THE POLANIAN DYNASTY 75
drove Waldemar from the city, and calmly slaughtered its inhabitants. Before
the Poles could intervene, the whole province was captured. The Grand Master
rode in haste from Venice, and in 1309 took up residence in his new castle of
Marienburg. For the next 146 years, Pomerania developed in the Teutonic orbit.
Gdansk became 'Danzig', and was resettled with Germans. It grew into the chief
emporium of the Teutonic state. Its recovery constituted one of the strategic
aims of Polish policy.^7
In view of these stirring events, it is surprising perhaps that knowledge of
Poland to the outside world had hardly increased in half a millennium. In
England, for example, Alfred the Great, when translating Orosius, had been able
to improve a passage on the lands north of the Danube with a sentence of his
own: 'and to the east of Moravia is the land of the Vislani'. Yet the famous
Mappa Mundi of Hereford Cathedral, dating from 1250, has no better informa-
tion. Its compiler knew only one Polish place-name - Vistula. Apart from 'Praga'
in 'Boemia', all his other information on Eastern Europe can be traced to ancient
and completely outdated sources. Obviously, he was not familiar with the work
of Gervase of Tilbury (c. 1150-1235) whose Otia imperialia (Imperial Delights)
reveals a correct understanding of the name of Poland - quasi Campania — and a
detailed knowledge of what he called 'the land of the Vandals between the
Sarmatian Sea and the Hungarian Alps'. Another author, the Franciscan,
Bartholomew de Glanville, who went to Saxony in 1230, correctly described
Poland's relation to the contingent countries. Though this was a very meagre
tally, it was not inferior to the information available in France and Germany.
Even the German chroniclers such as Thietmar (975-1018) or Adam of Bremen
(d. 1075), who mention events connected with Mieszko I and Boleslaw Chrobry,
have virtually nothing to say about the Empire's eastern neighbour. Helmut von
Bozow (1125-c. 1180), a specialist, who wrote a 'Chronicle of the Slavs', thought
that the Poles lived to the south of Carinthia. Not until the fourteenth century,
in fact, did information begin to flow in an appreciable quantity, or with rea-
sonable accuracy. Both the anonymous French 'Description of Eastern Europe',
of 1308, and the Catalonian Libra del Conoscimiento of 1348 show a distinct
advance on previous productions. The French poet Guillaume de Machaut
(1300-77), served as a secretary to John of Luxembourg in Bohemia, visited
Poland on several occasions, and made expert reference to Polish affairs in many
of his works. In England, knowledge about Poland was mainly garnered by
English knights who participated in the crusades of the Teutonic Order. Both
John Gower (1330-1408) and Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1345-1400) assumed that a
spell of fighting in Prussia formed an essential part of a knight's career:
There was a knight, a most distinguished Man
Who from the day on which he first began
To ride abroad, had followed chivalry,
Truth, honour, generous thought and courtesy.
He had done nobly in his sovereign's war
and ridden into battle, no man more,