He is a journalist of international repute (...) He first went to Poland as a reporter on the Manchester Guardian in 1957, and has returned almost every year since; he covered the Solidarity  period and the imposition of martial law for the Observer in 1980-81.

In 1988 Neal Asherson writes:

No other nation suffered so much in this century, and gained so little. 
 

Who knows, perhaps it was Europe that was sick, all Europe with the exception of Poland?
 

The country people of Poland, whose views and methods change only slowly. Catholic and patriotic, their ancient motto is 'We Nourish and Defend'.

All the same, the impression of 'strangeness' and the unfamiliarity of Poland have become realities which can't be argued away. Before reading an account of Polish history, it may be useful to summarise some of the elements of that history.

The brief answer is: in different places at different times. The Poles themselves, as an ethnic group, are a West Slav people speaking a Slav language whose relationship to Russian is - very roughly - like the relationship of Dutch to German. They have ranged over the flat, originally forested plains of northern Europe between the Oder river and the Pripet Marshes in the east. To the south, they have been bounded by the Carpathian range of mountains; to the north, by the Baltic Sea. The spinal chord of these lands is the Vistula river, rising in the southern mountains, flowing through Kraków in the south and Warsaw in central Poland to the sea at Gdańsk (Danzig).
 

A state is not the same as a nation. This is where Bismarck went wrong, and why so many in the west - where nation and state have come to seem synonymous - find Poland puzzling. But the Poles never mix the two words up. A 'nation' is a group of people united by cultural or racial identity , often by both. Thus a Polish passport will describe somebody as 'citizenship: Polish; nationality. Ukrainian [or Jewish, or German]'. A state is simply the political superstructure which may contain several different 'nationalities'. A state can change its borders, or be suppressed altogether . A nation survives, even if it is moved to another place or unless - as in the case of Europe's Jews under Hitler - it is physically exterminated.

For almost all of Poland's history, it has been a multinational state. Until the nineteenth century, the statement 'I am a Pole' meant 'I am the subject of the Polish crown' and not 'I am a Polish-speaking Slav of the Polish race'.
 

In the late eighteenth century, after more than 800 years of existence, the Polish state was wiped off the map of Europe by violence, and divided between its three neighbours. There is nothing comparable to this in European history. The only parallels, which are remote, are the English conquest of Ireland, the Spanish conquest of Catalonia, and the crushing of Bohemia by the Habsburg Empire.

There were three Partitions, each reducing the size of Poland until the last one in l795 abolished the state completely. From then until 1918 there was no independent Poland, although Napoleon set up briefly a puppet 'Grand Duchy of Warsaw' between 1807 and 1813. For the whole of the nineteenth century, the period of the Industrial Revolution and of the greatest scientific and intellectual changes the human race has ever experienced, Poland as such was not present. Instead, there were Poles who lived in the Russian Empire, Poles who lived in Prussia (later the German Empire) and Poles who lived in the Habsburg Empire which became known as Austria-Hungary.

The Partitions lasted until 1918, when Poland regained its independence. This meant that they were still in living memory when Poland was partitioned again in 1939 between Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union, who declared that the Polish state was an 'abortion' which had been abolished for ever. After Hitler's invasion ofthe Soviet Union in 1941, all Poland came under Nazi rule. This 'Fourth Partition', although it lasted for less than six years, brought with it more savagery and slaughter than all its predecessors. Hitler not only destroyed the state but - if he had not been defeated - would have proceeded to destroy the Polish nation as well by the same methods of mass murder which he applied to the Jews.

There were four major insurrections in occupied Poland during the Partitions, and countless national conspiracies. In a way , the 1944 Warsaw Rising against the Germans was a fifth insurrection. All the risings ended in heroic defeat. But the Poles became practised conspirators, and developed a lasting disrespect for all authority - which for so long was foreign.

Russia and Prussia, especially, tried to suppress both Polish culture and language and the Catholic faith. In response, the Poles developed one of the most intense and self-sacrificing versions of Romantic nationalism ever seen in Europe. In its most extreme form - known as 'Messianism' - Poland was thought to be the collective reincarnation of Christ, to be crucified and then resurrected for the redemption of all nations.

During the nineteenth century , the definition of a 'Pole' gradually changed. The Partition powers - on the 'divide and rule' principle - played off the ambitions of the other nationalities against those of the Slav and Catholic Poles. As a result, the old idea of a multi-racial Poland decayed, as the ethnic Poles came to suspect other races - especially Ukrainians and Jews - of collaborating with the Partition powers and of lacking commitment to the fight to regain independence.

(...)

During the Partitions, and especially after the November Rising in 1830, a large part of Poland's political, military and cultural leadership fled abroad. They settled in Paris, above all, where they became the recognised voice of their suppressed nation in the world. Much of the planning of the insurrections took place in Paris or London, and the best part of Poland's classic literature was composed in France. In the First World War, committees of Polish exiles in France and Switzerland were able to persuade Britain, France and the United States to restore an independent Poland after their victory. In the Second World War, the Poles followed the same tradition by setting up a government in exile near Paris and then in London.

In the later nineteenth century, there began an enormous economic emigration from the Polish lands, mostly of poor peasant families seeking a better life in North America or in the coal-mining areas of France, Belgium and Germany.

Out of these two very different currents of emigration there grew up the idea of Polonia - the notion that Poland did not exist only on the river Vistula but throughout the world, wherever Polish communities had settled. There is only one familiar parallel to this. It is the worldwide Diaspora of the Jews, and their attachment to the idea - and then the reality - of the land of Israel. The period of the Partitions left the Poles with violent but sometimes very mixed feelings about the rest of Europe. It was natural enough that they learned to hate and distrust Russians and Germans. But there were differences even here. With the Prussians and Germans, seen by Poles as inhuman and mechanical, it was difficult to make any contact. Polish attitudes to Russia, though, were more contradictory . There was contempt for Russian 'barbarousness', but also a fascination with Russia's size and power. There was loathing for the Russian schoolmaster bullying children who spoke Polish in class, but there was also real affection - even a sense of Slav kinship - for the open-heartedness and generosity of simple Russians. This is a mixture of emotions that has lasted.

During the Partitions, the Poles came to see France as their truest friend in the outside world. There was some background to this: the French and Polish royal families had intermarried, French had become the polite language of the great Polish aristocrats, and Poland had drawn many ideas from the Enlightenment and the Revolution of 1789 before its fall. Afterwards, Napoleon supported the Polish cause (for his own ends), and for most of the nineteenth century French governments not only welcomed Polish exiles but loudly endorsed their calls for the restoration of independence.

Apart from words, though, not much was done to help. As the years passed, and the twentieth century began, Polish feelings not just about France but about the United States and Britain became ambiguous. These were 'free' countries in which - France especially - Poles felt at home. At the same time, Poles came to realise that these governments would offer their country little more than sympathy and applause. The Poles felt themselves to be culturally part of 'the Christian West', but the west did not reciprocate - would, indeed, betray Poland for the sake of a quiet life. As a result, attitudes towards the west became the queer compound they still remain: yearning admiration combined with sardonic mistrust. The Second World War, which left most Poles with a sense that they had been betrayed and abandoned by their Allies in the West, strongly reinforced this trauma.

After nearly two centuries of intermittent persecution the Catholic Church in Poland has emerged more influential in civil society than in almost any other country in the world. Well over three-quarters of the population, including many members of the Polish United Workers' Party (the Communists) regard themselves as believers. At the same time, the Church itself in Poland is unusual in its attitudes. It is highly conservative over matters like abortion and contraception, but at the same time 'classless': a church of the people. It is intensely patriotic and often openly 'political', claiming a special right to act as the voice of popular opinion about anything from working conditions in factories to the curricula of universities.
 

Józef Piłsudski was born in a country manor in Lithuania, to a family of the Polish squires who had dominated that country for centuries, only four years after the suppression of the last great Polish insurrection which began in January l863. He grew up in a land helplessly exposed to the Russian vengeance that followed the January Rising: executions, torturings, arrests, deportation to Siberia, the confiscation of estates, the suppression of Polish culture and language, and the persecution of the Catholic Church. At school, Piłudski's teachers were Russians who sneered at his Polishness and treated him as an alien in his own country. Józef Piłsudski acquired a hatred and fear of Russia which never left him. The Polish gentry in Lithuania were little affected by the doctrines of compromise, of a sort of patriotic adaptation to foreign rule, which became widespread in other parts of the divided nation in the years after l863. They remained true to the older tradition of romantic conspiracy, which looked to yet another armed insurrection to liberate Poland. (...)

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Polish independence had been high in the priorities of European liberalism. Revolutions then were 'national' revolutions, the liberation of peoples from an 'imernational' league of reactionary Popes, Emperors and Kings. France, above all, had given moral support to the Polish cause, and had welcomed the Polish exiles after the failed insurrection of 1830 - 31; they were given state pensions corresponding to their rank. Even in Germany, a young revolutionary generation had given its heart to the Poles as the bravest fighters in the struggle for national liberty and constitutional government. But after the revolutionary wave of 1848, in which Polish exiles fought on the barricades in France, Italy and Germany, in Prague, Vienna and in the tremendous national uprising in Hungary , the climate  slowly changed. The surge of 1848 failed to overthrow the systems in Austria and Prussia, and did not touch Russia. Germans, faced in 1848 with the threat that Polish independence would mean the partial dismemberment of Prussia, withdrew their sympathy.

By 1900, a 'realistic' assessment of Polish chances could only be discouraging. Prussia had become the controlling element in a German Empire. Russia had begun to industrialise, enforcing an even more centralized and repressive regime on its dominions. The Habsburg Empire had become a 'dual monarchy' of Austria-Hungary in 1867, but attempts by Galicia, the Polish province under Austrian control, to win an autonomous status like that of Hungary had been weak and unsuccessful.
The trend in Europe seemed to be towards consolidation into a few vast supranational powers, towards a new epoch in which the aspirations of small, suppressed nationalities would become anachronisms. Both Germany and Russia had embarked on policies designed to eradicate what remained of Polish cultural and political identity. The huge scale of modern armies and the power of their weapons, now rapidly mobile along railway lines constructed principally for military reasons, reduced the chances of any old-fashioned national uprising.

In the Polish lands themselves, there were signs that the old cause of independence was beginning to disintegrate. Industrial capitalism, developing most rapidly in the Russian partition, established its markets and its finance within the separate framework of the three empires, and - even where its owners were Polish - saw its interests in gradual change and reform rather than in the violent upheaval of national revolution.

(...)

But what was it, anyway, that Polish patriots wished to restore? This was not a simple question. Poland had not been an island, but a multinational state with no natural boundaries except the Baltic Sea to the north and the mountain wall of the Carpathians in the south. In its 800 years of existence, ending with the Third Partition in 1795, its frontiers had shifted all over the map of eastern Europe. To demand the 'restoration of Poland' was to meet the question:'Which Poland, of what kind?'

Two elements had dominated most of Polish history. One was the relationship between Poland and Lithuania, the huge and more primitive dukedom to the north-east which remained pagan until the end of the fourteenth century. The second was the exceptionally strong position of the Polish nobility and gentry, which became the dominant class in society in the late Middle Ages and which prevented the development of an absolute monarchy.
 

the first historic ruler of Poland, founder of the Piast dynasty. He united several western Slavonic tribes under his sway and consolidated his power by marrying the Bohemian princess, Dobrava, and converting to Christianity in 966. As a result, the Polish state was brought into the European political system and established relations with the greatest powers of that period, the papacy and the empire. After Dobrava's death, Mieszko married Oda, the daughter of Margrave Dietrich. He conducted wars with the Eastern March and Bohemia. On his death, he divided his state among his first born, Boleslaus, and his sons by Oda.

