Poland under Casimir the Great (1333–70)
The Polish duchies were able by and large to resist efforts
to impose the vassalage and dependency that successive German emperors had
tried to impose on the Polish lands – lands whose rulers had often welcomed
that overlordship to advance their own interests. With the disintegration of
political authority after the death of the emperor Henry VI in 1197, Germany
began to slide into the same sort of fragmentation as Poland. When, at the
beginning of the thirteenth century, bishop Vincent of Kraków was chronicling
the mythical successes of the ancient Poles against the Roman emperors, he was
not simply engaged in a flight of whimsy: he was asserting the independence of
the Polish duchies, no matter how weak they may have been, against the claims
of the ideological successors to the mantle of Roman imperial authority, the
emperors of the German lands.
The road to even partial reunification was a tortuous one.
In 1289, the nobles, knights and the bishop of Kraków chose as princeps Duke
Bolesław II of Płock, in Masovia. Bolesław transferred his rights over the
principate to his cousin, Władysław ‘the Short’ (Łokietek, literally
‘Elbow-High’), ruler of the little duchies of Łęczyca, Kujawy and Sieradz. This
princely thug found that his penchant for brigandage won much support among
knights and squires on the up. He was quite unacceptable in Kraków, whose
townsmen handed over the capital to Henry IV Probus, the Honourable, duke of
Wrocław/Breslau. It was Henry who took the first serious steps towards what
would be so symbolically important for any reunification of the Polish lands.
He began to negotiate with the papacy and with his patron, the emperor-elect
Rudolf, for agreement to his coronation. Just before his childless death in
June 1290 he bequeathed the duchy of Kraków to Duke Przemysł II of
Wielkopolska. Przemysł was already suzerain of the port of Gdansk and of
eastern Pomerania. On paper, he had a stronger territorial power-base than any
of his predecessors for over a century. The idea of a crowned head was much
more attractive to a more latinized Poland than it had been in the early Piast
state. Archbishop Świnka was all in favour: the canonization in 1253 of Bishop
Stanisław of Kraków, whose dismembered body had undergone a miraculous
regrowth, provided an irresistible metaphor for Świnka’s aspirations.
Przemysł’s only serious Polish rival was Łokietek, clinging on in the duchy of
Sandomierz. Both men were, however, overshadowed by an ambitious and powerful
foreign ruler, Vaclav II of Bohemia.
Vaclav was one of the Middle Ages’ most successful
territorial stamp-collectors. His father, Přemysl Otakar II (1253–78) – Přemysl
to his Slav subjects, Otakar to his Germans – had built up a glittering court
at Prague. Bohemia’s mineral, commercial and agricultural wealth enabled him to
support an ambitious programme of expansion, until his bid for leadership of
the German Empire came to an abrupt end when he fell at the battle of Durnkrütt
on 26 August 1278, against the closest he had to a German rival, Rudolf of
Habsburg. The petty rulers of the dis-integrating Piast lands looked abroad for
protection: one such focus of attraction was the Přemyslid court of Bohemia;
the other was its rival, the Arpad court of Hungary. After the death of Henry
Probus, Vaclav’s own ambition to acquire Kraków was abetted by the local barons
and patricians. In terms of security, prestige and economic prospects, he
offered far more than either Przemysł or Łokietek. Vaclav secured the crucial
support of Małopolska by the Privilege of Litomyšl of 1291. He promised its
clergy, knights, lords and towns the preservation of all their existing rights,
immunities and jurisdictions; he would impose no new taxes on them and fill all
existing offices from their ranks. Łokietek’s position collapsed. His unruly
soldiery and knightly followers spread alienation everywhere they went. By
1294, he had not only to sue for peace but to receive his own remaining lands
back from Vaclav as a fief. It may have been to pre-empt the almost certain
coronation of Vaclav that Archbishop Świnka persuaded the pope to consent to
Przemysł II’s coronation in Gniezno cathedral on 26 June 1295. The machinations
behind this decision are as obscure as anything in Polish history; nor is it
clear whether Przemysł regarded himself as ruler of the whole of Poland, or
just of Wielkopolska and eastern Pomerania. He did not survive long enough to
test his real support. In February 1296 he was murdered, almost certainly on
the orders of the margraves of Brandenburg, whose territorial ambitions were
blocked by the new king’s lands. He left Poland one enduring bequest, in the
shape of the crowned eagle which he adopted as the emblem of his new state.
