Jerzy Lukowski & Hubert Zawadzki, A Concise History of Poland

Jerzy Lukowski and Hubert Zawadzki, A Concise History of Poland, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

The Romans never conquered Poland (3)

The year AD 966 has to serve, for in that year the ruler of what has come to be known as ‘Poland’ accepted (and imposed) Latin Christianity. (3)

‘Polak’ (polonus, polanus, polenus were in commonly used medieval Latin forms) derives from pole, plain—the land of the Polanie, living in the basin of the middle Warta river, in the western part of modern-day Poland. Some kind of distinct political unity emerged in this area between the sixth and ninth centuries AD, with well-established commercial and administrative centres in Gniezno and Poznan. The primacy of these western lands came to be acknowledged in the thirteenth century with their designation as ‘Old’ or ‘Great’ Poland (Wielkopolska, Polonia Maior) –as opposed to ‘Little’ Poland (Ma[l]opolska, Polonia Minor) to the south and south-east. (4)

Between 1034 and 1039, Poland may have been without a ruler at all (some chroniclers tried to fill the gap with a Boles[l]aw the Forgotten, but he is just as likely to have been Boleslaw the Non-Existent), as it threatened to disintegrate untder the pressures of pagan reaction and Bohemian invasion. (6)

Casimir the Restorer (1039-58), needed at least fifteen years to stitch his lands back together with Imperial and Kievan help. It was during his reign that Krakow began to establish itself as Poland’s capital: the old political and metropolitan centre of Gniezno was so devastated by the disorders as to be temporarily uninhabitable. (6)

The deeper Christianization of Poland began only with the coming of the monasteries and friars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Until then, the Church remained an alien, unpopular institution, foisted on the people by a ruling elite in pursuit of its own political and expansionist ambitions. But it differentiated Poalnd from its eastern Slav neighbours in one crucial respect. The new bishops, with their dioceses and synods, with their political and economic privileges, with their ties to Rome, came eventually to open a door to the differentiation and variegation of political authority, limiting the ruler’s monopoly on power. Further east, the traditions of Orthodoxy and Byzantine caesaropapism were to direct the lands of Rus’ along a very different path of political development. (7)

…a key weakness of the Piast state (though hardly one peculiar to it)—the absence of a secure means of succession. … overall political authority would be vested in the princeps, the eldest of his five sons. … The younger brothers would be his viceroys in different provinces; … Fratricidal strife inevitably followed. … Krakow retained a prestigious and symbolic role—no one could credibly lay claim to the title of princeps without control over it. …the approval of the wealthy, largely German-speaking Krakow urban elite came to be essential. (9)

Polish towns. Most were very small. The largest, Krakow and Wroc[l]aw, are unlikely to have numbered more than 5,000 inhabitiants each in 1200. This was not enough to generate the wealth that Poland’s rulers wanted. (13)

The governing classes in these towns were increasingly Germans and German-speaking. Indigenous Polish peasants were forbidden (ineffectively) to live Krakow, since princes and landlords feared the drain of manpower from their own estates… In larger towns, Germans, or Poles assimilated as Germans, made up a majority. Those most likely to resent germanization were, to begin with, the native Polish clergy, who as they found their feet, increasingly opposed the intrusion of Germans into their ranks. At the synod of Leczyca in 1285, Archbishop Jakub Swinka of Gniezno warned that Poland might become a ‘new Saxony’ if German contempt for Polish language, customs, clergy and ordinary people went unchecked. (13)

German wealth and culture, whose charms outshone those of an impoverished and backward Poland. It was only towards the later thirteenth century, encouraged by clerics like Archbishop Swinka, that Polish developed enough sophistication to be suitable for the delivery of sermons. As a literary medium, it could scarcely compare with German before the early 1500s. (14)

The Catholic Church contributed significantly to the survival of a sense of unity in the Polish lands. Gniezno, given metropolitan status in 999, was able to preserve its ecclesiastical authority over the five other sees of the Piast state… (15)

The rag-bag of Piast duchies could not hope to aspire to the forceful political role of Mieszko I and his immediate successors. (15)

The Poles stood no chance against the devastating Mongol onslaught which wreaked havoc across eastern and central Europe and which swept across Poland in 1241. … Only news of the death of their Great Khan Ogodei caused the Mongols to withdraw form their Polish and Hungarian conquests in December. They remained in the Crimea and the steppe-lands of the Black Sea and the eastern Balkans, a new and long-lasting menace to south-eastern Poland. Virtually all semblance of orderly rule collapsed in their wake. Dukes became robber-barons, strong enough to aggravate their subjects’ misery, too weak to impose order, let alone unity. Dwarf statelets emerged whose rulers could barely hold their own against their leading subjects. Who ruled in Krakow was no longer decided by the dukes, but by the barons, clergy and even townsmen of the area. … Only the core lands of Wielkopolska and the principate lands of Krakow and Sandomierz remained more or less intact. (16)

