ABSTRACT
In the fourteenth century, the Polish kingdom entered into three personal unions. The first of these was in the years 1300–6, when Wenceslas II and his son Wenceslas III of the Bohemian Premyslid dynasty were Polish kings. Secondly, between 1370 and 1382, Louis the Great, king of Hungary, sat on the Polish throne. Finally, the third personal union between the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania took place in 1386. This chapter focuses on the first two of these for several reasons, the most important being that the first union played a decisive role in the process of the permanent restoration of royal power in the Polish lands under the Piast dynasty at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and that the second sealed the final end of the Piast era.
