Wacław Sobieski

The Tsar and the King

An unprecedented coronation took place at Wawel in 1530. That time it was not a man in his prime who was crowned there, but a child of ten in spite of the fact that Sigismund the Old, the father of the anointed boy, was still alive and ruling.

It was the only exception and concession in our history, made for that Fortune’s darling who had not come of age yet; an exception made only thanks to the overwhelming influence of the prince’s mother, the despotic Bona. The Queen Bona, who wished to lay all the world’s treasures and all glory at the feet of her beloved and pampered only son, who wanted to surround him with all comforts and luxuries, who had given all her court and ladies-in-waiting to serve him, that Bona has now dressed him up in the fanciest and most beautiful trinkets, for she put the royal diadem on his petite temples, and in his feeble hands she placed the scepter of the Piasts in order to in advance secure his succession to his father.

Such was the bright dawn of Prince Sigismond Augustus’ life, such was his debut at Wawel.

A completely different fate was to befall the prince’s peer,1 tsarevitch Ivan, later Tsar Ivan the Terrible. While the young Jagiellon enjoyed every luxury and could be called a true child of happiness, Rurik’s descendant was to suffer only defeats, torments, and most unpleasant humiliations.

In contrast to Sigismund Augustus, the tsarevitch did taste the bitter misery of an orphan. He is barely three years old when his father dies, and eight when his mother passes away, and not of natural causes but poisoned by boyars!

That is when the lonely, poor orphan is put at the mercy of the whim of the conflicted boyar factions.

The sensitive child had to watch the cruel fights between these coteries and witness (as the Terrible later recalled) the mighty boyar Shuysky sprawl on his father’s bed in his shoes and snatch away the tsarist treasures.

The emboldened boyars gave the young tsarevich a hard time and did everything to vex him against themselves and incite him to take revenge. As if deliberately, they took from him everything he came to like, everything he loved. Firstly, they poisoned his mother. Next, they separated him from his favorite nanny, and, last but not least, they humiliated his favorite playmate, Vorontsov, before his eyes and exiled him. The young tsarevich remembered all that well to one day exact ample and brutal retribution on his oppressors. He took a lesson in barbarism from them, he trained himself in terror, he developed fortitude and ruthlessness, and above all, left to his own devices, he learned to rely only on himself in his later life and trust himself only.

Sigismund August grew up in totally different conditions. Pampered by his mother, the Jagiellons’ offspring grew in hothouse conditions and learned one thing only: to listen to his despotic and steadfast mother and to obey her. Unable to develop a stout heart, henceforth he shall always look for someone in his later life to direct and induce him, to mention only his future despotic adviser, Radziwiłł the Black.

Oh, how different from Ivan’s was the prince’s education. How could Sigismund Augustus gain energy when his tutor, Opaliński, even stopped him from hunting with a falcon, fearing that that type of hunting could arouse in him an inclination for cruelty and harden his heart. While Sigismond Augustus was being brought up in such effeminacy, “surrounded with song and dance,” young Ivan in the Kremlin was preparing for his future Neronian performances, when, still as a kid, accompanied by court dog handlers, he liked to throw dogs from a floor and then feast his eyes with the sight of those animals’ suffering and agony. It is no wonder that under the influence of such disparate upbringing on the one hand created was a man of such a tender and soft heart as Augustus, and in the Kremlin, the ruthless and cruel Ivan, that Ivan, who barely at the age of 13, ordered the same dog keepers to remove the boyar Shuysky, thus inaugurating his long-standing bloody tyranny.

Moscow herself brought him up to be so, for she had long been accustomed to the heavy blows of the Tatar whip, so she could no longer imagine the type or the ideal of a true ruler who would not be ruthless, decisive, harsh, and inexorable. For the Muscovite people, the height of power was precisely a tsar like Ivan the Terrible, a tsar who spread around himself silent fear and terror, a tsar who ordered people to worship him as much as they worshiped God and who knew how to offer human hecatombs on the altar of the state without any scruples! If for the then Muscovite society (as can be seen in the contemporary book on morals entitled Domostroy) the ideal of the father of the family was a stern father who could give his wife and children a good flogging, then obviously its ideal ruler for that nation was a tsar-executioner who knew how to threaten the nation and even torture it with that infamous stick topped with a djerid — in a word, a tsar at whose sight the blood curdled. Ivan knew his nation and that was why later he explained to the Polish king (Stephan) that that was precisely why he had his guards keep bared hatchets on their shoulders before his throne to, as he said, spread “horror” among his people. He felt that that people would thank him for that “horror,” that he would be able to, like Słowacki’s “King-Spirit,” say the following about himself:

 

that I was loved

For strength and for fear and for torment,

When I walked out, my people knelt before me,

A people’s man who clings to the common folk...

