Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland: The Career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468-1503) [Reprint ed.] 0754656446, 9780754656449

Table of contents :
List of Illustrations vii
Series Editor’s Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
Abbreviations xiii
Chronology: The Life and Times of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon xvii
Introduction 1
1. Towards Renaissance Monarchy? The Jagiellonians and the Polish Crown, 1386–1492 11
2. ‘Supremus consiliarius huius regni’: Fryderyk Jagiellon’s Role in Royal Government 37
3. ‘Reformanda reformare’: Fryderyk Jagiellon and the Polish Church 71
4. ‘Imperium sine fine’: Fryderyk Jagiellon, Image-making and Propaganda 99
5. ‘Cardinalis Cracoviensis’: Fryderyk Jagiellon and the Papacy 127
6. ‘Vita cardinalis’: Fryderyk Jagiellon’s Legacy in Poland, 1503–1535 155
7 Dynastic Bishops and Cardinal-Ministers: Fryderyk Jagiellon in European Context 179
Conclusion 193
Bibliography 197
Index 215

Citation preview

CHURCH, STATE AND DYNASTY IN RENAISSANCE POLAND

For my grandparents

Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland

The Career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468–1503)

NATALIA NOWAKOWSKA Somerville College, Oxford, UK

First published 2007 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OXI4 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Natalia Nowakowska 2007 Natalia Nowakowska has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publi shers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Nowakowska, Natalia, 1977Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland: The Career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468- 1503). - (Catholic Christendom, 1300- 1700) I . Jagiellon, Fryderyk. 2.Cardinals - Poland - Biography. 3. Church and state - Poland - History - To 1500.4. Church and state - Catholic Church - History - To 1500. 5. Poland - History - Jagellons, 1386- 1572. 6. Poland - Church history. I. Title 282' .092

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nowakowska, Natalia, 1977Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland: The Career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468- 1503) / by Natalia Nowakowska. p. cm. - (Catholic Christendom, 1300- 1700) Includes bibliographical references and index. I . Catholic church - History - 15th century. 2. Poland - Church history - 15th century. 3. Jagiellon, Fryderyk, 1468- 1503. 4. Catholic Church - Foreign relations - Poland. 5. Church and state - Poland. I. Title. BX1329.N692007 282.092- dc22 [B] 2006032410

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-5644-9 (hbk)

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Series Editor’s Preface

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Abbreviations

xiii

Chronology: The Life and Times of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon

xvii

Introduction 1

1

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

11

‘Supremus consiliarius huius regni’: Fryderyk Jagiellon’s Role in Royal Government

37

3

‘Reformanda reformare’: Fryderyk Jagiellon and the Polish Church

71

4

‘Imperium sine fine’: Fryderyk Jagiellon, Image-making and Propaganda

99

5

‘Cardinalis Cracoviensis’: Fryderyk Jagiellon and the Papacy

127

6

‘Vita cardinalis’: Fryderyk Jagiellon’s Legacy in Poland, 1503–1535

155

Dynastic Bishops and Cardinal-Ministers: Fryderyk Jagiellon in European Context

179

2

7

Conclusion

193

Bibliography

197

Index

215

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List of Illustrations

Figures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Jagiellonian dynasty family tree. Horizontal panel of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon’s tomb, Kraków cathedral Frontispiece woodcut, Missale Cracoviense, c.1494 Reliquary for the skull of Saint Stanisław, 1504 Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon’s larger Gniezno crucifix reliquary Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon’s coat of arms, Collegium Maius, Kraków ‘Nulla potestas nisi a Deo’, miniature from the King Jan Olbracht gradual

xv 173 174 175 176 177 178

Map 1

Jagiellonian Central Europe, c.1500, © 2004 Europa Technologies Ltd

xvi

Tables 1 2 3 4 5 6

Dioceses with multiple authorized, printed editions of the local liturgical rite (incunabula) Number and percentage of clerical discipline cases heard in person by leading Polish bishops, late fifteenth century Appointments of papal cardinal-nephews and dynastic bishops in the 1470s Bishops, archbishops and cardinals appointed from European ruling houses, 1200 to 1600 Number of bishops / archbishops appointed from ruling houses by decade, 1360–1600 European cardinal-ministers, 1400–1600

78 84 146 181 184 187

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Series Editor’s Preface The still-usual emphasis on medieval (or Catholic) and Reformation (or Protestant) religious history has meant neglect of the middle ground, both chronological and ideological. As a result, continuities between the Middle Ages and early modern Europe have been overlooked in favour of emphasis on radical discontinuities. Further, especially in the later period, the identification of ‘reformation’ with various kinds of Protestantism means that the vitality and creativity of the established church, whether in its Roman or local manifestations, has been left out of account. In the last few years, an upsurge of interest in the history of traditional (or Catholic) religion makes these inadequacies in received scholarship even more glaring and in need of systematic correction. The series will attempt this by covering all varieties of religious behaviour, broadly interpreted, not just (or even especially) traditional institutional and doctrinal church history. It will, to the maximum degree possible, be interdisciplinary, comparative and global, as well as non-confessional. The goal is to understand religion, primarily of the ‘Catholic’ variety, as a broadly human phenomenon, rather than as a privileged mode of access to superhuman realms, even implicitly. The period covered, 1300–1700, embraces the moment which saw an almost complete transformation of the place of religion in the life of Europeans, whether considered as a system of beliefs, as an institution, or as a set of social and cultural practices. In 1300, vast numbers of Europeans, from the pope down, fully expected Jesus’ return and the beginning of His reign on earth. By 1700, very few Europeans, of whatever level of education, would have subscribed to such chiliastic beliefs. Pierre Bayle’s notorious sarcasms about signs and portents are not idiosyncratic. Likewise, in 1300 the vast majority of Europeans probably regarded the pope as their spiritual head; the institution he headed was probably the most tightly integrated and effective bureaucracy in Europe. Most Europeans were at least nominally Christian, and the pope had at least nominal knowledge of that fact. The papacy, as an institution, played a central role in high politics, and the clergy in general formed an integral part of most governments, whether central or local. By 1700, Europe was divided into a myriad of different religious allegiances, and even those areas officially subordinate to the pope were both more nominally Catholic in belief (despite colossal efforts at imposing uniformity) and also in allegiance than they had been four hundred years earlier. The pope had become only one political factor, and not one of the first rank. The clergy, for its part, had virtually disappeared from secular governments as well as losing much of its local authority. The stage was set for the Enlightenment. Thomas F. Mayer Augustana College

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Acknowledgements Since I first began working on Jagiellonian Poland nine years ago, I have incurred a formidable number of academic and personal debts of gratitude. This research would not have been possible without the financial support of the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), which funded my masters’ and doctoral projects with studentships. Additional research trips to Italy and Poland were supported by an Oxford University Scatcherd European Scholarship, a Polish Government Postgraduate Scholarship and grants from the Colin Matthew Fund and the School of Humanities at King’s College London. This book has grown out of a doctoral thesis written between 2000 and 2003 at Lincoln College, Oxford, where I had earlier spent three years as an undergraduate benefiting from the teaching and encouragement of Susan Brigden and Paul Langford. Whereas the original aim of the thesis had been to explore papal–Polish relations through the prism of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s career, it quickly became clear that Fryderyk’s contacts with Rome were sadly meagre and that the real significance of his life lay in Central Europe itself. A one-year Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the History Department of King’s College London gave me the opportunity to redeploy the doctoral material, explore Fryderyk’s Polish context in more detail and write most of this volume. The very last stages of the project were completed at University College, Oxford, where I was delighted to take up a Junior Research Fellowship in October 2005. Teachers, colleagues and friends at all these institutions have shaped this book in decisive ways. Norman Tanner and Jacqueline Glomski oversaw my earliest research on Fryderyk and the papacy. Nicholas Davidson supervised the doctorate itself, offering astute guidance, careful feedback and optimistic support over several years; he might have forgotten that it was he who first suggested that the curious Polish cardinal might warrant closer investigation. I am indebted to John Watts for helping me to think more clearly about the fifteenth-century state, and to Ian Forrest for his acute thoughts on the late medieval church. My doctoral examiners, Robert Evans and David Chambers, offered thought-provoking pointers for the development of the thesis into a book. Jinty Nelson read a draft chapter and offered helpful comments. Professor Krzysztof Baczkowski welcomed me to his Late Medieval Europe seminar at the Jagiellonian University’s History Institute in 2002, while Dariusz Jach has shared his enthusiasm for and knowledge about Fryderyk unstintingly, and cast a careful eye over the manuscript. Leofranc Holford-Strevens provided expert checking of the Latin. Any remaining errors are my own. I would like to thank the staff of the Bodleian Library, and Janet Zmroczek of the British Library, who managed to source books and articles from Poland with uncanny speed. In Poland, I also owe a special debt of thanks to Father Jarosław Bogacz, Director of the Gniezno Archdiocesan Museum; Father Wojtek Kujawski, Director of the Włocławek Diocesan Archive; Father Marian Aleksandrowicz, Director of

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the Gniezno Archdiocesan Archive, and Elżbieta Knapek of the Metropolitan Curia Archive in Kraków. At Ashgate, Tom Gray and Thomas Mayer have been a pleasure to work with. In retracing Fryderyk Jagiellon’s restless steps across Poland, and working in the great Italian city he never saw, I have spent many months away from home. In Warsaw, the Hydzik family and Jacek and Małgosia Wojciechowski opened their homes to me, while Darek and Marzenka Jach were kind and generous friends in Kraków. The British School at Rome provided a stimulating and warm environment throughout the autumn of 2001. In Oxford and beyond, Emma Furniss and Margaret Small have offered much-valued advice, support and friendship. My parents, Chris and Jolanda, have been supportive throughout, and it was they who first suggested that Polish history should not be taken at face value. My husband, Nick, has offered many years of incisive comments and insights on Fryderyk at the dinner table, suffered the worst of Roman hotels and proved himself to be an upstanding honorary Pole. His love and support have underpinned this research. This book is dedicated to my grandparents, who left Central Europe in very dark times and found refuge in the United Kingdom when they most needed it – to my grandmothers, Tereska and Janina, and to my grandfathers, Tadeusz Podgórski (1920–86), journalist and political activist; Zbigniew Błażyński (1914–96), diplomat, journalist and political commentator; and Tadeusz Nowakowski (1917–96), novelist and broadcaster. Not all of them have lived to see the seismic changes of 1989 and symbolic turning point of May 2004. If this volume, with its sources freely garnered from across the Continent and upbeat geopolitical assumptions, appears to be a twenty-first-century product, it has nonetheless been shaped fundamentally by their twentieth-century European journey. Somerville College, Oxford, April 2007

Abbreviations AAG AAP ADWł AGAD AKK AKM ASV BJ Bodley BK BN Czart. PSB

Archiwum Archidiecezji Gnieźnieńskiej, Gniezno Archiwum Archidiecezji Poznańskiej, Poznań Archiwum Diecezji Włocławskiej, Włocławek Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Warsaw Archiwum Kapituły Krakowskiej, Kraków Archiwum Kurii Metropolitalnej, Kraków Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Vatican Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Kraków Bodleian Library, Oxford Biblioteka Kórnicka, Kórnik-Poznań Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw Biblioteka Czartoryska, Kraków Polski Słownik Biograficzny

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Figure 1

Jagiellonian Dynasty/family tree.

Map 1: Jagiellonian Central Europe, c.1500

Chronology The Life and Times of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon Reign of King Kazimierz IV (1447–92) April 1468

Birth of Cardinal Fryderyk in the Wawel palace, Kraków.

May 1471

Fryderyk’s older brother, Władysław, elected king of Bohemia.

March 1484

Fryderyk’s oldest brother, Kazimierz, dies in Grodno (beatified 1519).

Summer 1485

Sultan Bajezid II seizes Kilja and Białogród, Moldavian cities claimed by Poland and crucial to her trade.

August 1487

Jan Olbracht Jagiellon sets out with a crusader army against the Ottomans, but instead routs a horde of Tartars at Kopystrzyn.

April 1488

Fryderyk elected bishop of Kraków.

February 1489

Bishop Tungen of Ermland dies, triggering a contest over the see of Ermland between Fryderyk Jagiellon and Lukas Watzenrode.

June 1490

Władysław Jagiellon of Bohemia is elected king of Hungary, following the death of Matthias Corvinus.

October 1490

Jan Olbracht of Poland leads an army into Hungary, challenging his brother Władysław for the Crown.

February 1491

Jan Olbracht and Władysław sign a peace deal at Košice, by which the Polish Jagiellonians recognize Władysław as ruler of Hungary.

June 1492

Death of King Kazimierz IV, at Grodno in Lithuania. Prince Aleksander Jagiellon proclaimed Grand Duke

xviii

CHURCH, STATE AND DYNASTY IN RENAISSANCE POLAND

of Lithuania, followed by a Muscovite invasion of the Grand Duchy, triggering a conflict which is not concluded until 1494. Reign of King Jan Olbracht (1492–1501) August 1492

Election of Jan Olbracht as king of Poland at Piotrków, in an election presided over by Bishop Fryderyk.

February 1493

Death of Primate Zbigniew Oleśnicki.

April 1493

Fryderyk Jagiellon elected archbishop of Gniezno and primate of Poland.

September 1493

Fryderyk elevated Alexander VI.

April 1494

Jagiellonian dynastic summit at Levoca in Hungary, called by King Władysław.

February 1495

Grand Duke Aleksander of Lithuania marries Helena, daughter of Grand Duke Ivan III of Muscovy, as part of a peace settlement.

July 1496

King Jan Olbracht seizes Płock from the dukes of Mazovia.

1495–96

Financial and military preparations in Poland for a major military campaign against the Ottomans, to reclaim Kilija and Białogród.

August 1497

King Jan Olbracht’s army sets out for the Black Sea, leaving Cardinal Fryderyk as governor of Poland.

October 1497

King Jan Olbracht’s army is routed by Turks, Tartars and Moldavians at Codrul Cosminului.

February 1498

King Jan Olbracht returns to Kraków.

Spring 1498

First Ottoman raids on Polish soil, in retaliation for the 1497 war; large tracts of Podolia are looted by janissaries and their Tartar allies.

to

the

cardinalate

by

Pope

CHRONOLOGY

xix

November 1498

Poland, Hungary and Moldavia conclude a series of mutual peace treaties, agreeing to coordinate their antiOttoman strategies.

1499

Polish–Hungarian orators attend a series of diets in the Empire, requesting urgent financial aid to shore up Christendom’s south-eastern frontier.

December 1499

Cardinal Fryderyk travels to Bratislava for crusade talks with King Władysław.

May 1500

Alexander VI announces a new crusade against the Ottomans; a Jagiellonian–Venetian–papal league is envisaged.

May 1500

Grand Duke Ivan III of Muscovy invades Lithuania with three armies, triggering a three-year war.

August 1500

Papal nuncio Gaspardo Golfo brings the crusade-jubilee bulls to Poland.

Summer 1500

Repeated Tartar raids on south-eastern Poland.

March 1501

King Jan Olbracht tacitly withdraws from the Jagiellonian–Venetian–papal league, sending an orator to Constantinople to seek a truce with the Sultan.

May 1501

The crusade league’s terms are agreed in Buda.

June 1501

Jan Olbracht holds court at Thorn, to discuss the Teutonic Order’s refusal to swear homage; during these negotiations, the king dies.

June – Sep 1501

Fryderyk acts as ‘interrex’, assuring King Władysław that he is working for a Hungarian victory at the election, but secretly running Grand Duke Aleksander Jagiellon’s campaign in Poland.

Reign of King Aleksander (1501–06) September 1501

Aleksander Jagiellon is elected king of Poland, signing both a new act of union between Poland and Lithuania, and the Mielnica Constitution, severely curtailing royal powers.

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December 1501

Coronation of King Aleksander conducted by Cardinal Fryderyk.

February 1502

The Orthodox Lithuanian Grand Duchess, Helena of Muscovy, makes a ritual entry into Kraków, triggering public debate about the canonical status of the royal marriage.

March 1502

King Aleksander leaves Poland for Lithuania, where he is keen to lead the war effort against Muscovy in person. Cardinal Fryderyk is left as governor of Poland.

Summer 1502

Major Crimean Tartar raids on Poland; Aleksander repeatedly requests funds from the royal council to fuel the faltering Lithuanian war effort.

Summer 1502

Major arguments erupt between branches of the Kurozwęcki family, who launch armed raids on one another’s estates, further destabilizing southern Poland.

November 1502

Bishop Krzesław Kurozwęcki is appointed co-regent with Fryderyk.

Winter 1502

Cardinal Fryderyk becomes too ill to perform his governmental or episcopal functions.

14 March 1503

Death of Cardinal Fryderyk in Kraków.

April 1503

Conclusion of Muscovite–Lithuanian peace treaty.

October 1503

Return of King Aleksander to Poland.

Introduction Parallel Lives Kraków’s fourteenth-century cathedral is a small gothic construction of redbrick towers, copper roofing and one golden dome which sits on the Wawel hill overlooking a sweeping curve of the Vistula river. In the dark central spaces of the church, cluttered with kingly tombs and baroque altarpieces, armies of pilgrims and tourists pass the graves of two of Poland’s earliest cardinals. The older of the two resting places is unmarked and all but lost: somewhere beneath the flagstones of the cathedral choir, the body of Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki, one of medieval Poland’s most formidable politicians, lies in a bronze casket which was first lowered into the ground in spring 1455. His secretary, Jan Długosz, lauded him as ‘the parent, liberator and defender of our homeland … the father of the fatherland’.1 The second cardinal’s tomb is just a few feet away: a huge, blackened sarcophagus wedged right into the steps of the cathedral’s high altar, partially obliterating them with its bulk. This elaborate metal casket, produced by the Vischer workshop of Nuremberg, is covered with images. The vertical relief, facing the choir nave, shows a man in full cardinal’s regalia with broad hat, accompanied by a saint with buckling knees and a walking cadaver; all three figures venerate a Virgin and Child, who are shown seated on a giant cushion. The tomb’s side panels boast angels ringing handbells and cherubs riding dolphins. The main horizontal relief is obscured by a spare piece of carpet and a flowerpot, which hide the engraved face of the tomb’s occupant (Figure 2). Roman lettering across the rim of the sarcophagus records that the object was commissioned in 1510 by King Zygmunt of Poland, ‘for his dearest brother Cardinal Fryderyk, son of Kazimierz, who died on 14 March 1503 at the age of thirty-five’.2 This artistically eclectic funerary monument marks the final resting place of Fryderyk Jagiellon, arguably the most powerful churchman seen in Renaissance Central Europe. Although these two princes of the church never met, they were formidable political rivals and their ascendancies, while separated by three decades, are linked with delicate symmetries. Zbigniew Oleśnicki and Fryderyk Jagiellon, now 1 Jan Długosz, Annales Regni Poloniae (2 vols, Leipzig, 1711–12), vol. 2, p. 167; ‘parentem et liberatorem patriae et defensorem … pater patriae.’ A new scholarly, multivolume edition of Długosz was in preparation in Poland at the time of writing: J. Długosz, Annales seu Cronicae Incliti Regni Poloniae, ed. J. Wyrozumski, K. Ożóg, K. Baczkowski & D. Turkowska (Warsaw, 1998–2006). 2 ‘Hoc opus Federico Cardinali Cazimiri filio (qui quinque et triginta annis exactis MDIII Marcii XIIII obiit) fratri carissimo divuus Sigismundus Rex Poloniae pientissimus posuit ab incarnatione domini MCX’. Fryderyk Jagiellon’s tomb is discussed by Adam Bochnak, ‘Mecenat Zygmunta Starego w zakresie rzemiosła artystycznego’, Studia do dziejów Wawelu 2 (1961): 131–301.

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CHURCH, STATE AND DYNASTY IN RENAISSANCE POLAND

neighbours on the Wawel, were on opposing sides of a fierce battle over the character of the Polish monarchy waged throughout a turbulent fifteenth century. Zbigniew Oleśnicki was born into a minor noble family in 1389, but rose rapidly through the ranks of the Polish royal chancellery, becoming bishop of Kraków in 1423 at the age of 34. He immediately forged a powerful noble faction, rallying magnates such as the Tarnowski, Tęczyński and Koniecpolski around his episcopal throne. From 1423 to 1434, Oleśnicki was the king’s principal political opponent, and the succession of an infant king in 1434 enabled the bishop to emerge as de facto ruler of Poland for over a decade. During the schisms which plagued the fifteenth-century church, Oleśnicki was named cardinal by no fewer than three popes and anti-popes, thereby consolidating his national and international authority. Zbigniew Oleśnicki was by far the most successful and ambitious leader of what we might term the ‘magnate party’ in fifteenth-century Poland: that is the section of the kingdom’s high nobility who wished to see an elective monarchy with highly circumscribed powers, where effective political authority rested in the hands of the royal council – the ‘prelates et barones regni Poloniae’ – as a small self-governing elite possessed of carefully enshrined rights.3 Fryderyk Jagiellon, by contrast, was of impeccably royal pedigree and outlook. He was born in the Wawel palace in April 1468, in the immediate vicinity of the cathedral where he would be baptized, enthroned as bishop and later buried. He was the sixth and youngest son of Kazimierz IV (1447–92), the third Jagiellonian king of Poland, and his queen, Elizabeth Habsburg (see Figure 1). Fryderyk’s five sisters were married to the electors and princes of the Holy Roman Empire, while his brothers became sovereigns: Władysław in Bohemia (1471–1516) and Hungary (1490–1516), Jan Olbracht in Poland (1492–1501), Aleksander in Lithuania (1492– 1506) and Poland (1501–6), and Zygmunt too in Poland (1506–48). In 1488, at the age of 20, Fryderyk was elected bishop of Kraków, and in 1493 he became archbishop of Gniezno and thus primate of Poland. Later that same year, the Borgia pope Alexander VI elevated him to the cardinalate, with the title of cardinal-presbyter of Santa Lucia in Septem Soliis, making Fryderyk the only legitimate son of a European king to wear the red hat in the fifteenth century. Fryderyk became a senior member of the royal council and a leading dynastic politician, presiding over the elections of the new kings in 1492 and 1501. In those years he also enjoyed brief spells as ‘interrex’, culminating in his final twelve-month governorship of Poland in 1502–3. Throughout his short life, Fryderyk Jagiellon was an aggressive proponent of the regalist programmes espoused by his grandfather King Władysław-Jogaila (1386– 1434), father Kazimierz IV (1447–92), brother Jan Olbracht (1492–1501) and their For scholarship on Oleśnicki, see M. Dzieduszycki, Zbigniew Oleśnicki, 2 vols, (Kraków, 1853–4); Maria Koczerska, ‘Zbigniew Oleśnicki’, PSB 23 (1978): 776–84 and Zbigniew Oleśnicki i kosciół krakowski w czasach jego pontyfikatu (1423–1455) (Warsaw, 2004); Zbyszko Górczak, Podstawy gospodarczej działalności Zbigniewa Oleśnickiego biskupa krakowskiego (Kraków, 1999); Tomasz Graff, ‘Wokół sprawy kardynałatu biskupa krakowskiego Zbigniewa Oleśnickiego’, Zeszyty naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Prace Historyczne 129 (2002): 19–50 and ‘Katolicki episkopat gnieźnieński i lwowski wobec pseudo-papieża Feliksa V przez sobór bazylejski’, Nasza Przeszłość 99 (2003): 55–129. 3

INTRODUCTION

3

noble allies. In opposition to the magnate party, this Jagiellonian faction sought to forge a more centralized royal government, enhance the legal powers of the king, introduce an increasingly autocratic style of rule and assert the hereditary nature of Jagiellonian sovereignty in Poland. Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon’s singular career can best be understood as a studied reprise of Zbigniew Oleśnicki’s own ecclesiasticalpolitical life; it was intended to ensure that the Roman Catholic church in Poland would be an instrument of increasingly centralized Jagiellonian monarchist rule, rather than a vehicle for magnate government and opposition. His brief spell in public life from 1488 to 1503 thus represented a major opportunity for the Polish regalist party at the dawn of the early modern period. Church and State Fryderyk Jagiellon not only illuminates the vagaries of Poland’s rich factional and constitutional politics in the Renaissance period, but is also a figure of general European significance.4 Historians have long argued that a key feature of European political history in the fifteenth century was a gradual metamorphosis in relations between the two pillars of medieval society – church and state. It is argued that the titanic struggles waged between emperors and popes in the Middle Ages over the relative rights of secular and clerical authorities – culminating in the fiery pontificate of Gregory VII (1073–85) and the investiture contest – were in later centuries inherited by local princely rulers.5 This struggle was increasingly played out not at a universal level, but on a local stage by national rulers such as King Philip IV of France (1285–1314). The fifteenth century has traditionally been seen as the moment when these medieval trends accelerated, to the point at which ‘national churches’ became discernible – meaning that princes substantially increased their own powers (of taxation, jurisdiction and appointment) over the Catholic church in their realms, striking a blow against ecclesiastical autonomy. As Francis Oakley argued in 1979, this period witnessed ‘the disintegration of what had been under papal leadership and government a genuinely international church into a series of what were, de facto if not de jure, national and territorial churches dominated by kings and princes’.6 Major studies of the late medieval church written in the 1980s and 1990s took as their theme this narrative of creeping ecclesiastical ‘nationalization’. John Thomson’s general study Popes and Princes, 1417–1517: Politics and Polity in the Late Medieval Church (1980) explained how Catholic princes across Europe had steadily consolidated their control of local churches, through taxation and

The term ‘Renaissance’ is used in this book as a shorthand for a historical period, and also in reference to debates on the political history of late fifteenth-century Europe which have taken place in ‘western’ scholarship. In Polish historiography, however, the term Renaissance is understood primarily in artistic terms and is not routinely applied to Poland before 1506. 5 B. Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300 (Toronto, 1988). 6 Francis Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, Mich., 1979), p. 72. 4

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CHURCH, STATE AND DYNASTY IN RENAISSANCE POLAND

appointments.7 In 1988, Peter Heath published his account of relations between ‘church and realm’ in the English kingdom between 1272 and 1461. In this reign-byreign analysis, Heath, too, flagged up the Crown’s growing powers of taxation and appointment over the clergy, arguing that this story had to be told in order to reassert the political importance of the church in medieval England for an increasingly secularized twentieth-century readership.8 A very different treatment of the topic can be found in Bernard Guenée’s 1991 book Between Church and State, which seeks to explore the church–state interface in France in the era ‘between the universal and the national church’ through a biographical approach, offering stretches of the lives of Bernard Gui (d. 1331), Gillies de Muisset (d. 1353), Pierre d’Ailly (d. 1420) and Thomas Basin (d. 1490).9 In recent years, the dusty, high-political world of church–state relations has become distinctly unfashionable. The great majority of recent research on the late medieval church has abjured the study of bishops, kings and cardinals, focusing instead on ‘grass-roots’ phenomena such as lay piety, confraternities, preaching, literacy, pilgrimage and religious theatre.10 This neglect is unfortunate, because the emergence of more ‘national’ churches has implications which reach far beyond the sphere of the ecclesiastical historian. These processes slot directly into another major trend of the fifteenth century, the appearance of a different kind of monarchy, which laid the foundations of the early modern – and, by implication, the modern – state. Across Christendom, the middle and later decades of the fifteenth century had seen a rash of prolonged civil wars in which local magnates had undermined local monarchies – in the Trastamara dynasty’s war of succession in Castile (1468– 79), the leagues formed against the French Crown (such as the League of the Public Weal, 1465), or England’s Wars of the Roses (1453–85). Since the nineteenth century, historians have pointed to the generation of rulers who emerged from these conflicts, such as Isabella of Castile, Henry VII of England and Louis XI of France, as the architects of so-called ‘new monarchy’ or ‘Renaissance monarchy’ – a new model of secular government, with new ambitions. Crudely speaking, the features of these burgeoning Renaissance states are held to be a centralization of power around the monarch, the expansion of governmental bureaucracy, increasingly regular taxation (replacing the Crown’s reliance on income from its private estates), use 7 John Thomson, Popes and Princes, 1417–1517: Politics and Polity in the Late Medieval Church (London, 1980). 8 Peter Heath, Church and Realm, 1272–1461: Conflict and Collaboration in an Age of Crises (London, 1988); see also Denis Hay, ‘The church of England in the later middle ages’, in D. Hay (ed.), Renaissance Essays (London, 1988), pp. 233–48. 9 F. Guenée, Between Church and State: The Lives of Four French Prelates in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago, Ill., 1991). 10 See, for example, C. Trinkaus and H. Oberman (eds), The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion (Leiden, 1974); John Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence: Religious Confraternities from the Middle of the Thirteenth to the Late Fifteenth Century (London, 1983); Susan Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety as Public Performance (London, 2000); Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge, 2002).

INTRODUCTION

5

of mercenaries rather than noble muster armies, and the employment of a classical, imperial language of national sovereignty.11 The international structure of the Latin church was arguably the primary obstacle in the path of this evolving governmental system. With its separate hierarchies, jurisdictions, taxation, legal system and clerical populations who owed allegiance to a foreign overlord in Italy, the church was medieval Europe’s definitive state within a state. The extent to which these new regimes could impose their own will and authority on local clergy and religious institutions would be a basic test of their power. Fryderyk Jagiellon’s career in Poland is not just another case study in the rise of local churches, to set alongside Guenée’s work on France and Heath’s on England, and to reinforce their conclusions. Rather than providing a narrative of trends over one or more centuries, this book instead offers an in-depth study of the policies of one regime over a relatively short time span, in order to pin down precisely what the much used and abused term ‘national church’ might mean in practice, and to look again at who the real losers and winners were. Secondly, Fryderyk can help us to recover the significance of the dynastic bishop, the prince-priests who pop up across the Latin church in growing numbers from the 1450s, and who have traditionally been ignored as isolated hybrids or picturesque anomalies. This book will argue that the placing of a prince’s immediate male relatives in senior ecclesiastical posts within their realms was an important and overlooked tactic of Renaissance monarchies, developed not to pension off surplus sons, but adopted specifically to subjugate local churches to royal authority. The careers of Alfonso (1470–1525), son of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and holder of five Iberian bishoprics, or Albrecht of Brandenburg (d. 1545), episcopal pluralist and Imperial Elector, have many parallels with that of Fryderyk. Fryderyk is the ideal subject for a study of dynastic bishops and state-building circa 1500, precisely because he represents an apotheosis of the phenomenon, as the most highly titled prince-priest of them all. East and West The introductory sketch of Renaissance monarchy given above was, in common with existing scholarship, constructed exclusively from West European examples – its archetypes are the Tudors, Trastamara and Valois. A study which proposes to treat a Central European kingdom on the same terms might therefore require a few additional words of introduction. Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon was a leading actor 11 See J.R. Green, History of the English People, vol. 2 (London, 1878), pp. 5–23, 27–8; Fernando Chabos, ‘Was there a Renaissance state?’, in H. Lubasz (ed.), Development of the Modern State (New York, 1964), pp. 26–42; John Watts, ‘Introduction: history, the fifteenth century and the Renaissance’, in John Watts (ed.), The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Stroud, 1998), pp. 1–23; Janos Bak, ‘The Hungary of Matthias Corvinus: a state in “Central Europe” on the threshold of modernity’, in Bohemia: A Journal of History and Civilisation in East-Central Europe 31 (1990): 339–49; J. Russell-Major, From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy: French Kings, Nobles and Estates (Baltimore, Md., 1994).

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in a period of Polish history which has so far been almost completely invisible in ‘western’ scholarship.12 Linguistic barriers (real or perceived) and the vicissitudes of twentieth-century political history have ensured that western debates on Renaissance government and the late medieval church have so far been conducted almost entirely without reference to the kingdoms and peoples of Central (or, in less fashionable parlance, Eastern) Europe. Where our models are built from examples garnered from only half the continent, we risk operating with only a half (or even a halfaccurate) picture of Renaissance European society. The absence of Central Europe in English-language scholarship on the period can carry, and perpetuate, an implicit assumption that these kingdoms were backward and removed from cutting-edge processes of change. The premise of this study is that Poland – although, like all kingdoms, distinctive in certain respects – was firmly in the mainstream of political development until 1500 and therefore has much to tell us about the construction of the Renaissance state.13 Fryderyk Jagiellon can show us what Poland contributes to the general European picture and how Renaissance monarchy might flourish, and also falter, in Central Europe. The Invisible Cardinal: The Historiography of Fryderyk Jagiellon Although his impressive curriculum vitae should characterize him as a kind of Polish Thomas Wolsey or Henry Beaufort, Fryderyk Jagiellon has lost out twice over in historiographical terms. If Fryderyk has been completely overlooked in English-language and West European historiography, he is a distinctly shadowy presence in Polish scholarship too. Polish writers have traditionally treated Fryderyk Jagiellon as a minor figure, a miscreant and something of an embarrassment; the five hundredth anniversary of his death, in 2003, passed studiously unmarked. The verdict on Fryderyk first recorded in 1555 by Marcin Kromer, a leading bishop of the Polish Counter-Reformation, reflects sentiments which have prevailed among Central European historians ever since their first publication: ‘[Fryderyk was] quite without talent, an indolent, slothful inebriate who presided over a continual round of drinking parties, and who wasted away in vile living with his companions. And in the end he was finished off by syphilis.’14

The main studies of late medieval Poland in English are Paul Knoll, The Rise of the Piast Monarchy: Piast Poland in East-Central Europe (Chicago, Ill., 1972) and Oskar Halecki’s posthumous publication Jadwiga of Anjou and the Rise of East Central Europe (Boulder, Colo., 1991). For a recent general survey of Polish history, see J. Lukowski and H. Zawadzki, A Concise History of Poland (Cambridge, 2001). 13 For debates about the relative economic development of Western and East-Central Europe in the Middle Ages, see T. Ashton & C. Philpin (eds), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985) and Piotr Górecki, Economy, Society and Lordship in Medieval Poland, 1100–1250 (New York & London, 1992). 14 Marcin Kromer, De Origine et Rebus Gestis Polonorum Libri XXX (Basel, 1558), p. 678: ‘ingenio nullo, iners, ignavo ocio crapulae, & assiduis compotationibus in sumo & 12

INTRODUCTION

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To this day, the standard historical accounts of late fifteenth- and early sixteenthcentury Poland take Kromer’s characterization at face value, typically affording Cardinal Fryderyk little more than a passing, and usually dismissive, mention. The Kraków professor Fryderyk Papée (d. 1940), a leading interwar political historian, made only a handful of references to the royal cardinal in his three landmark monographs on the Jagiellonian regimes of Kings Kazimierz IV, Jan Olbracht and Aleksander, labelling him an overly ambitious prelate of very questionable personal morality.15 Oskar Halecki, another prominent twentieth-century scholar, accused Fryderyk of sabotaging royal government and being ‘scarcely worthy of a cardinal’s hat’.16 These criticisms of Fryderyk as an overweening, self-interested bishop, in the grip of insatiable political ambition, have been echoed in more recent works on Jagiellonian government by Jacek Wiesiołowski (1976) and Wojciech Fałkowski (1990).17 The mainstream view among ecclesiastical historians, meanwhile, was summed up in the 1974 multi-volume history of the Polish church edited by Bolesław Kumor, which referred to Fryderyk Jagiellon only once, stating that his impact on the church had been negligible.18 The cardinal did, nonetheless, find a twentieth-century apologist and advocate in the Catholic priest and historian Henryk Rybus, whose 1935 monograph on Fryderyk’s episcopal administration cast the cardinal as a pious Tridentine bishop avant la lettre.19 Rybus was, however, a lone and largely ignored voice, and it is only very recently that a tentative reappraisal of Fryderyk’s career has put up its first shoots in current Polish scholarship in the form of two articles – Dariusz Jach’s survey of Fryderyk’s place in Kazimierz IV’s wider ecclesiastical policy and Zbigniew Dalewski’s exploration of the cardinal’s manipulation of royal spectacle.20 The present study is the first attempt at a comprehensive analysis of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s career, drawing on evidence from all spheres of his life, and locating it in its wider Polish and European context. It will argue that the cardinalsordibus cum gregalibus suis quibusdam marcsecens [sic]: & ad extremum morbo Gallico confectus est’. 15 Fryderyk Papée, Polska i Litwa na przełomie wieków średnich (2 vols, Kraków, 1904); Studya i szkice z czasów Kazimierza Jagiellończyka (Warsaw, 1907); Jan Olbracht (Kraków, 1936); Aleksander Jagiellończyk (Kraków, 1949; 2nd edn, Kraków, 1999). 16 Oskar Halecki, ‘Jan Olbracht i Aleksander’, in Stanisław Lam (ed.), Polska jej dzieje i kultura (3 vols, Warsaw, 1937), vol. 1, pp. 283–95; p. 292. 17 Wojciech Fałkowski, Elita władzy w Polsce za panowania Kazimierza Jagiellończyka, 1447–92 (Warsaw, 1992), pp. 175–9; J. Wiesiołowski, Ambroży Pampowski – starosta Jagiellonów. Z dziejów awansu społecznego na przełomie średniowiecza i odrodzenia (Warsaw & Wrocław, 1976). 18 Tadeusz Silnicki, ‘Od Bazylei do śmierci Aleksandra Jagiellończyka’, in Bolesław Kumor & Zbigniew Obertyński (eds), Historia Kościoła w Polsce (2 vols, Poznań & Warsaw, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 340–56. 19 Henryk Rybus, Kardynał-Królewicz: Fryderyk Jagiellończyk jako biskup krakowski i arcybiskup gnieźnieński (Warsaw, 1935). 20 Dariusz Jach, ‘Zarys kariery kościelnej i wstępna próba ustalenia itinerarium królewicza kardynała Fryderyka Jagiellończyka’, Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Prace Historyczne 129 (2002): 51–74; Zbigniew Dalewski, ‘Ceremoniał koronacyjny królów polskich w XV i początkach XVI wieku’, Kwartalnik Historyczny 3–4/102 (1995): 37–60.

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prince – far from being a curious footnote in late medieval Polish history – represents one of the boldest royal assaults against the Catholic church’s liberties seen in late fifteenth-century Europe. The book starts by considering the political background to Fryderyk’s career. Given the paucity of English-language publications on late medieval Poland, Chapter 1 aims to provide an introduction to the kingdom’s politics since the fourteenth century, charting how the Polish monarchy became an increasingly ailing institution at the hands of the magnate party, before undergoing a sudden recovery under Kazimierz IV (1447–92). We will then examine the three principal ways in which Fryderyk Jagiellon exploited his ecclesiastical authority to make the Polish church (albeit briefly) an instrument of strong regalist rule and state-building in Poland. As a leading figure in national government (Chapter 2), Fryderyk used the political and financial resources of his bishoprics to further his father’s Renaissance monarchy project, raising taxes from his clergy, controlling church estates and castles for the Crown, dominating the royal council, presiding over Poland’s royal elections and tentatively linking church and state. Within the church itself (Chapter 3), Cardinal Fryderyk proved an interventionist governor, launching a major reform programme which, whatever its spiritual motivations, provided him with a pretext for attacking problematic independent bodies (such as cathedral chapters), while also giving the Crown closer control of the lives of clergy and laity at the grass-roots. Operating in a persistently hostile political climate, Fryderyk Jagiellon became a leading and canny propagandist for the Polish Crown. Chapter 4 probes his deployment of the church’s visual resources and the ways in which religious iconography and spectacle were used as a platform for carefully crafted royal propaganda. In the second part of the book, the focus broadens out both geographically and temporally. Chapter 5 asks what role papal Rome had to play in Fryderyk’s career, and why it did so little to prevent the apparent usurpation of its authority by a local prince. Given the brevity of Fryderyk’s life and the scope of his ambitions, Chapter 6 examines the cardinal’s legacy within the Polish kingdom, to the 1530s. Chapter 7 asks what Fryderyk’s remarkable career can tell us about the changing patterns of church–state relations and the use of royal clerics more generally in Renaissance Europe, using quantitative data in order to compare his career with those of other dynastic bishops and cardinal-statesmen. This study hopes to show that Jagiellonian Poland between 1488 and 1503 offers a compelling demonstration of the continuity of means and purpose between late medieval monarchy and sixteenth-century kingship, both Protestant and Catholic. The surviving sources for Fryderyk Jagiellon’s life are rich and eclectic. Scattered pieces of the Jagiellonian dynasty’s correspondence from the reign of Jan Olbracht (1492–1501) have survived, and the preservation of Cardinal Fryderyk’s register (of outgoing and incoming letters) for the period 1501–3 sheds particularly detailed light on his role in King Aleksander’s regime.21 The principal contemporary commentator Codex Epistolaris Saeculi Decimi Quinti, ed. A. Lewicki (3 vols, Kraków, 1876–94); Akta Aleksandra, ed. Fryderyk Papée (Kraków, 1927); Materiały do dziejów dymplomacji polskiej z lat 1486–1516 (Kodeks Zagrebski), ed. Józef Garbacik (Wrocław, 1986); BK, MSS 207, 208. 21

INTRODUCTION

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on these reigns is the Kraków professor Miechowita (Maciej of Miechów), the author both of a short ‘Life’ of Cardinal Fryderyk (composed in manuscript between 1508 and 1525), and the Chronica Polonorum, the first printed history of Poland (1519), censored and reissued in 1521.22 Fryderyk’s ecclesiastical governance is recorded in the detailed minute-books, or ‘acta’, of Polish cathedral chapters, transcripts from his bishop’s court, early printed liturgical works and a handful of episcopal decrees.23 Documentation pertaining to Fryderyk’s career and dioceses is also to be found in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano. A number of the cardinal’s artistic treasures, including gold liturgical artefacts and illuminated manuscripts, still survive today and sixteenth-century inventories of Polish cathedrals enable us to reconstruct much of his original collections.24 Virtually all of these sources (with the exception of the Vatican materials) have long been known to historians of Jagiellonian Poland, but they have not yet been viewed collectively or in a cross-disciplinary way, and several have been fundamentally misconstrued. Although the cardinal’s personality remains shadowy and obscured behind his Machiavellian letters and carefully honed public persona, a new reading of this fertile source material will hopefully enable a more nuanced image of Fryderyk Jagiellon to emerge: neither the monstrously corrupt cleric of sixteenth-century chronicles nor the flawed saint of Henryk Rybus’s 1935 apologia, but a highly competent and complex politician living at a time of great upheaval.

22 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (Kraków, 1519 and 1521). For the censorship of the chronicle, see Ferdynand Bortel, ‘Zakaz Miechowity’, Przewodnik naukowy i literacki (Lwów, 1884), pp. 438–51, 637–51. 23 Acta Capitulorum Nec Non Iudiciorum Ecclesiasticorum, ed. Bolesław Ulanowski (Kraków 1894), vol. 1; AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4; AKK, MS AA2; AAG, Acta Cap. B16. 24 AAK, AA2, fo. 228v; Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612–13, pp. 580–81; Inwentarz katedry wawelskiej z roku 1563, ed. Adam Bochnak, Państwowe Zbiory Sztuki na Wawelu: Źródła do dziejów Wawelu 10 (Kraków, 1979).

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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 Długosz, Annales, vol. 1, pp. 258–9. ‘Miles interea de exercitu Pruthenico Almanus genere appellatus Dippoldus Kikerzicz de Dieber de Lusatio … armis in toto corpore vestitus, ex acie maioris vexili Pruthenici inter alia sedecim consistentis, in equo russo exiliens, in locum usque quo Rex stabat, decurrebat, vibransque hastam, universo hostili, sub sedecem signis constituto exercitu inspectante, invasurus Regem videbatur. Quem dum Wladislaus rex, vibrata et ipse hasta sua, excipere niteretur, a Sbigneo de Oleschnicza Regio Notario, nudo et inermi, semifractam lanceam gestante ictumque Regis praeveniente in latus exceptus et in terram ex equo praecipitatus est (…) Quem dum Wladislaus Poloniae rex custodibus 1

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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 sui corporis, certatim animositatem illius apud aures Regis efferentibus, baltheo cingere ornareque militari, ac decus operis sui praemiari magnopere gestisset, non sustinuit ingenuus adolescens eo se honer a Rege tractatum et insignitum iri, sed Wladislao Regi, fasces sibi militari imponenti respondit: “non seculari militiae sed Ecclesiasticase se adiidiendum fore, et Christo malle quam Regi terreno et moratli perpetuo militare.” Tum Wladislaus Rex: “Ex quo, inquit, fortem potiorem delegisti; at ego si vixero, ad pontificale culmen te promovere, praemiaturus tuum opus, non intermittam. Ab eo tempore Sbigneus ipse charior Regi esse coepit, et in conspectu omnium singulari gratias et favore conspicuus, in Episcopum deinde Cracoviensem favore Regio processus temporis promotus.”’ 2 For the origins of the Polish monarchy, see P. Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom (Cambridge, 1970); T. Manteuffel, The Formation of the Polish State: The Period of Ducal Rule, 963–1174 (Detroit, Mich., 1982); Zofia Kurnatowska, Monarchia pierwszych Piastów (Warsaw, 1994).

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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 3 For an English-language account of this period, see S.C. Rowell, ‘The Central European kingdoms’, in David Abulafia (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 5 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 754–78. 4 Wincenty Kadłubek, Magistrii Vincentii Episcopi Cracoviensis Chronica Polonorum, ed. Andrzej Józefczyk & Aleksander Przezdziecki (2 vols, Kraków, 1862). 5 For an English-language study of Łokietek’s reign, see Knoll. 6 Knoll; J. Wyrozumski, Kazimierz Wielki (Wrocław, 1982). 7 Henryk Karbownik, Ciężary stanu duchownego w Polsce na rzecz państwa od roku 1381 do połowy XVI wieku (Lublin, 1980), pp. 33–4; Knoll, pp. 84–8; Adam Matudzek, ‘Jan Grot’, PSB 9 (1960): 115–18; Jerzy Wyrozumski, ‘Jan Muskata’, PSB 22 (1977): 291–5.

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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

The original texts of these accords are largely lost; part of the 1339 Vyszegrad agreement is published in M. Dogiel (ed.), Codex Diplomaticus Regni Poloniae et Magni Ducatus Lithuaniae (3 vols, Vilnius, 1758–64), vol. 1, pp. 38–9. 9 Knoll, pp. 97–9, 197–201. 8

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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: WładysławJogaila 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 Smolensk and Kiev, under Lithuanian rule.13 Lithuania was carefully poised between the Orthodox Halecki, Jadwiga of Anjou, pp. 49–76; Zdzisław Kaczmarczyk, ‘Dyplomacja polska w dobie zjednoczenia królestwa polskiego, 1306–82’, in Marian Biskup (ed.), Historia dyplomacji polskiej, vol. 1 (Kraków, 1980), pp. 219–94. For the text of the Privilege of Kosice, see: Leges, Statuta, Constitutiones Privilegia Regni Poloniae, Magni Ducatus Lithuaniae, Omniumque Provinciarum Annexarum a Comitis Visliciae Anno 1347 Celebratis Usque ad Ultima Regnicomitia (Warsaw, 1732), pp. 55–6. 11 Zenon Hubert Nowak, ‘Dyplomacja Polska w czasach Jadwigi i Władysława Jagiełły’, in Marian Biskup (ed.), Historia dyplomacji polskiej, vol. 1 (Kraków, 1980), pp. 299–394; Halecki, Jadwiga of Anjou, pp. 77–109. 12 For recent debates on Jogaila’s date of birth, see Tadeusz Wasilewski, ‘Daty urodzin Jagiełły i Witołda: przyczynek do genealogii Giedyminowiczów’, Przegląd Wschodni 1 (1991): 15–34. 13 S.C. Rowell, Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295–1345 (Cambridge, 1994); also ‘Baltic Europe’, in Michael Jones (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 6 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 699–734; Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades: The Baltic and the Catholic Frontier, 1100–1525 (London, 1980); 10

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and Catholic worlds: Gediminas, for example, married his daughters to Muscovite and Polish princes alike. Paganism, however, remained the religion of the ruling Lithuanian elites, a pantheistic cult based in sacred forest groves which celebrated the mounted thunder-god Perkunas. Crusader-travellers described the cremation of grand dukes with their horses on great funeral pyres and images of Perkunas’s sacred horse carved on the gables of houses.14 Despite its territorial expansion, for decades the grand duchy had been engaged in a crippling conflict which one historian has labelled ‘the other Hundred Years’ War’.15 In 1237, the crusader-knights of the Teutonic Order had established themselves on the eastern Baltic seaboard in a region called Livonia and used this base to wage war against Europe’s last pagan communities.16 Late in the fourteenth century, Lithuania began to suffer very serious territorial losses on its western flank at the hands of the Teutonic Knights. It was in this scenario, following the death of his father, Duke Algirdas, in 1377, that the young Jogaila eventually assumed sovereignty of the grand duchy after a five-year civil war. In 1385, his own rule established and in keen need of allies against the crusaders, Jogaila sent a Lithuanian delegation to the Angevin court in Buda and formally asked the Hungarian queen mother, Elizabeth of Bosnia, for the hand of her daughter, Queen Jadwiga. In 1386, Grand Duke Jogaila travelled to Kraków, where he was baptized with the old Polish name Władysław (an invocation of the ‘restaurator regni’), married Łokietek’s great-granddaughter and was crowned king of Poland. Władysław-Jogaila’s co-rule in Poland began promisingly enough. He brought with him to Kraków a political trump card, his sovereignty over the huge grand duchy of Lithuania. In the marriage treaty signed at Krewo on 14 August 1385, Jogaila did not simply offer a personal union between Poland and Lithuania; instead, he made the sparse but historic promise ‘to join [applicare] his lands of Lithuania and Russia perpetually to the Crown of Poland’.17 The dominant clique of magnate families based in Małopolska (‘Little’, or southern, Poland), assuming Poland to be the senior partner in the arrangement, cherished the notion that with Queen Jadwiga’s marriage Lithuania had been irrevocably absorbed into the Polish kingdom as a kind of uberprovince. Jan Długosz voiced the expectations of this elite in his account of the match in the Annales, which tellingly paraphrased the text of the Krewo Treaty, changing Jogaila’s ‘applicare’ into a more specific and elaborate formulation: ‘an irrevocable union and bodily incorporation’.18 The Kraków magnates repeatedly sought further, more explicit (although in practice temporary) acts of incorporation from Jogaila,

Norman Housley, The Later Crusades: 1275–1580, from Lyons to Alcazar (Oxford, 1992), pp. 351–75. 14 Lithuanian religion is discussed in Rowell, Lithuania Ascending, pp. 118–48. 15 Quoted by Housley, The Later Crusades, p. 338. 16 The history of the Livonian Order is discussed in Christiansen, pp. 93–103. 17 The text of the Krewo Treaty is given in: Akta Unji Polski z Litwą 1385–1791, ed. Stanisław Kutrzeba & Władysław Semkowicz (Kraków, 1932), nr 1, pp. 1–3. 18 Długosz, Annales, vol. 1, p. 98: ‘irrevocabili unione et invisceratione incorporaturum’.

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such as the Grodno Treaty of 1432.19 In signing such accords, Władysław-Jogaila was playing a treacherous balancing act: the union was hugely controversial in Lithuania, where it provoked rising after rising, but it formed the glue which bound the Jagiellonian dynasty to the Polish Crown. Jogaila’s union passed its first test in 1399, when the death of both Queen Jadwiga and her baby daughter in childbirth left her Lithuanian widower in legal limbo. Władysław-Jogaila threatened to leave Poland and tear up the union unless the Polish royal council confirmed him as ‘rex et heres’ in the kingdom in his own right. The magnates complied but set certain conditions, stipulating that Jogaila must undergo a re-coronation and marry another Piast, Anna, a granddaughter of Kazimierz the Great and countess of the imperial fief of Cilli.20 The lure of the Krewo union aside, the Jagiellonian monarch’s successes in foreign policy also shored up his rule. Władysław-Jogaila courted his new elites by expanding Poland to the north, at the expense of the Hospital of Saint Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem – the main branch of the Teutonic Knights. Initially invited to the Baltic littoral in the 1220s by a Polish duke keen to suppress the bellicose pagan tribes of Prussia, the Teutonic Order had quickly grown into a major regional power in its own right, based in the magnificent red-brick citadel of Marienburg (Malbork) on the Nogat river. The Knights had keenly exploited the weakness of disintegrationera Poland: the seizure of Danzig in 1308 had been the opening shot in long wars waged between Piast princes and Marienburg. In July 1410, King Władysław-Jogaila and his cousin Vytautas (Witold) brought their combined Polish–Lithuanian forces against the two states’ mutual adversary. The armies met at Czerwińsk on the Vistula, before engaging the Teutonic Order at Grunwald (Tannenburg) on 15 July, in a battle which left Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen and two hundred of his knights dead. Under the Toruń (Thorn) Treaty of 1411, the Order agreed to pay Poland a crippling indemnity.21 As Poland’s champion against the Teutonic Order, Władysław-Jogaila was taking on the mantle of Kazimierz the Great and prosecuting a legitimizing, touchstone patriotic project. Even Jan Długosz (no friend of the Jagiellonians) talked of the re-annexation of small pieces of Prussia with patriotic delight, describing in detail the original extent of the ancient kingdom founded by the legendary Lech.22 Queen Jadwiga’s widower also appealed to the pride and self-interest of the Polish elites by carefully extending Polish influence southwards, into Bohemia. In 1415, the controversial Prague theologian and reformer Jan Hus had been burnt as a heretic by the international church council at Constance. With the death soon afterwards of the hapless King Vaclav IV in 1419, Bohemia spiralled into a prolonged crisis of religious schism, millenarianism, foreign attack and interregnum. The Prague Articles of 1420 Julian Bardach, ‘Krewo i Lublin – z problemów unii polsko-litewskiej’, Kwartalnik Historyczyny 76 (1969): 583–619; Nowak, pp. 299–394. 20 Długosz, Annales, vol. 1, p. 166. 21 Housley, The Later Crusades, pp. 322–75; Christiansen, pp. 219–23; Marian Biskup, Walki Polski z Zakonem Krzyżackim (1308–1521) (Gdańsk, 1993). 22 See Jadwiga Krzyżaniakowa, ‘Pojęcie narodu w “Rocznikach” Jana Długosza – z problemów świadomości narodowej w Polsce XV wieku’, in Piotr Szubiszewski (ed.), Sztuka i ideologia XV wieku (Warsaw, 1978), pp. 135–57. 19

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enshrined the giving of communion in both kinds, free preaching and the supreme authority of scripture, and Bohemia thereafter found herself completely isolated on the European scene and the object of crusades.23 Various Hussite factions identified Poland as a potential protector against Catholic invaders and imperial incursion. While Władysław-Jogaila declined the utraquists’ (Hussite moderates) offer of the Bohemian Crown in the 1420s, he pursued a strategy of discreet sympathy towards the Hussites: his kinsman Zygmunt Korybut accepted an invitation to rule Bohemia in 1422–7 and formal theological disputations between Hussites and Catholics were held in Kraków with royal sanction in 1431, to the horror of the local diocesan hierarchy.24 This controversial policy allowed Poland to emerge as an unofficial protector or friend of the Bohemian kingdom. Most importantly of all, after the dangerous wobble following Queen Jadwiga’s death, King Władysław-Jogaila safeguarded the revived Polish monarchy by producing an heir, a daughter born to Queen Anna in 1408. As the direct descendant of Władysław Łokietek Piast and Gediminas, the baby (named Jadwiga) was acceptable as an heiress both to the Polish royal council and to their Lithuanian ruler. Under a treaty concluded in 1421, Jadwiga was engaged to Frederick Hohenzollern of Brandenburg, who was brought to the Kraków court in order to be raised as Poland’s future co-sovereign. It appeared as if Jogaila’s eventful reign had produced some kind of constitutional equilibrium in the kingdom. Just three years later, however, all his achievements would be jeopardized by one bold act and a surprising stroke of Jagiellonian luck. Showdown, 1424–1434 As so often in monarchies, it was the king’s marital involvements which triggered a political stand-off and national crisis. Following the death of Queen Anna of Cilli in 1417, Władysław-Jogaila had pursued further liaisons. In dismissing these as the lusts of a foolish old man, Jan Długosz could not mask the threat they posed to the interests of the magnate party. In May 1417, the king married Elizabeth of Pilcza and, just months after her death, Władysław-Jogaila concluded his fourth and final marriage in the Lithuanian town of Nowogródek in spring 1421, when the ageing sovereign took as his teenage bride the local noblewoman Zofia Holszańska.25 In 1424, contrary to all expectations, Queen Zofia gave birth to a son. WładysławJogaila became a Catholic dynast in the twilight of his life, and Poland was propelled into a bitter constitutional confrontation which would determine the future character of its monarchy. The birth of baby Władysław in 1424 was followed by that of his brother, Kazimierz, in 1427. Poland’s royal couple now sought an unconditional recognition 23 Thomas Fudge, The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia (Aldershot, 1998). 24 Jadwiga Krzyżaniakowa & Jerzy Ochmański, Władysław II Jagiełło (Wrocław, 1990), p. 299. 25 For biographical essays on Władysław-Jogaila’s queens, see Edward Rudzki, Polskie Królowe (2 vols, Warsaw, 1990).

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from the kingdom’s magnates that their eldest son, a child with no Piast blood born to Lithuanian parents, would be Poland’s next king. They were seeking, in effect, the severing of all connections between the Polish Crown and the house of Piast, the establishment of the Jagiellonians as Poland’s ‘natural’ royal dynasty, and asserting the king’s sole right to name his own (foreign) successor. The campaign launched by King Władysław-Jogaila and Queen Zofia split the kingdom: while they received the backing of Kraków, the major cities, part of the royal council and the Ruthenian and Podolian nobles, staunch noble opposition coalesced around the bishop of Kraków, Zbigniew Oleśnicki, who now emerged as a commanding figure on the Polish political scene. Zbigniew Oleśnicki had been born into a minor noble family with estates based near Wiślica in Małopolska. His father, Jan Oleśnicki, had found favour as a courtier in Queen Jadwiga’s household and held a number of royal offices in the Kraków area in the early 1400s. Zbigniew himself (b. 1389) was educated at Kraków University and from 1410 slowly worked his way up the royal chancellery. Initially disappointed at being repeatedly passed over for lucrative church benefices in the Crown’s gift, in 1418 Zbigniew was finally appointed a canon of Kraków cathedral. Five years later, at the age of 34, he was elected the city’s bishop, just in time to take on King Władysław-Jogaila over the Polish royal succession.26 From 1424, the Oleśnicki faction attempted to extract a heavy price from Władysław-Jogaila for his dynastic pretensions.27 At a series of national parliaments (sejms), held at Brześć (1424), Łęczyca (1425) and Jedlno (1430), the Małopolska faction made their support for a Jagiellonian succession contingent on the old king first confirming all existing magnate rights unconditionally. The very first article of the Jedlno Privilege reveals how deeply the episcopate was implicated in this resistance to the monarch: it required the king to confirm all the rights of the church in Poland.28 As the dispute degenerated, the magnates and bishops also demanded the right to choose between Władysław-Jogaila’s two sons, just as they had chosen between Maria and Jadwiga of Anjou 50 years earlier. The king, banking on the appeal of the Lithuanian union, doggedly refused to back down. With the king in his early sixties, the quarrel grew increasingly ferocious: at Łęczyca, the barons tore up a draft succession accord, hacking it to pieces with their swords before the king’s throne. In 1427, the very legitimacy of the princes was questioned when a charge of adultery was unsuccessfully made against Queen Zofia by Jan Strasz, a knight in Bishop Oleśnicki’s circle.29 The constitutional crisis grew more acute when the Piast–Jagiellonian princess Jadwiga died in 1431, taking with her the court’s last blood connection to the Piasts and leaving the Polish succession glaringly empty. In spring 1434, in the midst of this impasse, Bishop Oleśnicki set out from Kraków, bound for Basel and the ecumenical council called by Pope Eugenius IV. The bishop had travelled only as far as Poznań when news reached him Maria Koczerska, ‘Zbigniew Oleśnicki’; Górczak, pp. 148–52. Krzyżaniakowa & Ochmański, pp. 279–303. 28 The main articles of the Jedlno Privilege are reproduced in Krzysztof Baczkowski, Wielka historia polski, vol. 3 (Warsaw, 1999), pp. 131–2. 29 Krzyżaniakowa & Ochmański, pp. 282, 284–5. 26 27

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that, after nearly 50 years on the throne, King Władysław-Jogaila had died of a cold contracted (according to Jan Długosz) on a visit to hear larks singing in a forest glade – an intriguing echo of the pagan groves of his native Lithuania.30 Government by Bishop? Zbigniew Oleśnicki’s Ascendancy, 1434–1444 In July 1434, Poland’s high nobility gathered in Kraków to attend the late monarch’s funeral and convene a sejm. This parliamentary meeting is generally recognized as forming Poland’s first formal royal election, the first enactment of a political rite which would survive until 1795. Bishop Zbigniew Oleśnicki, aided by his brother, the newly appointed minister (Crown marshal) Jan Głowacz Oleśnicki, presented the infant Jagiellonians to the sejm and asked the assembled nobles and prelates to split themselves into two groups according to preference. In electing Władysław III, the sejm technically respected the principle of primogeniture and bowed to the late king’s wishes, but Queen Zofia was compelled to guarantee that the boy-king would confirm all noble privileges once he came of age. Queen Zofia’s attempts to be named regent (in accordance with the late king’s instructions) were unsuccessful, and the succession of her ten-year-old son instead marked the apex of oligarch influence in late medieval Poland. In 1434, the magnates created a regency council headed by a network of regional governors called the ‘provisores regni Poloniae’, but there was little doubt that the new government’s guiding spirit and de facto master was the bishop of Kraków.31 When Władysław came of age in 1438, Bishop Oleśnicki’s influence continued to grow, in part because of wider events in Central Europe. In 1439, the Hungarian throne fell vacant following the death of King Albrecht Habsburg, and Oleśnicki supported the young Polish sovereign’s successful political and military campaign to win the Magyar Crown. From 1440, Władysław III was an absentee ruler of Poland and his authority was increasingly feebly felt in Kraków, where Bishop Oleśnicki controlled royal patronage. Władysław III’s failing grip on his father’s kingdom was starkly revealed in the divergent policies which Hungary and Poland pursued in this decade, particularly on the landmark questions of conciliarism and crusading.32 In 1439, for example, Christendom was threatened with a new schism when the Council of Basel and Eugenius IV parted ways; the conciliarists claimed that they were the true, collective rulers of the church, rejected the medieval doctrine of absolute papal monarchy and excommunicated the pontiff. Władysław III and Hungary backed the pope, while under Zbigniew Oleśnicki’s direction, Poland ignored the king’s wishes and became a leading supporter of the Council of Basel; the bishop of Kraków received the cardinal’s hat from two Basel anti-popes for his trouble.33 The pliant Długosz, Annales, vol. 1, pp. 651–2. For a summary of scholarship on this period, see Baczkowski, Wielka historia polski, vol. 3, pp. 139–60. 32 Marian Biskup, ‘Czasy Władysława III Jagiellończyka, 1434–44’, in M. Biskup (ed.), Historia dyplomacji polskiej, vol. 1 (Kraków, 1980), pp. 395–429. 33 For Polish conciliarism, see Thomas Wünsch, Konziliarismus und Polen: Personen, Politik und Programme aus Polen zur Verfassungsfrage der Kirche in der 30

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archbishop of Gniezno, Wincenty Kot, followed Oleśnicki’s lead and also backed the council.34 Similarly, when the papal legate Julius Cesarini arrived in Buda to organize a major anti-Ottoman crusade, King Władysław and the Hungarian elites prepared for war, while the Polish government insisted on maintaining its diplomatic neutrality with the sultan.35 How did the bishop of Kraków, the third most junior prelate in the Polish kingdom and a man born into a lowly noble family, come to wield such national and international power between 1434 and 1444? Zbigniew Oleśnicki’s influence was essentially rooted in canny political management, backed up by the resources of the affluent Małopolska church. Using the episcopal incomes from his wealthy Kraków see, Bishop Oleśnicki purchased landed estates for his kin until they became one of the great landowning families of southern Poland, their rapid social rise symbolized by their flashy new castle at Pinczów. With the powers of patronage which he enjoyed as bishop, Oleśnicki packed the Kraków cathedral chapter with supporters, including his secretary Jan Długosz, his chancellor Jan Elgot and no fewer than six nephews.36 If ecclesiastical monies and appointments provided the springboard for the Oleśnicki ascendancy, it was consolidated through alliances concluded with a cluster of magnate families. Bishop Oleśnicki married his cousins, nieces and nephews to the famous noble houses which had dominated Małopolska since Polish reunification, the Tęczyński, Kurowski, Tarnowski, Melszytn and Koniecpolski.37 As leader of this mighty faction, from the 1430s Zbigniew Oleśnicki enjoyed control of royal patronage, using this power to raise his kinsfolk to high offices in the Polish kingdom. His uncle Dobiesław of Sienno, for example, became castellan of Sandomierz (1435) and starosta general of Kraków (1438), while the bishop’s brother, Jan Głowacz, also became starosta general of the capital (1439) and wojewoda of Sandomierz (1443).38 The nineteenth-century historian Stanisław Smołka denounced Oleśnicki’s ascendancy as a ‘dictatorship’ and ‘theocracy’; more recent Polish scholars have stressed the bishop’s success in combining the interests Zeit der mittelalterlichen Reformkonzilien (Padeborn, 1998) and Graff, ‘Wokół sprawy kardynalatu biskupa krakowskiego Zbigniewa Oleśnickiego’, Zeszyty Naukowe Univerytetu Jagiellońskiego 1206. Prace Historyczne 129 (2002): 19–50. 34 Silnicki, pp. 342–5; Aleksander Swieżawski, ‘Wincenty Kot’, PSB 14 (1968–9): 450–52. 35 For an account of the build-up to the Varna campaign, see Housley, The Later Crusades, pp. 86–9. 36 For the most recent study of Oleśnicki's ecclesiastical administration, see Maria Koczerska, Zbigniew Oleśnicki i kosciół krakowski w czasach jego pontyfikatu (1423–1455) (Warsaw, 2004). 37 Górczak, pp. 116–24, 153–80. For the development of the Polish nobility and the emergence of clans in the fifteenth century, see Piotr Górecki, ‘Words, concepts and phenomena: knighthood, lordship and the early Polish nobility, circa 1100 to circa 1350’, in Anne Duggan (ed.), Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe: Concepts, Origins, Transformations (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 115–55. 38 Maria Koczerska, ‘Jan Głowacz Oleśnicki’, PSB 23 (1978): 764–6; Feliks Kiryk, ‘Dobiesław Oleśnicki’, PSB 23 (1978): 762–3; Górczak, pp. 149–74. For the ranking of royal offices in Poland, see below.

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of the Małopolska magnates, Kraków diocese and Oleśnicki family in a single, potent political programme.39 The politically gifted bishop did not, however, represent the entire magnate class, and Władysław III’s reign was marked by feuding and lawlessness among the elite in the south of the kingdom. In 1439, the disgruntled Małopolska magnate Spytek of Melszytn assembled an anti-Oleśnicki confederation of 139 nobles and marched on a sejm in session at Piotrków. The bishop of Kraków had been forewarned and had remained in the capital; his brother, Jan Głowacz, and the royal chancellor, Jan Koniecpolski, were forced to hide in Piotrków castle while Melsztyn’s forces sacked the lodgings of Oleśnicki supporters. The rising was defeated in a pitched battle outside the town: Spytek of Melszytn was killed and his naked body left to rot on the battlefield for three days.40 There was discord, too, within the wider Oleśnicki family: in the 1440s, Bishop Zbigniew’s alienated cousins, the Krzyżanowski, conducted a mini-war against his estates, sacking episcopal castles, burning villages and abducting the heiress Jadwiga Księska.41 Oleśnicki struggled to control Lithuania, and the union came under severe strain: in 1440, Władysław III had appointed his younger brother as royal governor of the grand duchy, but upon his arrival in Vilnius Kazimierz Jagiellon was promptly acclaimed sovereign grand duke by the local lords, thereby alienating the Kraków government. This strange, and strangely under-studied, interlude in Polish political history came to an end in 1444. For a decade, nothing had been quite as it seemed, with Polish government nominally headed by an absentee teenager-king, and with real power concentrated in the hands of a man who was technically only bishop of Kraków. Oleśnicki’s ascendancy was the culmination of a tradition of episcopal resistance to the restored, post-disintegration Polish monarchy: the see of Kraków, a thorn in the side of the Piasts and Anjou under bishops Grot and Bodzentyn, had become the major locus of political opposition to the Jagiellonian dynasty and centralizing monarchical rule. Then, on 10 November 1444, King Władysław and Cardinal-legate Cesarini led a crusader army to the Black Sea coast and met the sultan’s regiments at Varna. The Hungarian army was massively outnumbered and Władysław III – the 20-year-old king of Poland and Hungary, the son so long awaited by Jogaila, the tool so necessary to Zbigniew Oleśnicki – disappeared into a crowd of janissaries and was never seen again. Kazimierz IV and Zbigniew Oleśnicki: The Beginning of the End, 1444–1455 News of the Polish king’s disappearance on a Balkan battlefield reached Kraków in the last days of 1444 and plunged Poland yet again into a succession dispute and constitutional disarray. These events now brought a new actor into the Polish political 39 Stanisław Smołka, ‘Spór o biskupstwo krakowskie za czasów Kazimierza Jagiellończyka’, Sprawozdania Zarządu PAU (Kraków, 1881), pp. 87–111; Fałkowski, p. 69. 40 Długosz, Annales, vol. 1, pp. 714–15; A. Sochacka, ‘Konfederacja Spytka z Melsztyna z 1439 roku. Ruch ideologiczny czy rozgrywka polityczna?’, Rocznik Lubelski 19 (1973): 41–65. 41 Górczak, p. 171.

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arena, in whom Zbigniew Oleśnicki would finally meet his match – WładysławJogaila’s youngest son, the adept 18-year-old Kazimierz Jagiellon. Bishop Oleśnicki and the royal council spent the early months of 1445 waiting for definite news of their monarch, or his body; Queen Zofia sent Polish knights to the Bulgarian lands to seek some trace of her son. When the magnates finally turned their attention to the question of the succession, preservation of the Lithuanian union was paramount in their minds. In order to salvage the old Krewo accord, Oleśnicki and the council accepted the principle of a Jagiellonian succession (so disputed in the 1420s) and formally offered Kazimierz the Polish Crown in August 1444, on condition that he confirm magnate privileges. The grand duke called the bishop’s bluff: he declined this offer, as well as those repeated by the royal council in autumn 1444 and January 1445. Kazimierz Jagiellon’s brinkmanship quickly split the ruling Oleśnicki faction. Inexplicably turned down by the Jagiellonian candidate, and in keen need of a king, the magnate party began to cast about for alternative rulers. Bishop Oleśnicki himself now offered the throne to the dukes of Mazovia, a surviving cadet branch of the Piast dynasty, while other factions courted Frederick of Brandenburg, the late Princess Jadwiga’s fiancé. Kazimierz Jagiellon finally made his move in spring 1446. Through a Lithuanian envoy, he privately expressed his acceptance of the Polish Crown to the Bełżyce sejmik (local parliament) organized by anti-Oleśnicki nobles and led by his stepbrother, Jan Pilecki (son of Elizabeth of Pilcza). The Jagiellonian candidacy quickly gained momentum, accepted by sejmik after sejmik. Ignoring Zbigniew Oleśnicki’s protests and warnings, a delegation from the relieved royal council crossed on to Lithuanian soil to discuss the terms of the succession. Kazimierz IV was crowned in Kraków cathedral in June 1447. The new monarch was compelled to sign an electoral capitulation, but Kazimierz had successfully avoided accepting the crown from the hands of Zbigniew Oleśnicki and inflicted a serious political defeat on the bishop.42 Kazimierz had managed to play the succession crisis, traditionally a moment of acute royal and dynastic weakness, to his own advantage. The first eight years of Kazimierz IV’s reign, until Zbigniew Oleśnicki’s death in 1455, were dominated by the new king’s attempts to neutralize the bishop of Kraków and his party. From 1447, King Kazimierz repeatedly delayed the royal confirmation of noble privileges promised in his pre-coronation pledge. Using Lithuania as a personal power base and counterweight to the Polish royal council, King Kazimierz spent much of his early reign in Vilnius, taking the Polish royal chancellery and royal seal with him, and thus placing physical distance between the Oleśnicki party and the central instruments and insignia of power. The new monarch was not shy of launching direct attacks on the anti-Jagiellonian opposition: in 1452, he denounced Bishop Oleśnicki, Jan Głowacz and Jan Tęczyński by name to a Wielkopolska sejmik, and later that year tried to bar these men from a meeting of the royal council.

