Jadwiga of Poland

Jadwiga was crowned in Kraków in 1384 as a girl of about ten and ruled Poland until her death in 1399. Her marriage to Jogaila, the pagan Grand Duke of Lithuania, joined Poland and Lithuania under one dynasty and brought Lithuania into Latin Christianity. She was the last hereditary monarch of Poland and was canonised in 1997.

Jadwiga was born in Buda, probably between October 1373 and February 1374, the youngest daughter of Louis I, King of Hungary and Poland, and Elizabeth of Bosnia. Both her grandmothers were Polish princesses of the Piast line. Louis had no sons, so his daughters were valuable matches. Jadwiga was promised to William of Habsburg, son of Duke Leopold III of Austria, and a provisional marriage ceremony was held at Hainburg in 1378, after which she lived mostly in Vienna for about two years.

When Louis died in September 1382, her sister Mary was crowned in Hungary, but the Polish lords refused to accept Mary's fiancé, Sigismund of Luxembourg. They insisted on a daughter of Louis who would live in Poland, and the queen mother eventually chose Jadwiga. Her arrival was delayed for more than a year while factions backed Duke Siemowit IV of Masovia, and an assembly threatened to elect him if she did not come. She was finally crowned at Wawel Cathedral on 16 October 1384. The title "King" used for her is usually read as stressing that she was a ruling monarch, not a consort.

The lords of Lesser Poland did not want an Austrian king and favoured a match with Jogaila of Lithuania. When William came to Kraków in August 1385 to complete the marriage, he was barred from the castle and forced out of Poland; chroniclers' accounts of what happened are contradictory, and the famous story of Jadwiga trying to break down a gate with an axe is doubted by some historians. That month Jogaila agreed in the Union of Krewo to accept Catholic baptism with his subjects. Baptised Władysław in February 1386, he married Jadwiga, then twelve, on 18 February and was crowned on 4 March as Władysław II Jagiełło.

Jadwiga's real power was limited, but she worked closely with her husband. After rebels in Hungary murdered her mother in 1387, she led Polish troops into Ruthenia, which had been under Hungarian rule, and most of its governors submitted to her without a fight. She reconciled quarrelling members of her husband's family, among them Vytautas and Skirgaila, and repeatedly tried to keep peace with the Teutonic Knights. When Mary died in 1395 she claimed the crown of Hungary, but the Hungarian lords stood by Sigismund.

Jadwiga founded and restored hospitals, schools and churches and encouraged hymns and scripture in Polish. In 1397 she set up a college for Lithuanian students in Prague. With her husband she secured papal approval for a theology faculty at Kraków, reviving the university that Casimir III had founded in 1364, and her will left her jewels to fund it. It was refounded in 1400.

After more than a decade without children, Jadwiga gave birth to a daughter on 22 June 1399. The baby died on 13 July and Jadwiga, from complications of the birth, on 17 July. Władysław kept the throne as an elected king, founding the Jagiellonian dynasty, and the union she made possible later faced the Knights at Grunwald. Venerated soon after her death, she was beatified in 1986 and canonised by Pope John Paul II in Kraków on 8 June 1997.

Our 1400 map shows Poland and Lithuania linked under Władysław II Jagiełło in the year after Jadwiga's death.