Notes from Poland
Notes from Poland
A Brief History of Poland, part 1: Beginnings (before and after 966)
Welcome to a Brief History of Poland. In this mini-series of podcasts, Notes from Poland editor-at-large Stanley Bill will be looking at over a thousand years of Polish political and cultural history, from 966 until today.
In this first part of the series, he looks at the year 966 and the symbolic baptism of the early Polish state. He examines the pre-Christian cultures of the region, and asks whether the entry to western Christian Europe was also a moment of cultural colonisation.
Producer: Sebastian Leśniewski
Hello, my name is Stanley Bill. You're listening to Notes from Poland. This week I'm beginning a brief history of Poland, with the year 966 and the baptism of the early Polish state. I'll ask whether this entry to Western Christian Europe was also a moment of cultural colonisation. 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 to the first part of a brief history of Poland. In this mini-series of podcasts, I'll be looking at over a thousand years of Polish political and cultural history from 966 until today. The word Poland, or Polska in Polish, comes from the word pole, meaning field. It has become a truism to say that Poland's often traumatic historical fate has been dictated by its location on unprotected fields or plains with no natural barriers to east or west, in an intermediate position, always in between, between east and west, between Russia and Germany, between the great Eurasian heartland and the European rim, between land powers and sea powers, between periphery and core. Today I want to go back to 966, the moment that usually passes as the symbolic beginning of the Polish state, with the baptism of Mieszko, the leader of a people called the Polanians, or Polanie in Polish, related to that word pole for field, meaning something like the people of the fields. Mieszko ruled a territory around the important centres of Poznań and Gniezno, today located in the west of Poland. In this moment, the territory that would later become Poland joined itself to Western Europe, to Western Christianity. But in doing so, it accepted a kind of cultural colonization, giving up many of its own former traditions and its pagan religion to adopt a strongly imitative path of development, thereby securing its position in Europe. Almost all histories of Poland begin with a very brief introduction almost perfunctory summary of the period before 966. Everything that happened before this moment is very little known, since the arrival of Western Christianity in the Polish lands simultaneously represented the arrival of writing, with the clergy, who initially came from neighbouring Bohemia, from Germany and then from other parts of Europe. The language they wrote was, of course, Latin. Very slowly, Over several centuries, literacy spread to native elites at the court, and as locals entered monasteries or became priests. The Polanians, the people of the fields, slowly came into the orbit of medieval Latin culture, accepting Christianity from Rome, not from Byzantium, like Kiev, of the Kievan Rus', which would have enormous historic consequences. and also explains why Russian and Ukrainian today are written in the Cyrillic script, based on Greek, while Polish, like Czech, uses the Latin alphabet. In any case, there was no writing before 966, and this means we have no locally produced records of any of the cultures that preceded the Polanians. This also explains the dearth of historical facts on these cultures. And indeed, everything before the shining moment of 966 is can seem like a mysterious black hole, impenetrable to any historical reflection. Of course, it's not entirely impenetrable. The information we have comes from archaeology, and this has led to various controversies. There's evidence of human settlement in the lands currently constituting Poland stretching back a few hundred thousand years, including Paleolithic communities near present-day Kraków. Various cultures from the Neolithic era, especially between 4000 and 1800 BC, are all distinguished by their pottery styles. There's also evidence of Celtic settlement in the southeast of contemporary Poland from around Kraków to the eastern border. This Celtic influence is sometimes given as a possible source of the name Galicia, which has been used in various periods to describe this southern part of Poland and even a part of Ukraine. In fact, this etymology is probably false, but it makes for a good story. Goths and Vandals also settled parts of what's now Poland at various times in history. A prime example of a controversy associated with the historiography of an undocumented era is the case of the so-called Lusatian culture, which is normally situated in what's now the western part of Poland and dated to the period between 1300 and 400 BC. Now, though there's no overwhelming evidence either way, at various points in time, particularly the 19th and 20th centuries, certain German scholars have tended to characterize these people as Proto-Germans, while Polish scholars have described them as Proto-Slaves or Proto-Poles. Other scholars, and particularly in more recent times, have tended to reject these interpretations. But from the Polish side, We see this desire, particularly in earlier periods, to link this early Lusatian people with the dynasty of Mieszko's first Polanian state, the Piast dynasty, the dynasty that would rule what would later