Though legendary and mythical, Princess Wanda, daughter of Cracus (founder of the ancient capital Cracow), symbolizes the virtues of Polish patriotism, chastity, and grace. She is the noblest type of Polish womanhood, and her memory lives on and on, in the soul of her race, as it were the personification of her sex Polonized. She had vowed eternal chastity, but a German war lord, Ritiger, inflamed by her beauty, waged war against her people to win her by force. Though the Poles were victorious, Wanda threw herself from the bridge of the castle on the Wawel mountain into the Vistula to save her country and her people from similar wars. Lyric and dramatic poetry, as well as the fine arts, music, painting, and sculpture, have glorified the self-sacrifice of the noble Polish princess at the legendary entrance of her race into history. Only the other great race of the western Slavic family, the Czechs, begins its history in like fashion with the beautiful and semi-divine form of Libussa. With the reign of Mieczyslaw I. (962) Polish history begins. In 965, this prince adopted Christianity in order to win the hand of Dombrowka, daughter of king Boleslaw of Bohemia, and thus to consolidate the two great western Slavic races against the ever-increasing encroachments of the Germans. Roman Catholicism stands at the cradle of the Poles, thus placing them from the start in opposition to the eastern Slavs, foremost among whom are the Russians. After Dombrowka's death in 977, a German markgravine, Oda, shared the Polish throne. Polish literature begins with a hymn to the Holy Virgin (_Bogarodzica_, Mother of God), the national protectress of the Poles, whose worship pervades their entire life, and whose sacred picture is the essential part of their national coat of arms of the white eagle and their national banner. This hymn is the Polish catechism; it accompanies the schoolboy and the warrior and, in fact, all classes and ages throughout life. This feminine romantic song and the _Psalter of Queen Margaret_ are the oldest monuments of Polish literature. The later princes and kings of Poland, a dignity bestowed upon them by Otto II., Emperor of Germany, married, for dynastic reasons, Czech, Kief, and German princesses, who, it is true, did not further Polish national life, but broadened Polish culture by contact with other nations. Wladislaw Lokietek (the Short), who about 1312 made Cracow the centre of Poland, being the first monarch crowned there, married Jadwiga, daughter of Boleslaw, Prince of Kalisz. She was an eminent woman, and was buried in the magnificent cathedral at Cracow, where her granite monument still stands.