Vladislaus II Jagiellon Crowned

JAN 01 1471 · 12:00

Folio of the Filipec Pontifical used at the coronation of Vladislaus II Jagiellon in St Vitus, 22 August 1471. Place: Cathedral of Saint Vitus, Prague Castle Figures: Vladislaus II Jagiellon, son of King Casimir IV of Poland · Beneš of Veitmile, administrator of the see (the archbishopric still vacant) · the Czech Diet (Utraquist majority) George of Poděbrady dies in March 1471. He has spent his last years arranging the succession in a way calculated to preserve the kingdom's confessional settlement: not his own sons, who could not hold the country, but a foreign prince capable of standing up to Matthias Corvinus and willing to swear to the Compactata. The Czech Diet, on his recommendation, offers the crown to Vladislaus, the fifteen-year-old eldest son of Casimir IV of Poland. Vladislaus is crowned in St Vitus on August 22, 1471. He is reasonable, slow, deeply Catholic by personal inclination, and, in office, scrupulously protective of the Utraquist settlement he has sworn to defend. The chroniclers call him král Dobře, King Bene, after his habit of agreeing to whatever was put before him with the Czech word dobře: very well. The historians are kinder; he keeps the peace for forty-five years between two confessions that elsewhere in Europe are about to start murdering each other in earnest.