Studies at the University of Warsaw hold high positions in international rankings, such as the Times Higher Education World University Ranking and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (also known as the Shanghai Ranking). Taking into account the total number of research universities that reaches 20 thousand, the University of Warsaw is among the top two per cent of the world’s best universities. From the beginning, the history of the University of Warsaw has been inextricably linked to the history of Warsaw itself and in some measure – the history of the entire Republic of Poland, which, partitioned by the neighboring countries (Prussia, Austria-Hungary and Russia) towards the end of the eighteenth century disappeared from the European map for more than a hundred years. The hopes for the rebirth of the country emerged as early as in the first decades of the nineteenth century. These were brought first by the Napoleonic times and subsequently by the Congress of Vienna. So, first the Duchy of Warsaw (1807–1813) and the Kingdom of Poland, which being a part of the Russian empire in 1815 became a poor substitute for the Polish state.