The Romans never conquered Poland: a source of pride to its first native chronicler, Bishop Vincent of Kraków, writing around 1200, but a nuisance to the modern historian. Since Rome neither subjugated nor abandoned Poland, there is no widely recognizable Year One from which to launch a historical survey. The year ad 966 has to serve, for in that year Mieszko, the ruler of what has come to be known as ‘Poland’, accepted (and imposed) Latin Christianity. We know as little about this event as we do about anything else that happened during the next hundred years or so. The written record begins to assume substantial proportions only in the fourteenth century. Some eighty years before Bishop Vincent, an unknown clergyman, possibly of French origin (he has come to be called Gall-Anonim, ‘the anonymous Gaul’), produced the earliest chronicle emanating directly from the Polish lands. Archaeological and toponymic evidence, the accounts of foreign observers and travellers, inform the historian little better than the folk memory on which Gall relied to locate the founder of the ruling house in a successful peasant adventurer called ‘Piast’, who had overthrown a tyrannical predecessor, Popiel (supposedly gnawed to death by some very hungry mice), at some point in the ninth century AD. Historians are more inclined nowadays to accept that Mieszko's immediate forebears, Siemowit, Lestek and Siemomysl, were real persons, not just figments of Gall's imagination; and that it was under them that the early foundations of the future Regnum Poloniae were laid, with commercial and administrative centres in Gniezno and Poznah.