Animated History of Poland

Explanation of Movie Dates:

900 unspecific:   The Slavic barbarian tribes known as "polans" are united by the Barbaric Thane Mieshko in to the Nation of "Polen".

966:   Mieshko is baptized and takes on the title of Prince Mieshko I. Polen is cleared by Christian preachers and is largely rid of Pagan Druidic deities, and has its name changed to the Kingdom of Poland.

1000:   Congress of Gniezno takes place, where the German King Otto III acknowledges Boleslaus I right to become a king, but he doesn't get officially crowned until 1020.

1018:   Boleslaw the First's intervention in the Kievan succession crisis is at it's culmination with Boleslaus I conquering Kiev. Boleslaus I places his Son in law Sviatopolk I on the Ukrainian throne.

1223:    After the rules of Casimir the Second just 5 sons wore left in stay to war over the Polish throne, the king wanted each of his sons to get a equal share of the lands, and thus split Poland in to 5 smaller princehoods, but it only weaken the Kingdom and created 5 waring factions fighting for dominance. Conrad the First of Mazovia brings the Teutonic Order and na grants the rule over the Chelminian Land, in exchange for military aid against his 4 brothers.

1333: Casimir the Great becomes the new King and built many new castles, reformed the Polish army and Polish civil and criminal law. At the Sejm in Wislica, 11 March 1347, he introduced salutary legal reforms in the jurisprudence of his country. He sanctioned a code of laws for Great and Lesser Poland, which gained for him the title of "the Polish Justinian". The King was favorably disposed toward Jews. On 9 October 1334, he confirmed the privileges granted to Jewish Poles in 1264 by Boleslaw V the Chaste. Under penalty of death, he prohibited the kidnapping of Jewish children for the purpose of enforced Christian baptism. He inflicted heavy punishment for the desecration of Jewish cemeteries. Although Jews had lived in Poland since before the reign Casimir he allowed them to settle in Poland in great numbers and protected them as people of the king.

1364: Casimir organised the meeting of kings at Kraków in which he exhibited the wealth of the Polish kingdom. The pretext for calling the meeting was very likely a proposed anti Turkish crusade, but the Congress was actually concerned mostly with European diplomacy issues, of which preeminent were peaceful relations and the balance of power in central Europe and negotiating a common response to the Turkish threat through the project of a central European league of states. The King also founded the University of Kraków  which is the oldest Polish university, although his death temporarily stalled the university's development. In 1817 it was renamed Jagiellonian
University to commemorate Poland's Jagiellonian dynasty, which had revived the University of Krakow after it had fallen upon hard times. It is the oldest university in Poland. It is the second oldest university in Central Europe and one of the oldest universities in Europe.

1377: Poland and Lithuania form the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, both kingdoms have 1 king and 1 currency. The Commonwealth enters a war with Germany the same year.

1410: Battle of Grunwald: Polish and Lithuanian forces under cousins Jogaila and Vytautas the Great decisively defeat the forces of the Teutonic Knights, whose power is broken.

1543:  Nicolaus Copernicus publishes De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in Nuremberg. Denies Geocentric Model and says all planets revolve around the sun. the following years Poland becomes a Cultural Educational and trade center of Europe.

1619:   Truce of Deulino was signed on 11 December 1618 and took effect on 4 January 1619. It concluded the Polish–Muscovite War 1605–1618 between the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Tsardom of Russia. The agreement marked the greatest geographical expansion of the Commonwealth, which lasted until the Commonwealth conceded the loss of Livonia in 1629. The Commonwealth gained control over the Smolensk and Chernihiv Voivodeships. The truce was set to expire in 14.5 years. The parties exchanged prisoners, including Filaret Romanov, Patriarch of Moscow. Wladyslaw IV, son of Commonwealth king Sigismund III Vasa, refused to relinquish his claim to the Moscow throne. Therefore in 1632, when the Truce of Deulino expired and Sigismund III died, and hostilities were immediately resumed in the course of a conflict known as the Smolensk War, which ended in the Treaty of Polanów in 1635

1683:  Battle of Vienna commences between the Holy league and the Ottoman Empire. The charge was planned and led by King of Poland Jan III Sobieski at the head of 3,000 Polish heavy lancers, the famed "Winged Hussars". The Lipka Tatars  who fought on the Polish side wore a sprig of straw in their helmets to distinguish themselves from the Tatars fighting on the Turkish side. The charge broke the lines of the Ottomans, who were tired from the long fight on two sides. In the confusion, the cavalry headed straight for the Ottoman camps, while the remaining Vienna garrison sallied out of its defenses and joined in the assault.

