Władysław II Jagiełło: From Pagan Duke to Victor of Grunwald

Few rulers changed the map of Europe as much as this pagan-born prince from Vilnius. His marriage tied the Kingdom of Poland to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania for four centuries, and his army inflicted on the Teutonic Knights, the crusading order that had raided Lithuania for generations, a crushing defeat in which their Grand Master and more than 200 brothers of the Order died. Historians in Kraków, Vilnius and Berlin still judge him very differently. Read the full story of his greatest day in our article on the Battle of Grunwald, and the wider picture in the military history of Poland and the military history of Lithuania.²

Family and the contested birth year

Jogaila was a son of Algirdas, Grand Duke of Lithuania, and of his second wife, a princess of Tver, and so a grandson of the great Lithuanian ruler Gediminas. His mother's family were Orthodox Christians, while his father's Lithuania was still officially pagan, so he grew up between two worlds.³

Nobody recorded when he was born, and historians still disagree. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives about 1351, and Norman Davies, as the Encyclopedia of World Biography reports, also suggests 1351. Since Tadeusz Wasilewski's study of 1991, Polish genealogists such as Jan Nikodem have argued for a later date, and Stanisław Sroka, citing their work, writes that Jagiełło was about 24 at his wedding in 1386, which places his birth around 1362.⁴

Grand duke, civil war and the death of Kęstutis, 1377 to 1384

When Algirdas died in 1377, Jogaila took his throne in Vilnius and shared power with his uncle Kęstutis, who ruled the western lands facing the crusaders. His eldest half-brother turned to Moscow for help, and Jogaila answered by making secret agreements with the Teutonic Order, partly at his uncle's expense.⁵

When Kęstutis learned of the secret deals, he seized Vilnius late in 1381, pushed his nephew aside and sent him to Vitebsk. Jogaila struck back in June 1382, while his uncle was busy elsewhere, regained Vilnius and, with the Order's army coming to his aid, cornered Kęstutis near Trakai. Kęstutis and his son Vytautas were taken prisoner.⁶

Kęstutis soon died in prison. The Polish chronicler Janko of Czarnków reported that he strangled himself. William Urban thinks he was probably murdered by Jogaila's brother Skirgaila, and Stanisław Smolka, writing in 1920, followed Ruthenian sources that named Jogaila's own servants as the killers and called the death a stain on his memory.⁷

The help of the Order had a price. In the Treaty of Dubysa, concluded at the end of October 1382, Jogaila promised the knights Samogitia up to the Dubysa river and agreed to accept Catholic baptism, but the treaty was never ratified. Vytautas escaped from prison, accepted baptism in 1383 and won the Order's backing as a rival claimant, and war followed.⁸

Krewo, the baptism and the crown, 1385 to 1386

The way out came from Poland. Its young queen, Jadwiga of Anjou, had been crowned in Kraków in October 1384, and the lords of Little Poland did not want her childhood betrothed, William of Habsburg, as their king. Jogaila's mother urged a match with a princess of Moscow and Orthodox baptism instead, but he chose the Polish offer, which promised a crown, an ally against the Order and the conversion of Lithuania on its own terms.⁹

On 14 August 1385, at Krewo, Jogaila issued the act that set the terms. He promised to accept Catholic baptism, to pay off the claims arising from Jadwiga's engagement to William, and to settle the territorial disputes between Poland and Lithuania. Polish historians long read the act as the incorporation of Lithuania into Poland, while recent Lithuanian scholarship, which has confirmed that the original in the Kraków cathedral chapter archive is authentic, sees the act as a marriage contract rather than a treaty of union.¹⁰

Events then moved fast. In Kraków on 15 February 1386 Jogaila was baptized with the Christian name Władysław, and his cousin Vytautas was baptized as Alexander. Three days later he married Jadwiga, and on 4 March he was crowned King of Poland while remaining Grand Duke of Lithuania.¹¹

The baptism of Lithuania

Early in 1387 the new king returned to Lithuania, began baptizing his subjects and founded the bishopric of Vilnius. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine dates the official conversion of Lithuania to Catholicism to that year.¹²

Długosz tells that the king himself spent days teaching the faith and the prayers, because the Polish clergy could not speak Lithuanian. The conversion stayed shallow for years: Samogitia had no parish churches until 1417, paganism survived in the countryside, and the knights kept warning the courts of Europe that the conversion was not what it seemed.¹³

Jagiełło and Vytautas

Jogaila left his brother Skirgaila to govern Lithuania, but the Lithuanian nobles preferred Vytautas, who rebelled and fought with the Order's support. In 1392, through a Masovian bishop, Jogaila offered him the rule of Lithuania, and in the agreement of Astrava (Ostrów) Vytautas became his viceroy and, in practice, grand duke. Jūratė Kiaupienė calls it Vytautas's first documented victory in his battle for primacy.¹⁴

