Apprehending an unindentified political object: French and Italian reactions to the first Polish royal elections (1573-1576)

This article discusses the reactions of French and Italian observers to the first two royal elections in the Polish Kingdom, in order to determine what kind of information they may reveal. Most of the witnesses describing the event and chroniclers – who in turn rely on these descriptions – perceive the elections, and more specifically their relatively peaceful outcome, as a sign of the scarcity of political and religious conflict within a society where civil cohesion appears to be surprisingly resistant. In this country where the frictions they usually encounter seem absent, some of these diplomats are tempted to locate their own political projects, since the election, in its international dimension, allows them to formulate such hopes. The diversity of these plans displays the variety of political aspirations and the way they depend on the social identity of the person who expresses them. But the brutal failure each of these attempts results in, confirms that they were all illusory. The less external point of view of members of the apostolic nunciature, however, avoids such massive refutations. The misunderstandings they met can therefore provide an evolving point of comparison to address the construction of a peculiar political culture in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Western reactions to a European event like the first Polish royal elections provide an insight into the gaps dividing political representations between as well as within Sixteenth-Century societies; they can thus be useful in order to better understand the developing ideologies in both the source and the target societies.