This history from the tenth century to the present days, tells of Poland achievement as an European nation. Here is the country that was one of the first in Europe to enshrine a measure of personal liberty in law, that was second only to Iceland in evolving a parliament. The Renaissance manifested itself much more strongly in Polish culture than in its neighbours'. Poland enjoyed religious peace while others were divided into the murderous factions of the Reformation and Counter Reformation. Its victories over Teutonic Knights, Tatars and Turks, and effortless conquest of Moscow, won it a reputation for a century and more as the most formidable military force in Europe. Its Constitution of 1791 lit a brief beacon for the liberal world, while sealing its own doom.

It is necessary to demonstrate the continuity underlying the apparently discontinuous history of the Polish people, and reveals much in Poland's past that must be grasped for any understanding of what is happening in the country today - in parliamentary politics from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, in the religious issues that have dominated public life, in Polish literature, art and architecture.

When Charlemagne was crowned Roman Emperor in the year AD 800 he knew less about the area which is now Poland than any other part of the European mainland. His Frankish and Saxon dominions ended on a line roughly equivalent to the recently defunct Iron Curtain, beyond which stretched a limitless Slav sea.

While most of Europe evolved from Dark Ages in mutual interaction, Poland existed in a vacuum. The whole of what is now Poland, eastern Germany, Czech Republic and Slovakia 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, had recorded that they were unwarlike and agricultural, living in a state of 'rural democracy'. The largest of these peoples even took their name from their trade, being known as "the people of the fields", Polanie in their language. Their profound attachment to the land kept them introverted, and they were cushioned from the outside world. What did provide the cohesion whose signs are everywhere were the rulers of the Polanie, 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 outwards to embrace the neighboring peoples. This dominion was described, in the fist written source of any worth, by Ibrahim Ibn Yaqub, a traveler 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 three thousand horsemen. Finally the period of isolation had come to an end, and Prince Mieszko could no longer ignore the outside world. In 962, Otto, King of the powerful Germans was crowned Roman Emperor by the Pope. The Empire was more of a theoretical than a material institution, but it drew considerable strength from its association with the center of Christianity. Mieszko was aware of the political and cultural benefits Christianity had brought the Bohemians. Only by adopting Christianity himself would 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 baptized. The Duchy of Polonia formally became a part of Christendom. Mieszko had no intention of playing the obedient godchild, and continued to pursue his own aims, even if they conflicted with those of the Empire. One of these was to gain control of as much of the Baltic coastline as possible. He invaded Pomerania, defeated Germans Otto II in 979, and became undisputed lord of the whole of Pomerania. He marked his triumph in the following year by planting a new city at the mouth of the Vistula to balance the existing ports of Szczecin and Wolin on Oder. This city, which was to play a unique and important role throughout Polish history, and which was to mark its millennium in a way that drew to itself the eyes of the world, was called Gdansk. Mieszko continued to advance along the coast until he joined up with the Danes, who had been extending their dominion eastward. The first ruler of Christian Poland was a remarkable man.

Consistently successful in war, he did not neglect diplomacy, seeking contacts with powers as distant as Moorish Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain to reinforce his policy of expansion and independence from the Empire. His last enterprise was to invade and absorb the lands of today Silesia. There in 992 he drew up a document, 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, Boleslaw the Brave, who carried his work through to a glorious conclusion, using the institutions and paraphernalia of the Church with flair. In 999 The Pope Sylvester took the momentous step of elevating Gniezno to the level of an Archbishopric, and creating new bishoprics at Wroclaw, Kolobrzeg and Krakow. It strengthen the Polish state, for in the conditions prevailing all over Europe, ecclesiastical networks were instruments of stability and control.

In the year 1000, the new Emperor Otto III came to Poland. He had come not only to pray at the tomb of his saintly friend, monk called Adalbertus (actually Vojteh, a Bohemian prince) assassinated by the Prussians. 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 a fully-fledged kingdom, alongside Germany and Italy. Like his father, Boleslaw 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, whose capital Kiev was a great center of Slav culture. Svatopolk was ousted by a rebellion, whereupon Boleslaw invaded 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 neatly rounded off his 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, Boleslaw had himself crowned King of Poland in Gniezno Cathedral. It was a great moment, but it was hollow of real significance. The reality was that the empire-building policy of Mieszko and Boleslaw had outstripped the means of the nascent state, which could not digest all their conquests at such a rate. At the same time, the regionalist tendencies inherent in the patterns of settlements of the Poles made themselves felt with the accession of Boleslaw's son Mieszko II. But the underlying conflict was over the question of Poland's position in the Christian world. 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 1040, Kazimierz had made Krakow his capital. Gniezno, the center of Wielkopolska (Greater Poland), the land of the Polanie, demanded a strong boundary along the Oder and the Polish domination of Pomerania in the north and Silesia in the south. Krakow, the capital of Malopolska (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 Boleslaw II, the Bold, who also married a member of that royal house, had turned their eyes to the east and Boleslaw occupied Kiev twice on his uncle's behalf.

