Poland / Hanover Iron Cast Medal 1719 - Escape of Princess Maria Clementina Sobieska from Innsbruck

33.4g. 48mm. UNC/UNC. 

Medalier: Ottone Hamerani (OTTO • HAMERANI • F • below bust). 

Hutten-Czapski 5960 (R3); MI 444/49; Eimer 484; Woolf 36:1.

Obv.: Draped and ermine-mantled bust of Princess Maria Clementina Sobieska left, wearing diadem and pearl necklace. 

Inscription around: 

CLEMENTINA • M • BRITAN • FR • ET • HIB • REGINA • 

(Clementina, Queen of Great Britain, France and Ireland). 

Rev.: Princess Maria Clementina escaping left in a two-horse chariot; in the background, Rome with Trajan’s Column and the Colosseum, with a ship sailing toward the city; rising sun at right. 

Inscription around: 

FORTVNAM • CAVSAMQVE • SEQVOR 

(I follow fortune and the cause). 

In exergue: 

DECEPTIS • CVSTODIBVS • / • MDCCXIX • 

(The guards having been deceived / 1719). 

Maria Clementina Sobieska was the granddaughter of King John III Sobieski of Poland and the goddaughter of Pope Clement XI. Her planned marriage to James Francis Edward Stuart, the Jacobite claimant to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland, had clear political significance: it linked the exiled Catholic Stuart cause with the prestigious Polish royal house of Sobieski. 

George I of Britain opposed the marriage and, through Emperor Charles VI, Clementina was detained at Innsbruck while travelling to join James. In 1719, at the age of seventeen, she escaped with the help of Jacobite supporters and reached Bologna, where she married James by proxy while he was in Spain. The couple later settled in Rome, at the Palazzo Muti, placed at their disposal by Pope Clement XI. 

The medal presents Clementina’s escape as a dynastic and political triumph. The reverse shows her fleeing in a two-horse chariot toward Rome, while the inscription “I follow fortune and the cause” emphasizes both destiny and loyalty to the Jacobite cause. Through Clementina, the medal also celebrates the Polish Sobieski lineage as an important source of legitimacy for the Catholic Stuart claim.