The story of Hungary 21

The story of Hungary 21

On the 18th of September, 1345, the whole court, and amongst them

Joanna, proceeded to Aversa, to indulge in the merry pastime of the

chase. Andrew was accompanied by his faithful Hungarian nurse, Izolda,

who, poor creature, little dreamed that her ward was to be the object

of the chase. In the evening the whole company took up their quarters

at the convent of St. Peter. Andrew had just retired to his chamber

when a familiar voice called him into the adjoining room, in order to

discuss some grave questions. The unsuspecting youth, anticipating no

evil, left his chamber, but no sooner had he crossed the threshold when

the door was locked behind him by his secretary. The assassins lying

in wait fell upon their victim at once and strangled him; his cries

for help remaining unheeded. His dead body they then dragged to the

balcony and precipitated it into the garden below. Whilst this bloody

scene was enacted, Joanna slept soundly, undisturbed by the scuffle at

her door, and cries of distress of her husband. She afterwards gave the

explanation that she had been put under a spell by a witch.

 

There was mourning at the castle of Visegrád at the sad tidings.

Louis swore dire vengeance, and the nation enthusiastically took

up arms to support him. From abroad there arrived but voices of

sympathy. The Italian princes offered his armies free transit through

their territories; 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.

 

All the great lords of the realm rallied round the king. A large

black flag was carried in front of the Hungarian army and on it was

depicted the pale face of Andrew. On two occasions they were led by

the king against Naples, and each time he was accompanied by the most

distinguished Hungarian families. Michael Kont, Andrew and Stephen

Laczfy, with Dionysius, the son of the latter, and a host of others,

brought with them their armed trains, by whose mighty blows both

Aversa, of mournful memory, and proud Naples were soon reduced. 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. But

his chief desire—to punish Joanna—was not gratified and at length he

entrusted the Pope with the sentence to be pronounced against her. The

Pope, however, declared her innocent of the crime of murder, imputed

to her, but mulcted her in a fine of 300,000 ducats as a restitution

of the expenditures of the campaign. The chivalrous king spurned the

blood-money and left the punishment of guilty Joanna to a more upright

judge—to Providence. And Providence dealt more severely with the

queenly culprit than the successor to St. Peter’s see had done. Charles

of 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. The victorious arms of King Louis

soon put an end to those lawless incursions. But one of the most

beautiful legends of Hungarian history is connected with one of the

campaigns against these marauding populations. Kieystut, the Prince of

Lithuania, after having been defeated several years before, broke into

Transylvania with an army considerably swelled by the accession of a

numerous body of Tartars. The king sent Louis Laczfy, the vayvode of

Transylvania, against him, and the brave Székely people followed in his

train. But the Hungarian army was small and the issue of the battle

remained for a long time doubtful. The legend tells that the news of

the peril threatening the Hungarian arms reached Grosswardein, where

St. Ladislaus lay buried, and that the heroic saint, leaving his grave,

bestrode the bronze horse of his own statue, which stood in the centre

of the public square, and hurried off to the relief of his distressed

countrymen. The Tartars were struck with the apparition of a warrior

“who towered over them head and shoulders,” and above whom was visible

the holy Virgin Mary, the patroness of Hungary. The pagans were seized

with terror at this sight, and the battle ended in a brilliant victory

for the Hungarians.

 

The arms of the king were no less successful in Servia where he was

about “to kindle the light of faith.” But the most glorious of his wars

was the one carried on against proud Venice, which continued during the

greater portion of his reign. Her enemies, especially Genoa, willingly

sided with the king of Hungary, and the ultimate result was the utter

humiliation of the city of St. Mark. At last, in 1381, one year before

the king’s death, peace was concluded between the two belligerents,

a peace of which the Hungarians had every reason to be proud, for by

its terms Dalmatia was unconditionally annexed to Hungary, and Venice

herself had to send the Hungarian king, annually on St. Stephen’s Day,

the 20th of August, a tribute of 7,000 ducats. As an indication of the

high esteem in which the name of Hungary was held at that time, it is

interesting to learn that foreign rulers sent their children to the

Hungarian court to be educated, and the inference is not a strained

one that the court of Louis must have been a centre of the European

culture and refinement of that day. The spouse selected by the king,

Elizabeth, the daughter of Stephen, the Prince of Bosnia, had herself

been sent to the court to be trained in courtly accomplishments. At

the Hungarian court also, Charles IV., the Emperor of Germany, wooed

Anna, the Duchess of Schweidnitz, his future empress. These two rulers

were united by ties of close friendship, until the discontent of the

Germans with “the stepfather of their country,” as they called Charles

IV., ripened a scheme to transfer the German crown to the Hungarian

king. Although King Louis refused to accept the crown proffered to him,

the sting remained, and his imperial friend became his deadly enemy.

