Territorial evolution of Poland

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1492, the lands of Poland-Lithuania covered 1,115,000 square kilometres, the largest territory in Europe. That count leaves out the fiefs of Mazovia, Moldavia and Prussia. By 1793 the same realm had shrunk to 215,000 square kilometres, no bigger than Great Britain. In 1795 it vanished from the map altogether.

  Few countries have swelled and collapsed on that scale. The territorial evolution of Poland begins with a modest nucleus between the Oder and Vistula rivers, on the North-Central European Plain. At its greatest extent, Polish power reached the Baltic, the Dnieper and the Carpathians. In weak periods it contracted sharply, and for a time it ceased to exist.

  The Poles are the most numerous of the West Slavs. Some believe they occupy the original homeland of the Slavic peoples. While other groups migrated, their ancestors, the Polanie, stayed on the Vistula, from the river's sources to its estuary on the Baltic Sea. No other European nation is centred to such a degree on a single river.

  So how did a state rooted on one riverbank grow so large? Who took its land, and who handed some of it back? And why does the Poland of today lie so far west of the Poland that once stretched to the Dnieper?

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• 2. Piast Beginnings

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  The year 966 is often given as the moment Poland became a state, when Mieszko I adopted Christianity. At that point the realm covered land similar to that of present-day Poland. Mieszko was the first recorded ruler of the Duchy of Poland. He gathered most of the territory inhabited by Polish tribes into a single state. By about 967 he held Pomerania as far as the Oder estuary and the island of Wolin. In 981 he lost the Czerwień Cities in the south-east, the tribal land of the Lendians, to Kyivan Rus'. His last conquests were Silesia and south-western Lesser Poland, added shortly before 990.

  Bolesław the Brave turned the duchy into a rival of the Holy Roman Empire. Wars broke out in 1002-1005-1007-1013 and 1015-1018. Poland took Lusatia in the south-west and briefly held Miśnia. After Bolesław's forces withdrew from Bohemia in 1018, he kept Moravia. That same year the Peace of Bautzen ended the German conflict on terms favourable to him. During a Kiev expedition in 1018 he retook the Czerwień Cities. Brześć fell to Kyivan Rus' in 1019 and returned the following year. In 1025, shortly before he died, Bolesław won papal permission to crown himself and became the first king of Poland.

  The young monarchy fell apart after the death of his son Mieszko II in 1034. Rebellion, both anti-feudal and pagan, swept the country, and in 1039 King Bretislav of Bohemia attacked it. The archdiocese of Gniezno stopped functioning properly. Casimir I, known as the Restorer, came back from exile in 1039 and rebuilt the realm. He took Masovia back from Miecław in 1047 and Silesia from the Czechs in 1050. Poland's recent enemies, the Holy Roman Empire and Kievan Rus, helped him, because both disliked the chaos next door.

  Casimir's son Bolesław II the Generous restored most of the country's strength and crowned himself king in 1076. He had recaptured Brześć by then. Three years later, a conflict involving the Bishop of Kraków ended with Bolesław ordering the execution of Bishop Stanislaus of Szczepanów. Pressure from the Catholic Church and a pro-imperial faction of the nobility forced the king to abdicate, and his younger brother Władysław Herman took over.

  Władysław's son, Bolesław III the Wry-mouthed, defeated his half-brother in 1106-1107 and ruled until 1138. He finished the reconquest of Mieszko I's Pomerania around 1123. Szczecin fell in a bloody takeover, and Western Pomerania as far as Rügen became his fief. Its local ruler was Wartislaw I, the first duke of the Griffin dynasty.

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• 3. Shattered Crown

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  Bolesław III left a written plan for his four surviving sons, known as the Testament of Bolesław III Krzywousty. It was meant to stop his heirs fighting one another and to keep the Piast lands together. It failed. The sons quarrelled soon after his death, and Poland entered a fragmentation lasting about 200 years.