42 The chief modern accounts of Kazimierz IV’s succession are found in Fałkowski, pp. 45–50 and Stadnicki, pp. 28–37.

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The Małopolska magnates fought back fiercely, threatening to depose the king at the Piotrków sejm of 1454, but failing to gain a critical mass of supporters.43 Recognizing that his pre-eminent position in Polish politics was being eroded, in the last years of his life Zbigniew Oleśnicki sought new weapons against the young king and his supporters. Since 1423, Oleśnicki had managed to wield huge informal power from his base in the bishopric of Kraków, and as this strategy began to falter he tried to bolster his position with new titles and offices. With the Council of Basel reduced to a rump of radicals, and its anti-popes scorned by most of Europe, in 1447 Bishop Oleśnicki offered Pope Eugenius IV his submission and obedience, in return for a cardinal’s hat from the victorious papal party. The Polish bishop duly received the title of cardinal of Santa Prisca, and his insignia arrived in Poland in December 1449.44 Armed with the red hat and cloak, Oleśnicki demanded to be recognized as the highest prelate in the Polish kingdom, de facto head of its church and president of the royal council. The archbishop of Gniezno, Władysław Oporowski, an ally of Kazimierz IV, refused to cede precedence to the bishop of Kraków, and this personal episcopal squabble became an open factional struggle in the council between regalists and oligarchs, settled only with a sejm-brokered compromise.45 The great episcopal warhorse passed away at Sandomierz in 1455. At Oleśnicki’s funeral Mass, all three cardinal’s red hats were suspended over his tomb, a pointed proclamation of his ecclesiastical authority and political power.46 Having watched the resources of the Polish church deployed against the Jagiellonian dynasty throughout his whole life, supplemented by those of the international church from the 1440s, King Kazimierz had learned a lesson that he would not forget. The Jagiellonian Breakthrough: Towards a Renaissance Monarchy? Removing the Opposition, 1455–1492 After the death of Zbigniew Oleśnicki in 1455, King Kazimierz laboured to wrest back control of those organs of government in which the Małopolska magnates had embedded themselves during the reign of Władysław III. In order to assert his personal authority, the king urgently needed above all to tame the royal council or senate, the ‘prelates et barones regni Poloniae’. Within Poland’s late medieval constitution (understood in this period as a set of political practices, rather than a body of codified rules), the royal council had emerged as the most important institution after the king himself, with a triple function – it formally advised the monarch, sat as the upper house of the sejm and elected Poland’s kings during interregna.47 Fałkowski, pp. 51–76; Karol Górski, ‘Rządy wewnętrzne Kazimierza Jagiellończyka’, Kwartalnik Historyczny 3/66 (1959): 726–59. 44 Graff, ‘Wokół sprawy kardynałatu’. 45 Fałkowski, pp. 65–70. It was agreed that the two bishops would attend alternate meetings and thereby avoid seeing one another. 46 Długosz, Annales, vol. 2, pp. 166–7. 47 See Jerzy Wyrozumski, ‘Geneza senatu w Polsce’, in Senat w Polsce: dzieje i teraźniejszość (Warsaw, 1993), pp. 21–34. 43

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The majority of places in this body, 44 in total, were held by lay officials of the Crown – the regional governors who ran local law courts and implemented royal decrees. These were, in rough order of seniority, the castellan of Kraków, starosta generals of Wielkopolska, Kraków and Ruś, 12 regional wojewodas, 23 local castellans and 5 lower starostas. The five ministerial posts in Polish royal government also carried a seat in the council: chancellor, vice-chancellor, treasurer, vice-treasurer and Crown marshal.48 By the fifteenth century, every one of these ecclesiastical and secular officials had the automatic right to sit in the royal council for life. The creation of a loyal Jagiellonian party in the council was therefore a longterm project, which could progress only as quickly as old incumbents died. The eight most senior places in the royal council / senate were, however, occupied by Poland’s bishops, and here a sketch of the kingdom’s ecclesiastical structures might be helpful. Most Crown lands fell within the western Polish province of the Catholic church, originally founded in 1000, which by 1400 encompassed the archbishopric of Gniezno and bishoprics of Kraków, Poznań, Płock and Włocławek.49 Kazimierz the Great’s fourteenth-century conquests in the south-east had, however, prompted the creation of a new eastern Polish province in 1375, headed by the archbishop of Lwów and including the bishops of Chełm, Przemyśl and Kamieniec (see Map). In practice, the more minor eastern bishoprics (located as they were in areas where the majority of the populace belonged to the Orthodox church) were so impoverished that they were typically held by middling parish priests as trophies and were of very limited political importance.50 With the episcopate, the new king was faced with an elite within an elite. In 1456, in a great stroke of luck for Kazimierz IV, eight wojewodas and senior castellans died in the space of one year, enabling the king to introduce a rash of his own candidates into the council. In May 1458, King Kazimierz controversially named his stepbrother Jan Pilecki to the senior post of wojewoda of Kraków. In 1459, a number of young magnates such as Jan Feliks Tarnowski and Dobiesław Kmita received castellanships – the king was essentially recruiting allies from a new generation of magnates, rather than from new families. Where possible, he courted the high nobles of Wielkopolska, handling Małopolska clans with care. The threat posed by the Oleśnicki themselves rapidly diminished: deprived of Bishop Zbigniew’s ecclesiastical incomes, his kin entered a precipitous and terminal financial decline from 1455.51 From the 1470s, Kazimierz IV was confident enough to take the innovative and controversial step of vesting multiple high offices in the The precise functions of these offices on the ground have not yet been studied in any detail. The best study of the structure and tenure within this hierarchy is Fałkowski; see pp. 21–2. 49 For the early structure of the Polish church, see B. Kumor, ‘Biskupstwo w Poznaniu: utworzenie metropolii w Gnieźnie’, in Kumor & Obertyński (eds), Historia Kościoła w Polsce, vol. 1, pp. 35–44. 50 Both Polish provinces also encompassed dioceses which were not actually located within the Polish kingdom: the sees of Wrocław (Silesia) and Vilnius (Lithuania) were, for example, part of the metropolitanate of Gniezno. The sees of Łuck (Lithuania), Kiev (Lithuania) and Seret (Moldavia) were subject to the authority of the archbishop of Lwów. 51 Górczak, pp. 185–91. 48

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hands of favoured magnates. Jan Rytwiański, a loyal Małopolska noble, thus joined the titles of wojewoda of Kraków, castellan of Kraków and the ministerial post of Crown marshal from 1477. Further north, Łukasz of Górka became both wojewoda of Poznań and starosta general of Wielkopolska. Through such tactics, Kazimierz IV squeezed the most dangerous remnants of the Oleśnicki party out of the royal council in the space of two decades.52 Rearing an army of loyal regional officials was, of course, only half the battle for the Jagiellonian court party. As Zbigniew Oleśnicki had demonstrated, the greatest threat to a centralizing monarchy could easily come from the ordained members of the royal council, the Polish episcopate, and from 1447 the reestablishment of direct royal authority over the Polish church became a political imperative. Whereas nobody denied the king’s right to appoint Crown officials, royal interference in the election of Catholic bishops had to be achieved through more circumspect means, out of deference to the electoral rights of cathedral chapters, which technically selected their own bishops. In order to introduce his own candidates into the church, Kazimierz IV had to find methods of controlling these elections. When sees fell vacant, the Jagiellonian monarchy typically influenced the electoral outcome through direct interventions – sending royal officials to observe the vote, or compelling canons to cast their ballots in the king’s own presence (as at Kraków in 1472) – and no doubt also using unrecorded methods of incentivization and coercion behind the scenes. The papacy was complicit in this process: in 1488, for example, Pope Innocent VIII gave King Kazimierz enhanced rights to nominate canons to Polish cathedrals, and thus hand-pick some of the electors in episcopal contests.53 The pontiffs, generally pliant in this period, were also happy to grant legal confirmation of Polish episcopal elections, turning a blind eye to royal manipulation. King Kazimierz scored his first major ecclesiastical victory in 1449, when Władysław Oporowski, the king’s favoured candidate and a former political ally of Władysław-Jogaila, was elected to the archbishopric of Gniezno, thereby securing the top place in the royal council (as primate 1449–53). Other early victories included the acquisition in 1451 of the bishopric of Włocławek by Jan Gruszczyński, another proven Jagiellonian loyalist who had accompanied Władysław III to Hungary and fought alongside him at Varna (bishop 1451–63).54 It was, however, the troublesome see of Kraków which remained the real prize. After Cardinal Oleśnicki’s death in 1455, the Kraków chapter had elected Canon Tomasz Strzempiński, an accomplished theologian, noted conciliarist and protégé of the late cardinal. Bishop Strzempiński’s death in 1460 became the cue for a messy four-way tussle over the bishopric between the chapter, king, Małopolska magnates and Rome, and a test of strength to determine who was political master of the church in Poland. The Kraków chapter initially elected its own candidate (vice-chancellor Jan Lutek of Brzezie) but Kazimierz IV succeeded in imposing his royal chancellor, Jan Gruszczyński, on the diocese instead. Fałkowski, pp. 83–4, 131–45. Vetera Monumenta Poloniae et Lithuaniae Gentiumque Finitimarum Historiam Illustrantia, ed. Augustin Theiner (Rome, 1861), vol. 2, nr 266, pp. 241–2. 54 Antoni Gąsiorowski, ‘Władysław Oporowski’, PSB 24 (1979): 142–4; Krystyn Malinowski, ‘Jan Gruszczyński’, PSB 9 (1960): 55–7. 52 53

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This smooth royal victory was abruptly derailed in January 1461. Unbeknownst to either the king or cathedral chapter, the dying Bishop Strzempiński had secretly resigned his bishopric in favour of Jakub of Sienno, Cardinal Oleśnicki’s nephew. Sienno had then rushed to Rome to seek papal confirmation of his appointment, and he now arrived in Kraków with a Roman bull and formally laid claim to his see. Sienno’s candidacy would become the last stand of the Oleśnicki party: backed by the Tęczyński, Melszytn and Oleśnicki families, Sienno barricaded himself in the family’s castle at Pinczów, insisting that the bishopric was his. Kazimierz IV ordered a siege of the fortress and had the fine Kraków town houses of all the pro-Sienno cathedral canons, including that of Jan Długosz, plundered. At the 1463 sejm, a compromise was brokered and Jakub accepted as bishop, although only after he had publicly begged Kazimierz IV’s forgiveness.55 With the Oleśnicki opposition effectively broken in the Kraków diocese, Kazimierz IV went on to assemble a full stable of loyal Polish bishops in the latter decades of his reign. Włocławek, the main see of the Kujawy district, was successfully entrusted to Jan Lutek of Brzezie, a former notary of Vytautas Jagiellon, in 1463 (bishop 1463– 4).56 In 1471, another veteran of Varna, Jan Rzeszowski, was elected as bishop of Kraków (bishop 1471–88), while in 1479 the bishopric of Poznań went to Uriel of Górka, son of the trusted starosta general of Wielkopolska (bishop 1479–97).57 Even Zbigniew Oleśnicki’s priestly nephews were allowed to clamber on board the Jagiellonian project in the church. Jakub of Sienno, reconciled to the king, went on to hold the sees of Włocławek (1464–73) and Gniezno (1474–81). A second nephew, Zbigniew Oleśnicki the younger, was nominated bishop of Włocławek in 1473 and ultimately elevated to the primateship of Poland in 1481. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the crowning achievement of this Jagiellonian ecclesiatical policy would be the imposition of the king’s own son on Poland’s wealthiest diocese in 1488. In spite of this run of successes in controlling appointments, the royal council nonetheless presented a serious obstacle to the realization of Kazimierz IV’s vision of Polish kingship; even a council stuffed full of loyal laymen and bishops still obstructed the unfettered exercise of royal power in fifteenth-century Poland. With its fixed membership of lay and priestly magnates, the council was inherently an oligarchical institution which embodied a belief in the existence of super-subjects – ‘born’ councillors with the unconditional right to advise the Crown. Such bodies carried a clear implication that sovereignty did not reside ultimately and unconditionally in the person of the anointed monarch and had their ecclesiastical parallel in ecumenical councils (such as Constance and Basel) and the College of Cardinals.58 In the fifteenth century, the Polish royal council increasingly referred to itself as the ‘senate’ rather than the ‘rada’ (council), a telling change of terminology which betrayed its aspirations to co-rule rather than mere dispensation of advice.59 F. Kiryk, ‘Jakub z Sienna’, PSB 10 (1963): 364–7. Barbara Janiszewska-Mincer, ‘Jan Lutek z Brzezia’, PSB 10 (1963): 443–5. 57 F. Kiryk, J. Kurtyka & M. Michałowicz, ‘Jan Rzeszowski’, PSB 34 (1992): 71–80; J. Garbacik,‘Uriel z Górki’, PSB 8 (1959–60): 421–3. 58 For parallels between the Sacred College and Polish senate, see below, pp. 126–7. 59 See, for example, Akta Aleksandra, nr 29, pp. 26–7. 55 56

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Having neutralized opposition within the council, a central part of Kazimierz IV’s recovery strategy was therefore to sideline the royal council altogether as best he could. In the 1480s, the king repeatedly declared that he had no ‘born’ councillors, implying that the members of the council were merely his chosen servants.60 Wojciech Fałkowski has demonstrated that, from 1479 onwards, King Kazimierz created an informal ‘private’ council of favoured allies and ministers to discuss matters of state, with the full ‘rada’ meeting only at sejms, in its capacity as the parliament’s upper house.61 Kazimierz IV also undermined the council as an institution by creating a handpicked court party or personal faction, based around the university-trained staff of the royal chancellery, who were physically and politically close to the king. One of the king’s most intimate personal allies was Jakub of Dębno, appointed vicetreasurer in 1460 before going on to serve as one of the master diplomats of the reign and ultimately becoming castellan of Kraków.62 Ambroży Pampowski, a minor knight from Wielkopolska, became one of the first members of the Polish gentry to break through into national office under Jagiellonian patronage; a graduate of Kraków university and member of the royal chancellery, he entered the senate upon being named castellan of Rozpiera in 1487.63 The most prominent members of this new private Jagiellonian party were, however, the six brothers of the Kurozwęcki family, descended from the old Kurowski magnate clan which had been prominent in national politics since the days of Kazimierz the Great. From the 1470s onwards, Stanisław and Krzesław Kurozwęcki served Kazimierz IV as chancellors, Piotr as vice-treasurer, Dobiesław as a castellan and Piotr, Mikołaj and Jan as royal secretaries.64 Towards the end of his reign, Kazimierz IV felt confident enough to use increasingly autocratic language and openly scorn the liberties of his subjects. Receiving a petition from Prussian Ermland in February 1492, for example, the king threatened to send a horde of Tartars to ravage the principality unless the envoys complied with his royal demands; witnesses recorded the Prussians’ apparent terror in the audience chamber.65 By the 1490s, Polish royal government was seemingly acquiring the authoritarian tinge which it had so long been denied. Towards the Baltic All of Kazimierz IV’s internal successes from the 1470s onwards were consolidated by the rising international power and prestige of the house of Jogaila, and by his Górski, ‘Rządy wewnętrzne’, pp. 749–50. Fałkowski, p. 182. 62 F. Kiryk, Jakub z Dębna na tle wewnętrznej i zagranicznej polityki Kazimierza Jagiellończyka (Wrocław, 1967). 63 For a study of Pampowski’s career, see Wiesiołowski. 64 Fałkowski, p. 145; Witold Kujawski, Krzesław z Kurozwęk jako wielki kanclerz koronny i biskup włocławski, Studia z Kościoła w Polsce 8 (Warsaw, 1987), pp. 26–43. The family name has variant spellings in Polish scholarship, e.g. Kurowązek, z Kurozwęk. 65 Fryderyk Papée, ‘Kandydatura Fryderyka Jagiellończyka na Biskupstwo Warmińskie, 1489–92’, in Studya i szkice, pp. 173–221; at p. 215. 60 61

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own achievements in dramatically extending the frontiers of the Polish kingdom. The apparent defeat of the magnate party must be read in the context of these external events. The king’s reign reached an early turning point in February 1454, when a delegation of harassed Prussians arrived at the Wawel palace. These men were representatives of the Prussian Confederation (Preussischer Bund), originally formed in 1440 by knights and settlers, along with the the wealthy cities of Danzig (Gdańsk), Thorn (Toruń) and Elbing (Elbląg) as an organized, armed opposition to the heavy-handed government of the Teutonic Order. In the Wawel, King Kazimierz signed an act of incorporation, by which all Prussia was absorbed into the Polish Crown, taking him alone as its lord and protector. This charter was the opening act of the tortuous Thirteen Years’ War (1454–66) waged between Jagiellonian Poland and the Teutonic Knights by land and sea. At its close, Polish forces had occupied over half of the Ordernstaat: Pomerania, Ermland (Warmia), the territories of Danzig, Kulm (Chełmno), Elbing, and the citadel of Marienburg (Malbork) itself. Under the peace treaty signed at Thorn in October 1466, the lands occupied by Polish armies became the semi-autonomous province of Royal Prussia, while the Order’s grand masters would rule the rump remainder of Teutonic Prussia from Königsberg, as quasi-vassals of the Polish king.66 The massive mobilization required to fight the Teutonic Order in such a sustained campaign acted, as war so often did, as a catalyst for stronger royal government. The reorientation of Polish policy northwards, and the shifting of the kingdom’s political centre of gravity from Małopolska to Wielkopolska (the base for frontier operations) sidelined the Kraków magnate party, already seriously weakened by the death of Cardinal Oleśnicki in 1455. Kazimierz IV fought the early stages of the Thirteen Years’ War with traditional feudal muster armies, but these proved ineffective in long sieges and the massed armed nobility had a tendency to demand political concessions before agreeing to fight, as at Nieszawa in 1454.67 In 1461, the king switched instead to mercenary troops, which effectively provided Kazimierz IV with a more pliant private army. In order to pay their steep salaries – estimated at 24 gold pieces a year for a knight and mount – the Polish Crown demanded increasingly high taxes from its subjects, enabling King Kazimierz to tap a greater percentage of Polish private incomes than ever before, in the name of a great national enterprise.68 With the conclusion of the 1466 peace settlement, the new German-speaking province of Royal Prussia provided Kazimierz IV with a major counter-lever to Polish magnate influence. In practical terms, with its Hanseatic trading ports and wealthy urban elites, Royal Prussia brought the Jagiellonian king a new and promising source of taxation, making him less reliant on the cooperation of Polish sejms. More importantly, however, under the terms of the Thorn Treaty, Royal Biskup, Walki Polski, pp. 200–259. The 1466 treaty did not explicitly apply vassal terminology to the Grand Masters of the Teutonic Order, but it did require them to swear an oath of loyalty to the Polish king, provide him with military assistance when required and accept certain limits on the Order’s policy. 67 Stanisław Roman, Przywileje Nieszawskie (Wrocław, 1957). 68 Stanisław Gawęda, ‘Rola finansowa duchowieństwa diecezji krakowskiej w okresie wojny trzynastoletniej’, Nasza Przeszłość 10 (1959): 143–58. 66

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Prussia had become a self-governing province under the Polish Crown, ruled by local diets, the Crown-appointed wojewoda of Marienburg and its own Prussian council. The Prussians pledged direct loyalty to the king alone as their deliverer and sovereign, and regarded the Polish royal council as a purely local body, with no authority over them. As the Prussian bishop Lukasz Watzenrode wrote: ‘Although this land of Prussia has been incorporated into the Crown, this land of Prussia is not the same as Poland, and the Prussians are not Poles, but a separate land …’69 Prussian separatism, like Lithuanian separatism, therefore much strengthened Kazimierz IV vis-à-vis the Polish royal council: the writ of the senate expired at Poland’s frontiers, and the king’s own person was the lynchpin which united three distinct political units after 1466. An International Dynasty Once the Treaty of Thorn had been concluded with seal and signature in 1466, the Polish king turned his attention southwards, towards Poland’s troubled Hussite neighbour. Bohemia had been ruled since 1458 by George of Podiebrad (1458–71), an isolated and ostracized figure on the international scene, almost universally regarded as a heretic. As King George advanced in years, Kazimierz IV prepared to capitalize on five decades of Jagiellonian rapprochement with the Bohemian utraquists. In 1471, Władysław Jagiellon, the oldest son of Kazimierz IV and his queen, Elizabeth Habsburg, put forward his candidacy; at the Bohemian electoral diet, Polish envoys promised toleration for Hussites and protection from the papacy. Władysław was duly elected and crowned in Prague cathedral on 22 July 1471 by Polish bishops.70 If the foreign policy of the 1450s and 1460s was dominated by the Prussian war, and the 1470s by the Bohemian succession, in the 1480s Kazimierz IV tentatively emulated Kazimierz the Great by flexing his muscles in the south-eastern frontier regions. Poland’s object here was the Orthodox princedom of Moldavia, ruled by wojewoda Stefan the Great (1457–1504) and periodically invaded by Hungary and the Ottoman sultans. In 1484, Sultan Bajezid II annexed the Moldavian Black Sea ports of Kilija and Białogród, cities which formed a crucial link in the trade routes which snaked through Poland.71 In response to this attack, Kazimierz IV marched an army into Podolia, ostensibly in order to aid the Moldavians. In the royal camp at Kołomija, Kazimierz IV extracted a public vow of homage from Stefan, thereby Quoted in Karin Friedrich, ‘Nobles, burghers and the monarchy in Poland–Lithuania: the case of Royal Prussia, 1454–1772/93’, in Richard Butterwick (ed.), The Polish–Lithuanian Monarchy in European Context, 1500–1795 (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 93–115; at p. 98. For conflicts between the various councils, see Papée, ‘Kandydatura Fryderyka Jagiellończyka’. 70 Karol Górski, ‘Dyplomacja polska czasów Kazimierza Jagiellończyka: lata konfliktów’, in Marian Biskup and Karol Górski (eds), Kazimierz Jagiellończyk (Warsaw, 1987), pp. 230–84. The fullest account of the Bohemian succession crisis is by Krzysztof Baczkowski, Walka Jagiellonów z Maciejem Korwinem o koronę czeską w latach 1471–79 (Kraków, 1980). 71 N. Beldiceneau, ‘La conquête des cités marchandes de Kilia et de Cetetea Albā par Bajezid II’, Sudost Forschungen 23 (1964): 36–90. 69

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declaring Poland’s status as superior regional power in the north-eastern Balkans, in a rebuff to Buda and Constantinople.72 Stefan received only paltry military assistance, but Kazimierz had made his point. In the 1490s, the last decade of his reign, Kazmierz IV turned his attention to the greatest prize in Central Europe – the kingdom of Hungary, so briefly and unhappily held in union with Poland in the 1370s and 1440s. Under King Matthias Corvinus (1458–90), the son of a Magyar baron who had seized the local Crown after the debacle at Varna, Hungary had become a regional superpower, conquering parts of Bohemia and Austria, snatching Vienna itself from the Habsburgs, and allying with the kingdom of Naples. Corvinus, Kazimierz IV’s great international rival, unfortunately lacked a legitimate heir to inherit these spoils. After Matthias’s death in April 1490, King Władysław Jagiellon of Bohemia won the support of the Buda court party and of Matthias’s widow, Beatrice of Aragon. He was crowned king of Hungary at Szekesfejervar and successfully fended off the armies of rival foreign contenders, most notably Maximilian Habsburg.73 However, in an indication of latent competition within the Jagiellonian dynasty, Władysław was also compelled to fight and defeat the army of his brother, Jan Olbracht of Poland. With this success, the Jagiellonians became one of Europe’s premier royal houses and the only dynasty on the continent to seriously rival the Habsburgs. Less than a century after the signing of the union of Krewo, Kazimierz IV and Władysław II together controlled the four principal states of Central Europe, father and son ruling a landmass which stretched from Silesia to Smoleńsk, from Danzig to Belgrade. On paper, this was the greatest dynastic bloc seen in fifteenth-century Christendom and the high-water mark of Polish power in Europe. In a crusading tract addressed to Innocent VIII in 1490, Callimachus (Filippo Buonacorsi), an Italian humanist employed as a diplomat by Kazimierz IV, was able to boast fulsomely of the glories of the Polish kingdom: These [lands] are truly very extensive and boast an incredible abundance of wealth, strength and resources, but no greater than the immense and almost infinite space could promise over which, enclosed by almost the same boundaries as the continent, the kingdom of Poland stretches out between the Dnieper and the Danube and the Oder from the Black Sea shore to the Baltic.74

72 Ilona Czamańska, Mołdawia i Wołoszczyzna wobec Polski, Węgier i Turcji w XV i XVI wieku (Poznań, 1996), pp. 148–53. 73 Krzysztof Baczkowski, Walka o Węgry, 1490–92 (Kraków, 1995). 74 Callimachus (Filippo Buonacorsi), Ad Innocentium VIII de Bello Turcis Inferendo Oratio, ed. T. Kowalewski (Warsaw, 1964), p. 80: ‘Maxima haec omnino et incredibilem quandum opum, uirium, facultatum amplitudinem prae se ferentia, non tamen maiora, quam polliceri queat immensum et prope infinitum spatium, per quod ei quasi, quibus orbis terrae partes, finibus circumdatum Poloniae regnum inter Borysthenem Histrumque et Oderam ab Euxini maris litore ad Sarmaticum oceanum porrigitur …’

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Poland and Renaissance Monarchy An Unposed Question Within most national historiographies, ‘Renaissance monarchy’ has had a celebratory ring about it. In England or Castile, for example, Queen Isabella and King Henry VII are popularly credited with having laid the foundations of future imperial greatness. Any visitor to Budapest today will find the ubiquitous image of ‘Matyas Király’, national hero and favourite king, gracing hotel façades, café menus and forint coins, a reminder of an expansionist period in Hungarian history. As early as the 1920s, the scholar Julius Szefjii argued that Corvinus (1458–90) should rightfully be included in the roll-call of Renaissance monarchies.75 In Poland, however, attitudes towards King Kazimierz IV have always been more ambivalent. In common (ironically) with J.R. Green, the English historian who first coined the phrase ‘Renaissance monarchy’ in the nineteenth century, Polish scholars have tended to view the combative regalist regimes of the late Middle Ages as a high road to tyranny.76 Traditional Polish historiography has had an anti-monarchist slant, insisting on the uniqueness of Poland’s early modern political development: accounts of late medieval politics tend to focus on the empowerment of the gentry rather than the flowering of the Crown, on the minor nobility who would become the architects of the kingdom’s ‘noble democracy’ in the 1550s, a system long celebrated as a source of special national pride and proof of an inherent Slav commitment to liberty.77 In Poland, the autocratic aspirations of Kazimierz IV have been regarded coyly – as an anomaly or an embarrassment. A Polish reluctance to engage with the concept of strong monarchy, and an implicit belief among foreign historians that the centralizing Renaissance state was an exclusively West European event, have conspired to ensure that nobody has yet seriously asked whether Kazimierz IV’s government fits into this category.78 It is precisely this lack of scholarly interest, however, which makes that question very difficult to answer. While late fifteenth-century government in Castile, Aragon, France and especially England has spawned an often formidable body of modern scholarship, research on Kazimierz IV’s internal rule amounts to no more than one monograph (1992), a book of essays (1984) and an article (1959).79 In this chapter, we have come across references to Kazimierz IV’s regular taxation of his subjects, new reliance on mercenary armies, centralization of power around the court, sidelining of oligarch organs and espousal of autocratic rhetoric. The main trends appear to be in place in Poland, and moreover they are in evidence exceptionally early: the Discussed in Bak, ‘The Hungary of Matthias Corvinus’. Green, pp. 5–23, 27–8. 77 For a discussion of the main trends in modern Polish historiography, see Andrzej Grabski, Zarys historii historiografii polskiej (Poznań, 2000). 78 For a rare discussion of Jagiellonian Poland as an unusually strong monarchy within Central Europe, see S. Russocki, ‘Monarchie stanowe środkowo-wschodniej Europy, XV– XVI wiek’, Kwartalnik Historyczny 84 (1977): 73–92. 79 Fałkowski; Marian Biskup and Karol Górski (eds), Kazimierz Jagiellończyk (Warsaw, 1987); Górski, ‘Rządy wewnętrzne’. 75 76

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recovery of the Polish Crown under the Jagiellonians began in the 1450s, predating Corvinus’s accession in Hungary and occurring decades before the succession of Louis IX in France (1461), Isabella in Castile (1474), Henry Tudor in England (1485) and Maximilian Habsburg in the Empire (1493). For all these intriguing signs, however, the lack of in-depth research on Kazimierz IV’s domestic policy means that these can remain only general observations. We are not yet in a position to tell, for example, how far Kazimierz IV affected a change of personnel rather than of government itself – whether he simply captured the heights of a decentralized system with a loyal faction, or whether he substantially remodelled the nature of royal power by expanding the scope and penetration of government itself. In trying to establish what manner of monarchy Kazimierz IV bequeathed to Jan Olbracht, Aleksander and Fryderyk in 1492, therefore, we must phrase the question slightly differently, asking more generally how Poland compared with its European counterparts. How far were the problems faced by the Jagiellonians in the late fifteenth century typical of those confronting their fellow monarchs? Two major difficulties to emerge from our narrative – elective monarchy and a strong culture of magnate rights – were widespread, but the long tradition of political opposition from within the church and the shallow historical roots of the Crown itself were more specifically Polish problems. Problems: Elections and Magnates The institution of formal royal elections in 1434 was a serious setback to Jagiellonian sovereignty, but it is worth remembering that Poland was by no means the only fifteenth-century kingdom where monarchy was elective. The Roman pontiff and Holy Roman Emperor, for example, had both been elected officials since the eleventh century, while the principle of elective kingship became more firmly established in Bohemia, Hungary and Scandinavia in this period.80 It was only from the 1570s that royal elections would become a truly distinctive feature of the Polish constitution, just as the practice died out elsewhere. We have seen how long years of magnate ascendancy in medieval Poland had generated a political culture which was deeply suspicious of strong kings. The charters conceded by Poland’s kings from Louis of Anjou at Vyszegrad in 1339 onwards, for example, contain a clear vision of a noble community possessed of defined social, economic and legal rights, ruled by a king with highly circumscribed powers. Perhaps the best insights into the Polish magnate mindset are found in Jan Długosz’s Annales, composed between 1455 and 1480, and it is worth probing the political values enshrined in this work more closely. Długosz dedicated his history to Cardinal Oleśnicki, whom he had served as secretary, episcopal estate manager, confidant, cathedral canon and finally executor, and the Annales are essentially an extended apologia for the bishop’s career. Accordingly, the Annales depict King Władysław-Jogaila as a dithering, drunken old man and Lithuanian interloper, and Zbigniew Oleśnicki as a fine patriot, 80 See John Gillingham, ‘Elective kingship and the unity of medieval Germany’, German History 9:2 (1991): 124–35.

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true guardian of the Piast Crown and the only figure capable of delivering good government. Długosz justifies the magnate party’s mid fifteenth-century programme by drawing a deft, implicit distinction between ‘regnum’ and ‘rex’, between the spirit of the national Crown, defended by honourable individuals, and the person of the king himself, who might be dispensable, especially if he were a foreigner and a barbarian. The Annales legitimizes Oleśnicki’s usurpation of royal authority through a series of carefully constructed scenes, which illustrate his intimacy with the ‘spirit’ of the Piast Crown and the Jagiellonians’ alienation from it. Thus Długosz has the young Zbigniew Oleśnicki make his debut in the Annales at the battle of Grunwald, heroically jumping into the path of a charging warhorse in order to save king and kingdom. Even more explicitly, Bishop Oleśnicki is shown receiving tutelage of the Crown on Władysław-Jogaila’s deathbed: Then [the king] slipped off his finger the ring with which the most glorious Queen Jadwiga had betrothed him and gave it to his chamberlain and particular intimate, Jan Schlabosz, with these words: ‘Take this ring, which is my dearest possession and which until today I have constantly worn on my hand as the most precious amongst things corruptible and give it to Zbigniew, Bishop of Kraków, as a momento of me, so that he may forgive my excesses, with which I sometimes offended His Paternity when flaring up in anger at his just rebukes. To him I entrust my soul, my kingdom, my sons and particularly Władysław, my firstborn.81

It is an indication of the permeation of these oligarch ideas that Jan Długosz wrote the bulk of his history from within the Jagiellonian regime, while serving as a tutor to the older Jagiellonian princes, royal diplomat and finally archbishop of Lwów.82 This strong culture of noble rights and limited kingship was not, however, a specifically Polish invention but rather part of a rich European heritage. The charters of Kosice and Jedlno, for example, are thought to have been based on celebrated foreign models, such as the Hungarian Golden Bull (1222) and England’s own Magna Carta (1215). Similarly, the belief that magnates could act against their (foreign) king in order to defend the ‘spirit’ of the national Crown was also well established in Hungary: in 1401, Archbishop Kanizai had led the Magyar barons in revolt, imprisoned King Sigismund Luxembourg and proceeded to create a ruling council convened in the name (or spirit) of the Holy Crown.83 In Aragon, the charismatic ‘new monarch’ Ferdinand II received a most grudging oath of loyalty from his Długosz, Annales, vol. 1, p. 611: ‘Deinde annulo, quo illum gloriosissima Hedwigis Regina desponsaverat, ex articulo deposito, Ioanni Schlabosz (…) cubiculario suo, inter paucos charo, illam tradidit, cum his mandatis: “Perfer, inquit, hoc annulum, quem in hanc diem, velut rem inter corruptibiles chariorem, in manu mea continue gestavi, Sbigneo Episcopo Cracoviensi, ut illum in signum memoriali mei deferat, indulgeatque mihi excessus meos, quibus aliquando in illum, pro iustis sui reprehensionis, ira excandescens, utens, suam Paternitatem offendebam. Habeatque animam meam, Regnum et natos meos et specialiter Wladislaum primogenitum, commendatos.”’ 82 Fryderyk Papée, ‘Jan Długosz’, PSB 2 (1939): 176–80. 83 Janos Bak, ‘Hungary: Crown and estates’, in Christopher Allmand (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 707–26; at p. 709. 81

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nobility in 1479: ‘We, who are as good as you and together are more powerful than you are, make you our lord and king, provided that you observe our “fueros” and liberties, and if not, not.’84 Across Catholic Europe, there were elites who cherished a vision of limited monarchy late into the fifteenth century. Problems: Kings and Bishops In two special respects, however, the Jagiellonian kings of Poland did indeed face distinctive problems. In 1959, Karol Górski concluded his landmark article on Kazimierz IV by arguing that the government’s most serious failing was its apparent inability to develop or nurse a robust regalist ideology.85 Faced with a large body of pro-magnate legislation, numerous circulating ‘lives’ of Cardinal Oleśnicki and Długosz’s celebrated Annales, the regalist party could produce only a tiny handful of (surviving) pro-Jagiellonian texts – two crusade orations delivered before the papal court in Rome and the Historia de Rege Vladislao, a brief account of the Varna conflict composed by Callimachus and dedicated to King Kazimierz.86 The coyness of the Jagiellonian party up to 1492 is especially surprising when contrasted with Matthias Corvinus’s grandiose deployment of Italian Renaissance arts, used to create an air of imperial splendour in Buda.87 This curious Jagiellonian reticence was most probably simply a reflection of a more fundamental problem – the relatively shallow roots of the Polish monarchy. Kazimierz IV’s more westerly counterparts could revive the relics of thirteenth-century high-monarchist theory: in the 1430s, the Castilian favourite Alvaro da Luna invoked the formulations on divine-right kingship contained in the ‘Siete Partidas’ law code, while English and French monarchs could look back to the regalist arguments and mystical rites honed by Richard II and Philip IV.88 Poland, by contrast, had no comparable medieval inheritance: in the same period, the national Crown had disintegrated into a mass of quarrelling duchies and vanished altogether for over a century. It was no coincidence that Poland was one of the only kingdoms in Catholic Christendom which had failed to acquire a saint-king in the Middle Ages, to compare with England’s King Edward (canonized 1161), Hungary’s King Stephen (canonized 1083), Bohemia’s King Venceslas (canonized 1083), France’s King Louis IX (canonized 1297), Denmark’s King Canute (1101) or Norway’s King Olaf (1164).89 From 1447, therefore, Kazimierz IV was not so much 84 Quoted by A. MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000– 1500 (London, 1977), p. 105; discussed in John Edwards, The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474–1520 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 40–41. ‘Fueros’ loosely translates as ‘rights’. 85 Górski, ‘Rządy wewnętrzne’, pp. 752–3. 86 See Jan Targowiski, Serenissimi Regis Polonie Oratoris ad Innocencium Octavum Pontificem Summum Oratio (Rome, 1486); Callimachus, Ad Innocentium VIII and Vita et Mores Sbignei Cardinalis, ed. Irmina Lichońska (Warsaw, 1962); Historia de Rege Vladislao, ed. Irmina Lichońska (Warsaw, 1959). 87 Thomas Da Costa Kaufman, Court, Cloister and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800 (London, 1998), pp. 39–49. 88 MacKay, pp. 99–104, 135–40. 89 G. Klaniczay, ‘Le culte des saintes dans la Hongrie mediévale: problèmes de recherches’, Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 29:1, (1983): 57–78.

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resurrecting a confident medieval Crown as building one up virtually afresh from the questionable materials bequeathed by the sons of Piast. Secondly, Poland was surely unusual in fifteenth-century Europe for the extent to which the local structures of the Roman Catholic church had become a locus of magnate power and opposition. It is true that all over Latin Christendom, bishops had been heavily implicated in the civil wars, elite rebellions and internal strife of the century. In Castile’s War of Succession, for example, waged between princesses Isabella and Juana, the archbishops of Toledo and Seville had faced one other across the battlefield, and in Hungary the archbishop of Esztergom led the failed 1471 rebellion against Matthias Corvinus.90 Zbigniew Oleśnicki, however, stands out from this cluster of belligerent prelates – his success in not only leading an opposition movement, but in inflicting a series of political defeats on the Jagiellonians and enjoying effective sovereignty in Poland for over a decade was almost unique in this period. As a result, Poland’s Renaissance monarchy had a special anxiety about the political colour of the episcopate from 1455 and even more reason to fear ecclesiastical autonomy than other contemporary regimes. These two predicaments of the Crown were probably linked: it was the very fragmentation of the medieval kingdom into multiple small polities which had allowed senior prelates to exploit their ‘national’ standing and carve out a dominant political role. In our opening quote from Jan Długosz, we saw the problems of the mid fifteenthcentury Polish monarchy starkly illustrated: the king alone on the battlefield at Grunwald, perilously isolated, and an ambitious future bishop symbolically staking his claim to political power, in emulation of his medieval predecessors. For all Kazimierz IV’s successes, neither of these underlying challenges had really gone away by the 1490s. These themes would run right through the career of his youngest son: Fryderyk Jagiellon’s life would be shaped both by the intense vulnerability of the high monarchy created by his father and the imperative to acquire Jagiellonian political mastery of the church in Poland.

90

J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (London, 1963); Bak, ‘Hungary’, p. 721.

CHAPTER TWO

‘Supremus consiliarius huius regni’: Fryderyk Jagiellon’s Role in Royal Government Introduction In Chapter 1, we saw Jan Długosz’s description of the dramatic launch of Zbigniew Oleśnicki’s ecclesiastical career: the Annales Regni Poloniae tell how, in the mire and mud of a battlefield in 1410, a grateful king promised a young nobleman a bishopric and thus unwittingly inaugurated an interlude in which the Polish church would become a bastion of the magnate party. That scene can be juxtaposed with an episode which occurred some 80 years later, an incident which appears to demonstrate just how effectively the Jagiellonian dynasty had regained political control of the Polish church by the close of the fifteenth century, and how determined it was to exorcize the ghost of Zbigniew Oleśnicki. On 14 December 1493, King Kazimierz IV’s youngest son, Fryderyk Jagiellon, made a triumphal entry into Kraków. He was already the highest prelate in the Polish church, but this winter pageant was a celebration of his recent elevation to the cardinalate. The city’s cathedral canons, burghers, university professors and populace lined the streets to watch the royal bishop pass through the city, and flattering Latin verses were delivered en route. Canon Jan Baruchowski greeted Fryderyk outside the Wawel cathedral, while at the city gates the canon and theologian Johannes Sacranus had delivered a floral outpouring of praise on behalf of Kraków University: We pray, beg, and beseech that this your present new visit to us in so exalted a state, fortunate by most kindly fate, may shine as gloriously as is our common expectation and desire; and that your most merciful fatherly kindliness, on account both of the splendour of your most flourishing lineage and this present new dignity, and of the most outstanding wisdom and brilliance of virtues whereby you become greater every day and more and more illustrious, may look upon and recognize the most sincere affection by which we are singularly attached to your Reverence’s splendour and generosity, and show us and demonstrate in yourself no mean proof and evidence of your benevolence and inborn goodness, that even as from such a most honourable prince the fatherland expects grandeur, the church from the glory of so great a pastor peace and increase, so this our no less afflicted and woebegone university may not despair of having and obtaining from the protection of such a most powerful and most glorious president enlightenment, shelter and peace.1 1 Jan Sacranus, ‘Oratio’, ed. J. Fijałek, in ‘Studya do dziejów uniwersytetu krakowskiego i jego wydziału teologicznego w XV wieku’, Rozprawy Akademii Umiejętności,

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This chapter will reconstruct Fryderyk Jagiellon’s meteoric rise through the Polish ecclesiastical hierarchy and the role which he played in the kingdom’s high politics between 1488 and 1503, as dynastic prince and head of the local church. We will first survey Polish domestic affairs in the last years of Kazimierz IV (1488–92), the reign of Jan Olbracht (1492–1501) and the early phase of Aleksander’s regime (1501– 03), paying special attention to Cardinal Fryderyk’s role as an advisor, fundraiser, senator and regent, a role which has traditionally been downplayed or overlooked by historians. The chapter will then assess Fryderyk Jagiellon’s overall impact on Polish Renaissance politics – in enhancing Poland’s regional standing, bolstering the regalist party in their struggles with the magnate faction, and ultimately strengthening the institution of the Crown itself. Fryderyk was at the heart of royal government when Poland’s increasingly emboldened Renaissance Crown reached its fifteenth-century zenith under Jan Olbracht, and he was there to face the backlash when that project abruptly stalled in 1501, ambushed from various quarters. Fryderyk Jagiellon’s short and brilliant political career, like a shooting star, shows both the potential and the limitations of the local church as a dynastic power base, and state-building tool, in the Renaissance period. The establishment of a royal-run church under Fryderyk did much to accelerate the building of a semi-autocratic monarchy under Jan Olbracht, but the cardinal’s final, disastrous months in government demonstrated that control of ecclesiastical structures was not in itself enough for the Jagiellonians to prevent or resist the backlash of an angry political nation after 1501. Fryderyk Jagiellon in Polish Politics, 1488–1503 The Rise of Fryderyk as a Public Figure, 1488–93 Episcopus cracoviensis: bishop and senator The sixth and youngest son of Kazimierz IV and Elizabeth Habsburg was born in the Wawel palace in April 1468 and named ‘Fredericus’ in honour of his kinsman, the Emperor Frederick III (1440– 93).2 Fryderyk Jagiellon was raised at the court along with the Polish royal couple’s younger children, Jadwiga (b. 1457), Zofia (b. 1464), Zygmunt (b. 1467), Anna (b. 1476), Barbara (b. 1478) and Elizabeth (b. 1483), largely in Kraków, but with a fivewydział filologiczny 14 (Kraków, 1899), series II, pp. 45–7: ‘suplicamus et imploramus, ut haec presens nowa tua ad nos accessio in statu tam sublimi fato dexterimo felix refulgeat pro expectacione et desiderio communi utque Clementissima tua paterna benignitas, tum ob florentissimi sui generis et huius presentis nove dignitatis splendorem, tum ob perillustrem sapienciam et fulgorem virtutum, quibus augescit in dies et splendescit magis atque magis, prospiciat et cognoscat sincerissimos affectus, quibus splendori et exteritati R. eiusdem unice afficimur, et sue benivolencie ac ingenite bonitatis monstret et exhibeat in se nobis argumentum et testimonium non illiberale, ut quaemadmodum ex tam honoratissimo principe patria lucem, Ecclesia vero ex tanti pastoris gloria pacem expectant et incrementum ipsa non minus afflicta et erumnosa Vniuersitas nostra ex tam potentissimi gloriosissimique presidis mvnimine illustracionem, tutelam pacemque se habituram consecuturamque non desperet.’ 2 Długosz, Annales, vol. 2, p. 423.

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year sojourn in Vilnius from 1479.3 Little is known about Fryderyk’s education, but fifteenth-century sources within Kraków University identified the cathedral canon and theologian Jan Baruchowski as the prince’s tutor.4 Fryderyk’s public career began in spring 1488, just after his twentieth birthday. Jan Rzeszowski, bishop of Kraków and Varna veteran, had died in late January and on 13 April the city’s cathedral chapter gathered in the Wawel cathedral, above the Vistula river, to elect his successor. In an indication that they had been influenced before the event, the canons proceeded to use the ‘per inspirationem’ method of selection reserved for undisputed and perfectly unanimous episcopal contests (‘inspired by the Holy Spirit’), and the meeting was thus more of an acclamation than a ballot.5 Canon Arnolphus of Mierzyniec emerged from the cathedral to announce the result to the waiting crowd, in the name of God, the Virgin Mary, Stanisław, Venceslas and all the saints. The chapter notary recorded in his book that the canons had elected ‘the most illustrious prince, lord Fryderyk, who although as yet having neither attained the age of 30, nor taken holy orders, is nonetheless known for his sound morals and learning’.6 The cathedral bells were rung, and the shrine’s cantors sung a solemn Te Deum. News of the happy result reached Kazimierz IV and Fryderyk at Piotrków, where they were attending a sejm; there, the king’s youngest son entered minor holy orders in the town’s parish church on 21 April, in the presence of the kingdom’s massed political elite.7 In Rome, Pope Innocent VIII promptly confirmed the appointment in a secret consistory held on 2 May, giving Fryderyk a dispensation to hold the see ‘in administrationem’ until he reached 25, the age of maturity under canon law.8 The Kraków chapter were duly rewarded for their loyal efforts when a Polish diplomat at the curia, Andrzej Róża Boryszewski, successfully petitioned the pontiff to grant the canons extended rights of patronage over certain benefices in their diocese.9 Fryderyk was formally installed as bishop-administrator in the Wawel cathedral on 24 January 1489.10 By the end of this apparently smooth ecclesiastical coup, Fryderyk Jagiellon had acquired one of the most senior public offices in the Polish kingdom. The bishop of Kraków was, above all, one of fifteenth-century Poland’s richest men, a great seigniorial lord who owned huge landed estates stretching out across Małopolska, 3 Biographical sketches of the Jagiellonian princesses are given in Małgorzata Duczmal, Jagiellonowie: leksykon biograficzny (Warsaw, 1996). 4 See Kazimierz Morawski, Historia Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, średni wiek i odrodzenie (2 vols, Kraków, 1900), vol. 2, p. 206. 5 AKK, AA2, fo. 194r. The alternative methods were a ballot ‘per scrutinium’ or an appointment committee who decided on behalf of the entire chapter, ‘per compromissum’. 6 AKK, AA2, fos 194r–194v: ‘nondum tricesimum etatis sue annum attingentem nec in sacris ordinibus constitutum vita tamen moribus et literarum scientia merito commendandum.’ 7 Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis Friderici Jagiellonidis’, printed in Rybus, pp. 203–6. 8 ASV, Camera Apostolica, Obligationes et Solutiones, vol. 83, fo. 142r. For the ten bulls relating to Fryderyk’s Kraków election, see Reg. Lat., vol. 861, fos 185v–189v. 9 Vetera Monumenta, vol. 2, nr 276, p. 247. 10 AKM, Acta Episcopalia 4, fo. 1v.

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encompassing at least 11 towns and 275 villages, as well as the princedoms of Siewierz in Silesia and Muszyna in the Carpathian mountains. As feudal lord of these territories, the bishop received seigniorial rents from his tenants, while as spiritual master of the Kraków diocese he was also entitled to the tithes (tenths) paid by local Catholics in wheat or coin.11 According to the late medieval financial records held by the Vatican, the bishopric of Kraków carried the second-highest annual income in the Polish province.12 The exact figures kept by the Camera Apostolica were, however, substantial underestimates. Zbyszko Górczak, in his recent research on the economics of the fifteenth-century Kraków diocese, has suggested its bishops received 10,000 grzywny, or 16,000 Hungarian gold florins (ducats), a year.13 The bishop also controlled substantial strategic resources, in the form of the eight castles and fortified manors built on the see’s feudal estates – at Lipowiec, Muszyna, Siewierz, Bodzentyn, Iłża, Radłów, Złotej and Sławków – as well as the episcopal palace in Kraków itself (see Map). This was a major private asset in a kingdom where the Crown itself directly controlled only some 30 fortresses.14 Throughout late medieval Europe, ecclesiastical incomes, lands and castles provided bishops with a solid platform for political influence, but in Poland their governmental role was especially pronounced; since the fourteenth century, bishops had richly reaped the constitutional benefits of the magnate movement. The bishop of Kraków, as one of the ‘prelates et barones regni Poloniae’, was automatically a senior member of the senate, the mighty body which fulfilled three functions: as a traditional royal council it advised the king, as the upper house of the sejm (parliament) it passed legislation, and as the body of the kingdom’s electors it chose Poland’s king during interregna. It was these king-making powers of Polish bishops which made them particularly powerful politicians in a European context; the prelates of Bohemia and Hungary, the College of Cardinals and the archbishop-electors of the Holy Roman Empire shared this relatively rare privilege. Fryderyk Jagiellon made his very first appearance in the royal council at the hunting lodge of Niepołomice, not far from Kraków, in January 1489.15 By convention, the bishop of Kraków occupied the third most senior seat in the senate, ranking below the archbishops of Gniezno and Lwów. The arrival of the young Jagiellonian bishop, however, instantly sparked a bitter row over precedence. At Niepołomice, King Kazimierz IV insisted that the new bishop-administrator of Kraków should take up the first seat and thus the presidency of the senate because, notwithstanding his junior ecclesiastical title, he was a prince of royal blood – a ‘princeps’. In an elective monarchy where the legal status of the king’s children was ambiguous, this was 11 Górczak, pp. 53–79; Stanisław Cynarski, ‘Sprawy wyznaniowe za Jagiellonów’, in Aleksander Gieysztor (ed.), Polska Jagiellonów (Warsaw, 1987), pp. 65–75. 12 Conrad Eubel, Hierarchia Catholica, vol. 2 (Regensberg, 1901). 13 Górczak, pp. 53–79. One Hungarian gold florin/ducat was worth approximately 1.6 grzywna (also called a ‘mark’) in this period. For a note on the values of late medieval Polish currency, see Górczak, pp. 217–21. 14 L. Kajzer, S. Kołodziejski and J. Salm (eds), Leksykon zamków w Polsce (Warsaw, 2001). 15 Kodeks dyplomatyczny Polski, ed. L. Ryszowski & A. Muczkowski (3 vols, Warsaw, 1847–58), vol. 3, nr 230, pp. 458–61.

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tantamount to an assertion of hereditary kingship, an explosive claim which touched on the most fundamental principles of the Polish constitution. While the archbishop of Lwów, Andrzej Róża Boryszewski, humbly accepted Fryderyk’s royal seniority, the Polish primate, Zbigniew Oleśnicki the younger, was less pliant. As the author of a 1530s pro-Jagiellonian ‘Life’ of Fryderyk later complained: ‘The high and mighty archbishop of Gniezno, Zbigniew Oleśnicki, stubbornly clung to his first place in the senate, and could not be induced to cede his place to Fryderyk, bishop of Kraków and the king’s son.’16 Zbigniew Oleśnicki the younger had loyally served Kazimierz IV’s regime for four decades as royal secretary, bishop, primate and vice-chancellor, but the claims made at Niepołomice awakened in him the oppositional spirit of his late uncle. After January 1489, Primate Oleśnicki removed himself from the regime and boycotted senate meetings: having witnessed 46 royal charters between July 1484 and January 1489, the primate signed only 4 between 1489 and June 1492.17 Kazimierz IV’s youngest son had been effectively installed as head of the senate, but the king had also suffered the first major episcopal defection of his reign. Two Prussian misadventures A month after the landmark senate meeting at Niepołomice, the second (albeit abortive) stage of Fryderyk’s ecclesiastical career was set in motion by events two hundred miles north. In February 1489, Bishop Nicolaus Tungen, Royal Prussia’s only bishop and governor of the small principality of Ermland (or ‘Warmia’), died in his episcopal palace at Heilsberg. In the 1460s and 1470s, Kazimierz IV’s attempts to assert control over Royal Prussia’s independent-minded German-speaking church hierarchy had met with repeated failure, and Tungen’s death provided the old king with an opportunity to install his own son in the fortified cathedral on the Baltic lagoon.18 The Polish Crown moved far too slowly: within five days of Tungen’s death, the Ermland chapter elected as his successor the canon and Thorn burgher Lucas Watzenrode (the uncle and early protector of Nicolaus Copernicus). An exasperated Kazimierz IV wrote in protest to Innocent VIII, reminding the pope of earlier promises he had supposedly made, to the effect that the see would go to Fryderyk upon Tungen’s death. The pope referred the dispute to a special commission of cardinals which ultimately ruled in favour of Watzenrode, arguing, somewhat disingenuously, that Fryderyk was too young to be a bishop. For the rest of Kazimierz IV’s reign, from 1489 until 1492, Ermland and the Polish Crown were frozen in a stand-off, with the threat of Polish military intervention hanging over Prussia like a Damocles sword.19 Stanisław Górski, ‘Vita Cardinalis Friderici Jagiellonidis’, BN MS BOZ Cim 5; published in Rybus, pp. 207–12: ‘Erat tum archiepiscopus Gnesnensis Sbigneus ab Olessnicza. Is, cum esset magno quodam et excelso animo, locum in senatu suum mordicus tuebatur, neque, cum primatem ageret, Friderico Cracoviensi episcopo, regis filio, ut cederet, adduci potuit.’ Irena Sułkowska-Kuraś, ‘Zbigniew Oleśnicki, 1430–93’, PSB 33 (1978): 784–8. 17 Fałkowski, pp. 176–9. The primate’s absence was not simply due to ill health, as he continued travelling within Wielkopolska during this period. 18 For an account of Kazimierz IV’s policy towards Ermland, see J. Sikorski, Monarchia Polska i Warmia u schyłku XV wieku (Olsztyn, 1978). 19 See Fryderyk Papée, ‘Kandydatura Fryderyka Jagiellończyka na Biskupstwo Warmińskie, 1489–92’, in Studya i szkice z czasów Kazimierza Jagiellończyka (Warsaw, 1907), 16

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Ermland was not the only Prussian prize which Kazimierz IV contemplated for his youngest son in the last days of his reign. The Jagiellonian court’s celebrity humanist advisor, the Italian exile Callimachus, and even the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, suggested to the Polish king in the 1480s that Fryderyk should stand for election as grand master of the Teutonic Order in Prussia – potentially a spectacular geopolitical coup which would have neutralized one of the Crown’s most difficult enemies, confirmed the Order’s vassal status following the 1466 peace and endowed Fryderyk with a large Baltic state to govern.20 By the time of Kazimierz IV’s death, however, both these Prussian projects had come to nothing. Instead, Fryderyk was now required to assist the dynasty in far graver matters at home. The Royal Election of 1492 Kazimierz IV died at Grodno castle in Lithuania in June 1492, after a reign of 45 years. His last act was the severance of the Polish–Lithuanian union: he named his third son, Jan Olbracht, as his chosen successor in the Korona (Crown lands), and his fourth son, Aleksander, as grand duke of Lithuania.21 Fryderyk and Jan Olbracht were awaiting their father at the Radom sejm when they received news of his death; from there, they accompanied the late king’s body to Kraków.22 The old king’s funeral Mass was celebrated in the Wawel cathedral, and the meeting of the electoral sejm was set for Assumption Day in Piotrków. The omens during the build-up to the Polish royal election were ominous for the ruling dynasty. For Primate Oleśnicki, now comprehensively alienated from the Jagiellonians, the kingdom’s first election for almost half a century provided an ideal opportunity to punish the ruling house. The primate joined forces with an antiJagiellonian candidate – Duke Janusz of Mazovia, ruler of an autonomous duchy within the Polish Crown and the descendant of a cadet branch of the Piast dynasty. Oleśnicki placed a small army at Duke Janusz’s disposal: ‘a formidable multitude’ according to a later chronicle, 1,500 men according to an eyewitness.23 The electors of Royal Prussia, travelling to their first royal election since their incorporation into the kingdom in 1466, complained that they had been harassed and delayed by the primate’s agents.24 An equally serious threat was brewing within the Jagiellonian dynasty itself. There were doubts whether Kazimierz IV’s oldest living son, pp. 173–221; Karol Górski, Łukasz Watzenrode, życie i działalność polityczna 1447–1512 (Warsaw & Wrocław, 1973); Hans Schmauch, ‘Der Streit um die Wahl des ermländischen Bischofs Lukas Watzenrode’, Altpreussische Forschungen 10 (1933): 65–101. 20 Józef Garbacik, Kallimach jako dyplomata i polityk (Kraków, 1948), p. 147. The Habsburg intervention is reported by Papée, ‘Kandydatura Fryderyka Jagiellończyka’, p. 184. 21 King Kazimierz thus bypassed his oldest living son, Władysław, already king of Bohemia (1471) and Hungary (1490). The king’s first-born son, baptised Kazimierz, had died in 1484. 22 Jach, p. 66. 23 Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 387, pp. 401–2, ‘mit funffczeenhundert mannen’; Bernard Wapowski, Kroniki Bernarda Wapowskiego, ed. J. Szujski (Kraków, 1874), p. 15. 24 Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 386, p. 401.

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Władysław, king of Bohemia and Hungary, would abide by his dying father’s wishes and accept the accession of a younger brother in Poland. The fraternal relationship between Władysław and Jan Olbracht was already strained: during the Hungarian succession crisis of 1490, the two had fought pitched battles in northern Slovakia over the Crown of St Stephen.25 As the electors gathered at Piotrków in August 1492, the air was thick with rumours that Władysław Jagiellon would imminently arrive with a great army and seize the Polish Crown by force. Recent events in Hungary offered a salutary warning: the death of King Matthias Corvinus in 1490 had triggered three years of civil war, foreign invasion, election and counter-election. As one of the Prussian electors anxiously wrote on the road to Piotrków: ‘God grant, that it will not be here as it was in Hungary.’26 As the Jagiellonians’ only agent within the senate, Bishop Fryderyk acted decisively in summer 1492. Shortly after his father’s funeral, he borrowed the sizeable sum of 5,675 florins from the Kraków city council and used these funds to hire a troop of 600 mercenaries, whom he led to Piotrków in person.27 Fryderyk successfully installed himself in Piotrków castle, while Primate Oleśnicki and Duke Janusz camped with their forces outside the town walls.28 Ten days of opaque negotiation followed, with Fryderyk emerging as a prime mover: the chronicler Miechowita wrote that the bishop of Kraków enjoyed ‘presiding authority’ throughout the electoral sejm, and the Prussian electors treated directly with him as head of the Jagiellonian party.29 In order to mend bridges with Royal Prussia, Fryderyk met with Lucas Watzenrode and recognized him as bishop of Ermland, apparently surrendering his own claims.30 Poland’s 40 electors finally moved to vote on 27 August. The senate and Prussian envoys heard a Mass of the Holy Spirit, expelled all observers from the main castle chamber, conducted an oral ballot and unanimously elected Jan Olbracht as his father’s successor. Dignitaries announced the result to the populace and lower nobility and a Te Deum was sung in Piotrków parish church.31 A rider carried the news to Kraków, where ‘to the joy of everybody’, many fires were lit, and many jugs of wine and beer were drunk.32 Jan Olbracht himself had no doubts as to who the architect of this felicitous victory had been. In a charter issued almost a decade later, the Polish king still The conflict is discussed in Baczkowski, Walka o Węgry. Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 382, p. 398: ‘Got gebe, das wer nicht also kissen, also in Wngern.’ 27 The loan is recorded by Papée, Jan Olbracht, p. 31. Prussian envoys noted that ‘ist der here bisschoff von Crokaw mit sechshundert pferden’, Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 387, p. 402. 28 It is not clear which of the parties arrived at Piotrków first or why they took up their respective positions: Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 346. 29 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 346, ‘cum auctoritate presidentiae’; Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 388, pp. 402–3. 30 Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 387, p. 402. 31 Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 390, p. 404. 32 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 347, ‘(mirum immodum omnibus gratulantibus et gaudientibus) ignes multis locantibus, vasa quoque vini et cervisiae exponentibus …’ 25 26

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listed as the foremost of Fryderyk’s political services the ‘brothery love’ which he demonstrated ‘during the interregnum after the death of our most serene former King Kazimierz, his and Our father’.33 The services which the bishop of Kraków had rendered the new king in 1492 would soon be handsomely rewarded. Primate and Cardinal When the politically humiliated Primate Oleśnicki crowned Jan Olbracht king of Poland in Kraków in September 1492, observers noted that the archbishop was ‘infirm and ailing with dropsy’.34 The prelate’s obviously failing health prompted the Jagiellonians to move quickly. Fryderyk had so far kept open the door to a future secular career by avoiding full consecration as a priest, but he now dispatched an urgent petition to Rome, asking for permission to receive in rapid succession the higher clerical orders of sub-deacon, deacon and priest, which would render him eligible for an archbishopric.35 In January 1493, Fryderyk placed a personal agent (and voter) inside the Gniezno chapter, when his old tutor Jan Baruchowski was named cantor-canon of the cathedral on the strength of letters of appointment secured by the Crown from the Holy See.36 Zbigniew Oleśnicki the younger died at the manor of Łowicz in March 1493, and the archiepiscopal election was scheduled for the following month. On the eve of the chapter’s crucial meeting, King Jan Olbracht surprised the canons by arriving in Gniezno in person, ostensibly for a devotional visit to the shrine of Saint Wojciech (Adalbert); this distinguished pilgrim nonetheless came with armed men.37 When the Gniezno chapter gathered to vote, Jan Olbracht strode into their chapel and delivered a short speech. He reminded the canons of the political importance of the primate, ‘the first councillor of this realm’, adding that ‘we cannot think of any more suitable candidate than our dear brother, the Reverend Lord Fryderyk, to whose election we give our consent.’38 Fryderyk was duly elected primate of Poland ‘per inspirationem’, but the meeting was heated. The Gniezno canons pointedly amended their electoral rules in order to deter any such future interventions by passing monarchs, and Canon Klemens of Piotrków lodged an official protest with the chapter notary at the use of the ‘per inspirationem’ method.39 33 AGAD, MK 17, fo. 221: ‘benvolenciam affectum fraternum et studium ferventissimum per eius caritatem fraternam sub vacacionem regni post mortem Serenissimis olim Regis Kazimiris nostri suique genatoris.’ 34 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 348: ‘debilem et hydropicum’. 35 Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 203. Fryderyk’s letter to Alexander VI of January 1493 appears to relate to this petition: see BK, MS 208, fos 31v–32r. 36 AAG, Acta Cap. B16, fo. 179. 37 Acta Capitulorum, nrs 2390–91, p. 542: ‘cum milicia’. This kind of direct royal intervention had been seen only once in the recent past, when Kazimierz IV ‘observed’ the election of Jan Rzeszowski as bishop of Kraków. See Kiryk, ‘Jan Rzeszowski’. 38 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2396, pp. 542–3. ‘Supremus consiliarius huius regni … non sentimus, qui in premissis esset utilior, nisi Reverendissimus dominus Fredericus … frater noster carissimus, in quem consentimus.’ 39 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2398, p. 543; AAG, Acta Cap. B16, fo. 193.

