Revamping the defences of Kamieniec Podolski prior to 1672

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Kamieniec Podolski was one of the most important strongholds of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As relations with Turkey were deteriorating after 1667 a revamping of this strategic fortress became a priority. Neglected during the reign of Jan Kazimierz (1648-1668), the town had suffered a gentle decline. His successor Michal Korybut was genuinely concerned about Kamieniec Podolski and instructed his legates to raise the matter in one sejmik (provincial assembly) after another. Indeed the interest in Kamieniec Podolski was growing hand in hand with the anxieties about Polish-Turkish relations. By the end of the 1660s the issue was mentioned in the instructions of some sejmiks; later it came up for discussion in more than half those assemblies. In the Sejm the problem of beefing up Poland’s key stronghold in the south-east was addressed with varying urgency. In the last phase of Jan Kazimierz’s rule there was hardly any interest in that issue. During the royal election it rose to the top of the aganda. The question of mending the fortifications of Kamieniec Podolski was debated in a number of sessions and addressed in more than one solemn resolution. Once the new king, Michal Korybut, was charged with the task of bringing the fortifications of Kamieniec Podolski up to scratch, the nobility assumed that they need no longer to be concerned with that problem. Even a mounting stream of news about an imminent war with Turkey left their complacency unruffled. Moreover, at that critical stage the Sejm proceedings were repeatedly blocked and the Senate Council in which the Kamieniec issue was reopened had no authority to assign any funds. Other sources do not add anything significant to our knowledge of the condition of Kamieniec’s defences on the eve of the war. The treasury bills are incomplete, the press seems to have either ignored the issue or picked it up only to score propaganda points. Neither did it exercise the attention of contemporary letter writers, with the exception of a number of patriots who felt strongly for Poland and the dangerously exposed capital of Podole. In 1672 Kamieniec was overrun by the Ottoman armies after a brief siege: the responsibility for its fall must be laid at the door of the Polish political elites which wasted all the years between 1667 and 1672. They had known that the stronghold was in bad need of revamping and yet had failed to do anything about it.