One state that emerged from others. The image of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in Alessandro Guagnini’s writings

Kacper Gis

doi:10.1515/openps-2019-0018

Abstract

AbstractResearch concerning the history of government and administration should be based not only on historical documents (like legal acts) but also narrative or literary sources such as chronicles. These texts contain large amounts of information about old forms of administration. A good example of that kind of narrative source is the description of European Sarmatia written by Alessandro Guagnini. The author of this text was Italian, who lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the turn of sixteenth and seventeenth century. This text was a historical and geographical relation about the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its neighbours. It was reprinted in different editions and in few languages having a considerable impact on a perception of abovementioned state and even Central and Eastern Europe as well.In modern times Guagnini’s works have been quite forgotten, nevertheless its renewed analysis leads to interesting information at various levels. One of them is presentation of government model in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The described state consisted of few great regions each of which had its own administrative division, history and customs. Together they merged into a great political entity ruled by one monarch and approaching unification.The purpose of this article is to present administrative division in the pages of the described chronicle and how that division was ideologically legitimated by appealing to ancient Sarmatia.

Highlights

Political transformations which happened in Europe in the early modern period had a significant impact on the states of that time
A good example of that kind of narrative source is the description of European Sarmatia written by Alessandro Guagnini
As Richard Mackenney noticed describing countries in sixteenth century “These regions themselves dissolve as the historian clutches at them, fragmenting first into a thousand case histories of larger or smaller localities which make a nonsense of ‘national’ histories

Summary

Introduction

Political transformations which happened in Europe in the early modern period had a significant impact on the states of that time. The size of political entities was growing, on the other hand, they continued to be divided into individual regions with their history and specificity This was the case with the Habsburg and the Polish-Lithuanian states. Other texts can provide interesting information on the political and administrative structure of a state. This was noticed by Stefan Neller and Peter Becker, who stated that the history of administration - called “administory” - should be looked at from different points of view, normative[9]. Dzieje Sejmu Polskiego, Wydawnictwo Sejmowe, Warsaw, 1993, p. Horner, Making sense of stories: A Rhetorical Approach to Narrative Analysis, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 14 (2004), no. 2, 147-170

Alexander Guagnini and his works

11 More about Guagnini

The image of Sarmatia

Discussion and conclusions