Louis I of Hungary

Louis I of Hungary
King of Hungary, Croatia, Dalmatia, Jerusalem, Sicily from 1342, Poland from 1370
Reign	21 July, 1312 – 10 September, 1382
Born	5 March, 1326
Birthplace	Visegrád
Died	10 September, 1382
Place of death	Nagyszombat, Kingdom of Hungary (present day Trnava, Slovakia
Predecessor	Charles I of Hungary
Successor	Mary of Hungary
Consort	Margaret of Luxembourg Elizabeth of Bosnia
Offspring	Mary of Hungary Jadwiga of Poland Mary (1365 – 1366) Catherine
Royal House	House of Anjou-Hungary
Father	Charles I of Hungary
Mother	Elizabeth of Poland

a 19th century portrait of Louis the Great.

Louis I the Great (Hungarian: I. (Nagy) Lajos, Polish: Ludwik Węgierski, Bulgarian: Лудвиг I, Ludvig I, Serbian: Lajoš I/Лајош I, Croatian: Ludovik I, Czech: Ludvík I. Veliký, Slovak: Ľudovít I. Veľký) (5 March 1326, Visegrád – 10 September 1382, Nagyszombat/Trnava) was King of Hungary, Croatia, Dalmatia, Jerusalem and Sicily from 1342 and of Poland from 1370. Louis was the head of the senior branch of the Angevin dynasty. He was one of Hungary's most active and accomplished monarchs of the Late Middle Ages, extending her territory to the Adriatic and securing Dalmatia, with part of Bosnia and Bulgaria, within the Holy Crown of Hungary. He spent much of his reign in wars with the Republic of Venice and in competition for the throne of Naples, the former with some success and the latter with little lasting results.

Louis, named for his uncle, Saint Louis of Toulouse, was the eldest son of Charles I of Hungary and Elisabeth of Poland, daughter of Ladislaus the Short and sister of Casimir III of Poland, the Piasts who reestablished kinship in Poland. He was designated heir of his father at birth. In due time, he became king of Hungary, at the death of his father in 1342. He was crowned only a few days later on 21 July. Louis led armies many times. Besides his best known campaigns, he fought with more or less success in Bulgaria, Bosnia, Wallachia, and against the Golden Horde. The first Ottoman-Hungarian clash occurred during his reign.

Wars with Venice and Naples

Main article: Neapolitan Campaigns

In 1346, Louis decided to help liberate city of Zara. His soldiers didn't take the field (because some Hungarian leaders were corrupted by Venice before the battle), therefore he couldn't help for Zara. Louis embarked on an expedition against Naples in revenge of the murder of his brother Andrew, Duke of Calabria, husband of Joan I of Naples. The circumstances of his death – in a palace conspiracy – suggested the involvement of the queen. Louis entered Italy on 3 November 1347 and, after obtaining the support of many local princes, he entered Benevento early in 1348 , much to the applause of the Neapolitan baronage. Louis defeated his enemies in Battle of Capua . On 15 January, Joan fled Naples by ship for Provence, soon to be followed by her second husband, Louis of Taranto. Having established himself in Naples with little difficulty, Louis was nevertheless forced to withdraw quickly by the arrival of the Black Death. In his rush to leave ravaged Italy, he appointed two Hungarian officials to hold the regency. They soon lost the support of the barons and opened the way for the return of Joan and her husband.

Two years later, early in 1350, Louis landed at Manfredonia and, in next to no time at all, was menacing Naples. However, he soon called off the campaign at the insistence of his exhausted troops and renounced all claims on the Neapolitan crown. Before leaving Italy, he had the papal curia of Avignon begin an inquest into the murder of Andrew, but the papal court found Joan innocent, largely for political reasons, as Joan agreed to ceded her temporal rights over the city of Avignon to the papacy. The conflict with Naples finally settled in 1381 , one year before Louis’ death. The pope stripped the royal title from Joan and authorized king Louis to execute his decision. He was too ill to go personally, but his nephew, Charles of Durazzo aided with Hungarian gold and men seized the throne and killed Joan. From 1357 to 1358, Louis waged a new war against Venice for the rule of Dalmatia. After successfully organising an anti-Venetian league, Louis put the cities of Dalmatia to fire and the sword, expelling all Venetians. By the Treaty of Zara (1358), all of Louis's demands over the Adriatic region were recognised. He immediately built up an Adriatic fleet. Venice also had to raise the Angevin flag on St. Mark's Square on holy days.

