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Portal:Poland/Selected biography/1
Józef Piłsudski
Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935) was a Polish military and political leader who was largely responsible for Poland's reëmergence as an independent nation in 1918 and later exercised dictatorial powers during much of the existence of the
Second Polish Republic. He was a leader of the
Polish Socialist Party early in his political career and later created the
Polish Legions which fought alongside the
Austro-Hungarian and
German Empires against Russia during World War I. In 1917, with Russia faring badly in the war, he withdrew his support from the
Central Powers. Piłsudski was named renascent Poland's
chief of state in 1918 and marshal of Poland in 1920. In 1919–1921, he led Polish forces to victory in the
Polish–Soviet War. He withdrew from political life in 1923, but came back three years later in the
coup d'état of May 1926, becoming a virtual dictator of Poland with a firm grip on military and foreign affairs until his death. Though a number of his political acts remain controversial, Piłsudski is held in high esteem by his compatriots. (
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A presumed image of Jogaila, painted c. 1475–80
Vladislaus II (
Władysław II Jagiełło, Jogaila; ca.1348–1434) was a
grand duke of Lithuania and
king of Poland. He ruled in Lithuania from 1377, initially with his uncle,
Kęstutis. In 1386, he converted to
Christianity, was baptized as Vladislaus, married the eleven-year-old Queen
Hedwig (
Jadwiga) and was crowned Polish king as Vladislaus II. His reign in Poland lasted a further forty-eight years and laid the foundation for the centuries long
Polish-Lithuanian union. He gave his name to the
Jagiellon branch of the
Gediminid dynasty which ruled both states until 1572, and became one of the most influential dynasties in
medieval Europe. Jogaila was the last pagan ruler of
medieval Lithuania. The allied victory over the
Teutonic Knights in the
Battle of Grunwald in 1410, followed by the
First Peace of Thorn, secured the Polish and Lithuanian borders and marked the emergence of the Polish-Lithuanian alliance as a major European force. His reign is often considered the beginning of
Poland's Golden Age. (
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Marian Rejewski
Marian Rejewski (1905–1980) was a Polish mathematician and
cryptologist who, in 1932, solved the
Enigma machine, the main
cipher machine then in use by Germany. While studying mathematics at
Poznań University, Rejewski attended a secret cryptology course conducted by the Polish General Staff's
Cipher Bureau, which he joined full-time in 1932. Rejewski and his two colleagues then developed an assortment of techniques for the regular
decryption of Enigma messages, including the cryptologic "
card catalog", the "
cyclometer", and the cryptologic "
bomb". Five weeks before the
German invasion of Poland in 1939, they presented their results on Enigma decryption to their French and British counterparts. Their success jump-started British reading of Enigma in
World War II, and the
intelligence so gained contributed to the
defeat of Nazi Germany. (
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Bolesław Prus
Bolesław Prus, born
Aleksander Głowacki (1847–1912), was a Polish journalist and novelist, best known for his novels
The Doll and
Pharaoh. He was the leading representative of
realism in 19th-century
Polish literature and remains a distinctive voice in world literature. An indelible mark was left on Prus by his experiences as a 15-year-old soldier in the Polish
1863 Uprising against
Imperial Russia, in which he suffered severe injuries and imprisonment. In 1872, in
Warsaw, Prus settled into a distinguished 40-year journalistic career. As a sideline, to augment his income and to appeal to readers through their aesthetic sensibilities, he began writing
short stories. Achieving success with these, he went on to employ a broader canvas; between 1886 and 1895, he completed four major
novels on "great questions of our age."
The Doll describes the romantic infatuation of a man of action who is frustrated by the backwardness of his society.
