Where Is Poland? | The Partitions of Poland

Chapter 1

The Partitions of Poland

But a hundred years ago, there had been no border, no customs officers here at all. ThePolish-LithuanianCommonwealth was one of the greatest European countries at its height in the seventeenth century. From 1772, however, the country began to disappear, swallowed up piece-by-piece by its imperial neighbours – Austria, Prussia and Russia.

The Partitions of Poland

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a confederation state of Poland and Lithuania which existed in 1569–1795. In the early seventeenth century, the Commonwealth was one of the largest countries of Europe spanning almost 1,000,000 км² and stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Although nominally a confederation of two nations, the Commonwealth was in fact a multi-ethnic state with a population which, at its peak, amounted to 11 million, including Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Jews, Tatars, Armenians, Germans and Latvians. The Commonwealth was an elective monarchy controlled by nobility (part of the system known as ‘noble democracy’) and was marked by relative religious tolerance. However, the state began to wane in the eighteenth century due to pressure from neighbouring powers. Attempts to reform the country in the spirit of a more egalitarian democracy resulted in the enactment of the 'Constitution of the Third of May' in 1791, the second national constitution in world history. Despite this late effort, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth conclusively fell to the partitioning powers just four years later, disappearing from the map of Europe.