Silent Sejm - Sejm

Sejm

To prevent the use of liberum veto from disrupting Sejm proceedings, the session was turned into a confederated sejm. (It was also a pacification sejm). Threatened by a strong Russian army, with Russian soldiers "guarding" the proceedings, the Silent Sejm was known as such because only the speaker (marshal of the Sejm) Stanisław Ledóchowski (podkomorzy krzemienicki), and a few selected other deputies were allowed a voice, outlining the terms of the settlement. Other names for the Sejm in the English language include Dumb or Muted.^ The terms themselves were significantly designed by Peter the Great. The Sejm lasted for one day only, or more precisely, six hours.

This settlement stipulated that:

• Tarnogród Confederation (and older, Sandomierz Confederation) were dissolved;
• the right to form confederations in the future was abolished;
• Golden Freedoms (Cardinal Laws) are reaffirmed (in particular, liberum veto still held);
• the king was not to imprison people based on his whim (reaffirmation of the neminem captivabimus);
• the king had to avoid offensive wars;
• Poles and Saxony (Augustus homeland) should not intervene into each other's domestic affairs (the king had to avoid negotiations on Polish affairs with foreign (Saxonian) powers);
• hetmans and sejmiks (local parliaments) had lost some of their prerogatives (notably, sejmiks no longer could change local taxation);
• Saxony troops stationed in Poland were to be significantly limited in size (banished totally, or reduced to 1,200 of royal guard, which no further foreign recruits allowed)
• Saxon officials were to be removed from Poland (or were limited to six) and the king was to not give any further offices to foreign officials;
• the rights of Protestants in Poland were curtailed (some Protestant churches were to be demolished to punish "Swedish partisans")
• establishment of an estimate of the state's income and expenditure (in essence, a budget, one of the first in Europe)
• established taxes for Commonwealth army (consuming over 90% of the state's income);
• the army was to be billeted on the crown estates;
• reduction of the army to 24,000 (or 18,000, or 16,000 – sources vary) for Poland and 6,000 (or 8,000) for Lithuania. An army of that size was insufficient to protect the Commonwealth; a normal soldier's wages meant that after factoring officer pensions and other military needs, the effective army was perhaps 12,000 strong, several times weaker than those of its neighbours – at that time the Russian army numbered 300,000;

Sources vary whether Russia was recognized as the power that would guarantee the settlement; this claim is made by Jacek Jędruch and Norman Davies, but rejected by Jacek Staszewski and explicitly noted as erroneous in the edited work by Zbigniew Wójcik.