poland history

The Poles who were West Slavic people established Poland in the late 5th century. History was first written in the 10th century about Poland when the Polish nation changed into Christianity in 966. Prince Mieszko I was the first ruler and his son, Boleslaw I, was the first king of Poland. This established the Piast dynasty that lasted from 966 to 1370. During the Piast dynasty there where Piast kings with a lot of rivalries from nobility and Bohemian and Germanic invasions that made Poland a very troubled country. The last king of the dynasty was Casimir III, crowned in 1333. He extended Polish influence eastward to Lithuania and Russia. He acquired Pomerania from the Teutonic Knights and shifted borders between Poland and Germany. During his 37-year reign a university was established, laws were made more organized, castles grew strong, and minority groups were given protection (Grolier).

The Polish nobility selected Jagello as grand duke of Lithuania in 1836, to rule by arranging his marriage to the Polish Princess Jadwiga. The initial personal union with Lithuania was formalized only 200 years later by the Union of Lublin in 1569 and it produced a state that extended from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south (Grolier).

Poland’s Golden Age started when Poland won the Battle of Tannenberg in 1410 against the Teutonic Order. The Polish would deal very well with threats from other countries. It was slowly devolving to rule under nobility that led the state to its disintegration (Grolier).

The Polish Renaissance of the 16th century produced a flourishing of arts and intellectual life. Some examples are the scientific work of Copernicus and the lyric poetry of Jan Kochanowski. Protestantism grew in Poland during this time and the Jewish community, which has been around Poland since the 14th century, won the right of self-government. The economic wealth at this time was based on grain exports (Grolier).

The Jagello dynasty ended in 1572, with the death of Sigismund II. The power was then transferred from aristocracy to the broader class of nobility called the szlachta. From 1573 to the last partition of Poland in 1795 the Republican Commonwealth was organized by a system of elective monarchy and of a Sejm (Parliament), meaning each noble had a vote. Even though the kings had to follow the idea of szlachta rule, they still used their own idea...

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...e the best. Two examples are the fall of Jan Olszewski, because he tried making a list of former high ranking communist collaborators, and the first women to be Prime Minister, Hanna Suchocka, who lost by a no-confident vote. The people split in groups and accused Walesa and the roundtable negotiators to sell out to communist when it was they that could help if the economy falls (Szczepkowski).

In 1995, Walesa was beat by Aleksander Kwasniewski, whose campaign asked people to look into the future and forget about the past, for presidency. The church suffered because it made many efforts to influence politics and tried to influence Poland to become a post communist society, but sometimes backfired (Szczepkowski).

Bibliography

Culture in People’s Poland. Ed. Tadeusz Galinski.

Poland: a Country of Study. Ed. Glenn E. Curtis 3rd ed. Lanham:

Bernan Press, 1994.

“Poland.” Britannica Online. 2001. Encyclopedia Britannica. 12

November 2001 <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=115127&tocid=0&query=poland>

“Poland.” 1998 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. CD-ROM.

Danbury: Grolier Interactive Inc., 1998.