The Eagle Must Be Free – 1060-1093
Sudislav had united the nobility of Poland and Galicia around himself through the promise of war with the Tatars and an end to their domination over the Kingdom. With great celebration he assembled an army and marched against the powerful Emirate of Minsk, ruling lands stretching from the Baltic to the Ukrainian Steppe. Seeking to liberation the great city of Kiev, once the capital of the Kievan Rus, the Poles stormed with foolhardy enthusiasm into enemy territory. They were stunned to discover the scale of the threat the faced, as the Tatars had called upon their allies to the east to assemble a force many times larger than that of the Poles and crushed them utterly. Sudislav himself barely escaped with his life, and much of the cream of Poland’s warrior elite was lost. Sudislav promptly surrendered – agreeing to a significantly increased tribute to the Tatars that drove the crown’s coffers deep into debt, and the brink of bankruptcy.
Worse was still to come. To the south the Hungarians, a Greek Orthodox kingdom that had embraced Christianity around the same time as the Poles had taken to Judaism, moved to take advantage of their neighbour’s woes by invaded Poland’s mountainous Slovakian borderlands. With its armies shattered by the Tatars, and its finances in ruin, the Kingdom had no hope of defeating the Hungarians in battle.
Poland’s salvation came from an unexpected source – epidemic disease. The Dark Plague had its origins in the Far East at some point in the late 1050s. Causing mass mortality, particularly in more densely populated regions, it swept westward along trading routes into the Middle East and thereafter Europe. It was in early 1062 that areas near Poland’s southern borders began to suffer, with parts of Galicia being affected. When an outbreak hit the Hungarian army, the invaders were forced to abandon their hopes of conquest. As it cursed through the continent, the Dark Plague may have killed as much as a quarter of Europe’s population – an even higher number in more urbanised societies in the Mediterranean. Remarkably, Poland was almost entirely spared. While its Baltic coastline and parts of Galicia suffered comparatively minor epidemics, there were few reports of outbreaks in Plock or the upper Vistula valley.
This event had a tremendous impact on the nation. Religiously, the Poles came to believe that God had granted them protection from the Plague that ravaged their neighbours – leading to an intensification of Jewish religious fervour within the Kingdom. Economically and demographically, Poland’s prominence relative to its devastated neighbours rose – allowing the Kingdom to assert itself as a regional power.
As the Plague’s grip of Europe eased with the end of the 1060s, Sudislav eyed an opportunity to avenge his humiliation at Kiev – once more invading the Emirate of Minsk in 1072. The Tatars were not the force they had been a decade before. The Plague had devastated their realms and sparked a wave of instability that had cut off the westerly Russian-based rulers from their allies in the east. In just two short years, Sudislav conquered Kiev, bested the Tatars numerous times on the field of battle and even sacked Minsk itself. When peace was agreed in 1074 Poland seized Kiev and brought an end to their tribute to the Tatars. The Eagle was free once more!
Flush with confidence, the Sudislav’s nobles were eager for further conquests and called upon their liege to lead a campaign against the Jomsvikings to liberate the Jewish population of Pomerania. The King obliged in 1077. The campaign was to be a disaster. Sudislav’s invading army was forced into headlong retreat within months, and the Norsemen retaliated by plundering Poland’s Baltic coastline before sailing up the Vistula to besiege Plock itself. Clearly beaten, Sudislav agreed to pay a large annual sum to the Jomsvikings in exchange for peace. The tribute to the Tatars had been replaced by a Danegeld for the lords of Rügen.
In the decades after the Great Conversion in 1026 the Polish realm was affected by a number of key cultural changes. In the West, in the more thoroughly Judaised lands of the crown of Poland, the upper nobility moved away from their traditional East Slavic, Russian, language and culture and adopt to customs of their Polish subjects. It was during this period that Polish replaced Russian as the courtly culture in Plock. In the eastern Kingdom of Galicia, the same shift did not occur. There, the Jewish revolution had had a lesser impact and the nobility remained more closely attached to their religiously diverse people by their Russian ethnicity than through faith. The two halves of the realm appeared to be drifting apart.
It was partly in response to this cultural divide that Sudislav embarked in a series of important legal reforms. He took a hammer to the power of the traditional tribal councils of Plock – drastically limited their ability to constrain the monarchy. Most importantly, he abolished the Kingdom’s elective succession and created a royal dynasty that would flow through his descendants. However, he also called for the partition of his Kingdom – with the Polish lands going to his first son Vladimir, and Galicia to his younger son Konrad.
If Sudislav had thought his reforms would bring peace he was sorely mistaken. Within weeks of his death in 1084 the realm had descended into civil war. The origins of the conflict were in Kiev. The new King of Poland, Vladimir, was deeply unhappy at the division of the realm, and when the Prince of Kiev decided to reject Konrad and instead swear allegiance to Plock – the eastern Kingdom had no choice but to go to war. This battle between brothers quickly developed into a three-way conflict as their cousin, Putia of Pomerania rallied a number of lords in the western territories in favour of a restoration of the old constitution. While the resulting conflict ravaged the country for three years, Vladimir’s control over the economic heart of the Polish world along the Vistula guaranteed his dominance. Konrad’s lands were simply too poor to support an army capable of defeating his brother, while Putia failed to rally the nobility in sufficient numbers.
Having united the Polish realm and crushed his internal enemies, Vladimir sought to win glory abroad by following in his father’s footsteps and invading Norse-ruled Pomerania in 1088. The ensuring Jomsviking Wars would last for the next 5 years. Vladimir’s initial invasion force was handily defeated in less than a year – with the two sides agreeing to a truce in 1089. However, mere months later the Norsemen crossed into Polish territory with a vast army – threatening to destroy the Kingdom entirely. Vladimir retreated back to Plock – and won a great victory on the outskirts of his capital, routing a number of smaller Norse armies over the course of the following two years. With the Jomsviking armies destroyed, Vladimir sensed the opportunity to push home his advantage to once again march into Pomerania.
With Vladimir advancing into Norse lands, the Swedes moved to intervene in the conflict. In 1093 Vladimir was captured in battle by Kettil ‘the Monster’ of Sweden. After the King’s councillors failed to produce a sufficiently large tribute, King Kettil killed the King of the Poles in the most brutal and terrible way – making a blood eagle out of him and displaying his body for days near the Polish frontier.
With the King dead, the Jomsviking Wars were over. Yet a new conflict was brewing in Poland itself. Vladimir’s son, Sudislav II, was only 9 years old leaving the realm under the control of a regency council incapable of providing Poland with the leadership it needed. His ascension was contested by two other claimants – Putia of Pomerania, seeking to seize the throne for a second time, and Briachislav Dregovich who led a coalition of Samaritans determined to bring religious renewal to the Kingdom.