Álmos I, King of Hungary

Álmos I (1254-1309) ruled as King of Hungary for four decades, from 1266 until his death. He is widely thought of as perhaps the greatest king of medieval Hungary, restoring the kingdom to greatness following the savage war of the so called Princes and Queens that had torn the kingdom apart during the reigns of his father and brother.

At the time of Álmos' birth, the conflict was in full swing, with control over the government of Álmos' weak father Stephen II being contested viciously by partisans of the prince's grandmother Queen Wyszesława and his great uncle, Prince Béla "the Bloody". Álmos' sixth birthday was marked by the kidnapping of his older brother, the Crown Prince Ladislaus by one Count Géza of Eger, who demanded the withdrawal of the princes' mother Queen Ibolya and grandmother Wyszesława. The crisis was ended by the death in battle a month later of Prince Béla, and the seizure of power by the Queens, but unhappiness continued, with remorseless Jurchen attacks and a major peasants' revolt in 1262. In 1265, King Stephen II himself was kidnapped, and committed suicide soon afterwards, bringing Álmos' eldest brother to the throne as Ladislaus II, but Ladislaus' reign lasted barely a year. In April 1266, a revolt of the Princes faction, with support from Croatia, Poland, and the Jurchen Khan of Kiev, saw Esztergom savagely sacked, and most of the royal family killed, including Álmos' mother Ibolya and his brothers King Ladislaus and the Crown Prince Béla the Younger. At the age of ten, Álmos thus succeeded to the Hungarian throne, bypassing his young niece Erzsébet, daughter of Ladislaus.

Unsurprisingly, given his brutal upbringing, the young king was reputed to be a strange and sombre child, with few interests and fewer social skills. In 1269, the Regency Council of leading Princes, led by Géza of Eger, went so far as to consider deposing the by now teenaged Álmos in favour of the previously passed over Princess Erzsébet. At this stage, Álmos showed the first hint of the political nous that would serve him well in the years to come. Aged fifteen, he wrote to the Princess Regent of Croatia, Jelena, one of the foremost backers of Géza of Eger, proposing his hand in marriage. The Princess, herself coming under political pressure back in Croatia to cede power to her ten year old brother Stephen V, consented, and the marriage was held and consummated with indecent haste. With Croatian backers now behind him, the King felt emboldened enough to topple his Regency council. On the fifth anniversary of his accession, April 22nd 1271, he ordered the arrest of the entirety of the council, and trials followed, presided over by the king and his Croatian in-laws. Of the nine-strong council, four men were found guilty of high treason and executed, with the others merely exiled. Most notable amongst the casualties was Géza of Eger. King Álmos was not yet seventeen years old.

The sack of Esztergom in 1266 had effectively decapitated the Queens faction, and the treason trials of 1271 did the same for the Princes. With the greatest nobles of Hungary now badly scattered, King Álmos opted to build a new powerbase amongst the lesser nobility and prosperous peasants known as the "Royal Servants". These had suffered badly over the past generation, and it became a stated policy of Álmos to restore them to power. In 1274, the king issued a Golden Bull, guaranteeing the rights of this class. Unsurprisingly, this won him a great deal of popularity and did much to buttress royal power, with the Royal Servants now much less willing to follow the greater nobles into revolt. Efforts were also made to woo the survivors of the factions of the previous decade: most notably, Álmos declined to break the betrothal of his younger sister Margit to Janos of Eger, despite the downfall of Janos' father Géza. In 1274, the couple were married, and four children followed.

All of this consolidation in Hungary was eyed warily by the Jurchen Khanate of Kiev. Already in 1268 an attack upon Hungary had taken place, but it was cut short before much damage could be done by the death of the Khan Jalāl. Jalāl was succeeded, after some eighteen months of war, by his son Aaron, a Jew who was more preoccupied with making war on the German Emperor Otto V. It would be 1276 before another serious Jurchen attack took place, and this time King Álmos met the invaders in battle himself, defending a number of castles from attack. Though ultimately casualties were low on both sides and the campaign was inconclusive, Álmos demonstrated conspicuous physical courage, and further boosted his royal prestige. In 1278, following the decisive defeat of a Jurchen army at the hands of the newly founded Teutonic knights, a generalised peace treaty was agreed between Hungary and the Khanate.

