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168 FRANK E. SYSYNzation came from regionalism, a force especially strong in the GrandDuchy of Lithuania, Royal Prussia, Livonia, and the Ukrainian landsdetached from Lithuania and annexed to Poland at the Union ofLublin.In the early modern period the strength of regionalism among allEuropean nobilities was considerable. 4 Yet the development of regionalismand of noble rights was very different in the Commonwealthfrom the Western and Central European pattern. In the West, feudalismresulted in the formation of a jig-saw puzzle of lands, regions, andcities with widely differing rights and multiple institutions serving thevarious corporate orders of society. The "new monarchs" and theirsuccessors in the sixteenth to eighteenth century strove to centralizetheir domains by whittling away at the rights of regional institutionsand elites, often by playing off one order of society against another.Resistance to the rulers' centralizing policies often arose among nobilitieswho viewed the preservation of the constitution and the privilegesof their realm, province, or region as a sacred trust.In comparison to the lands lying to the west, the vast sixteenthcenturyCommonwealth appeared to be remarkably uniform in administrationand institutions. Without ever having experienced true feudalism,the Kingdom of Poland was restored as a unified realm in thefourteenth century. 5Its warrior strata developed into a numerouslanded nobility, equal in rights, which gained more and more influencein government, culminating in a national Diet at the end of thefifteenth century. Enserfment of the peasantry and weak developmentof the cities ensured the nobles and their institutions dominancethroughout the land. The Kingdom and its provinces were adminiskatolickiegow Polsce 1460-1795 (Warsaw, 1966); idem, Państwo bez stosów:Szkice z dziejów tolerancji w Pobce XVII wieku (Warsaw, 1958), published inEnglish as A State Without Stakes: Polish Religious Toleration in the Sixteenth andSeventeenth Centuries (New York, 1973); and Wiktor Weintraub, "Tolerance andIntolerance in Old Poland," Canadian Slavonic Papers 13, no. 1 (1971) : 2\-AA.4On regionalism, see Dietrich Gerhard, "Regionalismus und Ständisches Wesenals ein Grundthema Europäischer Geschichte," Historische Zeitschrift 174(1952) : 307-337; an English version, "Regionalism and Corporate Order as a BasicTheme of European History," appeared in Ragnhild Hatton and M. S. Anderson,eds., Studies in Diplomatic History: Essays in Memory of David Bayne Horn(London, 1970), pp. 155-82.5See Tadeusz Manteuffel, "On Polish Feudalism," Mediaevalia et Humanística 16(1964): 94-104.