Elżbieta Knapek

A few remarks on the way the monarchs executed their right of patronage on the margine of an unknown document from 1390 issued by Władyslaw Jagiełło for Mikołaj Trąba

King Władysław Jagiełło had the right of patronage to over a hundred beneficiary parish churches in the Archdioceses of Gniezno and Lviv, several dozen prebendaries in cathedral and collegiate chapters, and to a difficult to assess number of chapels and church altar fundations all over the monarchy. The number of the beneficiaries under the king’s patronage was changing. It was being increased by the new churches and prebendaries founded by the king, and decreased by the benefices granted by the ruler to the Cracow’s University or religious congregations. As a patron, the king presented a candidate for a vacant benefice in writing. Due to the evanescent charcter of those documents, very few have survived until the present day. In the collection of the Scientific Library of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences a document written by Władysław Jagiełło in 1390 has been found. It presents Mikołaj Trąba as a candidate for the position of an altarist in the Cracow Cathedral. There is also another document worth mentioning in which seventeen years later Władysław Jagiełło presented Mikołaj Trąba as a candidate for the office of a parish priest in Przemyków, which became vacant after the death of king’s preacher and confessor, Jan Szczekna.

The beginnings of the parchment documents collection of the Scientific Library of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences date back to mid 19th century, that is to the time when the whole library collection started being created. It was established mainly thanks to the endowments donated by the members of the Cracow Scientific Society, later Academy of Arts and Sciences. Apart from that, the benefactors were Cracow’s burghers, clerks, priests, doctors, publicists and even students, there were also landowners. Their names were meticulously registered in the books of endowments to the Cracow Scientific Society from 1856 – 1871 and to the Academy from 1887– 1890. Initially, the parchment diplomas were not separated from the rest of the manuscripts. In 1906 Jan Czubek was preparing a publication of the second part of the Catalogue of the manuscripts belonging to the Academy of Arts and Sciences and he came up with an idea to create a separate collection of parchment documents. Three parchment documents from the 15th and 16th century are very interesting. Until mid 19th century they constituted the covers of the Sieradz land registers. After they were removed from the registers, despite being considerably damaged, they were preserved by an anonymous but provident collector and donated to the Academy of Arts and Sciences and its collection. In 2014 they were restored, so today we can identify two notarial documents and one papal bulla, unknown to the historians.