Józef Aleksander Jabłonowski

Józef Aleksander Jabłonowski

Józef Aleksander Jabłonowski (also Josef Alexander Yablonovsky ; * 4. February 1711 in Tychomel , Volyn , today in the Khmelnytskyi Oblast , Ukraine ; †  1. March 1777 in Leipzig ) was a Polish magnate , officials in the civil service , scholar and patron of the noble family the Jabłonowskis . In 1769 he founded the Princely Jablonowskische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften in Leipzig , which today is considered the oldest still existing scholarly society for the promotion of German-Polish scientific and cultural relations. He was also the imperial prince in the empire .

Life

Jabłonowski was born as a member of the Polish battle family of the same name . In 1743 Emperor Charles VII elevated him to the rank of imperial prince. Under the reign of King August III. of Poland (1733–1763) Jablonowski was promoted to cupbearer ( Stolnik ) of Lithuania in 1744 and in 1755 the official office of the voivode of Nowogrodek in Black Russia was transferred. At the same time Jablonowski united several Starosteien in his hand from 1755 . In the Polish royal elections in 1764 he was considered one of the aspirants to the throne, but was defeated by the competitor Stanislaus August Poniatowski . When the internal turmoil in Poland increased under the new king due to the Confederation of Bar and the Hajdamak uprising, Jablonowski moved to Leipzig in 1768.

"Zum Kurprinz" house in Leipzig around 1880, Jablonowski's former residence

Jablonowski married Karolina Teresa Radziwill (1707–1765), who came from a wealthy Polish-Lithuanian princely family, in 1740 and was married to Franziszka Wiktoria Woroniecka, who survived him. The first marriage had two daughters, the second marriage a daughter and a son. In 1773 Jablonowski bought the house "Zum Kurprinz" on Roßplatz in Leipzig and established his residence there. He died there and was buried in the Catholic court chapel of the Pleißenburg .

In 1761 he became a member of the Académie des Sciences .

Since 1880, Jablonowskistraße in Leipzig has been commemorating the prince's services to science and German-Polish cultural exchange; in addition, the Societas Jablonoviana continues to commemorate its founder and his mandate.

Scholar and patron

Since the middle of the 18th century Jablonowski emerged with political-historical writings. In 1748 Lochner in Nuremberg published Jablonowski's treatise L'Empire des Sarmates , a description of the Polish aristocratic republic . 1752 followed in Warsaw the publication of the medieval chronicle of the Poznan bishop Bogufał II. (1242–1253). In the same year, the second edition of Jablonowski's Heraldica was published in Lemberg to explain Polish knights and coats of arms.

In Leipzig Jablonowski 1769 founded at the local university named after him Princely Jablonowskische Scientific Society - Societas Jablonoviana that exists among some modified name to this day. The foundation charter approved by the Saxon sovereign in 1774 provides for annual prize competitions to promote work in the fields of mathematics or physics, economics, German-Polish history and the history of the Slavic peoples. Since 1771/72 the annual award-winning works have been published in the Acta Societatis Jablonovianae , which were published in Leipzig. Jablonowski invested the foundation capital of 2,000 ducats in a bank in Gdansk .

The royal monument in Leipzig, which Jablonowski commissioned from the sculptor and painter Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717–1799) in honor of the Saxon sovereign Friedrich August the Righteous (1763–1827), testifies to the patronage of the imperial prince . The memorial, which could only be completed after Jablonowski's death, was initially erected on today's Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz in Leipzig and is now in the garden of the Gohlis castle .

Publications

• L'Empire des Sarmates, aujourdhui royaume de Pologne , Nuremberg [= Nuremberg] 1748.
• Museum Polonum seu collectionem in regno Poloniae et magno ducatu Lithuaniae scriptorum editorum et edendorum opus bipartitum dicat , Leipoli [= Lemberg] 1752.
• Boguphali II. De armis et domo rosarum episcopi Posnaniensis chronicon Poloniae , Varsoviae [= Warsaw] 1752.
• Heraldica: to iest osada kleynotow rycerskich y wiadomość znaków herbownych dotąd w Polszcze obiaśniona [= Heraldica, that is a list of knight's coats of arms and an explanation of the coats of arms, as they have not yet appeared in Poland], 2nd edition, Lemberg 1752.
• De astronomiae ortu atque progressu et de telluris motu , Gedani [= Danzig] (1761/63).
• Acta Societatis Jablonovianae , Leipzig 1772 ff.

literature

• Constantin von Wurzbach : Jabłonowski, Joseph Alexander Pruss . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich . 10th part. Imperial and Royal Court and State Printing House, Vienna 1863, p. 5 ( digitized version ).
• Herbert Helbig :  Jablonowski, Joseph Alexander Prince of. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-00191-5 , p. 211 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Markus Cottin among others: Leipzig monuments . Beucha 1998, p. 20 f.
• Ewa Tomicka-Krumrey: Jozef Aleksander Jablonowski. An enlightened Sarmatian. On the personality of the patron . In: Dietrich Scholze and Ewa Tomicka-Krumrey (eds.): With word and deed. German-Polish cultural and scientific dialogue since the 18th century (publication on the 225th anniversary of the Societas Jablonoviana at the University of Leipzig 1774–1999), Leipzig 2001, pp. 37–51.

Individual evidence

1. ^ List of members since 1666: letter J. Académie des sciences, accessed on November 29, 2019 (French).