JOHN (Zapolya) (1487-1540), king of Hungary, was the son of the palatine Stephen Zapolya and the princess Hedwig of Teschen, and was born at the castle of Szepesvár. He began his public career at the famous Rákos diet of 1505, when, on his motion, the assembly decided that after the death of the reigning king, Wladislaus II., no foreign prince should be elected king of Hungary. Henceforth he became the national candidate for the throne, which his family had long coveted. As far back as 1491 his mother had proposed to the sick king that his daughter Anne should be committed to her care in order, subsequently, to be married to her son; but Wladislaus frustrated this project by contracting a matrimonial alliance with the Habsburgs. In 1510 Zapolya sued in person for the hand of the Princess Anne in vain, and his appointment to the voivody of Transylvania (1511) was with the evident intention of removing him far from court. In 1513, after a successful raid in Turkish territory, he hastened to Buda at the head of 1000 horsemen and renewed his suit, which was again rejected. In 1514 he stamped out the dangerous peasant rising under Dozsa (q.v.) and the infernal torments by means of which the rebel leader was slowly done to death were the invention of Zapolya. With the gentry, whose hideous oppression had moved the peasantry to revolt, he was now more than ever popular, and, on the death of Wladislaus II., the second diet of Rákos (1516) appointed him the governor of the infant king Louis II. He now aimed at the dignity of palatine also, but the council of state and the court party combined against him and appointed István Báthory instead (1519). The strife of factions now burnt more fiercely than ever at the very time when the pressure of the Turk demanded the combination of all the national forces against a common danger. It was entirely due to the dilatoriness and dissensions of Zapolya and Báthory that the great fortress of Belgrade was captured in 1521, a loss which really sealed the fate of Hungary. In 1522 the diet would have appointed both Zapolya and Báthory captains-general of the realm, but the court set Zapolya aside and chose Báthory only. At the diets of Hátvan and Rákos in 1522, Zapolya placed himself at the head of a confederation to depose the palatine and the other great officers of state, but the attempt failed. In the following year, however, the revolutionary Hátvan diet drove out all the members of the council of state and made István Verböczy, the great jurist, and a friend of Zapolya, palatine. In the midst of this hopeless anarchy, Suleiman I., the Magnificent, invaded Hungary with a countless army, and the young king perished on the field of Mohács in a vain attempt to stay his progress, the contradictory orders of Louis II. preventing Zapolya from arriving in time to turn the fortunes of the day. The court party accused him of deliberate treachery on this occasion; but the charge must be pronounced groundless. His younger brother George was killed at Mohács, where he was second commander-in-chief. Zapolya was elected king of Hungary at the subsequent diet of Tokaj (Oct. 14), the election was confirmed by the diet of Székesfehérvár (10th of November), and he was crowned on the following day with the holy crown.
A struggle with the rival candidate, the German king Ferdinand I., at once ensued (see [Hungary]: History) and it was only with the aid of the Turks that king John was able to exhaust his opponent and compel him to come to terms. Finally, in 1538, by the compact of Nagyvárad, Ferdinand recognized John as king of Hungary, but secured the right of succession on his death. Nevertheless John broke the compact by bequeathing the kingdom to his infant son John Sigismund under Turkish protection. John was the last national king of Hungary. His merit, as a statesman, lies in his stout vindication of the national independence, though without the assistance of his great minister György Utiesenovich, better known as “Frater George” (Cardinal Martinuzzi (q.v.)), this would have been impossible. Indirectly he contributed to the subsequent conquest of Hungary by admitting the Turk as a friend.
See Vilmos Fraknoi, Ungarn vor der Schlacht bei Mohács (Budapest, 1886); L. Kupelwieser, Die Kämpfe Ungarns mit den Osmanen bis zur Schlacht bei Mohács (Vienna, 1895); Ignacz Acsády, History of the Hungarian Realm, vol. i. (Hung.) (Budapest, 1902-1904).
