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Bona Sforza of Aragon brought great wealth, innovations and court intrigues to the Polish-Lithuanian lands of the early 16th century. Her decisive and shrewd character greatly surprised the nobles of her court. She was always very determined in affirming her prerogatives and her beloved son Sigismund Augustus. Very linked to the habits and customs of the Peninsula, at the time the fulcrum of European culture, the queen’s action had long-term consequences for the central-eastern area of Europe.
Youth and marriage
Bona Sforza was born in Vigevano, a town in the Pavia area, on 2nd February 1494 to the legitimate heir to the throne of the Duchy of Milan Gian Galeazzo Sforza and Isabel of Aragon. The future queen was born in a crucial year for the destinies of the Peninsula. In fact, the French king Charles VIII, with his sudden descent into Italy, started that bloody and turbulent period known as the “Italian Wars” which swept away the political structures of the Bel Paese established at the Peace of Lodi in 1454.
Her youth was symbolic of her era. Having left the Milanese court in 1500 by will of her mother Isabella by virtue of the usurpation of the dukedom title by the cynical Ludovico il Moro, she was raised between Naples and Bari. This escape to the south was made necessary by the death (probably due to poisoning) of her father of Bona, the aforementioned Gian Galeazzo Sforza. Her mother Isabella chose to head to Naples because she was the daughter of the Aragonese-Neapolitan king Alfonso II. Here Bona Sforza received a refined education thanks to the flourishing cultural life of the southern kingdom.
Credits: Visitpavia.
This mix of political instability and cultural ferment were typical characteristics of Renaissance Italy at the beginning of the 16th century. Great military leaders and sagacious thinkers outlined the Italian social horizon of the sixteenth century. In the following years, her mother Isabella managed to build the conditions for a prestigious marriage. Bona was then given in marriage to the King of Poland Sigismund I known as the Old, widower of his first wife. Young Sforza was 24 years old at the time of the marriage, while Sigismund was 51.
The king urgently needed to produce a male heir, so as to ensure dynastic succession. Her noble ancestry and his prestigious title brought about the union, which took place in 1518 at the Capuano Castle in Naples. Having arrived in the city eighteen years earlier as an exile, she was now leaving the southern capital as queen for Krakow.
An iron queen
As soon as she arrived in the Polish capital, Bona Sforza immediately showed off her Italian character. She maintained a typically Renaissance style of clothing that was elegant and, in the eyes of some Polish boyars, even extravagant. Her presence once again revived interest in Poland in Italy, whose culture had already been initially spread thanks to humanist Filippo Buonaccorsi in the second half of the 15th century.
Not only style, but also culinary traditions: Queen Bona did not want to separate herself from various typical Italian foods. This allowed the spread in Poland of typically Italian vegetables and fruit such as artichokes, oranges, lemons, lettuce, pomegranates, olives, cabbage. Other specialties of the Bel Paese such as parmesan and wine were also never missing from the pantries of Wavel Castle. Many local nobles found the queen’s meals unusually meager in light of Polish cuisine heavy on meat, beer, and mead.
However, such light eating habits did not reflect Bona’s decisive and assertive character in her political affairs. Unlike Sigismund I’s first wife, Hungarian Barbara Zápolya, Sforza was always energetically at the forefront in asserting her position in state affairs. In fact, Bona arrived in Krakow with large assets to which were also added generous land grants given to her by her husband. This meant that the Polish nobility, especially those more prominent, always disliked her.
Furthermore, she acted almost like a foreign body within the government body. In fact, the law considered her possessions as tax-free royal property, but unlike Sigismund, the queen did not participate in any way in state expenses. She also proceeded to use her proceeds to build her own political faction, sometimes even in conflict with the guidelines dictated by the king. Bona’s agenda, in any case, very often coincided with that of Sigismund, allowing the Polish monarch to double his political weight given the strong room for maneuver guaranteed to the queen.
Credits: wavel.krakow.pl.
In fact, already in the 16th century, the Kingdom of Poland was structured around a large and powerful nobility (szlachta) which had gradually obtained extensive privileges from the previous monarchs. There was a parliament (Sejm) and a senate. The king, for example, was personally called upon to pay for military expenses if the army had to leave the borders and was unable to establish new taxes without the consent of the noble community. The queen was not strictly bound to noble privileges and this could be a great strength for Sigismund’s objectives.
