Christianisation of Poland
Mieszko I was baptised in 966, and Poland dates its existence from it. He ruled the Polans from Gniezno and had built a substantial territory before any outside source noticed him. The Jewish traveller Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, writing around 966, described him as ruling the largest of the Slavic lands and keeping three thousand armoured retainers whom he equipped entirely. The baptism was a strategic act rather than a conversion in any sense a modern reader would recognise. The Holy Roman Empire was expanding east under a mandate to convert the pagan Slavs, and the Polabian peoples between the Elbe and the Oder were being conquered under exactly that justification. A baptised ruler could not be crusaded against. Where he took it from mattered as much as taking it. He married the Bohemian princess Dobrawa the previous year and accepted Christianity through Prague rather than through the German church, and had a bishopric established at Poznań in 968 answering directly to the papacy rather than to Magdeburg. That kept the German archbishops out of Polish affairs permanently. He fought and beat a German margrave at Cedynia in 972, took Silesia and Lesser Poland from Bohemia around 990, and late in life placed his realm under the protection of the Holy See in the document known as Dagome iudex — which contains the first description of Poland's borders. His son Bolesław was crowned king in 1025. The Piast dynasty ruled until 1370. The millennium of the baptism was celebrated in 1966 by both the Church and a communist state that insisted on marking it as the founding of the state instead.
- Year: 966 CE
- Category: Political
