Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland: The Career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468–1503) (review)

Nowakowska’s work is a long-desired contribution to our understanding of church and monarchy in the Renaissance from a perspective of late medieval and early modern Poland — until recently considered an Eastern European stepdaughter in Anglo-Saxon scholarship.

The young British scholar of Polish background effectively proves that the in-depth study of Jagiellonian Poland offers a compelling insight into multidimensional strategies (government, ecclesiastical governance, and cultural patronage) by which the Polish crown under Kazimierz IV (1447–92), Jan Olbracht (1492–1501), and Aleksander (1501–06) — which evolved into a major kingdom of Central Europe stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea — was reinventing the Polish church as a vessel of increasingly centralized Jagiellonian monarchist rule. The book argues that “the placing of a prince’s immediate male relatives in senior ecclesiastical posts within their realms was an important and overlooked tactic of Renaissance monarchies, developed not to pension off surplus sons, but adopted specifically to subjugate local churches to royal authority.”

The author shows this phenomenon by analyzing the brief yet ascendant career of one of the most aggressive proponents of the regalist programs, Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468–1503): the youngest son of the Jagiellonian monarchs, King Kazimierz IV and Queen Elizabeth Habsburg, brother of the rulers of Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and Bohemia, brother-in-law to five electors and princes of the Holy Roman Empire, Bishop of Cracow (then the Polish capital), primate, senator, and regent of Poland, and cardinal of the Roman Church.

The English reader will be lured by Nowakowska’s beautifully written and well-structured book, for the author places the “Polish Thomas Wolsey” lobbying for strong regalist power against the magnate class in a larger European context. Indeed, she successfully argues that the parallel state-church dynamics can be traced in the Renaissance monarchies of Henry VIII in England, Louis IX in France, Isabella in Castile, and Maximilian Habsburg in the empire. In this sense, Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon resembles the dynastic bishops and cardinals-ministers there: Henry Beaufort, Jean de Balue, Alonso of Aragon, and Pedro Gonzales de Mendoza among many others (their complete list is provided in the book). On the other hand, “a second pope for Central Europe” — the only one out of sixty-five cardinals created by Pope Rodrigo Borja (Alexander VI) never to visit Rome — was a unique figure also in other aspects: Fryderyk Jegiellon was the only legitimate son of a king to wear the red hat in the fifteenth century.

This book is part of the welcome Ashgate series, Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700, edited by Thomas F. Mayer from Augustana College, that testifies to “an upsurge of interest in the history of traditional (or Catholic) religion” aimed at the systematic correction of the inadequacies of received scholarship. In meeting the series’ goal, Nowakowska’s work is one of its most exemplary.