Things Kings Do for Love | Marek Kobryń

Things Kings Do for Love

“It was a love story […] He quietly accepts his suffering, never forgiving himself for putting his beloved wife through such torture in her final moments.” This is how British actor Paddy Considine describes the inner mechanics of his praised role as King Viserys I Targaryen in a recent HBO show House of The Dragon. This level of affection and dedication for the late wife bears some striking similarities to the attitude shown by Sigismund Augustus, King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania during the period known in Polish history as the Golden Age.

King Sigismund was being prepared for his role as a future monarch from a very young age. By the instigations of his mother Bona Sforza, he was crowned King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania while his father King Sigismund I was still alive and kicking. In 1546 Sigismund got married to Elizabeth of Austria, sister of Emperor Ferdinand I of Habsburg. Only two years later, the marriage came to an end, allegedly because young Queen Elizabeth was poisoned by the Queen Mother.

King Sigismund’s first marriage was arranged out of political necessity rather than a genuine affection between the future spouses. The case was quite different with the second marriage of the Polish king.

After the death of his first wife, the king fell madly in love with Barbara Radziwiłł, the sister of one of the most powerful Lithuanian magnates. This union, although founded on true and strong mutual passion, was opposed by practically everyone; from the nobility, through the court, to the king’s own mother. Unfortunately for the lovers, Barbara died only five months after her coronation. Although the cause of her passing was attributed to a fatal illness, some believed that the Queen Mother once again had assisted her daughter-in-law’s demise. However grief-stricken, the king had to marry once again – once again out of political necessity. If Sigismund’s first marriage was deemed unhappy, then his third was clearly a disaster. To put it mildly, the king certainly did not hold his wife Catherine of Austria in high regard, with some even gossiping that the new queen repelled him physically. Was that the reason or did the king still love the late Barbara Radziwiłł? One can only speculate. However, the fact remains that Sigismund did not attend to his third wife despite pleadings coming from the Polish senate and even direct begging on the part of some of the deputies of the lower house of the Polish parliament. Here the consequences of such behavior come to the foreground. Since king Sigismund was the last male member of the Jagiellonian dynasty, a dynasty that ruled both the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania since the Union in Krewo in 1385, the connection between Poland and Lithuania would be severed after his death. Fearing that the Grand Duchy of Lithuania would eventually fall victim to the aggressive Moscovites state in the East if stripped of Polish help, Sigismund came up with an idea to bind Poland and Lithuania politically with the 1569 Union of Lublin, which brought those two countries together for the next two hundred years.

Had King Sigismund’s love life been a little bit more fortunate, enough for him to sire a son or a daughter with one of his wives, the subsequent stricter union between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania would not have been necessary. The king would not have had to incorporate the South-Eastern lands of the Grand Duchy, whose territories would encompass most of present-day Ukraine, into the Kingdom of Poland, all in an effort to force the Lithuanian nobility to agree to the union. After the incorporation, the rich lands of Ukraine became widely open for the numerous Polish nobility, who answered the call and emigrated to the Eastern frontier in search of wealth and fortune. And thus Sigismund’s love life had a direct and profound influence on the history of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine.