To browse Academia. The course and result of the election in still arouses interest among historians. It should probably be associated with the choice of a rather unexpected candidate for the king — Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki.
There is no doubt that every European state was actively participating in the events occuring in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where the deputies were sent with a task to report on events related to the interregnum.
The correspondence of Sanderson and Yard is an interesting source of information about the interregnum after the abdication of Jan Kazimierz. Both of them passed numerous, sometimes unprecedented news about the electoral struggle. In their correspondence, they devoted ample amount of space to candidates for the throne as well as a description of the course of regional assemblies, and Sejms from the interregnum period, and the issue of equality of dissidents.
The reports of the diplomats were particularly concerned about the Lithuanian Equerry, Bogusław Radziwiłł and the book containing the genealogy of his family.
The Sanderson and Yard reports are another interesting addition to our knowledge of the interregnum in — Traditional historiography maintains that local institutions of self-government in Lithuania were insufficiently developed, suffering from manipulation and corruption by magnate factions. As Jūratė Kiaupienė put it: "a wide-spread system of protection promoted servility, [undermined the] self-sufficiency of the nobility and added to a number of other negative personal or collective features" 1.
