1480

So tonight, after eight months and two renewals, I’ve finished Długosz’s Annals. Even this abridgement at times felt interminable, five hundred and fifteen years of one thing after another, actually, the same damn things over and over, occasionally all at the same time, medieval things, mostly fighting, everywhere and between everyone, a thousand truces and never any peace, dynastic intrigue, religious and cultural bigotry resulting in copious bloodshed, every conceivable permutation of the Seven Deadly Sins, the plague, heresy, a dozen Władysławs at least, with an equal number of Bolesławs, and even more Casimirs, and to finish, Jan Długosz himself, a bit actor in his own chronicle, which ends in 1480 on his death bed:  

Though lying in bed, gravely ill, yet am I no little pleased that, after protracted, uninterrupted labour, much thought and deliberation, extensive travel and journeying in search of the chronicles of our own and other lands and in so doing subjecting myself to censure, abuse and rebuff, I have come to the end of this work, which all others have neglected. Gladly would I continue it for the honour of God and the benefit of my Fatherland, but Fate is preventing me, for I strongly suspect that the Cruel Sisters are even now drawing their threads. I have, by the Grace of God, reached an age that not all attain, having lived for sixty-five years. My afternoon being over and I having reached the actual evening and term of life, when I am to enter the kingdom of Eternal Light and enjoy everlasting life with all the saints, I confess, what I admitted long ago, that not absolutely everything I have written has accorded with the truth. Some of the things I have described have been trivial and ephemeral, though amusing, thing[s] that I have taken from the writings of others either on my own initiative or at the suggestion of others, things that I have found in minor works or in other people’s maps, or matters of hearsay, taking as worthy of belief what I have merely been told to be true. I beg those who are better endowed by Minerva and have ready tongues to correct my errors and misconceptions. Should they find what they read, even the whole, confused or amateurish, may they undertake the editing of it, and may they forgive my language and incompetence. With such a wealth and variety of topics, only an angel could explain and verify it all. It is not a gospel or a canonical letter I have been writing, as the holy apostles did, but, as an intellectual exercise, I have described things that are variable and ephemeral. I accept responsibility for verifying them or for failing to do so, should that be what I have done.

….I beg all who read or will read this Chronicle to kneel and say for me, first and last of sinners, one Paternoster and one Hail Mary, so that Our Lord Jesus Christ, son of the Immaculate Virgin, through all his torments borne with strange love for me, for him and every mortal, may deign to free me of eternal and temporal torment and lead me to see His Blessed Trinity, whose is the honour and the glory, now and for ever. Amen. (p. 601)

This I can do and have done, in Polish.

1414

On this date last year, I had just arrived in Poland, slipping down through a winter fog into the damp snowy cold of Małopolska, “Little Poland,” the capital of which is Kraków. A year later I miss everything about Poland—except the damp cold. But since so many of the good things about Poland in winter are a response to the damp cold, a quiet resistance to it, an occasional defiance of it—vodka, tea, grzaniec (“hot, spiced wine”), a peppery barszcz, conversation with family or boon companions in pubs and cafés and cukiernie (“sweet shops”), and szarlotka—perhaps I miss the damp cold, too. The slush on cobbly pavements. The snow falling clumpily from trees. The smell of wet cement, a little salty, a little savory. The typical cold in Minnesota is not the same, but drier, edgier, and its polar vortexicality, not in the least to be preferred. The chill cold dripping down one’s neck on Karmeliczka Street, while hardly pleasant, doesn’t begin to compare for discomfort with the rolling, bitter, avalanche of subzero temperatures and subarctic windchills. BRRR. At the moment, I remember my arrival in winter Poland warmly.

I have been reading Długosz desultorily, intermittently, since coming home and yesterday arrived at the year 1414, exactly 600 years ago. Sometimes such coincidences seem more than coincidental. But I have to say, little noteworthy appears to have happened in 1414. Yes, the plague abated somewhat, but the Teutonic Knights were up to their old bedevilment. While King Władysław defeated them spectacularly at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, he neglected to push his advantage, failing to take their fortress at Małbork and leaving them a stronghold for continuing mischief; the Order appears to be winning the “peace,” duping the King, taking advantage of his diplomatic good nature, and “using gold and bribery as arguments rather than justice” in international forums of arbitration. Władysław concludes a truce “for winter is approaching and dysentery rife among his troops.” He’s still angry with his kinsman and ally, the Grand-duke of Lithuania. Heresy visits Czechoslovakia in the person of Jan Hus. Same old, same old, and without much encouraging to say to readers 600 years hence.

But having now read Jan Długosz himself, and not just read of him, his long and unflinching account of hardship and misfortune in the middle ages, with rare visions of peace and goodness, I have a new appreciation for his name, accomplishment, and the resting place of his bones in the crypt as Na Skałce.