The reduced circumstances of present-day Poland—to say nothing of the periods of “partition” in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when its more powerful neighbors divided its territory among
themselves and the country simply disappeared from the map—make it all too easy to forget Poland’s time
in the sun, under the Jagiello kings. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the joint kingdom of Poland and
Lithuania was a great European power, maintaining an empire that reached from the Baltic Sea in the
north to the Black Sea in the south.
As a result of its status, and its diplomatic ties with western Europe, Poland had for centuries been an
avid importer of polyphonic music from the West. There is even an indigenous Polish manuscript
containing Notre Dame compositions of the “Leonin” and “Perotin” generations. Beginning around 1400,
however, native Polish musicians began to produce advanced polyphonic music as well as consume it.
Foreign travel in the service of the church may have given them their earliest opportunity to master