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Poland: A history
Adam Zamoyski
A substantially revised and updated edition of the author's classic 1987 book, 'The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and their Culture', which has been out of print since 2001.No nation's history has been so distorted as that of Poland. In 1797 Russia, Prussia and Austria divided the country up among themselves, expunging Poland’s sovereignty from history, casting it as a backwater that needed civilising. But as Adam Zamoyski’s thrilling history shows, the country they had wiped off the map had been one of Europe’s largest and most varied in cultural and religious traditions, with one of the boldest constitutional experiments ever attempted. Its destruction initiated a series of struggles that culminated in the two world wars and the Cold War. Today, Poland has been restored to its rightful place as one of the most vigorous nations of Europe, and is perfectly captured in this full revision Adam Zamoyski's classic ‘The Polish Way’.



POLAND A HISTORY
ADAM ZAMOYSKI





Copyright (#ulink_02be54dc-f636-572b-9ae4-3c7691618288)
HarperPress
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
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Published by HarperPress 2009
Copyright © Adam Zamoyski Ltd 2009
The Polish Way published by John Murray in 1987
Adam Zamoyski asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover shows detail from a parchment scroll of 1605, showing a member of the Husaria, the Polish winged cavalry
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007282753
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007322732
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Table of Contents
Cover (#ude79d91c-b4ba-532d-8c15-6e4fbaa6b068)
Title Page (#uaef1b316-2f44-5bea-9a35-03b155d3a644)
Copyright (#u398dc9a9-f530-5e0f-9b6b-0c3d7def3a4f)
MAPS (#ub1e8bd83-1b65-5f47-8675-5d2e6a3d8b4d)
TABLES (#ue11da63c-b705-53bb-ad84-53cda6ec2179)
NOTE ON POLISH PRONUNCIATION (#u608d6e56-70ee-564f-84da-396be2034666)
PREFACE (#u6a1945ca-c193-5ff9-9f7d-bd42abb4452b)
ONE: People, Land and Crown (#uf36d141e-5afe-5432-9b48-0c658d47c546)
TWO: Between East and West (#u536cd0ed-73ce-558b-b55a-15c6c94927cf)
THREE: The Jagiellon Experience (#u4c638513-9b47-5f1c-a007-d26752ac4ed1)
FOUR: Religion and Politics (#u925b2d89-3e88-5264-9ad3-1695582508f2)
FIVE: Kingdom and Commonwealth (#u2d0f815c-b591-502a-a28d-d032819e5ca4)
SIX: The Reign of Erasmus (#uf6624e3c-6f46-5223-b60c-b3c41c17aff0)
SEVEN: Democracy versus Dynasty (#u3d28323b-274c-5105-be0c-d1a77cae6883)
EIGHT: Champions of God (#ue4a657e4-7803-590e-95d4-e2719e79339b)
NINE: A Biblical Flood (#uee705bcc-4a89-5c46-96f8-2fb21160248f)
TEN: Morbus Comitialis (#u4542e67e-75af-504a-955f-5b5eef0232ee)
ELEVEN: The Reign of Anarchy (#u918efc84-55c6-587f-aa43-4eb3cd9328a8)
TWELVE: Renewal (#ua54c565f-ee4d-517b-a73a-03a58a4f2f84)
THIRTEEN: Gentle Revolution (#ubd08bc31-7c0f-5ed5-85b2-e3df0a6a02c1)
FOURTEEN: Armed Struggle (#u8f56132d-9489-5070-b19f-fc165266ff9b)
FIFTEEN: Insurgency (#u9eabb012-e0c2-56c4-b75e-9bc30f38392b)
SIXTEEN: The Polish Question (#u09005b67-eaba-5a9c-a422-4f478a5a90b5)
SEVENTEEN: Captivity (#u09135ec0-ec4e-5f2d-88e1-8ed8851384ff)
EIGHTEEN: Nation-Building (#u5911de5a-ff7e-59e3-8209-a78ecb0100f2)
NINETEEN: The Polish Republic (#uacacf770-ccaf-5a5f-9bc0-7d8ea00a5d50)
TWENTY: War (#u94c2b256-acd6-5252-a422-752efb80fa64)
TWENTY-ONE: The Cost of Victory (#uf81ae721-6155-500c-b98a-8a6be6754045)
TWENTY-TWO: Trial and Error (#u616f786b-ab0b-581a-ba55-a905e7b5d575)
TWENTY-THREE: Papal Power (#u4cfadc25-28b2-56e9-b343-11a715ca6901)
TWENTY-FOUR: The Third Republic (#u47caca80-a4c8-58f9-ac28-c555a3ca1336)
Keep Reading (#u62171c6b-d7b0-522a-bafa-badaa002e9d7)
Index (#u59cf3ca4-944b-5f52-aa3d-5b28aa219fb4)
By The Same Author (#u426f1ff7-f5a6-512c-8158-6e8d4e810fd8)
About the Publisher (#ub96338ec-5200-521e-8e32-ba078ce2aeff)

NOTE ON POLISH PRONUNCIATION (#ulink_1420ad50-193a-524b-8c30-2105238fa297)
Polish words may look complicated, but pronunciation is at least consistent. All vowels are simple and of even length, as in Italian, and their sound is best rendered by the English words ‘sum’ (a), ‘ten’ (e), ‘ease’ (i), ‘lot’ (o), ‘book’ (u), ‘sit’ (y).
Most of the consonants behave in the same way as in English, except for c, which is pronounced ‘ts’; j, which is soft, as in ‘yes’; and w, which is equivalent to English v. As in German, some con—sonants are softened when they fall at the end of a word, and b, d, g, w, z become p, t, k, f, s, respectively.
There are also a number of accented letters and combinations peculiar to Polish, of which the following is a rough list:
ó = u, hence Kraków is pronounced ‘krakooff ‘.
ą = nasal a, hence sąd is pronounced ‘sont’.
ę = nasal e, hence Łęczyca is pronounced ‘wenchytsa’.
ć = ch as in ‘cheese’.
cz = ch as in ‘catch’.
ch = guttural h as in ‘loch’.
ł = English w, hence Bolesław becomes ‘Boleswaf, Łódz ‘Wootj’.
ń = soft n as in Spanish ‘mañana’.
rz = French j as in ‘je’.
ś = sh as in ‘sheer’.
sz = sh as in ‘bush’.
?? = as rz (—?? is the accented capital).
ź = A similar sound, but sharper as in French ‘gigot’.
The stress in Polish is consistent, and always falls on the pen—ultimate syllable.

