Unknown Documents Concerning the Regional Council of the Poznań and Kalisz Voivodships from 1701 and 1735 in the London Archival Collection. Source Edition

Abstract

Recently, we can observe an increased interest in research on the history of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth based on the analysis of Western European archival resources. They present the image of Poland and Lithuania from a different point of view, which provides an interesting cognitive perspective and an opportunity to distance oneself from one’s own historiographical opinions. This is because facts that are commonly known but seen from a different, external perspective often acquire a new and valuable overtone. During the research in the National Archives and the British Library, we can find a large number of sources concerning the history of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which results from the active functioning of the Polish-Lithuanian state in the political struggles in Central and Eastern Europe, which was taken into account in diplomatic games in the west of the Old Continent. At the forefront of such documents are diplomatic correspondence, political writings, diaries of the Parliament, complete or partial. This group also includes instructions and accounts of local councils. Sometimes in the course of scientific research it is possible to come across manuscript documents completely unknown to Polish historiography, which either supplement the already known facts or present them in a slightly different way. This type of material is the instruction of the local council of the Poznań Voivodship “Points de l’instruction que la Province de la Grande Pologne a donnee a ses Deputes, ou Nonces pour la Diete prochain” from 1701 and “Relation de ce qui s’est passe a la Dietine de la Grande Pologne a Szroda par rapport aux Dissidents” from 1735. The first manuscript concerns the local council of the Poznań and Kalisz voivodships, which was break off, but the draft instruction was made public. On the other hand, the instruction found in London is slightly different from that known from domestic research, but the reasons for this cannot be resolved at present. As far as the latter document is concerned, i.e. the account of the 1735 local council, although the instruction itself is known, we do not know much about the course of the congress, especially about the relations between dissidents and Catholics during the local council. The found manuscript explains this in some way.