BOTH THE the Poles and the Czechs had to struggle against Germanic pressure in order to maintain their identity. The first built up a greater Poland whose axis was the Vistula and which, though its frontiers varied, extended to the Baltic coast. The second fashioned a small feudal state which was more influenced by the West, and more civilized, than any of the other Slav countries, and hammered out their national unity on the anvil of harsh religious conflict.
I THE POLES
The Polish People
The Polish people originated from the Slav tribes who spread northwards from the Carpathians to occupy, in the early centuries of the Christian era, the basins of the Odra (Oder) and Wisla (Vistula). But the term Polska is not recorded prior to the tenth century, when, the Poles having already a lengthy though obscure history, one of their leaders, Mieszko i, ruling in Poznan (one of the most ancient Polish towns, like Cracow and Gniezno), extended his authority to the whole country, and having married a Christ-ian (the duke of Bohemia's sister) was himself baptized in 966. Mieszko's reign was the start of Poland's history as a country.
The Poles are the 'people of the plain' - the plain which slopes away gently to the northward from the Carpathians and the mountains of Bohemia. The mouths of the large rivers draining it (the Odra and Wisla) provide the outlets on the Baltic which are indispensable to the country's economy. Beyond the Odra the Poles' Teutonic neighbours, pushing aggressively eastwards and spreading along the Baltic coast, forced them to vacate the area between the Elbe and the Odra and, subsequently, much of the coastal region. The entire course of Polish history is inter-woven with German-Polish rivalry, whereas Russia, Poland's neighbour to the east, presented no danger till much later. In direct contact with the West, whence came the Franciscan and Dominican monks who gradually converted her people to Christianity in the twelfth and thirteenth cen-turies, Poland underwent a religious history and general development which parallel those of Russia, or rather Kiev, under Byzantine influence.
THE WEST SLAVS 71
She was equally well provided with natural resources, and the first Polish chronicle, that of Gallus Anonymus (early thirteenth century), depicts her as 'a country where the air is healthy and the earth fruitful, where the forests abound with honey and the rivers with fish, where the knights are full of valour and the peasants work hard, where the horses have staying-power and the oxen are willing, where the cows give much milk and the sheep much wool'. But, unlike Kiev and Russia generally, Poland never came under the Mongols, who attacked Cracow without success in 1241;
her development proceeded unhindered.
The plain of the Vistula is not uniform. The plateaux of the south — Little Poland and the region of Cracow - which are particularly fertile and have abundant mineral resources, are of a different character from central Poland and were for some time politically separate from it, becoming a dependency first of the Moravian and later of the Czech kingdom. Polish territorial unity spread outwards from Great Poland. It was achieved by the efforts of the Piasts, a dynasty descended from Mieszko, and was rend-ered easier by a common language whose dialectal variations were not great, and by a gradually extending network of castra - strategic focal points which enabled local market-places to function undisturbed, and whose interdependence rapidly broke up the isolation of the flat country-side. In the eleventh century, however, the country's centre of gravity shifted to the south, controlled at that time by the Piasts, and Cracow became the capital.
Poland as a state was not yet firmly on its feet; the powers of its rulers, most of whom were not crowned, were disputed by the feudal landowners, who were building up big estates and who merely strengthened their own privileges by recognizing a sovereign. Nevertheless, under the auspices of a political authority which reached its peak under Boleslas the Bold, who
FIGURE 13 Metal drinking-bowl, Wroclaw (Poland).
FROM 'RUS' TO RUSSIA THE WEST SLAVS
was crowned in 1076, Polish territory underwent a gradual transformation.
The growth of trade, and relations with the West, Rome and even Byzantium, created a complex of influences, all of which left their mark on Polish civilization. Alongside the palaces in the 'cities' (or rather fortified towns, such as Poznan, Wroclav, Cracow, Gniezno, Kruszwica and Kalisz) Romanesque churches were built; nearly all of these have now gone, leaving only a little masonry and stained glass and a few frescoes, such as those at Leczyca and the twelfth-century examples discovered in 1959 at Wislica. Byzantine influence is evident in mosaics (Church of St Andrew, Cracow). A small number of curious stone monuments, mostly in western Pomerania, can be seen in the primitive countryside, whose in-habitants took three centuries to convert to Christianity and retained a good many heathen customs. Surviving traces of fine craft work (ladles, painted egg-shells, utensils made of horn, and carvings of animals) indicate that the peasants had risen some way above subsistence level.
