WARSAW, the capital of Poland and chief town of the province of Warsaw (Polish Warszawa). Area of the administra tive district, 46 sq. miles. Pop. (1931) 1,178,211, of whom 70.7% were Poles, the rest nearly all Jews. It is beautifully situated on the left bank of the Vistula, 387 m. by rail E. of Berlin, and 695 m. S.W. of Leningrad. It stands on a terrace 120 to 13o ft. above the river, to which it descends by steep slopes, leaving a broad bench at its base. The suburb of Praga on the right bank of the Vistula, here 45o to 66o yd. broad, is connected with Warsaw by two bridges.
Situated in a fertile plain, on a great navigable river, below its confluence with the Pilica and Wieprz, which drain southern Poland, and above its confluence with the Narew and Bug, which tap a wide region in the east, Warsaw became in mediaeval times the chief entrepot for the trade of those fertile and populous valleys with western Europe. Owing to its position in the territory of Mazovia, which was neither Polish nor Lithuanian, and, so to say, remained neutral between the two rival powers which constituted the united kingdom, it became the capital of both, and secured advantages over the purely Polish Cracow and the Lithuanian Vilna. The precise date of the foundation of the town is not known ; but it is supposed that Conrad, duke of Mazovia, erected a castle on the present site of Warsaw as early as the 9th century. Casimir the Just is supposed to have fortified it in the nth century, but Warsaw is not mentioned in annals before 1224. Until 1526 it was the residence of the dukes of Mazovia, but when their dynasty became extinct it was annexed to Poland. When Poland and Lithuania were united, Warsaw was chosen as the royal residence. Sigismund Augustus (Wasa) made it (155o) the real capital of Poland, and from 1572 on wards election of the kings of Poland took place on the field of Wola, on the western outskirts of the city. Charles Gustavus of Sweden took it in 1655 and kept it for a year; the Poles retook it in July 1656. Augustus II. and Augustus III. did much for its embellishment, but it had much to suffer during the war with Charles XII. of Sweden, who captured it in 1702; but in the following year peace was made, and it became free again. The
disorders which followed upon the death of Augustus III. in 1763 opened a field for Russian intrigue, and in 1764 the Russians took possession of the town and secured the election of Stanislaw Poniatowski, which led in 1773 to the first partition of Poland. In Nov. 1794 the Russians took it again, after the bloody assault on Praga, but next year, in the third partition of Poland, Warsaw was given to Prussia. In Nov. i8o6 the town was occupied by the troops of Napoleon, and after the peace of Tilsit (1807) was made the capital of the independent duchy of Warsaw ; but the Austrians seized it on April 21, 1809 and kept possession of it till June 2, when it once more became independent. The Rus sians finally took it on Feb. 8, 1813. On Nov. 29, 183o, Warsaw gave the signal for the unsuccessful insurrection which lasted nearly one year; the city was captured after great bloodshed by Paskevich, on Sept. 7, 1831. Deportations on a large scale, exe cutions, and confiscation of the domains of the nobility followed, and until 185,6 Warsaw remained under severe military rule. In 1862 a series of demonstrations began to be made in Warsaw in favour of the independence of Poland, and after a bloody repression a general insurrection followed in Jan. 1863, the Rus sians remaining, however, masters of the situation. Executions, banishment to the convict prisons of Siberia, and confiscation of estates were carried out on an unheard-of-scale. Scientific societies and high schools were closed ; monasteries and nunneries were emptied. Hundreds of Russian officials were called in to fill the administrative posts; and to teach in the schools and the university; the Russian language was made obligatory in all official acts, in all legal proceedings, and even, to a great extent, in trade. The very name of Poland was expunged from official writings, and, while the old institutions were abolished, the Rus sian tribunals and administrative institutions were introduced. The serfs were liberated. Much rioting and lawless bloodshed took place in the city in 1905—o6.