Archduchess Catherine of Austria and Sigismund August , King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, married by proxy on the cusp of summer 1553. It should have been a happy occasion. Catherine, daughter of Ferdinand, King of the Romans, would become queen of the largest monarchy in Europe. But the atmosphere at the wedding deteriorated soon after the hand of the princess was bound with a bishopâs stole to the hand of MikoĹaj âthe Blackâ RadziwiĹĹ, Voivode of Vilnius and Sigismund Augustâs proxy. Some modern historians are still too careful to include an account of the episode in their studies, calling it âdistastefulâ.1 It was also removed from the nineteenth-century edition of the chronicle by Ĺukasz GĂłrnicki, who was in the entourage of Jan PrzerÄbski, the other ambassador sent to conclude the marriage negotiations.2 GĂłrnicki reports:
This moment of tension has much to teach us about queenship, royal ceremonies, and royal families. The Polish and Habsburg sides both understood the purpose and general procedure of marriage by proxy, but differences in political cultures were alluded to. The Poles, having just arrived from an elective, parliamentary monarchy where rhetorical skill was highly valued as part of the culture of active political participation, expected royal ceremony to be accompanied by âgrand speechesâ. Consummation by proxy was not usually part of Polish ceremonies, and Ferdinand referred to it as the custom of âour Houseâ. These differences could be navigated by ambassadors, who acted as intermediaries and were normally well versed in the protocol of royal courts. However, MikoĹaj âthe Blackâ RadziwiĹĹ was not an experienced ambassador and had only entered the world of high-level politics following his cousin Barbaraâs scandalous, but short-lived, marriage to Sigismund August in 1547âshe died in 1551. This helps explain why he was so oblivious to the custom that Ferdinand had to give him instructions. GĂłrnicki reports that the voivode lay down âas he was dressedâ, while the usual custom was for the ambassador to undress down to his shirt. Even if RadziwiĹĹâs behaviour was unusual, Catherineâs resistance cannot be explained by maidenly embarrassment. She was already 20 years old and a widow, having been married to Francesco III Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, for four months in 1549â1550. Catherine must have been familiar with the custom and understood that this was part of the job. Instead of the maidenly blushes that would befit a princess bride, the episode reveals the complex personal anxieties Catherine must have felt about the marriage. She had to be put into bed by force and immediately leapt out almost fainting in the process, because she was marrying the same man her sister Elizabeth had married ten years previously, the man who notoriously neglected the older Archduchess on account of his then mistress, Barbara RadziwiĹĹ. Having to get into bed with the cousin of the woman who stole her older sisterâs (and now Catherineâs own) husband added insult to injury. This episode throws into sharp relief that these ceremonies, which so often come down to us as sets of depersonalised platitudes, were, in fact, deeply personal. GĂłrnickiâs report also helps us think about family dynamics in the context of dynasticism and rehearses ideas about the gendered expectations of royal women. Ferdinand would not be humiliated by his daughter and she is made to comply by force. In the report, dynastic rhetoric of âour houseâ quickly becomes the family business of disciplining Catherineâthe father calls his son, not his courtiers, to help him.After the banquet there was dancing. King Ferdinand was dancing himself, and rather a lot. After dancing they went to the bedroom. There, the King told the Voivode of Vilnius to lie down, saying: âThe usual custom has to be observed in our House.â And when the Voivode of Vilnius lay down as he was dressed, the King ordered his daughter to lie down beside him, but she was too embarrassed to do it. So her father caught her by the shoulders and said to his son: âMaximilian, help me.â Maximilian caught her legs, and they put her next to the Voivode. Immediately afterwards the Queen leapt out of bed, not without help, and the Voivode as well. There were other ceremonies too, but not accompanied by grand speeches as in our country.3
Catherine embodies the connections between European royal courts in the sixteenth century that this study encompasses. As the daughter of Anne of Bohemia and Hungary, she was niece, sister, and aunt to queens of France and Poland-Lithuania. She was also the granddaughter of Anne de Foix, who was the cousin to the queens of France Anne of Brittany and Claude of France. But even though Catherineâs cousins, sisters, aunts, and nieces figure prominently in French and English-language scholarship, she and her fellow queens of Poland are absent from narratives about sixteenth-century queenship, even those that claim to have a pan-European focus.4 The obscurity of Polish queens helps perpetuate the notion that Europe was historically divided into âWestâ and âEastâ, implying that a fundamental political and cultural divide animated life on the continent. As Norman Davies observes, âby taking transient contemporary divisions, such as the Iron Curtain, as a standing definition of âWestâ or âEastâ, one is bound to distort any description of Europe in earlier periods. Poland is neatly excised from the Renaissance, Hungary from the Reformationâ.5 Davies wrote this in the immediate aftermath of the fall of communism, but the tendency to diminish the extent of contact between Poland and the West while emphasising the âothernessâ or marginality of Polish culture persists in the historiography. For example, the tendency to downplay the significance of the Polish nobility in European affairs is even evident in Fanny Cosandeyâs otherwise outstanding study of French queenship. In her introduction, she lists the 12 French queens of her study. Only Marie LeszczyĹska, the wife of Louis XV and queen of France for 42 years, is given a descriptor. She is called âa modest Polish princessâ in direct contrast to Marie Antoinette, who is identified as âborn archduchess of Austriaâ.6 This apparently innocuous contrast speaks volumes. Marie LeszczyĹska was the only surviving daughter of King StanisĹaw I LeszczyĹski of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (1704â1709, 1733â1736), later Duke of Lorraine, and Katarzyna OpaliĹska, like her husband of a very distinguished Polish family.
