Thanks Admins...you cutted the important rest so here it is again:
Please check the rules about quoting the messages.
in 1336, the last of the Piast Princes died and the duchy of Silesia was annexed to Bohemia - despite the efforts of King Casimir III of Poland to hold onto it. His failure to do so meant that it was six hundred years until Wroclaw was returned to Polish hands.
Wroclaw, or Prezzla as it begins to be known as, continued to flourish under Bohemian rule and in 1387 gained admittance into the Hanseatic League, a powerful conglomeration of trading cities (think of it as a medieval version of G8!). The winds of change picked up again in the 16th century when King Ludwig died in battle, leaving no heirs, and the Bohemian estate elected Duke Ferdinand, of the Austrian line of Habsburgs, as King. Now Wroclaw was under Austrian rule.
The early 17th century saw a marked downturn in fortunes for Wroclaw, as both the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) and the plague took their toll on the city - indeed this period saw the population reduced by half. However when the warring factions of Europe eventually signed the Treaty of Westphalia and brought an end to the fighting, it was business as usual for Wroclaw and an economic and cultural revival began.
The next chapter in the city's colourful history began in 1741 when King Frederick the Great II seized Lower Silesia and brought it under Prussian rule. It was he who officially gave the city its German name of Breslau (or Prezzla), although it had been used for many centuries before by the large ethnic German population. Wroclaw spent the next two hundred years in German hands and by the end of the 19th century it was the third largest Prussian city behind Berlin and Hamburg, and began to be heavily industrialised.
It was polish for about 300 years...for far longer it was NOT polish but bohemian, austrian and german and inhabited mainly by Germans!
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