Louis I of Hungary

“ He was, however, more than compensated for this disappointment by his compact (1339) with his ally and brother-in-law, Casimir of Poland, whereby it was agreed that Louis should succeed to the Polish throne on the death of the childless Casimir. For an account of the numerous important reforms effected by Charles see Hungary: History. A statesman of the first rank, he not only raised Hungary once more to the rank of a great power, but enriched and civilized her. ”

“ His parts were good and he could speak and write six languages at a very early age, but the zeal of his guardians and tutors to make a man of him betimes nearly ruined his feeble constitution, while the riotous life led by him and his young consort, Maria of Austria, whom he wedded on the 13th of January 1522, speedily disqualified him for affairs, so that at last he became an object of ridicule at his own court. He was crowned king of Hungary on the 4th of June 1508, and king of Bohemia on the 11th of May 1509, and was declared of age when he succeeded his father on the 11th of December 1521. ”

“ Louis, the excommunicated German Emperor, entered into an alliance with the king; Edward III., the King of England, while condoling with him, spurred him on to revenge; the Pope alone maintained an ominous silence. This time, however, the desire for revenge proved stronger with the king than his reverence for the Pope, and in 1347 the Hungarian army was ready to march. To punish a faithless woman and not to conquer Italy was the object of their expedition, and the Italian princes were glad to afford the king’s army every facility to reach the proposed goal. ”

“ Hungary and the Turks. The original line of kings of Hungary having died out in 1301, the influence of the Pope, who claimed the kingdom as a fief of the papal see, secured the election to the throne of Charles Robert, or Caribert, of the Naples branch of the House of Anjou. He and his son Louis, called the Great, raised the kingdom to notable importance and power. Louis added the crown of Poland to that of Hungary, and on his death, leaving two daughters, the Polish crown passed to the husband of one and the Hungarian crown to the husband of the other. ”

“ Whilst Europe was thus troubled, the conqueror of Rhodes and Belgrade reappeared in a threatening attitude upon the banks of the Danube. Louis II. endeavoured to reanimate the patriotism of the Hungarians, and caused the old custom of exposing in public a bloody sabre to be revived, as a signal of war and of danger for the country. But neither the exhortations of the monarch, nor those of the clergy, nor even the approach of the enemy, were able to appease the discords, born of feudal anarchy and the lengthened misfortunes of Hungary. ”

“ Poland’s southern neighbour was the kingdom of Hungary, with which she had been for a short time united under Louis ‘the Great’, ‘the Banner-bearer of the Church’ as he was styled by a grateful Pope for his victories over the Mahometans. Besides fighting against the Turks, Louis had other military irons in the fire. One of his ambitions was to dominate Eastern Europe, and with this object he was continually attacking and weakening the Serbian Empire, that appeared likely to be his chief rival. ”

“ Louis, always inexhaustible in expedients, determined to indemnify himself in the north for his disappointments in the south. With the Habsburgs, Hungary’s natural rivals in the west, Louis generally maintained friendly relations. From 1358 to 1368, however, the restless ambition of Rudolph, duke of Austria, who acquired Tirol and raised Vienna to the first rank among the cities of Europe, caused Louis great uneasiness. ”

“ There a regular republican government was established under Louis Kossuth. Hungarian armies were raised, and, defeating the Austrians in pitched battles, drove them from the land. The Austrian Emperor in despair appealed to Russia for aid; and the Czar having just trampled out an incipient Polish rebellion of his own, came willingly to the aid of his brother autocrat. Just as Austrian troops had so often done in Italy, so now a huge Russian horde poured over Hungary, beat down all resistance, and having reduced the land to helplessness returned it to the angry grip of its insulted sovereign. ”

“ When the Lutherans got into power they sent quite a number of the priests of the other sect into exile. Finally, through the interference of the king, the exiles were recalled, the Lutheran officers deposed, and the other two sects celebrated the victory.
The short but fairly successful reign of Louis was ended by an unfortunate expedition against the Turks. In 1526, Sultan Soliman made the long expected and feared attack upon Hungary, having an army of some 300,000. King Louis, with a comparatively small army of Hungarians and Bohemians, took the field, and marched to meet the invading host. ”

“ Throughout his reign the Czechs and the Germans were every whit as dangerous to Hungary as the Turks, and the political necessity which finally compelled Matthias to partition Austria and Bohemia, in order to secure Hungary, committed him to a policy of extreme circumspection. He has sometimes been blamed for not crushing his incurably disloyal and rebellious nobles, instead of cajoling them, after the example of his contemporary, Louis XI., who laid the foundations of the greatness of France on the ruin of the vassals. ”

“ The troops which remained in Holland committed outrages which rendered the very name of the French detested. Louis, from the midst of the pomp and pleasure of his palaces, still displayed extraordinary energies. Agents were dispatched to all the courts of Europe with large sums of money for purposes of bribery. By his diplomatic cunning, Hungary was roused against Austria. Gold was lavished upon the King of England to induce him, notwithstanding the opposition of the British Parliament, to continue in alliance with France. ”

“ Queen Joanna, with her second husband, Louis of Taranto, escaped beyond the sea. Louis of Durazzo, one of the intriguing dukes who was suspected of having been an accessory to the murder, expiated his crime by being killed after a gay carouse and thrown down from the same balcony which had witnessed the foul deed of the conspirators. Four other dukes were carried to Hungary as prisoners. King Louis himself was always foremost in battle and received grave wounds on more than one occasion. ”

“ In Hungary the French emissaries endeavoured to sow the seeds of a new revolt. They exerted themselves with indefatigable industry in almost every court of Christendom. They had already gained over the elector of Bavaria, and his brother the elector of Cologn, together with the dukes of Wolfenbuttle and Saxe-Gotha, who professed neutrality, while they levied troops and made such preparations for war as plainly indicated that they had received subsidies from France. Louis had also extorted a treaty of alliance from the king of Portugal, who was personally attached to the Austrian interest ”

“ The Habsburgs were not slow to see and appreciate their opportunity.
The political and moral gloom weighing upon Hungary and Bohemia during the reign of the Jagello Kings is undeniable. At the same time it is easy to exaggerate its consequences. The historians of both countries, and more especially the Magyar authors writing on the reigns of Wladislav II and Louis II, seem at a loss for sufficient terms of reproach and recrimination with which to assail the Hungarians of this period ”

“ INVASIONS OF THE TURKS.—The last king of the Arpad dynasty died in 1301. There was a division of parties in the choice of a successor. Pope Boniface VIII. and the clergy supported the claims of Count Charles Robert of Anjou, who was related to the former reigning family. Under the son of Charles Robert, Louis, who also succeeded Casimir III. as king of Poland (1370) , Hungary became a very powerful state. Galicia was regained, Moldavia and Bulgaria were conquered. After the death of Louis, his daughter Maria reigned from 1386 conjointly with Sigismund, afterwards emperor, and king of Bohemia. ”

“ There was greater danger threatening Hungary from the south. The nobles of Croatia were dissatisfied with female rule. There were some ambitious men who were incensed to see themselves excluded from the royal court, whilst a man of low descent, like Garay, the palatine, took the lead there. They were intent upon destroying the government in order to remove the queen. In Charles of Durazzo, who owed the throne of Naples to Louis the Great, they found a man who was willing to become a candidate for the throne of Hungary. ”

“ He combined in his person the talents of a283 great warrior, a great legislator, and a great theologian. It was not long before the Hungarians themselves offered him an excuse for waging war against them. On his accession to the throne he had sent an ambassador to Louis II. for the purpose of prolonging the peace between them. The overbearing Hungarian nobles did not so much as enter into a parley with the envoy, but threw him into prison, dragged him with them all over the country, and finally, after cutting off his nose and ears, sent him back to his master. ”

