Constantine was already on his way to sainthood when Eusebius of Caesarea delivered panegyrics in his honour in 335—6. His Laudes are in the tradition of pagan panegyric, in which the virtues of the emperors were praised, especially their piety to the gods and the divine favour to them. Such had earlier been given to Constantine himself, relating him to his persecuting predecessors. But now it is his services to the one God the Creator, who inspired him with justice and wisdom to rule the Empire, to root out idolatrous error, and to set up the symbol of the Cross for mankind’s salvation. In the Life of Constantine, which must be largely or wholly from Eusebius, the whole career is surveyed in a form which combines panegyric, biography, history, and proclamation. The Emperor was, it was claimed, deeply, skilfully, and consistently Christian. He had fulfilled apocalyptic prophecy by destroying the persecuting dragon that corrupted the world, represented chiefly by Licinius. Constantine had filled the Empire with churches and Christian governors; he had pacified barbarians and brought them to the knowledge of God and the rule of law. In death he lay between monuments of Apostles, sharing the prayers of the Church to whose bosom he had finally been received in baptism. Coins depicted his ascent to heaven on a quadriga (a pagan tradition which Eusebius saw with Christian eyes), and the sons of his body continued to exercise his single, quasi-divine government of the world.

We know from Eadmer’s Vita Anselmi that Anselm would eat little when he sat down to meals with his monks. Instead of having one of his monks read from an appropriate book at mealtimes, Anselm would instruct the community himself. Indeed, Anselm talked so much that, according to his biographer, it would take a separate book to record all that he said. In fact, Anselm’s sayings were collected, and it is to one of these that I wish to pay particular attention.

By the twelfth century literate Europeans—and probably a far wider range of the population—were well aware of the differences between nations. The word most commonly used by twelfth-century writers to indicate nations or ethnic groups was gens. R. Bartlett in his work Gerald of Wales has observed that gens was a fluid concept: Gerald of Wales regarded the Welsh and Bretons as belonging to a single gens because of their ethnic relationship; the Irish and English were gentes; and the inhabitants of the Welsh Marches were also a gens —‘a gens raised in the Marches’.

Let us briefly recall the point of departure for the history of the relations between the Church and the Polish nation in the ninth and tenth centuries, that is, at the time when a strong monarchy had been formed between the Vistula and the Oder rivers, within the borders approximating to those we see today. These centuries were decisive not only for Poland, but also for other central and east European countries—for Bohemia, Hungary, Kiev, Ruthenia, and also for Scandinavia. In all these countries the emergence of the state structure went together with the official adoption of Christianity by the rulers and the social élites. The authorities also saw to it that at least the minimum requirements of the new religion were introduced and observed throughout the population. Around AD 1000 the borders of European Christianity had expanded to a fairly impressive size, and therefore this is a moment of special significance in the history of the European community. Only relatively small areas of heathendom remained unaffected, particularly the region of the Baltic coast—and it was in this region where the last stage of European Christianization took place, namely, the baptism of Lithuania in 1386–7, whose six-hundredth anniversary we celebrated recendy.

Le médiéviste tchèque connu František Šmahel a développé récemment la thèse précédemment déjà formulée sur ‘les anomalies historiques’ du hussitisme dans lequel il voit ‘une réforme avant les réformes et une révolution avant les révolutions des Temps modernes’. Dans la perspective comparative de l’Europe centrale et occidentale, était également selon lui une ‘anomalie’ la maturité précoce, la grande extension et le sentiment ailleurs inconnu de communauté ethnique en Bohême. Il serait difficile de préjuger dès maintenant la stabilité des ‘anomalies tchèques’ dans les recherches ultérieures sur le hussitisme et l’époque hussite. Il est toutefois certain que les conclusions de F. Šmahel ont présenté dans un nouvel éclairage tout ce que l’on a coutume d’appeler aspects nationaux du mouvement hussite.

The fifteenth century was a very important period in the history of the Polish State and nation. It had a particular significance for the development of national consciousness. The union of the Polish kingdom with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1385) changed not only the boundaries of this new and unified state called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but also created new and specific conditions for the development of the nation. The different nationalities of the jagiellonian state, Poles, Ruthenians, Lithuanians, Germans, Jews, and Armenians played an important role in the lively exchange of cultural experience on the basis of a sometimes uneasy partnership. Poland guaranteed privileges to the lords, both spiritual and temporal, to the gentry, and to the patricians, estates that had emerged in the course of the fourteenth century. These were united by common sentiment and desire for a strong political foundation. The urban and rural populations of both Polish and non-Polish speakers were bound together by loyalty to the Crown and its territory. Like other groups in late-medieval Europe they saw such a political union as advantageous.

The Reformation in the sixteenth century brought with it the complex and—for contemporary religious and political groupings—unacceptable phenomenon of religious plurality. In the Middle Ages citizenship as an independent concept scarcely existed, and tacit assumptions about the function of Church-State relations rested on the view that all inhabitants of the polity were members of the Christian respublica. There were, of course, some specific, necessary, and therefore tolerable exceptions, such as Jews in many, but not in all countries. Heretics and infidels, who did not conform to these specifications, were therefore regarded as legitimate targets for repression, even for physical violence, in the complex machinery of the Inquisition and in the ideology of the crusades. The Reformation brought about a reversal of this monolithic thinking about the nature of the Christian polity. Faced with plurality of religious ideas and organizations, various solutions were attempted. The earliest, and that which was to have the most widespread and long-lasting effect in pre-Enlightenment and pre-Emancipation Europe, was that formulated in the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555). Here the decree of cuius regio, ejus religio—with a deliberate retrospect to the Emperor Constantine—guaranteed the continuation of the medieval principle, whereby the good and loyal citizen was one who conformed in religious as well as political sentiment with the ruling authority.