Gero's successor, Margrave Hodo crosses Oder to battle Mieszko. Poles had between 3,000-4,000 men, mostly infantry and pancerni cavalry. Germans had mostly heavy cavalry forces. In the first phase elements of the Polish cavalry attacked lead formations of German cavalry, the Germans slowly taking the advantage. This forced the Poles to retreat closer to a little town called Cedynia. The actual 'retreat', wasn't at all surprising, it was a calculated move. The Polish cavalry lead the charging German forces into a trap, under the command of the brother of Mieszko - Czcibor. The German column was then attacked from almost all sides. The Germans were forced to retreat in the only direction they could - right into a swamp. Here they were cornered and cut to pieces. German losses were significant. Thietmar claims that most of the best knights were killed, apart from Hodo and Zygrfyd. The success of this battle allowed the continued maintaining of Polish control of eastern Pommerania. Otto I after hearing of the unprovoked attack on the Poles seriously reprimanded Hodo. Otto II however had stronger claims on Poland, in 979 another German invasion of Poland was organized. Again the Germans were defeated. Poles again drive out the  Germans, taking a number of missionary fortresses and destroying Hamburg.
 

the first son of Mieszko I and the Bohemian princess Dobrava. After his father's death, he banished Mieszko's second wife Oda and her sons, and reunited the state. In his attempts at winning the royal crown for himself, he developed contacts with papacy and the empire. Thanks to his efforts, Bishop Adalbert, murdered by the pagan Prussians, was canonised in 999 and the first Polish metropolis (archbishopric) was established at Gniezno, the capital of the country, in 1000. The same year he welcomed in Gniezno the emperor Otto III, an event of considerable political importance. In the wars he fought in the west and the east, he extended his rule to Milsko and Lusatia along the Elbe and the group of strongholds called Grody Czerwienskie in Rus. He had himself crowned king of Poland in 1025, shortly before his death

Chrobry defeats Jaroslav at the Bug river.  Pursues Jaroslav to Kiev, besieges, and wins. Establishes border at the Bug River. Legendary event - Notching of the Szczerbiec (Coronation Sword of Poland) on the Golden Gate of Kiev. August 14- Places son-in-law Sviatopolk on throne. Boleslaw sends 'Proclamation of Triumphant Peace and Friendship' to Roman and Byzantine emperors. Chrobry dismisses German, Hungarian, and Pecheneg allies, but stays in Kiev too long and makes Sviatopolk nervous. Chrobry withdraws in good order, retaking Grody Czerwienskie on the way home.

became king under the will of his father, Boleslaus the Brave, who also arranged his marriage to Richeza (Ryksa) of Lorraine, the emperor Otto III's niece, in 1013. His brothers, the elder Bezprym and the younger Otto, opposed the father's decision and in their struggle against Mieszko sought support of a German-Rus coalition. Under Mieszko II's rule, Bohemia captured Moravia, Germany occupied Lusatia, Denmark entered Pomerania, and Rus recovered Grody Czerwienskie. Richeza secretly left Poland, taking with her to Germany the royal insignia. The young Polish state was collapsing. In 1033, Mieszko recognised the suzerainty of the emperor and resigned from the crown and the royal title. His death was followed by a civil war. Mieszko had one son, Casimir, and two daughters

failed to take full control of the country which had slipped towards anarchy after the death of Mieszko II, and in 1037 was exiled by the rebellious nobles. Soon after, Prince Bretislav of Bohemia invaded Poland, sacked Poznan and Gniezno, stole the relics of Adalbert, the patron saint of Poland, and then captured Silesia. In these dramatic circumstances, Casimir's return encountered no opposition from the local nobles, and the prince proceeded to reconstruct the state and restore its economy and civilization. He regained Silesia and incorporated Mazovia. Since Great Poland and its oldest towns, Poznan and Gniezno, were in ruins, he moved his capital to Cracow.

the eldest son of Casimir the Restorer, obtained the royal title in 1076, after 18 years of rule as a prince, thanks to his support of the pope in the latter's dispute with the emperor Henry IV. Papal legates restored the metropolis of Gniezno and established a new bishopric (next to the old ones of Poznan, Wroclaw and Cracow) in Plock. Boleslaus conducted many wars and intervened in dynastic conflicts in Hungary and Rus. His strong-arm rule provoked opposition among the nobles, including the bishop of Cracow, Stanislaw of Szczepanow. The bishop was put to death for treason, which caused a revolt by the nobles. Boleslaus was excommunicated and in 1079 he had to abandon the throne and seek refuge in Hungary, where he died several years later

son of Casimir the Restorer, was asked by the nobles to ascend the throne in Cracow after Boleslaus the Bold's flight. He married the emperor's daughter. His policy was based on alliances with the Germans and Bohemians, and the recognition of the latter's claims to Silesia. A weak ruler, he let the real power slip into the hands of the voivode Sieciech. The latter's growing influence was opposed by the nobles, who supported Ladislaus Herman's sons, first Zbigniew, and then Boleslaus. In 1097, internal disorders resulted in the division of the country between Zbigniew and his younger brother, Boleslaus the Wrymouthed. Ladislaus Herman recognised the suzerainty of the empire and therefore never crowned himself king.

after his father's death, drove his elder brother, Zbigniew, out of the country. His influence grew as he made new conquests and expanded the territory of his realm. The dramatic war against the emperor Henry V ended in the latter's defeat at the battle of Psie Pole near Wroclaw. Boleslaus' conquest of Pomerania was accompanied by missionary work. He captured Gdansk Pomerania and won suzerainty over Szczecin Pomerania. Unfortunately, he undid his enormous successes when in his political testament he divided the state among his three adult sons, although he also established the institution of the sovereign, or senior, prince. This was the beginning of the period of feudal disintegration, which lasted almost two hundred years.

Germans again invade under the command of Henry V, in 1109 with around 10,000 men. Henry V moves into Poland but is unable to take Bytom, a massive Polish fortress. He then moves onto Glogow where another large Polish garrison awaited him. He demanded the capitulation of the garrison but it was refused. Boleslaw at the time was 200 km from Glogow during this time battling the Pommerians, it was imperative that he be given enough time to come to the aid of Glowgow. In 14 days he managed to arrive in the vicinity of the siege. Continued German assaults on the fortress came to no good, giving the Germans high casualties. Henryk V was forced to retreat with his army back west after this unsuccessful siege. After Henry V left Glogow he moved south onto Wroclaw. In an open field battle, Boleslaw defeated him again. The battle has a legendary name. The corpses of the dead Germans were left on the field of battle and therefore the wild dogs of the region took advantage of a free feed, hence the name 'Dog's field'
 

the eldest son of Boleslaus the Wrymouthed and under the latter's will the first sovereign prince. In addition to his hereditary province of Silesia, he took over the senior's province, together with Cracow and Gniezno. He sought allies in his efforts to reunify the country. In 1146, he won the support of the emperor Conrad III and turned against his brothers, but was defeated and banished. He sought refuge in Germany. In 1157, he supported the emperor Frederick Barbarossa's expedition against Poland, but he never recovered the throne of the senior prince. He was the first of the Silesian Piast rulers

received, under Boleslaus the Wrymouthed's will, the principalities of Mazovia and Kuyavia and following the banishment of his elder brother, Ladislaus, ascended the Cracow throne as the senior prince. He had to fight to keep this position since Ladislaus made efforts to win back the throne with the support of the papacy and the German states. In 1148, the papal legate Guido came to Poland with the mission of persuading the provincial princes to recognise the suzerainty of the exiled Ladislaus. In 1157, Boleslaus was defeated by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa and forced to pay homage and a high contribution. In the event, Ladislaus did not return to Cracow, but Boleslaus had to hand over Silesia to his sons in 1163. Under his rule, Poland lost Pomerania

the prince of Great Poland under his father's will, became senior prince and ascended the Cracow throne after the death of his brother, Boleslaus the Curly. His attempts at strengthening his authority provoked dissatisfaction among the nobles, and then an open revolt, as a result of which in 1177 the Cracow province was seized by Casimir the Just. Mieszko did not give up his position easily and strove to regain the throne. His efforts succeeded when for several he was allowed to rule on behalf of the minor Leszek the White, the son of Casimir the Just

the youngest son of Boleslaus the Wrymouthed, born probably after his father's death, which is why he was not assigned a hereditary province in the will. He succeeded to the province of Sandomierz only after the death of his brother, Henry. In 1177, in the wake of a revolt by the nobles, he became senior prince in Cracow, and in 1186, he took over the principalities of Mazovia and Kuyavia. He sought Church support and therefore at the congress at Leczyca in 1180, he bestowed various privileges on the Polish Church. In exchange, he was promised the Cracow province as his hereditary principality. Following his sudden death, war broke out for the Cracow throne and lasted eight years.

the son of Mieszko the Old, who was the prince of Gniezno and Poznan, ascended the throne after his father's death. However the majority of the nobles supported the prince of Sandomierz, Leszek the White, the son of Casimir the Just. Ladislaus was exiled from Cracow, and Leszek assumed power in the senior principality. Ladislaus did not give up his efforts to regain the throne and sought support in Great Poland. He achieved his aim shortly after Leszek's death, but was again exiled, this time by Prince Conrad of Mazovia, who claimed the throne as the brother of Leszek the White. After this defeat, Ladislaus also lost Great Poland. He sought refuge in Silesia, where in his last will he bequeathed his province to his host, Prince Henry the Bearded

the prince of Sandomierz, and the son of Casimir the Just. After his father's death, Leszek claimed the senior province of Cracow, having as his main rival at first Mieszko the Old, Casimir's brother. He eventually ascended the throne in 1202. He made efforts to capture Halich Rus, also claimed by Hungary, but failed. He died in tragic circumstances at Gasawa in Pomerania, where he held a meeting with Ladislaus Spindleshanks and Henry the Bearded, when they were unexpectedly attacked by Swietopelk, prince of Gdansk Pomerania

the first representative of the line of the Silesian Piasts on the Cracow throne. He paid much attention to the country's economic expansion, supported the foundation of new towns and villages, the development of mining, and monetary reform. he was the prince of Wroclaw, and in 1228-29 and from 1234 till his death the ruler of the senior province. He worked towards the reunification of Poland, which provoked a sharp conflict with Conrad of Mazovia, who had earlier banished Ladislaus Spindleshanks from Cracow. Under the will of the latter, Henry the Bearded took over part of Great Poland, but he never attained his main aim of unifying the Polish state. His son, Henry the Pious, was killed in 1241 in the battle of Legnica during the first Mongol invasion which threatened the West.

prince of Sandomierz, the son of Leszek the White, he assumed the throne in the Cracow province in 1243, having defeated Conrad of Mazovia. He failed to achieve his aims since the Sandomierz and Cracow provinces were invaded by the Mongols and attacked by Rus. In his foreign policy he relied on an alliance with Hungary, strengthened by his marriage with Kinga (Kunegunda), the daughter of the Hungarian king, Bela IV. He died leaving no heir

the son of the prince of Kuyavia and Sieradz, and the brother of Ladislaus the Short, he inherited the Cracow throne from Boleslaus the Bashful. He took power in peaceful circumstances, with no opposition. In his efforts to reunify the country, Leszek the Black looked to the towns for support and quelled a revolt by the lords. A year before his death, the Mongols invaded Poland for the third time and Leszek fled to Hungary. The Mongols approached the walls of Cracow but failed to capture the city. Leszek's death opened a long period of struggle for the Cracow throne
 

the prince of Poznan, he followed in the footsteps of many of his predecessors in efforts to reunify the Polish state. In 1290, he conducted a treaty with the dying prince of Cracow, Henry Probus, who had tried to get the crown from the pope. Under this treaty, he took over the Cracow province, but was defeated by Wenceslas II of Bohemia. He therefore concentrated his efforts on Great Poland, and was supported by an outstanding politician, the archbishop of Gniezno, Jakub Swinka. In 1294, Przemysl incorporated Gdansk Pomerania, and in 1295 had himself crowned king of Poland in the former Polish capital, Gniezno. This first coronation after almost 200 years had a considerable significance for the unification of the Polish state. A year later Przemysl was murdered, probably by hostile agents of the March of Brandenburg

the son of King Premysl Otokar II of the Bohemian Premyslid dynasty. Crowned king of Bohemia in 1283, he banished Przemysl II and became prince of Cracow in 1291. He crowned himself king of Poland in Gniezno in 1300. In 1301, he took the Hungarian crown on behalf of his only son. He strove to strengthen royal power, which was a difficult task after the long period of feudal disintegration and unrest. He introduced the office of starost with large powers. The opposition against Wenceslas was headed by his future successor, Ladislaus the Short, who was supported both by Pope Boniface VIII and King Robert of Hungary, the latter anxious about Bohemia's growing influence

the younger brother of Leszek the Black, inherited the province of Kuyavia and had plans for unifying the Polish territory. In 1296-1300, following a number of minor conquests, he captured the senior province and the principality of Sandomierz. Prevented by Wenceslas II from taking Cracow, he appealed for assistance to the Hungarians who helped him conquer Little Poland. However he lost Gdansk Pomerania to the Order of the Teutonic Knights. In 1311, he suppressed a rebellion of the Cracow townspeople, and then captured Great Poland. He knew what he wanted and how to get it. In 1320, he crowned himself in Cracow. This date is regarded as the end of the feudal disintegration of Poland.

