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Biography

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Jadwiga, often rendered in medieval Latin as Iadwiga or Hedvigis, was a late-fourteenth-century queen of Poland, a member of the Capetian House of Anjou, and a saint of the Catholic Church. She was a daughter of King Louis I of Hungary and Poland, known as Louis the Great, and of Elizabeth of Bosnia. Through her father she belonged to a dynasty that held both the Hungarian and the Polish crowns; through her mother she was connected to the Bosnian royal house. After Louis died in 1382, the succession split. The Hungarian lords accepted her elder sister Mary, while the Polish nobility, determined to keep the crown from being absorbed into a purely Hungarian succession, invited the younger daughter Jadwiga to Kraków. Still a child, she was crowned in 1384 with the male title rex Poloniae, a legal form that stressed that she held the full royal office and not a mere consortship. Contemporary and later tradition places her birth at Buda in the Kingdom of Hungary in the early 1370s; the precise year has never been established beyond dispute, and responsible accounts therefore speak only of the early 1370s.

Polish magnates set aside her childhood betrothal to William of Habsburg in order to secure a dynastic and political union with Lithuania, then a large, still partly pagan grand duchy. In 1386 she married Jogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania, who received Christian baptism under the name Władysław and was crowned king of Poland as Władysław II Jagiełło. The marriage became the foundation of the long Polish-Lithuanian connection. It was accompanied by the official Christianization of Lithuania, the last major pagan polity in Europe. Jadwiga’s personal part in the conversion and in mediating between Polish and Lithuanian elites is strongly emphasized in later hagiography and in Polish national memory, although the political initiative lay largely with the nobility and with Jogaila himself. The union also required her to accept a husband much older than herself and to relinquish the Habsburg match, a sacrifice that later pious writers treated as a mark of obedience and of love of the realm.

Chroniclers and later biographers present her as unusually well educated for a royal woman of her century, said to have been conversant in several languages, including Latin, and devoted to works of mercy. She is associated with care for the poor in Kraków, with the endowment of churches and hospitals, and with a personal life of prayer and austerity unusual at a late medieval court. Above all she is linked to the restoration of the university at Kraków, originally founded in the fourteenth century and then in decline. In the last years of her life she assigned jewels and other personal property to fund the academy that would become the Jagiellonian University, including provision for a faculty of theology. Jagiełło carried the project through after her death. These acts, together with her reputation for justice toward peasants and for interceding in political conflicts, formed the core of her medieval cult.

In 1399 she gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth Bonifacia, who lived only a few days. Jadwiga herself died in Kraków on 17 July 1399, almost certainly of complications of childbirth, and was buried in Wawel Cathedral, where her tomb became a focus of prayer. Veneration began in the late Middle Ages and continued in Poland through the partitions and into the modern era, though a formal universal canonization was long delayed. Pope John Paul II canonized her in Kraków on 8 June 1997. Her liturgical feast in Poland is kept on that date. She is invoked as a patron of Poland, of queens, and, in the language surrounding her canonization, of the unity of the peoples of Europe.

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