330 Poland son of Ladislas, was able to restore the royal authority in Poland, and effective government was restored Bolesław III reigned from 1102 to 1138 and even succeeded in defeating the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V twice in battle However out of diplomatic expediency, he later swore allegiance to the Emperor Lothair II, Henry’s son MONGOL INVASIONS The death of Bolesław in 1138 signaled the beginning of almost 200 years of domestic strife, as rival members of the Piast dynasty struggled for supremacy Poland, which under Miesko I had been a dominant power in eastern Europe, was reduced to a small player in international affairs The explosion of the Mongols into Europe in 1240 destroyed the entire strategic balance in eastern and central Europe In 1223 during the reign of Genghis Khan, the Mongol warlord Subotai had smashed the Kievan army in the Battle of the Kalka River In December 1237 the Mongols took Riazan and began a systematic campaign of crushing the Russian city-states On December 6, 1240, according to Eggenberger, the Mongols stormed into Kiev, “plundering and killing at will Kiev was burned to the ground.” This time, rather than making a large raid as the invasion of 1223 really had been, the Mongols had come to stay While Subotai and Batu Khan continued west, directly threatening weakened Poland, the khanate of the Golden Horde was established on the “lower Volga,” according to Eggenberger “For most of two centuries, most of Russia south of Novgorod lay under Asiatic suzerainty.” After the conquest of Russia Subotai and Batu headed directly into Poland and Hungary, having divided their army into three parts Fighting for Ogotai Khan, who had succeeded Genghis Khan in 1227 as the great khan in 1241, the Mongols virtually crushed the military power of eastern Europe, leaving Piast Poland in serious jeopardy During the Mongol (or Tatar) assault on Poland, they headed toward the city of Kraków There one of the truly heroic episodes of military history took place On the Rynek Glowny, or Main Market Square, stood St Mary’s Church According to Polish legend, an elderly watchman saw the Mongols approaching and sounded the trumpet call of the Hejnal to alert the town Since the trumpet was played regularly, nobody was alarmed at first But when he played it over and over, the townspeople became alarmed Suddenly, the trumpeter stopped playing They saw the Mongols coming closer, and volleys of arrows from Polish archers drove them back After the battle, somebody climbed up to the tower and found the old watchman dead, a Mongol arrow through his throat In honor of his saving the city, the Hejnal is played every hour THE ORDER OF TEUTONIC KNIGHTS The power vacuum created by the implosion of Piast Poland also faced another threat from the west, a condition that would mark Polish history In 1190 the Teutonic Knights, an order of crusaders, was established Pope Celestine III confirmed the order as a religious order of knights in 1196, as did Innocent III in 1199 Yet unlike the Knights Templars and the Knights Hospitallers, the Teutonic Knights would not make a name for themselves in the Holy Land Instead, as H W Koch writes in Medieval Warfare, the Teutonic Knights “remained a purely German movement particularly in the context of its long-term development of the German east.” The Teutonic Knights’ drive to the east became a permanent threat to the stability of Poland and the Lithuanian princes to the east Conrad (Konrad) of Masovia, son of Casimir II of Poland, asked the Teutonic Knights for their aid against the fierce and pagan Prussian tribes In order to bring the Teutonic Knights to accept his offer, he ceded to them Polish territory around Kulm on the Vistula River As crusaders, the order was happy enough to take on the Prussians at the request of the Polish ruler Pope Honorius III in 1226 issued the Bull of Rimini to give papal backing to the coming war against the Prussians, in fact raising it to the status of a crusade But, along with the crusade against the Prussians, the Bull of Rimini gave the order rights to make its first expansion into Polish territory The land around Lobau and Kulm was speedily converted by 1230, and Conrad of Masovia, apparently seeing no threat to Polish sovereignty, obligingly handed it over to the Teutonic Knights By the time that the grand master of the order, Hermann von Salza, died in 1239, Koch notes, “the Order controlled more than a hundred miles of the Baltic coast.” A Prussian uprising took the order by surprise in 1261, and it was not until 1271 that the order gained the upper hand But when it did, the Teutonic Knights again focused on their expansion eastward Danzig became part of the realm of the knights, and in 1309 Grand Master Siegfried von Feuchtwangen made the expansion a definite war aim of the Teutonic Order, while Ladislas Łokietek (Elbow-high) was the king of Poland Ironically it was under Wladyslaw that Poland began to regain its unity and strength The first open clash between the Poles and the order came in 1311, when the order supported John of Luxembourg, the king of Bohemia, in his bid for the crown against Ladislas John and