Imo it would lead to further degradation of royal power and rise of nobility, because even controlling Poland and Lithuania was challenging enough
AHC: by 1700 make Poland a great power comparable to France
- Thread starter marcinL
- Start date
Not necessarily, Charles V controlled even bigger lands, but I see the angle from which you're coming.
So when are you planning to answer my question? How come these countries without serfdom, despite having plenty of fertile soil, weren't grain exporters like Poland was? Apparently these free peasants all had more than enough money to buy more land, enough time to work all of it themselves, and could export their apparently vast surpluses abroad? Please show some examples of places like that, and of those advancements in agriculture that apparently didn't exist in Poland. Don't forget, it's pre-1700CE.
They likely meant the Agricultural Revolution which sped up after 1700 (c.f. Jethro Tull's seed drill, also steamboats and railroads) but crop rotation and breeding techniques were being improved pretty much continuously, just fairly slowly in general and at a different pace in different countries.
Remember, at the time the three field system was pretty much dominant, with two fields being used and the third lying fallow, and the idea of using root crops or legumes to improve soil instead of letting it lie fallow only started to spread after 1700, too.
I'm well aware of that lol. I'm just trying to make them figure out for themselves that their claims that "other countries had notably more advanced agriculture because they didn't have serfdom" is just straight up wrong, especially since they're talking about a POD that ends by 1700. I'm not just not feeling like writing paragraphs explaining to them how agriculture worked.
I agree with the people here who said it was better if the PLC never became elective, but I also think the Union of Lublin would be a perfect time to put the kingdom into a good path.
One big change would be the very first election. Just kept Charles IX of France alive and with sons, thus Henry Valois would remain at Poland his whole life. Just give him a son and a new dynasty would remain. After all, the Capets were usually good at centralizing and reforming their states, no matter the place they were, and there are many examples of this (Anjou Hungary, Anjou Naples, Anjou Albania, Valois Burgundy, Bourbon Spain, etc.).
The problem was that Henry leaving the polish throne just a few months after being elected actually damaged the credibility and prestige of the newborn state and set a precedent of having a powerful nobility at the expense of the king in charge. If you avoid that, you are set to a good start.
Or the other option is Charles IX dying earlier and Ernest of Austria is elected, instead. Habsburg were not as good as Capets at centralizing their domains but they were usually very capable on their own. Just make him start an Habsburg branch there and it could survive way into the 1700s.
A third option, and almost never considered in this place, is Albert Frederick, Duke of Prussia, and actually a descendant of Casimir IV Jagiellon (I think the last one of them).
He would be a good option considering he is a "native" ruler familiarized with the geopolitics of the region. The problem was that he left no adult sons and he started to suffer from a mental illness at the time of the first PLC election, so yeah, not much of an attractive candidate, after all.
Either he keeps his sanity in check or give him a brother who is more capable than him and you get the perfect, and totally neutral, candidate for a future dynasty of the PLC.
One big change would be the very first election. Just kept Charles IX of France alive and with sons, thus Henry Valois would remain at Poland his whole life. Just give him a son and a new dynasty would remain. After all, the Capets were usually good at centralizing and reforming their states, no matter the place they were, and there are many examples of this (Anjou Hungary, Anjou Naples, Anjou Albania, Valois Burgundy, Bourbon Spain, etc.).
The problem was that Henry leaving the polish throne just a few months after being elected actually damaged the credibility and prestige of the newborn state and set a precedent of having a powerful nobility at the expense of the king in charge. If you avoid that, you are set to a good start.
Or the other option is Charles IX dying earlier and Ernest of Austria is elected, instead. Habsburg were not as good as Capets at centralizing their domains but they were usually very capable on their own. Just make him start an Habsburg branch there and it could survive way into the 1700s.
A third option, and almost never considered in this place, is Albert Frederick, Duke of Prussia, and actually a descendant of Casimir IV Jagiellon (I think the last one of them).
He would be a good option considering he is a "native" ruler familiarized with the geopolitics of the region. The problem was that he left no adult sons and he started to suffer from a mental illness at the time of the first PLC election, so yeah, not much of an attractive candidate, after all.
Either he keeps his sanity in check or give him a brother who is more capable than him and you get the perfect, and totally neutral, candidate for a future dynasty of the PLC.
The difference existed before, agricultural improvements spread from west to east, in 16th century, when iirc Polish agriculture was closest to the west, in France crop yieds were 10% higher than in Poland, while in England iirc 50% and in Netherlands they were 100% higher.
Could it be because in the Netherlands, the main importer of Polish grain, 50% of people worked in agriculture while in Poland 75%? That vast surplus Poland exported amounted to couple percent of its production, btw, as peasants needed to eat too, and they were eating 75% of their product, while most of the rest went to Polish townspeople. And the work coerced out off Polish peasants at the point of whip was cheaper which reflected on the price of grain, so increasing production in the importer countries was not-economical?
This surprises me. Because the Dutch Republic was a great benefactor of that trade and could increase and maintain a much larger population.
I find it odd that you think feodal agriculture functions better than capitalist agriculture. The opposite is true. And it's made possible that early by trade. I wrote somewhere else about the agriculture of Holland:
Now this were free farmers, who made the switch. Already in the middle ages the feodal obligations were replaced by tenure.
amazing how that reply didn't answer my question at all
1. that's not at all what I'm saying? I'm saying that Poland with its serfdom had a larger agricultural output than they'd have had with subsistence farming...
2. you literally say in your own quotes that the Dutch switching their system reduced their agricultural output, reduced population growth, and forced them to rely on imports and immigration to survive. you're just proving my actual point.
