Duchy of Warsaw

A Polish state in everything but name, created to be useful and abandoned when it stopped being so. Napoleon established the duchy in 1807 from territory taken from Prussia at Tilsit, adding Austrian lands in 1809, and deliberately avoided calling it Poland or its ruler a Polish king - the title went to the King of Saxony, and the word kingdom was avoided so as not to commit France to restoring the partitioned state and alienating Russia. Poles understood the intention anyway, and the duchy became the focus of national hope for a generation. Its constitution abolished serfdom, though without giving peasants land, and introduced the Napoleonic code and equality before the law, which cut sharply against the old noble republic's structure. Jozef Poniatowski built an army of around a hundred thousand, one of the largest French allies, and it fought in Spain and formed a substantial part of the Grande Armee that entered Russia in 1812. Poniatowski drowned covering the retreat at Leipzig, having been made a marshal of France three days earlier. Russian troops occupied the duchy in 1813, and the Congress of Vienna converted most of it into the Congress Kingdom under the tsar. It lasted eight years. Its army and its code outlived it in Polish memory. Warsaw was the capital and Krakow its second city. The duchy covered about a hundred and fifty thousand square kilometres after 1809. Its white eagle and Napoleonic legend fed Polish nationalism for the next century. Dabrowski's marching song from the period became the Polish national anthem.

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