The nobles of Wielkopolska opted at first for Łokietek as
his successor – but his continued inability to control his own men, his
readiness to carve up Przemysł’s kingdom with other petty dukes, and a military
offensive from Brandenburg drastically eroded his support. In 1299, he once
again acknowledged Vaclav as overlord. Even Archbishop Świnka, conscious that
the Kraków clergy were behind Vaclav, accepted the inevitable. In September
1300 he crowned him king – although he could not refrain from complaining at
the ‘doghead’ of a priest who delivered the coronation sermon in German.
Unity, of a kind, was restored. Łokietek was forced into
exile. His quest for support took him as far as Rome, where he won the backing
of Pope Boniface VIII, hostile to the Přemyslids. Vaclav’s last serious
opponent, Henry, duke of Głogów/Glogau (1273–1309), nephew of Henry Probus,
recognized his suzerainty in 1303. Much of Poland, however, remained under the
rule of territorial dukes. Vaclav’s direct authority covered mainly
Kraków–Sandomierz, Wielkopolska and eastern Pomerania. He left an enduring
administrative legacy in the office of starosta (literally ‘elder’). Its
holders acted as viceroys in and administrators of royal estates, although his
preference for Czechs in this role provoked growing resentment. To Vaclav, of
course, the Polish lands were simply a subordinate part of a greater Přemyslid
monarchy. Polish reunification for its own sake was of little interest to him.
In January 1301, King Andrew III of Hungary died, leaving no
male heirs. Vaclav found the temptation irresistible. His attempts to impose
his 11-year-old son, another Vaclav, on Hungary and, in the process, massively
expand Přemyslid power, were too much for the Hungarians, the papacy, Albrecht
of Habsburg and the rulers of south Germany. By 1304 a Hungarian–German
coalition had been formed. To gain the support of the margraves of Brandenburg,
Vaclav promised to hand over to them eastern Pomerania and the port city of
Gdańsk. His supporters in Wielkopolska, already seething at the harsh rule of
Czech starostowie, could not accept this. Early in 1305, revolt shook the
southern part of the province. Those not reconciled to Czech rule would have
preferred to turn to Henry, duke of Głogów. Vaclav’s Hungarian and German
enemies declared for his exiled rival, Łokietek. Hungarian forces supporting
Charles Robert of Anjou’s bid for their throne helped Łokietek seize control of
almost all the territories of Małopolska, except for Kraków itself. Vaclav II
made peace with the coalition, just before he died on 21 June 1305. He agreed
to withdraw from Hungary. But to keep the margraves of Brandenburg on his side,
the young Vaclav III renewed his father’s undertaking to cede Gdańsk and
Pomerania and prepared to enter Poland at the head of an army. If Vaclav had
not been murdered at the instigation of discontented Czech lords on 4 August
1306, he and Łokietek might well have divided the Polish territories between
themselves. Instead, Bohemia was plunged into rivalries over the succession,
until the election of John of Luxemburg in 1310. In Poland, although the
townsmen of Kraków reconciled themselves to Łokietek, most of Wielkopolska
preferred to recognize Henry of Głogów.
In 1307, disaster struck Łokietek in Pomerania. The German
patriciates of the two chief towns, Tczew and Gdańsk, gravitated towards the
margraves of Brandenburg; the Polish knighthood of the countryside remained
loyal to Łokietek. In August 1308, the castle of Gdańsk was besieged by the
troops of margraves Otto and Waldemar. Łokietek called on the help of the
Teutonic Knights. The arrival of their forces lifted the siege of the castle –
which on the night of 14 November they proceeded to seize for themselves,
massacring Łokietek’s men in the process. By the end of 1311, most of Polish
Pomerania was in the Knights’ hands.
