Marek Słoń, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

 

In this post I would like to introduce research and data resources on the history of the parish network of the Polish church up to the end of the 18th century. The spatial boundaries are defined by the extent of dioceses to which a Polish character can be attributed. Both political and ecclesiastical boundaries are relevant in this respect and there is a strong link between the two anyway. The change of national boundaries caused the church boundaries to be adjusted to them, but not immediately, not exactly and not fully.

This can be illustrated by several examples. The extent of the dioceses subordinate to the metropolis of Gniezno at the turn of the 12^th/13^th century was similar to the borders of contemporary Poland, not including only Prussia. However, the relationship of short-lived Polish sovereignty over the Lubusz land and Western Pomerania meant that the dioceses of Lubusz and Kamień quickly severed links with Gniezno. Silesia came under Bohemian overlordship in the mid-14th century and the link between the diocese of Wrocław and the metropolis became weaker and weaker, although it was not until the 18th century that a complete break was made. Pomerelia, subject to the Teutonic Order from 1308 to 1466, remained part of the diocese of Wloclawek despite attempts to detach it. In contrast, the Prussian bishoprics (Chelmno, Pomezanian, Warmian) came under the control of Gniezno already 100 years after the change of political boundaries (1466-1566). The occupation of the Ruthenian lands (today's Ukraine) by the Polish kings in the 14th century entailed the establishment of a new Polish Catholic metropolis in Lviv. On the other hand, after the union of Poland with Lithuania, the dioceses of the latter were subordinated to Gniezno. Thus, not only in ethnically Polish, but also in Ruthenian and Lithuanian territories, the structures of the Catholic Church were predominantly Polish in character[1].

In this way, the Polish Church covered a significant part of Europe (see Figure 1).

 

 

Figure 1: Atlas of the Latin Church in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century

 
We can start to trace the parish network in the Polish lands in a relatively complete way in the 14th century, also thanks to the accounts of Peter's Pence[2]. At that time it continued to develop as a result of internal colonisation, and its relative stabilisation only took place in the 16th century. This process has been described in many regional studies[3], largely conducted by - or at least initiated at - the Institute of Historical Geography of the Church in Poland at the Catholic University of Lublin[4]. The results of these studies have not yet been transferred into research data.

However, a complete list of Catholic churches in the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before its first partition (1772) as well as of all places of worship, including those of other denominations and religions, in the territory of the Polish Crown at the same time has been compiled[5]. For each object, the type of institution, name, type of patronage, building material and approximate location were determined, noting the source of this information. The results were presented in printed atlases, with extensive commentary, and subsequently made available as a database. Basic features are presented in an online application, and the full resource can be loaded and analysed using GIS tools on one's own device (Figure 2).
 

 
Figure 2: Religions and Denominations in the (Polish) Crown in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

 

At the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, in the Department of Historical Atlas, the settlement network as well as state and ecclesiastical boundaries were reconstructed for the Polish lands of the Crown in the second half of the 16th century[6]. Each parish was thus shown with its boundaries (Figure 3).
 
 

Figure 3: Part of the main map of the Historical Atlas of Poland. Detailed Maps of the Sixteenth Century.

 

However, information on the church itself, such as its name or patronage, was not collected; only the type of ownership of all localities is of some help in this regard. This data, too, is available in the form of a printed atlas, in individual volumes and in an overarching edition in Polish and English. In addition to the map, it includes a commentary and a list of localities. The maps are available as WMS services, i.e. in raster form, and in vector format, as WFS services and uploadable files. Selected information and functionalities are presented in the form of applications. The atlasfontium.pl website also contains other spatial data for the past, which can be searched, displayed and analysed as a single resource.

Another project, entitled 'Territorial Divisions of the Latin Church in the Republic (X-XXI centuries): From Data Harmonization to Synthesis', is currently underway. One of the main tasks is to reconstruct the complete parish network for at least five specific points in time. Data from 1600 need to be supplemented with Ruthenian and Lithuanian areas (Figure 4). The cross-section of 1772 mainly needs to be combined with the others. It is not yet certain that the location of all sites will be retrievable. The second half of the 19th century is reconstructed on the basis of the so-called schematisms, i.e. the official registers of churches and offices compiled annually by each diocese, using mainly sources from around 1870 (if they are extant). The parish network of inter-war Poland was compiled on the basis of a single census covering the whole country, as also for the year 1984.

Harmonisation of these data items requires above all the development and application of a definition of a parish that is both universal and precise enough to be applicable to the whole period. It is necessary to answer the (difficult) question regarding the constitutive features of a parish: what determines that we conclude the existence of a parish or its disappearance? The parish was first of all an institution of canon law: erected by the bishop, subjected to him, with parochial compulsion, beneficium, and boundaries. The latter did not have to be spatial; numerous personal parishes are also documented.
 
 

Figure 4: Parish boundaries in the polish lands of the Crown circa 1600. Layer import in QGIS software.
 

