Catherine Jagiellon, Her Mother's Daughter

Catherine Jagiellon, queen of Sweden (born 1 November 1526)

I have already posted about two of Catherine Jagiellon's sisters, Isabella, queen of Hungary, and Anna, queen of Poland. (A fourth sister, Sophia, would become duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg.) 

A miniature of Catherine Jagiellon,
painted in 1563 by Cranach the Younger

Born in Krakow, Catherine was the fifth child (and fourth daughter) of Sigismund I, king of Poland, and his wife, Bona Sforza. 

In 1562, Catherine was married to John Vasa, duke of Finland, thus becoming duchess of Finland. According to some sources, they eloped; at the very least, they seem not to have married with the kind of permission expected for royal marriages. It did not help that John Vasa was Protestant, Catherine, Catholic. John's half-brother, King Erik XIV of Sweden, declared war on John the next year, captured the couple, and imprisoned them in Sweden. 

Although offered the opportunity of returning to Poland, Catherine remained with her husband, giving birth to two children while being held in Gripsholm Castle. Her daughter, Isabella, was born in 1564 but died in 1566. Sigismund, born in 1566, would later become king of both Poland (1587-1632) and Sweden (1592-99). 

In 1567, John and Catherine were released from their imprisonment. An unpopular Eric (who, among other things, was thinking about separating Catherine from John and sending her off to Russia and a disappointed suitor, Ivan IV "the Terrible") was deposed, and John Vasa, duke of Finland, became John III, king of Sweden.

Catherine's Catholicism was always viewed with some suspicion in Protestant Sweden, particularly after her husband attempted a religious reformation, the "Red Book," that would blend both faith traditions and reintroduce some Catholic customs, including the use of Latin in church ceremonies, into the Swedish church, and he allowed Catholic convents to once again receive novices. Catherine's children--Sigismund and a daughter, Anna Vasa, born in 1568--were raised in the Catholic faith, Sigismund sent to a Jesuit institution in the Polish city of Bransberg. (After her mother's death, Anna would convert to the Lutheran faith.)

As an interesting link to an institution we've discussed before, Catherine supported the now-declining Vadstena Abbey, founded by Birgitta of Sweden and once the home of Birgitta's daughter, Catherine of Vadstena, who had been its abbess and who had had St. Birgitta's remains moved from Rome to the abbey.

The king and queen of Sweden would also spend considerable effort trying to gain Catherine's Sforza inheritance, which she should have received after her mother's death. They were not successful.

Catherine Jagiellon, queen of Sweden, died on 16 September 1583. Her son, Sigismund, would become king of Sweden in 1592, but he would be deposed after only seven years of rule at least in part because of suspicions about his Catholic upbringing.

Update, April 2022: For the HistoryExtra podcast episode "The Jagiellonians, the Dynasty that Shaped Central Europe," click here. 

Anna Jagiellon, "By the Grace of God, Infanta of the Kingdom of Poland"

Anna Jagiellon, queen of Poland and grand duchess of Lithuania (died 9 September 1596)

Anna Jagiellon was the sister of a woman whom we have met before, Isabella Jagiellon, queen of Hungary. Anna would also become a queen regnant, elected queen of Poland in 1575.

Anna Jagiellon,
in her coronation robes,
Sigismund's Chapel,
Wawel Cathedral, Cracow

Although the Jagiellons were a remarkable family, ruling over many central European territories, states, and kingdoms, including Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, and Bohemia, they are much less well known than their contemporaries, at least to those of us who speak English. We are obsessed with the Tudors, most obviously, and are likely to know more about the Valois or even the Habsburgs than we do about the Jagiellons.

But the powerful dynasties of western Europe were well aware of the influence of the Jagiellons. Jagiellon daughters were married into royal families with names and geographical homes we may be more familiar with-- Anna's sister Sophia, for example, became the wife of a German duke, and her sister Catherine, became the queen of Sweden. 

And many daughters of royal families with names and geographical homes we may be more familiar with married into the Jagiellon family--Anna, Isabella, Sophia, and Catherine were the daughters of Bona Sforza, herself the daughter of the duke of Milan. Other Jagiellon brides came from the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire, from Foix and Anjou in France, from Russia, and from Aragon.

As for Anna, the information I have is, unfortunately, very limited. She was born in Cracow on 18 October 1523 to Sigismund, the king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuana, and his wife, Bona Sforza. Sigismund had two daughters with his first wife, Barbara Zápolya, who died in 1515, and would have six children with Bona Sforza, whom he married in 1517--Anna was Bona's fourth child and third daughter. (Sigismund also had at least three children with a mistress, a son who became a bishop and two daughters who made well-connected marriages.)

