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

To the bulk of the populace, Christianity brought burdens which only exacerbated those imposed by the ruler’s war bands and garrisons. Boleslaw I took his role as Christian ruler sufficiently seriously to be regarded by the young emperor Otto III as his partner in the conversion of Slavonic Europe. In the person of Vojtech (Adalbert) of Prague, Boleslaw furnished Poland with its first, albeit adopted, martyr - in 997 Vojtech was slain by the heathens of Prussia whom the king hoped he would convert. He was canonized two years later. Like Vojtech, most of the early clergy came from abroad. They were supported with tributes and tithes exacted by a brutal ruling apparatus. A significant native clergy did not begin to emerge until at least three or four generations after Mieszko I’s conversion. The deeper Christianization of Poland began only with the coming of the monasteries and friars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Until then, the Church remained an alien, unpopular institution, foisted on the people by a ruling elite in pursuit of its own political and expansionist ambitions. But it differentiated Poland from its eastern Slav neighbours in one crucial respect. The new bishops, with their dioceses and synods, with their political and economic privileges, with their ties to Rome, came eventually to open a door to the differentiation and variegation of political authority, limiting the ruler’s monopoly on power. Further east, the traditions of Orthodoxy and Byzantine caesaropapism were to direct the lands of Rus’ along a very different path of political development.

The new institution of kingship which accompanied Christianity found little wider echo. The Polish word for king, krol - a corruption of ‘Karol’ (Charles, Charlemagne) - reflects its alien character. Boleslaw 1, Mieszko II and Boleslaw II were Poland’s only crowned monarchs before 1296. All faced revolts almost immediately after their coronations (1025, 1026 and 1076). Opposition came not just from the lower orders. Mieszko II was murdered by a disgruntled courtier. Boleslaw II emulated Chrobry in his forays into Kiev, Bohemia and Hungary; he backed the pope against the emperor in the Investiture Conflict; he was a generous benefactor of the Church - but it was an ecclesiastic, Bishop Stanislaw of Krakow, who appears to have headed a reaction among the king’s own notables against his demanding foreign policy, not least because the strains it imposed threatened their authority over their own peasantry. In 1078, Boleslaw had Stanislaw tried by a compliant synod, and hacked to pieces, a traitor’s death. According to the chronicle of bishop Vincent, the king himself administered the punishment. Whatever the facts of the matter, the king inadvertently produced Poland’s first native martyr (Stanislaw was to be canonized in 12.53). Within a year, Boleslaw was deposed, exiled (he died in Hungary in 1081) and replaced by his younger brother, Wodzislaw Herman (1079-1102). Real power was exercised by the palatinus, Sieciech, head of the war bands and of the network of garrison-towns, the grody.