The "Common Good" and Urban Crisis Management in Early Modern East-Central Europe: The Examples of Danzig and Slutsk

This chapter examines the discussion between self-interest and the common good in two cities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: the Royal Prussian city of Danzig (Gdańsk) and the Belorussian city of Slutsk which in the seventeenth century was under ownership by the Lithuanian magnate family of Radziwiłł. Excluded as commoners from the nobility’s Renaissance discourse on inherited virtues – among which the duty to contribute to the common good of the republic was foremost – urban citizens reconciled their economic self–interest with their own approach to the common good. They found a working solution between balancing their commercial interests and living together in a closely intertwined multi–religious and multi–ethnic civic space, yet also align with the ideals of the forma mixta [mixed form] Commonwealth, typical for the composite monarchies of the “Younger Europe.” The burghers’ responses to the definition of the common good varied once more between those of the royal city of Danzig, governed until the early seventeenth century by a small Calvinist patrician élite, and the people of the private town and fortress of Slutsk, where the magnate owner represented the town’s contribution to the common good of the republic, but also left the practical regulation of affairs to local autonomous initiative under his ‘well–governed’ cameralist regime.