General Works.—See the histories of France, the Emigration, the
Restoration and especially the very full bibliographies to chapters
i., ii. and iii. of Cambridge Modern History, and Lavisse and Rambaud,
Hist. générale, vol. x. (C. B. P.)
LOUIS I. (1326–1382), called “the great,” king of Hungary and Poland, was the third son of Charles Robert, king of Hungary,
and Elizabeth, daughter of the Polish king, Ladislaus Lokietek.
In 1342 he succeeded his father as king of Hungary and was
crowned at Székesfehérvár on the 21st of July with great enthusiasm.
Though only sixteen he understood Latin, German
and Italian as well as his mother tongue. He owed his relatively
excellent education to the care of his mother, a woman of profound
political sagacity, who was his chief counsellor in diplomatic
affairs during the greater part of his long reign. Italian
politics first occupied his attention. As a ruler of a rising
great power in search of a seaboard he was the natural adversary
of the Venetian republic, which already aimed at making the
Adriatic a purely Venetian sea and resented the proximity of
the Magyars in Dalmatia. The first trial of strength began in
1345, when the city of Zara placed herself under the protection
of Hungary and was thereupon invested by the Venetians.
Louis fought a battle beneath the walls of Zara (July 1st, 1346),
which has been immortalized by Tintoretto, but was defeated
and compelled to abandon the city to the republic. The struggle
was renewed eleven years later when Louis, having formed, with
infinite trouble, a league of all the enemies of Venice, including
the emperor, the Habsburgs, Genoa and other Italian towns,
attacked his maritime rival with such vigour that she sued for
peace, and by the treaty of Zara (February 18th, 1358) ceded
most of the Dalmatian towns and renounced the title of duke
of Dalmatia and Croatia, hitherto borne by the doge. Far
more important than the treaty itself was the consequent voluntary
submission of the independent republic of Ragusa to the
suzerainty of the crown of St Stephen the same year, Louis,
in return for an annual tribute of 500 ducats and a fleet, undertaking
to defend Ragusa against all her enemies. Still more
glorious for Hungary was Louis’s third war with Venice (1378–1381),
when he was again aided by the Genoese. 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. Louis’s younger brother Andrew
had wedded Joanna, grand-daughter and heiress of old King
Robert of Naples, on whose death, in 1343, she reigned in her
own right, refused her consort any share in the government,
and is very strongly suspected of having secured his removal
by assassination on the night of the 19th of September 1345.
She then married Prince Louis of Taranto, and strong in the
double support of the papal court at Avignon and of the Venetian
republic (both of whom were opposed to Magyar aggrandisement
in Italy) questioned the right of Louis to the two Sicilies, which
he claimed as the next heir of his murdered brother. In 1347,
and again in 1350, Louis occupied Naples and craved permission
to be crowned king, but the papal see was inexorable
and he was compelled to withdraw. The matter was not decided
till 1378 when Joanna, having made the mistake of recognizing
the antipope Clement VII., was promptly deposed and excommunicated
in favour of Prince Charles of Durazzo, who had
been brought up at the Hungarian court. 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. But Louis always
preferred arbitration to war, and the peace congresses of Nagyszombat
(1360) and of Pressburg (1360) summoned by him
adjusted all the outstanding differences between the central
European powers. Louis’s diplomacy, moreover, was materially
assisted by his lifelong alliance with his uncle, the childless
Casimir the Great of Poland, who had appointed him his successor;
and on Casimir’s death Louis was solemnly crowned king
of Poland at Cracow (Nov. 17, 1370). This personal union
of the two countries was more glorious than profitable. Louis
could give little attention to his unruly Polish subjects and
was never very happy among them. Immovably entrenched
behind their privileges, they rendered him only the minimum
of service; but he compelled their representatives, assembled at
Kassa, to recognize his daughter Maria and her affianced husband,
Count Sigismund of Brandenburg, as their future king and
queen by locking the gates of the city and allowing none to leave
it till they had consented to his wishes (1374). Louis is the first
European monarch who came into collision with the Turks.
He seems to have arrested their triumphant career (c. 1372),
and the fine church erected by him at Maria-Zell is a lasting
memorial of his victories. From the first he took a just view
of the Turkish peril, but the peculiar local and religious difficulties
of the whole situation in the Balkans prevented him from
dealing with it effectually (see Hungary, History). Louis died
suddenly at Nagyszombat on the 10th of September 1382. He
left two daughters Maria and Jadwiga (the latter he destined
for the throne of Hungary) under the guardianship of his widow,
the daughter of the valiant ban of Bosnia, Stephen Kotromaníc,
whom he married in 1353, and who was in every way worthy
of him.
See Rationes Collectorum Pontif. in Hungaria, 1281–1375 (Budapest, 1887); Dano Gruber, The Struggle of Louis I. with the Venetians for Dalmatia (Croat.) (Agram, 1903); Antal Pór, Life of Louis the Great (Hung.) (Budapest, 1892); and History of the Hungarian Nation (Hung.) (vol. 3, Budapest, 1895). (R. N. B.)
LOUIS II. (1506–1526), king of Hungary and Bohemia, was the only son of Wladislaus II., king of Hungary and Bohemia,
and the French princess Anne of Candale. Prematurely born
at Buda on the 1st of July 1506, it required all the resources of
medical science to keep the sickly child alive, yet he developed
so precociously that at the age of thirteen he was well bearded
and moustached, while at eighteen his hair was silvery white.
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. But during the greater
part of his reign he was the puppet of the magnates and kept
in such penury that he was often obliged to pawn his
jewels to get proper food and clothing. His guardians, Cardinal
Bakócz and Count George of Brandenburg-Anspach, shamefully
neglected him, squandered the royal revenues and distracted
the whole kingdom with their endless dissensions. Matters
grew even worse on the death of Bakócz, when the magnates
István Báthory, János Zapolya and István Verböczy fought
each other furiously, and used the diets as their tools. Added to
these troubles was the ever-present Turkish peril, which became
acute after the king, with insensate levity, arrested the Ottoman
envoy Berham in 1521 and refused to unite with Suleiman in a
league against the Habsburgs. Nevertheless in the last extremity
Louis showed more of manhood than any of his counsellors.
It was he who restored something like order by intervening
between the magnates and the gentry at the diet of 1525. It was he who collected in his camp at Tolna the army of 25,000 men which perished utterly on the fatal field of Mohács on the 29th of August 1526. He was drowned in the swollen stream of Csele on his flight from the field, being the second
