The image of Polish rulers in eighteenth-century silva rerum books

The aim of this article is to present the view of Polish rulers by the nobility of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the eighteenth century. These reflections were based on the silva rerum books written in the eighteenth century, containing separate sections on the history of the Polish Kingdom. As in the printed works, there is a noticeable slow change in the manner of descriptiveness – the abandonment of factual information in favour of an attempt to evaluate the ruler and the times of his reign. The painful reality of the successive partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and then its collapse, resulted in a more critical approach to certain rulers, but also to the mechanisms of governance.