Sigismund III Vasa

King of Poland (r. 1587-1632) and King of Sweden (r. 1592-1599)

• Born: June 20, 1566
• Birthplace: Gripsholm, Sweden
• Died: April 30, 1632
• Place of death: Warsaw, Poland

Sigismund sought unsuccessfully to bring about a union of Poland and Sweden (the latter of which he was briefly king, from 1592 to 1599). Later, he sought to meddle in Muscovite affairs during Russia’s Time of Troubles.

Early Life

Sigismund III Vasa (ZEE-gihs-moont… VAH-sah) must have been one of the few kings in history to have been born in a dungeon. He was born in 1566 in Gripsholm Castle, Sweden, where his parents, the future John III and Katherine, sister of Sigismund II Augustus, last Jagiellonian king of Poland (r. 1548-1572), were held captive by John’s mad brother, Eric XIV. When Eric was assassinated in 1568, John became king of Sweden. Sigismund Vasa had a conventional princely upbringing, except in one respect: His mother, being a Catholic, and his father, secretly converting to Catholicism in 1578, resolved to bring up the heir to the throne as a Catholic in what was an overwhelmingly Lutheran country. It may have been this circumstance that led John III and his wife to dream of securing for their son the elective throne of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, because a Catholic king of Protestant Sweden would be an anomaly.

Sixteenth century Sweden was a difficult country to rule, for the Vasa monarchy was weak, hedged in by constitutional constraints, and confronted by a powerful and freedom-loving nobility, while the Protestant Reformation had made a distinct cultural imprint on society. It was against this background that, in 1587, John III managed to secure the throne of Poland for his son Sigismund, now aged twenty-one. The prince went as a stranger to Poland, where he was regarded as a foreigner, to be crowned in Kraków on December 27, 1587.

Life’s Work

King Sigismund III Vasa was faced with a daunting task. Since the end of the Jagiellonian Dynasty, the Polish monarchy had been elective and was forced to share its authority both with the Sejm, or Diet, and with a turbulent nobility in a country ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse. The Polish population encompassed Catholics, Lutheran and Calvinist Protestants, Greek Orthodox Christians in the southeast, and a flourishing Jewish community.

For Counter-Reformation Europe, Poland was unusually tolerant in religion and culture, but many Poles regarded Sigismund with suspicion. His predecessor, Stephen Báthory (r. 1575-1586), formerly prince of Transylvania, had married Anna, another sister of Sigismund II Augustus. Stephen had proved an outstanding ruler, well able to defend Polish-Lithuanian interests in the face of the aggressions of Czar Ivan the Terrible, but his reign was tragically short.

Sigismund’s election had been bitterly contested by a rival, the Archduke Maximilian, brother of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who enjoyed a considerable following among some of the Polish nobility. Stephen Báthory’s former chancellor, Jan Zamoyski, secured Sigismund’s election in the face of pro-Habsburg dissident opposition, but Sigismund found his power highly circumscribed, because the Sejm at his accession had forced him to accept a diminution of royal authority. He further antagonized his bitterly anti-German subjects by marrying the Habsburg archduchess Anna, sister of Ferdinand of Styria (the future Emperor Ferdinand II ), a connection that reinforced his deeply felt Catholicism. Indeed, if Sigismund had one consistent political objective, it was to restore Poland and eventually the Baltic world to the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1592, when John III died, Sigismund sought to obtain his paternal throne, dreaming of a union between Sweden and Poland-Lithuania. Such formal unions were not unknown, but Lutheran Sweden and predominantly Catholic Poland were an ill-matched pair. Surprisingly, though, the Sejm approved the attempt, and Sigismund, accompanied by a bevy of Catholic clerics, reached Stockholm in 1594, where he found a dangerous adversary in his uncle Charles, duke of Södermanland, the effective master of Stockholm and champion of the Protestant nobility.

At Sigismund’s coronation in Uppsala (February 18, 1594), he was compelled to assent to an Accession Charter by the Rad (the council of state), upholding Sweden’s Protestant constitution. Finding his authority thus diminished, he hurriedly returned to Poland, leaving the Rad and Duke Charles as coregents. Sigismund returned with an army in 1598 but was defeated by Charles’s forces at the Battle of Stângebro (September 25, 1598) and was formally deposed the next year, when Charles became the de facto ruler of the country. (He would formally be declared King Charles IX in 1604.) Obstinate and unrealistic, Sigismund refused to recognize the facts on the ground, and decades of intermittent warfare between Sweden and Poland followed, until the Polish Vasas finally abandoned their claim to the Swedish throne in 1660.

In 1601, Sigismund was forced to defend Polish Livonia, into which Duke Charles had advanced and where he had received a warm welcome from the mostly Protestant burghers and landowners. Sigismund responded by sending Polish troops into the province, and in 1605, at Kirkholm, near Riga, one of the greatest Polish soldiers of the age, Jan Chodkiewicz, grand hetman of Lithuania, won a spectacular victory over the Swedes for Sigismund. The victory produced no lasting consequences, however: The Swedes kept up the pressure on Livonia, and it gradually passed out of Polish control. Swedish king Gustavus II Adolphus completed its annexation between 1617 and 1622 with the capture of Riga. When the Treaty of Stummdorf (September 12, 1635) finally brought a temporary peace after Sigismund’s death, Sweden was confirmed in possession of Livonia. In retrospect, Sigismund’s Swedish adventures had brought disaster to his adopted country. He had done what he had sworn not to do, put Swedish interests before Polish, and his subjects remained in a state of continuous exasperation with him.