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As primate-elect of Poland, Fryderyk now acquired control of another large slice of ecclesiastical lands and incomes: it is estimated that the archbishop of Gniezno held some 20 per cent more land than the bishop of Kraków, with a total of 13 towns and 292 villages, as well as the castles of Uniejów, Łowicz and Opatówek (see Map).40 Fryderyk’s authority as president of the Polish senate, and the king’s legal deputy, was now beyond dispute. The royal archbishop-elect dispatched two members of his personal staff, Piotr Wapowski and Mikołaj Kotwicz, to Rome in order to secure papal confirmation of the Jagiellonian breakthrough in Gniezno.41 Alexander VI not only issued the necessary confirmation bulls for the archbishopric in September 1493 but, complying with Jan Olbracht’s personal petition, also took the highly unusual step of granting Fryderyk a dispensation to occupy the sees of Kraków and Gniezno simultaneously – not just as administrator-bishop, the usual polite cover for ostentatious pluralism in this period, but as full consecrated pastor once he came of age.42 Even greater prizes were yet to come. From the very first days of Fryderyk’s precocious ecclesiastical career, Kazimierz IV had lobbied hard for a red hat for his son. Writing to Innocent VIII in 1489, for example, King Kazimierz had openly asked for ‘further ornaments’ for Fryderyk – possibly in the hope that a cardinalate would cement the prince-bishop’s superiority over the troublesome Primate Oleśnicki.43 The oration Ad Innocentium VIII de Bello Turcis Inferendo, written by Callimachus on the occasion of a papal crusading conference in 1490, concluded with a lengthy explanation of why Fryderyk Jagiellon would make a splendid cardinal, as a serious, learned, princely and virtuous youth.44 When Wapowski and Kotwicz arrived in Rome in autumn 1493, on the eve of the first mass creation of cardinals of Alexander VI’s pontificate, they were in exactly the right place to reiterate these requests. The names of 12 new Roman cardinals were published on 20 September 1493: twelfth on the list was ‘Fredericus, administrator cracoviensis et gnesnensis, frater Regis Poloniae’, with the title of cardinal-presbyter of Santa Lucia in Septem Soliis.45 In December 1493, Fryderyk made his triumphal entry into Kraków as bishop, primate and cardinal. Having come of age under canon law in April 1493, Fryderyk was formally installed in the Wawel cathedral as bishop, celebrating his first public Mass as cardinal on Christmas Day.46 Eight months later, on 28 August 1494, he was enthroned in Poland’s metropolitan cathedral and received the pallium which had been brought from Rome – a stole blessed at St. Peter’s tomb and a universal symbol of archiepiscopal authority.47 His cardinal’s insignia, the red hat and cloak, finally Cynarski, pp. 65–75. AAG, Acta Cap. B16, fo. 201v. 42 The bulls for the Gniezno appointment can be seen in ASV, Reg. Lat., vol. 933, fo. 330–333v. For Jan Olbracht’s petition, see Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 398, p. 413. 43 ‘Materiały do historyi Jagiellonów z archiwów weneckich’, ed. A. Cieszkowski, Roczniki Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk Poznańskiego 34/19 (1892): 68–9. 44 Callimachus, Ad Innocentium VIII, pp. 70–73. 45 ASV, Arch. Concist., Acta Misc., vol. 3, fos 5–6. Alexander VI’s letter announcing the creation to King Jan Olbracht is published in Rybus, pp. 212–13. 46 Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 204. 47 ASV, Reg. Lat., vol. 960, fo. 93–93v; Acta Capitulorum, p. 550. 40 41

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arrived in Poland during Eastertide 1495.48 By the age of 25, Fryderyk Jagiellon had become the most powerful cleric ever seen in the Polish kingdom. Cardinal Fryderyk and King Jan Olbracht, 1492–1501 Anti-Ottoman Action Jan Olbracht was remembered by sixteenth-century chroniclers as a chivalric knight hungry for military glory, a gifted linguist, majestic ruler and an avid reader of history books.49 His brief reign was dominated by three main themes: conflict with the Ottoman empire, the exertion of Polish influence in Central Europe and the increasingly autocratic exercise of royal power within Poland itself. In all three spheres, Cardinal Fryderyk played a pivotal role as an advisor, fundraiser, ally and steadying hand behind the regime. One of the most pressing questions facing the Polish Crown in 1493 was what its proper response should be to the Ottoman empire’s steady encroachment into south-eastern Europe. Although Poland did not yet share a direct frontier with the Ottomans, the country had already lost one Jagiellonian sovereign to this geopolitical and religious struggle – at Varna in 1444 – and in 1484 Constantinople had struck its first direct blow against Polish interests with the annexation of the Black Sea trading ports of Kilija and Białogród from Moldavia, a princedom intermittently under Polish sovereignty.50 With the Jagiellonian bloc forming a Catholic arc across Christendom’s eastern frontier after 1490, a grand dynastic crusade involving Hungary, Poland, Bohemia and Lithuania seemed a promising option. In April 1494, Jan Olbracht and Fryderyk travelled to a dynastic summit in the Slovakian town of Levoca, where they met King Władysław and Zygmunt Jagiellon.51 During the two-week gathering, hours of discussion were devoted to the crusade question, yet by the time that Fryderyk celebrated the summit’s closing Mass with great pomp, no agreement on military action had been reached. Determined to press ahead regardless, Jan Olbracht’s mind now turned to organizing a unilateral Polish campaign to recapture the Black Sea ports, a national defensive war but not a crusade per se.52 The preparations were financed solely from domestic sources – by royal taxes voted by the sejm in 1496 ‘for liberty, the faith and the salvation of the Republic from great peril’, and a series of clerical contributions orchestrated by Cardinal Fryderyk.53 Under Fryderyk’s direction, two provincial

48 49 50 51

Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 204. Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 356; Wapowski, pp. 17, 19. See Beldiceneau. L. Finkel, ‘Zjazd Jagiellonów w Lewoczy r.1494’, Kwartalnik Historyczny 28 (1914):

315–50. See Natalia Nowakowska, ‘Poland and the crusade in the reign of King Jan Olbracht, 1492–1501’, in Norman Housley (ed.), Crusading in the Fifteenth Century: Message and Impact (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 128–47. 53 For the royal tax decrees, see Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nrs 415–17, pp. 427–34. 52

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synods (national assemblies of clergy) in July 1496 and July 1497 each voted a voluntary grant, a so-called ‘subsidium charitativum’, towards the king’s war.54 Jan Olbracht demanded military assistance from his vassal states of Mazovia and Teutonic Prussia, agreed to rendezvous with Grand Duke Aleksander’s Lithuanian troops in Podolia and allowed Poland’s 1489 truce with the sultan to lapse. By the time the royal army mustered at Sandomierz in early summer 1497, the king had raised one of the largest forces seen in fifteenth-century Poland. It was well equipped with heavy artillery, including two cannon so large that 90 horses were required to drag them.55 It was at this moment, as Jan Olbracht was ready to wage war, that Cardinal Fryderyk suffered serious misgivings and the brothers had their only documented falling-out. Fryderyk sent a last-minute message to the king at Przemyśl, begging him to call off the expedition because of the enormous military and political risks – the danger of antagonizing both the famously able and crafty Stefan of Moldavia and the mighty magnates of Hungary. This advice was rudely rebuffed. In the words of one chronicler, Jan Olbracht sent this ascerbic reply to his brother: ‘It is for you to tend souls, not to judge which wars and which enemies I should fight.’56 Jan Olbracht’s large army reached the banks of the Dniester, the southern frontier of the Polish kingdom, in August 1497. Our earliest account of what happened next comes from Cardinal Fryderyk’s own pen: His Majesty, motivated by the needs of the kingdom and the entire Christian faith, set out to capture the Moldavian ports which had been occupied by the Turk. Wojewoda Stefan [of Moldavia] had repeatedly asked the king for his assistance, but when the royal army reached Moldavian soil this ruler, with his usual treachery, declared that he was an ally of the sultan and would help him in any way he could. The king was thus forced to turn against this miserable Moldavian, and take up his sword to clear a path for his army [by laying siege of the capital of Suceava]. Just then, envoys arrived from the king of Hungary, saying that [Jan Olbracht] should immediately cease his hostile actions, or else it would lead to serious misunderstandings between the Hungarian king and our own monarch. Once the terms of a truce had been agreed, our army was then attacked by the Turks and Moldavians, with the loss of military equipment and men. A number of knights have been taken into captivity, and this and the other set-backs occurred largely because of the poor health of the king, who was then seriously ill.57 54 AAG, Acta Cap. B16, fo. 261v; Acta Capitulorum, nrs 2482, 2487, p. 558; Karbownik, pp. 133–4. 55 For accounts of the campaign preparations, see Czamańska, pp. 167–9 and Janusz Smołucha, Papiestwo a Polska w latach 1484–1526: kontakty dyplomatyczne na tle zagrożenia tureckiego (Kraków, 1998), pp. 59–69; Wapowski, p. 27. 56 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 350; Wapowski, pp. 24–5: ‘tuum est sacra curare, non exquirere, que bella ego aut quos hostes agredi debeam.’ 57 BK, MS 208, fo. 83 (ninteenth-century transcription and translation from a lost original): ‘Król Jegomość tak potrzebami państwa jak i powszechnej wiary chrześciańskiej wyruszył był na zdobycie owego obozu na Wołoszech, który Turek był zajał. Do tego przedcięwzięcia pokilkakroć wzywał Króla Jegomość Wojewoda Wołocki. Gdy jednakże wyprawa nastąpiła Wołoch sam wedle przyzwyczajenia swego do zdradu oświadzcył, że chce zupełnie stanąć po stronie Turka i jego wspierać. Tak więc Król Jegomość zmuszony został oręż swój na tego nędznego Wołocha zwrócić i mieczem tamtędy torować sobie drogę

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Cardinal Fryderyk’s succinct description of the 1497 Moldavian campaign – labelled ‘that most unfortunate expedition’ by Miechowita – belies the full drama of what befell the Polish army. The three-week siege of Suceava proved fruitless, as disease spread through Jan Olbracht’s forces, confining the king himself to his bed. On their humiliating northward retreat, Jan Olbracht’s forces passed through a narrow tract of forest outside the village of Codrul Cosminului. There, they were ambushed by a mixed force of Moldavians, renegade Magyar nobles, Ottoman Turks and Crimean Tartars. Large numbers of Polish knights were killed, including at least one senator, the palatine of Ruthenia. Miechowita describes nobles being led off into Turkish slavery, tied in pairs by their long hair.58 It was a defeat which the Polish nobility would remember for a long time. The sorry remnants of the king’s great army reached the walls of Lwów in November 1497. It was Cardinal Fryderyk, lodging in the Wielkopolska village of Zduny, who received Jan Olbracht’s first official account of what had passed, and who in turn informed his fellow senators.59 And it was to the archiepiscopal castle of Łowicz, not to Kraków, that the king travelled once he was finally well enough to leave Lwów in January 1498; there, the brothers spent two weeks in private talks.60 Embittered and shaken by events in Moldavia, Jan Olbracht suffered some form of moral or psychological collapse. Sixteenth-century chronicles carry lurid tales of the king, dressed as a commoner, whoring, drinking and brawling in the taverns of Kraków.61 Whatever occurred was serious enough to prompt Cardinal Fryderyk to make desperate epistolary appeals to Queen Mother Elizabeth to calm her son, while he himself addressed the monarch in uncompromising terms: ‘In the name of God I ask Your Majesty again to remember yourself, and have some thought for the miserable condition of your kingdom and its inhabitants …’62 As Fryderyk urged the king to act, Poland’s strategic situation steadily worsened. Sultan Bajezid II repaid Jan Olbracht’s aggression in Moldavia with the first ever Ottoman raids on Polish territory: in April–May 1498, a Turkish force appeared before the walls of a startled Lwów and raided its environs. This attack was followed with a Crimean Tartar raid and a second janissary expedition against Podolia in November. The Franciscan chronicler, Jan of Komorowo, left a graphic account of priests slain on the roadside, high nobles carried bound into slavery, and stout

dokąd pierwotnie iść zamierzał. Gdzyzię to dzieło Jegomość Król Węgierski przysyła posłów prosząc, aby utrzymano kroki nieprzyjacielskie, aż się tego Król Węgierski z naszym Królem Jegomości względem tego nie porozumieją. Gdy więc po złożeniu warunków rozejmu [na] wojska nasze napadły … Turków i Wołochów wyrządziła się strata w sprzętach i ludziach. Niektórzy bowiem z szlachty dostali się tam w niewolę, co, jak i inny szkody, zdarzyło się szczególnie dla złego zdrowia Króla Jegomości, które nalewczas mocno nadwerężone było.’ 58 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1519), p. 350. 59 BK, MS 208, fo. 83. 60 Papée, Jan Olbracht, p. 157. 61 Wapowski, p. 33; Kromer, p. 667. 62 BK, MS 207, fos 62v–63v: ‘Item igitur rogamus Vestram Maiestatem propter Deum: excutiat se tandem et respiciat ad miseram conditionem hujus infelicis regni et habitatorum ipsius …’

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peasants felling Turks with axes.63 Turkish chronicles nicknamed the raid ‘the war of abundant booty’, and Kraków braced itself for a direct assault, hastily throwing up a barbican, as rumours spread that the Ottoman raiders had repeatedly asked locals to point them towards ‘Gracovia’. Jan Olbracht hurriedly stationed mercenary troops along Poland’s south-eastern frontier but these served for only a few months, until the Crown could no longer pay their salaries.64 Again, Fryderyk was instrumental in providing much-needed funds from the Polish church, with a poll tax on all clergy resident in towns in 1498 and a further synod subsidy in April 1501.65 In order to coordinate the secular tax-raising effort, Fryderyk, meanwhile, tirelessly toured sejms and sejmiks (regional parliaments), meeting with local nobles across Wielkopolska in spring 1501. At these gatherings, the cardinal discussed defence and taxes with the provincial nobility, canvassed support for Crown policy, requested fiscal aid and reported back to Kraków on local opinion.66 Although Tartar raids continued throughout 1500, the threat of war with Poland’s Christian neighbours was gradually averted. In 1498 and 1499, Polish, Hungarian and Moldavian diplomats crafted a series of mutual peace treaties, and in December 1499 Cardinal Fryderyk travelled to Bratislava as Poland’s representative for more crusade talks with King Władysław.67 The entire interlude ended as it had begun, with an inconclusive dynastic summit in Slovakia. Polonization: Prussia, Mazovia and Beyond If the botched Moldavian campaign of 1497 was Jan Olbracht’s boldest attempt to assert and extend Polish power within Central Europe, it was certainly not the only one. At least three regions closer to home – the duchy of Mazovia, Royal Prussia and Teutonic Prussia – felt the force of the king’s ambitions after 1493, as aggressive centralization and Polonization formed two major themes of the reign. As rulers of medieval Lithuania, the Jagiellonian–Gedimin dynasty had enjoyed a close alliance with the Piast dukes of Mazovia, but as kings of Poland the Jagiellonians increasingly viewed the vassal duchy as an awkward blot on their royal sovereignty. Duke Janusz died in 1492, just a few months after his electoral misadventure at Piotrków, and was duly succeeded by his brother Konrad III. In 1495, Jan Olbracht appeared on the banks of the Vistula with a small army and occupied the eastern provinces of Mazovia and the city of Płock by force.68 The see of Płock, Mazovia’s principal bishopric, fell vacant two years later, with the death of Piotr of Chotków in November 1497. Cardinal Fryderyk travelled to the 63 Jan of Komorowo, Memoriales Ordiniis Fratrum Minorum Fr. Ioannes de Komorowo Compilatum, ed. X. Liske & A. Lorkiewicz, Monumenta Poloniae Historica 5 (Lwów, 1888), pp. 268–75. 64 Z. Spieralski, ‘Po klęsce bukowińskiej 1497 roku: pierwsze najazdy tureckie na Polskę’, Studia i Materiały do Historii Wojskowości 9:1 (1963): 45–57; O. Górka, ‘Nieznany żywot Bajezida II’, Kwartalnik Historyczny 52 (1938): 375–427. 65 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2566, p. 571; Karbownik, pp. 122–3. 66 Jach; Papée, Jan Olbracht, p. 198; BK, MS 207, fos 44–5v. 67 Materiały do dziejów, nr 25, pp. 65–9; nr 28, pp. 81–9; nr 30, p. 95. 68 Papée, Jan Olbracht, pp. 93–102.

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city and informed the chapter that he was putting his own name forward for election, but found his candidacy challenged by the Piast diplomat and local canon Mikołaj Bartnicki. Bartnicki comprehensively won the ensuing vote, but in an interesting sleight of hand Fryderyk immediately persuaded the bishop-elect to ‘donate’ these votes to him. Having established Jagiellonian ecclesiastical and political authority over the see of Płock, Fryderyk announced that he would not in fact take up the office himself, but ‘give’ it to a rising young star in the royal chancellery, Jan Lubrański.69 Aggressive ecclesiastical intervention thus consolidated the king’s physical coercion of the Mazovians. Although he was tempted by prizes in the south-east, Jan Olbracht, like his father, remained keen to bind both Prussias more closely to his throne. The barely healed wound of the Ermland bishopric dispute was picked at again: in 1499, diplomats in Rome reported with alarm that Fryderyk and Jan Olbracht were trying to secure a bull naming the cardinal as Watrzenrode’s successor in the see.70 In 1500, more serious trouble began to brew in Teutonic Prussia, when the crusader knights elected George Wettin, brother of the elector of Saxony, as their new grand master. George flatly refused to recognize the 1466 Treaty of Thorn or to perform the act of homage before Jan Olbracht which that text demanded. Fryderyk was sent to conduct highlevel talks with the Order in 1501; privately, the cardinal advised his brother to shore up his Prussian fortresses and prepare for war.71 In early summer 1501, Jan Olbracht himself travelled to Thorn to hold negotiations with Grand Master George’s envoys. Talks had barely got under way, however, when on 10 June the Polish king was suddenly struck down with paralysis, and the Teutonic envoys privately sent word to Königsberg that Jan Olbracht was dying.72 Royal Power within Poland Notwithstanding the growing military and financial crises which beset Jan Olbracht’s throne from 1497, his rule was characterized by increasingly overt assertions of Jagiellonian power and displays of autocratic behaviour within Poland itself. Like Kazimierz IV before him, Jan Olbracht was reluctant to concede any limitations on his power as an anointed Catholic king. Even an observer from the fringes of the royal court, such as Miechowita, could pointedly characterize Jan Olbracht in the Chronica Polonorum as a fantastically gifted monarch, undone by his refusal to take advice, and references to unheeded council punctuate Miechowita’s account of the reign.73 69 Z. Zyglewski, ‘Jan Lubrański, biskup płocki, 1497–8’, Nasza Przeszłość 82 (1994): 97–113; ASV, Reg. Lat. 1014, fos 211–14. Notwithstanding this event, Duke Konrad continued to regard Cardinal Fryderyk as his chosen mediator with King Jan Olbracht and the Polish senate, and the two men’s correspondence from 1498 kept open a channel of communication between the Crown and its aggrieved vassal duchy: Materiały do dziejów, nr 23, pp. 60–63. 70 Schmauch, pp. 100–101; Marian Biskup, Polska a Zakon Krzyżacki w Prusach w początkach XVI wieku (Olsztyn, 1983), p. 85. 71 BK, MS 207, fos 22v–23v. 72 Codex Epistoralis, vol. 3, nrs 477–8, p. 495. 73 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), pp. 352, 355–6.

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Jan Olbracht’s most flagrantly autocratic act was his attempt to strike down the senatorial Kurozwęcki family. Like the Jagiellonians themselves, the late fifteenthcentury Kurozwęcki were blessed with six sons, who had found great favour with Kazimierz IV and were promoted to senior positions in his chancellery. The family were a minor branch of a fourteenth-century baronial house, the Kurowski, and distantly related to Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki.74 The most successful brother, Krzesław, had been appointed royal chancellor in 1484 and bishop of Włocławek a decade later. Piotr Kurozwęcki also held a cluster of high offices, as royal vicetreasurer (from 1479), castellan of Sandomierz (from 1494) and starosta general of Kraków (1491–95). Mikołaj Kurozwęcki, meanwhile, had amassed great landed estates through marriage and royal grant, and sat in the senate as castellan of Sieradź from 1485.75 In the difficult financial climate of the 1490s, the Kurozwęcki lent large sums to the Crown, receiving major castles such as Kazimierz Dolny as surety. In 1498, fearful of their growing power and possibly anxious to eliminate his creditors, Jan Olbracht turned against the brothers. Vice-treasurer Piotr Kurozwęcki was formally accused of fraud and illegal devaluation of the realm’s coinage; Piotr fled to Vienna, where he died in 1499. Taking advantage of Bishop Krzesław’s absence on pilgrimage in Rome, in March 1501 the king asked the sejm to strip Piotr of his office posthumously and confiscate the considerable estates which he had bequeathed to his kin.76 No Polish king had attacked a magnate house so directly in living memory. As we shall see, not only was Cardinal Fryderyk heavily implicated in this strike against the Kurozwęcki as the leading royal agent in the senate, but he also engaged in his own ecclesiastical assaults on the magnate family. Having already seen his brother Piotr forced into exile by the Jagiellonians, upon returning from his Italian pilgrimage in 1501, Bishop Krzesław Kurozwęcki now found that a large part of his own lands had been seized by the Crown. This was a provocation too far: Krzesław removed himself from the royal council, and Jan Olbracht’s reign would end just as his father’s had done, with a dangerous, alienated bishop at large in the kingdom.77 The irresistible rise of the Jagiellonian Renaissance monarchy, and Fryderyk’s own unchallenged personal dominance of national church and government, so keenly felt from 1493 to 1501, were about to come to an end. Cardinal Fryderyk and King Aleksander, 1501–1503 Interregnum On 17 June 1501, a tremor passed through the Polish kingdom when King Jan Olbracht died in Thorn after a reign of just nine dynamic years. No one informed Cardinal Fryderyk in nearby Gniezno of the gravity of the king’s condition until it was too late. ‘The royal councillors did not mention that the king was at the point of Kujawski, pp. 30–6. Krzysztof Baczkowski, ‘Mikołaj Kurozwęcki’, PSB 16 (1971): 273–4; Feliks Kiryk, ‘Piotr Kurozwęcki’, PSB 16 (1971): 274–5. 76 Kujawski, p. 134. 77 Kujawski, pp. 134–5. 74 75

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death, but simply asked me to hurry there …’, he later complained.78 As president of the senate, Cardinal Fryderyk immediately took control of royal government with the title of ‘interrex’, and the Polish political establishment prepared itself for another election. Having hurriedly taken charge of his brother’s body in Thorn, Fryderyk’s first concern was to guarantee the security of Poland’s frontiers during the interregnum: in July and August he negotiated a temporary peace accord with the Teutonic Order, shored up the defences of Marienburg castle and hired a force of 300 mounted mercenaries for the Respublica.79 Fryderyk then turned his attention to an equally pressing internal threat to the suspended Jagiellonian regime, the alienated chancellor, Krzesław Kurozwęcki. On 30 July, Jan Olbracht’s royal secretary, vice-treasurer and favourite, Maciej Drzewicki, was arrested and incarcerated in Kraków on Fryderyk’s orders on suspicion of embezzlement.80 This was a clear sop to the Kurozwęcki: it was Drzewicki who had first accused the late Piotr Kurozwęcki of fraud and who had replaced that disgraced and exiled minister as vice-treasurer in March 1501. Now he provided a convenient scapegoat for his late royal master. In the aftermath of Jan Olbracht’s death, three candidates presented themselves for election to the Polish throne: Zygmunt, Władysław and Aleksander. In troubling contrast to the 1492 contest, all three were competing Jagiellonian princes, and each of them looked to Cardinal Fryderyk to act as their electoral agent. The long summer of 1501 cruelly exposed the growing cracks in the Jagiellonian dynastic bloc, as personal rivalries became the vehicles for a contest over regional supremacy between the states of Central Europe. Throughout July, King Władysław wrote to Cardinal Fryderyk from Buda, instructing him to work for the election of their brother Zygmunt Jagiellon, duke of Glogau, who had resided in Hungary since 1498. Fryderyk offered polite assurances of assistance, promising Zygmunt that ‘you can believe that in this hour my usual brotherly love [for you] will not desert me … you may have complete confidence in me, that I will do everything I can [for you] in this affair.’81 Almost simultaneously, however, King Władysław himself emerged as a candidate for the Polish throne. Perhaps remembering the heady magnate advances made during the reigns of Poland’s two previous absentee Hungarian kings, Louis of Anjou (d. 1382) and Władysław III (d. 1444), a section of the Polish senate warmly embraced the idea of King Władysław’s candidacy in 1501. Piotr Myszkowski, palatine of Sieradź, and the Kraków canon Mikołaj Wróblowski visited King Władysław in Buda to offer their support. Somewhat prematurely, Władysław

Akta Aleksandra, nr 1, p. 1: ‘consiliarii Regni … de extremo fine vitae eius nihil significaverant, tantummodo vocabant nos, ut illuc accurreremus.’ 79 Akta Aleksandra, nr 8, pp. 7–8; nr 13, p. 13; nr 24, pp. 22–3. 80 Akta Aleksandra, nr 20, pp. 19–20; nr 33, pp. 30–31. 81 Akta Aleksandra, nr 17, p. 17: ‘V.I.F. posset enim cernere, hoc tempore nos consueto debito fraterni amoris non deesse … habeatque eadem de nobis certam confidentiam, quod quicquid pro eadem efficere poterimus in hac futura deliberatione.’ 78

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triumphantly announced his election as king of Poland to the Holy Roman Emperor, the pope and the king of France.82 The warm, supportive letters which Fryderyk dispatched to Buda throughout summer 1501 were highly disingenuous. In fact, the cardinal had instantly emerged in interregnum Poland as the most energetic backer of Aleksander, grand duke of Lithuania. Even before Jan Olbracht was buried, Fryderyk responded positively to overtures from Vilnius, writing from Royal Prussia that ‘for my part, out of my goodwill towards [you], I will do everything in my power to assist you, as I have done before and always will do.’83 He interceded with Queen Mother Elizabeth, securing her express support for Aleksander’s campaign.84 From Prussia, the cardinal dispatched a small delegation to Lithuania, which carried secret advice for Aleksander from his Polish allies. In this clandestine oration, Aleksander was assured that Andrzej Szamotulski (castellan of Kalisz), Spytek of Jarosław (castellan of Kraków), Jan Tarnowski (wojewoda of Sandomierz) and all their noble relatives and knightly retainers in both Małopolska and Podolia wanted the grand duke as their king, because they wished to see a ‘reintegration’ and re-union of Poland and Lithuania.85 Fryderyk’s envoy urged Grand Duke Aleksander to boost his support by smearing Władysław’s name, suggesting that: The councillors and nobility are put in mind of the disaster in Wallachia, which would have never happened but for the Hungarian auxiliaries, nor would the other calamities [of Tartar and Turkish raids] which have affected this kingdom, if it were not for the suggestions and actions of the Hungarians …86

The tone of Cardinal Fryderyk’s letters during the frenetic interregnum deserves some comment. In 1501, the man who had been instrumental in supporting Jan Olbracht’s regalist regime now embraced an unlikely rhetoric, casting himself as a patriotic leader in the style of Zbigniew Oleśnicki, and positioning himself and the Jagiellonian dynasty as guarantors of magnate rights and the Polish constitution. Writing to Vilnius in June 1501 about the necessity of preserving the Polish– Lithuanian union, for example, Fryderyk adopted the language of the Krewo Treaty (1386), old Oleśnicki party and Długosz’s Annales, championing the incorporationist view which his Jagiellonian forbears had so diligently resisted: ‘how many good things depend on the union of the kingdom and the Lithuanian duchy, and how both

82

Akta Aleksandra, nr 69, pp. 80–81; Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1519), p.

359. Akta Aleksandra, nr 7, p. 7: ‘nos pro nostra erga eandem benivolentia omnia, quae eius causa facere possemus, et antea facisse et semper facturos’. 84 Akta Aleksandra, nr 25, p. 23. 85 Materiały do dziejów, nr 35, pp. 102–7. 86 Materiały do dziejów, nr 35, p. 106: ‘Suggeriturque etiam consiliariis et nobilitati clades Walachica, que numquam secuta fuisset nisi auxilia Hungarorum affuissent quod preterea calamitates reliquas, que per hoc tempora regnum attritum est nisi suggestionibus et opera Hungarorum evenisse …’ 83

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can be strong especially given the nature of this present age, if these dominions are reintegrated into one body, as in the time of our ancestors …’87 In both public and private communications, Cardinal Fryderyk warned his brothers that he personally expected them to abide by Polish electoral law. Władysław was made to promise that he would respect the decisions of the sejm and ‘not act against the laws of the fatherland if the election of another new king seemed likely’.88 When, on the very eve of the election, Fryderyk received secret intelligence that Aleksander was plotting to take the Crown by force, he upbraided his brother in a cool and ominous message, and stressing that he as interrex was singularly committed to defending the laws of the fatherland and the liberties of the kingdom.89 This language of Polish liberties and laws was borrowed directly from the magnate lexicon. The use of such rhetoric appears to be a calculated if desperate attempt by Cardinal Fryderyk to popularize the regime and forge a larger Jagiellonian party rallied around an episcopal leader – a clear if unconvincing reprise of Cardinal Oleśnicki’s political leadership. The Royal Election of 1501 Poland’s electors gathered at Piotrków castle yet again in September 1501, and the regime bequeathed by Kazimierz IV underwent its second major test. Early in the proceedings of the three-week electoral sejm, on 17 September, Cardinal Fryderyk completed his appeasement of the Kurozwęcki family by issuing a decree as ‘interrex’, which revoked Jan Olbracht’s confiscation of Piotr Kurozwęcki’s lands, restituting these estates to Bishop Krzesław.90 The description of the ensuing election given in the Chronica Polonorum is reassuringly straightforward: ‘certain leaders of the realm and their followers presented Aleksander, grand duke of Lithuania, for the Polish throne and elected him.’ Miechowita explicitly identified these ‘ductores regni’ as Cardinal Fryderyk and Bishop Krzesław, acting in concert.91 Some form of political deal, however uncomfortable for the Jagiellonian party, had been struck between the two prelates. The formal electoral ceremony within Piotrków castle took place on 3 October: Aleksander Jagiellon was unanimously elected king of Poland

87 Materiały do dziejów, nr 36, p. 108: ‘… quantum comodi et honestatis dependeat ex unione regni et ducatus Lythwanie. Et quantum utriusque statui valeat conducere potissime pro qualitate temporis moderni, si hec dominia ad unum corpus reintegrarentur quamadmodum antecessores nostri hoc modo necessario esse presenciebant …’ 88 Akta Aleksandra, nr 31, pp. 28–9: ‘ne instantia aliquorum novi regis electionem contra iura patria perturbavisset’. 89 Materiały do dziejów, nr 36, pp. 108–9: ‘invice aut coacte regna conquirruntur eciam hoc modo conquisita quomodo conservantur … cum sciret [dominus principus] sua illustrissima paternitas singulos esse nitentes ad conservanda iura patrie et regni libertates.’ 90 Kujawski, p. 137. 91 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1519), p. 359: ‘quorundam ductores regni cum sibi adherentibus Alexandrum ducem magnum Lithuaniae in regem Poloniae substituerent et elegerunt’.

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and Fryderyk promulgated the official electoral decree.92 The senate immediately composed a congratulatory letter, which robustly asserted the principles of elective monarchy. Aleksander was reminded that the Polish Crown was a non-hereditary dignity conferred by the senate, and that the Jagiellonians had no special relationship with the throne: ‘Wherefore the Holy Spirit led the lords to choose you, not from among the descendants of the Polish royal family, but from all the princes of Christendom.’93 From Piotrków, a senate delegation composed of Andrzej Róża Boryszewski (archbishop of Lwów), Jan Lubrański (bishop of Poznań), Jan Tarnowski (wojewoda of Podolia and Ruthenia) and Andrzej Szamotulski (wojewoda of Poznań) travelled to Mielnica, the small frontier town where Grand Duke Aleksander was encamped just inside the Lithuanian border.94 Events in Mielnica rather took the gloss off Aleksander’s success and arguably transformed the entire election into a pyrrhic Jagiellonian victory. The king-elect was informed that he would be required to ratify two texts before being officially offered the Polish Crown. The first was a new treaty of union (the so-called Mielnica Union), which had been unilaterally drawn up by the Polish senate and their counterparts in the Lithuanian grand-ducal council. This document went far beyond the original Krewo Treaty of 1385 and explicitly fused Poland and Lithuania into a single legal entity, ‘one people’, ruled – crucially – by a single elected king.95 The Mielnica Union was effectively an international coup against the Jagiellonians, an arrangement which guaranteed the Polish magnates a perpetual incorporation, granted the Lithuanian lords a new right to elect their ruler and effectively disinherited the Jagiellonians in their native grand duchy, stripping them of their main negotiating asset with the Polish elites. It is unclear from the surviving sources whether Cardinal Fryderyk was caught unawares by this text, or coerced into approving it as the high price to be paid for Aleksander’s election. The second document requiring Aleksander’s seal was even more ominous for the regalist party – an unsigned manifesto detailing the legal rights of Poland’s senators, entitled simply ‘constitutio’. Unlike the medieval magnate charters which had confirmed the legal privileges of the entire noble class, the Mielnica Constitution addressed only the rights of Poland’s senate. Although the document was drawn up anonymously, the hand of Krzesław of Kurozwęcki lay heavily upon it: the entire text is a thinly veiled protest at Jan Olbracht’s ‘tyrannical’ treatment of Piotr of Kurozwęcki. The Mielnica Constitution asserted, for example, that any senator accused of a crime could be judged only by an assembly of his peers, and not by the 92 ‘Modus eligendi regis z początku XVI wieku’, ed. Oswald Balzer, in Księga pamiątkowa ku uczczeniu 250-tej rocznicy założenia Uniwersytetu Lwowskiego przez Króla Jana Kazimierza (2 vols, Lwów, 1912), vol. 1, pp. 1–28. 93 Akta Aleksandra, nr 28, p. 25: ‘Quamobrem domini Spiritu ordinante Sancto Vestram Serenitatem, non quidem de successoribus tantum regiae familiae Poloniae sed ex universis catholicis principibus dignissimum.’ 94 Papée, Aleksander Jagiellończyk (1999), p. 53. 95 Kodeks Dyplomatyczny, nr 196, pp. 365–8. For the Lithuanian political background, see K. Pietkiewicz, Wielkie Księstwo Litewskie pod rządami Aleksandra Jagiellończyka (Poznań, 1995).

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king and gentry ‘rabble’ (‘turba malorum’) in parliament. In a restatement of the old medieval notion of ‘withholding obedience’ (‘de non praestanda obedientia’), the Constitution stated that if the king dared to commit an injustice against a senator, all his subjects were entitled to consider the prince not a lord but a tyrant and enemy, and individuals who are attacked may honestly and legitimately take refuge with a foreign prince, and use any means they wish against their prince to find redress, without any damage to their personal honour.96

In an even clearer allusion to the Kurozwęcki case, the text opened with the words: ‘For it is well known that princes often want to act according to their own will and desire, and when leading lords of the council try to resist them, they attack that councillor’s fortune, status and person, in no small rage.’97 As an uncompromising statement of oligarch principles, and a direct protest against Jan Olbracht’s absolutist style of government, the Mielnica Constitution can be read as a line drawn in the sand by Poland’s high noble class against the increasingly confident Renaissance regime. For the first time since WładysławJogaila’s death in 1434, the senate had succeeded in inflicting a serious blow against Poland’s Renaissance monarchy. After a long summer of politicking and careful political management, Cardinal Fryderyk had been able to secure the victory of his preferred Jagiellonian brother at Piotrków in 1501; he had not, however, proved strong enough to fend off punitive magnate demands. ‘Gubernator’ – Cardinal Fryderyk’s Regency, 1502–1503 In December 1501, Cardinal Fryderyk crowned his brother as Poland’s fourth Jagiellonian ruler in Kraków’s Wawel cathedral. Safely anointed, Aleksander promptly repudiated both the Mielnica Union and the Mielnica Constitution. He ejected all the Lithuanian magnates involved from his grand-ducal council and reinstated Maciej Drzewicki as vice-treasurer, but made scant attempt beyond this to rebuild the authority of the Polish monarchy.98 Instead, after a sojourn of only three months, King Aleksander marched out of Kraków’s Holy Cross gate on 3 March 1502 and returned to Lithuania, in order to attend to the disastrous war which he had prosecuted against his father-in-law, Ivan III of Muscovy, since May 1500. On the eve of his departure, Aleksander appointed Cardinal Fryderyk as his ‘gubernator’, Akta Aleksandra, nr 29, pp. 26–7: ‘et principem non ut dominum, sed ut tirannum et hostem reputet, et personae singulae, quae laesae fuerint, licite et honeste possent ad alium dominum confugere, et contra principem quibuscunque modis iniurias suas repetere, sine honoris sui detrimento.’ 97 Akta Aleksandra, nr 29, p. 26: ‘saepe tamen compertum est, principes velle pro arbitrio et voluntate sua agere, et dum illorum conatibus per primiores [sic] consilii resistitur, tunc impetus et ingenia contra statum et personam et fortunas eorum convertunt, non mediocriter saeviendo.’ 98 Pietkiewicz, pp. 206–7; Władysław Pociecha, ‘Maciej Drzewicki’, PSB 5 (1939): 409–12. On 20 January 1502, King Aleksander confirmed the return of the confiscated Kurozwęcki estates: Kujawski, p. 139. 96

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describing his duties as ‘the administration of the realm’ and ‘the preservation of domestic peace’.99 In these most unpromising circumstances, Cardinal Fryderyk reached the legal peak of his political powers in Poland. First and foremost, King Aleksander looked to his new ‘gubernator’ to provide a steady stream of Polish funds which might finance Lithuania’s failing military effort. Having found the Wawel coffers quite exhausted, Aleksander had used his post-coronation sejm (January 1502) to push through a huge tax-raising effort, suspending many existing tax privileges.100 After the king’s departure, Cardinal Fryderyk found himself quite unable to extract further cash from the Polish elites. In September 1502, local sejmiks in Małopolska and Ruthenia refused his request to attend a national sejm, saying they had no more money to give.101 The resources of the Polish church, such a useful milk cow under Jan Olbracht, were apparently also depleted: Cardinal Fryderyk managed to raise only one ‘subsidium charitativum’ as governor, in January 1503.102 From Lithuania, King Aleksander ordered Fryderyk to mint devalued silver coinage and raise loans for the Crown, standing as personal guarantor.103 Fryderyk criss-crossed Poland trying to implement these requests, but his growing exasperation was obvious. In summer 1502, he wrote to his brother: ‘Since there is no silver, no money can be minted. Even the tax collectors have nothing … I struggle with all the effort I can to provide for and help the Republic in these difficulties, but it is certain that in such penury my own labour will in no way suffice.’104 Poland’s military situation, already precarious at Jan Olbracht’s death, also deteriorated dramatically during Fryderyk’s governorship. In September 1502, Ivan III attempted to disable Lithuania’s partner state by sending a horde of Crimean Tartars against south-eastern Poland. The raid was the worst in living memory: an estimated 30,000 Tartar horsemen secretly moved through Ruthenia before striking Małopolska itself. Fryderyk pursued the Tartars near Nowy Korczyn with a small mounted force, but failed to catch them.105 In despair, he reported massacres of the populace and the decimation of his own episcopal lands.106 To a population already terrorized by the Ottoman and Tartar raids of 1498 and 1500, this was the last straw. In Kraków, Miechowita later recalled: And our enemies freely entered and left the kingdom whenever they wished, without any risk to themselves, and they wrought such damage on Lithuania and Ruthenia in particular, that the voice of the people rose up in this prayer: ‘Almighty God, we wish Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 363; Akta Aleksandra, nr 71, pp. 88–9. Acta Aleksandra, nr 49, pp. 53–5; nr 92, p. 116. 101 Akta Aleksandra, nr 102, pp. 141–2. 102 Akta Aleksandra, nr 49, p. 53; Acta Capitulorum, nr 2582, p. 576. 103 Akta Aleksandra, nr 95, pp. 121–3; nr 103, pp. 142–3. 104 Akta Aleksandra, nr 90, pp. 110–11: ‘Moneta tamen nondum cuditur, quia argentum non habetur. Exactores vero nihil habent … Nos quacunque ratione aut labore possumus, enitimur utique providere et obviare Regni incommodis et difficultatibus, sed certe in tante penuria nequaquem sufficimus.’ 105 Wapowski, p. 50. 106 Akta Aleksandra, nr 114, p. 166. 99

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With the Jagiellonian regime and its presiding cardinal mired in a deep fiscal and strategic crisis, the magnates of the Kurozwęcki faction were quick to capitalize on their political breakthroughs at Piotrków and Mielnica. From Lithuania, King Aleksander began to pay the Kurozwęcki what appears to have been a form of protection money out of his limited funds, to prevent the family from breaking away into open opposition.108 In March 1502, Aleksander increased Krzesław’s income as royal chancellor and in June allowed the bishop to retain 600 florins from the Royal Prussian tax returns.109 At the same time, Bishop Krzesław requested a number of ecclesiastical privileges which were not only prejudicial to Jagiellonian control of the church, but which directly undermined Cardinal Fryderyk’s archiepiscopal authority. In a petition lodged on Kurozwęcki’s behalf by Cardinal Fryderyk, the Crown ceded its patronage rights over the Wielkopolska parish of Gąbin to the Włocławek chapter. A further charter of June 1502 gave Bishop Krzesław ecclesiastical patronage rights in the royal town of Kowal. Most seriously, in March 1502 King Aleksander gave Bishop Krzesław the right to present candidates to benefices in the Kraków diocese, a clear erosion of Fryderyk’s personal authority.110 During Fryderyk’s governorship, the Kurozwęcki family increasingly defied royal authority. In summer 1502, Cardinal Fryderyk’s attempt to summon a general levy to repel Tartar attacks was unsuccessful; he attributed its collapse to Bishop Krzesław’s inexplicable failure as chancellor to send out the necessary letters summoning the armed nobility. The cardinal complained openly to Bishop Krzesław and wrote to a furious Aleksander that: ‘I do not believe it necessary to tell Your Majesty how much damage the Tartar raid caused, or whose negligence allowed it to happen … what happened was not my fault, but the result of the disobedience and procrastination of others.’111 In an indication of the gradual breakdown of royal authority, the wider Kurozwęcki family began to re-enact the noble military feuds last seen in Małopolska during Cardinal Oleśnicki’s ascendancy in the 1440s. Throughout 1502, Mikołaj Kurozwęcki, castellan of Lublin, and his son Adam waged a mini-war, raiding one another’s estates.112 Both Cardinal Fryderyk and King Aleksander seemed powerless to stop this elite lawlessness. 107 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1519), p. 364: ‘Ut quotiens hostes voluerunt, libere intrarunt et securi absque illorum damnis discesserunt terrarum quoque praecipue Lithuaniae et Russiae occupationes et alienationes sub ipso fuerunt, inde vox populi depraecatoria saepious insonuit: O deus omnipotentes favemus regis Alexandro salvatione, suscipe eum meliorum mitte nobis liberatorem.’ 108 Polish scholarship has construed these gifts as evidence of a sudden close alliance between the king and Kurozwęcki: Papée, Aleksander Jagiellończyk; Kujawski. 109 Kujawski, pp. 138–41. 110 ADWł, doc. 386; Kujawski, pp. 138–41. 111 Akta Aleksandra, nr 93, pp. 117–18; nr 131, p. 197: ‘Non putamus esse necessarium, ut recenseamus V. Mti quae et quanta mala fecerunt hic Tartari, aut cuius negligentia sit factum … qui accidit, non nostra culpa, set aliorum tarditate et inobedientia est factus.’ 112 Akta Aleksandra, nr 125, pp. 188–9.

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Emboldened, the bishop-chancellor Krzesław Kurozwęcki increasingly had Cardinal Fryderyk himself in his political sights. Fryderyk became convinced that Kurozwęcki agents in Lithuania were plotting against him, and mischievously eroding King Aleksander’s confidence in his governor. A note of paranoia and deep alarm crept into Fryderyk’s correspondence in 1502, as the cardinal repeatedly complained to both Aleksander and Bishop Krzesław that ‘there is no shortage of those who detract from my labour and slander my good name with Your Majesty, accusing me of negligence …’113 The Kurozwęcki scored their final, humiliating victory against the cardinal and the regalist party he represented in November 1502. From Lithuania, the king decreed that: In order that the governing prince may be burdened with less work and care, in accordance with the requests of the Nowy Korczyn and Sandecz sejmiks, which concluded that his most illustrious lordship should have lords at his side to give counsel, the king names the lord bishop of Włocławek [Krzesław Kurozwęcki] and the castellan of Kraków [Spytek of Melsztyn], to give him advice on all matters pertaining to the kingdom.114

The call for two permanent advisors to travel with the ruler and effectively co-govern with him had been made repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) by the Oleśnicki party in the 1440s and 1450s against Kazimierz IV.115 Either Aleksander had genuinely been convinced by his advisors that Fryderyk was incompetent, or else the king was simply unable to resist the rising tide of Bishop Krzesław’s authority in Poland. For the first time in his life, Fryderyk suffered an acute blow to his personal political power. In effect, the November 1502 decree represented a second Kurozwęcki coup against the remnants of Jan Olbracht’s regime. As the denouement with Bishop Krzesław reached its height, the 34-year-old royal cardinal succumbed to the first bout of a serious illness. Fryderyk was briefly immobilized in October 1502 and suffered a final relapse in January 1503, playing no part in government thereafter.116 The Jagiellonian cardinal’s career was brought to a premature close in the early hours of 14 March, in the episcopal palace in Kraków, at a moment of ignominious political defeat. Krzesław Kurozwęcki’s victory would, however, be short-lived: just three weeks later, on very the day that Fryderyk Jagiellon was buried before the high altar of Kraków cathedral, Krzesław himself suddenly died at the episcopal manor of Woborza on 5 April 1503.

113 Akta Aleksandra, nr 90, p. 111; nr 93, p. 118: ‘non desint aliqui qui hunc nostrum laborem et optimum affectum apud R. Mtem. carpant et lacerent, negligentiam nostram culpantes.’ 114 Akta Aleksandra, nr 125, p. 190: ‘Ut autem minori labore minorique sollicitudine princeps gubernans gravaretur, M. R., sic ut in Nova Civitate et Sandecz conclusum erat, quod aliquos dominos sua dtio. illma. ad latus habitura esset pro consilio, suae dni. adiungit dd. episcopum Vladislaviensem et castellanum cracoviensem, quorum consiliis sua d. illma. singulis eventibus Regni providere dignetur.’ 115 See Górski, ‘Rządy wewnętrzne’, p. 730. 116 Akta Aleksandra, nr 102, p. 142; nr 109, p. 152; nr 145, p. 226.

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Analysis: The Political Significance of Cardinal Fryderyk’s Career Simply by placing Fryderyk Jagiellon at the centre of this narrative and casting him as a pivotal regalist player, the account of late medieval Polish politics given above goes very strongly against the grain of earlier scholarship. For one, historians have traditionally regarded Fryderyk as a hopeless (and thus irrelevant) political incompetent. This is in large part because the sources have encouraged researchers to concentrate exclusively on the years of crisis: whereas only three unpublished pieces of Fryderyk’s correspondence survive from before 1501, there are no fewer than fifty-nine well-known letters from the interregnum and regency, all published in the 1920s.117 More seriously, historians have long cast Fryderyk Jagiellon as a treacherous figure, a super-magnate, a wrecker of the Jagiellonian monarchy driven only by his own lust for power, a megalomaniac running amok in the Polish state.118 As recently as 2002, an article on the Polish episcopate referred to Fryderyk Jagiellon as ‘an oligarch’, reflecting not only the confusion which exists around political terminologies, but perpetuating the notion that Fryderyk was in some sense an opposition politician.119 Such interpretations can be traced back to Miechowita’s Chronica Polonorum, the first work to cast the cardinal as a sinister manipulator of kings, but are surely difficult to sustain in light of the wider evidence. Jan Olbracht himself seemed to disagree, writing in the preamble to a 1501 charter: ‘Now and at all times since my accession to my father’s kingdom, [Fryderyk] shows and has shown special brotherly favour … in all the good events and all the difficult events of my reign, he has assisted me sincerely and unceasingly with brotherly advice and assistance.’120 Fryderyk Jagiellon’s ecclesiastical career had a profound impact on Polish politics – not because he somehow undermined the dynasty from within, but precisely because he bolstered the family’s rule in at least three significant ways. Fryderyk’s political activities spread Polish influence across Central Europe, helped entrench the Jagiellonian party in key power structures and strengthened the Crown itself as an institution. We can now consider each of these areas in turn – the international, party political and structural ramifications of the cardinal’s relatively brief governmental career – showing how the advent of a cardinal-prince might alter a kingdom’s political complexion.

BK, MS 207, 208; Akta Aleksandra. See Papée, Aleksander Jagiellończyk, pp. 48–9; Halecki, p. 292; Anna OdrzywolskaKidawa, Biskup Piotr Tomicki, 1404–1535: Kariera polityczna i kościelna (Warsaw, 2004), p. 69. 119 Przemysław Mrozowski, ‘L’élite du pouvoir en tant que protectrice de l’art dans les pays Jagellons au tournant des XV et XVI siècles’, in Die Jagiellonen: Kunst und Kulture einer europäischen Dynastie an der Wende zur Neuzeit (Nuremberg, 2002), pp. 59–63. 120 AGAD, MK 17, fo. 221: ‘Nunc quod et omnis temporibus post felicem nostram ad regnum paternum assumpcionem nobis exhibibem et exhiberi solitum… singulari favore fraterno… in omnibus nostris et reipublicae regni nostri eventibus prosperis atque adversis consiliis et auxiliis fraternis nobis sincerissime affisere non desistat.’ 117 118

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Geopolitical Agendas Cardinal Fryderyk’s ecclesiastical career had political reverberations well beyond Poland, affecting the balance of power in Jagiellonian Central Europe. After his initial electoral successes at Kraków and Gniezno, Fryderyk Jagiellon did not cease to search for further vacant bishoprics, and his ecclesiastical ambitions were intimately linked with the geopolitical agendas of Poland’s kings. We have already seen how Fryderyk’s bids for the sees of Ermland (1489 and 1499) and Płock (1497) were attempts to consolidate earlier military victories by Kazimierz IV and Jan Olbracht, against Royal Prussia and Mazovia respectively. Ecclesiastical advancement by a dynastic candidate was a helpful corollary to territorial expansion. Fryderyk’s quest for high ecclesiastical titles was not, however, limited to lands already under Polish sovereignty. In 1500, for example, Fryderyk set his sights on the wealthy Silesian see of Wrocław in the kingdom of Bohemia, when he tried to secure appointment as co-adjutor and successor to the ageing incumbent, Bishop Johannes Roth. The cardinal’s agent, Mikołaj Czepiel, was sent to Buda to seek direct royal support for this plan from King Władysław. Simultaneously, Fryderyk asked Władysław to back his petition to be named papal legate ‘a latere’ to the kingdoms of Poland and Hungary, an office which would have given him immense personal authority over the church in both realms.121 Unsurprisingly King Władysław, suspicious of his Polish relatives and bruised by the 1497 debacle, quickly vetoed both endeavours. Cardinal Fryderyk’s audacious 1500 bid to encroach onto the ecclesiastical affairs of Bohemia and Hungary should be read in the light of Jan Olbracht’s ongoing rivalry with King Władysław Jagiellon, and Poland’s longstanding desire to assert itself as regional hegemon. A royal priest could thus use the structures of the international Latin church as a discreet mechanism through which to spread Polish influence. Just as the western Polish province of the Catholic church had acted as the ‘shadow of the Crown’ during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, providing a template for political reunification, Fryderyk could later use it in an attempt to project a Polish ecclesiastical hegemony in Central Europe. By 1501, Fryderyk’s name had been linked with five of the six bishoprics which made up that province; by accident or design, the cardinal was on the way to uniting in his own persona all the ecclesiastical jigsaw pieces which had made up the original Piast kingdom.122 As we shall see in Chapter 7, a number of fifteenth-century dynasties used the promotions of their priest-princes to consolidate power in semi-autonomous provinces; few, however, were as bold as Fryderyk in using bishopric bids to weave a web of influence across an extensive geographical region, in open challenge of neighbouring monarchs. Through Fryderyk, the church thus supplied Poland’s Jagiellonians with a new method for pursuing the geopolitical ambitions nursed by the Crown since at least the fourteenth century.

Acta Capituli Wratislaviensis, 1500–1562, ed. A. Sabisch (Cologne, 1972), vol. 1, nr 1500: 13. 122 When the see of Włocławek fell vacant in 1494, the nearby city of Danzig was rife with rumours that Cardinal Fryderyk would claim that bishopric too; see Rybus, p. 51. 121

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Polish Factional Politics The political impact of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s governmental career was, of course, felt above all in Poland’s fraught internal politics, where it had a pronounced effect on the fortunes of the ‘Jagiellonian party’ – that is, the (mainly court-based) grouping which supported the dynasty’s drive towards a more centralized monarchy, and which was opposed by those magnates who still nursed more oligarch sympathies. Here, the cardinal was able to tip the scales in favour of the regalist faction, achieving this through shrewd use of his episcopal rights to nominate clergy, his seniority in the senate and his activities as an ecclesiastical judge. In Chapter 1, we saw how Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki had used his episcopal powers of nomination and patronage to fill Małopolska’s high clergy with kinsmen and close allies from the magnate party between 1423 and 1455.123 From 1488, Fryderyk Jagiellon worked to reverse this trend by filling Polish cathedral chapters with his own nominees, hand-picking men with regalist sympathies. Unfortunately, the loss of large sections of the Kraków chapter’s fifteenth-century ‘acta’ means that it is not possible to reconstruct complete lists of those canons nominated by Oleśnicki and Fryderyk.124 The incomplete surviving records, however, suggest that from 1488 the Kraków and Gniezno cathedral chapters were steadily packed with Fryderyk’s private staff: his former tutor Jan Baruchowski (Gniezno, 1493), chancellor Piotr Tomicki (Kraków, 1502), estate manager Jan Konarski (Kraków, 1494; Gniezno 1496) and Croatian secretary Bernardinus Gallus (Kraków, 1500) were all given seats in chapters, often in the face of stiff opposition and protest by older canons.125 Fryderyk also intervened in other dioceses: in December 1493; for example, his aide Mikołaj Kotwicz was named archdeacon of Poznań during Uriel of Górka’s episcopate, on the strength of the young cardinal’s letters.126 Throughout his reign, Kazimierz IV had worked to control membership of cathedral chapters, not only because these men were senior clerics in their own right, but also because they elected Poland’s bishops. His son’s campaign to install loyalists high within the church was a logical extension of that policy; it was all the more effective (and harder to resist) for being implemented from within the ecclesiastical hierarchy by a royal bishop. As we shall see in Chapter 6, Fryderyk’s nominations in the 1490s and 1500s would bear rich fruit after his death, changing the political colour of the sixteenth-century Polish episcopate. Within the organs of secular government, Fryderyk’s rapid rise in public life also boosted the king’s own party. From the first days of Fryderyk’s career, the Jagiellonians had been determined to use his ecclesiastical titles as a channel See Chapter 1, pp. 16–17. AKK, AA2 contains the chapter acts for only selected years of Fryderyk’s episcopate – April 1488 to July 1492 and February 1500 to March 1503. 125 AKK, AA2, fos 210v, 211; Anna Odrzywolska-Kidawa, Biskup Piotr Tomicki, 1404– 1535: Kariera polityczna i kościelna (Warsaw, 2004), p. 82; AAG, Acta Cap B16, fo. 179; Jan Kortykowski, Prałaci i kanonicy katedry metropolitalnej gnieźnieńskiej (4 vols, Gniezno, 1883), vol. 1. 126 AAP, AC 32, fo. 47v. 123 124

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for pacifying the senate. From 1493, as bishop of Kraków, primate, royal prince, cardinal and president of the senate, Fryderyk fundamentally changed the balance of power within that traditionally oligarch body, by introducing a direct Jagiellonian and royal presence which undermined the council’s collective, magnate and latently oppositional character. The list of witnesses on a royal charter of May 1502 captures the sheer mass of titles wielded by the king’s brother and shows just how highly he ranked in precedence above the heads of the great noble families, regional governors and chief ministers of the realm: The most illustrious prince Fryderyk, cardinal-presbyter of Santa Lucia in Septem Soliis, archbishop of Gniezno, primate and bishop of Kraków; Andrzej [Boryszewski], archbishop of Lwów; Krzesław [Kurozwęcki], bishop of Włocławek and chancellor; Maciej, bishop of Chełm; Syptek of Jarosław, castellan of Kraków; Piotr Kmita, palatine of Kraków and Crown marshal; Jan Tarnowski, castellan of Sandomierz; Mikołaj [Kurozwęcki], castellan of Lublin; Stanisław Kmita, palatine of Brzezie; Mikołaj Kamieniec, captain of Kraków; Jan Słupcz, castellan of Sądecz, Stanisław of Chodecz, castellan of Lwów.127

Fryderyk was not Poland’s first fifteenth-century politician who shored up the influence of his party by collecting a mass of senatorial titles. Zbigniew Oleśnicki had, after all, attempted to assert his own threatened presidency of the senate with a cardinal’s hat between 1447 and 1455. Kazimierz IV, too, had limited the size of the council and elevated key allies by vesting multiple secular offices in favoured individuals such as Łukasz Górka, from the 1470s onwards. The significance of the Jagiellonians’ achievement in installing one of their own number as primate-president of the senate in 1493 should not be underestimated. At the start of Kazimierz IV’s reign, in 1454, his far more modest attempt to appoint his inexperienced stepbrother Jan Pilecki as wojewoda of Kraków had provoked vocal opposition and controversy. By the 1490s, a far more provocative and powerful Crown agent such as Fryderyk – a youth and conspicuous pluralist – could be embraced by the majority of the senate.128 Until the opportunities offered by the 1501 interregnum, the senate apparently found it impossible to directly challenge Fryderyk’s personal authority – he was a cuckoo in the magnates’ nest. The legal systems of the Roman Catholic church provided Cardinal Fryderyk with a third, more controversial way of ensuring the ascendancy of the Jagiellonian party over their domestic political opponents. As bishop of Kraków, Fryderyk regularly sat in person as an ecclesiastical judge in his Kraków court of audience, the diocese’s highest canon law court. In 1494, a prosecution was brought in Fryderyk’s name against Mikołaj Kurozwęcki, senator and castellan of Sieradź, for illegally

127 128

ADWł, Dok. 386. Fałkowski, pp. 84–5.

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imprisoning a priest named Mikołaj Nybel.129 In part, this court case arose out of Fryderyk’s reform agendas as bishop (discussed in Chapter 3), but it also has the hallmarks of a party-political attack on a rising and distrusted magnate family. Six years before King Jan Olbracht used the sejm to launch an open assault on ViceChancellor Piotr Kurowązek, Cardinal Fryderyk had made an early foray against this family through the legal systems of the church. In all these ways, Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon skilfully deployed his episcopal tools in factional struggles at the top of Polish government, using the church as a surrogate power base for a ruling family and group whose hold on an elective throne was uncertain. Cardinal Fryderyk and the Polish Crown In assessing Cardinal Fryderyk’s political impact, it is important to distinguish between the fortunes of the Jagiellonian party or dynasty and the institutional changes experienced by the Crown as an institution. Fryderyk Jagiellon’s ecclesiastical career fundamentally strengthened Poland’s traditionally embattled Crown as a political institution – at least between 1488 and 1503 – and it is perhaps here that we can best see its broader historical significance. His rise as a public figure enabled the Jagiellonian monarchy to exercise an unusually direct political control over the Catholic church in its territories, tap the church’s material resources in unprecedented ways and use ecclesiastical courts to limit subjects’ legal rights vis-à-vis the Crown. In all these ways, the cardinal helped processes of centralization and state-building. Even the most basic facts of Fryderyk’s career had radical implications: he was the only royal prince to run a church as national primate in fifteenth-century Europe. Between 1493 and 1503, the ruling Jagiellonian dynasty enjoyed unusually overt control of the local church, even though Fryderyk’s royal leadership of the ‘ecclesia Poloniae’ was technically indirect, mediated as it was through Catholic priestly offices. This deliberate and provocative blurring of royal and ecclesiastical authority in Poland is particularly well captured in the titles and seals used by Fryderyk Jagiellon. From 1488 onwards, the royal chancellery and the bishop’s own officials referred to Fryderyk in legal documents as ‘princeps episcopus’ and later ‘princeps cardinalis’.130 These phrases, with their radical implication of direct royal authority over the church, were strongly resisted in many quarters of the clerical community. The Gniezno cathedral chapter, for example, gave Fryderyk the watered-down appellation ‘of royal blood’, and even the papal curia used the cautious wording ‘son of King Kazimierz’, denying him a secular title in his own right, and perhaps implying that this priest’s relationship with the Crown was tangential rather than direct.131 The archiepiscopal seal used by Cardinal Fryderyk between 1494 and 1496 carried through the logical implications of the ‘princeps’ title: it showed the arms of Poland and Lithuania quartered, a direct mimic of the royal seals of Kazimierz IV, AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fo. 120. See, for example, Kodeks Dyplomatyczny, nr 230, p. 461; nr 238, pp. 475–7; ADWł, Dok. 386; AKK, AA2, fo. 194r. 131 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2398, p. 543: ‘ex regali prosapia’; ASV, Reg. Lat., vol. 861, fo. 188: ‘Kasimiri Polonie Regis Illustris natus’. 129 130

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Jan Olbracht and Aleksander.132 Even more provocatively than the title ‘princeps cardinalis’, this deliberate symmetry between the royal and primatial seals suggested that Fryderyk’s authority over the church was not simply dynastic, but that of the Polish state itself, of which the church was by implication a department. Fryderyk Jagiellon’s nearest Renaissance equivalent was Alfonso of Aragon (1470–1525), King Ferdinand’s illegitimate son, archbishop of Saragossa, bishop of Chiete, Monreale, Orense and Tarragona, and sometime regent of the Iberian kingdom. Other parallel figures might include Jaime Aviz (d. 1459), the royal Portuguese bishop of Lisbon, and Alexander Stewart (d. 1513), son of King James IV and primate of all Scotland. Alfonso was a dominant figure in the Aragonese church and state, but his illegitimacy meant that Fryderyk – as a bona fide dynastic prince – was better able to offer a direct legal linking of church and state. Alexander Stuart also suffered from the disadvantage of illegitimacy, while Jaime Aviz lived his life in exile and played no role in domestic Portuguese politics.133 The wedding of princely, governmental and ecclesiastical authority which Fryderyk achieved in Poland was therefore unusual on a European scale and arguably foreshadows the policies of future Protestant princes, who 30 years later would create legally autonomous state churches in Saxony, England and Scandinavia. Cardinal Fryderyk is, of course, very much a late medieval precursor of this phenomenon. The entire ‘Jagiellonian church’ arrangement in Poland hinged on one individual who would unite royal and ecclesiastical office in his own person; it was not enshrined in law or institutions and was therefore by definition of limited duration, an ad hoc response. Nonetheless, Fryderyk’s ecclesiastical-political career was a significant experiment in fifteenth-century government and provides a clear stepping stone towards the mightier Crowns and ‘state’ churches of early modern Europe. The radical constitutional implications of his career aside, Cardinal Fryderyk also dramatically altered the fiscal relationship between the Polish province of the Catholic church and the local Crown. Under canon law, secular princes had no right to tax the priests, bishops, monks, friars and nuns resident in their realms because the clergy were ultimately not their subjects but had only one sovereign lord, the pope in the Rome; they paid their tax to the Holy See’s Camera Apostolica, in contributions such as annates, common services, crusade tenths and St Peter’s Pence. There was only one loophole in this ecclesiastical prohibition: in 1179, the Lateran Council had permitted clergy to vote a voluntary, emergency subsidy for a secular regime, the ‘subsidium charitativum’, if the land where they lived was in dire need.134 Historically, Poland’s kings had found it very difficult to extract funds from their clergy: Kazimierz the Great had struggled to collect contributions towards his 132 Fryderyk’s archiepiscopal seal is shown in Baczkowski, Wielka historia Polski, p. 282. Late fifteenth-century royal Polish seals are shown in Maria Woźniakowa (ed.), Orzeł Biały godło Państwa Polskiego (Warsaw, 1995). For a discussion of Fryderyk’s seals, see Chapter 4, pp. 92–3, 98–9. 133 See Table 4 in Chapter 7. C. Kennedy, ‘Cardinal James of Portugal’, in F. Hartt, G. Corti & C. Kennedy (eds), The Chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal 1434–56 at San Minato in Florence (Philadelphia, Pa., 1964), pp. 27–46. 134 Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. A. Richter, vol. 9 (Leipzig, 1881), Lib. 3, tit. 34, cols 622–32.

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Podolia–Ruthenia conquests (1360s), even though these were sanctioned by a papal crusade bull; Kazimierz IV, however, had more success during the Thirteen Years’ War, receiving a total of 16 clerical subsidies in the course of his 45-year reign.135 As we have already seen, Fryderyk was an important fundraiser in Jan Olbracht’s and Aleksander’s regimes, adopting an aggressive taxation policy towards his clergy immediately after his instalment as archbishop of Gniezno. As royal primate, Fryderyk was a reliable provider of the ‘subsidium charitativum’. Under Fryderyk’s direction, Polish provincial synods voted four subsidies between 1493 and 1503, and Fryderyk immediately doubled its rate from 12 grosze a head (the norm under Kazimierz IV) to 24 grosze, a figure which would be retained until the seventeenth century.136 More significantly, however, Fryderyk also facilitated direct parliamentary taxation of the Polish clergy, a flagrantly illegal act under canon law. In 1493, for example, he supported the sejm’s hugely controversial decision to impose a royal tax on the Polish church – specifically, on the rental incomes which clergy received from ecclesiastical lands.137 In 1498, the cardinal sanctioned two further, direct royal taxes on his clergy: a tax of 1 grzywna payable by all clerics who owned a village and a 1498 poll tax of 2 grosze on clergy living in towns.138 With this last measure, Poland’s huge swath of poorer clerics, vicars and altarpriests also became contributors to the royal treasury. From 1493, all sections of the Polish church – from the wealthiest bishops to the most miserable unemployed urban vicar – were made to pay up by their Jagiellonian cardinal and king. Many of these more innovative taxation measures predated the 1497 war and even the 1494 Levoca summit, indicating that they were not simply emergency responses to military crisis but part of a bigger royal programme. The sustained chorus of protest provoked by Fryderyk Jagiellon’s episcopal taxations gives some indication of how significant they were. The Poznań and Gniezno cathedral chapters, for example, discreetly coordinated their opposition to the 1493 tax: the Poznań canons sent assurances ‘that they would not freely assent to the levy imposed on the clergy, and wish to assist the Gniezno chapter in any way that they can’.139 In August 1494, the Poznań chapter sent Canon Kotwicz to discuss directly with the cardinal ‘the oppression, injury and burdens with which the clergy

135 Karbownik, pp. 28–40; Alfred Ohanowicz, ‘Ciężary państwowe duchowieństwa w Polsce w drugiej połowie XV i w początkach XVI wieku’, in O. Balzer (ed.), Studya nad historyą prawa polskiego (Lwów, 1911), vol. 3, pp. 311–88; Gawęda, pp. 143–58. 136 Rybus, pp. 134–48; Karbownik, p. 133–4; Acta Capitulorum, nr 2441, p. 550; nr 2487, p. 558; nr 2566, p. 571; nrs 2570–71, p. 572. 137 Karbownik, pp. 119–23. 138 Karbownik, pp. 119–23. 139 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2419, p. 546: ‘relacionem a capitulo Poznaniensis, quod non libenter consentiret in daciam et collectam impositam super clerum et vult assistere capitulo Gneznensis in omnibus’.

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is afflicted’.140 A stern oration against clerical taxation, traditionally attributed to Callimachus, is also thought to date from Fryderyk’s tenure as primate.141 The cardinal’s fundraising provoked intense opposition not only because of the financial pain caused to individuals but precisely because it was recognized as a violent assault on the autonomy of the Polish ‘ecclesia’ and the privileges of the clerical class. Fryderyk’s clerical taxations were a major step towards the creation of a stronger Crown in Poland, by eroding the long-standing privileges of priests and religious as a separate untaxed group within the ‘regnum’, and thereby extending the Crown’s own fiscal base and jurisdictional writ. The king emerged, alongside the Roman pontiff, as a dogged taxer of the Polish church. Through the good offices of Cardinal Fryderyk, the Polish monarchy was more successful in this respect between 1493 and 1503 than its counterparts. Henry VII of England (1485–1509) managed to raise an annual ‘subsidium’ from the English bishops and clergy, but he apparently never attempted a direct parliamentary taxation. In Castile, the ‘cruzada’ tax and tithes paid by the clergy to the Crown had, crucially, been formally granted by the papacy, rather than extracted by the local monarchy in the face of canon law prohibitions.142 The hybrid figure of a prince-primate could merge church and state into one taxable domain, taking Poland one step closer to a unitary state with only one jurisdictional authority. Thirdly, Cardinal Fryderyk used his episcopal authority and the Catholic church’s disciplinary structures in order to ride roughshod over noble rights. Two of the most basic tenets of the Kosice Privilege (1374), confirmed by all Jagiellonian kings, prohibited the imprisonment of any nobleman without trial and banned corporal punishment for members of the noble class. Contemporary reports suggest that Fryderyk openly breached the spirit of these rules as an episcopal judge in Kraków. Miechowita, for example, records in the ‘Vita Cardinalis’ that ‘a certain noble named Rudzki’ was summarily imprisoned in the dungeons of Iłża castle by the cardinal, for allegedly beating a clericand fined eighty marcs.143 If true, these anecdotes suggest that Cardinal Fryderyk used the institutional citadel of the Roman Catholic church in order to disregard the noble rights enshrined in Polish civil law (but not recognized in international canon law). The bishop’s court of audience thus provided the Jagiellonians with a way of circumventing the legal limitations on the Crown; the church might supply a back door towards arbitrary rule. In Renaissance Europe, the cardinal-prince was a state-builder par excellence.

140

Acta Capitulorum, nr 847, p. 155: ‘oppressiones, iniurias et gravamia, quibus afficitur

clerus.’ 141

Callimachus, In Synodo Episcoporum de Contributione Cleri Oratio (Kraków,

1584). J.J. Scarisbrick, ‘Clerical taxation in England 1485 to 1547’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1960): 41–54; Edwards, p. 157. 143 Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 205. 142

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Conclusion: The Long Road from 1488 to 1503 This chapter has attempted to show that, with his power base in the Polish church, Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon was one of the foremost architects and assets of the kingdom’s budding Renaissance monarchy – as a trusted royal advisor, chief political fixer, president of the senate, an ecclesiastical leader of regional significance, episcopal judge and patron, leading light in the regalist faction and fundraiser. From 1488, the institutional structures, material assets and political clout of the Catholic church in Poland were placed into the hands of the ruling royal dynasty; Fryderyk’s own person created an experimental link between church and state. For a little over a decade, the political subjugation of the Polish church to its royal masters – at the expense of the papacy and magnates alike – was surely as complete, and as audacious, as anywhere in Renaissance Europe. When Fryderyk was imposed on the Kraków chapter in 1488, therefore, it was not simply an attempt by Kazimierz IV to find a suitable living for the youngest of too many royal sons but a bold strategy for entrenching and expanding the Jagiellonian regime. The escalating domestic crisis triggered by Jan Olbracht’s death in 1501 would, however, demonstrate that control of the local church was a necessary, but not in itself a sufficient, condition for the creation of a strong Renaissance Crown. As Władysław-Jogaila and Kazimierz IV had found, there was scant appetite among Poland’s political elites for a mightier national monarchy. At the close of the century, the regalist party still fundamentally lacked support. It was in a sense a minority ruling faction: while many ‘loyalist’ nobles gathered around the Jagiellonian kings’ governing party, very few of these men had any commitment to the dynasty’s constitutional vision, and most fell away into neutrality or opposition during interregna. Fryderyk’s elaborate rhetorical contortions during the 1501 interregnum, for example, failed to galvanize the nobility in the senate or the country behind the Jagiellonian agenda, or pacify the anti-Jan Olbracht backlash, and the cardinal died politically isolated. Whereas Cardinal Oleśnicki (d. 1455) and Krzesław Kurozwęcki (d. 1503) had used their dioceses as launch pads for their personal political programmes, their mighty factions were ultimately built on coalitions of magnate families and their retainers. By 1503, Fryderyk Jagiellon’s party, by contrast, seemed to be sadly limited to the staff of his household and episcopal chancellery. Just weeks after Fryderyk’s death, for example, Piotr Tomicki could write to his uncle Andrzej Szamotulski, castellan of Kalisz, thanking Andrzej for protecting him from the powerful enemies who had ‘slandered’ and massed against his late master.144 Cardinal Fryderyk’s political star rose and fell with the centralizing monarchist regime which he had served so diligently since 1488, and the successes and failures of his career offer us a magnifying glass with which to view the strengths and flaws of that government. In December 1493, Fryderyk had entered Kraków in pomp and triumph, an apparently unchallengeable figure, a newly named cardinal, primate, dynastic prince and head of the Polish senate. Less than a decade later, in March 144

1940s.

Odrzywolska-Kidawa, Biskup Piotr, p. 84. Tomicki’s letter was destroyed in the

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1502, it seemed as if this experiment had very publicly failed, as Fryderyk found himself petitioning for humiliating concessions on behalf of another would-be heir to Zbigniew Oleśnicki, Bishop Krzesław Kurozwęcki. In the short term at least, the last word on Kazimierz IV’s Renaissance monarchy was Fryderyk Jagiellon’s signature on the crumpled and torn royal concession charters granted for the diocese of Włocławek, and now stored in the roof of another, more northerly, cathedral built in the broad sweep of the Vistula river. In Poland, a cardinal-prince had proved a potent but also a volatile and unstable element in the body politic.

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CHAPTER THREE

‘Reformanda reformare’: Fryderyk Jagiellon and the Polish Church

Introduction On the opening pages of a missal printed for the Polish capital in the 1490s, a crudely executed woodcut shows Fryderyk Jagiellon as bishop of Kraków, kneeling in a two-dimensional space (Figure 3). He is depicted in a flowing cardinal’s cloak and tonsured, with a wide-brimmed hat dangling down his back, a long primate’s cross tucked under one arm and the Polish coat of arms resting at his knees. This is the approved picture of Fryderyk as prelate and pastor that he wished his flock to see. What realities of church government lay behind this simple printed image? Just what kind of bishop, ecclesiastical administrator, pastor and spiritual leader was Fryderyk Jagiellon, ‘the son and brother of great kings’?1 In Chapter 2, we explored how Cardinal Fryderyk used his ecclesiastical titles in the high politics and factional battles of late fifteenth-century Poland. We can now change tack and view his career from a different angle, by peeling back the central political narrative and taking a closer look at the rich internal, religious life of the dioceses which Fryderyk headed. Within weeks of his enthronement as bishopadministrator of Kraków in 1489, Fryderyk emerged as a zealous reformer, or at least – until we define that term more closely – a committed agent of change within the Polish church. In his policies towards cathedrals, liturgies, public morality and the inviolability of church land and persons, Fryderyk’s pontificates marked a strong departure from local norms, differing significantly from the work of his contemporary brother bishops. Traditional historiography has it that the late medieval bishop was a detached and cynical career politician, and while recent scholarship on the spiritual life of fifteenth-century Christendom has had much to say about lay piety and grassroots phenomena, we still know lamentably little about the religious world of the European episcopate.2 Fryderyk Jagiellon offers us a thought-provoking case study on the meanings, varieties and practice of episcopally led ‘reform’ circa 1500 – not least because the cardinal’s reforms were not only spiritual endeavours, but a highly politicized exercise and an integral ingredient in the creation of a ‘national church’, a body effectively run by the national Crown. As such, Fryderyk’s record as church Missale Cracoviense (in quarto, post 1493). Quote from Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 205: ‘filius regis et frater magnorum regum erat’. 2 For works on fifteenth-century grass-roots religious experience, see, for example, Henderson; Trinkaus & Oberman (eds); Peters and Morrison. 1

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leader has much to tell us about the relationship between European monarchies and issues of church reformation at the close of the fifteenth century, in last days before a spiritually unified Latin Christendom – ‘the seamless garment of Christ’, in the words of Renaissance theologians – tore itself apart. The Bishop in His Diocese Two Cathedrals Cardinal Fryderyk’s policies towards his two gothic cathedrals, St Wenceslas’s on Kraków’s Wawel hill and St Wojciech’s in Gniezno, offer a neat microcosm of his vision for the Polish church. With their canopied episcopal thrones, these cathedrals were a symbol and physical embodiment of the bishop’s supreme authority over his flock, the showcase shrines of a diocese. In common with all late medieval consecrated spaces, their main day-to-day function was worship, the singing of holy office and the regular, reverent and efficacious celebration of the Eucharist – the transforming sacrament which, in the eyes of fifteenth-century believers, stood at the centre of all human affairs, forming a mighty and mystical portal between heaven and earth.3 Celebration of the divine worship in a cathedral required a structurally sound building, a full complement of liturgical apparatus, a body of diligent clerics and, ideally, laity who knew how to act with due decorum. Responsibility for managing the building and its worship lay, in the first instance, with the cathedral canons themselves. In fifteenth-century Poland, the great majority of bishops were happy simply to leave their canons to it. They adopted a hands-off approach to cathedral management, maintaining limited contact with their chapters; bishop’s names surface only infrequently in the extensive chapter minutes of fifteenth-century Poznań, Włocławek and Gniezno (to 1493, and Fryderyk’s election as archbishop), for example.4 Fryderyk Jagiellon, by contrast, probed very closely into the affairs of his cathedrals, dispatching regular letters, envoys and demands to the Kraków and Gniezno chapters, and personally policing the key elements of worship. To begin with the material fundamentals, both St Wenceslas’s and St Wojciech’s faced that perennial problem of church life , building maintenance. While the Wawel cathedral had been completed by Kazimierz the Great in 1364 and later embellished by the Jagiellonian kings, Gniezno cathedral was in a parlous physical state, having been razed during a Teutonic Order raid of 1331 and only partially reconstructed. An illumination commissioned by a Gniezno canon in 1506 shows the church with one and half towers, and a motley assortment of chapels.5 In canon law, the necessary funds for cathedral repairs could be raised in the form of a special levy, the ‘fabrica 3 John Bossy, ‘The Mass as a social institution’, Past and Present 100 (1983): 29–61; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991). 4 Acta Capitulorum. 5 AAG, MS 95, fo. 162; Marian Aleksandrowicz & Kazimiera Chojnacka (eds), Gniezno: pierwsza stolica polski, miasto Świętego Wojciecha: katalog wystawy zorganizowanej w dniach od 29 wrzesnia 1994 do 31 stycznia 1995 roku (Gniezno, 1995), pp. 187–8.

