Pobitno: a raid on the village of Powietna in 1436

The entry, as printed

Quinta citacio etc. Pro eo, quia tu veniens violenter in villam Powyethna recepisti bona in argento, auro, equis, bobus, owibus, peccoribus, peccudibus ac aliis rebus, que super eam post awam suam iure propinquitatis cesserunt in valore mille marcarum et pro totidem dampni.

In English

The fifth summons etc. Because, coming by force into the village of Powietna, you took goods in silver, gold, horses, oxen, sheep, cattle and other things that had fallen to her from her grandmother by right of kinship, worth a thousand marks, and for as much again in damages.

A raid in the autumn of 1436

In the autumn of 1436 Małgorzata of Rzeszów brought several summonses in a row before the Przemyśl court against Mikołaj of Wiśnicz. In the fourth she complained that he had seized by force her inheritance from her mother: half of the little town of Rzeszów and the villages of Krasne, Strażów and Wilkowyja. In the fifth, that “coming by force into the village of Powietna” he had taken silver, gold, horses, oxen, sheep and other livestock that had come to her “from her grandmother by right of kinship”, worth a thousand marks.

How the case ended, the book does not show. But this is the earliest mention of Powietna we know of, together with Wilkowyja, Krasne and Rzeszów, the same neighbours Pobitno borders today.

The division of 1443: peasants by name

On 29 April 1443 at Przeworsk, brothers and sisters of the family of the lords of Rzeszów divided “the inheritances of Powietna, Międzymoście and Wilkowyja”. In Powietna the peasants are named: Michał and Leniec “with their fields at the end of the village”, to be held “as they have held them of old, on both sides of the river Otcza”, and Krupa, Handa, Iwan Radzowicz, Piech, Niest and Pascha. There was an inn, a mill and “a lake called Smarzowskie”.

The most curious part is the toll. “They are all to hold it together and divide the money between them, and each will hold his own year,” the clerk wrote.

Heirs “of Powietna, that is of Rzeszów”

In 1447 Stanisław, “heir of Powietna, otherwise Rzeszowski”, pledged his property in Powietna, Rzeszów and Ruska Wieś. The condition was that the creditor should “build him a manor in Powietna, repair it, fence it with palings and, having built it, lock it”. In the 1440s, then, Powietna was not just a village near Rzeszów but the seat of one branch of the Rzeszów lords.

In the 1470s Powietna bordered Wilkowyja and Krasne, which belonged to Anna, heiress of Rzeszów. In 1473 Anna sued the heirs of Powietna because they would not “raise the bounds and make mounds”, bounds that, she wrote, were “as good as a hundred marks”.

What we do not know

When and why Powietna became Pobitno, we do not know. Nor can we place the river Otcza, the “Smarzowskie lake” or Międzymoście.

We have not seen the first volume of the “History of Rzeszów” (1994), which probably knows these entries. But they have not reached Wikipedia, where Pobitno’s history starts in 1589.

Sources

• Akta grodzkie i ziemskie, vol. XIII (Lwów, 1888), p. 14, nos. 92–93 (28 September 1436); pp. 150–151, no. 2120 (29 April 1443); p. 249, no. 3479 (1447).
• Akta grodzkie i ziemskie, vol. XIX (Lwów, 1906), pp. 17–18, nos. 99–100 (1473).

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