Abstract
Ladislaus II Jagiełło (1386–1434). Ladislaus II Jagiełło is the founder of the Jagiellonian dynasty that had ruled over Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (until 1572), Bohemia (1471–1526) and Hungary (1440–1444, 1490–1526). A Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1377, and from 1386 a king of Poland and lord of Lithuania, which he ruled jointly with his cousin Witold (Vytautas), the son of Kęstutis. Five medieval portraits of Jagiełło survive, four of which date from the period of his reign in the Polish–Lithuanian state and one was executed posthumously. The earliest image, on Jagiełło’s Great Seal, was made in connection with his coronation as king of Poland (1386). Two portraits in the Holy Trinity Chapel at the Castle of Lublin (1418) are part of a wall paintings scheme commissioned by the monarch and executed by a team of painters brought from Ruthenia. Furthermore, the sumptuous tomb (before 1430) in Cracow was commissioned by the king. Its top slab bears an effigy of Jagiełło with his suggestively rendered countenance, which undoubtedly reflects the actual facial features of the elderly monarch. An image of the king represented as one of the Three Magi in a panel of an altarpiece in the tomb chapel of Casimir IV Jagiellonian, Jagiełło’s son and his successor on the Polish throne, dates from 1470. The chapel dedicated to the Holy Cross, erected at Cracow Cathedral, was in all likelihood commissioned by Casimir himself and his consort Elizabeth of Austria.
Highlights
Louis of Hungary, king of Poland and Hungary, and granddaughter of Ladislaus the Short, the last-but-one king of Poland from the Piast dynasty), Jagiełło, in an oath taken before the coronation, pledged to adopt the Latin-rite Christianity along with the entire Lithuania, to join Lithuania to Poland and to restore to the Polish Crown the lands lost by Poland to the Teutonic Knights during the reign of the extinct Piast dynasty and the Angevins (for the text of the oath see [2] (p. 2); for the circumstances of Jagiełło’s accession to Polish throne and the commitments made by him at the time see [3,4,5])
The idea of Jagiełło’s contractual-elective rulership as a successor to the Piast dynasty on the Polish throne and a lord of Lithuania was displayed in the Great Seal and on the royal tomb, executed at the time when the monarch tried to secure the succession for his sons
This seal represents a novel type in Polish sigillography, conveying the idea of Jagiełło’s contractual-elective rule as a successor to the Piasts on the Polish throne and simultaneously a lord of Lithuania, through an image of the enthroned monarch surrounded by a group of heraldic emblems of the state and its lands
Summary
Historical narratives often presented Jagiełło as an uncouth heathen, uneducated, superstitious and obtuse This has resulted, to some degree, from the image of the king created by the great Polish chronicler Jan Długosz, who was biased against the Jagiellonians, considering them as ‘aliens’ who replaced the ‘natural lords of Poland’, that is, the Piasts, and did not even hesitate to write slanderous statements and gossip about them in his Encyclopedia 2022, 2, 514–529. The idea of Jagiełło’s contractual-elective rulership as a successor to the Piast dynasty on the Polish throne and a lord of Lithuania was displayed in the Great Seal (which he had used since shortly after the coronation throughout his entire reign) and on the royal tomb, executed at the time when the monarch tried to secure the succession for his sons (which was supposed to be based on the principle of election by the representatives of the estates, the rich figural and heraldic programme of the tomb-chest, partly inspired by the design of the Great Seal). It attests to the fact that the memory of the dynasty’s founder was kept alive during the reign of Jagiełło’s son and is an expression of the dynastic identity of the Jagiellonians that was taking shape at that time
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