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ecclesiae’, payable by the church’s canons, vicars and altar-priests. While all Polish cathedrals maintained a fabrica, this fund-raising institution typically ticked along in the background without any significant input from the bishop: Uriel of Górka, bishop of Poznań (1479–98), for example, rubber-stamped the creation of a fabrica at every annual chapter general and had no more to say about it.6 Fryderyk Jagiellon, however, supervised both fabricas very closely. In July 1489, one of his first acts as bishop of Kraków was to assure the canons that any of their number who fell behind in payments to the fabrica would be punished.7 In Gniezno, the annual fabrica fund initially launched by the canons themselves (in 1493 and 1496) to ‘restore the cathedral’ was soon transformed into Cardinal Fryderyk’s own episcopal project. From 1497 onwards, non-payers were threatened with punishment by the cardinal himself, the fabrica was run in the cardinal’s name, and the chapter notary adopted an increasingly deferential and passive tone when recording its history; references to ‘the will of the Reverend lord cardinal archbishop’ become common.8 Fryderyk was also keen to ensure that his cathedral interiors were correctly fitted out with all necessary liturgical equipment, including plate, manuscripts and musical instruments. Here, he proceeded through donation as well as coercion. In 1497, for example, the Jagiellonian archbishop warned the altar-priests of Gniezno cathedral that any of their number who lacked the necessary ‘vestments, candles, lamps’ for saying Mass would be excommunicated.9 Setting a good example himself, in 1499 Fryderyk gave two multi-volume illuminated musical books (an antiphonary and gradual) to Gniezno cathedral and, in 1500, 40 marks in cash towards the cost of installing a new organ.10 For Kraków, he commissioned a jewelled gold chalice, gilded ablution bowl, embroidered altar cloth and two reliquaries.11 The Jagiellonian cardinal also warmly embraced a rule introduced by Zbigniew Oleśnicki in 1453 which required every future bishop of Kraków to donate a golden chalice worth at least 200 Hungarian florins within a year of his enthronement, ‘to his spouse the cathedral, in order to adorn her with such ornaments’.12 Not only did Fryderyk comply with this requirement in Kraków and Gniezno, but during his intervention in the Płock episcopal election of 1497, he demanded that this ‘ancient Polish’ tradition also be written into the statutes of the Mazovian church.13 References to this kind of sustained gift-giving by other Polish bishops in the generally detailed records of

AAP, AC 32, fos 9, 18, 39v. For Primate Oleśnicki and the Gniezno fabrica, see AAG, Acta Cap. B16, fos 170, 159v. 7 AKK, AA2, fo. 201. 8 AAG, Acta Cap. B16, fos 223, 260, 281v, 329: ‘Volunt se conformare voluntati Reverendissimi domini cardinalis’; Acta Capitulorum, nr 2491, p. 559. 9 AAG, Acta. Cap. B16, fo. 280. 10 AAG, Acta Cap. B16, fo. 328; Acta Capitulorum, nr 1539, p. 566. 11 See Chapter 4, pp. 87–9, 91. 12 Statuta Synodalia Episcoporum Cracoviensium xiv et xv Saeculi, ed. Udalricus Heyzmann (Kraków, 1875), pp. 130–31: ‘sponsam suam, Cracoviensem ecclesiam, huiusmodi adornare insigniis.’ 13 For Fryderyk’s chalices, see Chapter 4, p. 87–8; p. 104. 6

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cathedral chapters are very rare indeed; Fryderyk Jagiellon’s generosity was matched only by that of Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki and his episcopal nephews.14 The main obstacle which stood in the way of harmonious cathedral worship, however, was the absence and absenteeism of clerical personnel. Under canon law, the chapter itself was required to sing holy offices and Mass on a daily basis, but in practice many Polish canons were non-resident, busy pursuing careers in the Roman curia, in the bishop’s peripatetic household, or as judges and canons in other dioceses. Both canons and altar-priests (the latter bound by the terms of wills to sing memorial Masses in chapels) were therefore permitted to appoint vicars to carry out liturgical duties on their behalf, although these priests often proved haphazard and unreliable substitutes. Bishops rarely became involved in these problems: Krzesław Kurozwęcki was an exception when he insisted in 1498 that the canons of Włocławek must each say four Masses at the high altar in person ‘to avoid neglect of the divine offices’.15 Cardinal Fryderyk, however, dealt with this issue with unusual severity. Visiting Gniezno in 1499, Fryderyk complained about ‘the vicars of this cathedral, and the disorders and negligence of which they are so often culpable’, blaming their failings on a lack of written rules, or statutes. The cathedral chapter was ordered to draw up an appropriate text, which was duly approved in spring 1501.16 In Kraków, Fryderyk tried to improve the liturgical life of the Wawel cathedral in another way, by disciplining the canons themselves. In this period, many Polish chapters voluntarily edited or tidied up their official statutes, the rule-books built up over the centuries by generations of bishops and canons; Poznań did so, for example, in 1493, Włocławek in 1500.17 In Kraków, Bishop Fryderyk unilaterally amended the chapter statutes just six months after his enthronement in 1489, adding seven new rules. Under this ‘reformatio’, canons faced new penalties for failing to say Mass weekly, failing to meet financial responsibilities or letting their houses fall into disrepair; new procedures were also introduced for marking the anniversaries of deceased canons and for ringing bells at vespers and matins. The canons reacted furiously, organizing an unsuccessful court case to overturn this intervention.18 Unusually, Cardinal Fryderyk also policed the behaviour of laity and pilgrims around the cathedral building where this might compromise the dignity of the shrine: in 1499, 14 For Cardinal Oleśnicki’s commissions, see Chapter 4, pp. 100–102. Jakub of Sienno (bishop of Włocławek 1464–73, primate 1473–8) and Zbigniew Oleśnicki the younger (bishop of Włocławek 1473–81, primate 1481–93) made donations of cash, plate and vestments to their cathedrals: Acta Capitulorum, nr 1205, p. 254; nr 1225, p. 257; nr 2110, p. 484; nr 2270, p. 522; AAG, Acta Cap. B16, fo. 143. 15 Metrica Capituli Wladislaviensis Antiquissima (1435–1518), fos 149–50, published on CD Rom by Biblioteka Kórnika PAN, Centrum Elektronicznych Tekstów Humanistycznych (Poznań, 2001). 16 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2527, p. 565; nr 2556, p. 569; AAG, Acta Cap. B16, fo. 348: ‘de vicariis huius ecclesie et disordinacionibus ac negligenciis, quas saepe committunt.’ 17 Metrica Capituli, fo. 156v; AAP, AC32, fo. 39v; Marek Kowalski, ‘Piętnastowieczne statuty kapitulne kapituły krakowskiej w Krakowie’, in K. Ożóg & S. Szczur (eds), Polska i jej sąsiedzi w późnym średniowieczu (Kraków, 2000), pp. 238–53. 18 AKK, AA2, fo. 201–201v.

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he issued in person a ban on the sale of venal objects, and the overnight parking of carts, in the doorways or cemetery of Gniezno cathedral.19 Canon law required a bishop to be solicitous of the state of his cathedral, and Fryderyk Jagiellon took this injunction seriously from 1488. Through codified rules, personal decrees, donations and threats, he tried to guarantee that cathedral worship in Gniezno and Kraków would be orderly, dignified and in compliance with the requirements of church law. Printed Liturgical Books In the 1480s, Fryderyk Jagiellon’s predecessor at Kraków, Jan Rzeszowski, had embarked on a cutting-edge experiment. In the medieval and Renaissance periods, all European dioceses possessed their own, individual versions of the Catholic liturgy. The main differences between these local rites, or ‘rubrica’ in Latin, lay in their calendars of feast days: whereas in Kraków, for example, the feast of St Wenceslas was celebrated as a major (or duplex) holy day in September, it might be a minor feast or omitted entirely in other dioceses.20 The local configuration of holy days was no mere liturgical nicety: during feast days, shops closed, business transactions were suspended and lay people were not allowed to work.21 A diocese’s individual rite was recorded and preserved in a group of liturgical texts – that is, the missal, breviary and diurnal. Missals contained the wording of all Masses said during the year (for example Advent, Eastertide, saints’ days, special votive masses); breviaries carried abbreviated Mass texts along with holy offices, psalms and hymns, while the diurnal – technically the slimmest volume – reproduced the divine office for the daylight hours only.22 For most of the medieval period, these local rite books had existed only in manuscript form. In the mid fifteenth century, there had been occasional attempts by Polish canons to tidy up or re-edit the text, to ensure that it was a faithful reproduction of the ancient diocesan rite; this was undertaken, for example, at Gniezno in 1433 and 1469.23 In 1483, Jan Rzeszowski entered uncharted territory for a Polish bishop when he took the bold decision to entrust the Kraków rite breviary to the printing press.24 This book was followed by two Kraków missals, produced in 1484 and 1487 by the Mainz printer Peter Schoeffer.25 The Kraków diocese was remarkably quick off the mark in embracing the new technology of moveable print type: the very first

Acta Capitulorum, nr 2528, p. 565. Missale Cracoviense (Mainz, 1484), fo. 5. 21 James Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London, 1995), p. 83. 22 See D. Hope & G. Woolfenden, ‘Liturgical books’, in C. Jones (ed.), The Study of Liturgy (London, 1992), pp. 96–101. 23 Acta Capitulorum, nr 1601, p. 339; nr 2031, p. 466. 24 No copies of the 1483 Breviarium Cracoviense survive: see Tadeuz Ulewicz, Wśród impresorów krakowskich doby Renesansu (Kraków, 1977), pp. 18–20. 25 Missale Cracoviense (Mainz, 1484); Missale Cracoviense (Mainz, 1487). 19 20

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printed liturgical books in Europe had been produced only a decade earlier, with two Roman-rite missals published in 1472 (Italy) and 1473 (Basel).26 After his election to the see of Kraków in 1488, Fryderyk Jagiellon took Rzeszowski’s project forward enthusiastically, possibly prompted by the appearance in the early 1490s of a host of unauthorized, foreign-produced liturgical editions for his two dioceses – by the printers Drach and Schott in Strasbourg, Schoeffer in Mainz, and Hochfeder and Stuchs in Nuremberg.27 In the late 1490s, the cardinal entered into a commercial arrangement with the local burgher Johannes Haller and the celebrated German printer Georg Stuchs, who had already printed an unauthorized Kraków diurnal in 1494. As a result of this deal, Stuchs produced three official editions of the Kraków rite (either in his native Nuremberg or using a portable workshop in the Polish capital itself): a breviary (May 1498) and two undated missals, the first in quarto format (after 1493) and the second in folio format (1494–96).28 The opening pages of both missals carried a large woodcut frontispiece showing a representation of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon himself (Figure 3), while printed on the reverse was the text of the formal episcopal monopoly granted to Haller and Stuchs: In order that no avaricious or malicious person should dare to reprint this book, the most illustrious Prince Fryderyk […] together with his venerable canons of Kraków, hereby solemnly decrees that nobody may reproduce the Kraków missal for this diocese to the detriment of the aforementioned Johannes Haller, under pain of certain punishments.29

Cardinal Fryderyk was presumably satisfied with the results of this exercise, because in the late 1490s the archdiocese of Gniezno also received an official printed rite. In 1497, the cardinal formally ‘approved and received’ a new edition of the Gniezno rite prepared by Canon Klemens of Piotrków, and in April 1499 a local merchant was persuaded to carry this breviary text to Venice for printing. The original Breviarium Gnesnense of 1500 (now lost) was followed by a second edition of Klemens’s text, printed in Nuremberg in April 1502.30 The 1502 breviary carried an archiepiscopal 26 M. Duggan, ‘Politics and text: bringing the liturgy to print’, Gutenburg Jahrbuch 76 (2001): 104–17. 27 Missale Gnesense et Cracoviense, Johann Prüss for Peter Drach (Strasbourg, 1490); Missale Cracoviense, Martin Schott (Strasbourg, 1491); Breviarium Cracoviense, Gnesnense et Posnaniense, Caspar Hochfeder (Nuremberg, 1494). Peter Schoeffer’s 1492 Kraków– Gniezno missal (Mainz) also seems to have been unauthorized (i.e. with no episcopal mandate or endorsement), as does Stuchs’s Diurnale Cracoviense (1494–96). 28 Missale Cracoviense (post 1493), Missale Cracoviense (1500?); Breviarium Cracoviense (1498). See A. Lewicka-Kamińska, ‘Mszały krakowskie z przełomu XV i XVI wieku’, Biuletyn Biblioteki Jagiellońskiej 23 (1973): 131–50. 29 Missale Cracoviensis in quarto: ‘At ne eundem aliquis librum avidus aut invidus in eius detrimentum imprimere de novo audeat Illustrissimus princeps Fridericus … una cum suorum venerabilium canonicorum cracoviensium cetu firmiter sanxit: que non alter suoram diocesium quispiam de novo in prefati Johannis Haller detrimentum hoc missale cracoviensis rubrice imprimere audebit: sub certa indicta pena.’ 30 AAG, Act. Cap. B16, fo. 275; Acta Capitulorum, nr 2524, p. 564; Ulewicz, Wśród impresorów, p. 20. The Gniezno liturgies are not listed in the British Library ISTIC catalogue.

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mandate from Cardinal Fryderyk on its opening page, with an adapted version of the original Kraków frontispiece woodcuts suitable for use in the Gniezno diocese.31 In the decade 1493 to 1503, Fryderyk Jagiellon was therefore involved in the printing of five liturgical editions in two separate dioceses. It is worth stressing just how unusual these projects were for their time. Under Cardinal Fryderyk, Kraków (three editions) and Gniezno (two editions) easily topped the printing league of Polish dioceses.32 The only comparable Polish texts are a Płock breviary of 1498, a Poznań breviary commissioned by the new bishop, Jan Lubrański, in August 1500 and a Włocławek breviary ordered and edited by Bishop Krzesław of Kurozwęcki in autumn 1502.33 All these dioceses printed only a single liturgical book apiece, and none of their volumes predate those produced as a result of the Fryderyk–Stuchs collaboration. The Polish church in general was, however, actually very advanced in its printing compared with other regions of Catholic Europe. Using the leading database of early printed books, the British Library’s Incunabula Short Title Illustrated Catalogue (ISTIC), supplemented with a new catalogue of Oxford incunabula, we can construct a broad statistical picture of ‘rubrica’ printing in late medieval Christendom.34 The ISTIC shows that any printing of diocesan liturgy was something of a rarity in this period. Of the 720-odd dioceses in Catholic Europe, only 150 saw their local rites committed to print before 1501.35 Importantly, most of these books had nothing to do with the local church hierarchy; as in Kraków, the great majority of early missals and breviaries were completely unauthorized editions, printed by (often foreign) workshops on their own initiative as a freelance commercial venture, over which the bishop had no control whatsoever. Overall, the number of European dioceses where the ecclesiastical authorities took charge of the new technology and formally commissioned an official version of their rite, protected with a monopoly (or mandate), was very small – only 38 in the incunabula period (that is, up until circa 1500).36 Within this select group of 38 dioceses, stretching from Uppsala to Breviarium Gnesnense (Nuremberg, 1502); Lewicka-Kamińska, p. 139. German-speaking Warmia, however, part of the archdiocese of Riga, printed three liturgical texts: Diurnale Warmiense (Strasbourg, 1490), Breviarium Warmiense (Nuremberg, 1497?), Missale Warmiense (Strasbourg, 1497). 33 Breviarium Plocense (Venice, 1498), Breviarium Posnaniense (Basel, 1500), Viaticum Wratislaviense, printed by Georg Stuchs (Nuremberg, 1502). The Viaticum is not listed on the ISTC, and the only surviving edition is found in the Gniezno Cathedral Archive, AAG. 34 The ISTIC is regularly updated but is reliant on the accuracy of the catalogues which it unites; the figures given below are therefore based on the best data available, but are not necessarily comprehensive. A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century Now in the Bodleian Library Oxford, ed. A. Coates, C. Dondi, B. Wagner & H. Dixon (6 vols, Oxford, 2005). 35 ISTIC. The number of dioceses has been calculated using the data in Eubel, vol. 2. 36 These are, according the information available in the ISTIC: Augsburg, Autun, Aversa, Besançon, Brandenburg, Cartagena, Chartres, Constance, Eichstätt, Embrun, Esztergom, Freising, Gap, Kraków, Limoges, Linköping, Magdeburg, Mainz, Meissen, Moûtiers, Naumberg, Olomouc, Passau, Poznań, Regensburg, Salzburg, Sion, Skara, Speyer, Strängäs, Strasbourg, Tarragona, Toledo, Uppsala, Vienne, Verdun, Wrocław, Würzburg. 31 32

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Toledo, the typical pattern was for a local bishop to commission a single, one-off edition of the local liturgy and leave the experiment at that. Only a tiny proportion of dioceses (and diocesan bishops) – 13 in total – showed a more sustained interest in ‘rubrica’ printing in the fifteenth century, ordering either repeat editions or more than one type of book, as Table 1 shows:37 Table 1:

Dioceses with multiple authorized, printed editions of the local liturgical rite (incunabula) Total no. of

Diocese

authorized

Texts Commissioning bishop

editions

Würzburg

7

type & number Rudolph von Scherenburg

Missal

(1466–95)

Breviary (1)

5

Missal

(2)

2

Missal

(2)

Laurentius de Biba (1495– 1519) Jan Rzeszowski (1471–88)

Kraków

6

3

Augsburg

3

2

Breviary (1)

3

Missal

1503)

Diurnal (1)

3

Breviary (1)

1

(1480–91)

(2)

Hugo von Landenberg

Breviary (1)

(1496–1530)

Diurnal (1)

2

Breviary (2)

2

Gabriel von Eyb (1497–1535)

Breviary (1)

1

Frederick von Zollern

Breviary (1)

(1486–1505)

Diurnal (1)

Wilhelm von Reichenau Eichstätt

(4)

Fryderyk Jagiellon (1488–

Otto von Sonnenburg Constance

commissioned:

(1464–96)

2

37 The table includes only those editions with a formal episcopal mandate; it excludes books such as the Sarum Missal (1500), which is linked to Cardinal John Morton solely by the inclusion of his heraldic barrel device in the marginal decoration of a woodcut, f. 242; see Richard Marks & Paul Williamson (eds), Gothic: Art for England, 1440–1547 (London, 2003), p. 418.

‘REFORMANDA REFORMARE’ Gniezno

2

Fryderyk Jagiellon

Breviary (2)

2

Missal

(1)

1

Breviary (1)

1

Breviary (2)

2

Jan Filipiec (1484–9)

Missal

(1)

1

Stanislaus Turzo (1497–1540)

Breviary (1)

1

Christoph von Schachner

Diurnal (1)

(1490–1500)

Breviary (1)

2

Breviary (1)

1

Breviary (1)

1

Breviary (2)

2

Guilelmus de Harcourt

Breviary (1)

2

(1457–1500)

Missal

(1493–1503) Johannes de Barthon (1457–84)

Limoges

2

79

Johannes de Barton the younger (1484–1510)

Naumburg

2

Olomouc

2

Passau

2

Dietrich von Schauemberg (1481–92)

Heinrich von Abensberg Regensburg

2

(1466–92) Rupert, duke of BayernSimmern (1487–1507)

Speyer

2

Verdun

2

Ludwig von Helmstadt (1478–1504)

(1)

The dioceses of Kraków and Würzburg were therefore at the very top of the European liturgical printing league at the end of the fifteenth century, having both produced a substantial body of printed books for local use, six or seven apiece. When we look at the output of individual commissioning bishops, Fryderyk Jagiellon’s five diocesan editions mark him out as one of the two most prodigious episcopal patrons of all, alongside Bishop Rudolph Scherenburg of Würzburg (five editions). Kraków was nonetheless distinctive for the range of liturgical texts produced in a relatively short time, and as such the collaboration between Cardinal Fryderyk, Johannes Haller and Georg Stuchs was a uniquely comprehensive project in the world of fifteenthcentury European liturgical printing. We have established, then, that Fryderyk Jagiellon’s involvement in liturgical printing was exceptional, but what was it for? Were Rzeszowski and the cardinal just fashionable enthusiasts, engaged in exciting technological innovation for its own sake? Or were these bishops naive and pliant clerics who were simply used by

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clever men in search of a fast profit, like Johannes Haller? The act of transferring a local liturgical rite from manuscript to printed form was, in fact, an intellectually complex process with serious spiritual ramifications. There were sound pastoral (or even ‘reform’) reasons for embarking on such a project, as the mandate in the 1484 Missale Cracoviense hints, when it states that Rzeszowski commissioned the work mindful of his duties as a bishop.38 The episcopal mandates printed in fifteenth-century commissioned missals, and other supporting documents, enable us to piece together some of the reasons why Fryderyk and his fellow printing bishops acted as they did. Firstly, one objective of ordering printed liturgy might be purely quantitative – that is, to increase the total number of local rite texts available for priestly use across the diocese. As a mass-production process, printing had the potential to increase radically the quantity of local rite books in existence; they could roll off the press, rather than being individually copied out by scribes. Bishop Rzeszowski had specifically complained in his 1484 mandate at ‘the great lack of missal codices which contained the liturgy (vulgarly called the rubrica) of the diocese …’39 Secondly, bishops and their chapters wished to improve the physical quality of local liturgical books, their condition, external and internal appearance. Rudolph of Scherenburg, the great printing bishop of Würzburg, lamented in his 1491 mandate that ‘the books [in this diocese] are partially destroyed by age [and in a] ruined state’.40 By providing a brand-new set of books to replace the aged and allegedly crumbling manuscripts circulating locally, printing offered an elegant solution. Quality was clearly in the minds of the Gniezno chapter, too, when they reminded their agent, on the eve of his departure for Venice, that Canon Klemens’s breviary must be ‘printed in good type’.41 It is probably no accident that, in Kraków, Cardinal Fryderyk engaged not the usual fly-by-night printers who handled unauthorized liturgies but the single most experienced printer of liturgy to be found in the whole of Europe, Georg Stuchs. While 83 per cent of workshops handling printed liturgy were non-specialists (producing fewer than 5 such editions before 1501), the workshop of Georg Stuchs completed 42 liturgical commissions.42 If quantity and quality were ultimately practical concerns, the art of liturgical printing also brushed up against big theological questions. There was a detectable anxiety among Polish and German bishops that priests were saying Mass from manuscripts which had been incorrectly copied, and which contained critical errors which might invalidate the sacraments altogether. Printing was a powerful instrument of textual standardization, able to ‘fix’ the words of Catholic liturgy and guarantee that priests had a theologically pure script in front of them on the altar. In Missale Cracoviense (1484), fo. 126v: ‘officij sui …’ Missale Cracoviense (1484), fo. 126v: ‘Cum in diocesi cracoviensi esset magna penuria emendatorum codicum missalium secundum ordinationem (& ut vulgo dicitur rubricam) ecclesie Cracoviensis …’ 40 Missale Herbipolense (1481), fo. 12: ‘partim vetustate ruptos … librorum ruinam’. 41 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2524, p. 564: ‘de bona littera facere impressam’. 42 These calculations are based on data from the ISTIC. These figures include all forms of printed liturgy, including music books, editions of the Roman rite and the liturgy of religious orders. 38

39

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a 1491 mandate, Rudolph of Scherenburg stressed that reverence for the Eucharist was the principal rationale of liturgical printing; Rzeszowski, too, noted the presence of ‘incorrect’ missals in his diocese.43 In 1503, a provincial synod decree binding upon the entire Polish clergy was issued in Cardinal Fryderyk’s name: item seven stipulated that all parish priests must possess ‘missals which are properly corrected, especially in the words consecrating the body and blood of Christ’.44 Printing, therefore, touched on the central mystical rites of the church. The printing press also enabled bishops to assert, protect and celebrate the individual character of the local liturgical rite. To an untrained eye, the missals (and calendars) of two different dioceses might be difficult to tell apart, particularly as manuscripts moved back and forth over diocesan boundaries. Church authorities often feared that their own rite might be undermined or contaminated by books crossing over from neighbouring areas. In the 1450s, the bishop of Brixen had excommunicated priests in his diocese for using the Augsburg liturgy, and both Rzeszowski and Scherenburg complained in their mandates about the circulation of ‘corrupted’ texts.45 Kraków suffered from similar problems: the unauthorized ‘Kraków’ missal printed by the Scholt workshop in Strasbourg in 1491 actually contained the calendar of the Wrocław diocese.46 Printing enabled bishops to fight back against foreign printers and muddled local clergy, and to fix permanently in print and preserve the true, ancient form of the local rite, as researched and edited by canons and scholars. Moreover, Fryderyk’s mandates and woodcut made the Stuchs books instantly recognizable as Kraków products, complete with prominent images of the bishop and the diocese’s patron saint. In Cardinal Fryderyk’s episcopal enthusiasm for the printing press, we can see further evidence of his determined concern for the integrity of worship in his dioceses: his woodcut image in the Kraków missals very publicly declared him to be the protector of the authenticity and dignity of the local ‘rubrica’. The exceptional number, and diverse spread, of liturgical books printed for the cardinal are testament to how seriously he took the issue of orderly sacramental celebration. His printed books could guarantee the accuracy of universal elements like the consecration of the bread and wine, while simultaneously safeguarding local particularism, with its special cults and devotional traditions. Discipline and Correction In the eleventh century, the Gregorian reform movement – a campaign by abbots and scholars which culminated in the explosive pontificate of Gregory VII (1073–83) – had placed the moral state of the clergy at the very heart of its programmes, setting Missale Herbipolense (1481), fo. 12–12v; Missale Cracoviense (1484), fo. 126v: ‘corrupti ac depravati’. 44 AAG, MS 376, fo. 2: ‘Missalia sint bene correcta maxime in verbis consecrationis corporis Christi et sanguinis.’ 45 Duggan, p. 111; Missale Herbipolense (1481), fo. 12; Missale Cracoviense (1484), fo. 126v. 46 Missale Cracoviense (1491). 43

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an agenda for church government for centuries to come, and making it a pastoral cause célèbre of the medieval church.47 Two main kinds of problem behaviour were associated with the (mainly lower) clergy – ‘neglegencia’ and ‘excessus’. A priest guilty of negligence might be unwilling or unable to sing Mass in the parish church, reluctant to administer sacraments to his flock, or fail to observe the daily prayer routine set out in the offices of the breviary. ‘Excesses’, or scandalous behaviour, might include inappropriate fraternizing with married women, mixing with women of blemished reputation (inhonestae), keeping a concubine, fathering children, frequenting taverns, drunkenness, playing dice, wearing lay dress, carrying arms or excessive public quarrelling. We can trace the ways in which the late fifteenth-century Polish church handled the problem of feckless clergy by consulting the kingdom’s well-preserved episcopal court books, the records of the highest canon law courts in any given diocese, where the bishop himself sat as judge (known in the English-language literature as ‘courts of audience’).48 Fryderyk Jagiellon’s court-of-audience book for the Kraków diocese has survived in full and can usefully be read alongside those of Uriel of Górka in Poznań (1479–97), Zbigniew Oleśnicki the younger in Gniezno (1481–93) and Krzesław of Kurozwęcki in Włocławek (1494–1503).49 These prelates – who include both pro-Jagiellonian and opposition bishops, operating in a range of major dioceses across the kingdom – constitute a useful control group who can help us to identify any distinctive elements in the royal cardinal’s disciplinary policies. In these bulky manuscripts, we can see the circumstances in which inept or incontinent Polish clergy were apprehended, admonished and punished at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although a high number of the disciplinary cases recorded in the Polish court books give no indication as to how the cleric originally came to the attention of the authorities (there are, for instance, 40 such cases in Włocławek, 20 in Kraków), we can nonetheless identify two principal routes by which a failing cleric might find himself before a judge. Clerical immorality and negligence could, firstly, be prosecuted as straightforward private litigation, in which disgruntled (usually lay) Catholics brought cases on their own initiative. In 1497, for example, a certain Piotr Kurek prosecuted his parish priest Maciej before the Włocławek court of audience, alledging that the clergyman had entertained the wives of local villagers in his house.50 In this kind of hearing, we see local communities in effect policing themselves, with the bishop simply adjudicating, and punishing, reported transgressions.

47 H. Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085 (Oxford, 1998) and Popes and Church Reform in the Eleventh Century (Aldershot, 2000). 48 For the functioning of ecclesiastical courts in this period, see R. Wunderli, London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation (Cambridge, Mass., 1981) and C. Donahue (ed.), The Records of the Medieval Ecclesiastical Courts, Part 1: The Continent (Berlin, 1989). 49 AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4; ADP, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 2 (AE III); AAG, A. Cap. A3; ADWł, Abkp, vol. 1 (107). Fryderyk’s own Gniezno court-of-audience book is, unfortunately, lost. 50 ADWł, Abkp, vol. 1 (107), fo. 86.

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Alternatively, prosecutions of problematic clergy might be handled entirely by the diocesan authorities, with the bishop and his staff together acting as investigator, prosecutor and judge. Such cases are indicated in the Polish sources through the court notary’s use of phrases such as ‘ex visitatione’ and ‘per inquisitionem’. Our notaries, unfortunately, nowhere elaborate precisely what legal or practical processes these terms refer to, and we are therefore forced to engage in some educated guesswork. ‘Ex visitatione’ probably indicates cases which originated in the triannual visitations, or inspections, of parishes which archdeacons were required to carry out under canon law; in other words, regular sweeps of the diocese by senior ecclesiastical officials would pick up lax local clergy, who might be duly prosecuted. The phrase ‘per inquisitionem’ is here altogether more opaque. It should certainly not be confused with the famous medieval papal inquisition, established in Poland in 1318 and run by the Dominican Order as a supra-diocesan operation, which existed principally in order to root out heresy.51 ‘Inquisitio’ might, alternatively, refer to use of a specific legal procedure devised in the thirteenth century, in which conviction could be secured simply on the grounds of ill fame (‘fama’), rather than on the basis of the two eyewitness testimonies required in normal canon law proceedings. The purpose of this method was to facilitate successful prosecution of occult (or hidden) crimes, such as sexual misdemeanours.52 Perhaps the most likely explanation, however, is that ‘inquisitio’ is used in the Polish court books in its very general original Latin meaning of ‘an inquiry’: the word is used almost interchangeably with ‘visitatio’, and occurs in cases where there is no question of the crime having been occult; for example, recurrent public drunkenness of the parish priest. Whatever the precise mechanics, these cases represent one or more forms of active investigation employed by the institutional church to police its own staff, the lower clergy. When we compare the court-of-audience books for Kraków, Poznań, Gniezno and Włocławek, the zeal with which Fryderyk’s diocesan officials instigated and prosecuted lax clergy stands out, both quantitatively and qualitatively:

Paweł Kras, ‘Inkwyzycja papieska w walce z Husytyzmem na ziemiach polskich’, in S. Byliny & R. Gładkiewicz (eds), Polskie echa Husytyzmu (Warsaw, 1999), pp. 88–115; Bernard Hamilton, The Medieval Inquisition (London, 1981). 52 Richard M. Fraher, ‘IV Lateran’s revolution in criminal procedure: the birth of the inquisition, the end of ordeals and Innocent III’s vision of ecclesiastical politics’, in Joseph Rosali (ed.), Studia in Honorem Ementissimi Cardinalis Alphonsi M. Stickler (Rome, 1992), pp. 97–112. See, for example, Brundage, pp. 92–4. 51

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Table 2:

Number and percentage of clerical discipline cases heard in person by leading Polish bishops, late fifteenth century Total no. of

Archbishop / bishop

cases heard in person

No. of clerical discipline cases

Percentage of clerical discipline cases

Krzesław Kurozwęcki (Włocławek, 1494–

266

86

32%

182

34

19%

162

21

13%

178

10

6%

1503) Fryderyk Jagiellon (Kraków, 1488–1503) Uriel of Górka (Poznań, 147997) Zbigniew Oleśnicki (Gniezno, 1481–93)

At first glance, the number of disciplinary cases heard by Fryderyk does not appear particularly dramatic, although he did preside over three times more such hearings than Primate Oleśnicki. The figures for the Włocławek diocese require some explanation. Włocławek, encompassing lands between Mazovia and the Baltic, was a diocese apart, with a particular local context: it was here that the heartlands of Polish Hussitism were to be found. Alongside heresy trials organized by Dominican inquisitors (such as the condemnation and burning of the priest Adam of Radziej in 1499), diocesan visitations were used vigorously by Bishop Krzesław and his predecessors as a preventative measure, to monitor local clergy closely and prevent abuses which might make local people more susceptible to disillusion and heresy.53 In the context of a Polish diocese without a heresy problem, therefore, Fryderyk Jagiellon’s court of audience heard a markedly high number of clerical discipline cases. The details of the Kraków cases are particularly telling because they reveal an unusual degree of close personal involvement by the Jagiellonian bishop. In Gniezno and Poznań, the ‘inquisitio’ and ‘visitatio’ cases involving incontinent clergy heard by Oleśnicki and Uriel Górka were exclusively the product of routine archdeacons’ visitations; even in Włocławek, in only one entry is the background investigation directly linked with the bishop’s person, when in February 1500 the high-profile

53 Paweł Kras, Husyci w pietnastowiecznej Polsce (Lublin, 1998); ADWł, Abkp, vol. 1 (107), fo. 139v, 151, 150 and Dok. 383, 384; Kujawski, pp. 118–21.

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prosecution of a cathedral canon was attributed to ‘the lord bishop’s inquisition’.54 The Kraków court notaries, by contrast, made it clear that several of the visitations to which they referred had been expressly ordered by Fryderyk himself, with the implication that these investigations were non-routine, and that the officials carrying them out were acting as the bishop’s own inquisitors: ‘the special inquisition recently carried out by the official of Wiślica collegiate church on the orders of the most revered lord cardinal’, or ‘the lord cardinal’s inquisitor’.55 We find further evidence of this trend in the minutes of the Gniezno cathedral chapter, which in June 1498 recorded the cardinal’s desire to ‘correct and reform the clergy’, appointing Canons Klemens of Piotrków and Paweł of Zalesia as his inquisitors. It was recorded that Fryderyk, ‘wishing to attend to the correction of the clergy and their reformation, sent [these agents] to this [cathedral] church and also within and without the walls of Gniezno, even including the monastries … [checking for] honest lifestyle and associations’.56 In other words, it appears that Fryderyk used his own agents to supplement, extend and strengthen the existing framework of diocesan visitation.57 Another distinctive feature of Fryderyk’s Kraków court book is the recurrence of handwritten confessions (‘manu proprio’) penned by incontinent clergy, which refer to the just castigation received from the bishop himself. We find this entry, for example, in 1490: ‘I Mikołaj of Byelanus parish priest … rightly rebuked for my excesses by the most illustrious and reverend lord bishop, promise not to meet with the married woman whom I enticed into my priest’s house, or with any other suspect women, in accordance with the order of the bishop, under pain of imprisonment and expulsion from the Kraków diocese …’58 There is only one comparable entry in Olesnicki’s Gniezno manuscript, and none whatsoever in Poznań or Włocławek.59 Disciplinary activity and policy in the Kraków diocese under Fryderyk therefore stands out within the late fifteenth-century Polish church; the royal cardinal heard high numbers of disciplinary cases for a diocese untroubled by heterodoxy, personally ordered a number of special visitations of parishes and collegiate churches to supplement the routine activity of archdeacons, and appears to have taken the time to dress down offending clergy in person. So far, we have considered disciplinary activity involving only the secular clergy – parish priest, vicars, mansionary canons and altar-priests. The Kraków court-of-audience book reveals, however, that the royal cardinal also, unusually and ADWł, Abkp, vol. 1 (107), fos 161v–162v. AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fos 112v, 137v. 56 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2510, p. 562: ‘volens intendere correctioni cleri ac reformacioni eorum, huc ad ecclesiam ac eciam intra et extra muros Gneznenses, inclusis eciam monasteriis … moribus ac honesta conversacione.’ 57 For routine and extraordinary visitations within the English late medieval church, see Ian Forrest, The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2005), pp. 28–59. 58 AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fo. 55: ‘Ego Nicolaus de byeloni plebanus … per meis excessibus per domini Illustrissimi et Reverendissimi electum confirmatum benigne correptus promitto quia cum muliere maritata quam servavi in domo mea plebanali et cum alia quacumque suspecta per amplius non conversabor iuxta decretum ipsius Reverendissimi domini Electi sub pena carceris et propulsionis de diocesi cracoviensi …’ 59 AAG, Acta Cap. A3, fo. 68 (1490). 54 55

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contentiously, used the tool of ‘visitatio’ against religious orders. Again, a practice which was decidedly rare in other dioceses is seen to be deployed repeatedly during Fryderyk’s pontificate.60 In autumn 1490, the young Fryderyk appointed two cathedral canons as inquisitors to conduct an episcopal visitation of the Benedictine monastery of Sieciechów, whose abbot, Jan Boturzyński, was subsequently tried in the court of audience for ‘scandals and excesses’.61 In 1494, Canons Jan Baruchowski and Jan Leszcziński received a similar commission to conduct a visitation of the convent of Saint Brigit in Lublin, founded by King Władysław-Jogaila between 1426 and 1432, and here the friar Maciej was prosecuted for scandals and corruption.62 In Gniezno, too, the cardinal’s inquisitors had in 1498 been specifically instructed to include monasteries in their investigations.63 The third kind of disciplinary inquiry ordered by Cardinal Fryderyk potentially encompassed a larger variety of persons, both clerics and laymen. In accordance with the founding charters of Kraków University granted by King WładysławJogaila in 1412, the city’s bishop was automatically chancellor of the academy.64 As bishop-chancellor, his grandson Fryderyk immediately took a close interest in the behaviour of the university’s members, who were concentrated in lodgings (‘bursae’) and college buildings in the city. In autumn 1491, Fryderyk launched an ‘inquisitio generalis’ into the scandals and excesses reported to have taken place within the Collegius Maius, the headquarters of the arts faculties. On 23 November, three graduates, or ‘magistros’, were charged with scandalous behaviour and excessive quarrelling before the bishop’s court of audience; they were fined and threatened with jail, and two were required to pay a bond of 200 florins to keep the peace.65 The following day, 24 November, Fryderyk wrote to the university’s rector, Maciej of Kobylin, investing him with special supplementary powers: the rector could thereafter hand down ecclesiastical penalties, such as excommunications, in his own university court.66 Here, Fryderyk was emulating a tactic first piloted by Of the other court books considered here, only the Włocławek manuscript contains any reference to correction of a religious order, when in 1499 a number of Bydgoszcz Carmelites were put on trial for immorality, but the origins of this hearing are unclear: ADWł, Abkp, vol. 1 (107), fo. 130v. 61 AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fo. 65–66v. For the history of this foundation, see Józef Gacki, Klasztor księży benedyktynów w Sieciechowie według pism i podań miejscowych (Radom, 1872). 62 AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fo. 72–72v; Urszula Borkowska, Królewskie modlitewniki: studium z kultury religijnej epoki Jagiellonów (XV i początek XVI wieku) (Lublin, 1999), p. 213. 63 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2510, p. 562. 64 See Zofia Kozłowska-Budkowa, ‘Odnowienie Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego krakowskiego’, in Kazimierz Lepszy (ed.), Dzieje Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego w latach 1364–1764 (2 vols, Kraków, 1964), vol. 1, pp. 37–88. 65 AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fo. 81. 66 Fryderyk’s letter is reproduced in J. Fijałek, ‘Studya do dziejów uniwersytetu krakowskiego i jego wydziału teologicznego w XV wieku’, Rozprawy Akademii Umiejętności (Kraków, 1899), series II, pp. 8–9: ‘personas quascunque et cuiuscunque status, gradus, condicionis et preeminencie’. 60

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Bishop Zbigniew Oleśnicki, who in 1448 had similarly granted the rector temporary increased powers to discipline miscreant students.67 Fryderyk Jagiellon, however, granted Maciej of Kobylin a much wider writ in 1491, allowing the rector to use his new powers against teachers and professors as well, ‘on persons of any and every status, condition and rank’. It is telling that Master Andrzej of Łabiszyn and his colleagues were arraigned in 1491 for similar offences to the parish clergy and monks caught by Fryderyk’s inquisition; the Jagiellonian bishop was again imposing discipline and public order. This discussion has tried to show, through comparative investigation, that in the Kraków diocese Cardinal Fryderyk enthusiastically embraced and expanded the church’s traditional disciplinary mechanisms of inquiry and visitation. The limited Gniezno sources also reveal traces of an identical campaign in Wielkopolska. Both in his own person, and through the use of specially delegated officials, the royal bishop moved energetically against negligent and scandalous clergy, lax monks and nuns, and disorderly academics. In this respect, he adopted a far more vigorous, interventionist and wide-ranging policy of moral correction than any other major Polish bishop of the late fifteenth century. With the assistance of his cathedral canons, archdeacons, court officials and notaries, Fryderyk made the Kraków church a more effective disciplinary machine, through which he might impose order, decorum and purity in Kraków and its hinterland. The Inviolability of Church Land and Personnel In his own lifetime, there was one aspect of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s episcopal government which his clerical contemporaries commented on very warmly – his zero-tolerance policy towards nobles who violated church lands and personnel. Throughout the medieval period, landed estates belonging to the church (whether to bishops, canons, monasteries or parish priests) had been vulnerable to armed raids or outright seizure by nobles. All clerics, meanwhile, were exempt from royal or baronial justice and answerable only to their ecclesiastical superiors, a legal situation which prompted some nobles in dispute with priests to take matters into their own hands, dispensing rough justice. Any attack on church estates or the church’s ministers was an affront to (and a denial of) the universal sovereignty and legal autonomy of the Catholic church. Miechowita, in his otherwise stinging accounts of Fryderyk’s life, noted with approval the cardinal’s solicitous defence of his clergy, writing in the ‘Vita Cardinalis’: ‘The lord cardinal Fryderyk was an excellent protector and indefatigable defender of his clergy, not allowing anybody to be harmed or molested in any respect by the nobles …’68 Miechowita repeated this claim in the Chronica Polonorum, concluding his epitaph on the cardinal with the words: ‘In his time, this man did not suffer or permit the clergy to be oppressed by the nobility. May he therefore rest in

Fijałek, p. 7. Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 205: ‘Idem dominus Fridericus cardinalis tutator precipuus et defensor sui cleri impiger fuit, non sinens quemquam eorum ulla ex parte a nobilibus violari aut molestari.’ 67 68

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peace.’69 Even the Gniezno cathedral chapter, during the coerced election of 1493, grudgingly noted that the young bishop of Kraków was already ‘most distinguished in his handling of spiritual affairs, and capable and vigorous in his defence of church liberties’.70 Cardinal Fryderyk’s high-profile prosecutions of nobles stood out in fifteenthcentury Poland because bishops had traditionally lacked the inclination, or the ability, to bring such offenders before a court. For example, when the archbishop of Lwów, Andrzej Róża Boryszewski, wished in 1493 to bring the senator Jan Oporowski (palatine of Brzezie) to justice for attacking priests and their lands, he was forced to seek jurisdictional backup from papal Rome.71 In the period 1479 to 1503, the court-of-audience books show that Bishop Krzesław of Włocławek, Primate Oleśnicki and Bishop Uriel in Poznań between them mustered a total of only five prosecutions against nobles for seizing tithes or hurting clerics.72 Significantly, none of these bishops took on any senators; indeed, in the Poznań court, the Górka family received sympathetic treatment from their kinsman.73 Instead, in the dioceses of Poznań, Gniezno and Włocławek, clergy who had suffered physical violence at the hands of noblemen or local officials overwhelmingly brought these cases to the bishop’s court as private prosecutions. We find a typical scene in Primate Oleśnicki’s courtroom in 1490, when the parish priest Stefan Lachowski brought his own case against two local noblemen whom he accused of beating him up and violating the church building.74 In a more extreme example from the Włocławek diocese, in 1491 a bereaved family, backed by the entire populace of the city of Bug, brought a private prosecution against the noble Tarnowski, who had mortally injured their cleric son in a sword fight.75 In these dioceses, attacks on clergy or church property by landowners remained essentially a matter of private dispute; in Cardinal Fryderyk’s Kraków, by contrast, they were treated with the utmost gravity as affronts to the bishop himself. Fryderyk struck his first blow against nobles who encroached on church estates in 1490, when he summoned the noble Stefan Pogorski to appear before the court of audience, charged with illegally seizing the village of Jemielino from the ‘mense’, or historic estates, of the bishops of Kraków. Having ignored the bishop’s first three summons, Pogorski eventually turned up in court with a charter which purportedly proved his ownership of the disputed land. Fryderyk inspected this document and pointed out that parts of it had been newly scraped away, and lines recently added in handwriting which did not match the original text. The cardinal transferred the Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 374: ‘Hic in diebus suis clerum non patiebatur nec permittebat a nobilis opprimi. Resquiescat ergo in pace.’ 70 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2398, p. 543: ‘in regimine rerum spiritualium bene discretum ac pro defensione libertatis ecclesiastice idoneum et valentem’. 71 AAG, Acta Cap. B16, fo. 202. 72 AAG, Acta Cap. A3, fo. 174v; AAP, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 2, fos 10v, 178; ADWł, Abkp, vol. 1 (107), fos 93, 166. 73 AAP, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 2 (AE III), fos 118–118v. 74 AAG, Acta Cap. A3, fo. 175. 75 AAP, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 2 (AE III), fo. 161. Similar private prosecutions can be found in: AAG, Acta Cap. A3, fos 150v, 167v, 175; ADP, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 2, fo. 146; ADWł, Abkp, vol. 1 (107), fos 56, 137v. 69

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case to the secular (grodzki) court of Kraków, where Pogorski was found guilty of forgery, and Jemielino returned to the royal bishop.76 The cardinal dealt most harshly, however, with those who perpetrated violence against the clergy technically living under his authority. At a court of audience sitting in April 1501, for example, Fryderyk fined the noble Jan Raptyński of Łowicz the substantial sum of 100 florins for beating a local priest.77 The cardinal was particularly audacious in his willingness to prosecute not only gentry but also senior dignitaries, including his fellow senators. In 1494, a Silesian duke was fined 50 florins for doing violence to a priest.78 In June 1493, Fryderyk convened his episcopal court at the Piotrków sejm and prosecuted Mikołaj Ostrowski, castellan and captain of Lublin, for illegally imprisoning a priest named Leonardus.79 More seriously, as we saw in Chapter 2, in June 1494 Fryderyk used his judicial authority against one of the most powerful magnates of the realm, Mikołaj Kurozwęcki, castellan of Sieradź. The court book records how Fryderyk’s episcopal authorities brought a prosecution against the senator for the violent detention of a parish priest, Mikołaj Nybel, in a Kurozwęcki castle. Mikołaj Kurozwęcki did not attend the hearing or send a legal representative, and Cardinal Fryderyk pronounced a sentence of excommunication; unusually, its entire text was copied out by the notary, an indication of the gravity of the occasion.80 Miechowita’s ‘Vita Cardinalis’ offers information on these and other cases to supplement the details found in the Kraków court book itself. Its account of the 1494 Mikołaj Kurozwęcki case, which we saw earlier but which is worth revisiting, is instructive: The case of the magnificent Mikołaj Lubelczyk, known as Wrzód, whom, for giving a light blow to one of his clerics at the door of the court in Kraków, he punished in a fearsome spirit and indignation, by seizing two great gilded cups, which Kreszław, bishop of Włocławek, the chancellor of the kingdom, had offered when seeking pardon together with his brother, the same Mikołaj Wrzód, and really and effectively exacting 300 gold pieces by way of punishment.81

Miechowita further recounts the case of ‘a certain noble named Rudzki’ who was summarily imprisoned by Fryderyk in the dungeons of Iłża castle and fined 76 AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fos 51v, 52, 53, 54. In 1493, Fryderyk again prosecuted Pogorski in a secular court for failing to pay the damages owed from the original case: Starodawne prawa polskiego pomniki z ksiąg dawnych sądowych ziemskich i grodzkich ziemi krakowskiej, ed. Antoni Helcel (5 vols, Kraków, 1870–88), vol. 2, pp. 874–8. 77 AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, unnumbered page; Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 205. 78 AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, 119v. 79 AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fo. 97v. 80 AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fo. 120. 81 Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 205: ‘magnifico Nicolao Lubelczik [i.e. Kurozwęcki] quem ob levem percussionem sui clerici in foribus curiae Cracoviensis percussi, terribili mente et indignatione punivit: binas cuppas magnas inauratas, quas Creslaus episcopus Wladlislaviensis, Regni cancellarius, cum eodem fratre suo Nicolao … veniam petens obtulerat, tollendo, et trecentos aureos pro pena realiter et cum effectu exigendo.’

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80 marks for violence against a priest – a useful reminder that not all such cases were methodically recorded in the court book.82 In Jagiellonian Poland, nobody was beyond the reach of Cardinal Fryderyk’s pastoral programmes and episcopal justice – neither the mighty castellan of Sieradź nor the lowliest parish priest in rural Małopolska. Fryderyk’s episcopates in Gniezno and especially Kraków stand out as the work of an individual, innovative and interventionist pastor, bringing to the Polish church a new style of episcopal governance. But what were the threads which linked these various projects, and what spiritual or even political rationales might have underpinned them? Fryderyk Jagiellon and Meanings of Reform So far, this chapter has steered shy of using, far less defining, the prickly term ‘reform’ – instead, it has employed interchangeable and less contentious phrases such as ‘purification’, ‘pastoral care’ or ‘discipline’. The magic word ‘reformatio’ – so evocative and portentous to historians of the Renaissance church – does surface with some regularity in Polish ecclesiastical documents from the later fifteenth century, but it is a sloppy, imprecise term, whose late medieval meaning is hard to pin down. In the Polish church, ‘reformatio’ could be applied to a pipe organ, clock or cathedral tower; it could signify physical repair as well as a moral improvement in specified groups of people.83 Tellingly, ‘reformatio’ was very rarely used in relation to the church as an institutional whole. The nearest we come to the latter are the decrees of the January 1503 Łęczyca provincial synod, summoned by Fryderyk and conducted while the cardinal lay dying in Kraków. That text warned all clergy in the Polish province that archdeacons would soon be visiting their parishes to ‘reform, amend and correct’, a succinct formulation which implies that reform is a general process in its own right.84 Given the linguistic vagueness of the sources themselves, can we say for certain that Fryderyk Jagiellon was engaged in a self-conscious campaign of reform at all? What can his episcopal career tell us about concepts and meanings of reform in Catholic Christendom circa 1500, and how should we characterize Fryderyk’s spiritual leadership? The closest we have to a blueprint of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s pastoral programme are the decrees promulgated by the Łęczyca provincial synod in January 1503. Fryderyk had already summoned at least seven earlier diocesan and provincial synods – held throughout 1489, 1496, 1497 and 1501, variously meeting in Gniezno, Łęczyca and Koło – but virtually nothing is known of their deliberations, beyond the fact that they Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 205. Acta Capitulorum, nr 2137, p. 491; nr 2491, p. 559. For discussions of the concept of reform in the Christian church, see G. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Karl Morrison, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton, NJ, 1982); C. Bellitto & L. Hamilton, Reforming the Church before Modernity: Patterns, Problems and Approaches (Aldershot, 2005). 84 Published in Rybus, p. 216: ‘reformanda reformare, emendanda emendare, corrigenda corrigere’. 82 83

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voted financial grants for the Crown.85 The 47 decrees of 1503 have survived only because a resourceful cleric copied them into the back of a printed devotional book.86 They provide a detailed and comprehensive vision of a parish’s proper sacramental life, sketching out an ideal in which the church is correctly stocked, the priest diligent and well behaved, and the parishioners fully aware of their spiritual responsibilities. It was stipulated, for example, that baptismal fonts should have lids, lockable with a key guarded by the parish rector, and that parish clergy should keep in their church a full copy of the provincial statutes and rite to ensure liturgical conformity across the diocese. Priests were banned from hearing women’s confessions in private, reminded to wear tonsures, avoid suspect places, never enter taverns, become intoxicated, carry weapons or play dice. Parishioners, meanwhile, were to say the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary daily and kneel devoutly and reverently when receiving an episcopal blessing or witnessing the elevation of the Host during Mass. In the 1503 Łęczyca statutes, all the chief elements of Cardinal Fryderyk’s pastoral work are present. His policies towards cathedrals, provision of standardized liturgies, and punishment of failing parish clergy, monks and friars speak of an iron dedication to order in the church’s life of sacraments and worship, to liturgical integrity; the castigation of ill-behaved university teachers shows that Fryderyk’s vision was not confined to the clergy, but encompassed laymen where it could. As the 1503 statutes show (with their injunction that all parishes must retain copies of such texts), Cardinal Fryderyk placed great faith in the provision of clear written rules, issuing them for cathedral canons in Kraków and vicars in Gniezno. Where rules failed, correction was required – through the new powers conferred on the university rector, the judicial instruments of visitation and the court of audience, and ultimately the penalties of excommunication, fines and incarceration in episcopal dungeons. Close personal supervision of these processes was a hallmark of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s episcopal regime: we constantly find him physically inspecting texts in public, whether it be the Gniezno vicars’ new statutes in 1501, the new breviary text prepared by Canon Klemens in 1497 or the forged charter submitted by the unwise Stefan Pogorski in 1490.87 If Fryderyk’s pastoral activities appear too conservative and stolid to warrant the label of reform, this is to minimize the fact that they were deeply rooted in, and had absorbed, the methods and logic of the Gregorian reform movement which had been so radical in its day, four hundred years earlier. It appears as if the canons issued by eleventh- and twelfth-century popes and the triumphant Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, and later adopted by Polish synods, had provided a gold standard for achieving a purer Catholic life in the dioceses.88 Fryderyk’s own 1503 Łęczyca 85 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2441, p. 550; nr 2462, p. 554; nr 2468, p. 555; nr 2482, p. 558; nr. 2582, p. 576. 86 AAG, MS 376; printed in Rybus, pp. 215–27. 87 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2556, p. 569; AAG, Acta Cap. B16, fo. 275; AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fo. 53. 88 For the reception of the Gregorian movement in Poland, see B. Kumor, ‘Walka o “Wolność Kościoła” w Polsce’, in Kumor & Obertyński (eds), Historia Kościoła w Polsce (2 vols, Poznań, 1974–9), vol. 1, pp. 107–24; Kazimierz Tymieniecki, ‘Henryk Kietlicz’, PSB 9 (1960–61), pp. 415–17.

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statutes were, for example, an almost verbatim repetition of the statutes drawn up by Bishop Nanker of Kraków in 1320.89 With this medieval legislative framework in place, a good fifteenth-century bishop need only enforce it. There was little doubt among the Polish episcopate that this body of law did require active enforcement, as shown by Fryderyk’s own iteration of rules and Bishop Jan Grot’s 1331 comment on the inevitable impetus towards moral decay in human society: ‘since human nature easily tends towards sinfulness and every day works to find new novelties, and frequently directs the greed of its unbridled desire towards harmful appetites, breaking old laws and refusing new ones …’90 If Fryderyk believed that the task of implementing medieval reform canons was necessarily ongoing, he seemingly had no sense that the framework itself should be altered or abandoned. It is for this reason that his pastoral work looks out of place and hard to classify within the dynamics of the late fifteenth-century church. His pastoral programmes were contemporary with, and entirely unaffected by, early manifestations of Christian humanism; in 1499, Cardinal Ximenes Cisneros of Castile laid the foundation stone of the university of Alcala, a home for the new textual theology, while in 1501 Erasmus of Rotterdam composed the Enchiridion, his humanist blueprint for the spiritual life of the lay Christian. Christian humanism implicitly rejected the notion that old medieval canons could adequately deliver good Christian life for clergy and laity, and effectively undermined them by going behind medieval law to seek more authentic values and methods in ancient texts, in Scripture and the Church Fathers. Fryderyk’s pastoral work therefore captures an important moment in the history of the Polish church. On the one hand, there was no lack of humanists in the cardinal’s immediate entourage: they included his secretary Bernardinus Gallus, a member of Konrad Celtis’s Soliditas Vistulana humanist academy; Jan Lubrański, a friend and correspondent of the Venetian humanist printer Aldus Manutius; Piotr Tomicki, who would later correspond with Erasmus; and the astrologer Nicholaus Schynagel, who included references to the very latest translations by the Florentine neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino in his 1501 almanac for Cardinal Fryderyk.91 Kraków University itself was a leading North European centre of the new learning.92 Nonetheless, by 1500 humanism had not yet affected religious thought or policy in Jagiellonian Poland, and Cardinal Fryderyk’s 16-year project within the Polish church constituted the last major ‘medieval’ reform seen in the dioceses of Kraków and Gniezno. In an age where scholarship has tended to Statuta Synodalia, pp. 4–32. Statuta Synodalia, p. 35: ‘quia humana natura facilius quodammodo labitur ad delicta et novitates cottidie nititur invenire sue cupiditatis effrenate ingluviuem ad noxios frequenter dirigit appetitus, vetera statuta transgrediens et nova refutans …’ 91 Tadeusz Ulewicz, ‘Polish humanism and its Italian sources: beginnings and historical development’, in S. Fiszman (ed.), The Polish Renaissance in Its European Context (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), pp. 215–35. Schynagel’s almanac for Cardinal Fryderyk is BJ, MS 8. See N. Nowakowska, ‘Papacy and Piety in the Career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon, Prince of Poland (1468–1503)’, D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University (2004), pp. 283–7. 92 See Jacqueline Glomski, Patronage and Humanist Literature in the Age of the Jagiellons: Court and Career in the Writings of Rudolf Agricola Junior, Valentin Eck and Leonard Cox (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming). 89 90

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emphasize the plethora of reformist currents abroad, and to equate reform with radical and disruptive change, Fryderyk Jagiellon provides us with a model of a conservative reformer immersed in continuities. He reminds us that, in Poland at least, no matter how institutionalized and stale it might have appeared to the impatient, the great reform movement of the High Middle Ages was deeply embedded in ecclesiastical thinking and still had its descendants and eager practitioners on the very eve of the Reformation. Reform and the Building of a ‘National’ Church in Poland From spring 1489, the Jagiellonian dynasty in Poland emerged quite suddenly as the patron of ecclesiastical reform, as the guarantor of clerical probity and the dignity of worship. Although Jagiellonian monarchs had regularly endowed the Brigittine, Cistercian and reformed Franciscan orders as acts of piety and thanksgiving, Fryderyk’s reforming credentials within the diocesan hierarchy had no precedent in dynastic history.93 Throughout the late medieval period, the impulse for reform had generally come from universal, grand international forces such as the papacy, ecumenical councils and the heads of religious orders (the abbots of Cluny and Clairvaux), or alternatively from wandering charismatic preachers, such as the crusader-friar Giovanni Capistrano (d. 1456), whose fiery penitential sermons were remembered in Kraków fifty years after the event.94 Under Cardinal Fryderyk’s tutelage, ecclesiastical reform became a more recognizably national phenomenon, conceived locally and implemented under the close patronage of the Polish monarchy; a national church with its own spiritual programmes. The Polish church was very much complicit in this creeping ‘nationalization’ of reform, and it would be wrong to portray it as a one-dimensional process. In early 1491, for example, a provincial synod formally complained to King Kazimierz IV about the state of the church, in a message delivered by Piotr Wspinek, canon of Kraków: ‘The sacraments of the church, and in particular the sacrament of marriage, are today profaned everywhere … We have complained to Your Majesty about the oppression of the clergy, the murder of priests, of our lack of liberty … Your Majesty has promised us reformation of all these things.’95 The 1491 provincial synod explicitly looked to the Crown to take responsibility for the state of the local church, revealing that a belief in ecclesiastical reform as the proper concern of royal government predated Fryderyk’s own headship of the 93 U. Borkowska, ‘Fundacje kościelne Jagiellonów w świetle zapisów w Metryce Koronnej’, in E. Opaliński & T. Wiślicz (eds), Fundacje i fundatorzy w średniowieczu i epoce nowożytnej (Warsaw, 2000), pp. 58–73. 94 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 348. See also Norman Housley, ‘Giovanni da Capistrano and the crusade of 1456’, in Housley, Crusading in the Fifteenth Century, pp. 94–115. 95 Codex Epistolaris, vol. 2, nr 257, p. 309: ‘Item Sacramenta Ecclesiae, praesertim matrimonium, quod hodie passim prophanatur … Intimaveramus etiam Maiestati Vestrae de oppressione personarum ecclesiasticarum, trucidationem presbiterorum, de illibertate nostra … Omnium istorum Maiestas Vestra pollicita est nobis reformationem.’

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church. If Cardinal Fryderyk embodied the Jagiellonian monarchy’s solicitous concern for reform of the Polish church, his intention was not merely to popularize the regime, or earn greater legitimacy for it, by offering a public demonstration of its pious intentions. Fryderyk’s pastoral programme was profoundly political, in that it changed the locus of power within the church and sought to alter the wider relationship between church, state and society. If it was conservative in its ecclesiastical methods and spiritual content, Fryderyk’s agenda was radical in its political implications. In the first instance, reform provided Fryderyk with a tool with which to alter the balance of power within the church communities of Kraków and Gniezno; his pastoral work was conceived and implemented so as to make the increasingly autocratic figure of the bishop the unquestioned high priest of the diocese, and enabled Fryderyk to assert his own supreme personal authority in local religious life. Reform, in other words, was used as a pretext for pushing aside traditionally semi-autonomous groups or organizations and subjecting them firmly to the bishop’s personal will. The cathedral chapters of Kraków and Gniezno, as self-governing corporations charged with co-running the diocese with their bishop, were the first in the cardinal’s sights. In the very act of assuming personal responsibility for the regulation of worship and policing cathedral life, Fryderyk effectively usurped the legal functions of his chapters; by imposing reforms on the canons themselves, Fryderyk was asserting his authority over them and eroding their historic independence. The canons were quick to perceive and resist the aggressive agenda contained within Fryderyk’s reforms. In July 1489, in a striking act of public defiance against their royal overlord, the Kraków cathedral chapter brought a court case against Fryderyk’s vicar-general, Stanisław of Swiradzicze, challenging the new bishop’s ‘reformed’ statutes.96 The hearing was held in Fryderyk’s episcopal palace, where the bishop himself ruled on their complaint; in itself a reflection of an imbalanced power relationship. Here, the outraged Kraków canons were not simply engaged in a debate on how to manage worship, but on who had the right to do so; in taking their own bishop to court, they were objecting not so much to the onerous demands in the statutes as to his open attack on their liberties. Similarly, the visitations of religious foundations were a way of asserting and consolidating the bishop’s jurisdiction over institutions which were only semiattached to the Kraków diocese. Sentencing Friar Maciej in 1490 for scandalous behaviour and rigging elections in the Brigittine convent in Lublin, Fryderyk took the opportunity to decree that all future heads of the house thenceforth had to be formally approved by the bishop of Kraków.97 Although the capital’s bishops had claimed the right to visit Benedictine monasteries in the diocese since the 1390s, the inquisition trials resulting from the Sieciechów visitation became a battle of wills between abbot and bishop.98 Abbot Jan began by insisting at the court sittings of 5 and 7 October 1490 that he was the innocent victim of a conspiracy and that his actions had been grossly misrepresented by the bishop’s agents. On 8 October, however, AKK, AA2, fo. 201. AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fos 72–72v. 98 Paweł Sczaniecki, ‘Benedyktyni’, Zakony benedyktyńskie w Polsce – krótka historia (Warsaw, 1982), pp. 39–77. 96 97

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having taken the advice ‘of certain friends’ overnight, the weeping abbot meekly resigned his office to the Jagiellonian bishop.99 With these very public humiliations of religious foundations, Fryderyk ensured that neither the Benedictines, with their network of wealthy and entirely autonomous monasteries, nor the international order of St Brigit, could successfully challenge the authority of the see of Kraków. It is possible that Fryderyk was here also implementing a Crown policy of limiting the autonomy of powerful monastic foundations: monastic sources indicate that Kazimierz IV ended free elections, ensuring that abbots (along with bishops) were men discreetly imposed by the Polish Crown.100 In Kraków University, Fryderyk’s 1491 inquisition against the Collegius Maius, his concession of more draconian powers to the rector, and determination to discipline both undergraduates and lecturers, were also aggressive assertions of the bishop’s jurisdiction over an institution where the see’s authority was open to challenge. Technically, King Władysław-Jogaila’s founding charter had named the royal chancellor as head of the university, with the bishop of Kraków in a supporting role as ‘conservator’.101 Oleśnicki had been the first bishop to effectively wrest control of the university from the chancellery, and with his 1491 interventions Fryderyk Jagiellon was trying to build on this earlier episcopal victory and consolidate the bishop’s authority over the capital’s students, masters and professors, appropriating Oleśnicki’s achievements for the Crown. By defending and extending the authority of the bishopric of Kraków, Fryderyk was in effect engaged in a state-building exercise within the church – centralizing power in the hands of the bishop, and chipping away at the plethora of overlapping jurisdictions which characterized the medieval church. In Poland’s stormy political climate, where it was imperative that the Crown retained its new-found grip on the church, the Jagiellonian cardinal could not tolerate any opposition to his person from within the religious community; reform enabled him to entrench himself firmly in his two dioceses. After 1489, any Kraków (or later Gniezno) reform programme which strengthened the episcopate was good for the Crown. Cardinal Fryderyk’s reform methods also began, in small but significant ways, to alter the relationship between Polish society and the church / Crown. Fryderyk not only asserted his power sideways, against rival bodies in the church, but also pushed downwards through the Catholic community to make his royal-episcopal presence felt at grass-roots level. From 1489, Kraków and Gniezno priests at the lower reaches of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the ‘clerical proletariat’, increasingly came face to face with Fryderyk’s reform programmes, whether they were based in Kraków itself, small outlying towns or rural parishes. With the ‘Lord cardinal’s inquisition’, these clerics found their ministry and lifestyles under close and regular surveillance by the bishop’s agents. The new liturgical books, meanwhile, served as a sharp, material reminder of the cardinal’s brooding presence – they carried a text sanctioned by him, his message on the front page and a prominent representation of the man himself. AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fos 65–66v. I owe this information to a personal communication by Artur Chojnacki of Kraków University. 101 Fijałek, pp. 10–12. 99

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Fryderyk Jagiellon’s intrusive presence in the lives of the lower clergy (and, by extension, their flocks) is significant because it carries the seeds of one of the major changes which would occur in European society in the sixteenth century – the state’s acquisition of increasingly penetrative power over its subjects. In the more draconian polities of the sixteenth century, ‘inquisition’ and a controlled printing press would be favoured instruments of state power: early modern censorship, the Holy Office in Iberia, Roman Inquisition and the papal index might all have their antecedents (or parallels) in actions such as those of our fifteenth-century Polish bishop, who tentatively placed these instruments in the hands of the Crown. Thirdly, the reform strategy executed by Fryderyk Jagiellon had harsh political overtones because it served to alter that most fundamental of relationships in the Catholic world, between church and state. Observers such as Miechowita delighted in Fryderyk’s rough handling of Mikołaj Kurozwęcki and other nobles, seeing these (directly or otherwise) as a revival of the great Gregorian reform project. Pope Gregory VII (d. 1085) had wished to purify the church by emancipating it from the corrupting influence of secular powers; his ultimate aim had been to defend the church as a perfectly sovereign and separate institution. In Fryderyk’s punishment of Mikołaj Kurozwęcki, Miechowita saw an affirmation of the church’s legal autonomy and its inviolability by secular powers; he believed that Fryderyk had protected and avenged poor Mikołaj Nybel as a clerical subject of the universal church. This was a woeful misreading: Fryderyk Jagiellon’s ecclesiastical governance might have possessed the rhetoric and mannerisms of the Gregorian reform project, but it had, of course, turned that project completely on its head. The cardinal-prince defended poor Nybel from the mighty senator not because the priest’s ultimate master was the pope in Rome, but precisely because that master was the royal bishop of Kraków. Cardinal Fryderyk happily borrowed his pastoral methods and programme of clerical discipline from the Gregorians, while completely rejecting that movement’s original political meaning. The cardinal, through his courts and dungeons, was defending the integrity of the Polish church because, in his person, it had become an extension of the Jagiellonian state. In Poland, it was now a royal prince, and not the pope, who acted as guarantor of the church’s ‘independence’ against marauding nobles. In this context, old touchstone ‘reform’ actions, such as avenging violence against clergy, were turned inside out and effectively stripped of their spiritual reform meaning altogether, becoming instead crude tools in Polish party politics. The energetic, kaleidoscope ecclesiastical governance of Fryderyk Jagiellon reveals how the ancient slogan of church reform could act as a Trojan horse for Renaissance monarchies, rolled into the precincts of the Catholic church. The cardinal-prince, a man poised between church and Crown, could emerge as a slightly subversive kind of reformer in Renaissance Europe. Reform, after all, provided the Jagiellonians with a pretext to seize control of the church. In the name of liturgical integrity, clerical probity and sovereignty, Fryderyk asserted his control over the lower clergy, cathedral canons, university scholars and nobles; over diocesan rites, legal systems and buildings. Reform, as a vehicle of control, would serve a similar purpose in the hands of the Lutheran princes of the Empire and the Counter-Reformation pontiffs in the sixteenth century. The popes would even mirror Fryderyk’s methods, signalling the Vatican’s status as supreme spiritual metropolis

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in the 1560s by preparing a Roman rite to impose on all Catholic Europe, printing and distributing books sanctioned by them. Poland in the time of Fryderyk Jagiellon demonstrates how, like tectonic plates moving towards seismic change, church–state relations were on the slide by 1500; he shows us the great upheavals of the sixteenthcentury in embryonic form. If we turn back to the Kraków missal woodcut described at the beginning of this chapter (Figure 3), we can perhaps see the many dimensions and nuances of that image of Fryderyk Jagiellon in cardinal’s robes, kneeling before the patron saint of the Kraków diocese, on the frontispiece of the freshly printed Missale Cracoviense. Fryderyk was not simply a symbolic, two-dimensional political overlord crudely imposed on the Polish province, but a complex pastor who engaged closely with the life of the Polish church at many levels. This Polish episode shows us that, in the years around 1500, the creation of a national church did not simply mean the construction of an institution governed and taxed by the Crown, but one where the state also regulated religious life. Fryderyk Jagiellon’s pastoral record in Poland shows that increased royal control over local churches before the Reformation was not only a matter of dry legal principle, but had far-reaching spiritual reverberations. The lessons which Fryderyk offers for the sixteenth century are instructive: the royal cardinal bishop did not preside over his far-reaching programme of ecclesiastical reform because of any new and violent theological changes abroad in the Catholic world, but as a political response to Poland’s legacy of bitter civil discord and the new ambitions of the Jagiellonian state.

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CHAPTER FOUR

‘Imperium sine fine’: Fryderyk Jagiellon, Image-making and Propaganda Introduction Kraków’s red-brick Collegium Maius, the oldest Italianate quadrangle north of the Alps, today houses the Jagiellonian University Museum. Among the prize treasures in its permanent collections are astronomical instruments associated with Copernicus, a preserved eighteenth-century chocolate from a royal salon, a rare statuette of King Kazimierz the Great and a splendid gilt processional mace produced for Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon at the end of the fifteenth century. The mace is just over a metre long, its stem engraved with geometrical designs; gold daisies and twisting leaves are carved around its base and three coats of arms in coloured enamels nestle in its crown. This item has long excited art historians interested in the development of high-gothic style and sculptural techniques and goldsmith production in Kraków around the year 1500. It is also, however, a profoundly political object with much to tell us beyond the narrowly stylistic. In Chapter 1, we saw that a peculiar weakness of Kazimierz IV’s regime (1447– 92) was its coyness in producing regalist propaganda which might challenge or address the prevailing hostility towards strong monarchy that was characteristic of Polish political culture.1 With the rise of Fryderyk Jagiellon and the accession of King Jan Olbracht, however, the 1490s and early 1500s would see a rich flowering of pro-Jagiellonian propaganda in Poland. For the most part, it did not take written form: unlike Władysław Jagiellon in Buda, the new king of Poland commissioned no official court histories, and Cardinal Fryderyk (to his great historiographical cost) employed no chronicler-sidekick in the mould of Jan Długosz.2 Instead, the dynasty’s persuasive efforts at the close of the fifteenth century focused on visual media, finding expression above all in religious art. Renaissance Christendom was an intensely visual society, where political dialogue was conducted not only in oral encounters and texts, but also through heraldic devices, in the decorated margins of

1 For a study of Kazimierz IV’s propaganda regarding Mazovia, see Piotr Węcowski, Mazowsze w Koronie: propaganda i legitymizacja władzy Kazimierza Jagiellończyka na Mazowszu (Kraków, 2004). 2 King Władysław employed Antonio Bonfini as his court historian. See A. Bonfini, Antonii Bonfini Rerum Hungaricarum Decades Quatuor (Basel, 1568).

