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Wed23 Jul04:30pm(15 mins)
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Where:
Room 16
Presenter:
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The presentation aims to showcase approaches to dealing with a wartime crisis, employed members of a cliental-administrative network of Podlachian Radziwiłł family estates in the period of the most intensifed warfare from 1702 to 1709.
The Great Northern War (1700-1721) was one of the most destructive conflicts which had affected the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Early Modern Period. While establishing exact scale of material and demographic losses remains a monumental task to establish, the severity of the crisis was evident in the eyes of contemporary. Documents such as correspondence can be helpful in assessing the situation through the eyes of people responsible for safeguarding estates and livelihoods of people living therein.
A significant number of letters and reports have been produced in the network of clients and administrators connected to Biała Radziwiłłowska (now Biała Podlaska), a town and a center of an estate complex belonging to Great Chancellor of Lithuania Karol Stanisław Radziwiłł. These documents concern managing the land holdings, their inhabitants, procuring income for Radziwiłł, and dealing with multiple military incursions from Swedish, Russian, Saxon and Polish forces. As such, they help in understanding the wartime situation on a more detailed level, as a threat to lives and property of men and a challenge for the network.
The presentation will outline the organisation of the local network (as much as it can be outlined) and duties of its members. The main point of interest is how ongoing warfare impacted life in the estates, and how clients and administrators tried to alleviate its effects on the local populace and economy. This will not only establish strategies of survival used in times of crisis, but help in delimiting competences and authority held by members of largely informal network. Since analysed information comes mostly from reports sent to the protector, a related question will concern the ways people resposible for the estates justified their actions and presented their agency.
