Defeated by the Swedes in combat, Jan Kasimir fled to Silesia, to the terrains under the Habsburg rule. The nobility and the royal clerks recognized the king of Sweden as the king of Poland in return for a guarantee of rights. At the same time Great Hetman of Lithuania Janusz Radziwiłł surrendered the Great Duchy of Lithuania to Sweden. With time, however, the Swedes began to treat the captured territory in an increasingly harsh way. They started to transport valuables and works of art out of the Commonwealth. They also accepted the fact that their soldiers were robbing peasants. To make the renegade king’s contact with the country more difficult the Swedes began to capture towns and fortresses on the border with Silesia. That was when they came to the foothill of the fortified cloister called Luminous Mount (Jasna Góra), the most important Marian sanctuary in the Crown. Their attempt to capture it, combined with other Swedish misdeeds, outraged the nobility, which turned back to Jan Kasimir. Under those circumstances, in December 1655 hetmans of the Crown with the army, representatives of the disappointed nobility, and the Lithuanian troops which had turned against Radziwiłł assembled in Tyszowce. They decided to establish a confederation, that is, an armed union of citizens formed to defend their violated rights. The Confederates declared their subordination to Jan Kasimir, promised to fight against the Swedes, and announced universal conscription. The Confederation of Tyszowce is regarded as the symbolic turning point in the Polish-Swedish War, which transformed from the invaders’ triumphant march into a bloody and difficult war, which came to an end in 1660 with the signing of the Treaty of Oliva and the Swedes’ retreat.

Nihil novi rendered the “Union of Mielnik” null-and-void in its entirety and strictly limited the legislative competences of the monarch and the Senate, banning the issuance of laws without the consent of the senators and gentrymen represented in the Chamber of Deputies. The thrust of Nihil novi was essentially to reinforce the position of the bicameral parliament in the political system of the Polish-Lithuanian Rzeczpospolita (Commonwealth). In so doing, the parliament, and particularly its Chamber of Deputies, attained the position of highest authority in the state. The functioning of the Sejm was henceforth to be based on smooth co-operation between the king, the royal council – i.e. the Senate – and the deputies elected locally or regionally to the Chamber of Deputies.

Constitutional and legal historians recognize Nihil novi as marking the beginning of the ‘nobles’ democracy’ (or, democracy of the nobility) in the Polish-Lithuanian Rzeczpospolita.