WI: No Polish Unification?

[htgriffin]

A common practice in medieval Europe was the division of land amongst all heirs in order to avoid fraternal strife. In the case of larger farms and estates this is indeed a sensable policy, but when applied to Royal successions the results are never good.

Case in point, Poland's Seniorate Constitution quite literally destroyed the fragile early kingdom when all of Boleslav III Piast's sons received part of the kingdom to do with as they will (although the eldest of the line was to remain the nominal king and direct lord of Cracow) upon his death in 1138. The subdivision amongst the Piast cousins continued over the generations, until there were at least 8 functionally independent duchies under the nominal control of the king in Cracow (always the senior Piast heir) by the mid 1200s. This does not even count the duchies of Silesia and Pomerania, which were absorbed into the HRE, or the lands the Teutonic Order seized on the Baltic coast.

It was not until 1314 that the noble Wladislaw Lokietek managed to unite many of the petty Polish states against the Kingdom of Bohemia and abolish the Seniorate... but what if Wenceslas of Bohimia had not provided such a convinient foil with his ambitions?

The near-anarchic patchwork of statelets had been run roughshod over by several invaders (inclusing the Mongols and Crusders) and Germans were settling in increasing numbers by the invitation of various dukes. Without a central government worth the name, could Poland have consolidated itself into several smaller states? Or perhaps creeping assimilation of both nobility and commoners could have resulted in the increasingly Germanized lands joining the "Holy Roman" Empire as the French chewed at the latter's western borders?

Discuss.

HTG

 

[htgriffin]

Bump

Hello? Surely some polonophiles here?

 

[Grey Wolf]

Its rather outside my area of so-called expertise, though all that means is its outside the less ignorance and inside the greater ignorance

Grey Wolf

 

[Valamyr]

Hm. I suspect that your latter theory is accurate. The germans were steadily expanding eastwards, and without a strong poland to stop them, they probably would continue to do so until they faced something solid.

 

[Anthony Appleyard]

... until they faced something solid.

What if the Slavic peoples who lived in what was later East Germany (Obotrites, Wiltzes, Sorbs, Polabs, Pomorze, etc) had formed as proper united state in time and kept German settlers and armies out over the centuries? About East Germany place names:-
By -nitz and -witz and -ow and -in
you tell that Slavs once lived therein.

 

[Faeelin]

Hmm. I'd say that the area is settled by Germans even more extensively than OTL; might end up as part of the empire of the house of Luxemberg.

 

[Sean Swaby]

Well, with a weakened Poland, effectively split into several fiefdoms, then most likely German immigration would continue for a while.
But at some point the continued divisions are going to become ridiculously small and it is possible that before Poland divided itself totally out of existence, some of the nobility would recognize that their heirs would soon be dukes without duchies and abolish the Seniorate Constitution (or at least the section with regards to dividing the royal possessions equally amongst the heirs).

It is also possible that some other Polish king would unite the various Polish duchies against some other foreign threat in the future (which is certainly possible, considering that stronger neighbours have a habit of preying on their weaker neighbours). So Polish unification would occur later, by which time Germans would probably be settled in more areas of Poland in larger numbers.

A third event that could happen is that whilst some of the Polish duchies become absorbed into the Holy Roman Empire (the more Germanized of the duchies), the rest could eventually fall under the dominion of Russia (when she comes about and starts expanding). Should Poland be effectively partitioned between the HRE and Russia, I would expect that the Russian dominated area would remain Slavic and may not ever achieve independence from Russia (if absorbed early enough).