PREFACE (#ulink_0c458734-2087-5736-b389-d62c24e633dc)
The idea that a historian should radically alter his view of the past over the space of a couple of decades is, on the face of it, preposterous. But when I reread my history of Poland, The Polish Way, first published in 1987, which I meant to revise and update for a new edition, I became convinced of the contrary. History did not, as some have argued, come to an end in the intervening two decades, but they have completely changed the perspective.
When I sat down to write that book, few people in western Europe, let alone further afield, had any idea of where Poland lay, and fewer still had any sense of its having a past worth dwelling on. Given that history is made up of an intricate interaction of land, people and culture, Poland presented unique problems. How was the historian to approach a country whose territory had expanded and contracted, shifted and vanished so dramatically, which currently existed as an almost random compromise resulting from the Second World War, and which lay within the imperial frontiers of another power? How was he to treat a people which, from ethnic, cultural and religious diversity had been purged by genocide and ethnic cleansing into a homogeneous society? How to represent a culture which had been largely obliterated, whose remains survived only underground or in exile?
Matters were made no easier by the fact that the entire geo—political space in which Poland existed was also in an unnatural state of suspension, with Germany divided, Russia a bureaucratic totalitarian monstrosity, and the areas inhabited by the Lithuanians, Belorussians and Ukrainians a kind of limbo.
Although the election of a Pole, Karol Wojtyła, to the Holy See as Pope John Paul II, the dramatic rise of Solidarność and a number of books and articles published in the West, along with increased travel, had recently brought Poland into the consciousness of greater numbers of people, it was not until the collapse of the Soviet project in 1989 that the situation began to alter significantly. It was only then that Poland and the other countries of the region came back to life as political entities. And that fundamentally altered the way in which they are perceived.
The concurrent process of globalisation and the huge shifts in economic and military power taking place around the world have also made it easier for the historian to represent a foreign country to his readers. The fact that what were then viewed as ‘developing countries’ (with all the condescension that term implied) are now emerging as the major players of the future has radically altered attitudes in the hitherto dominant nations of the West. Put simply, the historian has less to explain and fewer prejudices to break down. But the real significance of the events of 1989 only began to make itself felt later.
When I was writing my book, Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain. Crossing it was an awesome and bizarre experience for anyone brought up in the West—the coils of barbed wire, the watchtowers, the machine guns aimed at the traveller and the ubiquitous guards with their Alsatian dogs were richly redolent of Nazi concentration camp and Soviet gulag. Not surprisingly, since this absurd barrier was one of the last surviving vestiges of a long historical process that had reached its apogee in the twin abominations of Soviet communism and German fascism.
Only two hundred years before, the whole area between the Rhine and the Dnieper had been inhabited by a variety of peoples with wildly differing cultural, religious and political affiliations, organised into an equally variegated miscellany of empires, commonwealths, kingdoms, duchies, principalities, republics, bishoprics, city states, baronies and lesser sovereignties. In a process that began with the eighteenth-century partitions of Poland, these polities had been subjugated and then reorganised into a small number of highly competitive states and the peoples inhabiting them into largely fictitious nations which saw their survival in Darwinian terms. This initiated a struggle that culminated in the two world wars and the Cold War.
If the Iron Curtain disfigured Europe physically, the process which had led up to it had distorted history even more fundamentally. No history more so than that of Poland, which was the first and greatest casualty of the process. Two years after Russia, Prussia and Austria had divided the country up among themselves, on 26 January 1797 they signed a convention containing a secret article which stressed the absolute ‘necessity of abolishing everything which might recall the existence of a Polish kingdom in face of the performed annihilation of this political body’. In this spirit, the Prussians melted down the Polish crown jewels, the Austrians turned royal palaces into barracks, and the Russians grabbed everything they could lay their hands on and shipped it out, particularly documents. All three rewrote history to give the impression that Poland had never been a fully sovereign state, only a backwater which needed civilising.
Throughout the nineteenth century the Poles who struggled to reverse this process and recover their independence were generally viewed in the West as troublemakers impeding the orderly march of progress. In the twentieth century, by contrast, when they once again fell victim, to the Soviet Union, they came to be seen as reactionary and backward because of their resilience to supposedly progressive doctrines such as communism.
Looking back on the way history was written in the twentieth century, particularly in its middle decades, one cannot avoid being struck by how deeply politicised it was. Not only did nationalism or dominant state orthodoxy select and distort facts; various interpretations of Marxist theory reinvented them to suit visions of the future.
Not surprisingly, considering the country’s position at the geographical and ideological interface of such disputes, Poland’s past received the full treatment. And given that it was a battleground for political and nationalist passions of great intensity, it was impossible, even for supposedly uncommitted historians in faraway universities, to write about it entirely dispassionately. That did not change until the disintegration of the Soviet experiment robbed the most vociferous combatants of their arguments.
What was not immediately apparent even at that point was that the disintegration of the Soviet Union held a deeper significance: it marked the end of the era of state-based Darwinism that had begun with the rise of Prussia in the early eighteenth century (arguably even earlier). This model had been discredited by the Great War and was abandoned by most of Europe after 1945, as one country after another divested itself of its national pretensions and imperial attributes to pool its sovereignty in the interests of a united Europe. But the Soviet Union remained wedded to the old mindset of paranoid nationalist/ideological struggle for dominance. Its implosion released the nations of East Central Europe from this, and although large sections of society within those nations, particularly in the Balkans, are still affected by it (for understandable historical reasons), most of the inhabitants of the area have been able to, or even been obliged to, take an entirely fresh view of the past.
This mirrors an analogous process that has been taking place in Western societies. While most young Britons would probably still enjoy watching a 1940s war film glorifying British pluck and derring-do, the overwhelming majority might as well, for all their empathy, be watching an Arthurian romance or a piece of science fiction, and the concept of laying down their lives for their country is largely alien to them. The same is even more true of the French and Germans, while to young Italians the very myths of the Risorgimento, the founding faith of their country, now appear laughable. The majority of the population of the European Union now thinks in terms of societies rather than nations.
Histories written a few decades ago now appear strangely obsessed with political achievements, dominions established, battles won—in essence, with national success. They can seem embarrassingly patronising on the subject of all those who did not win out according to the rules of the day. Those rules have changed, and this is particularly welcome to the historian of Poland.
In the early modern period, the Poles failed spectacularly to build an efficient centralised state structure and they paid the price, being swallowed up by their more successful neighbours. The history of Poland has therefore, up until now, been written as that of a failed state. Like some distorting lens or filter, that failure coloured and deformed the historian’s view of the whole of Polish history.
He is now no longer, as he was only a couple of decades ago, writing the history of an enslaved and to all intents and purposes non-existent country. There is a great difference between writing up a bankrupt business and writing up one that has been through hard times and turned the corner. He is no longer writing the history of a state that failed, but of a society that created a social and political civilisation of its own, one which was occluded by the success of a rival model (now utterly discredited) but whose ideals are close to those the world values today.
All this convinced me that I could not just brush up and update The Polish Way. But since I still stand by that book, as far as it goes, and indeed its basic structure, I did not see any point in beginning a new history of Poland from scratch, and used that earlier book as the basis for this one. At the same time, I have so thoroughly reworked the text, removed so much of the old and added so much that is new, that I had no qualms about submitting it under a new title.
Some readers may be surprised to find no references to sources in the text. This is an essay rather than a textbook. It is based on wellknown and undisputed facts, and is not in any sense meant to break new ground. I therefore saw no reason to clutter the text with numbers, which many readers find off-putting.
I owe a debt to Miłosz Zieliński, who helped me research the recent past, and to Jakub Borawski, who helped me place it in perspective. I should like to thank my editors Richard Johnson, who gave me invaluable support when I began to entertain doubts about the venture, Arabella Pike, who took the project over with enthusiasm, and Robert Lacey, whose editorial skills are nonpareil. I must also thank Shervie Price for reading the text and making useful suggestions, and my wife Emma for her sensible comments and her love.
Adam ZamoyskiLondon, 2009