Pharaoh, Prus's only
historical novel, is a study of political power and statecraft, set in
ancient Egypt at the fall of its
20th Dynasty. (
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Witold Kiełtyka (Vitek)
Decapitated is a Polish
death metal band. It was founded in 1996 by guitarist
Wacław Kiełtyka (Vogg), drummer
Witold Kiełtyka (Vitek,
pictured) and vocalist
Wojciech Wąsowicz (Sauron). The members' average age was 14 when they formed the band. One year later, they were joined by 13-year-old bassist
Marcin Rygiel (Martin). In 2000, they released their debut album,
Winds of Creation. Decapitated soon became one of Europe's finest
technical death metal bands. In 2002 and 2004 the band released the albums
Nihility and
The Negation, respectively. In 2005, Sauron was replaced by
Adrian Kowanek (Covan), and the band's fourth album,
Organic Hallucinosis, was released in 2006. In 2007, their tour bus was involved in a road accident that killed Vitek and left Covan in a coma. In 2009, Vogg announced Austrian drummer Kerim Lechner (Krimh) as a new member. (
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George Chapman, born Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski, one of many Jack the Ripper suspects
"
Jack the Ripper" is the best known
pseudonym given to an unidentified
serial killer active in the largely impoverished districts in and around the
Whitechapel district of
London's
East End in 1888. Attacks ascribed to the Ripper typically involved women prostitutes from the slums whose throats were cut prior to abdominal mutilations. As the murders were never solved, the legends surrounding them became a combination of genuine historical research, folklore, and
pseudohistory. Among more than one hundred
Jack the Ripper suspects suggested since 1888, there have been several Poles and Polish Jews. These include
Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski (pictured), also known as George Chapman, a serial killer executed in 1903;
Aaron Kosminski, an insane Jew from
Kłodawa; and John Pizer, another Polish Jew, also known as "Leather Apron". In 1987,
Martin Fido, a
ripperologist, speculated that the crimes may have been committed by Nathan Kaminsky, a Polish Jew who went by a generic Jewish name, David Cohen. The
civil parish of Whitechapel around the time of the murders was experiencing an influx of immigrants from Ireland and Eastern Europe; its population was transient, impoverished and often used aliases. The Ripper's true identity will almost certainly never be known. (
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Paweł Jasienica, born Leon Lech Beynar (1909–1970), was a Polish historian, journalist and soldier. During World War II, Beynar fought in the Polish Army, and later in the Home Army resistance. Near the end of the war, he was also working with the anti-Soviet resistance, which later led to him taking up a new name to hide from the communist government of the People's Republic of Poland. He was associated with the Tygodnik Powszechny Catholic weekly and several other newspapers and magazines. He is best known for his books about pre-partition Poland, which played an important role in popularizing Polish history among several generations of readers. Jasienica became an outspoken critic of the communist censorship, and as a notable dissident, he was persecuted by the government. He was subject to invigilation by security services, and his second wife was in fact a communist secret police agent. Jasienica's books were banned during a brief period prior to his death. (Full article...)
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Józef Światło
Józef Światło, born
Izaak Fleischfarb (1915–1994), was a high-ranking
Stalinist secret police agent and then defector to the United States. A
Zionist, and then
Communist activist in his early life, he was taken prisoner by the Germans during the 1939
Invasion of Poland and soon escaped only to be captured and deported by the Soviets. He returned to Poland as a
political officer of the
Polish First Army and, in 1945, started to work for the
Ministry of Public Security, where he was nicknamed "Butcher" for his interrogation techniques. His arrestees included
Władysław Gomułka,
Marian Spychalski,
Michał Rola-Żymierski, and
Stefan Wyszyński. After
Stalin's death, Światło was sent to
East Berlin for consultations with the
Stasi where he defected to the U.S. military mission in
West Berlin. Included in the U.S.