become Poland. So I'll quote from a historian who perhaps gives an example of this kind of thinking, Paweł Jesienica, in his book Piast Poland. The fortifications of the Lusatians consisted of huge wooden containers placed in a row and filled with earth and stones. The same method was used a thousand years later in the forts of the Piast era. The continuity between the Lusatian and early Polish cultures is evident. So on this basis, Jasienica suggests, I quote again, One might argue that Poland's existence as a nation started in the Roman era, though it was not yet a state. So this is very interesting because it tells us a lot about the crucial role of history or even prehistory in the construction or creation of national narratives. So we see this desire to extend the history of the nation as far back as possible. the idea of a Polish history in this case, that extends back into time immemorial. That proto-Poles were defending themselves, for example, against the incursions of proto-Germans long before the birth of Christ. The sense that the Polish nation, therefore, is associated with a particular territory, and in fact with the territory of the current Polish state, for thousands and thousands of years, giving an almost natural association. between the people and the land, which is important in the construction of certain kinds of national narratives. We can see an example of this kind of construction also in the site of Biskupin, which is a settlement that is associated with this early Lusatian culture and that was reconstructed, it's in the western part of Poland, in the interwar period, in fact in 1936. And it was connected, therefore, with a kind of national narrative being asserted by this independent state, not long after having regained its independence and before the catastrophe of the Second World War. So we can see here in the physical monument of Biskupin the desire to push back Polish history and its association with the land, and particularly this very contested land close to Germany, as far back as possible. It's also telling in this context that the retreating German army at the end of the Second World War intentionally destroyed the Biskupin site in a sort of symbolic erasing of Polish traces or of a Polish narrative of history in this contested borderland. So what do we know for sure about the ancestors of the Poles? The answer is not very much. Well, if we look at the broader group of the Slavs, one theory suggests that, and the earliest, Slavic culture can be placed in an area of the North Carpathians, now largely in Ukraine, followed with a dispersal and migration of these people in various directions to later form a diverse set of East, South and West Slavic groups. These groups were also divided into separate tribes, so that the West Slavic group included tribes who took the names of the Polanians, who we've heard about already, the Vistulans, occupying an area on the Vistula River, for example, around current-day Krakow, the Mazovians, occupying the area around the current Polish capital of Warsaw, Lendians, Moravians, Silesians, and other West Slavic tribes. Without any direct evidence, it's impossible to establish exactly what languages they used, but it's very likely that they spoke mutually comprehensible variants of West Slavic languages, which eventually formed together to form a kind of Proto-Polish, as the tribes were united under Mieszko and his dynasty. So we can see here that the formation of the Polish nation, in a sense, if we want to look at it this way, somewhat anachronistically, is the coming together of a diverse set of West Slavic tribes, linguistically, culturally, and certainly politically, under Mieszko and the later rulers of the dynasty that Mieszko creates. One possible etymology, by the way, for the very word of the Slavs in Polish, Słowianie, connects this word to the very word for word in Polish, Słowo. which also has an etymological connection to word that means fame in English. So if we take this etymology seriously, the Svovjane are the people of the word, the people of the Svovo. And this contrasts this large group of peoples who speak languages that are connected with each other and that may even be mutually comprehensible in some cases as the people of the word with other neighbouring peoples. who do not speak Slavic languages and therefore are not comprehensible, and people who cannot understand the Slavs. So a good example of this would be the Germans, who in Polish are known as Niemcy. And one etymology suggests that this word is connected to the Polish word for mute, niemy. So the Germans, according to this etymology, are the mutes, people who cannot speak our language, we, the people of the word. It's a very interesting set of etymologies which may have some basis in historical fact, although there are a lot of challenges to these etymologies and other ideas of where these words come from. In any case, they give this sense again of the opposition between the Slavic tribes occupying this area of what's now Poland and the Germans to their west. Now, before the historical period, before Mieszko's time, there are various pre-Christian legends that have survived, mostly those recorded by early chroniclers, including Gallus Anonymous, or the anonymous Gaul, who may have come from France, who wrote his chronicle between 1112 and 1116, but also from the chronicle of Vincente Kadwubek, who lived between 1150 and 1223. One of the most famous legends