 

Indeed! His people really “loved him for torment.” Ivan got the best proof of that on the then famous example of a boyar who back then, for some minor offense, was impaled by Ivan’s order and, suffering for the following twenty-four hours, said nothing else to his wife and children, who were standing by the stake, but repeated blessings of the tsar: “God save the Tsar.”

The Polish nation had a completely different disposition and preferences, and Sigismund Augustus grew up to be completely different. He knew that in order to do something in Poland, to push something through, and, generally speaking, to govern Poland, one could not act through coercion and violence. Instead, one had to win the nation by accessibility, popularity, gentleness, and, instead of surrounding oneself like Ivan with Byzantine ceremonial, one had to do the opposite: humble oneself and strip oneself of the splendor of majesty. Sigismund Augustus believed that deeply and he used to say that he could gain more from his Poles with a single raise of his cap than other monarchs through fear and threats. Therefore, when the Lithuanian noblemen knelt before him at the Sejm of the Union of Lublin, he spoke to them emphatically: “We are to kneel before God alone and not before earthly lords...” He knew that with such a statement he would capture the hearts of Poles, who together with the chronicler Lubieniecki would approvingly remark that “August was humble.” He knew perfectly well that nothing would buy him more support from senators than his telling them at banquets to be on intimate first-name terms with him.

In Poland, one had to be a “painted king.” One had to be, like Sigismund Augustus, a “day-after-tomorrow king,” namely one that puts everything off until tomorrow and never makes any rash decisions. In a word, one had to be, as the Terrible deridingly called Sigismund Augustus, a “slave to slaves.” When Sigismund Augustus once asked Pszonka, the founder of the Babin Republic, who was the king in Babin, Pszonka humorously replied: “God forbid that we choose a different master as long as you are alive.” The Polish nobility called Sigismund Augustus a “Babin king,” that is a king good for nothing, but although the nobility mocked him so, it did not want a different kind of ruler. The nobility fancied him precisely because it wanted to have on the throne such a slave bound by the chains of its rights. It would not have born Ivan the Terrible at Wawel for an hour. It would not have understood that whole Muscovite “heroism of slavery,” as Mickiewicz later called it, and, above all, it would have detested so many atrocities with which Ivan the Terrible had stained her hands. Those numerous murders would have been detested by the Polish nation, which as contemporary foreign travelers and diplomats approvingly say has a strangely “mild” blood.2

So it is characteristic that while Ivan’s people regarded his inspiring horror as his most noble trait, and in reward the chroniclers of Moscow engraved on the pages of history his nickname “the Terrible,” the Poles recognized a completely opposite characteristic as their king’s most lofty trait of character, saying through the mouth of his chronicler, Bielski, that “there was great humanity in him...”

That difference in the way that those two monarchs treated their subjects became evident the moment when their reign began. For by a strange coincidence, when they take the helm of government, they both face a rebellion raised by their own subjects, a rebellion which begins almost simultaneously in both countries (August 1547).

One is a rebellion started by the Orthodox monks of the city of Moscow because of the terrible fire in the capital, a fire that destroyed not only the city, but also the Kremlin itself.

The Moscow rebellion is a natural rebellion, a rebellion of a superstitious, dark mob, which, enraged by this fire, wants to find the perpetrators of this conflagration and finally takes revenge by murdering the Glinsky family, the Terrible’s closest cousins, and even attacks the tsar’s house and demands that he release the rest of the Glinskys. What should Ivan have done? He responded with murder to the murder of his cousins. He ordered that the mob’s leaders be captured and executed, and the frightened Orthodox monks dispersed...