Equally important are the criteria for the continuity of the parish, determining that we are still dealing with the same institution and not a new entity. Elements such as the church building, the patrocinium, the ward boundaries, the parish seat, the community of the faithful, patron of the church and, last but not least, the denomination have to be taken into account. The project involves the spatial reconstruction of the network, so the question of its seats is of particular importance. How broadly should it be understood: is it a building, the plot of land on which it stands, or perhaps the whole locality? Bogumił Szady defined the concept of the parish seat as ‘a set of points that reflect the location of buildings that had parish functions at different historical periods’[7]. That is, a parish can be moved to another village and still be the same unit. It is particularly challenging to analyse continuity when the denomination changes. The same building, vocation, patron, endowment and, above all, community of believers remained.

The material collected is also used to analyse the network, not just its individual elements. Here, too, the question of its constitutive elements comes into play. Is it possible to speak of the creation of a network when a Catholic diocese was erected, only after a certain number of parishes had been founded, or perhaps only when every worshipper or even every settlement was subordinated to one of them? It is already clear from the current state of research that no parish districts could be demarcated in most of the Ruthenian areas, because in most of the villages there was no Catholic population, at least not of the Latin rite.

The foundation of the medieval parish was canon law, above all the canon omnes utriusque sexus, i.e. the parochial compulsion introduced at the 4^th Council of Lateran IV. This required that all the faithful be included in the structure, i.e. the existence of a parish network. In turn, this leads to the question: Could there have been a Catholic parish before the parish network in the Middle Ages and in modern times? It plays an important role. There has been a lively discussion in Polish historiography about the existence of parishes and the parish network before the 13th century. It did not lead to a conclusion. A similar question applies to Ruthenian lands throughout the period up to and including the 18th century.

[Polish original text translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version); revised by the author and Beat Kümin]

 
The author 

Marek Słoń was a My-Parish Fellow in November-December 2024. He is a researcher in the Institute for the Historical Geography of the Church in Poland, co-Editor of the Polish lands of the Crown in the second half of the sixteenth century, member of the editorial boards of two journals (‘Studia Źródłoznawcze’ / ‘Studia Geohistorica’) and organiser of the ‘parish panel’ in the planned conference Research on in-depth Christianization in late medieval Poland (Centre for Medieval Studies, Lublin, 2024) as well as the forthcoming annual conference of the Urban History Section of the Committee of Historical Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences (Lublin 2025), on the theme of Town and Parish. Following a PhD on Die Spitäler Breslaus im Mittelalter (1999) and a higher doctorate on Double and Multiple Towns in Medieval Europe (2012), he focuses primarily on the urban and religious history of the Middle Ages, while also aiming to reconstruct the territorial divisions of the Catholic Church in Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the sixteenth century. A second major strand is spatial history and Digital Humanities tools, especially in the context of source editions. He led the Department of Historical Atlas of the Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences (2009-2020), which developed a Polish historical geoportal, an application for annotating manuscripts using GIS, and offered reflections on historical source editing in the digital age. His current project focuses on the urban parish in medieval Poland.

 

Endnotes

[1] See maps for 12th /13th c. and 1772 on wiki.

[2] Atlas Kościoła łacińskiego w Rzeczypospolitej Obojga Narodów w XVIII wieku; Religie i wyznania w Koronie w II połowie XVIII wieku

[3] For example: Przemysław Szafran, Rozwój średniowiecznej sieci parafialnej w Lubelskiem (Lublin, 1958); Aniela Olczyk, Sieć parafialna biskupstwa warmińskiego do roku 1525 (Lublin, 1961); Eugeniusz Wiśniowski, Prepozytura wiślicka do schyłku XVIII wieku. Materiały do struktury organizacyjnej (Lublin, 1976); Grzegorz Klebowicz, Organizacja parafialna diecezji przemyskiej obrządku łacińskiego w XIV-XVI wieku (Lublin, 2013).

[4] Partially summarised in the work Eugeniusz Wiśniowski, Parafie w średniowiecznej Polsce. Struktura i funkcje społeczne (Lublin, 2004); the full list will be provided in the 'Resources' section of the MyParish, under 'works in languages other than English'.

[5] Tadeusz Ładogórski, Studia nad zaludnieniem Polski XIV wieku (Wrocław, 1958).

[6] Polish Lands of the Crown in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century, Part 1: Maps, Plans, Part 2: Commentary, Lists, eds. Marek Słoń, Katarzyna Słomska-Przech, IH PAN, Warszawa, 2021 (Historical Atlas of Poland. Detailed Maps of the Sixteenth Century. Collective Edition of the Series, eds. Marek Słoń, Henryk Rutkowski); application (map) and data: atlasfontium.pl.

[7] Bogumił Szady, 'Typologia i rozmieszczenie kościołów parafialnych w II Rzeczpospolitej przed II wojną światową', in: Res Historica 57 (2024), p. 1410.