(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

‘Polak’ (polonus, polanus, polenus were the commonly used medieval Latin forms) derives from pole, plain or clearing - the land of the Polanie, living in the basin of the middle Warta river, in the western part of modern-day Poland. Remote though these territories may have been, they were not isolated. Even in Roman times, a well-established trade route joined the southern shores of the Baltic and its much-prized amber resources to the Europe of the Mediterranean. By the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, in the shadow of the fortified strongholds, the grody, which housed garrisons and princely officials, and which preserved the ruler’s authority, small commercial communities, even a scattering of Jewish trading centres, grew to service the arduous overland routes connecting the Rhineland, Germany and Bohemia with Kiev, Byzantium and the Orient. The primacy of these western lands came to be acknowledged in the thirteenth century with their designation as ‘Old’ or ‘Great’ Poland (Wielkopolska, Polonia Maior) - as opposed to ‘Little’ Poland (Malopolska, Polonia Minor) to the south and south-east. What linked the Polanie to their neighbours and to so many peoples of the great Eurasian plain was language - stowo - the word: those who spoke intelligibly to one another were Slowianie, Sclavinii, Slavs - as opposed to the ‘Dumb Ones’ (Niemcy) who spoke no tongue intelligible to ‘Poles’ or ‘Czechs’ or ‘Russians’. The ‘Dumb Ones’ were mainly from the Germanic world - Saxons, Franks, Bavarians, Lothar-ingians. The Dumb Ones were little bothered by such linguistic insults. The pagan Slavs, whether living east of the Elbe or north of the Danube, were fair game as slaves. It was in Venice, one of the great entrepots of the early medieval world, that the word Sclavus first came to be synonymous with both ‘Slav’ and ‘slave’ - so many were the numbers of southern, Balkan Slavs sold on by its merchants.

Linguistic community did not mean political solidarity. The Slav tribes of the lands between the Elbe and the Oder were as likely to be in conflict with their Polish/Silesian/Czech neighbours of the east as with incomers from the west. In 965, the knez, the prince of the Polanie, Mieszko 1, thwarted a troublesome alliance between the Christian Czechs and his pagan, Slav neighbours to the west by his marriage to Dobrava, daughter of Duke Boleslav I of Bohemia. Conversion in the following year allowed Mieszko to tap into the manpower, military technology and politics of the German Empire in a way that would have been inconceivable if he had remained a heathen. Most of the early clergy who came to Poland were German; Mieszko and his successors were as willing to conclude marriage alliances with the great families of the Empire as with the ruling dynasties of Scandinavia, Hungary and the Rus’ lands. They were quite prepared to furnish the emperors with tribute and warriors in return for recognition of their lordship over the borderlands that they disputed with the German marcher lords. Mieszko’s marriage to Dobrava was something of an aberration - the Piasrs and the Bohemian Premyslids had too many conflicting interests for family ties to take root.

Political contacts with German potentates must have existed for a long time before Mieszko’s accession. It was probably Mieszko’s father, Siemomysl, who first pushed across the river Oder around Lubiąž (Lebus), and north-west into Pomerania. This westward drive was bound to lead to clashes with the rulers of the ‘Northern Mark’, a political unit of undefined borders established by the German emperor Otto I east of the middle Elbe. Its rulers had a free hand to convert the Slavs and annex their territories, which they did with genocidai gusto. Christian German and pagan Slav rulers could, as occasion demanded, form alliances. Mieszko was clearly well informed of the feuding and power struggles within the German empire. Even before his conversion, he agreed in 964 to pay tribute to Otto I for at least some of his lands. For his part, the Emperor saw in rulers such as Mieszko a useful counterforce against the excessive ambitions of his own marcher lords. Conversion was also likely to strengthen the ruler’s own position: among the Polanie, there was almost certainly no one central cult, but a variety of localized beliefs. Christianity could provide a central, unifying religious force, which of its very nature was bound to strengthen the ruler’s authority.