Duchy of Kalisz

The Duchy of Kalisz was a district duchy of fragmented Piast Poland, centred on the city of Kalisz and the surrounding Kalisz Land in Greater Poland. It emerged in 1177, when a rebellion against the overbearing Duke Mieszko III the Old divided Greater Poland among his kinsmen, and Casimir II the Just became its first ruler. For its first half-century Kalisz remained a fief of the broader, dismembered Polish realm, which contemporaries still called the Kingdom of Poland. In 1227 the duchy gained a measure of independence under local Piast lines, and it survived as a small frontier principality on the road between Silesia, Pomerania and the Polish heartland. Its dukes granted town charters and fostered the settlement that made Kalisz a notable trading centre. The experiment ended in 1279, when Przemysl II reunited Kalisz with Gniezno and Poznan and reconstituted the Duchy of Greater Poland, from which he would later claim the Polish crown. Kalisz therefore belongs to the long age of Polish partition, when a single kingdom was parcelled into dozens of competing duchies.