During the Livonian War, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, speaking in 1561 in support of the Livonian Order, found itself in difficult conditions. In 1563, Ivan the Terrible took Polotsk, the largest city of the principality. There was a threat to the capital of the state of Vilna. In search of an ally, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania turned to the Kingdom of Poland, with which it had long-standing ties. However, the conditions proposed by the Polish crown, actually leading to the elimination of the statehood of the Grand Duchy, could not suit the Lithuanian side. Then the Kingdom of Poland annexed a significant part of the lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the territory of modern Ukraine ), which put Lithuanian statehood on the brink of destruction.
The Union
As a result, in 1569 the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania signed the Union of Lublin united in the Rzeczpospolita. King Stefan Batory, elected in 1575, managed to return Polotsk and other cities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. After that, he besieged Pskov, but after an unsuccessful siege, a hard war ended with the Yam-Zapolsky peace in 1582.
In the middle of the XVI century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was affected by the Reformation process. Protestant communities arose in Nesvizh, Brest, Kletsk and dozens of other cities, Simeon Budny, Vasily Tyapinsky, Nikolay Radzivil Black and others became famous figures of the Reformation.
The Brest Church Union of 1596 subordinated the Orthodox Church on the territory of the Commonwealth to the Pope. This caused discontent among the local Orthodox population and led to a bloody confrontation between Uniates and Orthodox who engulfed the whole of Western Russia. On the Belarusian lands, it was expressed in a number of uprisings, such as Mogilyov or Vitebsk. However, unlike the central and eastern Ukrainian lands, the resistance of the Orthodox in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the seventeenth century was broken and the Catholic and Uniate churches throughout the territory of Belarus spread intensively. The Lithuanian aristocracy in the majority was polonized, there was a cultural, linguistic and religious gap between the upper and lower strata of society. In 1696, the Western Russian written language was finally taken out of use in clerical work in favor of the Polish language. The cultural life of Belarus in the 17th century was greatly influenced by the counter-reformation, the bearer of which was the Jesuit Order. The activities of the order was ambiguous, but it mainly contributed to the rapid rise in enlightenment, education, literature, theater, music, architecture, and visual arts at that time. It was among the Jesuits that the work of outstanding masters, polemicists, writers, preachers unfolded. The Counter-Reformation movement contributed to the entry and assimilation of the Baroque style by Belarusian art and architecture.
The XVII century on the Belarusian lands was a time of incessant military actions, accompanied by famine, epidemics and mass migrations of the population. Thus, since 1648, during the uprising of Bogdan Khmelnitsky on the territory of modern Belarus, the population has decreased significantly. The wars between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of 1632–1634 and 1654–1667 for lands in the north-east and south of Belarus, as well as for Ukrainian lands, were also significant. Only the truce concluded in Andrusovo (1667), stopped this confrontation. But at the end of the 17th century, tensions between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden increased. This resulted in the Northern War of 1700-1721. Commonwealth acted in alliance with Russia, and hostilities took place mainly on the territory of Belarus. In 1708, in the area of Mogilev, a battle took place during the Golovchin Northern War between the Swedish and Russian troops, which ended in victory for the first. Difficult external circumstances, continuing sieges of cities, fires made the situation of the population of Belarus unbearable, who fought against the authorities or fled beyond the borders of the state.
The Belarusian lands, exhausted by the Northern War, with deserted and destroyed cities, burned villages represented a terrible sight. It is no coincidence that during the XVIII century there were strong peasant uprisings here. Together with the anarchist policy of the magnates, and the freedom of the nobility, created the conditions for the implementation of bourgeois-democratic reforms.
In 1764, Stanislav Augustus of Ponyatovsky (Augustus IV) entered the Polish throne. His attempts to improve the state management system were not successful. Indicative in this regard is the creation of the so-called Bar Confederation. The decision of the Sejm of 1768 on freedom of religion, equality of religions in the Commonwealth, the prohibition of the death penalty of serfs, which caused the unification of the reactionary magnates and gentry, an armed uprising became the impetus for it. Catherine’s protege Augustus IV turned to Russia for help. The rebellion was suppressed, but this only brought the collapse of the state closer.
In 1772, the first division of the Commonwealth took place between Russia , Austria and Prussia. As a result, Rzeczpospolita ceased to exist as a state. Land of Belarus came under the control of the Russian Empire.