A nominally independent city-republic carved from former Duchy of Warsaw territory by the 1815 Congress of Vienna, wedged between the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian empires and jointly overseen (in practice, dominated) by all three despite formal autonomy. Locally governed by an elected Assembly of Representatives and a Governing Senate under a President (Stanisław Wodzicki from 1815); it prospered as a free-trade zone and became a center of Polish national and intellectual life during the partitions.
Its autonomy eroded after the failed November 1830-31 Uprising elsewhere in partitioned Poland; following the abortive Kraków Uprising of February 1846, Austria unilaterally annexed the city (16 November 1846 per Wikipedia narrative; Wikidata's P576 gives 6 November), absorbing it into Austrian Galicia as the Grand Duchy of Kraków.
Polity-specific legal-history monograph covering exactly this entity's full lifespan (1815-1846), confirmed on Open Library.