Pagina 723 di 788

In the seventeenth century, not to speak of civil troubles,

Poland was devastated by disastrous wars, in particular with the

Cossacks and with the Swedes (1655-60; pp. 169, 302). The great

victory of Jan Sobieski, the warrior king, over the Turks in

1683, when he went to the relief of Vienna, was the last military

triumph of old Poland (pp. 167, 170, 200, 201).

During the eighteenth century Poland sank to a condition of

disgraceful dependence on Russia. In 1764 Catharine II. caused

her favourite, Stanislaw Poniatowski, to be elected King. In 1768

Polish patriots, in a convulsive effort to throw off the Russian

ascendancy, organised the Confederacy of Bar, which maintained a

desperate struggle for four years. The Confederacy was crushed by

Russia, and soon after its defeat followed the first partition of

Poland (1772), by which Russia received a large share of the

former Lithuanian provinces. A Diet, convoked under the forms of

a confederacy, in order to avoid dissolution by the liberum veto,

was obliged to sanction this partition. The desperate opposition

of Rejtan, the deputy from the district of Nowogrodek (that is,

from the region of which Mickiewicz was a native), Korsak, and

other patriots, was of no avail (pp. 3, 139, 140).