Poland's medieval and Renaissance capital and a mainspring of humanist learning in east central Europe, Cracow, suffered from neglect and decay after the Baltic-oriented Vasa dynasty transferred the court to Warsaw at the end of the sixteenth century. The first partition of Poland established the new border with Austria along the Vistula River, at the very gates of Cracow. Deprived of its hinterland, the city lost both suppliers and markets, and its commerce dried up. Local nobles and patricians abandoned the city for the more glittering and bustling life at the court of Stanisław August in Warsaw. Russian troops seized Cracow toward the end of the Kościuszko Insurrection and then ceded it to Austria in Poland's third partition. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, its population had shrunk to barely ten thousand. Ensuing Germanization was halted only when Cracow was joined in 1809 to the short-lived Duchy of Warsaw.

Unlike their Czech and Hungarian colleagues, Polish historians have traditionally paid little attention to the history of the Habsburg monarchy and its nationalities, except for their studies of Galician affairs and Austro-Polish relations. Before the fall of the monarchy Polish scholars were primarily interested in Austrian constitutional and legal developments, thereby reflecting the concern that Galician Poles felt for their position in the monarchy.

In his Pan-Slav treatise of 1837, On Literary Reciprocity Between the Different Branches and Dialects of the Slav Nation, Jan Kollár recommended that all educated Slavs ought to know the four principal Slavic “dialects”: Illyrian (Serbo-Croatian), Russian, Polish, and Czecho-Slovak. He thought that the scholar, however, should be able to use all the Slavic dialects, as well as the languages of the Slavs’ neighbors. But in a less frequently cited passage, in which he explained why his work was appearing in German, Kollar bemoaned the still limited knowledge of the various Slavic idioms, even among so-called learned Slavs: “When one wishes to make himself understood on any important matter to brother Slavs, he must use a foreign, non-Slavic tongue.”