THE VICISSITUDES OF URBAN LIFE 235Poland's least productive regions, it enjoyed but modest success in the corn and
timber trade. As a minor provincial fortress of Mazovia, which did not form
part of the Polish Kingdom until 1526, it passed the Middle Ages in the shadow
both of Plock and of Czersk, and could not compare with the royal capital at
Cracow. Yet, in time, its central position in the Republic of Poland-Lithuania
was seen to offer unequalled advantages. Its position on the Vistula kept its res-
idents in regular contact with Danzig in the north and Cracow in the south, and
with the main commercial traffic. Equally, at a time when Poland was consoli-
dating the constitutional union with Lithuania, Warsaw lay astride the main
routes from west to east. From 1611, it has been the capital of all the successive
states that the Polish lands have produced.
Mazovian Warsaw grew slowly. It was founded in the last quarter of the thir-
teenth century, in replacement of the nearby fort of Jazdow, destroyed in a
Lithuanian raid in July 1262. It was named after some long-forgotten hero or
patron called 'Warsza' and around 1300 received its first and long-lost muni-
cipal charter according to the Chelmno Law. The Church, later the cathedral of
St. John, the princely castle, the Market Square, and the city walls, all date from
those early years. By 1321, Warsaw had become the seat of a castellan, and in
1339 hosted the tribunal of inquiry into the conduct of the Teutonic Order,
whose advance had recently obliged the Piast Prince of Mazovia to admit the
suzerainty of Casimir the Great. In 1350, the Church and monastery of the
Augustinians was founded. In the fifteenth century, in the afterglow of the vic-
tory at Grunwald, Warsaw outpaced all its local rivals. Prince Janusz the Elder,
who ruled from 1374 to 1429 permanently transferred the residence of his line
together with the Mazovian archdeaconry from Czersk in 1413. He rebuilt the
Castle, the Walls, and City Hall: installed the hereditary Wojt in a mansion on
the Market Square (nowadays the seat of the Institute of History of the
Academy of Sciences), and in 1408 founded Nowe Miasto (The New Town)
with a charter and corporation of its own. This last development was intended
to check the proliferation of the freti, or 'unregulated settlements' beyond the
Walls, many of which were swelled by the rapid influx at this time of the Jews.
The definitive defeat of the Teutonic Order in the Thirteen Years War made the
separate political policies of the Mazovian Princes unnecessary. The last mem-
bers of the ruling House vainly opposed the steady territorial and administrative
encroachments of their Jagiellonian suzerains. The series of sudden deaths by
poison, in 1522 of Princess Anna, and in 1524 and 1526 of her two unbalanced
sons, Stanislaw and Janusz, brought a timely end of the profligate, heirless, and
anachronistic rule of the House of Piast. (See Map 16.)
Jagiellonian Warsaw enjoyed royal patronage from the start. The first visit of
Zygmunt I in 1526 gave rise to the so-called 'Third Ordinance' for the cities of
the Kingdom. Bona Sforza, who inherited her husband's estates in Mazovia,
resided by preference in the palace of Jazdow, as did her daughter, Anna
Jagiellonka. Zygmunt-August went there regularly on his progresses from
Cracow to Wilno, especially in the 1560s when he was constantly drawn to the