Imagine a European kingdom where the crown did not automatically pass from father to son.

After the Jagiellonian dynasty ended in 1572, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth created a system in which the king was elected by the nobility. In theory, every nobleman could personally take part.

For the 16th century, this was a strikingly different way to run a monarchy.

The system was known as electio viritim, meaning an election by individual members of the noble estate.

It did not give every person in the Commonwealth a vote. Political rights were largely concentrated in the szlachta, Poland’s noble class. But the nobility was relatively large compared with many other European countries, making royal elections enormous political events.

The first free election took place in 1573 near Warsaw. Around 50,000 nobles reportedly gathered to take part in the process.

They eventually chose Henry de Valois, a French prince, as the new king.

For an international reader, the remarkable part is the scale. This was not simply a few powerful nobles deciding behind closed doors. Thousands could personally gather and participate in choosing the next monarch.

The King Could Not Rule Without Limits

The election was only part of the system.

The new king also had to accept the Henrician Articles, which established important limits on royal power and guaranteed the principle that future kings would be elected by the nobility.

The rules also gave the political nation important rights involving taxation, war and government. If a king violated the fundamental laws and rights he had sworn to uphold, the nobility could refuse to obey him.

That made the Commonwealth a very unusual kind of monarchy. It still had a king, but the political power of the nobility was unusually strong.

A Different Idea of Who Chose the Crown

For centuries, Poland's political system gave its nobles a direct role in deciding who would wear the crown.

That makes the story interesting beyond Polish history. Long before modern democratic elections looked the way they do today, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had developed a political system where thousands of individual nobles could personally participate in choosing the country's monarch.

It was far from universal democracy, but it was also very different from a simple hereditary monarchy.

Poland's kings were crowned, but they first had to win an election.