In the Holy Cross Chapel of the Wawel Cathedral in Kraków stands the funerary monument of Kajetan Ignacy Sołtyk, sixty-seventh Bishop of Kraków — commissioned by his nephew Michał in 1790, the year of Poland’s second partition. On the face of the sarcophagus, rendered in low relief, a carriage moves under cavalry escort along a road that leads, though the stone does not say so, to Kaługa, in the Russian interior. The year was 1767. Sołtyk had been seized by Russian troops by order of the Russian ambassador for opposing Russia’s political and religious program for the Commonwealth during the Sejm, bundled into a carriage, and driven east — a political abduction so brazen that it became, in the decades following, one of the founding outrages of Polish martyrological memory. He would not return for five years.
The monument transforms that enforced journey into the central scene of a man’s significance: not his episcopate, not his theology, not his political career, but the moment he was taken away against his will and transformed into a patriot-martyr — a transformation his later years, marked by mental collapse and withdrawal from public life, would do nothing to complicate in the popular memory.
That is one carriage.
There is another, less well-known but preserved in prose.
The memoirist Jędrzej Kitowicz, describing the ceremonial processions that opened each session of the Sejm — the king riding from his palace to the Sejm, flanked by the ranked carriages of senators and deputies, each equipage expressing by the number of its liveried attendants the precise degree of its owner’s dignity — notes that the most elaborate display permitted by custom consisted of twelve lackeys and six haiduks (the tall liveried footmen whose Hungarian-style dress and ceremonial bearing made them among the most visible markers of aristocratic magnificence), a number not exceeded even by the king himself. In fact it was exceeded by one participant only. Kajetan Sołtyk, in the first year of his episcopate at Kraków, appeared in the procession of 1760 with twenty-four lackeys, twelve haiduks, and four pages. Already in his second year, Kitowicz adds with characteristic dryness, he had reduced this magnificent display to conventional proportions.
Two carriages, then. One at the height of his career, one at its nadir. One the expression of an ambition so consuming it overreached even the sovereign’s ceremonial precedence; the other the instrument of a foreign power’s contempt for Polish sovereignty and ecclesiastical dignity. In both, the bishop is being carried — not walking of his own volition, not the autonomous agent of his own movement, but the passenger of forces that exceed his will. In 1760 those forces are internal: a visceral hunger for visibility, for precedence, for recognition. In 1767 they are external and violent. But the structural resemblance is uncanny and instructive. He is always at the center of an attended vehicle. What changes is not the form, but only the hand that commands the escort.
Kitowicz does not moralize. He gives you the numbers — twenty-four, twelve, four — and then simply notes, almost in passing, the reduction that followed. Whether the correction came from rebuke or recognition of excess, the record does not say. It is enough that the excess was seen and then moderated and not repeated.
What the monument suppresses, and what Kitowicz preserves, is that earlier carriage: the one that moved through Warsaw under twenty-four lackeys, announcing to every observer that the newly installed Bishop of Kraków had arrived and was to be noticed above all others, including the king. Michał Sołtyk knew the record. He chose which carriage to put on the sarcophagus.
The choice, motivated by familial piety and political calculation, was not wrong — or not simply wrong, though neither was it uncontested. Sołtyk’s reputation has never settled into a single image. Those who remembered him as a patriot and victim were matched, even in his own lifetime, by those who remembered him as a man whose turbulent ambitions had done as much to destabilize the Republic as the foreign powers that preyed upon it. The martyrological image the monument proposes is one reading of the man — a powerful reading, and one that history has repeatedly ratified — but it is a reading, not a verdict. What it identifies correctly is the hinge. The deportation to Kaługa became the organizing fact of his significance. The twenty-four lackeys made him conspicuous for a season; the cavalry escort made his memory, his conspicuousness, permanent.
There is a certain grammar to this, whether one chooses to call it providential or merely historical. The force that humiliated him accomplished what his own will had sought, and failed, to secure: an uncontested image of magnitude, carried not along the Kraków Road in Warsaw but forward into a posterity that required, as Poland required, its martyrs. Sołtyk, a Catholic bishop and political operator with a pronounced taste for the theatrical and excess, would not have found the role uncongenial. The monument does not lie, exactly. It chooses. It fixes upon the carriage that tells the truth it prefers and lets the other fall away—not into oblivion, but into the keeping of a memoirist who recorded what he saw, and of those who return to it.
Sources
The fullest current scholarship on Sołtyk’s funerary monument and the attribution of its design to Father Sebastian Sierakowski draws on Joanna Daranowska-Łukaszewska, “Kto jest autorem nagrobka biskupa Kajetana Sołtyka w katedrze na Wawelu?” (Studia Waweliana, vol. 1, 1992). The account of the Sejm processions and Sołtyk’s ceremonial display is drawn from Jędrzej Kitowicz, Opis obyczajów za panowania Augusta III (Description of Customs in the Reign of Augustus III). Background on Sołtyk’s seizure and deportation draws on Kazimierz Rudnicki, Biskup Kajetan Sołtyk (Kraków, 1906), and on the archival and biographical materials assembled in the course of the author’s ongoing work on a biography of the bishop.
Northcoast Antiquarian 