Aleksander Gieysztor i Gerard Labuda jako badacze historii powszechnej

In concordance with the scholarly profile of the Warsaw historiographical school of the time, Aleksander Gieysztor’s early research, which begun in the 1930s. was devoted to the Carolingian monarchy and the origins of the crusade movement. It was not until after the Second World War that Gieysztor turned his attention to the Slavic studies, conducted from the very beginning by the Poznań historiographical school, to which Gerard Labuda remained faithful throughout his research career. Labuda was primarily interested in Western Slavdom, the origins of Slavic states (Samo’s Empire) and the political and legal aspects of the functioning of early states in Central Europe. Aleksander Gieysztor’s studies on Slavic Europe focused mainly on early medieval Rus’ and on comparative research confronting the phenomena of the history of culture and the history of state and social institutions in Central and Eastern Europe with analogous phenomena and processes known from Carolingian and post-Carolingian Europe.