110 JOGALIA
he had no chance to wrest control of Polish affairs from his father's favourite
Bishop. The first years of his reign were engulfed by the shock waves from the
civil war in Lithuania, where Jagiello's brother Swidrygiello was conspiring
with the Teutonic Knights to break the union with Poland. The Polish barons
took the field in support of Witold's brother, Zygmunt Kiejsztutowicz, whose
accession was secured by 1434. In 1435, after the battle of Witkomierz
(Ukmerge), they had obliged the Order to submit its foreign policy to Polish
approval. No sooner were these northern storms calmed, when the death of
Sigismund of Luxembourg disturbed the southern horizon. Cardinal Olesnicki
entered the diplomatic lists for the resultant election of a new king of Hungary,
and in 1440 won the contest on behalf of his young master. From the Cardinal's
standpoint, it was an ideal solution. Wladyslaw went off to Hungary. The
Cardinal was left in sole command in Poland. The rest is well known. For rea-
sons deriving almost entirely from Hungarian interest and papal policies,
Wladyslaw was persuaded to lead a crusade against the Turks in the Balkans. In
1444, on the Black Sea coast near Varna, both he and the papal legate were killed
by the Sultan's army. Constantinople was not saved.
Kazimierz Jagiellonczyk (1427-92.) was duly warned by his brother's fate, and
was content to rule in his own house. Having succeeded to Lithuania in 1440, he
held a power base of his own from which he could undermine the wily Bishop
of Cracow and the Polish barons. He found plenty of allies among the lesser
nobility and the ambitious young ranks of the lower clergy. Like many of his
contemporaries elsewhere in Europe - Louis XI in France, Henry VII in
England, or Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, he contrived to build a national
party at court which challenged the vested interests of the Church and the habit-
ual disobedience of the barons. His efforts were greatly furthered by the war
against the Teutonic Order, 1454-66, and were rewarded by the acquisition of
Royal Prussia, Oswiecim (1454), Rawa and Belz (1462), and Sochaczew (1476).
In the last quarter of the century, he emerged as 'the Father of Central Europe'.
From the triangular dynastic struggles of the Jagiellons, the Luxemburgers, and
the Angevins, it was the Jagiellon who emerged triumphant - inevitably a rela-
tive and a counterweight to the looming presence of the Habsburgs in Austria.
In 1471, his eldest son, Wladyslaw (1456-1516), was elected as King of Bohemia
and in 1490 as King of Hungary; the second son, Kazimierz, once offered the
Hungarian throne by a group of Magyar rebels, died in 1483, a saint; the three
other sons -Jan Olbracht (John Albert), Aleksander, and Sigismund were des-
tined to succeed each other in turn as Kings of Poland; the sixth son, Fryderyk
(1468-1503), became a cardinal; the daughter, Zofia, was married to the Elector
of Brandenburg, and was mother to Albrecht von Hohenzollern, last Grand
Master of the Teutonic Order. The education of this brood was entrusted to the
historian, Jan Dlugosz, formerly secretary to Bishop Olesnicki and now Canon
of Cracow. Together with Ostrorog, Weit Stoss (Wit Stwosz), the painter and
sculptor from Nuremburg, Filippo Buonacorsi, the poet and diplomat from San
Gimignano, and Archbishop Gregory of Sanok (1407—77), whose palace at