Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland

The Career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468–1503)

Natalia Nowakowska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351951555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the career of Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468-1503) arguably the most powerful churchman in medieval or early modern Central Europe. Royal prince, bishop of Kraków, Polish primate, cardinal, regent and brother to the rulers of Hungary, Poland, Bohemia and Lithuania, Fryderyk was a leading dynastic politician, diplomat, ecclesiastic and cultural patron, and a pivotal figure in three Polish royal governments. Whereas Polish historians have traditionally cast Fryderyk as a miscreant and national embarrassment, this study argues that he is in fact a figure of fundamental importance for our understanding of church and monarchy in the Renaissance, who can enhance our grasp of the period in a variety of ways. Jagiellon's career constitutes an ambitious state-building programme - executed in the three spheres of government, ecclesiastical governance and cultural patronage - which reveals the multi-dimensional ways in which Renaissance monarchies might exploit the local church to their own ends. This book also offers a rare English language insight into the development of the Reformation in central Europe, and an analysis of the reigns of Kazimierz IV (1447-92), Jan Olbracht (1492-1501), Aleksander (1501-6), Poland's evolving constitution, her foreign policy, Jagiellonian dynastic strategy and, above all, the tripartite relationship between church, Crown and state.

CHAPTER ONE

Towards Renaissance Monarchy? The Jagiellonians and the Polish Crown, 1386–1492

Introduction

In the celebrated Annales composed by Jan Długosz (d. 1480), the principal contemporary historian of late medieval Poland, there is a scene which presents us with a snapshot of the fault lines which ran through the Polish political landscape in the fifteenth century. Describing the momentous battle fought between the Polish– Lithuanian armies and the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald (Tannenburg) on 15 July 1410, Długosz recounts the following incident involving a king and a bishop:

Thereupon a knight from the Prussian army, of German stock, called Dietbold Köckritz from (Alt)döbern in Lusatia … armed cap-à-pie, broke out from the line of the main Prussian, which stood amidst sixteen others, on a red horse and charged right up to the place where the king [of Poland] was standing, and, brandishing his sword in full view of the entire enemy army, which was drawn up under sixteen flags, appeared ready to attack the king. King Władysław brandished his own sword and prepared to meet his blow; but the royal notary Zbigniew Oleśnicki, totally unarmed, wielding a broken lance and thwarting the blow to the king, caught him in the side and tumbled him off his horse to the ground. … King Władysław of Poland, hearing his bodyguards vie to praise the man’s courage, was very eager to gird and decorate him with the knightly belt, and to reward his glorious feat, but the noble youth refused to be thus honoured and decorated by the king; as King Władysław placed the knight’s insignia on him, he replied that he should be enrolled not in a worldly army but that of the Church, and had rather fight at every moment for Christ than for an earthly and mortal king. Then King Władysław said: ‘Wherefore you have chosen the better lot; but if I live, I shall not hesitate to raise you to the height of a bishopric in order to reward your deed.’ From that time this Zbigniew became very dear to the king, and conspicuous in the sight of all for singular grace and favour, and in the course of time was promoted by royal favour to the bishopric of Kraków.¹

We cannot understand the origins or meaning of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon’s ecclesiastical-political career without first taking a look at the evolution of royal government in late medieval Poland, and probing in particular the relationship between the kingdom’s bishops and its Lithuanian, Jagiellonian kings from the 1380s onwards – a relationship which, as we shall see, was far from the harmonious, humble friendship which Długosz duplicitously paints for us in this passage. In the early Jagiellonian period, during the reigns of King Władysław-Jogaila (1386–1434) and his son Władysław III (1434–4), the Polish Crown, already a compromised entity in the Middle Ages, lost battle after battle with the nobles and bishops of the magnate party, until the institution became little more than a mask for the rule of Bishop Zbigniew Oleśnicki. It was only some 13 years before Fryderyk’s birth that the Jagiellonian monarchy finally began to find its feet in Poland and made a sudden breakthrough recovery under his father, Kazimierz IV (1447–92), who succeeded in constructing a recognizable if vulnerable Renaissance Crown in Kraków. This chapter will sketch out these confrontations, enacted against the backdrop of Poland’s growing status in Central Europe. In conclusion, we will consider how Poland’s political culture and development compared with that of other Catholic kingdoms by 1492, at the outset of Fryderyk’s career.

