A Country under Pressure
Keeping peace is hard even in regions where natural barriers secure unity and safety. Think how much harder it is in lands whose frontiers on one side or several are pressed by greedy neighbors. Fourteenth-century Poland was half crushed under the pressure of Teutonic, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Moravian, Bohemian and German knights hammering at its borders. When Ladislas the Short became grand prince of Little Poland, in the south (1306), he faced numerous enemies.
The Germans of Great Poland, in the west, refused to obey him. Teutonic warriors conquered Danzig and Pomerania. The Margrave of Brandenburg plotted to remove him, and Wenceslaus III, King of Bohemia, claimed the Polish throne. Through this sea of troubles Ladislas made his way by force of arms, by statecraft and by marriage. He joined Little and Great Poland into one state and crowned himself in Kraków, the new capital, in 1320. When he died at seventy-three (1333), he left his troubled throne to his only son, Casimir the Great.
Casimir the Great
Some may have grudged Casimir III his title "the Great," since he preferred negotiation and compromise to war. He gave Silesia to Bohemia and Pomerania to the Teutonic warriors, and consoled himself with the gains of Galicia, the region around Lwów, Mazovia, and the regions around Warsaw. He devoted his thirty-seven-year reign to government, bringing the various regions under a single law, so that the country "no longer looked like a many-headed dragon."
A group of jurists under his leadership united the conflicting laws and customs of the provinces into the "Statutes of Casimir," the first Polish law code, which in comparison with contemporary codes is an example of moderate humanity. Casimir protected Jews, Greek Orthodox and other racial and religious minorities, and encouraged learning and art. He founded the University of Kraków (1364) and put up such solid buildings throughout the country that it was said that when he came to the throne he found a Poland of wood and boards and left one of stone.
Casimir developed every side of the national economy so wisely that peasants called him "king of the peasants," merchants found their affairs going as they wished in the security of peace, and all classes gave him the title of Great.
The Hungarian Interlude
Since he had no son, he left his throne to his nephew Louis the Great, King of Hungary (1370), hoping to place his country under a strong king's protection and share in the cultural impulses the Angevin dynasty had brought from Italy and France. But Louis was so absorbed in Hungary that he forgot Poland. To keep the proud nobles obedient in his absence, he exempted them from taxation by the "Privilege of Košice" (1374) and gave the high officials absolute authority.
After Louis died (1382), war broke out over the succession. The country's parliament, called the Sejm, recognized his eleven-year-old daughter Jadwiga as "king." Disorder subsided when Jogaila, Grand Prince of Lithuania, married Jadwiga (1386). Jogaila (Jagiełło) united his vast land with Poland and showed himself a forceful ruler.
The Rise of Lithuania
The growth of Lithuania is among the important events of the fourteenth century. Gediminas and his son Algirdas annexed almost all of western Russia, including Polotsk, Pinsk, Smolensk, Chernigov, Volhynia, Kiev, Podolia and Ukraine, to their pagan state. For some provinces this was welcome, since joining the grand princes kept them safe from the Golden Horde of the Tatars, who held eastern Russia in fief. When Jogaila succeeded Algirdas (1377), the Lithuanian empire, whose capital was Vilnius, stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea and almost to Moscow itself.
This was the gift Jogaila offered his wife Jadwiga; Poland was the dowry she brought to his house. Jadwiga was only sixteen at the wedding. She was raised a Roman Catholic and brought up in surroundings that shared in the Latin culture of the Renaissance era. Jogaila was thirty-six (the book's figure), illiterate and a pagan. But he converted to Christianity, was baptized, took the Christian name Ladislas II and promised to bring all the Lithuanian people into the Christian faith.
Grunwald and the Teutonic Order
The marriage was timely, because the advance of the Teutonic knights endangered both countries. The Order of the Cross, which at first had devoted itself to Christianizing the Slavs, had become a body of military conquerors whose business was to take by the sword whatever lands it could from pagans or Christians and impose an oppressive serfdom on the free peasants. In 1410 the Grand Master, from his seat at Marienburg, ruled Estonia, Livonia, Courland, Prussia and eastern Pomerania and had closed Poland's road to the sea.
In the "Northern War" the armies of the Grand Master and of Jogaila, each said by tradition to number a hundred thousand fighting men, met near Grunwald, or Tannenberg (1410). The Teutonic knights were defeated, leaving fourteen thousand prisoners and eighteen thousand dead (the book's figures), and the Grand Master was among the dead. From that day the Order declined rapidly, until by the Peace of Thorn (1466) it yielded Pomerania, West Prussia and the free port of Danzig to Poland as a gateway to the sea.
Casimir IV and the Flowering of Kraków
Under Casimir IV (1447–1492) Poland reached the peak of its size, power and art. Casimir, though illiterate himself, gave his sons a full education, and so put an end to the scorn of the knights who thought literacy and learning a disgrace. Queen Jadwiga on her deathbed had given all her royal jewels for the reopening of the University of Kraków, which in the next century produced Copernicus. Literature, philosophy and science were taught in Latin. Jan Długosz wrote his History of Poland in Latin (1478).
In 1477 Veit Stoss of Nuremberg was invited to Kraków. He stayed seventeen years and raised the city to high rank in the art of the time. In the Church of St. Mary he carved and painted 147 choir stalls, an immense altarpiece about 12 by 10 meters (the book's figures), with a depiction of the Virgin's ascent that rivals Titian's paintings in its appeal, and eighteen wooden panels showing the life of Mary and her child. Stoss's panels, though wooden, compare with the bronze doors of Ghiberti, made a generation before for the Florence baptistery.
In Kraków's cathedral he carved an exceptionally beautiful tombstone for Casimir IV from veined red marble. With these works, Gothic sculpture in Poland reached its peak and its end. During the reign of Casimir's son Sigismund I (1506–1548), Polish art took up the style of the Italian Renaissance, Lutheranism also entered from Germany, and a new age began.