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

It may be that Casimir wished to build up new elements on which he could base royal power. For the first time, the non-knightly administrators of peasant villages, the wdjtowie and soltysi, were expected to turn out in their own right on military campaigns. His confiscational programme was matched by an extensive settlement of peasants under ‘German law’ on royal domain. The king encouraged Jewish settlement, mainly of Ashke-nazim from the Empire. While the same baggage of prejudices and misconceptions found across Christendom was reflected in Poland, it was clearly not enough to put a stop to such immigration. He took a Jewish mistress. And although the merchants and guilds of many towns, fearful of competition, secured bans on Jewish residence inside the town walls, they were almost invariably able to settle in the suburbs or in privileged enclaves beyond municipal jurisdiction. Whatever reservations his Christian subjects had about them (and there were occasional anti-Jewish riots), Casimir appreciated that they represented an invaluable asset. The 1338 coinage reform helped boost the circulation of small-denominational silver monies. All this, combined with a flourishing north-south and west-east trade, with Krakow at its crossroads, enabled Casimir successfully to pursue a harsh fiscality. He subjected peasant holdings on lay and ecclesiastical estates to an annual land (‘plough’, paradine) tax of n groszy per lan (about 18.5 hectares). Only land worked directly for the lords was exempt. Such taxation, combined with a reform of the administration of the lucrative royal salt-mines at Bochnia and Wieliczka, first exploited in 12.51, enabled him to finance a major defence and reconstruction programme. He built some fifty castles across Poland, and provided twenty-seven towns with new curtain walls (or, rather, they did so on his orders). It was enough to contain the incursions of the Tatars and the ever more frequent raids of the Lithuanians; but none of Casimir’s new fortresses could match the Teutonic Knights’ defensive marvel at Marienburg. The Krakow patriciate was kept sweet by the king’s successful commercial policies and by the enhanced prestige it enjoyed from his ban on all municipal appeals to Magdeburg: two appellate urban courts were set up in the capital.

For all the difficulties that Casimir experienced in Halych-Rus’, it was in his reign that the processes took off which were to give the area its variegated ethnic character for almost the next six centuries. The campaigning devastated the countryside; but the area's fertility made it a magnet for the dispossessed, impoverished and adventurous from all over Poland and beyond. The boyar aristocrats of the area either died out during the wars or preferred to migrate to Rus’ lands under Lithuanian lordship: the surviving lesser nobility was in no shape to stand up to the influx of immigrants. The great trading centre of L’viv continued to attract a vigorous mix of settlers. Germans formed the largest number of incomers, then Poles and Czechs - though by the end of the fifteenth century, most of these elements were to be polonized and L’viv/Lwow itself became something of a Polish island in a sea of Rus’, Orthodox peasantry. The first Jews established themselves in 1356, alongside a thriving Armenian community. During Casimir’s last years and over the next decades, petty and not-so-petty Polish nobles were granted extensive land rights in the area. Casimir and his successors preferred to govern through an alien, non-bovar, non-Orthodox class on whose loyalty they could rely. The process was made easier in that even the Rurikid princes of Halych-Rus’ had shown considerable interest in accepting union with the Latin Church, as a channel for securing help against the Mongols. The petty Orthodox boyars who clung on, loaded with service obligations, uncompensated by any rights or liberties on the Polish or Hungarian models, found that polonization and Catholicization offered the easiest route to preserving and advancing their status and fortunes. It was in these lands of western Rus’ that the process of the separation and alienation of the elites from the mass of the local population first began and proceeded furthest.