Anna von Schweidnitz
Anne of Schweidnitz ( Czech Svidnicka Anna, Polish Anna Świdnicka; * 1339, † July 11, 1362 in Prague) was by birth Princess of Świdnica and Jawor. By her marriage to Charles IV was she the Queen of Bohemia, Holy Roman German Queen and Empress of the Holy Roman Empire. She came from the noble family of the Silesian Piast dynasty.
Life
Anna was the daughter of Duke Henry II of Świdnica and Jawor and his wife, the Hungarian Princess Catherine of Hungary ( † before September 29, 1355 ) from the House of Anjou. Her father died when she was four years old. Guardian was her childless uncle Bolko II Świdnica and Jawor, which should inherit Anna. The orphan was talking with her mother at the court of her uncle in oven and Visegrád and was educated there. At the age of 11 years she was the then eleven-month Wenceslas, son and heir of Emperor Charles IV, was promised in marriage. After the heir to the throne and his mother Anna died of the Palatinate within the next two years, the now widowed Charles IV gave to himself for the hand of Anne of Schweidnitz.
The negotiations about the wedding took place in 1353 at the Viennese court. In addition to the thirty-seven groom Karl and Anna's guardian Bolko II were present: Duke Albert II, King Louis of Hungary, Margrave Ludwig of Brandenburg, Duke Rudolf of Saxony, emissary of the Polish king Casimir and an ambassador of the Republic of Venice.
The planned marriage went well with the aspirations of Charles, also part of the Principality of Świdnica and Jawor as a fief of the crown of Bohemia to win. Anna's uncle Louis of Hungary encouraged this connection by - as the future king of Poland - all claims to the Duchy of Świdnica and Jawor in favor of the renounced Luxembourg.
After the Prague Archbishop Ernest of Pardubice when Pope Innocent VI. a Ehedispens reached because of extensive kinship, the wedding took place in oven on May 27, 1353.
On July 28, 1353 Anna was crowned in Prague by Archbishop Ernest of Pardubice Queen of Bohemia and on 9 February 1354 Aachen Holy Roman queen. At the coronation of Charles as Emperor on 5 April 1355 the Basilica of Saint Peter was also crowned the Empress of the Holy Roman Empire. She became the first Queen of Bohemia, who had been anointed to an empress.
1358 Anna gave birth to a daughter who was named after the last Přemyslovna Elizabeth. In February 1361 she became the mother of the heir to the throne awaited Wenzel, who was born in the city of Nuremberg and baptized on 11 April in the Church of St. Sebald by the archbishops of Prague, Cologne and Mainz. The culmination of the two-year Wenceslas not live to see the Queen, however. At the age of only 23, she died on July 11, 1362 at the birth of another child. Their remains rest in a tomb in St. Vitus Cathedral.
The widowed siebenundvierzigjährige emperor married a year later Elizabeth of Pomerania. The Duchy of Świdnica and Jawor fell Bolkos II 's death in 1368 as a Erbfürstentum to the crown of Bohemia.
Representations
In art many representations of the Empress and Queen Anne of Schweidnitz preserved, eg:
- Peter Parler created around 1375 in their own image on the Chortriforium of Prague's St. Vitus Cathedral one of the sandstone busts than life-size half-length figure, with strongly modeled face and long hair.
- Miniatures of a magnificent manuscript, which gave Anna's son Wenceslas in 1400 in order to show the queen with courtly entourage.
- On a wall painting of the castle Karlstejn and Anna hold a reliquary cross, and on another fresco they are represented kneeling before an image of the Madonna.