I am assuming that, like her sister, Isabella, Anna would have received an excellent education that included the study of Polish, Italian, Latin, and, like her siblings, a training in politics. After her father's death in 1548, Anna and her sister Catherine moved with their mother from Cracow to Masovia, a duchy in the northeast of Poland, at least in part because of the turmoil surrounding the secret marriage of the new king (their brother Sigismund II) to Barbara Radziwill, a Calvinist. (Bona Sforza did not approve--she had been busy negotiating for his marriage to Anne of Ferrara.)

But by 1551, the unfortunate Barbara Radziwill had died (Bona was suspected of having poisoned her), and although Bona and her son were "reconciled," she decided to return to her Italian duchy of Bari. (You have to wonder about the reconciliation with Sigismund II, though, since he opposed his mother's departure and threatened to imprison her.) After their mother's return to Italy, Anna and Catherine remained in Masovia. 

Anna Jagiellon after 1586

While her elder sisters, Isabella Jagiellon and Sophia Jagiellon, had been married at the ages of twenty and thirty-three, respectively, and her younger sister, Catherine, at age thirty-six, Anna did not marry until 1576, when she was fifty-two years old.

It was then that her quiet life in Masovia changed. In 1572, her brother had died, leaving no male heir behind. Since rule in Poland and Lithuana was determined by election rather than inheritance--much less primogeniture--the parliaments of Poland and Lithuana elected the Valois son of Henry II of France and Catherine de' Medici as the new king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania. He was elected, at least in part, with the understanding that he would marry Anna Jagiellon.

But once elected and in Poland, Henry did not marry Anna, and by June of 1574, he was gone, back to France, where he had become King Henry III after the death of his brother.

It was at this point that Anna asserted her political significance, adopting the Spanish title of infanta, certainly signifying her sense of herself as heir apparent to the Polish throne. She referred to herself as "Anna Dei Gratia Infans Regni Poloniaeas," or "Anna, by the Grace of God, Infanta of the Kingdom of Poland." 

In 1575, a new candidate for the king of Poland emerged. Stephen Báthory, prince of Transylvania. His election was difficult--there was also a Habsburg candidate--but the view that there should be a Polish king for Poland won out. Polish electors decided that Anna would become the monarch of Poland and that she would marry Báthory, who would be king in jure uxoris--that is, by or through his wife's right. In December 1575 the two were elected as co-rulers. Their coronation as rulers of Poland and Lithuania took place on 1 May 1576. (Their marriage seems to have been primarily a formal affair.)

After the death of Stephen Báthory on 12 December 1586, Anna did not continue to rule as queen and grand duchess. She became the last Jagiellon--her nephew Sigismund Vasa, the son of her sister Catherine (and her husband, King John of Sweden), was elected as king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania.

Anna Jagiellon spent the final ten years of her life in Warsaw, where she oversaw the building of many fine tomb monuments--she also oversaw the construction of her mother Bona Sforza's tomb in Bari, where she had died in 1557. (Her return to Italy had given her no peace or happiness, and she died in poverty.)

Anna Jagiellon, the last Jagiellon, died on 9 September 1596. She had prepared her own monument, in a chapel (Sigmund's Chapel) in Wawel Cathedral, Cracow.

Wawel Cathedral, Cracow

The best source of information is Maria Bogucka's Women in Early Modern Polish Society, against the European Background, but it is, unfortunately, very expensive. Otherwise it's bits and pieces from books that include information about Bona Sforza, Isabella Jagiellon, and Stephen Báthory . . . 

The tomb of Bona Sforza,
erected by Anna Jagiellon,
Church of San Nicola in Bari

Update, April 2022: For the HistoryExtra podcast episode "The Jagiellonians, the Dynasty that Shaped Central Europe," click here. 

Isabella Jagiellon: A Queen Who Pursued Peace and Toleration

Isabella Jagiellon, queen of Hungary (born 18 January 1519)

Born in the same year as Catherine de' Medici, Isabella Jagellion is much less well known to most American readers than her contemporary, but she is no less a formidable, accomplished ruler.  

The Polish princess was raised in Cracow, where she received an excellent education that included the study of Polish, Italian, Latin, and, as is evident from her life, a training in politics that she would need and that she would put to good use.*

Isabella Jagiellon, c. 1550

In 1539 Isabella Jagellion was married to the fifty-two-year-old king of Hungary, John Zápolya, who, like Isabella's father, was resisting the eastward expansion of the Holy Roman Empire. Zápolya had recently concluded a ten-year war with the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I, the terms of which divided Hungary.

(In 1515, Ferdinand, then duke of Austria, had married the Jagiellon princess Anna, the older sister of King Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia. When Louis died, Ferdinand thought he should claim the kingdoms through the right of his wife.)

