ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a description of certain developments within the Polish community and their relation to the fact that Poland stood on the eastern side of a frontier which was, influenced from the German lands to the west. The earliest bishops of the Polish Church came from abroad, chiefly from the German lands. The first, Jordan, probably came from within the Empire when he arrived in Poland in the 960s, shortly after Mieszko's conversion, to establish a missionary see subject directly to the papacy. By the middle of the twelfth century certain fundamental aspects of the political and economic institutions of Poland were undergoing rapid change. This anti-German hostility helped fuel the beginnings of a Polish national or ethnic consciousness. The early Polish polity and economy evolved out of the needs and conditions of the early Piast period. But these institutions were not phenomena that grew within a vacuum.
