Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski

Works

• 1551On the Improvement of the Commonwealth

  Five books on morals, law, war, the Church and schools (complete edition Basel 1554), proposing equal laws and penalties for all estates.

Position

Frycz Modrzewski applied the humanist ideal of a commonwealth governed by law and the common good to the Kingdom of Poland, in which the nobility held legal and political privileges over burghers and peasants. In five books – on morals, laws, war, the Church and the school – he called for one law for all estates, equal penalties for homicide, legal protection of peasants against arbitrary lords, capable officials chosen for merit and a strong but law-bound royal power. War was to be waged only in defence, and disputes between Christian states were to be settled by arbitration. Schools should educate all citizens for public life, and the Church was to be reformed through a national synod and a general council with lay participation. Cyprian Bazylik’s Polish translation (1577) carried the book to readers without Latin; his writings were placed on the Roman Index. Historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, among them Stanisław Kot and Waldemar Voisé, presented him as the leading political writer of the Polish Renaissance and an early advocate of equality before the law. They also note that his proposals found little echo in the noble republic of his time and that his idea of equality remained within a society of estates.

Life & context

Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski was born in 1503 in Wolbórz, a town belonging to the bishops of Kuyavia, where his father was the town’s wójt (bailiff). He studied at the Kraków Academy from 1517 and then entered the service of Jan Łaski, Archbishop of Gniezno and Primate. In the circle of the Łaski family, whose younger Jan Łaski was a friend of Erasmus, he became a humanist. In the 1530s he stayed in Germany, above all in Wittenberg, where he came into contact with Philip Melanchthon. After his return he published, from 1543, orations on the punishment of homicide in which he demanded the same penalty for killing a peasant as for killing a noble. From 1547 he was secretary to King Sigismund II Augustus and took part in royal embassies. His main work, “On the Improvement of the Commonwealth”, appeared in Kraków in 1551 without the books on the Church and the school, which church censorship held back; the complete edition was printed in Basel in 1554. In later years he wrote on Church reform and was drawn into the disputes of the anti-Trinitarians, which made him suspect to Catholics and Protestants alike. He died in Wolbórz in 1572.

Further main works

• Lascius, or On the Punishment of Homicide (Lascius, sive de poena homicidii, 1543)
• Sylvae (writings on the Trinitarian disputes, published posthumously 1590)