  In Silesia, Henry I the Bearded rebuilt much of the divided kingdom during the first half of the 13th century. By 1211 he had regained eastern Lower Lusatia with the towns of Gubin and Lubsko. In 1232 he became duke of Kraków, which carried the title of senior duke, and in 1234 he held most of Greater Poland. The Polish crown still eluded him. His son Henry II the Pious carried on the effort until his sudden death at the Battle of Legnica in 1241. Polish historians call these gains the monarchy of the Silesian Henries, with Wrocław as the political centre of the broken kingdom.

  A single sale then damaged the western frontier. Bolesław II the Bald, son of Henry the Pious, sold the Lubusz Land to two buyers. They were Archbishop Wilbrand von Käfernburg of Magdeburg and the Ascanian margraves of Brandenburg. Brandenburg pushed east of the Oder and formed the province of Neumark. It also absorbed north-western Greater Poland piece by piece, taking Wałcz, Drezdenko and Kalisz Pomorski in 1296, Międzyrzecz in 1297 and Czaplinek around 1300.

  Crowns changed hands quickly. Przemysł II of Greater Poland was crowned king in 1295 but ruled only part of the country, and he was assassinated soon afterwards. Wenceslaus II of Bohemia married Przemysł's daughter and became king in 1300, achieving a wider unification than any Piast had managed. His heavy-handed policies cost him his support, and he died in 1305. After his son Wenceslaus III died in 1306, most of the Polish lands passed to Władysław I the Elbow-high.

  All nine dukes of Silesia declared, in 1319 and again in 1320, that their realms lay within Władysław's kingdom. John of Bohemia nevertheless invaded in 1327 and forced the Upper Silesian Piasts to accept his supremacy. Northern Spisz and the town of Podoliniec went to Hungary early in the 14th century.

  Casimir III the Great settled for loss in the west and looked east. In 1335 John of Bohemia gave up his claim to the Polish crown, and Casimir in turn gave up Silesia. The Treaty of Namysłów confirmed the bargain in 1348. Between 1340 and 1366 Casimir's campaigns retook the Czerwień Cities and added Red Ruthenia, western Volhynia with Włodzimierz, and western Podolia with Kamieniec Podolski. In the west, allied with Denmark and the Duchy of Pomerania, he recovered Wałcz, Człopa, Tuczno and Czaplinek in 1368. That cut the land link between Brandenburg and the Teutonic state. Lwów quickly grew into the main town of the new eastern lands.

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• 4. Teutonic Quarrel

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  In 1308 the Margraviate of Brandenburg invaded Pomerelia, and Władysław I the Elbow-high asked the Teutonic Knights for help. They drove the Brandenburgers out and kept the land for themselves, annexing it into the Teutonic Order state in 1309. That seizure of Gdańsk Pomerania started a dispute that fed the Polish-Teutonic Wars of the 14th and 15th centuries. Papal verdicts in the 14th century ordered the area returned to Poland. The Knights ignored them.

  A purchase deal collapsed in 1402. Poland and Bohemia had agreed that Poland would buy back lands once ruled as the New March. These included north-western Greater Poland, northern Lubusz Land and parts of Pomerania. The Bohemian rulers instead sold the area to the Teutonic Order. The Poles briefly and partly recaptured it during the war of 1431-1435.

  Victory in the field came in 1410, during the Polish-Lithuanian-Teutonic War. Most of Gdańsk Pomerania, including Gdańsk itself, returned to Poland. It slipped back to the Knights in 1411. A more lasting change began in February 1454. The anti-Teutonic Prussian Confederation asked Casimir IV Jagiellon to take Gdańsk Pomerania, Chełmno Land and Prussia into the kingdom. He signed an act of incorporation in Kraków that March. Cities, towns, nobles and officials across the region swore allegiance and called the earlier Teutonic rule unlawful.

  That started the Thirteen Years' War. Poland largely held the Pomeranian lands, including the port of Gdańsk, and kept Elbląg throughout. Control of Prussian territory shifted, and Królewiec went back to the Knights in 1455. The peace treaty of 1466 recognised Gdańsk Pomerania, Chełmno Land, Elbląg, Malbork and Warmia as reincorporated into Poland. The rest of historic Prussia stayed with the Order as a fief and protectorate of Poland. It was still treated as part of a "one and indivisible" kingdom. Poland had regained free access to the Baltic Sea.

