page_title: James Louis Sobieski
section_title: Candidacy for the Polish Crown
hierarchical_section_title: James Louis Sobieski / Biography / Candidacy for the Polish Crown
context_page_description: James Louis Sobieski was a Polish nobleman, politician, diplomat, scholar, traveller and the son of King John III of Poland and Marie Casimire Louise de La Grange d'Arquien.
context_section_description: With the death of James Louis' father, John III, no fewer than eighteen candidates stood for the vacant Polish throne. Family rivalries prevented the election of James Louis Sobieski even though Austria supported his candidacy. James Louis Sobieski's own mother, Marie Casimire, favored her son-in-law, Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria. The powerful King Louis XIV of France supported François Louis, Prince of Conti (1664–1709).
  In the end, Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony, who renounced Lutheranism and converted to Catholicism in order to qualify, was crowned as Augustus II, King of Poland on 1 September 1697. It was the first time that a deceased monarch's son had not been elected to succeed him, the previous king's heir had been debarred from the throne by military force, and that a German became king (which went against a tradition of avoiding German hegemony). Augustus II's first act as king was to expel the prince of Conti from the country.
caption: This painting was commissioned by James Sobieski in 1697. It depicts his deceased father pointing to a book entitled Hac Lege lego and accompanied by James and his wife, suggesting that James ought to be the to the next King of Poland.
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