The emperor persisted in indulging in his unfounded suspicions of the

king’s good faith, and so far forgot himself as to speak insultingly

of the king and his exalted mother. The Hungarian ambassadors at

the emperor’s court, incensed at the affront done to their master,

challenged the emperor to mortal combat. But he cravenly declined

to accept the challenge, whereupon they declared war in the name of

their king. Louis, who almost worshipped his mother, approved of the

proceedings of his ambassadors, and sent the emperor an insulting

letter, in which he declared that nothing better might be expected from

a drunkard. Very soon a large army of Kuns devastated Moravia, until,

at length, after a warfare of several years, the humiliated emperor

begged for peace, obtaining the Pope’s intercession in his behalf.

Peace was at last concluded, and matrimonial alliances were to make it

doubly sure. Sigismund, the emperor’s son, was betrothed to Mary, the

king’s daughter.

 

In the latter half of the fourteenth century Christianity in Europe was

threatened by a new foe. The warlike followers of Osman had, by the

capture of Adrianople firmly laid the foundations of their powerful

empire in Europe. Youths, forcibly taken at a tender age from their

Christian parents, and educated afterwards in implicit obedience to

the behests of the Sultan, were rigorously trained as soldiers after

the most approved fashion of the day, and the troops thus obtained

were destined to become the most formidable aid in the building of the

Ottoman power in Europe. The Eastern empire had sunk too low, at that

time, to be able, single-handed, to resist such a power, and she lost

her strongholds, one after the other. In this strait her ruler resorted

to one of those deceitful devices characterizing the policy of the

Eastern court. John Palæologos, the Eastern emperor, proceeded to the

court of the king of Hungary, at Buda, and, promising to give in his

adhesion to the Western Church, he asked the aid of Louis against the

savage enemy. The “Banner-bearer of the Church,” as the king of Hungary

was styled by the Pope, deemed it his duty, under these circumstances,

to come to the rescue of the distressed emperor, and shortly afterwards

the two kindred nations, the Turks and the Hungarians, met in hostile

array on the banks of the Maritza. This was the first warlike contest

of the two nations. It resulted in the victory of 20,000 Hungarians

over a Turkish army four times as large, a victory commemorated to this

day by the treasures and appropriate inscriptions still to be seen at

the church of Mariazell in Styria.

 

Casimir, the last Polish king of the house of Piast, died on the 5th of

November, 1370. His death was caused by an injury contracted in falling

from his horse during the chase.

 

On the 17th of the same month Louis was crowned King of Poland, at

Cracow, by the Archbishop of Gnesen. At the very moment when he was

about to reach the goal of the highest ambition of his predecessor,

and of himself, Louis seemed to waver, and to doubt the expediency

of accepting the crown. He could not help reflecting that governing

two nations, which were united by no other tie except his own person,

and defending them against their enemies, might prove a task to which

one king was not equal. He nevertheless accepted the crown, but his

sinister presentiments were fated speedily to be confirmed. The Polish

lords were not used to an energetic rule. The nobles of Little and

Great Poland were eager, each for themselves, to secure the offices of

state, but both equally hated the queen-mother sent there to rule. The

country soon fell a prey to internal dissensions and strife, compelling

the queen to fly from the land, in which a new pretender had appeared.

This pretender to the throne was a kinsman of the late king of Poland,

and had retired to a convent in France in the lifetime of Casimir. His

ambition made him exchange the cassock for armor, and a large portion

of the people of Poland very soon acknowledged him to be their king.

But his royalty was of short duration; the army of the adventurer was

scattered by the adherents of King Louis.

 

The Lithuanians, whom we have before mentioned as being driven back

by Andrew Laczfy, now took advantage of the disorders prevailing in

Poland, and succeeded in securing such a foothold in that country

that one of their dukes, Jagello, who was converted to Christianity,

and subsequently married Hedvig, the daughter of King Louis, became

in the course of a few years the founder of a new Polish dynasty, the