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

Fragmentation may, paradoxically, have facilitated economic and cultural development. Rulers and their leading subjects had little choice but to expand their resources by intensive means, just like the lords of Germany’s thinly populated eastern marches. From the early twelfth century, the lords of these territories began to attract new colonists with the promise of collective and individual exemptions from dues and services and the prospect of lighter burdens in the future. West of the Elbe, the bulk of the peasantry remained closely tied to their lords - unless they broke loose and made the difficult decision to settle in the east on more generous terms, albeit under harsher physical conditions. In Silesia, dukes Boleslaw the Tall (1163-1201) and his son, Flenry the Bearded (1201-38), both of whom had spent many years in Germany as a result of the expulsion of the elder Piast line in 1146, were particularly well positioned to observe the progress of such settlement drives. A strong, prosperous Silesia could provide an ideal platform for the realization of their claims to the principate. Through their German wives and through their patronage of religious orders such as the Cistercians, they were able to launch the expensive tasks of recruiting settlers from Germany, Wallonia and the Rhineland. These hospites, ‘guests’, brought with them technical innovations in the form of mills, heavier ploughs and more compact field systems. By 1229, Henry the Bearded was beginning to accept the need to set up Polish settlements, perhaps not 011 the same terms as the newcomers, but certainly with degrees of exemptions and immunities from ‘Princely Law’ - the near arbitrary demands of the ruler’s service. These were the beginnings of the process of settlement under ‘German law’, ins teutonicum -not the laws in Germany, but the more-or-less standard package of terms under which colonists from the German lands, and, with time, from elsewhere in Poland, were settled east of the Elbe and Oder rivers.

The settlement of the east E.lbian lands developed into a major enterprise, as entrepreneurs and speculators, locatores, looked to enrich themselves by the provision of human capital to landowners desperate for the manpower without which even the most extensive estates were useless. Other lords, dukes and ecclesiastics followed suit. By the middle of the fourteenth century, if not earlier, the bulk of the Polish peasantry, including a largely assimilated German element, could regard themselves as in some sense ‘free’. But assimilation worked both ways. By the end of the thirteenth century, in central and northern Silesia, the more fertile areas most attractive to new settlers were becoming German, rather than Polish. By 1300, the once Polish village of Wien, near Wroclaw, had become the German Lahn; and Wroclaw itself, to increasing numbers of its inhabitants, was becoming Breslau.

Parallel influences were at work in Polish towns. Most were very small. The largest, Krakow and Wroclaw, are unlikely to have numbered more than 5,000 inhabitants each in 1200. This was not enough to generate the wealth that Poland’s rulers wanted. Seeking to attract merchants and craftsmen, they looked to the German lands, where, in the course of the eleventh century, more and more towns had succeeded in wresting a degree of genuine autonomy from their overlords: they appointed their own judges, administrators and magistrates. The towns’ new status found legal expression in charters of rights and privileges. Magdeburg, the closest significant German urban centre to Polish lands, had secured effective self-rule in t 1 8 8. Its pattern of an elected or co-opted bench of aldermen, sitting as magistrates, assisting a mayoral figure, the Vogt (in Poland, wojt), administered under its own municipal law, was to become almost universal in the Polish lands. In 1 211, Henry the Bearded conferred Magdeburg law on the little Silesian town of Zlotoryja; in 1258, Boleslaw ‘the Bashful’ did the same for Krakow. Judicial appeals and other delicate questions were usually referred to Magdeburg itself for advice and adjudication. Before the thirteenth century was over, around one hundred Polish towns had Magdeburg-style municipal institutions.