Zygmunt Wojciechowski - Biography

Biography

Wojciechowski was born in Stryj near Lviv (Stryi, Ukraine), then Austro-Hungarian Galicia. In World War I he volunteered Piłsudski’s Legion but was not deployed anymore.

In 1921, Wojciechowski began studying at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów, which had then just been re-incorporated in the re-created Polish state (now Lviv in Ukraine). In 1924, he obtained a doctorate in medieval history, social sciences, and economics, and became assistant professor at the Institute for Auxiliary Sciences of History. In 1924 he published his first concept of the "motherland territories" of Poland. His definition of "Polish motherland" was the areas as acquired by 10th-century Piast Poland in the era of Mieszko I and Boleslaw Krzywousty (Greater Poland, Silesia, Pomerania, Neumark, West Prussia). In 1925, he moved to Poznań, where he first was the deputy holder of the chair for the history of the political system and Ancient Polish law at Adam Mickiewicz University (UAM). The same year, he completed his habilitation with a thesis on the territorial administration of medieval settlements. He became extraordinary (non-tenured) professor in 1929, and full professor in January 1937. From 1939, he was the dean of the university's Department of Law and Economics.