50 POLSKAthe political link of the Hohenzollern dukes in Prussia with their relations in
Brandenburg was confined to the promise of an eventual reversion on the fail-
ure of male descent. In Muscovy, Ivan IV, whose barbarous extermination of
Novgorod and other Russian countries was matched only by the sensational
violence towards his own subjects, had still not crossed the Urals, and was bat-
tling to gain a foothold on the Volga at Kazan, and on the Baltic at Narva. Thus
the Polish system gelled at a time when internal prosperity was at its height and
the external threat was still small. The decentralized traditions of defence,
finance, and executive power were perpetuated in line with previous conditions,
and not in expectation of increased pressures. It could be argued that Poland
developed too soon, or too easily.
A second line of approach is provided by the Lithuanian connection, which
complicates any arguments based on the geography of central Poland. For 407
years, from 1385 to 1793, Poland and Lithuania were joined together, first by the
personal union of crowns and then by a constitutional union. Their association
was longer than the comparable experience of England and Scotland since 1603.
The Lithuanian state as founded in the thirteenth century may be seen as the last
and most successful of the primitive and usually ephemeral enterprises which
emerged in Eastern Europe from the ninth century onwards. Like Kiev Rus (which
has been aptly described as 'a glorified Hudson's Bay Company'), like the Great
Moravian 'Empire', or like the primitive Polish Kingdom of Mieszko I, it was
created by a team of intrepid warriors whose ability to conquer vast areas of
sparsely populated prairie, was far greater than their powers of permanent admin-
istration. Its existence was prolonged by the union of 1385 with the Polish monar-
chy, with whose assistance the rising threat of the Teutonic Order was averted;
and its feeble hold on the southern provinces of Volhynia, Podolia, and the
Ukraine was ultimately recognized by their transfer to the Polish Kingdom at the
time of the constitutional union. Yet Lithuania always remained the more vulner-
able and weaker half of the Republic. Its human resources were fewer, its eco-
nomic base more precarious, its defences more open, its nobility more wayward,
its capacity to defend itself was more inadequate. Its position adjacent to Muscovy
called for a sterner stance. From the end of the fifteenth century, the Polish army
was continually required to bolster the flagging performance of the hard-pressed
Lithuanians. As time went on, the Grand Duchy proved to be a burden which
weighed ever more heavily on the shoulders of the Kingdom. If one holds therefore
that the institutions and traditions of the united Republic grew naturally from the
circumstances of Poland, one might equally maintain that their extension into
Lithuania was one of the principal causes of their failure. But here again there are
serious drawbacks. One has only to remember the role of Lithuania in repeated
Polish Risings throughout the nineteenth century, long after the legal link had been
broken, to realize that the bond between Poland and Lithuania was not quite so
artificial or burdensome as geography alone might imply.
By this time, the dull sublunary amateur who imagined that Geography could
give simple clues to the central problems of Poland's History will be forced to