1772:  The First Partition of Poland or First Partition of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth took place in 1772 as the first of three partitions that ended the existence of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth by 1795. Growth in the Russian Empire's power, threatening the Kingdom of Prussia and the Habsburg Austrian Empire, was the primary motive behind this first partition. Frederick the Great  engineered the partition to prevent Austria, jealous of Russian successes against Turkey, from going to war. The weakened Commonwealth's land, including that already controlled by Russia, was apportioned among its more powerful neighbors—Austria, Russia and Prussia—so as to restore the regional balance of power in Eastern Europe  among those three countries. With Poland unable to effectively defend itself, and with foreign troops already inside the country, the Polish parliament ratified the partition in 1773 during the Partition Sejm convened by the three powers.

1791:  The Constitution of May 3, 1791 is generally regarded as Europe's first and the world's second modern codified national constitution, following the 1788 ratification of the United States Constitution. The May 3 Constitution was designed to redress longstanding political defects of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and its traditional system of "Golden Liberty" conveying disproportionate rights and privileges to the nobility. The Constitution introduced political equality between townspeople and nobility and placed the peasants under the protection of the government, thus mitigating the worst abuses of serfdom. The Constitution abolished pernicious parliamentary institutions such as the liberum veto, which at one time had put the sejm at the mercy of any deputy who might choose, or be bribed by an interest or foreign power, to undo legislation passed by that sejm. The Constitution sought to supplant the existing anarchy fostered by some of the country's magnates with a more democratic constitutional monarchy. The adoption of the May 3 Constitution provoked the active hostility of the Commonwealth's neighbors. In the War in Defense of the Constitution, the Commonwealth was betrayed by its Prussian ally, Frederick William II, and defeated by Catherine the Great's Imperial Russia allied with the Targowica Confederation, a coalition of Polish magnates and landless nobility who opposed reforms that might weaken their influence. Despite the Commonwealth's defeat and the consequent Second Partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the May 3 Constitution influenced later democratic movements.

1795:   After the Second Partition of Poland of 1793, the Kosciuszko Uprising occurred. Kosciuszko's insurgent armies won some initial successes, but they eventually fell before the superior forces of the Russian Empire. The partitioning powers, seeing the increasing unrest in the remaining Commonwealth, decided to solve the problem by erasing any independent Polish state from the map. On 24 October 1795 their representatives signed a treaty, dividing the remaining territories of the Commonwealth between their three countries.

1797:   Mazurek Dabrowskiego  is the national anthem of Poland. It is also known by its original title, Song of the Polish Legions in Italy. The song is a lively mazurka with lyrics penned by Józef Wybicki in Reggio nell'Emilia, Cisalpine Republic , around 16 July 1797, two years after the Third Partition of Poland erased the once vast country from the map. It was originally meant to boost the morale of Polish soldiers serving under General Jan Henryk Dabrowski in the Polish Legions, which were part of the French
Revolutionary Army led by General Napoléon Bonaparte in its conquest of Italy. The mazurka, expressing the idea that the nation of Poland, despite lack of political independence, had not disappeared as long as the Polish people were still alive and fighting in its name, soon became one of the most popular patriotic songs in Poland.

1806:  Greater Poland Uprising was organized by General Jan Henryk Dabrowski to help advancing French forces under Napoleon I in liberating Poland from Prussian occupation. The Wielkopolska Uprising was a decisive factor that allowed the formation of the Duchy of Warsaw 1806 and the inclusion of Wielkopolska in the Duchy of Warsaw. It was one of the two most successful uprisings in the history of Poland, in addition to the Greater Poland Uprising of 1918 to 1919.

1830:  The November Uprising—also known as the Cadet Revolution was an armed rebellion against the Russian Empire in Poland,
Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. The uprising began on 29 November 1830 in Warsaw when young noncommissioned officers at the Imperial Russian Army's military academy in that city revolted, led by Piotr Wysocki. They were soon joined by large segments of Polish society. Despite some local successes, the uprising was eventually crushed by a numerically superior Russian army under Ivan Paskevich.

