God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Vol. 1: The Origins to 1795

497 Pages·2005·54.17 MB·English

by  Norman Davies

GOD'S PLAYGROUND
A History of Poland

GOD'S
PLAYGROUND
A History of Poland
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME I
THE ORIGINS TO 1795
NORMAN DAVIES
Columbia University Press New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York
Copyright © 2005 Norman Davies
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0-231-12817-7
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 32
Typseset by Hope Services (Abingdon) Ltd.
Printed in Great Britain
on permanent and durable acid-free paper by
Biddies Ltd.
King's Lynn, Norfolk
for DANIEL
So that he may know and love the land of his birth,
(if he wants to).

PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION
OF VOLUME 1
To write the history of someone else's country is, no doubt, to take a terrible
liberty. Judging by the reticence which professional scholars show before pro
nouncing on minor episodes in the past of their own country, it would seem that
only the young and foolhardy might attempt to publish their thoughts on other
people's millennia. A proper appreciation of the complexities of the task deters
most of those best qualified to perform it. An Englishman who has dared to
write a History of Poland, therefore, must be aware that any number of Polish
scholars know vastly more about the subject than he does. At the same time, free
from the burdens of their knowledge and from political circumstances which
inhibit the expression of independent views, he can still hope to contribute
perspectives and insights of value. Fortitude, no less than Modesty, must be his
constant companions.
This study is not inspired by any particular ideology. It cannot claim to be
objective, of course, since objectivity is always impossible. Like all history
books, it had to be written through the distorting medium of the mind of the
historian, whose private quirks necessarily select a finite quantity of informa
tion from the infinite details of past reality. It can faithfully reproduce that
reality no more than a two-dimensional photograph, formed through the
refracting glass of the camera's lens, can produce an accurate picture of the
three-dimensional world. The historian, like the camera, always lies. He is
incapable of telling the whole truth. All he can do is to recognize the particu
lar distortions to which his work is inevitably subject, and to avoid the grosser
forms of retouching and excision. Like the photographer who demonstrates
the effect on his picture of all the available light filters, he can present the var
ious interpretations of controversial issues with equal prominence, and refrain
from arbitrary judgements. By so doing, he can hope if not to be objective,
then at least to be impartial.
In this regard, a note on the historian's private philosophy of history may not
be entirely irrelevant. Two formative influences have tended to pull me in oppo
site directions. A period of study at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow,
where the requirements for the doctoral examinations included reading matter
of a distinctly ideological nature, certainly aroused my curiosity about the prob
lem of Causality. Whilst not converting me to the cogency of Marxism,
Leninism, or Marxism-Leninism, it did reinforce my earlier suspicions that
something akin to 'historical forces' might exist, and might be responsible in
part for the way that things happen. Concurrently, an earlier period of study in
viii PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION OF VOLUME I
the School of Modern History at Oxford under the tuition of Mr A. J. P. Taylor
did not pass entirely into oblivion. Unlike our illustrious predecessor at
Magdalen College, Edward Gibbon, I cannot pretend that my years at Oxford
'were the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life'. I did not accept that Mr
Taylor's inimitable opinions are invariably perverse, and I respect his prompt
ings that both chance, and the will of individual human beings, play their part
in directing the course of events. As a result, in trying to reconcile the contrary
influences, I have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively of
determinist, individualist, or random elements, but from a combination of all
three. In any given historical situation, I insist at the start on identifying a matrix
of social, economic, cultural, institutional, military, personal, and dynamic
political factors which are pertinent to all further developments. But there I
draw the line. I think that the matrix of historical forces determines the limits of
the possible, but does not, and cannot determine what course events will subse
quently take within those given limits. I believe that a range of choices is always
available to individuals, especially to those set in positions of authority, and that
their response to the options before them can influence mankind's fate deci
sively. In the realm of human motivation, I happen to believe in the primacy of
the irrational, seeing Reason as the servant, not as the master of our fears, emo
tions, and instincts. Finally, I believe that all human beings are fallible; that all
leaders of men are inadequate to their calling: and that the results of their
