302 SERENISSIMA
in close liaison with the Polish monarchy. Habsburg brides set up house in
Poland on no less than nine occasions between 1548 and 1795, supplying wifely
comforts to seven of the eleven kings of the Republic. Yet no Habsburg candi-
date ever contested a Polish election successfully. On only one occasion did
Habsburg treaties succeed in raising Polish military support for the Empire. In
this, as in so many ways, Sobieski's expedition to Vienna in 1683 was excep-
tional, and from the Polish point of view, prejudicial. It seems that the
Habsburgs were too obviously associated with the Court and the high clergy to
win the confidence of the electors in general, or to build up a broad-based party
among the nobility.^16
The Habsburgs' position in the Republic was bolstered by their Spanish rela-
tives. The Spanish trade with Danzig was of the first importance, and a constant
stream of ambassadors out of the Spanish Netherlands maintained close rela-
tions. In 1596, Don Francisco de Mendoza arrived in Warsaw to combat the
Anglo-Dutch blockade of Spanish ships at Danzig. (He was the source of
Dzialynski's counter-mission to London in the following year.) In 1633, the
Baron d'Auchy made one of several attempts to draw the Republic into the
Thirty Years War on the imperial side. In 1670, Spanish contacts briefly
increased in response to Michal Korybut Wisniowiecki's marriage to Eleonora
of Austria, sister of the Queen of Spain; as it did eighty years later when Charles
III of Spain was married to one of the daughters of Augustus III. In the 1760s,
Charles Ill's ambassador, Don Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, Count of Aranda,
was the life and soul of a Varsovian generation which danced out in the Saxon
Era in endless nights of opera, masquerade, and carnival.^17
In contrast to the steady mediocrity of relations with the Habsburgs, Polish
relations with France were wildly erratic. France had few direct military or ter-
ritorial interests in Poland. But close connections at various times with Sweden,
Brandenburg, and Turkey inevitably plunged her into the political combina-
tions of Eastern Europe. Her sporadic triumphs in Poland were separated by
long periods of disenchantment. In 1573, the success of Henry Valois at the first
Election of the united Republic augured an era of Franco-Polish collaboration;
but his flight in 1574, and his dethronement by the Sejm, proved such a disgrace
that relations were completely severed for nearly thirty years. In the seventeenth
century, French hopes sprang eternal that their Habsburg rivals could be finally
outflanked by a combination of Sweden, the Republic, and Turkey. But there
was always one piece out of place, and the French never progressed beyond the
middle game. In 1648 and 1674, French Queens reversed the Habsburg tenden-
cies of preceding reigns. In the case of Sobieski's Queen, Marysienka, the con-
nection proved negative when, in the cause of her son's succession, she showed
increasing hostility to her French compatriots. Polish—Swedish rivalry proved
the greatest stumbling block. In 1625-9, the mission to the Republic of M. de
Charnace, Richelieu's envoy, was ruined by Gustavus Adolfus's invasion of
Polish Pomerania. In 1635, the Comte d'Avaux was entirely preoccupied with
the Peace of Stumsdorf, just as twenty years later Antoine de Lumbres spent his