Bona allied himself with the Polish nobleman and Primate Jan Łaski, supporting the use of Polish-style courts on Lithuanian territory. She therefore worked to reduce the enormous influence of the Goštautas and Radziwiłł families in Lithuania. Starting from the possession of the municipalities of Kaunas, Brest and land in Mazovia, in the 1530s and 40s she purchased new properties with her own finances. Sigismund himself guaranteed her freedom of maneuver in the purchase of the Lithuanian grand ducal lands. She came to hold territories along an arc of 240kms, from Palanga (on the Baltic Sea) to Kaunas.
The queen busily took care of her possessions, ensuring that the inspectors made these lands profitable and well organized. Bona also standardized bonds and rents, making payment in cash or labor the norm. She also did her best to defend the minor nobility against the abuses of the aforementioned Goštautas and Radziwiłł families. She ordered the return of property to minor noble families if the more prominent aristocrats could not legally prove that such property belonged to them.
This caused her great hostility among the upper nobility, but she gained the respect of much of the middle and lower szlachta. As if that wasn’t enough, she rationalized the arable land starting from 1533, standardizing it into lots of 21.3 hectares each. Each lot was divided into three fields: grain, winter wheat and fallow. This made it possible to greatly increase the fertility and yield of the fields. Indeed, Bona’s reform clearly bore her fruit: by the end of the century, Lithuanian land revenues had quadrupled.
The queen now held boundless possessions in every corner of the Confederation. In Małopolska alone, she had 15 royal towns and 191 villages. In the Mazovian voivodeship, she could even boast of the city of Warsaw, as well as hundreds of other properties. This great effort to centralize power was mainly aimed at forming a solid future for the only male child destined to live a long time.
Her son Sigismund II Augustus e her last years
In 1520, Sforza gave birth to the long-awaited male heir of the Jagiellonian family of Poland: Sigismund II Augustus. His father Sigismund I the Old was 53 years old at the time of his birth when the hopes of fathering a son had almost completely vanished. This event was, in fact, totally unexpected also due to the response of the court astrologers who had stated that no male heir would see the light. Bona immediately did her utmost to prepare the ground for her son’s rise, particularly focusing her action on Lithuania.
The same second name “Augustus” was strongly desired by her mother, with her hope that the future king would be equal to the Roman emperors. The queen personally took care of her son’s education with great dedication and attention. Despite this, Bona long harbored doubts about young Sigismondo’s real governing abilities. In any case, she moved quickly to ensure her son’s future rise to power, having him pre-elected as the future king of Poland as early as the age of nine in 1529.
This coup was absolutely not tacitly accepted by the demanding Polish nobility who raised enormous protests due to an action that violated the very essence of the elective monarchy in force. The deed was now accomplished, but Sigismund the Elder was forced to solemnly promise the szlachta that the elections of the kings following his son would be solely the prerogative of the Sejm. This agreement was widely criticized by Bona, who had always had the objective of transforming Poland into a more absolutist monarchy, along the lines of the French model.
However, these ambitions of hers could never make a dent in the well-established Polish elective monarchy, of which the nobility had been the beating heart for centuries. In this regard, she was not even able to prevent her son’s first marriage to Elizabeth of Habsburg, favored by much of the nobility. However, Sigismondo Augusto was never attracted to her first wife, neglecting her and rarely visiting her. Neverthless, the Austrian did not have a long life.
Her premature death did not coincide with Bona’s renewed political strength. In fact, her son secretly married her true love Barbara Radziwiłł in 1547 again against his mother’s will. This relationship caused scandal at court, but in the end the nobility granted Barbara’s coronation as queen of Poland in 1551. Bona, now elderly and widowed since 1548, made the decision to abandon Krakow definitively in 1556. Her influence was now more and more limited and most of the nobility did not have great respect towards the widow queen.
Credits: Cultural Heritage.
She spent the last months of his life in Bari, passing away in 1557. She bequeathed the properties within the Polish-Lithuanian borders to her son Sigismund Augustus, but on her deathbed she decided to donate her rich possessions in Italy southern to Spanish king Philip II. The attempts of Polish diplomats to claim possession of the former queen’s Neapolitan heritage were in vain, so much so that this dispute between Poland-Lithuania and Spain lasted until the final partition of the Confederation in 1795.
Her children Sigismondo and Anna nevertheless did their utmost to give her a rest worthy of a queen. They commissioned a mausoleum inside the Basilica of Saint Nicholas of Bari, still one of the main attractions inside the basilica dedicated to the patron saint of Russia. The presence of the tomb of an Italian queen of Poland further testifies to Bari’s role as “eastern gateway to Italy”.
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