Founded in the late twelfth century as an offshoot of the
Order of St John of Jerusalem, just in time to be forced out by Islam’s
counter-attack against the Crusader states of the Middle East, the Teutonic
Knights had relocated their military-proselytizing operations to Hungary and
Transylvania. King Andrew II threw them out once their ambitions to carve out
their own independent state revealed themselves. In 1227, Conrad I, duke of
Masovia, settled them in the county of Chełmno on the Vistula in order to
defend his eastern borders against the pagan tribes of Prussia, while he
devoted himself to feuding with his Piast relatives and meddling in the
politics of the Rus’ principalities. Backed by emperors and popes (the Knights
proved adept at playing one off against the other), patronized by the rulers
and knighthood of Christian Europe (not least by individual Piast princes),
they built up a de facto independence. Their most enthusiastic supporters
included Přemysl Otakar II (in whose honour they named the new port of
Königsberg in 1255), Vaclav II and John of Bohemia. By the late 1270s, they had
subdued the Prussian tribes; they could embark on the process of colonization
which gave the area its Germanic character for almost 700 years. The Order was
also able – precisely because it was a religious organization, bound by a rule,
dedicated to the higher goal of the spread of the Catholic faith and the
conversion of the heathen – to organize its territories on lines very different
from those of contemporary medieval territories. The Order represented the
impersonal state – something higher than a dynastic or patrimonial entity. The
command structures of what has come to be known as the Ordensstaat were less
subject to the whims and favouritisms of individual monarchs. Its Grand Masters
were elected from the tried and the tested by an inner circle of superiors who
had shown how to combine prayer and aggression, faith and brutality. They and
their fellow northern-Crusaders, the Knights of the Sword further along the
Baltic coast, in what are now Latvia and Estonia, could suffer setbacks, but,
constantly renewed by fresh recruits and enthusiastic part-timers, they could
always rise above them. The actual fighting monks, the German Knights of the
Blessed Virgin, were, however, few in numbers – this was their weakness.
Control of Gdańsk and its hinterland permitted a steady flow of settlers,
soldiers, recruits and allies from the German lands. In 1309 the Grand Master,
Conrad von Feuchtwangen, moved his principal headquarters from Venice to
Marienburg (now Malbork) on the lower Vistula. This was the Ordensstaat’s new
capital, rapidly built up into one of the most formidable fortified complexes
of medieval Europe, a mirror of the Knights’ power and pride. The fragile
entity ruled by Łokietek and his successors could do little more than rail and
complain at the Order’s perfidy and brutality – but its rulers could not subdue
what they had nurtured.
Łokietek had no realistic hopes of recovering Pomerania.
Most of Wielkopolska remained alienated. The dukes of Masovia mistrusted him.
In May 1311, only Hungarian help enabled him to subdue a major revolt of German
townsfolk in Kraków. Poles replaced Germans in key positions on the town
council, Latin replaced German as the official language of town records. True,
it was not many years before German burghers and merchants regained their old
influence, but the town itself ceased to be the political force it once had
been. The repression did little to enhance Łokietek’s appeal to townsmen
elsewhere.
In 1309, his rival in Wielkopolska, Duke Henry of Głogów
died, leaving five young sons, all more German than Polish. The knights
preferred Łokietek to fragmentation and German rule, but it was not until the
submission of the town of Poznań in November 1314 that serious opposition was
eliminated. In control of Wielkopolska and Kraków, Łokietek could realistically
aspire to the royal dignity – were it not for the rival claims of the new king
of Bohemia, John of Luxemburg, who had cheerfully taken over the claims of his
Přemyslid predecessors. Most of the Silesian and Masovian dukes looked to him.