  The Reformation then removed the Order from the picture. In 1525, Grand Master Albert of Hohenzollern secularised the Prussian territory and became Albert, Duke of Prussia. His Duchy of Prussia, with its capital at Königsberg, remained a fief of the Polish kingdom. That status would be tested in the next century.

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• 5. Commonwealth and Deluge

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  In 1462 the Crimean city of Caffa recognised Polish suzerainty, one of several distant gains of the 15th century. Moldavia had become a vassal principality in 1387, when Petru II paid homage to King Władysław II Jagiełło and Queen Jadwiga. Sixteen towns of Spisz returned from Hungary in 1412, and in 1494 the kingdom bought the Duchy of Zator.

  The Livonian War of the 1560s pushed Poland's Baltic reach further. The kingdom captured most of Livonia, including the port of Riga. In 1561 the Livonian Confederation was dismantled and the Livonian Order of German knights disbanded. Under the Treaty of Vilnius, the territories of modern Latvia and southern Estonia went to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as the Duchy of Livonia. The Duchy of Courland and Semigallia was a vassal of the Polish crown from 1569 to 1726. The village of Lajs, now Laiuse in Estonia, was the seat of the northernmost starostwo in Polish history.

  The Jagiellon dynasty ruled the Polish-Lithuanian union from 1385 to 1569, beginning with the Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila. The Union of Lublin in 1569 created the Commonwealth. Its system, called Noble's Democracy or Golden Freedom, cut the monarch's power through laws and a legislature, the Sejm, controlled by the nobility, the szlachta. The two partners were formally equal, though Poland dominated. The population was ethnically and religiously diverse. The state showed unusual tolerance for its age, although the degree varied over time.

  The Commonwealth's armies pushed far into Russia. They retook Połock in 1579 and Wieliż, Uświat and Newel in 1580. During the Polish-Russian War of 1609-1618, Commonwealth forces controlled Moscow for two years, from the 29th of September 1610 to the 6th of November 1612. The Truce of Deulino in 1619 confirmed Poland's hold on the Czernihów and Smolensk regions and on Siebież and Newel. In 1635 Sweden, weakened by the Thirty Years' War, signed the Armistice of Stuhmsdorf on terms favourable to the Commonwealth.

  Then came the Deluge. The Khmelnytsky Uprising began in 1648, and from 1655 to 1660 Sweden invaded and occupied the western half of Poland-Lithuania. Russia attacked as well. On the 19th of September 1657, the Treaty of Wehlau renounced Polish suzerainty over Ducal Prussia. It recognised Brandenburg's sole rule there, a reward for help against the Swedes. Opposition was strong, especially in Königsberg.

  In the Treaty of Oliva of 1660, King John II Casimir gave up his claim to the Swedish crown. His father Sigismund III Vasa had lost it in 1599. The king also ceded Swedish Livonia and Riga.

  The Treaty of Andrusovo, signed on the 13th of January 1667, gave Moscow the Left-bank Ukraine while Poland kept the Right-bank. By then the population had almost halved through war and disease. The wars had wrecked the economic base of the cities and stirred a religious fervour that ended the policy of tolerance. The Ottoman war cost Podolia in the Treaty of Buczacz in 1672. John III Sobieski won back part of it in 1676, and the Treaty of Karlowitz, signed on the 26th of January 1699, returned the rest. Between those two events, the Eternal Peace Treaty of the 6th of May 1686 confirmed Russia's hold on Smolensk, Chernihiv and Starodub. Poland retained the Right-bank Ukraine.

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• 6. Partitions and Napoleon

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  In February 1772, an agreement in Vienna set out the first partition of the Commonwealth. Early in August, Russian, Prussian and Austrian troops entered simultaneously and occupied their allotted provinces. The Commonwealth lost about 211,000 square kilometres, 30 percent of a territory then measuring about 733,000. Between four and five million people went with it, about a third of a population of 14 million. Prussia annexed Warmia, Powiśle, northern Greater Poland and most of Polish Pomerania, though not Gdańsk, which stayed Polish as an exclave. Austria took a large part of the south with Lwów. Russia took the north-east and east, including historic Latgale and White Ruthenia.

