Zbigniew Olesnicki

Zbigniew Olesnicki governed Poland for thirty years without ever being king, and the crown he made and unmade twice was not his own. He first appears at Grunwald in 1410 as a young secretary who unhorsed a German knight riding at Wladyslaw Jagiello and saved the king's life; the king offered him knighthood and he asked for the church instead. He became bishop of Krakow in 1423 and the first Pole made cardinal. On Jagiello's death in 1434 he led the regency for the ten-year-old Wladyslaw III and ran the kingdom's policy: hostility to the Hussites, whose Bohemian crown he refused on Poland's behalf; the containment of the Teutonic Order; and the acquisition of the Hungarian throne for his ward in 1440, which brought Poland into the Ottoman war on the Danube. He argued the case that an oath sworn to an infidel did not bind, which released the king from the Truce of Szeged and sent him to Varna, where he was killed at twenty. Olesnicki then spent four years insisting the king might yet be alive before accepting his brother Kazimierz, who proved considerably harder to manage and steadily reduced the church's political weight. His long duel with the historian Jan Dlugosz's patronage networks, his founding of collegiate churches and his support for the university at Krakow made him the dominant figure of Polish public life for a generation. Dlugosz, who was his secretary, wrote him into the chronicles as the man who held the kingdom together, which is a partial verdict from an interested source. He received the cardinal's hat twice, once from the Council of Basel and once from the pope it was opposing, and had to choose which to accept. He founded the collegiate church at Sandomierz and endowed a hall for poor students at Krakow. He was buried in the cathedral on Wawel Hill.

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