ABSTRACT
Writing in the 1880s, Stanisław Smolka observed that ‘the Poles were not too eager to venture on the crusades.’1 Generations of historians since then have accepted this view, and over time a tendency has developed among Polish historians to marginalize the impact of the idea of crusade in Poland and to devalue the participation of Poles in the crusades as politically motivated episodes of early Polish imperialism. This situation has no doubt been exacerbated by the limited amount of primary material on the subject of the crusades – which allowed for wide interpretational differences – by the political climate after 1945 and by post-war anti-German sentiment, which influenced attitudes towards the Teutonic Order and its place in Polish history.
