The Krezas, Przeginia coat of arms – genealogy of the family

Abstract

The subject of the research undertaken by the Author is the history of the Krezas family Przeginia coat of arms from the end of the 14th to the 17th century. It was the middle noble family of Minor Poland, which gained the greatest importance in the first half of the 16th century. The fate of the Krezas family attracted the attention of researchers mainly because one of its representatives – Mikołaj, married Anna Szafraniec of Pieskowa Skała, the natural granddaughter of King Sigismund I the Old. So in the veins of the descendants of this pair, royal blood flowed. Despite of this interest, little has been known about the history of this family. The Author focused his attention on the source search, which enabled him to elaborate the full genealogy of the studied family. In the text presented here, almost all issues that remained unknown until now have been resolved. The Author determined who were the wives of the two most active in the public forum of the great-grandchildren of Sigismund I the Old, i.e. Jan and Marcin Kreza. He proved that Urszula, who had been attributed to Jan as his own daughter so far, was in fact his niece. He found sources from which result that the other of the said brothers – Marcin, left five sons and five daughters. He finally corrected a number of his own mistakes, introduced to the scientific circuit in his text dedicated to the Polish descendants of Sigismund I the Old and Katarzyna Telniczanka.