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Rh under the triumviri or under Octavian, and was mainly important as a harbour. It seems to have attained its greatest prosperity about the time of the emperor Septimius Severus (193–211 ), when it was an important war harbour and contained 35,000 to 50,000 inhabitants. At a later period Pola became the capital of the margraves of Istria, and was captured by the Venetians in 1148. It was several times captured and plundered by the Genoese, and recaptured by the Venetians. In 1379 the Genoese, after defeating the Venetians in a great naval battle off the coast, took and destroyed Pola, which disappears from history for the next four hundred and fifty years. It remained under Venetian supremacy down to 1797, and has been permanently united with Austria since 1815. In 1848 a new era began for Pola in its being selected as the principal naval harbour of Austria.

 POLABS (Po =o n, Laba = Elbe), the (q v.) who dwelt upon the Elbe and eastwards to the Oder. Their chief tribes were the Vagri in Holstein, the Bodriči or Obotritae in Mecklenburg, the Ljutiči or Wiltzi in western Pomerania, the Sprevane on the Spree and the Glomači or Dalemintsi in Saxony. Except the Lithuanians they were the last Europeans to be Christianized; their chief sanctuary was at Arcona on the Isle of Rugen. They were converted and conquered by the 12th century and systematically germanized. By the 17th century Slavonic survived only in a tiny patch in the east of Hanover about Luchow, where a few words were still understood at the beginning of the 19th century. The population of the district still goes by the name of (q.v.). The chief remains of the language are a paternoster, a few phrases and a short vocabulary written down by Pastor Chr. Henning (c. 1700), and the diary of J. Paruns Schultze (d. 1734). These were edited by A. Hilferding (St Petersburg, 1856), and a grammar was published there by A. Schleicher (1871). M. Porzezinski and Fr. Lorentz are the chief later authorities. Polabian agrees mostly with Polish and Kašube with its nasalized vowels and highly palatalized consonants. It had, however, long vowels and a free accent. The remains of it are most corrupt, having been written down when the language was full of Low German by people who did not know Slavonic.

 POLACCA, the Italian name for a three-masted merchant vessel, formerly common in the eastern waters of the Mediterranean. The masts were of one piece and the sails were square or lateen-shaped. The name appears in various forms in other languages, e.g. Fr. polaque or polacre, Sp. polacra, Du. polaak or Ger. Polack, and certainly means Polish, although there is no explanation to be found for any connexion between Poland and such a Mediterranean vessel.

 POLAND (Polish Polska, Ger. Polen), (see, below), a country of Europe which till the end of the 18th century was a kingdom extending (with Lithuania) over the basins of the Warta, Vistula, Dwina, Dnieper and upper Dniester, and had under its dominion, besides the Poles proper and the Baltic Slavs, the Lithuanians, the White Russians and the Little Russians or Ruthenians.

We possess no certain historical data relating to Poland till the end of the 10th century. It would seem, from a somewhat obscure passage in the chronicle compiled from older sources by Nestor, a monk of Kiev (d. c. 1115), that the progenitors of the Poles, originally established on the Danube, were driven from thence by the Romans to the still wilder wilderness of central Europe, settling finally among the virgin forests and impenetrable morasses of the basin of the upper waters of the Oder and the Vistula. Here the Lechici, as they called themselves (a name derived from the mythical patriarch, Lech), seemed to have lived for centuries, in loosely connected communities, the simple lives of huntsmen, herdsmen and tillers of the soil, till the pressure of rapacious neighbours compelled them to combine for mutual defence. Of this infant state, the so-called kingdom of the Piasts (from

Piast its supposed founder), we know next to nothing. Its origin, its territory, its institutions are so many insoluble riddles. The earliest Polish chroniclers, from Gallus in the early 12th century to Janko of Czarnkow in the 14th, are of little help to us. The only facts of importance to be gleaned from them are that Prince Ziemovit, the great-grandfather of Mieszko (Mieczyslaw) I. (962–992), wrested from the vast but tottering Moravian Empire the province of Chrobacyja (extending from the Carpathians to the Bug), and that Christianity was first preached on the Vistula by Greek Orthodox missionary monks. Mieszko himself was converted by Jordan, the chaplain of his Bohemian consort, Dobrawa or Bona, and when Jordan became the first bishop of Posen, the people seem to have followed the example of their prince. But the whole movement was apparently the outcome not of religious conviction, but of political necessity. The Slavonic peoples, whose territories then extended to the Elbe, and embraced the whole southern shore of the Baltic, were beginning to recoil before the vigorous impetus of the Germans in the West, who regarded their pagan neighbours in much the same way as the Spanish Conquistadores regarded the Aztecs and the Incas. To accept Christianity, at least formally, was therefore a prudential safeguard on the part of the Slavonians. This was thoroughly understood by Mieszko’s son Boleslaus I. (992–1025), who went a considerable step farther than his father. Mieszko had been content to be received on almost any terms into the Christian community, Boleslaus aimed at securing the independence of the Polish Church as an additional guarantee of the independence of the Polish nation It was Boleslaus who made the church at Gnesen in Great Poland a national shrine by translating thither the relics of the martyred missionary, St Adalbert of Prague. Subsequently he elevated Gnesen into the metropolitan see of Poland, with jurisdiction over the bishoprics of Cracow, Breslau and Kolberg, all three of these new sees, it is important to notice, being in territory conquered by Boleslaus; for hitherto both Cracow and Breslau had been Bohemian cities, while Kolberg was founded to curb the lately subjugated Pomeranians. Boleslaus was also the first Polish prince to bear the royal title, which seems to have been conferred upon him by Otto III. in 1000, though as Boleslaus crowned himself king a second time in 1025, it is evident that he regarded the validity of his first coronation as somewhat doubtful. He was primarily a warrior, whose reign, an almost uninterrupted warfare, resulted in the formation of a vast kingdom extending from the Baltic to the Carpathians, and from the Elbe to the Bug. But this imposing superstructure rested on the flimsiest of foundations. In less than twenty years after the death of its founder, it collapsed before a combined attack of all Poland’s enemies, and simultaneously a terrible pagan reaction swept away the poor remnants of Christianity and civilization. For a time Poland proper became a smoking wilderness, and wild beasts made their lairs in the ruined and desecrated churches. Under Boleslaus II. (1058–1079) and Boleslaus III. (1102–1139) some of the lost provinces, notably Silesia and Pomerania, were recovered and Poland was at least able to maintain her independence against the Germans. Boleslaus III., moreover, with the aid of St Otto, bishop of Bamberg, succeeded in converting the heathen Pomeranians (1124–1128), and making head against paganism generally.

The last act of Boleslaus III. was to divide his territories among his sons, whereby Poland was partitioned into no fewer than four, and ultimately into as many as eight, principalities, many of which (Silesia and Great Poland, for instance) in process of time split up into still smaller fractions all of them more or less bitterly hostile to each other. This partitional period, as Polish historians generally call it, lasted from 1138 to 1305, during which Poland lost all political significance, and became an easy prey to her neighbours. The duke of Little Poland,