Jadwiga had never seen him, and the rumours said Jogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania, was ugly, coarse and a barbarian. She sent Zawisza of Oleśnica to meet him on the road. His orders: see him, come back fast, describe him faithfully. But the duke guessed why the knight had come. He welcomed him warmly and, the chronicle says, took him with him to the baths, so he could see not just his face but every line of his body.

A bath in those lands was a hot room: a stove of stones, water thrown for steam, bundles of birch twigs. And Jogaila was a man of the bath. The same chronicler writes that as king he took the warmth of the baths often, at times every other day; his court accounts list a bath keeper by name.

The knight rode back to the queen. Slender, he said. Well made. Medium height. A cheerful face. Long, but with no trace of ugliness. That February, she married him.

In the Kalevala, before the smith Ilmarinen goes to propose, his sister heats the sauna. He comes out unrecognisable, his face quite handsome.

One more thing: the chronicler, Jan Długosz, wrote this story more than seventy years later, in a house below Wawel that had once been the royal bathhouse.

Would you have sent a knight?

Sources: Jan Długosz, Annales seu cronicae incliti Regni Poloniae, years 1385 and 1386 (the only source for the bath; historians treat it as an anecdote) and 1434 (the king's habits); the royal court accounts of 1388 to 1394; Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub (965) and finds at Gdańsk for what a bath was; Jarosław Nikodem (Przegląd Historyczny 2007; Jadwiga, król Polski, 2009); Kalevala, runo 18.
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