The Earliest Ecclesiastical Connections of the Territory Between the Vistula and Wieprz Rivers (Poland)

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to find the answer to the question of ecclesiastical administrative affiliation regarding the area between the Vistula and Wieprz Rivers. This relatively narrow aspect of the research was the subject of academic controversy over the possible influence of the organization of Methodian Christianity, not only on the designated area, but in general on Polish soil. The vast majority of authors – even if some of them allow for a wide geographic range of Methodian influence – firmly opposes the idea of the presence of any structure of the Methodian rite in the lands north of the Carpathian Mountains, regarding this idea as unsubstantiated. The form of territorial organization of the Church involving the land between the Vistula and Wieprz Rivers could only be in the Latin bishopric of Poznań, which was undoubtedly a permanent diocesan structure that depended directly on the Holy See from its earliest period. Theoretically, if the area between the Vistula and the Wieprz Rivers had been included in the territory that on the Czechs in the second half of the tenth century, it would have also belonged to the Diocese of Prague and the Metropolis of Mainz, or, a bit later, to the Diocese of Olomouc. The formal nature of that membership would have probably involved a lack of durable local structures of Christianity, which also had to be a characteristic of the first decades of their dependence on the Diocese of Poznan. It seems that it was only the entrance of the lands between the Vistula and Wieprz Rivers into an administrative relationship to the Bishops of Cracow and the Metropolitans of Gniezno in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, which proved to be a stable association that would be strengthened in material and spiritual significance in the coming decades and centuries.