Kruszwica

Kruszwica
Mysia Wieża (Mice's Tower) in Kruszwica
Coat of arms
Kruszwica
Coordinates: 52°40′38″N 18°19′45″E / 52.67722°N 18.32917°E / 52.67722; 18.32917
Country	Poland
Voivodeship	Kuyavian-Pomeranian
County	Inowrocław
Gmina	Kruszwica
Area
• Total	6.64 km2 (2.56 sq mi)
Population (2006)
• Total	9,373
• Density	1,400/km2 (3,700/sq mi)
Postal code	88-150
Website	http://www.kruszwica.um.gov.pl

Kruszwica [kruʂˈfʲit͡sa] (German: Kruschwitz) is a town in central Poland and is situated in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship (since 1999), previously in Bydgoszcz Voivodeship (1975–1998). It has a population of 9,412 people (2004).

This article incorporates text from The political history of Poland (1917) by Edward Henry Lewinski-Corwin, a publication now in the public domain.

Owing to the frequent raids of the Norsemen, the people of this region early organized an effective military force of defense. Under the protection of the military bands and their chiefs, the fields could safely be cultivated and the little, fortified towns (grody), which became places for the transaction of intertribal business and barter, for common worship, and for the storage of goods during a foreign invasion could be successfully defended and the wrongs of the people redressed. The military bands and their leaders soon became the unifying force, and the fortified towns, the centers of a larger political organization, with the freeman (Kmiec or Kmeton) as its base.

The first historical town of this nature was that of Kruszwica, on the Lake of Gopło. It soon gave place to that of Gniezno or Knezno, further west, which by its very name indicates that it was the residence of a Knez, or prince or duke. In time Poznań became the princely town, and the principality began to assert itself and to grow westward to the Oder, southward to the Barycza and eastward to the Pilica Rivers. In the east this territorial expansion met with the armed opposition of another large tribe, the Lenczanians, which was similarly organized under a military ruler and which occupied the plains between the Warta, Bzura and Pilica Rivers. Further east, in the forests of the middle course of the Vistula to the north of Pilica, lived the most savage of the Polish tribes, the Mazurs. This tribe was the latest to come under the sovereignty of the principality and began its political existence on the bank of the Gopło Lake under the leadership of the Piast, whose dynasty ruled the country until 1370. To the north of the Netze River between the Oder and the Baltic, lived the northernmost of the Polish tribes known as Pomorzanie (in the Polish: people living by the sea); hence the name of the province Pomorze.