Krystyna Radziwiłł

Jan Sariusz Zamoyski ( la, Ioannes Zamoyski de Zamoscie; 19 March 1542 – 3 June 1605) was a Polish nobleman, magnate, and the 1st ''ordynat'' of Zamość. He served as the Royal Secretary from 1565, Deputy Chancellor from 1576, Grand Chancellor of the Crown from 1578, and Great Hetman of the Crown from 1581.

Zamoyski was the General Starost of the city of Kraków from 1580 to 1585, Starost of Bełz, Międzyrzecz, Krzeszów, Knyszyn and Tartu. An important advisor to Kings Sigismund II Augustus and Stephen Báthory, he was one of the major opponents of Bathory's successor, Sigismund III Vasa, and one of the most skilled diplomats, politicians and statesmen of his time, standing as a major figure in the politics of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth throughout his life.

Biography

Childhood and education

Jan Zamoyski was born on 19 March 1542 to Stanisław Zamoyski and Anna Herburt in Skokówka. He started his education in a school in Krasnystaw but when he was thirteen years old he was sent to study abroad; from 1555 to 1559 he was a page at the royal court in Paris. Already at this young age he attended lectures at the Sorbonne University and Collège de France. In 1559 he briefly visited Poland, then attended the University of Strasbourg; after a few months there he moved to University of Padua, where from 1561 he studied law and received a doctorate in 1564. During his years abroad he converted from Calvinism to Roman Catholicism.

During his education, he became active in university politics, and in 1563 he was elected the rector of the law department. Around that time he also wrote ''De senatu Romano'', a brochure about Ancient Rome government. He returned to the Commonwealth in 1565, and was the first person to receive a commendation letter from the senate of the Republic of Venice.

File:Palazzo Bo sala dei 40 busto Zamoyski - Wikigita Padova 16 settembre 2022 f27.jpg, Bust of Zamoyski in the University of Padua, where he was a student and rector of the ''Universitas Iuristarum''.

Early career

After returning to Poland, he was appointed to the Royal Chancellery, and soon became a favorite secretary to King Sigismund II. In 1567 he commanded a royal task force, sent to remove the noble family of Starzechowscy from the royal lands they were decreed to hold illegally. Another major task he completed at that time was the reorganization of the Chancellery archive.

In 1571 he married Anna Ossolińska; his wife and their young son died shortly afterwards, in 1572. After the extinction of the Jagiellon dynasty in 1572 during the election sejm (special session of the Commonwealth parliament) he used his influence to enforce the '' viritim election'' (meaning all nobles had the right to vote for the new king during the upcoming 1573 Polish–Lithuanian royal election). However, his proposal for majority voting did not pass, which opened the process for abuses of '' liberum veto'' in the future. He was a colleague of Mikołaj Sienicki and Hieronim Ossolinski, and with them he was one of the leaders of a faction of the lesser and middle nobility (szlachta) in the Commonwealth, whose goal was the reform the country – the execution movement – preserving the unique constitutional and parliamentary government of the Commonwealth with the dominant role of poorer nobility ( Golden Freedom). He was so influential and popular among the lesser nobility that he was known as the "first tribune of nobility" or "Polish Gracchus."

Chancellor and Hetman

In that first election he was in favour of Henry de Valois (later, Henry III of France). Subsequently, he was part of the diplomatic mission that traveled to France to finish formalities with the newly elected king. He also published a pamphlet praising the new king, and thus suffered a loss of face when Henryk secretly abandoned Poland and returned to France. During the following 1575 election he was a vocal enemy of the Habsburg dynasty and its candidate, and this anti-Habsburg stance, resounding among the lesser nobility, helped him regain his popularity. For the king, Zamoyski championed the case of a Polish candidate, which ended up in the marriage of Anna Jagiellon with the anti-Habsburg Stephen Bathory of Transylvania.

Bathory thanked Zamoyski by granting him the office of Deputy Chancellor on 16 May 1576. He participated on Batory's side in the quelling of the Danzig rebellion in 1576–1577, sponsoring a chorągiew of pancerni (cavalry unit) and participating in close combat on several occasions. In 1577 he married again, this time marrying Krystyna Radziwiłł, daughter of magnate Mikołaj Radziwiłł Czarny; this made him a close ally of the Radziwiłł family, the most powerful family in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1578 he received the post of the Grand Crown Chancellor. That year poet Jan Kochanowski dedicated his '' Odprawa Posłów Greckich'', the first Polish tragedy, to him.

He took part in the preparation for a war against Muscovy in 1579–1581, where he contributed a group of 400 or 600 mercenaries. Through he had little prior military background nor experience, he was interested in mastering the military art, and proved to be an adept learner. With Batory's support, he began filling in for some of the roles of Grand Crown Hetman Mikołaj Mielecki, particularly when Mielecki was not present. While not campaigning, he was also instrumental in ensuring that the ongoing political support for the war. In 1580 he was hit by another personal tragedy, as his wife died in labor, together with their child; entering a short period of depression.

Later that year, in August, he captured Velizh in September he participated in the siege of Velikiye Luki, and then took Zavoloc. On 11 August 1581 he received the nomination for the post of Grand Crown Hetman; this nomination, although uncontroversial at that time, was technically illegal. Following that he participated in the long and inconclusive Siege of Pskov, which ended with the Peace of Yam-Zapolsky in 1582. Though Zamoyski failed to capture Pskov, he drained the Russian resources, and the ongoing siege was a major reason for the final treaty, which was highly favorable to Poland.

In June 1583 Zamoyski took his third wife, Gryzelda Bathory, a relative of king Bathory himself. In May 1584 Zamoyski's men captured Samuel Zborowski, a noble whose death sentence for treason and murder had been pending for roughly a decade; shortly afterwards with Bathory's consent Zborowski was executed. This political conflict between Báthory, Zamoyski and the Zborowski family, framed as the clash between the monarch and the nobility, would be a major recurring controversy in internal Polish politics for many years, beginning with a major dispute at the Sejm of 1585.

Later years

After the death of Batory in 1586, Zamoyski helped Sigismund III Vasa gain the Polish throne, fighting in the brief civil war against the forces supporting Habsburg archduke Maximilian III of Austria. The camp supporting Sigismund was rallied around Zamoyski, whereas Maximilian was supported by the Zborowski family. Zamoyski defended Kraków and defeated Maximilian's forces in the Battle of Byczyna in 1588. In that battle, which Sławomir Leśniewski describes as "one of the most important in Polish history, and the most important in Zamoyski's military career", Maximilian was taken prisoner and in the resulting Treaty of Bytom and Będzin of 1589 had to give up all pretenses to the Polish crown. Later that year Zamoyski proposed a reform of the royal elections, which failed to pass the Sejm. Zamoyski presented to this Sejm a project that in case the present King should die without issue none but a candidate of some Slav stock should henceforth be eligible to the Polish throne. This was a project which could even imagine the possibility of some kind of union between Catholic Poland, Orthodox Moscovy and semi-Protestant Bohemia. In fact, it was a circuitous and clumsy counter-proposal against pro-Habsburg policy.Bain, R. Nisbet, ''Slavonic Europe'', Cambridge University Press, 1908, p.137.

From 1589 Zamoyski, in his role as the hetman, tried to prevent the intensifying Tatar