Another impractical scheme in which Sigismund became involved occurred when a pretender claiming to be the Czarevich Dmitry (allegedly, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, who died mysteriously as a child in 1591), crossed the Lithuanian border from Muscovy in October, 1603, and was taken under the protection of Jerzy Mniszech, palatine of Sandomiertz. Mniszech was one of a group of Polish-Lithuanian nobles who ardently advocated a renewal of war with Russia. He wrote to Sigismund representing the False Dmitry as a catalyst for the Catholicization of Russia. The Sejm was divided on the scheme to invade Russia, and Chancellor Zamoyski, one of the greatest of Polish statesmen, bitterly opposed it. Meanwhile, Claudio Rangoni, the papal nuncio, and the veteran Jesuit, Antonio Possevino, appealed to Sigismund’s conscience to support the cause.

Whatever pressures may have been brought to bear on Sigismund from either side of the debate over the False Dmitry, however, the king had little actual influence on the course of events during the early years of the Russian smutnoe vremya (Time of Troubles). On October 13, the False Dmitry crossed the Russian frontier with twenty-five hundred men, half of whom were Ukrainian Cossacks and the rest of whom were raised by Mniszech, who had also betrothed his daughter, Marina, to the pretender. The False Dmitry’s advance on Moscow led to the death of Czar Boris Godunov, the coronation of the pretender as czar, and his marriage with Marina Mniszech. However, the unpopularity of his Polish troops and his introduction of Western ways into Russian culture led to an upsurge of xenophobia, which Prince Vasily Shuysky orchestrated into a coup d’état. The False Dmitriy was lynched, and Vasily ascended the throne as Czar Vasily IV.

Several years of widespread anarchy followed, with Vasily incapable of coping with Cossack insurrections, uprisings by disenfranchised peasants and disgruntled townsfolk, and a spate of pretenders. In desperation, he sought military assistance from the Swedes in exchange for the cession of Karelia. The czar’s offer galvanized Sigismund into action. Hitherto, Polish units had been engaged in the Muscovite civil wars, but only under the leadership of local Polish-Lithuanian nobles. Now, the king intervened in person, leading an army against Smolensk (September, 1609).

Following the Smolensk campaign, a Polish army under Crown Hetman Stanislaw Zolkiewski defeated the Muscovites at the Battle of Klushino (June 24, 1610). On July 17, 1610, Vasily was deposed by the Muscovites and sent to Sigismund, who took him back to Poland as a prisoner. He died there in September, 1612. The Poles now occupied Moscow, but the occupation provoked a national uprising by Muscovites of all classes, and the invaders were expelled from the city in November, 1612. Desultory fighting between Poles and Muscovites continued until the Treaty of Deulino (1618). Again, through Sigismund’s nonchalance, Poland had made great sacrifices of men and resources to no effect.

Finally, Sigismund’s pro-Habsburg proclivities brought him into conflict with the Ottomans. In 1620, he rashly provided troops for his brother-in-law, Emperor Ferdinand II, to employ against the Protestant prince of Transylvania, Gabriel Bethlen (r. 1613-1629), despite the fact that the prince was the sultan’s vassal. Iskender Paşa, Ottoman governor of Ochakov, swiftly retaliated, defeating Sigismund’s Poles at Cecora on the Pruth (September 20, 1620), where Hetman Zolkiewski, the hero of Klushino, was killed. Sigismund remained, impotent, in Warsaw, while Crimean Tatars now penetrated southeastern Poland. A year later, at Choczim on the Dniester, a Polish army under Hetman Chodkiewicz redeemed the nation’s reputation by resisting the Ottoman army, which was commanded by Sultan Osman II in person (1618-1622). This led to a negotiatiated settlement (October 9, 1621). Based on the 1617 Treaty of Busza, the antebellum borders were restored, with Poland agreeing not to interfere in Transylvania, Moldavia, or Walachia and to restrain Cossack depredations, as the Ottomans promised to do with the Crimean Tatars.

Significance

Sigismund III Vasa’s military schemes, undertaken on behalf of the Counter-Reformation, proved disastrous for Poland. At the time of his election, a contemporary remarked: “King Stefan was good for the soldiers and this one will be good for the clergy,” and it is true that with the help of the Jesuits, Sigismund contributed largely to the re-Catholicization of Poland. It is said that Sigismund’s temperament more closely resembled that of the Habsburgs than the Vasas. Stiff and formal, vacillating and diffident, he lacked the personality to appeal to his mercurial Polish subjects. A lover of the arts, Sigismund renovated and enlarged the Wawel Castle in Kraków, traditional residence of Polish kings, and in 1597, he transferred the capital to the more centrally located Warsaw, where he employed Italian architects and craftsmen to beautify the city. Insofar as the Poles regard his reign with any nostalgia, it is as the lavish patron of the Polish Baroque.

Bibliography

Davies, Norman. God’s Playground: A History of Poland. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. An excellent general history.

Jasienica, Pawel. The Commonwealth of Both Nations: The Silver Age. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1987. A leisurely narrative of Sigismund’s reign.

Nowak, F. “Sigismund III, 1587-1632.” In The Cambridge History of Poland, to 1696, edited by W. F. Reddawa et al. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1950. Still the best summary of Sigismund’s reign.

Perrie, Maureen. Pretenders and Popular Monarchism in Early Modern Russia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. An important account of Poland’s involvement in the Time of Troubles.

Roberts, Michael. The Early Vasas: A History of Sweden, 1523-1611. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1968. A detailed account of Sigismund’s Swedish imbroglio by the most authoritative scholar of early modern Sweden writing in English.