A Brief History of Poland, part 2: the medieval Piasts

In the second part of the Brief History of Poland series, Notes from Poland editor-at-large Stanley Bill looks at the Piast dynasty in the period between 1025 and 1370. He examines the development of the dynasty, the feudal fragmentation of the kingdom and its restoration, the rising conflict with the Teutonic Knights, the dazzling reign of Kazimierz the Great, and the oldest known Polish song - Bogurodzica.

The Brief History of Poland series will cover over a thousand years of Polish political and cultural history, from 966 until today.

The first episode is available here.

Producer: Sebastian Leśniewski


Music credit: Collegium Vocale (under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license).

Excerpt from Bogurodzica: Translated by David Welsh, in Monumenta Polonica: The First Four Centuries of Polish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. Bogdana Carpenter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Slavic Publications, 1989).

Transcript

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Hello,

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my name is Stanley Bill. You're listening to Notes from Poland. This week I'll continue my brief history of Poland, with part two on the medieval dynasty of the Piasts. I'll discuss the rising conflict with the Teutonic Knights, the dazzling reign of Kazimierz the Great, and we'll listen to the oldest known Polish song. NotesFromPoland.com is the leading English-language source of news, insight and analysis on Poland. In this podcast, I look at the country from all angles– politics, history, culture and society. You can get more news and the deeper stories about Poland at NotesFromPoland.com. Welcome back to A Brief History of Poland. Last time we finished in the year 1025, when Bolesław I, the brave, crowned himself king in Gniezno Cathedral. From being a mere duke or prince, księżeł in Polish, Bolesław became the first Polish king, król, a word that derives via the German Karl from the name of Charlemagne. In this way, Bolesław joined his realm to the political system of Western Europe, completing what his father Mieszko had begun by accepting Christianity from Latin, Western sources. The realm of the Polanians, Polanie, the people of the fields, was made safe from conquest on the pretext of conversion by their German neighbours, but at the cost of giving up their own pagan religion. Starting with Mieszko and his court, baptism soon spread across the land in group ceremonies that ended in the new converts emerging dressed in white robes as visible external signs of their inner transformation. The old sacred places were destroyed, the sacred fires were extinguished, sacred oak trees were cut down, and the construction of new buildings, churches, began across the land. filling the country with the evidence of the new power. This calculated concession to a kind of cultural colonization perhaps allowed Poland to come into existence. Without it, the Polanians might well have been swallowed up by the German principalities, like other Slavic tribes to their west. With their security reinforced by conversion to Christianity, Mieszko and Bolesław oversaw the consolidation of various West Slavic tribes– Polanians, Vistulans, Mazovians, Silesians and others– into a kind of Polish proto-nation, a larger group united under their rule and by an increasingly shared language. The next three centuries saw the fortunes of the nascent Polish realm fluctuate. In this episode, we'll cover this period of the Piast dynasty up to its high point and end in the reign of Kazimierz the Great. In geographical terms, Bolesław I presided over Poland's first decisive move to the east, occupying the western part of Red Ruthenia, around what is now Poland's southeastern border with Ukraine, near the city of Przemysl. These acquisitions would soon be lost, as the young kingdom was engulfed by internal turmoil, including the so-called Pagan Reaction, a series of mostly peasant rebellions from the 1030s onward, against the continued imposition of the alien religion of Christianity, but also oppression at the hands of feudal landowners. In 1079, the first major conflict between crown and church exploded, as Stanisław, Bishop of Kraków, was murdered at the Skalka, just outside the walls of the city, and his body hacked to pieces after a dispute with King Bolesław II, called the Generous. Some versions of the story suggested that the king himself had committed the murder. Outrage at this killing forced the king to flee to Hungary, where he died a few years later. Bishop Stanisław would become another martyr saint associated with the Polish realm. Later, he would become a second patron saint, in fact, after the Czech Wojciech or Adalbert, who had been killed earlier trying to convert the pagan Prussians near the Baltic Sea. The Polish realm's mixed fortunes under the Piasts reached a nadir in a long period of feudal fragmentation. beginning when Bolesław III divided the kingdom into five principalities for his sons upon his death in 1138. In legend, the separate territories became associated with the severed body parts of St. Stanisław, which, according to the stories, had miraculously reassembled after his murder. The kingdom, too, would be re-established. Though in history, this did not take place until almost two centuries later, when Władysław the Short, literally the elbow high, was crowned in Wawel Cathedral as king in Kraków in 1320. This moment was the culmination of Władysław's slow regathering together of most of the former lands of the kingdom over several decades. Poland's feudal fragmentation was far from unusual in medieval Europe, and indeed the Polish period was briefer than the earlier English or later German examples. One principality that Władysław failed to bring back under his power was the Duchy of Mazovia, the region of today's Warsaw, which would retain at least some autonomy for centuries to come. A century earlier, During the period of fragmentation, in 1226, Conrad, the independent duke of Mazovia, had made one of the most fateful decisions in Polish history, when he invited the Teutonic knights to help him in his missionary and territorial struggles against the pagan Prussians, once again to his north. Conrad was losing the war against this Baltic tribe, suffering constant border raids and harassment. The Teutonic Knights were a religious military order that had begun as a crusading operation in the Middle East called the Order of Brothers of the German House of St. Mary in Jerusalem. After their arrival in Mazovia, they soon demonstrated that they had much greater ambitions than simply aiding their hosts. The Knights seized the Polish Duke's northern lands for themselves and formed the monastic state of the Teutonic Order. in 1230. They fought against the pagan Prussians, taking control of their lands and eventually bringing about the total destruction of their culture and language. The order then turned its attention to the neighbouring Lithuanians, also a pagan people at this time. The knights fought and prayed, justifying conquest and colonisation with the familiar pretext of conversion. For centuries to come, these lands would be culturally and linguistically German, right up until the end of the Second World War. Indeed, these events in the 13th century still leave their mark on the map of Europe today. The strange presence of Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, wedged between Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea, is a legacy of what had been German East Prussia before the war. with its capital, Königsberg, once the city of Immanuel Kant. This region, in the interwar period, was separated from the rest of Germany by a broad strip of Polish territory. An ultimatum demanding annexation to Germany of a transit corridor through this strip of land would form part of the pretext for Hitler's invasion of Poland on the 1st of September 1939. So the existence of this German exclave to be linked with the rest of the Reich was the direct historical result of the state of the Teutonic Order, established over seven centuries earlier. After the defeat of Germany in the Second World War, the victorious Soviets would split the occupied region of East Prussia between the newly reformed Polish state and the Kaliningrad region of the Soviet Union. Today, this region remains part of Russian territory, in a strategically important position, squeezing the NATO border area between Poland and the Baltic states into a narrow passage of land. The original pagan Prussians, destroyed by the knights, are a people almost forgotten by history, only giving their name to the powerful German militaristic state that would eventually drive the unification of Germany in the 19th century. Of course, using national designations remains quite anachronistic in the medieval period. Modern notions of mass collective identity within a relatively uniform state make no sense at a time when personal, dynastic, religious and other social bonds were more meaningful. Nation is a modern concept that simply doesn't apply here. Nevertheless, when we look at various sources, some sense of a kind of proto-national identity or loyalty is sometimes visible. The pre-modern substrata of the nation in a sort of ethnolinguistic core. Tensions between Poles and Germans in this period are perceptible in various contexts. not only in the conflict with the Teutonic Knights. We also see this conflict in an urban rebellion in Kraków put down by Władysław the Short in 1311-12 as part of this process of gathering together the lands of the former kingdom to re-establish it. This uprising in Kraków against the control of the Polish prince was led by the town's German mayor, known to history as Mayor Albert. with its participants mostly the German burghers who formed the majority of the town's population. In fact, the main towns of the Polish principalities were often dominated by Germans, who had been invited by the crown and the princes to develop them, together with the so-called German law of the Magdeburg Rites. When Władysław put down this German rebellion, According to