226 MIASTO
entirely explicable by the invisible lines of demarcation between the numerous
jurisdictions.
It should also be remembered that a considerable number of market towns
and prosperous villages, whose outward appearance may closely have resem-
bled that of the smaller cities, did not enjoy municipal status. For want of a
patron and a charter, they could not offer their inhabitants the social, political,
and economic advantages of self-government, and they remained subject to the
owner of the land on which they happened to be located. These charterless
towns were joined in due course by the growing ranks of former cities whose
charters for one reason or another had fallen into disuse.
The incorporation of cities, first encountered in Poland in the thirteenth cen-
tury, continued at irregular intervals until the end of the eighteenth. In those six
hundred years, almost two thousand acts of incorporation were recorded. In the
early centuries, the initiative was usually taken by the King or the ruling prince,
or in some cases by the Church. Nysa (Neisse) in Silesia, for instance, received
its charter in 1220 from the Bishop of Breslau, twenty-two years before Breslau
itself was incorporated. As time went on, however, the incorporation of cities
by powerful noble patrons grew increasingly common, until eventually the pri-
vate city became the commonest variety of all. Most cities were minuscule by
modern standards. Most contained less than two thousand inhabitants. Of the
700 chartered cities in the Kingdom of Poland in the late sixteenth century less
than twenty - Krakow, Danzig, Elbing, Thorn, Bydgoszcz, Warsaw, Poznan,
Lublin, Sandomierz, Lwow, Kamieniec, Korsun, Kiev, and Perejaslaw claimed
a population of 10,000 or over. In Lithuania, only Wilno, Polotsk, Kowno,
Brzesc, Pinsk, Witebsk, and Mohylew; and in Livonia, Riga, could match their
larger Polish counterparts.
The pattern of incorporation in Mazovia typified developments in the other
central provinces. The first city of Mazovia, Plock, started life as the sprawling
faubourg of the castle and cathedral on the banks of the Vistula, and received its
charter from the Prince of Mazovia in 1237. Pultusk in 1257, and Lowicz in 1298
were both ecclesiastical foundations; Warsaw, incorporated about 1300 from an
existing market town, was another princely foundation. Mogilnica owed its
birth in 1317 to a monastic order. The first noble foundations, Budiszowice and
Bolimow, appeared in 1358 and 1370 respectively, at a time when princely and
ecclesiastical charters still predominated. The fifteenth century saw the largest
number of the province's new cities, forty-three in all. The sixteenth century
saw the noble foundations (82 per cent) overtake all the others. The seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries saw numerous jurydyki (municipal jurisdictions)
established by the nobility in the immediate vicinity of Warsaw, but little activ-
ity elsewhere. The charters granted in 1670 by the Church to Gora Kalwaria and
in 1791 by the King to Myszyniec, were already rarities in their day. All in all, of
156 incorporations enacted in Mazovia between 1237 and 1791, 36 per cent were
granted by the Prince or the King, 15 per cent by the Church, 49 per cent by the
nobility.^2 (See Map 15.)