Thanks to the Brieff Discours, a partisan account published for polemical purposes almost twenty years later, the ‘Troubles’ which began with this gesture form one of the best-known aspects of the Marian exile. However, because of the context within which the compilers of that work were operating, it is usually seen simply as a liturgical conflict between the protagonists of the 1552 Prayer Book, and those of the Geneva rite, which had been printed in English as far back as 1550. In fact, the issues which it raised were far wider, embracing the whole conduct of ecclesiastical affairs, and the nature of the English church.

From the moment of Luther’s defiance of both Pope and Emperor at the Diet of Worms the sixteenth century became a period par excellence of cuius regio, eius religio, and of nowhere was this more true than for the very different societies of England and Poland. In England, for that time a highly centralized country, the nation’s religious fate oscillated wildly with the change of monarchs and their respective governments, mildly reformist under Henry VIII so long as Thomas Cromwell held power, indisputedly Protestant during the rule of the boy king, Edward VI, as indisputedly Roman Catholic in the equally short reign of Mary I, and then Protestant, as it turned out permanently, on the accession of Elizabeth. In Poland, where, because of its proximity to Wittenberg, Luther’s teachings began taking root at least within the German communities considerably earlier than in England, the spread first of Lutheranism and then Calvinism depended far more on the attitude of the nobility than of the monarch, though the succession of the more tolerant Sigismund Augustus in 1548 certainly accelerated the process. Apart from the five years between 1547 and 1553 in England, in neither country was life easy for converts to the Swiss version of Protestantism before 1560, and at different times both Polish and English Protestants suffered quite severe episodes of persecution: this essay traces the fortunes of the Poles who found a refuge in England and of the English who sought a temporary haven in Poland on account of their religion in the mid-sixteenth century.

The process of adapting universal religions to local cultures, conditions, and milieux is as old as the religions themselves. As far as Christinity is concerned, it was also subject to the continuous blending of general doctrinal principles with the national form of their expression, especially with age-old traditions in folklore. Consequently, Frankish or Germanic Christianity differed considerably from the Slavic version, while the latter again differed from that prevailing in the Eastern Roman Empire. Although in missionary areas the Church sometimes approved of investing the cult with specific features, taking into account the nationality and mentality of its congregations, in Europe itself conflicts between local church authorities on the one hand and Rome on the other often broke out over these matters. They found expression and were finally ossified in successive divisions of Christianity; beginning with the Great Schism of 1054, through the attempt to organize a national church in Bohemia (the Hussite Movement), to the permanent split brought about by the Reformation.

Jan Paweł Woronicz—Polish archbishop, preacher, and poet, who lived in the second half of the eighteenth century and in the first third of the nineteenth century—presented in his writings a very characteristic and conceptually uniform vision of the nation. Generally speaking, one can say that this vision was based on the principles of divine finality and providence. It perceived individual nations as realities planned and created by God, aimed at precisely determined goals and provided with continual divine providence. These views are not the fruits of the Enlightenment, but can be traced back to biblical sources and to the writings of St Augustine and Jacques Bénigne Bosuet (1627–1704). However, in Poland these ideas are deeply rooted in the concepts already expressed by Jan Długosz (1415–80), Stanisław Orzechowski (1513–66), Stanisław Sarnicki (1532–97), Piotr Skarga (1536–1612), Wespazjan Kochowski (1633–1700), and Szymon Starowolski (1588–1656).

The subject of my paper lies in a field of studies seldom pursued in Church historiography. Catholic historians in Poland are concerned principally with the study of the Church itself: its spiritual life, organization, political role, and contribution to national life. Much less attention is given to adversaries of the Church; so that, generally speaking, the study of non-Catholic (and non-Christian) trends or sectors in society is currently left to Marxist or liberal scholars. This is a pity.

Before I attempt a brief survey of the numerous and varied examples of religious architecture in Poland let me mention a few well-known facts. Poland, having grown out of a tribal community, and having early developed a national character, after the Union with Lithuania (first a personal union in 1386 and then a State union in 1569) began expanding rapidly. At the turn of the fifteenth century a new model of parliamentary monarchy was established, a model functioning in an already multinational, federal state, which ceased to be the ‘Republic of Two Nations’ and became instead the ‘Republic of Many Nations’. I do not intend to analyse here all the achievements, changes, and mistakes of Poland, but I would like to stress that between the fifteenth century and the eighteenth century the Poles were in a minority. This minority, however, decided the country’s fate, as it was Polish noblemen (szlachta) who set the political and cultural pace. It has never been accurately assessed what percentage of the whole society the noblemen were, but it must have been high, probably the highest in Europe. According to some sources, the Poles who felt themselves free and regarded Poland as their commonwealth formed ten per cent of the whole population. We should also note that at that time the process of Polonization took place mainly among the nobility, and that the Poles who were in a minority in the Polish-Lithuanian State were at the same time a majority among those who ruled that State. I am not saying that as a Polish nationalist, but as an historian who has a deep respect and friendly feeling for all the nations and denominations which once inhabited this large and unique country. The Union of Lublin put the final touches to this distinctive commonwealth, which appeared too early in the Europe of nationalism and absolutism to survive.