later accounts, the guilty parties to be punished by torture and death were identified linguistically as those unable to recite the Polish words soczewica, koło, miele, młyn– lentils, wheel, grinds, mill. Being Polish, or at least speaking Polish… was therefore viewed or presented later as a sign of identity and loyalty to the prince. Such tensions between Poles and Germans would explode into violence in various towns of the Kingdom of Poland over the centuries, even taking the form of fierce conflict between Polish and German factions of the clergy. With the Polish crown re-established under Władysław the Short, the German element of the towns would steadily decline over the next centuries, as the urban sphere became more Polish, but also Jewish. Władysław's son, Kazimierz, succeeded him as king upon his death in 1333. Coming to the throne in his twenties, the energetic Kazimierz would rule for almost four decades until his death in 1370. With the stability and long-term purpose of such a long reign, together with his own political abilities and various conducive external circumstances, Kazimierz's achievements would win him the name of the Great. His reign is the Golden Age of Piast Poland. One theory suggests that this success can partly be understood by in the broader European context surrounding the Black Death of the late 1340s. For reasons that are not well understood, the pandemic did not appear to hit Poland very hard in comparison with other parts of Europe. While much of the continent suffered total devastation, with half of the inhabitants of some regions perishing, Poland's prosperity and population continued to increase. putting the kingdom perhaps at a kind of competitive advantage with other parts of Europe. Kazimierz the Great was a great builder. He oversaw the construction of a large number of castles and defensive walls for cities. Some of the remains of these structures can still be seen in an impressive chain of castles stretching between Kraków and Częstochowa along a beautiful walking path known as the Trail of the Eagle's Nests. In the words of the chronicler Jan Długosz, Kazimierz found Poland untidy of wood and clay, but left it magnificent of stone and brick. This was a very important period in the development of Kraków as a great city of stone as well. Kazimierz was also a codifier of laws, including those that offered protections to peasants, Jews and regulated the status of the rising noble class. He expanded Polish territory further into the east, retaking Red Ruthenia and bringing the city of Lwów into the lands of the Polish crown for the first time on a more permanent basis. He established the University of Kraków, now known as the Jagiellonian University, in 1364 and making it the second oldest university in Central Europe, largely to produce legal specialists for his rule. He strengthened the army, he stabilized the situation with the Teutonic Knights in the north, and he expanded and solidified the royal protections offered to the Jews in a time when they were suffering persecutions elsewhere in Europe, especially after the Black Death first struck. Jews were often blamed for the plague in parts of Western Europe. This situation probably accelerated a developing trend of Jews coming to Poland, mostly from the West, fleeing persecution and oppression to a place of greater tolerance, which the Polish kingdom was at that time. According to one legend, described by Warsaw's Museum of the History of the Polish Jews, the Hebrew word for Poland, Polin, which also gives its name to the museum, derives from the situation of Jews who were escaping from persecution in other parts of medieval Europe and reached the territories of today's Poland where they heard birds singing, Polin, Polin. In Hebrew and Yiddish, the word meant, you will rest here. As time passed, it also began to denote Poland. According to the legend, Jews regarded it as a sign from God and decided to settle down in the new place where they could develop their spirituality, their culture and their educational institutions. Especially after the time of the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century, Jewish emigration to the Kingdom of Poland increased significantly. The so-called Statute of Kalisz, first proclaimed in 1264 but then confirmed by Kazimierz the Great in 1334, supposedly codified the rights of Jews and Jewish communities in the Polish kingdom, providing a level of protection and autonomy that compared very favourably with other parts of Europe at the time. Among its clauses were paragraphs forbidding the dissemination of accusations of the so-called blood libel, the myth that Jews needed the blood of Christian children for religious rituals, which would be common in various parts of Europe, including Poland, right up until the 20th century, and would sometimes lead to violent retribution against Jewish communities when these rumors would spread. While Jews were being expelled from England, Hungary, parts of France, and later from Germany and Italy, the relative tolerance of Poland made it a safe haven. This period would