Salvation and Loss
The Grunwald Swords were used for the last time in a coronation of a Polish king – that of Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski – in 1764 in Warsaw. They are mentioned in the last inventory of the royal treasury of 1792. During the Kościuszko Uprising in 1794, Kraków was captured by the Prussian army, which occupied the Wawel Castle and looted its treasure vault. However, the Prussians, probably uninterested in the material value of two simple iron swords and unaware of their historical and symbolic significance, left the Grunwald Swords behind.
After Prussia ceded Kraków, by the terms of the Third Partition of Poland, to the Habsburg Empire in 1796, the swords were retrieved from the devastated treasury by historian Tadeusz Czacki who handed them over to Princess Izabela Czartoryska. The princess was an art collector known for her interest in Polish national memorabilia. The Grunwald Swords were placed among other patriotic souvenirs in the Temple of the Sybil, her private museum established in the garden of the Czartoryski Palace in Puławy.
The palace was seized by the Russian government during the November Uprising of 1830–1831. Most of the collection from the Temple of the Sybil had been evacuated to France shortly before the uprising broke out, but the Grunwald Swords were hidden in a parish priest's house in the nearby village of Włostowice (now part of Puławy). In 1853, after the priest's death, the house was searched by Russian gendarmes, or security police, who confiscated the swords as illegal weapon and took them to the fortress of Zamość. Their subsequent fate is unknown.
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