Stephen Bathory
Stephen Báthory was Prince of Transylvania and elected King of Poland, and is generally reckoned among the ablest rulers either country had. Born in 1533 into a Hungarian noble family, he was educated at Padua, served the Habsburgs, and spent three years as their prisoner in Vienna, where he read Roman history. He became Prince of Transylvania in 1571, a principality holding a precarious autonomy between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. He was elected King of Poland in 1576 after the Valois king Henry abandoned the throne to become king of France, on condition that he marry Anna Jagiellon, who was fifty-three and the last of her dynasty. The nobility that elected him expected a figurehead. He crushed the city of Danzig, which had backed a rival, and then governed with a firmness the Commonwealth rarely permitted. His reputation rests on the Livonian war against Ivan the Terrible. He reformed the army, hired Hungarian and German infantry, created a peasant infantry from crown lands, and rather than relieving besieged fortresses he struck at the Russian bases behind them — taking Polotsk in 1579, Velikiye Luki in 1580, and besieging Pskov in 1581. Ivan sued for peace at Jam Zapolski in 1582 and gave up Livonia entirely. He founded the academy at Vilnius that became its university, granted the Jesuits schools, and kept a genuine religious toleration in a country of Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Calvinists, Jews and Antitrinitarians. He died suddenly in 1586. He had ruled for ten years and had been preparing a war against Muscovy that his death cancelled. Poland never elected a king of comparable ability again.
- Lived: 1533 CE – 1586 CE
- Nationality: Hungarian
- Roles: king, ruler, head_of_state, general
