Jan Dlugosz

Jan Dlugosz wrote the twelve-volume Annals that are the foundation of Polish historical writing, and he is the reason a good deal of medieval Poland can be described at all. He was a canon of Krakow and secretary to Cardinal Zbigniew Olesnicki, the most powerful man in the kingdom, and spent his career on diplomatic missions to Rome, Hungary and the Teutonic Order while writing at night. The Annales seu cronicae incliti Regni Poloniae took him twenty-five years and run from legendary origins to his own death. What separates them from most medieval chronicles is method: he used archives, charters, tomb inscriptions and battlefield topography, travelled to check what he described, interviewed survivors of events within living memory, and named his sources. His account of Grunwald in 1410 is the principal source for the largest battle in medieval Europe and was written by a man whose father had fought in it. He compiled the first heraldic register of Polish noble clans and the first systematic description of the kingdom's geography and church benefices. He was also thoroughly partisan: hostile to Lithuanians, to Bohemians and to the Jagiellonian dynasty he served, and he tutored the king's sons while disapproving of their father. He refused the archbishopric of Prague and was nominated to Lviv shortly before his death. The Annals were not printed in full until the nineteenth century, partly because the church found parts of them embarrassing, and the modern Polish critical edition took decades. He was beatified by the Catholic Church in 1880. Schools across Poland carry his name, as does a university in Czestochowa. He described the Battle of Grunwald battlefield in enough topographic detail that archaeologists have used the account to locate finds.

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