When Wladyslaw Lokietek (i.e. the Short) returned from exile in 1304 a 'kingdom of Poland' was little more than a memory from the Central Middle Ages. After the death of the last king of a unified state in 1138 the many branches of the ruling house of the Piasts fought for a while with each other for 'seniority,' but later developed into virtually independent principalities. However, the Bohemian bid for Poland had in a way paved the road to unification. The last Piast of the Wielkopolska (Great Poland) line, Przemysl II (1295-96), tried to unite the country in opposition to Wenceslas of Bohemia, who held Little Poland and much of Silesia. Wenceslas's installation of a royal official (capitaneus, starosta) for every region was an important step towards the unification of all Polish lands.
Wladyslaw hthe Short could also count on the rudiments of an emerging sense of unity in the many principalities, enhanced by the ecclesiastical unity upheld by the archdiocese of Gneizno through the centuries of particularism. Upon his return he was recognized in 1306 in Little Poland and Pomerania; Great Poland fell to him in 1314, and in 1320 he was crowned king in Cracow. The choice of the place was no mere accident. This city in southern Poland became and remained the seat of the monarchy in the Late Middle Ages as Wldyslaw's and his successors' centre of power had shifted from the north-west to the south-east largely because of the loss of the Silesian duchies to Bohemia and the conquest of Pomerania by the Teutonic Knights.
The preoccupation of Poland and the Teutonic Knights with each other enabled the Lithuanian princes to expand their territory far beyond the Baltic Area where their people lived. Rulers of the last major population in Europe not yet Christianized, they managed to keep at bay the crusading Orders to their west and profit from the quarrels of Mongol-dominated Russian princes to their east at the same time. Prince Gediminas or Gedymin (1315-1341) set up his government in the newly founded city of Vilnius/Vilno and freed his hands for further expansion by signing a peace with the Order in 1323. An alliance with Wladyslaw the Short was sealed by the marriage of the king's son, Casimir, to Gedymin's daughter. With a safe border towards Prussia and Poland Gedymin was able to subdue many minor Russian territories as far as the limits of Kiev.