Stanisław August Poniatowski was crowned King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania in Warsaw. Elected largely through the influence of Russian Empress Catherine the Great, with whom he had once had a romantic relationship, Poniatowski would spend his three-decade reign attempting Enlightenment reforms while his kingdom was progressively dismembered by its neighbors, ending with the Partitions of Poland and his forced abdication in 1795.
Poniatowski's path to the throne began not in politics but in the bedchamber of the future Empress of Russia. As a young diplomat in St. Petersburg in the 1750s, he became the lover of Catherine, then a lonely grand duchess trapped in an unhappy marriage. Years later, when the Polish throne fell vacant, Catherine backed his candidacy, calculating that a former lover with a weak power base would make a compliant client king.
She was largely right, though Poniatowski proved more reform-minded than she anticipated. He founded a national library, established Europe's first ministry of education, and later signed the progressive Constitution of May 3, 1791, only the second written national constitution in the world after that of the United States. It alarmed Russia enough to trigger military intervention.
His reign became a slow-motion tragedy. Russia, Prussia, and Austria carved up Polish territory in three successive partitions, extinguishing the Commonwealth entirely by 1795. Poniatowski abdicated and died in exile in St. Petersburg in 1798, the last king of a nation that would not exist again as a sovereign state for over a century.
Key people: Stanisław August Poniatowski, Catherine the Great