Brandenburg and the Teutonic Knights endorsed him as the supposed heir of the
Vaclavs in Poland, in the expectation of satisfying their own titles and
claims. Pope John XXII, whose approval was necessary to a coronation in what
was technically a papal fief, was reluctant to offend either party. He gave his
consent in terms so ambiguous as to suggest that he considered both men to have
a legitimate royal title. When Łokietek’s coronation did finally take place on
20 January 1320, it was not in Gniezno but, for the first time, in Kraków. The
new venue was dictated not only by a recognition of the greater economic
importance of the southern provinces but by a tacit acknowledgement of the still
limited extent of Łokietek’s territorial support. He controlled less than half
of the territory which Bolesław Wrymouth had ruled: Wielkopolska in the west,
Kraków and Sandomierz in the south, the two regions linked in the central
Polish lands by his own duchies of Łęczyca and Sieradz. Łokietek was more king
of Kraków than king of Poland. He was fortunate that John of Bohemia had his
own difficulties with the Czech nobility.
Łokietek sought security through marriage alliances: in
1320, he cemented his long-standing alliance with the Angevins of Hungary when
his daughter Elizabeth (1305–80) married King Charles Robert (1308–42). In
1325, the king secured his son’s marriage to Aldona (d. 1339), daughter of the
Lithuanian prince Gediminas – at the cost of driving the Masovian dukes,
perpetually feuding over their eastern borderlands with the Lithuanians, into
an alliance with the Ordensstaat. His only recourse against the Knights lay in
persuading the papacy to issue legal pronouncements enjoining them to restore
Pomerania. Such pronouncements (never definitive) were indeed made, but the
Knights paid no attention. John of Bohemia prepared, in 1327, to attack Kraków
– and had he not been kept in check by Charles Robert from Hungary, Łokietek’s
monarchy might not have survived. Most of the dukes of southern Silesia
declared themselves John’s vassals. Łokietek’s offensive against Duke Wacław
(1313–36) of Płock only precipitated incursions by his allies, Brandenburg and
the Knights. Łokietek bought Brandenburg off in 1329 with the county of Lubusz
(Lebus), at the confluence of the Warta and the Oder. In the winter of 1328–9,
John of Luxemburg and the Knights undertook a ‘crusade’ against Łokietek’s
Lithuanian allies. The Polish military diversion into the county of Chełmno
backfired: John and the Knights conquered the northern Polish territory of
Dobrzyń, which John, by virtue of his claims to the Polish throne, generously
awarded to the Knights. Duke Wacław of Płock declared himself to be his vassal.
So did most of the remaining Silesian dukes.
The Knights followed up with an offensive into Wielkopolska
in July 1331. They comprehensively sacked Gniezno, although, as a religious
order, they felt it politic to spare the cathedral. On 27 September, the Polish
and Teutonic armies met at Płowce. The battle lasted most of the day; if, on
balance, this pyrrhic encounter was a Polish victory, it resolved nothing. It
marked the limit of Łokietek’s military endeavour. The king could raid, but not
reconquer; above all, he lacked the resources and the organization to take on
the Knights’ strongholds. Had John of Luxemburg also invaded – as he had
promised the Knights – Płowce might have been even more irrelevant than it was.
In 1332, the Knights more than made up for Płowce by occupying Łokietek’s old
patrimonial duchy of Kujawy. In August, he had to agree to a truce which left
them in possession of all their recent gains. Through sheer, murderous
persistence, he had semi-reunited Poland. But at his death, on 2 March 1333, he
left an even smaller kingdom than the one which had acknowledged him at his
coronation in 1320. His successor, Casimir III, began his reign by renewing the
truce with the Teutonic Knights.
