The name Poles goes back to a tribe named for flat land
Poles call themselves Polacy, after the Western Polans, a tribe that settled around the Warta River from the sixth century. Their name traces to an ancient root meaning flat, fitting the plains they farmed. Neighbours such as Hungarians and Turks instead use names from Lechia, an old word for Poland.
Long before any Polish state, the land hosted a shifting mix of peoples. Neolithic farmers built megalithic tombs, the Bronze Age Lusatian culture raised a fortified settlement at Biskupin in the 8th century BCE, and a site at Bronocice holds the world's earliest known pictures of a wheeled vehicle. Celts, Goths, Vandals and Balts all left traces, and the Amber Road carried Baltic amber south to the Mediterranean. After the Goths moved away, Slavic settlers arrived around 500 to 700 AD and absorbed those who remained.
Recorded history begins around 930 to 960, when the Western Polans united neighbouring clans under the Piast dynasty. Mieszko I's baptism in 966 tied the new state to Latin Christendom, and his son Bolesław the Brave was crowned the first king in 1025. Fragmentation after 1138 and Mongol invasions followed, but Casimir the Great founded the first Polish university in 1364, and the Union of Krewo in 1385 joined Poland with Lithuania. The victory at Grunwald in 1410 turned the tide against the Teutonic knights.
The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, formed in 1569, became one of Europe's largest states, run by an elected king and an assertive nobility under a system called Golden Liberty. The Warsaw Confederation of 1573 enshrined religious tolerance, and minority communities such as Polish Jews flourished. Sigismund III moved the capital from Kraków to Warsaw in 1596.
Today the constitution defines the nation as all citizens, regardless of heritage. The 2011 census counted about 37.4 million self-declared Poles among 38.5 million residents. Polish, a West Slavic language written with 32 letters, is the mother tongue of nearly 97 percent of citizens, partly because border changes and forced resettlement after the Second World War left the country unusually uniform. Kashubian and Silesian survive alongside it, and a large diaspora, the Polonia, stretches across the world.
Source: Polish people
