II. The Landed Nobility
Reverencing the memory of our ancestors as the founders of a free government, we most solemnly assure to the noble estate all liberties, freedoms, prerogatives, and precedence in private and public life, and more particularly we confirm, assure and recognize as inviolable the rights, statutes and privileges justly and lawfully granted to that estate by Kazimierz the Great, Louis the Hungarian, Władysław Jagiełło and his brother Witold, Grand Duke of Lithuania, and no less those by Władysław the Jagiellonian and Kazimierz the Jagiellonian, by Jan Albert, the brothers Alexander and Zygmunt the First, and by Zygmunt August, the last of the Jagiellonian line. We acknowledge the dignity of the noble estate in Poland as equal to any degree of nobility used anywhere. We recognize all the nobility to be equal among themselves, not only in seeking for offices and for the discharge of services to the country that bring honor, fame or profit, but also in the equal enjoyment of the privileges and prerogatives to which the noble estate is entitled, and above all we desire to and do preserve sacred and intact the rights to personal security, to personal liberty, and to property, landed and movable, even as they have been the title of all from time immemorial, affirming most solemnly that we shall permit no change or exception in law against anyone’s property, and that the supreme national authority and the government instituted by it shall lay no claims to any citizen’s property in part or in whole under pretext of jurium regalium [royal rights] or any other pretext whatever. Wherefore we do respect, assure and confirm the personal security of, and all property by rights belonging to, anyone, as the true bond of society, as the pupil [zrenica] of civil liberty, and we desire that they remain respected, ensured and inviolate for all time to come. We recognize the nobility as the foremost defenders of liberty and of this Constitution, and we charge unto the virtue, citizenship and honor of every nobleman the reverence of its sanctity and the safeguarding of its durability, as the sole bulwark of the country and of our liberties.
III. The Cities and Their Citizens
We desire to maintain in its entirety, and declare to be part of this Constitution, the law passed at the present sejm under the title, Our Free Royal Cities in the States of the Commonwealth, as a law that provides new, genuine and effective force to the free Polish nobility for the security of their liberties and the integrity of our common country.