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liturgical books, the fabric of bishop’s robes and the interiors of consecrated spaces.3 While ‘propaganda’ is very much a modern term, it captures the essence of these Renaissance acts of visual persuasion. The Jagiellonians’ artistic patronage in Poland has consistently proved one of the most popular fields of enquiry for scholars writing on the dynasty, yet Cardinal Fryderyk’s own contribution to this dynastic cultural history has long remained obscure. There is, for example, a wide literature on the neo-Byzantine fresco cycles created for King Władysław-Jogaila and Kazimierz IV at Lublin and Kraków (1418, 1470s); the illuminated books of hours owned by the royal family; the canopied marble tombs erected for Jagiellonian kings in the Wawel cathedral; the carved altarpieces donated to that shrine by queens Zofia and Elizabeth, and the rebuilding of the Wawel palace façade in an Italianate style by King Aleksander in the early 1500s.4 Cardinal Fryderyk’s own considerable role as patron has attracted very limited comment, in part because his commissions consisted of small-scale, ephemeral and largely lost liturgical objects, perhaps implicitly disregarded as ‘decorative arts’. Fryderyk serves as a salutary reminder that if we are to view the image-making of Renaissance elites in context, we must go beyond traditional notions of ‘high art’ patronage and grands projets and draw on the more recent concept of ‘material culture’, considering furnishings and clothing alongside panel-painting and architecture. This chapter will first reconstruct Fryderyk Jagiellon’s largely vanished material possessions, considering these objects’ functions and their likely contemporary audience. The second part of the discussion will then tease apart the various bullish messages about Jagiellonian regal power present in Fryderyk’s treasures and iconography. Through the careful and provocative use of symbols, the cardinal attempted to construct (and display) an alternative political reality, in which the Jagiellonian dynasty ruled with divine sanction as hereditary, sacral, absolute, national kings, over a humbled magnate party. The contrast between the image of political life offered in Fryderyk’s visual propaganda and the facts of Polish high politics by 1503 is painfully stark, and the cardinal’s campaign is all the more intriguing for it.

3 Peter Coss & Maurice Keen (eds), Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2002). 4 Anna Różyczka-Bryzek, ‘Bizantyńsko-ruskie malowidła ścienne w kaplicy świętokrzyskiej’, in Studia do dziejów Wawelu 3 (Kraków, 1968), pp. 175–292; Anna RóżyckaBryzek, Freski bizantyńsko-ruskie fundacji Jagiełły w kaplicy zamku lubelskiego (Lublin, 2000); Borkowska, Królewskie modlitewniki; Barbara Miodońska, Małopolskie malarstwo książkowe, 1320–1546 (Warsaw, 1993); M. Skubiszewska, ‘Program ikonograficzny nagrobka Kazimierza Jagiellończyka w katedrze wawelskiej’, in Studja do dziejów Wawelu 4 (Kraków, 1978), pp. 117–214; A. Bokińska, ‘Mecenat artystyczny królowej Elżbiety, żony Kazimierza Jagiellończyka’, Jagiellonian University doctoral thesis (1966); M. Fabiański, ‘Art and architecture of the Renaissance in Kraków, 1500–1550: an introduction’, in F. AmesLewis (ed.), Polish and English Responses to French Art and Architecture: Contrasts and Similarities (Hove, 1995), pp. 141–51.

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Reconstructing Fryderyk Jagiellon’s Visual Presentation Sources Only a small proportion of the objects created for Cardinal Fryderyk between 1468 and 1503 survive today – the mace in the Jagiellonian University Museum; a gold reliquary in the Wawel cathedral treasury; two reliquaries and a fragment of clothing in the Gniezno Archidiocesan Museum; three illuminated manuscripts in the Gniezno and Kraków archives and a selection of wax seals, woodcuts and carvings on Małopolska buildings. A further 42 documented items are now lost, and in order to reconstruct the full extent and range of Fryderyk’s visual presentation we must turn, in the first instance, to written sources – to three sixteenth-century inventories. The text of Fryderyk’s will is not known, but in 1503 his executors – Canon Jan Konarski, Zygmunt Jagiellon and Queen Mother Elizabeth – shared out (some of?) the late cardinal’s episcopal treasures between his two cathedrals, thereby giving rise to our first two inventories.5 In May 1503, the Kraków canons officially took custody of Fryderyk’s bequests, and their notary wrote a sparse list of what had been received.6 At Gniezno, a similarly brief note was recorded in the chapter acts on 19 June.7 Sixty years later, a far more informative and meticulously detailed description of ‘the late lord cardinal’s’ bequests to Kraków was composed by Canon Stanisław Słomowski, in his lengthy 1563 inventory of the contents of the Wawel cathedral.8 Here we can find careful accounts of many vanished artefacts, mediated through the ‘period eye’ of a sixteenth-century cleric highly attuned to the use of precious metals, coats of arms and religious symbols on the objects he examined. Using Fryderyk’s surviving objects and these ecclesiastical records in tandem, we can divide the material evidence into a number of distinct categories: processional items; Eucharistic plate; reliquaries; vestments and textiles; illuminated manuscripts and, finally, carvings, inscriptions, seals and woodcuts. Processional Items Three of the largest (metal) objects owned by Cardinal Fryderyk – his bishop’s crosier, archiepiscopal cross and cardinal’s mace – were carried either by him or before him on ceremonial occasions, as ancient symbols of his pastoral authority and seniority in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Canon Słomowski gave a detailed description of Fryderyk’s crosier (‘baculus pastoralis’) in the 1563 Wawel inventory, and in general appearance it was probably similar to the preserved gilt staff of Fryderyk’s near-contemporary, Bishop Richard Fox of Winchester (1502–25): The executors are named in later litigation over Fryderyk’s debts: Wypisy źródłowe do dziejów Wawelu z archiwaliów kapitulnych i kurialnych krakowskich, 1501–1515, ed. Bolesław Przybyszewski (Kraków, 1965), nr 52, p. 44. 6 AAK, AA2, fo. 228v. 7 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612–13, pp. 580–81. 8 Inwentarz katedry; Kruszyński, T., ‘Działaność artystyczno-kulturalna Kardynała Fryderyka Jagiellończyka i jego dary dla katedry wawelskiej’, Prace Komisji Sztuki 9 (1948): 243–5. 5

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CHURCH, STATE AND DYNASTY IN RENAISSANCE POLAND The first crosier: having intercolumnia with an image of Saint Stanisław, silver but gilded all over. In the upper spiral there is the aforesaid image of Saint Stanisław, with the arms of the kingdom on one side and the arms of the late, most reverend lord Cardinal Fryderyk on the reverse (by whom this object was given to the church) with the arms of Austria. There are further intercolumnia within the spiral itself, with gilded finials beneath them. In need of restoration.9

Fryderyk’s full-length metropolitan’s cross, a key part of his insignia as archbishop of Gniezno from 1493, is not mentioned in any of the surviving sources, although a representation of it can clearly be seen tucked under the cardinal’s arm in Georg Stuchs’s woodcuts (Figure 3). Fryderyk’s gilded cardinal’s mace is believed to be the work of the leading Kraków goldsmith Marcin Martinus, and the enamelled heraldic devices in its crown are those of the cardinal himself, the Austrian Habsburgs and the Borgia pontiff Alexander VI. The mace denoted Fryderyk’s membership of the Sacred College: all Roman cardinals of the Renaissance period had such an object carried before them, usually by a mace-bearer specifically employed for this purpose.10 Eucharistic Plate In purely quantitative terms, the majority of Fryderyk’s recorded possessions pertained to the celebration of the Eucharist, the central sacrament of the late medieval Catholic church and one of Fryderyk’s chief duties as priest and bishop. In order to focus the celebrant’s mind on the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist, canon law required the presence of a crucifix (or equivalent image) on or near the altar; the full-page images of the crucifixion included in contemporary missals opposite the words of consecration were intended to serve the same purpose.11 In about 1493, to mark her son’s election as primate of Poland, Queen Elizabeth gave Fryderyk a small, pure-gold altar crucifix with images of the Virgin, Apostles and six angels; it 9 Inwentarz katedry, p. 30: ‘Baculus pastoralis primus cum imagine S. Stanislai, argenteus, inauratus totus, in gyro suo superiori habens intercolumnia cum ipsa imagine S. Stanislai et armis Regni ex una parte et reverendissimi olim domini Frederici cardinalis, eo quod per illum ecclesiae donatus est, ex alia parte item stemma domus Austriae. Infra gyrum alia intercolumnia habens, sub quibus in tribus locis sunt coronides deauratae imum versus. Indiget restauratione.’ For a discussion and illustration of Bishop Fox’s gilt staff, see Barrie Dobson, ‘Two ecclesiastical patrons: Archbishop Henry Chichele of Canterbury (1414–43) and Richard Fox of Winchester (1501–25), in Richard Marks & Paul Willliamson (eds), Gothic: Art for England, 1440–1547 (London, 2003), pp. 234–45, nr 104 in catalogue. 10 Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, for example, also bequeathed a mace at his death in 1483, ‘una mazo de peze da rocheti strazate’: see A Renaissance Cardinal and His Worldly Goods: The Will and Inventory of Francesco Gonzaga (1444–83), ed. D.S. Chambers (London, 1992), pp. 97, 135, 165. 11 The crucifixion woodcuts included in the missals printed for the Kraków diocese by Georg Stuchs are published in Ulewicz, Wśród impresorów, p. 76. See also Elizabeth McLauchlan, ‘Liturgical vessels and implements’, in T. Heffernan & E. Matter (eds), The Liturgy of the Medieval Church (Kalamazoo, 2001), pp. 369–429.

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was set with 34 pearls and the wounds and nails on the sculpted gold figure of Christ were made of rubies and diamonds.12 A second gilded crucifix owned by the cardinal was acquired by the Gniezno chapter in 1503.13 Prior to the consecration of the bread and wine, a presiding priest washed his hands in an ablution bowl, or laver. Cardinal Fryderyk owned one large silver laver which bore ‘the arms of the lord cardinal in its middle’.14 A second laver was given to Kraków cathedral as a gift in the cardinal’s lifetime: it was described as being ‘of great size, with a domed lid with gilt edges’, with a mesh of gild branches on its lid, topped with the Polish arms.15 For the act of consecration itself, the bread and wine were kept, respectively, on a shallow dish called a paten and in a Eucharistic chalice, which often formed a matching set. Cardinal Fryderyk owned at least two such sets: the first he retained for his own use, while the second was offered as a gift to Kraków cathedral.16 This second chalice – executed in pure gold, thick stemmed and engraved with images of saints – was presumably commissioned to discharge Fryderyk’s obligations under local diocesan law. In 1453, Cardinal Oleśnicki had passed a rule which bound all future bishops of Kraków to donate a gold chalice worth at least 200 florins to the cathedral within a year of their enthronement.17 The cardinal also owned a gilded ‘ciborium tabernaculum’, a special structure with a cover or canopy for storing the consecrated Host, which stood on the altar on little pillars. 18 More peripheral items of liturgical plate in his possession included an antique incense burner, two pairs of silver altar candlesticks, two silver flasks for holding holy oil with eagle decorations on their lids, and a further pair of flasks received from King Władysław of Hungary.19 Reliquaries Reliquaries were vessels which, since late antiquity, had been used to store and display artefacts associated with saints or Christ himself; fused into a single object of veneration, relic and reliquary together served as the focus for a specific devotional Inwentarz katedry, pp. 4–5. Acta Capitulorum, nr 2613, p. 581. 14 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612, p. 581: ‘cum armis dni cardinali in medio’. Pictures of contemporary English ablution bowls, with the bishop’s arms, can be found in Dobson. 15 Inwentarz katedry, p. 25: ‘iustae magnitudinis, in marginibus superficieli concavae inauratum’. 16 Inwentarz katedry, p. 18; Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612, p. 581. For fifteenth-century Polish chalices, see Kazimierz Jasiński, ‘Kielich płocki z pateną – dar księcia mazowieckiego Konrada I’, in R. Michałowicz (ed.), Człowiek w społeczeństwie średniowiecznym (Warsaw, 1997), pp. 283–97. 17 Statuta Synodalia, pp. 130–31. 18 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612, p. 581. For late medieval tabernacles, see A. King, Eucharistic Reservation in the Western Church (London, 1965); Jan Samek, ‘Późnogotycka puszka na hostię w kościele mariackim w krakowie. Po zagadnienia rytów w złotnictwie krakowskim’, Biuletyn Historii Sztuki 34 (1972): 332–4. 19 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612, p. 581; AAK, AA2, fo. 228v. 12 13

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cult. Between 1488 and 1503, Cardinal Fryderyk commissioned, owned, repaired or donated at least five reliquaries, variously containing the head of Saint Stanisław, fragments of the True Cross and a piece of Saint Ursula’s skull. The reliquary for the head of Saint Stanisław – still preserved in the vaults of Kraków cathedral – is the single most celebrated artistic commission associated with Fryderyk Jagiellon (Figure 4). It was completed by the goldsmith Martin Martinus (d. 1518) in 1504, and the wording engraved around its rim declares it to be a joint Jagiellonian offering to the saint: ‘For Holy Stanisław, excellent patron of Poland, from Elizabeth queen of Poland and her sons, King Jan Olbracht, Cardinal Fryderyk and his successor Jan Konarski bishop of Kraków, 1504.’20 Although the reliquary was only completed after Fryderyk’s death, the chronicler Miechowita identified the cardinal as the project’s instigator in his generally hostile ‘Vita Cardinalis’ (1508– 25), grudgingly describing the commission as one of the key events of Fryderyk’s life: This most illustrious prince and most reverend bishop ordered and had made a reliquary in pure gold, decorated with pearls and gems for the head of the most blessed Stanisław, our patron, for which the gold cost as much as 7,500 gold pieces. The greater part of the cost was met by his mother Elizabeth, queen of Poland, but a trifle was given by Cardinal Fryderyk himself, so they say, from the university jewels.21

The Saint Stanisław reliquary is made of pure gold, octagonal in shape and stands about 30 centimetres high. The entire structure rests on the shoulders of four gold angels, each of which carries a coat of arms – those of the kingdom of Poland, grand duchy of Lithuania, Cardinal Fryderyk and the Habsburgs. Intricate gold reliefs on the reliquary’s side panels show eight scenes from the saint’s life and martyrdom. The domed lid is encrusted with precious stones: in 1563 Canon Słomowski counted 94 pearls, 32 sapphires and ‘one great pointed diamond’.22 Adam Bochnak has claimed that the 1504 gold casket was probably the single most expensive reliquary

20 ‘Divo Stanislao patrono precipuo Elizabet polonie regina cum filis Joanne Alberto rege et Frederico cardinali episcopo crac. Joanne Conarsky successore eius procurante vasculum hoc dedit dicavitque anno domini 1504’. Text published in Adam Bochnak, ‘Zabytki złotnictwa późnogotyckiego związane z kardynałem Fryderykiem Jagiellończykiem’, Prace Komisji Sztuki 9 (1948): 1–26. Martinus engraved his name on the inside base of the reliquary, although this confirmation of authorship was found only in 1881: Jerzy Pietrusiński, Złotnicy krakowscy XIV–XVI wieku i ich księga cechowa (2 vols, Warsaw, 2000), vol. 1, pp. 549–59. 21 Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, pp. 204–5: ‘Hic illustrissimus princeps et pontifex reverendissimus tabernaculum sive inclusorium capiti beatissimi Stanislai, patroni nostri, ex puro auro, cuius valor et summa ad VII millia et medium millenarium aureorum extendebat se, fabricavit et ordinavit, unionibus et gemmis preciosis adornatum, quarum maiorem partem Elizabet genitrix eius, regina Polonie, donavit, partem vero aliquantulum, ut aiunt, ex unionibus collegiatorum ipse cardinalis Fridericus addiderit.’ The ‘university jewels’ is a reference to the claim made by Miechowita in the Chronica Polonorum (1521, p. 357) that Fryderyk had seized a stash of jewels accidentally uncovered in the university buildings in 1494. 22 Inwentarz katedry, p. 8: ‘diamentum magnum acutum unum’.

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commissioned in the early sixteenth-century Europe – a plausible suggestion but difficult to verify.23 The two True Cross crucifix-reliquaries owned by Cardinal Fryderyk can still be seen in Gniezno today. These items, with their wood fragments mounted in the middle of a sculpted cross, appear to have been part of the cardinal’s personal priestly and devotional collections.24 The larger crucifix is thought also to be the work of Martin Martinus: it is topped with a gilded pelican and shows the arms of Fryderyk, the Habsburgs and Lithuania on its six-leafed pedestal (Figure 5). The second Gniezno crucifix is smaller, partially enamelled and thought to be of Hungarian craftsmanship.25 Fryderyk’s third True Cross relic is now lost: a ‘tabernaculum’, or tower-shaped silver reliquary decorated with images of Saints Christopher, Barbara and Katherine.26 Five further reliquaries associated with Fryderyk Jagiellon have also been lost. In 1563, Canon Słomowski recorded the presence of a gilded reliquary containing part of Saint Ursula’s skull in the Wawel cathedral – it was decorated with engraved columns, 17 rods or twigs and bore Cardinal Fryderyk’s arms alongside those of the Kraków chapter, an indication perhaps of a donation or financial contribution towards the item’s restoration.27 The cardinal’s collections included three further but empty reliquaries (‘tabulae’ or ‘tabellae’), decorated with gold, ‘Lithuanian jewels’ and images of the Magi.28 Vestments and Textiles Canon law and ecclesiastical tradition stipulated a number of special garments and headgear which priests and bishops were required to wear on liturgical occasions, many of them derived from the civil dress of late antiquity.29 Fryderyk Jagiellon owned at least two bishop’s mitres. The first was a ‘mitra simplex’, a plain white mitre for use on solemn feast days such as Good Friday, worn mainly by his suffragan bishop of Kraków, Marian Lula.30 Fryderyk’s principal mitre, however, was an elaborate jewelled object which carried images of five angels and eighteen classical figures – semi-clad youths and virgins with turbans, axes (‘fasciae’) and spears, with Bochnak, ‘Zabytki złotnictwa’, p. 2. Kings Jan Olbracht and Aleksander also owned True Cross relics. See Akta Aleksandra, nr 329, p. 543. See also Jan Kasprowicz, ‘Późnogotycki pacifikał tzw. mniejszy z daru Kardynała Fryderyka Jagiellończyka w skarbcu katedry gnieźnieńskiej’, Roczniki Humanistyczne 28:4 (1980): 23–42. 25 Bochnak, ‘Zabytki złotnictwa’, pp. 16–21. 26 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612, p. 581. See also Kelly Holbert, ‘Relics and reliquaries of the True Cross’, in S. Blick & R. Tekippe (eds), Art and Architecture of the Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles (Leiden, 2005), pp. 337–63. 27 Inwentarz katedry, p. 9. 28 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612, p. 581. 29 For late medieval vestments, see William C. Jordan, ‘Liturgical and ceremonial clothing: neglected evidence of medieval political theology’, in Ideology and Royal Power in Medieval France: Kingship, Crusades and the Jews (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 104–19. 30 AKK, AA2, fo. 228v. 23 24

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diamonds glittering in their navels. Two jewelled strips attached to the base of the mitre showed the Polish and Habsburg arms. Canon Słomowski marvelled at this item in 1563, describing it as being ‘made all of precious gems’, crammed with no fewer than 9 emeralds, 13 diamonds, 37 sapphires, 54 rubies and 137 pearls, plus a host of semi-precious stones, such as ‘oriental amethyst’ and topaz. By comparison, the fabulous golden helmet worn by King Henry V of England at Agincourt notched up only 128 pearls.31 The most voluminous and visible item worn by Renaissance bishops was the cope – a great mantle or cloak fastened across the chest with a clasp. Representations of copes can be seen in the little colour illustrations of bishops painted in Fryderyk’s pontifical (see below). The cardinal owned at least four copes. The first cloak was ‘made all from shining thread and red silk’, showing a panoply of saints including Peter, Stanisław, Wenceslas, John the Baptist, Andrew, Wojciech, Florian and the Virgin of Revelation, all stitched with pearls, diamonds and rare gemstones. Słomowski recorded ‘an image of the Virgin and Child with the Virgin in sole wearing a gilded silver crown, surrounded by gold slag, her cloak rendered in pearls, on two gilded silver moon tips, the background cross-stitched in gold thread and rare gemstones …’32 The clasp, in the shape of a shield, carried heavily jewelled images of God the Father, the Coronation of the Virgin, Christ, Saint Elizabeth and the Throne of Grace (Trinity).33 The cardinal’s other copes can be identified more securely with a specific liturgical season. One is described as depicting ‘scenes from the Nativity of Christ’, which might link it with Fryderyk’s first Mass as cardinal and fully consecrated bishop, said in Kraków with great pomp on Christmas Day 1493.34 Another, made of white silk and gold thread, was designed for use during the Corpus Christi liturgical octave in June, while a fourth boasted images of the Holy Trinity.35 Underneath the cope, Fryderyk would have worn one of at least two chasubles – large, loose tunics with a hole for the head, one of the most ancient of Christian priestly vestments. As a gift to mark Fryderyk’s election as Polish primate in 1493, King Władysław gave his youngest brother a chasuble stitched with 13 eagles, decorated with pearls and a couple of emeralds.36 A second chasuble was stitched ‘with copious amounts of gold’ and the images of Saints Bartholomew, Vincent and Sebastian. This is the only item of Fryderyk’s vestments which has survived in some form today: the central embroidered column showing the three saints was

31 Inwentarz katedry, pp. 45–8: ‘tota ex gemmis pretiosis’. J. Lander, The Limitations of English Monarchy in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto, 1989), p. 47. 32 Inwentarz katedry, pp. 81–3: ‘… et anterali dextro est imago Virginis Mariae cum Puero, in sole, sub tectura stans, in corona argentea inaurata, radii circumcirca imaginem de slag inaurato, pallium ex margaritis et fundamentum sub pedibus duo cornua lunae argentea inaurata, pavimentum ex filis aureis cum reticula de gemmis raris intertextam.’ 33 Inwentarz katedry, pp. 81–3. 34 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612, p. 580; Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 204. 35 AKK, AA2, fo. 228v. 36 Inwentarz katedry, pp. 73–4.

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incorporated into a much later garment, now in the Gniezno Archdiocesan Museum. Curators here believe the material to be Tuscan, and possibly Florentine.37 Fryderyk also owned two dalmatics, the simple white silk robes worn under all the other vestments by any cleric who had been ordained deacon. Both were embroidered with pearls and gold thread.38 His vestment collection further included a pair of humerals (rectangles of material placed over a bishop’s shoulders during special Eucharistic rites), stitched with pearls and decorated with images of the Resurrection and ‘cum nomine Ihezus’.39 In 1494, Fryderyk received from Rome the pallium, a small piece of material worn around the neck as a symbol of archiepiscopal authority; marked with crosses, it was made from wool taken from lambs blessed in the cathedral of St John Lateran.40 Last but not least, Fryderyk Jagiellon owned two cardinals’ outfits, each consisting of a red silk cloak stitched with gold thread and a broad-brimmed red hat with tassels.41 These arrived in Poland at Eastertide 1495 and vanished from the collections of both Kraków and Gniezno cathedral treasuries soon after Fryderyk’s death. It was not just the bishop’s person which was adorned with expensive and eyecatching materials: as the miniatures in Fryderyk’s pontifical suggest, the altar itself was covered with elaborate textiles. To Kraków cathedral, for example, the cardinal donated a red silk altar hanging embroidered in gold with his own coat of arms, to be prominently displayed on the altar of Saint Stanisław in the very middle of the church.42 From the queen of Hungary (presumably Anne de Foix, rather than Beatrice of Aragon), Fryderyk received an altar cloth for his own use, while a third altar hanging in his possession was finished with gold thread, showing images of saints, the arms of Poland and Lithuania, and the embroidered phrase ‘I am the shepherd and you are the salt of the earth.’43 Illuminated Manuscripts The celebration of the Eucharist required books, from which both the basic texts of the Mass and the special prayers for specific moments in the liturgical cycle could be read. The illuminations in Cardinal Fryderyk’s pontifical clearly show bishops reading from missals either propped open on the altar, or held up by assisting priests.44

Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612, p. 580. I am grateful to the staff of the Gniezno Archdiocesan Museum for bringing the survival of the recycled chasuble to my attention. 38 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612, p. 580; Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, pp. 203–4. 39 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612, p. 580. 40 ASV, Reg. Lat., vol. 960, fo. 93; Acta Capitulorum, nr 2439, p. 550. It is not clear what happened to Fryderyk’s pallium at his death. 41 AKK, AA2, fo. 228v; Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612, p. 581. 42 Inwentarz katedry, p. 95. 43 Inwentarz katedry, p. 100; Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612, p. 581: ‘Ego sum pastor et vos estis sal terrae’. More peripheral ecclesiastical textiles owned by the cardinal included two altar cushions and two red pulpit hangings: Acta Capitulorum, nr 2612, p. 581. 44 AKK, MS 14. 37

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The earliest of Fryderyk’s illuminated liturgical manuscripts was a missal given to him by his mother in 1487, when he was a 19-year-old layperson; the choice of a priestly manual rather than the more usual book of hours is a clear hint that Fryderyk was being prepared for an ecclesiastical career. The 1487 missal, which survives in the Kraków cathedral chapter archive, was penned by the scribe Jan Złotkowski and bears the painted royal arms on its front page.45 Fryderyk benefited from Złotkowski’s services again in 1493, when the calligrapher and a local workshop were engaged to produce a pontifical (‘liber pontificalis’) for the cardinal – that is, a book containing the text of the blessings and special ceremonies which only a bishop was authorized to perform.46 This manuscript, still in the possession of the Kraków cathedral chapter, is a lavish volume which Barbara Miodońska, the leading expert on Polish high-gothic book painting, has singled out as ‘opening a new chapter in the history of Małopolska illuminated manuscripts’.47 The book’s borders are painted with twisting floral and foliage motifs, with red, gold and blue flower heads sprouting from spiral branches. It boasts some 180 coloured and gilded initials and includes dozens of miniatures illustrating the ceremonies detailed in the text: we see bishops blessing church bells, consecrating abbesses and presiding over ordination services. In 1499, Cardinal Fryderyk presented Gniezno cathedral with two sets of musical books, an antiphonary and a gradual; these would have been huge volumes, up to a metre tall, large enough for a whole choir to gather around and sing from. Within weeks of Fryderyk’s death, the Gniezno chapter gave Canon Klemens of Piotrków permission to take away these manuscripts and ‘correct them’; there is no trace of them after 1503.48 In about 1500, Cardinal Fryderyk commissioned what may well have been the most spectacular illuminated manuscript in his possession, a missal in the Kraków rite for his own personal use, which today survives in the Gniezno Archdiocesan Archive as MS 139.49 Painted in a slightly later and denser version of the high-gothic AKK, MS 6; Miodońska, Małopolskie malarstwo, p. 43. AKK, MS 14. A selection of illuminations from Fryderyk’s pontifical are published in Miodońska, Małopolskie malarstwo, pls. 173–7, 186. 47 Miodońska, Małopolskie malarstwo, p. 169: ‘otwiera nowy rozdział w dziejach iluminatorstwa małopolskiego’. 48 Acta Capitulorum, nr 1539, p. 566; AAG, Act Cap. B16, fo. 376. 49 AAG, MS 139. This manuscript has traditionally been identified as a gift to Gniezno cathedral from King Jan Olbracht, on grounds of its stylistic similarities to the books donated by the king to Kraków cathedral and the Jasna Góra monastery. However, the detailed Gniezno chapter acts contain no record of any royal gift in the years circa 1500, and it is unlikely that the king would have donated a book in the Kraków rite to Gniezno. MS 139 does, however, match the descriptions of the supposedly lost personal missal bequeathed by Cardinal Fryderyk to Gniezno in 1503: ‘a missal, with gilded silver clasps, bound in red silk’. This manuscript can be traced through the cathedral inventories of the sixteenth century: in 1536, Fryderyk’s bequest was listed as the most valuable of the shrine’s missals, but by 1581 the gilding had been stripped from it to make new altar decorations, and it lost its distinctive frontispiece ‘with the royal arms’ some time after that. Restoration of the codex in 1964 revealed traces of red silk and clasps: Jadwiga Ryl, Katalog rękopisów biblioteki katedralnej 45 46

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book style than the 1493 pontifical, the missal contains 33 miniatures, 192 painted initials and 200 letter characters in gold leaf, still bright enough for a reader to see their own reflection in the burnished metal. The masses of floral border illumination contain surprising and playful touches: the missal’s opening page, for example, shows a bear playing the lute, a tiny owl, a swallow drinking from a flower, two buzzing flies and a squatting monkey.50 Seals, Carvings, Inscriptions and Woodcuts Turning away from the strictly liturgical and devotional sphere, we can also find evidence for Fryderyk Jagiellon’s visual presentation in the wider world in an array of wax seals, carvings, inscriptions and woodcuts produced on the cardinal’s instructions, and to his specifications, as public statements of his authority and/or patronage. Episcopal seals – pressed into hot wax and tied to the foot of a document – not only authenticated texts issued by the bishop’s chancellery but also provided an important vehicle for the display of an individual prelate’s chosen identifying symbols. The seal used by Fryderyk Jagiellon as bishop of Kraków between 1491 and 1493, for example, showed a robed angel with outspread wings, holding a coat of arms with the Polish white eagle.51 From 1494 to 1496, Fryderyk’s archiepiscopal Gniezno seal consisted of the arms of Poland and Lithuania quartered, with a small Habsburg badge in the centre, topped with a cardinal’s hat. This composition directly mimicked the royal seals of kings Jan Olbracht and Aleksander.52 Fryderyk’s personal iconography was also carved in stone. When Kraków university’s new Collegium Maius building was completed in the 1490s, the chancellor’s coat of arms was prominently mounted above the entrance in St Anna Street, in the form of a large, painted stone carving (Figure 6). Here, a shield showing Poland’s white eagle device is surmounted with a bishop’s mitre, red cardinal’s hat with flowing tassels and a discreet metropolitan’s cross. Similar carvings could probably have been seen across Małopolska in the fifteenth century. It was common practice for stone posts bearing a bishop’s arms to be erected in the countryside to mark out the boundaries of episcopal estates. However, while we know that Cardinal Fryderyk did order clear demarcations of his territories, no examples of the posts used

w Gnieźnie (Lublin, 1982), pp. 88–9; Zofia Rozanow, ‘Gnieźnieński Kodeks Olbrachta’, Studia Renesansowe 4 (1964): 380–469; AAG, Acta Cap. B115, fo. 4v; Acta Cap. B117, fo. 3; Acta Cap. B118, fo. 12. 50 Barbara Miodońska has suggested that a high-gothic illuminated psalter and lectionary now in the Kraków Chapter Archive (AKK, MSS 22, 35) might also have been produced on Fryderyk’s orders: Miodońska, Małopolskie malarstwo, pp. 83, 169–71. 51 A photograph of Fryderyk’s early seal is printed in Baczkowski, Wielka historia Polski, p. 282. 52 See Ryszard Kiersnowski, ‘Aleksandra Jagiellończyka królewskie dukaty’, in S. Kuczyński (ed.), Cultus et cognito: studia z dziejów średniowiecznej kultury (Warsaw, 1976), pp. 251–8; Woźniakowa, pls. 17–20.

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(or their imagery) have survived to this day.53 At the episcopal castle of Bodzentyn, Fryderyk ordered the construction of a new residential wing, mounting over one of the new doorways a (now lost) tablet which reported that the new ‘domus’ was the work of the royal cardinal. 54 Arguably the single most innovative and ambitious components of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s visual presentation, however, were the woodcuts forming the frontispieces of the various liturgical books printed by Georg Stuchs of Nuremberg on the cardinal’s orders (discussed in Chapter 3). These are the sole representations of Fryderyk’s own person in his entire visual presentation and form the only official images of the cardinal produced in his lifetime. The first Missale Cracoviense authorized by Fryderyk (in quarto format) carried a rather crude image of the tonsured cardinal kneeling before the bishop-saint Stanisław, who is accompanied by his iconographical attribute, the shrouded knight Piotr (Figure 3).55 A new and less flattering version of this woodcut (identical in composition but slightly different in execution) made up the frontispiece of the second Missale Cracoviense, printed in folio.56 A third and final version of the Cardinal Fryderyk woodcut was included on the opening page of the Breviarium Gnesnense produced by Stuchs in April 1502. Here, the visual references to the Kraków diocese have been crudely removed by erasing the reanimated Piotr, and it seems that Saint Stanisław is masquerading (somewhat unconvincingly) as Gniezno’s Saint Wojciech instead.57 In their composition, context and form, these three Polish woodcuts were virtually unique in fifteenth-century European printing. We saw in Chapter 3 that in only 11 Catholic dioceses did bishops personally authorize the printing of multiple editions of the local liturgy before 1501, and in this entire body of work the only images typically included are printer’s symbols or an occasional diocesan coat of arms. Any representations of the commissioning bishop himself were most unusual in fifteenthcentury diocesan liturgies, and we can usefully consider two examples. The 1481 and 1484 Würzburg missals printed for Bishop Rudolph of Scherenburg, for example, show the bishop emerging from behind his coat of arms, but the images are small and tucked away on page 13.58 Only the 1486 Regensberg breviary printed by Georg de Spira for the Bavarian bishop Heinrich IV of Abensberg (bishop 1465–92) carries a full-page frontispiece comparable to the Stuchs–Fryderyk woodcut: we see Bishop Heinrich kneeling in episcopal robes and Saint Peter standing at his back, presenting him to a heavenly vision of the Virgin and Child, who sit in a cloud in the top rightAAG, Acta Cap. B16, fo. 234v (September 1494). One of Zbigniew Oleśnicki’s border posts can still be seen, for example, in the village of Biskupice Radłowskie; see Baczkowski, Wielka historia Polski, p. 205. 54 J. Kuczyński, ‘Rezydencja biskupów krakowskich w Bodzentynie’, in K. Brach (ed.), Bodzentyn: z dziejów miasta w XII–XX wieku (Kielce, 1998), pp. 65–79. Excavations of the new Bodzentyn wing uncovered late fifteenth-century stove tiles featuring dragons, mermaids and pelicans. See J. Kuczyński, ‘Badania wykopaliskowe przeprowadzone w 1969 r. na terenie zamku w Bodzentynie’, Rocznik Muzeum Świętokrzyskiego 7 (1971): 133–49. 55 Missale Cracoviense in quarto (post 1493). 56 Missale Cracoviense in folio (1494–96). 57 Breviarium Gnesnense (1502). See Anna Lewicka-Kamińska, p. 139. 58 Missale Herbipolense (1481), fo. 13v. 53

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hand corner of the picture.59 Fryderyk Jagiellon, in other words, was one of a tiny handful of fifteenth-century bishops who keenly exploited the new technology of moveable print type in order to hone and disseminate an image of their own person. Audiences The mass of evidence for Fryderyk Jagiellon’s visual presentation is diverse, eclectic and potentially confusing, ranging from jewelled garments to wax imprints and black-and-white woodcuts. In order to understand who the likely contemporary audience (and thus the intended recipients) of this image-making would have been, it might be helpful to conceive of the objects discussed above as forming three rings, like ripples on a pool, with Fryderyk himself at the centre. The great majority of the items associated with Cardinal Fryderyk were intended for use in a liturgical context, where they might amplify and augment his physical presence in a formal ecclesiastical setting. The processional insignia, Eucharistic plate, vestments and illuminated books were all meant to be deployed, and seen, in close proximity to Fryderyk Jagiellon’s own person. There are at least six documented occasions where we can reasonably assume that Fryderyk’s liturgical treasures were on public show in this way: at his enthronement as bishop-administrator of Kraków (January 1489); as an assistant bishop at Jan Olbracht’s coronation (1492); at his first Mass as cardinal and fully consecrated Kraków bishop, celebrated on Christmas Day 1493; at the Mass which closed the Jagiellonian dynastic summit in Levoca in April 1494; at his archiepiscopal enthronement in Gniezno (August 1494) and, finally, at King Aleksander’s coronation, over which Fryderyk presided as primate in December 1501.60 The audiences at these events were diverse. The coronations and Levoca summit were attended, for example, by fellow Jagiellonians, members of the Polish senate and high clergy, Lithuanian barons, Magyar nobles, Duke Konrad of Mazovia, the Elector of Brandenburg and ‘many other’ foreign representatives. At the Wawel Masses, Polish commoners, too, had a good view of Fryderyk’s liturgical splendour. ‘A great multitude of the people’ turned out to watch the 1492 and 1501 coronations, while at Fryderyk’s Christmas Mass of 1493 ‘there came so great a multitude of nobles and common people even from the furthest provinces, that many were crushed in the commotion.’61 Cardinal Fryderyk’s numerous gifts to the cathedrals of Kraków and Gniezno and his carved heraldic devices might form a second ring, slightly removed from his person. Donated reliquaries, chalices, choir books and altar hangings would have symbolically signalled and perpetuated Fryderyk’s presence in these major Polish shrines, serving as a reminder of his authority at times of physical absence. They Breviarium Ratisponiense (1480) (unnumbered pages). AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fo. 1v; Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), pp. 347, 363; Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 204; Bonfini, p. 734; Acta Capitulorum, nr 2437–9, pp. 549–50. 61 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), pp. 347, 363; Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 204: ‘ad quam maxima multitudo nobilium et ignobilium etiam exterarum provinciarum … obvenerat et tumultum cum oppressione multorum fecerat.’ 59 60

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would have been visible not only to cathedral canons, suffragan bishops and vicars, but also to local townspeople, visitors and pilgrims. The Saint Stanisław reliquary (complete with Fryderyk’s arms) was, for example, carried in procession through Kraków on the saint’s two annual feast days, and might also have been displayed in the cathedral’s special relic gallery, constructed in emulation of Nuremberg cathedral in the 1450s.62 Aleskander Witkowska has demonstrated that about half the pilgrims who visited Saint Stanisław’s shrine in Kraków cathedral in the fifteenth century lived over 60 kilometres outside the capital: the potential viewing audience for liturgical gifts was thus large and diverse.63 Similarly, anybody walking down St Anna Street would have had a clear view of Fryderyk’s carved coat of arms, prominent in one of the capital’s central streets. Our third ring includes all those artefacts which were not unique, bespoke treasures, but rather easily reproduced (or even mass-produced) objects made from cheap materials, which were disseminated throughout both Małopolska and Wielkopolska. Cardinal Fryderyk’s episcopal seals, for example, were fixed to all charters, correspondence and decrees issued in his name, and as such the wax imprints were seen, held (and retained) by landowners, parish priests and monasteries, as a validating component of important legal records. Indulgences issued by Fryderyk, meanwhile, would have been nailed to the doors of churches and cathedrals. The hundred-day indulgence issued by the cardinal in December 1496, for example, in order to raise funds for a parish church in the Poznań diocese would have been put on public display, complete with seals, in a number of churches in the area, showing that the reach of ‘Fryderyk’ images was not confined to his own dioceses.64 The Stuchs woodcuts arguably constitute the apotheosis of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s image-making. It is not known whether Kraków and Gniezno clergy were legally compelled to purchase the new liturgical books commissioned by the cardinal, as clerics were in Würzburg.65 Nonetheless, the intention behind the printing project was for the new texts to become the dominant edition in use in both dioceses: it was envisaged, in other words, that Cardinal Fryderyk’s image would sit on hundreds of altars, in cathedrals, urban collegiate churches and tiny rural parishes. Some clerics interacted positively with this royal imagery, paying local artists to illuminate the frontispiece, delicately colouring in the picture of their Jagiellonian overlord.66 With the Stuchs woodcuts, Fryderyk Jagiellon made a foray into the world of mass-media propaganda.

62 M. Jagosz, ‘Procesje ku czci Świętego Stanisława na Skałkę w okresie przedrozbiorowym’, Analecta Cracoviense 11 (1979): 608–14; Marek Walczak, ‘Działalność fundacyjna biskupa krakowskiego kardynała Zbigniewa Oleśnickiego’, Folia Historiae Artium 28 (1992): 57–73, at p. 68. 63 Aleksandra Witkowska, Kulty pątnicze: z badań nad miejską kulturą religijną (Lublin, 1988), p. 128. 64 AGAD, Pergaminy, nr 7399. The seals are now missing from this decree. 65 Missale Herbipolense (1481), fo. 13. 66 Missale Cracoviense, BJ incunabula 2849.

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Images of Royal Power We have so far examined the materials and forms used by Cardinal Fryderyk, but what were the intended messages within this hotchpotch of images? Fryderyk’s visual presentation contained a number of intermeshed regalist pronouncements: it celebrated the glory of his own person, the authority of the Jagiellonian dynasty, the Crown’s status as an absolutely sovereign force and its comprehensive defeat of Cardinal Oleśnicki’s magnate programme. These messages addressed various points of vulnerability in the Jagiellonian regime – Fryderyk’s own ambiguous and contentious status within the Polish constitution, the dynasty’s foreign origins, the prevalence of oligarch sentiments among the nobility and the ongoing resonance of the propaganda symbols developed by the magnate party fifty years earlier. It is in tackling this latter problem that Fryderyk’s image-making contains its most surprising twists. ‘Fredericus princeps’ The single most striking feature of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s collection of liturgical treasures was its size and opulence, its ‘magnificentia’. Put simply, the bespoke plate, vestments, manuscripts and reliquaries created for the cardinal between 1487 and 1503 were unparalleled in late medieval or Renaissance Poland. There is anecdotal evidence of this even from Fryderyk’s own day – in Miechowita’s wonder at the awesome cost of the Saint Stanisław reliquary, and in the Gniezno cathedral chapter’s decision to give Queen Elizabeth a relic of Christ’s robe as a gesture of gratitude for her son’s bequests, a rare gesture for a rare haul of treasures.67 We can assess the relative splendour of Fryderyk’s liturgical collections most systematically, however, by consulting a range of sixteenth-century cathedral inventories. A 1536 inventory of Gniezno cathedral’s treasury, for example, reveals that Fryderyk’s treasures still formed the heart of the shrine’s collections 30 years after his death – ten individual items are identified as having been received as a result of Fryderyk’s decade-long incumbency, compared with six from Jan Łaski (primate for 20 years, 1510–31) and a further six gifts from unspecified ‘royal’ donors.68 Canon Słomowski’s 1563 inventory of Kraków cathedral is even more revealing. According to this document, the most prolific donors to the Wawel cathedral by that date were Piotr Tomicki (bishop 1524–35, 29 gifts), Fryderyk Jagiellon (21 gifts), Zbigniew Oleśnicki (bishop 1423–55, 11 gifts), Queen Zofia (d. 1461, 11 gifts) and Samuel Maciejowski (bishop 1546–50, 11 gifts). These sources, however, are not ideal because they discriminate against earlier donors, who tended to be forgotten as heraldic devices fell off and oral traditions of provenance were lost over time; nevertheless they do give a general indication. More important than this quantitative data is Słomowski’s assessment of the value of the donated treasures. The 1563 inventory organizes the treasury’s contents into categories, and within these lists Słomowski ranked each object by splendour, using 67 68

Acta Capitulorum, nr 2615, p. 581; Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, pp. 204–5. AAG, Acta Cap. B115.

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explicit phrases such as ‘the first and most excellent’, ‘the first and most splendid’. In many of the most important sections of Słomowski’s list, the artefacts received by Cardinal Fryderyk over half a century earlier are still rated the most valuable of their kind: Fryderyk supplied the cathedral’s most lavish mitre, crosier, missal, reliquary and oil flasks. By contrast, the items given by the more prolific Piotr Tomicki were on average much humbler and tended to consist of more peripheral liturgical objects: only Tomicki’s silver candlestick and a vessel for storing the consecrated host were identified as top-ranking in 1563.69 In the late sixteenth-century, Fryderyk’s treasures still formed the splendid core of the Kraków cathedral treasury, which had long served as a receptacle for prominent donations from the kingdom’s elite. The expense and splendour of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s liturgical equipment and gifts would have carried a specific meaning for Renaissance contemporaries. Przemysław Mrozowski has argued that the quality of tools and clothing which a bishop had at his disposal was an acute indicator of social status in the fifteenth-century church. He points out that bishops from leading magnate families such as Uriel of Górka (bishop of Poznań 1479–97) commissioned brand-new items from the most fashionable artists of the day, in Poznań and Nuremberg.70 By contrast, prelates from humbler houses, such as Andrzej Róża Boryszewski (primate 1503–10), typically had to borrow their plate and vestments from the cathedral treasury – they were, in effect, obviously second-hand. Fryderyk Jagiellon’s own unprecedented display of gold, silver, pearls, precious stones, lavish illuminations and rich fabrics, acquired from Florence, Hungary and Lithuania, would have spoken unapologetically of royal, princely status. This air of personal magnificence certainly had the desired effect on at least one contemporary, albeit a sympathetic observer. Describing the events of the 1494 Levoca summit in his Rerum Hungaricarum Decades Quatuor, the Hungarian court historian Antonio Bonfini (1427–1502) praised the majesty of Cardinal Fryderyk’s closing Mass. Interestingly, Bonfini did not single out individual items, but was instead impressed by the cumulative effect of the liturgical ‘spectaculo’. Bonfini was in no doubt that he had been watching a prince at the altar: … at the request of his royal brothers Cardinal Fryderyk presided over Mass and prayed to God for the safety of both kingdoms and peoples [of Poland and Hungary], performing the rites with great pomp and ceremony. Nothing could be more noble or splendid than this spectacle – if you had gazed upon the presiding priest, the royal youth, far excelling all others in all the gifts of body and spirit which nature can confer.71

In fifteenth-century Poland, this princeliness was a highly provocative claim for Fryderyk Jagiellon to make. As we saw in Chapter 1, as the son and brother of elected kings, Fryderyk’s own legal relationship with the Crown was ambiguous; attempts Inwentarz katedry, pp. 27, 29. Mrozowski, ‘L’élite du pouvoir’. 71 Bonfini, p. 734: ‘… Fridericus cardinalis regum fratrum rogatu, sacris magna pompa caerimoniaque patratis, Deum pro utriusque regni et regum populorumque amborum incolumitate oravit. Quo spectaculo nullum aliud nobilibus augustiusque esse potuit, vel si sacerdotem operantem intuereris, regium iuvenem omnibus & corporis & animi muneribus, quae a natura conferri possunt, longem caeteros excellentem.’ 69

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to assert Fryderyk’s seniority within the royal council on the basis of his birth as a ‘princeps’ has been fiercely resisted by the primate in 1489.72 In a kingdom where the legal equality of the noble class was celebrated, and all higher titles abjured, the advent of a self-styled prince was particularly galling. Higher clergy, too, pointedly refused to echo the title ‘princeps cardinalis’ which the royal chancellery doggedly applied to Fryderyk.73 In asserting this claim through his visual presentation, the cardinal was in effect publicly proclaiming that the Jagiellonian dynasty had an incontrovertible, hereditary relationship with the Polish Crown. With his politicized ecclesiastical ‘spectaculo’, Fryderyk was broadcasting his personal authority as member of the ruling house, and his superiority over his fellow senators and the kingdom’s magnates. The White Eagle: A National Royal House We have seen that the crowned white eagle on a red background, the ‘arma Regni Poloniae’, was a recurrent image in Fryderyk’s visual presentation and arguably its leitmotif. Its inclusion was neither obvious nor inevitable, but a statement of political intent. Fryderyk placed it, for example, at the very centre of his personal coat of arms, where it formed the main component of the ‘armis domini cardinalis’. The white eagle within Fryderyk’s arms (topped with mitres or red hats) can still be seen today on the Collegium Maius carving (Figure 6), Saint Stanisław reliquary (Figure 4), Gniezno crucifixes (Figure 5) and Jagiellonian University gilded mace, and it was also stitched, embroidered, enamelled or painted onto the majority of Fryderyk’s lost treasures, as our inventories make clear. The bird was also used as a free-standing image – one cope was covered with no fewer than 13 eagles, and eagles were engraved on the lids of Fryderyk’s silver oil flasks. The white eagle device dated from the medieval territorial disintegration period, when it was first used by the Wielkopolska prince Przemysław II, who had himself crowned king of Poland in 1295. When Władysław Łokietek successfully resurrected the Polish monarchy in 1320, both he and his son Kazimierz the Great (1333–70) had retained the coat of arms. Like the lions of England’s Plantagenet kings, the white eagle which had started life as a Piast dynastic symbol slowly became the recognized heraldic image of the Polish Crown (and maybe the kingdom) itself.74 Fryderyk’s adoption of the ‘arma Regni Poloniae’ as his personal device was, therefore, a combative reiteration of the cardinal’s claim to irreproachable royal status. We can see this most starkly, perhaps, in the Stuchs woodcuts (Figure 3), where the white eagle shield placed by Fryderyk’s feet functions as a royal insignia; just like the identical shields painted at the feet of the Polish king in a contemporary

Fałkowski, pp. 176–9; Górski, ‘Vita Cardinalis’. See above, Chapter 2, pp. 56. 74 Przemysław Mrozowski, ‘Formy i stylizacje Orła Białego w średniowieczu’, in Stefan Kuczyński (ed.), Orzeł Biały – herb państwa polskiego (Warsaw, 1996), pp. 61–72. 72 73

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royal manuscript, the ‘crystal-gazing’ prayer book illuminated for King Jan Olbracht in the 1490s.75 Fryderyk’s insistent use of the Piast eagle was a cultural as well as a constitutional statement, a studied attempt to pitch the Jagiellonians as a ‘national’ dynasty and good Poles. Jan Długosz’s Annales (1454–80) had made it quite clear that sections of Poland’s elites looked down on the Jagiellonians as an upstart foreign dynasty, sprung from barbarian Lithuania. In using exclusively Polish heraldic symbols, Cardinal Fryderyk was deliberately glossing over the dynasty’s eastern origins. The heraldic omissions in Fryderyk’s collections are highly telling. The arms of his ancestral Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the mounted rider, were used very sparingly: they appear on only three pieces of plate and two minor textiles. The Jagiellonians’ own dynastic coat of arms, meanwhile, a double white cross on a black background, are almost completely absent. Whereas Władysław-Jogaila and Kazimierz IV had proudly used the Jagiellonian device on their tombs and fresco portraits, Fryderyk seems to have employed it only once, and discreetly, on the foot of a Gniezno crucifix where, symbolically, part of the white cross has since broken off (Figure 5).76 This use of the Piast white eagle instead of the Jagiellonian white cross thus positioned the regime of the 1490s and its cardinal not as part of an international dynastic bloc, but as a wholly Polish ruling house. In order to ensure the family’s ongoing sovereignty, Fryderyk was paradoxically trying to make that family, as an autonomous and regional political entity, perfectly invisible, to hide it behind the institution of the Polish Crown. This trumpeting of his Polish credentials in his visual presentation is closely analogous to the patriotic rhetoric adopted by Fryderyk during the 1501 interregnum.77 At first glance, the recurrence of Austrian Habsburg heraldry on Cardinal Fryderyk’s liturgical treasures (present on six items) might seem to contradict this patriotic message. Art historians long took the presence of the black shield with white stripe as evidence that most of Fryderyk’s liturgical gear consisted of presents commissioned for him by his mother, but our inventories make clear that the cardinal willingly made use of the Habsburg arms himself – not least on his archiepiscopal seal.78 Here, it might help to think of late medieval coats of arms as denoting a bearer’s dynastic and political identity, rather than his or her ethnicity 75 Bodley, MS Rawl., liturg. D6; Modlitewnik Władysława Warneńczyka, ed. T. Korzeniowski (Lwów, 1928); Barbara Miodińska, ‘Historyk sztuki o datowaniu tzw. Modlitewnika Władysława Warneńczyka w Oksfordzie’, in Danuta Gawinowska (ed.), Kultura średniowieczna i staropolska (Warsaw, 1991), pp. 703–14. 76 The Jagiellonian cross can be seen in Władysław-Jogaila’s Lublin castle chapel frescos, and on Kazimierz IV’s Wawel tomb: Różycka-Bryzek, Freski bizantyńsko-ruskie; Skubiszewska. 77 See Chapter 2, pp. 46–7. 78 Although Fryderyk’s Habsburg arms take the form of a white stripe on a black shield (rather than a red shield), contemporary notaries nonetheless explicitly identified this device as the ‘armis domus austriae’. The 1503 chapter lists of the Cardinal’s requests identify only three objects as having originally been gifts from the Queen Mother, and another three as gifts from the Hungarian royal family, demonstrating that Elizabeth was not the prime mover behind this collection, and indicating that Fryderyk used the Habsburg arms on items which

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in a modern sense. Whereas the Jagiellonian white cross potentially carried pagan, eastern and ‘barbarian’ associations, and the Polish white eagle symbolized Piast royal sovereignty, the Habsburg arms proclaimed Fryderyk’s prestigious descent from Holy Roman emperors and the hereditary rulers of Austria, and his kinship with a leading Catholic dynasty. The ‘armis domus Austriae’ reminded Polish contemporaries that Fryderyk was a member of a European royal elite. The Tree of Jesse: Hereditary and Sacral Monarchy There is one image in Fryderyk Jagiellon’s collections which addresses overarching questions of political authority, celebrating the inherently sacral nature of monarchy as an institution. In the late 1490s, Cardinal Fryderyk and Jan Olbracht together turned to a physically small-scale but expensive and potent form of propaganda – painted miniatures in liturgical manuscripts. These little images were not only visually impressive, executed in copious gold leaf, but contained complex iconographical and theological nuances, presumably for the consumption of the cathedral clergy, cantors, canons and bishops who would have seen them whenever the volumes were used in liturgical rites. Both Jagiellonian brothers employed the services of the same Kraków illuminators’ workshop. In 1499, King Jan Olbracht commissioned the most celebrated artistic project of his reign, a richly illuminated three-volume gradual (music book), intended as a royal gift for Kraków cathedral and its choir.79 The gradual miniatures, pored over by generations of Polish art historians in the Kraków Chapter Archive, appear to contain dense regalist propaganda, mining the deep vein of kingly imagery present in late medieval Catholic iconography. Barbara Miodońska argues that the scenes depicted in the gradual differ significantly from other comparable fifteenth-century Central European manuscripts in their insistent emphasis on heavenly and earthly kingship.80 In a near-simultaneous commission, King Jan Olbracht also ordered an illuminated missal as a gift for the Marian shrine of Częstochowa; its frontispiece shows Jan Olbracht’s arms topped not with the traditional open corona, but with a closed imperial crown, the first known use of such iconography by a Polish ruler and a declaration of absolute sovereignty.81 When Cardinal Fryderyk commissioned a missal for his own use, in the late 1490s or early 1500s, he engaged the same workshop. While the missal’s miniatures are mostly conventional in their iconography, one composition stands out as having overt political resonance. The single most lavishly illustrated page in the missal contains the liturgy for the feast of the birth of the Virgin Mary, and here the bookwere apparently in no way connected with her. The Habsburg arms were also adopted by Kazimierz IV’s other sons in their seals and coinage: Kiersnowski; Woźniakowa. 79 AKK, MSS 42–4. The gradual was completed in 1506. 80 Barbara Miodońska, Rex Regum i Rex Poloniae w dekoracji malarskiej graduału Jana Olbrachta i pontyfikału Erazma Ciołka – z zagadnieniem ikonografii władzy królewskiej w sztuce polskiej w. XVI (Krakòw, 1979). 81 Aleksandra Jaworska, ‘Insygnia w herbie Orzeł Biały, koniec XIII–XVII wieku’, in Stefan Kuczyński (ed.), Orzeł Biały – herb państwa polskiego (Warsaw, 1996), pp. 73–84.

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margin is filled with a rich painting of the Tree of Jesse – the royal genealogy of Christ.82 The miniature is constructed around a resplendent gold letter ‘F’, in which Jesse sleeps with a vine unravelling from his chest. The vine climbs right around the borders of the page, and 12 crowned kings in late medieval dress playfully climb its looping branches, towards a crowned Virgin and Child in the page’s top left-hand corner. Family trees of any kind were a legitimizing image in the Renaissance period, an assurance of direct succession from medieval or ancient rulers; the Jagiellonian genealogy included in a 1521 chronicle dedicated to King Zygmunt I is one example.83 Jesse’s golden tree, with its 12 generations of kings, was perhaps the best visual celebration of hereditary kingship that fifteenth-century Catholic iconography had to offer. If the illuminations produced for Jan Olbracht proclaimed the sacral, imperial nature of earthly monarchy, the Tree of Jesse in Fryderyk’s private missal also stressed that kingship, in its pure divine form, was an undeniably hereditary institution, with the obvious implication for Polish (clerical) viewers that election was superfluous and illegitimate. Reprising Oligarch Symbols Just as Cardinal Fryderyk’s image-making cannot be viewed in isolation from parallel Jagiellonian propaganda efforts such as those of Jan Olbracht, its full implications can only be understood if we place it in the historical context of the visual programmes developed by the magnate party earlier in the fifteenth century. The regalist messages in Fryderyk’s campaigns were, in fact, highly reactive and in many respects appear to have been pieced together from the self-legitimizing visual devices adopted by Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki between 1423 and 1455. Both bishops of Kraków were leading consumers, or patrons, of gothic and high-gothic art in their day – employing illuminators, goldsmiths, sculptors and stonemasons.84 In their type, design, decoration, location and iconography, the objects produced for Fryderyk Jagiellon between 1488 and 1503 closely echo items created a half-century earlier for his great predecessor and dynasty’s nemesis, Zbigniew Oleśnicki. This copying motif is found, in the first instance, in Fryderyk’s liturgical apparatus. Whereas most medieval mitres preserved in Kraków cathedral’s treasury had no figurative decoration at all, those created for Oleśnicki and Fryderyk were conspicuously similar – both showed figures of armed youths, turbaned virgins and angels in jewels.85 With the two mitres in front of him in 1563, Canon Słomowski noted that Oleśnicki’s hat featured ‘a turbaned woman holding a ribbon, in her navel she has a balas ruby between her hands, and below that a sapphire and seven large round pearls’, while Fryderyk’s included ‘a woman with a ribbon, with a small and beautiful ruby in her navel, a triangular sapphire underneath it, circled with three AAG, MS 139, fo. 196. Justus Ludovicus Decius, De Iagellonium Familia (Kraków, 1521). 84 Callimachus lauded the liturgical spectacle which Oleśnicki had created around himself: Vita et Mores, pp. 42–5. 85 A thirteenth-century ‘Saint Stanisław’ mitre and Bishop Tomasz Strzempiński’s (d. 1463) mitre are both described in the 1563 inventory Inwentarz katedry. 82 83

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lovely pearls’.86 The centrepiece of Oleśnicki’s mitre was a white eagle, clutching an emerald and sapphire in its talons; the ribbon of Fryderyk’s mitre showed the white eagle set in pearls.87 The gold cardinal’s mace produced by Martin Martinus circa 1493 is virtually identical to the mid fifteenth-century mace bequeathed by Cardinal Oleśnicki to Kraków University in 1455. Bokińska has found that, of the 21 Renaissance processional maces which survive in Central Europe, only Fryderyk’s and Oleśnicki’s share an unusual open crown design. Whereas Oleśnicki’s mace carried the enamelled arms of Poland, the Oleśnicki family and Pope Martin V inside this crown, Fryderyk’s showed the arms of Poland, Austria and Pope Alexander VI, the only known instance where Fryderyk used Borgia heraldry.88 When Jan Złotowski and the Kraków illuminators began work on Fryderyk Jagiellon’s pontifical manuscript (completed 1493), most of the text and all of the images were copied directly from Oleśnicki’s own pontifical, preserved in the cathedral treasury. The little square illustrations of ceremonies, in their composition and choice of subject, are nearly identical in the two volumes: just as Oleśnicki’s pontifical included a touch of devotional humour in showing a boy turning away from the bishop to look at the viewer in the confirmation ceremony illustration, Fryderyk’s volume included exactly the same image.89 Fryderyk Jagiellon and Zbigniew Oleśnicki were also, as far as cathedral chapter records show, the only bishops in fifteenth-century Poland to give illuminated music books as gifts to their cathedrals: Oleśnicki donated an antiphonary and gradual to Kraków circa 1423, while Fryderyk gave a matching set of books to Gniezno in 1499.90 The trail of similarities continues well beyond the liturgical sphere. As we have seen, when Kraków University’s Collegium Maius (the arts scholars’ college) was rebuilt on St Anna Street in the 1490s, Cardinal Fryderyk’s carved and painted coat of arms was prominently mounted over the new entrance. The Collegium Maius was the first significant new building acquired by the university since 1453, when Cardinal Oleśnicki had funded the Jerusalem Dormitory, a student accommodation block (pulled down in the nineteenth century). A plaque mounted on the dormitory’s wall showed the cardinal-chancellor kneeling before the Virgin Mary, a gothic building poised on his outstretched palm.91 Here, Fryderyk’s arms formed a continuity with Oleśnicki’s plaque, asserting the presence of both cardinals on these high-profile academic buildings. Official contemporary depictions of the two cardinals themselves might also be in dialogue. The most celebrated representation of Zbigniew Oleśnicki was a full-page sketch on the cover of the Liber Privilegiorum Ecclesiae Cracoviensis, a 86 Inwentarz katedry, pp. 45–6: ‘habens mulierem mitratem cum fascia propendente. In umbilico inter manus habet rubinum balas, sub eo vero zaphirum et quattour margaritas maiores rotundas …’; p. 48: ‘cum muliere fasciata in cuius umbilico est rubinus parvus pulcher, sub quo est zaphirus triangularis, quem cingunt tres margaritae pulchrae …’ 87 Inwentarz katedry, p. 51. 88 Bokińska, ‘Mecenat artystyczny’, pp. 156–7. 89 AKK, MS 12, fo. 323; MS 14. 90 Acta Capitulorum, nr 1539, p. 566; AKK, MS 47. 91 Walczak; Maria Koczerska, ‘Miniatura na dokumencie odpustowym Kardynała Zbigniewa Oleśnickiego’, Biuletyn Historii Sztuki 2 (1983), pp. 163–74.

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1449 compendium of the legal rights of the Kraków diocese, and one of the most important manuscripts in the chapter’s possession. Here, the recently nominated cardinal is shown in his red robes and hat, his family (Dębno) coat of arms at his feet, and a (provocative) metropolitan’s cross tucked under his arm, kneeling before a vision of the Virgin and Child.92 In its large size, basic composition and prominent inclusion on the cover of a central diocesan text, the 1449 Oleśnicki sketch arguably prefigures Georg Stuchs’s 1490s woodcuts of Fryderyk Jagiellon. By comparison, no other fifteenth-century bishops of Kraków left comparable representations of their own persons. The third and most important area of overlap is the cult of Saint Stanisław. The Jagiellonians themselves had supported the cult in a most sporadic and erratic way throughout the fifteenth century: Queen Zofia (d. 1461) had donated a plain gold reliquary for the saint’s skull, and her son Kazimierz IV made intermittent pilgrimages to Stanisław shrines.93 The most enthusiastic proponents of the cult in fifteenth-century Kraków, however, were Zbigniew Oleśnicki and Fryderyk Jagiellon. Oleśnicki’s episcopal seal, for example, showed Stanisław in a gothic choir, flanked by Saints Venceslas and Prisca (the latter a reference to the cardinal’s titular church in Rome).94 In 1442, Oleśnicki had a new stone church constructed in the village of Piotrowin, the site of Stanisław’s principal miracle (see below), and had his own arms carved throughout the building.95 The plaque on the wall of the Jerusalem Dormitory (1453), meanwhile, showed Saint Stanisław standing next to the kneeling Oleśnicki. In 1436, during Władysław III’s minority, Bishop Oleśnicki issued a decree confirming Wojciech, Florian, Wencelas and Stanisław as Poland’s patron saints, and stipulated that the office (prayer-cycle) of Saint Stanisław would, for all time, be carried out across the Kraków diocese every Thursday.96 In the 1450s, the bishop tried to expand the pantheon of holy figures around the Stanisław cult, when the tomb of Bishop Prandota (d. 1266) was miraculously and conveniently rediscovered in Kraków cathedral in 1454. (Prandota was the medieval cleric who had translated Stanisław’s relics to the Wawel in 1245 and successfully campaigned for his canonization.) Pilgrimages to the new site were encouraged by the chapter, and Oleśnicki’s notary, Maciej of Milejów, kept a list of reported Prandota miracles.97 Stanisław was also honoured by Cardinal Oleśnicki’s wider entourage, and in particular by his intimate associate, ally and publicist, Jan Długosz. Długosz generously endowed the Saint Stanisław shrine at Skałka, just outside Kraków’s walls, installing Pauline friars there in 1472.98 The single greatest tribute to Stanisław to emanate from the Oleśnicki camp, however, was Długosz’s

92 93 94 95 96 97

Koczerska, ‘Miniatura’, fig. 6, p. 168. Borkowska, Królewskie Modlitewniki, pp. 230–39; Inwentarz katedry, p. 9. Koczerska, ‘Miniatura’, p. 169. Walczak, pp. 59–60. Statuta synodalne krakowskie, ed. Stanisław Zachoworski (Kraków, 1915), p. 47. Witkowska, pp. 92–3; Stanisław Trawkowski, ‘Prędota, 1200–1266’, PSB 28 (1985):

447–52. 98

Koczerska, ‘Miniatura’, p. 171; Papée, ‘Jan Długosz’.

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Vita Beatissimi Stanislai, a new hagiography composed by the historian in the 1460s, after his master’s death.99 Fryderyk Jagiellon took up this championing of Saint Stanisław with enthusiasm from 1488, as seen in Martinus’s fabulously expensive gold reliquary for the martyr’s skull; the silk altar cloth draped over the saint’s Wawel altar with Fryderyk’s own arms in gold; the gold Stanisław statuette in the spiral of Fryderyk’s crosier; the inclusion of the saint’s image on a jewelled cope; the large miniature of Stanisław in the cardinal’s private missal and, above all, in the woodcuts for Georg Stuchs’s Kraków missals, where the royal bishop is shown kneeling in veneration before the saint. Fryderyk was prepared to experiment with liturgical innovations in order to bolster the cult, altering sections of King Aleksander’s coronation ceremony in 1501 to afford Stanisław greater prominence, as we shall see. There are a number of quite innocuous factors which could explain this persistent similarity between the artistic programmes and devotional trends of our two fifteenth-century Polish cardinals. Zbigniew Oleśnicki’s liturgical apparatus (the mitre, mace, pontifical) might simply have provided the most obvious recent models for any Kraków bishop or artist interested in cultivating an air of opulent splendour; it had perhaps set a gold standard within Poland. Fryderyk and his artists might have preferred continuity of local style, and direct emulation of famous gothic forms, to innovation. Maybe it is unsurprising that the types of objects, spaces and themes chosen by both cardinals (liturgical treasures, university buildings, the cult of the principal local saint) were similar: these were arguably the obvious vehicles for any major campaign of episcopal display in fifteenth-century Małopolska. Perhaps only Cardinal Oleśnicki, with his canny fiscal management and extensive private estates, and Fryderyk Jagiellon, with his Gniezno archiepiscopal incomes, were sufficiently wealthy bishops of Kraków to engage in patronage on this scale. In other words, we seem to have nothing but correlations: there is no hard proof that Fryderyk deliberately and methodically reprised Cardinal Oleśnicki’s artistic programmes, although we may nurse the suspicion that the Jagiellonian bishop was visually setting himself up as the triumphant new Oleśnicki (as he implicitly did in his correspondence during the 1501 interregnum) or declaring that bishop’s final defeat and total eclipse by his own triumphant, royal person. When it comes to the cult of Saint Stanisław, however, we are on firmer ground. In the context of that cult’s fifteenth-century history, Fryderyk’s programmes are not only ardently political and anti-magnate, but a studied reprise of Zbigniew Oleśnicki’s devotional propaganda. For this reason, it pays to consider the legend of Saint Stanislaw in more detail. Fighting for Saint Stanisław Stanisław of Szczepanów was an eleventh-century bishop of Kraków martyred at Skałka in 1079; his relics were transferred to the high altar of the Wawel cathedral in 1245 and he was canonized in Assisi in 1253.100 The saint’s story was first set Jan Długosz, Vita Beatissimi Stanislai Cracoviensis Episcopi (Kraków, 1511). For an analysis of the sources for Stanisław’s life and cult, see Marian Plezia, Dookoło sprawy Świętego Stanisława (Bydgoszcz, 1999). 99

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out in Wincenty Kadłubek’s thirteenth-century Chronica Polonorum. Kadłubek describes how King Bolesław II’s (1058–79) lengthy military campaigns abroad led to social breakdown at home, with peasants installing themselves in castles and bedding knights’ wives. The returning king’s retributions were so cruel that Bishop Stanisław remonstrated with his monarch and ultimately excommunicated him. The enraged Bolesław then cut down the bishop with a sword while he was saying Mass in Skałka church outside Kraków, and soldiers hacked the body into pieces. Four heavenly eagles appeared to guard the corpse, which gave off a special light and miraculously reassembled itself.101 Wincenty of Kielce wrote an elaborated version of this life during the canonization campaign of the mid-thirteenth century.102 This account introduced a subplot, in which King Bolesław falsely accuses Stanisław of unlawfully acquiring the village of Piotrowin from the late knight Piotr, whom the holy bishop goes on to raise from the dead and bring to the sejm trial to testify on his behalf. Piotr duly became the saint’s iconographical attribute – he is the shrouded figure popping out of the ground in the Stuchs woodcuts. Stanisław of Szczepanów was, then, the prototype rebel bishop, a priest who stood up to an unjust monarch in the interests of the ‘regnum Poloniae’, without regard to his own interests or safety. This pious opponent (and victim) of royal tyranny provided Zbigniew Oleśnicki with a perfect legitimizing model and ideal national hero in his showdowns with King Władysław-Jogaila (1424–34), and in the period of his own effective rule of Poland, as head of a magnate party (1434–47). Jan Długosz openly pointed to these tantalizing parallels in his writings. In a pivotal scene in the Vita Beatissimi Stanislai, when all Poland’s bishops, abbots and clergy are too afraid to speak out against the tyrant Bolesław II, Stanisław alone bravely upbraids the king for his personal immorality and abduction of a noble’s wife: ‘You, our king and the image on earth of the Supreme King, lead into such obscene vices and pollute your subjects ... Groan therefore, O King, and wash away your offence with constant weeping and restore the abducted woman to her husband, and constrain your loins, lest you bring about the censure of God and man against you, lest you earn association with those who fall into the pit whence none shall depart.’103

This scene is echoed in the Annales Regni Poloniae when, in his very last meeting with King Władysław-Jogaila, Bishop Oleśnicki castigates the ageing king in the presence of the Polish senate: ‘You spend the whole night in heavy drinking and the whole day sleeping it off … The entire realm cries out under this burden, finding itself without law and order, and in this time of drought and famine they demand the food which, for licentiousness and avarice, Wincenty Kadłubek, pp. 58–70. Wincenty of Kielce, ‘Wincentego z Kielc żywot mniejszy i żywot większy Świętego Stanisława’, ed. and trans. Janina Pleziowa, Analecta Cracoviensia 11 (1974): 143–220. 103 Długosz, Vita Beatissimi Stanislai, p. 13v: ‘Ago si tu omnium nostrum rex et summi regis in terris imago in hec tam obscena vicia, puolueris que subditorum tuarum … Ingemisce itaque a rex et facinus tuum assiduo comploratu dilue et raptam viro suo redde, atque persona continentie et lumbas constringe ne diviniam et humanam contra te procures censuram ne cum his qui in baratrum unde nunquam ex cident lapsi eternum mereare conforcium.’ 101 102

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is stockpiled in houses and wagons … You will not hear the suits of widows, orphans and the oppressed to reach you and when they do you do not decide them … I too should like to please you, O King, but I prefer the salvation of your soul and the commonwealth of our kingdom. No matter how angry it will make you, if you really intend to persist in this insolent and obstinate manner, you know me to be sufficiently free, constant and daring to declare a sentence of excommunication upon you, and that what I cannot cut back with paternal castigation, I may do so by the rod of the Apostles.’104

Just in case any of his less alert readers had failed to spot the literary and historical reference in this passage, Długosz went on to describe an exchange conducted in the council chamber after the departure of the incensed Jagiellonian king: Primate Oporowski turns to Zbigniew Oleśnicki and thanks him for doing what other bishops had shrunk from, declaring the bishop of Kraków to be ‘a worthy successor of Saint Stanisław’.105 In this context, where a canonized medieval bishop had become an established patron of the Małopolska magnates, personal totem of Zbigniew Oleśnicki and heavenly backer of a programme of limited, elective monarchy, Fryderyk Jagiellon’s enthusiastic appropriation of the cult in his own image-making takes on a new dimension. In trying to wrest back this potent Catholic symbol from the magnate party, Fryderyk was engaged in the thankless task of trying to reinvent Poland’s Thomas à Beckett as a regalist saint. By deploying Stanisław’s image alongside his own coat of arms, and in proximity to his own person, Fryderyk was enlisting this powerful and emphatically patriotic cult for the Crown: the image of Stanisław blessing Fryderyk’s episcopate in the Stuchs woodcuts proclaimed that even the great rebel-bishop had been converted to the Jagiellonian cause and adopted as a dynastic family saint. Even this clever propaganda campaign, however, speaks eloquently of the regime’s anxieties and insecurities in the 1490s. Stanisław was evidently still too perilous and resonant a symbol to simply discard, and it is telling that Fryderyk felt unable to devise his own royalist cult around an obvious alternative – Saint Wojciech, protector of the archbishops of Gniezno, friend of emperors and intimate ally of Poland’s first crowned king, Bolesław I.106 The woodcut showing Saint Wojciech and Fryderyk on the 1502 Breviarium Gnesnense was simply a brutal adaptation of an image of Stanisław, and when the Gniezno chapter commissioned a gold jewelled reliquary for their martyr’s skull in Poznań in 1494, Fryderyk not only Długosz, Annales, vol. 1, pp. 647–9: ‘Noctem enim in totam in crapula expendis, quae gravatus, interdiu somno et quieti vacas … Universum Regnum se illa gravari clamat, cum sine ordine, sine lege, in ea vivitar et pro libidine avaritiae victualia, non quae sitim aut famam extinguant, sed quae currus et domos impleant, exigiunt … Causas viduarum, orphanorum et oppressorum ingredi ad te non permittis et ingressas non decidis … Vellem quidem et ego tibi placere, o Rex, sed malo te et Rempublicam Regni nostri salvam fore; quantumcumque infesto odio in me sis futuris, si vero in his contumax pertinaxque persistere volueris, scias me eo animo, eo libertate et constantia fretum, ut in te censuras Ecclesiasticas extendam, ut quod paternam correctione non possum, virge Apostolum rescindam.’ 105 Długosz, Annales, vol. 1, p. 649. 106 See Wojciech Danielski, Kult Świętego Wojciecha na ziemiach polskich (Lublin, 1997). 104

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refused to contribute, but initiated a rival reliquary project in Kraków.107 Fryderyk’s propaganda programmes therefore testify not only to his own ebullient regalism, but also hint at the largely hostile nature of the ecclesiastical and political culture in which he operated. ‘Imperium’, ‘Tyrannus’ and the 1501 Coronation All the themes in Fryderyk Jagiellon’s image-making meet in one ephemeral event, which contains all the strengths and shortcomings of the cardinal’s propaganda in microcosm – King Aleksander’s coronation ceremony, conducted in the Wawel cathedral in December 1501. Here, Fryderyk presided over the Renaissance church’s most quintessentially regalist liturgical rite. In full sight of the Polish episcopate, senate, Kurozwęcki family, Jagiellonian relatives and foreign envoys, the cardinal blessed, crowned and anointed his older brother; he was probably dressed in some of the vestments we have met, equipped with his fine liturgical plate, and almost certainly conducted the ceremony from the pontifical produced by Jan Złotkowski in 1493. As Zbigniew Dalewski has demonstrated, however, Cardinal Fryderyk not only directed the 1501 coronation ceremony, but he had also rewritten it. In 1493, Złotkowski had transcribed into Fryderyk’s ‘liber pontificalis’ the traditional coronation ‘ordo’ found in all fifteenth-century Kraków pontificals. The spare pages at the back of the book, however, contain a scribbled, scrappy and completely undecorated new coronation liturgy, added by a scribe named Jan Gorzycki in 1501.108 In this newly concocted version, adapted from an old Bohemian coronation rite, Saint Stanisław is given special prominence. The 1501 ‘ordo’, for example, required Poland’s future king to undertake a pilgrimage to the saint’s shrine at Skałka on the eve of his coronation. At the eleventh hour, after Gorzycki had already signed his name at the bottom of the ‘ordo’ text to signal its completion, he included one final prayer on the very last pages of the pontifical. It appears as if Cardinal Fryderyk had asked him to introduce one last innovation: the ceremony would now close with the episcopal blessing reserved for use on Saint Stanisław’s feast day: May Almighty God pour out on you an abundant blessing, who immediately sent his heavenly eagles to guard the scattered body of his martyr Stanisław, and guard you from all the snares of the ferocious Belial, [he], who caused the holy martyr to conquer the tyranny of the slayer. Amen. And may you who hasten to observe devoutly his deserved and illustrious festival be able to attain the eternal festival of unending joy, by the grace of him whose kingdom and empire last without end, age through age. Amen.109

107

AAG, Acta Cap. B16, fo. 241; Acta Capitulorum, nr 2381, pp. 540–41; nr 2448, pp.

