LADISLAUS [I.], Saint (1040-1095), king of Hungary, the son of Béla I., king of Hungary, and the Polish princess Richeza, was born in Poland, whither his father had sought refuge, but was recalled by his elder brother Andrew I. to Hungary (1047) and brought up there. He succeeded to the throne on the death of his uncle Geza in 1077, as the eldest member of the royal family, and speedily won for himself a reputation scarcely inferior to that of Stephen I., by nationalizing Christianity and laying the foundations of Hungary’s political greatness. Instinctively recognizing that Germany was the natural enemy of the Magyars, Ladislaus formed a close alliance with the pope and all the other enemies of the emperor Henry IV., including the anti-emperor Rudolph of Swabia and his chief supporter Welf, duke of Bavaria, whose daughter Adelaide he married. She bore him one son and three daughters, one of whom, Piriska, married the Byzantine emperor John Comnenus. The collapse of the German emperor in his struggle with the pope left Ladislaus free to extend his dominions towards the south, and colonize and Christianize the wildernesses of Transylvania and the lower Danube. Hungary was still semi-savage, and her native barbarians were being perpetually recruited from the hordes of Pechenegs, Kumanians and other races which swept over her during the 11th century. Ladislaus himself had fought valiantly in his youth against the Pechenegs, and to defend the land against the Kumanians, who now occupied Moldavia and Wallachia as far as the Alt, he built the fortresses of Turnu-Severin and Gyula Féhervár. He also planted in Transylvania the Szeklers, the supposed remnant of the ancient Magyars from beyond the Dnieper, and founded the bishoprics of Nagy-Várad, or Gross-Wardein, and of Agram, as fresh foci of Catholicism in south Hungary and the hitherto uncultivated districts between the Drave and the Save. He subsequently conquered Croatia, though here his authority was questioned by the pope, the Venetian republic and the Greek emperor. Ladislaus died suddenly in 1095 when about to take part in the first Crusade. No other Hungarian king was so generally beloved. The whole nation mourned for him for three years, and regarded him as a saint long before his canonization. A whole cycle of legends is associated with his name.
See J. Babik, Life of St Ladislaus (Hung.) (Eger, 1892); György Pray, Dissertatio de St Ladislao (Pressburg, 1774); Antál Gánóczy, Diss. hist. crit. de St Ladislao (Vienna, 1775).
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LADISLAUS IV., The Kumanian (1262-1290), king of Hungary, was the son of Stephen V., whom he succeeded in 1272. From his tenth year, when he was kidnapped from his father’s court by the rebellious vassals, till his assassination eighteen years later, his whole life, with one bright interval of military glory was unrelieved tragedy. His minority, 1272-1277, was an alternation of palace revolutions and civil wars, in the course of which his brave Kumanian mother Elizabeth barely contrived to keep the upper hand. In this terrible school Ladislaus matured precociously. At fifteen he was a man, resolute, spirited, enterprising, with the germs of many talents and virtues, but rough, reckless and very imperfectly educated. He was married betimes to Elizabeth of Anjou, who had been brought up at the Hungarian court. The marriage was a purely political one, arranged by his father and a section of the Hungarian magnates to counterpoise hostile German and Czech influences. During the earlier part of his reign, Ladislaus obsequiously followed the direction of the Neapolitan court in foreign affairs. In Hungary itself a large party was in favour of the Germans, but the civil wars which raged between the two factions from 1276 to 1278 did not prevent Ladislaus, at the head of 20,000 Magyars and Kumanians, from co-operating with Rudolph of Habsburg in the great battle of Durnkrüt (August 26th, 1278), which destroyed, once for all, the empire of the Přemyslidae. A month later a papal legate arrived in Hungary to inquire into the conduct of the king, who was accused by his neighbours, and many of his own subjects, of adopting the ways of his Kumanian kinsfolk and thereby undermining