Introduction

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