220 HANDEL
themselves. Noblemen paid no excise on their own produce nor on goods for
their own use. As taxpayers they were assessed according to the land they held,
not according to what they produced or what they earned. This meant that the
active prosperous producer paid the same as his idle neighbour. In favourable
years, the state benefited little from increased prosperity, and accumulated no
funds to offset hard times, when the rate of taxation was necessarily low. In later
years, central taxation all but ceased. From 1588, the King took one-half of the
port dues raised in Danzig, in addition to the Vistula tolls; and these sums were
not negligible. (In 1626-9, when Gustavus Adolphus controlled the Vistula, his
income from the tolls is supposed to have covered a quarter of his entire
expenses in the German War.) But this was no more than the small change of the
Vistula Trade at its height. The really big money sped abroad in the profits of
Dutch entrepreneurs, or stayed in Danzig in the coffers of the financiers, manu-
facturers, and merchants. The Danzig patricians were no less wealthy than the
great magnates, many of whom were deeply in debt to them. People in Poland
who complained of their usurious lending rates - which, at 18 or 20 per cent,
were three or four times higher than the rate prevalent in Danzig among them-
selves — or of their shameless bribery of prominent politicians, found that in
practice little could be done. As King Stephen Batory ruefully commented, The
Danzigers shoot with golden bullets.' In 1637, Wladyslaw IV himself borrowed
1 million zl. from George Hewelka of Danzig. It was symptomatic of deeper ills.
Danzig lived well off the Republic. In more senses than one, the Vistula Trade
was essentially a one-way business.
The decline of the Vistula Trade after 1648 coincided with the decline of the
power and prosperity of the Republic as a whole. Many modem historians
would propose that the one was the cause of the other. Others, whilst denying
such a close causal relationship between economic and political life, would have
to admit that the coincidence is more than a little striking.
Certainly, almost all available indices point to the conclusion that in the mid-
seventeenth century the Republic of Poland-Lithuania was beset by an irre-
versible process of economic regression. By 1750, the Republic's economy was
considerably weaker, and its inhabitants considerably poorer, than two cen-
turies earlier. Studies based on the lands of the Archbishop of Gniezno, which
were scattered across the Korona, show that agricultural methods, no less than
agricultural production declined dramatically. Taking the year 1500 as index
100, the figures record steady advance in the sixteenth century, catastrophic col-
lapse in the second half of the seventeenth, and only partial recovery in the eigh-
teenth: