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In , the Statute of Kalisz or the General Charter of Jewish Liberties introduced numerous right for the Jews in Poland, leading to a nearly autonomous "nation within a nation". His son, Casimir III reigned — , has a reputation as one of the greatest Polish kings, and gained wide recognition for improving the country's infrastructure.
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The Golden Liberty of the nobles began to develop under Casimir's rule, when in return for their military support , the king made a series of concessions to the nobility and establishing their legal status as superior to that of the townsfolk. When Casimir the Great died in , leaving no legitimate male heir, the Piast dynasty came to an end. During the 13th and 14th centuries, Poland became a destination for German, Flemish and to a lesser extent Walloon, Danish and Scottish migrants.
The Black Death , a plague that ravaged Europe from to , did not significantly affect Poland, and the country was spared from a major outbreak of the disease. The partnership brought vast Lithuanian -controlled Rus' areas into Poland's sphere of influence and proved beneficial for the Poles and Lithuanians, who coexisted and cooperated in one of the largest political entities in Europe for the next four centuries.
In the Baltic Sea region the struggle of Poland and Lithuania with the Teutonic Knights continued and culminated at the Battle of Grunwald in , where a combined Polish-Lithuanian army inflicted a decisive victory against them. The Jagiellon dynasty at one point also established dynastic control over the kingdoms of Bohemia onwards and Hungary. Some historians estimate that Crimean Tatar slave-raiding cost Poland-Lithuania one million of its population between the years of and Poland was developing as a feudal state, with a predominantly agricultural economy and an increasingly powerful landed nobility.
The Nihil novi act adopted by the Polish Sejm parliament in , transferred most of the legislative power from the monarch to the Sejm, an event which marked the beginning of the period known as "Golden Liberty", when the state was ruled by the "free and equal" Polish nobility. Protestant Reformation movements made deep inroads into Polish Christianity, which resulted in the establishment of policies promoting religious tolerance, unique in Europe at that time.
The European Renaissance evoked in late Jagiellon Poland under kings Sigismund I the Old and Sigismund II Augustus a sense of urgency in the need to promote a cultural awakening , and during this period Polish culture and the nation's economy flourished. Another major figure associated with the era is the classicist poet Jan Kochanowski.
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The Union of Lublin established the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth , a more closely unified federal state with an elective monarchy , but which was governed largely by the nobility, through a system of local assemblies with a central parliament. The Warsaw Confederation guaranteed religious freedom for the Polish nobility szlachta and townsfolk mieszczanie.
In , the Tsar of Russia paid homage to the King of Poland. From the middle of the 17th century, the nobles' democracy, suffering from internal disorder, gradually declined, thereby leaving the once powerful Commonwealth vulnerable to foreign intervention. Starting in , the Cossack Khmelnytsky Uprising engulfed the south and east, eventually leaving Ukraine divided, with the eastern part, lost by the Commonwealth, becoming a dependency of the Tsardom of Russia.
This was followed by the 'Deluge' , a Swedish invasion of Poland, which marched through the Polish heartlands and ruined the country's population, culture and infrastructure—around four million of Poland's eleven million inhabitants died in famines and epidemics throughout the 17th century. Sobieski's reign marked the end of the nation's golden era.
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Finding itself subjected to almost constant warfare and suffering enormous population losses as well as massive damage to its economy, the Commonwealth fell into decline. The government became ineffective as a result of large-scale internal conflicts e. Lubomirski Rebellion against John II Casimir and rebellious confederations and corrupted legislative processes. The nobility fell under the control of a handful of magnats , and this, compounded with two relatively weak kings of the Saxon Wettin dynasty , Augustus II and Augustus III , as well as the rise of Russia and Prussia after the Great Northern War only served to worsen the Commonwealth's plight.
Despite this The Commonwealth-Saxony personal union gave rise to the emergence of the Commonwealth's first reform movement, and laid the foundations for the Polish Enlightenment. During the later part of the 18th century, the Commonwealth made attempts to implement fundamental internal reforms; with the second half of the century bringing a much improved economy, significant population growth and far-reaching progress in the areas of education, intellectual life, art, and especially toward the end of the period, evolution of the social and political system.
However, as a one-time personal admirer of Empress Catherine II of Russia , the new king spent much of his reign torn between his desire to implement reforms necessary to save his nation, and his perceived necessity to remain in a political relationship with his Russian sponsor.
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This led to the formation of the Bar Confederation , a szlachta rebellion directed against the Polish king and his Russian sponsors, which aimed to preserve Poland's independence and the szlachta's traditional privileges. Attempts at reform provoked the union's neighbours, and in the First Partition of the Commonwealth by Prussia, Russia and Austria took place; an act which the " Partition Sejm ", under considerable duress, eventually "ratified" fait accompli.
Corporal punishment of children was officially prohibited in However, this document, accused by detractors of harbouring revolutionary sympathies, generated strong opposition from the Commonwealth's nobles and conservatives as well as from Catherine II, who, determined to prevent the rebirth of a strong Commonwealth set about planning the final dismemberment of the Polish-Lithuanian state.
Russia was aided in achieving its goal when the Targowica Confederation , an organisation of Polish nobles, appealed to the Empress for help.
The defensive war fought by the Poles ended prematurely when the King, convinced of the futility of resistance, capitulated and joined the Targowica Confederation. The Confederation then took over the government. Russia and Prussia, fearing the mere existence of a Polish state, arranged for, and in executed, the Second Partition of the Commonwealth , which left the country deprived of so much territory that it was practically incapable of independent existence. Poles rebelled several times against the partitioners , particularly near the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century.
But, after the failed Napoleonic Wars , Poland was again split between the victorious powers at the Congress of Vienna of However, over time the Russian monarch reduced Polish freedoms, and Russia annexed the country in virtually all but name. Meanwhile, the Prussian controlled territory of Poland came under increased Germanization. Throughout the period of the partitions, political and cultural repression of the Polish nation led to the organisation of a number of uprisings against the authorities of the occupying Russian, Prussian and Austrian governments.
They were joined by large segments of Polish society, and together forced Warsaw's Russian garrison to withdraw north of the city. Over the course of the next seven months, Polish forces successfully defeated the Russian armies of Field Marshal Hans Karl von Diebitsch and a number of other Russian commanders; however, finding themselves in a position unsupported by any other foreign powers, save distant France and the newborn United States, and with Prussia and Austria refusing to allow the import of military supplies through their territories, the Poles accepted that the uprising was doomed to failure.
Upon the surrender of Warsaw to General Ivan Paskievich , many Polish troops, feeling they could not go on, withdrew into Prussia and there laid down their arms. After the defeat, the semi-independent Congress Poland lost its constitution, army and legislative assembly, and was integrated more closely with the Russian Empire. During the Spring of Nations a series of revolutions which swept across Europe , Poles took up arms in the Greater Poland Uprising of to resist Prussian rule.
Initially, the uprising manifested itself in the form of civil disobedience but eventually turned into an armed struggle when the Prussian military was sent in to pacify the region. Eventually, after several battles the uprising was suppressed by the Prussians, and the Grand Duchy of Posen was more completely incorporated into Prussia.
In , a new Polish uprising against Russian rule began. The January Uprising started out as a spontaneous protest by young Poles against conscription into the Imperial Russian Army. However, the insurrectionists, despite being joined by high-ranking Polish-Lithuanian officers and numerous politicians, were still severely outnumbered and lacking in foreign support.
They were forced to resort to guerrilla warfare tactics and failed to win any major military victories. Afterwards no major uprising was witnessed in the Russian-controlled Congress Poland, and Poles resorted instead to fostering economic and cultural self-improvement. Congress Poland was rapidly industrialised towards the end of the 19th century, and successively transformed into the Empire's wealthiest and most developed subject.
Despite the political unrest experienced during the partitions, Poland did benefit from large-scale industrialisation and modernisation programs, instituted by the occupying powers, which helped it develop into a more economically coherent and viable entity. This was particularly true in Greater Poland, Silesia and Eastern Pomerania controlled by Prussia later becoming a part of the German Empire ; areas which eventually, thanks largely to the Greater Poland Uprising of and Silesian Uprisings , were reconstituted as a part of the Second Polish Republic , becoming the country's most prosperous regions.