JOHN OF BRIENNE (c. 1148-1237), king of Jerusalem and Latin emperor of Constantinople, was a man of sixty years of age before he began to play any considerable part in history. Destined originally for the Church, he had preferred to become a knight, and in forty years of tournaments and fights he had won himself a considerable reputation, when in 1208 envoys came from the Holy Land to ask Philip Augustus, king of France, to select one of his barons as husband to the heiress, and ruler of the kingdom, of Jerusalem. Philip selected John of Brienne, and promised to support him in his new dignity. In 1210 John married the heiress Mary (daughter of Isabella and Conrad of Montferrat), assuming the title of king in right of his wife. In 1211, after some desultory operations, he concluded a six years’ truce with Malik-el-Adil; in 1212 he lost his wife, who left him a daughter, Isabella; soon afterwards he married an Armenian princess. In the fifth crusade (1218-1221) he was a prominent figure. The legate Pelagius, however, claimed the command; and insisting on the advance from Damietta, in spite of the warnings of King John, he refused to accept the favourable terms of the sultan, as the king advised, until it was too late. After the failure of the crusade, King John came to the West to obtain help for his kingdom. In 1223 he met Honorius III. and the emperor Frederick II. at Ferentino, where, in order that he might be connected more closely with the Holy Land, Frederick was betrothed to John’s daughter Isabella, now heiress of the kingdom. After the meeting at Ferentino, John went to France and England, finding little consolation; and thence he travelled to Compostella, where he married a new wife, Berengaria of Castile. After a visit to Germany he returned to Rome (1225). Here he received a demand from Frederick II. (who had now married Isabella) that he should abandon his title and dignity of king, which—so Frederick claimed—had passed to himself along with the heiress of the kingdom. John was now a septuagenarian “king in exile,” but he was still vigorous enough to revenge himself on Frederick, by commanding the papal troops which attacked southern Italy during the emperor’s absence on the sixth crusade (1228-1229). In 1229 John, now eighty years of age, was invited by the barons of the Latin empire of Constantinople to become emperor, on condition that Baldwin of Courtenay should marry his second daughter and succeed him. For nine years he ruled in Constantinople, and in 1235, with a few troops, he repelled a great siege of the city by Vataces of Nicaea and Azen of Bulgaria. After this last feat of arms, which has perhaps been exaggerated by the Latin chroniclers, who compare him to Hector and the Maccabees, John died in the habit of a Franciscan friar. An aged paladin, somewhat uxorious and always penniless, he was a typical knight errant, whose wanderings led him all over Europe, and planted him successively on the thrones of Jerusalem and Constantinople.
The story of John’s career must be sought partly in histories of the kingdom of Jerusalem and of the Latin Empire of the East, partly in monographs. Among these, of which R. Röhricht gives a list (Geschichte des Königreichs Jerusalem, p. 699, n. 3), see especially that of E. de Montcarmet, Un chevalier du temps passé (Limoges, 1876 and 1881).
JOHN III. (Sobieski) (1624-1696), king of Poland, was the eldest son of James Sobieski, castellan of Cracow, and Theofila Danillowiczowna, grand-daughter of the great Hetman Zolkiewski. After being educated at Cracow, he made the grand tour with his brother Mark and returned to Poland in 1648. He served against Chmielnicki and the Cossacks and was present at the battles of Beresteczko (1651) and Batoka (1652), but was one of the first to desert his unhappy country when invaded by the Swedes in 1654, and actually assisted them to conquer the Prussian provinces in 1655. He returned to his lawful allegiance in the following year and assisted Czarniecki in his difficult task of expelling Charles X. of Sweden from the central Polish provinces. For his subsequent services to King John Casimir, especially in the Ukraine against the Tatars and Cossacks, he received the grand bâton of the crown, or commandership-in-chief (1668). He had already (1665) succeeded Czarniecki as acting commander-in-chief. Sobieski had well earned these distinctions by his extraordinary military capacity, but he was now to exhibit a less pleasing side of his character. He was in fact a typical representative of the unscrupulous self-seeking Polish magnates of the 17th century who were always ready to sacrifice everything, their country included, to their own private ambition. At the election diet of 1669 he accepted large bribes from Louis XIV. to support one of the French candidates; after the election of Michael Wisniowiecki (June 19, 1669) he openly conspired, again in the French interest, against his lawful sovereign, and that too at the very time when the Turk was ravaging the southern frontier of the republic. Michael was the feeblest monarch the Poles could have placed upon the throne, and Sobieski deliberately attempted to make government of any kind impossible. He formed a league with the primate Prazmowski and other traitors to dethrone the king; when (1670) the plot was discovered and participation in it repudiated by Louis XIV., the traitors sought the help