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.