Sarmatia revisited: maps and the making of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

ENThe map of “European Sarmatia” by the Polish physician and cartographer Andrzej Pograbka (d. 1602) was published in Venice in 1570 at a moment of historic change in central and eastern Europe. Just one year previously, on July 1, 1569, the nobilities of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had agreed to bind together their composite polities “in perpetuity,” forming a confederated political entity that replaced a looser union first forged in 1385. The new body politic is known in the English-language scholarship as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but in the original Polish-written document it was described simply as Rzeczpospolita , meaning both a well-ordered political community and “something held in common by a wider public,” [our] shared thing - res publica in the classical rendering, and “common wealth” in the early modern English translation. Strictly speaking, there were still two autonomous polities, the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (both of which were composite realms), but their political communities ceded parts of their sovereignty to the Commonwealth, establishing a common Sejm (legislative assembly) and currency. Pograbka’s map was the first to appear after the forging of this momentous political alliance, and thus it marks an important milestone in representing the newly formed Commonwealth as an integrable entity. Pograbka needed to tackle several issues, however, in order to render his cartographic representation of the Polish-Lithuanian territories legible and indelible. For how was it possible to depict a confederated polity on a map, with only mountain ranges and rivers acting as subdivisions of land, and with no internal or external borders added to the picture? What would this polity even be called if its self-proclaimed name referred simply to an idealized system of governance?.“Commonwealth” (or its cognates, such as “Republic”) did not unambiguously convey the composite character of the Polish-Lithuanian union, and, given that most cartographic depictions of Poland-Lithuania were produced and consumed in western Europe, there was always the danger that the meaning of the toponym “Commonwealth” might have been lost in translation. Indeed, mapmakers tended to use the name of the more powerful partner in the union, Poland, to refer to the entire confederated polity, as is evident in the 1570 edition of Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum. Less frequently, they included the names of both territorial states, as in various editions of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia. For map owners in Poland-Lithuania, the former solution risked irritating the Lithuanian elites, who continued to insist on the legal distinctiveness of the Grand Duchy within the Commonwealth; the latter accommodation entirely ignored the converging aspect of the union. Pograbka’s choice to call the Commonwealth “European Sarmatia” was an answer to these concerns. Rather than entering into the potentially contentious politics of his day, marked by often bitter disagreements over the nature of the union, Pograbka offered a less politicized and simultaneously more inclusive vision of the Polish-Lithuanian lands by mapping them onto cartographic divisions dating back to Ptolemy’s treatise Geographia, an ancient text written around 150 AD, first printed as a modern illustrated edition with maps in 1477, and still widely read in the sixteenth century.Backed by the authority of this celebrated Greco-Roman geographer, European Sarmatia in Pograbka’s map served as an ancient substitute for the lands that lay between the Vistula and the Don, which in the early modern period were inhabited by Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, and Prussians. The term was not only meant to give these otherwise separate peoples a sense of historical continuity and an impetus for greater association between them, but also marked their place firmly among all those other Europeans with a claim to classical heritage. Using an ancient geographical concept and applying it to an early modern context, Pograbka solved the problem of naming the new Commonwealth, while also claiming for it an allegedly unbroken history anchored in “Sarmatian" antiquity [p. 113-116].