Sigismund I the Old

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Sigismund I the Old
on a drawing by Jan Matejko
Born	1 January 1467
in	Kozienice, Poland
Died	1 April 1548
in	Cracow, Poland
Buried	on 26 July 1548 Wawel Cathedral, Cracow

Coronation	January 24, 1507 in Wawel Cathedral, Cracow

Family or dynasty	Jagiellon dynasty
Coat of Arms	Pogoń Litewska.
Parents	Casimir IV of Poland Elisabeth of Austria
Marriage and children	with Katarzyna Ochstat Telniczanka: Jan Ochstat, Regina Szafraniec, Catherine de Montfort
	with Barbara Zapolya: Jadwiga Jagiellon, Anna
	with Bona Sforza: Isabella of Hungary, Sigismund II of Poland, Zofia, Anna Jagiellon, Catherine of Sweden and Finland, Wojciech Olbracht

Sigismund I the Old (Polish: Zygmunt I Stary; Lithuanian: Žygimantas II Senasis; 1 January 1467 – 1 April 1548) of the Jagiellon dynasty reigned as King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1506 to his death at age 81 in 1548. Before that, Sigismund had already been invested as Duke of Silesia.

Sigismund I owed allegiance to the Imperial Habsburgs as a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece.

The son of King Casimir IV Jagiellon and Elisabeth of Austria Habsburg, Sigismund followed his brothers John I of Poland and Alexander I of Poland to the Polish throne. Their elder brother Ladislaus II of Hungary and Bohemia became king of Hungary and Bohemia. Sigismund was christened the namesake of his mother's maternal grandfather, Holy Roman 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 the 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). Those conflicts formed part of the Muscovite wars. 1515 he entered an alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I.

In return for Maximilian lending weight to the provisions of the Second 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. In return, he was given the domains of the Order, as the First Duke of Prussia. This was called the Prussian Homage.

"Prussian Homage," by Jan Matejko, 1882, 388 x 875 cm, National Museum in Cracow. Albrecht Hohenzollern receives the Duchy of Prussia in fief from Polish King Sigismund I the Old in 1525

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.