Poland and every aspect..... Please help me learn and understand the realities?

ok, p3, you got to start putting a space after every comma and period. It's a rule, I swear.
Edit: after question mark, too.

f stop,lol,sure thing ;).Thanks for giving me some realities :)

Benevolent? He was successful and cunning! Cannot say that nobility existed but if the old heads of local territories rebelled they rebelled only once.In fact he wasn't tyrannic, just as lond as everybody remembered the order of pecking!

4th or 5th oldest, but still quite old.


A lady prefers to get flowers on St Whatever's day than have everyone in the neighbourhood know she's 48.


Written in stone !

48 is not that bad after all. Well, it's better than 58.


It would be interesting to know the list of its predecessors.

Tell me about it! Mind you, a lady is only ever over 21...


There was a thread about that once. The oldest, I remember, is San Marino and England had two (albeit briefly) during the interregnum. There was at least one other.

Since bullfrog got it right with the day, but got it wrong with the year of the Polish constitution, I wonder if it could affect the ranking? ;-)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution#Early_constitutions

Ironside,at what point did Poland develop a nobility.Is there a difference between Poland and the rest of Europe's nobility?

Does anyone want to offer any more information?

Don't take me wrong, p3undone, but you are approaching your selected subjects here in an impatient American way, in the apparent rush to get the quick answers. Unfortunately, this invites shallow answers - even though given in good faith, but it unfortunately does not teach you anything of value. So what do you now know about early Piasts?

You were shortly told about one succesfull and cunning dynasty (of Piasts) taking over power from other families. You were also told of a bunch of semi-legendary predecessors of Mieszko I. And that's more or less it.

But since you never asked about it you were not told about other very important issues:
+ Relationships with Western Slavs, German margraves and Holy Roman emperors
+ Relationships with Czechs and Kievian Rus - winning and loosing control over lesser of greater pieces of land
+ Role of the Church in tempering the ruler's absolutism - as opposed to Byzantine caesaropapism further east
+ Continuous internal power struggle and various revolts. Family feuds: assassinations, exiles, mutiliations, blindings, poisonings ...
+ Continuous alternate regional breakdowns and unifications of Greater Poland and Lesser Poland until the last of Piasts. Complete separation of Silesia, Pomerania and Masovia and subjugation the first two of those provinces to Bohemia and German margraves. (Masovia joined Poland quite late)


If you want an academic understanding of basic issues why don't you ask us about good sources for all of this. You already got one such suggestion - Jasienica. I am sure everyone has their own one. I found something concise and readable: Cambridge Concise Histories: A Concise History of Poland, Jerzy Lukowski and Hubert Zawadzki

Available in Chapters.Indigo and Amazon but there is also part of it available online: 30 pages or so, covers Piast Poland, slavia.org/drawsko_history_1.pdf

Thank you boletus,It is not to garner information the quick impatient American way;)I would welcome any answer as it will give me more knowledge than I have now.I will ask every kind of question as this thread evolves.I expect to get more sources as well.I want more than just an academic understanding.For some reason I retain knowledge better if acquired through discussion.If you would in your own words,tell me about the early Piasts?

P3, it's very hard to answer questions which are too general, it would be much easier if they were more specific. "Tell me about early Piasts" is like "tell me about the forming of the USA", whole books have been written about it. The period covers about 400 years and there were lots of them.

Strzyga,good point,then how about tell me what you know of the early Piasts?

Indeed, mixed up my years. I was referring of course to modern democratic constitutions with the 3 oldest being in that order the USA (21 June 1788), Poland (3rd May 1791) and France (3rd September 1791). The UK has, at least to my knowledge, no written constitution.

boletus,I have read most of the source that you have provided and it seems pretty concise.Thank you.rybnik,I will read yours as well.Thank you.

Great. This is what I expected from you. :-)

boletus,correct me if I'm wrong but Casimir lll seemed to have if not the biggest impact in Poland.

Ever talk to Davies? He didn't receive tenure because he tried to present a balanced picture of Polish affairs, rather than one slanted in favour of the one and only 'chosen people'. And where he was they aad a lot of say in things. Gross is not a graduate historian, he's got his degree in sociology. All in all, he is one Gross mistake!

