The Treaty of Oliva

MAY 03 1660 · 12:00

First page of the Treaty of Oliva, closing the northern war between Sweden, Poland, Brandenburg and the Habsburgs. Place: Oliva (Oliwa) Cistercian monastery, near Danzig (Gdańsk) Figures: John II Casimir Vasa of Poland-Lithuania · Charles XI of Sweden (a minor, represented by his regents) · Emperor Leopold I · Frederick William, the Great Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia · French mediation by Antoine de Lumbres The Deluge Settled The Second Northern War (1655 to 1660) is, for Poland-Lithuania, Potop, the Deluge: a Swedish invasion that occupies most of the Commonwealth within months, joined opportunistically by Brandenburg, Transylvania, and Russia. Warsaw and Kraków fall. The king flees to Silesia. Poland's recovery is partial, costly, and accomplished only with Habsburg and Tatar help, and only after a national mobilization rallied around the icon of the Black Madonna at Częstochowa. Sweden, having overreached, accepts a French-mediated peace at the Oliva monastery outside Danzig. John II Casimir Vasa, last of the Polish Vasas, renounces his hereditary claim to the Swedish throne for himself and his line. Sweden returns most of its Polish conquests but keeps Livonia, consolidating its eastern Baltic empire. Poland keeps its borders with Brandenburg substantially intact, though hollowed by the war. The settlement is filed as a coda to the Westphalian round, the eastern bookend to the Pyrenees in the west, completing the post-1648 grid of sovereign equality across the continent. A Hohenzollern Sovereignty The article that matters most is Article 2 on Ducal Prussia. Since 1525, Ducal Prussia had been a fief of the Polish crown, held by the Hohenzollern Electors of Brandenburg in vassalage. The Treaty of Wehlau (1657), confirmed at Oliva, releases the duchy from Polish suzerainty. Frederick William, the Great Elector, becomes a sovereign prince outside the Holy Roman Empire for the territory of Ducal Prussia, while remaining an Imperial Elector for Brandenburg. The implication is structural. The Hohenzollerns now hold sovereign territory that no Emperor can revoke, on which they can crown a king. Frederick III of Brandenburg does precisely that in 1701, crowning himself King in Prussia at Königsberg, a title legally permissible because Prussia lies outside the Empire. The kingdom that emerges, expanded by Silesia in 1742 and by the Polish partitions thereafter, will unify Germany in 1871 and propel two world wars in the twentieth century. The Cistercians of Oliva witness, in their abbey church, the founding clause of a state that will outlive their order in those provinces by less than three centuries.