Domestically, Poland needed stability, which could only come
about by strengthening royal authority. Externally, the new king had not only
to resolve relations with the Ordensstaat and the House of Luxemburg, he had to
deal with a power vacuum on Poland’s south-east borders, which threatened to
embroil him with the Tatars and with Lithuania. Poland continued to lie in the
shadow of the Hungarian Angevins, first, of Casimir’s brother-in-law, Charles I
Robert, and then his nephew Louis the Great (1342–82), both of whom had their
own designs on the Polish throne. The realm, the ‘Crown’ as it was styled by
his jurists – Corona Regni Poloniae – that Casimir ruled, a narrow and
irregular lozenge of territory, spilled from north-west to south-east on either
side of the Vistula; with probably fewer than 800,000 inhabitants, it contained
less than half the territories and population that might plausibly have been
called Polish. Against the Knights, Casimir was largely on his own. The
Angevins wanted good relations with them in their own struggles against the
Wittelsbachs and the Luxemburgs. Poland was to be kept in its subordinate
place. The treaty of Kalisz of 8 July 1343 was a ‘compromise’ which benefited
the Knights. They restored the vulnerable border territories of Dobrzyń and
Kujawy lost by Łokietek, but kept what they really wanted – Gdańsk and
Pomerania. Casimir also had to face up to the loss of Silesia. In 1348, John of
Bohemia’s successor and heir-elect to the Empire (he was to succeed Louis the
Bavarian in 1349), Charles IV, decreed its incorporation into the kingdom of
Bohemia. He even contemplated the incorporation of the duchies of Płock and
Masovia, by virtue of the claims he had inherited from the Vaclavs and his
father. With only faltering support from Louis of Hungary and with a storm
brewing in the south-east, Casimir resigned himself. By the treaty of Namysłów
(Namslau) of 22 November 1348, he abandoned his claims to the Silesian
principalities. There was some consolation in the north-east, where in 1355,
Duke Ziemowit III (1341–70), who succeeded in reuniting (albeit briefly) most
of the Masovian lands, acknowledged Casimir’s overlordship. He stipulated,
however, that the preservation of the relationship after Casimir’s death was
contingent on the king’s siring a legitimate male heir.
The troubled situation in the south-east, in the lands of
Rus’, helps explain Casimir’s retreat in the west. After the reign of Yaroslav
I the Wise (1019–54), the once-great principality of Kiev had undergone its own
dynastic fragmentation. The Mongol onslaughts of 1237–40 had savaged these
lands far more viciously than Poland. The successor-states of Kievan Rus’ were
largely reduced to tributaries of the Golden Horde, established in the Eurasian
steppes. The continued raids of the Mongols, or Tatars as they were widely
known, carried them periodically into Polish territory. In 1340,
Bolesław-Iurii, the childless ruler of the two westernmost principalities of
Halych and Vladimir, and a scion of the Masovian Piasts, was poisoned by his
leading boyar-advisers, thoroughly alienated by his open contempt for them and
his over-enthusiastic support for Roman Catholicism.
No credible claimant to Halych-Vladimir emerged from among
the other Rus’ princes. Casimir seized the moment. These fertile Rus’
principalities, straddling the great east–west overland trade route from
Germany to the Black Sea, offered pleasing prospects of enriching both the
nobility of southern Poland and the merchants of Kraków. They could serve as a
buffer zone against Tatar raids. They offered some compensation for the lands
renounced in the west and north. They also aroused the appetite of Lithuania
and the Hungarian Angevins. If Casimir did not annex them, others would. His
invasion of 1340 may have been prompted by the very real fear that the Tatars
would impose their direct rule in the ‘regnum Galiciae et Lodomeriae’, the
‘kingdom of Halych and Vladimir’.
It took twenty years of intermittent struggle to impose even
partial Polish authority. The Lithuanians established themselves in the north. Casimir
satisfied himself with acknowledgement of his suzerainty by Lithuanian
princelings. Casimir held the south, centred on the town of L’viv
(Lwów/Lvov/Lemberg). But even here he owed his position to Hungarian support.
Poland’s Rus’ lands remained separate from the rest of the Crown: in return for
Louis of Hungary’s assistance in their subjugation, Casimir agreed in 1350 that
they would pass to him on his demise. Divisions in Lithuania, where Duke
Gediminas’ seven sons quarrelled among themselves after his death in 1341,
worked to Casimir’s advantage. Even the Black Death helped: it left a sparsely
populated Poland largely unscathed, but in 1346 it devastated the Golden Horde.
Despite all this, the venture cost Casimir dear. In 1352, to raise money for his
war effort, he plundered the archiepiscopal treasury in Gniezno. He borrowed
from all and sundry, even from the Teutonic Knights, to whom he assigned the
county of Dobrzyń as security. Impoverished Dobrzyń could scarcely begin to
compare with Rus’ potential prosperity.
Casimir’s principal achievement was to restore strong
monarchic rule at home, within the narrow limits open to any medieval ruler.