Christianity. Ladislaus was not really a pagan, or he would not have devoted his share of the spoil of Durnkrüt to the building of the Franciscan church at Pressburg, nor would he have venerated as he did his aunt St Margaret. Political enmity was largely responsible for the movement against him, yet the result of a very careful investigation (1279-1281) by Philip, bishop of Fermo, more than justified many of the accusations brought against Ladislaus. He clearly preferred the society of the semi-heathen Kumanians to that of the Christians; wore, and made his court wear, Kumanian dress; surrounded himself with Kumanian concubines, and neglected and ill-used his ill-favoured Neapolitan consort. He was finally compelled to take up arms against his Kumanian friends, whom he routed at Hodmézö (May 1282) with fearful loss; but, previously to this, he had arrested the legate, whom he subsequently attempted to starve into submission, and his conduct generally was regarded as so unsatisfactory that, after repeated warnings, the Holy See resolved to supersede him by his Angevin kinsfolk, whom he had also alienated, and on the 8th of August 1288 Pope Nicholas IV. proclaimed a crusade against him. For the next two years all Hungary was convulsed by a horrible civil war, during which the unhappy young king, who fought for his heritage to the last with desperate valour, was driven from one end of his kingdom to the other like a hunted beast. On the 25th of December 1289 he issued a manifesto to the lesser gentry, a large portion of whom sided with him, urging them to continue the struggle against the magnates and their foreign supporters; but on the 10th of July 1290 he was murdered in his camp at Korosszeg by the Kumanians, who never forgave him for deserting them.
See Karoly Szabó, Ladislaus the Cumanian (Hung.), (Budapest, 1886); and Acsády, History of the Hungarian Realm, i. 2 (Budapest, 1903). The latter is, however, too favourable to Ladislaus.
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LADISLAUS V. (1440-1457), king of Hungary and Bohemia, the only son of Albert, king of Hungary, and Elizabeth, daughter of the emperor Sigismund, was born at Komárom on the 22nd of February 1440, four months after his father’s death, and was hence called Ladislaus Posthumus. The estates of Hungary had already elected Wladislaus III. of Poland their king, but Ladislaus’s mother caused the holy crown to be stolen from its guardians at Visegrad, and compelled the primate to crown the infant king at Székesfejérvár on the 15th of May 1440; whereupon, for safety’s sake, she placed the child beneath the guardianship of his uncle the emperor Frederick III. On the death of Wladislaus III. (Nov. 10th, 1444), Ladislaus V. was elected king by the Hungarian estates, though not without considerable opposition, and a deputation was sent to Vienna to induce the emperor to surrender the child and the holy crown; but it was not till 1452 that Frederick was compelled to relinquish both. The child was then transferred to the pernicious guardianship of his maternal grandfather Ulrich Cillei, who corrupted him soul and body and inspired him with a jealous hatred of the Hunyadis. On the 28th of October 1453 he was crowned king of Bohemia, and henceforth spent most of his time at Prague and Vienna. He remained supinely indifferent to the Turkish peril; at the instigation of Cillei did his best to hinder the defensive preparations of the great Hunyadi, and fled from the country on the tidings of the siege of Belgrade. On the death of Hunyadi he made Cillei governor of Hungary at the diet of Futtak (October 1456), and when that traitor paid with his life for his murderous attempt on Laszló Hunyadi at Belgrade, Ladislaus procured the decapitation of young Hunyadi (16th of March 1457), after a mock trial which raised such a storm in Hungary that the king fled to Prague, where he died suddenly (Nov. 23rd, 1457), while making preparations for his marriage with Magdalena, daughter of Charles VII. of France. He is supposed to have been poisoned by his political opponents in Bohemia.
See F. Palacky, Zeugenverhör über den Tod König Ladislaus von Ungarn u. Böhmen (Prague, 1856); Ignacz Acsády, History of the Hungarian State (Hung.), vol. i. (Budapest, 1903).