Introduction: the neglect and distortion of the history of the Black Death in Poland

Communist authorities and ideological watchdogs prevented serious research on the Black Death and the following plague epidemics, suspecting (correctly) that this study could establish disturbing alternative demographic views to Marxist orthodoxy on important historical developments in the late Middle Ages. The late-medieval crisis was, for all practical purposes, unknown when Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin formulated Communist orthodoxy, and quite generally historical demography was in an emergent stage of development. Historical demographic perspectives and Malthusian theory have been disregarded and discarded by almost all Marxists, not only by politicians but also by scholars working on the basis of Marxist theory with various later dogmatic additions and adaptations. Those who saw things differently had to espouse such notions or ideas if they wished to stay alive and in their academic positions. For this reason, the study of the Black Death, later plague epidemics and historical demography more generally have been neglected in the Communist period, and that was also the case in Poland.

Because Poland’s plague history has been neglected and exposed to myths, the central data on Poland’s plague history after the Black Death to 1500 are presented below in an Appendix.

Main geographical and administrative features and tentative population estimates

The borders of the medieval Kingdom of Poland were very different from those of our days. After some tumultuous and tragic centuries, a sovereign Poland (re-)emerged after the First World War. However, the end of the Second World War caused comprehensive redrawing of borders and large-scale movements and resettlements of nationalities. At the time of the Black Death, Poland comprised a smallish landlocked territory stretching south-eastwards from the border on Prussia and the then State of the Order of the Teutonic Knights in the north in the direction of Moldova, and from the borders with the eastern German regions of Brandenburg and Silesia into the west to the borders of present-day Ukraine. Because there have been comprehensive border changes in this part of Eastern Europe, some aspects of the Black Death’s spread within the present-day territory of Poland have been commented on in connection with the discussion of its history in Prussia and the Baltic countries.