Talk:Louis I of Hungary
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Here's the big chuck of info from 1911 EB related to Louis. Use freely User:kt2
It was reserved for the two great princes of the house of Anjou, Charles I. (1310?342) and Louis I. (1342?382), to rebuild the Hungarian state, and lead the Magyars back to
House of
civilization. Both by character and education they Anjou. were eminently fitted for the task, and all the circumstances were in their favour. They brought from their native italy a thorough knowledge of the science of government as the middle ages understood it, and the decimation of the Hungarian magnates during the civil wars enabled them to re-create the noble hierarchy on a feudal basis, in which full allowance was made for Magyar idiosyncracies. Both these monarchs were absolute. The national assembly (Orszflggyules) was still summoned occasionally, but at very irregular intervals, the real business of the state being transacted in the royal council, where able men of the middle class, ~~i7S of principally Italians, held confidential positions. The lesser gentry were protected against the tyranny of the magnates, encouraged to appear at court and taxed for military service by the royal treasury direct—so as to draw them closer to the crown. Scores of towns, too, owe their origin and enlargement to the care of the Angevin princes, who were lavish of privileges and charters, and saw to it that the high-roads were clear of robbers. Charles, moreover, was a born financier, and his reform of the currency and of the whole fiscal system greatly contributed to enrich both the merchant class and the treasury. Louis encouraged the cities to surround themselves with strong walls. He himself erected a whole cordon of forts round the flourishing mining towns of northern Hungary. He also appointed Hungarian consuls in foreign trade centres, and established a system of protective tariffs. More important?in its ulterior consequences to Hungary was the law of 1351 which, while confirming the Golden Bull in general, abrogated the clause (iv.) by which the nobles had the right to alienate their lands. Henceforward their possessions were to descend directly and as of right to their brothers and their issue, whose claim was to be absolute. This ?principle of aviticity ?(osiség, aviticum), which survived till 1848, was intended to preserve the large feudal estates as part of the new military system, but its ultimate effect was to hamper the development of the country by preventing the alienation, and therefore the mortgaging of
lands, so long as any, however distant, scion of the original owning family survived.i Louis’s efforts to increase the national wealth were also largely frustrated by the Black Death, which ravaged Hungary from 1347 to 1360, and again during 1380?381, carrying off at least one-fourth of the population.
Externally Hungary, under the Angevin kings, occupied a commanding position. Both Charles and Louis were diplomat ists as well as soldiers, and their foreign policy, largely based on family alliances, was almost invariably successful. Charles married Elizabeth, the sister of Casimir the Great of Poland, with whom he was connected by ties of close friendship, and Louis, by virtue of a compact made by his father thirty-one years previously, added the Polish crown to that of Hungary in 1370. Thus, during the last twelve years of his reign, the dominions of Louis the Great included the greater part of central Europe, from Pomerania to the Danube, and from the Adriatic to the steppes of the Dnieper.
The Angevins were less successful towards the south, where the first signs were appearing of that storm which ultimately swept
~ k~ h away the Hungarian monarchy. In 1353 the Ottoman in~a~ons. Turks crossed the Hellespont from Asia Minor and
began that career of conquest which made them the terror of Europe for the next three centuries. In 1360 they conquered southern Bulgaria. In 1365 they transferred their capital from Brusa to Adrianople. In 1371 they overwhelmed the Servian tsar Vukashin at the battle of Taenarus and penetrated to the heart of old Servia. In. 1380 they threatened Croatia and Dalmatia. Hungary herself was now directly menaced, and the very circumstances which had facilitated the advance of the Turks, enfeebled the potential resistance of the Magyars. The Arpâd kings had succeeded in encircling their whole southern frontier with half a dozen military colonies or banates, comprising, roughly speaking, Little Walachia,2 and the northern parts of Bulgaria, Servia and Bosnia. But during this period a redistribution of territory had occurred in these parts, which converted most of the old banates into semi-independent and violently anti-Magyar principalities. This was due partly to the excessive proselytizing energy of the Angevins, which provoked rebellion on the part of their Greek-Orthodox subjects, partly to the natural dynastic competition of the Servian and Bulgarian
