The royal cult of Saint Denis and Saint Remigius, considered special patron saints of the Carolingian Kings of the Franks and later of the Kingdom of the West Francia between the mid–8th century and the end of the 9th century, seems to have diminished after Hugh Capet and his descendants took royal power in 987. Both Hugh and his successor, Robert the Pious, seem to be looking for new patron saints of the monarchy in France. These are primarily local saints, such as St. Aignan of Orleans and St. Savinian of Sens, although there is also evidence of promotion of cults common in Europe, such as St. Benedict or the Virgin.
The aim of the paper is to present the early Capetian search for new patron saints of the dynasty, but also the political conditions for the valorisation, in the last years of the 10th and 11th centuries of the cult of patron saints of kings and kingdom other than the Carolingian ones, before Louis VI and Abbot Suger reinstated St. Dionysius as the principal patron saint of the French kingdom in the first quarter of the 12th century.

It is not known when the coronation crown of Polish kings, known from the inventories of the Kraków Cathedral treasury from the 16th to the 18th century as privilegiata and mentioned as one of the five royal crowns at the disposal of Polish monarchs, was created. In iconography, it appears for the first time in a 16th-century portrait of King Stefan Batory and can be seen in unchanged form in royal portraits until the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The destruction of the Polish royal insignia on the orders of the Prussian authorities at the beginning of the 19th century forces historians’ attempts to date it to be based on preserved iconography only. In modern times, the name “Chrobry Crown” attributed to it meant that it was considered the insignia of the first Polish king, a symbol of the antiquity and durability of the Kingdom of Poland. It was not until the 19th century, and especially in the 20th century, that historians and art historians, guided by both the stylistic analysis of the crown as depicted in the iconography and the evidence of written sources, proved that this insignia was much younger. Most often it is assumed that the crown was made for the coronation of Władysław Łokietek in 1320. The name of “Chrobry Crown” has been therefore replaced by the “Łokietek Crown”. This attribution, however, can hardly be considered unquestionable.
The attribution of the Polish coronation crown to an emblematic figure of the Kingdom of Poland – Bolesław the Brave (Chrobry) – cannot, however, by any means be considered as unique in the history of European coronation insignia. Similar means of creating a historical myth or a renewed historical memory – are also known from France, England and Bohemia, from the late Middle Ages to the modern era.