ABSTRACT
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
in Polish politics; like Zbigniew Oleśnicki before him, he lingered as a monumental ghost in the political landscape.
