Golden Liberty

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Golden Liberty (Latin: Aurea Libertas; Polish: Złota Wolność, sometimes used in the plural: this phenomenon can also be referred to as "Golden Freedoms," "Nobles' Democracy" or "Nobles' Commonwealth" — Polish: Rzeczpospolita Szlachecka) refers to a unique aristocratic political system in the Kingdom of Poland and later, after the Union of Lublin (1569), in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Under that system, all nobles (szlachta) were equal and enjoyed extensive rights and privileges. The szlachta controlled the legislature (Sejm — the Polish parliament) and the Commonwealth's elected king.

"Golden Liberty" distinguished Poland and was a unique exception in an age when absolutism was developing in the principal countries of Europe to the east and west. Freedom and liberty, even if enjoyed only by a single social class — the szlachta — were assets almost unheard-of elsewhere in Europe, where monarchs held power of life and death over all their citizens. But in the end, the excesses of Golden Liberty resulted in weakness in the central government — a weakness that eventually allowed the Commonwealth's neighbors to paralyze the polity, bring it to the brink of anarchy, and annex the powerless country in the late-18th-century partitions of Poland.