The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

POLAND. 243successors soon lost most of his conquests, but a century later Bolislas III. evangelizedthe Pomorianians (Pomeranians), who, cut off by the impassable marshesof the Netze, had long formed a world apart grouped round Wollin, or Vineta.Still the internal dissensions of the Slavs and tha " Germanisation " of a great partof their domain prevented Poland from retaining her western conquests. Towardsthe end of the thirteenth century the kingdom had lost half of the original Polishlands in the Oder basin. By invitation the Duke of Mazovia and the TeutonicKnights established themselves in the Prusso-Lithuanian lands on the Baltic,Fig. 116.— Shifting of the Polish State East and West.According to Dragomanov. Scale 1 : 20,000,000.Limits of the TerritoryWestern Slavs, actually ofTenth Century, occupied by Bolislas IPresentKingdom.whence they commanded the Niemen and Vistula basins. Thus began one of thepolitical elements destined one day to share in the fall of Poland.After the definite renunciation of Polish Silesia by Casimir the Great in themiddle of the fourteenth century, the state seems to have turned its attentionentirely towards the east. Through the spread of Christianity and the marriageof the Polish queen with the pagan Prince Jagello, Lithuania was annexed, andthe whole of Western Russia thrown open. Even in the seventeenth centurySigismund III. could still aspire to become monarch of all East and North Europe.Claiming at once the throne of Sweden and Poland, he also aimed at the sovereigntyof Muscovy. Under Sobieski the Polish nation, brave and heroic aboveall other*, seemed to have definitely become the champion of the West against the