Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a bi-confederal state uniting the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, formally established by the Union of Lublin in 1569 and enduring until 1795, governed as an elective monarchy in which the king was chosen by an assembly of the nobility and shared power with a bicameral parliament called the Sejm. Known to its own citizens as the Commonwealth of Both Nations, it became one of the largest and most populous states in early modern Europe and was distinguished by an unusually broad degree of religious toleration and a political system dominated by an extensive noble class exercising rights that later historians have compared to a form of noble republicanism. The Commonwealth's power peaked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but declined through the eighteenth century as neighboring Russia, Prussia and Austria increasingly interfered in its internal politics, exploiting weaknesses in its unanimity-dependent parliamentary procedure, most notoriously the liberum veto. The Commonwealth was ended by a series of three partitions carried out by Russia, Prussia and Austria between 1772 and 1795, with the final partition in 1795 erasing an independent Polish-Lithuanian state from the map of Europe until 1918.