An army of Germans, from the Teutonic Order, 7,000 strong. Poles had 5,000 men. The aim of the Order was to take Brzesc Kujawski with a lightning attack. When the Germans under Dietrich Von Altenburg arrived near the blockaded peasant town of Plowce the Poles immediately attacked in a frontal assault. A few seconds later, Polish detachments hiding to the left of the city in a forest attacked themselves. The Poles were victorious in this phase of the battle taking into captivity 56 brotherly knights and freeing many Polish captives. The second battle was even more bloody with rear elements of the German formations alarmed on hearing the generals sounds of battle from Plowce. The battle was exceedingly bloody, both armies not giving up an inch. Reuss Von Plauen, commander of the army and 40 knights were taking into captivity by the Poles. An estimated 4,000 men (combined) were said to have fallen on the field of the battle. 73 of these were brotherly knights of the Teutonic Order. About 1/2 of the dead were Poles. The Germans had to retreat back to Torun, their losses climbing to 1/3rd dead of all their knights taking part in the whole war. The Polish armies, seriously bloodied as well didn't follow the retreating Germans. In actuality because of the casualties the battle is treated as a draw, but is important as it was the first defeat of the Teutonic Order in battle by any central / northern European army of that time. The Order was considered to have the most powerful armies in all of Europe during this time.
 

the son of Ladislaus the Short and Poland's only king with the cognomen "Great". He completed the work of the reunification of the state which under his rule more than doubled its size. He attached great importance to economic development. He is said to have found Poland built in wood and to have left it built in stone. He contributed to the development of the towns and commerce, carried out a monetary reform and codified the laws. In 1364, he established the Cracow Academy, the first Polish university. In foreign policy, in spite of some opposition, he was in favour of compromise, for he believed that Poland needed internal stability and peace. The only point of his policy which never changed was his alliance with Hungary. In 1339, in Visegrad, he concluded a treaty with the Hungarian king, under which the throne was to pass to the Angevins in the event of his childless death. He was the last ruler from the great Piast dynasty. His death caused sadness and anxiety among his subjects

king of Hungary, called in his own country Lajos the Great. He was the son of Elizabeth, Casimir the Great's sister, and became king of Poland under the treaty concluded at Visegrad in 1339 by Casimir the Great and his father, Charles Robert, the founder of the Hungarian Angevin dynasty. After his coronation in Poland in 1370, he ruled in Cracow through the intermediary of his mother. He wanted the Polish throne for one of his daughters and therefore tried to win over the gentry by giving them extensive privileges, called the Kosice pact, which became the foundation of the freedom and political power of the gentry in Poland. In exchange, the gentry agreed to one of Louis' daughters ascending the throne. He left Poland united, its borders almost the same as after the death of Casimir the Great

the daughter of King Louis of Hungary. In 1384, the Polish lords recognised her rights to the throne and had her crowned queen of Poland, but they forced her to break off her engagement to William of Habsburg, since they were in favour of a dynastic union with Lithuania, which would strengthen both these countries threatened by the Teutonic Knights. Under the treaty of Krevo concluded in 1385, the grand duke of Lithuania, Ladislaus Jagiello, together with his brother and the whole of Lithuania, were converted to the Latin rite and Ladislaus married Jadwiga. Jadwiga enjoyed great popularity due to her readiness to sacrifice her life to state aims. She renovated the Cracow Academy and bequeathed to it her personal property

In outline, the Polish-Lithuanian union went through much the same stages as the union between England and Scotland several centuries later. It began as a union of crowns: Jagiełło and his successors were at once kings of Poland and Grand Dukes of Lithuania, while the political systems of the two nations remained separate. Finally , after nearly 200 years of association, the Union of Lublin in 1569 brought Poland and the Grand Duchy together into a single 'Commonwealth' with one united parliament (Sejm). The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was to last for over 200 years, binding together races of entirely different origins and language. After the Lublin Union, the Lithuanian nobility and gentry - originally a warrior caste speaking an East Slav dialect but ruling a population of Baltic language - became steadily 'polonised', reinforced by immigration and intermarriage from Poland proper until by the late eighteenth century the landowning and dominating class in Lithuania was 'plus polonais que les polonais' - the main source of Romantic Polish patriotism.

became grand duke of Lithuania in 1377 and was crowned king of Poland in 1396. He was the founder of the Jagiellonian dynasty, and as king opened a new epoch in the history of Poland, a central European country with close ties with western, Latin civilisation. Through Ladislaus Jagiello, Poland entered into a union with Lithuania, a country covering a vast territory between the Baltic and the Black Sea, inhabited by a mixture of pagan Lithuanians and Orthodox Christians in the Rus territory captured by Lithuania. This union served an important political aim: of checking the expansion of the Order of the Teutonic Knights who were defeated by the combined Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian forces at Grunwald on 15 July 1410. But it also resulted in some serious problems in the East, with which the kingdom not always could cope. In 1413, Ladislaus Jagiello concluded a new union at Horodlo, which strengthened Poland's links with Lithuania, and issued new privileges for the gentry in order to secure the throne for his sons

At the great battle of Grunwald in 1410, the Order was defeated by the combined Polish and Lithuanian armies. The Teutonic Knights were not finally subdued until the Peace of Toruń over fifty years later, but the breaking of their power allowed Poland to gain control of the Baltic seaboard around the city of Gdańsk. By dazzling good fortune, the whole length of the Vistula river, stretching from the fertile plains of central and southern Poland to the seaport of Gdańsk at its mouth, had now returned to Polish possession just as the growing populations of northern Europe were looking for fresh supplies of grain. Through the 'Vistula grain trade', Poland was to feed the soaring prosperity of western Europe in the Renaissance as North America's prairie wheat was to feed the Industrial Revolution in Europe three centuries later.

also called BATTLE OF GRÜNFELDE,or Grunwald , battle fought at Tannenberg (Polish: Stebark) in northeastern Poland (formerly East Prussia) that was a major Polish-Lithuanian victory over the Knights of the Teutonic Order. The battle marked the end of the order's expansion along the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea and the beginning of the decline of its power.

Polish and Lithuanian forces proceeding toward the order's stronghold, Marienburg, met its army between the villages of Grünfelde (Polish: Grunwald) and Tannenberg. Though the order defeated the Lithuanian contingent, the ranks of the Poles remained unbroken. (as shown on diagram below, Polish force is in white. To the right in stage one the Lithuanians have been broken and indeed the Germans made an attack on the Polish King himself, however were routed by the Polish Royal Guard) The Poles / Germans continued to fight, the Poles slowly gaining an advantage. The Lithuanians had now reformed and had rejoined the battle. Eventually the Germans were circled and broke. Polish and Lithuanian cavalry charged as they ran capturing their tents and continuing the charge many km's past the battle zone.

By the end of the 10-hour clash, the order's forces had been crushed and its grand master, most of its commanders, and 205/250 of its knights had been killed. About 8,000 dead + 2,000 taken into captivity. Subsequently many Prussian castles controlled by the order surrendered to the Polish-Lithuanian force, though Marienburg, which was defended by Heinrich Reuss von Plauen, did not fall. It was one the most strongly built and defended fortresses in the whole of Europe. By September 1410 the Polish-Lithuanian army withdrew.

Sources are wild on actual numbers of this battle, though its safe to say Polish-Lithuanian armies were at between 30,000 and 50,000 men, whilst the Germans had around 25,000. Whatever the stats of this battle is considered to be the largest and bloodiest of the medieval era in the whole of Europe.
 

crowned king of Poland in 1434, and king of Hungary in 1440; the son of Ladislaus Jagiello and Sophia of Holszany. Since he ascended the Polish throne at the age of ten, the country was ruled in his name by Cardinal Zbigniew Olesnicki. The accepting of the Hungarian crown involved Ladislaus directly in a war  with the Turks, who were a threat to Hungary. Encouraged by the papal legate, the young king set out against the Turks at the head of a small, poorly prepared army. In the decisive battle fought at Varna on 10 November 1444, the anti-Turkish forces were routed and Ladislaus slain. Ladislaus is one of the best known rulers of medieval Poland. His defeat on the battlefield of Varna gave rise to a legend about a young king who died in a war between two different civilisations

the younger son of Ladislaus Jagiello and Sophia of Holszany; grand duke of Lithuania, crowned king of Poland in 1447. He restricted the powers of Cardinal Zbigniew Olesnicki and the latter's supporters among the nobles, who held sway during the reign of his predecessor. He carried out an active dynastic policy: his son Ladislaus became king of Bohemia in 1471 and succeeded to the Hungarian throne in 1490. In his efforts to strengthen royal authority, he sought supporters among the knights and limited the influence of the nobles. Under the terms of the treaty of Torun, which ended the so-called Thirteen Years' War with the Teutonic Knights, he incorporated Royal Prussia, that is, the western parts of the Teutonic Knights' state. After years of conflict, he finally won the right to appoint bishops (who were members of the Royal Council). His long reign contributes to economic and cultural development, and to Poland becoming a European power.

Fought during the 13 years war with the Teutonic Order. The definitive battle that saw the Order reduced into  ruin and fall under the might of Polish overlordship. Polish army decides to charge the German Garrison near Swiecino. Assault is successful, 1,000 Germans die, 70 are captured, 200 tabors are taken including all 15 artillery pieces. Polish losses at 100 dead and 150 wounded. After this battle the Order's defenses slowly cracked. In 1463 ships under the Polish insignia of Elbing and Gdansk defeated a German flotilla at Zalewie Wislanym. Puck fell in 1464, Now in 1465. In 1466 Starogard and Chojnice.

This was not as outrageous as it sounds. In much of Europe at the time, a nation was defined as a series of 'estates': nobles, the Church, the burghers and commoners, and so on. But there was always a large mass of the poor 'below the line' who belonged to no 'estate' and were not considered to be part of the political nation at all, even though they usually formed a majority of the population. The Polish 'noble estate' merely pulled the line upwards until it excluded from 'the nation' almost everyone but its own members.

There was good and bad in this 'gentry power'. It meant that the Commonwealth was a primitive and limited democracy, in which no king could ever attain absolute control - a contrast to the grimly autocratic systems soon to arise on either side of Poland in Prussia and Russia. The gentry, perhaps ten per cent of the total population, enjoyed their 'golden freedom' by developing a high-spirited, generous, often wild and hard-drinking style of life; their proud impulsiveness and touchy independence have left their mark on Polish behaviour to this day. On the other hand, the Commonwealth was not only difficult to govern but - more importancly - almost impossible to adapt to changing conditions.

