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

The Catholic Church contributed significantly to the survival of a sense of unity in the Polish lands. Gniezno, given metropolitan status in rooo, was able to preserve its ecclesiastical authority over the five other sees of the old Piast state and ultimately to back the programmes of political unification which emerged. After all, the Church itself was one of the chief victims of political disorders. The hierarchy made strong efforts in the thirteenth century to deepen the parish and schools network and to tighten their links to the populace. As the largest landowner after the dukes, the Church had an urgent material interest in halting the processes of political fragmentation - which, in the final analysis, counterbalanced the positive social and economic developments of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The rag-bag of Piast duchies could not hope to aspire to the forceful political role of Mieszko 1 and his immediate successors. Before a number of external threats, they found themselves on the retreat or on the defensive. Conrad, duke of Masovia (Mazowsze) (1202-47), found himself unable to protect his north-eastern borders against the incursions of still-pagan Prussian and Yat-wingian tribes, who seriously threatened the integrity of his possessions. To contain them, in 1227, he settled the crusading order of the Teutonic Knights on the lower Vistula. Elsewhere, the Poles stood no chance against the devastating Mongol onslaught which wreaked havoc across eastern and central Europe and which swept across Poland in 1241. Duke Henry the Pious of Silesia was slain at the battle of Legnica on 9 April. Only news of the death of their Great Khan Ogodei caused the Mongols to withdraw from their Polish and Hungarian conquests in December. Their destruction of much of Krakow in 1241 remains part of the city’s collective memory, even today. They remained in the Crimea and in the steppe-lands of the Black Sea and the eastern Balkans, a new and long-lasting menace to all within reach of their plundering expeditions.

Historians have traditionally painted a grim and lurid picture of this period. Silesia and Masovia went furthest down the road of fragmentation. The local princes through whom the Piasts had ruled in western Pomerania broke loose. Only the core lands of Wielkopolska and the principate lands of Krakow and Sandomierz remained more or less intact. But it was also in the period after the Tatar onslaught that the new settlement processes reached their peak and the freedoms granted spread to the indigenous population. The assemblies of the different duchies, the wiece, where the prince dispensed justice, heard appeals and issued decrees, where notables, officials, knights and townsmen were grouped together, acted as a school of political and judicial instruction. Nobles and urban patricians acquired a sense of entitlement to be consulted and that they should have a say in the running of the judicial and administrative business which most affected them.

The Polish duchies were able by and large to resist efforts to impose the vassalage and dependency that successive German emperors had tried to impose on the Polish lands - lands whose rulers had often welcomed that overlordship to advance their own interests. With the disintegration of political authority after the death of the emperor Henry VI in 1197, Germany began to slide into the same sort of fragmentation as Poland. When, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, bishop Vincent of Krakow was chronicling the mythical successes of the ancient Poles against the Roman emperors, he was not simply engaged in a flight of whimsy: he was asserting the independence of the Polish duchies, no matter how weak they may have been, against the claims of the ideological successors to the mantle of Roman imperial authority, the emperors of the German lands.