The territory of today’s Poland was inhabited by Slavic tribes. One of them was the Polan tribe living in the area of today’s Greater Poland. The name of Poland is coined from the word Polonia in Latin naming “the land of Polans”. The first confirmed ruler of the Polans was Duke Mieszko I (c. 930-992), from the Piast dynasty, ruling in Poland until 1370. During the reign of Mieszko I, in 965, he married the Czech princess Doubravka and decided to accept Christianity as a national religion.

Ibrahim ibn Yacub’s “Account of the travels in the Slavic countries” described Poland of that period. He was a Jewish merchant and traveller from Tortosa that belonged then to the Caliphate of Cordoba, and today is located in Spain (Catalonia). He lived under the reign of two Umayyad caliphs – Abd al – Rahman III and al-Hakam I. The latter liked the company of Jewish scholars, and Ibrahim ibn Jacob probably was one of them. He had to be enormously trusted by his ruler since was sent on an important diplomatic mission. In 965 or 966 Ibrahim talked in Magdeburg with the newly crowned Roman emperor of the Germans Otto I (912-973).

Probably there Ibrahim ibn Yacub obtained the first information about the “land of Mesko”. It is possible that he expanded these data during his visit to the Czech capital – Prague. He wrote it down in an account which, unfortunately, was not preserved in its entirety. It survived only in excerpts used by the chronicler al-Bakri in the 11th century (“Book of Roads and Kingdoms”) and by Qazvini of Damascus in the 13th century (“‘Monuments of the Lands and Historical Traditions about Their Peoples”).