Lesser Polish

The Lesser Polish are the West Slavic people of Lesser Poland, the upper Vistula basin. The Vistulan tribe held its south and the Lendians its north-east until Mieszko I of Poland annexed the region in the late tenth century. From about 1040 Kraków was the royal capital.

The 1138 fragmentation split it into the duchies of Kraków and Sandomierz. Mongol raiders burned its cities in 1241, when its assembled nobility perished at Chmielnik. In 1320 Władysław I was crowned in Wawel Cathedral, and the reunited province became the heart of a kingdom that prospered under Casimir III the Great.

Sixteenth-century grain trade down the Vistula enriched its cities, and the Union of Lublin was concluded there in 1569, but the court's move to Warsaw in 1596 began its decline. The partitions of 1772 and 1795 gave most of Lesser Poland to Austria as Galicia; after 1815 Kraków became a free city. Its dialect descends from Vistulan speech and, with Greater Polish, shaped standard literary Polish.