Casimir III the Great
Casimir III found Poland built of wood and left it built of brick, and he is the only Polish king called the Great. He came to the throne in 1333 at twenty-three, inheriting a kingdom that had only just been reunified after two centuries of fragmentation, with the Teutonic Order holding the Baltic coast, Bohemia claiming the crown and Lithuania on the eastern border. His method was law and money rather than war. He bought off the Bohemian claim, made a treaty with the Order that conceded Pomerania in exchange for recognition and the return of other provinces, and expanded east into Ruthenia instead. He codified the customary law in two statutes for Great and Little Poland, founded some sixty-five fortified towns and rebuilt fifty in stone, standardised the coinage, and established the university at Kraków in 1364, the second in central Europe. He also convened the Congress of Kraków that year, a summit of five monarchs at which a Kraków merchant gave a feast that became legendary. He is remembered particularly for two policies. He took the peasantry under royal protection against the nobility to a degree unusual in the period, which earned him the label king of the peasants from his critics; and he confirmed and extended the charter protecting Jews, inviting those expelled from western Europe after the Black Death, which is the foundation of Polish Jewry. He died in 1370 without a legitimate son. The dynasty ended with him, which is why the throne passed to his Hungarian nephew and then to his great-niece Jadwiga, whose marriage to the Lithuanian grand duke in 1386 created the union that became the largest state in Europe. His succession problem produced Poland's greatest period.
- Lived: 1310 CE – 1370 CE
- Nationality: Polish
- Roles: king, ruler, head_of_state, legislator