I should've never replied in this thread lol
There were those people called money lenders and merchants that lended money and bought and sold stuff, like grain. As for the working more land, if they dont need to work on landlord's fields they might work on more on ther own. If they dont need to work on landlord's fields they dont need to hire hands that tended to their own farms when they worked for the nobles so they save money or perhaps still hire the help and increase production. Although in this case they wouldnt be so much subsitence farmers anymore
1) Your assumption is that the freed farmers in Poland will turn to autarky/subsistence farming of grain. What i show with my example is that there's another way. What you missed is that despite that the grain production declined, the total agricultural production increased enormously. The Dutch were one of the first to implement specialisation. And that's what lead to all kinds of agricultural innovations. This is a change that a feodal system is limited in making. On of the basic problems is it limiting geographical mobility.
2) No only grain but that was already reducing,Ok but that's the cities not the countryside, yes and that went so succesfull that there are no reported famines in the entire period. That's why i'm not proving your point. Your assumption might just be wrong.
Please stay friendly.
idk why I have to explain this but OP's question was to find a way to give the PLC a population to rival that of France by 1700, that means more than doubling OTL's population, and he swears that just abolishing serfdom is suddenly going to make grain production grow enough so that such a population can be sustained. I'm not assuming they would keep making grain without serfdom, he needs them to keep making grain for his premise.
And it obviously wouldn't work. To repeat myself: the reason Poland had an export market for grain to begin with was because the Polish folwark manors explicitly existed to overproduce and thus create a surplus for export. Taking the peasants off the folwarks isn't magically going to make them work even harder and produce even more grain.
An increase in agricultural production like in the Netherlands isn't relevant here because it's achieved by shifting the focus away from crops that people can actually eat. We're not trying to give the farmers more money by having them sell hemp, we're trying to make them feed 20 million people.
And it obviously wouldn't work. To repeat myself: the reason Poland had an export market for grain to begin with was because the Polish folwark manors explicitly existed to overproduce and thus create a surplus for export. Taking the peasants off the folwarks isn't magically going to make them work even harder and produce even more grain.
An increase in agricultural production like in the Netherlands isn't relevant here because it's achieved by shifting the focus away from crops that people can actually eat. We're not trying to give the farmers more money by having them sell hemp, we're trying to make them feed 20 million people.
It should be said that cereal production benefitting from production of scale, those Dutch farmer tended to produce high value agricultural products, it’s often what you see with smaller free farmers is a shift to high value agricultural products, while large land owners tend to produce low value agricultural products, because they can outcompete smaller land owners.
It helped that, thanks to slave work of their peasants, their costs were close to zero. They were moved onto the serfs who had to come with their own equipment, and hire workers to tend to their own fields when they were working for the landlord (at least in Poland's case)
First, I didnt say anything like that, it was you who brough up the manorial farms and having to keep them around to produce enough food for more populous Poland, because apparently peasants wont produce surplus without being whipped by their betters, which is nonsense, because the farmers in Holland and Belgium were much more productive than their Polish counterparts. If they have incentives to produce surplus, they will produce surplus, whether the incentive is whip and they do it on landlord's field or the incentive is coin and they do it on their own. Coincidentally it would help with the rest of the economy, because wealthier peasants could buy various goods that would likely be produced in the local towns as they still wouldnt be rich enough to buy imported luxury goods (without customs, as the nobles didnt pay customs tarrifs for the goods they brought for their own needs, and did everything they could to prevent enacting import tarrifs, while banning polish merchants from travelling abroad, thus creating on their own wish conditions similar to colonial exploitation)
Dutch produced hemp and dairy because that was more valuable than grain, and they didnt need to produce that much grain (they still produced 90% of what they needed) because they could buy it from losers who sold their grain for half the price the local sellers wanted, and was happy like a child being able to buy saffron, tokay and silk. If they didnt have a reasonably sure supply of grain, the grain prices would go up, and they would plant their hemp fields with wheat, oats and rye again. (Considering that Polish grain export collapsed in otl, they likely did just that or found another supplier)
But anyway, as the requirement is economic parity with France the ruinous manorial-serfdom economy moving around exporting basic and importing processed goods at the cost of impoverishing the 80% of population indeed cannot stay, they need to find a better way of making money.
Last edited:
The benefit of scale come more from equipment than from the free labor (labor cost was always dirt cheap), it’s also why in countries focusing on cereal export, you tended to have semi-communal farms, a heavy plough demand several horses or oxen as such it was a better solution to pool resources. The shift to individual farms came with the turn plough which needed fewer animals to pull it and shorter fields (as the heavy plough demanded long fields). There’s also benefit in transportation and implementing new technics, tools and crops with large land owners.
I don’t say that serfdom was better for agriculture, but with some crops and places it did better than small farmers and small farms are only a success if the farmers are educated, which is why the shift to small free farmers also happen with the introduction of universal education.
Serfdom in Central/Eastern Europe was form of social security. Being serf wasn't pleasant, but alternative with three-field system was being dead. It was in landowners' interest to keep their peasants alive and it was easier for big landowner to recover from cathastrophe such as war than it was for individual farmer. Big landowner would be able to provide his peasants with some cattle and enough foodstuff to save them from starvation. Otherwise after every war half of peasants would be dead.
Yes, but bear in mind that the equipment also came from the peasants; they shared all the risks (because the equipment could broke or the animals could die) while the landlords reaped the benefits. The point should be to perhaps to have larger farms, but without exploitation of the peasant class.
The price was that the landlords exploited the peasants as much as they could without outright starving them to death, which had negative effects on the whole economy.
That didnt happen in any other country. The only area I know where half of population perished in war was the Deluge Lithuania.