Ecclesiastical Background
THE DIOCESE OF KRAKÓW
The see of Kraków was founded in 1000 together with three other suffragan dioceses (Wrocław, Poznań, Kołobrzeg), all within the newly established archbishopric of Gniezno. The decision was announced in presence of Otto III and Papal Legate at a Council held in Gniezno, which was an aftermath of St. Adalbert’s martyrdom in Prussia and the emperor’s pilgrimage to his relics. The city itself and the land surrounding it was a relatively recent holding of the Piast dynasty. Since the middle of the 10th century it had been controlled by Bohemian troops and was captured only around 990 by the soldiers of Boleslav Chrobry (“the Valiant”), the son of the first ruler of Poland Mieszko I. For the first bishop, a certain Poppo was appointed at the Council. However, in the oldest lists of the bishops of Kraków his name is preceded by Prohorus and Proculphus. It is not clear what was their connection to Kraków (if any) but it can be ascertained that until the Council of Gniezno the region was a part of the bishoprics of Olomouc, which in turn belonged to the archdiocese of Mainz. The church building must have stood on the Wawel Hill long before 1000, and the choice of its patron – St. Wenceslas, uncle of Boleslav’s mother Dobrawa – most probably also predates the establishment of the see. The prominence of the city and its bishop rose significantly in the 1040s, when Duke Casimir, Boleslav’s grandson, moved his capital to Kraków, Gniezno having been devastated in 1038 by the army of Bohemians (led by duke Břetislav) and pagan riots. One of the most decisive events in the history of the diocese took place forty years later. In April 1079, at the behest of Casimir’s son, king Boleslav the Bold, Stanislas of Szczepanów, bishop of Kraków, was killed. The martyrdom of Stanislas was recognized as such by the papal commision many decades later and the bishop was canonized in Assisi in 1253, giving to the city the glory of his sainthood and establishing its principal patron.
At the turn of the fourteenth century, after a period of disintegration lasting almost two hundred years, the Polish lands were reunited, the crown regained and the role of Kraków as capital city of the kingdom reestablished. The reestablishment of the rule of the Piast dynasty and the coronation of Ladislav the Elbow-high in 1320 coincided with the beginning of the episcopate of bishop Nanker (1320‒1326), who ordered the rebuilding of the cathedral and issued a number of important statutes regulating many important matters in local ecclesiatical affairs, including liturgical issues. The importance of Kraków and its predominant cultural and liturgical impact on other centres of Poland was reinforced by the founding of a university (studium generale) in 1364 by the king Casimir the Great and its restoration, now with a faculty of theology, by king Ladislav Jagiełło and his wife Hedwig of Anjou, at the end of the fourteenth century. The rule of Jagiellonian dynasty in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a Golden Age for Poland, for its capital city (Poloniae urbs celeberrima), and for the diocese, which at the turn of the seventeenth century could count as many as 900 parishes.
The history of the first hundred years of the liturgical use of Kraków is practically undocumented. It seems that rather early, perhaps during the pontificate of Aron (1044‒1059), the cathedral chapter was organised with secular canons to whom the celebration of the Office Hours was entrusted, and who most probably tried to create the local liturgy with its unique shape. The inventory of books of the cathedral library from 1111 lists Omelie, Ordinales IV, Benedictionales III (…) quinque lectionares, antifonarium, nocturnales III, Missalia II, Gradualia III, Capitulare, and a Breviarium, some of which are still preserved in situ. The Office of Kraków must have been shaped at that time, if the fifteenth century chronicler and a canon of the chapter Jan Długosz is to be trusted. According to Jan, Siroslav (Żyrosław), bishop of Wrocław from 1112 to 1120, desiring to make uniform and to stabilize the use of his see, adopted the customs of Kraków: “Qui ecclesiam Wratislaviensem stabili rubrica in officiis divinis et cantu regulaturus, cum usque ad tempus sui pontificii in incerto vagaretur, examinatis ceterarum ecclesiarum cathedralium Poloniae rubricis et officiis, ad Cracoviensis ecclesiae rubricam animum appulit, velut ordinatiorem, et illam in ecclesiam Wratislaviensem induxit. Ab illo quoque tempore utraeque ecclesiae, Wratislaviensis videlicet et Cracoviensis, erant unanimes et conformes in officiorum divinorum et rubricae observatione, licet processu temporis nonnullas discrepationes induxissent (Joannis Dlugossi Vitae episcoporum Poloniae, ed. I. Polkowski, Kraków 1887, s. 116).” This information finds some support in the extant liturgical books from Kraków, which transmit two distinct traditions of the Office (labelled below KRA1 and KRA2).
Cf. Bolesław Kumor, Dzieje diecezji krakowskiej do roku 1795 [History of the diocese of Kraków till 1795], vol. 1, Kraków 1998.