On the limehills extending from Krakow to Wielun ("land of the eagle's nest") on the River Warta, rises the city of Czestochowa, the capital of the province of the same name. It is believed that the name of the city derives from its founder, a Slav called Czestoch. In 13th century documents, it is mentioned as a village of horsemen called Czestochowa and at the end of the 14th century, it received its charter.

In the western part of the city, known as "old Czestochowa" in the 14th century, a 293-metre high hill was handed over to the Pauline Monks from Hungary in 1382. A sanctuary and monastery were built on the site, surrounded by a wall and garden and it bore the name Jasna Góra (Bright Hill). The name was taken from that of their Mother House at Buda, St. Lawrence in Claro Monte Budensi.

The Pauline Monks belonged to the Order of St. Paul the First Hermit, founded at the beginning of the 13th century in Hungary in the wake of the great Hermit movement that swept Europe between the 12th and 13 th centuries. The Order's founder, the Blessed Eusebius, Canon of Esztergom, founded the first community of Paulines by uniting all the hermits who lived in the forests of Hungary and Croatia. They modelled their monastic life on St. Paul of Thebes, the First Hermit, as their Patriatch.

Born in Thebes probably in the year 230, Paul fled into the surrounding desert when he was only 16 years old during the persecutions of Decian. According to the tradition passed down from St. Jerome, he lived in the desert for 90 years on a diet of bread, brought to him by a raven. St. Jerome tells us that at the end of his life, St Anthony, abbot had sought him out and, according to legend, buried Paul's body in a grave dug by two lions. This is why the symbol of the Order of the Pauline Monks shows a palm tree, two lions and a raven with in its beak. It was Prince Ladislaus of Opole, the plenipotentiary of King Louis of Hungary for Polish territory between 1367 and 1372 who summoned the Pauline Monks to Poland. They arrived given a small church where they kept which the Miraculous Painting of Our Lady which the Prince had brought from the city of Belz in Ukraine.

There are two version of the history of the Jasna Gora painting. There is a traditional version, steeped in legend and an historical one, reconstructed by art critics whose attention was drawn to this extraordinary image and its origins.
According to the traditional version, the painting was created by St. Luke the Evangelist on a table top from the house of the Holy Family. St. Luke was said to have painted two images of Mary, one of which found its way to Italy and was kept in Bologna where it is still venerated. The other was said to have been removed from Jerusalem and brought to Constantinopole by the Emperor Constantine and placed in a church. Six centuries later, the Russian Prince Lev obtained the painting from the emperor of the time in acknowledgement of his military achievements.

During the wars in Rus, Prince Ladislaus of Opole found the painting in the castle at Bełz and discovered it was being venerated as if it were miraculous. After the victory over the Tatars, he brought the painting to Czestochowa, entrusting it to Pauline Monks for safekeeping. This information is contained in a manuscript - one of the oldest - entitled "Translatio Tabulae", a copy of which, dated 1474, is conserved in the Jasna Góra archives. According to art critics, the Jasna Góra painting was originally a Byzantine icon (of the Hodigitria type), dating between the sixth and ninth centuries.

The growing fame of the miraculous image of the Mother of God meant that in a short time, the monastery became the site of constant pilgrimages and the costodian of numerous, priceless votive offerings. But, unfortunately, such valuable gifts led to greed. On Easter Day April 14 1430, a gang of robbers from Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia attacked the monastery.

They burst into the Chapel of the Mother of God and grabbed the image from the altar. They then stole all the painting's valuable gift offerings and disfigured it slashing it with their swords. They threw the painting to the ground and it broke in three places, according to the account of Piotr Risinus in the 1523 volume "Historia Pulchra". The painting was restored at Kraków, at the court of King Ladislaus Jagiełło. Restorers tried repeatedly to spread colour on the panel but the shades kept vanishing. Today, it is known that in the Middle Ages, restorers had difficulty working on an ancient icon because of the application of tempera colours on an image obtained with shades diluted with fused wax. Because the restoration operation was a total failure, the restorers scraped away the ancient image and painted a completely new one over the miraculous panel. They marked the sings of the robbers' outrage on the face of the image with a pen, inmemory of the barbarism.