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  • Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland: The Career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468–1503)
  • Paul W. Knoll
Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland: The Career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468–1503). By Natalia Nowakowska. [Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co. 2007. Pp. xx, 222. $99.95. ISBN 978-0-754-65644-9.)

The traditional view of Fryderyk, the sixth son of King Casimir IV the Jagiellonian, is decidedly negative. Contemporaries like Matthew of Miechów, author of a Vita of Fryderyk and of the Chronica Polonorum, saw him, as Nowakowska puts it, as “a minor figure, a miscreant and something of an embarrassment” (p. 6). Later scholars, particularly Fryderyk Papée and Oscar Halecki in the interwar period of the twentieth century and Jacek Wiesiołowski and Wojciech Fałkowski more recently, have scarcely been more kind. This volume, however, is a bold revisionist interpretation of Fryderyk as an important and influential figure whose ambitious state-building program in secular and ecclesiastical government and in the realm of cultural patronage marked him as a figure of the first rank.

Early in his short career Fryderyk was elected bishop of Cracow in 1488. He was thereby a member of the Polish Senate, but his father successfully insisted that as a prince of the royal blood he hold the presidency, taking precedence over even the archbishops of Gniezno and Lwów. In this status he was positioned to defend and advance the interests of the Jagiellonian dynasty within the state. In 1493, retaining his episcopal see, Fryderyk became archbishop of Gniezno and primate of Poland, and in that same year Pope Alexander VI elevated him to the College of Cardinals, the only legitimate son of a European king to become a cardinal in the fifteenth century. In addition, Fryderyk sought—unsuccessfully—to add to his ecclesiastical dignities by obtaining other episcopal sees and may even have contemplated being elected Grand Master of the Teutonic Order in Prussia.

After a chapter that sets the background for politics in Poland and the history of the Polish monarchy into the reign of Casimir IV, during which royal power was strengthened at the expense of the great nobles, Nowakowska turns in three subsequent chapters to the ways Fryderyk used his ecclesiastical authority to make the Church in Poland an instrument of royalist power and state-building. Fryderyk was a leading figure in national government, and within the Church he sought means by which the crown had increasing control over cathedral chapters, clergy at all levels, and the religious life of the laity down to the grassroots. In all his functions, Fryderyk sought to be a propagandist for the Polish crown, and this is revealed in a fine chapter that analyzes patronage, iconography, and ritual as platforms for royal propaganda. A subsequent chapter examines Fryderyk’s relations with the papacy, showing carefully and with European-wide comparisons why the popes seemed to accept the cardinal’s exercise of papal prerogatives within the Polish church. A penultimate chapter is devoted to an examination of Fryderyk’s legacy into the 1530s, while the final chapter treats the cardinal’s career as a prism [End Page 399] through which can be refracted larger considerations of church-state relations in Renaissance Europe.

Nowakowska’s revisionist presentation may not convince all in every respect, but it is firmly grounded in a careful reading of the sources and a nuanced treatment of the complexities of her subject’s career and times. The cardinal emerges as more successful, competent, and less flawed personally and politically than has been the case in previous scholarship. Moreover, she is also successful is showing Fryderyk’s career to be, as she puts it, a “case study in how Europe’s late fifteenth-century monarchies might build up the power of the Renaissance state by asserting closer control over local ecclesiastical structures” (p. 193).This book is a welcome corrective and a fine addition to the literature on late-medieval and Renaissance church-state relations and on late-medieval Poland.

Paul W. Knoll
University of Southern California (Emeritus)
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