551–2. Dalewski; AKK, MS 14, fos 201v–214v. AKK, MS 14, fo. 215: ‘Effundat super vos omnipotens deus benedictionem exuberantem qui corpori beati Stanislai martiris sui statim sparsi aquilarum celestium custodiam deputavit [cu]stodiatque vos a cunctis insidis truculenti belial qui sanctum martirem fecit tirannidem devincere occisoris. Et qui ad eius festa meritaque preclara devote colenda 108 109

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All the chief themes of Jagiellonian propaganda under Jan Olbracht and Fryderyk are present in this short but significant prayer. A national, patriotic note is struck by invoking Poland’s only indigenous saint; the magical eagles gathered around the martyr’s body echo the white eagles of the Piast dynasty; Stanisław is publicly wrested from the magnates and co-opted as protector of the Jagiellonian monarchy; the inherently kingly nature of God is noted. In order to make the latter point more emphatically, the prayer itself was doctored – its wording differs from the standard versions of the Saint Stanisław feast-day liturgy by including a concluding phrase which does not occur elsewhere: ‘He whose kingdom and empire last without end, age throughout age.’110 Fryderyk’s decision to include the heady word ‘imperium’ was a clear evocation of God’s kingly status, an assertion of the monarchical structure of the universe and a reminder of Jan Olbracht’s claim (made in the Częstochowa missal) that the king of Poland claimed quasi-imperial status. The prayer chosen by Cardinal Fryderyk in December 1501, however, also betrayed the weaknesses of the regime and reveals a clash of political cultures in early sixteenth-century Kraków. The coronation blessing contained thorny references to tyranny and extra-judicial murders by kings – the one human monarch alluded to, Bolesław II, is bluntly called a murderous tyrant. ‘Tyrannus’ was a live word in Polish political debate. Well-read members of the congregation might have remembered that Długosz’s Vita Beatissimi Stanislai had closed with a hearty condemnation of tyranny and a warning that all tyrants would be chased from the Polish kingdom and meet with death.111 Just two months earlier, the word had been directly deployed against the Jagiellonian monarchy, in the Mielnica Constitution drawn up by the senate, which had accused Jan Olbracht of tyranny.112 Cardinal Fryderyk’s flawed blessing on the Jagiellonian monarchy in December 1501 serves as a reminder that one man, no matter how confident or resourceful, could not single-handedly change a kingdom’s prevailing political culture. Through the artistic patronage and propaganda of Jan Olbracht and Fryderyk, in the 1490s and early 1500s the Jagiellonian monarchy acquired increasingly sacral and lavish visual trappings, but it nonetheless remained a house of cards, built on delicate foundations in a hostile climate. Although Fryderyk had shown that the Renaissance cardinal-prince could manipulate religious art and spectacle in the interests of the state from within the Roman Catholic church, by December 1501 he had already seen how fragile his father’s and brother’s Renaissance monarchy was; his inventive propaganda would not, unfortunately, win him enough supporters to survive the difficult months ahead.

accurritis ad festam eternam interminabilis gaudium pervenire valeatis ipse prestare dignetur cuius regnum et imperium sine fine in secula saeculorum Amen.’ 110 This phrase is missing, for example, in the version of the Saint Stanisław feast-day prayer given in Erazm Ciołek’s 1505 pontifical, Czart., MS 1212, fos 20v–21f. 111 Długosz, Vita Beatissimi Stanislai, p. 43. 112 Akta Aleksandra, nr 29, pp. 26–7.

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CHAPTER FIVE

‘Cardinalis Cracoviensis’: Fryderyk Jagiellon and the Papacy Introduction In 1492, Johannes Burchard, Pope Alexander VI’s Master of Ceremonies, left this account of a celebration at the papal palace: That day, the most illustrious lord Giovanni Sforza, count of Cotignola, lord of Pesaro, married and took as his legitimate wife Lucrezia Borgia, the pope’s daughter, who was aged about ten. The great hall and all the rooms around it were made ready … At the pope’s command his son Giovanni Borgia, Lord of Gandia, brought the bride Lucrezia from the house of the Cardinal of Saint Maria in Portico, where she was living together with her maternal aunt Donna Giulia. Lucrezia was followed by Battistina, daughter of Teodora, daughter of the late Pope Innocent VIII, whose train was carried by a black girl. She was followed by Donna Giulia Farnese, the pope’s concubine, and she in turn by a crowd of about 150 Roman ladies. [After the wedding] diverse kinds of sweetmeats were brought out, marzipan, fruit, confectionaries and many kinds of wine, all arranged on about 200 bowls and cups.1

The close of the fifteenth century has traditionally been seen as something of a nadir in papal history. In the writings of Renaissance contemporaries and modern historians alike, we find a well-established narrative of lamentation over the corruption, immorality, worldliness, italianization and secularization of the Quattrocento popes, and none more so than the Catalan Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, whose pontificate has attracted much prurient interest.2 Both implicitly and explicitly, it is 1 Johannes Burchard, Johannes Burckardi Liber Notarum, ed. E. Celani (2 vols, Città di Castello, 1907–13), vol. 1, pp. 443–6: ‘Eadem die ill. d. Johannes Sfortia Cotignale, Pisauri dominus, desponsavit ac in suam uxorem legitimam sumpsit d. Lucreziam Borgiam, filiam pape, virginem in x vel circa sue etatis anno constitutam. Parata fuit aula magna nova ac omnes camere illam sequentes … Don Johannes Borgia, dux Gandie, filius pape, d. Lucrezie sponse frater germanus, de mandate SSDN pape, adduxit eandem Lucreziam sponsam, sororem suam, ex domo r. cardinalist S. Marie in Porticu, quam una cum d. Julia matertera sua inhabitat. Sequebatur Lucretiam d. Baptistina, filia D. Theodore, filie fel. rec. Innocenti pape VIII, cuius vestis caudam etiam portavit alia puella nigra. Hanc sequebatur d. Jula de Farnesio, concubina pape, et hanc multe mulieres romane, number cl vel circa … apportata fuit collatio diversorum confectionum, marzapanum, fructuum et confectionibus compositorum et diversorum generum vine in bacilibus et tazeis circiter ducentum.’ 2 Ludwig Pastor, History of the Popes, ed. F.I. Antrobus (40 vols, London, 1956), vol. 5, p. 388; Denys Hay, The Church in Italy in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1977), pp.

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suggested that hedonistic Renaissance popes effectively brought the Reformation upon themselves. Alongside these allegations of moral and spiritual decay, the historiography of the fifteenth-century papacy has also painted it as an institution which was in serious political decline, a pitiful reflection of its high-medieval forebear, compromised by schisms and harried by conciliarists. Writers such as John Thomson and Anthony Black have suggested that the political weakness of the Quattrocento papacy was the principal reason for the emergence of ‘national churches’ in ultramontane Europe; in their accounts, cynical princes simply exploited the helplessness of their old rival in Rome. The career of Fryderyk Jagiellon can therefore be used as a test case, to establish whether the late fifteenth-century kings of Poland did indeed exploit a prostrate papacy in order to bolster their own sovereignty. To answer this question, and get at the core of their relationship, it is important to separate the wheat from the chaff, distinguishing between stable trends inherited from the Middle Ages, and those which were genuinely novel and distinctive to the years around 1500. This chapter will first sketch out two areas where the Jagiellonians’ experience of Rome – that of Cardinal Fryderyk and his kingly relatives – was resoundingly one of continuity: diplomatic relations and the administration of the church in Poland. We will then consider an area of important and potentially radical discontinuity: the cooperation of both sides in creating a hybrid prince-priest such as Cardinal Fryderyk, and the local political effects of his career in both arenas. The Polish evidence points to a slightly different story from that which is traditionally told about Renaissance popes and princes. Cardinal Fryderyk’s contacts with Rome strongly suggest that the main political conflict waged within the church at the close of fifteenth century was no longer that between ‘popes and princes’, but rather between these (secular and priestly) monarchies and their respective local elites. It is precisely these battles – between pope and cardinals, Polish kings and their pro-magnate clergy – which Fryderyk’s career illuminates, leading us towards an image of the Renaissance papacy not as an institution in the throes of moral decay, decadent with sweetmeats and ladies-in-waiting, but rather as a monarchy in a state of dynamic political evolution. Papal–Polish Diplomacy, 1488–1503 Diplomatic relations between Rome and Poland – that is, contacts between the two courts relating to matters of war, peace, regional power balances and major ecclesiastical events – constitute the most visible, best-documented and traditionally most closely studied aspect of their wider relationship.3 At a time when the late 26–48; Peter Partner, The Pope’s Men: The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance (Oxford, 1990); Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (London, 2005), p. 68. 3 See, for example, Smołucha and Krzysztof Baczkowski, ‘Działalność polskowęgiersjkiej dyplomacji w Rzeszy Niemieckiej w latach 1498–1500’, Studia Historyczne 20 (1977): 517–40; ‘Państwa Europy środkowo-wschodniej wobec anty-tureckich projektów Innocentego VIII, 1484–92’, Nasza Przeszłość 74 (1990): 207–35; ‘Próby włączenia państw

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Quattrocento popes were increasingly drawn into the violent affairs of Italy, and supposedly handing out concessions to eager princes, we might anticipate some change in the tone or level of political contact between the curia and distant Kraków. Moreover, the arrival on the diplomatic scene of a figure unprecedented in Central Europe – a royal cardinal, intimately related to all the major rulers of the region – might be expected to alter the balance of power between the major players, strengthening either the Roman or the Polish hand. In the three major internationalrelations incidents of Fryderyk’s adult life, however, there is nothing substantially new about the diplomatic relationship between the Polish kings and Popes Innocent VIII and Alexander VI to mark it out from that of their predecessors. The Ermland Bishopric Dispute (1489) The first major diplomatic engagement of Fryderyk’s career occurred in 1489 when, as we briefly saw in Chapter 1, the principal bishopric of Royal Prussia, Warmia (Ermland), fell vacant following the death of Nicholaus Tungen.4 The cathedral canons hurriedly elected as bishop one of their number, Lucas Watzenrode, to the anger of King Kazimierz IV, who understood the see to have been promised by the pope to his youngest son.5 Throughout the spring of 1489, Watzenrode (aided by agents of the Teutonic Order), and a small Polish delegation led by the orator Jan Brandys, fought in Rome to win papal recognition for their respective candidates. Pope Innocent VIII entrusted the matter for arbitration to Cardinal Marco Barbo, who in May presented the consistory with a memorandum, whose interpretation of recent Prussian history was heavily and obviously influenced by the Teutonic Order. Barbo rejected Fryderyk’s claims to Warmia, on the grounds that any such sanction of Jagiellonian authority in Prussia would be tantamount to an approval of Kazimierz IV’s alienation of ecclesiastical land from a religious order during the Thirteen Years’ War (1454–66): ‘we would thereby confirm the detested peace [Treaty of Thorn] …’6 Neither Kazimierz’s formal appeal against the decision, nor his increasingly menacing letters to Rome, moved the pope and Watzenrode landed on the Baltic coast in July 1489, with the papal bull of confirmation in his baggage.7 Although this dispute revolved around the person of the young Fryderyk Jagiellon, it was essentially part of a long-standing clash between Rome and the Polish Crown over sovereignty in Prussia. The popes considered the Prussian lands to be inalienable ecclesiastical estates granted to a crusading order which had distinguished itself converting the native Baltic peoples; the Poles regarded the Prussian seaboard as a natural part of their kingdom, illegally seized by the Teutonic Knights in the Jagiellońskich do koalicji antytureckiej przez Papieża Aleksandra VI na przełomie XV/XVI wieku’, Nasza Przeszłość 81 (1994): 5–49. 4 The chief studies of this dispute are Papée, ‘Kandydatura Fryderyka Jagiellończyka’; Schmauch; Sikorski. For the relationship between the Polish Crown and Warmia, see B. Leśnodorski, Dominium Warmińskie (1243–1569) (Poznań, 1949). 5 Materiały do historyi, nr 35, pp. 69–70. 6 Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 339, pp. 352–4. 7 The appeal is summarized in both Sikorski, pp. 107–10 and Schmauch, p. 73. Codex Epistolaris, vol. 2, nr 250, pp. 293–5.

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thirteenth century. The papacy’s vigorous diplomatic support for the Order had been a principal grievance in Polish–Roman relations throughout the medieval period. Pope Urban VI had sided with the Knights in the 1380s in questioning the sincerity of Władysław-Jogaila’s conversion to Catholicism; Rome had placed Polish-occupied areas of Prussia under interdict during the Thirteen Years’ War and openly regarded the 1466 treaty as an illegitimate settlement. The Warmia bishopric dispute of 1489 was therefore just another instalment of the saga and yet another opportunity for the Teutonic Order’s agents to defeat Polish diplomacy in Rome. In conflicts with powerful religious orders, fifteenth-century princes were still on the back foot when it came to securing papal favour. The Anti-Ottoman Crusade, 1500–1503 From the fourteenth century until the seventeenth, the threat posed to Christendom by the Ottoman empire formed the most common occasion for contact between the Polish Crown and the Roman curia. Accordingly, the single most ambitious papal–Polish diplomatic project of Cardinal Fryderyk’s career was Pope Alexander VI’s crusading league of 1501, an endeavour born out of an apparent convergence of geopolitical interests. Following Jan Olbracht’s failed 1497 attempt to push the sultan back from the Black Sea littoral, and the retaliatory Tartar and Turkish raids on south-eastern Poland in 1498, the Polish king and Władysław Jagiellon of Hungary had agreed to coordinate their future efforts to find international aid against the Ottoman threat.8 Throughout 1498 and 1499, the doom-laden orations delivered by the Polish–Hungarian envoy Mikołaj Rozemberg to Emperor Maximilian and the imperial diet had failed to elicit a response.9 As 1499 drew to a close, King Władysław finally persuaded a sceptical Jan Olbracht that the two kingdoms’ next diplomatic port of call should be Rome, and the traditional patron of holy wars, the pope.10 As it happened, this decision was made in Buda and Kraków just as, in the Mediterranean basin, the sultan violently broke his 20-year truce with Venice by ordering lightening raids on the republic’s Greek ports. Alexander VI, unexpectedly presented with a rush of Jagiellonian and Venetian orators in Rome begging aid against the infidel, seized his chance to devise the first major European crusading league seen since the 1460s. In Buda, diplomats (including the Polish observer Piotr Kmita) began to thrash out the terms of the planned league.11 On 1 June 1500, in the midst of Rome’s jubilee Holy Year celebrations, Alexander VI set events in motion when he published the crusade bull Quamvis ad Amplianda and declared a holy war against the Ottoman Turks.12 On 2 June, the pope issued two crusade bulls specifically for Hungary and See Chapter 2, pp. 39–42. See Baczkowski, ‘Działalność polsko-węgiersjkiej dyplomacji’. 10 Materiały do dziejów, nr 24, pp. 63–5. 11 For the diplomacy surrounding the league, see Baczkowski, ‘Próby włączenia’; K. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1201–1571 (4 vols, Philadelphia, Pa., 1978), vol. 2, pp. 509–33 and Housley, The Later Crusades, p. 116. 12 The text of the bull is given by Burchard, vol. 2, pp. 220–24. 8 9

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Poland. The first bull raised a tenth (the traditional source of revenue for holy wars) on all clergy and religious living in both Jagiellonian kingdoms, while the second granted a powerful plenary indulgence to all Poles and Hungarians who equipped the crusade army, fought, sent proxies or made financial donations.13 In June 1500, the papal nuncio Gasparo Golfo set out from the Borgia court bound for Poland, armed with the freshly sealed crusade bulls and 70 gold pieces to cover his travel expenses.14 Golfo reached Kraków in August, where he published the papal bulls with some pomp, as Miechowita described: ‘on Sunday 30 August he declared a holy year indulgence and a crusade against the pagans, and he led a procession from the church of Saint Mary [in the market square] up to the cathedral, with King Jan Olbracht following …’15 With the assistance of the local Observant Franciscans, Golfo immediately preached the crusade in Kraków, before heading north to organize collections in Teutonic Prussia.16 Gasparo Golfo, a Dominican friar and bishop of Cagli, made a strong impression on his contemporaries. Miechowita, a writer little given to praise, called him a ‘cunning and able man’, while the Venetian diarist Marino Sanudo was impressed by Golfo’s dynamic performance before the Venetian senate in 1501: ‘this bishop of Cagli wore black over a friar’s habit, he was young and spoke exquisitely and very fast. He is a good friend of [this Republic], and full of enthusiasm for the crusade …’17 Golfo and the Jagiellonian cardinal did not get on, and a poisonous but opaque quarrel exploded between them. Fryderyk later reported the incident in very evasive terms to Zygmunt Jagiellon, then in Buda: You well know that by nature and by upbringing I am, always have been, and always aspire to be of a calm and tranquil spirit. Not only do I refrain from injuring others, but I tolerate the injuries done to myself, but … that nuncio behaved so irreverently towards me, and in public discussions he slandered me in such a way, that modesty forbids me from repeating it in writing ...18

13 The first bull (clerical tenth) is published in Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 458, pp. 478–82. The second (indulgences) is found in ASV, Arm. 32, vol. 21, fols. 131v–134v. 14 ASV, Camera Apostolica, Diversa Cameralia, vol. 53, fo. 116. 15 Miecowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 354: ‘Et iubileum cum cruciate contra paganos, die dominica quae fuit 30 Augusti, Craccoviae de ecclesia sanctae Mariae in circulo processionatim in ecclesiam Cathedralem incedendo rege Alberto sequente, publicavit.’ 16 For Golfo’s later account of his travels, see Marino Sanudo, Diarii di Marino Sanuto, ed. F. Stefani (58 vols, Venice, 1879–1902), vol. 3, pp. 1163–4; Jan of Komorowo, p. 285. 17 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 354: ‘homo callidus et facundus’; Sanudo, vol. 3, p. 1549: ‘Questo Caliense va vestito di soto da frate, e di sopra di negro; è giovane, parla lengua exquisita, veloce, et è molto amico nostro; et à bona volunta a la expedition general …’ 18 BK, MS 207, fo. 48–48v: ‘Scit enim optime F.V.I. et natura et institutione nos tales esse et nuper fuisse, ut ea semper amplicteremus, quae essent pacifici et tranquilli animi, et non modo non inferremus alicui injuriam, sed potius illatam equo animus tolleraremus … [eiusdem nuncio] irreverentes erga nos se habent, ut in colloquiis publicis talia de nobis oblatraveret, quae vestrae Illustrissimi Fraternitati pudet nos scribere …’

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As soon as Golfo crossed the border into Hungary in the last days of 1500, Fryderyk moved quickly to reassert royal control over the funds raised from the Polish clergy by the Italian. On 30 December, in an early indication of his machinations, Fryderyk sent two envoys to the bishops and cathedral chapters of Włocławek, Poznań and Płock, to convey his instructions ‘in the matter of the tenth established by the Holy See’.19 At an unknown point in 1501, Fryderyk announced to the Polish church that he had unilaterally, and in complete defiance of Alexander VI’s instructions, converted (‘commutaverimus’) the papal tenth in every Polish diocese into an episcopal ‘subsidium charitativum’, of the kind which he had regularly raised for the Crown since 1493.20 Unlike a crusade tenth, which was controlled by papal representatives and 30 per cent of which had to be sent to Rome, the ‘subsidium charitativum’ taxation was entirely in the hands of the local bishop or primate.21 In the six months which passed between Golfo’s departure (December 1500) and Jan Olbracht’s death (June 1501), Poland discreetly but surely removed herself from Alexander VI’s league. Tartar raids on Podolia continued unabated after 1498, and Ivan III was making large territorial gains against Grand Duke Aleksander’s Lithuania, leaving Poland simply unable to make major military commitments elsewhere. Privately, the king’s councillors insisted in anonymous memoranda that an international crusade was no answer to Poland’s strategic problems. In March 1501, to the disappointment of the curia, Jan Olbracht sent an envoy to Constantinople to seek a unilateral truce with the Turks. When the crusading league treaty was finally concluded in Buda in May, Poland was not a signatory, although the text optimistically stated that the kingdom might join the allies at a later date.22 Between June and October 1501, as an interrex desperately seeking the means to secure Poland’s frontiers during the electoral campaign, Fryderyk moved to seize also the lay crusade contributions of which he was co-custodian, and which sat in legal limbo as cash collected for an indefinitely postponed war effort. In Buda, the papal crusade legate Cardinal Pietro Isvagli received reports that Fryderyk Jagiellon’s suffragan had taken away the crusade chests of Royal Prussia.23 The Polish and Sicilian cardinals exchanged a series of letters, respectively evasive and acrimonious. Isvagli threatened to report the matter to Rome, and directly accused his Polish counterpart of lying and extortion: ‘I think [you] are trying to conceal the truth by procrastinating for so long, that this affair will be forgotten … I ask you not to ignore my requests and advice, but to be willing to take pains that all ecclesiastical moneys that may be found be kept safely, since it may be necessary for them to be put back in the chests from which they were taken.’24 Both Gasparo Golfo and 19 Acta Capitulorum, nr 2559, p. 570: ‘Domini … de mandato Rmi dni noster Cardinalis … vener. dominos Sigismundum Camyenski ad Poznaniensem et Vincenzium Lagyewniczski ad Wladislaviensem et Plocensem Epos et eorum capitula deputaverunt in facto decime a Sede Apost. Institute …’ 20 BK, MS 207, fos 43v–44. 21 Setton, vol. 2, p. 402. 22 Baczkowski, ‘Próby włączenia’, pp. 39, 45. 23 Akta Aleksandra, nr 35, pp. 33–4. 24 Akta Aleksandra, nr 35, pp. 32–4: ‘Sed puto D. V. Reverendissimam velle dissimulando veritatis cognitionem proferre in id longum tempus, ut res oblivioni tradatur … Qua propter

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Cardinal Isvagli swore to report Fryderyk’s scandalous behaviour to Rome, but it seems that Alexander VI let the matter pass. The Jagiellonians were less forgiving, and Fryderyk organized a letter-writing campaign by his relatives to the pope, in order to denounce Nuncio Golfo’s disrespectful behaviour towards him.25 Golfo never again served as a papal diplomat for the Alexandrine regime: he was murdered in 1503 when the armies of the pope’s son, Cesare Borgia, seized his episcopal seat of Cagli.26 Neither of the two key features of this episode, Poland’s palpable reluctance to participate in crusades against the sultan and Fryderyk’s overt seizure of crusading funds, was at all new. The Jagiellonians had prevaricated over, and avoided, papal invitations to crusade since the 1380s, generally preferring to fight national defensive wars against potential Islamic invaders without external involvement.27 Władysław-Jogaila had not participated in the Nicopolis campaign of 1396, the Polish government had officially abstained from Władysław III’s misadventure at Varna in 1444, and all Jagiellonians had refused to support the imperial crusades against Hussite Bohemia. The traditional Polish strategy of maintaining peace with the sultan at all costs (although briefly questioned by Jan Olbracht in 1497) was warmly embraced by Cardinal Fryderyk himself, who counselled his brother to avoid conflict in 1497, urged him in 1501 to conclude peace with Sultan Bajezid II ‘so that we might have some respite from these evils’, and even defended this policy in writing to Pope Alexander VI.28 Similarly, the local confiscation or diversion of crusade funds raised on Roman authority and collected by hapless papal agents was a problem almost as old as the crusade itself. As Norman Housley has pointed out, the Vienne tenth of 1310 was almost universally appropriated by secular princes, and England routinely used cash for Hussite crusades to finance the Hundred Years’ War with France.29 In the Holy Jubilee Year of 1500, Cardinal Fryderyk was in good company: money raised from crusade–jubilee indulgences was also seized for local defence by the Teutonic Order in Livonia, and by the Venetian Signoria.30 The undermining of Alexander VI’s crusading league in Poland is not per se testament to any sudden haemorrhage of papal authority in Central Europe circa 1500, but rather a continuation of existing

rogo D. V. Reverendissimam, ne super hoc negligat rogationes et consilium meum, sed velit operam dare, ut quaecunque reperiuntur ecclesiasticae peccuniae, tuto conserventur, quia forte erit opus, ut reponantur in capsulis unde abductae sunt.’ See also Akta Aleksandra, nr 41, pp.39–40. 25 BK, MS 207, fos 48–9. 26 See A. des Mazis, ‘Cagli’, Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclesiastique (Paris, 1949), vol. 2, pp. 163–7. 27 For a characterization of Polish crusading policy in this period, see Nowakowska, ‘Poland and the crusade’. 28 BK, MS 207, fos 44–45v, 46v–47r: ‘possemus habere pacem cum hoste et quanto possit fieri diuturniorem utari quando a tot malis respirare possemus’; Sanudo, vol. 3, p. 655. 29 Housley, The Later Crusades, pp. 256, 444–6. 30 Girolamo de Priuli, I Diarii di Giralomo Priuli, ed. A. Segre, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores 25, part. III (Città di Castello, 1912), vol. 2, p. 128; Akta Aleksandra, nr 37, p. 35.

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negotiation and conflict around an institution which the Polish Crown and its elites had long regarded with ambivalence. The Grand Duchy of Muscovy: Marriage and War, 1500–1503 The third diplomatic engagement between Rome and Kraków during Fryderyk’s lifetime concerned Lithuanian religious and military problems, which came to impinge on Polish diplomacy after the coronation of Grand Duke Aleksander Jagiellon as king of Poland in December 1501. A series of contacts with the Vatican between 1500 and 1503, encompassing matters of marriage, religious minorities and war, had their roots in events which had built up in the dynasty’s ancestral lands over several decades. After Jogaila’s baptism in 1386, the nobles and populace of the core Lithuanian lands had become Catholic, but the inhabitants of the Rus territories conquered by the Giedimins had retained their Orthodox faith, making up the religious majority in the grand duchy. Having succeeded as grand duke in 1492, Aleksander Jagiellon spent the first two years of his rule fighting off an invasion by Ivan III of Muscovy, and as part of a peace settlement concluded in 1493 it was agreed that Aleksander would marry Ivan’s daughter Helena, an Orthodox princess descended from the Paleologan emperors of Byzantium. Ivan III sent his daughter to Lithuania in 1494 on condition that she would not be permitted to convert to the minority Catholic faith – even if she wanted to.31 Six years after the wedding, in May 1500, Ivan III invaded Lithuania again, claiming that the oppression of Orthodox believers, including his own daughter, compelled him to intervene. Anxious to remove Ivan III’s claim to speak for Lithuania’s Orthodox subjects, in 1500 Aleksander tried to establish ecclesiastical authority over his entire populace by reviving the Florentine Union – the agreement on a reunion of the Orthodox and Catholic churches signed in 1439, but generally disregarded in the Orthodox world. The terms of the Florentine Union allowed Orthodox believers to retain their own liturgies and forms of worship, accepting the pope as their spiritual sovereign and technically becoming Catholics.32 In 1501, the Orthodox Metropolitan of Kiev signed a declaration of submission to the bishop of Rome, and this text was carried to Italy by the talented diplomat Erazm Ciołek. Pope Alexander VI received this news with good cheer.33 In Vilnius, however, Grand Duchess Helena endangered the entire project and emerged as a possible fifth column, a beacon of pro-Muscovite Orthodox resistance, when she refused absolutely to accept the Florentine decrees herself. Ciołek was now instructed to seek a papal divorce for his master. As the Papée, Aleksander Jagiellończyk, pp. 9–21; Pietkiewicz, p. 160; Skarbiec dyplomatów papieskich, cesarskich, królewskich, książeńcych, uchwał narodowych, postanowień różnych władz i urządów pospoługujących do krytycznego wyjasnienia dziejów Litwy i Rusi Litewskiej, ed. I. Daniłowicz, (2 vols, Vilnius, 1861), vol. 2, nrs 2071, p. 236; nr 2077, p. 237. 32 Joseph Gill, The Council of Florence (Cambridge, 1959); Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. N. Tanner (London & Washington, 1990), vol. 2, pp. 523–8. 33 Brevia Romanorum Pontificum ad Poloniam Spectantia ex Minutis et Registris Pontificis, ed. Henryk Wojtyska (Rome, 1986), nr 144, pp. 90–93; nr 147, pp. 95–7. 31

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inimitable Gasparo Golfo reported to the Venetian Senate in 1501, the grand duke ‘wants to divorce his wife, and for this reason he has sent his orators to Rome’.34 This theological, diplomatic and military mess became Cardinal Fryderyk’s problem in autumn 1501. On 26 November, following Aleksander’s election, the pope wrote to Fryderyk, asking him to undertake the conversion of Helena in person, point out the errors of Orthodox dogma, warn her of the consequences of her beliefs and, as a last resort, proceed against her as a schismatic through the ecclesiastical courts. Alexander VI stressed ‘what an indignity and disgrace it would be to the Roman church, to be everywhere cursed with mighty malediction, if a woman who hates and avoids the name of Christian and the institutions of the Catholic faith were to be called queen of so famous and powerful a kingdom.’35 Fryderyk convened a panel of Kraków canons to study the question of the queen’s faith and the king’s marriage, but his own equivocal correspondence with King Aleksander creates the impression that the cardinal was a reluctant participant in the whole affair. Fryderyk was careful to offer no personal opinions on the matter and departed Kraków for a tour of his episcopal lands soon after Helena’s arrival in Kraków in February 1502.36 Grand Duchess Helena was granted a formal entry into the Polish royal capital, but denied a coronation.37 The focus of papal–Jagiellonian communications shifted soon afterwards. As the Lithuanian–Muscovite war dragged on, King Aleksander began to cast around for international mediators who might broker a peace with Ivan III. He turned first, in July 1502, to King Władysław of Hungary, who in turn availed himself of the services of Cardinal-legate Isvagli. The Hungarian envoy Zygmunt Zanthey was promptly dispatched to Kraków and Vilnius as a mediator, equipped with letters from Cardinal Isvagli and the pontiff himself, in which they urged Ivan III to cease hostilities against the Jagiellonians in the name of Christian solidarity.38 When Fryderyk met with Zanthey at Łowicz, the sight of these letters much cheered the beleaguered Polish cardinal: ‘the authority of the pontiff and king of Hungary will soon make the duke of Muscovy change his mind for the better, because their very great standing and arguments will surely move him, no matter how stubborn and boorish he may be.’39

34 Brevia, nr 152, pp. 101–3; Sanudo, vol. 2, p. 1549: ‘voleva far divortio di la moglie, qual é con lui; e per questo mandò soi oratori al papa.’ 35 ASV, Arm. 32, vol. 21, fos 59v–60; partially published in Brevia, nr 154, pp. 104–5: ‘Quippe summa esset Romanae Ecclesiae indignitas et obprobium ubique ingenti detestationi execrandum, ut quae christianum nomen et catholicas institutiones abhorret et fugit, tam insignis potentisque regni regina dicatur.’ 36 See Akta Aleksandra, nr 60, pp. 65–6; nr 64, pp. 68–70. 37 Akta Aleksandra, nr 64, pp. 68–70; Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 363. 38 Akta Aleksandra, nr 108, pp. 146–51. 39 Akta Aleksandra, nr 98, pp. 137–8: ‘[quod incedens] auctoritate ad concordiam ineundam summi pontificis et sermi. d. regis Hungariae, promptior erit dux Moscoviae ad mutandum animum in melius, et maxime quando tales respectus et rationes adducentur, quae merito eum movere debent, quantumcunque durum et agrestem.’

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Rome and Buda placed far greater hopes, however, in the mediation of another agent – Ivan’s own daughter. Prompted by King Aleksander, in September 1502 Cardinal Fryderyk wrote to Helena on behalf of the entire Polish episcopate, formally asking her to intervene in the dispute. He noted that her silence in the face of the prolonged conflict between her father and husband ‘is a thing which has aroused great astonishment among all men, and especially in the city of Rome itself’ – a possible hint that Fryderyk’s approach had been prompted by papal diplomats.40 Having cast Helena as his chosen mediator, Alexander VI discreetly put aside the issue of her conversion. Zanthey’s mission was a success, and a Lithuanian–Muscovite truce was signed on Annunciation Day in April 1503 – a month after Cardinal Fryderyk’s death, and just four months before Pope Alexander VI’s own life drew to a close on the Vatican hill. While the marriage of a Polish Catholic king to an Orthodox princess was a unique event, posing a series of specific problems, the wider issue of a church union had already proved the subject of diplomatic contacts between Rome and Władysław-Jogaila and Kazimierz IV earlier in the fifteenth century – at the Council of Constance, during Cardinal Isidore’s mission to Eastern Europe in the 1440s, and again when the papal envoy Antonio Bonumbre travelled to the region in 1473.41 Similarly, the facilitating of peace accords between Christian princes was a longstanding papal practice, as a necessary precondition of a successful universal crusade. An especially telling point here, however, is the negligible role played by Cardinal Fryderyk himself: in the major questions of the royal divorce and conclusion of the ruinous Muscovite war, neither King Aleksander nor Pope Alexander VI made any use of the cardinal-prince, and he was effectively sidelined throughout these delicate negotiations. The papal court instead used Cardinal-legate Isvagli in Buda as its principal agent in the region. Cardinal Fryderyk: A Diplomatic Low Profile Throughout the period described – during the Ermland bishopric dispute, the papal crusading league and the crisis over Helena of Muscovy – the Jagiellonians never looked to their own dynastic cardinal to act as a special intercessor with Rome, but instead preferred to use specialized agents in their dealings with the curia, employing experienced royal chancellery diplomats such as Marcin Brandys or rising stars such as Erazm Ciołek. This is unsurprising, given the poverty of Fryderyk’s own contacts in the papal court and administration: Vatican documents show that even his personal business in Rome (for example, the paying of curial fees) was handled by minor figures such as the merchant ‘de Gaddis’ or by established agents of his Hungarian

40 Akta Aleksandra, nr 104, pp. 143–4: ‘Est enim ea res maximae admirationi apud omnes homines et praesertim in ipsa urbe Romana …’ 41 M. Keppell, ‘New light on the visit of Grigori Tsamblak to the Council of Constance’, in D. Baker (ed.), The Orthodox Churches and the West (Oxford, 1976), pp. 223–9; Gill, pp. 358–62; O. Halecki, Od unii florenckiej do unii brzeskiej, vol. 1, 2nd edn (Rome & Lublin, 1997), pp. 138–42.

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Jagiellonian relatives, such as Cardinal Piccolomini.42 The minor role played by Cardinal Fryderyk in this diplomatic axis reveals that the Polish Crown regarded him primarily as a national or regional politician and never seriously intended him to open up privileged channels of communication with Rome. Diplomatic relations between the Polish Jagiellonians and the papacy between 1489 and 1503 therefore show no clear signs of papal political decline, and neither the themes nor the execution of diplomacy – on either side – were materially affected by the arrival of a royal cardinal-primate. The Administration of the Polish Church Among historians who have described the emergence of ‘national churches’ in the fifteenth century, a prince’s ability to control ecclesiastical administration (appointments, jurisdiction, taxation) is presented as the basic litmus test of such an entity, with the usual implication (or assumption?) that these things were achieved exclusively at the cost of the papacy.43 However, an examination of administrative contacts between the two major dioceses of Kraków / Gniezno and Rome during Fryderyk’s ascendancy (in the chief areas of papal provisions to benefices, Roman influence in local ecclesiastical courts and the activities of papal collectors) shows little substantive change in the balance of power between the king and pope in the everyday running of the Polish church in these years. The level and success of papal interventions on the ground in Poland seems, perhaps surprisingly, to be broadly unchanged from the fourteenth century. Papal Provisions Invoking the right of papal provision, both Innocent VIII and Alexander VI attempted to impose their own chosen candidates on lucrative, senior posts in Fryderyk’s dioceses without consulting local authorities. The clerics involved were mostly Polish curialists, expatriates making their careers in Rome, and all of them encountered serious difficulties in taking up Polish benefices gifted by their papal master. In 1488, for example, Innocent VIII promoted a Polish member of his household, Andrzej Piotr, to the Kraków cathedral chapter, yet he was unable to claim his prebend because of obstruction by local clergy.44 When Innocent VIII appointed a second ‘friend and familiar’, Jakub Lipowiecki, as archdeacon of Sandomierz in 1490, he soon discovered that this office and its incomes had been occupied by Canon Jan Turski, who blithely ignored several papal sentences of excommunication. In both these cases, the pontiff wrote in protest to Bishop Fryderyk himself.45 Alexander VI’s Polish curialists fared little better. In 1493, the new pope conferred Kraków canonries on the scholar Mikołaj Czepiel, his associate of 20 years, and

42 43 44 45

ASV, Arch. Concist., Acta Vicecancellari, vol. 1, fo. 30. See Thomson and Heath, discussed above in the Introduction, pp. 3–4. Vetera Monumenta, vol. 4, nr 267, p. 242. Vetera Monumenta, vol. 2, nr 267, p. 242; Brevia, nr 138, pp. 84–5.

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the ex-curialist Andrzej Róża Boryszewski.46 These men, too, encountered serious difficulties in retrieving any income from the posts, and the curia again complained directly to the Jagiellonian bishop.47 A far more serious dispute occurred in 1494, when the Borgia pope ordered that the six Kraków and Gniezno benefices vacated by Krzesław of Kurozwęcki (following his election as bishop of Włocławek) should pass to Cardinal Giovanni Sangiorgio, an auditor of the papal Rota (high court).48 This was a controversial move, because Cardinal Giovanni was a foreigner, and a number of the benefices in question (including a chapel in the Wawel castle) were under royal patronage. The royal vice-chancellor Gregorz Lubrański and Jan Konarski, Fryderyk’s estate manager and later executor, quickly and illegally occupied these benefices. Alexander VI protested directly to Jan Olbracht in May 1495 and November 1498, claiming that the Crown was knowingly protecting the offenders.49 It was not until February 1503 that Cardinal Sangiorgio finally paid annates on the chapel of St Mary in the Wawel castle, suggesting that local Jagiellonian obstruction had prevented him from taking up the benefices for almost ten years.50 Rome and Polish Ecclesiastical Courts Rome was also a presence in the judicial life of the Kraków diocese.51 Between 1488 and 1503, Fryderyk presided over 182 hearings in his court of audience in person; in only two of these cases, did litigants go over his head and appeal the outcome in Rome.52 Well-connected Małopolska litigants might, alternatively, persuade the papacy to appoint an apostolic judge-delegate specifically to hear their case.53 Three judges-delegate were named by Rome to hear Kraków cases during Fryderyk’s episcopate, a local abbot and the cardinal himself (1491).54 Quantitatively, therefore, direct Roman intervention in judicial proceedings was very rare. It was, however, simple papal bulls which formed the most common evidence of Roman authority in the courtroom: in eight Kraków court-of-audience hearings (4 per cent of the total), local people produced newly acquired or old curial bulls to back up their claims,

Brevia, nr 139, p. 86; see H. Barycz, Polacy na studiach w Rzymie w epoce Odrodzenia, 1440–1600 (Kraków, 1938), pp. 40, 59–61. 47 Brevia, nr 139, p. 86. 48 Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 409, pp. 422–3. The benefices in question were a Kraków cathedral canonry, the praepositorship of the church of St Michael, canonry of the collegiate church of St Mary in Kielce, the parish church of Bochnia, the deaconate of Gniezno cathedral and the prebend for the Chapel of St Mary of Egypt in Kraków castle. See also ASV, Reg. Vat., vol. 785, fo. 276v–279. 49 Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 435, pp. 455–6; nr 412, pp. 424–5. 50 ASV, Camera Apostolica, Annatae, vol. 47, fo. 30. 51 The court of audience records from Fryderyk’s incumbency in Gniezno are lost and therefore cannot be discussed here. 52 AKK, AA2, fo. 204; AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fo. 114. 53 Brundage, pp. 127–9. 54 AKK, AA2, fo. 196; AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fos 76v, 99v. 46

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like a rabbit pulled from a hat.55 These bulls were in fact surprisingly ineffective in limiting Fryderyk’s judicial options. In a 1490 hearing, for example, the bulls secured by opposing litigants, Jan Turski and Jakub Lipowiecki, contradicted one another and Fryderyk simply deferred the case.56 The persistent problem of fraud also undermined the value of papal bulls: Fryderyk and his officials inspected all purported bulls carefully, and at least one was declared to be a forgery, in a 1489 hearing.57 Papal Collectors Perhaps the most visible sign of pontifical power in Poland was the figure of the papal collector, empowered to raise the Peter’s Pence tax. Between 1488 and 1503, the Camera staff recorded receipt of over 3,300 gold ducats from collectors of the ‘denarius sancti Petri’ in Poland – Bishop Uriel of Górka, Mikołaj of Prazmow and Jan Turski.58 The title of collector was sufficiently lucrative for Mikołaj of Prazmow’s brother, Wawrzyniec, to pass himself off as his curial sibling, successfully raising 1000 florins from the inhabitants of Poznań and Płock in 1502.59 The Crown intervened only once in the collection of the Peter’s Pence. In 1496, King Jan Olbracht suspended all payments of the tax in Poland, on the grounds that Mikołaj of Prazmow had failed to ‘inform either His Majesty or [Cardinal Fryderyk] of his new office’. Prazmow was officially recognized as collector by the royal government in July 1497, the Crown having briefly delayed his activities. 60 Here, if anything, we can detect a slight shift in the balance of power in favour of Rome: for much of the fifteenth century, collectors in Poland had been local bishops known and loyal to the Jagiellonian kings (such as Uriel of Górka), and the gradual shift in the 1490s to appointing absentee curialists instead potentially threatened the Crown’s ability to exercise direct personal influence over the tax and its custodians. With one brief exception, therefore, during Fryderyk’s episcopates money continued to flow undisturbed from the Polish church to the coffers of the Camera Apostolica in Italy, as annate, common service and Peter’s Pence taxes. Rome, Kraków and Gniezno As a diocesan bishop and metropolitan archbishop, Fryderyk Jagiellon enjoyed a very free hand in the running of his dioceses, with relatively infrequent (and frequently ineffective) papal interventions in the governance of the Polish church. In 55 For a discussion of papal intervention in Kraków courts, see Nowakowska, ‘Papacy and piety’, pp. 266–8. 56 AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fo. 76. 57 AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4, fos 36, 139. 58 ASV, Camera Apostolica, Diversa Cameralia, vol. 50, fo. 76v; vol. 53, fo. 127–127v; vol. 54, fo. 119–119v. 59 ASV, Camera Apostolica, Diversa Cameralia, vol. 54, fos 176–177v. 60 Acta Iudiciorum Ecclesiasticorum Diocesum Gneznensis et Poznaniensis, ed. B. Ulanowski (Kraków, 1902), nr 1527, pp. 685–6: ‘docuit sufficienter de sua facultate’; Vetera Monumenta, vol. 2, nr 293, pp. 264–5.

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this, he was simply following in the footsteps of generations of medieval bishops. In a study of the papacy’s impact on Scotland and northern England between 1342 and 1378, for example, A.D.M. Barrell found that fourteenth-century British bishops ran their dioceses virtually independently of Rome; local priests felt the force of papal authority ‘indirectly and infrequently’ and ‘the papacy retained a role as overseer and arbiter’.61 Stanisław Szczur, in his study of Polish payments to Avignon in the fourteenth century, also found that Rome was no more than a very distant fiscal overlord.62 The apparent stability of papal power on the ground in Poland is striking because we would expect a royal bishop with a centralizing agenda to have a far more damaging impact on papal jurisdiction within his kingdom. This apparent continuity with the later Middle Ages, which challenges some of our historical models, suggests that the Polish kings never intended the papacy to be the primary casualty of their ecclesiastical policies or of Fryderyk’s potent concentration of secular, dynastic and priestly power. Clerical taxation provides us with an important illustration: Cardinal Fryderyk’s various ‘subsidium charitativum’ levies were intended to supplement and exist alongside traditional papal taxes (such as annates, common services and Peter’s Pence), not to displace them.63 The evidence on the ground implies that popes and princes, at least in Poland, had found a modus vivendi over ecclesiastical governance by 1500; a modus vivendi which predated the rapid rise of Renaissance monarchy in that country, and which was seemingly unconnected with the need for a royal bishop on the ground. Royal Careerists in the Church The lack of detectable change in papal–Polish relations in the spheres of diplomacy and church administration between 1488 and 1503 suggests that the real import of Fryderyk’s career lay elsewhere. It is, instead, in the most basic facts of his career that we can detect something strikingly new in relations between Renaissance popes and Polish royal government at the close of the fifteenth century. Fryderyk was the legitimate son and brother of reigning kings (a ‘princeps’ in Poland according to the Jagiellonians), yet he was permitted also to become a priest, prelate, cardinal and head of the Polish church. Rome’s sanctioning of, and active support for, Fryderyk’s clerical career thus represents a significant change from papal policy of the eleventh to fourteenth centuries; indeed, it is seemingly a complete reversal of the zealous Gregorian campaign to exclude secular princes from the government of the church. Fryderyk Jagiellon was, however, hardly an isolated case, as the bishoprics of Christendom and even the Sacred College began to fill up with the sons of secular ruling dynasties during the Quattrocento. It is precisely this papal collusion in a creeping return to a pre-Gregorian situation, to overt and significant secular control over spiritual matters, which has often been construed as decline and political

A.D.M. Barrell, The Papacy, Scotland and Northern England, 1342–78 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 256–7. 62 S. Szczur, Annaty papieskie w Polsce w XIV wieku (Kraków, 1998). 63 See above, Chapter 2, pp. 57–8. 61

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weakness on the part of the Renaissance papacy.64 If we are to understand the nature of this change, we must look in more detail at the various papal promotions of Fryderyk, at the wider phenomenon of ‘dynastic’ bishops and the ultimate political motivations of late fifteenth-century pontiffs in creating them. Papal Support for Fryderyk Jagiellon’s Clerical Career The papacy, and not the Polish Crown, was the ultimate arbiter and patron of Cardinal Fryderyk’s ecclesiastical career. Whatever political craftiness and coercion Kazimierz IV and Jan Olbracht might have used to secure pro-Jagiellonian votes by Polish cathedral chapters, these results were meaningless and illegitimate unless formally confirmed by the papal curia. Fryderyk’s failed bid for the Royal Prussian see of Ermland in 1489 well illustrated Rome’s effective right of veto: once Cardinal Marco Barbo had delivered his memorandum in favour of Lucas Watzenrode, and Innocent VIII officially confirmed the Prussian as the new bishop, Fryderyk’s candidacy was wrecked.65 The Ermland dispute was, however, a rare blot on the papacy’s otherwise enthusiastic support for Fryderyk Jagiellon’s rise through the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In May 1488, Pope Innocent VIII had speedily confirmed the result of the Kraków episcopal election in a public consistory, dispatching ten bulls to Poland announcing Fryderyk’s appointment as administrator-bishop.66 Papal support for Fryderyk’s career entered a new phase with the election of Pope Alexander VI, Poland’s former cardinal-protector, in August 1492.67 In autumn 1493, the new pontiff confirmed Fryderyk’s election as archbishop of Gniezno, allowed him to retain the see of Kraków, waived the payment of all curial fees on these bulls and, of course, named Fryderyk as the eleventh of 12 new cardinals on 20 September.68 The latter act in particular revealed that papal support for Fryderyk was not passive, and not simply a matter of rubber-stamping Jagiellonian requests from distant Poland; Alexander VI was sufficiently enthusiastic about Fryderyk’s priestly career to include him in a select group of 12 favoured nominees in 1493 and to make him an object of the highest patronage a reigning pope could bestow. In Good Company: Fryderyk and His Fellow Dynastic Bishops It is important to read Fryderyk’s story within its wider European context. The late fifteenth-century papacy’s willingness to elevate the sons and brothers of kings, dukes and princes to the highest clerical offices is traditionally held up as one of the Thomson, pp. 151, 154. See Chapter 2, pp. 35–6. 66 ASV, Camera Apostolica, Obligationes & Solutiones, vol. 83, fol. 142v; ASV, Reg. Lat., vol. 861, fos 185v–189v. 67 Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 412, pp. 425. For Alexander VI as cardinal-protector, see Nowakowska, ‘Papacy and piety’, pp. 60–61. 68 ASV, Reg. Lat., vol. 933, fos 330–333v. The fee remissions are recorded in ASV, Camera Apostolica, Diversa Cameralia, vol. 50, fo. 160; ASV, Arch. Concist., Acta Misc., vol. 3, fo. 5. 64 65

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ultimate proofs of its moral corruption and political weakness. As Stella Fletcher and Aidan Bellenger noted in their book on English cardinals, ‘No princes of the church were more princely, either in blood or in manner, than those cardinals who lived during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.’69 In his 1490 crusade oration to Innocent VIII, Callimachus suggested that royalty was a natural and necessary ornament of the College of Cardinals, arguing that Fryderyk’s royal birth made him an ideal candidate for a red hat: ‘As for nobility of birth, on the basis of which I believe a number of cardinals have been elevated to the Sacred College, so as to bring it greater splendour, [Fryderyk] could not only augment your community, but also bring glory and honour to the whole Catholic world.’70 Between 1200 and 1450, only one senior member of a ruling family had secured a nomination to the College of Cardinals – Jacobus, son of King James II of Aragon, in 1387. From the mid fifteenth century, what had once been a genuine anomaly became a relatively common practice, and between 1461 and 1500 no fewer than seven dynastic cardinals were created by the Renaissance popes.71 This new trend within the Sacred College, alluded to by Callimachus, was only the tip of the iceberg, however. Statistically, Quattrocento dynastic clerics made their greatest gains in another tier of the Catholic hierarchy, within the bishoprics and archbishoprics of Latin Europe. The data will be discussed in detail in Chapter 7, but here it suffices to note the basic trends. Whereas only eight close princely relatives had held sees between 1200 and 1400, the numbers rose rapidly after the papacy’s return to Rome under Martin V. Twenty dynastic bishops and archbishops were appointed in the fifteenth century, and the trend peaked in the 1470s and 1480s, decades which each saw five or six new princely appointees. Whereas the Renaissance cardinalprince was largely confined to Italy, the dynastic bishop became a fixture across Catholic Europe, from Scotland to Portugal. Fryderyk Jagiellon was squarely at the heart of this new trend in senior ecclesiastical appointments, riding the crest of a wave. How, then, are we to account for this striking papal U-turn? Constitutional and Military Threats Twentieth-century scholarship on the Renaissance papacy has, broadly speaking, offered two main explanations as to why the papacy apparently capitulated to princes (by allowing them greater control over ecclesiastical affairs in their lands), pointing to two developments which profoundly weakened the papal monarchy in the fifteenth century: schism and conciliarism on the one hand and new military threats to the Italian peninsula on the other.

A. Bellenger & S. Fletcher, Princes of the Church: A History of the English Cardinals (Stroud, 2001), p. 43. 70 Callimachus, Ad Innocentium VIII, p. 72: ‘Iam vero nobilitas, ob quam plerique, ut puto, ad exornandum sacrosanctum hoc collegium cardinalium numero sunt adiecti, tanta in eo est, ut non solum uester hic consessus, sed uinuersum quoque genus Christianum ab ipso splendorem ac decus suscepturum uideri queat.’ 71 For a fuller discussion of these statistics, see Chapter 7. 69

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The first hypothesis, propounded chiefly by Anthony Black, argues that fifteenthcentury pontiffs cosied up to princes when faced with the threat of conciliarism. In 1378, a disputed papal election had created the Great Schism (1378–1417), generating two sets of popes, curias and cardinals. In response to this ecclesiastical chaos, canonists and princes had turned to the ancient institution of the ecumenical council. Although the Council of Constance (1414–18) healed the schism and agreed on a single pope, it also issued the decrees ‘Frequens’ and ‘Haec Sancta’, which declared that a pontiff had to call a council every ten years, to face the Christian community from whom he drew his sovereignty. The conciliar movement reached its height at the Council of Basel (1431–45), where its more radical members claimed sovereign authority within the church, arguing that Christ had vested absolute spiritual power on earth in the collective of the Apostles, and not the individual of Peter.72 The Basel conciliarists were excommunicated by Eugenius IV, and conciliar doctrines finally condemned in the 1460 bull ‘Execrabilis’. In this reading, the Quattrocento popes believed the internal dangers posed by conciliarism to be a far more pressing threat to their authority than the ambitions of secular princes. Black suggests that Rome rallied princes behind its cause by stressing the subversive implications of conciliar theory for all kings, as in Eugenius IV’s 1436 Tract of Self-Defence, and by handing out favours in the form of concordats, such as those signed with Brittany (1441), Burgundy (1441) and the Empire (1448).73 Nonetheless, the Holy See’s very real and persistent anxieties about conciliarism do not in themselves entirely account for Rome’s willingness to create dynastic bishops. Concordats were only concluded sporadically after the Council of Basel disbanded, and there is not much evidence that legal concessions to princes as a deliberate anticonciliar policy survived much past the 1440s. Moreover, this ‘Basel theory’ does not explain why the phenomenon of dynastic bishops – arguably a more important concession to princes than concordats – only took off some three decades later, in the 1470s. A second traditional explanation for the Quattrocento pontiffs’ warm relations with the princes of Europe hinges on the new military dangers faced by the popes in the Italian peninsular. Rome and the Papal States were threatened, firstly, by the Ottomans’ steady encroachment into the western Mediterranean basin, towards Italy’s Adriatic coast. In 1480, the Ottoman capture of the Neapolitan city of Otranto deeply shocked Innocent VIII; in 1500, Cardinal Isvagli expressed his conviction that the Turks ‘are now trying to penetrate the interior of Italy, which would lead to the fall of the peninsula … may God prevent it.’74 The fifteenth-century pontiffs also faced Christian enemies closer to home. In 1494, Charles VIII of France marched a large army into Italy, triggering the Italian Wars, a 60-year period of conflict in which the peninsula became a sparring ground for Europe’s great powers. In 1494, French 72 C. Crowder, Unity, Heresy and Reform, 1378–1460: Conciliar Response to the Great Schism (London, 1977); Anthony Black, Monarchy and Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliarist Controversy (Cambridge, 1970). 73 Black, pp. 85–129; Thomson, pp. 145–66. 74 Vetera Monumenta, vol. 2, nr 297, pp. 271–2: ‘et ad interiora iam Italie penetrare omni conatur mediatur … quod deus avertat.’

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troops marched through Rome itself; Louis XII’s 1499 invasion of northern Italy and Ferdinand of Aragon’s 1500 conquest of Naples threatened the independence of the Papal States, the security of Rome itself and the safety of the pope’s own person.75 There is some evidence that these burgeoning military threats prompted popes such as Alexander VI to offer major concessions to Europe’s princes, in a desperate attempt to win allies. In Fryderyk’s own case, it is noticeable that papal favours tended to coincide with good news about Jagiellonian crusading. Innocent VIII confirmed the result of the Kraków episcopal election, for example, just weeks after learning of Jan Olbracht’s defeat of a horde of Tartars, at the head of a Polish crusader army.76 Callimachus’ plea for Fryderyk’s elevation to the cardinalate (circa 1490) was judiciously made in the context of a crusading oration addressed to the pope, which promised great military feats against the sultan.77 The red hat itself was granted just a few months after a notable victory over the Turks by Władysław Jagiellon’s Hungarian forces.78 Similarly, Roman writers were in no doubt that Fryderyk’s elevation to the cardinalate was part of a bid by Alexander VI to win the support of Central Europe’s Jagiellonian kings on the eve of a French invasion. The papal secretary Sigismondo Conti explicitly identified the 1493 creations as a series of favours for princes, including the Jagiellonians: … for Maximilian king of the Romans, Raymund Peraudi, bishop of Gurk; for King Charles of France, Bishop John Villiers [de La Grolaie]; for King Ferdinand of Spain, Bernard López de Carvajal, bishop of Cartagena …; for England, Andrew [i.e. John Morton], archbishop of Canterbury; for Wladislaus of Hungary and Albert of Poland, the archbishop of Gniezno, their brother …; Domenico Grimani for the doge of Venice; Bernardo de la Lune for the duke of Milan; for the people of Rome, Alessandro Farnese, and the apostolic secretary Giulio Cesarini; for the duke of Ferrara, his son Ippolito [d’Este], administrator of Esztergom …79

In themselves, however, the military worries of Innocent VIII and Alexander VI still do not completely account for their new-found enthusiasm for creating dynastic bishops and cardinals. The papacy had faced military threats before: the Hohenstaufen emperors who blithely marched over the Papal States in the thirteenth See David Abulafia, The French Descent in Renaissance Italy, 1494–5: Antecedents and Effects (Aldershot, 1995). 76 Targowiski; Smołucha, pp. 38–42. 77 Callimachus, Ad Innocentium VIII, pp. 70–73. 78 Burchard, vol. 1, p. 414. 79 S. Conti, Le storie de’suoi tempi dal 1475–1510: Sigismundi de Comitibus Fulginatis, Historiam Sui Temporis (2 vols, Rome, 1883), vol. 2, p. 61: ‘nam Maximiliani regis Romanorum precibus, Raymundum Peraudi Gurcensem episcopum; Caroli Francorum, Ioannem episcopum Lombardiensem; Ferdinandi Hispaniarum, Bernardinum Carvaial episcopum Chartaginsensem praeclaro genere ortum …; Angliae, Andream archiepiscopum Cantuariensem; Wladislai Ungarie et Alberti Poloniae Regnum, archiepiscopum Gensnensem [sic] eorum fratrem germanium …; Ducis Venetorum, Dominicum Grimanum …; Ducis Mediolani, Bernardinum de Lunate; Populis Romani Alexandrum Farnesium ex Barone genere, et Iulianum Caeserinum …; Ducis Ferrariae Hyppolitum filium administratorem ecclesiae Strigoniensis.’ 75

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century arguably posed far greater dangers to Roman authority than either Sultan Bajezid II or Charles VIII. Again, the timing, too does not quite work: the dynastic bishop trend took off in the 1470s, a decade before the Ottoman sack of Otranto and 20 years before the first French invasion. We must look elsewhere, therefore, for the decisive trigger. Nepotism and the Papacy as Renaissance Monarchy The Renaissance papacy’s sudden fondness for dynastic bishops can, instead, perhaps be better explained by examining a key theme which arguably characterized the institution’s history in this period, the thorny question of papal nepotism. The threads which link the elevation of men from papal, as well as secular royal, dynasties are instructive. Modern historians have stressed that nepotism was an ongoing and stable feature of papal history, from late antiquity to the seventeenth century; Wolfgang Reinhard made this case in a now-famous 1974 article, while Peter Partner demonstrated that Pope Martin V’s (1417–31) dogged elevation of his Colonna relatives was strongly in keeping with trends from previous centuries.80 In discussing the enduring phenomenon of papal nepotism, these scholars have tended to focus on laymen from papal dynasties who were appointed to governmental offices or lands within the Papal States, on brothers, nephews and cousins who enjoyed control of territories in Spoleto, Nepi and so on. Statistical evidence, however, suggests that patterns of papal nepotism were not entirely stable and did in fact undergo a material change in the late Quattrocento. In this period, for example, pontiffs for the first time consistently appointed their relatives not only to roles in Italian regional government, but also to senior clerical titles within the international church. For much of the Middle Ages, pontiffs would typically raise one or at most two relatives to the cardinalate, such as Adrian IV’s nephew Boso Breakspeare (1155) or Urban IV’s nephew Ancero Pantaleone (1261).81 The Avignon papacy briefly bucked this trend, but in the mid fifteenth century the numbers were again low. Nicholas V (1447–55), for example, created one cardinal-nephew, Calixtus III (1455–58) two, Pius II (1458–64) one, and Paul II (1464–72) two. The significant break came with the pontificate of Sixtus IV (Francesco della Rovere, 1472–84), a distinguished theologian and former head of the Franciscan Order. Born into a minor Ligurian family, Sixtus IV raised six nephews to the cardinalate, one of whom was aged only 16. Partner has noted that Sixtus IV’s creations of cardinal-nephews were unprecedented – ‘a record unparalleled in earlier papal history’.82 While Innocent Wolfgang Reinhard, ‘Nepotismus: Der Funktionswandel einer papstgeschichtlichen Konstanten’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 86 (1975): 145–85; Peter Partner, The Papal State under Martin V: The Administration and Government of the Temporal Power in the Early Fifteenth Century (London, 1958), pp. 193–5. See also Paolo Prodi, The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls, trans. Susan Haskins (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 91–2. 81 Eubel, vol 1. 82 Peter Partner, The Pope’s Men: The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance (Oxford, 1990), p. 203; Reinhard, p. 163. 80

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VIII (1484–92) was able to confer only one red hat on a nephew, under Alexander VI another five Borgia cardinals were created between 1492 and 1500. This upsurge in ‘clerical’ nepotism at the papal court from the 1470s is significant because it exactly mirrors (and coincides with) the sharp rise in the numbers of bishops from European ruling dynasties outlined above. Sixtus IV’s nephews were raised to the Sacred College just as a variety of European princelings took up their bishop’s mitres, and Table 3 shows the strange coincidence of these dual types of appointments as both reached a sudden surge. Whereas both kinds of ‘dynastic’ prelate had been rare in previous centuries, both took off in the 1470s: Table 3:

Year 1470 1471

Appointments of papal cardinal-nephews and dynastic bishops in the 1470s83 Papal nephews appointed to

Secular princelings appointed to

Sacred College

bishoprics

-

-

Pietro Riario Giuliano delle Rovere

-

1473

-

-

1474

-

-

1475

-

-

1476

-

-

Christoforo delle Rovere 1477

Giralomo Basso delle Rovere

Philip of Aragon (Palermo)

Raffaele Riario 1478

Dominico delle Rovere

Alfonso of Aragon (Saragossa) Ascanio Sforza (Pavia)

1479

-

Ernst of Saxony (Magdeburg) Albrecht of Bavaria (Strasbourg)

Over the following two decades, in the 1480s and 1490s, the number of both cardinalnephews from papal dynasties and bishops from secular ruling houses would remain unusually high, in a parallel statistical trend. The data strongly suggests, therefore, that the policy of placing an immediate male relative within high ecclesiastical office was not simply imposed on weak pontiffs by clamouring European princes in the late 83

Eubel, vol. 2.

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Quattrocento; rather, the Renaissance dynastic prelate was in fact a figure originally developed and pioneered within the Roman court itself, by the delle Rovere and Borgia dynasties, and either copied or simultaneously improvised by secular rulers. It is in Rome and Roman nepotism, in other words, that we might glimpse the origins and birth of the Renaissance dynastic bishop; a figure ‘invented’ in the papal city who subsequently appeared quickly across Iberia, the Empire and more northerly kingdoms. Why, then, was the policy of creating dynastic cardinals / bishops incubated within the papal court itself in the years circa 1475? Scholars writing on the Renaissance papacy have argued for some time that, at some point in the fifteenth century, the popes abandoned their campaign to exercise universal political leadership in Christendom and instead channelled their energies into constructing a stable and powerful state in central Italy, in ‘the lands of St Peter’. In a celebrated study, Paolo Prodi argued that Rome therefore provides us with a precocious, if peculiar, model of European state-building in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.84 Although Prodi himself did not use the term, we could here deploy a term from Englishlanguage scholarship, and explicitly label the Quattrocento papacy as a ‘Renaissance monarchy’, another example of bullish regalism to set alongside Isabella of Castile, Henry VII of England and their counterparts. Curial rhetoric, which tended to cast the papacy as a medieval monolith defending a unique spiritual empire, should not blind us to the fact that Rome was both a supreme monarchy within the ‘ecclesia’ and a major Italian territorial ruler in its own right. In common with monarchs in England, Iberia, Hungary and France, the delle Rovere and Borgia pontiffs were engaged in a bitter struggle to assert their sovereignty over local elites – the barons of Rome, the nobility of the Papal States and, above all, the cardinals of the Sacred College. The appointment of cardinal-nephews could bolster this monarchy-building process in diverse and valuable ways, protecting the pontiff from powerful opposition cardinals within the College (such as Giovanni delle Rovere in the 1490s), guaranteeing a ready-made loyal faction within the consistory and, in future conclaves, providing a block vote which might perpetuate a dynasty’s rule.85 The delle Rovere and Borgia families both had ambitions to ease the papacy towards a quasi-hereditary monarchy, a trick which the Medici would briefly pull off between 1513 and 1534. It was argued in the Introduction that dynastic bishops are a misunderstood and overlooked tool of Renaissance monarchies, and the papacy’s intimate involvement in the ‘invention’ and diffusion of these figures provides us with an important part of this European jigsaw. If we wish to glimpse the close similarity of purpose which united Renaissance popes and princes at the end of the fifteenth century, and the parallel, complementary ways in which both made use of dynastic prelates, we can usefully compare Poland and Rome, King Kazimierz IV and Pope Alexander VI. Both men were elected rulers, who headed monarchist regimes still in recovery from the acute civil upheavals of the 1440s, the ascendancy of the Oleśnicki faction and the Council of Basel. Both had inherited recent traditions of constitutional resistance to their rule (discourse 84 85

For a discussion of this historiography, see Prodi, pp. 1–9, 17–18. See Prodi, pp. 81–4.

