Grzegorz Franczak

The subject of this edition is a forgotten 17th-century Polonicum: a Latin panegyric in hexameter by Antonio Querenghi entitled Ad urbem Romam in adventu Serenissimi Vladislai, Poloniae Principis (To the city of Rome on the occasion of the arrival of His Most Serene Highness Vladislaus, the Prince of Poland). The work, published in 1625 in Rome, was noted in bibliographies of S. Ciampi and K. Estreicher as anonymous. This is because the only copy known of the first edition until recently, preserved in the holdings of Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, was deprived of the title page. The discovery of a second, complete copy in the collection of Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome allowed us to identify the author, namely the Padovan humanist Antonio Querenghi (1546-1633), who from 1605 served as the pope’s personal secretary (cubicularius), prelate and referendary of both signatures. The closest relation Querengi developed with Maffeo Barberini (Urban VIII), the “pope-Cicero” and patron of poets and artists, at whose side he stayed until his own death. On 19 January 1625 he graced with his panegyric the Roman visit of Prince Vladislaus Vasa, the later King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania Vladislaus IV.
The prince arrived in Rome on 20 December 1624, after an eight-month journey around Europe. Vladislaus, who tried to travel incognito, was received with all the honour due to the successor to the Swedish throne with the title of electi Magni Ducis Moschoviae (the elected Grand Duke of Muscovy). In the minds of the inhabitants of Europe, his person was also inextricably associated with the double triumph over the “schismatic” Muscovy, and above all with fending off Turks at the battle of Chocim (2 September–9 October 1621). Vladislaus spent the fortnight from 20 December 1624 to 2 January 1625 in the papal capital and took part in the celebration of the Jubilee. On 17 January he arrived there again after a short trip to Naples and left the city after only three days. Yet it was the latter short stay in Rome that the grandest reception in honour of the Polish Prince was held. On Sunday, 19 January, after a private audience with Pope Urban, at which only the closest curial dignitaries (with Querenghi probably among them) and officials from Vladislaus’ retinue were present, a sumptuous dinner was given with a concert afterwards. In the panegyric written for this occasion, Querenghi praises Vladislaus’ triumphs over “Muscovy twice defeated” (he meant armed attempts of the prince to the tsarist throne in the years 1610-1619) and over “the Thracian (i.e. Turkish) enemy”, the army of sultan Osman II. The ideological pivot of the poem is the pope’s planned general military expedition against Turkey: Urban VIII anoints the Polish Prince as the commander in chief of the upcoming crusade and a defender of Christianity. Vladislaus appears to be a new Hercules choosing the difficult path of Virtue, filled with renunciations and leading to eternal fame. In the panegyric apostrophe, the poet appeals to the Christian prince to follow the example of the mythical hero by taming the “godless monsters” (monstra impia) and taking upon his shoulders the weight of the world resting theretofore on the shoulders of the Italian Atlas – Pope Urban. Ad urbem Romam constitutes an excellent example of Querenghi’s stylistic manner shaped in the neo-Platonist spirit of hermetism, which made the poet create labyrinthine and enigmatic texts for the exclusive use of a narrow circle of exegetes. This manner resulted in a discrepancy, starkly visible through the refined hexameters, between two irreconcilable textual (and thus essentially linguistic) facts, one arising from historic discourse and the other generated within conventionally antiquisating, petrified, panegyric hyperbole. Namely, between Vladislaus who, abashed, retreated from Muscow and spent the battle of Chocim sick in his own tent, and the new Hercules who puts to rout the schismatic-pagan monsters threatening the Western civilisation.

Carmen ad Urbem Romam in adventu Serenissimi Vladislai Poloniae Principis (1625)

Ed. and transl. by Grzegorz Franczak

This study discusses an important aspect of a political message conveyed by Stanisław Pachołowiecki’s map, published in 1580 by G.B Cavalieri’s printing house in Rome as part of The Atlas of the Principality of Polatsk – Descriptio Ducatus Polocensis. The message in question is one of the paratexts, presenting a detailed historical note on Polatsk and the Principality. The main goal of the study is to prove a double hypothesis, first that the note on Polatsk was a key argument legitimising the rule of Stephen Báthory – contested by Tsar Ivan the Terrible – not only over the small territory under dispute but over the whole Great Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and second, that the decision to aim the first Polish-Lithuanian military offensive in the 1577–1582 war at Polatsk was motivated by political rather than military or strategic considerations.
In section I, preliminary assumptions, theses and research methods are presented. Then, in section II, the context of the propaganda campaign, as Pachołowiecki’s map ideological framework, is introduced. This is followed by a critical analysis of the historical note, based on Polish and Ruthenian-Lithuanian sources (III.1). The next section (III.2) demonstrates that Polatsk held a central place in the Muscovite political discourse. Having proclaimed himself a heir to the throne of the Great Duchy and to the crown of Poland, Ivan the Terrible seized the land of Polatsk, and the efficient Muscovite diplomacy started to assert the tsar’s alleged dynastic claim to Lithuania and Poland. In this way, the manipulated history of the “recovered Polatsk”, Polotia recepta, argued to be a historical part of Lithuania, can be seen as a reply to the Muscovite discourse of power drawing on dynastic claims to a non-existent duchy, and the key matter is the legitimisation of elective monarchy as opposed to hereditary one. Having discussed the theatrical and iconic form of the Polish triumph over Ivan the Terrible (III.3), the author highlights the long life of the political myth of the Polatsk statehood and its sign ificance for today’s Belarusian identity discourse.

The aim of this paper is to make an experimental application of textual criticism (the stemma method or Lachmann’s method) in the analyses of early-modern maps. It is supposed to verify whether, and to what extent, the means developed by philologists to establish how texts were transmitted in medieval codices, can be applied to study the transmission of geographic knowledge on early-modern maps. The author postulates that well-tried procedures should be used in studies of textual parts of old maps. They allow the formulation of fi liation hypotheses. These procedures consist of collating extant texts and detecting mistakes that indicate, connect or divide individual branches of tradition.