the reign of Henri iv.Footnote ⁷² In the 1590s, perhaps already hostile to the Society, he was humiliated by Zygmunt iii's Jesuit confessor in the royal presence, losing royal favour – and becoming a staunch opponent of the Jesuits in the process.Footnote ⁷³ He attacked the Jesuits during the rokosz, but ultimately backed the regalist side when it became clear that the movement had run its course. Zbaraski was a relative and close friend of Jan Szczęsny Herburt, and both men shared a passion for anti-Jesuit polemics.Footnote ⁷⁴ After the rokosz, Zbaraski helped to publish and disseminate ex-Jesuit Hieronim Zahorowski's Monita privata (1614), an apocryphal secret mandate from the Society to its priests, advising them how to gain power and exploit naive widows.Footnote ⁷⁵ When the controversial publication of a university pamphletFootnote ⁷⁶ by Rector Najmanowicz in 1622 led to the imprisonment of the noble Jerzy Nowodworski, Zbaraski helped to disseminate Nowodworski's response to the Jesuits' attack on Najmanowicz's work in Warsaw.Footnote ⁷⁷ Feted as pater patriae by the nobilityFootnote ⁷⁸ (a title used for Chancellor Zamoyski before him), Zbaraski was famous for his blunt epistolary reaction to a Jesuit seeking to reform Catholic churches on his domains, which survives in several manuscript copies. In his combative answer he asserts that he prefers ‘to have a calm religion for a long time, rather than a furious one and be consumed by it quickly’, adding that God knows the Jesuits' ‘fictam religionem’.Footnote ⁷⁹

During the conflict with the Jesuits in Cracow Zbaraski vehemently supported the university's claims at the Proszowice dietine,Footnote ⁸⁰ and wrote cautionary letters to the Jesuit provincialFootnote ⁸¹ and the university's chancellor, Bishop Szyszkowski.Footnote ⁸² These were essentially emotive and rhetorical attacks upon the Jesuits, which while not winning over regalist magnates who supported the Society, certainly brought the issue to public attention. However, his aggressiveness did help to solidify royal and episcopal support for the Jesuit college in the 1620s. Wielewicki (much of whose evidence is one-sided and anecdotal and who presents Zbaraski as a virtual heretic), reports that Zbaraski and Stanisław Lubomirski turned Prince Władysław against the Jesuits during a banquet in 1621 by questioning the legality of the college at table in a discussion with the bishop.Footnote ⁸³ The Jesuits needed to undermine Zbaraski and tried to achieve this by questioning his reputation and spreading the kind of innuendos which formed the basis for the widespread mistrust of them. Wielewicki records (1622) that Bishop Szyszkowski supposedly divulged to the Jesuits that Zbaraski had blasphemed against St Ignatius and might even use soldiers against the college.Footnote ⁸⁴ And he does not fail to point out Jerzy Zbaraski's displeasure when the university's students killed one of his Cossacks and wounded his treasurer, which outrage nevertheless had no impact on his support for the university.Footnote ⁸⁵

Crucially, Zbaraski's support for the university was directly connected to wider noble support for the Dominicans. The order had three provinces and 114 convents (excluding nunneries) in Poland-Lithuania by 1648, having grown six-fold since 1580 from 300 to around 1,750 friars,Footnote ⁸⁶ particularly on the military frontier with the Turks in the Commonwealth's south-eastern territories. This rate of expansion related to the massive popular appeal of the pre-existing mendicant culture of piety, but was clearly also linked to the popularity of the friars' stand against the Society. Anti-Jesuit nobles such as Zbaraski, Stanisław Lubomirski, Jan Zebrzydowski and many of those active at the Proszowice dietine patronised the friars. When Jerzy Zbaraski's brother Krzysztof died in 1627, he founded a magnificent chapel for the family at the Holy Trinity convent.Footnote ⁸⁷ Both men were buried there with great ceremony, with funeral sermons given by friars Jacek Choryński (1631) and Fabian Birkowski (1627) respectively. The Lubomirski family had long-standing links with the Dominicans. Stanisław Lubomirski's father Sebastian, castellan of Wojnicz (1546–1613), had founded a family chapel in the Dominican church in 1611, making a grant of the village of Wolica for its upkeep. He was later buried there and had masses said for his soul.Footnote ⁸⁸ Stanisław's mother Anna (d. 1639), who was devoted to the friars, not only founded a convent of Dominican nuns in Cracow (1623–34),Footnote ⁸⁹ but later interceded with the burghers together with Jan Zebrzydowski to elect Jacek Mijakowski (her funeral orator) to the preaching post at St Mary's in 1635.Footnote ⁹⁰ Stanisław Lubomirski himself, after an abortive foundation attempt at Stepusiac in 1616,Footnote ⁹¹ founded the Lubar Dominican convent (in the province of Ruthenia) in 1630–4.Footnote ⁹² Apart from Jan Zebrzydowski,Footnote ⁹³ several of the signatories of the petition of the Proszowice dietine in 1626Footnote ⁹⁴ against the Jesuit college, which pledged to stand behind the university (for example, Jan Pisarski, Biernat Czerny, Adam Misiowski and Abraham Latoszyński), can be identified as either personal patrons of the Dominicans or as belonging to families which were patrons.Footnote ⁹⁵