Disaster struck in 1399. Jadwiga gave birth to a daughter in June, and mother and child both died in July, which left Jogaila's position as king and the succession open. The Polish lords confirmed him that August, and in 1402 he married Anna of Cilli, a granddaughter of Casimir the Great, the last Piast king.¹⁵

The acts of Vilnius and Radom in 1401 let Vytautas rule Lithuania for life as grand duke, while Jogaila kept the title of supreme duke. At Horodło on 2 October 1413 the two cousins renewed the union and agreed that Lithuania would keep a grand duke of its own after Vytautas, chosen by the King of Poland with the advice of the lords of both countries.¹⁶

The road to war, 1409 to 1410

In May 1409 Samogitia rose against the Order. Sven Ekdahl writes that Vytautas stirred up the revolt and Jagiełło at least tolerated it. When Polish envoys would not promise that Poland would stay neutral in a war between the Order and Lithuania, Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen decided to deal with Poland first, and he declared war on Jagiełło on 6 August 1409.¹⁷

The short campaign of 1409 ended in a truce and an arbitration by King Wenceslas IV of Bohemia, whose award of February 1410 Poland refused. The Order won an alliance with Sigismund of Hungary, while Jagiełło sent letters to the courts of Europe explaining his cause and spent the winter hunting to salt meat for his army.¹⁸

Over the winter the allies planned to strike straight at Marienburg, the Order's capital. A pontoon bridge was built in secret at Kozienice, and on 30 June 1410 the Polish army crossed the Vistula on it at Czerwińsk. On 2 July it joined Vytautas's Lithuanians, Ruthenians and Tatars.¹⁹

Ulrich had expected two separate attacks and kept part of his army at Świecie. When he found the fords of the Drwęca at Kurzętnik fortified against him, Jagiełło turned east instead of forcing a crossing, took Dąbrówno on 13 July and marched on toward Marienburg.²⁰

Grunwald, 15 July 1410: what did the king do?

On the morning of 15 July the two armies met near Grunwald and Stębark. The king heard Mass to the end while his men waited in the shade of the forest and the knights stood in the sun. Heralds then brought him two naked swords from the Grand Master to goad him into battle. Sylvain Gouguenheim argues that the Order resorted to this because the heat was turning the situation against it. In Długosz's account the king replied: "I do not need the swords of my enemies, as I have in my army a sufficient amount", yet he accepted them.²¹

Jagiełło did not fight in the line. He watched the fighting from close by with his escort. When a knight from Meissen, Diepold von Kökeritz, charged straight at him, the king's secretary Zbigniew Oleśnicki knocked him from the saddle and he was killed. Jerzy Rajman notes that Andrzej Nadolski took one chronicle of the battle to be written by an eyewitness standing where the king commanded.²²

An hour into the fight, the Lithuanian wing fell back and the Order's horsemen chased it. Długosz calls it flight, but many modern historians suspect a planned feigned retreat in the steppe manner. Ekdahl, who published a mercenary's letter that bears on the question, describes it as a tactically motivated feigned flight, and Gouguenheim, after weighing both readings, leans toward a ruse.²³

The Grand Master led his reserve of sixteen banners against the Polish center and was killed with almost all the Order's leaders. The Grunwald museum counts 203 of about 250 brothers of the Order among the dead, and Ekdahl writes of more than 200. Total losses are uncertain: Heinrich von Plauen later claimed 18,000 Christian dead, Nadolski estimated about 8,000 on the Order's side, and Gouguenheim about 8,000 on both sides together. The size of the armies is just as disputed: Andrzej Nadolski counted about 20,000 Poles and about 10,000 Lithuanian horsemen against about 15,000 men of the Order, while Marian Biskup thought the allies may have had up to 41,000 riders.²⁴

Who deserves the credit is an old argument. The Lithuanian encyclopedia calls Jogaila the nominal commander-in-chief, and Vanda Sruogienė gives the field command to Vytautas while praising the king's diplomacy and mercy to the defeated. Polish scholarship of the Lewicki school made Jagiełło the architect of the victory, which Smolka in 1920 thought exaggerated.²⁵

Marienburg and the Peace of Toruń

The army stayed on the field until 17 July, as custom demanded, and reached Marienburg only on 25 July. By then Heinrich von Plauen had brought in food and sailors from Danzig and burned the town. The besiegers had no heavy guns, and the siege was lifted on 19 September. In the verdict of the German national biography, Plauen's defense saved the Order's state.²⁶

