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manhefnawi

Sigismund II Augustus | king of Poland | Britannica.com - 1 views

www.britannica.com/...Sigismund-II-Augustus

Sigismund II Augustus Poland Union of Lublin

shared by manhefnawi on 10 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • The only son of Sigismund I the Old and Bona Sforza, Sigismund II was elected and crowned coruler with his father in 1530.
  • In 1559, when the Livonian Order (a branch of the Teutonic Knights) became too weak to protect itself from Muscovite attacks, it sought and obtained Sigismund’s previously offered protection. The Polish king intervened
  • The subsequent war (see Livonian War) with Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible over Livonia compelled Sigismund to strengthen his position by constitutionally uniting all the lands attached to the Polish crown. Supported by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry, Sigismund ceded his hereditary rights in Lithuania to Poland (1564), thus placing the two states in constitutional equality but not in a complete union. In 1569 he formally incorporated Podlasie, Volhynia, and Kiev provinces into the Polish kingdom, thereby giving their representatives seats in the Sejm; the enlarged Sejm then enacted the Union of Lublin (1569), uniting Poland and Lithuania as well as their respective dependencies.
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  • last Jagiellon king of Poland, who united Livonia and the duchy of Lithuania with Poland
manhefnawi

Poland - The Commonwealth | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...The-Commonwealth

Báthory and the Vasas Jagiellonian Dynasty Stephen Sigismund III Vasa

shared by manhefnawi on 10 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Throughout most of Europe the medieval system of estates evolved into absolutism, but in the Commonwealth it led to a szlachta democracy
  • The end of the Jagiellonian dynasty meant the beginning of unrestricted election to the throne. The first king elected viritim (i.e., by direct vote of the szlachta) was Henry of Valois, the brother of the king of France. On his accession to the throne (reigned 1573–74), which he quickly abandoned to become Henry III of France, he accepted the so-called Henrician Articles and Pacta Conventa. Presented henceforth to every new king as a contract with the noble nation
  • The most spectacular achievement of Báthory’s reign was a series of military victories (1579–81) over Ivan the Terrible of Russia.
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  • The long reign of his successor, Sigismund III Vasa (1587–1632), raised hopes of a union with Sweden that would strengthen Poland’s standing in the north.
  • The victory at Klushino in 1610 by Hetman Stanisław Zółkiewski resulted in a Polish occupation of Moscow and the election by Moscow’s boyars of Sigismund’s son Władysław as tsar. Sigismund’s veto wasted this opportunity and instead left a residue of Russian hatred of Poland.
  • Although the royal forces triumphed in battle, both the king and the reformers were losers in the political realm to the magnates posing as defenders of freedom.
  • Transferred as a result of the Union of Lublin from the grand duchy of Lithuania to the more ethnically homogeneous Crown, Ukraine was “colonized” by both Polish and Ukrainian great nobles.
Javier E

Niall Ferguson: Ukraine Invasion Struggles Could Be the End for Putin - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...les-could-be-the-end-for-putin

