Excerpt from The Spirit of Polish History The long struggle against these barbarians, who menaced Europe, was begun in 1241 by King Henry the Pious at the battle of Lignica. Jan Sobieski, in 1683, struck the decisive blow to Turkish power under the walls of Vienna. Europe could never have developed as it did, had not the bar barian invaders who had overrun Eastern Europe for five hundred years been checked by the victorious resistance of the Poles. In the middle ages the Lithuanians, the last pagan people of Europe, were converted to Christianity by the Poles who introduced the Bible and western civilization into their country.' The Polish people at that time had reached a high state of intellectual development. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.