POLAND A HISTORY ADAM ZAMOYSKI
Copyright
HarperPress
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Published by HarperPress 2009
FISRT EDITION
Copyright © Adam Zamoyski Ltd 2009
The Polish Way published by John Murray in 1987
Adam Zamoyski asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover shows detail from a parchment scroll of 1605, showing a member of the Husaria, the Polish winged cavalry
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Ebook Edition © September 2009 ISBN: 978-0-007-32273-2
Version: 2015-12-14
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
MAPS
TABLES
NOTE ON POLISH PRONUNCIATION
PREFACE
ONE People, Land and Crown
TWO Between East and West
THREE The Jagiellon Experience
FOUR Religion and Politics
FIVE Kingdom and Commonwealth
SIX The Reign of Erasmus
SEVEN Democracy versus Dynasty
EIGHT Champions of God
NINE A Biblical Flood
TEN Morbus Comitialis
ELEVEN The Reign of Anarchy
TWELVE Renewal
THIRTEEN Gentle Revolution
FOURTEEN Armed Struggle
FIFTEEN Insurgency
SIXTEEN The Polish Question
SEVENTEEN Captivity
EIGHTEEN Nation-Building
NINETEEN The Polish Republic
TWENTY War
TWENTY-ONE The Cost of Victory
TWENTY-TWO Trial and Error
TWENTY-THREE Papal Power
TWENTY-FOUR The Third Republic
Index
By The Same Author
About the Publisher
MAPS
Central Europe at the Beginning of the Tenth Century2 The Kingdom of Bolesław the Brave in 10257 The Division of Poland, 113813 The Polish Duchies, c.125022 The Kingdom of Władysław the Short, c.132029 Poland under Kazimierz the Great, 137033 The Combined Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania in 146636 The Jagiellon Dominions at the End of the Fifteenth Century49 The Religious Debate of the Sixteenth Century59 The Polish Commonwealth of 156981 The Commonwealth in the Mid-Seventeenth Century137 The Commonwealth in Decline150 The First Partition of Poland, 1772195 The Three Partitions of Poland212 Napoleonic Europe, 1809223 The Congress Kingdom, 1815-31227 The Lands of Partitioned Poland, c.1860259 The Polish Republic295 The Nazi-Soviet Partition of Poland, 1939317 The People’s Republic of Poland337 Modern Europe383
TABLES
The early Piast kings10 The division and reunification of Poland under the later Piasts24-25 The Jagiellon dynasty of Poland-Lithuania41 The Vasa kings of Poland116
NOTE ON POLISH PRONUNCIATION
Polish words may look complicated, but pronunciation is at least consistent. All vowels are simple and of even length, as in Italian, and their sound is best rendered by the English words ‘sum’ (a), ‘ten’ (e), ‘ease’ (i), ‘lot’ (o), ‘book’ (u), ‘sit’ (y).
Most of the consonants behave in the same way as in English, except for c, which is pronounced ‘ts’; j, which is soft, as in ‘yes’; and w, which is equivalent to English v. As in German, some con—sonants are softened when they fall at the end of a word, and b, d, g, w, z become p, t, k, f, s, respectively.
There are also a number of accented letters and combinations peculiar to Polish, of which the following is a rough list:
ó = u, hence Kraków is pronounced ‘krakooff ‘.
ą = nasal a, hence sąd is pronounced ‘sont’.
ę = nasal e, hence Łęczyca is pronounced ‘wenchytsa’.
ć = ch as in ‘cheese’.
cz = ch as in ‘catch’.
ch = guttural h as in ‘loch’.
ł = English w, hence Bolesław becomes ‘Boleswaf, Łódz ‘Wootj’.
ń = soft n as in Spanish ‘mañana’.
rz = French j as in ‘je’.
ś = sh as in ‘sheer’.
sz = sh as in ‘bush’.
?? = as rz (—?? is the accented capital).
ź = A similar sound, but sharper as in French ‘gigot’.
The stress in Polish is consistent, and always falls on the pen—ultimate syllable.
PREFACE
The idea that a historian should radically alter his view of the past over the space of a couple of decades is, on the face of it, preposterous. But when I reread my history of Poland, The Polish Way, first published in 1987, which I meant to revise and update for a new edition, I became convinced of the contrary. History did not, as some have argued, come to an end in the intervening two decades, but they have completely changed the perspective.
When I sat down to write that book, few people in western Europe, let alone further afield, had any idea of where Poland lay, and fewer still had any sense of its having a past worth dwelling on. Given that history is made up of an intricate interaction of land, people and culture, Poland presented unique problems. How was the historian to approach a country whose territory had expanded and contracted, shifted and vanished so dramatically, which currently existed as an almost random compromise resulting from the Second World War, and which lay within the imperial frontiers of another power? How was he to treat a people which, from ethnic, cultural and religious diversity had been purged by genocide and ethnic cleansing into a homogeneous society? How to represent a culture which had been largely obliterated, whose remains survived only underground or in exile?
Matters were made no easier by the fact that the entire geo—political space in which Poland existed was also in an unnatural state of suspension, with Germany divided, Russia a bureaucratic totalitarian monstrosity, and the areas inhabited by the Lithuanians, Belorussians and Ukrainians a kind of limbo.