ONE People, Land and Crown (#ulink_20cc64dd-1db7-5df7-9779-4504004ba1a3)
In the Middle Ages, when people favoured simple explanations, Polish folklore had it that the German nation had been deposited on this earth through the rectum of Pontius Pilate. Sadly, the Polish nation boasts no such convenient and satisfying founding myth, and its origins were something of a mystery even to its neighbours.
While most of Europe evolved from the Dark Ages in mutual interaction, with Celtic monks from Ireland carrying the religion of Rome to Germany, and Vikings from Scandinavia linking England and France with Sicily and the Arab world or sailing down the rivers of Russia to Kiev and Constantinople, the area that is now Poland existed in a vacuum.
Along with eastern Germany, Bohemia and Slovakia, it had been settled by a number of Slav peoples. Roman merchants who had come from the south in the first century in search of amber, the ‘gold of the north’, had recorded that they were unwarlike and agricultural, living in a state of ‘rural democracy’. The most numerous of these peoples even took their name from their trade, being known as ‘the people of the fields’, Polanie in their language. There is some evidence that in the sixth century the area was overrun or partially settled by Sarmatians, a warrior people from the Black Sea Steppe, who may have provided a new ruling class, or perhaps only a military caste for the Polanie.
Be that as it may, the Polanie were cushioned from the outside world by other Slav peoples. To the north, the Pomeranians (Pomorzanie, or people of the seaboard) and others were linked by Viking trade with much of Europe and the Arab world. To the south, the Vislanie of the upper Vistula were alternately attacked and evangelised by Christian Moravians. To the west, the Lusatians and the Slenzania of Silesia warred and traded with the Germans and Saxons. Sheltered by this buffer zone, the Polanie remained undisturbed throughout the eighth and ninth centuries.


The Polanie shared a common language with the other western Slavs which differed slightly from that spoken by the Bohemians or Czechs to the south-west and that of the eastern Slavs of Rus. They also shared a common religion based on much the same pantheon as other Indo-European cults, worshipped through objects in nature—trees, rivers, stones—in which they were held to dwell, and less so in the shape of idols, or in circles and temples. As practised by the Polanie, this religion was neither organised nor hierarchical, and was not a politically unifying force. What set the Polanie apart from their sister peoples were their rulers, the Piast dynasty established in Gniezno at some time during the ninth century.
Throughout the second half of the ninth century and the beginning of the tenth, these princes gradually extended their sway over neighbouring peoples. Most of these were under some kind of pressure from the outside world, which made it easier for the Piast princes to assume control, and by the middle of the tenth century they reigned over a considerable area. This dominion was described in the first written source of any worth, by Ibrahim Ibn Yaqub, a Jewish traveller from Spain, who noted that the ruler, Prince Mieszko, had imposed a relatively sophisticated fiscal system, and exercised control through a network of castles and a standing army of 3,000 horsemen.
It was these troops and castles that Otto I, King of the Germans, encountered in the year 955. Otto had won a series of victories over his eastern neighbours and fortified his boundaries with a string of bastion-provinces known as marches. He then crossed the Elbe. As he advanced eastward, routing small bands of Slav warriors on the way, he eventually came up against something resembling an army and a system of defences. For the Polanie, the period of isolation had come to an end, and Prince Mieszko could no longer ignore the outside world.
He could even less afford to do so after 962, when Otto was crowned Roman Emperor by the Pope. This was a largely symbolic act, but one charged with significance, and Mieszko, who was aware of the political and cultural benefits Christianity had brought his Czech neighbours of Bohemia, appreciated this. Only by adopting Christianity himself would he be able to avoid war with the Emperor, and at the same time provide himself with a useful political instrument. In 965 he sought the approval of Otto and married the Bohemian Princess Dobrava. The following year, 966, Mieszko and his court were baptised. The Duchy of Polonia became part of Christendom.
Mieszko nevertheless continued to pursue his own aims, even where they conflicted with those of the Empire. One of these was to gain control of as much of the Baltic coast as possible. He invaded Pomerania, but this led to confrontation with the Margrave of the German northern march, who was attempting to conquer the area for the Empire. Mieszko defeated him at Cedynia in 972 and reached the mouth of the Oder in 976. The Margrave called on his new master Otto II for assistance, and the latter mounted an expedition against the Poles. Mieszko defeated him too in 979, and became master of the whole of Pomerania. He con—tinued to advance along the coast until he joined up with the Danes, who had been extending their dominion eastward. He ensured good relations with his new neighbours by giving his daughter Świętosława in marriage to King Eric of Sweden and Denmark (after Eric’s death, she would marry Swein Forkbeard, King of Denmark, and bear him a son, Canute, who visited Poland in 1014 to collect a force of three hundred horsemen who would help him reconquer England).
The first ruler of Christian Poland was a remarkable man. Consistently successful in war, Mieszko did not neglect diplomacy, involving powers as distant as the Moorish Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain in his schemes. His last enterprise was to invade and absorb the lands of the Slenzanie. There in 992 he drew up a document, Dagome Iudex, laying down the boundaries of his realm, which he dedicated to St Peter and placed under the protection of the Pope.
The Pope was to prove immensely useful to Mieszko’s son and successor, Bolesław the Brave, who carried on his work with flair. In 996 a monk called Adalbertus (originally Vojteh, a Bohemian prince) appeared at Bolesław’s court. As he had been sent by Pope Sylvester I on a mission to evangelise the Prussians, a non-Slavic people inhabiting the Baltic seaboard to the east of the mouth of the Vistula, Bolesław received him with due honours before sending him on his way. The Prussians made short work of putting the missionary to death. On hearing the news, Bolesław sent to Prussia and bought the remains of the monk for, allegedly, their weight in gold. He then laid them to rest in the cathedral at Gniezno.
When Pope Sylvester heard of this, in 999, he canonised Adalbertus. He also took the momentous step of elevating Gniezno to the level of an archbishopric, and creating new bishoprics at Wrocław, Kołobrzeg and Kraków. This effectively created a Polish province of the Church, independent of its original tutelary German diocese of Magdeburg. It also strengthened the Polish state, as ecclesiastical networks were prime instruments of communication and control. In Poland, the first parishes were established beside castles which were centres of royal administration, a connection between religious and temporal power which is enshrined in the etymology of the Polish word for ‘church’—kościół, which derives from the Latin castellum.
The new Emperor Otto III had been a friend of Adalbertus, as well as of Pope Sylvester, and in the year 1000 he came on a pilgrimage to the saint’s shrine at Gniezno. His visit is described by the chronicler Gallus, who wrote:
Bolesław received him with such honour and magnificence as befitted a King, a Roman Emperor and a distinguished guest. For the arrival of the Emperor he prepared a wonderful sight; he placed many companies of knights of every sort, and then his dignitaries, in ranks, every different company set apart by the colours of its clothes. And this was no cheap spangle or any old stuff, but the most costly things that can be found anywhere on earth. For in Bolesław’s day every knight and every lady of the court wore not linen or woollen cloth, but coats of costly weave, while furs, even if they were very expensive and quite new, were not worn at his court unless lined with fine stuff and trimmed with gold tassels. For gold in his time was as common as silver is now, silver was as cheap as straw. Seeing his glory, his power and his riches, the Roman Emperor cried out in admiration: ‘By the crown of my Empire! What I see far exceeds what I have heard!’ And taking counsel with his magnates, he added, before all those present: ‘It is not fit that such a man should be titled a prince or count, as though he were just a great lord, but he should be elevated with all pomp to a throne and crowned with a crown.’ Taking the Imperial diadem from his own brow, he placed it on the head of Bolesław as a sign of union and friendship, and for an ensign of state he gave him a nail from the Holy Cross and the lance of Saint Maurice, in return for which Bolesław gave him the arm of Saint Adalbertus. And they felt such love on that day that the Emperor named him brother and associate in the Empire, and called him the friend and ally of the Roman nation…
Otto had come not only to pray at the tomb of his saintly friend. He needed to assess Poland’s strength and establish its status within the Holy Roman Empire. He was impressed by what he saw, and decided the country must be treated not as a tributary duchy, but as an independent kingdom, alongside Germany and Italy.


