Among the wealth of comprehensive studies on sainthood in the Middle Ages, the figure of St Stanislaus of Krakow features merely as parochial counterpart to St Thomas Becket, one of a long list of bishop martyrs. The history and fortunes of his cult are not familiar to Western scholarship, yet they formed the ideological foundation for the revival of the Polish nation. St Stanislaus presided over a political and devotional history of the state that began in fragmentation and eakness in the 12th and 13th ceuntries anf grew, in the course of the later Middle Ages, into the status of super-power.