At the same time, Hungary was emerging as an important factor in Polish affairs. A rich, attractive land with a population sympathetic to Polish attitude, it was an obvious ally against Bohemia and the Empire. Wars in the west against Germans were costly and destructive, and Polish kings learned to eschew them in favor of diplomatic maneuvers based on the Poland-Hungary-Rome axis, which at this moment extended all the way to Spain in a great web of anti-Empire papal policy. One of the fringe benefits of this alliance was that Pope granted Boleslaw a royal crown, with which the latter crowned himself in great ceremony in 1076. The fiery king's friendship with the Papacy came to grief only three years after this event. A number of magnates, including Stanislaw, Bishop of Krakow, had started to plot against him. When Boleslaw uncovered the conspiracy he reacted with his usual violence, putting to death a number of the conspirators, including the bishop. It was a move that aroused widespread indignation, and the unfortunate king was obliged to abandon his throne to his brother Wladyslaw Herman. The killing of the bishop, who was later canonized, brought about a sharp decline in Poland's position, and in 1085 the Emperor Henry IV allowed the Duke of Bohemia to crown himself King of Bohemia and Poland. This was a slap in the face to Wladyslaw, although it did not actually entail Bohemian domination in Poland.

At home, Wladyslaw was unable to curb the rising power of local lords, who stipulated that Poland should be divided between his two sons at his death. When this came, however, in 1102, the younger son, Boleslaw the Wrymouth, drove his brother out of the country. As his name suggests, he was an ugly, cunning, sardonic man, but he was also extremely capable, and quickly earned the respect and even the love of his subjects, in spite of his determination to rule with a strong arm. He was aided in this by his ability as a general. In 1109 he won a victory over the Emperor and the Duke of Bohemia at the Battle of Psie Pole near Wroclaw, forcing them to renounce all their claims to Polish territory. He also invaded Pomerania, where a gradual German incursion had over the years weakened the Polish position. He recaptured the whole area up to and well beyond the Oder, as far as the Island of Rugen.

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 Boleslaw to make a political testament which carved Poland up in duchies. Each of his five sons was to rule over one of these. Pomerania, whose Dukes were closely related but not of the main Piast line, was given equal status. The eldest son was to reign in the small but symbolic duchy of Krakow as well as his own and exert suzerainty over the others. Thus when Boleslaw the Wrymouth died in 1138, the country embarked on a political experiment designed to compromise between the strong regionalist tendencies, and the feeling of kinship and political unity which already existed throughout Poland.

The eldest of his sons, Wladyslaw, made an attempt at reuniting the country, from his position as ruler of Krakow, but he came up against the resistance not only of his brothers bur of most of the local lords as well. Over the next hundred years successive dukes reigning in Krakow proved less and less successful in enacting 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, Malopolska, Sandomierz and Silesia into smaller units in order to accommodate their offspring. Wladyslaw of Wielkopolska, also known as Spindleshanks, made a valiant attempt to reassert his authority as Duke of Krakow, but a number of powerful barons forced him to grant them substantial prerogatives by the Privilege of Ciena in 1228, just twelve years after a similar document, the Magna Carta, had been extorted from a king of England. The highest estate in Poland, at this time, 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 tribunal, 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 there were a number of estates, including the wlodyki, who were knights without noble status, and the panosze, who formed a sort of yeoman class. The peasants were
mostly free and able to rise to a different status. A small proportion belonged to their masters, but these gained greater personal freedom during the first half of the XIII century, and were not generally tied to the land as in Western Europe 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 large 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 or Magdeburg Law, which was first adopted for Silesian towns in 1211, and quickly spread, in modified form, to others all over Poland. These laws, which regulated criminal and civic offenses 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 city-dwellers 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 in 1264, the first of a number of such privileges which were to turn it 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.

These divergences from European norms are characteristic. Poland had joined Christendom in 966 as a relatively mature if unsophisticated political unit. It had not been absorbed in the manner of a frontier province or colony, and it continued to reject those religious and cultural elements which it could not accommodate. Politically, it fought hard to keep both the Empire and the Papacy at arm's length throughout the crucial period. By the 1250, when the power of the Empire had gone into decline as a result of internal struggle in Germany, the sense of political unity was gaining ground throughout the Polish lands in spite of their divided condition and it was thanks to this that the kingdom survived, to flourish in the next two centuries. To the historian, thirteenth-century Poland provides the unusual spectacle of an unsophisticated, even primitive society refusing to obey the cultural and economic laws which would have it absorbed into the powerful European mainstream, apparently determined to find its own course.

Excerpts from the book "The Polish Way" by Adam Zamojski (John Murray-Publishers Ltd. London 1987)