Princes and governors : the legal-historical glossa to the Janusz Bieniak’s conception of a constitutional order in the second Piasts’ monarchy

In the paper, an attempt of eliminating a certain supposed internal contradiction in the concept of Janusz Bieniak concerning the role and position of junior members of the Piast dynasty in the territorial governance of the so called second Polish monarchy (ca 1040–1177) was undertaken. As the result of the conducted reasoning, three probable and one hypothetic model of engaging the junior Piasts in the management of provinces were discerned, two of which (1. and 2.) included co-existence in a given province of a Piast duke and a noblemen appointed by the “grand duke” (princeps), and two: officiating of sole members of the dynasty as governors or rulers in the provinces of the monarchy. All those models must be taken into account in further research on the constitutional and political history of the Piast state in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.