As soon as Otto was succeeded by the less exalted Henry II this independence came under threat. Neither German nor Bohemian raison d’état accommodated the idea of a strong Polish state, and a new German offensive was launched, supported by Bohemia on the southern flank, and some pagan Slavs in the north. Bolesław defeated Henry in battle. He then brought diplomatic pressure to bear on Bohemia by a timely alliance with the Hungarians, and on Henry himself by arranging a dynastic alliance with the Palatine of Lorraine. Pressed from all sides, Henry was obliged, at the Treaty of Bautzen (1018), to cede to Poland not only the disputed territory along the Elbe, but the whole of Moravia as well.
Like his father, Bolesław was not a man to rest on his laurels, and when an opportunity for action arose, he took it. He had married his daughter to Prince Svatopolk, ruler of the Principality of Rus. When Svatopolk was ousted by rebellion from his capital in Kiev, Bolesław intervened on his son-in-law’s behalf. He took the opportunity of annexing a slice of land separating his own dominions from those of Kiev, the area between the rivers Bug and San, which rounded off his own state in the east.
The Polish realm was now large by any standards, and its sovereign status seemed beyond doubt. To stress this, in the last year of his life, 1025, Bolesław had himself crowned King of Poland in Gniezno Cathedral. But his death revealed that the empirebuilding policies of Mieszko and Bolesław had outstripped the means of the nascent state, which could not digest their conquests at this rate. At the same time, strong regionalist tendencies made themselves felt with the accession of Bolesław’s son Mieszko II.
While he attempted to hold together his dominions, jealous brothers obtained the support of Kiev by promising to cede the lands between the Bug and San rivers, and that of the Empire by offering to give back areas annexed by Bolesław. They had little difficulty in toppling Mieszko, and he had to flee the country in 1031. The unfortunate man was then set upon by some Bohemian knights who, according to the Polish chronicler, ‘used leather thongs to crush his genitalia in such a way that he would never sire again’. Although he managed to return and regain his throne, Mieszko died in 1034, leaving the country divided.
His son, Kazimierz I, was hardly more successful, and he too had to flee when civil war broke out. Duke Bretislav of Bohemia took advantage of this to invade. He seized Gniezno, whence he removed not only the attributes of the Polish crown, but also the body of St Adalbertus (Wojciech in Polish), which put in jeopardy the very survival of Poland as an independent unit.
At a moment when boundaries were theoretical, cultural distinctions imperceptible and concepts of nationhood in their infancy, the first Czech chronicler, Cosmas of Prague, and his Polish contemporary the monk Gallus, both saw the other nation as the worst enemy of his own.
This raises the question of what we mean by terms such as ‘Poland’ at this point in history, let alone by ‘Poles’, ‘Germans’ and ‘Czechs’. Frontiers, such as they were, were fluid, changing each time one ruler or another asserted his rights by force. Ethnic distinctions did not impose any deeper loyalty, and Germans fought amongst themselves more often than they fought Slavs, while the Slavs were constantly at war with each other. Nor were they well defined. When the Germans occupied the lands up to the Oder, they absorbed so much Slav blood that the population of what would become Brandenburg, the cradle of German racial myths, was heavily mixed. When the area later known as Mecklenburg became part of the German world, the Slav ruling classes became the German aristocracy. On the other hand, the rulers of Poland repeatedly intermarried with Germans.


Fig. 1 The early Piast Kings. (Only the more important members of the dynasty are shown. Dates given are those of reigns. The family tree continues on pages 24-5.)
The underlying conflict that ranged the Poles against Bohemia and the Empire was over the question of Poland’s position in the Christian world. For a century and a half after Otto III had sanctioned Bolesław the Brave’s royal ambitions, Poland’s status remained uncertain, with the Empire repeatedly trying to place it in the position of a vassal state, and Poland struggling to preserve its sovereignty. The ebb and flow of this struggle is reflected in the way Polish monarchs are variously referred to as dux, princeps or rex in contemporary Western sources. In spite of its own internal dissensions and wars, the Empire was the theoretical arbiter on such questions. The Polish monarch could strengthen his position by building up his own power, by seeking the support of other countries and by alliance with the Pope against the Emperor. The problems involved are clearly illustrated by the hundred years after the death of Kazimierz I in 1058.
After regaining his throne in 1039, Kazimierz had made Kraków his capital. Gniezno, the centre of Wielkopolska (Greater Poland), the land of the Polanie, needed a strong boundary along the Oder and Polish domination of Pomerania in the north and Silesia in the south. Kraków, the capital of Małopolska (Lesser Poland), was likely to be more affected by what happened in Kiev than what was going on in Pomerania. Both Kazimierz, who was married to the sister of the Prince of Kiev, and his son Bolesław II, the Bold, who also married a member of that royal house, had turned their eyes to the east and Bolesław occupied Kiev twice on his uncle’s behalf. At the same time, Hungary was emerging as an important factor in Polish affairs. It was an obvious ally against both Bohemia and the Empire. It was also an element in a great web of papal diplomacy aimed against the Empire, stretching from Poland to Spain. One of the benefits of joining this alliance was that the Pope granted Bolesław a royal crown, with which the latter crowned himself in 1076.
The fiery king’s friendship with the Papacy came to grief only three years after this event. Less than a century after his namesake had made such mileage out of a saint, Bolesław lost his throne over one. A number of magnates, including Stanisław, Bishop of Kraków, had started to plot against him. When Bolesław uncovered the conspiracy he reacted with violence, putting to death several of the conspirators, including the Bishop. This aroused widespread indignation, and the unfortunate King was obliged to abandon his throne to his brother Władysław Herman. The killing of the Bishop (who would be canonised in 1258) undermined the prestige of the Polish dynasty, and in 1085 the Emperor Henry IV allowed the Duke of Bohemia to crown himself King of Bohemia and Poland. Although this was a purely symbolic act, it was an affront to Władysław.
At home, Władysław was unable to curb the rising power of local lords, who stipulated that Poland should be divided between his two sons at his death. But when this came, in 1102, the younger son, Bolesław the Wrymouth, drove his brother out of the country. As his name suggests, he was an ugly man, but he was extremely capable, and quickly earned the respect of his subjects, in spite of his determination to rule with a strong arm. He was aided in this by his military prowess. In 1109 he won a victory over the Emperor and the Duke of Bohemia at the Battle of Psie Pole near Wrocław, forcing them to renounce their claims to Polish territory. He also invaded Pomerania, where a gradual German incursion had over the years weakened Polish influence. He recaptured the area up to and well beyond the Oder, as far as the island of Rügen.


