(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

were simply all those who held land carrying the obligation - even if it was in many cases notional, rather than real - of performing military service. Those affected ranged from lords of the royal council to backwoods squires barely able to afford a horse and military accoutrement. The driving force consisted of a core of some twenty families, most of whom had risen under Casimir III and were determined not to lose their standing in the state. These were the primary beneficiaries of the Privileges of Buda and Košice. That their lesser fellow-rycerze also gained was a useful bonus which enabled the great families to build up followings and clienteles - it was to be at least another century before these junior knights/nobles became a serious political force in their own right. Louis’ Privileges also applied to the townsmen - their existing rights were confirmed - but they enjoyed only local and ad hoc concessions, grants and favours. The towns, divided by commercial rivalries, failed to show a common front. Members of the Krakow patriciate, who might even sit on the royal council, were concerned only with the well-being of their own city, not that of other towns; in any case, they could reasonably aspire to a niche among the aristocratic core. The clergy followed on the coat-tails of the ‘communitas nobilium’.

While Louis accepted that he had to make concessions in order to secure the throne for his daughters, like Vaclav II barely two generations previously, he felt no compunction at truncating Polish territory. In 1377 he incorporated Polish Rus’ into Hungary, a step already agreed on with Casimir and made easier by its separate status of a royal dominium. He confirmed the cession of Silesia to the Luxentburgs. He transferred disputed border territories to Brandenburg. These measures and the behaviour of Hungarian officials caused immense resentment, culminating in the massacre of dozens of Hungarian courtiers during riots in Krakow in 1376. In T380, Louis judged it prudent to relinquish rule in Poland to a caucus of Malopolska potentates, which did nothing for his wavering support in Wielkopolska. When he died, in September 1382, the question of the succession was almost as vexed as ever. The Polish elites had promised to accept his daughter, Maria - but jibbed when Louis, in an attempt to unite the Angevin and Luxemburg houses, insisted that she should marry the unpopular

Sigismund of Luxemburg. The Hungarians compromised and suggested that a younger daughter, Jadwiga (she was barely 10 years old), could be substituted. Malopolska agreed, but Wielkopolska wanted Duke Ziemowit IV of Plock as king. Angevin support in the south proved too strong for him. The entry of pro-Jadwiga troops obliged Ziemowit to withdraw.

Wielkopolska’s leaders were prepared to accept Jadwiga if her long-standing betrothal to Wilhelm of Habsburg could be broken off in favour of Ziemowit. She was crowned ‘king' (this was not an age which discarded law and custom lightly) in Krakow on i 5 October 1384. The southern lords had little truck with Wielkopolska’s provincialism. They, too, could play the dynastic card as well as any Luxemburg or Angevin. Jadwiga's engagement was broken off - not in favour of Ziemowit, but of the illiterate heathen, Jogaila, ruler of Lithuania. At Krėva, in Lithuania, on 14 August 1385, Jogaila confirmed a deal his representatives had struck with Louis’ widow, the queen-dowager Elizabeth, and with Malopolska’s lords: he and his Lithuanian subjects would convert to Catholicism; he would marry Jadwiga, provide money to pay off the disappointed Wilhelm of Habsburg and annex to Poland his vast principality, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Malopolska’s elite had embarked on a spectacular exercise in corporate dynasticism, well worth the price of a 12-year-old’s feelings. Former Piast Poland stood on the threshold of a bizarre and unexpected new career.

Jagiellonian Poland, 1386-1572

Jogaila of Lithuania was received into the Catholic Church in Krakow cathedral on 15 February 1386. His baptismal name, Wladyslaw, harked back to Lokietek, re-unifier of the ‘Crown’, the kingdom of Poland - reason enough for Ernst von Zollner, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, to decline the invitation to stand as godfather. In the autumn of 1387, Peter I Mushat, hospodar of Moldavia, transferred allegiance and homage for his lands from the rulers of Hungary to Wladyslaw and Jadwiga of Poland. He and Zollner recognized that a new power had arrived. Barely a hundred years later, not only Poland and Lithuania, but Hungary and Bohemia had come under Jagiellonian rule. It was the greatest dynastic concatenation of territory Europe had yet seen.