His deliberate patronage of talented lay and ecclesiastical advisers from
southern Poland, the advancement of their careers by service on the royal
council, created a generation of new men, ready to aid and abet fresh fiscal
and administrative initiatives. The king was more aware than his predecessors
of the value of more formal means of government. In 1364, he set up, in Kraków,
a partial university or studium generale, teaching mainly law, with some
medicine and astronomy (the papacy would not agree to instruction in theology).
The new institution above all aimed at producing the jurists and lawyers
increasingly indispensable to the government of a self-respecting monarchy.
Casimir introduced written regulation of judicial procedure and criminal law.
In the 1360s, he began to widen the bases of his support to Wielkopolska. He
never sought to put an end to the established divisions and differences between
his two chief provinces, but instead played their elites off against each
other. An extensive programme of revindication of usurped royal lands, often by
arbitrary royal fiat, recovered hundreds of properties, though it led to revolt
in Wielkopolska in 1352. Casimir made some tactical concessions. In 1360, after
the troubles had died down, the revolt’s leader, Maćko Borkowic, was arrested,
chained in a dungeon and starved to death, though it seems that his involvement
with local brigandage rather than his political past was more responsible – not
so much a royal act of revenge as a warning to powerful men not to get above
themselves.
It may be that Casimir wished to build up new elements on
which he could base royal power. For the first time, the non-knightly
administrators of peasant villages, the wójtowie and sołtysi, were expected to
turn out in their own right on military campaigns. His confiscational programme
was matched by an extensive settlement of peasants under ‘German law’ on royal
domain. The king encouraged Jewish settlement, mainly of Ashkenazim from the
Empire. While the same baggage of prejudices and misconceptions found across
Christendom was reflected in Poland, it was clearly not enough to put a stop to
such immigration. He took a Jewish mistress. And although the merchants and
guilds of many towns, fearful of competition, secured bans on Jewish residence
inside the town walls, they were almost invariably able to settle in the
suburbs or in privileged enclaves beyond municipal jurisdiction. Whatever
reservations his Christian subjects had about them (and there were occasional
anti-Jewish riots), Casimir appreciated that they represented an invaluable
asset. The 1338 coinage reform helped boost the circulation of
small-denominational silver monies. All this, combined with a flourishing
north–south and west–east trade, with Kraków at its crossroads, enabled Casimir
successfully to pursue a harsh fiscality. He subjected peasant holdings on lay
and ecclesiastical estates to an annual land (‘plough’, poradlne) tax of 12
groszy per łan (about 18.5 hectares). Only land worked directly for the lords
was exempt. Such taxation, combined with a reform of the administration of the
lucrative royal salt-mines at Bochnia and Wieliczka, first exploited in 1251,
enabled him to finance a major defence and reconstruction programme. He built
some fifty castles across Poland, and provided twenty-seven towns with new
curtain walls (or, rather, they did so on his orders). It was enough to contain
the incursions of the Tatars and the ever more frequent raids of the
Lithuanians; but none of Casimir’s new fortresses could match the Teutonic
Knights’ defensive marvel at Marienburg. The Kraków patriciate was kept sweet
by the king’s successful commercial policies and by the enhanced prestige it
enjoyed from his ban on all municipal appeals to Magdeburg: two appellate urban
courts were set up in the capital.
For all the difficulties that Casimir experienced in
Halych-Rus’, it was in his reign that the processes took off which were to give
the area its variegated ethnic character for almost the next six centuries. The
campaigning devastated the countryside; but the area’s fertility made it a
magnet for the dispossessed, impoverished and adventurous from all over Poland
and beyond. The boyar aristocrats of the area either died out during the wars
or preferred to migrate to Rus’ lands under Lithuanian lordship: the surviving
lesser nobility was in no shape to stand up to the influx of immigrants. The
great trading centre of L’viv continued to attract a vigorous mix of settlers.