The sixteenth century was Poland's 'Golden Age'. All through the period, the privileges of the gentry continued to accumulate. They had personal immunity against the law, freedom to follow any faith and - from l496 - a monopoly on landholding; the burghers had to sell what land they possessed. They acquired increasing power over the peasants on their land, who were steadily reduced to the condition of serfs, forbidden to leave the estate.

Here was a real divergence between the histories of eastern and western Europe. In the west, rural slavery or serfdom was rapidly vanishing by the late Middle Ages, parcly due to the shortage of labour caused by plague, and was being replaced by wage labour. But in central and eastem Europe - not only in Poland, but in the whole region from eastem Germany to Russia, from the Baltic south to Hungary - serfdom became far more common in the same period, and survived until the nineteenth century . The cause seems to have been the increasing monopoly of political power by the noble classes, reinforced by the new wealth of the great estates which exported grain to the West.

In 1505, the nobles extorted from the Crown the Nihil Novi (Nothing New) statute, a pledge that no new taxes or laws would be applied without the consent of both chambers of the Sejm. In 1573, when the last of the Jagiełło kings died, the nobility finally secured the right to elect the monarch - not through their representatives in the Sejm but at a vast, often chaotic, rally of the entire gentry at Warsaw.

In the sixteenth century , the Polish gentry - and not just the bigger landowners - prospered as the rye and wheat from their estates was floated down the Vistula on rafts and sold at Gdańsk to German, Dutch and Scottish merchants. But this was an agricultural boom. The urban development and the rise of a native middle class which was taking place so rapidly in westem and northem Europe at this period was only stunted in Poland. Especially in smaller towns, jealous local landowners controlled trade and prices; serfdom meant that it was almost impossible for peasants to move off the land, find work in towns and enter trade, and most commerce stayed in the hands of Jews, Germans and Scots. Some of the money rubbed off on the towns; cities like Kraków or Torun acquired magnificent buildings and became centres of craftsmanship, high art and science. But no coherent middle class emerged in Poland, as it did in the West, to challenge the old landed nobility for economic and political influence.
 

the son of Casimir Jagiellonian, crowned king in 1492. He reigned in Poland, while his brother Alexander became the grand duke of Lithuania. He carried out reforms which strengthened the position of the gentry. The Statute of Piotrkow of 1496 reserved higher church positions for the gentry exclusively, barred the townspeople from buying land, and restricted the peasants' freedom of movement. In foreign policy, John Albert concentrated on the Turkish problem and wished to improve Poland's standing by assuming control over Danube principalities. In 1497, he set out on an expedition against the Turks, which ended in his defeat.

the son of Casimir Jagiellonian, crowned grand duke of Lithuania in 1492 and king of Poland in 1501. At the beginning of his reign, he issued the so-called Mielnik privileges, by which the Senate under the monarch's chairmanship was granted the exclusive right to take decisions on state matters. This caused sharp protests of the gentry who well remembered Alexander's predecessors pro-gentry policy. The gentry were against one person holding more than one dignity and in favour of the participation of the lower chamber in government. This last privilege was granted by the Constitution Nihil Novi, adopted by the Seym in Radom in 1505. This meant that from then on no new law could be adopted without the joint consent of the Senate and Deputies. This was the beginning of the system called gentry democracy in Polish history.

son of Casimir Jagiellonian, the grand duke of Lithuania and king of Poland from 1506. He married Bona Sforza, the duchess of Milan, who exerted a strong influence on the government and who supported her husband in his efforts to strengthen royal authority. Under Sigismund's reign, Renaissance spread in Poland, and the level of eduction among the magnates and the gentry grew. Nicholas Copernicus worked on his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. The king corresponded with Erasmus of Rotterdam. The townspeople became more active in the field of literature. Discussion on the Reformation developed freely. The gentry continued its struggle against the magnates and for restricting the Church's privileges. The Polish language began to prevail in literature and diplomacy. Sigismund incorporated Mazovia with Warsaw (the last province which remained outside Poland) and accepted the tribute of Prince Albrecht Hohenzollern. The state was powerful and no one threatened it. The golden age of the Renaissance began.

the son of Sigismund the Old and Bona Sforza, crowned king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania in 1529, during his father's lifetime. He assumed power in 1548. He supported the reformatory movement of the gentry. The result was the re-seizure of royal lands and the setting up of a standing army. A supporter of tolerance, he prevented persecution and religious wars, for, as he declared in the Seym: "I am not the king of your consciences." He had no sons or daughters to inherit the throne, therefore he strove to consolidate Poland's links with Lithuania on the basis of a real union. He achieved this aim - the Union of Lublin of 1569 - three years before his death. His romantic love and marriage to Barbara Radziwillowna, and the latter's coronation was in contravention of the dynastic interests and reasons of state. The king built a large fleet and incorporated Livonia into the Polish-Lithuanian state. He was a Renaissance man, a well educated protector of science and learning which flourished under his reign

the son of King Henry II of France, he was the first king of Poland to be elected in free election by all the gentry in 1573. On the occasion of this first election, the so-called Henrician Articles were formulated. From then all, on ascending the Polish throne every king elect had to pledge to observe these articles. The articles listed the most important principles underlying the state system, including the superior role of the Seym. The choice of the first king proved unfortunate. Henry arrived in Poland in January 1574, in the midst of a severe winter. He did not like Polish customs, and the Poles disliked him and his courtiers. When notified of the sudden death of his elder brother, Charles IV, Henry secretly fled Cracow in June 1574 in order to assume the French throne. His escape made a very bad impression in Poland

Duke of Transylvania, was elected king of Poland in 1575, and crowned in 1576, having previously married Anne Jagiellonian, the sister of Sigismund Augustus. The Polish crown was a great honour for Bathory, who immediately made it clear that he did not take his position lightly. He opposed the licence of the gentry and the magnates, and continued the policy of religious tolerance which the Convocation Seym of 1573 (the so-called Warsaw Convocation) made one of the principles of the political system of Poland. Although a proponent of strong government, he renounced his judicial powers and instead appointed separate tribunals for Poland and Lithuania. He introduced important reforms in the army and the system of taxes. He defeated Muscovy over war Livonia.. He elevated the Jesuit college in Vilnius to the rank of Academy university

the son of the Swedish king John III and Catherine Jagiellonian, king of Poland from 1587 and king of Sweden in 1592-98. His claims to the Swedish crown involved Poland and Lithuania in conflicts and wars, and made him many bitter opponents. He was a Catholic and a supporter of the Counter-Reformation, which turned against him many adherents of tolerance and dissenters. The opponents accused him of favouring the Habsburgs in his policies. Dissatisfaction with his government took on an extreme form in 1606 with the rebellion of Mikolaj Zebrzydowski. Sigismund conducted wars with Muscovy and claimed the crown of Muscovy, which the defeated boyars offered to his son, Ladislaus. In 1596, Sigismund transferred the capital of Poland from Cracow to Warsaw.

the son of Sigismund III Vasa and Anne of Habsburg, ascended the Polish throne following the election of 1632. He was in favour of armed moves, unlike the majority of the gentry. He continued to make unsuccessful armed attempts to claim the Swedish crown as well as the crown of Muscovy which he had been offered in 1610. In order to strengthen his position on the Baltic, he built a large fleet. He also planned a war against Turkey, but his plans were defeated by the gentry. His wife, Marie Louise Gonzague, took an active part in political life, and acted for an alliance with France and the introduction of vivente rege election (that is, election during the lifetime of the ruling king). During Ladislaus' reign the Cossacks in the Ukraine started an open rebellion against Poland.

the son of Sigismund III Vasa and Constance of Habsburg, half-brother of Ladislaus IV, the second husband of the latter's widow, Marie Louise de Gonzague, who formed a strong pro-French party at the royal court. During his reign Poland fought heavy wars with Muscovy and Sweden , and their allies(the latter referred to in Polish history as the  deluge), and against a Cossack uprising in the Ukraine. The Swedish army captured most of Poland almost without any blood shed and the king had to leave the devastated country. According to John Casimir, the reason for the disasters that befell Poland was weak royal power and the gentry's licence. But his attempts at introducing reforms provoked a civil war, called Lubomirski's rebellion, in 1665. Disillusioned, John Casimir abdicated in 1668 and left for France. He died in Nevers

Fought between the army of Poland-Lithuania with Cossack support against an Ottoman army under the command of the Sultan set out to conqueror the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Estimated at between 100,000 and 400,000 men, the Turks first aim was to capture the Polish fortress of Chocim. In the face of this formidable threat, the Seym raised an army of 40,000 regulars. Chodkiewicz (pictured on the white horse) dug in at Chocim on the Dneper where for almost a month the Polish infantry managed to held off repeated Turkish assaults, while the cavalry made sallies into te enemy flanks (shown in the painting). The husars - 70 regiments of 8,000 horse was the most numerous formation, more than once led by the hetman himself. On the 23rd of September, just as the Ottomans were retreating from the fortress he died. The enemy suffered an astounding 40,000 dead during this month long assault.

When the peace treaty was signed on 9th October in the Polish camp there was no food, fodder or ammunition but the borders were successfully defended. It is believed that the defence of Chocim confirmed the military superiority of the Polish army, proving its preparedness to all kinds of warfare, including the defence of field fortifications. This army would have been well used in the north during the same time when the Swedes' under Gustavus Adolphus were moving into Livonia and Polish Prussia. Lack of adequate resources meant that only a small army could be used in the subsequent Prussian campaign.

During the 2nd Swedish-Polish war over control of Livonia / Royal Prussia.
A sea battle lasting 2.5 hours, undertaken by a Polish fleet (10 ships)to free the blockade of Gdansk by the Swedish fleet (6 ships) at Gdansk in 1627 during the Polish-Swedish war of 1619-21. Polish leader of the fleet was also killed (Dickmann). Polish forces being victorious destroying two Swedish ships: Sun & Tiger. Polish mariner losses at 47 dead, Swedish losses at 350 dead and an additional 68 captured.

During the 2nd Swedish-Polish war over control of Livonia / Royal Prussia.
Koniecpolski defeated the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus during a running battle. The King saved some of his army despite sacrificing much of his cavalry, some infantry and losing some high ranking Swedish commanders. Swedish dead are counted at over 1,000. On the Polish side about 150 dead Poles and about the same Austrians. Poles took 400 captives, 10 artillery pieces, 15 standards and other assorted equipment. During this battle Gustavus is almost taken into captivity / killed by several Polish husars however is saved by a rajtar. Swedish army counted at 5,000 infantry, 4,700 rajtars. Koniecpolski had 1300 Husars, 1200 'Cossack' cavalry and 2000 dragoons a long with Austrian cavalry. Polish infantry was late and therefore could not participate in the battle.
 

Dissatisfied with the Vasas' dynastic policies, which they saw as contrary to the interest of the Polish-Lithuanian state, the gentry decided to elect a native Pole, a "Piast", to the throne. Michael Korybut was the son of Jaremi Wisniowiecki, a military commander who won fame during Khmelnitski's rebellion, and Gryzelda Zamoyska. However, Michael Korybut proved unable to cope with his responsibilities and with tensions among the various political fractions. Moreover, he lost a war against Turkey; under the terms of the peace treaty Turkey occupied Podolia with Kamenets Podolsk, a stronghold once built with a thought to the defence of the south-eastern borders of the state

Fought between the Poles and the Tartars, great Polish victory.
Some historians claim it as he greatest triumphs of the Polish Army in the mid seventeenth century, since it was for the first time that the enemy was prevented from crossing the state border and ravaging the southern countryside. In reality it was a 45 day campaign against the Tartars led by Tuhaj-Bej. Despite losses at Szmankowcami in 1624, at Podolia, 1626, at Biala Cerkwia (Ukraine) in 1629 and at Ujsciem on the Dniestr & Kamieniec Podolski in 1633, the Tartars continued to make their forays into the territory of the Commonwealth. Tuhaj-Bej decided to conduct a pitched battle due to the Tartars having much higher numbers measured at between 40-50,000 men. Poles had 19,300 men total in the campaign. 2,900 Quarter army, 650 Guards, 4,000 registered Cossacks, 24 pieces of artillery. Under Koniecpolski, though it was only numbered at 10,000 men. Due to the speed and manuverability of the Tartar army in a set battle it was difficult to use the old style Polish battle tactic of probing for a weak spot with light cavalry, keeping the infantry only as fire support and sending the Husars in at the appropriate time. Therefore the primary reason the Poles won here was their advantage in artillery and musketeers.

military engagement in which the king of Poland, John Casimir (reigned 1648-68), inflicted a severe defeat upon the rebel Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky. One of the largest military engagements in the mid 17th century Europe.

