The earliest Polish chroniclers, from Gallus in the early 12th century to Janko ofĬzarnkow in the 14th, are of little help to us. Its origin, its territory, its institutions are so many insoluble riddles.
Piast its supposed founder), we know next to nothing.
Of this infant state, the so-called kingdom of the Piasts (from Here the Lechici, as they called themselves (a name derived from the mythical patriarch, Lech), seemed to have lived for centuries, in loosely connected communities, the simple lives of huntsmen, herdsmen and tillers of the soil, till the pressure of rapacious neighbours compelled them to combine for mutual defence. 1115), that the progenitors of the Poles, originally established on the Danube, were driven from thence by the Romans to the still wilder wilderness of central Europe, settling finally among the virgin forests and impenetrable morasses of the basin of the upper waters of the Oder and the Vistula. obscure passage in the chronicle compiled from older sources by Nestor, a monk of Kiev (d. It would seem, from a somewhat Origins of Poland. We possess no certain historical data relating to Poland till the end of the 10th century. Polen), (see Poland, Russian, below), a country of Europe which till the end of the 18th century was a kingdom extending (with Lithuania) over the basins of the Warta, Vistula, Dwina, Dnieper and upper Dniester, and had under its dominion, besides the Poles proper and the Baltic Slavs, the Lithuanians, the White Russians and the Little Russians or Ruthenians.