It's funny because criminalisation in Poland is stated as 1815 but Poland was not existing at that time. It's had been divided by three countries (Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary) three times, last done on 1795 which made Poland inexistent for next 123 years. I wonder which territory was taken into account because there were three different law systems on the three partitions.
Although I suspect it may be coming from the Wikipedia article, or its source (which is in Polish so I can't verify exactly what it says) - reproduced below.
> The Napoleonic Code, introduced in the Duchy of Warsaw in 1808, was silent on homosexuality. After 1815, all three countries that partitioned Poland explicitly declared homosexual acts illegal. In Congress Poland homosexuality was criminalised in 1818, in Prussia in 1871 and in Austria in 1852. Russia's new code of law (called Kodeks Kar Głównych i Poprawczych/Уложение о наказаниях уголовных и исправительных 1845 года) in 1845 penalized homosexuality with forced resettlement to Siberia.
What is the source of the criminalisation of homosexuality? The original sin that started the wave?
Is it tied in any way to backlash to the Romans? It seems to randomly pop up in Christian Rome and then percolate across the Abrahamic faiths from there [1].
It must be hard to do research on this since I can imagine that prosecutions were possible even if homosexuality were not actually illegal (one can find other crimes to prosecute such as 'corrupting the youth') and the conflation between various sexual acts in law (e.g. consentual versus non-consentual sexual activity).
I do appreciate the idea that it may have been prompted by anti-homosexual moral panics though. That resonates.
Kind of an absurd metric. At one point, no countries criminalized homosexuality. A nation state in general is a European concept. The earliest accepted date for the first nation state is 1648, but even then it didn't really turn into a global concept until after WW1 or even WW2. Most countries that criminalized homosexuality did so while under colonial rule
It just seems silly to start the timeline to when France, a country that criminalized homosexuality in its colonies, decriminalized it
> At one point, no countries criminalized homosexuality. A nation state in general is a European concept
Your confusion arises from mixing up the terms country and nation state. Nation states are modern [1]. States, what you’re calling countries, are as old as history.
States criminalised homosexuality well before there were nation states [2]. (The point at which no country criminalised homosexuality appears to be in the neighbourhood of the first centuries AD.)
