After the Peace of Oliva

The war with Sweden ended on 3 May 1660, but armed conflicts and political disputes did not. A distinction matters here: events after the Peace of Oliva belong to the history of the same Commonwealth, yet not every one was a direct consequence of the Swedish Deluge¹².

War in the east continued

The war with Muscovy began in 1654, before the Swedish invasion. It continued after Oliva, with interruptions, until the truce signed at Andrusovo on 30 January 1667. Treating 1660 as the end of all the Commonwealth's wars obscures this distinction².

A dispute over the political future

After years of fighting, King John II Casimir and his circle sought to change the way the next ruler would be chosen. Plans for an election during the king's lifetime met opposition from some nobles and magnates. Historian Dorota Gregorowicz also describes internal conflict, military confederations and Jerzy Sebastian Lubomirski's rebellion in 1665–1666. This was not a later phase of the war with Sweden, although it took place in a state exhausted by many years of war³.

Mątwy and abdication

On 13 July 1666 royal troops were defeated by the rebels at Mątwy. The Museum of the Polish Army counts it among the bloodiest episodes of the civil war. Two years later, on 16 September 1668, John II Casimir abdicated. This ended his reign and the rule of the Polish Vasa line, but not the history of the Commonwealth⁴³.

This closes the account of the war and its immediate surroundings. Consequences of the Deluge examines losses and historians' disagreements about their scale. The war later acquired separate lives in Sienkiewicz's novel and Hoffman's film; neither is a source for seventeenth-century events.