Association with Saxony

The reigns in Poland of Augustus the Strong and Augustus III, Electors of Saxony of the House of Wettin,  brought further military and political decline. Poland's involvement in the Northern War (1702-1721) was the next calamity, the time when neighbouring powers started to meddle in Poland's internal affairs (e.g. the Swedish "nomination" of Stanis³aw Leszczyñski to the Polish throne, 1704-1709). However, in a situation where maintaining neutrality in the face of a Russo-Swedish conflict proved impossible, the Wettins not only managed to keep the country intact territorially, but also prevented its social and cultural degradation. Although weak and dependent on her neighbours, Poland was still a dynamically developing European state. However, any attempts to remedy the domestic situation were doomed to fail not only due to behind-the-scene interventions by Russia, Prussia and Austria, but most of all because of the feuding factions of the great lords (the Potocki, Czartoryski, and Sapieha), who  looked more and more to foreign powers for (mostly financial) support.