4 MILLENIUM
bunch of grass in their hands, and waft the steam around. Then their pores open, and all
excess matter escapes from their bodies. This hut is called al-istba.
Their kings travel in great carriages, on four wheels. From the corners of the carriage
a cradle is slung on chains, so that the passenger is not shaken by the motion. They pre-
pare similar carriages for the sick and injured...
The Slavs wage war with the Byzantines, with the Franks and Langobards, and with
other peoples, conducting themselves in battle with varying success.^1
Mieszko I, King of the North, or 'Mesko' as Ibrahim's Czech hosts called
him, was understandably of special interest to the visitor from Spain. In that
same year, when the Corbodan embassy arrived in Prague, Mieszko betrothed
the Czech king's daughter, Dubravka, and took her to his Polish home in
Poznan. In the following year, as part of the marriage agreement, he renounced
the pagan religion of his ancestors, and was baptized into the Christian faith.
Mieszko was in no sense a national monarch of the sort imagined by nineteenth-
century romantics. He was chief of the Polanie or Polanians, one of the numer-
ous Slav tribes of the period. He was a warlord, whose fluctuating territory
reflected little else but the ebb and flow of military success. He was as ready to
plunder his various Slav neighbours as he was, on occasion, to make common
cause with Germans or Czechs alike. Of all his feats, like those of his grandson
Canute in Denmark and England, none but his baptism was permanent. By this
one act, he brought his people into the world of western culture and Latin liter-
acy. He prepared the way for the creation in the succeeding reign of the ecclesi-
astical province of Poland with its see at Gniezno. He started the recorded
history of the Poles which has continued without a break from that day to this.
The events of a thousand years are as daunting to the historian who has to
expound them, as to the reader who wants to learn about them. They are too
complex to be comprehended in bulk; and served in one lump, are entirely indi-
gestible. As a result, they are customarily divided into chronological groups, or
periods. For some historians, this 'periodization' is no more than an empirical
exercise, like the work of a chef who divides the meal into separate dishes,
arranging the ingredients according to his individual art and the dictates of
digestion. For others, it is a matter of high seriousness, guided by the laws of
philosophy and science. It is one of the unavoidable tasks of the trade. The man-
ner in which it is undertaken reveals much, not only about History but also
about the historian.
The earliest writers on historical matters did not attempt to periodize their
subject. As chroniclers they are often dismissed as men whose fragments, fables,
and ecclesiastical tales 'abused the privilege of fiction'. In Poland, as elsewhere
in Europe, they were mainly learned clerics, writing in Latin about the heroes of
the Faith or the glories of the ruling house. Gallus Anonimus, 'the Anonymous
Gaul' (d. 1118), was a Benedictine monk from France who related the reign of