1863:  The January uprising began as a spontaneous protest by young Poles against conscription  into the Russian Army, and was soon joined by high ranking Polish Lithuanian officers and various politicians. The insurrectionists, severely outnumbered and lacking serious outside support, were forced to resort to guerrilla warfare tactics. They failed to win any major military victories or capture any major cities or fortresses, but they did blunt the effect of the Tsar's abolition of serfdom in the Russian partition, which had been designed to draw the support of peasants away from the nation. Severe reprisals against insurgents, such as public executions and deportations to Siberia, led many people to abandon armed struggle and turn instead to the idea of organic work: economic and cultural self improvement.

1918:   The History of interwar Poland starts with the recreation of independent Poland in 1918 as part of the Treaty of Versailles.

1919:   The Polis Soviet war was an armed conflict with Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine pitted against the Second Polish Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic, four states in post World War I Europe. The war was the result of the belligerents' desire to expand their territories and their influence over them. Poland, whose statehood had just been reestablished by the Treaty of Versailles following the Partitions of Poland  in the late 18th century, sought to secure territories it had lost at the time of partitions; the aim of the Soviet states was to control those same territories, which had been part of the Russian Empire until the turbulent events of World War I.

1920:  On August 10, 1920, Soviet Cossack units under the command of Gayk Bzhishkyan crossed the Vistula river, planning to take Warsaw from the west while the main attack came from the east. On August 13, an initial Soviet attack was repulsed. The Polish 1st Army resisted a direct assault on Warsaw as well as stopping the assault at Radzymin. The Soviet commander in chief, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, felt certain that all was going according to his plan. However, Polish military intelligence had decrypted the Red Army's radio messages, and Tukhachevsky was actually falling into a trap set by Pilsudski and his Chief of Staff, Tadeusz Rozwadowski. The Soviet advance across the Vistula River in the north was moving into an operational vacuum, as there were no sizable Polish forces in the area. On the other hand, south of Warsaw, where the fate of the war was about to be decided, Tukhachevsky had left only token forces to guard the vital link between the Soviet northwest and southwest fronts. Another factor that influenced the outcome of the war was the effective neutralization of Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army, much feared by Pilsudski and other Polish commanders, in the battles around Lwów. The Soviet High Command, at Tukhachevsky's insistence, had ordered the 1st Cavalry Army to march north toward Warsaw and Lublin, but Budyonny disobeyed the order due to a grudge between Tukhachevsky and Yegorov, commander of the southwest front. Additionally, the political games of Joseph Stalin, chief political commissar of the Southwest Front, decisively influenced the disobedience of Yegorov and Budyonny. Stalin, seeking a personal triumph, was focused on capturing Lwów—far to the southeast of Warsaw—which was besieged by Bolshevik forces but still resisted their assaults. Polish soldiers displaying captured Soviet standards after the Battle of Warsaw. The Polish 5th Army under General Wladyslaw Sikorski counterattacked on August 14 from the area of the Modlin fortress, crossing the Wkra River. It faced the combined forces of the numerically and materially superior Soviet 3rd and 15th Armies. In one day the Soviet advance toward Warsaw and Modlin had been halted and soon turned into retreat. Sikorski's 5th Army pushed the exhausted Soviet formations away from Warsaw in a lightning operation. Polish forces advanced at a speed of thirty kilometers a day, soon destroying any Soviet hopes for completing their enveloping manoeuvre in the north. By August 16, the Polish counteroffensive had been fully joined by Marshal Pilsudski's "Reserve Army." Precisely executing his plan, the Polish force, advancing from the south, found a huge gap between the Soviet fronts and exploited the weakness of the Soviet "Mozyr Group" that was supposed to protect the weak link between the Soviet fronts. The Poles continued their northward offensive with two armies following and destroying the surprised enemy. They reached the rear of Tukhachevsky's forces, the majority of which were encircled by August 18. Only that same day did Tukhachevsky, at his Minsk headquarters 300 miles  east of Warsaw, become fully aware of the proportions of the Soviet defeat and ordered the remnants of his forces to retreat and regroup. He hoped to straighten his front line, halt the Polish attack, and regain the initiative, but the orders either arrived too late or failed to arrive at all. Soon after the Battle of Warsaw the Bolsheviks sued for peace. The Poles, exhausted, constantly pressured by the Western governments and the League of Nations, and with its army controlling the majority of the disputed territories, were willing to negotiate.