Piast and Anjou: The Inheritance from the Middle Ages

The Polish monarchy was – generations of national historians have claimed – promisingly inaugurated in the medieval capital of Gniezno in 1000, when Emperor Otto III pledged to confer a crown on the country’s ruling duke, Bolesław I Piast.² The Piasts were Poland’s original indigenous dynasty who, like the Prĕmysl of Bohemia and the Árpád of Hungary, had successfully reinvented themselves from local tribal leaders into medieval monarchs. Just over a century after this happy event, in 1138, King Bolesław III Piast took the momentous decision to divide his kingdom up between his four sons at his death, breaking it into the regional princedoms of Mazovia, Wielkopolska (Greater Poland), Silesia and Kraków, the last territory snaking up towards the Baltic coast through Gniezno and Danzig. This act triggered the rapid disintegration of the Polish kingdom into dozens of warring territories with no recognized overlord. By 1288, the Polish lands had split into no fewer than 17 separate Piast duchies, with their own courts, coinage and foreign alliances.³ Nonetheless, the idea of ‘Polonia’ as an overarching loyalty, and even a single state, did remain. It was embodied most visibly in the Polish province of the Catholic church, which centred on the metropolitan see of Gniezno and stretched out across the Piast lands. Clerical writers appealed to the memory of the old monarchy, most famously in the Chronica Polonorum composed by Wincenty Kadłubek, bishop of Kraków (1150–1223).⁴ Throughout the 170-year eclipse of the Polish monarchy, various pretenders periodically had themselves crowned king in Gniezno or Kraków, but were promptly murdered or ejected. The first claimant to keep a persuasive grip on the core territories of the old kingdom was Władysław Łokietek, from the Kujawy branch of the Piast dynasty, known as the ‘restaurator regni’ (1320–33). Łokietek was also the first claimant to successfully bequeath the Crown to his son, Kazimierz Piast.⁵

Kazimierz, known as Wielki (‘the Great’, 1333–70), presided over an impressive flowering of the Polish kingdom, consolidating his father’s precarious achievements. The new king increased Poland’s overall territories by a third, annexing the Silesian territory of Wschowa (Fraustadt), regaining the regions of Kujawy and Dobrzyn from the Teutonic Knights, asserting Kraków’s sovereignty over Mazovia in 1355 and conquering the Orthodox princedoms of Halicz and Wołyń, which thereafter formed the vast new south-eastern provinces of Ruthenia and Podolia (Ruś Czerwona and Podole, see Map). Within Poland, central government in Kraków was strengthened with the construction of 50 royal castles and the establishment of new law courts; German law was conferred on scores of free towns and villages, and a university founded in the Polish capital in 1364. The kingdom’s resurrection on the European scene was symbolized by the triumphant Congress of Kraków of 1364, hosted by King Kazimierz and attended by the kings of Hungary, Bohemia, Denmark and Cyprus.⁶

Historians have arguably overestimated the ability of one ruler to undo, in just 40 years, the effects of two centuries of local particularism. The restored Piast monarchy was not universally acclaimed. Just as King Władysław Łokietek had faced determined resistance from Jan Muskata, the pro-Prĕmyslid bishop of Kraków (1294–1320), his son Kazimierz met fierce opposition from the capital’s later bishops, Jan Grot (bishop 1326–47) and Bodzenty (1348–67), and found himself excommunicated by the former in 1343.⁷ Kazimierz’s project was ultimately undone, however, and the Polish monarchy fatally undermined, by the king’s inability to father a male heir in any of his three marriages, to Aldona of Lithuania (d. 1339), Adelaide of Hesse (d. 1371) and the Silesian princess Jadwiga of Sagan (d. 1390), or by his bigamous liaison with Christina of Prague. As a result, much of the reign was dogged by disputes about the kingdom’s future. This was but the first in a series of late medieval succession crises which would create a critical negotiating space – a political Pandora’s box – between the Polish magnate class and those who aspired to rule over them.