witness protection program, he began working for the
CIA and the
Radio Free Europe. Światło's written and broadcast incriminations shook the
Polish United Workers' Party and contributed to the reform of the Polish security apparatus as one of the factors leading to the
Polish October revolution. (
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King Vladislaus IV as painted by Peter Paul Rubens
Vladislaus IV (
Władysław IV Waza; 1595−1648) was a Polish–Swedish prince of the
House of Vasa. He reigned as
king of Poland and
grand duke of Lithuania from 1632, and also claimed the titles of
king of Sweden and grand duke of
Muscovy (Russia). He was the son of King
Sigismund III of Poland and Sweden, and his wife, Queen
Anna of Habsburg. The teen-aged Vladislaus was elected tsar by the
Seven Boyars in 1610, but did not assume the Russian throne because of his father's opposition and a popular uprising in Russia. Following his father's death in 1632, he was elected king of Poland, with no serious contenders. Vladislaus was fairly successful in defending the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth against invasion, notably through his personal participation in the
Smolensk War. He supported
religious toleration, carried out military reforms, and was a renowned patron of the arts. The king failed, however, to realize his dreams of regaining the Swedish crown, conquering the
Ottoman Empire, strengthening royal power, and reforming Polish internal politics. He died without a legitimate male heir and was succeeded by his half-brother,
John Casimir. Vladislaus's death marked the end of relative stability in Poland. (
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Hugo Steinhaus
Hugo Steinhaus (1887–1972) was a professor of mathematics at the
University of Lwów (now
Lviv, Ukraine), where he helped establish what became known as the
Lwów School of Mathematics. He is credited with "discovering"
Stefan Banach, a prodigy autodidact. Together they contributed to
functional analysis by developing the
uniform boundedness principle, also known as the Banach-Steinhaus theorem. After
World War II, Steinhaus played an important role in establishing a mathematics department at the
Wrocław University. Author of around 170 scientific articles and books, Steinhaus left a legacy in several branches of mathematics, including functional analysis,
mathematical logic,
geometry, and
trigonometry. He is also considered a pioneer in
game theory and
probability theory. (
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Megitza with her double bass
Małgorzata Babiarz (born 1984), also known by her stage name
Megitza, is a Polish singer,
double bass player, and composer. She combines Polish and Eastern European folk music,
Romani music and
gypsy jazz with
world music,
worldbeat,
Latin American music,
pop, and
Americana. Born in
Zakopane at the foot of the
Tatra Mountains, she was introduced to the traditional music of Polish Highlanders (
górale) by her father, and began performing in a children folk dance ensemble. She moved to
Chicago in 2003 and started her professional career in 2008, when she formed the Megitza Quartet and released her debut album,
Boleritza. The Sound Culture Center for Global Arts described Megitza as "a true concert revelation – an unusual voice, charisma and beauty", describing her music as "dynamic, vibrant, full of energy, uniting listeners of all ages." She performs mostly in the United States and in her native Poland. (
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Elizabeth of Bosnia as imagined by Sándor Liezen-Mayer
Elizabeth of Bosnia (
Elżbieta Bośniaczka; ca. 1339–1387) was a
queen consort of Hungary and
Poland. A daughter of the
ban of Bosnia,
Stephen II of the
House of Kotromanić, she married King
Louis the Great of Hungary in 1353. As queen consort, she was overshadowed by her domineering mother-in-law,
Elizabeth of Poland, daughter of King
Vladislaus the Elbow-high of Poland. She gave birth to their first child,
Catherine, 17 years after the marriage, shortly after Louis acquired the crown of Poland, where she was sent to govern as a
regent. When Louis died in 1382, their elder surviving daughter,
Mary, ascended the throne of Hungary, with Elizabeth as a regent. Unable to retain control over Poland, Elizabeth secured the Polish throne for her youngest daughter,
Hedwig. During her regency in Hungary, the queen mother was faced with several rebellions led by Croatian noblemen who wished to take advantage of Mary's insecure reign, before being murdered in the turmoil. (
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Marie Curie
Marie Curie (1867–1934) was a Polish-French
physicist and
chemist. Born
Maria Skłodowska in
Warsaw, she studied at the clandestine
Floating University and began her practical scientific training in the same city. In 1891, she followed her older sister to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work, becoming the first female professor at the
University of Paris (
La Sorbonne). Her achievements included a theory of
radioactivity (a term that she coined), techniques for isolating radioactive
isotopes, and the discovery of two elements,
polonium (which she named for her native country) and
radium. Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of
neoplasms, using radioactive isotopes. She founded the
Curie Institutes in Paris and