1939: The Invasion of Poland, also known as the September Campaign or 1939 Defensive War, was an invasion of Poland by Germany, the Soviet Union, and a small Slovak contingent that marked the start of World War II. The invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week after the signing of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, and ended 6 October 1939 with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of Poland.
The Battlecruiser: The Battle of Westerplatte was the very first battle that took place after Germany invaded Poland and World War II began in Europe. During the first week of September 1939, a Military Transit Depot on the peninsula of Westerplatte, manned by fewer than 200 Polish soldiers, held out for seven days in the face of an overwhelming German attack. The defense of Westerplatte served as an inspiration for the Polish Army and people as the successful German advances continued elsewhere and today is still regarded as a symbol of resistance to the invasion.
The Panzer tanks: The Battle of Wizna was fought between September 7 and September 10, 1939, between the forces of Poland and Germany during the initial stages of Invasion of Poland. Because it consisted of a small force holding a piece of fortified territory against a vastly larger invasion for three days at great cost before being annihilated with no known survivors. The German forces wore noted for having 42.200 Soldiers and 350 tanks Fighting 720 Polish Infantrymen and taken the casualty toll of at least 4000 soldiers and 45 tanks.

1940:  The Polish government in Exile puts forth Polish soldiers to fight at the battle for London, the Polish underground resistance cracks Cryptanalysis of the Enigma and pass there findings to the allied forces.

1944:  The Battle of Monte Cassino was a costly series of four battles during World War II, fought by the Allies with the intention of breaking through the Winter Line and seizing Rome.
The Warsaw Uprising was a struggle by the Polish resistance organization, the Home Army, to liberate Warsaw from Nazi German occupation during World War II, before the arrival of the Soviet Army. The Uprising began on 1 August 1944, as part of a nationwide rebellion, Operation Tempest. The rebellion was intended to last for only a few days until the communists reached the city. The Soviet advance stopped short, however, while Polish resistance against the German forces continued for 63 days until the Polish surrendered.

1945: The People's Republic of Poland was the official name of Poland from 1952 to 1990. Although Communists took control of the country immediately after the liberation from Nazi Germany in 1944, the name of the state was changed only eight years later. Although the Polish People's Republic was a sovereign state as defined by international law, its leaders were at the very least approved by the Kremlin. They aligned their policies with those of Moscow, making the People's Republic of Poland a satellite state member of the Eastern Bloc almost entirely subordinate to the Soviet Union. The Soviets had much influence over internal affairs and foreign affairs, and Red Army forces were stationed in Poland. In 1945, Soviet generals and advisors formed 80% of the officer cadre of Wojsko Polskie. The Polish United Workers' Party became the dominant political party, officially making the PRL a socialist state.

1978:  Pope John Paul I succeeds Pope Paul VI as the 263rd Pope and the first Polish pope. The following festivities are quelled by the socialist government with Motorized citizen militia Units which wore one of the motivations of forming the Solidarity movement in 1980.

1989:  Following the factory strikes of the early 1980s and the subsequent formation of the then still underground Solidarity movement under the leadership of Lech Walesa the political situation in Poland started relaxing somewhat. Despite an attempt by the government to crack down on the anti Communism sentiments, the movement had gained too much momentum and it became impossible to hold off change anymore. In addition there was fear of a social explosion due to economic malaise and runaway inflation that had depressed Polish living standards and deepened public anger and frustration. By 1988 the authorities began serious talks with the opposition. In September 1988, when a wave of strikes was coming to an end, a secret meeting was held which included amongst others the opposition leader Lech Walesa and Minister of Internal Affairs Czeslaw Kiszczak. They agreed on holding the so called Round Table talks in the near future to plan out the course of action to be undertaken in the country. The Round Table talks began on February 6th 1989. They included the solidarity opposition faction and the coalition government faction. The talks were held in the Council of Ministers Office. The meetings were co-chaired by Lech Walesa and Czeslaw Kiszczak. The Polish Communists, led by Gen. Jaruzelski, hoped to coopt prominent opposition leaders into the ruling group without making major changes in the political power structure. In reality, the talks radically altered the shape of the Polish government and society. The events in Poland precipitated and gave momentum to the fall of the entire Communist bloc; the Yalta arrangement collapsed soon after the events in Poland.