Jarema Wisniowiecki after the victory at Beresteczko, 1651

In 1648 Khmelnytsky organized an insurrection among the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who lived along the Dnieper River, against their Polish rulers, who had been trying to limit the Cossacks' autonomy by reducing their numbers, restraining them from conducting lucrative raids upon their Turkish and Crimean Tatar neighbors, and forcing them into a condition of serfdom. After a series of minor military victories, the Cossacks exacted the Compact of Zborów (1649) from the Polish king.

Although that settlement granted a large degree of autonomy to the "registered" Cossacks (i.e., those forming a privileged class), it failed to satisfy either the Poles or the "unregistered" Cossacks. Within 18 months, hostilities were resumed. The Cossacks were formally taken under the protection of the Turkish sultan (April 1651) and were reinforced by the sultan's vassal, the khan of the Crimean Tatars.

In June the Cossack-Tatar force advanced against the Poles and engaged them in battle at Beresteczko, on the Styr River in Volhynia south of Lutsk. The Cossacks' army was approximately three times larger than the Poles'. But in the midst of the fighting the Tatar khan and his force left the field of battle.

This action, which has been described by some historians as treasonous desertion and by others as a maneuver to establish another line of defense closer to the Dnieper to protect Kiev from an advancing Lithuanian army, enabled the numerically inferior Polish army to gain a victory over the Cossacks. Losses on the enemy side are extremely difficult to count, though they are counted in their thousands.

In reality the Tartars retreated due to overwhelming losses inflicted on their forces by the Crown armies and retreated in their usual manner. Sources are wild about the total number of forces in the battle on both sides. Many claim that between 100,000 and 250,000 Tartars/Cossacks took part in the engagement against a reported Polish army of about 60,000 men. This was indeed one of the largest armies conscripted by the Poles in any war during the 17th century.

Without a doubt it was one of the most powerful formations to have been formed and exist in the mid 1600's. Had necessary reforms been put into place and the independence war averted, many have said that the 'Deluge' would never have occured.

First victory of a Polish army in a major field battle against the Swedes during the Deluge (1648-1667). Won by Stefan Czarniecki it lifted the nations' spirit to carry on the fight despite overwhelming odds, the country occupied by Swedes & Muscovites. Swedish losses were at around 1500 dead, along with 200-300 captured (some higher officers), 20 standards and 200 tabors. The Poles lost around 50 dead, 100 wounded.

After the retreat of combined Swedish-Brandenburg armies from Warsaw in 1656, the Polish commanded decided to spare no expense in attacking the territories of Ducal (Polish) Prussia, which despite being a Polish fief had allied itself with the Swedish King.  One of the objectives during this campaign was to completley destroy Prussian territory to force Frederick Wilhelms' mindset in co-operating with the Swedish invader.  A victorious battle against a combined Swedish-Brandenburg-Prussian army conducted under the command of Field Hetman of Lithuania, 'Wincenty Gosiewski', during the Prussian campaign in the time of the Swedish-Muscovite Deluge on Poland in 1654-1660. The Polish-Lithuanian army was composed of Lithuanian units, Crown units (Poles), pospolite ruszenie (general levy) and tartars. The whole army was counted at about 12-13,000 men, most of it cavalry including about 2,000 tartars. Enemy forces under the Swedish General Waldeck were counted at much lower; 2,500 cavalry, 1,000 Prussian infantry (general levy) & 6 artillery pieces,, as well as about 800 cavalry under the command of the traitor, Boguslaw Radziwill. Other Swedish commanders in the area heard of the approach of the Polish-Lithuanian army, (namely General Walenrodt and Colonel  Josiass Waldeck), who would supply an additional 2,000+ infantry. Total forces were then were around 5,500 men, the bulk of which was Brandenburg infantry.

Gosikewski arrived at Prostek on the right bank of the river Elk and decided to immediately attack the Brandenburg forces, after which he would completley destroy any more advancing formations. He also sent the tartars for a preliminary confrontation with the forces of Wallenrod.

The Lithuanian units used the old trick of 'feinting retreat' (which worked so well at Kircholm, and by the tartars so many hundreds of years ago), against the Prussian infantry, which fell for this maneuver and moved across the river to the right side of the bank. Gosiewski's army surrounded the Prussian infantry, attacked, and their formations broke. Much of the infantry was forced back into the river, either drowing or being killed however a few units together with some artillery pieces managed to escape back to the other side of the bank. The Lithuanians and Tartars immediately charged after them capturing their base of operations very quickly. After this, together with some Tartars then moved to attack the 800 cavalry under Radzwill, which they managed to attack from behind and flanks. Most of his cavalry was killed, only a few successfully retreated the rest were captured, including Prince Radziwill himself. The battle ended at 2pm with a successful attack on the formations of General Waldeck  which were almost completley defeated. The rest of the army moved to attack the retreating infantry formations of Wallenrodt which was exhausted by a long march when retreating being continously attacked by Tartar units.

Total Swedish-Brandenburg losses in this battle amounted to about 5,000 men (over 75% of the entire army)), whilst Polish-Lithuanian army losses amounted to no more than around 200-250 dead. The defeat was so great that the population of Ducal Prussia demanded that Frederick Willhelm sign a treaty with the Poles immediately, however it never came to that.  Whilst this was a great victory, proving that the Polish-Lithuanian army was again a competent force, though victories continued to be  on / off affairs, it would be an uphill battle to ride the enemy from the country which had entrenched itself so completley.

Polish cavalry regiments under Czarniecki cross a strait and storm the castle defeating the Swedish garrison there.

The battle started 1100 the 14th november 1659. The Swedes under PfalzGraf von Sulchbach and Gustav Otto Stenbock defended with 5000men. They were good generals have defended well against several danish attacks earlier this year. However, much of the personel was freshh-recruits that had arrived as replacement. The attackers were danish,brandenburgian and dutch infantry and polish cavalry. The battle starts good for the swedes, not until the end phase of battle the excellent dutch infantry manages to outmaneuver the swedes and attacking their flank. When the swedes start a tactical withdrawal they are unable to perform it in good order. The Polish cavalry uses this opportunity and charges. "when the Swedish order of battle starts to crumble the polish cavalry charges with great success, swedes fall in great numbers under the polish charge".

Victories over the Muscovites during the 1660's Polish campaigns the aim of which was to ejected the Muscovites from Lithuania, there since the start of the 1654 deluge.

Czarniecki and the Lithuanian Hetman Sapieha completely annihilated the army of Chowanski, who were laying sieges without success the city of Lachowicze. Several months later the Muscovites were again defeated, in 1661. For the third time several weeks later. The victories forced the Muscovites to retreat from the capital of Lithuania, Wilno and sent them packing deep into the Berezyna. The Muscovites had between 70 and 80,000 men during the campaign, not counting units garrisoning various cities. (In fact the same forces used in the invasion of Lithuanian during the deluge). The reformed Polish army after the crisis and disappointments of the last ten years ballooned to 54,000 men by 1659 on the onset of the campaign. During the 1660 campaign the Poles captured, 130 standards, 50 pieces of artillery. Many Muscovite garrisons were forced to capitulate due to overwhelming artillery and infantry numbers of the Poles.

The campaign cost the Poles 3500-4000 dead and wounded. Another 1500-200 died due to sickness and disease. The Polish infantry lost the most, around 37% of the soldiers, followed by the dragoons - 16%. The Muscovites however lost an astounding 8-9,000 men dead. Cossacks' in support of the Muscovites an additional 2,000. In 1667 though, despite the victorious campaign a civil war erupted in Poland (some magnates weren't happy due to the King forcing pressing reforms still needed due to the Deluge) and the Poles and Muscovite signed a treaty partitioning the Ukraine between themselves. The right bank of the Ukraine a long with Kiev was to be ceded to the Muscovites for only 2 years, in reality it was never recovered. The Poles being too busy for the rest of the 17th century fighting the Turks (1672-1699).

A Polish Army commander by Hetman Sobieski, of 30,000 men, 65 artillery pieces ( a long with 2,000 Moldavians who didn't take part in the battle) successfully storms the captured Turkish controlled fortress of Chocim on the Dniester, given to the Turks in 1671 at the treaty of Buczacz when an unprepared and exhausted Poland had to pay a large indemnity and hand of Podolia to the Turks. In a dawn attack the Poles charged the Turkish defences, annihilating almost the entire Ottoman army within the space of a few hours. Victory was due to excellent work of the Polish infantry and dragoons. After the first defences were overcome, the Husars charged inside the fortress butchering the defending Ottoman army.

During the Ottoman retreat the Polish artillery successfully blew up one major bridge on which much of the enemy army was retreating - AS it was retreating. The Ottoman army of 30,000 men (50 artillery pieces) was completely and totally annihilated. Of the 30,000 men, only 2,000 survived and managed to retreat from the fortress and surrounding area, such was the magnitude of their loss. This victory propelled Sobieski to be elected the new Polish King on his return to Warsaw.
 

was another Pole elected to the Polish throne. He had won fame as the grand hetman, an outstanding military commander and strategist in another  wars with Sweden and later Turkey. He married Marie Casimire de la Grange d'Arquien, a woman of great political aspirations. The king's letters to Marysienka, as he endearingly called his queen, are masterpieces of Polish late seventeenth century literary language. At first, the king conducted a policy of close contacts with France, later however he entered into an alliance with the Habsburgs. His best known and greatest success was the relief of Vienna, besieged in 1683 by the Turks, where he scored a tremendous victory over the army of the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Christian inhabitants of southeast Europe live in perpetual fear of Muslim invasion. Tartar raiding parties laid waste to the countryside, abducting captives for slaves and ransom; Turkish occupation meant at the least pillage, sacrilege and extortion. For both Turk and Tartar the sole purpose of waging war was material gain. The Muslim invasion routes were through either the Danube Valley to the walls of Vienna, or through the Moldavian plain and southern Poland. Much of the Turkish effort was directed against Poland, whose heroic resistance earned her the name "propugnaculum Christianitatis" the bulwark of Christianity. In the winter of 1682-3, Poland and Austria came to an agreement providing for joint action against a Turkish invasion and promising relief in case of a direct attack on Vienna or Cracow. The threat of Turkish attack could not have been more real. A Turkish army of over 140,000 men started marching north in March of 1683, and arrived before the walls of Vienna on July 14, 1683.

Vienna was a strong fortress, but by the end of August the city was in mortal danger. Food and ammunition were inadequate, and on September 1, the Turks exploded a mine under the walls and captured one part of it. Outside the walls however the outlook was brighter. The defeat of a Turkish corp at Bisamberg allowed the concentration of the allied armies northwest of Vienna. Most importantly 30,000 Poles under their warrior-king Jan Sobieski had arrived.