The duchy of Krakow to Duke Przemsl II of Wielkopolska… nor is it clear whether Przemys[l] regarded himself as a ruler of the whole of Poland, or just of Wielkopolska and eastern Pomerania. He did not survive long enough to test his real support. In February 1396 he was murdered… He left Poland one enduring bequest, in the shape of the crowned eagle which he adopted as the emblem of his new state. (17)

Vaclav… September 1300… king… Much of Poland, however, continued to remain under the immediate rule of territorial dukes. Vaclav’s direct authority covered mainly Krakow-Sandomierz, Wielkopolska and eastern Pomerania. … To Vaclav, of course, the Polish lands were simply a subordinate part of a greater Premyslid monarchy. Polish reunificaiton for its own skae was of little interest to him.
In January 1301, King Andrew III of Hungary died, leaving no male heirs. Vaclav found the temptation irresistible. His attempts to impose his 11-year-old son, another Vaclav, on Hungary and, in the process, massively expand Premyslid power, were too much for the Hungarians, the papacy, Albrecht of Habsburg and the rulers of south Germany. By 1304 a Hungarian-German coalition had been formed. … Vaclav II made peace with the coalition, just before he died on 21 June 1305. He agreed to withdraw from Hungary. (18)

Founded in the late twelfth century as an offshoot of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, just in time to be forced out by Islam’s counter-attack against the Crusader states of the Middle East, the Tetutonic Knights had relocated their military-proselytizing operations to Hungary and Transylvania. King Andrew II threw them out once their ambitions to carve out their own indepent state revealed themselves. In 1227, Conrad I, duke of Masovia, settled themin the country of Chelmno on the Vistula in order to defend his eastern borders against the pagan tribes of Prussia, while he devoted himself to feuding with his Piast relatives. Backed by emperors and popes (the Knights proved adept at playing one off against the other), patronized by the rulers and knighthood of Christian Europe (not least by individual Piast princes), they built up a de facto independence. (19)

By the late 1270s, they have subdued the Prussian tribes; they could embark on the process of colonization which gave the area its Germanic character for over 600 years. (20)

In May 1311, only Hungarian help enabled him to subdue a major revolt of German townsfolk in Krakow. Poles replaced Germans in key positions on the town council, Latin replaced Germans as the official language of town records. True, it was not many years before German burghers and merchants regained their old influence, but the town itself ceased to be the political force it once had been. (20)

[14th c.] The realm, the ‘Crown’ as it was styled by his jurists—Corona Regni Poloniae—that Casimir ruled, a narrow and irregular lozenge of territory, spilled form north-west to south-east on either side of the Vistula; with probably fewer than 800,000 inhabitants, it contained less than half the territories and population that might plausibly have been called Polish. (23)

Divisions in Lithuania, where Duke Gediminas’ seven sons quarreled among themselves after his death in 1341, worked to Casimirs advantage. Even the Black Death helped: it left a sparsely populated Poland largely unscathed, but in 1346 it devasted the Golden Horde. (27)

Casimir’s principal achievement was to restore strong monarchic rule at home… (27)

The king encouraged Jewish immigration, mainly from the Empire, to a greater extent than his predecessors. Whatever reservations his Christian subjects had about them (and there were occasional anti-Jewish riots), Casimir appreciated that they represented an invaluable asset. … Such taxation… enabled him to finance a major defence and reconstruction programme… It was enough to contain the incursions of the Tartars and the ever more frequent raids of the Lithuanians; (28)

Even in his own lifetime, Casimir’s III’s attainment of a relative prace and prosperity, his legal and administrative reforms earned him the title ‘the Great’ (the only Polish monarch so honoured). Yet Poland remained a lesser power, too weak to assert its claims to its old territories in the west and north. Casimir probably did as much as could be done with some unpromising materials. For better or worse, he paved the way for a new course of eastwards expansions. He restored strong monarchic rule, although nothing that he did could compensate for the lack of a legitimate son. (29)

[Jagiellonian Poland, 1386-1572] not only Poland and Lithuania, but Hungary and Bohemia had come under Jagiellonian rule. It was the greatest dynastic concatenation of territory Europe had yet seen. (33)

Jaie[l][l]o (to use the polonized form) … incorporate Lithuania into Poland. For over a hundred and fifty years the Poles were to insist on this. … The term used for ‘incorporate’ in 1385—‘applicare’—has given rise to much acrimonious discussion between Polish and Lithuanian historians, but the Poles had no doubt of what it meant at the time. (34)

After 1422, Poland and Lithuania purused different, if often complementary, foreign policies, with Poland looking to the north and south and Lithuania to the east. Chronic strains dogged their relationship, not least over the possession of the southern Rus’ territories of Podole and Jagie[l][l]o’s grandsons, John Albert (Jan Olbracht) in Poland and Alexander in Lithuania, represented, strictly speaking, a sundering of the dynastic union, stitched together once more in 1501, when Alexander succeeded his childless elder brother in Poland. (35)