On the death of James' father, John III, no fewer than eighteen candidates for the vacant Polish throne presented themselves. Family rivalries prevented the election of James Sobieski even though Austria supported his candidacy. James Sobieski’s own mother, Marie Casimire favored her son-in-law, the Elector of Bavaria. The powerful king Louis XIV of France supported 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 September 1, 1697. It was the first time that a deceased monarch's son had not been elected to succeed him; that the rightful candidate had been debarred from the throne by military force; and that the Poles had acquired a German king, which went against a long tradition of keeping German hegemony at arm's length.
Augustus II’s first act as king was to expel the prince of Conti from the country. Then, in 1704 James Sobeiski and his brother Alexander were seized by Augustus II’s troops and imprisoned. They remained in prison for two years before finally being released.
Prince James Sobieski died on December 19, 1737 in Żółkiew, Poland and is buried there.
known that the "Northern Lion" was on the field and the Turks fled, panic-stricken, with Sobieski's horsemen still in pursuit.
Sobieski, though deeply offended, pursued the Turks into Hungary, attacked and took Ostrzyhom after the a second battle, and returned to winter in Poland, with immense spoils taken in the Turkish camp.
His wife, a Frenchwoman, the widow of John Zamoyski, Marie-Casimire, though not worthy of so great a hero, was tenderly beloved by him, as his letters show: she influenced him greatly and not always wisely.
James the First, King of Scotland; his son; was, at the age of fourteen years, imprisoned in the tower of London, and remained there a prisoner for nineteen years.
James the Second, King of Scotland: his son; was slain by the splinter of a cannon, which bursted at the siege of Roxburgh, in 1460.
James II., having by the Revolution been deprived of the throne of Great Britain and Ireland, was hospitably received, himself, his family, and his friends who accompanied him to France, by Louis XIV., at the palace of St. Germain; he was in 1696 offered the Crown of Poland, which he declined.
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