In early August Plauen had offered Pomerania, the Chełmno land and the Michałów land for peace, and Jagiełło refused, believing the Order was finished. Vytautas left the siege first. A Polish victory at Koronowo on 10 October stopped reinforcements from reaching Plauen, but most Prussian towns and castles went back to the Order.²⁷

The First Peace of Toruń, signed on 1 February 1411, returned Samogitia to Lithuania, though only for a time. Apart from Samogitia the Order lost no territory, so the lands Poland had lost to it in the fourteenth century stayed in the knights' hands. The treaty settled little, and new wars soon followed.²⁸

Later wars with the Order

In the "Hunger War" of 1414 the knights shut themselves in their castles and stripped Prussia of food, so the invaders ravaged the country without a battle. A truce on 7 October 1414 sent the quarrel to the Council of Constance.²⁹

At Constance, Polish envoys argued against the Order's claims, and the knights answered with propaganda of their own. The council settled nothing, and in 1418 Jagiełło asked the pope and the emperor to judge the dispute.³⁰

A new war in 1422, called the Golub War after the castle the Poles took, ended that September with the Peace of Melno. The Order gave up its claim to Samogitia for good, while Poland gained only Nieszawa, Orłów and Murzynno and left Gdańsk Pomerania in the Order's hands.³¹

In the same years the Hussites of Bohemia offered Jagiełło their crown: from the spring of 1420, over a year and a half, four Czech embassies invited him. He kept them waiting and never accepted, since the lords around him and the clergy opposed a union with heretics, and Vytautas took up the offer instead. In 1424 Jagiełło issued an edict against support for the Hussites.³²

Crown, university and succession

On 26 July 1400 Jagiełło refounded the University of Kraków, renewed thanks to the jewels and property that Jadwiga had left it in her will, and opened it to Poles and Lithuanians alike. The king was the first name entered in its register, and since 1817 the school has been called the Jagiellonian University.³³

After Anna of Cilli died he married Elżbieta of Pilica, who also died before him. In 1422, already an old man, he married the Lithuanian princess Sophia of Halshany, who bore him two sons, Władysław and Casimir, and both later became kings. Władysław, crowned at the age of ten after his father's death, was killed fighting the Ottomans at the Battle of Varna on 10 November 1444.³⁴

To secure the throne for one of those sons, Jagiełło had to buy the nobles' consent. The privilege of Jedlnia of 4 March 1430 granted the nobility the rights it had demanded since 1425 and left the choice between his sons to the people of the kingdom. He renewed it at Kraków on 9 January 1433.³⁵

His last years were troubled. When Vytautas died in 1430, Jagiełło first confirmed his own brother Švitrigaila as grand duke against Polish wishes. He was then drawn into the Polish lords' fight with Švitrigaila over Podolia, until in 1432 a pro-Polish party raised Sigismund Kęstutaitis in Lithuania.³⁶

Death at Gródek and burial in Kraków

Jagiełło died on 1 June 1434 at Gródek, today Horodok near Lviv in Ukraine. Długosz tells that a late frost came that spring, and the old king went into the woods, as was his habit, to listen to the nightingales, caught a chill and died.³⁷

He was buried in Wawel Cathedral in Kraków. His tomb, carved before 1431 by a workshop whose origin is still debated, shows him lying in red marble with crown, scepter and orb, his face lined with age.³⁸

How historians judge him

Polish writers have argued about him since Długosz, who wrote that he loved his Lithuanian homeland and kin so much that he dragged Poland into many wars, yet praised his mercy and noted that he won almost every war he fought. Juliusz Bardach, quoted in Poland's national e-textbook, calls him an outstanding statesman and military commander, and Jadwiga Krzyżaniakowa and Jerzy Ochmański, in their biography of the king, read even the Peace of Toruń as the moment the Order first admitted defeat.³⁹

In Lithuania the picture is darker. Sruogienė wrote in 1987 that most Lithuanians still disliked him, a view that hardened during the national revival of the nineteenth century, because his marriage began the union with Poland. Kiaupienė's generation of Lithuanian historians, by contrast, treats 1386 as a dynastic union of two states.⁴⁰

German memory long followed the Order's view of the war, in which the knights charged Poland with fighting beside pagans and schismatics. Urban notes the knights' deep suspicion of his conversion, and Sven Ekdahl, author of the Neue Deutsche Biographie entry on Ulrich von Jungingen, has rebuilt the war from the Order's own pay books and diplomatic records.⁴¹

Compare him with the other Polish leaders in our ranking of the greatest Polish commanders, see where Grunwald stands among the greatest Polish battles and the greatest medieval battles, or follow the story of another king who fought for Poland in Jan III Sobieski.