in Warsaw, which remain major centres of medical research today. During
World War I, she established the first military field radiological centres. She was the first woman to win a
Nobel Prize (in
Physics, shared with her husband,
Pierre Curie, and with her doctoral advisor,
Henri Becquerel, in 1903), the only woman to win it in two fields (the other being
Chemistry, in 1911), and the only person to win in
multiple sciences. Curie died in 1934 of
aplastic anemia brought on by years of her exposure to radiation. (
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Stanisław Staszic
Stanisław Staszic (1755–1826) was a Catholic priest, philosopher, geologist, writer, poet, and statesman. A leading figure of the
Polish Enlightenment, he espoused
monism,
physiocracy and
laissez-faire economics, and later
Pan-Slavism. He is best remembered for his political writings in support of political reforms in Poland and of the
Constitution of 1791. He continued his political career as a member of the State Council of the
Duchy of Warsaw and as minister of trade and industry in the
"Congress" Kingdom of Poland. Staszic is also noted as the father of Polish geology, statistics and sociology, and a promoter of exploration, mining and industry. In 1800, he co-founded the
Warsaw Society of Friends of Learning, one of Poland's earliest
scientific societies. (
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Tadeusz Kościuszko
Thaddeus Kosciuszko (
Tadeusz Kościuszko; 1746–1817) was a military engineer who became a national hero of Poland and the United States. Having completed his studies in Warsaw and Paris, he worked as a private tutor, but had to flee Poland after a failed elopement with one of his students. Upon learning of the outbreak of the
American Revolutionary War, Kosciuszko travelled to America in 1776 and joined the rebel cause as a colonel in the
Continental Army. Serving under General
Horatio Gates, he worked on the defences at
Ticonderoga and
Saratoga. In 1778, he helped design and supervised the construction of the garrisons at
West Point. Back in Poland, Kosciuszko commanded a division of the Polish army in the
Polish–Russian War of 1792, which resulted in the
Second Partition of Poland. Two years later, he led
an unsuccessful uprising against Russia until he was wounded and captured by Russian forces in the
Battle of Maciejowice. The defeat resulted in the
Third Partition, which ended the existence of Poland as an independent state. Kosciuszko was a firm believer in human rights, standing up for the freedom of all people, from
Polish serfs to
black slaves in America. He bequeathed the pay received for his service in the American Revolution to his friend,
Thomas Jefferson, asking him to spend the money on freeing and educating slaves,
including Jefferson's own; the will was never executed. (
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Emilia Plater
Emilia Plater (1806–1831) was a
Polish–Lithuanian noblewoman and revolutionary. Born in
Vilnius, then in the
Russian Empire, and brought up in Polish patriotic tradition, she fought in the
November Uprising, during which she raised a small unit, participated in several engagements, and received the rank of a
captain in the Polish-Lithuanian insurgent forces. Near the end of the uprising, she fell ill and died. Although she did not participate in any major engagements, her story became widely publicized. She is considered a national heroine in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus, venerated by a number of Polish artists as a representative of women fighting for the Polish cause. (
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Stanisław Ulam
Stanisław Ulam (1909–1984) was a
Polish-American mathematician. Born into a wealthy
Polish Jewish family, Ulam earned his
D.Sc. in mathematics at the
Lwów Polytechnic Institute in 1933. He then worked on the
ergodic theory at
Harvard University, shuttling between Poland and America, and ultimately settled in the United States after the
German invasion of Poland in 1939, becoming an assistant professor at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1943, Ulam joined the
Manhattan Project, where he made
hydrodynamic calculations to predict the behavior of
explosive lenses for an
implosion-type nuclear weapon. After the war, he became an associate professor at the
University of Southern California, but returned to
Los Alamos in 1946 to help
Edward Teller develop the
Teller–Ulam design of
thermonuclear weapons. Ulam contributed to such fields of mathematics as
set theory,
topology,
transformation theory,
group theory,
projective algebra,
number theory,
combinatorics, and
graph theory. With
Enrico Fermi and
John Pasta, he studied the
Fermi–Pasta–Ulam problem, which became the inspiration for the vast field of
nonlinear science. Ulam is perhaps best known for realising that electronic computers made it practical to apply statistical methods to functions without known solutions, and as computers have developed, the
Monte Carlo method he invented has become a standard approach to many physical and mathematical problems. (
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Adam Mickiewicz
Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) was a Polish poet, dramatist, essayist and translator. A principal figure of
Polish Romanticism, he is counted one of Poland's "
Three Bards" and widely regarded as Poland's greatest poet. Born in the
