Free City of Kraków

The Free City of Kraków was a small neutral republic created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 out of territory taken from the Duchy of Warsaw. Its full official name was the Free, Independent and Strictly Neutral City of Cracow and its District, and it was also known as the Republic of Cracow. The city and its surrounding district were placed under the joint protection of Russia, Prussia and Austria, the three powers that had partitioned Poland, and were given a liberal constitution. Kraków became a refuge for Polish political life and learning, including the ancient Jagiellonian University, while its position as a free city made it a symbol of the vanished Polish state. The arrangement lasted only three decades. After an unsuccessful uprising in 1846, Austrian troops entered the city and the free city was annexed, being reorganized as the Grand Duchy of Cracow within the Austrian Empire. The episode is remembered as the last surviving fragment of independent Poland before the national revivals of the later nineteenth century.