Masovia historical timeline

Masovia’s history is Warsaw’s, and Warsaw’s is a story of repeated destruction and repeated rebuilding.

A late capital

Masovia was a separate duchy under its own Piast line and was only fully absorbed into the Polish crown in 1526. Warsaw became the capital in 1596 when Sigismund III moved the court from Krakow, chosen largely because it sat midway between Poland and Lithuania in the joint Commonwealth.

Partition

The Commonwealth was carved up by Russia, Prussia and Austria in the late eighteenth century and Poland ceased to exist as a state for 123 years. Warsaw spent most of that under Russian rule, and the failed uprisings of 1830 and 1863 were met with reprisals and Russification. The Orthodox cathedral built to dominate the skyline was demolished once independence returned in 1918.

1939 to 1945

The city was bombed in September 1939 and occupied. The Warsaw Ghetto, sealed in 1940, held some 400,000 people in appalling conditions before deportation to Treblinka; the Ghetto Uprising of April 1943 was suppressed and the district burned block by block. The Warsaw Rising of August 1944, a general insurrection by the Home Army timed to the Soviet advance, held out for sixty-three days while the Red Army waited on the far bank. Around 200,000 civilians died, and afterwards Hitler ordered the city demolished.

Reconstruction

By 1945 most of Warsaw was rubble. The decision to rebuild the historic centre rather than start afresh produced a reconstruction based on eighteenth-century Bellotto paintings and surviving photographs, completed over decades and inscribed by UNESCO in 1980.

Since 1989

Warsaw became the financial centre of central Europe, and the skyline changed again.