The last years of his reign brought defeat during expeditions in support of his Hungarian allies, provoking renewed Bohemian invasions. A group of nobles took advantage of the situation, forcing Bolesław to make a political testament which carved Poland up into duchies. Each of his five sons was to rule over one of these. Pomerania, whose dukes were closely related to but not of the main Piast line, was given equal status. The eldest son, Władysław, was to reign in the small but theoretically paramount duchy of Kraków as well as his own and exert suzerainty over the others. Thus when Bolesław the Wrymouth died in 1138, the country embarked on a political experiment designed to compromise between regionalist tendencies and an underlying sense of kinship and political unity.
Ironically, considering the frequent interruptions in the succession and the consequent fragmentation of the realm, this sense of unity was based primarily on the Piast dynasty. They had established over eighty castle-towns by the end of the eleventh century and endowed market towns with royal charters granting rights and protection. They encouraged the replacement of barter with their own coinage, and provided the security necessary for the development of international trade routes through the country. Cities such as Kraków, which became the capital in 1040, Sandomierz, Kalisz, Wrocław, Poznań and Płock flourished.
Another unifying element was the Church, which was instrumental in the spread of new technologies and of the Romanesque style in architecture. It was also central to the spread of culture and education, providing as it did technical expertise, administration and schooling for would-be priests and young noblemen. The arrival of the Benedictines, whose monastery at Tyniec on the Vistula dates from the second half of the eleventh century, and later of the Premonstratentian and Cistercian orders, added impetus to this process. Most of the cathedrals had schools attached to them, and through the institution of the Church it was possible for Polish students to travel to other counties in search of learning. A local Latin chanson de geste made its appearance, and between 1112 and 1116 the first Polish chronicle was written in Kraków by Gallus, probably a Benedictine monk from Provence.
A distinction must be drawn between the great impact of the Church’s educational and even political activities, and the con—siderably lesser one it produced at the strictly religious level. Pagan cults survived the official conversion of the country in 966, and the next two centuries witnessed several major revivals, during which churches were burnt and priests put to death. The pagan survivals were particularly strong in areas such as Pomerania, which maintained a measure of autonomy in the face of pressure to submit to either Polish or Imperial overlordship.
The Church could do little about this in the face of a general lack of zeal, which is well illustrated by the Polish response to Rome’s summons to the Crusades. Apart from Prince Henryk of Sandomierz, few heeded it. Duke Leszek the White explained in a long letter to the Pope that neither he nor any self-respecting Polish knight could be induced to go to the Holy Land, where, they had been informed, there was no wine, mead, or even beer to be had. There were other reasons for staying at home, since there were troublesome pagans on Poland’s own frontiers in the shape of the Prussians and Lithuanians. But little was being done to convert them, and this lack of zeal was characteristic. A major motive propelling European knights across the seas to fight crusades in Palestine and the Baltic (and settlers to follow them) was the population explosion of the Middle Ages which produced overcrowding in some areas. The far from populous Poland felt no such need for expansion, and her rulers welcomed the immigration of Jews, Bohemians and Germans who provided useful services.
The realm continued to fragment after the death of Bolesław the Wrymouth in 1138 had transformed it into five duchies. The eldest of his sons, Władysław, made an attempt at reuniting it from his position as ruler of Kraków, but he came up against the resistance not only of his brothers but of most of the local lords as well. Over the next hundred years successive dukes reigning in Kraków proved less and less able to enact the formal suzerainty which went with the position, and eventually abandoned the attempt altogether. The various branches of the royal family established local dynasties, in some cases subdividing the original five duchies of Wielkopolska, Mazovia-Kujavia, Małopolska, Sandomierz and Silesia into smaller units in order to accommodate their offspring.
There was more to such fragmentation than sibling rivalry. Regional lords and the larger towns yearned for autonomy, and the trend towards devolution went hand in hand with a demand for wider power-sharing. Władysław of Wielkopolska, also known as Spindleshanks on account of his bony legs, made a valiant attempt to reassert his authority as Duke of Kraków, but powerful barons forced him to grant them substantial prerogatives by the Privilege of Cienia in 1228, thirteen years after a similar document, the Magna Carta, had been extorted from a king of England.
There was nevertheless a marked difference between the barons of England and the magnates of Poland. The power of an English or French lord at this time was held from the crown and fitted into a system of vassalage. This feudal system was never adopted in Poland, except with respect to some nobles who had migrated from western Europe. This set Polish society apart from the rest of the Continent in fundamental ways.
The highest estate were the gentry, the szlachta, who inherited both status and land. They were obliged to perform military service for the king and to submit to his tribunals, but they were the independent magistrates over their own lands. They upheld the customary laws of the country, the Ius Polonicum, based entirely on precedent, and resisted attempts at the imposition of foreign legal practices by the crown. Beneath the szlachta were a number of estates, including the włodyki, who were knights without noble status, and the panosze, who formed a kind of yeoman class. The peasants were mostly free and able to rise to a higher status. While the land they tilled belonged to the sovereign, they enjoyed defined rights. A small number were enserfed, but these gained greater personal freedom during the first half of the thirteenth century, and were not generally tied to the land as in western Europe. The adoption of the three-field system at the beginning of the thirteenth century and the agrarian boom it brought about differentiated between those who had land and those who did not. Those who did grew richer, those who did not were revealed to have nothing to offer except their labour. Thus while they gained greater personal freedom and legal protection, the poorer peasants were caught up in the mesh of economic bondage.
The cities were, literally, a law unto themselves. Most of them had been either founded by or endowed with special charters which gave them a measure of autonomy. As they grew, they attracted foreigners—Germans, Italians, Walloons, Flemings and Jews—whose presence served to increase this independence. The Germans imported with them the Ius Teutonicum, which was first adopted for Silesian towns in 1211, and subsequently, in the modified form of ‘Magdeburg Law’, for others all over Poland. These laws, which regulated criminal and civic offences and all trade practices, meant that the area within a city’s walls was both administratively and legislatively in another country from that lying without. The citydwellers evolved as a separate class having nothing in common with the others. The same was true of the growing Jewish community, which was granted a royal charter by Bolesław the Pious in 1264, the Statute of Kalisz. This recognised all Jews as servi camerae (servants of the treasury) and afforded them royal protection. It was the first of a number of such privileges which were to turn them into a nation within a nation.
Since there was no framework of vassalage there were no natural channels for the exercise of central authority. Royal control therefore depended not on a local vassal as elsewhere in Europe, but on a functionary appointed by the king. He was known by his function, and his title of Castellan (Kasztelan) derived from the royal castle from which he exercised judicial, administrative and military authority on the king’s behalf. There were over a hundred of these castellans administering the Polish lands by 1250, but their importance waned along with central authority when the country was divided. In terms of power, they began to be superseded by the ministers of the individual dukes, the Palatines (Wojewoda).
This divergence from European norms is significant. Unlike Bohemia, which had faced similar challenges and choices, Poland had not been fully absorbed into the framework of European states. One consequence of this was that it remained more backward. But it maintained a greater degree of independence. And while it was divided into duchies it remained more uniform and cohesive as a society than many others, because it was not subjected to the mixed overlordships that placed large tracts of geographical France under the sovereignty of the king of England, areas of Germany under that of the French dynasty, or Italy at the mercy of a succession of Norman, French and German warlords. It was probably this that ensured the survival of Poland as a political unit.

