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SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY VIEWS ON THE KHMEL'NYTS'KYI UPRISING 437to tolerate all Christian denominations. Earlier, Poland had become ahaven for Jews expelled from western and central Europe. The religiousrights of peasants were never discussed explicitly and the rightsof burghers depended on municipal autonomy and internal powerrelationships, but the religious rights of the nobles were firmly entrenched.The Commonwealth was spared the religious wars of thesixteenth and the early seventeenth century, and its inhabitants experienceda modicum of mutual tolerance surpassing mere legal toleration.13During the first half of the seventeenth century, however, thereligious situation in the Commonwealth was changing. King SigismundHI (1587-1632) actively supported Counter-ReformationCatholicism, and more and more nobles converted to Catholicismfrom Protestantism and Orthodoxy. The government refused to recognizethat a large segment of the Orthodox population did not adhereto the Union with Rome negotiated in 1595-1596, and consequentlybegan to persecute these Eastern Christians. Orthodox clergymen andlaymen were obliged, then, to challenge the authority of the Commonwealth.At the same time, Catholic clerics and zealots began todemand restrictions on other churches. Acts such as the closing of theAntitrinitarian school at Raków (1638) bespoke the end of the age oftolerance. 14Although tolerance and toleration were on the decline, in the firsthalf of the century they were still vital traditions. Władysław IV13On traditions of tolerance and the religious problem in the Commonwealth, seeJanusz Tazbir, Państwo bez stosów: Szkice z dziejów tolerancji w Polsce XVIIwieku (Warsaw, 1958) (published in English translation as A State Without States:Polish Religious Toleration in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries [New York,1973]); Mirosław Korolko, Klejnot swobodnego sumienia: Polemika wokół KonfederacjiWarszawskiej w latach 1573-1658 (Warsaw, 1974); Ambroise Jobert, DeLuther à Mohila: La Pologne dans la crise de la Chrétienté 1517-1648 (Paris,1974) (Collection historique de l'Institut d'études slaves, 21); and Wiktor Weintraub,"Tolerance and Intolerance in Old Poland," Canadian Slavonic Papers 13,no. 1 (1971): 21-44.14On the changes in the reign of Sigismund III, see, in addition to the works citedin fn. 13, Henryk Wisner's "Walka o realizację konfederacji warszawskiej zapanowania Zygmunta III w latach 1587-1632," Odrodzenie i Reformacja wPolsce 19 (1974) : 129-49. On the problems of the Orthodox church, see KazimierzChodynicki, Kościół Prawosławny a Rzeczpospolita Polska 1370-1632 (Warsaw,1934); P. N. Zhukovich, Seimovaia bor'ba pravoslavnogo zapadno-russkogo dvorianstvas tserkovnoi uniei (do 1608) (St. Petersburg, 1901), and Seimovaia bor'bazapadno-russkogo dvorianstva s tserkovnoi uniei (s 1609), 6 pts. (St. Petersburg,1902-1912); and Vasilii Bednov [Vasyl' Bidnov], Pravoslavnaia tserkov' ν Pol'sheі Litve po "Volumina Legum" (Katerynoslav, 1908).