actions are rarely an exact measure of what they intended. As Bismarck once
remarked, they are not so much in full control of events, as in a position occa
sionally to deflect them. When they fail to do either, they lay themselves open to
what the ancients called Fate or Providence, what the moderns call Accidents,
and what the British call 'muddling through'. In short, life is not entirely absurd;
but it is not entirely rational either. Among British and American scholars, atti
tudes of this sort are not uncommon; but whether they find any coherent expres
sion in the text only the reader can judge.
In writing the history of a modern country, however, philosophical reflections
must often take second place to more practical problems. Among them is
the problem of hindsight. On the one hand, the cautious historian is bound to
wonder whether the teleological exercise of tracing the origins of a modern state
or nation from the present into the past is essentially unhistorical. It tends to
confuse antecedent and postcedent with cause and effect, and obliterates the
multifarious alternatives which faced the actors of the drama at each stage of
their progress. It justifies the course of events in terms of their outcome. In the
Polish case, it suggests that the present People's Republic of Poland is the one
and only conceivable product of the historical process. On the other hand, the
historian is unable to deny that he is living in the fourth quarter of the twentieth
century, and not in the Dark Ages, and that he is blessed with the benefit of hind
sight whether he likes it or not. Nor can he ignore the interests of his readers,
whose curiosity about a modern country will have more probably been aroused
by the happenings of their own times than by any thirst for knowledge about the
PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION OF VOLUME I ix
remoter past. He is bound to pay some special attention to those aspects of his
subject most closely connected to the world in which we live.
There is, above all, the capital problem of definition. For the historian who
aims to write a comprehensive survey of a European country, the really difficult
task lies less in the interpretation of historical facts than in defining what facts
are supposed to be interpreted. In this regard, it is much easier to discredit the
syntheses of rivals and predecessors than to construct a coherent scheme for
oneself. Oddly enough, modern Marxist-Leninist historians in Poland have
swallowed the old nationalist ideology hook, line, and sinker. Although their
socio-economic analysis of the development of the Polish national community
represents a new tack in modern historiography, their unquestioning acceptance
of the permanent existence of that community throughout recorded history
stands in complete agreement with the definition of Polish History as assumed
by pre-war nationalist scholars. Very few Polish historians have doubted the
contention that the Polish community of their own day was the sole legitimate
claimant to the soil on which they live, and that they are the natural and exclu
sive heirs of all those earlier communities who occupied those same lands. Yet
such a contention, though politically convenient, is demonstrably false. The citi
zens of the People's Republic do not have the same things in common as the citi
zens of pre-war Poland, still less with the subjects of the stateless Polish nation
of the nineteenth century or of the Kingdom and Republic of earlier times.
A more cautious approach would suggest that nothing in our present under
standing of European History permits us to view the growth of its constituent
nations as an 'autonomous . . . organic . . . process'. There is something to be
said for analysing the development of states and institutions from that point of
view, but nothing for applying it to the development of nations. In Poland's
case, where the existence of the state has been intermittent, and only partly coin
cidental with the life of the nation, it would seem to be quite inappropriate.
In my view, the historian has no safe choice but to examine the pieces of the
puzzle separately, with no hope of fitting Society, State, and Nation into some
neat and consequential pattern. I do not maintain, of course, that Polish History
is completely fortuitous or disjointed. What I do say is, firstly that the role of
arbitrary external influences and of foreign powers has been no less important
than that of coherent domestic forces; and, secondly, that the instances of dis
continuity are no less in evidence than the strands of continuity.
In the history of the Polish State, the established order has been overturned on
at least five occasions - in 1138, in 1795, in 1813, in 1864, and in 1939. On each
occasion, all concrete manifestations of a unified political community were lost.
At the end of each disembodiment - in 1320, 1807, 1815, 1918, and 1944 - the
new order which came into being owed little to its predecessors, and was
obliged to make a fresh start, in new conditions and under new management.
Similarly, in the history of the Polish nation, the destiny of its members has been
fused for long periods and in the most intimate way with that of other peoples
- in the early centuries with the Czechs and other Slavs; from 1385 to 1793 with