TWO Between East and West (#ulink_e7e20746-70d3-5ba8-8411-801812a5c95c)
In 1241 the horde of the legendary Genghis Khan, now commanded by his grandson Batu, broke over eastern Europe in a great wave. It overran and put to fire and sword the principalities of southern Russia and then divided into two. The larger force swept into Hungary, the other ravaged Poland. The knighthood of Małopolska gathered to face it at Chmielnik, but were swamped and massacred. The Duke of Kraków, Bolesław the Chaste, fled south to Moravia.
The Tatars sacked Kraków, then rode on westwards into Silesia. Here Duke Henryk the Pious had massed all his own forces, as well as those of Wielkopolska, a contingent of foreign knights, and even the miners from his goldmines of Złotoryja. On 8 April 1241 he led them out of the city of Legnica to face the oncoming Tatars. His forces were defeated and Duke Henryk himself was hacked to pieces.
Happily for western Europe, the Tatars veered south to rejoin their brothers in Hungary and there news reached them of the death of their Khan Ugedey. They abandoned their westward advance and rode back whence they had come. Although they never again attempted a conquest of Europe, they would keep the whole of Russia under their yoke for the next three centuries and continued to harass Poland. In 1259 they sacked Lublin, Sandomierz, Bytom and Kraków. They returned in 1287, wreaking similar devastation. The horror of these raids was vividly captured in chronicle, legend and song, and is kept alive to this day in the hourly trumpet-call from the tower of St Mary’s Church in Kraków, which breaks off in the middle to commemorate the Tatar arrow that cut short the medieval trumpeter’s call. And it established the barbaric eastern infidel as a bogeyman in the Polish political mind.
The Tatar incursions showed up the vulnerability of a country divided. Although there was a community of interest, there had been no coordination of action, and regional militias were defeated one by one. Just as the Tatar threat died away, this vulnerability was beginning to be demonstrated on the other side of the country, where the other great bogeyman of modern Polish history was born, swaddled in steel marked with the black cross.
At a time when Poland had already been a Christian state for two hundred years, much of the southern and eastern Baltic coastline was still inhabited by pagans and was the scene of a fierce struggle carried on by Denmark, the Scandinavian kingdoms, Brandenburg and the Polish Dukes of Gdańsk-Pomerania and of Mazovia. Denmark, Brandenburg and other German princes vied with each other to conquer the area which would be known as Mecklenburg, with its valuable port of Liubice (Lübeck). Further east, where the Baltic coast curves northwards, the Danes and Scandinavians were making inroads into the lands of the Lithuanians, the Latvians, Lettigalians and Semigalians, and the Curonians. In between, the Poles battled against the Prussians, another Baltic people. The motives were the desire for land and trade, thinly disguised as missionary by local bishops who could not afford to have the Church excluded. This changed when St Bernard of Clairvaux started preaching the crusade all over Europe.
It was he who persuaded Pope Alexander III to use north European crusaders in northern Europe rather than the Middle East, and to issue, in 1171, a bull granting the same dispensations and indulgences to those who fought against the heathen Slavs or Prussians as to those fighting the Saracens. The advantage of a crusade was that any local duke who launched what was in effect a private war against his enemies could, by making an arrangement with his bishop, recruit foreign knights who would come and fight for him as unpaid soldiers. And the fruits of this crusade whetted the appetites of Danes, Poles and Germans alike. Although the first northern crusade was a failure, the heathen Slavs in Western Pomerania were gradually subjugated by the Germans and the Danes over the next fifty years.
Throughout the early 1200s the Dukes of Mazovia made inroads into Prussia, but this only provoked counter-raids from the Prussians. A methodical military takeover of the area was needed, and the only armies which could take up such a challenge were the military orders, the most famous of which, the Templars and Hospitallers, had proved their efficacy in Palestine. The Bishop of Riga had, in 1202, formed the Knighthood of Christ, better known as the Sword Brothers, to help him conquer and evangel—ise the Latvians. With the approval of Duke Konrad of Mazovia, the Bishop of Prussia followed suit by founding Christ’s Knights of Dobrzyn as the regular army of the Polish ‘mission’ to Prussia. But this was too small to cope with the task.
A more radical solution was called for, and so, in 1226, Konrad of Mazovia took a step whose consequences for Poland and for Europe were to be incalculable. He invited the Teutonic Order of the Hospital of St Mary in Jerusalem, known as the Teutonic Knights, to establish a commandery at Chełmno and help him con—quer Prussia. The Teutonic Knights, founded at Acre in Palestine on the model of the Templars, were attracted by the idea of a mission nearer home. They thought they had found one in Hungary, where they were given the task of holding the Tatars at bay, but King Andrew II of Hungary grew wary of their ambitions and shortly expelled them.
They could see the advantages of the Polish offer, but this time the Grand Master Hermann von Salza was determined to guarantee their future. He obtained documents from the Emperor Frederick II and a bull from Pope Gregory IX authorising the order to conquer Prussia and thereafter to hold it in perpetuity as a papal fief. Before he realised what he had let himself in for, Konrad of Mazovia discovered that the lease he had granted the order on the territory of Chełmno had become a freehold.


Hermann von Salza, who still kept his sights on the Holy Land, originally saw the Prussian theatre of operations as a sideshow. He despatched a few knights there in 1229, and a further contingent took part in a crusade into Prussia in 1232-33, preached by the Dominicans, in which several Polish dukes, the margraves of Meissen and Brandenburg, the Duke of Austria and the King of Bohemia took part, along with hundreds of German knights. The order’s involvement grew when, in 1237, it took over the Sword Brothers. And it was encouraged to take a greater interest in the area by successive Popes, whose wish to see the conversion of the pagan Balts was complemented by a desire to bring as much of northern Russia as possible into the fold of the Roman Church.
This placed the order in a position to organise annual forays (reysas) against the pagans for kings, princes and knights who wished to acquit themselves of the duty to bear arms for Christ. These reysas were like safaris for the visiting grandees, who not only fulfilled their crusading vows but enjoyed a good campaign. They also took away a favourable impression of the order, which they subsequently expressed by giving it grants of land in their own countries and by supporting it diplomatically. At the same time, the increase in crusading activity in the region created tensions and problems of its own, as it was now drawing in not only Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the Polish duchies, but also the emerging state of Lithuania and the Russian principalities of Novgorod and Muscovy.
By 1283 most of Prussia had been conquered. Although it was settled by a considerable number of landless Polish and German knights, it was the Teutonic Order that ruled the province. It established a formidable stronghold at Marienburg, a number of castles throughout the territory and a port at Elbing (Elbląg) to carry trade from the province. It proved an efficient administrator, as monastic discipline precluded venality and its structure provided a degree of continuity which dynastic states (with their disputed successions, minorities and likelihood of feckless or incompetent rulers) lacked. The knights’ rule was relatively benign to begin with. They favoured voluntary over forced conversion of the autochton—ous population, and were pragmatic enough to use local pagans to fight alongside them when necessary. But repeated revolts and apostasies made them take a more jaundiced view with time, and the autochtones were gradually all but exterminated.


