Marriages and illegitimate relationships in the army of the Crown of the Polish Kingdom and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the sixteenth and seventeenth century – the law and the practice

The article presents the legal regulations on the principles of women’s presence in the Polish and Lithuanian army in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Jan Tarnowski at the end of the first half of the sixteenth century introduced the first significant limitations on this matter. According to military law the only women that could exist in army were wives of soldiers and persons accompanying troops (e.g. merchants, servants). The soldiers did not reconciled with the limitations and began to exploit loopholes for their own purposes. Firstly, marriages were concluded, only to make possible prostitution in the army. Secondly, in many cases, soldiers declared that concubine or sexual slave is their married wife. Lawmakers were trying to refine the rules during the second half of sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century. In a result (despite the difficulties and with the help of military law) in that period Polish and Lithuanian army had a small percentage of women, especially compared to Western armies. Periods when the practice was significantly different from the legal rules were periods of war. Then the soldiers treated the captured people as spoils of war. Some of the women were „military wives”, some were used as sex slaves