of the elector of Brandenburg against their own justly indignant countrymen. Two years later the same traitors again conspired against the king, at the very time when the Turks had defeated Sobieski’s unsupported lieutenant, Luzecki, at Czertwertyworska and captured the fortress of Kamieniec (Kamenetz-Podolskiy), the key of south-eastern Poland, while Lemberg was only saved by the valour of Elias Lancki. The unhappy king did the only thing possible in the circumstances. He summoned the tuszenia pospolite, or national armed assembly; but it failed to assemble in time, whereupon Michael was constrained to sign the disgraceful peace of Buczacz (Oct. 17, 1672) whereby Poland ceded to the Porte the whole of the Ukraine with Podolia and Kamieniec. Aroused to duty by a series of disasters for which he himself was primarily responsible, Sobieski now hastened to the frontier, and won four victories in ten days. But he could not recover Kamieniec, and when the tuszenia pospolite met at Golenba and ordered an inquiry into the conduct of Sobieski and his accomplices he frustrated all their efforts by summoning a counter confederation to meet at Szczebrzeszyn. Powerless to oppose a rebel who was at the same time commander-in-chief, both the king and the diet had to give way, and a compromise was come to whereby the peace of Buczacz was repudiated and Sobieski was given a chance of rehabilitating himself, which he did by his brilliant victory over an immense Turkish host at Khotin (Nov. 10, 1673). The same day King Michael died and Sobieski, determined to secure the throne for himself, hastened to the capital, though Tatar bands were swarming over the frontier and the whole situation was acutely perilous. Appearing at the elective diet of 1674 at the head of 6000 veterans he overawed every other competitor, and despite the persistent opposition of the Lithuanians was elected king on the 21st of May. By this time, however, the state of things in the Ukraine was so alarming that the new king had to hasten to the front. Assisted by French diplomacy at the Porte (Louis XIV. desiring to employ Poland against Austria), and his own skilful negotiations with the Tatar khan, John III. now tried to follow the example of Wladislaus IV. by leaving the guardianship of the Ukraine entirely in the hands of the Cossacks, while he assembled as many regulars and militiamen as possible at Lemberg, whence he might hasten with adequate forces to defend whichever of the provinces of the Republic might be in most danger. But the appeal of the king was like the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and not one gentleman in a hundred hastened to the assistance of the fatherland. Even at the end of August Sobieski had but 3000 men at his disposal to oppose to 60,000 Turks. Only his superb strategy and the heroic devotion of his lieutenants—notably the converted Jew, Jan Samuel Chrzanowski, who held the Ottoman army at bay for eleven days behind the walls of Trembowla—enabled the king to remove “the pagan yoke from our shoulders”; and he returned to be crowned at Cracow on the 14th of February 1676. In October 1676, in his entrenched camp at Zaravno, he with 13,000 men withstood 80,000 Turks for three weeks, and recovered by special treaty two-thirds of the Ukraine, but without Kamieniec (treaty of Zaravno, Oct. 16, 1676).
Having now secured peace abroad Sobieski was desirous of strengthening Poland at home by establishing absolute monarchy; but Louis XIV. looked coldly on the project, and from this time forth the old familiar relations between the republic and the French monarchy were strained to breaking point, though the final rupture did not come till 1682 on the arrival of the Austrian minister, Zerowski, at Warsaw. After resisting every attempt of the French court to draw him into the anti-Habsburg league, Sobieski signed the famous treaty of alliance with the emperor Leopold against the Turks (March 31, 1683), which was the prelude to the most glorious episode of his life, the relief of Vienna and the liberation of Hungary from the Ottoman yoke. The epoch-making victory of the 12th of September 1683 was ultimately decided by the charge of the Polish cavalry led by Sobieski in person. Unfortunately Poland profited little or nothing by this great triumph, and now that she had broken the back of the enemy she was left to fight the common enemy in the Ukraine with whatever assistance she could obtain from the unwilling and unready Muscovites. The last twelve years of the reign of John III. were a period of unmitigated humiliation and disaster. He now reaped to the full the harvest of treason and rebellion which he himself had sown so abundantly during the first forty years of his life. A treasonable senate secretly plotting his dethronement, a mutinous diet rejecting the most necessary reforms for fear of “absolutism,” ungrateful allies who profited exclusively by his victories—these were his inseparable companions during the remainder of his life. Nay, at last his evil destiny pursued him to the battlefield and his own home. His last campaign (in 1690) was an utter failure, and the last years of his life were embittered by the violence and the intrigues of his dotingly beloved wife, Marya Kazimiera d’Arquien, by whom he had three sons, James, Alexander and Constantine. He died on the 17th of June 1696, a disillusioned and broken-hearted old man.