Queen Bona Sforza (1494-1557), the second wife (from 1518) of Sigismund the Old (1467-1548), the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, is a figure of an exceptionally one-dimensional and lasting black legend' among a gallery of numerous royal consorts not only of the Jagiellonian, but also of other Polish kings in the entire Polish monarchy. Many elements contributed to this legend. Some of them created a pejorative image of the Queen already throughout her life, while others were added, in historiography, literature, poetry, theatre, artworks, films, in the following centuries. In a broader understanding and culture, Bona's "black legend" was deprived of any nuances, and became limited to a primitive image of the Queen as a ruthless poisoner and demonical demoraliser of her own son. 1 In a rather porous collective memory, as well as in a serious historiography, Queen Bona is seen stereotypically and, in fact, one-dimensionally. Until the mid-20 th century, this one-dimensional view, which included academic studies too, of Queen Bona's life, her role and significance, engendered, almost without exceptions, a negative approach, often tinged either with antifeminism intolerant of an active and important role of a woman in public or political life, or with the spirit of Romanticism which, in opposition to the Polish heroine of the "Mother of the Fatherland", was in need of creating her antithesis, an orderly villain of foreign background. 2 Some modern research, e.g. by Katarzyna Kosior, tries to explain the vitality of the "black legend" of the Italian woman on the Polish throne either by the 19 th century nationalism, a systemic communist anti-Germanism, or even by a literary construct, quite popular in recent times, of the "Polish post-colonialism," 3 which the historiography of the Jagiellonian era is also starting to request. 4 This "campaign of antipathy, lasting almost half 1
