Even More on Lublin and the Partitions

Holy smokes, this Polish history stuff gets real complicated, real quick.  In the hopes of establishing a timeline of who was ruling Lublin and Krakow when over the last 200 years, I think I've finally got it figured out.  With some help from the book I'm reading and this handy Wikipedia article on West Galicia, here's what I've got so far:

1) Lublin and Krakow are annexed by Austria and the bizarre Habsburgs in 1795 as part of the Third Partition of Poland.  They are tacked onto the land that Austria stole in the First Partition, which is now called "Galicia".  The area containing Lublin and Krakow are called "West Galicia" (despite the fact that they are in fact north of Galicia).  Here's a picture of Galicia directly after the 1795 Partition

2) Napoleon sweeps through Eastern Europe in the early 1800's and takes over much of Poland.  He carves out a huge chunk of it and creates an entity called the "Duchy of Warsaw", which includes Lublin and Krakow.  The latter is right on the border of Austria and the new Duchy.  The Duchy of Warsaw is run by Saxony, a German state that became independent briefly duing the Napoleonic Wars and sided with the French.  Here's a map during this brief period lasting from 1809 till 1815:

3) So Napoleon gets beat by the Russians and they come storming West.  They take over Duchy of Warsaw in 1813 and try to reaffirm their control during the Congress of Vienna in 1815.  The Congress of Vienna was essentially an enormous diplomatic summit that occurred in the wake of the Napoleonic wars where all of the winners got together and decided how they were going to divvy up Europe.  Russia wasn't allowed to keep the entirety of the Duchy of Warsaw, but much of it (including Lublin) was included in yet a new entity named "Congress Poland", which was a semi-autonomous state essentially run by Russia.  However, Krakow and it's environs got a measure of independence and was called the "Free City of Krakow".  Here's a map of Poland after the Congress of Vienna (same one I posted yesterday):

4) These borders remain essentially static except that Russia and Austria eventually remove whatever semi-autonomy their respective areas of influence had.  In 1830, Russia removed any independence from Congress Poland following an attempted uprising.  In 1846 Austria did the same to Krakow after their own uprising.

Things remained this way right up until the end of World War I.  I think I've finally got a handle on the shifting borders from 1795 through 1918.  While this may seem a little in-the-weeds, it's nice to know which of the empires were ruling over my family during which periods.  Was it the corrupt, oppressive, decadent and declining Austrian empire?  Was it the brief but overwhelming French Empire, screaming across Poland, anxious to meet their doom in Russia?  Or was it the corrupt, oppressive, totalitarian and ascending Russian empire?  Now I (and you) know.

More on Lublin and the Partitions

I'm making my way through Norman Davies "God's Playground: A History of Poland" Volume Two and came across something that contradicts the previous map I posted yesterday.  Apparently, Lublin fell within the Russian Partition of Poland, not the Austrian portion.  Take a look at this map:

The gray area in the middle is the Congress of Poland (Kongresspolen in German, apparently).  According to the book and Wikipedia, this was an autonomous region until the 1830's, when Russia made it essentially a vassal state. It includes Lublin and you can also see that Krakow is right on the border, but clearly within the Austrian Partition (but for some reason is yellow.  That needs some investigation).  After taking over the Congress of Poland, Russia renamed it Vistulaland, after the river which starts at Gdansk (then called Danzig) and cuts all the way through the Poland.

As with most things involving Polish history, this is all very complicated and requires a bit of unraveling to see what is really going on.

Also, my favorite quote of the day, from page 56 of God's Playground:

"The proliferating profusion of possible political permutations among the pullulating people and parties of the Polish provinces in this period palpably prevented the propagation of permanent pacts between potential partners". 

Mr. Davies, you are the premiere protector of Polish posterity and your prose performs it's planned purpose perfectly.

Trip Plan – Leg 3 – The Danube

In my mind, this is where my trip really starts. The first two weeks are about getting my head on straight and learning the ropes about what it takes to bike tour in Europe. I’ll have any gear and equipment problems sorted out and will have gotten a bit fitter as well.

Leg 3 starts in Donaueschingen the (disputed) source of the Danube and the ancestral home of the Furstenberg family. I chose this town as a start to this leg primarily because it’s the western most point on the bike maps that I purchased through Esterbauer. These maps are a work of art, with each 10-15 km having insane details on all the various trails, amenities and sites along the way. Here’s a shot of the area around Regensburg, for example.

The length of the Danube that I’ll be riding takes me 700 km all the way into Vienna. From the western part of Germany, through Bavaria. I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently about the area, but not nearly enough to have any kind of insight about it yet. It sounds like a conservative region of Germany. It only became part of Germany in the late 1800’s, and only in response to an impending war with France. Obviously, there’s the infamous Munich Beer Halls and all the Hitler associations. I’ve learned recently that Germany, as a country, is a relatively new invention which was crafted by the Prussians (coming in the from the Baltic Coast and Northeast Germany). It was a crapshoot for a while whether Germany would unite under Austria or under Prussia. Prussia won and dominated the politics of the country for a long time. Some would argue that the Prussia military temperament had something to do with World War I and II, but that’s for people who know a lot more than me. It’s all a lot more complicated than that, so I’ll just stop embarrassing myself here. There’ll be lots more fascinating history about Prussia during my trip in Poland, but that’ll have to wait.

I’ll be leaving the Danube at Regensburg for a side trip down to Munich. That town just sounds like too much fun to pass up. I’ll spend a couple of days in Munich, then return to the Danube and head into Austria until I hit Vienna.

Vienna used to be the capital of an insanely large and powerful empire, run by the bizarre Habsburg empire. A hopelessly imbred lineage with jutting, misshapen jaws, this family married their offspring into every major royal family in Europe, allowing them to slowly accumulate royal titles and hereditary claims over a huge swath of Europe. In the midst of their decline, they made the mistake of triggering World War I and paid for it by having only the current borders of Austria to show for it. Here’s the Habsburg empire at it’s height in the 1500’s

Here is where my family history and my trip start to intertwine a bit. Austria-Hungary, along with Russia and Prussia, participated in the Partitions of Poland in the late 1700’s. The Partitions was the very diplomatic manner in which these three countries dismantled and destroyed Poland, simply annexing the entire country because they could. Austria-Hungary got the part which included Krakow (where my last name comes from) and Lublin (where my grandmother’s family came from). After the First World War, the chastened Austria-Hungary was forced to give back it’s chunk of Poland, and my grandmother’s family, presumably, lived in a free Poland from 1919 until the Germans and Russians came storming in once again in 1939. Here’s a good map of the partitions:

Also of note is that the 700 km I’ll be riding on is nearly completely devoid of any kind of hill. Because of this, I’m going to attempt my first 100 mile day (called a Century, in biker parlance) along the Danube.

Next up: Vienna to Prague!