Statutes of Casimir the Great

The Statutes of Casimir the Great, also known as the Piotrków-Wiślica Statutes, are a collection of laws issued by King Casimir III of Poland, called Casimir the Great, between 1346 and 1362 at congresses held in Piotrków and Wiślica. They represent the first and only major legal codification carried out under the Piast dynasty, and roughly two-thirds of their content addresses criminal law with the remaining third covering civil matters, codifying existing Polish legal custom for the first time and laying the groundwork for later Polish legal development. Opposition from factions who saw a centralized code as a threat to their own power meant Casimir succeeded in only two of Poland's provinces, the Piotrków statute for Greater Poland and the Wiślica statute for Lesser Poland, and modern historians have found that parts of the text were written after Casimir's death and only later attributed to him.