Sigismund III Vasa
Sigismund III was a Swedish prince elected king of Poland at twenty-one, inherited Sweden and lost it to his uncle for being a Catholic, spent the next thirty years trying to get it back, put a Polish garrison in the Kremlin, moved his capital from Kraków to Warsaw, and reigned for forty-five years, the longest of any elected king, over a state that was never again as large. He was born in 1566 in Gripsholm castle, where his parents, John of Sweden and Catherine Jagiellon, were imprisoned by his uncle Eric XIV, and was raised a Catholic by his mother in a Lutheran country. The Polish nobles elected him in 1587 as the last Jagiellon's grandson and had to beat a Habsburg army at Byczyna to make it stick. He became king of Sweden on his father's death in 1592, was crowned at Uppsala on a promise to leave the Lutheran church alone, and by 1598 his uncle Charles had turned the Swedish estates against him. He lost at Stångebro, was deposed in 1599, and the war between the two branches of the Vasas ran on and off until 1629 and cost Poland Livonia. Because the Swedish question consumed him and because he governed through Jesuits and Habsburg marriages, the nobles rose against him in the rokosz of 1606, which he beat in the field and could not beat in the Sejm. The Muscovite Time of Troubles was the opening he took. His hetman Żółkiewski destroyed the Russian army at Klushino in 1610 and the boyars offered the throne to his son Władysław, and Sigismund, who wanted it himself and Catholic, refused the terms, so that the garrison in the Kremlin was starved out in 1612 and Russia got a Romanov instead. He moved the court to Warsaw in 1596, nearer to Sweden and Lithuania, and the column in the castle square is his. The Union of Brest in 1596 brought the Ruthenian bishops under Rome and split the Orthodox of the east for four centuries. He died in April 1632 and Gustavus Adolphus, his cousin, seven months later.
- Lived: 1566 CE – 1632 CE
- Nationality: Polish
- Roles: king, monarch