Fig. 2 The division and reunification of Poland under the later Piasts


In the space of fifty years, the Prussian nuisance on the Mazovian border had been replaced by a well-ordered state. This did not in itself represent a threat to the Polish duchies. But it was one of a series of developments that would.
A century earlier, in 1150, the last Slav prince of Brenna died, to be succeeded by a German. The March of Brandenburg, as it then became, encroached eastwards, driving a wedge between Slav states on the Baltic, where the outflanked Prince Bogusław of Szczecin was forced to accept German overlordship, and those to the south, like the small principality of Lubusz, which was annexed to Brandenburg outright. In 1266 Brandenburg took Santok, and in 1271 Gdańsk, thus extending its own territory to that of the Teutonic Order. The Poles retook both Gdańsk and Santok in the following year, but they would never push the German advance back to the river Oder. From the stronghold they had set up at Berlin on the river Spree in 1231, the margraves of Brandenburg looked eastward, and they would seize every opportunity to extend their dominion in that direction.
At the same time, settlers from all over Germany came in search of land and opportunity, usually well received by Polish rulers, and by the end of the thirteenth century not only Silesian and Pomeranian cities such as Wrocław and Szczecin, but even the capital, Kraków, had become predominantly German. In Silesia and Pomerania, the influx of landless knights and farmers from Germany also made itself felt in rural areas, radically affecting the will as well as the ability of local Piast rulers to stand by a disunited Poland. Like so many small shopkeepers, these minor rulers had to pay tribute to whoever was strong enough to impose protection. One by one the princes of Pomerania, outflanked by German states and undermined by the German ascendancy in their cities, particularly Hanseatic centres such as Szczecin and Stargard, had to accept the German Emperor instead of the Duke of Kraków as their overlord. This process weakened the greater Polish duchies as well, as a result of which even their independence came under threat. In 1300 King Vaclav II of Bohemia was able to invade Wielkopolska, and with the blessing of the Emperor have himself crowned King of Poland.
If the experience of the Tatar invasions had provided a powerful argument in favour of reuniting the Polish duchies into a single kingdom, this was given added weight by increasing resentment of the encroaching Germans and foreigners in general. After Bohemia’s capture of Kraków with the connivance of some of the townspeople in 1311, the Polish troops which retook it the following year rounded up all the citizens and beheaded those who could not pronounce the Polish tongue-twisters they were made to repeat.
It was also supported by the Church. Until now, this had not played a political role, merely an administrative one. Under the early Piast kings, the bishops had been little more than functionaries with no power-base of their own. The devolution of the country into separate duchies changed this, as the individual dukes needed the support of their local bishops. These were quick to perceive that if the Polish duchies were absorbed into Bohemia or Germany, the Polish Church would lose its autonomous status, and they took steps to counter the creeping Germanisation. At the Synod of Łęczyca in 1285 the Polish bishops adopted a resolution that only Poles could be appointed as teachers in church schools.
After the canonisation of Stanisław, the Bishop of Kraków put to death by Bolesław II and recognised as patron of Poland in 1253, the monk Wincenty of Kielce wrote a life of the saint in which the alleged miraculous growing together of his quartered body is described as prophetic of the way in which the divided Poland would become one again. Similarly patriotic sentiments can be detected in the chronicle of another Bishop of Kraków, Wincenty Kadłubek, written in the first years of the thirteenth century, and in the more reliable Kronika Wielkopolska, written by a churchman in Poznań in the 1280s.
The message was taken up by some of the dukes, who decided to abandon the hereditary principle and to elect from their number an overlord who would rule effectively in Kraków. Henryk Probus of Silesia was the first to be chosen in this way, and on his death in 1290 the Kraków throne was given to Przemysł II of Gniezno, who was actually crowned King of Poland in 1295, but was assassinated two years later by agents of Brandenburg. He was succeeded in 1296 by a prince of the Mazovian line, Władysław the Short, who was to become one of the most remarkable of Polish kings.
The Bohemian invasion of 1300 forced Władysław to flee the country for a time, and he went to Rome in search of allies. As his sobriquet suggests, he was a small man, but he knew what he wanted and how to get it, laying his plans with skill. The Papacy was locked in one of its perennial conflicts with the Empire, and therefore looked kindly on the anti-Imperial Polish prince. Władysław sought the support of Charles Robert of Anjou, the erstwhile King of Naples and Sicily who had just succeeded to the Hungarian throne. With the Pope’s support he sealed an alliance by marrying his daughter to the Angevin. Having also secured the cooperation of the princes of Halicz and Vladimir he set off to reconquer his realm from the Czechs.


In 1306 he took Kraków and in 1314 Gniezno, thus gaining control of the two principal provinces, while a third, Mazovia, recognised his overlordship. In 1320 he was crowned King of Poland, the first to be crowned at Kraków. By making an alliance with Sweden, Denmark and the Pomeranian principalities, Władysław forced Brandenburg on to the defensive while he dealt with the Teutonic Order, which was in a difficult position. The fall of Acre to the Saracens in 1291 had deprived it of its headquarters. The indictment in 1307 of the Templars, on whom the Teutonic Knights were closely modelled, their subsequent dissolution and savage persecution, were a chilling warning to any order which grew too powerful. Władysław lost little time in taking the Teutonic Order to a Papal court not only on charges of invasion and rapine, but on more fundamental questions of whether it was fulfilling its mission. The Papal judgement went against the order, but the very fact that the Knights had been cornered brought about a subtle change in their attitude.
Their headquarters, located in Venice after the fall of Acre so as to be ready for future crusades in the Holy Land, was quickly moved to Marienburg in Prussia in 1309. Prussia now became not a crusading outpost, but a state, and it would settle its disputes with neighbours not through Papal courts but on the battlefield. In concert with its ally John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, the order invaded Poland. The Silesian Duke Bolko of Świdnica held off the Bohemians while Władysław marched against the order and defeated it in a costly battle at Płowce in 1331. Too weak to pursue his advantage, he did not manage to reassert a Polish ascendancy in Pomerania or Silesia, where the German hegemony persisted. Nevertheless, by the time of his death in 1333, Władysław the Short had managed to reunite the central provinces and to establish at least nominal control over a number of other areas. His son Kazimierz III (1333-70), known as the Great, was able to carry through this process and to place the sovereignty of Poland beyond question.
In this he was assisted by an unusually favourable conjunction of circumstances. As a minor ice-age reduced yields and ruined harvests throughout much of Europe, Poland basked in a more than usually warm and temperate spell, which produced not only bumper crops but also conditions in which Mediterranean fruit could be grown and wine produced. While the Hundred Years’ War devastated the richest lands in western Europe and wrought financial havoc as far afield as Italy, Poland was spared lengthy conflicts. Finally, as the entire Continent was engulfed by the plague of 1348, the Black Death, most of Poland remained unaffected. The populations of England and France, of Italy and Scandinavia, of Hungary, Switzerland, Germany and Spain were more than halved. Poland’s grew, partly as a consequence of conditions elsewhere. The depredations of the plague were accompanied by widespread famine, which provoked an exodus from towns, and refugees roamed Europe in search of food and a safe haven. In addition, the need for a scapegoat had provoked the greatest wave of anti-Jewish atrocities in medieval history, and terrified survivors also fled, mainly eastwards. All were welcomed in Poland, which insisted only on a period of quarantine.
Kazimierz was a fitting ruler for these halcyon days. Physically handsome, with a broad forehead and a remarkable head of hair, he was a regal figure, combining courage and determination with the tastes of a voluptuary. He launched a building programme which, along with the cathedrals of Kraków and Gniezno and churches all over the country, gave rise to sixty-five new fortified towns, the fortification of twenty-seven existing ones, and fiftythree new castles. He also rerouted the Vistula at Kraków, and constructed a canal linking the salt-mines of Wieliczka with the capital. In 1347 he codified the entire corpus of existing laws in two books: one, the Statute of Piotrków, for Wielkopolska; one, the Statute of Wiślica, for Małopolska. He reformed the fiscal system, created a central chancellery, and regulated the monetary situation with the introduction in 1388 of new coinage. In the towns, he established guilds and extended Magdeburg Law. He granted a separate law to the Armenians living in Polish cities and gave the Jews their own fiscal, legal, and even political institutions.
These measures laid the foundations of a new boom. Polish cities gained considerable numbers of merchants and skilled artisans, while the influx of Jews provided them with banking and other facilities. This stimulated industry. Newly-discovered deposits of iron, lead, copper, silver, zinc, sulphur and rock salt were exploited and mining techniques improved. The traditional exports of grain, cattle, hides, lumber and other forest produce were supplemented by manufactured goods such as finished cloth, which was carried as far west as Switzerland.
Contact with the outside world was increasing, largely thanks to the Church, whose activity, both missionary and educational, brought foreign clerics to Poland and sent Polish ones abroad, some, like the friar Benedictus Polonus, as far as the capital of the Mongol Khan Guyuk in 1245, but most to study, particularly at the universities of Bologna and Paris. King Kazimierz exerted a personal influence on the development of learning and culture, and laid the foundations of the flowering of the next century by establishing, in 1364, a university at Kraków. Coming just after the foundation of the Charles University of Prague and before those of Vienna and Heidelberg, this was the second such academy in central Europe. Unlike most English, French and German universities, which evolved from religious institutions, it was based on the Italian models of Padua and Bologna, which were secular establishments.


