The issue of rulers’ sanctity in the Early and High Middle Ages – a Polish case against the European background

The text analyses the problem of the sanctity of rulers, especially non-martyrs, in Latin Europe in the Early and High Middle Ages. The starting point for this discussion is a frequently asked question about the reasons for the lack of such a phenomenon in Poland.

Historiographic initiatives related to the restoration of the Polish Kingdom

The unification and revival of the Polish Kingdom in the late 13th and the early 14th centuries, an event of great political significance, was accompanied by a remarkable development of medieval Polish historiography. It was the first time that historiographic works covered so many parts of Poland, almost simultaneously. In the chronicles produced at that time, great significance was attached to the reasons for the division of the Polish Kingdom, as well as identifying the prince who had the right to unite the Polish state and finally legitimise the royal power. This issue was equally addressed by hagiographical and strictly historiographic works (yearbooks and chronicles). This article deals with devising an ideological programme for the unification of Poland and discusses the various historiographic works in which this programme, formulated in different ways, was taken up. In the case of historiography, the political importance of the revival of the Polish Kingdom is evident both in the number of works on political themes and in the fact that unification ideas appeared several decades before the royal coronation of Vladislaus the Short, which sealed the process, as well as during the unification struggle, and even after the actual revival of the regnum Poloniae.