Casimir's greatest failing was dynastic. He had four wives: the first, Aldona-Anna of Lithuania, produced two daughters. The second, Adelaide of Hesse, was pious, unexciting and possibly barren. Casimir despised her and ensured that she spent a miserable marriage confined in remote castles until a divorce came through around 1356 - in scandalous circumstances. The king's lust for Krystyna, the widow of a patrician of Prague, got the better of him. He contracted a bigamous marriage with her even before his divorce from poor Adelaide. No children were produced. In a race against time, he put Krystyna aside to marry, in 1363, Jadwiga, daughter of Duke Henry of Zagan. Four children followed - all girls. Casimir could not produce legitimate sons. He may, nevertheless, have had second thoughts about letting the Angevins get their hands on his lands. In 1368 he adopted as his heir his grandson Kažko, heir to the duchy of Slupsk in Pomerania. Days before his death on 5 November 1370, he bequeathed his patrimony of Lęczyca, Sieradz and Kujawy to Kažko. The Rus’ lands, Wielkopolska and the territories around Krakow and Sandomierz were to pass to I.ouis of Hungary. Casimir had clearly not shaken off the sense that this was a family, patrimonial monarchy, ultimately his and his alone to dispose of. But this was not a view shared by the lawyers, clergy and barons who had helped him rule. His thirty-seven-year reign had persuaded them that their political arena was more than a local or regional one: that the ‘Crown’, the Corona Regni Poloniae, was a real political entity that had to be preserved. A freshly divided Poland was unlikely to hold on to the potential riches of the hard-won Rus’ lands. At the same time these notables had an unmissable opportunity to return to the politics their predecessors had practised at the height of Poland’s fragmentation, of playing off one potential ruler against another, albeit now on a scale that went beyond Poland’s borders. The county court of
Sandomierz ruled the will invalid. Kažko settled for compensation in the shape of the county of Dobrzyn, to be redeemed from the Knights, as a fief to be held of Louis of Hungary, who was to inherit the Crown.
Even in his own lifetime, Casimir Ill’s attainment of a relative peace and prosperity, his legal and administrative reforms earned him the title ‘the Great’ (the only Polish monarch so honoured). Yet Poland remained a lesser power, too weak to assert its claims to its old territories in the west and north. Casimir probably did as much as could have been done with some unpromising materials. For better or worse, he paved the way for a new course of eastwards expansion. He restored strong monarchic rule, although nothing that he did could compensate for the lack of a legitimate son.
Whatever the vagaries of Casimir’s policies, he had been a strong, at times even brutal, ruler. The nobility had good reasons for welcoming Louis’ accession. An absentee king (he ruled in Poland largely through his mother, Casimir’s sister, Elizabeth) would almost inevitably be less demanding. He had made promising concessions in return for acceptance of his succession. In 13 5 5, by the Privilege of Buda, Louis had solemnly assured the nobility and clergy that he would exempt them from any new taxation. His uncertain health, and the gratifying inability he shared with Casimir to father sons, opened up even more favourable prospects. In 1374, the nobility agreed that he could designate one of his three daughters as successor in Poland. In return, from Košice in northern Hungary, Louis promulgated a Privilege, reducing in perpetuity the paradine tax paid by peasants on noble and knightly estates from 12 to 2 groszy per lan. He went on to promise that he would pay his knights for any military service beyond Poland’s borders. In 13 81, he extended these provisions to the clergy.
In retrospect, these concessions can be viewed as the beginning of a linear process which was to give the nobility a dominant and domineering position within the state. At the time, they were more an attempt to secure protection against royal fiscal arbitrariness. The ‘nobility’ were the beneficiaries because they held a nearmonopoly of military force. But the Polish ‘nobles’ at this time
3 Interior view of the cathedral at Gniezno, as rebuilt after 1342 in the gothic style, replacing the earlier romanesque building. This can be seen as part of a general programme of renovation which contributed much to the reputation of Casimir III.