Northern wars

In the North Lajos assisted his ally, King Casimir, in his wars against the pagan Lithuanians and Tartars, and against Bohemia. After Casimir's death in 1370, the Poles elected Lajos King of Poland in compliance with the agreement made in Visegrád during his father's reign. Being the ruler of Poland, however, was not an unqualified pleasure. The Poles hated to pay taxes and loved to quarrel among themselves and with the Court, especially with the domineering dowager Queen Elizabeth.

Louis had named Elizabeth Regent of Poland to conveniently eliminate her from his Court. Still, Queen Elizabeth had some justification for taking part in the affairs and quarrels of Poland: she had been a Polish princess before marrying Róbert Károly. Elizabeth's regency turned out to be a failure, her background notwithstanding. In 1375, the Poles killed 160 of her Hungarian soldiers and the dowager Queen escaped to Hungary lest she, too, be killed by her compatriots.

Balkanian and Turkish wars

His campaigns in the Balkans were aimed not so much at conquest and subjugation as at drawing the Serbs, Bosnians, Wallachians and Bulgarians into the fold of the Roman Catholic faith and at forming a united front against the looming Turkish menace. It was relatively easy to subdue them by arms, but to convert them was a different matter. Despite Lajos' efforts, the peoples of the Balkans remained faithful to the Eastern Orthodox Church and their attitude toward Hungary remained ambiguous. They regarded powerful Hungary as a potential menace to their national identity. For this reason, Hungary could never regard the Serbs and Wallachians as reliable allies in her subsequent wars against the Turks. However Lajos defeated the Turks when Hungarian and Turkish troops clashed for the first time in history at Nicapoli in 1366. The Hungarian Chapel in the Cathedral at Aachen was built to commemorate this victory.

In the spring of 1365, Louis I headed a campaign against the Bulgarian Tsardom of Vidin and its ruler Ivan Sratsimir. He seized the city of Vidin on 2 May 1365; the region was under Hungarian rule until 1369.^[1]

Domestic activity

Constitutionally, Louis maintained much of the structure of his father's regime, but introduced several cultural reforms. In 1351 he reissued the Golden Bull of 1222 in a modified form to ensure the rights of the nobility. His other laws introduced the entail system regulating the inheritance of the land-owning class. He founded the first university in Hungary^[2] in the city of Pécs and made general efforts at Latinisation in the kingdom.

Inheritance of Poland and death

Coat of arms (clockwise from upper left): paternal (Hungary – the Arpad stripes – and Anjou-Sicily), Poland, Hungary (the double cross), and Dalmatia.

In 1370, the Piasts of Poland died out. The last dynast, Casimir the Great, left only female issue and a grandson. Since arrangements had been made for Louis's succession as early as 1355 , he became King of Poland upon his grandfather's death in right of his mother, who held much of the practical power until her death in 1380 .

When Louis died in 1382, the Hungarian throne was inherited by his daughter Mary. In Poland, however, the lords of Lesser Poland did not want to continue the personal union with Hungary, nor to accept Mary's fiancé Sigismund as a regent. They therefore chose Mary's younger sister, Jadwiga of Poland as their new monarch. After two years of negotiations with Louis widow, Queen Elisabeth, who was regent of Hungary, and a civil war in Greater Poland (1383), Jadwiga finally came to Kraków and was crowned "King" (not Queen) of Poland on 16 November 1384. The masculine gender in her title was intended to underline the fact that she was a monarch in her own right and not a queen consort.

Peace for Hungary in a Turbulent Europe

Although he waged a host of campaigns outside Hungary, Lajos did keep peace within Hungary itself. In an era when Spain was harassed by the Arabs, France targeted by the British, Germany tormented by the rivalries of its princes, Italy the scene of bloody conflicts among its city-states, Poland and Russia the objects of Lithuanian and Tartar attacks, and Byzantium and the Balkan states subject to Turkish raids and expansion, Hungary flourished as an island of peace.

In death as in life, Lajos expressed his wish to lie eternally by his idol's side. Accordingly, he was laid to rest in Nagyvárad beside the tomb of king Saint László

Family

In 1342, Louis married his first wife, Margaret (1335 – 1349), underaged daughter of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, who died while still a minor. He then married his second wife, Elisabeth, daughter of Stephen II of Bosnia, who became Louis's vassal, and Elisabeth of Kuyavia, in 1353 . Her maternal grandfather was Casimir of Kuyavia, son of Ziemomysl of Kuyavia and Salome of Eastern Pomerania.

Louis had four daughters, all born of his second wife:

• Mary (1365 – 1366)
• Catherine (1368 – 1378)
• Mary, his successor in Hungary, who married Sigismund, at that time Margrave of Brandenburg (1371 – 1395)
• Hedwige his successor in Poland, who married Jogaila, then Grand Duke of Lithuania

Ancestors

References

• Louis the Great, 1326–82 at bartleby.com