2017, Budapest, Hungary: The Confessional Politics of the Holy See towards the Polish-Lithuanian Interregna (Seventeenth Century) (original) (raw)

The attempt of the paper is to illustrate the confessional politics of papal diplomats in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the periods of interregna in the 17th century. The confessional factors were crucial for the policy of the Holy See towards the Polish-Lithuanian kings’ elections. They probably overtook the political aspects. From the papal point of view, a new monarch in Poland-Lithuania should have been a real Counter-Reformation warrior, ready to undertake a struggle with the protestant and orthodox neighbours of the Commonwealth, as well as with the Ottoman power. The priority was to preserve the Polish-Lithuanian state under the Holy See’s influence and to maintain it as a bastion of Catholicism in Central and Eastern Europe. As a result, the problem of conversion of protestant and orthodox candidates to the crown recurs over the 17th century, even if the Apostolic Nuncios were generally sceptical towards any projects of conversion, calculated for obtaining requirements necessary to compete for the Polish-Lithuanian throne. The other aspects of papal confessional policy and its diplomacy’s activity towards the elections in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were the tutelage of Counter-Reformation progresses and the battle against the local tendencies to support the religious tolerance. Nevertheless, those elements got gradually marginalized throughout the 17th century, as the position of Catholicism got stabilized, while the idea of the religious expansion slightly lost its importance. Yet, new confessional problems emerged, regarding, in particular, the coexistence of the eastern Churches: orthodox and ruthenian Catholic.