Poland: A history
A substantially revised and updated edition of the author's classic 1987 book, 'The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and their Culture', which has been out of print since 2001.No nation's history has been so distorted as that of Poland. In 1797 Russia, Prussia and Austria divided the country up among themselves, expunging Poland’s sovereignty from history, casting it as a backwater that needed civilising. But as Adam Zamoyski’s thrilling history shows, the country they had wiped off the map had been one of Europe’s largest and most varied in cultural and religious traditions, with one of the boldest constitutional experiments ever attempted. Its destruction initiated a series of struggles that culminated in the two world wars and the Cold War. Today, Poland has been restored to its rightful place as one of the most vigorous nations of Europe, and is perfectly captured in this full revision Adam Zamoyski's classic ‘The Polish Way’.
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POLAND A HISTORY
ADAM ZAMOYSKI
HarperPress
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperPress 2009
Copyright © Adam Zamoyski Ltd 2009
The Polish Way published by John Murray in 1987
Adam Zamoyski asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover shows detail from a parchment scroll of 1605, showing a member of the Husaria, the Polish winged cavalry
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007282753
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007322732
Version: 2017-04-25
Table of Contents
THREE: The Jagiellon Experience
FIVE: Kingdom and Commonwealth
SEVEN: Democracy versus Dynasty
TWENTY-ONE: The Cost of Victory
| Central Europe at the Beginning of the Tenth Century | |
| The Kingdom of Bolesław the Brave in 1025 | |
| The Division of Poland, 1138 | |
| The Polish Duchies, c.1250 | |
| The Kingdom of Władysław the Short, c.1320 | |
| Poland under Kazimierz the Great, 1370 | |
| The Combined Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania in 1466 | |
| The Jagiellon Dominions at the End of the Fifteenth Century | |
| The Religious Debate of the Sixteenth Century | |
| The Polish Commonwealth of 1569 | |
| The Commonwealth in the Mid-Seventeenth Century | |
| The Commonwealth in Decline | |
| The First Partition of Poland, 1772 | |
| The Three Partitions of Poland | |
| Napoleonic Europe, 1809 | |
| The Congress Kingdom, 1815-31 | |
| The Lands of Partitioned Poland, c.1860 | |
| The Polish Republic | |
| The Nazi-Soviet Partition of Poland, 1939 | |
| The People’s Republic of Poland | |
| Modern Europe |
| The early Piast kings | |
| The division and reunification of Poland under the later Piasts | |
| The Jagiellon dynasty of Poland-Lithuania | |
| The Vasa kings of Poland |
Polish words may look complicated, but pronunciation is at least consistent. All vowels are simple and of even length, as in Italian, and their sound is best rendered by the English words ‘sum’ (a), ‘ten’ (e), ‘ease’ (i), ‘lot’ (o), ‘book’ (u), ‘sit’ (y).
Most of the consonants behave in the same way as in English, except for c, which is pronounced ‘ts’; j, which is soft, as in ‘yes’; and w, which is equivalent to English v. As in German, some con—sonants are softened when they fall at the end of a word, and b, d, g, w, z become p, t, k, f, s, respectively.
There are also a number of accented letters and combinations peculiar to Polish, of which the following is a rough list:
ó = u, hence Kraków is pronounced ‘krakooff ‘.
ą = nasal a, hence sąd is pronounced ‘sont’.
ę = nasal e, hence Łęczyca is pronounced ‘wenchytsa’.
ć = ch as in ‘cheese’.
cz = ch as in ‘catch’.
ch = guttural h as in ‘loch’.
ł = English w, hence Bolesław becomes ‘Boleswaf, Łódz ‘Wootj’.
ń = soft n as in Spanish ‘mañana’.
rz = French j as in ‘je’.
ś = sh as in ‘sheer’.
sz = sh as in ‘bush’.
?? = as rz (—?? is the accented capital).
ź = A similar sound, but sharper as in French ‘gigot’.
The stress in Polish is consistent, and always falls on the pen—ultimate syllable.
The idea that a historian should radically alter his view of the past over the space of a couple of decades is, on the face of it, preposterous. But when I reread my history of Poland, The Polish Way, first published in 1987, which I meant to revise and update for a new edition, I became convinced of the contrary. History did not, as some have argued, come to an end in the intervening two decades, but they have completely changed the perspective.
When I sat down to write that book, few people in western Europe, let alone further afield, had any idea of where Poland lay, and fewer still had any sense of its having a past worth dwelling on. Given that history is made up of an intricate interaction of land, people and culture, Poland presented unique problems. How was the historian to approach a country whose territory had expanded and contracted, shifted and vanished so dramatically, which currently existed as an almost random compromise resulting from the Second World War, and which lay within the imperial frontiers of another power? How was he to treat a people which, from ethnic, cultural and religious diversity had been purged by genocide and ethnic cleansing into a homogeneous society? How to represent a culture which had been largely obliterated, whose remains survived only underground or in exile?
