In June 1543, a sixteen-year-old girl arrived in Kraków to become Queen of Poland. She could not speak a word of Polish. Elizabeth of Austria, the eldest daughter of Ferdinand of Habsburg, had been betrothed to Sigismund Augustus since she was eight months old, a marriage arranged to shift the balance of a war her father was losing. The young king had been crowned at nine, his future secured by the relentless maneuvering of his mother, Bona Sforza.

Now the bride came to the Wawel Castle, and the woman who had spent ten years trying to stop the wedding was waiting for her. Bona Sforza hated the match. She wanted a French alliance and a daughter-in-law she could control. She saw in Elizabeth a foreign agent with a direct line to Vienna, planted in her son’s bedchamber.

Elizabeth arrived without the dowry her father had promised, the money lost to an empty treasury and a Turkish war. And within weeks, the bride’s hidden illness revealed itself. The young queen had the falling sickness, epilepsy. Without warning, she would go rigid and drop to the floor in convulsions.

Her husband told his physician that the sight repelled him. Most of what survives of Elizabeth’s married life was written by a spy. Giovanni Marsupino, an Italian secretary on her father’s payroll, reached Kraków a month after the wedding and became her interpreter, the only man in the kingdom she could speak to freely. His letters to Vienna describe a queen who ate every meal alone.

The king took his dinner with his mother. Courtiers were afraid to be seen visiting the young queen, lest Bona’s favor turn against them. Her mother-in-law controlled the kitchen that fed her, and when Elizabeth’s servants asked for a piece of Parmesan cheese from the queen mother’s pantry, the matter ended up before the Royal Council of Poland. Bona responded to the scandal by summoning the senior bishops and senators to hear her complaint.

She presided over the council herself. “You will laugh, my lords, that I summoned you over so small a matter,” she told them, “but evil must be cured at the root. ” They sided with her to a man. The blame fell on the spy who had spread the story, and Marsupino was driven out of the country that autumn.

With him went the only person Elizabeth could talk to freely. The king withdrew further. He left for Lithuania in July 1543, on his mother’s advice, to learn the government of the Grand Duchy. Elizabeth was left behind with her parents-in-law, moving between country manors ahead of the plague.

Month after month, letters arrived from the young king, but they were addressed to his mother. He sent nothing to his wife. His father-in-law pressed him, and eventually he wrote. Elizabeth’s reply survives, full of formal phrases and one honest line: “How my soul rejoiced, learning from your majesty’s letter of all the adventures and events which your majesty deigned to share with me.

” She was seventeen, ignored for a year, and one letter was enough to make her happy. Bona tried to have the marriage annulled, discovering a flaw in the dispensation that had permitted the cousins to marry. The document named the wrong degree of kinship. She needed a royal secretary to draft the petition to Rome, but a learned churchman named Stanislaus Hosius refused to write it.

The Habsburg lawyers obtained a corrected dispensation instead, and the marriage held. In October 1544, the king was given the government of Lithuania, with his own court at Vilnius. For the first time, Elizabeth lived where her mother-in-law did not. Reports from those months are the brightest of her life.

The couple went hunting together. She waited in the hall to receive him when he returned to the castle. He sought remedies for her illness, consulting astrologers and trying to obtain from England the miraculous cramp rings blessed by King Henry VIII, prized as a cure for the falling sickness. The dowry finally arrived in April 1545, nearly two years late, delivered by the same diplomat who had negotiated her price when she was four.

She had about ten weeks to live. In April, her seizures grew frequent. A bishop reported her health “nearly lamentable,” then that she had come out of danger. Her husband took that judgment at its word and left Vilnius for Kraków to formally receive the dowry.

On the 11th of June, the seizures came back. She had fifteen convulsions in ten hours. She never recovered. On the 15th of June 1545, on the feast of St.

Vitus, the patron saint of those who suffered from the falling sickness, Elizabeth of Austria died. She was eighteen years old, twenty-four days short of her nineteenth birthday. No member of either family was with her. Her husband was in Kraków with her money.

The weather was hot, and a queen could not be buried without the king present. Her attendants packed the body in lime and sealed the coffin. It stood through the summer while the household was dissolved. Sigismund Augustus did not hurry.

The funeral was finally held on the 24th of August. She was buried in the vault beneath the cathedral in Vilnius, beside her husband’s uncle, King Alexander. Her crown was buried with her, a hasty piece of gilded silver made by local goldsmiths in the few weeks between her death and the funeral. The following years were consumed with quarrels over her tapestries and plate and the remaining money.

Her husband remarried, secretly and scandalously, to Barbara Radziwiłł, a Lithuanian widow he had met while Elizabeth lay waiting for a letter in a plague refuge. He fought his mother and the Polish Parliament for years to have Barbara crowned queen. She died within months of her coronation, of what modern examination suggests was cancer of the womb. People said poison, and they said Bona.

Sigismund Augustus then married Elizabeth’s younger sister Catherine, at her father’s urging. Catherine had the same illness. She had her first seizure in 1558, and the king’s old revulsion returned. He kept her away from court, said God was punishing him for marrying his dead wife’s sister, and begged Rome to release him.

Rome refused. Catherine left Poland and died in 1572. Bona Sforza left Poland for Italy in 1556, laden with her fortune, and died the following year. Her own son believed she was poisoned on Habsburg orders.

Sigismund Augustus never fathered a legitimate child. The Jagiellon dynasty ended with his death in 1572. Elizabeth’s bones stayed in Vilnius. In the 1650s, with a Muscovite army approaching, cathedral clergy moved the royal dead into a small chamber beneath the high altar and bricked up the entrance.

The knowledge of where they lay was lost for nearly three hundred years. In 1931, engineers surveying the cracked foundations of the cathedral broke into the walled-up chamber. Elizabeth’s bones lay against the wall, cemented to the stone by the lime that had been packed around her in the summer of 1545. On a ledge above the bones sat her crown, set aside by the men who had moved her.

Her remains were gathered and placed in a mausoleum beneath the chapel of St. Casimir, where they remain. Her crown, hidden from the Germans in 1939, was found in a hollow space beneath a staircase in the cathedral crypts in December 2024, still wrapped in a newspaper from the first month of the war.