Sigismund Augustus had to deal with a completely different [social] fabric. Although the Polish nobility acts radically and some noblemen even refuse to obey him and want to elect “a different king” for themselves, and in the Sejm raise such a commotion that the king must cry “Silentium” several times to defend his beautiful Barbara and his marriage, it differs from the Moscow Orthodox monks. Although it hates the Radziwiłłs, now related to the king by marriage through Barbara, it does not murder them like that mob murdered the Glinskys. It acts less wildly and far more circumspectly and also gets a different, softer response than that in Moscow, an answer, given to it by the king who has taken off his cap, an answer in which the king only gently persuades it and speaks to its mind and heart in such a way that he finally disarms it.

Those were different rebellions, but they brought the rulers to similar conclusions. They both suspected that behind those rebellious mobs there must have been some hidden instigators who had to be tracked down and dealt with. On the one hand behind that mob Ivan discovers the conspiring boyars (the Shuyskys), who, jealous of the Glinskys’ influence on Ivan, stirred up the street mob against them. Likewise, Sigismund Augustus noticed the doing of such magnates (like Kmita and Górka), jealous of the elevation of the Radziwiłł family.

From now on, the monarchs are becoming increasingly certain that the actual enemies of the throne are not those rebellious crowds, but the most prominent boyars and senators. Therefore, while Ivan in Moscow undertakes to destroy the boyars and their council, Sigismund Augustus undertakes to undermine the Senate.

And now the same crowds that these oligarchs had instigated and incited against the throne are being turned by the two monarchs against the same boyars and senators under the slogan of “democracy.”

And yet what a difference! How very different is the guard which each ruler has surrounded his throne with. How different are the helpers whom they used to fight the oligarchy and protect their throne.

There, in Moscow, Ivan organized himself a kind of police — the oprichnina. The oprichniki swore absolute obedience to the tsar, who was able to incite in them, amidst fervent prayers and practices, a slavish enthusiasm for the idea of tsarism. Using that guard of henchmen, he perpetrated terrible acts of terror among the Moscow clerical and secular hierarchy.

While this terrible entourage of tsarist “Jacobins” is running rampant in Moscow, Sigismund Augustus is doing the work of democracy with the help of completely different people, namely, through Sejm deputies, through the chamber of deputies.

Although this group of deputies takes the king’s side and fiercely attacks the noblemen and bishops, those Polish tribunes differ from those “tsarist hellhounds.” There, in Moscow, the tsar treats his henchmen as his slaves, while in Poland they are the true chosen ones, the nation’s creme de la creme, the apex of national thought, and it is not the king who imposes his will on them but vice versa. There, in Moscow, the tsar dresses these thugs of his in uniforms, according to his liking and whim, and orders that a broom and a dog’s head are embroidered on their caps to symbolize their dog-like obedience to the throne. Here in Poland, it is not Sigismund Augustus, but these deputies who set the fashion, and, following their example, the king dresses in minor noblemen’s fashion to show that henceforth he shall follow their program and will.

The most important difference, however, is that Ivan the Terrible did not allow his minor nobleman to have any relations with the boyars and he severed all relations between them once and for all, while in Poland all these loud deputies and the entire crowd of minor noblemen, even though now they are attacking senators and pretending to take the king’s side, always clearly feel that together with the senators they belong to the same families and coats of arms, and therefore, as soon as they obtain certain concessions, they shall find a way to reach an agreement with the Senate and the nobility will immediately fall into the senators’ embrace. Consequently, the enlarged and united nobility, aware of its interests and walking in close array, did not take the king’s side but opposed him. And instead of strong authority and government, emerged the “golden freedom.”

Things were completely different in Moscow. The boyars had no estate consciousness or solidarity. They fought one another and did not form a close-knit class. Hence, Ivan the Terrible succeeded in crushing them all, subjugating them to himself, and equalizing them in shared captivity.

And just as Moscow becomes a hell for boyars, Poland becomes a paradise for the nobility. While Ivan is the main destroyer of the Moscow aristocracy, Sigismund Augustus is a king of the nobility.

Nothing proves this difference between Sigismund Augustus and Ivan the Terrible better than the then constant emigration of boyars fleeing from Moscow to Poland. Like birds in autumn, one boyar after another escapes the cold frost of the north, seeking refuge in the land of golden freedom, predominantly the loudest Prince Kurbsky, who, having arrived in Sigismund Augustus’ land, in his famous letter3 curses the tyrant of the north and urges him to face God’s final judgment for his atrocities, for which, as we know, Słowacki epitomized Ivan in “Spirit-King” in the marvelous songs about Śwityn and his messenger, Zorian, whose leg, according to the legend, while reading the letter the cruel tyrant drilled through with his famed walking stick.