More widely, the order's popularity in south-eastern Poland can be linked to the staunchly republican culture of the region's nobility,Footnote ⁹⁶ which revered the memory of Chancellor Zamoyski. Prince Władysław's Dominican preacher Fabian Birkowski gave the chancellor's funeral sermon in 1605, while his brother Szymon Birkowski had been appointed by Zamoyski as tutor to his son Tomasz, the future crown chancellor. Lublin palatinate's dietine, for example, the envoys of which to the diet strongly upheld religious toleration in this period,Footnote ⁹⁷ met at the Lublin Dominicans' church of St Stanisław. Noble testamentsFootnote ⁹⁸ from the region show a clear preference for the mendicant orders, including the Dominicans, but far less support for the Jesuits, whose strongholds were in Wielkopolska and Lithuania. Having been established since the thirteenth century, the friars could claim a long tradition of pastoral activity in the region, and found natural allies among ‘anticlerical’ Catholics by distinguishing themselves from the newly-arrived Jesuits.

This mendicant-noble-university alliance, supported by the astute Władysław iv, helps to explain the successes of the Counter-Reformation in Poland-Lithuania before 1648. While the rokosz had castigated the Jesuits for absolutist tendencies and interference in politics, Catholic nobles were not averse to the post-Tridentine renewal as such.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Dominican-Jesuit conflict, and the rampant expansion of the Order of Preachers, demonstrate that nobles were not passive recipients of an enforced confessionalisation, but active and willing participants in Catholic renewal, capable of discriminating between different cultural trends and patronising those to which they felt drawn. The pro-university, Dominican-leaning, nobility clearly acted to oppose the Society by supporting more established Catholic institutions: an exercise of choice within the bounds of orthodoxy. Capitalising on this cultural dissonance by associating themselves with the principles of consensual mixed monarchy so fiercely defended by nobles during the rokosz, the Dominicans emphasised the consensual and collaborative characteristicsFootnote ¹⁰⁰ of their order's constitutions and culture of piety, and by implication Realist Thomism's advocation of elective monarchy as the ideal political system. This joint confrontation of the perceived political implications of Jesuit activity by friars and nobles constituted a mechanism for the identification and fusion of orthodox Catholicism and noble republicanism, greatly facilitating the Catholicisation of the Commonwealth.

The years 1630–4, witnessing the transition from the reign of Zygmunt iii to that of Władysław iv, were accompanied by the formal settlement of noble-clerical tensions at the diet and through papal intervention. Both estates agreed to keep to their spheres of influence under both laws. The clergy, led by the bishops, began to pay the subsidium charitativum Footnote ¹⁰¹ towards the costs of war (and continued to quarter soldiers on their land), agreed to examine the titheFootnote ¹⁰² records, curtailed appeals to Rome, upheld the noble ius patronatus and agreed not to buy land without special ecclesiastical permission.Footnote ¹⁰³ In addition, the 1635 constitutions,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ referring to a papal breve of 1634, stipulated that the diet's consent was required in any religious foundation. In return, the noble estate accepted tithes, as well as episcopal jurisdiction, which was supposed to resolve inter-estate disagreements. Exemptions from Catholic episcopal jurisdiction were simultaneously put in place for Protestant ministers and Orthodox nobles and clergy.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The Polish Dominicans, never unanimous in their opposition or ultimately prepared to contradict their vows of obedience, accepted the Immaculate Conception and came to terms with the Jesuits in the 1630s. Yet the period 1564–1648 was marked by the contestation of a Jesuit-centred approach to the renewal of Catholicism in Poland-Lithuania, not by the ineluctable triumph of the Society, as commonly believed. Enjoying strong royal support since the 1570s, the Society had steadily expanded its network of schools with little opposition until 1606. Only in that year were the Jesuits vocally challenged by the Catholic nobility, articulating its wider grievances against the Church, even as the mendicant orders and Cracow University were beginning to confront the Jesuits' ambitions in the intellectual and spiritual domains.

For long, historians have failed to take into account this challenge from pre-existing elements within Catholicism in Poland-Lithuania, assuming that the Jesuits represented both the essence and sole model for Catholicism after Trent. Taking accusations of ‘absolutism’ at face value, they have failed to understand that those who were making such imputations were often also orthodox Catholics: laymen and clergy, and that polemics between them and the Jesuits were integral to the process of Catholicism's appropriation and inculcation. This misunderstanding has led to numerous paradoxes and simplifications: that Trent signalled a fundamental break with earlier trends such as humanism; that the initiative for the reception of Catholicism lay solely with the Jesuits' tactics rather than with noble patronage and choice; or that the vital mendicant culture of pre-Tridentine Europe was simply radically corrupt and obsolete. This in turn encouraged the misreading of a bald distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Catholics – the first tolerant and open but lax, the second zealous, intolerant and domineering.

In reality, orthodox Catholicism and noble culture had always overlapped, even as neither culture had remained static. King Władysław iv's closure of the Jesuits' college in Cracow was a political act made for pragmatic reasons, for public peace, but also a signal that Catholicism and the Jesuits were not synonymous. By 1648 ‘absolutism’ was no longer a credible description of Catholicism in Poland-Lithuania. The transformation, from anticlericalism to the popular embrace of orthodoxy, was less related to a change in Jesuit tactics, for they remained unpopular with many, than to the alternative institutions which had so successfully confronted them, and the laity's free choice of spiritual provision in a vibrantly pluralistic yet coherent Catholic culture, with which Protestant confessions could not ultimately compete.