While he lavished care on domestic projects and encouraged education and the arts, Kazimierz did not neglect foreign affairs: he inherited a kingdom of 106,000 square kilometres, and left one of 260,000.He warred with John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, over rival claims to Silesia, finally defeating him in 1345, one year before the unfortunate blind king lost his ostrich feathers to the Prince of Wales at Crécy. He then turned his attention to the east.
The Tatar invasions of the previous century had annihilated the Principality of Kiev, and the smaller Russian principalities were only allowed to survive at the cost of yearly tribute to the Tatars, who had settled in southern Russia. Two such principalities, those of Halicz and Vladimir, were adjacent to Poland’s south-eastern border. Both were dynastically connected with Poland, and after the princes of Halicz died out, in 1340, Kazimierz incorporated their lands into his own dominion.
This elongation of Poland to the south-east was inevitable and permanent. The move of the Polish capital from Gniezno to Kraków three hundred years before was now beginning to affect Polish policy significantly. The king viewed his dominions from a different vantage point, and the most pervasive influence at court was that of the magnates of Małopolska, the ‘Kraków Lords’.
There was more at stake in this eastern theatre than territorial gain. The disintegration of Kiev had left a power vacuum into which Poland was inevitably drawn, all the more so since another power was taking more than a passing interest in the area—Lithuania.
The Lithuanians were a Baltic people like the Prussians and the Latvians, between whom they were settled. Long after their kindred Latvians and Prussians had been subjugated by the Sword Brothers and the Teutonic Knights respectively, the Lithuanians continued to defy all attempts at conquest. They were ruled by a dynasty well suited to the situation, prepared to make peace and accept token Christianity from the order to gain support against the Russians of Novgorod, and from Novgorod to defeat the order. Their conduct of policy was so wily and volatile that none of their neighbours could ever rest easy. After the débâcle of Kiev, the Lithuanians annexed vast tracts of masterless land. In 1362 their ruler Grand Duke Algirdas defeated the Tatars at the Battle of the Blue Waters, and in the following year he occupied Kiev itself.
In less than a hundred years the Lithuanian state had quadrupled in size, but while this made it more formidable to its enemies, it endeared it to none and enmeshed it in problems which, for once, were too great for its rulers. They could not hope to administer the huge area populated with Christian Slavs by whose multitude they were to be eventually swamped. Their seizure of these lands had brought them into conflict with the Tatars on one front, while the Teutonic Knights were straining all their resources to crush them on the other. The Russian principalities were hostile, while the Poles, who now shared a long frontier with Lithuania, were growing tired of sporadic border raids. Lithuania needed an ally. The problem of which to choose was the most pressing issue facing Grand Duke Iogaila when he came to the Lithuanian throne in 1377. And that same year had placed Poland in a dilemma, for different reasons.
Kazimierz the Great had died in 1370. Although married four times, he had no heir, and left the throne to his nephew, Louis of Anjou, King of Hungary. King Louis attended his uncle’s funeral and then went back to Hungary, leaving his mother, the late king’s sister, to rule in his name. She could not rule without the support of the more powerful nobles of Małopolska, the ‘Kraków Lords’. They exploited this opportunity to assume a greater share not only in the running of the country, but in the definition of its very status.


A new concept of the Polish state had been evolving from the beginning of the fourteenth century whose gist was that sovereignty should be vested not in the person of the monarch, but in a specific geographical area, the Corona Regni Poloniae, an expression meant to embrace all the Polish lands, even those which had fallen under foreign domination. In 1374 the Polish nobles wrested from King Louis the Statute of Košice, which stressed the indi visibility of this patrimony, and stipulated that no part of it was his to give away. They were looking to a future which remained uncertain, since Louis, too, had no male heir.
He did, however, have two daughters. He had married the elder, Maria, to Sigismund of Luxembourg, and intended him to take the Polish throne. The younger, Hedwig, was betrothed to Wilhelm of Habsburg, who was to have Hungary. But when Louis died in 1382, the Kraków Lords refused to bow to these wishes and made their own plans.
They rejected the already married Maria and brought her ten-year-old sister Hedwig, Jadwiga in Polish, to Kraków, where in 1384 she was crowned emphatically king (rex). The chronicler Długosz noted: ‘The Polish lords and prelates were so taken with her, so greatly and sincerely loved her that, almost forgetting their masculine dignity, they did not feel any shame or degradation in being the subjects of such a gracious and virtuous lady.’ In fact, they saw her principally as an instrument, and they disregarded her feelings entirely. When young Wilhelm of Habsburg turned up to claim his betrothed, she was locked in the castle on Wawel hill. After fruitless efforts to see her he left, and she was prepared by the Polish lords for the bed of another: they had found a husband for her in Iogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania.
The idea of a union between Poland and Lithuania had germin—ated simultaneously in both countries. On 14 August 1385 a basic agreement was signed at Krewo. This was followed by more specific pledges at Wołkowysk in January 1386, and at Lublin a few weeks later. On 12 February, Jagiełło, as his name had crystallised in Polish, entered Kraków, and three days later he was baptised as Władysław. On 18 February he married Jadwiga, and on 4 March was crowned King of Poland.

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