Grunwald Swords - From War Trophy To Royal Insignia

From War Trophy To Royal Insignia

See also: Polish Crown Jewels For the sword-related terminology used in this section, see Sword: Morphology.

The king sent the two swords to Kraków and deposited them, together with Teutonic army banners and other war trophies, in the treasure vault of the Royal Wawel Castle. Eventually, the "two Prussian swords", as they were described in a treasury inventory in 1633, became treated as part of Polish-Lithuanian crown jewels. They were used in royal coronations throughout the existence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795) and possibly also earlier, during the dynastic union of the two nations under the House of Jagiellon. Since the pair of swords had been given to two rulers – of Poland and Lithuania – each of the weapons was associated with one of the two constituent nations of the Commonwealth.

During a coronation ceremony, the king-elect made a sign of the Cross three times with the Szczerbiec, or the principal coronation sword. Immediately afterwards, one of the bishops assisting in the ceremony handed the Grunwald Swords to the king who in turn passed them on to the Crown (i.e., Polish) and Lithuanian sword-bearers (miecznicy). After the coronation, the king returned from the cathedral where the ceremony had taken place to the royal castle, preceded, among others, by the two sword-bearers carrying the Grunwald Swords as symbols of the king's reign in the two nations.

Unlike the Szczerbiec and other ceremonial swords stored in the royal treasury, the Grunwald Swords were simple battle swords that would have been typical for armament of early 15th-century European knights. At some point in time they were embellished with hilts made from gilded silver. Additionally a little shield with the coat of arms of Poland, the White Eagle, was attached to the blade of one sword and, analogically, a similar shield with the Lithuanian Pursuer was fastened to the other one.

Two of the elective kings of Poland–Lithuania were crowned without the use of the Grunwald Swords. King Stanislaus I Leszczyński was crowned in Warsaw in 1705 with a makeshift set of royal insignia given to him by King Charles XII of Sweden and quickly destroyed after the ceremony. The set probably did not include an equivalent of the Grunwald Swords. During the War of the Polish Succession, Leszczyński's supporters sequestered the Polish Crown Jewels from Wawel and hid them at the Jasna Góra Monastery in Częstochowa to prevent Stanislaus's rival Frederick Augustus Wettin from using them for his coronation. Hence, Augustus III used his own set of crown jewels for his 1734 coronation. His set included two sheathless ceremonial swords, described by an anonymous witness of the ceremony as "two huge épées", that were meant to replace the Grunwald Swords as symbols of Poland and Lithuania. The Polish sword had a pommel in the shape of an eagle's head, a cross-guard in the form of an eagle's talons, and a little crowned heraldic shield with the arms of Poland on the blade. Its Lithuanian counterpart had a pommel shaped like a lion's head, a lion's paws as the cross-guard, and on the blade an armorial shield of Lithuania below a grand-ducal hat. Those two swords were used again in a mourning ceremony on the third anniversary of the death of King Augustus II, Augustus III's father, in 1736. Afterwards, they were moved to the Armory (Rüstkammer) in Dresden were they could still be seen at the end of the 19th century. Their current location is unknown.