Sobieski, who already had a considerable reputation against the Turks, assumed command. His plan was to force battle on the plain west of the city and annihilate the Turkish army, thus breaking the siege. The Turkish commander Kara Mustapha continued to focus much of his effort at capturing the city, therefore at the start of the battle only part of his army was prepared to meet the relief force. At four a.m. on the 12th of September 1683, the Austrians on the left wing moved forward and commenced battle, the Germans in the left center soon joined them. As the Turks were preparing to counterattack, the Polish infantry emerged on the right wing clearing the foothills dominating the plain. By four p.m. the cavalry had moved up and prepared to charge. At five p.m. Sobieski ordered the charge. One German-Austrian and three Polish cavalry groups, 20,000 men charged down hill, echelon after echelon, lead by King Jan Sobieski, straight for the center of the Turkish camp. As the cavalry burst into the Turkish lines, the garrison in the city attacked the Turkish rear. The demoralized Turks and Tartars soon broke and ran, and the battle turned into a route. At half past five Sobieski entered the Grand Viziers tent and the siege of Vienna was broken.

The Turks lost about 7-8,000 men on the field (according to recent studies), while the allies lost about 2000 killed and wounded.  (500 of these were Poles) Additionally another 2,000 were wounded. Vienna had been delivered in the nick of time; earlier that same day the Turks had exploded mines that had given them access to the city. "..Never a victory of so great importance cost so little blood.." (Taffe).

The Turks never recovered from the battle, while the Ottoman Empire survived for another two hundred plus years, from here on out it was merely a holding action.

An eyewitness account

"Raising the Siege of Vienna
John III Sobieski, King of Poland

1683

The Immortal God, (to whom Honour and Glory be Ascribed for Ever) has Blest us with so Signal a Victory, as scarce the Memory of Man can Equal: The Enemy was not only content to Raise the Siege of Vienna, and Leave us Masters of the Field; But also of all their Cannon, and Tents, with Inestimable Treasure, and clim'd over Mountains of Carcasses made by their own Body's in the Flight. My Eyes were never Blest before with so delightful a Prospect as to see my Soldiers follow here a great Drove of their Sheep and Oxen, and there a much greater Herd of Turkish Captives; Nor my Ear's e're Charm'd with so pleasing Musick, as the Howlings and Dying Groans of these Miserable Wretches: So great was their Hast, that the Prime Visier almost alone and forsaken of all, was forc't without the Ceremony of his Turbant, to take his Flight; But yet he left me Heir to his Tent and Riches whith were shewn me by a Renegado of his own Retinue.

I have Presented the Turkish Standard to His Holyness, who was Instrumental no less by His Money, than His Prayers, to their Overthrow. The Prime Vizor's Horse with all his Trappings, I reserv'd for my self; And tho he was so Fortunate in his Flight to Escape us, yet his Caymecam, or Lieutenant-General, with some of the most Considerable Bassa's [Pashas] fell by our Swords; But the approaching Night put a Stop to our Pursuit, and their Slaughter. Those Janizaries which were left behind in the Mines and Trenches, we thought not worth the dulling of our Swords, therefore we made but one Funeral Pile for 'em all, and Burnt 'em.

In the Action there were about Thirty Thousand Turks kill'd; besides Tartars, and One Hundred Thousand Tents taken. Our Souldiers, and the Burghers of Vienna, were Two whole Nights, and One Day, in Rifling their Tents and Body's, and I believe a Week would scarce suffice to finish it.

The Rarities which were found in the Prime Vizor's Tent, were no less Numerous than Strange and Surprising, as very curious Parrots, and some Birds of Paradise, with all his Banios, and Fountains, and some Ostriches, which he Chose rather to Kill, than let 'em fall Alive into our Hands; Nay his Dispair and Jealousy transported him so far, as to Destroy his very Women for the same Reason.

The whole Army Attributes the Glory of this Victory to God, and Us, and all the Princes of the Empire, with the Great Officers, as the Dukes of Bavaria and Lorrain, Prince Waldek, etc. were so far transported with my Valour and Success, that their Thanks and Praises were more Numerous, than was their Fears before; and Count Staremberg the Governour, Saluted me with the Title of his Mighty Deliverer. The Common People in my going to and from the Churches, pay'd their Veneration even to my very Garments, and made their Cry's and Acclamations reach the Sky, of Long Live the King of Poland.

In the battle we Lost some of our Friends, as Prince Halicki, and the Treasurer of our Household. The Reverend Marinus Daviano, heapt on me his Pray'rs and Blessings, and told me he saw a White Dove fluttering o're the Army, which he look'd upon as an happy Augure of our Victory.

We are now on our March towards Hungary; taking the Advantage of their Distraction, to Defeat the Remainder of their scatter'd Troops, and Surprize Gran or Newheufell. I have all the Princes of the Empire my Companions in this Enterprise, who tell me they are ready to follow such a Leader not only into Hungary, but to the End of the World.

The Prime Vizor being unable to put a Stop to our Pursuit, told his Eldest Son Mahomet Han, That he must now bid Adieu to all his Greatness, and never expect to be in Safety, whilst their Lye's one Stone upon another in the Walls of Vienna, but withal bid him hasten to the Grand Seignor and Demand a Speedy Succour, to whom his Son Reply'd, That he knew him too well for that, and there was nothing for 'em now to Rely on but their Flight.

I am just now going to take Horse, and all my way for Two Hungarian Miles together, are so strew'd with the Carcasses of Men, Horses, and Camels, that the Stench of 'em would be insupportable to any but a Soldier.

I have sent several Dispatches to Forein Princes to give Notice of this Action, but the King of France was forgotten.

I Rejoice to see our Son Alexander of so Clear and Undanted a Courage who always stuck to me in my most iminent Dangers: and made the first onset on a Body of Turkish Spahn, with that Courage that he put 'em soon to flight, and Receiv'd the Applauses of the whole Army. He has Contracted a very Intimate Friendship with the young Duke of Bavaria with whom he equally devided the spoyl, This Prince has been very Assiduous in his Services to me; therefore I have presented him three of my Horses, the Bassa of Egypt's Tent and Standard, and ten Pieces of Cannon. To his Sister the Dauphiness, a Locket of Diamonds. Yet there Remains such heaps of their Colours and Symeters in our possession as are not to be numbred.

All my Countrey men March't with the same Bravery to the Relief of Vienna, as the Souldiers of Godfrey of Bullein did to the Holy Land, and the miraculous Cross that you presented me with (which was his companion in that Expedition) I Believe Contributed no less to our Victory.

Thanks be to Heaven, now the Half-Moon Triumphs no longer o're the Cross, And 'twas thrown down from St. Stephen's Steeple in Vienna (whom it had o'retopt so long) immediately on the Defeat: Neither have the Turks any occasion to upbraid us with their Blasphemous Mahometan Proverb. Ye Christians where is Your God?

The Turks' Prayer against the Christians

Eternal God and creator of all things, and thou O Mahomet his sacred and divine prophet. We beseech thee let us not dread the Christians, who are so mean and silly to rely on a crucified god. By the power of thy right hand, so strengthen ours that we may surround this foolish people, on every side, and utterly destroy them. At length fulfill our prayers and put these miscreants into our hands, that we may establish thy throne for ever in Mecca, and sacrifice all those enemies of our most holy religion at thy tomb. Blow us with thy mighty breath like swarms of flies into their quarters, and let the eyes of these infidels bedazelled with the lustre of our moon. Consume them with thy fiery darts, and blind them with the dust which they themselves have raised. Destroy them all in thine anger. Break all their bones in pieces, and consume the flesh and blood of those who defile thy sacrifice, and hang the sacred light of circumcision on their cross. Wash them with showers of many waters, who are so stupid to worship gods they know not: and make their Christ a son to that God who ne're begot him. Hasten therefore their destruction we humbly entreat thee, and blot out their name and religion, which they glory so much in, from off the face of the earth, that they may be no more, who condemn and mock at thy law. Amen. "

A Letter From the King of Poland to His Queen. In Which is Incerted Many Particulars Relating to the Victories Obtained Against the Turks. With a Prayer of the Turks against the Christians. (London: 1683).

Three day Battle of Parkany several days after Vienna.  As important a victory as Vienna, however it could have ended in disaster.

The three day battle of Parkany several days after Vienna. In this battle Sobieski was almost killed: It was actually as much a decisives battle as Vienna, maybe even more so. On Day 1, Polish dragoons galloped up to the lead formations of Ottoman janissaries. What they didn't know was that Ottoman light cavalry was hiding in the woods.Before they could retreat the Ottoman cav. charged killing many of them. Sobieski was leading the formation and he was saved by a young German dragoon at a cost to his own life. On this first day the Polish army lost complete discipline and retreated in a panic, a sign of what was to come as the 18th century slowly krept forward into being.

The Austrians had to stem the panicked Poles and managed to stop the situation getting out of control. Despite this close to a 1,000 Poles died that day. In other words the losses were 2x as high than during the lifting of the Siege of Vienna.

Sobieski was psychologically wrecked after this encounter, the Austrian officers couldn't hide their happiness at the conduct of the Polish troops as always jealous of the decisive role they played during the lifting of the Siege. Sobieski however recovered, together with Prince Lotarinski he set out to destroy the Ottoman army numbering 25,000-35,000 men which were about equal those of the Allied army of around 30-35,000 men.  By day 3 the Ottomans were however completely beaten with casualties much higher than inflicted on them during the Siege of Vienna. The victory was complete, only about 700-800 Turks managed to retreat across the Dunaj..with a further 2.000 surviving.  The Christian army took 1,200 prisoners. The Christian victors were unnecessarily cruel to the Ottoman captives taking their revenge over the near disaster and loss of life that had taken place only 2 days before. Sobieski and Prince Lotarynski tried their best to hold their men off, however they were largely unsuccessful. After this victory the Christian army split into to, the Poles successful in forcing the capitulation of Esztergom, where more unnecessary cruelties occured. After these insubordinations it proved to be impossible to continue the campaign, it was decided for the Polish Army to return back home to the Commonwealth. Soon the Wallachian campaigns would begin..

The Sejm had now adopted the Liberum veto system, the rule of unanimity, which allowed a single member to halt all proceedings with a cry of nie pozwalam - 'I do not permit'. The invitation to corruption, obvious enough, was accepted eagerly by outsiders; Russia, in particular, presented herself as the guarantor of the 'noble democracy' which kept the Commonwealth so conveniently weak.

The eighteenth century is the focus of intense arguments about Polish history. One school of thought sees it as a shameful time, in which the nobility deliberately allowed the Commonwealth to lapse into anarchy and into fatal dependence on its hostile neighbours for motives of blind egotism and greed. Others point out that Poland was the victim of its virtues. Only Britain had developed a more effective system of early democracy and constitutional monarchy, and Poland-Lithuania remained in some respects more tolerant than Britain. It was hardly Poland's fault that its neighbours to east and west were the absolutist states of Russia and Prussia, politically and culturally far less advanced.

The old saying nierzadem Polska stoi - roughly, 'the essential thing about Poland is unrule' - was not contemptuous. Given a chance, this fluid combination of the King, the Sejm and the gentry could have evolved towards an enlightened parliamentary democracy. Poland's tragedy is that it did so, but only when it was already too late.

Poland's weakness was made manifest in 1733 when Russian armies intervened to depose the elected king, Stanisław Leszczyński, and replace him by a more pliable monarch. But there followed a period of relative peace, in which intellectual energy revived: a season of new ideas for the political and economic revival of the Commonwealth. 
 

the son of John George of Saxony, of the Wettin house, king of Poland from 1697, and elector of Saxony from 1694. He attempted to introduce a Saxon-style absolute monarchy in Poland, which provoked many conflicts. Against Poland's real interests, he allied himself with the tsar Peter I and involved Poland in the so-called Northern War, originally fought by Sweden and Russia. When Charles XII of Sweden invaded Poland, part of the gentry deposed Augustus and elected Stanislaus Leszczynski in his place. The majority of the gentry supported Augustus II who, however, had to abdicate when the Swedish army entered Saxony in 1706. He regained the Polish crown in 1709, following the defeat of Charles XII at Poltava by Peter I's army. Under his reign, Poland ceased playing any major role in international relations.

