Koncepcja Polski piastowskiej w myśli historycznej II Rzeczypospolitej
The concept of ‘Piast Poland’ in the historical thought of the Second Polish Republic

Summary/Abstract: In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Piast epoch of Polish history began to arouse growing interest among Polish historians. A significant impetus for the intensified research into medieval history was given by the works of Stanisław Smolka (1854–1924), published from the late 1870s onwards. In 1916, Oswald Balzer (1854–1933), a professor at the University of Lviv, formu- lated the concept of the ‘old’ – Gniezno, and ‘new’ – Kraków Piast states, pointing out the differences in their geopolitical location. In 1925, Jagiellonian University professor Władysław Semkowicz (1878–1949), drawing on the research of two professors of Lwów University – Eugeniusz Romer (1871–1954), a geographer, and Kazimierz Nitsch, a Slavist and dialectologist, formulated the con- cept of the Poland of the first Piasts as a physiographic whole, a state of two Baltic rivers, the Vistula and the Oder, and an internally coherent state, uniting tribes belonging to one linguistic group – the Lechitic one. In the 1930s, a professor at Poznań University, which in the Second Polish Republic became a centre of research into the origins of the Polish State, used the results of the researchers mentioned above to propose a comprehensive concept explaining the geopolitical conditions deter- mining the identity and potential of the Piast State during the period when Gniezno was its capital. This concept is referred to as the concept of ‘Piast Poland’.

• Details
• Contents