Germans formed the largest number of incomers, then Poles and Czechs – though
by the end of the fifteenth century, most of these elements were to be
polonized and L’viv/Lwów itself became something of a Polish island in a sea of
Rus’, Orthodox peasantry. The first Jews established themselves in 1356,
alongside a thriving Armenian community. During Casimir’s last years and over
the next decades, petty and not-so-petty Polish nobles were granted extensive
land rights in the area. Casimir and his successors preferred to govern through
an alien, non-boyar, non-Orthodox class on whose loyalty they could rely. The
process was made easier in that even the Rurikid princes of Halych-Rus’ had
shown considerable interest in accepting union with the Latin Church, as a
channel for securing help against the Mongols. The petty Orthodox boyars who
clung on, loaded with service obligations, uncompensated by any rights or
liberties on the Polish or Hungarian models, found that polonization and
Catholicization offered the easiest route to preserving and advancing their
status and fortunes. It was in these lands of western Rus’ that the process of
the separation and alienation of the elites from the mass of the local
population first began and proceeded furthest.
Casimir’s greatest failing was dynastic. He had four wives:
the first, Aldona-Anna of Lithuania, produced two daughters. The second,
Adelaide of Hesse, was pious, unexciting and possibly barren. Casimir despised
her and ensured that she spent a miserable marriage confined in remote castles
until a divorce came through around 1356 – in scandalous circumstances. The
king’s lust for Krystyna, the widow of a patrician of Prague, got the better of
him. He contracted a bigamous marriage with her even before his divorce from
poor Adelaide. No children were produced. In a race against time, he put
Krystyna aside to marry, in 1363, Jadwiga, daughter of Duke Henry of Żagań Four
children followed – all girls. Casimir could not produce legitimate sons. He
may, nevertheless, have had second thoughts about letting the Angevins get
their hands on his lands. In 1368 he adopted as his heir his grandson Kaźko,
heir to the duchy of Słupsk in Pomerania. Days before his death on 5 November
1370, he bequeathed his patrimony of Łęczyca, Sieradz and Kujawy to Kaźko. The
Rus’ lands, Wielkopolska and the territories around Kraków and Sandomierz were
to pass to Louis of Hungary. Casimir had clearly not shaken off the sense that
this was a family, patrimonial monarchy, ultimately his and his alone to
dispose of. But this was not a view shared by the lawyers, clergy and barons
who had helped him rule. His thirtyseven-year reign had persuaded them that
their political arena was more than a local or regional one: that the ‘Crown’,
the Corona Regni Poloniae, was a real political entity that had to be
preserved. A freshly divided Poland was unlikely to hold on to the potential
riches of the hard-won Rus’ lands. At the same time these notables had an
unmissable opportunity to return to the politics their predecessors had
practised at the height of Poland’s fragmentation, of playing off one potential
ruler against another, albeit now on a scale that went beyond Poland’s borders.
The county court of Sandomierz ruled the will invalid. Kaźko settled for
compensation in the shape of the county of Dobrzyń, to be redeemed from the
Knights, as a fief to be held of Louis of Hungary, who was to inherit the
Crown.
Even in his own lifetime, Casimir III’s attainment of a
relative peace and prosperity, his legal and administrative reforms earned him
the title ‘the Great’ (the only Polish monarch so honoured). Yet Poland
remained a lesser power, too weak to assert its claims to its old territories
in the west and north. Casimir probably did as much as could have been done
with some unpromising materials. For better or worse, he paved the way for a
new course of eastwards expansion. He restored strong monarchic rule, although
nothing that he did could compensate for the lack of a legitimate son.
Whatever the vagaries of Casimir’s policies, he had been a
strong, at times even brutal, ruler. The nobility had good reasons for
welcoming Louis’ accession. An absentee king (he ruled in Poland largely
through his mother, Casimir’s sister, Elizabeth) would almost inevitably be
less demanding. He had made promising concessions in return for acceptance of
his succession. In 1355, by the Privilege of Buda, Louis had solemnly assured
the nobility and clergy that he would exempt them from any new taxation. His
uncertain health, and the gratifying inability he shared with Casimir to father
sons, opened up even more favourable prospects. In 1374, the nobility agreed
that he could designate one of his three daughters as successor in Poland. In
return, from Košice in northern Hungary, Louis promulgated a Privilege,
reducing in perpetuity the poradlne tax paid by peasants on noble and knightly
estates from 12 to 2 groszy per łan. He went on to promise that he would pay
his knights for any military service beyond Poland’s borders. In 1381, he
extended these provisions to the clergy.
