Some readers may be surprised to find no references to sources in the text. This is an essay rather than a textbook. It is based on wellknown and undisputed facts, and is not in any sense meant to break new ground. I therefore saw no reason to clutter the text with numbers, which many readers find off-putting.
I owe a debt to Miłosz Zieliński, who helped me research the recent past, and to Jakub Borawski, who helped me place it in perspective. I should like to thank my editors Richard Johnson, who gave me invaluable support when I began to entertain doubts about the venture, Arabella Pike, who took the project over with enthusiasm, and Robert Lacey, whose editorial skills are nonpareil. I must also thank Shervie Price for reading the text and making useful suggestions, and my wife Emma for her sensible comments and her love.
ONE
In the Middle Ages, when people favoured simple explanations, Polish folklore had it that the German nation had been deposited on this earth through the rectum of Pontius Pilate. Sadly, the Polish nation boasts no such convenient and satisfying founding myth, and its origins were something of a mystery even to its neighbours.
While most of Europe evolved from the Dark Ages in mutual interaction, with Celtic monks from Ireland carrying the religion of Rome to Germany, and Vikings from Scandinavia linking England and France with Sicily and the Arab world or sailing down the rivers of Russia to Kiev and Constantinople, the area that is now Poland existed in a vacuum.
Along with eastern Germany, Bohemia and Slovakia, it had been settled by a number of Slav peoples. Roman merchants who had come from the south in the first century in search of amber, the ‘gold of the north’, had recorded that they were unwarlike and agricultural, living in a state of ‘rural democracy’. The most numerous of these peoples even took their name from their trade, being known as ‘the people of the fields’,
Be that as it may, the Polanie were cushioned from the outside world by other Slav peoples. To the north, the Pomeranians (
The Polanie shared a common language with the other western Slavs which differed slightly from that spoken by the Bohemians or Czechs to the south-west and that of the eastern Slavs of Rus. They also shared a common religion based on much the same pantheon as other Indo-European cults, worshipped through objects in nature—trees, rivers, stones—in which they were held to dwell, and less so in the shape of idols, or in circles and temples. As practised by the Polanie, this religion was neither organised nor hierarchical, and was not a politically unifying force. What set the Polanie apart from their sister peoples were their rulers, the Piast dynasty established in Gniezno at some time during the ninth century.
Throughout the second half of the ninth century and the beginning of the tenth, these princes gradually extended their sway over neighbouring peoples. Most of these were under some kind of pressure from the outside world, which made it easier for the Piast princes to assume control, and by the middle of the tenth century they reigned over a considerable area. This dominion was described in the first written source of any worth, by Ibrahim Ibn Yaqub, a Jewish traveller from Spain, who noted that the ruler, Prince Mieszko, had imposed a relatively sophisticated fiscal system, and exercised control through a network of castles and a standing army of 3,000 horsemen.
It was these troops and castles that Otto I, King of the Germans, encountered in the year 955. Otto had won a series of victories over his eastern neighbours and fortified his boundaries with a string of bastion-provinces known as marches. He then crossed the Elbe. As he advanced eastward, routing small bands of Slav warriors on the way, he eventually came up against something resembling an army and a system of defences. For the Polanie, the period of isolation had come to an end, and Prince Mieszko could no longer ignore the outside world.