In proportion as Christianity became the religion of the country, Latin replaced the vernacular; from the reign of Mieszko onwards it was the official administrative language.
Polish Agriculture
It was thought at one time that tenth-century Poland consisted entirely of forests and marshes and that the population lived by hunting and food-gathering, with very little agriculture; but this view has long been ex-ploded. The introduction of winter wheat, and the progress of stock-breeding (which, incidentally, remained the chief rural occupation until the thirteenth century), had already started yielding marketable surpluses which were exchanged by barter. The small towns of western Poland and the coastal areas (Gdansk, Wolin, Opole, Gniezno) traded over great dis-tances; excavation has turned up Arab money and a few Polish coins. A rapid diversification of agriculture began in the tenth century. The Cistercian monks introduced the cultivation of high-quality fruit and even, despite the climate, planted vineyards, though these eventually disap-peared when Hungarian wines started to be imported. The crops grown included flax, hemp and hops. Hunting certainly remained important, less for fur than for food; but the need to preserve useful species had already caused the establishment of game preserves (Zaseki). Nature's bounty could no longer be squandered. Though there were huge uncleared expanses, dwindling slowly as cultivation advanced, the numerous res-trictions typical of an agricultural society were already in existence.
Rural Government. Nobles and Peasants
As tribal organization broke up, leaving only its basic unit, the family, the ownership of land followed suit; and among the peasantry thus created there grew up a prosperous minority in whose hands an increasing amount of real property was concentrated. Events followed exactly the same pat-tern as in the West. The king conferred privileges on the Church and his
73 leading vassals; the result was a class of wealthy aristocrats living on the estates they had acquired or been presented with, as the case might be, and pressing the helpless peasantry into line with their own interests in every available way. Slavery still existed, but slowly died out; meanwhile most of the peasants were sinking into serfdom.
Their subjection was in line with the general trend of Polish agriculture, which was becoming increasingly orientated towards the export of cereals.
Small units were still the rule in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But large holdings - sometimes as large as 1,250 acres - were beginning to emerge in the form of feudal 'reserves' (folwarki), worked by agricultural retainers and producing wheat. In the fourteenth century these units began to predominate over the peasant smallholdings, multiplying especially along the navigable rivers leading to the Baltic; access to the sea, after the treaty of Torun (1466), hastened their development. Whereas the corvee had been almost unknown in the fourteenth century, it now weighed oppressively on the peasants, who were compelled both to work on the reserves and to help transport the crop; the number of days on which they had to do so depended on whether they could supply haulage themselves or not. The next step arose from the need to keep the requisite numbers of workers on the land; legislation was introduced to limit removals and finally to forbid them altogether. By the early sixteenth century the tenant-farmer and his family had become bound to the estate. Thus Poland, de-spite its very different political system, followed the same evolution as Muscovy and Bohemia.
There was, however, in this moderately diversified society consisting mainly of the great landowners and the peasant masses, an intermediate class of small freehold landowners whose property had not been absorbed
CURE 14 Romanesque tombstone, twelfth century, at Wislica (Poland)
FROM 'RUS' TO RUSSIA
. • " : ' iillliuilllllimimmiimnm'l
LITHUANIA^
thVKolobrzeg
Wolin 6 P
POMERANIA .zczecin
nT M'ASOVI~A(?
Plock
GRAND POLAND KaliszH
LITTLE POLAND
Sandomir
Frontier of Polish State, circa 1,000 AD Present frontier
Fortifications
^HHH- Marshes of Gniezno ^'"^ Northern limit of Principal bishoprics '' Carpathians Principal castra
O
Metropolitan See of GnieznoMap 5 Poland in the Year 1000
into the big estates; and within this class there was a category of military knights whose social rank was below that of the feudal lords. These knights became the szlachta, an aristocratic body under the patronage of the great families, who thus had considerable room for manoeuvre in their dealings with the sovereign. The fertility of the soil and the exploitation of the peasants gave the power to a landowning nobility which the king never succeeded in bringing under complete control.
