Historia Poloniae
The Zygudski Dynasty
The Zygudski Dynasty
Foreword
The date was January 14th, 1864. Czesław Fryderyk Raczkowski, better known to history as Wisła, and his Robotnik forces had at last successfully broken the monarchist resistance at Gdańsk, after a final eight hours of frenetic artillery rounds and a brief assault. Zygfryd Zigurdski, Car of All Slavs; his wife Elizabeth, their daughters Elżbieta and Mania, and the young heir to the Imperial throne Carewicz Zygfryd attempted to flee the Silver Palace, but the Robotniks had moved swiftly to shut down the great Gdańsk docks. Before the Car and his family could reach the Imperial frigate which would have offered them safe passage to the United Kingdom, they were captured by the Robotniks. Seeking to bring a quick end to the Autumn Rising, Wisła summarily executed the Car and his family. The execution was not formal. A former Robotnik revolutionary present at the time recalled 'a few muttered words between Wisła and the lieutenant [Mikołaj Malek], a pistol raised. One shot. The girls screaming, the Carina sobbing, the Carewicz silent but with a look of such intense hatred that all but Wisła averted their gaze. Five more shots, in turn. Mania was the last, before the bodies were quickly thrown into the grey waters of the harbour.'
Their deaths came mere hours before the monarchist army they had been holding out for arrived at Gdańsk, too late to lift the siege. The war would drag on for another seven months, ending only on August 3rd, 1864 with the triumphant rout of the last monarchist forces at the battle of Crumlaw, but by then the monarchist forces were dying for little more than the chance to place some distant pretender on the Imperial throne. The Zigurdski dynasty, an unbroken line stretching back over eight hundred years, had been broken; and the mighty Polish Empire, now reduced to little more than a husk, would soon collapse alongside it. Perhaps the most powerful and mighty family to have shaped the course of European history had at last become yet another page in the vast annals of history.
A hundred and fifty years on from that date, however, I was struck by how unlucky that turn of events now seems. We take it for granted in this day and age that the Cardom of Poland was perhaps uniquely placed to become the first major industrial power and consolidate the already pre-eminent place it held in European history even further; but if you were to travel back in time to the middle of the 9th century, you would have been struck by how unimportant the nascent Polish state was. The Carolingian Empire had already split into West Francia and East Francia, forerunners of the modern German and French nations, and both were huge kingdoms that dominated Europe both geographically and politically. Meanwhile, the Polanie were a number of divided tribes with no real political infrastructure, scattered along the banks of the river Vistula. This, then, is the history of Poland: a detailed walk through the unification of the Polanie, the birth of the Kingdom of Poland, and the vast sprawl of the Polish Empire. However, one might equally put it another way - this is a history of the Zygudski dynasty. I hope you find it as interesting as I did.
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