ABSTRACT
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?