is that of Prince Krak, or Krakus, the king of a tribe called the Lehites. The name of the city of Krakuf supposedly comes from Krak, and one of the most famous legends is still told by tourist guides today in that city. The legend of a dragon supposedly living under the Vavel hill, where the Vavel royal castle is now situated. which demanded offerings of cattle or it would eat local people. According to one of the legends, Krak's sons gave the beast a carcass stuffed with sulfur and killed it. Another of the legends tells of Wanda, a daughter of Krak, a princess, who jumped to her death from the battlements of Wawel Castle into the Vistula River to avoid marrying a Germanic prince. Again, in this legend, this sense of the rivalry, between the West Slavic people of the Polanians and those that preceded them and the German tribes further to their west. We can still see some evidence in Poland of this earlier pre-Christian period. In particular, in the Kraków area, there are some ancient burial mounds, some of which may in fact have Celtic origin, in particular the Krak Mound, named after Prince Krak, which is in the southern part of the city. And archaeologists who were excavating this burial mound in the 1930s found at its top the remnants of the roots of what would once have been a very large oak tree, suggesting a very strong religious significance. The oak tree was an important religious symbol for some of the original Slavic pagan religions in this area. at least from the 9th century, is probably the origin of the mound itself and certainly the tree, and probably much earlier than this. We're going to take a short break now. When we come back, I'll be talking about the beginnings of the Piast dynasty, the baptism of Mieszko's state, and the pagan rebellion that followed this fateful decision. There has never been a more important time to understand Poland. At notesfrompoland.com, We're dedicated to providing comprehensive coverage of Polish current affairs, society, culture and history, as well as regular analysis and opinion from a wide range of expert authors. But we can't do all this without your support. Every donation to our independent nonprofit foundation helps our editorial team to create new content, from breaking news stories to deeper insight pieces. By supporting our work, You'll be part of our mission to bring the full picture on Poland to the world with no paywall. Please consider making a donation at notesfrompoland.com. The legendary beginnings of the Piast dynasty itself, Mieszko's dynasty, are first told in the Polish chronicle of Gallus Anonymous. He tells the story of a peasant wheelwright, whose name was Piast. So this is interesting because we have this legend of a royal dynasty that descends from the peasantry, from the common people. This legend is located in the town of Gniezno, near the Warta River. Again, it's in the western part of what's now Poland. And according to this legend, Piast either became the duke himself or saw his son assume this title from the former ruler. the wicked Duke Popiel, who was chased out of the kingdom to a wooden tower on an island where he was devoured by furious mice. This legend has been told and retold throughout the history of Polish literature in various contexts. So Piast, the peasant prince, gave his name to the subsequent Polanian dynasty of Mieszko. Little is known about the pagan religion of pre-Christian Poland. It seems that there was a similar set of gods and goddesses to other neighbouring Slavic peoples, often with deities representing natural forces. For example, Piorun is the god of thunder and lightning. In this word, Piorun is still the word for lightning in Polish today. Or another famous pagan god, Sviatovid, who was the god of war, fertility and abundance, connected with the harvest season. If we move from legend to history and to the figure, the historical figure of Mieszko I, the date of Mieszko's birth is unknown, but according to Gallus Anonymous, the Piast line was already well established by the time of his arrival. So he mentions a line extending from Piast himself to figures called Ziemowit, Leszek, Ziemomys and then Mieszko. The earliest reference to the Polanian state comes from the account of Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, a Sephardic Jew writing in Arabic, probably from Cordoba in Spain, on a diplomatic mission in the region. I think it's worth quoting from his account as translated in Norman Davies' History of Poland, God's Playground. This is what ibn Yaqub writes. As far as the realm of Mesko is concerned, It produces an abundance of food, meat, honey and fish. The taxes collected by the king from commercial goods are used for the support of his retainers. He keeps 3,000 armed men divided into attachments. In general, the Slavs are violent and inclined to aggression. They are especially energetic in agriculture. Their women, when married, do not commit adultery, but a girl, when she falls in love with some man or other, will go to him and quench her lust. The Slavs wage war with the Byzantines, with the Franks and Lengobards, and with other peoples, conducting themselves in battle with varying success. So Ibn Yaqub's account suggests a powerful state, but a state whose power is nevertheless limited. Mieszko probably replaced his father somewhere between 950 and 960. And either in the early years of his own reign, or perhaps in the final years of his predecessor's reign, the Polanian state