Poland then became more similar to the west-European feudal monarchy though she lacked a feudal organisation of society and though the primitive clan system still survived. Here lies the chief source of the degeneration of her political institutions. The kings, in their struggle for power against the magnates, could not, like the sovereigns of the West, look for support to the middle class, for that class was very weak in Poland. They therefore tried to find it in the powerful class of the knighthood or gentry (szlachta). But between the gentry and the magnates there was only a difference of wealth and culture. Both belonged directly to the same class of the community, both were members of the same clans, and the gentry by its social character was destined rather to co-operate with the magnates than to struggle against them. And, as both those elements occupied the same legal position, the power wrested from the king by the magnates became legally an acquisition of the whole of the nobility, the rich and advanced as well as the poor and uncultured. For a country like Poland, which had no feudal hierarchy in her social structure, the destruction of despotic rule meant gradual transformation into a democratic republic.
The end of the Middle Ages, when those constitutional changes are taking place in Poland, is at the same time a great landmark in Polish economic history. In the fourteenth century, when the sea-routes to the Levant, being harassed by the Turks, became very unsafe, trade with Asia was carried on in great measure by continental routes leading from Western Germany through Poland to the Greek settlements on the