In retrospect, these concessions can be viewed as the
beginning of a linear process which was to give the nobility a dominant and domineering
position within the state. At the time, they were more an attempt to secure
protection against royal fiscal arbitrariness. The ‘nobility’ were the
beneficiaries because they held a nearmonopoly of military force. But the
Polish ‘nobles’ at this time were simply all those who held land carrying the
obligation – even if it was in many cases notional, rather than real – of
performing military service. Those affected ranged from lords of the royal
council to backwoods squires barely able to afford a horse and military
accoutrement. The driving force consisted of a core of some twenty families,
most of whom had risen under Casimir III and were determined not to lose their
standing in the state. These were the primary beneficiaries of the Privileges
of Buda and Kosice. That their lesser fellow-rycerze also gained was a useful
bonus which enabled the great families to build up followings and clienteles –
it was to be at least another century before these junior knights/nobles became
a serious political force in their own right. Louis’ Privileges also applied to
the townsmen – their existing rights were confirmed – but they enjoyed only
local and ad hoc concessions, grants and favours. The towns, divided by
commercial rivalries, failed to show a common front. Members of the Kraków
patriciate, who might even sit on the royal council, were concerned only with
the well-being of their own city, not that of other towns; in any case, they
could reasonably aspire to a niche among the aristocratic core. The clergy followed
on the coat-tails of the ‘communitas nobilium’.
While Louis accepted that he had to make concessions in
order to secure the throne for his daughters, like Vaclav II barely two
generations previously, he felt no compunction at truncating Polish territory.
In 1377 he incorporated Polish Rus’ into Hungary, a step already agreed on with
Casimir and made easier by its separate status of a royal dominium. He
confirmed the cession of Silesia to the Luxemburgs. He transferred disputed
border territories to Brandenburg. These measures and the behaviour of
Hungarian officials caused immense resentment, culminating in the massacre of
dozens of Hungarian courtiers during riots in Kraków in 1376. In 1380, Louis
judged it prudent to relinquish rule in Poland to a caucus of Małopolska
potentates, which did nothing for his wavering support in Wielkopolska. When he
died, in September 1382, the question of the succession was almost as vexed as
ever. The Polish elites had promised to accept his daughter, Maria – but jibbed
when Louis, in an attempt to unite the Angevin and Luxemburg houses, insisted
that she should marry the unpopular Sigismund of Luxemburg. The Hungarians
compromised and suggested that a younger daughter, Jadwiga (she was barely 10
years old), could be substituted. Małopolska agreed, but Wielkopolska wanted
Duke Ziemowit IV of Płock as king. Angevin support in the south proved too
strong for him. The entry of pro-Jadwiga troops obliged Ziemowit to withdraw.
Wielkopolska’s leaders were prepared to accept Jadwiga if
her long-standing betrothal to Wilhelm of Habsburg could be broken off in
favour of Ziemowit. She was crowned ‘king’ (this was not an age which discarded
law and custom lightly) in Kraków on 15 October 1384. The southern lords had
little truck with Wielkopolska’s provincialism. They, too, could play the
dynastic card as well as any Luxemburg or Angevin. Jadwiga’s engagement was
broken off – not in favour of Ziemowit, but of the illiterate heathen, Jogaila,
ruler of Lithuania. At Kreva, in Lithuania, on 14 August 1385, Jogaila
confirmed a deal his representatives had struck with Louis’ widow, the
queen-dowager Elizabeth, and with Małopolska’s lords: he and his Lithuanian
subjects would convert to Catholicism; he would marry Jadwiga, provide money to
pay off the disappointed Wilhelm of Habsburg and annex to Poland his vast
principality, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Małopolska’s elite
had embarked on a spectacular exercise in corporate dynasticism, well worth the
price of a 12-year-old’s feelings. Former Piast Poland stood on the threshold
of a bizarre and unexpected new career.
