354 VASA
discomfiture he had so conspicuously contributed. This Republic, with its fine
ideals of unanimity and personal freedom, was run on the most delicate under-
standing between king and citizens. If it was to work at all, it had to be led by
intelligent men. It had no reserves of power, no means of coercing the unrea-
sonable rebel. When intelligence gave way to brute force, it threatened to
collapse. As with Lubomirski, a 'headache' could prove fatal.
In 1672, Jan Kazimierz died a lonely death in exile, in a monastery at Nevers-
sur-Loire in Central France. His heart was preserved in a casket in St. Germain-
des-Pres in Paris. His body was brought back to Cracow for burial. One of the
few lasting reminders of his sorry reign were the coins minted in the 1660s by
Boratini and Tymff. Each of these Masters-of-the-Mint had produced wonder-
ful schemes for curing the Republic's ills at a stroke. Both turned out to be
incompetents, if not plain swindlers, whose debased productions plagued every-
day life for the next hundred years. Boratini obtained a royal licence to mint
copper shillings worth one-third of a grosz. In 1660-6, he produced over 900
million of them, flooding the market and causing untold chaos. In succeeding
years, the value of these 'boratynki' slumped from 90 to the zloty, to 800.
Tymff's scheme was to mint silver zloties, whose value was to be arbitrarily
equated with that of the gold ducat. His coins contained only 13 of the stated 30
groszy's worth of pure silver. On the reverse side, they carried the King's mono-
gram, I.C.R. - lohannes Casimirus Rex. When people learned what their coins
were really worth, the name of the last of the Vasas was taken as a symbol of
corruption and debasement. Henceforth his initials were universally known in
a new interpretation - I.C.R. - INITIUM CALAMITATIS REGNI: 'The Start
of the Kingdom's Calamity.'^24