Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/103

 were the cause of the decline of the Polish State. Those characteristics must be accounted for by the geographical situation of the country and the part played by it in European history.

In the tenth century, when Poland appeared on the historical arena, there were two Europes, the Roman and the Byzantine. The Roman Church had conquered all the West and centre of Europe, all the Latin and Germanic countries, some Western Slavs, and even the Hungarian Kingdom founded by the Turanian invaders in the Danube Valley. The Byzantine Church had spread its teaching all over the Balkan Peninsula, among the Greeks and Southern Slavs, and was converting the Eastern Slavs of Russia, whose great centre was Kiev.

Of all Slavs the Poles were the most distant from Rome as well as from Byzantium, and therefore the most isolated from the influence of ancient civilisation, either Roman or Byzantine. This is also the reason why of all Slav countries Poland was the least known to contemporary chroniclers and why even now we know nothing certain about the origin of the Polish State. Concerning the beginnings of Poland we have only legends preserved in Polish tradition and transmitted to us by the Polish chroniclers of the twelfth century. It appears that Poland, before coming into contact with other European nations and adopting the Christian faith in the tenth century, had had a long existence, perhaps of some two centuries, as a small kingdom isolated from the life of contemporary Europe, both Western and Eastern. At least, legendary history gives the names of a long series of rulers of two