130 ANTEMURALE
must be regarded as an exception in every way. In his early years he had served
Stefan Batory in the Transylvanian Guard and on embassy to Constantinople,
but was exiled in disgrace for duelling. For ten years, he served Henry of
Navarre in France, and joined the Order of St. John in 1599. In 1602 he fought
in a Venetian galley at the naval battle of Patras and returned to Malta as an
invalid. In Malta, he was found by Piotr Kochanowski, who happened to be
travelling in the Mediterranean, and was brought back home to Poland. In 1617,
in Cracow, he accepted the first chair of secular philosophy at the Jagiellonian
University, and founded the city's leading Gymnazium, which still bears his
name. In 1618, at the age of 74, he accompanied Chodkiewicz on the expedition
to Muscovy, and was wounded in the Battle of Tuszyn. He was put in charge of
the one remaining commandery of the Hospitallers in Poland, at Poznan, but
died before he could be installed.^8
Crusading, in fact, could never have been very popular in Poland. The Infidel
was too close and too well known to hold much glamour; and there were wars
enough as it was. More importantly, throughout the Middle Ages, the Kingdom
of Poland had itself been assaulted by western crusaders, who in the pay of the
Teutonic Order spent more time fighting their Catholic hosts than converting
the heathen. For three hundred years, from 1226 to 1525, the struggle against the
'Knights of the Cross' exerted one of the formative influences on the develop-
ment of Polish Catholicism. At the Council of Constance in 1414—18 the chief
Polish delegate, Pawet Wlodkowic, (Paulus Vladimiri 1370-1435), Rector of the
Jagiellonian University, systematically condemned crusading as contrary to
God's will. His detailed charges against the excesses of the Teutonic Order were
supported by arguments from theology and philosophy which provide one of
the earliest expositions of a specifically Polish concept of international law.^9
Moreover, the need for reconciliation as opposed to religious militancy was
readily understood in a society where the Roman Church had never enjoyed a
monopoly. Unlike the countries of Western Europe, where the ecclesiastical
authority of Rome was unchallenged till the end of the Middle Ages, the church
in Poland was constantly beset by pagans, dissenters, and schismatics. Paganism
thrived long after the formal conversion of Poland to Christianity in AD 966, and
continued to provide the official religion of Lithuania till 1386. Traces of ances-
tor worship were still to be found in remote districts in the nineteenth century;
and harmless pagan customs, like the dozynki or 'harvest fires', survive in the
countryside to this day. Judaism, introduced by Chazars in the ninth century,
had a longer history in Poland than Christianity. The eastern lands of the
Kingdom were largely inhabited by Orthodox, whilst at the Reformation,
Lutherans, Calvinists, and other Protestant sects, founded important congrega-
tions. In Lwow and Wilno, Armenian and Tartar minorities established their
own churches and mosques. In the united Republic between 1569 and the First
Partition in 1772, the Roman Catholics formed the largest single religious
group, but accounted for barely half of the total population. (See Diagram G (a),
p. 127.)