The first tapestries were brought by Queen
Bona Sforza as her wedding
dowry. Then in 1526 and 1533,
Sigismund I the Old ordered 108 fabrics in
Antwerp and
Bruges. and Nicolas Leyniers between 1550-1565. Initially, there were about 170 tapestries in the royal collection, among them 84 black-and-white tapestries with the royal crest and the letters
SA, 8 tapestries which
Sigismund I the Old had been received from the
Emperor Maximilian I, and others, gifts from foreign delegations. The gifts include one tapestry with the Polish eagle bearing the date 1560, the royal initials and the letters
CKCH (Christophorus Krupski Capitaneus Horodlo) next to the
Korczak coat of arms and the inscription
SCABELLVM PEDVM TVORVM (the footstool under your feet, from
Psalm 110 (A Psalm of David)), a gift from Krzysztof Krupski,
starost of
Horodło for Sigismund Augustus. •
Mythological scenes - scenes from the
Trojan War, the
Military expeditions of the Persian king Cyrus, the
Story of Romulus and Remus, the
Story of Scipio, the
Story of Hannibal, the
Story of Julius Caesar and the
Story of Octavian Augustus (scattered), •
landscape and animal scenes (verdure) (sometimes associated with Willem Tons), •
grotesque scenes with the coats of arms of
Poland and
Lithuania and the royal initials were given to the king's three sisters and after their death, they had become the property of the State Treasury,
to serve the public good of the Commonwealth and not for private benefit of future kings (fragment of the Diet's resolution). Unfortunately, the not quite precise will became a cause of many conflicts over ownership of the tapestries between the kings and nobles. The whole collection was only together for a short time at the
Castle in Tykocin until 1572. Then the king's sisters scattered it between their residences in
Kraków,
Niepołomice,
Warsaw,
Vilnius and
Hrodna, and even sent some to
Sweden. During the
Deluge the collection was hidden by
Jerzy Sebastian Lubomirski in his estates in
Spiš. In the following years the king
John II Casimir Vasa mortgaged 157 tapestries to a merchant from
Gdańsk, Jan Gratta, without the consent of parliament. In order to force the lifetime wages after his
abdication the king also took some of the tapestries to
France. This caused protests from the nobility and the king's debt was not repaid until 1724. When the
Second World War broke out in 1939, the tapestries stored at Wawel Castle were transported through
Romania, France and England to
Canada to be finally returned, after 15 years of negotiations, to the
People's Republic of Poland in the 1960s. In 1961, when the royal collection was coming back from a long journey it was greeted by the
Sigismund Bell and the Kraków inhabitants. Today 137 fabrics are owned by the Wawel Royal Castle (2 of them,
Forest landscape with a deer and a duck catching fish and the
Forest landscape with a deer and giraffes by Nicolas Leyniers, are displayed in the Warsaw Royal Castle), the
Moral fall of the humanity before the deluge, returned to Poland in 1977 as a gift from the Soviet Union, it is in the Royal Castle in Warsaw and one of the missing, which appeared on the antique market in the 1950s and was purchased by the
Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam. Today, the 136 that are still in possession of the Wawel castle make up Europe's best tapestry collections. ==See also==