Changes

}}, Book I, verse 484</ref>; and even before that, Italy was the point of cultural reference. But few people in Poland remember that in the late Middle Ages and at the turn of the Renaissance everything Czech was ''en vogue'' in Poland. Under Casimir the Great, the Polish Kingdom was growing strong, and forgotten were the times when Poland was ruled by King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia (Charles's grandfather), while Vladislav the Ell (Casimir's father), leader of the anti-Bohemian opposition, had to hide in forests and caves; but Casimir still looked from Cracow to Prague -- now by then, the ''de facto'' capital of the Roman Empire -- as the West, in both geographic and cultural terms, and eagerly copied Bohemia's legal, administrative and monetary solutions. Even the Czech language, which rings childish and funny to Polish ears today, was regarded as a speech of great beauty and elegance by 16th-century Poles.