Galicia, around Debica

 
Further east now, still heavily populated but beginning to disperse into country towns and villages, rather than commercial and manufacturing centres.  These are still satellite lands of Krakow, as all of Galicia, a large region compared to many of those I've worked on in east-central Europe, this is the powerhouse of the whole Polish state of the era.  Krakow was, for a time, the capital of Poland, in tandem with the other capital in Lithuania, Vilnius, or Wilno.  But the capital was moved to reduce the power of the intellectual class, to isolate the Polish throne from "facts" and "realistic expectations" and so on ... and that went very, very well.

For all of Poland's enemies.

There's much more Galicia to do, until drifting out of this corner of Poland and back into modern Ukraine, around Lwow.  All through the path ahead, I'll be cutting through the region's agricultural heart, right up to where I reach Kiyev.  I imagine that for most readers, a lot of what I'm doing now is a complete mystery to them, a part of Poland they've never looked at in depth.

For example, Nowy Sacz, which was done a few maps ago, is the navigational head of the Dunajec river, just as Krakow is the head of the Vistula.  "Poland" is defined by its rivers, which extend the importance of the Baltic Sea deep, deep into the far reaches of the country, in a great circle from Galicia here to Silesia.  The reason why Poland demanded an open port after WWI is because giving that port to Germany would have been like locking a collar around the entire economic welfare of the whole country.  A German-controlled Danzig would have become spectacularly wealthy on the labour of Poland, and would have funded a war twice the size of the one the Nazis were able to fight.  NO ONE in Europe, in 1919, would have permitted that; they'd have gone to war with Germany again rather than permit that.  So the Germans had to do without it, until they seized it in 1939 ... whereupon it did them no good, because Danzig's trade was throttled anyway by the British Navy keeping the Germans bound to the Baltic and North Atlantic.

It's this trade that made Poland such an appetising prize for the Russians, Austrians and Prussians in the 18th century.  It was the Austrians who gobbled up south and East Galicia in 1772, and then Krakow and Zerrwen in 1795.  True enough, it meant making the Prussians rich, as they controlled Gdansk, but the food production of Galicia and Lwow was prodigious, sufficient to allow Austria to double its population through the 19th century (among other factors). Galicia became known as the "granary of Europe," with its fertile lands producing abundant crops. The region's agricultural prosperity attracted settlers from other parts of the Austrian Empire, particularly from regions facing economic hardships or overpopulation.