Golden Liberty (Latin: Aurea Libertas; Polish: Złota Wolność, sometimes used in the plural: this phenomenon can also be referred to as "Golden Freedoms," "Nobles' Democracy" or "Nobles' Commonwealth" — Polish: Rzeczpospolita Szlachecka) refers to a unique democratic political system in the Kingdom of Poland and later, after the Union of Lublin (1569), in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Under that system, all nobles (szlachta) were equal and enjoyed extensive rights and privileges. The szlachta controled the legislature (Sejm — the Polish parliament) and the Commonwealth's elected king.
- Nihil novi (1505).
- Pacta conventa and King Henry's Articles (1573).
- Szlachta history and political privileges.
- Sejm of the Kingdom of Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
- Organization and politics of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
"Golden Liberty" distinguished Poland and was a unique exception in an age when absolutism was developing in the principal countries of Europe to the east and west. Freedom and liberty, even if enjoyed only by a single social class — the szlachta — were assets almost unheard-of elsewhere in Europe, where monarchs held power of life and death over all their citizens. Yet the excesses of Golden Liberty resulted in weakness in the central government — a weakness that eventually allowed the Commonwealth's neighbors to paralyze the polity, bring it to the brink of anarchy, and annex the powerless country in the late-18th-century partitions of Poland.
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