Recovered Territories - History Before 1945

History Before 1945

Numerous West Slavic tribes had inhabited most of the area of present-day Poland since the 6th century. Mieszko I of the Polans from his stronghold in the Gniezno area united various neighboring tribes in the second half of the 10th century, creating the first Polish state and becoming the first historically recorded Piast duke. His realm roughly included all of the area of what would later be named the Recovered Territories, except for the Warmian-Masurian part of Old Prussia and eastern Lusatia.

His son and successor, Bolesław I Chrobry, upon the 1018 Peace of Bautzen expanded the southern part of the realm, but lost control over the lands of Western Pomerania on the Baltic coast. After fragmentation, pagan revolts and a Bohemian invasion in the 1030s, Casimir I the Restorer again united most of the former Piast realm, including Silesia and Lubusz Land on both sides of the middle Oder River, but without Western Pomerania, which became part of the Polish state again under Bolesław III Wrymouth from 1116 until 1121, when the noble House of Griffins established the Duchy of Pomerania. On Bolesław's death in 1138, Poland for almost 200 years was subjected to fragmentation, being ruled by Bolesław's sons and their successors, who were often in conflict with each other. Partial reunification was achieved by Władysław I the Elbow-high, crowned king of Poland in 1320, although the Silesian and Masovian duchies remained independent Piast holdings.

In the course of the 12th to 14th centuries, Germanic, Dutch and Flemish settlers moved into East Central and Eastern Europe in a migration process known as the Ostsiedlung. In Pomerania, Brandenburg, East Prussia and Silesia, the former West Slav (Polabian Slavs and Poles) or Balt population became minorities throughout the following centuries, although substantial numbers of the original inhabitants remained in areas such as Upper Silesia. In Greater Poland and in Eastern Pomerania (Pomerelia), German settlers formed a minority.

Despite the actual loss of several provinces, medieval lawyers of the Kingdom of Poland created a specific claim to all formerly Polish provinces that were not reunited with the rest of the country in 1320. It was based on the theory of the Corona Regni Poloniae, according to which the state (the Crown) and its interests were no longer strictly connected with the person of the monarch. Because of that no monarch could effectively renounce Crown claims to any of the territories that were historically and/or ethnically Polish. Those claims were reserved for the state (the Crown), which in theory still covered all of the territories that were part of, or dependent of, the Polish Crown upon the death of Bolesław III in 1138. Some of the territories as Pomerelia, or Masovia were reunited with Poland during the 15th and 16th centuries. However all Polish monarchs until the end of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795 had to promise to do everything possible to reunite the rest of those territories with the Crown.

The areas of the Recovered Territories fall into three categories:

• Those that once had been part of the Polish state during the rule of the Piasts
• Those that had not been part of Poland, but were fiefs of the Polish crown in the 15th and 16th centuries (Ducal Prussia)
• Territories that had been part of Poland until the Partitions (parts of Royal Prussia including Warmia, as well as the regions of Piła, Wałcz, and Złotów, which went to Prussia in the First Partition of 1772; and Gdańsk, Międzyrzecz, and Wschowa, which followed in the Second Partition of 1793)