ABSTRACT
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 PolishLithuanian armies and the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald (Tannenburg) on 15 July 1410, Długosz recounts the following incident involving a king and a bishop:
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.