lay the foundations for what would become probably the largest and most vibrant Jewish community in the world for long periods of history. Today, the former Jewish district of Kraków, once a separate town, still bears the name of Kazimierz. the king who established it in the 14th century. Inside the district is a street called Ulitsa Esteri, named after Esterka, or Esther, a Jewish woman reputed to have been one of Kazimierz's lovers. It's unknown whether Esterka is a figure of history or legend, but the stories around her have come to symbolise the royal protection of Jewish communities. The Jews were a separate estate within the medieval system in Poland, separate in their rights and responsibilities from peasants, burghers, the clergy, and the estate whose power steadily rose over the centuries, the szlachta, or nobility. The szlachta is a difficult concept to translate into English, as it refers to a social formation that developed in a very unique way. Though the group arose in part as a military class, as in other parts of Europe, the Schlachta would grow to include a much larger and more diverse section of the society of what would eventually become the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the late medieval period, the rights and privileges of this estate within the Kingdom of Poland began to coalesce. The origins of the term itself seem to lie in the German word Geschlecht. referring to family or genealogy. Many historians assume the origins of the Schlachter can be found in extended family groups or clans among the early West Slavic tribes. This would also partly explain the gathering of multiple Schlachter families under a broader clan coat of arms, the so-called Herb, another word derived from German. Membership of the Schlachter was originally linked to military service, and less strictly to property. But over the centuries, a distinct and increasingly codified set of rights began to accrue. Under Kazimierz the Great, nobility, or schlachetstvo, became a formal legal status based on proven descent from noble families, often to be attested by independent noble witnesses. Property was usually associated with this status, but not always. Indeed, the very significant disparity in wealth between different members of the Schlachter, all of them theoretically accorded the same legal rights, at least in some periods, would become a unique characteristic of Polish and later Polish-Lithuanian social structures. Famously, some Schlachter families were just as poor as the surrounding peasantry, especially in the Mazovian region. where historian Henrik Samsonovic estimates that over 20% of the entire population belonged to the Schlachter by the year 1400. The stereotypical image of what looked like an ordinary peasant ploughing his field, but with a rusty metal or even wooden sword at his side, would become emblematic of this group. It took time for these impoverished members of the Schlachter to solidify their rights, and they often submitted to a system of patronage under wealthier members of the estate, who sometimes controlled very large territories. From the time of Kazimierz the Great, but especially after his death, a great contest for power between the crown and the szlachta would shape the history of Poland-Lithuania, contributing to its successes, the very specific nature of its culture, but also to its ultimate downfall. We will continue to follow these developments in this series. For several centuries, written culture existed only in Latin in the Polish kingdom, mostly taking the form of legal documents, lives of the saints, and the historical and quasi-historical chronicles of the anonymous Gaul, who was probably a French monk, the Bishop of Kraków, Vincente Kadłubek, and later Jan Długosz, who was writing in the 15th century. By the time of Kazimierz the Great, the Polish language was beginning to be written down, most often to serve the purposes of evangelization, putting the Christian message into the native language. Therefore, we find religious poems, sermons, and translations of the Psalms among the earliest known surviving works in the Polish language. dating back to the 14th century, possibly from earlier oral traditions. The oldest known work of literature in Polish is a religious song called Pogorodzica. There are various theories on precisely how old it is, with historians dating its composition anywhere from the 10th to the 14th centuries, though there is increasing consensus around the middle or later part of this range. Ultimately, we don't know when it was composed, how it was composed, or who composed it, though it may well have been a work that existed for a long time only in oral form, undergoing various changes and transformations over the years before it was first written down. The oldest surviving manuscript dates back to 1407, accompanied by musical notation. It was found inside the back cover of a collection of sermons in Latin. According to the chronicler Jan Długosz, the song was not just devotional, but also filled the function of a kind of national hymn. This is what it sounded like. I

