4,415
edits
Changes
no edit summary
The only historical source that mentions the banquet at Wierzynek's are the ''Annals of the Glorious Kingdom of Poland'' by Jan Długosz, also known by his Latinized name, Joannes Longinus. According to his account, it all began when Charles of Luxembourg, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Bohemia (a kingdom roughly corresponding to the modern-day Czech Republic) was receiving envoys from Hungary and said something very offensive about King Louis of Hungary's mom. It led, obviously, to a major diplomatic crisis. Louis, together with Duke Rudolph Habsburg of Austria (who also had his differences with the emperor and, incidentally, his father-in-law), was getting ready for war. This is when Pope Urban V decided it was enough that Western Europe, recently ravaged by a pandemic of bubonic plague, was already being plunged into a bloody conflict (which would later come to be known as the Hundred Years' War). Having rulers of the relatively stable and quickly developing Central Europe at each other's throats would be too much. Which is why he dispatched his nuncio, Peter of Volterra, to try and calm them down. The nuncio did a great job -- he managed to prevent hostilities and to convince the wrangling monarchs to settle their argument through arbitration. It was agreed there would be two adjudicators: one was Duke Bolko the Small of Schweidnitz, the last sovereign ruler in Silesia and uncle of the emperor's recently deceased third wife. The other was King Casimir of Poland, brother of the Hungarian queen mother whose honour had been besmirched.
The nuncio also engaged in matchmaking and arranged the marriage of the freshly widowed emperor with Casimir's granddaughter, Duchess Elizabeth of Stolp, Pomerania. The wedding was held in Cracow. According to Longinus, people invited by King Casimir included -- apart from the young bride (and her family) and the not-so-young groom (and his family) -- King Louis of Hungary, King Sigismund of Denmark, King Peter of Cyprus, Duke Bolko the Small of Schweidnitz, Duke Otto V of Bavaria, Duke Semovit of Masovia, Duke Vladislav II of Opole, etc. The wedding reception lasted twenty days, during which barrels of wine were put out in the streets for the common folk, while the royals and lords enjoyed tournaments, dances and banquets. The festivities were overseen -- again, according to Longinus -- by a certain Wierzynek, "a councillor of Cracow, native of the Rhineland" and "manager of the royal treasury". He held one of the banquets in his own home, where -- in gratitude for "unspeakable benevolence" -- he seated King Casimir (and not the emperor!) in the place of honour and showered him with presents that were worth more than the new empress's dowry.<refname=Długosz>{{Cyt
| nazwisko = Długosz
| imię = Jan
}} }}
It's possible that these gifts were not so much handed to the guests as allowed to be taken. During the congress of Cracow, these may have been parts of the interior design of royal sleeping chambers, "sumptuously decorated with purple and scarlet, gold, pearls and jewels",<ref>Jan name=Długosz, ''op. cit.''</ref> as well as precious-metal plates, which the visitors simply helped themselves to after the party. It's like you steal a towel from a hotel room and the hotel manager decides to make you a present of it; this just seems to have been the norm in the Middle Ages. It's little surprise, then, that both the guests and the chroniclers paid much more attention to the tableware than to the food and drink that was served on it. Especially that, outside of special occasions, even at royal tables people normally ate from trenchers cut out of stale loaves of rye bread, which -- soaked with rich, spicy sauces -- were later consumed by the servants.<ref>{{Cyt
| nazwisko = Dembińska
| imię = Maria