Russian territories of the former
Grand Duchy of Lithuania, he was sentenced to a five-year exile to central Russia for his political activism. He left Russia in 1829 and, like
many of his compatriots, lived out the rest of his life abroad. He settled first in Rome, then in Paris, where for a little over three years he lectured on
Slavic literature at
Collège de France. Mickiewicz died, probably of
cholera, in
Istanbul, where he had gone to help organize Polish and Jewish forces to fight Russia in the
Crimean War. He is known chiefly for the poetic drama
Dziady ("Forefathers' Eve") and the
national epic poem Pan Tadeusz. His other influential works include
Konrad Wallenrod and
Grażyna. (
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Henryk Sienkiewicz
Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) was a Polish journalist, novelist and philanthropist, best remembered for his
historical novels. Born into an impoverished
Polish noble family in Russian-ruled
Congress Poland, he began publishing journalistic and literary pieces in the late 1860s. In the late 1870s he explored the United States, sending back travel essays that won him popularity with Polish readers. He began serializing novels in the 1880s and soon became one of the most popular Polish writers of the turn of the century. Numerous translations gained him international renown, culminating in his receipt of the 1905
Nobel Prize in Literature for his "outstanding merits as an epic writer." In Poland he is best known for his
Trilogy of historical novels —
With Fire and Sword,
The Deluge and
Sir Michael — set in the 17th-century
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, while he is mostly remembered abroad for
Quo Vadis, a novel set in
Nero's
Rome. Several of his works have been filmed, some more than once, with the
1951 Hollywood adaptation of Quo Vadis receiving most international recognition. (
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Jan Henryk Dąbrowski
Jan Henryk Dąbrowski (1755–1818) was a Polish military officer and a national hero. He served in the
Royal Saxon Army before joining the
Polish–Lithuanian army in 1792, not long before the
Second Partition of Poland. He was promoted to the rank of general in the
Kościuszko Uprising of 1794. After the
Third Partition of Poland he became actively involved in promoting the
cause of Polish independence abroad. He founded the
Polish Legions in Italy serving under
Napoleon since 1797, and as a general in Italian and French service he contributed to the brief restoration of the Polish state in the form of the
Duchy of Warsaw after the
Greater Poland Uprising of 1806. He participated in subsequent
Napoleonic Wars, including the
Polish–Austrian War and the
French invasion of Russia. After Napoleon's defeat, he accepted a senatorial position in the Russian-controlled
"Congress" Kingdom of Poland, and helped organize
the new kingdom's army. In 1797,
Józef Wybicki wrote
Poland Is Not Yet Lost, a
mazurka to be sung by Polish legionnaires in Italy, with the chorus "March, march, Dąbrowski, from Italy to Poland!" The song later became Poland's national anthem. (
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Frédéric Chopin as portrayed by Eugène Delacroix
Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849), was a
Romantic-era composer born in what was then the
Duchy of Warsaw of a Polish mother and a French father. A
child prodigy, he grew up in
Warsaw, where he completed his musical education and composed many of his works before leaving Poland less than a month before the outbreak of the
November 1830 Uprising. At the age of 21 he settled in
Paris, where he gained renown as a leading piano virtuoso of his generation despite giving only some 30 public performances during the remaining 18 years of his sickly life. Chopin was a good friend of the Hungarian composer
Franz Liszt and maintained an often troubled relationship with the French writer
George Sand. All of Chopin's compositions include the piano; most are for solo piano, although he also wrote two
piano concertos, a few
chamber pieces, and some
songs to Polish
lyrics. His
keyboard style, which is highly individual, is often technically demanding; his own performances were noted for their nuance and sensitivity. Chopin invented the concept of
instrumental ballade; his major piano works also include
sonatas,
mazurkas,
waltzes,
nocturnes,
polonaises,
études,
impromptus,
scherzos, and
preludes. His innovations in style,
musical form, and
harmony, as well as association of his music, often blending Polish
folk tunes and
classical tradition, with
nationalism, were influential throughout and after the late Romantic period. (
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Jan Zamoyski
Jan Zamoyski (1542–1605) was a
Polish magnate who served as both
grand chancellor and
grand hetman of the Crown. As such, he commanded both civilian and military power in the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and is considered one of the most prominent statesmen in Polish history. He was also one of the richest people in his country; lands either owned or leased by him covered more than 17,000 km
2 (6,600 sq mi) with 23 towns and 816 villages. In 1589 he established the
Zamoyski Family Fee Tail, which existed until 1944. His principal seat and most prized creation was
Zamość, a fortified town he founded. Designed as a
Renaissance ideal city, it was home to
