Territorial Coats of Arms on the Crown Seals of King Stanisław August

Abstract

A wreath of territorial, and later also state and dynastic coats of arms, as an element of the composition of Polish royal seals, appeared at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries. Initially, it was placed on the seals of majesty, later on the broad (chancellor's) seals of the Crown and Lithuania, and from the times of John Casimir also on the small (sub-chancellor) Crown seals. A set of these coats of arms was created during the reign of King Michael. In general, however, in the field of territorial heraldry, it was characterized by quite high stability, and the land coats of arms introduced to it in the Jagiellonian times functioned without major changes until the reign of Stanisław August. This king used two sets of state seals. The first, created for the coronation in 1764, was a continuation of traditional patterns. The changes concerned only the coat of arms in the second set of seals made in 1780. They concerned two areas: the content and the form of presenting the signs. In the first, the markings of the former fief areas, which were no longer associated with the Crown, were updated: the coat of arms of the Moldavian fief was replaced with the coat of arms of the Kalisz Voivodeship, and the coat of arms of the Pomeranian fief with the coat of arms of Livonia. In the aspect of form, hatching of signs was used for the first time in state sigillography. Although hatching appears already on Wettin's seals, it was not used on Polish state seals. As a result, the seals created in 1780 are the first official color representation of the coats of arms of the lands of the Kingdom of Poland. Breaking with the existing tradition, the creator of the seal, Jan Filip Holzhaeusser, also reversed the arrangement of figural emblems, which until then had been directed towards the central element of the image (i.e., towards the figure of the enthroned ruler, or the Polish Eagle), and also changed the shape of some emblems to forms known from earlier times, later rejected. Enigmatic in this context is the small crown seal of this king, known from one of the collector's imprints, probably made in 1785. Its uniqueness, apart from the lack of confirmation of wider use, prove modifications in the coat of arms, unjustified on the grounds of Polish territorial heraldry.