ukraine situation crisis analysis consequences strategy russia

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • What makes history so hard to predict — the reason there is no neat “cycle” of history enabling us to prophesy the future — is that most disasters come out of left field.
  • Unlike hurricanes and auto accidents, to which we can at least attach probabilities, the biggest disasters (pandemics and wars) follow power-law or random distributions. They belong in the realm of uncertainty, or what Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book “The Black Swan,” calls  “Extremistan.”
  • What’s more, as I argued in my book “Doom,” disasters don’t come in any predictable sequence.
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  • Ukraine is also receiving vital private-sector assistance, notably the delivery of Starlink internet terminals, which are helping maintain communications
  • All I can do is to apply history, as there is no model from political science or economics that can really help us here.
  • 1. Do the Russians manage to take Kyiv in a matter of two, three, four weeks or never?
  • At least one military analyst I respect said late last week that the Russian invasion force has around two weeks left before serious logistical and supply problems force Putin seriously to the negotiating table.
  • On the other hand, Western media seem over-eager to cover news of Russian reverses, and insufficiently attentive to the harsh fact that the invaders continue to advance on more than one front.
  • A better analogy than the Winter War with Finland may be the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that began in December 1979.
  • Economic warfare between 1914 and 1918 was not a substitute for sending British armies to fight on the European continent, just as it had not been in the Napoleonic Wars against France.
  • What I cannot tell is whether or not these weapons and other equipment will suffice to sustain Ukrainian resistance over the coming weeks.
  • But the Ukrainians have no real answers to higher-altitude bombardment and missile attacks.
  • 2. Do the sanctions precipitate such a severe economic contraction in Russia that Putin cannot achieve victory?
  • I have heard it said that the breadth and depth of the sanctions imposed on Russia make them unprecedented. I disagree
  • recalls but does not quite match the sanctions that Britain and its allies imposed on Germany at the outbreak of World War
  • It seems there are seven distinct historical processes at work and it’s not clear which is going fastest.
  • Then, as now, it was possible for an increasingly authoritarian government to impose economic controls and divert resources away from civilian consumption to the war effort, while blaming the resulting deprivation on the enemy
  • We should remember that those measures did not defeat Germany, however, because — like Russia today — it had the resources to be self-sufficient
  • no one should forget that self-sufficiency is possible for Russia, albeit at the price of severe austerity, whether it is a choice or a consequence of war.
  • China is able to help Russia in ways that could mitigate the economic shock, just as for years it has helped Iran to circumvent U.S. sanctions by buying its oil.
  • Unlike Soviet citizens, who were accustomed to a state monopoly on communications, today’s Russians have come to rely as much as we do on Big Tech. Being cut off from the metaverse may prove a more psychologically painful deprivation than shortages of imported foods.
  • even a 35% quarterly decline in gross domestic product does not condemn a country to military defeat if its planes can still fly and its tanks still fire rounds.
  • 3. Does the combination of military and economic crisis precipitate a palace coup against Putin?
  • 4. Does the risk of downfall lead Putin to desperate measures (carrying out his nuclear threat)? 
  • The people with the power to arrest Putin are the people he counts on to execute his arrest orders: Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Security Council and, like Putin, a long-serving KGB officer; Sergei Naryshkin, the head of foreign intelligence; and Alexander Bortnikov, who heads the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB.
  • 6. Does the West’s attention deficit disorder kick in before any of this?
  • If Putin’s goal was to deter members of NATO from offering direct military assistance to Ukraine, it seemed to have some effect.
  • Russian casualties are being caused by Ukrainians using arms supplied by multiple NATO countries, including the U.S. and Turkey, but they are mostly crossing into Ukraine from Poland. Might Putin therefore strike a target in eastern Poland — Lublin, say, or Przemysl?
  • he is surely more likely to do so if believes the U.S. would not immediately retaliate in kind against a Russian target. A key lesson of this entire crisis has been that indications of weakness on the U.S. side, which I discussed here last week, have emboldened Putin.
  • 5. Do the Chinese keep Putin afloat but on the condition that he agrees to a compromise peace that they offer to broker?
  • My guess is that the Chinese make no serious diplomatic move until they are convinced Putin’s invasion is thoroughly bogged down in Ukraine’s spring mud.
  • I would not bet the fate of Ukraine on Russian internal politics.
  • Remarkably, one U.S. legislator told me last week that he “couldn’t recall an issue more obsessively followed and more unifying among” his constituents.
  • The only real significance of Western public outrage at Putin’s actions is the political pressure it exerts on Biden and other leaders to take a tougher line with Russia.
  • 7. What is the collateral damage?
  • History shows that wars (much more than pandemics) are the most common cause of jumps in inflation.
  • The best-known recent illustration is the way wars in 1973 (Yom Kippur) and 1979 (Iran-Iraq) contributed to the great inflation of the Seventies
  • these price spikes are not confined to oil and gas but involve a host of other commodities. The prospect of this year’s Ukrainian grain harvest being disrupted means a significant surge in food prices, with all kinds of consequences, especially in developing countries.
  • A tsunami of war has struck Ukraine. Whether the Russian tide flows or ebbs in the coming weeks will do much to determine the course of world history for the rest of our lives.
  • Nor can we ignore the risks that may be lurking within the international financial system.
  • This is the first big crisis of Cold War II, which is in many ways like a mirror image of Cold War I, with China the senior partner, Russia the junior, and a hot war in Eastern Europe rather than East Asia (it was Korea’s turn in 1950).
  • I do not know how the crisis will turn out, but I do know it will have profound consequences for the course of the superpower contest.
  • If the invasion of Ukraine ends in disaster for the heroic defenders of Kyiv and their comrades, another disaster may well follow — and it could occur as far away as Taiwan. Conversely, if there is justice in the world and the disaster befalls the architect of this war, that too will give birth to some fresh and unforeseeable event.
  • Add these seven imponderables together and you see how profoundly important the next few weeks will be.
  • The failure of the administration to signal that it would retaliate is of a piece with last year’s reports that Biden’s national security team was considering ruling out first use of nuclear weapons in its new national military strategy. Nuclear missiles cease to be a deterrent if one side is unwilling to use them.
  • Today, however, the boot is on the other foot. Not only is Putin intimidating NATO; he may have achieved something more, namely a tacit admission by the Biden administration that it would not necessarily retaliate with nuclear weapons if Russia used them.
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