Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/112

 Poland a great code of laws, the Statute of Wislica. based upon the principle "one king, one law, one coinage," abolished the right of appeal to Magdeburg and created conditions under which the German element was quickly absorbed by the Polish community. The end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century is the period during which German influence in Poland comes to an end and the expansion of Germanism towards the East is stopped for centuries. By the defeat of the Teutonic Order at the battle of Tannenberg (Grunwald) with the subsequent Second Treaty of Thorn, by which the Western possessions of the Order, including the mouth of the Vistula and the city of Danzig, were again incorporated into Poland, Germanism was even pushed back where it remained within the same frontiers till the second half of the eighteenth century—till the partitions of Poland.

In the second half of the fourteenth century Poland had two powerful and dangerous neighbours, the Teutonic Order, which barred her access to the Baltic and extended its conquests into Polish territories, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, whose rulers, of the Giedymin dynasty, extended their dominion over Western Russian principalities at a time when Great Russia was still under the Tartar yoke. The Lithuanians were engaged in a struggle with the Teutonic Order, but they also frequently raided Polish possessions and struggled against Poland for the acquisition of Russian Southwestern territories. Poland was too small to fight both those enemies, and in these circumstances the Polish lords displayed a great genius for statesmanship. They married the heiress to the Polish throne, Hedwig,