Politically, then, Álmos' reign was already a great success, but it was marred by personal tragedy. In 1277, all three of his children, including the Crown Prince Ladislaus, died when plague swept across the kingdom. Queen Jelena delivered a fourth child the following year, but the boy, named Stephen for his grandfather, died in 1282. Meanwhile, the king's sister Princess Margit enjoyed all of the family bliss that he did not, providing her husband Janos of Eger with two sons and two daughters, all of whom were healthy. It is hard not to suspect resentment behind the banishment of Janos from the kingdom in 1287. Queen Jelena fell pregnant again early in 1288, but expectations by this point were not high: she was thirty six years old, and had not delivered a living child in nine years, with five pregnancies all ending in miscarriages or stillbirths. Nonetheless, to the surprise and delight of all, on Christmas Day 1288 the Queen was safely delivered of a healthy boy, Prince Andrew. The labour was long and hard, and Jelena would never again fall pregnant, but Andrew was a robust and healthy child, and he would become everything his father sought in an heir.

The king's reign continued, despite all of this heartbreak in the palace. In 1281, he opted for a policy of studious neutrality when the great Jurchen siege of Constantinople was mounted, but nonetheless marched into battle in 1282 to defeat a large raiding army that had fled following the death of the Great Khan before the walls of the Roman capital. A minor conspiracy in 1284 was dealt with extremely harshly, with the conspirators mutilated and decapitated, before being fed to a dancing bear. In 1289, following disturbances, the King issued a series of laws relating to the Jews of Hungary, giving them freedoms unseen across most of Europe. A flood of Jewish immigrants followed over the next decade, greatly aiding the kingdom's fiscal fortunes. At the beginning of his reign, Álmos had been a bankrupt king thanks to the civil war, but by 1300 the kingdom was one of the most prosperous in Europe.

Tolerance for Jews made Álmos rich, but it did not make him popular, especially in Germany, where memories of the depradations of the Jewish Khan Aaron were still fresh. Between 1290 and 1305, the Parisian Patriarch was Michael II, originally a German monk who had seen his monastery destroyed by Aaron's raiders back in 1277. In 1293, 1299 and 1304, the Patriarch issued a number of condemnations of Álmos' Jewish laws, tacitly encouraging good Christians to rise up against him. The cowed nobles of Hungary signally failed to do so, but in Poland and Germany it was a very different story. Otto V was succeeded in 1279 by his warlike son Wilhelm I, who was determined to continue his father's policy of imposing himself as the shield and defender of Christendom. Initially, Wilhelm's efforts were directed at the German barons themselves, but with the encouragement of Patriarch Michael, he turned his efforts onto Hungary from the later 1290s onwards. In 1303, an army of Teutonic knights, supported by the Poles and led by the Emperor himself invaded the kingdom, in the most serious military threat of Álmos' reign. The king, ably supported by the teenage Crown Prince Andrew, opted to meet the invaders head on, and on August 23rd 1303, the two armies met at Sopron, a stronghold on the western border of the kingdom. The result was a crushing Hungarian victory. Three hundred Teutonic knights were killed on the battlefield, together with a number of German dukes and nobles, most importantly King Ottakar III of Bohemia. All, however, paled in comparison to the most important casualty of the battle: for the Emperor Wilhelm I himself was killed by a Royal Servant footman, Zoltán of Szeged: a man who would rise high in future. Never again would the Teutonic Knights threaten the future of Hungary.

The victory at Sopron was the crowning achievement of Álmos' reign. The king himself, however, was badly wounded in the battle, and never again truly took over the reins of government in the kingdom, which increasingly came to be exercised by the Crown Prince Andrew. Andrew seems to have arranged his own marriage to the Francian heiress Adela of York in 1305: the king was certainly to ill to attend his son's nuptials, and it was Andrew who eventually signed a peace treaty with the Reich in 1307 following the death of Patriarch Michael II. King Álmos did not entirely lose his grip on power, and indeed he banished a number of his son's allies in 1308, but soon afterwards his illness returned, and he died in April 1309. Despite the apparent rift that had developed between king and Crown Prince in Álmos' last years, his son succeeded him peacefully as Andrew IV.

Andrew IV inherited a rich, united, and militarily powerful kingdom: a contrast that could hardly have been starker to the feeble state to which the Kingdom of the Magyars had shrunk in 1266 following a generation of warfare between Princes and Queens. It is this that is King Álmos I's greatest achievement, and his name is deservedly remembered as the greatest king Hungary ever knew.