The Great Sejm, or Four-Year Sejm, was a sejm (diet or parliament) of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that was held in Warsaw between 1788 and 1792. Its principal aim became to reform and restore sovereignty to the Commonwealth. The Great Sejm's foremost achievement was the adoption of the Constitution of May 3, 1791, often described as Europe's first modern written national constitution. The constitution was designed to redress long-standing political defects of the nation and its system of Golden Liberties. It introduced political equality between townspeople and nobility and placed the peasants under the protection of the government, thus mitigating the worst abuses of serfdom. It sought to supplant the existing anarchy fostered by some of the country's reactionary magnates with a more egalitarian and democratic constitutional monarchy. The reforms instituted by the Great Sejm were undone by an intervention of the Russian Empire at the invitation of the Targowica Confederation. (Full article...)