Quoting: Bratwurst Boy
In the late 700's and early 800's, the Slavs fought off invasions by Charlemagne, whose empire bordered theirs to the west. Charlemagne captured so many Slavs and brought them back to France as slaves that their name has become the French (and English) word for slave (the Latin word was servus, which has become our word servant). Of course the Slavs captured Frenchmen in these wars too, but we don't know what they called them.
But most Slavs continued to live in Eastern Europe, where they gradually were taken over by the Roman Empire, and converted to Christianity. As the Roman Empire got weaker in the 1300's, the Slavs got more and more independent.
When the Ottomans conquered the Roman Empire in 1453 AD, most of the Slavs also came under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and some of them converted to Islam."
...and so on
What a biased statement.
May I make some few corrctions? Of course I may.
I think that by now every participant of this forum heard the term „Drang nach Osten” which refers to this German urge to go and conquer the lands situated east from them. As an excuse for their aggression Germans were convincing that they are just merely trying to convert the pagans to the one and only rightful religion, Christianity. Of course this whole crusade hadn’t anything to do with the religion, but still it was a pretty though argument at that time. Their main advantage above the Slavs was that they weren’t only a loose group of tribes, like the Slavs were, but thanks to the long contact with the Roman Empire they developed a centralized jurisdiction. Fortunately for the Poles, by the time our two nations met, poles also had achieved it. Than, the first known polish ruler, Mieszko I, decided freely to be baptized form the hands of Czechs in 966. Thanks to it not only Germans lost their primary argument for conquering the Eastern Europe, but also Mieszko managed to establish an completely independent polish church! Poland was now a part of the European community and cut the Germans from other pagan countries (they lost their territory of future expansion). Further more, Mieszko's son, Boleslav the Brave, managed to crown himself, which made him equal with the rest of the European rulers.
The history of Polish-German conflict is very long... The important thing is to know that Poland not only managed to maintain it's sovereign and independence, stopped the German walk towards east but also established a very strong and meaningful state just under the Germanys nose. If we would gather all Polish-German conflicts we would see that in most cases it was Poles that actually where the victors. Germany never could eliminate Poland from the map. It couldn't ever do it on their own, had to had a help from Austria and Russia to finally accomplish it, and yet, as the history has shown us, that also didn’t quite work out.
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