9
MIASTO:
The Vicissitudes of Urban Life
Cities have never been particularly prominent in Polish civilization. Their
origins in the Middle Ages had such strong German connections, that for long
historians considered them to be mere colonial excrescences on the essentially
rural Polish scene. The moments of prosperity in the sixteenth and early seven-
teenth centuries passed so quickly that they left few lasting traditions. Their
subsequent decay was so complete that there was little to arouse contemporary
interest. Yet they present a subject without which the growth of Polish economy
and society cannot be properly understood.^1
It is important to remember that in the medieval tradition, the city - civitas in
Latin, miasto in Polish - was a juridical concept rather than a geographical
phenomenon. The city was in no sense equivalent to what today might be called
an 'urban area'. Indeed, most of the land within the city limits was devoted to
agriculture and was indistinguishable in appearance from the surrounding
countryside. Only the cluster of houses, churches, streets, and municipal build-
ings in the city centre possessed a distinctly urban character, and even there the
persistence of gardens, fields, and small-holdings would strike the modern eye
as more suited to a village than to a municipality. The city, in fact, was defined
in terms of the legal privileges embodied in its charter of incorporation, and in
no way depended on the use to which its lands were put. Its bounds were fixed
by law, and formed a precise jurisdictional district within which the king or
patron had permanently ceded his former rights to the municipal courts. What
is more, the gradual proliferation of immunities and private jurisdiction gave
rise to a situation where several separate cities co-existed within the same urban
conglomeration, together with numerous ill-defined settlements and suburbs.
The medieval city of Krakow, for example, did not include the separate cities of
Kazimierz and Kleparz. Yet it did include many square miles of land beyond the
city walls, which has remained essentially rural in character to the present day.
Warsaw contained two cities: Stare Miasto (The Old City) founded in 1300, and
Nowe Miasto (The New City) founded in 1412. Around these two municipal
foci, a multitude of distinct royal, ecclesiastical, or private jurisdictions prolif-
erated, each with its own laws and government. To the casual observer, or to
the geographer, the view from the cathedral spire presented a haphazard jumble
of scattered groups of buildings. To the jurist, the jumble would have been