How can pollen from the Lednica Lake and silver coins from the Islamic world explain the process of the formation of the Piast state? This is demonstrated by the results of research combining a detailed reconstruction of changes occurring in the ecosystems of Greater Poland with findings from archaeology, history and numismatics. The first such comprehensive treatment of the subject was presented in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” (PNAS). The lead author of the article is Prof. Adam Izdebski from the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw.

Many years of cooperation between historians from Warsaw, Białystok and Berlin, natural scientists and archaeologists from Poznań and Dziekanowice, as well as geologists from Cologne and Zurich, have resulted in ground-breaking conclusions about the beginnings of the Piast state. An international team of researchers led by Prof. Adam Izdebski from the UW’s Faculty of “Artes Liberales” presented them in the PNAS journal.

The new insight was made possible by, for example, conducting innovative research on sediments from the Lednica Lake. This is where the island, which was once one of the main centres of power of the first Piasts, is located. The new research has made it possible to reconstruct mediaeval changes in the landscape of this part of Greater Poland with an average accuracy of 20 years.

“Our article shows that the history of Poland is not only fascinating for a national audience, but can also be crucial for international scientific debate. Interdisciplinary research combining history, ecology and archaeology yields unique knowledge that opens up new possibilities for testing social and ecological theories built on research conducted in other parts of the world,” Prof. Adam Izdebski emphasises.

Ecological revolution

As researchers have shown, the establishment of the state of the first Piasts in the Lednica region was associated with an ecological revolution – a sudden acceleration of landscape changes in the 9th and 10th centuries.

Analysis of pollen collected in the sediments of the Lednica Lake has made it possible to refine the existing knowledge on vegetation changes due to human activity in the early Middle Ages. In the central area of the Piast dynasty’s dominion, extensive clearing (pruning) of natural oak-hornbeam forests was carried out within one to two generations. Thus, a successful attempt was made to lay the agricultural foundations for new political and military structures.

“Up until the 20th century, cereals – thanks to their high calorific value, easy storage and transport – played a key role in maintaining the large population centres necessary for the establishment of strong state structures. Detailed palaeoecological data from the central area of Greater Poland show that this was also understood by the elite of the early Piast state. They even made a ‘textbook’ attempt to create the ecological structures necessary for the development of their political-military project, which in later times evolved into the Poland we know today,” Prof. Izdebski explains.

New light

The ecological revolution was accompanied by the development of a settlement network, well identified by archaeologists working around Lednica, Gniezno, Poznań, Giecz and Grzybów in recent decades. The synthesis of archaeological research presented in this article illustrates the changes that took place in Greater Poland in the 10th century and the first half of the 11th century. At that time, a network of key castles of the Piasts’ rule was formed, which were the main princely centres. As we read in the article, the open settlement developing around them, spurred on by increasing population density, caused major natural changes, particularly visible in the form of deforestation. At the same time, the development of settlement in central Greater Poland was accelerated by the resettlement of the population and the settlement of bracken on new land, which fuelled the economic development of the Piast domain.

The ecological revolution did not happen at an accidental time. As the analysis of numismatic data from Greater Poland described in the article shows, the beginning of the whole story was the infiltration of Greater Poland even earlier by very active and dynamically changing slave trade networks organised by pagan Scandinavians for the needs of recipients in Muslim Central Asia.

“The influx of silver coins and the emergence of groups using military violence set in motion a whole new dynamic. It led to an ecological revolution that laid the foundations of the Piast state,” Prof. Adam Izdebski says.

Available records show that the Scandinavians – also known as Vikings – traded with the Islamic world from as early as the early ninth century, but the exchange peaked in the first half of the tenth century, when rulers of the Samanid dynasty in Central Asia produced large quantities of silver coins (dirhams).

“These coins flowed north mainly in exchange for slaves, especially young women and boys, who were obtained from local Slavic rulers such as the Piasts. The direction of the trade changed little after 950, when the Samanids reduced their production of dirhams and silver-dependent elites from Central Europe began importing German coins, undoubtedly still in exchange for people,” the researcher adds.

Where did the collapse come from?

As the article shows, the mismatch between the ecological base of the new state and the dynamics of its expansion is where its collapse came from.

“The Piasts operated in the very difficult context of early mediaeval Central Europe, which until the early 10th century was a kind of ‘jungle’, a sparsely populated and isolated space on the periphery of Western Europe recovering from the collapse of the Roman Empire and the dynamic trade networks created from the north by the Scandinavians,” Prof Izdebski says.

As he adds, in contrast to the European parts of the former Roman Empire and its immediate borderland, which maintained the continuity of cultural and economic structures, in the territories of today’s Poland there was a total collapse of all social structures and for at least several hundred years there was a natural forest regrowth, which has no analogue among today’s temperate zone forest ecosystems in Europe. The Piasts created their state almost literally on ‘raw roots’, unable to rely on any previous political, commercial, military or religious networks. They had to create everything almost from scratch, trying to keep up with military successes with administrative measures. This made their state extremely fragile and, as a result, its collapse came extremely quickly, barely a century after its creation. This was the end of Greater Poland’s fascinating history as the political centre of Central Europe.

Final

New palaeoecological data also shed new light on the final existence of the Piast state in Greater Poland, complementing the often contradictory archaeological and historical data in the form of written sources. The latter indicate that, at the political level, the early Piast state ceased to exist as a result of internal struggles and the brutal invasion of the Bohemian ruler Bretislav.

“At the same time, there is convincing archaeological evidence for the preservation of settlement continuity while the main settlements and defensive structures declined, which would contradict the vision of a total collapse of early Piast structures in Greater Poland,” Prof. Adam Izdebski explains.

However, the palaeoecological data, thanks to their extraordinary detail, confirm that there was a rapid collapse of Piast structures in Greater Poland. The level of cereal cultivation decreased dramatically and rapidly, and deforestation processes came to a halt, allowing secondary forest, consisting mainly of pine and birch, to spread back. These probably occupied areas that had been used agriculturally during the years when the young state was flourishing. However, there was no break in socio-ecological continuity, which agrees with the knowledge provided by archaeology.

The fact of a revival of agriculture in areas – also palaeoecologically studied by the authors of the article – located around the Lednica core of the Piast state, including Pomerania or the Lubusz Land, further suggests that some of the population previously forcibly relocated to eastern Greater Poland may have simply left it.

“The difficulty in researching the origins of states is that it is not easy to record this process on an ongoing basis: only after some time is it known that a state was established. Written sources therefore usually appear too late. This is why the Piast state is an accidental exception: we can now trace its rise and subsequent fall on the basis of two very precise sets of data – coins from the Islamic world and pollen. This creates a unique opportunity to understand what determined the rise and disappearance of states,” concludes Marek Jankowiak, PhD, from the UW’s Faculty of “Artes Liberales” and the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences.