124 FABRYKAmonastic management, the first medieval forges were constructed. By 1500,
Wachock could claim twenty-two of the 289 forges known in the Kingdom. The
forges were built on the site of local iron ore deposits. The metal was smelted in
furnaces fired with charcoal, and hardened by water-driven hammers. Annual
production could not have exceeded twenty tons. In Danzig, Swedish ore and
'pigs' were processed, and re-exported as steel or 'Dantsick iron' to England. In
1612, an epic poem entitled 'Officina Ferraria .. .' (The Workshop of the Noble
Iron Industry) was published in Cracow by Walenty Rozdzienski, the son of an
industrial family, who described the techniques, and the dangers, of iron-
making. 'Injuries often take half a year to heal', he wrote; There is no shortage
of deafened and crippled invalids amongst us.'^6 Rozdzienski was writing at a
moment when magnatial entrepreneurs had begun to construct furnaces of a
more advanced type. In 1598, Cardinal Jerzy Radziwitt( 1556-1600), Bishop of
Cracow, commissioned an Italian engineer, Giovanni leronimo Caccia of
Bergamo, to construct a steel-furnace pn his estate at Samsonow near Kielce.
This laid the foundations of the Staropolskie Basin, and of the Republic's
weapons industry. Similar enterprises were started at Krzepice and Pankow near
Czestochowa by the Crown Marshal Mikolaj Wolski (1550-1630), and in the
eighteenth century at Janow and Konskie, by another Chancellor, Jan
Malachowski (1698-1762). By 1781 the Republic possessed thirty-three 'great
forges', each producing some 200 tons per year. Production had risen tenfold
over two centuries. The metal, reheated twice in two separate processes, was of
high quality. But perspectives were low compared with progress made in subse-
quent decades when iron was wedded to coal.
The Polish iron and coal industry developed in the shadow of Prussian enter-
prises in neighbouring Silesia, and was closely associated with the name of
Stanislaw Staszic. Staszic was almost the exact contemporary of Friedrich
Wilhelm Reden, and shared his enthusiasms for geology and mining. In 1778,
when Reden entered the Prussian Mining Board at Breslau, Staszic was begin-
ning his career as administrator of the Zamoyski estates. For forty years, he
watched as Reden installed all the latest acquisitions from his visits to England
- in 1788, the first steam-pump in a coal-mine at Tarnowitz (Tarnowskie Gory);
in 1796, the first blast-furnaces at Gleiwitz (Gliwice) and at Koenigshutte
(Chorzow); in 1811, the mammoth coke-oven at the Koenigin Ludwika mine at
Hindenburg (Zahrze). By this time, Silesia was producing over 100,000 tons of
coal, and 20,000 tons of steel. To think', wrote Staszic from the other side of the
frontier, 'that they take all their ore from us, but do not belong to us!' Staszic
took his chance between 1816 and 1824, when he served as Director of the
Department of Industry and Crafts of the Congress Kingdom. As author of a
thorough geological survey of Poland, published in 1815 as 'O Ziemorodztwie
gor dawnej Sarmacji' (On the Fruits of the earth of the Mountains of former
Sarmatia), he was able to proceed at once with a plan for the establishment of a
co-ordinated Polish heavy industry. In the eight short years of his administra-
tion, all the existing furnaces of the Staropolskie Basin were modernized, and a