Zamojski Academy, Poland's third oldest university. Despite his wealth and power, in politics Zamoyski led the faction of
lesser and middle nobility in support of the
"enforcement of laws" movement, which earned him the moniker "Polish
Gracchus". He also supported the idea of
royal elections open to all Polish nobles and advised the first elective kings,
Henry and
Stephen, but fell out with
Sigismund III. In war – against
Muscovy, the
Ottomans and
Sweden – he employed tactics based on sieges, flanking maneuvers, fortification, artillery, and the principle of conserving his forces. (
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Jan Matejko's self-portrait
Jan Matejko (1838–1893) was a Polish painter and academic. He is best known for large canvases devoted to major figures and events in Polish history, such as
Stańczyk,
Skarga's Sermon,
Rejtan,
Union of Lublin,
Battle of Grunwald,
Prussian Homage and
Constitution of 3 May. His other works include imaginary portraits of Polish monarchs and mural paintings in
Kraków's
St. Mary's Basilica. With his style described as "colourful, detailed and imaginative", he reminded Poles of their nation's former glory at a time when it lacked political independence. His vision of national history has been propagated in Polish textbooks to this day. In 1872, Matejko became a
rector of the
Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, which now bears his name. Among his students were such artists as
Maurycy Gottlieb,
Jacek Malczewski,
Józef Mehoffer and
Stanisław Wyspiański. (
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Roman Dmowski in a colorized photograph
Roman Dmowski (1864–1939) was a Polish statesman. As the co-founder and chief ideologue of the right-wing
National Democracy movement, he was one of
interwar Poland's most influential politicians, known as the father of
Polish nationalism. A prominent spokesman for Polish national aspirations during
World War I and Poland's delegate to the
Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he was instrumental in the restoration of his homeland's independence, but, except a brief stint as
foreign minister in 1923, he never wielded official political power. Before independence, Dmowski saw aggressive
Germanization of ethnicaly Polish territories in the
German Empire as the major threat to
Polish culture and advocated a degree of accommodation with another
partitioning power – the
Russian Empire. He favored
re-establishment of Polish independence by nonviolent means and supported policies favorable to the middle class. Convinced that only a Polish-speaking Roman Catholic could make a good Pole, he marginalized renascent Poland's ethnic minorities and he was vocally
anti-Semitic. Dmowski was the chief political opponent of
Józef Piłsudski, who sided with the
Central Powers against Russia, and of his vision of Poland as a
multinational federation. (
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Maximilian Kolbe
Maximilian Kolbe (
Maksymilian Maria Kolbe, 1894–1941) was a
Conventual Franciscan friar best known for volunteering to die in place of a fellow inmate at the
Auschwitz concentration camp. Born Raymund Kolbe of a Polish mother and an ethnic German father, he joined the Franciscans with his brother in 1907 and professed his
final vows in 1914. He studied philosophy and theology in
Rome, where he was ordained priest, before returning to Poland in 1919. He was active in promoting the veneration of the
Immaculate (
Niepokalana)
Virgin Mary. In 1927, he founded near
Warsaw a monastery, known as
Niepokalanów, along with a
seminary, a radio station, and a publishing house, where he was the editor-in-chief of the monthly
Rycerz Niepokalanej (
Knight of the Immaculate). During the 1930s, he undertook
missions to China, Japan and India. Kolbe was accused of expressing
anti-Semitic sentiments in his publications, but also known to have sheltered Jews during the
Holocaust. He was arrested by the
Gestapo in February 1941 and imprisoned at Auschwitz. At the end of July, he volunteered to be starved to death instead of one of ten inmates selected for punishment. He was killed by a lethal injection after spending two weeks in a starvation cell. Kolbe was declared a
martyr and
canonized by
Pope John Paul II in 1982. (
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Przemysł II as imagined by Jan Matejko
Premislaus II (
Przemysł II; 1257–1296) was the first
king of Poland after a hiatus of more than two centuries. Born posthumously as the only son of Duke
Premislaus I of
Greater Poland, he was brought up by his uncle, Duke
Boleslaus the Pious, until he came of age and began to rule the Duchy of
Poznań. Through inheritance, by 1294 he had expanded his domain over the duchies of
Kalisz,
Lesser Poland and
Pomerelia, but he was forced to retreat from Lesser Poland, leaving it to King
Wenceslaus II of Bohemia. Thanks to the mediation of Archbishop
Jakub Świnka of
Gniezno, Premislaus formed an anti-Bohemian alliance with the dukes of
Kuyavia,
Vladislaus the Elbow-high and
Casimir II of Łęczyca. With much of Poland's territory under his rule, he decided to take the Polish throne; he was crowned by Świnka in Gniezno, in 1295. His reign was cut short nine months later, as he was murdered during a failed kidnapping attempt orchestrated by the margraves of
Brandenburg. (
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