Saint Casimir

Saint Casimir, known in Polish as Kazimierz and in Lithuanian as Kazimieras, was a prince of the Jagiellonian dynasty and the second son of King Casimir IV of Poland, who was also Grand Duke of Lithuania, and Queen Elizabeth of Austria (Elżbieta Rakuszanka), a Habsburg princess and daughter of Albert II. He was born on 3 October 1458 at Wawel Castle in Kraków, then the capital of the Kingdom of Poland. The court in which he was raised linked the Polish–Lithuanian union with the dynasties of Central Europe and was among the most prominent in late fifteenth-century Christendom. He received a careful education from the historian and canon Jan Długosz and from the Italian humanist Filippo Buonaccorsi, known as Callimachus. Contemporary notices and later hagiography describe him as serious, literate, and unusually devout for a royal youth, with a marked devotion to the Eucharist and to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In 1471 a faction of Hungarian magnates opposed to King Matthias Corvinus offered the Hungarian crown to the young prince. King Casimir IV sent him, then about thirteen years old, with an army. The expedition failed through weak support, desertion, and the strength of Matthias; Casimir returned without a major battle. After his elder brother Vladislaus became King of Bohemia that same year, Casimir stood as the principal heir to Poland and Lithuania. He took part in government and, when his father was in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, exercised viceregal authority in Poland, especially in the early 1480s. Dynastic marriage was discussed, including a proposed match with Kunigunde of Austria, but he did not marry. Accounts of his life stress chastity, fasting, night prayer, sleeping on a hard bed or the floor, and almsgiving. A Marian hymn, Omni die dic Mariae, has long been associated with him, though modern scholarship treats the attribution with caution.

Casimir suffered from a chronic lung disease, generally identified as tuberculosis. In the winter of 1483–1484 he traveled to the Lithuanian lands. He died on 4 March 1484 at Grodno (Hrodna) in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, at the age of twenty-five. His body was taken to Vilnius and buried in the cathedral. Reports of miracles at the tomb soon followed, and a popular cult grew in both Poland and Lithuania. In later centuries his remains were placed in a dedicated chapel of Vilnius Cathedral, which became the principal shrine and a center of pilgrimage, especially for Lithuanians.

Papal recognition of the cult came in stages. An early canonization is associated with Pope Leo X around 1521 and with confirmation under Pope Adrian VI in 1522; Pope Clement VIII confirmed the cult and had Casimir entered in the Roman Martyrology in 1602. His feast is kept on 4 March. He is venerated as a patron saint of Poland and of Lithuania, and is also invoked as a patron of youth and of bachelors. In iconography he appears as a young royal figure, often in a red robe or in armor, holding a white lily as a sign of virginity, sometimes with a cross or the cap of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania. His memory has remained central to Polish and Lithuanian Catholic identity, and in Lithuania he is regarded as a national patron.