The Bohemian invasion of 1300 forced Władysław to flee the country for a time, and he went to Rome in search of allies. As his sobriquet suggests, he was a small man, but he knew what he wanted and how to get it, laying his plans with skill. The Papacy was locked in one of its perennial conflicts with the Empire, and therefore looked kindly on the anti-Imperial Polish prince. Władysław sought the support of Charles Robert of Anjou, the erstwhile King of Naples and Sicily who had just succeeded to the Hungarian throne. With the Pope’s support he sealed an alliance by marrying his daughter to the Angevin. Having also secured the cooperation of the princes of Halicz and Vladimir he set off to reconquer his realm from the Czechs.
In 1306 he took Kraków and in 1314 Gniezno, thus gaining control of the two principal provinces, while a third, Mazovia, recognised his overlordship. In 1320 he was crowned King of Poland, the first to be crowned at Kraków. By making an alliance with Sweden, Denmark and the Pomeranian principalities, Władysław forced Brandenburg on to the defensive while he dealt with the Teutonic Order, which was in a difficult position. The fall of Acre to the Saracens in 1291 had deprived it of its headquarters. The indictment in 1307 of the Templars, on whom the Teutonic Knights were closely modelled, their subsequent dissolution and savage persecution, were a chilling warning to any order which grew too powerful. Władysław lost little time in taking the Teutonic Order to a Papal court not only on charges of invasion and rapine, but on more fundamental questions of whether it was fulfilling its mission. The Papal judgement went against the order, but the very fact that the Knights had been cornered brought about a subtle change in their attitude.
Their headquarters, located in Venice after the fall of Acre so as to be ready for future crusades in the Holy Land, was quickly moved to Marienburg in Prussia in 1309. Prussia now became not a crusading outpost, but a state, and it would settle its disputes with neighbours not through Papal courts but on the battlefield. In concert with its ally John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, the order invaded Poland. The Silesian Duke Bolko of Świdnica held off the Bohemians while Władysław marched against the order and defeated it in a costly battle at Płowce in 1331. Too weak to pursue his advantage, he did not manage to reassert a Polish ascendancy in Pomerania or Silesia, where the German hegemony persisted. Nevertheless, by the time of his death in 1333, Władysław the Short had managed to reunite the central provinces and to establish at least nominal control over a number of other areas. His son Kazimierz III (1333-70), known as the Great, was able to carry through this process and to place the sovereignty of Poland beyond question.
In this he was assisted by an unusually favourable conjunction of circumstances. As a minor ice-age reduced yields and ruined harvests throughout much of Europe, Poland basked in a more than usually warm and temperate spell, which produced not only bumper crops but also conditions in which Mediterranean fruit could be grown and wine produced. While the Hundred Years’ War devastated the richest lands in western Europe and wrought financial havoc as far afield as Italy, Poland was spared lengthy conflicts. Finally, as the entire Continent was engulfed by the plague of 1348, the Black Death, most of Poland remained unaffected. The populations of England and France, of Italy and Scandinavia, of Hungary, Switzerland, Germany and Spain were more than halved. Poland’s grew, partly as a consequence of conditions elsewhere. The depredations of the plague were accompanied by widespread famine, which provoked an exodus from towns, and refugees roamed Europe in search of food and a safe haven. In addition, the need for a scapegoat had provoked the greatest wave of anti-Jewish atrocities in medieval history, and terrified survivors also fled, mainly eastwards. All were welcomed in Poland, which insisted only on a period of quarantine.