Th tsars, and partly to the emergence of a new nationality,
Vi;chs. the Walachian. Previously to 1320, what is now
called Walachia was regarded by the Magyars as part
of the banate of Szorény. The base of the very mixed and evershifting population in these parts were the Vlachs (Rumanians), perhaps the descendants of Trajan’s colonists, who, under their voivode, Bazarad, led King Charles into an ambuscade from which he barely escaped with his life (Nov. 9?2, 1330). From this disaster are to be dated the beginnings of Walachia as an independent state. I\’Ioldavia, again, ever since the 11th century, had been claimed by the Magyars as forming, along with Bessarabia and the Bukowina, a portion of the semi-mythical Etélkdz, the original seat of the Magyars before they occupied modern Hungary. This desolate region was subsequently peopled by Vlachs, whom the religious persecutions of Louis the Great had driven thither from other parts of his domains, and, between 1350 and 1360, their voivode Bogdan threw off the Hungarian yoke ahogether. In Bosnia the persistent attempts of the Magyar princes to root out the stubborn, crazy and poisonous sect of the Bogomils had alienated the originally amicable Bosnians, and in 1353 Louis was compelled to buy the friendship of their Bar Tvrtko by acknowledging him as king of Bosnia. Both Servia and Bulgaria were by this time split up into half a dozen principalities which, as much for religious as for political reasons, preferred paying tribute to the Turks to acknowledging the hegemony of Hungary. Thus, towards the end of his reign, Louis found himself cut off from tile Greek emperor, his sole ally in the Balkans, by a chain of bitterly hostile Greek-Orthodox states, extending from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. The
i Knatclzhull-Ilngessen, i. 41.
That is to mv the western portion of \Valachia, which lici between the Aluta and the Danube.
commercial greed of the Venetians, who refused to aid him with a fleet to cut off the Turks in Europe from the Turks in Asia Minor, nullified Louis?last practical endeavour to cope with a danger which from the first he had estimated at its true value.
Louis the Great left two infant daughters: Maria, who was to share the throne of Poland with her betrothed, ‘Sigismund of Pomerania, and Hedwig, better known by her Polish name of Jadwiga, who was to reign over Hungary with her young bridegroom, William of Austria. This plan was upset by the queendowager Elizabeth, who determined to rule both kingdoms during the minority of her children. Maria, her favourite, with whom she refused to part, was crowned queen of Hungary a week after her father’s death (Sept. 17, 1382). Two years later Jadwiga, reluctantly transferred to the Poles instead of her sister, was crowned queen of Poland at Cracow (Oct. 15. 1384) and subsequently compelled to marry Jagiello, grand-duke of Lithuania. In Hungary, meanwhile, impatience at the rule of women induced the great family of the Horvâthys to offer the crown of St Stephen to Charles III. of Naples, who, despite the oath of loyalty he had sworn to his benefactor, Louis the Great, accepted the offer, landed in Dalmatia with a small Italian. army, and, after occupying Buda, was crowned king of Hungary on the 31st of December, 1385, as Charles II. His reign lasted thirtyeight days. On the 7th of February, 1386, he was treacherously attacked in the queen-dowager’s own apartments, at her instigation, and died of his injuries a few days later. But Elizabeth did not profit long by this atrocity. In July the same year, while on a pleasure trip with her daughter, she was captured by the Horváthys, and tortured to death in her daughter’s presence. Maria herself would doubtless have shared the same fate, but for the speedy intervention of her fianc? whom a diet, by the advice of the Venetians, had elected to rule the headless realm on the 31st of March 1387. He married Maria in June the same year, and she shared the sceptre with him till her sudden death by accident on the 17th of May 1395.
[edit] King of Slavonia?
Slavonia was not yet a separate kingdom in the XIV. century. It was a part of Hungary with a special status.
Titles of Louis (no king of Slavonia):
1350:Ludovicus, Dei gratia Hungariae, Jerusalem, Siciliae, Dalmatiae, Croatiae, Ramae, Serviae, Lodomeriae, Galiciae, Cumaniae, Bulgariaeque Rex Princeps Salernitanus et honoris montis sancti Angeli dominus.
1374: Lodovicus, Dei gratia Hungarie, Polonie, Dalmatie, Croatie, Rame, Servie, Gallicie, Lodomerie, Comanie, Bulgarieque rex, princeps Sallernitanus et Honoris Montis Sancti Angeli dominus —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.2.156.29 (talk) 09:52, 10 March 2007 (UTC).
- This information should be incorporated into the article. Srnec 06:22, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