had expanded from its heartland on the Warta River, with its main centres in Gniezno and Poznań, to embrace the region of Mazovia. Of course, the most important event in Mieszko's reign, and among the most important events in the whole of Polish history, was the ruler's baptism in 966 BC. This is this key symbolic moment from which in most accounts of Polish history the very beginning of the state is traced. So the first question is why did Mieszko convert from the former pagan religion to Christianity? It would seem that his decision was largely a political one, connected to the rising power of the eastern marches of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. who had attacked, conquered and forcibly converted several Slavic tribes to the west of Mieszko's territory. So again, this decision seems to be related to the ongoing rivalry between German tribes and Mieszko and the West Slavic tribes that are coming together under his reign. By converting to Christianity, Mieszko could preserve his own independence, since the empire could not use the argument of conversion to invade another Christian power. So Mieszko married Dobrava, a princess of already Christian Bohemia, in 965, and probably the conversion was discussed in the marriage agreement, and in fact she arrived with an entourage of priests. The next year, Mieszko formally converted and made his entire state Christian. A contemporary German chronicler, a bishop called Tetmar of Mersenburg, gives quite a different picture, and he places his emphasis not on the political aspects of this decision, but on the role of the Czech princess herself, of Dobrava. And this has formed an important part of the popular narrative of the baptism of Mieszko and hence the Christianization of Poland. So I want to quote from the bishop and in this case from Paweł Jasienica's Piast Poland. She did indeed live up to her name, which means in Slavic, good. This pious Christian woman, seeing her husband plunged in the arrows of paganism, pondered how she could win him over to her faith. She endeavored to persuade him by all means not to satisfy the three sinful desires of this evil world, but with a view to the glorious reward awaiting the faithful in the afterlife. So, of course, we can't really know what motivated Mieszko, and it's not impossible that some kind of religious motive was involved, some kind of genuine conviction, a genuine conversion experience. However, we can say for certain that there was a clear political motive as well. So the Polanian state, or Proto-Poland, enters the European sphere of Latin Christianity at this point in time. At least from one point of view, we're dealing here with a pragmatic political decision made by a very competent ruler, motivated by the desire to preserve his influence in the face of a rising Germanic power to the West. As a result, the Polanians accepted the new religion of Christianity from Czech sources, from the sources of Mieszko's wife, Dobrava, so that to this day a large part of the religious vocabulary of the Polish language comes from Czech, including words for church and priest. Czech would go on to have an influence on the beginnings of Polish literature for this reason, since most early works took religious themes. And indeed, we can even find works that are written in an interesting mixture of Polish and Czech. Now, this is an interesting question because we're dealing here with two related West Slavic languages. So we might ask where the blurry lines between them really lie. We very clearly see here, at the beginning of the Polish state, this sense of a kind of cultural hybridity. In around 990 AD, Mieszko, in fact, took some of the former Czech lands, including the city of Kraków, which comes under his power for the first time. So he brings the lands of the Vistulin and the Silesian tribes into his state. Again, we see here this coalescing of a proto-Polish nation formed from these diverse West Slavic tribes, probably speaking similar languages and having similar cultural customs and background. In 992, Mieszko formalized the boundaries of his realm and dedicated them to the patronage of St. Peter and the Pope. Now an important question to raise in this context is that of a sort of cultural colonization which has happened here after 966. So Mieszko managed to avoid colonization the conquest or colonization of his territory by the German rulers of the eastern marches of the Holy Roman Empire. But he did so by accepting a form of cultural colonization. He adopted the alien Christian faith from foreign powers and forced it upon his people in exchange for the security of his state, but also of his own reign, of his own power. It's easy to forget what a dramatic shock this must have been for the Polanian people, suddenly to be forced to change their long-standing religious practices. Indeed, there were significant pagan uprisings in the 1030s, burning of churches, the killing of priests. This uprising may have formed part of a broader peasant rebellion against noble overlords, so that it's not entirely clear if this is largely a religious rebellion or not. a kind of social rebellion. But it's important to remember also that Christianization did not occur with a single declaration in Mieszko's state. The apparatus of state control was simply not strong enough or omnipresent enough to enforce the new religion throughout Mieszko's lands. There were almost certainly pagan enclaves and holdouts that continued