A total of 2 million Polish troops fought with the armies of the three occupying powers, and , died. It reaffirmed its independence after a series of military conflicts , the most notable being the Polish—Soviet War —21 when Poland inflicted a crushing defeat on the Red Army at the Battle of Warsaw , an event which is considered to have halted the advance of Communism into Europe and forced Vladimir Lenin to rethink his objective of achieving global socialism.
The event is often referred to as the "Miracle at the Vistula". During this period, Poland successfully managed to fuse the territories of the three former partitioning powers into a cohesive nation state. Railways were restructured to direct traffic towards Warsaw instead of the former imperial capitals, a new network of national roads was gradually built up and a major seaport was opened on the Baltic Coast, so as to allow Polish exports and imports to bypass the politically charged Free City of Danzig.
The inter-war period heralded in a new era of Polish politics. Whilst Polish political activists had faced heavy censorship in the decades up until the First World War, the country now found itself trying to establish a new political tradition. For this reason, many exiled Polish activists, such as Ignacy Paderewski who would later become prime minister returned home to help; a significant number of them then went on to take key positions in the newly formed political and governmental structures.
As a subsequent result of the Munich Agreement in , Czechoslovakia ceded to Poland the small sq mi Zaolzie region. The area was a point of contention between the Polish and Czechoslovak governments in the past and the two countries fought a brief seven-day war over it in On 28 September , Warsaw fell. In —41, the Soviets deported hundreds of thousands of Poles. Polish intelligence operatives proved extremely valuable to the Allies, providing much of the intelligence from Europe and beyond, [77] and Polish code breakers were responsible for cracking the Enigma cypher.
Poland made the fourth-largest troop contribution in Europe [f] and its troops served both the Polish Government in Exile in the west and Soviet leadership in the east. Polish troops played an important role in the Normandy , Italian and North African Campaigns and are particularly remembered for the Battle of Monte Cassino.
The wartime resistance movement , and the Armia Krajowa Home Army , fought against German occupation. It was one of the three largest resistance movements of the entire war, [g] and encompassed a range of clandestine activities, which functioned as an underground state complete with degree-awarding universities and a court system. Nazi German forces under orders from Adolf Hitler set up six German extermination camps in occupied Poland, including Treblinka , Majdanek and Auschwitz.
The Germans transported millions of Jews from across occupied Europe to be murdered in those camps. During the Warsaw Uprising alone, over , Polish civilians were killed, most were murdered by the Germans during the Wola and Ochota massacres. In , Poland's borders were shifted westwards. The shift forced the migration of millions of other people , most of whom were Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, and Jews.
At the insistence of Joseph Stalin , the Yalta Conference sanctioned the formation of a new provisional pro-Communist coalition government in Moscow, which ignored the Polish government-in-exile based in London. This action angered many Poles who considered it a betrayal by the Allies.
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In , Stalin had made guarantees to Churchill and Roosevelt that he would maintain Poland's sovereignty and allow democratic elections to take place. However, upon achieving victory in , the elections organized by the occupying Soviet authorities were falsified and were used to provide a veneer of legitimacy for Soviet hegemony over Polish affairs. The Soviet Union instituted a new communist government in Poland, analogous to much of the rest of the Eastern Bloc. As elsewhere in Communist Europe , the Soviet influence over Poland was met with armed resistance from the outset which continued into the s.
Military alignment within the Warsaw Pact throughout the Cold War came about as a direct result of this change in Poland's political culture. In the European scene, it came to characterize the full-fledged integration of Poland into the brotherhood of communist nations. The new communist government took control with the adoption of the Small Constitution on 19 February Collectivization in the Polish People's Republic failed. A similar situation repeated itself in the s under Edward Gierek , but most of the time persecution of anti-communist opposition groups persisted.
Despite this, Poland was at the time considered to be one of the least oppressive states of the Eastern Bloc. Despite persecution and imposition of martial law in , it eroded the dominance of the Polish United Workers' Party and by had triumphed in Poland's first partially free and democratic parliamentary elections since the end of the Second World War.
The Solidarity movement heralded the collapse of communist regimes and parties across Europe.