But not only boyars flee to Poland. They are followed by a printer from Moscow, Fedorov, as well as all those who are beginning to deviate from the old principles, predominantly the rightful Orthodox faith, and become interested in religious novelties.

There is no place for them in the land of Ivan the Terrible, because he unflaggingly and unwaveringly supports the old Orthodox faith and considers it the foundation of his tsarist regime (and vigorously defends it in disputes with Jesuit Possevino or with Brother Rokita of the Unity of the Brethren).

Sigismund Augustus did the exact opposite. He did not firmly support any faith. He was a Catholic, but in 1563 he granted equal rights to schismatics and made all concessions to the ones professing reformed religions. Moreover, at the famous Sejm of the Union of Lublin (1569) he uttered the memorable words: “Let no one think that I shall convert anyone through cruelty or severity, or that I shall burden anyone’s conscience. Indeed, this is not my intention for I do not intend to build any faith.”4

There is no clearer depiction of the Jagiellon’s tolerance and indecision than the moment when, upon Radziwiłł’s invitation, he was ready to visit a Calvinist church near Vilna, and was already on horseback, when a Catholic bishop, dressed in church robes, stood before him, took the king’s horse by the reigns and led him to a Catholic church. This scene is a most telling reflection of our Jagiellon’s irresoluteness, which is in such stark contrast to the tough and ruthless Ivan the Terrible, who would never let anyone take his steed’s reigns. This scene is a telling example of how different were the spirits blowing on each side of the Dnieper.

There, beyond the Dnieper, everything happens as the tsar himself desires, and here in Poland as one wants! There, there is the exclusive rule of Orthodox Church. Here, there is tolerance for all faiths, even most outright sects!

There, there is the exclusive rule of one Russian nation. Here, there is peace and harmony among different races, among Poles, Germans, Ruthenians, and Jews. There, there is a uniform state chiseled from one block. Here, there is a diverse federation!

There to be cemented were fear and “horror,” here — brotherhood, “humanity,” and love among the nobility!

There, everyone was equal before the tsar in their captivity. Here, there was the “golden freedom” of one estate — the nobility!

There, there was the grand edifice of the tsarist autocracy erected in pools of blood, an edifice ruled by the tsar — a hereditary tsar. Here, there was the Platonic Republic, beautiful as a dream, with the king at the lead — a elected king at the lead!

Those edifices, erected in such contradictory styles, grew right next to each other, one the antithesis of the other. Of course, the two builders of those completely different adjacent edifices were perfectly aware of the mutual, far-reaching contradiction. It was clear to them that they were mortal enemies and that they were creating mutually hostile and increasingly conflicting centers of the Slavic world — one at Wawel and the other one at the Kremlin (that is the Crimea — gorod!)

Each looked jealously at his rival’s city, fearing that it would surpass his. For their throne and crown they each wished to gain as much splendor and allure as possible, and to beat their rival at grandness, dignity, significance, and titles. After all, Ivan wants to be the supreme monarch in the Slavic region. He is the first Moscow ruler ceremoniously crowned tsar — a title he surrounds with an almost religious cult. And this sparks strife and jealousy. Sigismund Augustus flatly refuses to recognize Ivan as “tsar,” in return for which Ivan calls him merely the Duke of Lithuania instead of “king.”

That entire dispute over the highest title in the Slavic region was not just a dispute over an empty formality. In the background of that dispute, a fight for something more was taking place, namely for Ruthenia! For that Ruthenia which lay between the two rival Slavic dynasties. Ivan the Terrible strove for that Ruthenia, because, wanting to pose as the tsar, he was well aware that what he needed to complete the splendor of his tsarist majesty was Kiev — that ancient capital of Saint Vladimir, which had preserved the traditions of the ancient Kiev Rurikids. That ancient capital and the main foundation of the old Ruthenia of the Rurikids was in the hands of his rivals — the Jagiellons. Hence, the struggle against Sigismund Augustus for that ancient heritage of his ancestors now became his program, a program he accentuated precisely by accepting the title of the tsar of Rusia, and a “tsar of All-Russia” at that.

