Based on the "palace" rumor, Gall Anonim in his chronicle made a suggestive mention of an alleged romance between the court's manager and the queen herself. In fact, the unrepentant couple were to commit at least a few more wicked deeds apart from adultery. But was this slander really just an invention of the hostile rulers? Or was there a grain of truth in it?
"Let it suffice what has been said about Sieciech and about the queen," noted Gall Anonymous, leaving details of the vivid imagination of posterity. And these eagerly picked up the veiled suggestion. In this way, a rumor was born about a villainous palatine's romance with Władysław Herman's second wife, Judyta Salicka. But was it really just a rumor?
Is this a conspiracy or is it sweetheart?
If we believe the more sensational reports, in the last decade of the 11th century, rumors were buzzing at the Piast court. Their main heroine was Herman's new wife, Duchess Judith, who was not young by then (by contemporary standards, she was over forty). to call Regina Poloniae - the Queen of Poland.
Were the rumors about Judith true?
After the death of the first wife (and also Judith), the uncrowned ruler remarried, concluding a powerful alliance. Judith number two was not only the widow of the (deposed) Hungarian monarch, but above all the daughter of Emperor Henry III. The problem is that, as it was said in the lobby, she was not faithful. Courtiers who were not very sympathetic to the ambitious woman repeated reports of her alleged bad conduct in Hungary.
And if she had no qualms about adultery in the past, why would she change her habits after moving to the Vistula River? The malicious ones quickly pointed out her alleged partner in the crime - the palatine Sieciech, whose powerful influence at the court aroused dissatisfaction among many. Prof. Jerzy Wyrozumski reports:
The relationship between Sieciech and Judyta Salicka looks very mysterious. Gall couldn't have written what they were all about, only hinting at their suspicious nature. They can be treated as another proof of the prince's strange dependence on the palatine, because Sieciech's impure relations with the duchess should, after all, alienate Herman from him, and yet we do not read about anything like that in Gall.
Suspect character is not yet synonymous with spitting a husband. Especially since Judith was busy at that time trying to get a male heir - and plotting how to get rid of the sons of Herman's previous relationships for good. Or was there a grain of truth in the rumor?
One request too far
According to Grzegorz Pac, Gall noted not the facts with a true chronicle precision, but ... his own interpretation, disturbed by the aversion to the ruler and the wicked palatine (whom Anonymous considered the perpetrator of all evil in the Piast state). The same opinion was shared by Gerard Labuda, who rejected the slander, writing:" soon a fame arose that they both had something more than politics (...). He recorded this fame in the pages of his chronicle Anonymous Gall; behind him eagerly and uncritically, historians repeat these rumors. ”
Kamil Janicki in his latest book "Damn damned. The women who buried Poland ” summarizes:
Regardless of what the author of the first Polish chronicle supported himself and what the queen's opponents believed even during her reign, the romance of Judyta and Sieciech in the early 90s is completely impossible unthinkable.
The Queen was constantly pregnant, giving birth or trying to conceive at this time. She placed all her hopes on the birth of a male heir on which her future depended. She was far too skillful and far-sighted politician to harm her own prospects. And yet any romance would risk undermining the legality of Judith's son and removing him from inheritance.
The conclusions of researchers such as Karol Maleczyński or Janusz Kurtyka, who, on the basis of Anonymous's enigmatic notes, put forward a hypothesis that Judyta and Sieciech were in fact connected by a fiery romance, so should be considered - to put it mildly - a bit too far-reaching. The thesis that yes, they were a couple, but ... political allies, not lovers, seems to be much closer to the truth. So they were united by plots against Hermann and his sons rather than by an unbridled, ardent lust.