Louis I of Hungary

Louis I of Hungary, often called Louis the Great or Louis the Hungarian, ruled as King of Hungary and Croatia from 1342 and as King of Poland from 1370 until his death in 1382. Born on 5 March 1326, he was the only child of Charles I of Hungary and Elizabeth of Poland to survive infancy. A 1338 agreement between his father and his maternal uncle, Casimir III of Poland, secured Louis’s right to inherit the Polish throne if Casimir died without a son; in return, Louis had to help his uncle reclaim Polish territories lost in earlier decades. Between 1339 and 1342, he held the title Duke of Transylvania but never governed the region.

When Louis succeeded his father in 1342, he was already an adult, but his deeply religious mother heavily shaped his views. He took over a centralized kingdom with a full treasury. Early in his reign, he led a crusade against the Lithuanians, restored royal control in Croatia, and defeated a Tatar army, pushing Hungarian influence toward the Black Sea. After his brother Andrew, Duke of Calabria and husband of Queen Joanna I of Naples, was murdered in 1345, Louis blamed Joanna and made punishing her his main foreign policy goal. He invaded the Kingdom of Naples twice between 1347 and 1350, occupying large areas and adopting Neapolitan royal titles like King of Sicily and Jerusalem, though the Holy See never accepted his claim. His harsh actions and the brutality of his mercenaries made him unpopular in southern Italy, and he pulled all his troops out of Naples in 1351.

Like his father, Louis ruled Hungary with absolute authority, using royal powers to grant privileges to his courtiers. Still, at the 1351 Diet, he confirmed the liberties of the Hungarian nobility, stressing that all noblemen were equal. That same Diet introduced an entail system, set a uniform rent for peasants to pay landowners, and affirmed peasants’ right to free movement. During the 1350s, he fought wars against the Lithuanians, Serbia, and the Golden Horde, restoring Hungarian monarchs’ control over frontier territories lost in earlier decades. In 1358, he forced Venice to give up its Dalmatian towns. He also tried repeatedly to extend his authority over the rulers of Bosnia, Moldavia, Wallachia, and parts of Bulgaria and Serbia. These rulers sometimes submitted under pressure or in hopes of support against internal enemies, but Louis’s control over these areas remained mostly nominal. His efforts to convert pagan or Orthodox subjects to Catholicism made him disliked in the Balkan states. He founded a university in Pécs in 1367, but it closed within twenty years because he failed to provide enough funding.

Louis inherited Poland after Casimir III’s death in 1370. Having no sons, he wanted his subjects to accept his daughters’ right to succeed him in both Hungary and Poland. To secure this, he issued the Privilege of Koszyce in 1374, which spelled out the liberties of Polish nobles. Even so, his rule remained unpopular in Poland. In Hungary, he allowed royal free cities to send jurors to the high court handling their cases and established a new high court. Suffering from a skin disease, Louis grew even more religious in his final years. During the Western Schism, he recognized Urban VI as the legitimate pope. After Urban deposed Joanna and placed Louis’s relative Charles of Durazzo on the Neapolitan throne, Louis helped Charles take the kingdom. In Hungarian history, Louis has long been seen as the most powerful monarch, ruling an empire “whose shores were washed by three seas.”

**Childhood and youth (1326–1342)**

Louis was born on 5 March 1326, the third son of Charles I and Elizabeth of Poland. He was named after his father’s uncle, Louis of Toulouse, who had been canonized in 1317. His older brother Charles died before Louis’s birth, and after another brother, Ladislaus, died in 1329, Louis became the heir. He received a liberal education for his time, learning French, German, and Latin, and took a special interest in history and astrology. A cleric from Wrocław named Nicholas Neszmélyi taught him Christian basics, but his mother’s influence drove his religious fervor. Louis later recalled that a knight named Peter Poháros often carried him on his shoulders as a child. His tutors Nicholas Drugeth and Nicholas Tapolcsányi saved both Louis and his younger brother Andrew when Felician Záh tried to assassinate the royal family at Visegrád on 17 April 1330. At age nine, Louis stamped a treaty of alliance between his father and John of Bohemia. A year later, he joined his father in invading Austria. On 1 March 1338, John’s son Charles, Margrave of Moravia, signed a new treaty with Charles I and Louis in Visegrád, acknowledging that Charles I’s sons could succeed their uncle Casimir III if Casimir died without male heirs. Louis also promised to marry Charles’s three-year-old daughter, Margaret. Casimir III’s first wife, Aldona of Lithuania, died on 26 May 1339. Two leading Polish nobles—Zbigniew, chancellor of Kraków—then...