  The country was so helpless by the 1790s that it was pushed into an alliance with Prussia, the Polish-Prussian Pact of 1790. The terms made the last two partitions inevitable. Then came the May Constitution of 1791. It gave the townspeople political rights, separated three branches of government and ended the abuses of the Repnin Sejm. Neighbours wary of a revival answered aggressively. In the second partition, Russia and Prussia took so much land that only one-third of the 1772 population remained.

  Kosciuszko's insurgent armies won early successes but fell to Russian forces. The partitioning powers decided to remove the unrest by erasing any independent Polish state. On the 24th of October 1795, their representatives signed a treaty dividing what was left among their three countries.

  Napoleon offered a hope of revival. Volunteer Polish legions joined his armies in the expectation that he would let Poland reappear from his conquests. The Treaties of Tilsit in 1807 produced the Duchy of Warsaw. It was built from Polish lands ceded by Prussia and held in personal union by King Frederick Augustus I of Saxony. The Franco-Prussian treaty signed on the 9th of July 1807 also carved a Free City of Danzig out of West Prussia.

  In 1809 the duchy fought a short war with Austria. It won at Raszyn, though Austrian troops entered Warsaw. Duchy and French forces outflanked them and captured Kraków, Lwów and much of the Austrian gains from the partitions. After the Battle of Wagram, the Treaty of Schönbrunn expanded the duchy southwards.

  Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia ended that chapter. Prussian and Russian troops occupied the duchy, and in 1815 the Congress of Vienna divided it between the two powers. The Congress also created Congress Poland, the Grand Duchy of Posen and the Free City of Cracow. Posen was promised autonomy but was subordinated to Prussia in practice. After the November Uprising, Congress Poland lost its status as a sovereign state in 1831, and Russia abolished the Sejm. In 1846 Austria annexed the Free City of Cracow after the failed Kraków uprising.

  Spring 1848 brought one more flicker in Posen. Sympathetic Prussian liberals granted some autonomy, but outrage among the German-speaking minority led Berlin to reverse course. By April the army had crushed the Polish militias and National Committees. On the 3rd of May 1848, independence was proclaimed in Mosina, but the Prussians defeated the insurgents at the Battle of Rogalin days later. By year's end the Duchy had lost its last formal autonomy and become an ordinary Prussian province.

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• 7. Borders After 1918

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  On the 31st of October 1918, Polish organisations liberated Tarnów and Kraków, the first steps in freeing southern and central Poland. They reached Warsaw on the 11th of November, and Poland proclaimed independence that day. A day earlier, the Polish Republic of Ostrów had been proclaimed in the Prussian partition.

  Trouble came from the east. The West Ukrainian People's Republic, proclaimed on the 1st of November with Lwów as its capital, claimed Eastern Galicia, Volhynia, Carpathian Ruthenia and Bukovina. Poles made up over 60 percent of Lwów's inhabitants, Jews almost 30 percent and Ukrainians under 10 percent. The Battle of Lwów followed. On the 25th of June 1919 the Supreme Allies Council transferred East Galicia to Poland. A ceasefire on the 17th of July 1919 let Poland keep the territory.

  In the west, the Greater Poland Uprising began on the 27th of December 1918 in Poznań, after a patriotic speech by the pianist Ignacy Paderewski. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 recreated Poland. It gave the new state most of the Prussian Province of Posen and 70 percent of West Prussia as the Polish corridor to the sea. It also granted Działdowo, so a railway could link Gdańsk and Warsaw, and a small area of Warmia and Masuria.

  The Free City of Danzig was created on the 15th of November 1920 under League of Nations protection. It stayed outside both Germany and Poland. A binding customs union gave Poland rights over its port and transport.

  The Polish-Soviet War ran from February 1919 to March 1921. Armistice terms were signed on the 12th of October 1920 and took effect on the 18th. The Treaty of Riga followed in March 1921. Historians disagree on who won. Lenin saw it differently from most Soviet-era historians. In a secret report on the 20th of September 1920, he called the outcome "In a word, a gigantic, unheard-of defeat".

