Poland: A history. Adam Zamoyski

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.

       THREE The Jagiellon Experience

      Queen Jadwiga died young, having borne her husband no heir. Yet the fruits of her marriage to Władysław Jagiełło were prodigious. In the first instance, it sounded the knell for the Teutonic Order: with the conversion of Lithuania the need for crusading vanished, and with it the whole raison d’être of the Knights in Prussia. The union of two enemies whom the order had often played off against each other in the past only compounded this.

      The order responded by trying to undo it. Władysław Jagiełło unwittingly helped when he installed his fiercely ambitious and unaccountable cousin Vytautas (Witold) as regent in Lithuania. Vytautas championed pagan separatist opposition to the union with Poland, at the same time accepting baptism and the alliance of the order. But while the order continued to intrigue with Vytautas and negotiate with Władysław, it could not hope to avoid confrontation with the Polish-Lithuanian alliance indefinitely. When this came in the war of 1409-10, it resulted in the devastat ing defeat of the Order on the battlefield of Grunwald (Tannenberg) by a combined force under the command of Władysław and Vytautas.

      The battle was one of the longest and bloodiest of the Middle