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was born a virgin, a virgin, I was born a virgin, Satsang with Mooji Słysz głosy, napełj myśli człowiecze. Słysz modlitwę, ją szosimy. Badać raczy, jej już prosimy. Thank you.

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The song is a plea to the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist to intercede with Christ for people on earth. The first verse directly addresses the Virgin. In the translation of David Welsh, O Mother of God, Virgin blessed by God, Maria, with your Son, our Lord, O Mother chosen, Maria, intercede for us, send him to us. Kyrie eleison. There is something very immediate about the yearning tones of this song, giving us a kind of insight into the worldview of people living in medieval Poland. for instance, in the time of Kazimierz the Great, or at least of the elites who might have heard the song. We find within it the abiding medieval preoccupations with death and the afterlife, though in this case balanced somewhat more optimistically with the desire for a good life on earth. In the final lines of this version of the song, we hear requests for both. on earth a happy sojourn, and afterlife to reside in paradise. The world and the otherworldly realm have equal place in the song's supplications. The language of the song is archaic and linguistically very difficult for contemporary poles to comprehend in certain places, since there are many obsolete words and grammatical forms. For example, the very title of the song, Bogurojitsa, only appears in this work. It's not known in other sources. It means literally God-bearer or bearer of God. It's quite a beautiful word, from the word book, meaning God, and the word rojic, meaning to bear or to give birth to. It seems to be an indirect translation of a Greek word, theotokos, which is sometimes used to describe the Virgin Mary in the Eastern Orthodox Church. So here, immediately, we have the suggestion of a Byzantine influence on the poem, an Eastern influence on this product of a Polish culture supposedly arising from Western Christianity. This term, Theotokos, God-bearer, is often used in Eastern Orthodox hymns to Mary, very much in the same context as this song. And it may well have come into Polish, and therefore into the song, through the mediation of Old Church Slavonic, the Eastern Slavic language of the Eastern Church, from a very similar word, bogorodica. There's another possibility, though, and perhaps a more likely one, that the word came into Polish through Czech, like most of the religious vocabulary in early Polish did, since we've already seen that the conversion to Christianity happened through the marriage of Mieszko to Dobrawa, a Czech princess. So here we have the suggestion that the Czech word, Bohorodice, may be the source of Bogorodica. But in this case, it's also possible that the Czech is simply another intermediary in a longer chain of influences, with the Old Church Slavonic still as the earlier source. In fact, the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius who created the early version of the Cyrillic alphabet and formed the religious vocabulary of the Eastern Church, had initially spent time in Great Moravia, in the Czech lands, in the 9th century, influencing the early phase of Christianity there. So we have this fascinating chain of possible influences. Of course, scholars are still arguing about how best to understand them. From Greek, Old Church Slavonic, Czech, In this light, the very title of the song becomes a real hybrid creation, suggesting a whole set of different layers of cultural history within it. In the same way, we perhaps get an insight into an earlier stage in the development of Christianity, before the split between Eastern and Western churches became irreversible. Indeed, alongside these apparent Eastern influences, we find clear Western, Latin influence in Bogorodzica. Its form borrows from earlier Latin poetry. The song's construction is actually quite elaborate, suggesting a lengthy incubation in oral form, or that it was written when poetic forms were already becoming quite developed in Polish. In other words, although Bogorojica is the earliest known work, it can't be the first literary work to have been written. It's simply too well crafted for that, perhaps indicating the culmination of a much longer tradition before it. There must be other works that have been lost. The melody of the song also represents a set of Western influences. It dates back at least as far as the 14th century, and musicologists have included elements of Roman Catholic Gregorian chant, but also folk elements from Troubadour songs among its likely sources. However, it also contains unfamiliar elements that may well be local and specific to the Polish context. This is really quite fascinating to think about, that there may be in some of the phrases of this song, in its musical line, the last remnants of the earlier musical traditions of the Polanians and the other West Slavic tribes, perhaps even from the pre-Christian times, from the pagan religious songs of fireside ceremonies. Some trace of these songs may still linger in the melodies of Bogorojica. So we find here, in this song, in this symbolic first work of Polish literature, a fascinating diversity of influences, Greek Eastern Orthodox, Eastern Slavic languages, and Latin Christianity. On a more fundamental level, at the very dawn of recorded Polish culture, we find a mixture of East and West that, according to many later thinkers, would come to define Poland's history as a place in between. In 1410, Four decades after the death of Kazimierz the Great and the end of the Pias dynasty, Bogorojica would be sung by Polish knights at the Battle of Grunwald, supposedly one of the largest of medieval battles, where they fought the old enemy of the Teutonic Knights. But they did not fight alone. Alongside the Poles fought Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Moldavians, and even Tatars of the Golden Horde. These diverse forces were all under the command of King Władysław Jagiełło, previously known simply as Jogaila, the pagan Grand Duke of medieval Lithuania, who had converted to Christianity and become the King of Poland, thereby uniting these two very different realms. We'll talk about how this came to pass in the next episode, of a brief history of Poland. I'm Stanley Bill. Thanks for listening.