Towns under German Law
In Poland as in Bohemia, German colonization stimulated the develop-ment of towns; though in neither country can the town as such be regarded as a German creation. More than half the towns in medieval Poland had
THE WEST SLAVS 75
developed from markets existing in the shadow of the forts (grod, gorod, castra} which kept the roads and river-crossings secure. Some of these towns had a sizeable population by the tenth century, such as Gdansk (2,000 inhabitants), Poznan and Gniezno (5,000). German colonization made the towns grow faster, bringing with it a German system of laws (the so-called 'right of Magdeburg') which prevailed because it facilitated that growth. It should be noted, however, that Poland had its own burgher class before the German colonists arrived, especially in the larger centres such as Poznan and Cracow, on which German law was conferred in 1253 and 1257 respectively. Enjoying a considerable degree of self-government in administrative and judicial matters, and endowed with commercial privileges which largely made up for municipal expenses (keeping the ramparts in good order, providing a contingent of troops, and paying revenue in cash), the Polish towns made great strides in the thirteenth century and after. Warsaw, then only a village, was granted urban status in 1289.
As Poland's towns developed, her artisan class became more numerous and diverse, and in her sawmills and forges she possessed the primitive prototypes of modern industry. The rich saltpans of Wieliczka (producing the so-called Cracow salt) and those in Ruthenia, the argentiferous lead mines of Olkusz and Chenciny, copper mining at Kielce, open-cast iron workings - all these were busily exploited and made money for the sove-reign, who owned the rights. The trade routes through Poland, parallel to the Vistula (at that time not used for navigation above Torun), the Oder and their tributaries, connected Hungary with the Baltic. Poland traded with Flanders, Germany, Prussia and Muscovy; as well as supplying transit facilities she had her own import and export trade, in which the main commodities were Polish wheat and timber passing in one direction and Flemish and English cloth in the other. The principal commercial centres were Cracow, Lwow and the port of Danzig; Cracow was particularly important as the outlet for Little Poland, exporting yew for bows and oak for shipbuilding.
Poland as a Baltic Power
Subjected in the thirteenth century to an intensive wave of German settle-ment from the west, the Polish territories were also influenced by the pull of Bohemia in the south. Bohemia was like Poland in having a great num-ber of German settlers, but was economically more advanced. In 1300, the mercantile burgher class of Cracow sent an appeal to Wenceslas n, king of Bohemia, and he was crowned as king of Poland at Gniezno. The Piasts lost the sovereign power for twenty years.
But the real decision about Poland's future was being fought out on the Baltic coast; the Teutonic Knights, who established themselves strongly in Pomerania and Prussia between 1233 and 1466, cut off the Poles' access to the sea. It took Poland over a century to recapture her maritime outlets.
Casimir HI, ruling the interior (1333-70), enlarged his realm towards the
y6 FROM 'RUS' TO RUSSIA
south-east by imposing his authority on Galicia (Lwow and the country round) but achieved nothing against the Knights. The capital event was the marriage of one of his grand-nieces, Hedwiga, to Jagellon, Grand Duke of Lithuania, who became King of Poland (1386-1434); the kingdom was strengthened by the addition of the 'lands of Lithuania and Russia' and by an accretion of military force resulting in the victory of Griinwald (Tannenberg) over the Teutonic Knights (1410). Nevertheless thirty years of fighting under Casimir Jagellon (1447-92), ending in the treaty of Torun (1466), were necessary before Poland could recover an outlet to the Baltic in the form of Danzig and part of Pomerania.
FIGURE 15 The Polish eagle. Left, seal of Przemysl n, prince of Great Poland (1291).
National Museum, Cracow. - Right, scutcheon on the monument of Henryk iv, prince of Silesia (thirteenth century). Church of the Holy Cross, Wroclaw.