As an opponent of Augustus II's policies, he was put on the Polish throne by King Charles XII of Sweden during the Northern War in which Poland was involved by Augustus II acting in alliance with the tsar Peter I. Following the defeat of Charles XII, he had to leave Poland and Augustus II regained the throne. Stanislaus' daughter, Maria, married Louis XV and became queen of France. After the death of Augustus II he was again elected king of Poland, but Russian and Saxon intervention forced him to abdicate in 1736. He kept his royal title. From the king of France he received the Duchy of Lorraine for life, and he enjoyed an excellent reputation as a ruler. He was an intellectual, a protector of arts and sciences, rather than a politician

the son of Augustus II, elector of Saxony and king of Poland from 1733. He was brought to the throne following an armed intervention by Russian and Saxon forces and the deposition of the elected king, Stanislaus Leszczynski. Augustus was an indolent and incapable monarch, but he did enjoy popularity among certain sections of the gentry, because he did not interfere in state affairs and tolerated the licence of the magnates and their lesser peers. Under his reign, Poland completely lost her significance on the international arena. In the history of Poland, the Saxon period became synonymous with backwardness and inertia which push state into decline. During the times of Augustus III, the Enlightenment ideas began reaching Poland and the first projects for the reform of the state were drawn up, though without any involvement on the part of the king.

Nobody expected much of him. He had been the lover of Catherine II of Russia, and she, through her Polish contacts in the Czartoryski family, engineered his election. But almost at once this apparently feeble courtier began manoeuvering to increase the power of the Crown, to reform and modernise the political structure of Poland by reducing the influence of the magnates, and to restore some of the Commonwealth's lost independence. A crisis with Russia opened when he attempted to curtail the Sejm's unanimity rule. The Russians responded by cynically organising the Orthodox and Protestant interests against him. Stanisław August survived this challenge, but in 1768 there broke out what was in effect the first Polish insurrection in the cause of independence, the Confederation of Bar.

This was a nobles' rising, strongly Catholic in character, and directed not only against Russian interference but against the King's apparent compliance with Russian pressure. It failed, after four years of war against both Russian and royal forces, and in 1772 Frederick the Great of Prussia was able to persuade Catherine and Joseph II, the young Austrian Emperor, that the 'chaotic' condition of Poland justified a forcible and drastic reduction of the Commonwealth. Through this 'First Partition', Russia, Prussia and Austria annexed almost a third of Poland's territory and thirty-five per cent of its inhabitants. In the style of many future crimes of aggression, the Partition was proclaimed to be a high-minded action designed to secure the stability of Europe. But, as Norman Davies has put it, the Commonwealth 'was not destroyed because of its internal anarchy. It was destroyed because it repeatedly tried to reform itself'.

In his mutilated kingdom, Stanisław August did his best to press forward with reforms. The army was reorganised and an attempt was made to relieve the condition of the peasantry. In 1773 the National Education Commission was set up, in effect the first ministry of education in Europe. In 1788 there met the Four-year Sejm, dominated by men of high intellectual calibre who had absorbed with enthusiasm the ideas of the Enlightenment in the West.

The Constitution of the Third of May, one of the proudest achievements of all Polish history, was their work. It was drafted and passed in 1791, at a moment when most of the reformers' parliamentary opponents were absent from the Sejm. It was the zenith of Poland's astonishing revival at the end of the century. The Constitution's provisions, had they ever been applied, would have transformed the nation. The Sejm's disastrous unanimity rule was to be dropped, the throne was to be made hereditary rather than elective and a Cabinet (including the king and the Roman Catholic primate ) was to be established: three reforms which would have given the state real authority at last. The town citizens were to be given the same civil rights as the nobility, and the peasantry was declared to be under the protection of the law of the land.

the son of a magnate family, he became king in 1764 as a protege of the Russian empress Catherine II. He was an enlightened man, well educated and sensitive. He did a lot to raise the level of the Polish elites and modernise the country. Politically and from the point of view of its international position, the Polish-Lithuanian state was already in a state of decline, and measures introduced by the king and his enlightened associates served the future rather than the present day. The king was a knowledgeable protector of the arts and culture. He hoped that Poland would preserve its independence thanks to the magnanimity of Catherine the Great. One of his greatest achievements was his active participation in the drafting of the Constitution of May 3rd of 1791. However, when faced with the strong opposition of the empress, he quickly capitulated and agreed to abdicate. His abdication spelt the end of the independent Polish-Lithuanian state
 

Austria did not take part this time. But Russia annexed another immense slice of what had belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, while Prussia took Gdańsk on the Baltic and a swathe of western Poland stretching from the Poznań region to Toruń on the middle Vistula. The Sejm, meeting at Grodno, was forced to recognise the Second Partition and repeal the Constitution of the Third of May 

But Stanisław August had lost his authority. the only power now visible in the land was the Russian army. As in France in the same period, the mood in Poland which had begun with constitutional reform in the name of Reason was stoked up by foreign invasion into a blaze of radicalism that was revolutionary and patriotic at once.

An army mutiny in March 1794 exploded into national insurrection. On 24 March, in the ancient market square of Kraków, Tadeusz Kosciuszko (1746-1817) took the oath to restore the independence of Poland and establish 'general liberty'. Kosciuszko, a professional soldier who had trained in France and fought in the American War of Independence, was well aware of the revolutionary surge in Polish opinion and saw that his only chance was to enlist the peasant masses in the national cause. On 7 May, he issued the Manifesto of Połaniec, abolishing serfdom and promising that the new insurrectionary government would defend the peasants against their landlords. At the battle of Racławice, the charge of peasants armed with scythes and pikes stormed through the Russian guns and put the enemy to flight. Warsaw rose against the occupiers, led by the tailor Jan Kiliński and by a committee openly supporting the ideas of Jacobin revolution in France. In both Wilno and Warsaw, leaders of the Confederation of Targowica were hanged - including a bishop - and there were massacres of those suspected or rumoured to support Russia.

But the desperate courage of the Poles and the skill of their beloved Kościuszko were not enough to hold the combined armies of Russia and Prussia. Kościuszko was defeated, wounded and captured at the battle of Maciejowice in October 1794. On 4 November, General Suvorov captured Praga, the suburb of Warsaw east of the Vistula, and the Cossacks massacred its inhabitants. The capital surrendered, and the King was taken off into exile, finally abdicating in November 1795.

A hundred and twenty-three years were to pass before a sovereign Polish state reappeared. Poland had 'descended into the grave', as the Romantic poets were to put it, but it was an unquiet grave. Poland was not dead, and it was not only the Poles who tried to resurrect her.

France, at war with all Europe, did not abandon the Polish cause, though ruthless calculation was as important as fraternal emotion in French actions. Napoleon allowed General Jan Henryk Dabrowski to raise two legions of Polish exiles in Italy (their 'March, march, Dabrowski' song became Poland's national anthem) and another legion was organised in Germany. They served France loyally, in part by helping to combat the national insurrection in Spain, and in 1807 Napoleon established the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a satellite state carved out of the Polish territories annexed by Prussia which soon included not only Warsaw but Kraków and a part of the Austrian zone.

But with Napoleon's defeat, Poland again left the map. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 changed the Partition boundaries: the Prussians fell back some way to the west, Kraków became a 'free city' in practice subject to the partitioning powers, and most of the old Grand Duchy of Warsaw, including the capital, became a semi-autonomous region of the Russian Empire, the so-called 'Kingdom of Poland'.

Abroad, all those who opposed the Holy Alliance, the block of three reactionary powers which not only suppressed Poland but seemed to threaten liberty throughout Europe, gave at least sentimental support to the Polish cause. It was the sense of belonging to a 'liberal international' that encouraged a series of Polish national conspiracies, especially in the Congress Kingdom.

Matters came to a crisis in 1830; the July Revolution in France spread waves of democratic unrest and turbulence across the Continent, while the Tsar prepared to send Russian troops (with Polish regiments) to suppress the new and liberal state of Belgium.

The November Rising began on the night of 29 November 1830 when a small party of officer-cadets attacked the Belvedere Palace, residence of the Russian viceroy, and another group captured the Arsenal with the assistance of the Warsaw population. The rising rapidly developed into a national insurrection, and the armies of the Congress Kingdom fought Russian troops in open warfare for almost a year before going down to defeat. But the leadership of the rising, ill-prepared, proved divided and confused; the liberal nations of the West, Britain and France, did not come to Poland's aid, although thousands of Poles secretly crossed frontiers to join the insurrection; and the strategy of the generals did not match the courage and professionalism of their soldiers. Warsaw was recaptured by the Russians in September 1831, and by late October organised resistance was over.

The consequences of the November Rising were grim and long-lasting. General Paskievitch in the Kingdom and General Muraviev in lithuania carried out their own versions of 'pacification': hundreds were executed, and some 180,000 Poles were deported, many in irons to Siberia. The civil service was purged, and the Kingdom lost its relative autonomy, to be ruled by decree. Polish institutions like the Bank, the army, the Sejm and the Commission for National Education were systematically abolished.
 

Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki wrote verse and drama, mystical and moral and yet intensely political, that still suffuse and inform the Polish imagination; Joachim lelewel wrote Poland's history; Frederic Chopin composed; Cyprian Kamil Norwid developed a new poetry whose innovation and genius was only recognised in the following century.

This was a Romantic culture. Neither the old Age of Reason nor the optimistic, liberal mood of the contemporary West could answer the questions the Poles now put to themselves: why had Heaven allowed the martyrdom of their country when it sought only justice, and how - when - could it be resurrected from the tomb? Against the background of intense Catholic faith, there developed the haunted idea of Messianism which - in its extreme form presented Poland as the collective Christ, crucified to redeem the nations, one day to be resurrected by a new embodiment of the Holy Spirit.

At home, the earth continued to heave over the buried nation. Another national rising was planned for 1846, but ended in multiple disaster. In Prussian Poland, the leaders were arrested; Krakow rose, but the rebellion was rapidly crushed by Austrian and Russian troops. In Galicia, the portion of southern Poland held by Austria which stretched from Krakow eastwards to the fortress city of Lwow and on into the Ukraine, 1846 did not just fail but turned into a slaughter of Poles by Poles. In this overcrowded province, nearly five million Polish and Ukrainian peasants worked the lands of a tiny class of great landowning magnates. As the rising began, the Austrians were able to provoke a peasant rebellion against the landlords which turned into a massacre; some two thousand estate owners and their families were murdered, and their manors burned down.

The fiasco of 1846 was a turning-point in the history of the Partitions. From Kosciuszko's rising onwards, Polish leaders had been able to rely on peasant support, promising an end to rural servitude in return for military service. Now, after Galicia, the Powers saw that they could cut off this source of strength by exploiting social divisions in Polish society. In 1848, Count Franz von Stadion, the Austrian governor of Galicia, offered the peasants possession of their own land and the abolition of feudal labour services. The Russians took a similar course in 1864.

As a result of the failure two years before, the Polish national leaders were too demoralised and disorganised to take a major part in the liberal revolutions which blazed across Europe in 1848. Minor rebellions in Kraków and Lwów were bombarded into surrender by the Austrians. In Prussian Poland, a National Committee sprang up in Poznań seeking autonomy within Prussia, but the movement was suppressed a few months later as the Hohenzollern monarchy regained control in Berlin. But Polish exiles fought 'for your freedom and ours' in almost every other nation in Europe during 1848-9. The poet Mickiewicz raised a legion in Italy, General Ludwik Mierosławski (who had led the ill-fated 1846 rising in Poznań) fought in Sicily and in southern Germany, General Henryk Dembiński and the legendary General Józef Bem commanded armies in the Hungarian national revolution. In the 1848 'springtime of nations', European sympathy with the Polish cause - rising all through the idealistic and revolutionary movements of the first half of the century - reached a peak, from which it then declined. Europe now entered a period of huge wars between empires and of internal class struggle, in which the fate of a 'failed' nation-state seemed steadily less relevant.
 