to exist possibly even for centuries after the original Christianization of Poland. And as in other parts of Europe, it's also very clear that aspects of the old pagan traditions would find their way into the Polish version of Christianity, especially in its folk variants. One example of this might be in the very important festival in the Polish tradition of All Saints' Day, which has a sort of pagan background. It comes on the same day as a pagan festival of the dead, Forefather's Eve, that was celebrated before the arrival of Christianity, and that would continue to be celebrated in different forms in an unconventional hybrid Christian form for centuries later. It's also important to remember that some of Poland's neighbours were still pagan at this time. For example, the Lithuanians, and we'll hear more about them as we move through this history of Poland. but also the Prussians. And the Prussians are in fact, they're not Germans, they're a Baltic people who were wiped out later, living in the area close to Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, speaking a language that was related to modern-day Lithuanian. But they were wiped out by the Teutonic Knights who arrived in this area in the 13th century, a little later. But at this time, they're a pagan people living on the borders of Mieszko's state. At this time in history, we find the moment when the Polish state, or the Polanian state, it's unclear how we should refer to it at this point in time, joins the broader process of Christianizing Europe, and in particular, of converting those pagan holdouts in Europe, so particularly in the east and to the north of Poland's borders, or the borders of the Polanian state at this point in time. So having only recently been converted to Christianity itself, The Polish state wants to join this process, and in that way, to legitimate itself more powerfully as a part of the family of Western Christian nations. In 996, a Bohemian monk named Adalbertus, or Wojtek in Czech, Wojciech in Polish, was sent by Pope Sylvester I on a pilgrimage mission to convert the pagan Prussians on the Baltic Sea. He arrived at the Polanian court, where he was greeted with pomp and ceremony. The duke of the time sent a few soldiers along with him to help on his mission. It was a typical practice then of Christian missionaries in the northern pagan lands to chop down sacred oak trees, supposedly filled with the spirits of ancestors, in groves that formed the equivalent of temples for the local people. Adalbertus had just celebrated mass in one of these groves, after his men had chopped down the trees, when his party was surprised by a group of locals led by a pagan priest, who killed Adalbertus, chopped off his head and put it on a pike. When the Polanian duke heard of this from some of the survivors, whose lives the Prussians had spared, he supposedly bought Adalbertus' body from the pagans for the monk's weight in gold. Then he laid the remains to rest in the cathedral at Gniezno. It's an important symbolic moment here of the Polanian state claiming a kind of ownership of this martyr for the expansion of the Christian faith. In 999, Pope Sylvester made Adalbertus, or Wojciech, a saint, at the same time solidifying the status of the young Polish state in the Christian world by making Gniezno an archbishopric. while also creating new bishoprics at Kraków, Wrocław and Kołobrzeg. In this way, Poland became a separate province within the structures of the church, where before it had come under the authority of the German diocese at Magdeburg. It's a very interesting moment here where we find the first Polish saint, who's really Czech, and we see this moment of the legitimation, The son of Mieszko is Bolesław I, often known as Bolesław the Brave, who reigned from 992 until 1025. He further expanded his father's realm, and crucially this expansion was in an eastward direction. He married his daughter to Prince Svatopolk, a ruler of the Kievan Rus, and when a dynastic dispute erupted in Kiev, Bolesław supported his son-in-law with a military intervention, supposedly riding into Kiev and notching his sword by striking it against the city's legendary Golden Gate. At the same time, he seized the area known as the Red Cities, which is in what's now the eastern border region of contemporary Poland. so that the Polish state moved decisively to the east for the first time. And this would be the beginning of a sort of drive to the east of the Polish state, which would define the next few centuries of its history. In 1025, Bolesław crowns himself as the first Polish king in Gniezno Cathedral. Poland had established itself among the kingdoms of Europe. The earliest period of Poland's history sees a leader, Mieszko, who pragmatically accepts a foreign religion in order to preserve his own power and perhaps the existence of his state. In doing so, he abandons the former pagan religion and traditions of his people, some of whom fiercely rebel against this decision. In other words, the very beginnings of the Polish tradition as we currently understand it with an important role for Catholic Christianity are marked by the adoption of foreign ideas, institutions and vocabulary. Like most other European states, Poland has been defined by borrowing and hybridity from its very foundation. In the next episode, I'll talk about the development of the Polish kingdom to the beginnings of the union with Lithuania and the great dynasty of the Agilonians.