To what extent this fight absorbed the two rivals, and especially Sigismund Augustus, could be gauged, for example, from the great impression that the news that Ivan had conquered Polock made on the last Jagiellon. Upon hearing of that loss, he burst into tears before the entire Sejm. Amazed by Moscow’s claims to all of Ruthenia, Sigismund Augustus devised a rescue for Poland: a union. Fearing that after his childless death Ivan would snatch away from Poland the entire Ruthenian east, Sigismund Augustus decides to tie Lithuania and Ruthenia with the Crown with a bond so strong that it could never be severed. And this is where the idea of the union is born, a union that is to become the Jagiellonian states’ bastion against the hostile tsarism and a center of the centralization and unification of the new federal republic under the slogan: “Unus rex, una natio, una lex.”

After he had articulated that slogan, that alluring program of a federation and golden freedom attracted Livonia, Western Prussia, and Lithuanians, among whom the first and most ardent agitator for the union was the king himself. There, in Lithuania, Sigismund Augustus himself turned the lower nobility against the magnates, incited the former to participate in parliamentary life, and even undermined the prestige of his own position, renouncing the heredity of the throne. But that was not enough for the nobility’s king! A tireless proponent of the “golden freedom” and the union, Sigismund Augustus had an idea that went even further, an idea to extend that propaganda even further, beyond the Dnieper, to Moscow’s interior, so as to undermine his rival’s throne, to discredit and destroy the Moscow tsarism there, in Ivan’s own homeland, with that golden freedom! To this end he even sends agents such as the boyar Kozlov to Moscow. He waits. Soon, from the east he shall see the glow of the boyars’ revolution against the Tsar.

But Ivan the Terrible was well aware of the great danger he and his tsarism had been in since the signing of the Union of Lublin. And so his anger had no limits when, on top of all that, he learned, precisely when the Union of Lublin was being concluded, that the slogans of that union had enchanted and attracted even some of his own peoples as inhabitants of Veliky Novgorod had already written a letter to Sigismund Augustus to separate themselves from Moscow and join Lithuania... When he heard that, Ivan fell into an uncontrollable, bloodthirsty frenzy. He stormed into Novgorod, ordered that hundreds of Orthodox monks be clubbed to death. He leveled market halls with the ground, subjected the conspirators to sophisticated torture in the market square, and, last but not least, ordered that hundreds upon thousands of unfortunate Novgorodians of both sexes be thrown from the bridge into the river and drowned, with babies strapped to their mothers’ chests.

This is the bloody work of mass murder with which Ivan responded to the Union of Lublin, to that attempt to uniting the two nations. At the same time when the last Jagiellon, by way of persuasion and treaties “tied [the two nations] with his heart and thoughts” (as Kochanowski put it), when he connected his lands with the Western civilization, a truly oriental ruler, following the example of Tatar khans, drowned in torrents of blood the rebellion of those who wanted a taste of the “golden freedom.” There, in Lublin, the Jagiellon said the following to the two nations: “Trust one another, for trust shall facilitate greater love and harmony among you,” while here, in Novgorod, the son of the Rurikids founded his state not on trust or love, but on tortures, torment, fear, and horror. There, in Lublin, there was a European, while here in Novgorod, there was a man of “the East.”

There was another reason why Ivan carried out such extreme repressions in Novgorod. The reason why Ivan desired Novgorod so much and wished to completely destroy that spreading cancer of betrayal and rebellion in that very place was that through Novgorod Moscow had access to the Baltic Sea. Getting to that sea and the place where later Petersburg was erected – that was one of the greatest goals of Ivan’s politics and at the same time one of the most important reasons for his fight against Sigismund Augustus. For Sigismund Augustus was aware of how dangerous it would have been for Poland, if that immortal rival of Poland had reached the Baltic coast. Consequently, he defended it with all his might and snatched Livonia from him.

In order to gain an ally in that deadly wrestling for breath towards the life-giving waves of the sea, Sigismund Augustus comes up with the fortunate idea of uniting Poland with Sweden and gives his sister Catherine’s hand to John, the future Swedish king. Through that skillful maneuver Sigismund Augustus attacked Ivan, and all the more so as Ivan himself had sought Catherine’s hand. Hence, Ivan the Terrible had a hard time accepting that pea wreath. Seething with anger, the rejected suitor vowed to kill Catherine’s brother. He even considered kidnapping Catherine from her husband’s side.5

With that rejection all hope of blood relations between the two dynasties, the Jagiellons and the Rurikids, vanished for good. That was when an unmendable disunity between those two representatives of those Slavic dynasties became fully pronounced. That Jagiellon and that descendant of Rurik acutely felt the envy that had been smoldering for a century between those their rival families. They felt it all the more acutely because the two of them were the last representatives of those two dynasties, and being the “last ones,” they more strongly epitomized, concentrated, and realized all the aspirations of those two families envious of each other.

