In 1172 they divided the heritage: the Upper Silesian lands with the Cieszyn area stretching up to the Beskid Mountains fell to the second son Mieszko I Tanglefoot, who ruled as Duke of Racibórz.

After Mieszko's death in 1315, his son Władysław took the lands east of the Biała river where he established the separate Duchy of Oświęcim, which eventually became a fief of the Polish Crown.

While the Lands of the Bohemian Crown passed to the Habsburg dynasty in 1526, the Duchy of Teschen during the reign of Duke Wenceslaus III Adam, from 1528 onwards, shifted to Protestantism.

Influenced by the Moravian governor John of Pernstein, his tutor and father-in-law, he turned to the Lutheran faith in 1540 and his subjects had to follow according to the cuius regio, eius religio rule.

The remaining duchy passed to the only surviving son Adam Wenceslaus, who in 1610 shifted back to Roman Catholicism for the sake of political advantage and enacted several Counter-Reformation measures.

The Cieszyn Piast rule continued until 1653, when the male line became extinct with the death of Adam Wenceslaus' son Frederick William amidst the Thirty Years' War in 1625.

The intentions of the Habsburg rulers to seize the duchy as a reverted fief were initially thwarted by his surviving sister, Duchess Elizabeth Lucretia, who began a lengthy lawsuit on her heritage.

Leopold had unsuccessfully claimed his maternal grandmother's rights to the north Italian Duchy of Montferrat, which Charles had taken and given to the Dukes of Savoy in 1708 as part of their alliance pact.

Once Holy Roman Emperor, Francis had to face the attack by the Prussian king Frederick the Great, who after the 1742 Peace of Breslau took the bulk of Silesia, while Teschen remained with the Habsburg Monarchy.

Archduke Frederick, appointed Austrian field marshal in 1914 but soon neutralized by Chief-of-Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, found his vast possessions expropriated and retired to Magyaróvár in Hungary.

However, the preliminary convention failed to settle the border conflict between the newly established state of Czechoslovakia and the Second Polish Republic, which claimed further areas of the former Cieszyn duchy with a predominantly Polish-speaking population.