THE POLISH LAND 29Plains) and the Zaporozhe. It was populated by Cossacks, fugitives, colonists,
and in safer areas by free Ruthenian peasants. Its chief city, Kiev, centre of the
ancient Rus, together with the left-bank lands was conquered by Muscovy in
- The remainder was annexed by the Russian Empire in the course of the
eighteenth century, since when the name of Ukraine has been extended to
include all Ruthenian lands south of the Pripet.
Ukraine, in common with neighbouring provinces, was joined to Poland in
consequence of its earlier association with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In the
fifteenth century, in the era of the personal union with Poland, the Grand Duchy
had stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It was a curious organism, ruled
from Wilno (Vilnius, Vilna) in the north by a Lithuanian aristocracy which was
gradually Polonized. Yet the mass of the populace, like the language of admin-
istration, was Ruthenian. After the constitutional union with Poland in 1569, it
maintained its separate identity on a diminished, territorial base.
The two ethnically Lithuanian territories of Zmudz (Samogitia), the 'low
country', and Aukstota, the 'upper country', are dominated by the river net-
work of the Niemen. The land here is often swampy, harsh, and stony, and the
population sparse. Even in the twentieth century, one-third of the land was
trackless forest. Wilno was culturally Polish by the seventeenth century; all the
smaller towns contained a strong Jewish element.
Bialorus (Byelorussia, or more correctly in the historical context, White
Ruthenia) stretched from the Dvina in the north to the Pripet in the south and
the upper Dnieper in the east. It included the palatinates of Minsk, Polotsk,
Witebsk, and Mscislaw. Both in the cultural and the geographical sense, it rep-
resented a vast area of transition between Europe and Muscovy, an area of deep,
external penetration and of weak local resources and identity. In essence, it was
neither Polish nor Russian, but has never in its long career been able to deter-
mine its own destiny. Its wide open spaces are neither agriculturally attractive
nor militarily defensible. Its Slav population had little sense of belonging except
to the 'Christian souls of these parts'.
Czarnorus (Black Ruthenia), adjoining Bialorus to the south and south-west,
lost its separate designation in the eighteenth century. It included the palatinates
of Brest, Troki, and Nowogrodek.
In the east, beyond Lithuania, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine, lay a further ring
of provinces possessing still more tenuous connections with Poland. There was
Inflanty (Livonia) on the Gulf of Riga, whose easterly city of Dyneburg (Dvinsk)
remained Polish after the Swedish Wars of the seventeenth century; Courland
(Kurlandia) which became a joint fief of the united Republic; Smolensk, inter-
minably disputed with Muscovy; Sieviersk on the Desna, captured by Ivan III in
1492, and Moldavia on the Dniester, a Polish fief from 1387 to 1497.
To describe this long catalogue of territories as 'Polish' is no doubt contro-
versial. For the most part, their population has never been dominated by eth-
nic Poles, and they no longer form part of the Polish People's Republic. But to
limit one's understanding of 'Poland' to a presumed ethnic heartland is both