From the first days of Kazimierz the Great’s reign, his impatient cousins in Hungary jostled to have themselves named as heirs to the Polish throne. Hungary had been ruled since 1307 by the so-called second house of Anjou, a junior branch of the royal Capetian dynasty of France. In 1320, King Charles-Robert of Hungary had married King Kazimierz’s sister, Elizabeth Piast, and this match would form the basis for the Anjous’ claims. From the 1330s, King Charles-Robert and his son Louis actively sought recognition as rightful heirs to the Polish throne, not only from King Kazimierz but also, crucially, from his leading subjects. The Angevin signed bilateral agreements with the Polish magnates at Vyszegrad in 1339, Lublin in 1351 and Buda in 1355: in return for recognition as the Piasts’ rightful heirs, the Hungarian Angevin promised not to remove significant funds from Poland, not to appoint any German officials, to levy no new taxes without consent, and never to compel Polish nobles to fight outside their own kingdom.⁸ Not only did these accords implicitly concede the magnates’ right to choose (or at least endorse) their own king, but they also championed a contractual concept of kingship, allowing Poland’s high nobles a ‘right of disobedience’ if the future monarch reneged on these pre-coronation pledges.⁹ As King Kazimierz approached the end of his life, his regalist legacy was already being eroded and the balance of power within the Polish polity was slowly tipping, like a see-saw.

Kazimierz the Great, the last Piast king of Poland, died in 1370 at the age of 60, from a fever contracted after a bad fall from a horse. Louis of Anjou’s long preparations paid off: he carefully approached Kraków with an army and was duly crowned king of Poland. Notwithstanding this pacific succession, the political confidence and constitutional claims of Poland’s magnates and bishops grew apace during Louis’s short, largely absentee reign. Like the late King Kazimierz, Louis, too, lacked a male heir – his nephew John, a plausible successor, had died a decade earlier in 1360. In this way, Louis’s accession yet again threw the Polish succession wide open, and the Anjou–magnate bargainings of the former reign continued unabated. In return for the magnates’ promise to accept his oldest daughter, Catherine, as their future sovereign, King Louis granted the landmark Privilege of Kosice (1374), long acclaimed as the cornerstone of Polish constitutionalism, which exempted nobles and their estates from the basic land tax. Further mishaps befell the Angevin in 1378 when Princess Catherine died and King Louis was compelled to renegotiate the succession with his increasingly emboldened subjects at a second Kosice meeting.¹⁰ Although the Polish magnates and bishops agreed to accept one of Louis’s two surviving daughters as their future ruler, they reserved the right to pick which girl it would be, Maria or Jadwiga (Hedwig).

When Louis himself died in 1382, after a reign of just 12 years, the Polish succession was ultimately settled by arms. After months of wrangling and skirmishes, the party favouring Maria and her husband, Sigismund of Luxembourg, was defeated by a pro-Jadwiga faction led by Kraków magnates. The ten-year-old Jadwiga of Anjou was crowned in Wawel cathedral on 16 October 1384.¹¹ Not only had Poland’s high nobility and bishops successfully asserted their right to choose between Władysław Łokietek’s royal descendants, but they had, just as significantly, denied the basic principle of primogeniture by anointing a younger sister as their ‘rex’. This, then, was the situation which the Piast and Anjou dynasties bequeathed to fifteenth-century Poland and to their eventual successors, the Lithuanian house of Gediminas – a magnate class with a robust belief in its political rights and a very recently revived monarchy, a recipe for constitutional conflict.

Early Jagiellonian Government, 1386–1455

The New King: Władysław-Jogaila

The tensions latent in Poland’s political situation at the end of the fourteenth century would be played out in a monumental showdown between two men: Władysław-Jogaila and Zbigniew Oleśnicki. Jogaila was born in about 1362, into the ruling family of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the largest polity in late medieval Europe (see Map).¹² Under the rule of Vytenis (1295–1316), Gediminas (1316–41) and Algirdas (1345–77), Lithuania had steadily emerged as the premier power in northeastern Europe, conducting massive campaigns of territorial conquest which brought the majority of the Russian-speaking lands, including the towns of Smolen...