Russo-Polish Rivalry; and a Permanent Crusade
The de facto union of Poland and Lithuania, whose grand dukes supplied Poland with her new dynasty, had the effect of suddenly widening the Poles' field of action, extending it far beyond the limits of Polish territory in the direction of Muscovy and the Black Sea. The grand duchy of Lithuania comprised not only the region of Vilna, with its population of heathen Baits, but stretched far to the south, in consequence of the Jagellons' having liberated Kiev, and the right bank of the Dnieper almost to its mouth, from the Tatars. Having been converted to Christianity at the time of the union, the dynasty transmitted to the Poles a crusading tradition which was transferred later to the struggle against the Turks.
The liberated territories became a colonial area in which the Polish aristo-cracy carved out huge estates. The Polish horizon expanded to the shore of the Mediterranean - a novel and tempting prospect but an uncertain one, not without danger for a state whose real interests lay on the Vistula, and'whose gaze needed to be directed constantly towards the north.
Even in the fifteenth century, however, as we shall see, the struggle
THE WEST SLAVS 77
against the Teutons distracted the Poles from their southern leanings.
Meanwhile a more pressing problem was the discontent of the Orthodox population who were in a majority in the Lithuanian-held territories; for these new possessions were Russian lands which the Jagellons had acquired, and which now found themselves under Catholic rule. Through union with Lithuania, Poland was henceforward in contact with the grand principal-ity of Moscow, which was in process of transforming itself into the state of Russia and was eager to claim the whole former Rus, lately delivered from the Tatars. The maintenance of Polish-Lithuanian sovereignty to some distance beyond Smolensk depended on a combination of forces which, from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth, was to work in favour of Poland.
A great state territorially speaking, whose boundaries enclosed a patch-work of nationalities, in the fifteenth century the RegnumPoloniae displayed, after a temporary setback, an expansive force which can be attributed only to the inherent vitality of the Polish people. In the fourteenth century the German settlers had managed to become the leading element in the towns and had entered the clergy and administration in considerable numbers, though they never affected the character of the rural districts. The fifteenth :entury was characterized by a re-Polonization of the towns, including lose where German influence was strongest. In Cracow, the proportion Df Poles among the artisan classes increased from 13 per cent in 1401 to
|.i per cent at the end of the century. The same phenomenon can be traced Poznan and Gniezno.
Population pressure, which was felt in town and country alike, mani-fested itself in Lithuania's southern territory - Ukraine - as elsewhere.
3olish lords and peasants began settling there. But they were under con-stant threat from the Tatars; and despite the protection of a line efforts from Kamienec Podolsk to the vicinity of Kiev, colonization remained sparse. Only a few isolated groups ventured beyond this bastion on to the steppe, rapidly adopted military organization in self-defence, and eventually joined the ranks of the Cossacks.
Aland's Latin Culture
:*oland grew up as a member of Catholic Christendom. The country was closely involved in the intellectual and artistic life of the West; by the end the fifteenth century it had become - in the words of the Florentine lumanist Buonaccorsi (Callimachus), tutor to the sons of Casimir Jagellon (d. 1492) - terra latina.
The language of learning and literature was Latin, which was also the official language. Very few texts in Polish have come down to us from this period. They consist of sermons and psalters, such as the fourteenth-century psalter of St Florian, a translation of the Psalms of David into - signi-cantly! - three languages, Latin, German and Polish. To these can be added the fifteenth-century psalter of Pulawy and the Bible of Queen Sophia.
FROM 'RUS' TO RUSSIA
78
The fourteenth century, during which Polish economic life made great progress under Casimir the Great (1333-70), was also marked by rapid growth in cultural matters. The event of the greatest significance for the future was the foundation in 1364 of the University of Cracow, where teaching began in 1400 and which quickly acquired a European reputation for mathematics and agronomics. It was also a centre of theological and political discussion reflecting the vital intellectual interests of the day.
The sciences, law and religion were represented by Polish scholars who had studied at the recently founded university of Prague or the Italian universities. When, after Griinwald, the future of the Teutonic Order was debated at the Council of Constance, the defender of the rights of the people of Prussia against their German conquerors was a theologian from Cracow. The Hussite movement, which, for social reasons, aroused much sympathy among the Polish middle classes and minor nobility, was not without echoes in Cracow. But the Polish church was strong and triumphantly overcame the threat of heresy.
FIGURE 16 Highly characteristic milestone and boundary stone,
FIGURE 16 Highly characteristic milestone and boundary stone,