History of Poland: From medieval origins to the modern republic

Numerous prehistoric finds, the oldest from the Stone Age in the area of today's southern Poland, testify with fortifications, settlements and gravesites to various cultural epochs and the settlement of today's Polish territory. The assignment of the finds to a closed settlement area of the Poles is not clear. Migrations of various peoples through the territory of today's country caused a great ethnic diversity, in historical times one of the characteristics of the population of Poland. The British historian Norman Davies notes that prehistory is often interpreted in such a way that an "exclusive claim to ownership" of an area is derived from it in favour of only one ethnic group. This is what happened with the area between the Oder and Bug rivers; the "Autochthonous School" in Poland interprets the area as the "fixed and sole homeland of the Prasłowianie". The national Prussian historiography, on the other hand, made the area the original homeland of the Early Germanic tribes. In fact, the lengthy process that gave the Slavic, Polish-speaking element a predominant position within the overall population is obscure.

Taking into account the aforementioned limitations, it can be assumed that some Slavic tribes from the Dniester and Pripjet regions settled in the area between the Oder, Vistula and Baltic Sea between the 6th and 7th centuries. Their migration was triggered by the Hun storm at the beginning of the Germanic migration of peoples.

The tangible beginning of Polish history falls in the 10th century. Between 880 and 960 various West Slavic tribes between the Oder and Vistula rivers grew together to form a state. The most important of these tribes were the Opolans, the Slenzans, the Masovians, and the Wislans. Another tribe, the Polans (polanie, "field dwellers") is said to have established a permanent state, which emerged as a duchy in the late 10th century in the region around the cities of Posen and Gnesen. The fact that the ruling federation of the Polans, whose centre of settlement was an area around Gniezno, did not appear in the written sources in the 9th and 10th centuries was explained by older Polish historiography with the relative isolation of central Greater Poland. Without contact with the East Franks, Bohemia, Moravia, moreover away from the known trade routes, the Poles could have developed and consolidated here completely unnoticed by the outside world.

The emergence of their increasingly dense and coherent dominion territory took place through a planned conquest. The first traces of their violent actions can be found on the middle Warta and along the Obra, where at the beginning of the 10th century older small castles of various petty rulers, which had been established in the 8th-9th century, were systematically destroyed. The population there was resettled in the Gniezno Highlands, the possible ancestral territory of the Polans. For the Gniezno Highlands, neither a more intensive population nor a network of castles had been found by then. The ancestral territory was consolidated in the 920s and 950s by the expansion of the two castle villages of Giecz and Moraczewo. Furthermore, wooden and earthen ramparts and castle chains were built on its periphery. These planned extensions required large amounts of resources and a large number of workers. Archaeological evidence at this time indicates settlement geographic changes, in the course of which the western and southwestern regions of Wielkopolska were subjected to massive destruction and depopulation, while the Poznañ-Gniezno central area underwent internal colonization expansion and population increase.

The leaders of the Poles relied on an elite, tightly managed, powerful military following. From the 930s and 940s onwards, luxury goods of interregional exchange increasingly reached Wielkopolska. These were exchanged for people who were in demand especially on oriental and southern European slave markets. The actual subsistence of this ruling elite had to be paid for by the local population through taxes and services. Due to the still poorly developed agrarian society, this very quickly reached its limits. In order to secure the loyalty of his military followers, the duke had to supply and reward them regularly, for which his own territory and population were not sufficient. Thus, slaves could only be drawn to a small extent from the duke's own population. Therefore, raids and wars into foreign territories and the siphoning off of the resources there were an indispensable instrument for securing rule. This explains the rapidly increasing expansion of the Polans outside their own core territory.