ANNA JAGIELLON (1523– 1596) was a Jagiellonian princess, the daughter of King Sigismund the Old of Poland and Bona Sforza. Anna's political career started when her brother, Sigismund II August, died in 1572, leaving his three sisters, Anna, Sophie, and Catherine, the heiresses to his considerable wealth. A tumultuous interregnum followed, and another one when the newly elected Henry Valois fled back to France in 1574. In 1575 the Polish nobility elected Anna queen of Poland and grand duchess of Lithuania alongside her husband and king, Stephen Bathory (1533– 1586). As the sister and successor of the last Jagiellonian king of Poland, she provided continuity and financial stability to the Commonwealth torn by the two interregna. Following a long struggle to ratify her brother's last will, Anna navigated the meanderings of Polish politics to gain some autonomy from the Polish nobility through marriage and the crown of a consort, renouncing much of her wealth in the process. As the parliament refused to ratify Sigismund's last will, this wealth was not accessible to the princess as things stood. When the nobility elected her to become queen, she agreed out of her own will and shrewdly negotiated the financial terms of her election. While managing to keep some of the wealth, she built a rhetoric of sacrifice to the severely destabilized Commonwealth of the early 1570s.

Anna's rise was unparalleled, but she is remembered primarily as a maritally unfulfilled woman rather than the only early modern woman to be a candidate in royal elections. In Polish historiography she has the reputation of a pathetic old spinster motivated by romantic notions of marriage and having children, even though Anna was already fifty-three when she married Bathory and there could be no hope of having children. Instead, following Bathory's death, she used her position of authority and wealth to orchestrate the election of her nephew, Sigismund III Vasa, whom she quickly began treating as her son both in public and private, while continuing to exercise political agency. Anna's rise to power was so unusual that there is some confusion as to her status among modern historians. Her most prominent biographer, Maria Bogucka, claims that she was elected queen regnant and “anointed as the king, not as queen.”