  Upper Silesia was settled by ballot and by force. In the plebiscite of the 20th of March 1921, 707,605 votes were cast for Germany and 479,359 for Poland, a margin of 228,246. Rumours that the region would stay German triggered the Third Polish Uprising in May-July 1921. A League of Nations council took up the question with a commission of representatives from Belgium, Brazil, Spain and China. In October 1921 it awarded most of the industrial district to Poland.

  Other frontiers were bargained piece by piece. In Cieszyn, a brief Seven-day war in 1919 preceded a division along the Olza river. The Conference of Ambassadors in Spa decided it on the 28th of July 1920. Czechoslovakia kept the western suburbs as Český Těšín, with the Karvina coal basin and the railway, just as the Red Army neared Warsaw.

  The Orawa and Spisz border was settled by arbitration, and a court of the League of Nations adjusted it on the 12th of March 1924. Czechoslovakia retained Javorzyna. In the north-east, the Republic of Central Lithuania arose in 1920 from a staged rebellion by soldiers of the Polish Army. An election on the 8th of January 1922 joined it to Poland.

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• 8. War and Westward Shift

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  Noon on the 30th of September 1938 was the deadline Poland set in an ultimatum to Czechoslovakia over Trans-Olza, the Czech half of Cieszyn. Czechoslovakia was being absorbed into the German Reich at the time. At 11:45 a.m. the next day, the Czech foreign ministry told the Polish ambassador that Poland could have what it wanted. Poland was accused of acting as an accomplice of Nazi Germany. It also took land in northern Spisz and northern Orawa, officially receiving it on the 1st of November 1938. Polish became the only official language there.

  In 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland and divided it under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Germany annexed the lands it had ceded to Poland in 1919-1922. Two decrees from Adolf Hitler, on the 8th and the 12th of October 1939, split the annexed areas into four units. They were Reichsgau Wartheland, Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia, the Ciechanów District and the Katowice District. Together they covered 94,000 square kilometres and held 10,000,000 people.

  The Soviet Union took eastern areas that became part of Soviet Belarus or Soviet Ukraine. Germany ruled the remainder as the General Government. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Białystok district was attached to East Prussia. Distrikt Galizien was added to the General Government.

  The settlement of 1945 moved Poland bodily westward. The Tehran Conference of 1943 had decided, at Soviet insistence, that the territories east of the Curzon Line would go to the Soviet Union. This region, known as the Kresy, was permanently annexed. Poland lost over 20 percent of its pre-war borders, and most Polish inhabitants of the area were expelled. Today those lands belong to Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania.

  In exchange, Poland received former German land east of the Oder-Neisse line. It included the southern two thirds of East Prussia and most of Pomerania and Silesia. Under the Potsdam Agreement it also received Szczecin and Świnoujście. The German population was expelled, and the lands were resettled mainly by Poles from central Poland and from the lost east. Soviet and Polish Communist authorities began some expulsions before the Potsdam Conference, the so-called wild expulsions. The final balance was a loss of about 178,000 square kilometres in the east against a gain of some 101,000 in the west and north.

  The southern frontier took longer. Marshall Michał Rola-Żymierski issued directive number 00336 on the 16th of June 1945, ordering the 1st Armoured Corps to concentrate near Cieszyn and seize Trans-Olza. The Soviets decided to hand the region to Czechoslovakia, and Poland followed the Moscow directive. A treaty signed on the 21st of September 1945 accepted the borders of the 31st of December 1937.

  After 1946 came only small corrections. Medyka, near Przemyśl, passed to Poland in 1948. Treaty No. 6222, signed on the 15th of February 1951, exchanged 480 square kilometres with the Soviet Union. A pumping station for Świnoujście came to Poland in a 1951 swap with East Germany. In 1975 a border shift along the Dunajec allowed a dam at Czorsztyn.

  The most recent adjustment, in 2002 with Slovakia, was tiny. Each side handed over 2,969 square metres in all. Poland gave up a viewing tower site of 376 square metres on the Dukielskie saddle, an island of 2,289 square metres, and 304 square metres near Jaworzynka. Slovakia gave back matching areas, including land near Skalité. It was an exact balance on a border once measured in hundreds of thousands of square kilometres.

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