WEST PRUSSIA
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In the Thirteen Years' War (1454-1466), the towns of Pomerelia and western Prussia rebelled against the Teutonic Knights and sought the assistance of King Casimir IV Jagiellon of Poland. In the Peace of Torun in 1466, Pomerelia and western Prussia became the Polish province of Royal Prussia, which received several special rights, especially in Danzig (Gdansk). Royal Prussia became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. Eastern Prussia, on the other hand, remained with the Teutonic Knights, who were reduced to vassals of Poland by the Peace of Torun. This territory became the Duchy of Prussia in 1525.

Most of Royal Prussia was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia in the First Partition of Poland in 1772, and became the Province of West Prussia the following year, with the exception of Warmia which was joined with eastern Prussia to form the Province of East Prussia. In the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, the Hanseatic city of Danzig, no longer able to rely on its own strength, was annexed into the Kingdom of Prussia and added to West Prussia. Some of the areas of Greater Poland annexed in 1772 that formed the Netze District were added to West Prussia in 1793 as well. During the Napoleonic Wars in 1806, southern parts of West Prussia were moved to the Duchy of Warsaw. From 1824-1878 West Prussia was combined with East Prussia to form the Province of Prussia, after which they were reestablished as separate provinces. The region became part of the German Empire in 1871.

After the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, most of West Prussia was granted to the Second Polish Republic, while small parts of the west and east of the former province remained in Weimar Germany. The western remainder formed Posen-West Prussia in 1922, while the eastern remainder became part of the District of West Prussia within East Prussia. In the Potsdam Conference of 1945 after World War II, all of former West Prussia was placed under the administration of Poland and was later recognized as part of Poland by East and West Germany in ensuing decades. The remaining German population of the region was expelled westward and replaced with Poles. Some of these refugees established the non-profit Territorial Association of West Prussia to represent German West Prussians.

Sigismund I (1506-1548)

Sigismund I the Old of the Jagiellon dynasty reigned as King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1506 to his death at age 81 in 1548. Before that, Sigismund had already been invested as Duke of Silesia. Sigismund I owed allegiance to the Imperial Habsburgs as a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece. The son of King Casimir IV Jagiellon and Elisabeth of Austria Habsburg, Sigismund followed his brothers John I of Poland and Alexander I of Poland to the Polish throne. Their elder brother Ladislaus II of Hungary and Bohemia became king of Hungary and Bohemia. Sigismund was christened the namesake of his mother's maternal grandfather, Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, who had died in 1437.

Sigismund faced the challenge of consolidating internal power in order to face external threats to the country. During Alexander's reign, the law Nihil novi had been instituted, which forbade Kings of Poland from enacting laws without the consent of the Sejm. This proved crippling to Sigismund's dealings with the szlachta and magnates. Despite this Achilles heel, he established (1527) a conscription army and the bureaucracy needed to finance it. Intermittently at war with Vasily III of Muscovy, starting in 1507 (before his army was fully under his command), 1514 marked the fall of Smolensk (under Polish domination) to the Muscovite forces (which lent force to his arguments for the necessity of a standing army). Those conflicts formed part of the Muscovite wars. 1515 he entered an alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. In return for Maximilian lending weight to the provisions of the Second Peace of Thorn, Sigismund consented to the marriage of the children of Vladislaus II of Bohemia and Hungary, his brother, to the grandchildren of Maximilian. Through this double marriage contract, Bohemia and Hungary passed to the House of Habsburg in 1526, on the death of Sigismund's nephew, Louis II. The Polish wars against the Teutonic Knights ended in 1525, when Albert of Brandenburg, their marshal (and Sigismund's nephew), converted to Lutheranism, secularized the order, and paid homage to Sigismund. In return, he was given the domains of the Order, as the First Duke of Prussia. This was called the Prussian Homage.

In other matters of policy, Sigismund sought peaceful coexistence with the Khanate of Crimea, but was unable to completely end border skirmishes. Sigismund was a Humanist. He and his third consort, Bona Sforza, daughter of Gian Galeazzo Sforza of Milan, were both patrons of Renaissance culture, which under them began to flourish in Poland and in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Groschen
Two designs of groschens were struck in Sigismund's reign dated from 1528-1535. The difference in types is fairly minor, the legends remain the same.