THE LITHUANIAN UNION 101Legatus Natus 'Hereditary Legate' and promptly used it to reject the Vatican's
pro-Habsburg plans for a war with Turkey. In 1530 the ageing Primate received
a papal monitorium or 'warning' which summoned him to appear before a
Roman court as a 'traitor' and ally of the Infidel, and which threatened him with
excommunication, confiscation, and ruination by a fine of 25,000 ducats. He
took no notice, and died. These same ebullient bishops were at once the patrons
of the New Humanism and the cause of growing anticlerical feeling. If active
Hussitism had been suppressed, demands for the 'Break with Rome' and for
control of the wealth and power of the Church, were raised with accelerating
insistence. By the time the Reformation appeared in the 1520s, the pitch had
been well prepared.
The structures of society were rapidly ossifying. The Jagiellonian period wit-
nessed the emergence of five separate and exclusive estates - the clergy, the
nobility, the burghers, the Jews, and the peasantry. Each estate was governed by
special rights and rules, its area of competence carefully circumscribed by a
body of detailed legislation. Membership of an estate was principally deter-
mined by a person's birth, and movement between one estate and another was
strewn with obstacles. The process whereby the clergy and the nobility rein-
forced their privileges in the country as a whole matched by the actions of the
Guilds in the cities. It was as difficult for a burgher to become a nobleman, as it
was for a Jew to aspire to the rights of a burgher or to buy land, or for a peas-
ant to engage in the activities that occupied the Jews. Constant efforts were
made to eliminate independent social groups. As from 1421, the bishops closed
the cathedral Chapters to all but noble candidates, thus eliminating that large
group of plebeian clerics who by merit and education had risen to occupy an
influential position mid-way between the episcopate and the parish clergy. Only
two prebendaries, for Doctors of Law or Medicine, were reserved for
non-nobles in each Chapter. The nobility attacked the shrinking holdings of the
free peasantry and eliminated the special status of the esquires, forcing them to
accept the full responsibilities of a nobleman or driving them into the towns or
into serfdom. The Guilds attacked the illegal craftsmen's fraternities a parte,
whose members, known as partacze or 'interlopers' contrived to evade estab-
lished practices of apprenticing and licensing. By doing so, they drove a large
part of the urban poor into the service of the noble estates, and fostered the cre-
ation of extra-municipal zones within the cities. These zones or jurydiki, subject
only to the jurisdiction of their noble or ecclesiastical owners, were common-
place by the middle of the sixteenth century. Often located on the outskirts of
the ancient city wards, or beyond the walls, they were frequently settled by poor
Jews and developed into ghettos. For its part, the Jewish Kahal attacked the sep-
arate Jewish Guilds which sought to escape from its own rigid control.
In all these social conflicts, the noble estate clearly held the upper hand. It held
a monopoly in the running both of the Church and the central legislative organs,
and dominated the life of the royal court, army, and administration. In the
Jagiellonian period, membership of the szlachta became stabilized. Henceforth,