The estate on which the palace was built stands some 150 miles northeast of Warsaw, near the towns of  Brest-Litovsk and Białystok.  Bounded and cleaved by the Lesnaya, Belaya, Hwozna, and Narewka Rivers, this estate-considered the finest shoot in Europe-comprised in Tsarist days a carefully maintained quarter-million acres-all that remained of the primeval forests that had once covered the whole of Europe. Białowieża Forest – Belovezhskaia Puschcha or Białowieska Puszcza - had long been a favorite retreat for hunting, and became a protected site very early in its history. Few people had lived there, and until the 14^th century there were no roads at all: those who braved its silent green depths used the rivers to get about. In the 15th Century, the Lithuanian Dukes of the Jagiełlo Dynasty had built a lodge here; the forest was then Lithuanian territory, and its bison and other fauna were a welcome food reserve for a marching army skirmishing with predatory neighbours.  Later, Sigismund the Old built a lodge here, declaring the forest a hunting reserve, and instituted the death penalty for poaching of bison. When Poland and Lithuania merged to form a united kingdom under the Jagiełlo family, the kings continued to use the lodge.

Years passed, and the monarchy became elective, its throne occupied by a turbulent succession of German or Swedish princes and Polish nobles, but the forest retreat remained in favour.  Wladyslaw IV Vasa, Poland’s second elected king, freed the peasants there from both serfdom and taxation, on condition that they acted as royal servants in the hunt and took care of the forest. 

King Augustus III (a prince of Saxony, by birth) was particularly famous for his hunts, to which he invited an assortment of European royalty, and which were commemorated by an obelisk with Polish and German inscriptions recording that on one day in 1752 the king and his party had killed "42 European bisons, i.e. 11 great ones, the heaviest of which was 14 quintals 50 pounds, 7 smaller ones; 18 European bison cows; 6 calves; 13 elks, i.e. 6 great ones, the heaviest of which was 1 quintal 75 pounds, 5 females, 2 young ones; 2 roe-deer. In total: 57 animals".  Before the hunt, the animals were herded into a special enclosure called Augustowy Sad (Augustus’s Garden) by the hunt staff.  The monarchs stood on a platform, constructed especially for the purpose and, at a sign, the battue staff drove the animals in front of their guns.  A memoirist mentioned that Empress Maria-Josefa of Austria killed twenty European bison herself while reading a French novel in the intervals between shooting. 

Augustus extended the old wooden lodge, as did Stanislaw II, always eager to surround himself with the external trappings of a grand monarchy.  But by King Augustus’s day, Poland’s status as an independent kingdom was in decline.  The terrible internecine struggles of the impoverished aristocracy, coupled with international interference in every royal election, had rendered the nation ungovernable.  Stanislaw II Poniatowski, destined to be the last king, was elected with Russian support, and he did his best to hold Russia, Austria, and Prussia back from Poland’s borders.  His efforts were in vain: early in his reign areas of Poland were seized by the great powers, and in the end he was deposed when the Russians - in the name of Catherine the Great, his former lover-swept into Warsaw and removed him from the throne.  In the partition of what remained, Białowieża Puszcza fell under Russian control, and one of the first acts of Catherine’s successor - her son Paul, who believed himself (erroneously) to be Stanislaw’s son -was to reduce the local peasants to the status of serfs.  Many of the early settlers of the forest had come from western Poland and were Catholic, but the arrival of the Russians introduced a strong Orthodox element still apparent today in the onion domes of Białowieża Forest’s main town, Hajnowka.