Since Davies wrote in 1992, Robert Frost and Natalia Nowakowska have pioneered early modern Polish history as an English-language field of study. Nowakowska is right to argue that âwhere our models are built from examples garnered from only half the continent, we risk operating with only a half (or even a half-accurate) picture of Renaissance European societyâ.7 In other words, historians have tried to define the âEuropeanâ by looking only at half of Europe, as eastern and central Europe remains the primary context for representing the Polish monarchy.8 Polish historiography is no less guilty of this tendency. It tends to treat queenship in even more reclusive terms, for although it includes assiduously researched biographies of some queens, particularly Bona Sforza, few attempts have been made to relate Polish queens to each other, never mind other European consorts.9
This study seeks to address these imbalances. It uses âEastâ and âWestâ in a strictly geographical sense, eschewing any sense that these terms necessarily signify fundamental cultural difference, and pierces stereotypes of sixteenth-century Polandâs cultural and political isolation by offering the first substantial comparison of Polish royal ceremony and culture with that of France, an apparently quintessentially western realm. French queens have been studied as a group by historians such as Fanny Cosandey, Kathleen Wellman, and Simone Bertière, but their connection to the Polish queens has never been fully understood or appreciated.10 More generally, even in the robustly developing area of royal studies, sustained comparisons are rare, an exception being Jeroen Duindamâs study of the Valois-Bourbon and Habsburg royal courts.11 By framing Polish and French queenship comparatively and relating Polish queenship and monarchy to the ongoing debates in recent scholarship, this study will reinforce our growing understanding of how queens helped spin the thread that connected early modern Europe, linking together various European realms with blood-ties and alliances; it will also demonstrate that Poland was very much a part of that rich tapestry, exposing the extent to which the wives of the Valois and Jagiellonian kings related to each other.
The ceremonies of becoming a queen, understood as the wedding with the accompanying festivals, coronation, childbirth, and motherhood, marked the transition of a bride into a queen consort but have never been studied as a sequence in a larger European context. The analysis of these ceremonies illuminates French and Polish queenship by revealing the ideological, conceptual, political, diplomatic, and family frameworks within which queens functioned. Establishing the patterns that marked the movement of royal brides between East and West, laying bare the connections that bound together monarchical Europe, enables us to question whether the differences in European royal ceremony and queenship were motivated by specific âEasternâ and âWesternâ ideas. This study uses both queens and royal ceremonies as a way of understanding the political and cultural dynamics that animated life on the continent in the sixteenth century.
Although the historiography of the Polish monarchy has not been affected by the âceremonial turnâ to the same extent as the English and French-language scholarship, works on Polish royal ceremony have been produced by MichaĹ RoĹźek, Urszula Borkowska, Aleksander Gieysztor, Krystyna Turska, and Karolina Targosz.12 But the tremendously prolific English-language scholarship on ceremonies is limited too. The tendency to focus on the western part of the continent has produced a lopsided account of European ceremony, and therefore royal culture, because not only does the literature neglect a large expanse of European territory but it also fails to take account of ceremonies in a different political setting than that provided by hereditary and absolute monarchies.13 Among the works claiming to have...