Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: to Jagiello, Grand Duke of Lithuania, in 1386, and in that way a union of Lithuania with Poland was effected in the person of the king,—a union which later on was voluntarily confirmed by the pact of Horodlo, 1413, and made indissoluble by the pact of Lublin of 1569. The significance of the fifteenth century. The Renaissance in Poland.—The fifteenth century in Polish history was marked by the introduction of the Renaissance into Poland, the spread of the Hussite Movement, the supremacy of the State over the Church, Poland's conquest of the Teutonic Knights, and by the growth of the power of the gentry. In 1400 King Wladyslaw Jagiello generously endowed the University of Cracow, reorganized and enlarged it by adding to the departments of law, medicine, and philosophy, the department of theology. Soon the fame of the reorganized university spread all over Europe, the university became a center of humanistic learning, attracted the scholastic world of western Europe, and counted among its graduates a great number of learned men. In its faculty it had such distinguished men as Adalbert Brudziew, mathematician and astronomer, teacher of Copernicus, and Matthew Miechow, distinguished for his medical knowledge and works. The enrollment of the university was very large, and both the students and the faculty were drawn from all classes of society and from many countries. In the second half of the fifteenth century nearly half of the students enrolled were of foreign birth.11 The university became a living link connecting Poland with European education and science.12 As early as 1416 the University of Cracow acquired a European reputationso far as to venture upon forwarding an expression of its vieAVS in connection with the deliberations of the Council of Constance, siding with the Fr...