Under the terms of the treaty of Varda, the western section of Hungary was joined to the empire, with Ferdinand recognized as king of Hungary; the eastern portion was granted to Zápolya, recognized as king of Transylvania. If he died without an heir, Transylvania would become part of the empire.

But John Zápolya did not die without an heir. A year after his marriage to Isabella, she gave birth to a son, John Sigismund. After the child's birth, Zápolya formally rejected the treaty he had made with Ferdinand. Two weeks later he died, naming his wife as queen regent for his newborn son. In historian Roland Bainton's words, "Isabella took up the campaign for the infant." 

On hearing the news of Zápolya's death, Isabella's father, the Polish king, Sigismund I, sent a letter of advice to his daughter. "Do not allow yourself to be crushed by grief," he wrote. "The course of prudence is that reason should rule the emotions. It becomes a prince to bear with composure that which cannot be altered. To succumb to immoderate weeping is to contest the will of God, whose judgments are a great abyss." 

Isabella's mother, Bona Sforza, wrote as well, and she too advised Isabella not "to be mired in grief." "After the sorrow of the night comes the joy of the morning," she reminded her daughter.

Isabella seems to have followed her parents' advice about overcoming her grief, but during the course of the next few years, she faced a great deal of political turmoil. Immediately after her husband's death, one of the guardians he had named for his son usurped Isabella's authority, but by 1542 the Estates of Transylvania "confirmed Isabella as queen regent and recognized Sigismund as their prince." When the emperor laid siege to the castle of Olah where Isabella was residing, relief came to her from the Turkish sultan.

Suleiman I (the Great) with Isabella Jagiellon and her son

 John Sigismund, an image from c. 1550

After breaking the siege, the sultan asked to see Isabella's son. As recorded in a contemporary chronicle, "She was frightened and suggested to her advisers that she go alone with presents, or, if this would not do, that she take the boy."

Her advisers recommended that she should send her son to the sultan, as he had asked. Despite Isabella's concerns, the sultan returned the boy to her unharmed: "The queen thanked the Sultan for returning her son, begged to be taken under his protection, promised not to remarry and sent a present to his daughter." The sultan, for his part, "promised to do his best" for Isabella.

For the next five years, as David Daniel indicates, there was an "endemic triangular contest for hegemony" between the the Habsburg empire, the Turks, and Isabella.

But in 1547 the emperor and the sultan signed a truce, and Isabella was forced to retire with her son to the territory of Opole, assigned to her by the emperor. Isabella refused to give up; instead, she "began to prepare the way for a return to Transylvania," negotiating with the Turks and with opponents of the Habsburgs.

By 1555, she had "established a residence on the Polish-Hungary border"; by 1556, the Estates had "reaffirmed her sixteen-year-old son as their prince." The Habsburgs, Daniel notes, "did not regain control of Transylvania until the end of the eighteenth century."

From 1556 until her death on 20 September 1559, Isabella ruled as queen regent for her son, "actively" governing Transylvania. Like Catherine de' Medici, she extended a measure of religious toleration to her subjects, viewing this as a necessary concession to bring peace to the kingdom and strengthen her political influence and security.

Through her edict of 1558 she became, as Bainton notes, "the first ruler to issue an edict of universal toleration." Like Catherine de' Medici's 1562 edict of Saint Germain, Isabella Jagiellon's own act of toleration, passed forty years before the edict of Nantes, has not received nearly the recognition of Henry IV's, always praised in all our history textbooks.

While her own religious views can be debated, what is clear is that Isabella used her edict "to fulfill her dynastic and political responsibilities." As Daniel concludes, "She used the Reformation and its advocates as she saw fit, on her own terms, for her own reasons, to secure for her son the rightful inheritance of the father he never knew."

There is no complete biography of Isabella Jagiellon in English. I rely here on accounts by Roland Bainton, in his Women of the Reformation: From Spain to Scandinavian and David P. Daniel's "Piety, Politics, and Perversion: Noblewomen in Reformation Hungary," in Sherrin Marshall's Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe: Public and Private Worlds.

And a couple of additional notes: the Holy Roman emperor of Ferdinand I was the son of a woman we have mentioned before, Queen Juana of Castile, and about whom we will hear more as the year progresses. Ferdinand was also one of the Habsburg children reared by Margaret of Austria.

For Isabella Jagiellon's mother, Bona Sforza, click here. For more about Isabella's sister Anna Jagiellon, click here, and for her sister Catherine Jagiellon, click here.

*This post has been adapted from The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan).

Update, April 2022: For the HistoryExtra podcast episode "The Jagiellonians, the Dynasty that Shaped Central Europe," click here.