Lesser Poland historical timeline

Lesser Poland was the seat of Polish kings for half a millennium, and its history runs from that to the twentieth century’s worst crime.

The royal capital

Krakow became the capital in the eleventh century, and the coronation and burial church on Wawel hill made it the ceremonial heart of the kingdom for centuries after the court itself left for Warsaw in 1596. The Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364, is one of the oldest in Europe and counts Copernicus among its students.

Salt and trade

The Wieliczka mine made the crown enormously wealthy — salt revenues at one point funded a third of royal income — and Krakow sat on the trade route between Hungary and the Baltic.

Under the Habsburgs

After the partitions the region became Austrian Galicia, poor and rural but politically the most permissive of the three partition zones. Polish language and culture survived here in a way they could not under Russia or Prussia, which is a large part of why Krakow retained its role.

1939 to 1945

The Germans made Krakow the capital of the General Government. The city’s Jewish population was confined to the Podgorze ghetto and then destroyed; the Jagiellonian professors were arrested and sent to camps in the first months. At Oswiecim, an army barracks became Auschwitz, and the vastly larger camp at Birkenau was built alongside it. More than a million people, the overwhelming majority of them Jews, were murdered there.

Since

The communist authorities built the steelworks and workers’ city of Nowa Huta beside Krakow to dilute its intellectual character, which backfired. Karol Wojtyla, archbishop here, became pope in 1978.