A few months after Kinga’s death, on the eighth day of November in the year 1292, King Wenceslas II of Bohemia issued a charter that was to change the fortunes of the whole Sącz region.
Bertold and Arnold, sons of Tylman, reeve of Sącz, were instructed to move the town onto the lands of the episcopal village of Kamienica, in the fork of the Dunajec and the Kamienica, on land belonging to the Bishop of Kraków, Paweł of Przemanków.
The new site was more defensible, and the Hungarian border needed a strong watchtower. The design was a bold one: to move not only the burghers but both religious houses as well, the Poor Clares and the Franciscans.
Two Sączes, one name
The plan succeeded but by half. Nowy Sącz arose and grew, yet the old town had no thought of vanishing – it held fast by the convent, by the tomb of its foundress and by its market square.
In 1298 the Poor Clares received a hundred marks of silver from the Kraków salt works as compensation, which was meant to settle the matter of the removal once and for all. The convent took the silver, and the town stayed where it was.
From then on the two Sączes had somehow to be told apart. As early as 1299 the parish priest Jakub appears in a document as plebanus de Antiqua Civitate – parish priest of the Old Town. The name “Nowy Sącz” came into common use only in the second quarter of the 14th century.
And so it was that Kinga’s old town gained the epithet it bears to this day.
A restless fourteenth century
The new century brought the town blood and fire. In 1306, after the murder of Wenceslas III, the men of Bishop Jan Muskata fell upon Stary Sącz, and the record of the event says that “many people were killed, hanged and crucified”.
Hard times those were for a defenceless town, sheltered by no walls at all.
And yet trade did not cease. Around 12 September 1306 a privilege for Kraków required merchants carrying copper “from Hungary and Sącz to Toruń” to sell their goods in Kraków itself.
In 1307 a town council appears in a document, and in 1310 a letter concerning the import of copper, wine, cattle and pigs from Hungary. Sącz lived by the highway that led over the mountains to its southern neighbours.
Nor was there any want of unrest later on. In 1311 Hungarian troops were stationed here, summoned by Władysław the Elbow-high to crush the rebellion of the reeve Albert.
In 1315 the reeveship was sold for money, and in 1322 the Poor Clares were in dispute with Władysław the Elbow-high over the patronage of the parish.
A curious thing: historians know of no privilege of Władysław the Elbow-high for Stary Sącz. Once he had taken power, however, the estates of the Poor Clares were put on a steady footing.
Kinga’s tomb and the church of the Holy Trinity
The memory of Kinga never faded, not for a moment. Around 1307 her remains were laid in a stone tomb; in the years 1307–1312 twenty-one miracles were recorded, and in 1329 the book of Miracula was completed.
The anonymous life Vita et miracula sanctae Kyngae, written between 1317 and 1329, is ascribed to the Franciscans of Stary Sącz, and among them to Brother Florian.
It was then, too, that the stone convent church arose. The Gothic church of the Holy Trinity was consecrated by Bishop Jan Grot in 1332.
The art historian Piotr Pajor sees in it a unified building, raised in a single campaign by the workshop of Kraków Cathedral, most likely with the support of Władysław the Elbow-high and his consort Jadwiga.
That same Jadwiga of Kalisz, once widowed, took up the rule of Stary Sącz in 1334. She died on 10 December 1339 and was laid to rest in the convent.
She was not the first of her line to find a haven here – her mother Jolenta, Kinga’s own sister, had died here as a Poor Clare as early as 1298.
Abbesses, villages and Magdeburg law
The Poor Clares managed great estates and understood that land without people is worth little.
In 1307 they settled Kluszkowce on sixty łany (fields) with sixteen years free of dues; in 1317 Sromowce Wyżne; in 1324 they bought Krosna; and in 1336 Abbess Salomea founded Tylmanowa.
Not everything succeeded: in 1341 Abbess Wisława tried in vain to settle a village between the Dunajec and the Poprad.
In 1327 customs houses were at work in Rytro and in Stary Sącz, and the chartering of Piwniczna (1348) and Muszyna (1364) rearranged the whole network of settlements round about. Around 1340 the parish of Stary Sącz numbered roughly one thousand three hundred and forty souls.
The most important event came in the year 1357. Abbess Konstancja, formerly Duchess of Głogów and niece of Casimir the Great, granted the town Magdeburg law.
The reeveship remained in the convent’s hands, and the document lists butchers’, bakers’ and clothiers’ stalls. The privilege was confirmed later, among other times in 1358 and in 1415.
It was then, too, that the town received its regular shape: a rectangular market square with blocks of building radiating from it.
The king favoured settlement: in 1359 Bishop Bodzęta, urged on by the monarch, lowered the tithe on the Poor Clares’ estates.
Less happily, Casimir’s privilege of 1363 freed the merchants of Bardejov from tolls and set off a long dispute over the Grybów toll – settled in the Poor Clares’ favour only in 1508.
Through Sącz passed salt from Bochnia and Wieliczka, scarlet cloth, and lead from Sławków and Olkusz. The oldest fairs were held on Trinity Sunday and on the feast of Saints Felix and Adauctus. The first mention of a parish school dates from 1396.
Kings and queens, however, were already residing in Nowy Sącz: in 1376 Queen Elizabeth ruled “from Sącz”, and in 1384 it was there that Jadwiga of Anjou was welcomed.
Fire and a slow decline
The year 1410, remembered in Poland for Grunwald, was marked in Stary Sącz by the glow of flames. Ścibor of Ściborzyce, in the service of Sigismund of Luxembourg, raided and burnt the unwalled town. The parish church was most likely rebuilt after this very destruction.
Life went on. In 1413 the merchants of Stary Sącz were in dispute with Katarzyna of Bochnia at Kraków Castle, and in 1441 miners from Bochnia made a pilgrimage to Kinga’s tomb. From 1454 there was a joint guild in the town.
Around 1470 a limewood figure of Kinga was carved, which may be seen in the chapel to this day; in the 1470s Bishop Jan Rzeszowski raised her mausoleum, and in 1473 Jan Długosz himself wrote her life.
The town book of 1480–1489 names four furriers’ workshops, four bakers, two smiths and two breweries. The confraternity register of 1488 adds shoemakers, smiths, coopers and fishermen. Modest crafts, to be sure, but alive.
Długosz, however, had no mercy on the town. He wrote of Stary Sącz as a place “once famous and rich in people and merchants”, which “is now scarcely a little-known village”.
He doubtless exaggerated, as chroniclers will – but in those words one hears the truth about a town whose younger brother on the Kamienica had taken away its trade and the favour of kings. Stary Sącz entered a new age as a quiet little town in the keeping of the abbess.
In old and new photographs