“ Religious distrust also complicated political distrust; Protestantism, crushed in Bohemia, remained powerful and irritated in Hungary. The emperor demanded the assistance of the Germanic Diet and all the Christian states against the enemy of Christianity. ... Louis XIV., at the first request of Leopold, supported by the Pope, replied by offers so magnificent that they appalled the Emperor. Louis proposed not less than 60,000 auxiliaries, half to be furnished by France, half by the Alliance of the Rhine; that is, by the confederates of France in Germany. ”

“ We have described, in the preceding pages, the fatal battle of Mohács, fought on the 29th of August, 1526, in which the youthful King Louis II. opposed an army of hardly 25,000 men to Solyman’s 300,000, to be swept away by the torrent of overwhelming numbers. To give an adequate idea, however, of this awful catastrophe in the annals of Hungary, we will add here that seven bishops and archbishops, thirteen lords of the banner, five hundred magnates, and many thousand nobles laid down their lives on the bloody battle-field. ”

“ Whether Hungary extended, as it did under Louis the Great in the fourteenth century, from Pomerania to Bulgaria, or as under Matthias, from Saxony to Servia, the Magyar kingdom always had an unbroken continuity of territory such as is in our own times possessed only by the several great States of Europe. The same remark applies to Poland, with a few insignificant allowances, and also to the kingdom of Bohemia. ”

“ One has only to compare the incessant activity in foreign policy of Maximilian, or Ferdinand I of Austria, with that of Wladislav II and Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia, in order to see how utterly inferior Magyar political strategy was to that of the House of Habsburg. Maximilian's great wars with Venice, France, and Switzerland, his incessant diplomatic campaigns with the Curia of Rome, with the princes of Germany, with Venice, are all discussed in other parts of this work. It will be sufficient here to limit our attention to Maximilian's eastern policy. ”

“ Uladislaus now perceived the bearing of the Rákos resolution and, in consequence, entered into a new treaty with Maximilian. Under its terms Ferdinand, a grandson of Maximilian, was to marry Uladislaus’ daughter Anna, whilst another grandchild of Maximilian, Mary, was betrothed to Louis, the boy just born. By virtue of this treaty Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, took possession of the throne of Hungary after the fatal day of Mohács. This new alliance, however, did not deter Szapolyai from his bold purpose. ”

“ At an early stage of the contest Venice was so hardly pressed that she offered to do homage to Hungary for all her possessions. But her immense resources enabled her to rally her forces, and peace was finally concluded between all the powers concerned at the congress of Turin (1381) , Venice virtually surrendering Dalmatia to Louis and undertaking to pay him an annual tribute of 7000 ducats. The persistent hostility of Venice is partially attributable to her constant fear lest Louis should inherit the crown of Naples and thus threaten her trade and her sea-power from two sides simultaneously. ”

“ Charles of168 Durazzo, called also Charles the Little, son of Louis of Durazzo, having conquered the throne of Naples, ordered Queen Joanna in 1382, thirty-seven years after the commission of her crime, to be thrown into prison, where she met her death by strangling.
During the Italian campaign Hungary was also called upon to meet another enemy in the East. Roving populations were making constant inroads on the eastern border, harassing the Hungarian inhabitants, who had by this time become accustomed to the peaceful avocations of the husbandman and tradesman. ”

“ Instead of heeding the warning of the Prince of Orange, the empire concluded with Louis the truce of Regensburg, by which he was suffered to retain these conquests. He evinced his arrogance in making a quarrel with Genoa, in bombarding the city, and in forcing the doge to come to Versailles and beg for peace (1684) .
HUNGARY AND AUSTRIA.—The Emperor Leopold was busy in the eastern part of his dominions. The success of the Turks, who gained possession of Lower Hungary, called out a more energetic resistance; but a victory gained by the imperial general, Montecuculi, at St. ”