Sigismund I the Old

Sigismund I the Old (Polish: Zygmunt I Stary; Lithuanian: Žygimantas II Senasis; 1 January 1467 – 1 April 1548), a ruler of the Jagiellon dynasty, reigned as King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1506 to his death in 1548.

Before Sigismund reigned as King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (1505 – 1548), he had already been invested as Duke of Silesia.

The son of King Casimir Jagiellon and Elisabeth of Austria Habsburg, Sigismund followed his brothers Jan Olbracht and Alexander Jagiellon to the Polish throne. Their elder brother Władysław became king of Hungary and Bohemia.

Sigismund was christened the namesake of his mother's maternal grandfather, Emperor Sigismund, who had died in 1437.

Sigismund faced the challenge of consolidating internal power in order to face external threats to the country. During Alexander's reign, the law Nihil novi had been instituted, which forbade Kings of Poland from enacting laws without the consent of the Sejm. This proved crippling to Sigismund's dealings with his szlachta and magnates.

Despite this Achilles heel, he established (1527) a conscription army and the bureaucracy needed to finance it.

Intermittently at war with Vasily III of Muscovy, starting in 1507 (before his army was fully under his command), 1514 marked the fall of Smolensk (under Polish domination) to the Muscovite forces (which lent force to his arguments for the necessity of a standing army). 1515 he entered an alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I.

In return for Maximilian lending weight to the provisions of the 2nd Peace of Thorn, Sigismund consented to the marriage of the children of Vladislaus II of Bohemia and Hungary, his brother, to the grandchildren of Maximilian. Through this double marriage contract, Bohemia and Hungary passed to the House of Habsburg in 1526, on the death of Sigismund's nephew, Louis II.

The Polish wars against the Teutonic Knights ended in 1525, when Albert of Brandenburg, their marshal (and Sigismund's nephew), converted to Lutheranism, secularized the order, and paid homage to Sigismund, who in return gave him the domains of that order, as the First Duke of Prussia. This was called the Prussian Homage. Sigismund's eldest daughter Hedwig (Jadwiga) (1513-1573) married Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg.

In other matters of policy, Sigismund sought peaceful coexistence with the Khanate of Crimea, but was unable to completely end border skirmishes.

Sigismund was a Humanist. He and his third consort, Bona Sforza, daughter of Gian Galeazzo Sforza of Milan, were both patrons of Renaissance culture, which under them began to flourish in Poland and in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

On Sigismund's death, his son Sigismund II August became the last Jagiellon king of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.

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