Poland’s King Casimir III had realized that…

Poland’s King Casimir III had realized that the nation needed a class of educated people, especially lawyers, who could codify the laws and administer the courts and offices in the reunified state.

His efforts to found an institution of higher learning in Poland had been rewarded in 1364, when Pope Urban V granted him permission to open a university—the second oldest university in Central Europe after the University of Prague founded 4 years earlier—but its development had been stalled by the death of the king.

In 1399, the academy is reestablished by King Wladislaus Jagiełło and his wife Jadwiga, who donates all of her personal jewelry to the academy, allowing it to enroll 203 students.

A gentle woman of poor health, the twenty-seven-year-old queen gives birth on June 22 to a daughter, baptized Elżbieta Bonifacja; but within a month both mother and baby are dead from birth complications, leaving the fifty-year-old king sole ruler of Poland and without an heir.

(Jadwiga, soon venerated as a saint in Poland, is today the Patron Saint of queens, and of United Europe.

Known for the first 453 years of its history as the Kraków Academy, it would be renamed the Jagiellonian University in 1817 to commemorate the Jagiellonian dynasty of Polish-Lithuanian kings, in accordance with the Organic Statute issued by the Organisation Commission of the Free City of Kraków established in 1815.

Today ranked by the Times Higher Education Supplement as the best Polish university, it is one of the oldest universities in Europe.)