The first of them, Ivan, who can be called the last representative of the Rurikid dynasty — for his son and successor Feodor is a moral zero — I repeat, Ivan took tsarist autocracy to extremes, thus fulfilling the program which the dynasty had outlined and developed for itself. The other, the last Jagiellon, brought about that union which (despite all the reservations)6 was finally prepared by the Jagiellonian dynasty...

So those last two offsprings of the two dying dynasties left their nations totally disparate mottoes for their further journey through history. They bequeathed them totally disparate directions — they pointed their nations in two completely opposite directions, and it was only later history that showed which way would lead astray and which would lead to the land of happiness and the promised land.

It might be that at the very end of his life, the Jagiellon himself might have partly lost his faith in the benefit of the nobility’s slogans. On the eve of his death, doubt and pessimism are exuded by his black, melancholy eyes, his pale face, and his lugubrious figure of the Polish Hamlet.

Surrounded by female suitors and dubbed Sardanapalus by magnates, the last Jagiellon is expiring childless, and in the face of the now inevitably approaching dangerous storm of interregnum, he is thinking about how to avert that storm and, immersed in dark thoughts, he comes up with an idea that seemed to almost completely contradict his entire life’s program.

He suggests to Poles that after his death they should elect to the Polish throne a monarch “from the north,” namely Ivan the Terrible, the same one with whom he has fought all his life. How come? So this implacable enemy of his principles is to be crowned at Wawel and the crown of the benevolent Jagiellonians is to touch the temples of that tyrant? So all the secrets of the state and the helm of the entire Republic is to be handed over to this cunning Rurikid so that he can overturn and distort everything in it? At the moment of making that suggestion did Sigismund Augustus not fear for his Wawel and for all the treasures and national sanctities at it? Even if only for his favorite lavish carpets from Flanders, with which he himself so meticulously decorated the walls of his Wawel castle and which in the end were to go there, up north, to now decorate the palace in Gatchina?

Of course, when Sigismund Augustus suggested Ivan’s election he expected quite different results. Offering the Jagiellonians’ crown to Ivan, that son of the cunning Italian woman was convinced that that would not only not hurt his own homeland but, on the contrary, would undermine Moscow, because that would open Moscow’s gates to the propaganda of the Polish union and freedom and because in that way the Polish element would dominate the Moscow element and absorb it.

But Ivan the Terrible was also confident about himself and the strength of his own people, and this is why he did not reject that project. Indeed, he clutched at that idea with both his hands and was already making arrangements and making it clear that he would not be crowned at Wawel by the Polish Primate, but by the Metropolitan of Moscow, and he was already dreaming of supporting the Orthodox Church in Lithuanian-Ruthenian Ruthenia and annexing it to Moscow, inclusive of Kiev.

So it is no wonder that due to his conditions Ivan was rejected as a candidate for both thrones after the death of Sigismund Augustus. During those elections, it became crystal clear just how impossible it was to unite and merge those two societies so hostile to each other and so disparate, with each of them firmly guarding its dogmas and flatly refusing to give them up. During those elections, the gap between the two antitheses in the Slavic world opened for the world to see, and from then on the Slavs’ King-Spirit was to manifest himself in two complete opposites, so clearly shown by Słowacki. The first one was the King-Spirit whom Słowacki modeled faithfully on Ivan the Terrible, with his iron, implacable, indomitable will of a monarch, who knew how to “harden his nation to pain” and “taught it to disdain death.” The other King-Spirit was the one that spread “serene grace” and “silent benevolence” all around, the one that spread union and tolerance, the one that loved freedom above all else.

Two different tastes, two different spirits, two different nations, whose hearts beat as differently as the sound of the swinging Sigismund bell at Wawel differs from the Ivan bell rung at the Kremlin.

 

This is a translation of the Polish language version printed in: Wacław Sobieski, Studia historyczne (Lviv: 1912).