of Charles XII. brought new misfortunes; soldiers, Swedish, Saxon, Russian, and Polish, alternately occupied the town, leaving it poorer each time. The Polish Diet of 1710 decreed that a part of the contributions extorted from the town, to the amount of half a million of Polish florins, should be paid back to it by the realm. On the 17th of August, 1734, the last coronation of a Polish king took place in the Wawel, viz., that of Augustus III of Saxony and his wife, Maria Josepha. His successor, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski (who was not crowned) visited the town in 1787 and promised to give it some aid, but the whole country had grown so poor by this time that no help could be given. The war of independence, undertaken in 1794 by the great national hero, Thaddaeus Kosciuszko, and quenched in blood by the united forces of Russia and Prussia, was begun in the old capital of Poland; at Cracow General Kosciuszko had organized the first troops of his famous peasant militia, at whose head he won the glorious victory of Raclawice.
After the third division of Poland, Cracow, in 1796, fell to the share of Austria. It had hardly 10,000 inhabitants at that time; the streets looked like heaps of ruins. The wars of Napoleon awakened fresh hopes for liberty and new life in the town, especially when, in 1809, a Polish army under Prince Joseph Poniatowski entered it and added the whole of western Galicia to the independent Grand-Duchy of Warsaw which Napoleon had created—-and again, when the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, declared it a free town. This freedom of the city republic, however, was but apparent: everything was managed by the orders of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, through their agents. Three small towns and 244 villages formed the territory of the free state. Freedom from customs duties and ensuing cheapness of all articles brought about a new rise of commerce and a rapid increase of population. There were some sweeping changes in administration, regular institutions of a modern type, mostly on the French model, being established.
When General Kosciuszko died in Switzerland in 1817, his body was brought to Cracow and buried among the kings on the
