Europe · High and late Middle Ages
Duchy of Silesia
drawn on the map 1139–1146, 1169–1304
Assigned in 1138 to Władysław II the Exile, ancestor of the Silesian Piasts. Silesia fragmented into a dozen or more duchies (below).
- Shown on the map
- 1139–1146, 1169–1304 (2 periods)
- Peak area
- 120k km²
- Region
- Europe
Overview
Assigned in 1138 to Władysław II the Exile, ancestor of the Silesian Piasts. Silesia fragmented into a dozen or more duchies (below). The Mongol invasion culminated in the Battle of Legnica (Liegnitz) on 9 April 1241, where Henry II the Pious of Silesia was killed and his army destroyed — though the Mongols then withdrew. From the 1320s–1330s the Silesian dukes progressively accepted Bohemian overlordship (most homages 1327–1335; confirmed by treaty renouncing Polish claims), and Silesia passed with the Bohemian crown to the Luxembourgs and later Habsburgs.
Common questions
- What was the Duchy of Silesia?
- Assigned in 1138 to Władysław II the Exile, ancestor of the Silesian Piasts. Silesia fragmented into a dozen or more duchies (below).
- When is the Duchy of Silesia shown on the map?
- The border data draws the Duchy of Silesia 1139–1146, 1169–1304, in 2 separate periods. The source samples borders at fixed dates, so a span can begin late or run on past the end.
- How large was the Duchy of Silesia?
- At its greatest extent drawn on this map, the Duchy of Silesia covered about 120,000 km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.
Sources
This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia articles for each territory as the primary basis, with Encyclopædia Britannica, the World History Encyclopedia, academic works (John Fine on the Balkans, Halperin and Martin on Muscovy, Rady and Veszprémy on Hungary) and, for a few entries, the medieval Livonian Chronicle of Henry itself. The article this entry is anchored on:
- Wikipedia — Duchy of Silesia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Silesia
This entry was last updated .
This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made
Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.
Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).
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