Part 3

Crown of the Polish Kingdom

Toward the end of the 13th century the division of the Polish lands into a number of petty duchies became a burden for the majority of social groups. It was a serious obstacle for the Church, as the diocesan borders were not identical with those of the provinces. The division was undermining the prestige of weak provincial princes and of magnates, who were craving for power. It hampered trade and was a barrier to the development of towns. Foreign invasions were a threat to the security of the rural population.

As a result, aspirations to unite Poland were gathering momentum. Even during the peak of the division some elements of unity were preserved--princes of the same Piast dynasty were ruling everywhere except for Pomerania. Polish lands were linked by one Church metropolis. The symbolic signs of Poland's unity, coming from the common past, were preserved, too, in the uninterrupted use of the name of Regnum Poloniae [Kingdom of Poland], as well as in the coronation insignia of 1076, kept at the Krakow Cathedral. The longing for unification was best reflected in the all-Poland cult of St. Stanislaus.

Unification was no easy task to fulfill, as each of the local rulers wanted to be the unitizing savior. The social base of unification was also controversial. Was it to be provided by the inhabitants of one of the major provinces, supporting their prince? Was it to be one of the powerful social groups--knights, clergy or burghers of larger towns?

After several abortive attempts by the Silesian and Little Poland princes, Great Poland's Prince Przemyslaw II won the crown but he was assassinated in 1295. The heritage was contested by Silesian Prince Henry of Glogow and Prince of Sieradz, Leczyca and Brzesc, Ladislaus [Wladyslaw] the Short, as well as by the Czech King of the Przemyslid Family, Wenceslaus [Waclaw] II. The latter won control of Little Poland, Great Poland, the Gdansk area of Pomerania and part of Kujawy, and had himself crowned in 1300 as the King of Poland.

The sudden death of Wenceslaus II, and of his son Wenceslaus III, opened up the way to the Polish throne for Ladislaus the Short. He won the Pope's support, armed assistance from Hungary, and united part of the Polish territory. Silesia stayed outside the Polish state, with its princes being vassals to the King of Bohemia, John of Luxembourg. Mazovia [Mazowsze] continued its independence while Gdansk Pomerania was seized by the Teutonic Knights in the years 1308-1309. The loss of Pomerania and of Poland's access to the Baltic Sea were ominous events, as they ushered in a 150-year long period of wars between Poland and the Teutonic Order for the recovery of those territories.

In 1318, a general rally at Sulejow sent a petition to the Pope on behalf of the "monastic orders, chapters, eminent personalities, dukes, counts, barons and towns," asking for the crown for Poland. The Pope wavered in view of the claims put forth by John of Luxembourg to the throne of Poland, but he supported those aspirations. The coronation of Ladislaus the Short and his spouse, Hedwig, was held in Krakow in 1320.

In the 14th century, France, Germany, Flanders, England, Italy and the states of the Iberian Peninsula were in the grip of an economic crisis, of the shocks of the so-called Black Death [epidemic plague] and the 100-year war. For the states of Central-Eastern Europe it was a century of economic, political and cultural development. Those times were of the heyday of the Kingdom of Bohemia, Hungary, the Teutonic State, as well as of an accelerated growth of Poland and Lithuania in economy and politics. The idea of "sovereign kingdom" became dominant in that part of Europe.

During the first few decades of the 14th century, Poland was the weakest of those sovereign kingdoms facing a constant threat from the alliance between the Czechs and Teutonic Knights. Ladislaus the Short, in his struggle to recover Pomerania, took advantage of the Pope's support and of the alliance with Hungary, but neither a court trial before the papal envoys, which he won, nor an armed struggle, brought the desired effect.

His son and successor, Casimir [Kazimierz] the Great (1333-1370), one of the most outstanding Polish rulers, made peace with the Teutonic Knights (1343), giving away Pomerania as "an eternal alms" to them. That enabled him to recover other lands which were held by the Order. He also made John of Luxembourg renounce his claim to the Polish crown, acknowledging, however, the subjugation of Silesia to the King of Bohemia. As a result. he ensured peace to Poland and could preoccupy himself with reforming the state.

The king lent support to the settlement drive, creating new villages and towns. He also promoted trade and issued statutes regulating the extraction of salt, lead, silver and iron in Poland. He carried out a monetary reform and consolidated the state treasury. The existing common law was codified and standardized. The administration of justice was reformed and consolidated. Those holding high offices, such as chancellor, treasurer and chamberlain, were included in the Royal Council set up by the king as an organ of central power.

In 1364, the King Casimir the Great founded the first Polish university, the Krakow Academy. The king earmarked huge sums for the construction of a network of castles to stand guard at Poland's borders and for reforming the army. The royal authority, however strong, was limited by the law, whose guarantor and executor was the king himself. Those were estate laws, separate for each social group, i.e., different for knights, clergy, townspeople and peasants. The balance between the social classes and the king's position as arbiter favored the strengthening of the royal power, as in other feudal monarchies of medieval Europe.

European political culture and the experience of Angevin Hungary provided a term defining the Polish state: the Corona Regni Poloniae [the Crown of the Polish Kingdom]. The legal construction behind that term amounted to separation of the person of the ruler from the state (the crown). The state thus ceased to be the patrimony of the ruler and became a separate entity in terms of the political-legal system, with indivisibility to be its feature. The new term corresponded not only to the internal political situation of the state monarchy, but to the external policy and situation of Poland, as well.

From the turn of the 14th century the political program of the Regnum Poloniae consisted primarily of the unification of the Polish lands. Its realization was only partly successful. After the local dynasty of the Rurykhovichs died out in Halicz Ruthenia, the Duchy was taken over by Casimir the Great (1344, 1366). It had never been part of the historical Polish Kingdom. It was included into the new form of the state--into the Crown of the Polish Kingdom.

Toward the end of Casimir the Great's rule, the state territory amounted to some 240,000 sq. kms., with a population of about two million. Thus, the number of people per square kilometer increased from about four in the 10th-11th centuries to almost 8.5 during his rule. Some one million people speaking Polish and belonging to Polish culture lived outside the Crown of the Polish Kingdom in the 14th century--in Silesia, Pomerania, Mazovia--and there were Germans, Ruthenians and Jews within the Polish state.

The successful rule of Casimir the Great was burdened with a personal and dynastic failure; despite having been married a couple of times the king had no lawful son. Therefore, conflicts over the succession could threaten the integrity of the Kingdom. The handing over of power to any of the numerous Piasts in Silesia or Mazovia was out of the question, because of the lack of prestige of those princes. So, Casimir concluded a treaty with Louis Angevin, the King of Hungary, a grandson of Ladislaus the Short on the distaff side. The latter ascended the Polish throne (1370-1382).

Louis the Hungarian had no son either and he curried favor with Polish knights to recognize one of his daughters as his heiress. As a result he granted privileges to the knights, called the Kosice Privilege (1374), exempting them from paying taxes, save for two groszy per lan [a unit of cultivated land] of peasant farmland. He thus started a series of privileges that were granted to the knights by successive rulers of Poland in the 14th and 15th centuries.