In many US academic circles reminding people that one-half of the some 6 million Polish citizesn killed in WW2 were Christians is a 'scietnifc flaw'. Equating the crimes of Hitler with those of Stalin is another no-no. Actually Stalin produced a higher body count, except he was impartial -- he killed Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Georgians, Armenians, whoever.

Oh my god, please please p3 do listen to her. What you're doing right now in writing is an equivalent of the auditory finger nail scratching on a blackboard. Besides it makes you look stupid and your arguments weigh less if nothing, zero-punctuated as they are. And you are a mod at that!! At the end of the day you may not care how you are perceived by others but you should, at least, care how your writing feels as it, for better or worse, has to be endured here as long as you are a mod. Not to mention that in itself reflects badly on the forum when its moderators come across as somewhat illiterate. That is all --- end of my sermon. Good luck.

I would rather live with a firm-but-fair mod with poor punctuation, than put up with yet another rude, threatening mod who knows how to use the space bar. Think of it as part of his "posting style".

Really? From memory he took that one to court and the court found that he was denied tenure "not [due to] his political outlook or views, but rather the manner and substance of his academic interpretation of historical events occurring some 40 years earlier." But do feel free to claim that it was all another insidious Jewish plot.


+1

Gross is a professor of history - what more do you need?

Davies on the other hand is...who, exactly?


Indeed, he's a good guy. Who cares if he doesn't know what a space bar is? It's meaningless.

Indeed, American judges are just as 'niezawiśli' as the Polish ones up in Gdańsk.

So it seems the court dismissed Davies' claim on the grounds that the tenure was denied to Davies not because of his political views or outlook. But obviously, "the manner and substance of his academic interpretation of historical events occurring some 40 years earlier" was not judged by the court since the court of justice is not competent to assess the manner and substance of a historical dispute.

I've come across this issue in one of Davies' books (published before the verdict was declared for which verdict he still waited at the time of writing the book) in which he was presenting the grounds on which his tenure had been denied by the university.

Jan Tomasz Gross earned the deserved name of an untiring enemy of Poland and Poles (he'd feel right at home on PF!), a swindler and cheat. Few people know that many years ago the anti-Polish falsifications made by Gross began provoking strong ripostes of eminent Poles, especially those meritorious for building bridges between Poles and Jews.

The first person that saw through Gross was Stefan Korbonski, one of the commanders of the Polish Underground State (former Government Delegate at Home), who received the Righteous Among the Nations medal from the Yad Vashem in 1980. As early as in 1981 Korbonski branded very severely Gross's various lies on the pages of 'Zeszyty Historyczne' [Historical Journals] (issue 59), connected with 'Kultura' in Paris. Korbonski focused his polemic on Gross's accusation of the whole Polish nation of anti-Semitism and indifference

sunday.niedziela.pl/artykul.php?dz=z_historii&id_art=00056

In your twisted, racist, disturbed mind perhaps. Most rational people see that he told a story that needed telling, no matter how unsavory the truth.


Strong words, especially coming from someone who routinely posts false and misleading information about many people on PF.


Is this another one of your amazing truths that you point blank refuse to reference?


Gross was entirely right if we talk about the II RP. Most Poles were absolutely indifferent to the laws in place at the time, such as the ones that forced Jewish children to attend compulsory Catholic religion classes.

FlaglessPole,when people stop responding to my posts because they can't understand the way I write,then perhaps,but until then I will continue to write the way I do or does writing this way hide veiled insults?When I'm writing a novel or an essay and not writing

chat,then I'll worry about that,but thanks for the concern and good luck.

Durng wars, the prime task of most people is sheer survival. That being the case, it's amazing that Poland was the only occupied country to create an offfical Jew-saving organisation Żegota, even though only there did such activity mean death for the aider and his entire family.

I wonder how keen you'd be to put your life on the line to conceal, feed or otherwise assist such a victim?
But there were war-time Poles that did, and that's why Poland boasts more Yad Vashem heroes than any other country.

But don't deny the part that plenty of Poles betrayed them too.

It's amazing that Poland was the only country where such an official organisation was needed. In other countries the resistance saw it as part of their duty to save Jews (which is why, to give one example, the entire Danish resistance movement is listed as righteous among nations) but in Poland some resistance groups saw it as their duty to hunt down and murder Jews.


We've been through this before: death penalties were also in place in Norway and Ukraine, to name just two places where people risked their lives to save Jews.