The article is dedicated to an attempt at reconstructing the early appearance of the tomb of king Bolesław I the Brave in the Poznań cathedral, destroyed in 1790. By referring to the discussion of the tomb’s founder and the changes in its shape, the author has focused on K. Stronczyński’s theory from 1887 that the chalcography by A. Mylius (1595) consolidated the early portrait of the king’s statue. The scholar was of an opinion that king Bolesław’s sculpture was modelled by the tomb of duke Henry II the Pious. The original of the portrait was created by Tomasz Treter, an artist born in Poznań who could have captured the state of the king’s statue around 1585 (a variant of the portrait was provided by S. Sarnicki in 1594).
The paper is an attempt at showing the context of important changes, which took place in the course of the 16th century, in the process of shaping the identity of German-speaking elites of the Western Pomerania and Silesia. At the time, the fledgling humanist historiography looked for arguments supporting the primary political independence, or ethnic distinctiveness, of the tribes inhabiting these territories vis a vis their neighbours, firstly in ancient authors (Tacitus), or neighbours (Albert Krantz, Johannes Dlugossius, Jost Ludwig Dietz). It was initially a successful venture, when the works of Johann Bugenhagen, Thomas Kantzow and Joachim Cureus put forward the theses on the ethnogenetical distinctiveness of the Pomeranians (as Vandals-Veneti-Wends) and Silesians (as Elysians) from Poland and Poles. In the mid-16th century, among others under the infl uence of the triumph of the “German religion” (influenced by the historical ideas of Melanchthon), the historiography of these “former Piast” territories rejected both the newly acquired individual perspective of depicting its earliest past and the “sarmatian” version documented by Martin Cromer. The decisive factor here was the, then dominant in the Reich, identifi cation of theearliest historic inhabitants of Pomerania and Silesia with German tribes inhabiting these lands, which was based on the works of Tacitus. According to this identification, the local historians, disregarding the effects of the migration of peoples, demonstrated the “precedence” of their own, Germanancestors in these territories. Slavs, in turn, were depicted as immigrants (“late” Kantzow and Klempzen) or invaders (Cureus).
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