Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/297

Rh 285 POLAND . late I. T)OLAND (the Polish Polska, German Polen, French I Pologne) was till towards the end of the 18th century a large and powerful kingdom, extending, with Lithuania, which was incorporated with it, over the basins of the Warta, Vistula, Dwina, Dnieper, and upper Dniester, and having under its dominion, besides the Poles proper and the Baltic Slavs, the Lithuanians, the White Russians, and the Little Russians or Ruthenians. If Schafarik is correct in seeing the name of the Poles in the Bulanes of the geographer Ptolemy, we should have this Slavonic people mentioned as early as the 2d century after Christ. 1 There can be no doubt about the derivation of the name ; the country is one vast plain, and thus the Poles come to mean dwellers of the plain or field (pole). Jordanes has no distinct name for them, although he speaks of Slavs inhabiting the banks of the Vistula. About the he Gth or 7th century we find a people called Lekhs settled near 3khs. that r iver, and this appears to be the oldest name which we can positively assign to the Poles. These Lekhs are considered by Szajnocha and some of the modern school of historians to have been a Norse tribe who in the 6th cen tury ruled over the Slavonic peoples from the Baltic to the Carpathians. And, if this were the case, the origin of the Polish kingdom would be traced to the same source as the Russian empire. No satisfactory etymology has been given as yet of the word Lekh or Lech ; we cannot accept Schafarik s attempt to connect it with szlachta, nobility, as that word is in all probability derived from the German geschlecht. From the form of tha word Lech, Russian Liakh, we can see that the vowel represents a suppressed nasal, and this is further proved by the change which it undergoes in the neighbouring languages ; thus in Lithu anian we get Lenkas and in Magyar Lengyel. The chronicle of Thomas, archdeacon of Spalato, calls them Line/ones (Bielowski, Mon. Hist. Pol.}, the Polish chronicles of Mierzwa and of Vincent Kadlubek Lenchitx, Linchitx. The loss of the nasal in the modern Polish form is curious, and contrary to the analogy of the language ; it is supposed to have disappeared under the influence of Russian pronunciation. In the 13th century Kadlubek invented the imaginary heros eponymus Lekh, supposed to have been the father of the Poles, and two brothers were found for him, Czech and Rus. 2 A great similarity has been noticed between these early heroes and others among the Czechs. Thus we may compare Cracus and Krok, Piast and Premysl. Many of the legendary tales greatly resemble Scandinavian sagas, as indeed much of the early Russian history does which is contained in the chronicle of Nestor. Gradually the name Lekh was superseded by Poliani or Polaki. Nestor, the old Russian chronicler, or at least the work which goes under his name, knows both appellations and distinguishes between Poliane Liakhove on the Vistula and Poliane Rousove on the Dnieper, When we first become acquainted with the Poles we find them like the other Slavonic peoples living in a kind of democratic communism, to which we need not assign the patriarchal simplicity and happiness in which some of their chroniclers, e.g., Dlugosz, would make us believe. All the early period of Polish history is mixed up with fables. Their first writers Gallus, Kadlubek, Dlugosz, Kromer, and others, who were ecclesiastics and used the Latin 1 There is another reading, Sulanes or Sulones ; but the former is preferred by the best editors. &quot; For a further discussion of this subject, see the indexes to M. Leger s Nestor (p. 328), and especially the Archiv fur Slawische Philoloyie (vol. iii., Ueler die Namen fur Polen und Lechen, by Prof. Nehring, and vol. iv., Polen, Ljachen, Wenden, by Prof. Perwolf). language as their literary medium and handled it with considerable dexterity, have treated these stories as genuine history, just as Holinshed, Milton, Sir Richard Baker, and others did the Arthurian legends. The careful criticism, however, of modern times has relegated them to their proper place, and Lelewel has classified all the period of Polish history from the earliest times to the reign of Mieczyslaw I. as belonging to the era of myths. We are hardly likely to believe in the existence of a Duke Lech or a beautiful Princess Wanda, who flourished in the 8th cen tury, or in Cracus, said to have been the founder of Cracow. All these are obviously only generic and national names individualized. Many of the quaint and striking stories of these princes have done duty in all the legendary history of Europe. It cannot be doubted that poems corresponding to the Russian lillni are imbedded in the writings of these early chroniclers. The good peasant Piast, from whom was derived the celebrated line of kings, reminds us of the Mikoula Selianinovich of the Russians and the Premysl of the Czechs. Kromer has tricked out the legend of his call to the throne in all the graces of his elegant Latinity. Bielowski, the editor of the Monumenta Polonies Views of Historica, in his Wstep Krytyczny do Dziejoiu Polski 3 Bielowski, (&quot;Critical Introduction to Polish History&quot;) endeavoured to prove that the original Poles dwelt on the banks of the Danube, from which they were driven by the Romans. He also attempts to trace them in the 2d and 3d centuries after Christ. According to the whimsical theory of this author a man to whom Slavonic history in other respects owes so much the original habitation of the Poles was by the Lake of Ochrida. The Le,chites (Lyncesta?) in the 3d century before Christ were driven by the Celts beyond the Danube, and there the kingdom of Dacia was founded. King Boirebista is Leszek II., Decebalus is Semowit, Arc. Lelewel and Bielowski seem to have identified all the Thracian peoples with the Slavs. All that we are told of the early Slavs shows them to The early have been a quiet agricultural people. We find them at Slavs. first living in village communities with a tribal govern ment. Nestor says, &quot; The Poliani lived in separate groups, and each governed his family.&quot; Gradually a class of serfs sprung up, whose origin cannot be clearly traced. Ropell in his history supposes that they were the descendants of rival tribes who had been conquered. At all events we soon find the following divisions of society among the Poles : (1) the nobility, szlachta, who throughout Polish history constitute the nation properly so-called ; (2) a superior class of peasants who were per sonally free, but bound to perform certain services (these are always called in the old Polish documents cmetones, or kmetones, Polish kmieci} ; and (3) the peasants strictly so called, who were the property of their masters and had no rights. We shall see how there was gradually formed in Poland a proud military aristocracy, which circumscribed the power of the king by the pacta conventa, so that he became a mere puppet in their hands. The nobles had ab solute power over their serfs, as each separate palatinate had its tribunals. In course of time the kmieci became mere bondsmen. The miserable condition of the latter is seen in such books as Connor s Letters on Poland, published at the conclusion of the 17th century. Connor, who was physician to John Sobieski, had good opportunities for 3 The following directions for pronunciation may be useful: c = ts; cz = ch; sz = sh; z = zh (the French j, as in jour) ; I has a thick sound which can only be acquired by ear. In nearly every word the accent is on the penult.