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of magnate rights, conciliarism) and faced threats from powerful local senates, the Polish royal council and the College of Cardinals which, having declared itself to be a corporation in 1150, claimed a right to co-rule of the church and regarded itself as the true successor to the senate of ancient Rome. Just as Polish kings were presented with charters of noble rights at their elections, so at every conclave of the Quattrocento the cardinals imposed ‘electoral capitulations’ on successful candidates.86 Both these monarchist regimes turned simultaneously to the tactic of appointing a dynastic priest; Fryderyk Jagiellon, son of the Polish king, and Cesare Borgia, son of the pope, were both named cardinal on the same September day in 1493 – perfect counterparts. Turning back to Cardinal Fryderyk himself, we can see, therefore, how he boosted not one, but two emerging Renaissance regimes. As the chosen tool of two different monarchies eager to combat and undermine their respective senates, Fryderyk benefited twice over, as both Rome and Kraków united behind his precocious career, embracing new forms of clerical nepotism, in an alliance of ambitious but vulnerable monarchy. Repercussions: Fryderyk and the Sacred College If Cardinal Fryderyk’s designated and novel role was indeed to subvert the oligarchical councils which threatened the Borgia and Jagiellonian monarchies, how did he fare? The royal cardinal’s impact on the Polish senate, its lay and episcopal senators, has already been discussed in Chapter 2; there we saw how Fryderyk diluted and undermined that magnate body through his imposing royal presence, sitting as its president in council meetings, at parliamentary sessions and at royal elections.87 But what impact, as an absentee cardinal who never set foot in Italy, did Fryderyk have upon Pope Alexander VI’s relationship with the College of Cardinals? Here, it is the very fact of Fryderyk’s permanent absenteeism and political isolation from the curia which is significant. There was a strong perception in the fifteenth-century church that the cardinalate, a title which had grown out of the pastoral structures of late-antique Rome, was an office which of necessity had to be exercised in that city. Angry English clerics, for example, complained to Pope Eugenius IV that his recent nominee, Archbishop of York John Kemp (1439–54), could not rightfully call himself a cardinal because he was permanently resident in England.88 Ceremonies described in Johannes Burchard’s diary reveal an underlying conviction at the papal court that a cardinal’s appointment was only fully consummated upon his arrival in Rome. Cardinals arriving at the gates of Rome for the first time – as Pierre de Foix did in 1487 – were required to remove their red hat and cloak, which were formally handed back to them by the Pope and Sacred College during a ritual welcome on the Milvian Bridge; they were then officially inducted into the consistory upon making their first speech, an W. Ullman, ‘The legal validity of papal electoral pacts’, Ephemerides Iuris Canonici 12 (1956), pp. 246–78. 87 See above, Chapter 2. 88 Thomson, p. 64. 86

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occasion referred to as the ‘aperitio oris’.89 Non-resident cardinals forfeited certain kinds of income and once settled in Rome required a papal licence to leave the city, however briefly. As K.J.P. Lowe has written, ‘non-resident cardinals were like the country members of a club; with residence came full membership.’ 90 Fryderyk Jagiellon, as one of the most conspicuously absent cardinals of Alexander VI’s pontificate, represented a new and peculiar kind of cardinal at the dawn of the sixteenth century: of the 65 men who wore the red hat during Rodrigo Borgia’s reign (1492–1503), the Pole was the sole cardinal of the pontificate never to visit Rome.91 In official lists of cardinals compiled by Burchard, the Jagiellonian is simply described as ‘cardinalis cracoviensis, absens’.92 Milanese correspondence indicates that Fryderyk’s imminent arrival in Italy had been anticipated following his nomination to the Sacred College in September 1493, but by 1495 Pope Alexander had relinquished this hope and instead sent the insignia to Poland.93 More striking even that Fryderyk’s singular disinclination to travel to Rome was his complete paucity of contact with the papal court. Written contacts between the two parties were notably sparse (nine letters / bulls apiece), and largely confined to procedural matters, as we shall see. For chroniclers and commentators based in Rome, the Polish cardinal was an exotic and virtually invisible presence. Burchard’s minutely detailed diary of life at Alexander VI’s court refers to Fryderyk only twice, vaguely and in passing.94 When, for example, the Venetian orator in Rome composed a lengthy political memorandum on the Sacred College in 1500, he had no information whatsoever about two of its members: ‘About the English one [John Morton], who is the grand chancellor, and the Polish one, the king’s brother, he said nothing.’95 The apostolic secretary and diarist Sigismondo Conti was in possession of more specific intelligence on Fryderyk, recording that he ‘combined the splendour of royal blood with excellent morals and learning’, but this phrase was taken directly from Callimachus’ 1490 crusading oration and is simply a thin echo of Jagiellonian propaganda.96 The curia itself was notably muddled when it came to Fryderyk Jagiellon. Bulls and briefs dispatched to Poland frequently confused his titles: a 1494 document referred to him only as ‘bishop of Kraków’, while a curial text of 1500 called him simply ‘primate’, as if ignorant of the fact that the same incumbent held both sees

Burchard, vol. 1, pp. 217–20; A.V. Antonovics, ‘A late fifteenth-century division register of the College of Cardinals’, Papers of the British School at Rome 35 (1967), pp. 98–101. 90 Lowe, p. 47. 91 Pastor, vols 5 & 6; Burchard, vols 2 & 3. 92 Burchard, vol. 2, pp. 7, 227, 271. 93 From a letter of Ascanio Sforza found by Ludwig Pastor: Pastor, vol. 5, p. 417. 94 Burchard, vol. 2, pp. 7, 227, vol. 1. p.271. 95 Sanudo, vol. 3, p. 844: ‘Di quel d’Inghiltera, ch’è gran canzelier, e quel di Polana, fradello dil re, nulla disse.’ 96 Conti, vol. 2, p. 61: ‘splendorem regii sanguiniis optimis moribus et doctrina condiderat …’; Callimachus, Ad Innocentiam VIII, pp. 70–73. 89

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and was also a cardinal (and maybe a prince). 97 The papal bureaucracy’s complete lack of intelligence about the Jagiellonian prelate is, however, best illustrated by the formal instruction document drawn up for Pietro Isvagli, crusade legate to Hungary and Poland, in November 1500. The instruction – a detailed briefing on how the legate should proceed in Buda and Kraków – devotes several paragraphs to Tamás Bakócz, archbishop of Esztergom, a leading figure in King Władysław’s regime and a recently nominated cardinal, explaining how Isvagli should handle Bakócz and best enlist his aid: ‘He enjoys great grace and authority in that kingdom, and the king follows his council in everything.’98 By contrast, the brief lines on Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon at the very end of the instruction are generic and entirely bland, revealing a lack of any personal information: Fryderyk is simply asked to back the crusade cause and make a financial contribution towards the campaign.99 Fryderyk’s complete isolation from the ceremonial and political life of Alexander VI’s Rome is symbolically captured by his titular church. In a sixteenth-century sketch of the Palatine Hill executed by Martin von Heemskerk, the late-antique tower of Santa Lucia in Septem Soliis can be seen protruding through the foliage in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture.100 This is only known image of the shrine: by the 1490s it had apparently been abandoned, a church without clergy, omitted from Renaissance pilgrim guides to Rome.101 In 1483, Sixtus IV had issued a bull calling for the demolition of Santa Lucia, on the grounds that ‘unfortunate events and the blasts of war’ had left the shrine so ruined that its final disintegration was only a matter of time.102 Ten years later, Alexander VI awarded this shell of a church to his new royal Polish cardinal, even though other more prestigious titular shrines were available at the time. Although a man who took meticulous care over his public presentation in Poland, Fryderyk himself seemed perfectly unconcerned at receiving one of the most parlous churches in Rome as a symbol of his cardinatial authority; indeed, he was the only incumbent of Santa Lucia between 1440 and 1520 who did not petition for a new title almost immediately.103 It is precisely this complete lack of engagement with the papacy and fellow cardinals which distinguishes Fryderyk Jagiellon from those North European cardinals appointed earlier in the fifteenth century who had also spent little or no For example, Fryderyk is referred to as ‘episcopus cracoviensis’ in ASV, Reg. Vat., vol. 785, fo. 276f–279 (1494) and as primate in Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 458, pp. 478– 82. 98 Vetera Monumenta, vol. 2, nr 297, pp. 274–5: ‘qui cum plurimum gratia et auctoritate apud illum Regem possit, et eius consilio idem Rex agat omnia.’ 99 Vetera Monumenta, vol. 2, nr 297, pp. 276. 100 Published in A. Bartoli (ed.), Cento vedute di Rome Antica (Rome, 1911), plate xxiv. For a history of Santa Lucia in Septem Soliis, see A. Bartoli, ‘La diaconia di Santa Lucia in settizonio’, Archivio della R. Società Romana di Storia Patria 50 (Rome, 1927): 59–73. 101 There is no reference to the church in the Mirabilia Romane Urbis (Rome, 1492) and Mariano da Firenze, Itinerarium Urbis Romae, ed. P.E. Bulletti (Rome, 1930). 102 The bull is published in Bartoli, ‘La diaconia’: ‘Propter sinistros eventus et bellorum turbines … in suis structuris ita consumpta et diruta quod de totali illius ruina et desolatione brevi tempore erat manifeste formidandum.’ 103 Eubel, vol. 2. 97

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time in Rome, and which marks him out as a new kind of cardinal. Cardinal Henry Beaufort (1377–1444) was based in England throughout his career, yet nonetheless participated in the life of the international church, for example at the Council of Constance.104 A particularly instructive contrast, however, can be drawn between Fryderyk Jagiellon’s and Zbigniew Oleśnicki’s experiences of the cardinalate. Although Oleśnicki never travelled to Rome (and his attempt to attend the Council of Basel in 1434 was thwarted by the sudden death of Władysław-Jogaila), he maintained lively contacts with popes and fellow cardinals. Between 1429 and 1455, for example, Oleśnicki is known to have exchanged at least 45 letters with figures in the international church – with Popes Eugenius IV, Nicholas V and Martin V, the Sacred College, legates, the Council of Basel and his own informants in Rome – and enjoyed regular epistolary contact with that great fifteenth-century luminary, reformer and future pope Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini.105 This Polish–Roman correspondence was wide-ranging and touched on the all major political questions of the day – the anti-Ottoman crusade, the Teutonic Order and Hussitism. In spite of the fact that we might expect more documents to survive from the later period, Fryderyk Jagiellon’s written contacts with Rome were entirely sparse and largely procedural: the nine recorded letters which Fryderyk sent to the curia between 1488 and 1503 (on average one every two years) included a request for a licence to take higher orders (1492), a thank-you letter for that licence (1493), a letter about disputed episcopal lands (1489) and an expression of support for a Polish layperson’s petition to install relics in a local church (1496).106 In return, he received only nine papal briefs, variously relating to Fryderyk’s own ecclesiastical promotions, to papal appointees resisted by the Kraków chapter and Helena of Muscovy.107 As an absent cardinal based in Kraków, Oleśnicki had participated in the life of the international church by cultivating personal epistolary relationships, dispensing advice and keeping abreast of papal politics; Fryderyk Jagiellon apparently had no such interest. The very different role which the cardinalate played in the identities of our two Polish 104 G.L. Harriss, Cardinal Henry Beaufort: A Study of Lancastrian Ascendency and Decline (Oxford, 1988). 105 Codex Epistolaris, vol. 2, part 1: nr 70, pp. 67–8; nr 71, pp. 68–9; nr 84, pp. 79–80; nr 86, p. 81; nr 88, p. 82; nr 115, pp. 126–7; nr 117, pp. 129–30; nr 119, pp. 131–2; nr 122, pp. 135–6; vol. 2, part 2: nr 10, pp. 17–18; nr 14, pp. 21–2; nr 15, pp. 22–4; nr 20, pp. 27–8; nr 23, pp. 31–2; nr 24, pp. 32–3; nr 25, pp. 33–4; nr 29, p. 36; nr 32, pp. 38–9; nr 33, p. 39; nr 38, pp. 43; nr 39, pp. 43–4; nrs 44–5, pp. 48–50; nr 46, p. 450; nr 49, pp. 64–6; nrs 77–8, p. 81; nr 81, p. 84; nr 82, pp. 84–5; nr 83, pp. 85–6; nr 86, pp. 88–9; nr 88, pp. 90–91; nr 98, p. 106; nr 99, p. 107; nr 104, p. 112; nr 105, pp. 112–3; nr 111, pp. 118–19; 113, pp. 121–3; nr 114, p. 123; nr 115, p. 123–4; nr 116, pp. 124–5; nr 127, p. 138; nr 130, p. 140; nr 139, p. 153; vol. 2, appendix: nrs 1–3, pp. 315–36. 106 ASV, Reg. Lat., vol. 891, fos 89v–90v; BK, MS 208, fos 31v–32; Sanudo, vol. 3, p. 655; W. Abraham, ‘Sprawozdanie z poszukiwań w archiwach i bibliotekach rzymskich do dziejów polski w wiekach średnich za lata 1899–1913’, Archiwum Komisyi Historycznej 1 (1923), series 2, pp. 1–65, at p. 10; Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, pp. 591–3; ASV, Reg. Lat., vol. 1094, fos 101v–102. 107 Vetera Monumenta, nr 267, p. 242; Brevia, nr 138, pp. 84–5; nr 154, pp. 104–5 & nr 141, pp. 87–8; ASV, Reg. Lat., vol. 861, fos 188–9; Reg. Lat., vol. 933, fos 330–331v.

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prelates is perhaps captured in their respective coats of arms. From 1477, Zbigniew Oleśnicki adopted Jerome, the cardinal-saint and patron of the Sacred College, as the central image in his personal iconography.108 Fryderyk, meanwhile, may have placed a discreet cardinal’s hat above his arms, but he largely eschewed papal emblems and instead adopted the quintessentially national symbol of the Polish royal eagle as his central device, a reflection of his avowedly national political persona. Fryderyk Jagiellon’s absenteeism, lack of contact with and apparent lack of interest in his fellow cardinals and the Sacred College marked the start of an important new trend – in the early sixteenth century, the permanently absent cardinal deeply involved in national politics became an increasingly common figure on the international scene. Fryderyk was, in a sense, a precursor to Thomas Wolsey, Georges d’Amboise, David Beaton and Matthias Lang.109 This trend towards the nationalization and effective devolution of the Sacred College, pioneered by men such as Fryderyk, had considerable political significance for the papacy because it seriously undermined the notion of collegiality and group solidarity which the medieval cardinalate had depended upon for much of its power vis-à-vis the pontiffs.110 As such, Fryderyk’s unconventional wearing of the cardinal’s hat indirectly, and perhaps unwittingly, served to erode the Sacred College’s long-standing pretensions to co-rule of the church, marking an important stage in the European cardinals’ long journey from mighty medieval senators to neutered civil servants of the CounterReformation. Winners and Losers Fryderyk Jagiellon’s multifaceted relations with papal Rome, and by extension Poland’s wider relationship with the papacy during his career, do not quite follow the pattern we might anticipate. In diplomatic affairs and the governance of the Polish church, areas where scholarship suggests that Renaissance princes will be found extending their political and jurisdictional control at the expense of Rome, very little change can be detected in the years 1488 to 1503. There is virtually no evidence of Cardinal Fryderyk trying to elbow out papal claims in dramatic new ways; his appropriation of crusade funds and obstruction of papal appointees in his dioceses were not only sporadic acts of rebellion, but also merely an emulation of the behaviour of generations of ultramontane bishops. This conspicuous lack of any jurisdictional sparring or conflict with Rome indicates that both the Polish episcopate and the Polish monarchy (the two constituencies jointly represented by Fryderyk) in practice already enjoyed effective freedom of action in the ecclesiastical sphere well before 1488 – either because Polish elites had already acquired the concessions they desired from the papacy decades or centuries earlier, or because the medieval pontiffs had never in fact made their authority seriously felt, or seriously cumbersome, in distant Poland. Koczerska, ‘Miniatura’. Jan Długosz also adopted Jerome imagery in his own commissions in these years. 109 For further discussion of this, see Chapter 7, pp. 152–4. 110 See Prodi, pp. 82–4; Partner, The Pope’s Men, p. 206. 108

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Fryderyk’s complete lack of appetite for challenging papal claims strongly suggests that, in creating their super-bishop, the Jagiellonian monarchs had never intended Innocent VIII and Alexander VI to be the principal losers. Instead, the royal priest was meant to tackle far more local, and far more immediate, threats to the Polish Crown – the kingdom’s high nobility, and in particular the traditionally autonomous upper ranks of the Polish ecclesiastical hierarchy, the cathedral canons of Małopolska and politically unreliable bishops such as Oleśnicki the younger or Krzesław Kurozwęcki. In light of this, the Jagiellonian monarchy in Poland and the late Quattrocento papacy might be described as tentative political allies engaged in the construction of bold regalist regimes, rather than old enemies still fighting an eleventh-century battle over the Two Swords. We have seen how Kazimierz IV and Alexander VI simultaneously propelled their sons, Fryderyk and Cesare, into the top ranks of the church, in a parallel attempt to entrench their vulnerable dynasties and find (through nepotism) new tools to use against the Polish Senate and Roman Sacred College. The papacy (in its own eyes) was a winner, and not a loser, from Fryderyk’s immodest career – his highly detached approach to the cardinalate helped to further erode any residual political influence enjoyed by the College of Cardinals. Fryderyk Jagiellon, a secular prince and head of a major Catholic province, might have been a nemesis to the old Gregorian papacy, but for Renaissance pontiffs he was a welcome sight, a novel ally as regimes across Europe struggled to forge more autocratic forms of monarchical government.

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CHAPTER SIX

‘Vita cardinalis’: Fryderyk Jagiellon’s Legacy in Poland, 1503–1535 As he reached the fifteenth year of his episcopate, Fryderyk died of the French disease. Throughout the autumn he was tormented with the French disease, he had agonizing pains in his limbs, his joints wasted away, and his skin was covered with sores and pustules…1 Miechowita (writing between 1508 and 1525) Fryderyk was a man of singular piety and religious devotion … Every day, after getting out of bed, he spent a large part of the morning in prayer. Not content with just singing the holy office, he also offered many other pious and devout prayers to God …2 Stanisław Górski (writing between 1530 and 1535)

Introduction When Fryderyk Jagiellon died in March 1503 at the age of 35, he had enjoyed only a relatively brief stint in Polish political life – 16 years, compared with the 48-year reign of King Władysław-Jogaila, the 45-year rule of his father Kazimierz IV, or the 30-year public careers of Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki and Bishop Krzesław Kurozwęcki. The royal cardinal died in the depths of the crises which engulfed King Aleksander’s reign. Just three years later, as the smoke from these disasters began to clear, Zygmunt Jagiellon was crowned king of Poland (1506–48), inaugurating a momentous reign and taking the dynasty into a third century of rule in the Piast kingdom – traditionally celebrated as the Golden Age, ‘Złoty wiek’. Having considered Fryderyk’s career from many different angles, we can now ask what role he played in shaping the royal regime of sixteenth-century Poland, a regime which he did not live to see. Posthumously, Cardinal Fryderyk remained a prominent figure

Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 205: ‘dum annis prope XV sedisset, morbo gallico ex humanis raptus est. Nam in autumno morbus gallicus cruciatu et doloribus artus et iuncutras eius cepit vastare, extra vero exiture et scabies cutem defedare et deturpare …’ 2 Górski, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, pp. 207–12: ‘Fuit Fridericus singulari pietate et relligione predictus … Quottidie, cum e lecto surgeret, bonam temporis partem in precacionibus consumebat, neque hiis modo contentus erat, quas horas vocant canonicas, sed multa preterea alia pia et devota Deo mente orabat …’ 1

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in Polish politics; like Zbigniew Oleśnicki before him, he lingered as a monumental ghost in the political landscape. Cardinal Fryderyk’s life, just like the fifteenth-century Polish state itself, had been moulded by a great clash of political cultures, between two groups whom we might label oligarchs and regalists. During King Zygmunt’s reign, a fierce debate raged between these two sides over Cardinal Fryderyk’s reputation and legacy, and this quarrel was conducted chiefly by high-ranking clerics, revealing how central the church remained to constitutional tussles in early sixteenth-century Poland. Two very different pictures of the late cardinal emerged in King Zygmunt’s kingdom. Canons and bishops of an oligarch persuasion – led by Jan Łaski (d. 1531), Krzesław Kurozwęczki’s protégé – accused Fryderyk of gross immorality, resented his coup against the church and continued to use the episcopate as a platform for opposition to the Jagiellonians’ Renaissance monarchy, albeit with limited success. Simultaneously, royalist clergy – led by Piotr Tomicki (d. 1535), Fryderyk’s former chancellor – celebrated the late cardinal as a virtuous hero, closely adopted his reform agenda and monarchist iconography within their dioceses and formed a core regalist faction within King Zygmunt’s regime. This chapter will reconstruct both traditions in turn, looking at the writings and composition of the two chief factions within the early sixteenth-century Polish church, in relation to Fryderyk and his legacy. The internal political history of King Zygmunt I’s rule unfortunately remains relatively ill-understood and little-studied, and the picture given here is necessarily slightly provisional, a first impression.3 Nonetheless, there is strong evidence that, for all the virulent posthumous opposition which Fryderyk Jagiellon attracted, he was ultimately successful in transforming the Polish church into a vehicle of royal power in the sixteenth century – indeed, the sustained and clamorous nature of the clerical protests against the Jagiellonian cardinal (heard well into the 1520s) were directly proportional to his impact on the Polish state. For this reason, it is unwise for any study of Cardinal Fryderyk’s career to end with the year 1503. The Oligarch Party and Cardinal Fryderyk, 1503–1535 ‘Morbus gallicus’: Written Attacks on Fryderyk Jagiellon’s Person Within the early sixteenth-century Polish church, a written tradition implacably hostile to the late Cardinal Fryderyk took root and steadily evolved within pockets of the clerical community, and especially in the kingdom’s capital. Its earliest surviving trace is found in a manuscript produced for Kraków’s Dominican friars in about Scholarship on Zygmunt I’s government has focused overwhelmingly on foreign policy. See Zygmunt Wojciechowski, Zygmunt Stary (Warsaw, 1946); Andrzej Wyczański, Zygmunt Stary (Warsaw, 1985) and N. Nowakowska, ‘Jagiellonians and Habsburgs: the Polish historiography of Emperor Charles V’, in Scott Dixon & Marina Fuchs (eds), The Histories of Charles V (Aschendorff, 2005), pp. 249–73. For two rare studies of Polish government and its elites under Zygmunt, see A. Odrzywolska-Kidawa, Biskup Piotr Tomicki and Podkanclerzy Piotr Tomicki (1515–1535): polityk i humanista (Warsaw, 2005). 3

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1508, the Catalogus Episcoporum Cracoviensium, by Friar Maciej Grodziski. In this compilation of episcopal mini-biographies, based on an earlier work by Jan Długosz, Grodziski included his own ‘Life’ of the recently deceased Jagiellonian bishop: Cardinal Fryderyk, son of King Kazimierz, the thirty-eighth bishop of Kraków and also archbishop of Gniezno. He held both bishoprics for as long as 12 years, and died in Kraków on the night of 14 March 1503. King Jan Olbracht, too, died from this illness of the French disease. And in the same year, on Reminiscere Sunday, on St Gregory’s Day [12 March], in the twenty-fourth hour Krzesław, bishop of Włocławek and royal chancellor, died soon after the cardinal. And in March of that same year the Dominican Marian, suffragan bishop of Kraków, also died (in my presence).4

The scandalous implications of this oblique passage – with its suggestions that the top ruling elite of the 1490s had all died of syphilis – were echoed and much expanded by the second and most influential of all writers on Fryderyk Jagiellon, the Kraków professor, physician and cathedral canon Miechowita (Maciej of Miechów).5 Between 1508 and 1525, Miechowita updated the manuscript of Długosz’s Catalogus Episcoporum Cracoviensium owned by the cathedral chapter, adding his own ‘Vita Cardinalis Friderici Iagiellonidis’. This evolving catalogue provided a space in which the chapter could record their collective recollections of their bishops once these prelates were safely dead.6 Miechowita described Fryderyk’s promotions and defence of clergy in the church courts, but he made the French disease accusations the centrepiece of his biographical sketch. The ‘Vita Cardinalis’ gave special and gruesome prominence to Fryderyk’s sickness and death: At the age of 35, Fryderyk, the thirty-ninth [sic] bishop of Krakow, having reigned for some 15 years, the sixth son of King Kazimierz and Queen Elizabeth of Poland, died of the French disease. Throughout the autumn he was tormented with the French disease, his painful limbs and joints began to waste away, and his skin was covered with burning sores and pustules. He rallied a little in the winter, and having dismissed his first doctors he chose four more, whom he did not obey (to his own destruction, he and his companions consumed sharp, fat, peppery foods which he was forbidden, and he did not avoid Piotrków beer or overeating) … When he suffered a fifth relapse in springtime, his strength deserted

Catalogi Episcoporum Cracoviensium, ed. Józef Szymański, Monumenta Poloniae Historica (Series 2) 10 (Warsaw, 1974), p. 119: ‘Ffredericus cardinalis regis Kazimiri filius episcopus Cracoviensis xxxviij ac archiepiscopus Gneznensis. Iste tantum annis xij kathedram utramque tenuit et mortuus est in Cracovia post dominican Reminiscere xiiij Marci die nocte anno domini 1503. Tactus fuit etiam serenissimus rex Polonie Johannis Rex illa infirmitate mala ffranczusum. Eodem anno Kreslaus Lubelczyk episcopus Kujaviensis et cancellarius regni mortuus est cito post dominum cardinalem mortuus est. Item eodem anno domenica Reminiscere ipso die sancti Gregorij (me presente) hora xxiiij sufraganeus Cracoviensis magister Marianus ordinis nostri predicatorum mortuus est.’ 5 Henryk Barycz (ed.), Maciej z Miechowa 1457–1523: historyk, geograf, lekarz, organizator naukowy (Wrocław & Warsaw, 1960). 6 ‘Catalogi’, pp. 125–30. 4

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The picture of Fryderyk Jagiellon as a decayed, syphilitic cardinal reached a mass audience, however, when it moved beyond the private manuscripts of Kraków’s ecclesiastical communities and into print. In 1519, Miechowita published his Chronica Polonorum, the first printed history of Poland and the first major chronicle of contemporary history since Jan Długosz’s Annales (broken off in 1480). In this work, printed by Hieronim Wietor in Kraków, the canon’s comments on Fryderyk were placed within a much broader political narrative, in which Miechowita expressed his fury at the ineptitude of royal government under Jan Olbracht and Aleksander. This history stated unequivocally in several places that Cardinal Fryderyk had died of ‘morbus gallicus’ but, like Grodziski’s 1508 account, it claimed that other ‘ductores regni’ had also died of the disease during Aleksander’s reign – specifically Bishop Krzesław Kurozwęcki.8 Miechowita made the issue of Fryderyk’s alleged illness the centrepiece of an entire chapter of the Chronica Polonorum. Chapter 77 (ostensibly an account of the years 1493–5) describes Fryderyk’s triumphant elevation to the Sacred College and his first Mass as cardinal, before launching directly into a pointed discussion of the origins of the French disease, its astrological and moral causes, its unstoppable spread across Europe, and its arrival in Poland. The image of Fryderyk’s red hat being carried to Kraków from Rome is implicitly reprised, and juxtaposed with the picture of a serving-woman bringing syphilis to the Polish capital from the papal city: ‘Here in Kraków the first woman was infected in 1495, when she carried this disease with her back to Kraków from a pilgrimage to Rome.’9 In 1521, just two years after its publication, the sejm banned and recalled the Chronica Polonorum on the grounds that it contained public and private slanders.10 The task of amending the text in order to prepare an acceptable second edition was assumed by Jan Łaski, the former chancellor of Poland (1503–10) and primate since 1510.11 Łaski proved an unusually diligent censor: presented with Miechowita’s history, he not only removed offending passages, but also added large chunks of text, interpolating his own government insider’s recollections of the early 1500s with Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 205: ‘Trigesimus nonus Cracoviensis pontifex Fridericus, sextus Casimiri regis et Elisabet regine Polonie filius, dum annis prope XV sedisset, morbo gallico ex humanis raptus est. Nam in autumno morbus gallicus cruciatu et doloribus artus et iuncturas eius cepit vastare, extra vero exiture et scabies cutem defedare et deturpare; invalescenteque sub hiemem egritudine, post primarios quos habebit phizicos, quatuor ultimos delegit et advocavit, quibus non obtemperando (vetita enim in perniciam suam cum sodalibus et consuetudinariis sumebat accuta, grossa, piperata, cervisiam Piatcoviensem et repletionem non vitabat … Deinde in quintam recidivam lapsus circa Carnisprivium, virtute eum deserente et deficiente, confessus et sacramentis procuratus in curia episcopali Cracoviensi fato periit.’ 8 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1519), p. 366. 9 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), pp. 356–8: ‘Apud nos in Graccovia prima mulier hoc morbo infecta, anno 1495, quae ex perigrinatione de Roma reduendo, praefatum morbum secum Graccoviam attulit.’ 10 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 379. 11 Bortel, pp. 438–51, 637–51. 7

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Miechowita’s urban-ecclesiastical record, and in the process creating a hybrid, coauthored work. Łaski dutifully removed those sections of the Chronica Polonorum which cast leading Jagiellonians in a subversively bad light – the description of the massacre at Codrul Cosminului in 1497, allegations about Queen Zofia Holszańska’s marital fidelity and criticisms of King Aleksander’s rule – and also added favourable information about his own role in government in the early 1500s, and his friends, allies and kin. Miechowita’s syphilis slur against Łaski’s old protector, Krzesław Kurozwęcki, was carefully removed, for example. The most striking feature of Łaski’s 1521 censorship, however, was the primate’s decision to leave Miechowita’s scandalous allegations against Fryderyk Jagiellon perfectly intact. With the 1519 copies of the chronicle recalled and virtually all destroyed, Łaski’s new version would provide the historical orthodoxy on Jan Olbracht’s and Aleksander’s reigns for centuries to come, with Cardinal Fryderyk as the sole villain of the piece – an effect never intended by Miechowita himself.12 There was a lively and prickly debate among Polish ecclesiastical historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about the veracity of the ‘morbus gallicus’ allegations against Cardinal Fryderyk.13 While that issue is not entirely immaterial, if we really wish to understand what the authors (and editors) of these texts were trying to say, we have to ask a different and bigger question: why did this particular charge come to assume such prominence in sixteenth-century critiques of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s life? The answer may seem obvious; to a modern reader, the French disease or syphilis is immediately identifiable as a sexually transmitted infection, and it has long been assumed that Grodziski, Miechowita and Łaski were simply expressing their pious Catholic dismay at sexual impropriety at the heart of the Polish church. There are good grounds, however, for believing that these texts were not intended as literal accounts of the cardinal’s death, but were instead meant to carry symbolic, allegorical and ultimately political messages. The style of Miechowita’s ‘Vita Cardinalis’ offers us an early clue. The description of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s last months, for example, is not simply a literal account by a physician with first-hand information about the cardinal’s treatment, but conforms to an accepted Renaissance literary model (or ‘topos’). The mortally ill, non-cooperative patient who rejected medical advice, or ate and drank foods which hastened his death, was a familiar figure in late medieval Polish chronicles; almost identical scenes are found in Janko of Czarnów’s description of Kazimierz the Great’s last illness and in accounts of the death of the humanist Rudolph Agricola in Kraków (1521).14 Jan Długosz’s Annales, too, stress Władysław-Jogaila’s medical recklessness in spending freezing nights in forest groves, simply in order to indulge 12 Only three known copies of the 1519 edition survive today: at the Jagiellonian Library (Kraków), Czartoryski Library (Kraków) and Toruń University Library. See K. Podlaszewska, ‘Pierwsze wydanie kroniki Macieja z Miechowa w zbiorach Biblioteki UMK w Toruniu’, Studia do działalności i zbiorach biblioteki Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika (Toruń, 1980), vol. 1, pp. 189–210. 13 See Rybus, pp. 189–96; J. Krzemieniecki, Bernardinus Gallellus de Jadra, Vicarius et Officialis Generalis Cracoviensis 1509–17 (Kraków, 1934), p. 176. 14 Jan of Czarnków, Chronicon, ed. Jan Szlachtowski, Monumenta Poloniae Historica 2 (Lwów, 1888), pp. 619–756; Emil Arbenz (ed.), ‘Die Vadianische Briefsammlung der

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a whimsical desire to hear lark song.15 This pattern reminds us of the need to be closely attuned to the conventions of sixteenth-century history writing, imbued as it was with complex allusions. Secondly, sixteenth-century physicians and readers would not necessarily have equated ‘morbus gallicus’ with sexually transmitted disease. The pan-European epidemic which erupted during the French occupation of Naples in 1494–5 was the subject of much confusion among medical writers in an age with no clear concept of bacteria. The papal physician Pedro Pintor, for example, declared that French disease was contracted from foul air and best avoided by living underground. The celebrated humanist Paracelsus was closer to the mainstream when he argued that the pox was a poison which attacked the bodies of those living in indulgence and luxury.16 Physical excess of any kind – over-indulgence in sex, food or drink – made one vulnerable to contagion. Exactly this moralistic but nonetheless broad understanding of French disease was espoused by Miechowita himself, who declared in the Chronica Polonorum that the epidemic affected ‘in particular the insincere men and those living in excess, in lust, drinking wine, and eating sharp and fatty foods’.17 In his ‘Vita Cardinalis’, Miechowita lays almost all these charges verbatim against Fryderyk (‘vino, acutis, grossis’) but makes no reference at all to sexual behaviour (‘libidine’).18 Instead, he paints a picture of a scandalously gluttonous and drunken clerical household. In the ‘Vita Cardinalis’, for example, he points to Fryderyk’s fondness for sharp and peppery foods, and rounds off the account by claiming that Marian Lula died the night after his master, ‘killed by eating an excess of fatty peasant foods’.19 Miechowita flags up the cardinal’s appetite for dark Piotrków beer and includes the quite invented story that in 1493 Alexander VI initially conferred on Fryderyk the cardinal’s titular church of SS Sergius and Bacchus, ‘which was changed to Santa Lucia in Septem Soliis at Fryderyk’s own request’.20 Once we see ‘morbus gallicus’ as a sixteenth-century byword for a collective range of lax behaviours, we are much closer to grasping why Cardinal Fryderyk’s ecclesiastical critics made this charge against him so enthusiastically. In Renaissance Poland, indulgent activities such as drinking, carousing, over-eating and sexual licence were perceived, above all, in terms of social disorder. We can see this in the trial records of fifteenth-century Kraków, Gniezno, Poznań and Włocławek priests Stadtbibliothek St. Galen’, vol. 2, Mitteilungen zur Vaterländischen Geschichte 25 (1891), nr 248, pp. 346–7. I am grateful to Jacqueline Glomski for this reference. 15 Długosz, Annales, vol. 1, pp. 650–51. 16 J. Arrizabalga, J. Henderson & R. French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven, Conn., 1997), pp. 89–144. 17 Miechowita, Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 357: ‘praevicatores et homines superflue viventes, in libidine, vino, acutis et grossis’. 18 This was not simply coyness on the chronicler’s part: elsewhere in the Chronica Polonorum, (1521) the debauched exploits of Jan Olbracht and his army are reported unflinchingly, pp. 351, 356. 19 Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 206: ‘nocte sequenti ex repletione grossorum et rusticanorum nutrimentorum moreretur …’ 20 Miechowita, ‘Vita Cardinalis’, p. 204: ‘supplicante prefato Friderico, commutatus est in alium titulum, hunc videlicet: Fridericus presbiter cardinalis S. Luciae in Septemsoliis.’

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accused of concubinage, public quarrelling, inappropriate dress, bearing arms, frequenting taverns or conversation with ‘suspect’ women. In prosecuting such crimes in their courts of audience, Cardinal Fryderyk and his fellow bishops used the terms ‘excessis’, ‘scandales’ and ‘disordinationibus’ interchangeably.21 Order, as we saw in Chapter 3, was the keynote of Fryderyk’s own pastoral programmes. Keeping this framework of Renaissance concerns and values in mind, we can see that disorder, not sex, was the central theme in the sixteenth-century histories hostile to Fryderyk. It is no accident that chapter 77 of the Chronica Polonorum, Miechowita’s account of Fryderyk’s promotions in the church, is framed with images of disorder in nature: it opens with a description of a freakishly warm winter (with chicks hatching in January) and concludes with the birth of two monster serpent children in Kraków.22 These phenomena are not simply general ill omens, but symbols which communicate the fundamental ‘disordinatio’ of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s own career. Similarly, Miechowita’s luridly detailed description of the cardinal’s supposed symptoms in the ‘Vita Cardinalis’ – the oozing pustules, swollen joints and itchy rashes – seems to use images of physical deviancy and bodily corruption as an allegory for political deviancy. The ‘morbus gallicus’ story embraced by Grodziski, Miechowita and Łaski was therefore most likely at its heart a vehement political protest against (and revenge for) Fryderyk’s ‘unnatural’ and disorderly combination of royal and ecclesiastical power and his high-handed governance of the church between 1488 and 1503. It was a disorder for a cardinal of the Roman church to die of a disfiguring, drink-induced disease; just as it was a disorder for Kazimierz IV to impose his royal son on the Polish church as its overlord. It is no surprise that the most visceral opposition to Fryderyk emanated (through the person of Miechowita) from within the Kraków cathedral chapter, a bastion of oligarch sympathies since the days of Cardinal Oleśnicki and Jan Długosz, which had proved highly resistant to Fryderyk’s interventions, taxes, reforms and appointments. In the chapter’s Catalogus Episcoporum Cracoviensum, Fryderyk was not the first royal appointee whose ‘Vita’ was reduced to a simple narrative of corruption punished by death. Miechowita’s entry on Bishop Jan Rzeszowski (1471–88), another bishop imposed by King Kazimierz IV, declared: ‘When he arranged for the weddings of his granddaughters to be celebrated in the episcopal palace in Kraków, he was overcome with an illness, so they say, and died very shortly afterwards.’23 The canons’ hostility towards Fryderyk himself would remain unabated for decades. As late as the 1540s, the ‘Life’ of Piotr Tomicki added to the chapter’s Catalogus further elaborated the Fryderyk legend – it included a vignette which described how the cardinal’s drunken parties had been tempered by Tomicki’s sober presence, with Fryderyk and his drinking pals hiding their chalices under the table whenever the ‘little Italian’ entered the room.24 21 AKM, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 4; AAP, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 2 (AE III); AAG, A. Cap. A3; ADWł, Abkp, vol. 1 (107). 22 Chronica Polonorum (1521), pp. 356–8. 23 ‘Catalogi’, p. 238: ‘Dum nepti suae in curia pontificali Cracoviae nuptias instrueret, ex nimia solicitudine, ut aiunt, egritudine correptus, mortuus est.’ 24 AKK, MS 203, fo. 57v

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A local urban tradition which began as a collective slander against the entire ruling elite of King Aleksander’s day was, over 20 years, narrowed down until the charge was levied at Fryderyk Jagiellon exclusively. The protest of the Kraków chapter steadily escalated, sanctioned and expanded in 1521 by a neo-oligarch primate who strongly sympathized with their objections. The retrospective unease at Fryderyk’s royal governorship of the church was not confined to the church: in 1518, a sejmik meeting at Koło recalled the ‘great uproar and dissent’ provoked in the kingdom by Fryderyk’s career.25 All these complaints and scandalous stories were the protests of an alienated but rapidly diminishing political-ecclesiastical party. The Last Bishop-oligarch? Jan Łaski and Cardinal Fryderyk Jan Łaski, censor of the Chronica Polonorum, was arguably the last great standardbearer of Poland’s medieval magnate bishops, and his political pedigree is worth examining. Born into a Wielkopolska gentry family which claimed kinship with medieval Kraków magnates, Łaski began his political career under the patronage of Bishop Krzesław Kurozwęcki. In 1479 Krzesław had resigned his senior post as canon-cantor of Poznań cathedral in favour of Łaski, and in 1480 the young cleric joined the Włocławek episcopal chancellery in 1480 as one of Krzesław’s staff. In 1490, he won a post in the royal chancellery, then run by Bishop Krzesław.26 Łaski’s career truly took off, however, when the Kurozwęcki senators defected from the Jagiellonian party in 1501. In the immediate wake of the Mielnica Constitution, at the height of Bishop Krzesław’s personal power, Jan Łaski was appointed King Aleksander’s first secretary, travelling with him to Vilnius as the royal chancellor’s acting deputy.27 With Krzesław Kurozwęcki’s death in 1503, Łaski acted as executor of the late bishop’s will and succeeded him as royal chancellor.28 After several years of manoeuvring, Łaski secured a papal bull naming him coadjutor archbishop of Gniezno, taking full possession of the see in 1510.29 Although Łaski’s political career has not been the subject of a published study to date, there are strong indications that he opposed everything that Fryderyk Jagiellon had stood for. Within government, Jan Łaski used his primate’s see in order to oppose the growth of monarchical authority in Poland – just as the Oleśnicki and Kurozwęcki bishop-senators had done in the fifteenth century. When the 1505 Piotrków sejm passed the Nihil Novi constitution, a document which enhanced the powers of parliament and placed restrictions on royal prerogatives, it was Chancellor Łaski who edited the text, publishing it with his own introduction in 1506 and his own

Acta Tomiciana, ed. A. Działyński, vol. 5 (Kraków, 1852), nr 84, p. 82: ‘cum reverendissimus olim dominus Fridericus … cardinalis esset creatus, qui tametsi filius regis erat, magnus tamen secutus fuit motus et dissensio pro locis et aliis officiis exercendis.’ 26 I. Sułkowska-Kuraś, Polska kancelaria królewska w latach 1447–1506 (Kraków, 1967); Włodzimierz Dworzaczek, ‘Jan Łaski, 1456–1531’, PSB 18 (1973): 229–37. 27 See Łaski’s addition to the Chronica Polonorum (1521), p. 362. 28 Kujawski, pp. 143–4. 29 ASV, Reg. Lat., vol. 1207, fo. 307–314v. 25

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person prominently represented in the volume’s opening woodcuts.30 At Zygmunt Jagiellon’s accession in 1506, Łaski led those who unsuccessfully demanded that the 1501 Mielnica Union, which effectively disinherited the Jagiellonians in Lithuania, should be honoured; in drawing up the text of the electoral decree, Łaski included a line stressing the elective nature of the grand duchy.31 Once elected primate, Łaski remained a thorn in King Zygmunt’s side. He remained the first advocate of enhanced parliamentary powers, secretly attempted to arrange a Piast–Jagiellonian marital alliance, pursued a private foreign policy in Rome while representing Poland at the Fifth Lateran Council, and petitioned twice for a red hat without royal permission, an act prohibited under Polish law since 1447.32 Like Oleśnicki before him, Łaski invited papal interventions in the Polish church, especially in crusading matters, as a counter-balance to growing Crown influence over religious life. In the ecclesiastical sphere, Stanisław Grad’s 1979 study of Jan Łaski’s pastoral activity as primate (1510 to 1531) reveals very limited continuities with Fryderyk Jagiellon’s own earlier programmes in Gniezno.33 There is no evidence that Łaski was particularly engaged with grass-roots reform: his six synods raised subsidies for the Crown and reissued existing diocesan statutes, but Łaski did not attend them all in person. Instead, Łaski expended much energy defending and increasing his personal jurisdiction as primate, at the cost of his political rivals in the episcopate. In 1510, for example, he instructed cathedral chapters across Poland to inform on local bishops who did not abide by his provincial statutes, and his appointment as papal legate to Poland in 1515 dramatically enhanced his authority over his fellow bishops and factional rivals.34 Łaski’s cultural activities within the church celebrated oligarch figures and deliberately reprised (or at least challenged) aspects of the royalist devotional iconography earlier developed by Cardinal Fryderyk. One of Łaski’s principal artistic projects were six Italianate red-marble tomb slabs ordered in Esztergom in 1516 – five for his predecessors buried in Gniezno cathedral (carefully ommitting Fryderyk Jagiellon) and one for Krzesław Kurozwęcki’s grave in Włocławek.35 The latter commission – engraved with the words ‘Johannes a Lasco archiepiscopus Gnesnensis alumnus suo patrono Creslao de Kuroswanki’ – was rich in politically subversive nuances, celebrating a notable defector from the Jagiellonian regime. From 1495 onwards, Łaski kept a diary in which he devoted much space to musing over the preferred, and regularly changing, arrangements for his own funeral.36 The manuscript provides a valuable insight into Łaski’s evolving choice of personal patron saint. In 1510, for example, he recorded that he wished to be buried adjacent 30 Papée, Aleksander Jagiellończyk, pp. 76–85; Commune Incliti Regni Poloniae Privilegium (Kraków, 1506). 31 Dworzaczek, p. 230. 32 Smołucha, pp. 127–55; Dworzaczek, pp. 229–37. 33 Stanisław Grad, Kościelna działalność arcybiskupa i prymasa Jana Łaskiego, Studia z historii kościoła w Polsce 4 (Warsaw, 1979). 34 Grad, p. 263; Dworzaczek, p. 232. 35 Grad, pp. 278–80; Kujawski, p. 145. 36 Published by H. Zeissberg, Johannes Łaski Erzbischof von Gnesen (1510–31) und sein Testament (Vienna, 1874).

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to the tomb of Saint Wojciech in Gniezno cathedral. In 1512, however, the Statuta Sinodalia pro Diocesi Gneznensi printed on Łaski’s orders carried a woodcut not of the archdiocese’s patron, Wojciech, but of Saint Stanisław.37 By the 1520s, when Łaski finally ordered the construction of his own, free-standing funerary chapel in the grounds of Gniezno cathedral, the shrine was dedicated to Saint Stanisław, an unprecedented move for a Polish primate, given the historic rivalry between Gniezno and Kraków and their two saintly cults.38 It appears that, as his political struggles with fellow bishops grew more acute, Jan Łaski was increasingly keen to reclaim the medieval rebel-bishop and martyr, a patriotic political symbol originally developed by Cardinal Oleśnicki’s oligarch party in the 1430s and appropriated by Cardinal Fryderyk for the Jagiellonian monarchy in the 1490s. The career of Jan Łaski, like that of his master, Krzesław Kurozwęcki, demonstrates that Cardinal Fryderyk was not successful in eliminating oligarch elements entirely from the Polish church; like his grandfather, father and brothers, Zygmunt I, too, had to deal with a problematic bishop. By the sixteenth century, however, the scale of that problem was entirely different and wholly diminished; Łaski, a man from the gentry, was hardly a magnate-bishop and his political programmes did not represent a pure revival of medieval oligarch demands, but rather a new kind of constitutionalism which would bear fruit in the 1550s, with the gentry movement for ‘the execution of the laws’.39 Łaski never broke into open opposition against the Jagiellonians, cooperatively raised funds for King Zygmunt’s Moldavian and Muscovite wars and was ultimately an isolated agitator within the wider regime – more of a mouse than an Oleśnicki lion. Łaski’s sabotaging of Fryderyk’s character during his 1521 censorship of the Chronica Polonorum, like Miechowita’s attack before it, might have done mortal damage to Fryderyk’s historical reputation, but it was essentially the hollow gesture of an oligarch cleric railing against a royalist fait accompli. The Royalist Bishops and Fryderyk Jagiellon, 1503–1535 The Virtuous Fryderyk Unsurprisingly, the image of Fryderyk Jagiellon found in the writings of sixteenthcentury Jagiellonian circles is radically different to the scandalous picture honed in clerical and oligarch texts. In Cardinal Fryderyk’s own lifetime, official accounts written within the Jagiellonian courts had already begun to characterize the young Polish primate as a man of special virtue and talents. Callimachus’ 1490 crusading oration stressed Fryderyk’s serious personality and intellectual grasp of canon law, while King Władysław Jagiellon’s court historian, Antonio Bonfini, declared in his

37 Jakub Sawicki, Statuta synodalne krakowskie biskupa Jana Konarskiego z 1509 roku, Concilia Poloniae 1 (Kraków, 1945), p. 34. 38 See Helena Kozakowiecka, ‘Mecenat Jana Łaskiego z zagadnień sztuki renesansowej w Polsce’, Biuletyn Historii Sztuki 23 (1961): 3–17. 39 See Anna Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August: Król Polski i Wielki Książe Litewski 1520–1562 (Warsaw, 1996), pp. 29–40.

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1494 Chronica Hungarorum that Fryderyk led a ‘saintly’ lifestyle.40 Learning and virtue remained the twin themes of royalist comments on Fryderyk well into the sixteenth century. In a tract on raising princes written after 1503, Queen Mother Elizabeth quoted the late cardinal’s favourite proverb in a passage on virtue: ‘it is as rare to find a good prince as a learned one.’41 The 1521 printed chronicle De Iagiellonium Familia composed by King Zygmunt’s Alsatian royal secretary, Jodos Ludovicus Decius, also flagged up learning as Cardinal Fryderyk’s most conspicuous trait.42 The culmination of this Jagiellonian tradition, and the only text to challenge the Miechowita–Łaski story head on, was a new ‘Vita Cardinalis Friderici’. This text was written between 1530 and 1535 by Stanisław Górski, personal secretary of Bishop Piotr Tomicki, for inclusion in Tomicki’s lavish illuminated manuscript, Catalogus Archiepiscoporum Gnesnensium.43 Górski’s ‘Life’ is virtual hagiography – having fulsomely praised the devout characters of King Zygmunt I and Prince Kazimierz (d. 1484, beatified 1516), the text goes on to celebrate Cardinal Fryderyk’s ‘conspicuous chastity’, daily prayer routine, constant meditation on divine things, choice of learned councillors, commitment to justice, and zealous protection of the Kraków clergy from the Kurozwęcki and other nobles. The fact that the most energetic defence of the late cardinal emanated not from within the dynasty itself, but from Piotr Tomicki’s entourage, already provides us with a hint that Fryderyk’s legacy in the sixteenth century would be embraced first and foremost by his clerical protégés. Piotr Tomicki and the ‘Fryderyk Party’ in the Polish Church In the first decades of the sixteenth century, many of the most senior bishoprics in King Zygmunt’s Poland were collectively held by a group of three clergymen who had worked intimately with Cardinal Fryderyk before 1503 – Jan Konarski (1447– 1525), Jan Lubrański (1456–1520) and Piotr Tomicki (1464–1535). Konarski, the oldest of the troika, had served as head of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s clerical household and manager of his episcopal estates from 1488 (the same function which Jan Długosz had performed for Cardinal Oleśnicki fifty years earlier) and succeeded Fryderyk as bishop of Kraków in 1503.44 Jan Lubrański’s career had been launched by Fryderyk in 1497, when the talented royal secretary was imposed on the Mazovian see of Callimachus, Ad Innocentiam VIII, pp. 70–73; Bonfini, p. 729: ‘vir non generis solum splendore, sed morum etiam sanctitate memorandus.’ I am grateful to Dariusz Jach for drawing my attention to this reference. 41 Heinrich Zeissberg, ‘Kleinere Geschichtquellen Polens im Mittelalter’, Archiv für österreichische Geschichte 55 (1877): 1–168; p. 116: ‘bonum principem, quam litteratum rarius inveniri’. 42 Decius, p. 49. 43 BN, MS BOZ Cim 5; published in Rybus, pp. 207–12. 44 Maria Goetel-Kopffowa, ‘Jan Konarski, 1447–1525’, PSB 13 (1968), pp. 458–60. Konarski took holy orders while serving in Fryderyk’s household and, under his master’s patronage, became canon of Kraków cathedral (1494), deacon of Kielce (1495), canon of Gniezno cathedral (1496) and a canon of Poznań (1499). 40

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Płock as a result of the cardinal’s personal intervention.45 Correspondence reveals how Fryderyk and Lubrański worked together closely to implement royal policy in Wielkopolska during Jan Olbracht’s reign, and Lubrański was soon promoted to the bishopric of Poznań (1498–1520).46 The most successful of this group, Piotr Tomicki, had been appointed head of Cardinal Fryderyk’s chancellery in 1501 and was immediately rewarded with senior offices: Fryderyk nominated him as archdeacon of Kraków within months of his arrival in the episcopal household.47 With assistance from bishops Konarski and Lubrański, and the king’s backing, Tomicki successively won the sees of Przemyśl (1514–20), Poznań (1520–24) and finally Kraków (1524–35). As royal vice-chancellor and bishop from 1514, Piotr Tomicki stood at the centre of the single most powerful faction in King Zygmunt’s senate. The Acta Tomiciana, the great collection of Tomicki’s correspondence and the single most important source for the internal politics of the reign, reveals that Tomicki, Lubrański and Konarski provided the king with his most influential advisers and loyal diplomats between 1506 and 1535, occupying a central place in policy-making. They were backed by Erazm Ciołek, bishop of Płock (1505–22), Maciej Drzewicki, Jan Olbracht’s former favourite and bishop of Włocławek (1513–31), and the minister Krzysztof Szydłowiecki.48 These bishops had already corresponded as young men at the outset of their careers in the 1490s, and in King Zygmunt’s senate they formed a close-knit faction, resisting the influence of Primate Łaski.49 The factional battlelines were particularly clearly revealed in disputes over ecclesiastical promotions. In 1510, Jan Lubrański failed in his attempt to dislodge Łaski as coadjutor archbishop of Gniezno; in 1514, the primate delayed papal confirmation of Tomicki’s election to the see of Przemyśl for several months, and in 1523 Łaski also tried to prevent Tomicki’s appointment as coadjutor bishop of Kraków, again by using his influence in Rome. The poisonous tone which characterized these disputes is well captured in two epic letters written to King Zygmunt by Primate Łaski and Erazm Ciołek, in which both prelates vehemently denounced one another, invoking examples of alleged deceit dating back 20 years.50 In the realm of government policy, Tomicki and his allies used their personal influence over the king to work for the avoidance of anti-Ottoman crusades, a peaceful dynastic settlement with the Habsburgs in Central Europe and a controversial peace deal with the newly Lutheran state of Teutonic Prussia. The real importance of Tomicki’s faction, however, was that it represented something of a revolution in the Polish episcopate, in terms of social origins, training and political outlook. The great majority of bishops appointed by Kazimierz IV See Chapter 2, p. 43. BK, MS 207, fos 44–45v. 47 Odrzywolska-Kidawa, Biskup Piotr Tomicki, pp. 64–86. 48 Acta Tomiciana, vols 1–17. 49 For the bishops’ early mutual correspondence, see Odrzywolska-Kidawa, Biskup Piotr Tomicki, p. 84. 50 Leszek Hajdukiewicz, ‘Jan Lubrański, 1456–1520’, PSB 13 (1973): 81–4; Dworzaczek; Pociecha; Goetel-Kopffowa, ‘Jan Konarski’, p. 460; Odrzywolska-Kidawa, Biskup Piotr Tomicki, pp. 125–43. 45 46

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between 1447 and 1492 had been the sons of senior magnate families, appointed because of the influence wielded by their kin in the senate and provinces – Uriel of Górka, Krzesław Kurozwęcki, Zbigniew Oleśnicki the younger and, earlier in the reign, Władysław and Andrzej Oporowski and Piotr of Bnin.51 The clerics raised up around 1500 by Kings Jan Olbracht and Aleksander and Cardinal Fryderyk were, however, overwhelmingly from the minor nobility. Jan Konarski and Piotr Tomicki were both born into middling gentry, while Jan Lubrański’s father was a simple notary in the Kraków ecclesiastical courts.52 Maciej Drzewicki’s noble parents were so impoverished that he lived off alms as a student.53 As the son of a Kraków tavern keeper, the social leap made by Erazm Ciołek was by far the most spectacular.54 The new generation of bishops also boasted more extensive legal training than their magnate predecessors; whereas it had been fashionable in the 1450s for the sons of high nobles to acquire a smattering of university education (if not an actual degree) in Kraków, King Zygmunt’s bishops were perhaps more akin to the letrados, or lawyer-administrators, of Castile. Lubrański, for example, spent 14 years studying in Kraków, Bologna and Rome, joining the royal chancellery in 1489, while Tomicki had also studied in Italy and served in the papal curia.55 Cardinal Fryderyk himself had been instrumental in facilitating the rise of this new class of bishop; as we saw in Chapter 2, he energetically appointed members of his household staff to cathedral chapters across Poland, giving Tomicki, Lubrański and Konarski their first major offices, presiding over the contested legal process which raised Erazm Ciołek to noble status at Aleksander Jagiellon’s request in 1501, and fending off the vigorous protests of older canons.56 In promoting regalist agents in his own image, Fryderyk provided one of the main channels for raising up ‘new men’ in the church circa 1500 through the formidable force of his patronage. The transformation of the Polish episcopate in the years around 1500 – a transformation whose main beneficiary would be King Zygmunt I – was not simply an interesting social trend, but also represented a major political shift within the kingdom. Like the Castilian letrados, the new bishops had risen to high office as the chosen favourites of individual Jagiellonians and creatures of the dynasty. The emergence of a new cadre of loyal bishops personally dependent on the ruling family is one of the hallmarks of Europe’s Renaissance monarchies and a major breakthrough in the construction of a stronger centralizing Crown in Poland. For the first time, men with pronounced regalist tendencies formed the majority party in the Polish episcopate. The new regalist sympathies of the gentry-bishops can clearly be glimpsed in the private illuminated manuscripts commissioned by them. Erazm Ciołek’s pontifical (circa 1506), for example, carries an elaborate iconographical Janiszewska-Mincer; Gąsiorowski; Garbacik, ‘Uriel z Górki’; Anon., ‘Andrzej Oporowski’, PSB 24 (1979): 132–4. 52 Hajdukiewicz, p. 81. 53 Pociecha, p. 409. 54 Stanisław Lempicki, ‘Erazm Ciołek, 1474–1521’, PSB 4 (1938): 78–81. 55 Hajdukiewicz, p. 81; Odrzywolska-Kidawa, Biskup Piotr Tomicki, p. 64. 56 Akta Aleksandra, nr 64, p. 69; AKK, AA2, fos 210v, 211; Odrzywolska-Kidawa, Biskup Piotr Tomicki, p. 82. 51

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celebration of the sacral nature of kingship, with full-page depictions of coronation ceremonies – the central rite of monarchy – as its visual centrepieces, in a clear echo of the images produced for Jan Olbracht and Fryderyk in the 1490s.57 Piotr Tomicki’s Catalogus Archiepiscoporum Gnesnensium included an image of the reigning monarch on its front page and contained hagiographies of the house of Jogailo.58 The political relationship between Crown and church had come a long way since the 1450s, when Jan Długosz had taken up his pen and dedicated his great apologia for magnate rule, the Annales Regni Poloniae, to Bishop Zbigniew Oleśnicki. If we consider the pastoral and cultural interests of King Zygmunt’s royalist bishops, we can see that Fryderyk Jagiellon was not simply a distant figure who had lent a helping hand at the outset of their careers, but seems to have been (consciously or otherwise) nothing less than a direct model for the sixteenth-century pro-Jagiellonian bishop. Tomicki, Lubrański and Konarski closely emulated the late cardinal’s methods and implicitly identified themselves with his person and programmes. Within their Catholic dioceses, for example, this trio of bishops adopted, continued and disseminated the distinctive, interventionist and reforming pastoral style developed by Cardinal Fryderyk before 1503. Printing provides a good case study. As we saw in Chapter 3, one of the hallmarks of Cardinal Fryderyk’s tenures at Kraków and Gniezno was his enthusiasm for printing diocesan liturgy, as a tool which could deliver accurate texts, enhance episcopal control of worship and act as a vehicle for royal visual propaganda. While Fryderyk was still alive, Jan Lubrański began to emulate these projects, commissioning a Breviarium Posnaniense from a Basel workshop in August 1500, just two years after his promotion to the Poznań see, followed by a Viaticum Posnaniense (Lyons, 1513).59 In Kraków, Bishop Jan Konarski followed boldly in his former master’s footsteps, reissuing Fryderyk’s missal with his own arms on the frontispiece, and commissioning a Liber Horarum in 1508 before royal monopolies increasingly enabled Kraków printers to publish liturgy without reference to the local bishop.60 Konarski and his officials also diversified, entrusting other ecclesiastical documents to the printing press for the first time: the resolutions of a local synod in 1509 and the diocesan calendar for the year 1514 were both produced on cheap and easily distributed one-sheet placards.61 Piotr Tomicki, too, printed a local missal as bishop of Poznań in 1524, before commissioning a missal (1532) and two shorter ‘rubricellae’ for his new Kraków diocese.62 By contrast, prelates who had not been associated with Cardinal Fryderyk tended to afford liturgical printing a much lower priority:

57 Czart., MS 1212. The royalist iconography of Ciołek’s pontifical is the subject of Miodońska’s study Rex Regum. 58 BN, MS BOZ Cim 5. 59 Breviarium Posnaniense (Basel, 1500); Viaticum Posnaniense (Lyons, 1513). 60 Missale Cracoviense (post 1503); Liber Horarum Canonicarum Secundam Veram Rubricam sive Notulam Ecclesie Cracoviensis (Kraków, 1508). 61 See M. Goetel-Kopffowa, ‘Mecenat kulturalny Jana Konarskiego, 1447–1525’, Rozprawy i sprawozdania muzeum narodowego w Krakowie 8 (1964): 53–65. 62 Kazimierz Gabryel, Działalność kościelna biskupa Piotra Tomickiego, 1464–1535 (Warsaw, 1972), p. 367.

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both Jan Łaski and Erazm Ciołek printed only one item a piece during their long episcopates, the 1512 Gniezno synod statutes and a Płock missal respectively.63 A second characteristic of Cardinal Fryderyk’s pastoral style had been an unusually heavy use of visitation in order to police local clergy and assert the bishop’s personal jurisdiction and this, too, was copied by his protégés. As bishop of Poznań, in 1500 Jan Lubrański promptly reissued statutes which prohibited clergy from entering taverns or keeping concubines, issued a de facto night curfew on priests and banned cathedral canons from employing female serving staff, in some contrast to the relatively relaxed stance of his predecessor, Uriel of Górka (bishop 1479–97).64 In Kraków, Jan Konarski’s 1509 synod decrees similarly condemned clerical concubinage, drunkenness and the avoidance of priestly garb, and – like Fryderyk before him – announced the instigation of a new episcopal inquisition to find the perpetrators of such ‘excesses’.65 Piotr Tomicki, meanwhile, ordered a series of inquisitions and visitations in the Poznań region (1521, 1522), in Kraków, Kazimierz and Klepacz (1525), the archdeaconry of Sądek (1532), and the Sandomierz region (1533), the last carried out by the bishop himself.66 Like Fryderyk, Tomicki also aggressively asserted the authority of the see of Kraków vis-à-vis religious orders. He scored a great coup in 1531 with a papal bull which granted him complete visitation rights over all convents, monasteries and friaries in the Polish kingdom, and thereafter intervened regularly (and controversially) in the elections of Cistercian abbots and Poor Clare abbesses, just as Fryderyk had done against Benedictines and Brigittines in the 1490s.67 Again, research to date suggests that contemporaries such as Jan Łaski or even Erazm Ciołek showed no comparable pattern of disciplinary interventions. It is, however, the use of the Saint Stanisław cult by Konarski, Lubrański and Tomicki – and an iconography intimately associated with the person of the late cardinal – which strongly suggests that through their pastoral and cultural output these bishops were deliberately identifying themselves with the person of the late Fryderyk Jagiellon, or at least taking up part of his agenda. Upon succeeding Fryderyk as bishop of Kraków, Jan Konarski immediately made a financial contribution towards the completion of the gold Saint Stanisław reliquary commissioned by the cardinal, and had his own name engraved on the rim in 1504 (Figure 4).68 Konarski went on to support the cult in at least three centres beyond the city. In the episcopal town of Bodzentyn, the painter Marcin Czarny in 1508 completed a new Saint Stanisław altarpiece in the parish church, with scenes from the saint’s life and a representation of Konarski as donor.69 Konarski also founded a new altar in the parish church of Piotrowin (constructed by Bishop Olesnicki, on the site of Stanisław’s main miracle), 63

Sawicki, p. 34; Henryk Folwarski, Erazm Ciołek: biskup i dyplomata (Warsaw, 1935),

p. 111. 64 65 66 67 68 69

318.

Acta Capitulorum, nrs 906–7, pp. 168–9; AAP, Acta Episcopalia, vol. 2 (AE III). Sawicki, pp. 44–9. Gabryel, pp. 304, 361–6. Gabryel, pp. 371–4. Inwentarz katedry, p. 8. Juszczak Wiesław, ‘Tryptyk Bodzentyński’, Studia Renesansowe 3 (1963): 267–

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and in 1518 built a new church dedicated to the saint in Kobylin, complete with a special fresco cycle.70 In common with Fryderyk, Konarski was careful to grace his printed liturgies and placards with woodcuts depicting Saint Stanisław. Images of the martyr-bishop can be seen, for example, in Konarski’s 1508 Liber Horarum, on the one-sheet ‘rubricella’ of 1514 and the 1509 printed synod statutes.71 Succeeding Konarski as bishop of Kraków in 1524, Piotr Tomicki too linked himself with the Stanisław cult. Four years after his election, Tomicki presented the Wawel cathedral with a gilded statue of the saint in pontifical robes, blessing and raising Piotr from his grave. This figure rested on the shoulders of four lions, and included relics enclosed in crystal.72 On the magnificent illuminated frontispiece of Tomicki’s Catalogus Archiepiscoporum Gnesnensium, the painter Stanisław Samostrzelnik showed a giant figure of Saint Stanisław, with angels.73 Perhaps most telling of all is the use of the saint’s image by Fryderyk’s protégés in Wielkopolska, a region traditionally devoted to Saint Wojciech. In the illuminated antiphonary donated to Gniezno cathedral by Canon Klemens of Piotrków in 1506, one of the miniatures shows Bishop Jan Lubrański of Poznań kneeling in devotion before Saint Stanisław, explicitly echoing the iconography of the late Fryderyk.74 For most of the fifteenth century, Saint Stanisław had not been a focal point for Jagiellonian devotion or artistic projects, but this changed circa 1500 and Cardinal Fryderyk appears very much to have been a pioneer of, if not the inspiration behind, this new current. Queen Elizabeth’s carved altarpiece for Jan Olbracht’s funerary chapel in the Wawel cathedral (circa 1501), for example, gave great prominence to the saint: in golden pontifical robes, Saint Stanisław is shown placing a protective hand on the dead king’s shoulder and presenting him to the crucified Christ.75 The gold ducat minted by King Aleksander in 1503 showed ‘Stanislaus episcopus’ on its reverse, while King Zygmunt donated new silver tablets for the saint’s tomb and the Skałka shrine (1512).76 In 1508, the Nuremberg brass sarcophagus which King Zygmunt ordered for his late priestly brother echoed the imagery of the Stuchs woodcuts by placing Fryderyk and Stanisław in close proximity – just metres away from the saint’s own resting place (Figure 2). It is difficult to pin down the exact relationship between Fryderyk’s Stanisław commissions and those cultural celebrations of the cult produced for his relatives and protégés in the years immediately following his death; the evidence points towards conscious emulation of a political project, but this cannot be proved categorically. Nonetheless, Jan Laski’s careful posturing around the figure of Stanisław strongly suggests that the cult was just as politicized in the 1530s as it had been in the 1430s, and remained a potential locus of conflict between factions. If Zbigniew Oleśnicki had made Stanisław a magnate mascot, this Goetel-Kopffowa, ‘Mecenat kulturalny’, p. 52. Goetel-Kopffowa, ‘Mecenat kulturalny’, figs. 8, 15, 18. 72 Inwentarz katedry, p. 15. 73 BN, BOZ Cim 5; B. Miodońska, Miniatury Stanisława Samostrzelnika (Warsaw, 1983), pp. 26–7. 74 AAG, MS 95, fo. 16. 75 Colour photographs of the altarpiece are published in Michał Grzybowski, Katedra Wawelska (Katowice, 2001), pp. 122–3. 76 Kiersnowski; Borkowska, Królewskie modlitewniki, pp. 229–43. 70 71

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whole-hearted adoption of Stanisław of Szczepanów by the Jagiellonian regime in the early sixteenth century suggests that, following Fryderyk’s lead, the saint was securely claimed by the Crown. In the space of three generations, then, the Polish church had moved from the political leadership of Zbigniew Oleśnicki, avowed oligarch, to that of Piotr Tomicki, loyal client, minor noble and first ally of King Zygmunt I. Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon provides a symbolic bridge, or halfway house, between these two models of episcopal power – between medieval practice in which individual bishops drew their authority from their blood, as members of a magnate (or even royal) house, and an early modern scenario in which a bishop’s authority sprang solely from his client relationship with the Crown. Krzesław Kurozwęki would be the last of Poland’s medieval magnate-bishops; when he and Cardinal Fryderyk died within weeks of each other in spring 1503, like two titans locked in combat, it marked the end of an era. Although Fryderyk Jagiellon had apparently died at a moment of complete political defeat, and for all the protests and lurid accusations of the Małopolska church and senate oligarchs, Kazimierz IV’s priestly son had presided over a fundamental breakthrough for the Polish Renaissance Crown. Fryderyk set a new paradigm, providing a convincing and influential template of how a sixteenthcentury pro-Jagiellonian bishop might behave in his diocese, and which politicized devotional symbols he might flaunt. The Jagiellonians and the Polish Church: Into the Sixteenth Century K.J.P. Lowe concluded her 1996 study of Fryderyk’s Florentine contemporary, Cardinal Francesco Soderini, with a chapter entitled ‘In praise of Francesco Soderini’.77 A survey of the early modern literature written in praise of Fryderyk Jagiellon would be rather sparse. In the decades after his death, historical accounts of the royal cardinal’s life were comprehensively hijacked by those who felt they had lost out by his spectacular rise, the autonomous higher clergy of Małopolska and the senatorial oligarchs of the old Kurozwęcki party. The Chronica Polonorum’s verdict on Fryderyk Jagiellon hardened into a historical orthodoxy after 1521; in the 1550s, Counter-Reformation chroniclers such as Marcin Kromer would elaborate on it, building Fryderyk into a grotesquely corrupt medieval cleric, a man so slothful, stupid and drunken that his life was deemed entirely inconsequential.78 In this sense, Fryderyk’s unenviable legacy was to attract such violent and long-lasting opposition that his enemies simply tried to wipe him from the historical record as a serious figure, and here Miechowita and Łaski have largely succeeded to date. In light of the ongoing early modern opposition to Cardinal Fryderyk’s person, his career might be regarded as a self-defeating exercise by the Crown, an experiment which simply served to galvanize anti-royalist sentiment. Beneath this thick crust of sixteenth-century anger and polemic, however, Fryderyk Jagiellon’s achievements were eagerly appropriated by the Renaissance 77 78

K.J.P. Lowe, pp. 268–78. Kromer, p. 678.

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Crown and its agents. By the 1530s, notwithstanding the eclipse of his own person by the syphilis legend, it was clear that Fryderyk had succeeded in his most fundamental goal: that of placing the Polish church firmly under the political control of the Jagiellonian party, with its own national traditions of reform and saintly cults, in a kingdom with an increasingly confident Crown, ever more securely in the hands of Lithuania’s Jagiellonian dynasty. In 1539, in a huge breakthrough, King Zygmunt would feel confident enough to tackle the elective principle established by the magnates in the 1370s, when his 19-year-old son, Zygmunt Augustus, was successfully crowned king of Poland vivente rege in his father’s lifetime with the cooperation of the local episcopate. We can see just how far the Jagiellonian project had come by the sixteenth century by juxtaposing two final images which encapsulate the continuities and successes of the dynasty’s ecclesiastical enterprise: the woodcut frontispiece of the Missale Cracoviense (1490s) printed by Georg Stuchs for Cardinal Fryderyk (Figure 3), and Stanisław Samostrzelnik’s painted frontispiece of Piotr Tomicki’s Catalogus Archiepiscoporum Gnesnensium (1530–35). Although separated by almost 40 years, the images created for Fryderyk and his former chancellor are almost identical in composition and communicate the same political agenda. The Stuchs woodcut shows Fryderyk Jagiellon kneeling in cardinal’s robes at the feet of Saint Stanisław, with a white eagle shield at his feet, in a declaration of royal sovereignty and custodianship over the church. Samostrzelnik’s gilded illumination, meanwhile, shows Bishop Tomicki and King Zygmunt kneeling side by side in the foreground in their episcopal and royal regalia, with a crowd of devout Kraków canons and loyal Polish senators behind them. Towering above these men is the looming figure of Saint Stanisław, who holds a banner depicting the Polish white eagle and the monarch’s ‘S’ monogram, while angels drape his billowing cloak around King Zygmunt and Bishop Tomicki. These two images, with all their direct symmetries, were produced in very different political contexts: if the 1490s woodcut was a manifesto, the 1530s illumination is perhaps a declaration of victory. By lining up Stanisław, the white eagle, Jagiellonians and the local episcopate together, the most famous representations of Cardinal Fryderyk and Piotr Tomicki, master and pupil, both proclaim the reality of royal power over the Polish ‘ecclesia’.

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Figure 2

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Horizontal panel of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon’s tomb, Kraków cathedral

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Figure 3

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Frontispiece woodcut, Missale Cracoviense, c.1494–96

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Reliquary for the skull of Saint Stanisław, 1504. Photograph by J. Andrzejewski.

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Figure 5

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Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon’s larger Gniezno crucifix reliquary. Photography by Dariusz Jach.

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Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon’s coat of arms, Collegium Maius, Kraków

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Figure 7

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‘Nulla potestas nisi a Deo’, miniature from the King Jan Olbracht gradual

CHAPTER SEVEN

Dynastic Bishops and Cardinal-Ministers: Fryderyk Jagiellon in European Context Introduction Fryderyk Jagiellon was, strictly speaking, a unique figure – the only legitimate son of a king to become a Catholic cardinal in the fifteenth century. Does this mean, then, that Fryderyk was simply a bizarre one-off, a Central European anomaly, or a peculiar figure shaped by Poland’s individual domestic dramas? So far, this study has treated Cardinal Fryderyk’s career as a case study in the ecclesiatical policies of Renaissance monarchies, but this final chapter aims to locate him more explicitly in his European context. How did the Jagiellonians’ ecclesiastical experiment in Poland relate, if at all, to the policies espoused by Renaissance monarchies elsewhere? Where exactly does Fryderyk Jagiellon fit into the international history of the Latin church in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – on the margins or at its centre? We can attempt to answer such questions by comparing the basic trajectory of Fryderyk’s career with those of three other controversial groups of clerics who are indigenous to the late medieval and early modern periods – dynastic bishops, cardinals from ruling houses and cardinal-ministers. Although Fryderyk Jagiellon’s precise combination of high offices was uniquely impressive, he was actually part of a small army of royal and ducal sons, grandsons and brothers who held Catholic bishoprics in growing numbers in the Renaissance, as dynastic bishops.1 With his elevation to the Sacred College in 1493, Fryderyk became a member of a second, even smaller elite, the dynastic cardinals. Fryderyk was also intimately connected with another contentious group, the cardinal-ministers, who emerged on the European scene in the early sixteenth century. Using quantitative data, this discussion will attempt to demonstrate how, and explain why, Fryderyk Jagiellon was delicately poised between these three overlapping phenomena.