O Lithuania, my country, thou
Art like good health; I never knew till now
How precious, till I lost thee. Now I see
The beauty whole, because I yearn for thee.

 O Holy Maid, who Czestochowa's shrine
Dost guard and on the Pointed Gateway shine
And watchest Nowogrodek's pinnacle!
As Thou didst heal me by a miracle
(For when my weeping mother sought Thy power,
I raised my dying eyes, and in that hour
My strength returned, and to Thy shrine I trod
For life restored to offer thanks to God),
So by a miracle Thou 'lt bring us home.
Meanwhile, bear off my yearning soul to roam
Those little wooded hills, those fields beside
The azure Niemen, spreading green and wide,
The vari-painted cornfields like a quilt,
The silver of the rye, the whetfields' gilt;
Where amber trefoil, buck-wheat white as snow,
And clover with her maiden blushes grow,
And all is girdled with a grassy band
Of green, whereon the silent peear trees stand.

 Such were the fields where once beside a rill
Among the birch trees beside a hill
There stood a manor house, wood-built on stone;
From far away the walls with whitewash shoe,
The whiter as relieved by the dark green
Of poplars, that the autumn winds would screen.
It was not large, but neat in every way,
And had a mighty barn; three stacks of hay
Stood near it, that the thatch could not contain;
The neighbourhood was clearly rich in grain;
And from the stooks that every cornfield filled
As thick as stars, and from the ploughs that tilled
The black earthed fields of fallow, broad and long,
Which surely to the manor must belong,
Like well-kept flower beds -- everyone could tell
That plenty in that house and order dwell.
The gate wide open to the world declared
A hospitable house to all who fared.

English translation by Kenneth R. Mackenzie 
Based on the bilingual (Polish-English) edition 
of Pan Tadeusz by The Polish Cultural Foundation, London, 1986.

The Austrian Partition - Galicia and Austrian Silesia - was the most lenient. Here the ever-changing efforts of a multinational empire to reach a stable relationship with its subjects - Germans, Czechs, Magyars, Croats, Poles and Ukrainians, to name only the larger population groups - allowed the Poles to acquire considerable autonomy in Galicia where they numbered about three million, almost half the population of the province. They - or rather the highly conservative Polish landowners - ran their own internal affairs, fostered Polish culture without much hindrance, and for much of the period used Polish as an official language. As the Empire was itself Catholic, Polish religion raised no problems. Galicia was economically backward and rural, and the Polish nobility, nervous both about peasant radicalism and the rise of the Ukrainian minority (about forty-one per cent of the province's population in 1880), relied on the Austrians to protect them and became thoroughly nervous about ideas of national resurrection.

In Prussia, by contrast, the Poles - just under three million of them - were a minority. Up to the 1848 crisis, they had been handled with tolerance. But in the second half of the century, as the policy of Germanisation set in, they were treated increasingly as a threat.

Their position became far more exposed in 1871, when Germany united into an empire under Prussian leadership. Bismarck, who had been the chief minister to the Prussian King, now became the first Chancellor of the Hohenzollern Empire. Within a few years, the Prussian Poles were embroiled in the Kulturkampf - Bismarck's attempt to break the influence of the Vatican and bring the Catholic Church throughout the German dominions under the control of the state. Bismarck did not launch the Kulturkampfsimply to break the national spirit of the Catholic Poles - though he certainly hoped for such a result. Neither did he attack the Church simply because he, like the rest of the Prussian ruling class, was a Lutheran Protestant. His central purpose was to destroy or at least disable any institution which challenged the absolute authority of the German state. But the effect of Bismarck's onslaught against their church, coupled with his violent contempt for the very idea of Poland, faced the Poles in Prussia with the most serious danger to their cultural survival that they had yet encountered.

They became the target of campaigns not only against their faith but against their education and finally against their land. Government-financed waves of German farmer-colonists were sent east to buy out the Poles and settle. On all three fronts the Poles of the Poznań region and West Prussia successfully defended themselves through a generally defiant Catholic leadership (Cardinal Ledóchowski was imprisoned for two years ), and through a network of self-help organisations which not only blocked the German colonisation plans but in some areas bought back farms that had been purchased from Poles.

Bismarck regarded Poland as a 'seasonal state', a sort of sandbank which appeared in times of international crisis but which had no title to be considered a nation. The keystone of his European strategy was the maintenance of peace between the German and Russian Empires through their common interest in the partition of Poland. After his fall in 1890, when he was succeeded by Chancellor Caprivi, German policy changed towards a hostility to Russia that was to reach its climax in 1914, but this brought no relief to the Prussian Poles, now regarded as a security risk in a military frontier zone.

Of all three fragments of Poland, the Russian partition was easily the most oppressive. It contained the largest block of Poland's former population: there were over five million Polish subjects of the Tsar, of whom about 4.3 million lived in the 'Kingdom of Poland' and the remainder either in the old lithuanian territories or in the eastern Ukraine.

After 1831, the Kingdom was in effect under military occupation. Polish culture was treated as subversive, and the Catholic religion was regarded as a disqualification from official employment. The modest political liberty allowed in Prussia and still more in Galicia was unthinkable in Russian Poland. Polish politics, to the extent that there were any beyond an unfocused hatred of anything Russian, could only develop as conspiracies prepared to use violence to maintain themselves and armed revolution to achieve their ends. Between the Russian tradition of total, utterly centralised and despotic authority and Poland's history of free speech and limited power, no stable compromise was possible.

After the Russian setback in the Crimean War (1854-6), conspiracies were formed among the thousands of Polish students studying at Russian universities and there was a new restiveness in the Kingdom. The new Tsar Alexander II, who had come to the throne in 1855, warned the Poles that they would win no concessions, but in 1860 patriotic demonstrations took place in Warsaw, followed by more in the following year which were crushed by the gunfire of Russian troops. Plans were laid for another national insurrection, which exploded prematurely in January 1863.
 

Wymarsz powstańców ze wsi w 1863 roku. 
Ok. 1867. Akwarela, tektura. 17,3 x 28,7 cm.
Muzeum Narodowe, Warszawa.

The odds, however, were hopeless. Feeble attempts by France, Britain and Austria to mediate with the Tsar were ignored. As in 1830, thousands of Poles came from Austria and Prussia and from all the emigrations in the west to fight and die, but the Rising itself did not spread beyond the Russian partition. After fifteen months of desperate courage, the insurrection crumbled away, and its last leadership, headed by Romuald Traugutt, was hanged outside the w arsaw Citadel.

The January Rising failed mainly because, without the intervention of a foreign power , partisans could not defeat a Russian army which came to number nearly 350,000 men. But its collapse was hastened by a clever stroke of politics. The underground 'government' had - as usual - promised the peasants full ownership of their land and an end to labour duties for the landlord. But in March 1864, Alexander II proclaimed a version of these reforms as his own, on behalf of the Russian government, depriving the Rising of much of its appeal to the rural poor.
 

Under the Partitions, two broad strategies were open to patriotic Poles. One was the Romantic tradition of armed insurrection, a course which turned out to be hopeless in practical terms unless there was full-scale support from other European nations - which never materialised. The other was to preserve and build up the cultural and economic strength of the nation, which involved a degree of compromise and collaboration with the partitioning Powers.

This second strategy, known as 'Organic Work', dominated the decades after the failure of the 1863 Rising. In Galicia, the agrarian slum of Europe, there was little industrial development before the end of the century. In Prussian Poland, the self-help policies of the Poles, combined with the economic dynamism of Germany, gave them a prosperous farming interest and useful experience in finance and industry . But it was in Russian Poland, in spite of ferocious political and cultural suppression, that the most vigorous changes took place.

Polish society there had been shattered as much by the land reforms of 1864 as by the defeat of the Rising. The easy-going old life of the rural gentry came abruptly to an end, with the loss of unpaid labour. A part of the petty nobility left the land and moved to Warsaw where - barred from any responsible post they became the embryo of the turbulent, independent Warsaw intelligentsia that survives today. Others, however, went to Russia itself, to study, to work as managers and - often - to encounter the new Russian generation of revolutionary conspirators. Professor Leslie records that the Polish population of St Petersburg rose from 11,000 in 1864 to 70,000 by 1914.

In 1851, the tariff barrier between Russia and the Kingdom had been abolished; in the years after 1863, Russia's protectionist policies cut off the supply of industrial goods from the West. This was the opportunity for Russian Poland, still economically far more advanced than the rest of the Empire. There were few Polish capitalists, but German investment poured in to finance industrial development; large-scale industry appeared not only in the boom town of Lódź, whose textiles clothed all Russia, but in the coal and iron basin of the Dabrowa and in Warsaw in the form of heavy and light engineering.

By 1900, Poland accounted for an eighth of all Russian production. Organic Work, at a first glance, seemed to be paying off. But in fact it was already a discredited creed.

There were two reasons for this. One was social: the new Polish working class was underpaid and atrociously housed, and - in Russian Poland - almost totally deprived of trade union protection until 1906. Revolutionary socialist ideas spread rapidly , accelerated by the slump at the end of the century. On the land, the end of serfdom and land reform had only created further problems as a rural population with a soaring birth rate tried to fend off starvation on tiny plots of soil. Many gave up the struggle and emigrated, from Prussian Poland to the United States and to the Ruhr in western Germany, then from the old Kingdom, and finally in an enormous exodus from overcrowded Galicia which took over one million - Poles, Jews and Ukranians - abroad, mostly to the Americas, between l870 and 1914.

The second reason for the fading of the Organic Work strategy was political. If it was not to degenerate into mere opportunism, only making life easier for those with money and position, it had to show returns - an appreciative readiness of the partition Powers to allow the Poles to run their own affairs. But the opposite was true: in Russia and Germany, above all, imperialist russianising and germanising policies were growing rapidly more oppressive.

(...)

1914, the novelist Joseph Conrad decided to take his family on a continental holiday. He wanted to show his English wife and children the city of Kraków, where he had grown up and where he had buried his father, the revolutionary Apollo Korzeniowski. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, successor to the imperial Austro-Hungarian throne, had been shot at Sarajevo a few weeks before. Like most ordinary Europeans, Conrad paid little attention to this. As a result, the outbreak of the First World War caught the Conrads in Krakow, in what was now the enemy territory of Austria-Hungary, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that they managed to escape internment and make their way back to Britain.

On the night of the general mobilisation, as army cars rushed hooting through the streets and crowds of unwilling young men slouched to the barracks to have their hair cut off and their uniforms fitted, Conrad and a group of Polish friends gathered in the smoking-room of his hotel and contemplated the future.

'The big room was lit up only by a few tall candles, just enough for us to see each other's faces by. I saw in those faces the awful desolation of men whose country, torn in three, found itself engaged in the contest with no will of its own, and not even the power to assert itself at the cost of life. All the past was gone, and there was no future, whatever happened; no road which did not seem to lead to moral annihilation.' Conrad, recalling the scene a year later, wrote: 'I am glad I have not so many years left me to remember that appalling feeling of inexorable fate, tangible, palpable, come after so many cruel years, a figure of dread, murmuring with iron lips the final words: Ruin - and Extinction. (Joseph Conrad, Notes on Lifes and Letters, J. M. Dent & Sons, London, 1921, p. 229, P.238)

Four years later, Poland regained her independence. The war which seemed to promise only ruin and extinction led to the collapse of all the three partitioning empires. But there are lessons in that memory of Conrad's which should never be forgotten. Only hindsight or the bravest contemporary guess could identify those baleful days of 19l4 with the beginning of Poland's resurrection. Only the most absurd nationalism could attribute that resurrection to the actions of the Poles themselves. There was nothing inevitable about Poland's revival in 1918, which was the result of an incredible stroke of fortune. In 1914, there was no lack of Polish politicians struggling for the independence of their country, openly or underground, at liberty or in prisons. But Conrad in that Kraków hotel, like most Poles, shared only their aspirations, not their optimism.

(...)