In particular after 1400, life at the courts of the king and leading secular and religious officers, as in the large towns of the kingdom of Poland, came close to the level of that of other central European countries at the end of the Middle Ages. Court celebrations and entertainments, tournaments, feasts and ostentatious decoration contrasted, as they did everywhere, even in the major towns, with the squalor and the poverty found in many towns. The higher nobility lived in contact with the urban patriciate and eagerly adopted foreign customs imported into the country or encountered on journeys abroad. None the less, there were regional variations. Silesia and Little Poland were the leaders in cultural matters; then came Royal Prussia, Great Poland and Mazovia. In the south-east, the new developments spread unevenly. In Lithuania, which still belonged culturally to eastern Europe, the first wave of westernisation was to affect the princes, nobles and the Catholic elements of the population in particular.
From the mid-fourteenth century Poland developed a network of cathedral, parish and town schools. This was to affect both the numbers of those who pursued studies in order to enter the Church and others, often sons of the nobility and townspeople, who did so with the aim of working in local courts and chanceries. Such schools also prepared men for university study in Italy (especially Bologna), France and at Prague.
The University of Cracow, the second after Prague to be established in central Europe, had been founded by Casimir III in 1364 on the Bolognese model to concentrate on law as a subject necessary to the administration of Church and state. Renewed by a foundation charter of Wladyslaw II Jagiello in 1400, the university came under the influence of Paris and established a faculty of theology. Maintaining contact with other universities, it influenced neighbouring lands, especially Lithuania. In philosophy, it tended towards nominalism and taught ethics and politics, spread conciliar doctrine within the Polish Church and maintained religious orthodoxy. From among the theologians, Matthew of Cracow and Iacobus de Paradiso stand out, while the lawyer Stanislaw de Scarbimiria developed the doctrine of the just war (1411). The school of astronomy led by Adalbert of Brudzewo and others produced the university’s most famous alumnus, Nicholas Copernicus, who studied there between 1492 and 1496.
The study of literature and Italian humanism reached the university later in the century. Gregory of Sanok, archbishop of Lwow (d. 1471), patronised writers seeking new literary forms and secular subject matter. About 1470 a new circle grew up in Cracow around Filippo Buonaccorsi-Callimachus, and at the end of the century the ‘Sodalitas litteraria Vistulana’ was formed by Conrad Celtis. Latin remained the major form of literary expression in many areas. In history, Jan Dlugosz (Longinus), canon of Cracow, teacher of the royal children and a diplomat, composed his Annales seu cronicae inclyti regni Poloniae, an extensive account of Polish history from the beginning to 1480, written in the style of Livy. The Polish language was used for biblical translations, statutes of common law and both religious and secular poetry. The first presses appeared in Cracow in 1473/5; the first Polish-language book was printed in Wroclaw in 1475, and the first Cyrillic book was produced in Cracow in 1491.
The fine arts were represented by guilds of painters, sculptors and goldsmiths patronised by the royal and magnate courts, the Church and the towns. Gothic style common throughout central Europe had three provincial artistic centres: Silesia, Little Poland and Prussia which influenced one another, the kingdom and the grand duchy. The spread of western European art in the age of the Romanesque had reached the Vistula; in the Gothic period western influence spread as far as Vilnius and Lwow. From the other direction, Rus'ian art of the Novgorod and Volyn' schools reached Cracow and Lublin as a result of the personal ‘ecumenism’ of Wladyslaw III and Casimir IV.
The nations within the Jagiellonian state, open to cultural interchange, were held together by loyalty to the kingdom or the grand duchy. Such was the legacy bequeathed to the age which followed.