This chapter uses the term ‘dynastic bishops’ in order to avoid confusion with ‘princebishops’, those North European prelates who historically enjoyed not only spiritual leadership of a diocese but also temporal sovereignty over local territories, for example the princebishopric of Eichstätt. 1

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CHURCH, STATE AND DYNASTY IN RENAISSANCE POLAND

The Dynastic Bishop Since the fifteenth century, those writers who have wrung their hands over the state of the late medieval church, as a morass of corruption and worldly greed, have held up the papacy’s weakness for children – both its own offspring and those of other rulers – as one of its worst excesses. Innocent VIII and Alexander not only unabashedly married their own illegitimate sons and daughters into the ruling houses of Italy but showered bishoprics and archbishoprics on child and teenage princes.2 Ippolito d’Este (1479–1520) perhaps epitomizes this trend: the son of Duke Ercole I of Ferrara, Ippolito was appointed archbishop of Esztergom and primate of Hungary in 1487 at the age of ten. Innocent VIII initially protested at the Este duke’s demands, declaring that ‘it is quite absurd to entrust the [Hungarian] province to a boy, a virtual infant’, but quickly acquiesced, and Alexander VI went on to name Ippolito a cardinal in 1493.3 Across fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, a whole host of young princelings such as Fryderyk Jagiellon and Ippolito d’Este were launched on ecclesiastical careers as children or very young men. Table 4 offers a preliminary list of 43 such dynastic appointees who lived between 1200 and 1600, from Philip, infante of Castile and archbishop of Seville from 1249, to Leopold of Austria, son of Emperor Maximilian II and archbishop of Toledo from 1594. The table has been compiled by cross-referencing Conrad Eubel’s data on the Renaissance church hierarchy with information available in more specialized national genealogical and biogaphical studies.4 In Table 4, the term ‘dynastic bishop’ includes any cleric drawn from the inner ranks of a ruling house; that is, sons, grandsons, brothers, half-brothers and illegitimate progeny of the ruler himself. A possible second tier of dynastic cousins and nephews (which would run to several dozen more) has been omitted here, for clarity and also in order to provide a sharper picture of those men who bear direct comparison with Fryderyk Jagiellon. The dates given for commencement of an ecclesiastical career are based on the issue of the papal bull confirming an individual’s first bishopric; appointments made by antipopes have been left aside. Any list of fifteenth-century Europe’s sovereign houses is open to debate; the map of late medieval Christendom was a messy mix of nominally united kingdoms and great collections of small principalities. In Table 4, the sovereign ruling families featured are the major monarchies and the most powerful houses of the Empire and Italian peninsula – the Trastamara kings of Aragon, Naples and See Chapter 5, pp. 140–42. Quoted in Baczkowski, ‘Państwa Europy środkowo-wschodniej’, at p. 213: ‘Nimis quippe absurdum est ecc[les]iam huiusmodi puero et quasi infanti committere …’ 4 Eubel, vols 1–3; H.C.G. Matthew & B. Harrison (eds), Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), vols 4, 52; Peter Bietenholz & Thomas Deutscher (eds), Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation (3 vols, Toronto, 1985–7); M. Prévost & R. d’Amas (eds), Dictionnaire de biographie française, vol. 6 (Paris, 1954); Alberto Maria Ghisalberti & M. Pavan (eds), Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome, 1960–), vols 3, 43, 57; R. Vaughan, Philip the Good: The Apogee of Burgundy (Harlow, 1970); Erwin Gatz & Clemens Brodkorb (eds), Die Bischöfe des Heiligen Römischen Reichs, 1448 bis 1648: Ein biographisches Lexicon (Berlin, 1996); Aleksander Swieżawski, ‘Jan z książat litewskich’, PSB 10 (1962–4), pp. 439–41. 2 3

1439

Son of King Charles II of Naples Lord of Milan Son of King James II Lord of Milan Grandson of King Jaime II Illegitimate son of Duke John the Fearless Illegitimate son of Duke Philip the Good

Naples

Milan

Aragon

Milan

Aragon

1478

Illegitimate son of King Ferdinand Son of Ernst, Elector of Saxony

Aragon

Saxony

1479

1477

Illegitimate son of King John II

Aragon

1461 (cardinalate)

Son of Marquis Ludovico III

1451

1342

1319

1277

1263

1251

Mantua

Burgundy

Burgundy

1362

Half-brother of King Henry III

England

1251

Son of King Ferdinand III

Castile

1249

Date of first bull of appointment

Son of King Ferdinand III

Relationship to ruler

Castile

State

Saragossa, Chiete, Monreale, Orense, Tarragona Magdeburg, Halberstadt

Palermo

Terouanne, Utrecht Brixen, Mantua, Bologna

-

-

-

1461

-

-

1387

Tortosa, Valencia Cambrai

-

-

Tarragona, Toledo Milan

-

-

-

-

-

ate

Cardinal-

Milan

Toulouse

Winchester

Toledo

Seville

Sees held

Bishops, archbishops and cardinals appointed from European ruling houses, 1200 to 1600

Philip of Castile (1231–74) Sancho of Castile (1233–61) Aymer de Valence (1228–60) Louis of Toulouse (1274–98) Otto Visconti (1207–95) Juan of Aragon (1304–34) Giovanni Visconti (1290–1354) Jaime of Aragon (1341–96) John of Burgundy (1404–1479) David of Burgundy (1427–96) Francesco Gonzaga (1444–83) Philip of Aragon (1456–88) Alfonso of Aragon (1470–1525) Ernst of Saxony (1464–1513)

Name

Table 4

1487

Illegitimate grandson of Duke Niccolò III Son of Duke Ercole I Son of King Kazimierz IV Son of Lorenzo de’ Medici

Ferrara

Ferrara

Poland

Florentine Republic

Florence

Portugal

Alfonso of Portugal (1509?–1540)

Brandenburg

Scotland

Navarre

Milan

Son of King Emmanuel

Son of Giuliano de’ Medici

Illegitimate son of King James IV Son of John Nestor, Elector of Brandenburg

Brother of King of Navarre

Illegitimate grandson of King Ferrante Illegitimate son of Duke Francesco I

1486

Son of Elector

Brandenburg

Naples

1483

Son of Ludovico, Marquis of Mantua

Mantua

1516

1513

1513

1504

1499

1498

1498

1489 (cardinalate)

1488

1487

1482

Half-brother of King James IV

Scotland

1479

Son of FRancesco I

Milan

Giulio de’ Medici (1478–1534)

Ascanio Sforza (1455– 1505) Andrew Stewart (d. 1501) Ludovico Gonzaga (1460–1511) Friedrich von Hohenzollern Niccolò Maria d’Este (d. 1507) Ippolito d’Este (1479–1520) Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468–1503) Giovanni de’ Medici (1476–1521) Luigi of Aragon (1474–1519) Giovanni Maria Sforza (d. 1520) Amanerus d’Albret (1478– 1520) Alexander Stewart (1493–1513) Albrecht of Brandenburg (1490–1545)

1517

1513

Florence, Albi, Lavaur, Albenga, Bitonto, Ascoli, Bologna, Embrun, Worcester Errores, Idana, Viseu, Evora, Lisbon

-

-

1500

-

1493

1489

Halberstadt, Magdeburg, Mainz

St Andrew’s

Condom, Cominges

Genoa

Lecce, Aversa, Policastro, Capaccio, León, Nardo, Alessano

Amalfi, Pesaro

1493

1493

Esztergom, Ferrara, Eger, Capua, Modena, Milan Kraków, Gniezno

-

-

-

-

1484

Adria

Augsburg

Mantua

Moray, Caithness

Pavia, Novara, Cremona, Pesaro, Eger

Austria

Bavaria

Franc/Navarree

Bavaria

Mantua

Brandenburg

Brandenburg

Austria

Portugal

Austria

Mantua

Ferrara

Lithuania/Poland

Jan of Lithuania (1499–1538)

Ippolito d’Este II (1509–72) Ercole Gonzaga (1505–63) George of Austria (1504–57) Henry of Portugal (1512–80) Leopold of Austria (1515–57) Frederick of Brandenburg (1530–52) Sigismund of Brandenburg (1538–66) Francesco Gonzaga (1538–66) Ernst of Bavaria (1554–1612) Charles de Bourbon (1554–1610) Philip Wittelsbach (1576–98) Albrecht of Austria (1559–1621)

Burgundy

Philip of Burgundy (1465–1524)

Son of Wilhelm V, Duke of Bavaria Son of Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor

Half-brother of King Henry IV

Illegitimate son of Emperor Maximilian Son of Joachim II, Elector of Brandenburg Son of Joachim II, Elector of Brandenburg Grandson of Francesco II, Marquis of Mantua Son of Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria

Son of King Emmanuel I

Illegitimate son of Zygmunt, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania Son of Alfonso I, Duke of Ferrara Son of Francesco II, Marquis of Mantua Illegitimate son of Emperor Maximilian I

Illegitimate son of Duke Philip the Good

1594

1580

1569

Toledo

Regensburg

Rouen, Comminges

1578

1596

1547

-

Freising, Cologne, Hildesheim, Liège, Münster

1566

1561

Mantua, Cosenza

1562

-

Magdeburg, Halberstadt

Halberstadt, Magdeburg

1552

-

1545

-

1527

1538

-

-

1552

Córdoba

Braga, Evora, Lisbon

Brixen, Valencia, Liège

Mantua, Fano, Modena, Sovano

Laon, Autun, Novara, Auch, Narbonne, Milan, Casale

Vilnius Poznań

Utrecht

1541

1533

1526

1521

1519

1519

1517

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CHURCH, STATE AND DYNASTY IN RENAISSANCE POLAND

Castile; the Valois and Bourbon kings of France; the Plantagenet and Tudor kings of England; the Aviz kings of Portugal; the Jagiellonian kings of Poland; the Habsburg Holy Roman emperors; the Wettin electors of Saxony; the Wittelsbach electors of Bavaria and the Rhine Palatinate; the Hohenzollern electors of Brandenburg; the Valois dukes of Burgundy; the Visconti and Sforza dukes of Milan; the Este dukes of Ferrara; the Medici rulers and dukes of Florence, and the Gonzaga marquises of Mantua.5 Using the data in Table 4, it is possible to plot the rise of the dynastic bishop or archbishop in pre-modern Europe. Six dynastic bishops were appointed between 1200 and 1360, and Table 5 shows a gradual rise in their numbers per decade from 1360: Table 5:

Number of bishops / archbishops appointed from ruling houses by decade, 1360–1600 Decade 1360–1369 1370–1379 1380–1389 1390–1399 1400–1409 1410–1419 1420–1429 1430–1439 1440–1449 1450–1459 1460–1469 1470–1479 1480–1489 1490–1499 1500–1509 1510–1519 1520–1529 1530–1539 1540–1549 1550–1559 1560–1569 1570–1579 1580–1589 1590–1599

No. of arch/bishops 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 4 7 3 1 6 2 1 2 2 1 1 0 1

5 Hungary, Hussite Bohemia and the Scandinavian kingdoms did not produce any dynastic bishops or cardinals in this period.

DYNASTIC BISHOPS AND CARDINAL-MINISTERS

185

As Table 5 illustrates, the progeny of ruling houses were only very occasionally appointed to bishoprics in the fourteenth century: Jacobus of Aragon (1313–34), son of the Aragonese king and archbishop of Toledo, was a definite rarity in his day. It was from the 1470s, and the pontificate of Sixtus IV, that the number of dynastic appointees to Catholic sees suddenly rose: Aragon, Saxony, Portugal, Milan and the Rhine Palatinate all acquired ruling-house bishops in that decade. This high level of dynastic appointments increased throughout the 1480s under Innocent VIII (1484– 92). When Fryderyk Jagiellon was confirmed as bishop of Kraków in 1488, his fellow dynastic appointees in that decade included Andrew Stewart, the half-brother of King James IV of Scotland, named bishop of Moray in 1483; Ippolito d’Este, son of Duke Ercole I of Ferrara, elevated to the see of Esztergom in 1487; Niccolò Maria d’Este, an illegitimate ducal grandson, confirmed as bishop of Adria that same year, and Ludovico Gonzaga, son of Marquis Ludovico, who became bishop of his native Mantua in 1483. These Europe-wide statistical patterns show that Fryderyk Jagiellon was clearly riding the crest of a historical wave: his confirmation as bishop of Kraków in 1488 came at the peak of the quintessentially Quattrocento dynasticbishop phenomenon. The dynastic-bishop trend would tail off gradually throughout the sixteenth century. In Poland as elsewhere, bishoprics were not simply seen by Renaissance rulers as a convenient way of pensioning off their surplus sons; instead, many dynastic bishops were envisaged as major tools of domestic policy and used to entrench the sovereign’s power. A dynastic bishop could, for example, consolidate the authority of a ruling house over its own or neighbouring territories. Just as Fryderyk Jagiellon was very briefly elected bishop of Płock in 1497 following Jan Olbracht’s partial military conquest of Mazovia, so David of Burgundy was installed by force as bishop of Utrecht in 1457, in order to assert Valois ducal power over that city.6 In the wake of the civil wars which swept Europe in the mid fifteenth century, dynastic bishops could help to rebuild royal power and deny the opposition a foothold in the church. For example, in Aragon, riven by civil strife and dominated by warlord bishops between 1462 and 1472, King Ferdinand II gradually placed the sees of Saragossa, Chiete, Monreale, Orense and Tarragona in the hands of his illegitimate son Alfonso, from 1478 onwards.7 In Hungary, too, Mathias Corvinus saw in his nephew-in-law Ippolito d’Este a dynastic agent who might place the fiscal, political and military resources of the see of Esztergom at the disposal of the Crown.8 The tactic was used again by the Jagiellonians against the Lithuanian magnatry in the sixteenth century when, in 1519, King Zygmunt's illegitimate son Jan was appointed bishop of Vilnius and served as a de facto governor of the grand duchy.9 Finally, ‘David of Burgundy’, in Bietenholz & Deutscher, vol. 1, pp. 226–7. Similarly, in 1521 the Bavarian government was excited by the strategic value of the prince-bishopric of Eichstätt, which was won by Ernst, brother to the Bavarian dukes: see G. Strauss, ‘The religious policies of dukes Wilhelm and Ludwig of Bavaria in the first decade of the Protestant era’, Church History 28 (1959): 350–73. 7 Edwards, pp. 200–203. 8 Baczkowski, Walka o Węgry, pp. 30, 65–6. 9 Swieżawski. 6

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CHURCH, STATE AND DYNASTY IN RENAISSANCE POLAND

while Fryderyk Jagiellon held effective public office as head of the Polish senate, a handful of dynastic bishops occupied more formal ministerial posts: Andrew Stewart (d. 1501), half-brother to King James IV, was chancellor of Scotland, while Alfonso of Aragon (d. 1525) acted as chancellor, viceroy and regent in his father’s Iberian kingdom.10 In the timing, nature and purpose of his ecclesiastical promotions, therefore, Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon appears to fit squarely and reassuringly neatly into the Europe-wide trend to promote dynastic bishops. This is not the whole story, however: Fryderyk was not just a bishop but belonged to an even more rarefied class, the Renaissance royal cardinal. The Dynastic Cardinal Of the 43 dynastic bishops and archbishops listed in Table 4, 17 individuals (or 40 per cent) also became cardinals of the Roman church, yet it is harder to detect any statistical trend for this category of appointee. Cardinals from ruling houses were virtually unheard of in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: Jacobus of Aragon (named cardinal 1387) was a very rare exception. As David Chambers has pointed out, when Pope Paul II raised Francesco Gonzaga, son of the marquis of Mantua, to the Sacred College in 1461, he thereby inaugurated a steady trickle of such appointments which would last throughout the sixteenth century.11 The next individuals to be so elevated, in 1484, were Ascanio Sforza of Milan and Giovanni de’ Medici of Florence, and they were joined by three further dynasts over the course of the 1490s. The Italian dynastic cardinal quickly became a self-perpetuating phenomenon – the entry of Francesco Gonzaga into the Sacred College in the 1460s, for example, provided the Mantuan ruling family with a foothold in Rome and a base of influence from which to petition successfully for a further three Gonzaga cardinals. For the Gonzaga, Medici, Este and the Neapolitan house of Aragon, dynastic cardinals were a first-class political asset who, from their courts in Rome, could advance and protect the interests of their native states in the cockpit of the Italian peninsula. Fryderyk Jagiellon stands out from these Renaissance dynastic cardinals for two reasons: he was the only non-Italian dynastic bishop to join the Sacred College in the fifteenth century, and he never travelled to Italy or resided in Rome. Unlike Mantuan or Florentine cardinals, there was no pressing need for him to do so; the curia and the Papal States were not Poland’s neighbours, or even a major factor in the kingdom’s foreign policy under Jan Olbracht and Aleksander. Although Alexander VI very much expected his Jagiellonian appointee’s imminent arrival in Rome from 1493, the Borgia pope waited in vain, and Fryderyk Jagiellon instead became one of the first permanently and deliberately absentee cardinals of the Renaissance period.12 This absenteeism reveals that Fryderyk’s membership of the ‘dynastic cardinals’

J. Thomson & J. Dowden, The Bishops of Scotland (Glasgow, 1912), pp. 163–4; ‘Alfonso of Aragon, 1470–1525’, in Bietenholz & Deutscher, vol. 1, pp. 34–5. 11 A Renaissance Cardinal, p. 1. 12 For Roman expectations of Fryderyk’s arrival, see Pastor, vol. 5, p. 417. 10

DYNASTIC BISHOPS AND CARDINAL-MINISTERS

187

club is something of a red herring, and instead links him with our third, final and perhaps most revealing clerical group – the cardinal-ministers. The Cardinal-Minister Throughout the medieval period, kings and princes had employed bishops as their ministers in royal government. In Poland, for example, Uriel of Górka combined the roles of bishop of Poznań and royal vice-treasurer from 1473 to 1497, while Krzesław Kurozwęcki served as both bishop of Włocławek and royal chancellor from 1494 until his death in 1503. When explaining to pontiffs why he needed firmer control of episcopal appointments in this kingdom, Kazimierz IV of Poland cited the central role which bishops played in government, and which made it imperative that appointees were friends of the king.13 Throughout the Middle Ages, this national class of bishop-ministers had existed quite separately from the international body of the College of Cardinals. From the mid fifteenth century, however, these two groups began to overlap for the first time. Five bishop-ministers were appointed Roman cardinals in the fifteenth century, followed by a further ten in the sixteenth, as shown in Table 6: Table 6:

European cardinal-ministers, 1400–160014 Date of

Name

State

Role in government

creation as cardinal

Henry Beaufort (1377–1444) Jean de Balue (1421–91) Pedro Gonzales de Mendoza (1428–95) John Morton (1420–1500)

England

Chancellor of England: 1403–4, 1413, 1424–6

1426

France

Almoner of France from 1464

1467

Castile

Chancellor of Castile, 1473–95

1478

England

Chancellor of England, 1487– 1500

1493

Codex Epistolaris, vol. 3, nr 38, pp. 49–51. Stephen Gunn, ‘Introduction’, in S. Gunn & P. Lindley (eds), Cardinal Wolsey: Church, State and Art (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 1–53; Margaret Sanderson, Cardinal of Scotland: David Beaton, c.1494–1546 (Edinburgh, 1986); Johann Sallaberger, Kardinal Matthaus Lang von Wellenberg (1468–1540): Staatsmann und Kirchenfürst im Zeitalter von Renaissance, Reformation und Bauernkriegen (Salzburg, 1997); Frank S. Tompa, Cardinal Thomas de Erdeud and His Clan: A Genealogical and Historical Revision (Pender Island, 2001); Eubel, vols 2–3; Harriss; ; E. Rummel, Jimenez de Cisneros: On the Threshold of Spain’s Golden Age (Tempe, Ariz., 1999). 13 14

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CHURCH, STATE AND DYNASTY IN RENAISSANCE POLAND

Georges d’Amboise (1460–1510) Tamás Bakócz (1442–1519) Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros

France Hungary

Castile

(1436–1519) Thomas Wolsey

England

(1471?–1530)

First minister of France, 1498– 1510 Chancellor of Hungary from 1490 Chancellor of Castile from 1495; regent of Castile, 1516–19

1498 1500

1507

Chancellor of England, 1515–29

1515

Imperial chancellor from 1508

1512

Chancellor of France from 1515

1527

Chancellor to Charles V, 1518–30

1529

Holy

Matthias Lang

Roman

(1468–1540)

Empire

Antoine Deprat

France

(1463–1535)

Spain/ Mercurino

de

Burgundy/

Gattinara

Holy

(1465–1530)

Roman Empire

David Beaton (1494?–1546)

Keeper of Privy Seal from 1529; Scotland

Chancellor of Scotland from

1538

1543 Burgundy/

Antoine de Granville (1517–86)

Spain/ Holy Roman

Keeper of Charles V’s Privy Seal from 1550

1561

Empire

Alongside these men, there existed a small and more ambiguous group of cardinalfavourites, clerics who dominated government or a political faction because of an individual monarch’s special favour, but who held no formal governmental office. These included Zbigniew Oleśnicki (effective regent of Poland 1434–47, named cardinal 1447), the Aragonese diplomat Joan Margaret I Pau (1433–84, named cardinal 1484), the Emperor Maximilian’s right-hand aide, Melchior von Meckau (1440?–1509, named cardinal in 1503), Louise of Savoy’s private advisor François

DYNASTIC BISHOPS AND CARDINAL-MINISTERS

189

de Tournon (1489–1562, named cardinal 1530) and Charles de Guise (1524–74, named cardinal 1547). For much of the fifteenth century, absentee cardinal-ministers such as Henry Beaufort of England or Jean de Balue of France were rare and highly controversial anomalies; English bishops argued furiously that the office of cardinal could only be held in Rome and had no meaning in ultramontane Europe.15 Notwithstanding such early local resistance, the cardinal-minister trend peaked in the two decades between 1490 and 1510: in these years, Hungary, France, the Empire, Castile and England all received at least one cardinal-minister, and sometimes two in quick succession. Although he enjoyed the title of cardinal-president of the Polish royal council and senate, Fryderyk Jagiellon was not, of course, a cardinal-minister: he never worked in the royal chancellery or held ministerial office. Nonetheless, there are far closer similarities between his career and those of cardinal-ministers such as Thomas Wolsey than there are between Fryderyk and fellow dynastic cardinals such as Ippolito d’Este of Ferrara. Firstly, the Renaissance cardinal-ministers never intended to decamp to Rome after their creation, in order to dance attendance on the papal monarchy as its courtiers. Instead, they preferred to stay put and use the prestige of the cardinalate in order to entrench their political position in national government in an ultramontane kingdom of their choosing. Like Fryderyk Jagiellon, cardinalministers such as Moreton, Wolsey, Amboise, Lang and Gattinara were permanent absentees from the papal court, and each of these individuals demonstrates the creeping nationalization of the cardinalate and its reinvention as a local, rather than a universal, office circa 1500. Absenteeism was not, however, the only important feature which Fryderyk Jagiellon shared with the cardinal-ministers. In common with them, he attempted to use his red hat in order to extend the Crown’s grip over local religious life, as governor of a ring-fenced national church. The cardinalate, an office which had evolved out of the parishes of Rome in late antiquity, was designed to be held in that city. A cardinal who resided outside the curia lost income, direct influence over the pope and could carry only very minimal powers with him beyond Italy – chiefly the right to ceremonial precedence and the authority to promulgate generous indulgence decrees of 100 days.16 As such, the red hat won by an absentee Quattrocento cardinal, such as Cardinal Fryderyk (or Cardinal Oleśnicki), was little more than a prestigious bauble. In order to remedy this, and turn the cardinalate into a genuinely powerful office in the kingdoms of Europe, cardinal-ministers typically sought appointment as a ‘legate a latere’. A cardinal-legate was the pope’s special representative in a given kingdom, with the right to wield the devolved powers of the Holy See. Depending on the specific terms of his legantine bull of appointment, he might hear any canon law case in the kingdom, make appointments to any local benefice, order visitations across all dioceses, license preachers, confer new constitutions on religious orders

Thomson, p. 64; N.A. Weber, ‘Jean de Balue’, in Catholic Encylopedia, vol. 2 (1907), pp. 241–2. 16 Antonovics; Lowe, pp. 46–52. 15

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and summon local church councils.17 He became, in effect, a mini-pope in his own kingdom. In all, seven of the thirteen cardinal-ministers created between 1400 and 1600 successfully had themselves named papal legates. Henry Beaufort was appointed legate to England in 1447, Jean Balue to France in 1482, Tamás Bakócz to Hungary in 1513, Georges d’Amboise to France in 1501, Thomas Wolsey to England in 1518, Antoine Deprat to France in 1530 and David Beaton to Scotland in 1544. In light of these trends, which reflect the growing determination and inventiveness of princes and their allies in trying to assert ever closer control over local churches, the following extract from the acts of the Wrocław cathedral chapter is instructive. The entry dates from 27 March 1500, the month in which Cardinal Fryderyk attempted to secure appointment as coadjutor-bishop of the Silesian see: And then their lordships [the canons] in agitation discussed the news they had recently received, and which they had heard for certain, that Fryderyk, the son of King Kazimierz of Poland, bishop of Kraków and cardinal, had send Mikołaj Czepiel, canon and provost of Wrocław, as his envoy to King Władysław, in order to ask if Fryderyk could become papal legate to the kingdoms of Hungary and Poland.18

This passage – the only surviving trace of a failed diplomatic project – represents an audacious attempt by Fryderyk Jagiellon to gain (via his older brother’s petition) substantive ecclesiastical powers not only in his native Poland but also in the large kingdom of Hungary, making him in effect a second pope for Central Europe. It is unsurprising that King Władysław, in barely restrained competition with his Polish relatives, declined to lend enthusiastic or consequential support for his youngest brother’s project. Fryderyk’s bid for legantine powers in 1500 was apparently quite unique among dynastic bishops or cardinals, and instead firmly links the Jagiellonian into the ‘cardinal-minister’ model. Moreover, here again we find Cardinal Fryderyk firmly in the mainstream of European trends in church–state relations: his petition to Buda in 1500 occurred in the very years (1493–1507) in which the number of ministers raised to the Roman cardinalate reached its peak. The Dynamics of Change How can we account for the fact that, in so short a space of time, Renaissance rulers switched from raising up the dynastic bishops of the 1470s and 1480s, and chose instead to campaign for the elevation of their chief ministers to the Sacred 17 See, for example, Peter Gwyn, The King’s Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (London, 1990), pp. 265–353; AKK, AA2, fos 300–300v; P. Blet, Histoire de la représentation diplomatique du Saint-Siège: des origines à l’aube du XIXe siècle (Vatican, 1982). 18 Acta Capituli Wratislaviensis, p. 14: ‘Item motum fuit inter dominos cplm’, qualiter pro certo haberetur, quod Fridericus filius Kazimiri regis Poloniae episcopus cracoviensis et cardinalis misisset ad regiam maiestatem doctorem Cepel canonicum crac. et praepositum wratislavien. pro impetranda legatione, ut posset fieri legatus apostolicus ad regna illa Hungariae et Poloniae.’

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College, from the 1490s and 1500s? The evolving policies of Emperor Charles V (1519–55) and his grandfathers illuminate this shift. In Spain, King Ferdinand II had showered Aragonese bishoprics on his illegitimate son Alfonso from the 1470s, while in Burgundy Maxilian I had installed an appointee from his wife’s Valois dynasty, Philip, as bishop of Utrecht in 1517. By the reign of Charles V, by contrast, it was Habsburg ministers who reached the highest ecclesiastical office: the Spanish chancellor Mercurino de Gattinara was named cardinal in 1529, while the keeper of Charles’s privy seal, Antoine de Granvelle, in his retirement enjoyed the see of Mechlin (1559) and a cardinalate. Is it purely coincidental that Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon sits squarely on this fault line between dynastic bishops and cardinalministers, or can he tell us something useful about the general direction of church– state relations in Renaissance states? One hypothesis which might explain this shift from kinsfolk to ministers is that Renaissance princes’ changing choice of agents to govern their local churches reflects fundamental changes in European secular government in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Here, we will have to sketch two rather crude models to illustrate the point. In a late medieval model of government, sovereign authority was firmly centred on, and exercised through, the person of the ruler himself. The monarch or duke, for example, dispensed justice in person, and the chancellery staff and royal seal travelled with him, because these only functioned as valid instruments of government if they existed in close proximity to the ruler. Where sovereignty was centred so strongly on the king’s physical person, the ruler’s kinsfolk were the most compelling possible agents to assert royal power over the church. For example, when the illegitimate son of Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy occupied the see of Cambrai in 1436, he was essentially acting as an extension of the duke’s own person, his ability to act as an authorized surrogate rooted in his intimate blood link with the ruler. The cardinal-minister, by contrast, was the product of a more tightly centralized, bureaucratized and more obviously early modern regime. The apparatus of government could increasingly function independently of the king’s personal participation, bureaucracy became bigger and more complex, and more effective in directing the lives of subjects on the ground. In this early modern model, where royal power was increasingly exercised through the machinery of government – the chancellery and its staff – it was the ruler’s first minister, rather than his son or brother, who now became the most obvious tool for subjugating the local church. In England, for example, the rise of Cardinal John Morton demonstrated that an individual could derive enough personal authority from his office as chancellor, and thus from the strength of early Tudor central government, to make him a mighty agent of royal power within the church, in spite of his relatively humble birth as the son of a minor Dorset landowner. Similarly, Cardinal Wolsey was reputedly the son of an Ipswich butcher; Tamás Bakócz of a Hungarian peasant. This hypothesis might explain why the one cardinal who sat most stubbornly on the boundary between these two trends – between dynastic bishops and cardinalministers – happened to be based in Poland. In Cardinal Fryderyk, the Polish Jagiellonians pushed the strategy of raising up dynastic prelates to its European apogee, and in doing so they revealed the limitations of their own royal power.

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Fryderyk Jagiellon was a dynastic cardinal who behaved like a cardinal-minister, a slightly hybrid figure on the European scene, precisely because the Crown in Kraków was not yet robust enough to produce a genuine cardinal-minister of its own, and Fryderyk (the would-be royal legate) tried to compensate for this with his own career. Yet again, we come up against the paradox that Poland’s Renaissance monarchy was keenly ambitious and vigorous, but existed within a largely hostile political culture. The Jagiellonians were too suspicious of their Polish elites to elevate any one subject to the giddy heights of cardinal-minister; they remembered the damage wrought by their great opponent, Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki (d. 1455) and the surprise political defections of Primate Oleśnicki the younger in 1492 and Bishop-chancellor Krzesław Kurozwęcki in 1501. The feeling of distrust was mutual: a year after Fryderyk’s death, in 1504, the Piotrków sejm passed the so-called ‘incompatabilia’ law, which banned any individual from holding more than one seat in the senate simultaneously. The 1504 law, at a stroke, theoretically uncoupled ministerial and episcopal office in Poland, in what has traditionally been seen as an early blow by the Polish lower parliament against the senate and Crown.19 This survey of data and trends has tried to show that, through the person of Fryderyk Jagiellon, Jagiellonian Poland was in the very vanguard of European church–state relations (or, put more precisely, the evolving relationship between Catholic priestly office and secular regimes) up until 1503. With the 1504 parliamentary statute, however, cardinal-ministers were effectively outlawed in Poland and the kingdom was pulled in quite a different direction to other European states. In Castile, for example, Queen Isabella had legally linked the office of royal chancellor with the archbishopric of Seville, making Castile’s primate her automatic first minister, and explicitly fusing ministerial state power with ecclesiastical office, linking the ‘national’ church with Crown institutions. The 1504 law provides an early hint that, in Poland, the apparently increasingly assured Jagiellonian Renaissance monarchy nursed within it the seeds of constitutionalism, parliamentarianism and so-called ‘noble democracy’ – but, as King Zygmunt sat with unusual security on his Polish throne from 1506, those threats still lay half a century away.

19 Volumina Legum, ed. J. Ohryzko (2 vols, St Petersburg, 1859), vol. 1, p. 135; Papée, Aleksander Jagiellończyk, p. 84.

Conclusion The career of Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468–1503) – the youngest son of King Kazimierz IV, bishop of Kraków, primate of Poland and Roman cardinal – provides a compelling case study in how Europe’s late fifteenth-century monarchies might build up the power of the Renaissance state by asserting closer control over local ecclesiastical structures. This trend, traditionally referred to as the growth of ‘national’ churches, had serious implications not only in the political and constitutional sphere, but also for the spiritual and cultural character of the Roman Catholic church on the eve of the Reformation. In the fifteenth century, the Polish Crown had undergone much the same processes of crisis, civil war and sudden political renaissance as monarchies elsewhere – in England, France, Aragon, Castile and Hungary. The Anjou rulers of Poland (1370– 99) and the first Jagiellonian king, Władysław-Jogailo (1386–1434), had conceded a mass of political privileges to the magnate class, including the right to elect kings, and noble power reached its peak during the ascendancy of Bishop Zbigniew Oleśnicki (between 1434 and 1444), who ran royal government with the help of a party of Kraków magnates. After the ascension of Kazimierz IV in 1447, Poland’s beleaguered Crown experienced a dramatic recovery. By 1490, regular taxation, the pacification of the magnate opposition, successful territorial expansion and dynastic union with Lithuania had rendered Poland’s monarchy stronger than ever before. Beneath the surface, however, Poland’s Renaissance Crown, like those elsewhere, remained vulnerable – still elective, without any medieval absolutist tradition to emulate and operating within a political culture (and church) dominated by oligarch ideas. It was into this scenario that the 20-year-old Fryderyk Jagiellon’s career was launched, with his election as bishop of Kraków in 1488, soon followed by his selection as archbishop of Gniezno and elevation to the Sacred College in 1493. As president of the senate and the king’s legal deputy, Cardinal Fryderyk provided the Jagiellonian monarchy with a formidable political tool. He helped deliver a Jagiellonian victory at the 1492 royal election, taxed Poland’s clergy for the Crown at unprecedented levels, extended Polish influence in Central Europe by trying to win sees outside the old Korona, packed cathedral chapters with his own supporters and attacked the privileges of the Polish nobility in public church trials of magnates. Acting in concert, King Jan Olbracht (1492–1501) and Cardinal Fryderyk set Poland firmly on the path towards a more autocratic monarchy. With Jan Olbracht’s death in 1501, however, Fryderyk was left alone to face a magnate backlash against Jagiellonian ‘tyranny’, led by a new magnate-bishop, Krzesław Kurozwęcki. Within the Polish province of the Catholic church, Cardinal Fryderyk launched a campaign of national religious reform, using ‘reformatio’ as a vehicle for creating a state-controlled church on the ground. From 1489 onwards, Fryderyk disciplined his cathedral clerics, launched episcopal inquisitions of the lower clergy, ordered

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visitations of monasteries and convents, and presided over fifteenth-century Europe’s most ambitious programme of diocesan liturgical printing. Fryderyk implemented a highly conservative reform, rooted in detection, punishment and the stringent application of canon law. This spiritual agenda had very worldly implications: it extended Fryderyk’s personal episcopal power at the expense of religious orders and cathedral chapters, exerted more penetrative forms of authority over the Polish Catholic community through royal control of printing and inquisition, and generally provided Fryderyk (and thus the Crown) with a pretext to intervene aggressively in the life of a church which had traditionally supported the magnate opposition, especially in Małopolska. Cardinal Fryderyk was also a keen propagandist for the Jagiellonian regime. The cardinal’s extensive and opulent collections of liturgical plate, vestments, reliquaries and illuminated manuscripts should be viewed alongside woodcuts, seals and heraldic carvings. Highlights of this image-making include the 1504 gold reliquary for Saint Stanisław, a gilded Tree of Jesse illumination in Fryderyk’s Gniezno missal, and Georg Stuchs’s 1490s woodcuts of the cardinal. In this visual display, Fryderyk proclaimed his own status as a hereditary prince, the Jagiellonians’ sovereignty as a ‘national’ dynasty and the sacral nature of earthly kingship – a combative regalist manifesto. Fryderyk appears to have deliberately emulated many of the treasures and iconographies created for Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki half a century earlier, and he appropriated in particular the medieval bishop, rebel and martyr Saint Stanisław (d. 1079), transforming an oligarch hero into a bona fide royalist saint. Fryderyk’s relationship with papal Rome starkly reveals which elements were stable in Polish rulers’ relations with the pontiffs and which were undergoing dramatic change in the last decades of the fifteenth century, a period traditionally viewed as one of precipitous ‘decline’ for the medieval papacy. In the two major areas of diplomacy (for example the crusading league of 1501) and the everyday administration of the church in Kraków and Gniezno (for example, papal provisions and the working of local ecclesiastical courts), papal power in Poland circa 1500 was easily thwarted and weakly felt. This, however, was merely a steady continuation of trends already apparent in earlier centuries; significantly, the advent of a Jagiellonian cardinal did nothing to dent papal influence further. In creating a royal primate, the Jagiellonians had therefore not intended Innocent VIII or Alexander VI to be the primary political casualties; it was not Rome which threatened effective Crown sovereignty over the Polish church, but rather local clerical elites, autonomous canons and renegade bishops. Rome’s active sanctioning of Fryderyk’s career was, however, genuinely new and striking because in entrusting the Polish church to an underage royal prince Renaissance popes were effectively rejecting a key principle of the eleventh-century Gregorian reform movement, with its insistence that secular government be kept out of the church. This new policy of support for hybrid figures such as Fryderyk seems to have been intimately linked to the papal dynasties’ own espousal of clerical nepotism from the 1470s. Both Polish kings and the popes, anxious to assert themselves against local oligarch challenge, embraced clerical nepotism together (the cardinal-nephew, the prince-primate) as a state-building tool in order to entrench their regimes, in an alliance of Renaissance monarchy.

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Cardinal Fryderyk died in the bishop’s palace in Kraków in March 1503, after a long illness. His death triggered a massive posthumous backlash by those in the Kraków church and magnate party who had resented the regalist coup against the church, and who expressed their fury at Fryderyk’s career through a lurid (and probably deeply symbolic) ‘black legend’, which cast the Jagiellonian cardinal as a drunkard who died of the French disease. Although Fryderyk was politically defeated by Krzesław Kurozwęcki in 1503, and his name muddied thereafter, something fundamental had arguably shifted in the Polish state. By the reign of King Zygmunt I (1506–48), Poland’s bishoprics were filled with regalist agents, lesser nobles drawn from the chancellery, many of them Fryderyk’s former staff and protégés. These men, led by Piotr Tomicki, continued Fryderyk’s religious reforms, closely perpetuated his royalist iconography within the church and publicly identified themselves with him. King Zygmunt was the first Jagiellonian monarch to benefit from a truly regalist, loyalist episcopate, and by 1539 he felt secure enough to defy the elective tradition and crown his ten-year-old son ‘vivente rege’. Although Fryderyk Jagiellon’s precise combination of royal and ecclesiastical titles and credentials was unique in fifteenth-century Europe, his career was part of a much wider political phenomenon. Between 1300 and 1600, some 43 sons, grandsons and brothers of kings were appointed bishops or cardinals, from Portugal to the Rhine Palatinate, from Naples to Scotland, as rulers established control over local churches by using kin who could act as extensions of their personal authority. In a European context, Fryderyk’s career is significant because it forms a bridge between these dynastic priests and the cardinal-ministers who would dominate the political landscape of sixteenth-century Europe. Like Thomas Wolsey and Georges d’Amboise, Fryderyk Jagiellon was a permanently absentee cardinal, a leading player in national government and a would-be papal legate to his home country. Fryderyk Jagiellon’s complete invisibility to date in modern historical literature on late medieval and early modern Europe is unfortunate. Fryderyk shows how far Renaissance rulers were willing and able to go, in asserting de facto state control over their local churches circa 1500. As such, Fryderyk Jagiellon provides a stepping stone not only to those Protestant princes who would later use the Reformation to seize power of the church outright, such as Henry VIII of England and Philip of Hesse, but also to the Counter-Reformation Catholic kings who would extract increasingly far-reaching concordats from the papacy at its medieval spiritual empire unravelled around it.1 Fryderyk Jagiellon, and royal ecclesiastics like him, suggest that closer state control of the church in the sixteenth century was not necessarily or uniquely the product of radical theological ruptures, but also a direct political legacy of the late medieval world and the ambitions of the Renaissance state. Between 1488 and 1503, then, Cardinal Fryderyk and his Jagiellonian relatives briefly created a church which was directly managed by the Crown, using bishoprics as a political vehicle to serve the interests of the Jagiellonian dynasty and enhance the institutional powers of the monarchy. This rare regalist interlude in Polish history is perhaps summed up in a single illumination, and it is only appropriate to end 1 Strauss; Alton Hancock, ‘Philip of Hesse’s view of the relationship of prince and church’, Church History 35 (1966): 157–69.

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our investigation of a life so rich in images and image-making with a picture. The three-volume gradual commissioned by King Jan Olbracht for Kraków cathedral in 1499 boasts a number of highly politicized paintings, including a miniature to accompany the introit ‘Nulla potestas nisi a Deo’, which shows King David and Pope Gregory the Great kneeling before God the Father (Figure 7). The image of the biblical king and medieval pope was commonly used in the fifteenth century as a meditation on the origins of church music (a great psalmist and a great early composer shown together) or, alternatively, as a commentary on harmony between secular and spiritual power.2 The image in the Kraków gradual has a particularly mordant resonance, however, because, as generations of Polish art historians have pointed out, the figure of King David is clearly a portrait of King Jan Olbracht himself. The face of the kneeling Pope Gregory has escaped the attentions of scholars, but it appears to be a portrait of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon, bearing a certain resemblance to the likeness of Fryderyk engraved on the upper panel of his Wawel tomb (Figure 2). If this reading is correct, the small gilded painting would instantly take on a range of new, more audacious meanings. In a kingdom where bishops and kings had so regularly been at war since the 1310s, this apparently innocuous image of David and Gregory amicably clasping hands could carry a sharp political message, proclaiming the defeat of the magnate party, the reinvention of the Polish church as a vessel of Jagiellonian rule and the extirpation of the legacy of bishops Jan Muskata, Grot, Bodzentyn and Zbigniew Oleśnicki. The image of the two men holding hands might explicitly link church and state, celebrating the unification of both under the Jagiellonian dynasty. Most surprising, the man who might be Fryderyk appears here in the guise of a pope, cheekily dressed up in pontiff’s clothing and a prominent three-tiered tiara, perhaps declaring his own absolute, untrammelled sovereignty over the church in Poland, depicting himself as a pope in the Jagiellonian lands. Whether or not this intriguing miniature formed part of Fryderyk Jagiellon’s immodest and extensive propaganda campaigns, his entire career shows that, even in a kingdom which would remain Catholic in the sixteenth century, state control over the church was rising rapidly and hungrily by 1500.

2

Miodońska, Rex Regum, pp. 74–83.

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Index

Abensberg, Heinrich von, 79, 110 Adalbert, Saint, see Wojciech Adelaide of Hesse, 14 Agricola, Rudolph, the younger, 159 Albrecht of Brandenburg (d. 1545), 5, 182 Albrecht Habsburg, king of Hungary, 20 Aldona of Lithuania, 14 Aleksander Jagiellon, king of Poland (1501– 06), 2, 7, 33, 37, 66, 109, 165, 155, 158–9, 161–2, 166–7, 170, 186 as grand duke of Lithuania, 42, 47, 134–5 elected king of Poland, 52–6 coronation of, 124–5, 111, 121 war with Muscovy, 56–9, 136 patronage of, 100 Alexander VI, pope, 2, 45, 102, 119, 127, 129–30, 132–8, 141, 144, 146–50, 153, 160, 180, 186, 194 Alfonso of Aragon (d. 1525), 5, 65, 146, 181,185, 186, 191 Algirdas, grand duke of Lithuania, 15–16 altar-priests, 66, 73–4, 85 altarpieces, 1, 100, 169–70 Alvaro da Luna, 35 d’Amboise, Cardinal Georges, 152, 188, 190, 195 Anjou dynasty, 14, 15 Anna of Cilli, 17–18 annates, 66, 138, 140 antiphonary, 73, 103, 119, 170 Augsburg, 78, 81 Austria, 32, 102, 116–17, 119 Aviz, Cardinal Jaime, 65 Bajezid II, Ottoman sultan, 30, 133, 145 Bakocz, Cardinal Tamas, 150, 188, 190–91 Balue, Cardinal Jean de, 187, 189, 190 Barbo, Cardinal Marco, 129, 141 Bartnicki, Mikołaj, 50 Baruchowski, Jan, 37, 39, 44, 62, 86 Basel, 67, 168

Council of, 19–20, 24, 27, 143, 147, 151 Beaton, Cardinal David, 152, 188, 190 Beatrice of Aragon, 31, 107 Beaufort, Cardinal Henry, 6, 151, 187, 189, 190 Białogród, 30, 46 Bishops, Polish, relationship with Crown, 13, 19, 22, 35–6, 153, 167–8, 171, 192, 196 political rights of, 25–6 election of, 26 changing social composition of, 166–8 defence of clergy by, 87–90 courts of audience, 82–5 Black Sea, 22, 30–31, 46, 130 Bnin, Piotr of, 166 Bodzenty, 13, 22, 196 Bodzentyn, 40, 110, 169 Bohemia, kingdom of, 17–18, 30–31, 33, 35, 40, 46, 61, 133 Bolesław I, king of Poland, 12, 123 Bolesław II, king of Poland, 122, 125 Bolesław III, king of Poland, 32 Bonfini, Antonio, 99, 114, 164 Borgia, Cesare, 133, 148 Giovanni, 127 Lucrezia, 127 Rodrigo, see Alexander VI Boryszewski, Andrzej Róża, 39, 41, 55, 63, 88, 114, 138 Bratislava, 49 breviary, 75–9, 82, 91, 110, 123, 168 Brixen, 81, 181, 183 Brześć, 19 Brzezie, Jan Lutek of, 26–7 Palatine of, 63, 88 Buda, 14, 16, 21, 31, 35, 52–3, 61, 99, 130, 131–2, 136, 150, 190. Calixtus III, pope, 145 Callimachus, 31, 35, 42, 45, 67, 142, 144 Camera Apostolica, 40, 66, 139

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Capistrano, Giovanni de, 93 cardinals, insignia of, 7, 24, 71, 97, 109, 152, 194 cardinal-ministers, 79, 187–92, 195 Carvajal, Cardinal Bernard de, 144 Castile, 4, 32, 36, 67, 92, 167, 187–9, 192–3 castles, 13, 40, 45, 51 Catherine of Anjou, 14 chalice, liturgical, 73, 103, 111 Celtis, Konrad, 92 censorship, 9, 96, 158–9, 164 Cesarini, Julius, 21–2, 144 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 188, 191 Charles VIII, king of France, 143–5 Charles-Robert, king of Hungary, 14 chasuble, 106–7 Chełmno, 29 Chotków, Paweł of, 49 Christina of Prague, 14 ciborium, 103 Ciołek, Erazm, 125, 134, 136, 166–9 Cisneros, Cardinal Jimenez de, 92, 188 clergy, disciplining of, 82–5, 160–61, 168–9 defended against nobles, 87–90 Codrul Cosminului, 48, 158 conciliarism, 20, 26, 142–3, 148 Constance, 78 council of, 17, 27, 136, 143, 151 Constantinople, 31, 46, 132 Conti, Sigismondo, 144, 149 cope, 106, 115, 121 Copernicus, Nicholas, 41, 99 Corvinus, Matthias, king of Hungary, 31–2, 35–6, 43, 185 Counter Reformation, 6, 96, 152, 171, 195 crosier, 101–2, 114, 121 crucifix, 102–3, 105, 115–16 crusades, 16, 18, 21–2, 46, 49, 130–34, 136, 144, 150–51, 166 funding of, 66, 131, 152 Czarnów, Janko of, 159 Czepiel, Mikołaj, 61, 137, 190 Częstochowa, 117, 125 dalmatic, 107 Danzig, 12, 17, 29, 31 Dębno, Jakub of, 27 Decius, Jodos Ludovicus, 165 diurnal, 75–6, 78–9

Długosz, Jan, 1, 11–12, 16–18, 20–21, 27, 33–6, 99, 116, 120, 122–3, 125, 157–9, 161, 165, 168 Dniester, 47 Dobrzyn, 13 Drzewicki, Maciej, 52, 56, 166–7 dynastic bishops, 5, 8, 65, 140–48, 179–86 Eichstatt, 78, 179, 185 Elbing, 29 Elgot Jan, 21 Elizabeth of Bosnia, 16 Elizabeth Habsburg, queen of Poland, 2, 30, 48, 53, 100–102, 104, 113, 116, 157, 165, 170 Elizabeth Piast, queen of Hungary, 14 Elizabeth of Pilcza, queen of Poland, 18, 23 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 92 Ermland, 28–9 see of, 41–2, 50, 61, 129–30, 136, 141 d’Este, Cardinal Ippolito, 144, 180, 182, 185, 189 Niccolo Maria, 182, 185 Eucharist, 72, 81, 101–3, 107, 111 Eugenius IV, Pope, 19–20, 24, 143, 148, 151 excommunication, 86, 89, 91, 123, 137 fabrica, 72–3 Farnese, Cardinal Alessandro, 144 feast days, 75, 105, 112, 117, 124–5 Ferdinand II, king of Aragon, 5, 34–5, 65, 144, 185, 191 Ficino, Marsilio, 92 Florence, 114, 182, 184, 186 St. Florian, 106, 120 Fraustadt, 15 Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, 38, 42 Frederick Hohenzollern, fiancé of Princess Jadwiga, 18, 23 French disease, 6, 155–62, 171, 195 Gąbin, 58 Gallus, Bernardinus, 62, 92 Gattinara, Cardinal Mercurino de, 188–9, 191 Gedimin, House of, see Jagiellonians Gediminas, 15, 16, 18 George Wettin, grand master, 50

INDEX Gniezno, 12, 13, 25, 105, 111 see of, 25–7, 40, 45, 75–7, 82, 87, 123 163, 166 cathedral chapter of, 44, 62, 65–6, 72, 80, 85, 88, 94, 101, 103, 108, 113, 123, 165 cathedral, 72–5, 107–8, 113, 119, 163–4, 170 Golden Bull, 34 goldsmiths, 99, 102, 104, 118 Golfo, Gasparo, 131–3, 135 Gonzaga, house of, 181–6 Górka, Łukasz of, 26, 63 Górka, Uriel of, 27, 62, 73, 82, 84, 88, 114, 139, 166, 169, 187 Górski, Stanisław, 155, 165 gradual, 73, 108, 117, 119, 196 Granvelle, Antoine de, 191 Gregorian reform, 81, 91, 96, 140, 153, 194 Gregory the Great, pope, 196 Gregory VII, pope, 3, 81, 96 Grodno, 42, Treaty of 17 Grodziski, Maciej, 156–7 Grot, Jan, 13, 22, 92, 196 Grunwald, Battle of, 11, 17, 34, 36 Gruszczyński, Jan, 26 Guise, Cardinal Charles de, 189 Habsburg, house of, 31, 102, 104, 106, 109, 116, 160, 184, 191 Halicz, 13 Haller, Johannes, 76, 79–80 Heilsberg, 41 Helen of Muscovy, 134–6, 151 Henry V, king of England, 106 Henry VII, king of England, 4, 32–3, 67, 147 Henry VIII, king of England, 195 heresy, 83–4 Hochfeder, Kasper, 76 Hungary, 14, 20, 30, 33–4, 36, 40, 43, 46–7, 61, 114, 130, 132, 147, 150, 180, 185, 188–90 unions with Poland, 14–15, 20, 31 humanist, 31, 42, 92, 159–60 Hus, Jan, 17 Hussites, 17, 30, 84, 151 Iłża, 40, 67, 89

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indulgence, 111, 133 inquisition, 83, 85, 87, 94–6, 169, 193–4 Innocent VIII, Pope, 26, 31, 39, 141 Isabella, queen of Castile, 4, 32, 33, 36, 147, 192 Ivan III, grand duke of Muscovy, 56, 134–5 Jadwiga of Anjou, queen of Poland, 15–17, 19, 34 Jadwiga, princess of Poland, 18–19, 23 Jadwiga of Sagan, 14 Jagiellon, Cardinal Fryderyk, tomb, 1, 170, 196 reputation, 6–7, 60, 154–65 overview of career, 8 sources for, 8–9 childhood, 38–9 election to see of Kraków, 39–40 entry into Kraków, 37, 45 as ‘princeps’, 40, 64, 113–15 and 1492 royal election, 43–4 receives higher priestly orders, 44 elected primate, 44–7 named cardinal, 45 taxes Polish church, 46, 49, 57, 65–7, 90–91, 140 relationship with Jan Olbracht, 47, 43–4, 48, 60 and Mazovia, 49–50 as interrex, 1501, 52–54 as regent of Poland, 56–60 quest for further ecclesiastical offices, 61, 190 promotes his clients, 62–3, 166–7 and royal council, 40, 63–4 as episcopal judge, 63–4 and powers of Crown, 64–9 depictions of, 1, 71, 95, 195–6 pastoral and reform activities, 71–97 as cultural patron, 99–125 will of, 101 and Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki, 1–2, 53–4, 118–24 and crusades, 130–34 and Helena of Muscovy, 134–6, titular church, 149 legacy in Poland, 165–72 career in European context, 179–92 Jagiellonian dynasty, rise of, 15–16, 28–31

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succession in Poland, 18–20, 23 party, 26–8, 35–6, 62–4, 68–9 disputes within dynasty, 43, 52–4 as cultural patrons, 100 heraldry of, 116 Jan Olbracht Jagiellon, king of Poland (1492–1501), 2, 7, 31, 33, 38, 65, 68, 109, 111, 125, 138–9, 141, 157–9, 165–7, 170, 185–6, 193 election of, 42–3 reputation, 46, 48 and Gniezno election, 44 as king of Poland, 46–58, 61, 64 as Renaissance monarch, 50–51 as cultural patron, 99, 104, 117–18, 196 and crusade, 130–34, 144 tomb of, 170 James IV, king of Scotland, 65, 182, 185–6 Jan of Lithuania, son of Zygmunt I, 183, 185 Janusz, Duke of Mazovia, 42–3, 49 Jarosław, Spytek of, 53 Jedlno, 19, 34 Kadłubek, Wincenty, 13, 122 Kalisz, castellan of, 53, 68 Kamieniec, see of, 25 Kazimierz the Great, king of Poland, 13–14, 17, 25, 30, 66, 72, 99, 115, 159 Kazimierz IV Jagiellon, king of Poland, 2, 7, 8, 12, 18, 38, 93, 95, 99–100, 116, 120, 129, 136, 141, 155, 157, 161, 166, 171, 187, 193 as grand duke of Lithuania, 22 as king of Poland, 23–31, 41 as Renaissance monarch, 32–6, 147, 153 Kazimierz Dolny, 51 Kiev, 15, 25 Metropolitan of, 134 Kilija, 30, 46 Kmita, Dobiesław, 25 Kobylin, Maciej of, 86–7 Kołomija, 30 Komorowo, Jan of, 48 Konarski, Jan, 62, 101, 104, 138, 165–9 Koniecpolski, Jan, 22 Königsberg, 29, 50 Konrad III, duke of Mazovia, 49, 50, 111 Kosice, 14–15, 34, 67

Kot, Wincenty, 20–21 Kotwicz, Mikołaj, 45, 62, 67 Kowal, 58 Kraków, 1–2, 12–14, 16, 18–19, 20, 27, 37–8, 42–3, 45, 48–9, 52, 57, 59, 69, 93, 99–100, 102, 106, 112, 131, 135, 158, 161, 167 castellans of, 25–8, 53, 59, 63 cathedral, on Wawel, 1–2, 15, 23, 27, 37, 39, 42, 45, 56, 59, 72–4, 100, 101, 103–5, 107, 111–12, 114, 117–21, 124, 131, 169–70, 196 cathedral chapter of, 26–7, 39, 62, 72–3, 91, 94, 101, 105, 108, 135, 137, 151, 161 congress of, 13 liturgy of, 75–81, 111 see of, 11, 21–2, 24–7, 39–40, 58, 73, 84–8, 94, 102, 110, 120, 138, 160, 164, 168–9 starosta general of, 21, 51 wojewoda of, 25–6, 63 Kraków, University of, 13, 19, 28, 37, 39, 86, 91–2, 95, 104, 109, 119 Krewo, Treaty of, 16–17, 23, 31, 53, 55 Kromer, Marcin, 6, 171 Krzyżanowski family, 22 Księska, Jadwiga, 22 Kujawy, 13, 27 Kurozwęcki, Adam, 58 Dobiesław, 58 Jan, 58 Krzesław, 28, 63, 68–9, 74, 84, 138, 153, 158, 165, 187, 192–3, 171, 195 alienated from Jagiellonians, 51–4, 89 at 1501 election, 54–6 at height of power, 58–9 relationship with Łaski, 156, 159, 162–4 Mikołaj, 28, 51, 62–4, 89, 96 Piotr, 28, 51–2, 54, 56 Lang, Cardinal Matthias, 152, 188–9 Lateran Council IV, 66, 91 Lateran Council V, 163 laver, 103 Lech, 17 Legates, papal, 21–2, 61, 132, 135–6, 150–51, 163, 189–90, 192, 195 Leopold of Austria, 180, 183

INDEX Levoca, conference of, 46, 66, 111, 114 Lipowiec, 40 Lipowiecki, 137, 139 Lithuania, 11, 22–3, 30, 42, 46–7, 49, 53, 55–8, 111, 114, 116, 132, 136, 162 late medieval expansion of, 15–16, paganism, 16, 20 church in, 25, 134–5 heraldic arms of, 105, 1–7, 109 unions with Poland, see Polish Crown, unions with Lithuania liturgical books, 75–81, 110, 168 Livonia, 16 Louis XI, king of France, 4, 32–3 Louis XII, king of France, 144 Louis of Anjou, king of Poland and Hungary, 14–15, 3–4, 52 Lublin, 14, 86, 94, 100 castellan of, 58, 63, 89 Lubrański, Gregorz, 138 Jan, 50, 55, 77, 92, 138, 165–70 S. Lucia in Septem Soliis, church of, 2, 45, 63, 150, 160 Lula, Marian, 155, 160 Lwów, 48 castellan of, 63 see of, 25, 34, 40–41 Łaski, Jan, 113, 156, 158–9, 162–4, 166, 168–9, 171 Łęczyca, 19, 90 Łowicz, 44–5, 48, 89, 135 mace, processional, 99, 101–2, 115, 119, 121 Maciej of Miechów, see Miechowita Maciejowski, Samuel, 113 Magna Carta, 34 magnates, of Poland, 2, 4, 16–17, 20–22, 24, 26–7, 29, 55, 58, 62–3, 123, 115, 125, 162, 171 political culture of, 33–4, 162–3 privileges of, 14–15, 19, 23, 55–6, 67 Małopolska, 16, 19, 21–2, 24–5, 29–30, 53, 57–8, 62, 90, 101, 108–9, 112, 121, 153, 171, 194 manuscripts, illuminated, 101, 107–8, 116–17, 119, 165, 167, 194 Manutius, Aldus, 92 Maria of Anjou, 15, 19

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Marienburg, 17, 29, 52 wojewoda of, 30 Martin V, pope, 119, 142, 145, 151 Martinus, Martin, 102, 104–5, 119, 121 Mazovia, duchy of, 12–13, 23, 47, 61, 84, 99 and Jan Olbracht, 49, 185 Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, 31–3 Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor, 180 Meckau, Melchior von, 188 Medici, house of, 147, 182, 184, 186 Melsztyn, Spytek of, 22, 59 mercenaries, 5, 29, 32, 43, 49, 52 Miechowita, 9, 43, 48, 50, 54, 57, 60, 64, 67, 87, 89, 96, 104, 113, 131, 157–61, 165, 171 Mielnica, 55, 58 constitution of, 55–6, 125, 162 union of, 55, 162 Mierzyniec, Arnolphus of, 39 Milan, 144, 149, 181–2, 184–6 ministers, of the Polish Crown, 20, 25, 28, 52, 166, 187, 192 missals, 71, 76–81, 97, 102, 107–8, 110, 114, 117–18, 121, 125, 168, 172, 194 mitre, 105–6, 106, 109, 114–15, 119, 121 Moldavia, 25, 30, 46, 48–9, 164 Moldavian campaign, 1497, 46–9 monasteries, see also religious orders, 86–7, 94–5, 112, 169, 194 Morton, Cardinal John, 78, 144, 149, 187, 189, 191 Muscovy, 16, 56, 134–6 musical instruments, 73 Muskata, Jan, 13, 196 Muszyna, 40 Myszkowski, Piotr, 52 ‘national churches’, 3–5, 71, 93–7, 128, 137 Nepotism, see also dynastic bishops, 145–8, 153, 194 Nicholas V, pope, 145, 151 Niepołomice, 40–41 Nieszawa, 29 ‘noble democracy’ 32, 192 Nobility, see Magnates Nowogródek, 18 Nowy Korczyn, 57, 59

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Nuremburg, 1, 76, 112, 114, 170 Oleśnicki, Jan, 19 Oleśnicki, Jan Głowacz, 20–23 Oleśnicki, Cardinal Zbigniew, career, 2–3, 19, 51, 53, 55, 69, 87, 95, 110, 155, 161–3, 165, 169–70, 188, 192, 196 and Jagiellonian succession, 19–20 as de facto ruler of Poland, 20–22, 58 conflict with Kazimierz IV, 23–4, 163 cardinalate, 20, 24, 151–2, 189 in Długosz’s writings, 11, 33–4, 37, 122–3, 168 party of, 25–7, 29, 53, 59, 62, 68, 147, 164 as cultural patron, 73–4, 103, 113, 118–21 relationship with Rome, 151–2 tomb, 1–2 Oleśnicki, Zbigniew, the younger, 27, 82, 84–5, 88, 153, 166, 192 Opatówek, 45 Oporowski, Andrzej, 166 Jan, 88 Władysław, 24, 26, 123, 166 Orthodox church, 15, 25 union with Rome, 134–6 Otto III, Holy Roman Emperor, 12 Ottomans, 21, 30, 46–9, 130, 143, 145, 151, 166 attacks on Poland by, 48–9 pallium, 45, 107 Pampowski, Ambroży, 28 Papacy, 26, 127–53 and Polish dioceses, 137–40 papal bulls, 27, 45, 130–31, 138–9, 141, 149 papal collectors, 137, 139 Papal States, 43, 144–5, 147, 186 Pau, Cardinal Joan Margaret I, 188 Paul II, pope, 145, 186 Perkunas, 16 St. Peter’s pence, 66, 139–40 Philip IV, king of France, 3, 35 physicians, 157, 159–60 Piast dynasty, 12–13, 15, 19, 23, 34, 42, 49–50, 61, 115–17, 125, 155, 163 Piccolomini, Cardinal, 137

Aeneas Silvius, 151 Pilecki, Jan, 23, 25, 63 Pilgrimage, 4, 44, 50–51, 112, 120, 124, 158 Pinczów, 21, 27 Piotrków, 22, 24, 39, 42–4, 49, 54, 55–6, 58, 157, 60, 162, 192 Klemens of, 44, 76, 80, 85, 91, 108, 170 plate, liturgical, 73–4, 101–2, 111, 113–14, 116, 124, 194 Płock, see of, 25, 27, 49–50, 61, 73, 166, 168, 185 Podiebrad, George, 30 Podolia, 13, 19, 30, 47–8, 53, 55, 66, 132 Pogorski, Stefan, 88–9, 91 Polish church, structure of, 25 see also bishops Polish monarchy, origins of, 12–13 in writings of Długosz, 33–4 late medieval succession crises, 14–15, 17–20 and its ministers, 191–2 elective principle, 15, 20, 33 relationship with Rome, 128–36, 152–3 as Renaissance monarchy, 145–53 taxation by, 29, 46, 57 union with Lithuania, 16–17, 19, 22–3, 55, 162–3 Pomerania, 29 pontifical, 106–9, 119, 121, 124–5, 167 Poznań, 19, 114, 123, 139 cathedral chapter of, 66–7, 72, 74, 132, 162 see of, 25, 27, 83–5, 88, 112, 160, 165, 169, 166, 168–9, 183 wojewoda of, 26, 55 Prague, 17, 30 Articles of, 17–18 Prandota, 120 Prazmow, Mikołaj of, 139 printing, of liturgy, 75–81, 110, 112, 166, 194 Prussia, 17, 28–9, 42, 129–30 Przemyśl, 47 see of, 25, 166 Przemysław II, 115 Radłów, 40 Radom, 42

INDEX Raptyński, Jan, 89 Reform, ecclesiastical, 8, 64, 71, 74, 80–81, 85, 90–97, 156, 161, 163, 168–9, 171, 193–4, 195 Reformation, 93, 97, 128, 193, 195 Regency council, 20 Religious orders, Cistercians, 93, 169 Benedictines, 86, 94–5, 169 Brigittines, 86, 93–5, 169 Dominicans, 83–4, 131, 156–7 Franciscans, 48, 93, 131, 145 reliquaries, 73, 101, 103–5, 111–15, 120–24, 169, 194 Renaissance monarchy, 4–6, 8, 12, 32–6, 67–9, 147–8, 190–91 Richard II, king of England, 25 Rome, city of, 27, 35, 39, 44–5, 50–51, 66, 107, 120, 129–30, 132, 135–7, 143–4, 147–51, 158, 163, 166–7, 186, 189 Royal chancellery of Poland, 2, 19, 23, 28, 50, 64, 115, 136, 162, 167, 189 Royal council of Poland, 17–18, 23, 26–8, 30, 55–6, 63 Functions of, 24–5, 40 Royal Prussia, 29, 41–3, 49–50, 53, 58, 61, 129, 132, 141 royal saints, 35 royal seal, 23, 65, 109, 191 Rovere delle, family, 145–7 Rozemberg, Mikołaj, 130 Rozpiera, castellan of, 28 Ruthenia, 13, 19, 57, 66 Rzeszowski, Jan, 27, 39, 75–6, 78–9, 80–81, 161 Sacranus, Jan, 37 Samostrzelnik, Stanisław, 170, 172 Sandomierz, 21, 24, 47, 137, 169 castellan of, 21, 51, 63 wojewoda of, 21, 53 Sangiorgio, Cardinal Giovanni, 138 Saxony, 50, 65, 146, 182, 184–5 Scherenburg, Rudolph von, 78–81, 110 schism, 17, 20, 128, 143–4 Schoeffer, Peter, 75–6 Schynagel, Nicolaus, 92

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sejms, 19–20, 22, 27, 40, 42–3, 46, 49, 51, 54, 57, 64, 66, 89, 122, 158, 162, 192 sejmik, 23, 49, 57, 59, 162 senate, see royal council Sforza, Cardinal Ascanio, 146, 149, 182, 186 Siete Partidas, 35 Sienno, Dobiesław of, 21 Jakub of, 27, 34 Sieradź, castellan of, 51, 89–90, 63 palatine of 52 Siewierz, 40 Sigismund of Luxembourg, 15, 34 Silesia, 12–14, 25, 31, 40, 61, 89, 190 Sixtus IV, pope, 145–6, 150, 185 Skałka, 120–22, 124, 170 Sławków, 40 Słomowski, Jan, 101, 104–6, 113–14, 118 Smoleńsk, 15, 31 Soderini, Francesco, 171 St. Stanisław, 39, 102, 104, 106–7, 110, 112–13, 115, 118, 120–25, 163–4, 169–70, 172, 194 Stefan of Moldavia, 30–31, 47 Stewart, Andrew, 182, 185–6 Alexander, 65, 182 Strasz, Jan, 37 Strzempiński, Tomasz, 26–7, 118 Subsidium charitativum, 47, 57, 66–7, 132, 140 Suceava, 47–8 state-building, (see also Renaissance monarchy), 5, 8, 38, 64, 68, 95, 147, 194 statutes, ecclesiastical, 73–4, 91–2, 94, 163, 168–9 Stuchs, Georg, 76–7. 79–81, 102, 110, 112, 115, 120, 123, 170, 172, 194 synods, 47, 66, 81, 90–91, 93, 163, 168–9 syphilis, see French disease Szamotulski, Andrzej, 53, 55, 68 Szekesfejervar, 31 Szydłowiecki, Krzysztof, 166 Tarnowski, Jan Feliks, 25 Tartars, 28, 48–9, 53, 57, 130, 132, 144 Teutonic Knights, 11, 13, 16–17, 29–30, 42, 47, 49–50, 52, 72, 129–31, 133, 151 Tęczyński, Jan, 29

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Thirteen Years’ War, 29–30, 66, 129–30 Thorn, 29, 41, 52 Treaty of (1411), 17 Treaty of (1466), 29–30, 129 Tomicki, Piotr, 62, 68, 92, 113–14, 156, 161, 165–70, 172 Tournon, Francois de, 189 True Cross, relics of, 104–5 Tungen, Nicolaus, 41, 129 Turski, Jan, 137, 139 tyranny, 32, 55–6, 122, 124–5, 193 Uniejów, 45 Urban VI, pope, 130 St. Ursula, 104–5 Vaclav IV, king of Bohemia, 17 Varna, battle of, 21–2, 26–7, 31, 35, 39, 46, 133 Venice, 76, 80, 92, 130–31, 133, 135, 144, 149 vestments, ecclesiastical, 73–4, 101, 105–7, 111, 113–14, 124, 194 vicars, 66, 73–4, 85, 91, 112 Vilnius, 22–3, 25, 39, 53, 134–5, 162, 185 Virgin Mary, 39, 117, 119 visitations, 83, 87, 91, 94, 168–9, 189, 194 Vistula, 1, 69 Vyszegrad, 14, 33 Vytautas (Witold), 17, 27 Vytenis, 15 Watzenrode, Lukas, 30, 41, 43, 129, 141 Wawel cathedral, see Kraków cathedral St. Wenceslas, 106, 72, 75 Wielkopolska, 12, 25–9, 41, 48–9, 58, 87, 112, 115, 162, 165, 170 Wiślica, 19 Władysław-Jogaila, grand duke of Lithuania and king of Poland (1386–1434), 2, 12, 15–16, 23, 26, 68, 86, 95, 100, 116, 122, 130, 133, 136, 151, 155, 193 at Grunwald, 11 as ruler of Lithuania, 16

as king of Poland, 16–20 in writings of Długosz, 33–4, 122–3, 159 Władysław Jagiellon, king of Bohemia and Hungary (d.1516), 2, 30–31, 46, 49, 99, 103, 106, 130, 35, 144, 160, 164 and 1492 Polish election, 42–3 and 1501 Polish election, 52–4 blocks Cardinal Fryderyk’s ambitions, 61, 190 Władysław Jagiellon III, king of Poland and Hungary (d.1444), 12, 18, 20–22, 24, 26, 52, 120, 133 Władysław Łokietek, king of Poland (d.1333), 13, 15–16, 18, 115 Włocławek, 163 see of, 7, 25–7, 58, 61, 69, 51, 74, 77, 82–6, 88, 132, 138, 160, 162, 166, 187 St. Wojciech, 44, 72, 75, 106, 110, 120, 123, 163, 170 Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas, 6, 152, 188–91, 195 Wołyń, 13 woodcuts, 7, 76–8, 81, 97, 101–2, 109–10, 112, 115, 120–23, 162, 169–70, 172, 194 Wróblewski, Mikołaj, 52 Wrocław, see of, 25, 61, 81, 190 Wschowa, 13 Wspinek, Piotr, 93 Würzburg, 78–80, 110, 112 Zanthey, Zygmunt, 135–6 Zduny, 48 Złotkowski, Jan, 108, 124 Zofia Holszańska, queen of Poland, 18–20, 23, 100, 113, 120, 158 Zygmunt August Jagiellon, king of Poland (d.1572), 171 Zygmunt I Jagiellon, king of Poland (d.1548), 1–2, 38, 46, 52, 101, 118, 131, 155–6, 162–8, 170–72, 183, 185, 195 Zygmunt Korybut, 18