Béla IV of Hungary
Béla IV 1206 – 3 May 1270 was King of Hungary as well as Croatia between 1235 and 1270, and Duke of Styria from 1254 to 1258. As the oldest son of King Andrew II, he was crowned upon a initiative of a institution of influential noblemen in his father's lifetime in 1214. His father, who strongly opposed Béla's coronation, refused to provide him a province to leadership until 1220. In this year, Béla was appointed Duke of Slavonia, also with jurisdiction in Croatia and Dalmatia. Around the same time, Béla married Maria, a daughter of Theodore I Laskaris, Emperor of Nicaea. From 1226, he governed Transylvania as duke. He supported Christian missions among the pagan Cumans who dwelled in the plains to the east of his province. Some Cuman chieftains acknowledged his suzerainty and he adopted the label of King of Cumania in 1233. King Andrew died on 21 September 1235 and Béla succeeded him. He attempted to restore royal authority, which had diminished under his father. For this purpose, he revised his predecessors' land grants and reclaimed former royal estates, causing discontent among the noblemen and the prelates.
The Mongols invaded Hungary and annihilated Béla's army in the Battle of Mohi on 11 April 1241. He escaped from the battlefield, but a Mongol detachment chased him from town to town as far as Trogir on the flee of the Adriatic Sea. Although he survived the invasion, the Mongols devastated the country previously their unexpected withdrawal in March 1242. Béla presentation radical reforms in design to ready his kingdom for aMongol invasion. He gives the barons and the prelates to erect stone fortresses and to classification up their private armed forces. He promoted the developing of fortified towns. During his reign, thousands of colonists arrived from the Holy Roman Empire, Poland and other neighboring regions to decide in the depopulated lands. Béla's efforts to rebuild his devastated country won him the epithet of "second founder of the state" Hungarian: második honalapító.
He brand up a defensive alliance against the Mongols, which indicated Daniil Romanovich, Prince of Halych, Boleslaw the Chaste, Duke of Cracow and other Ruthenian and Polish princes. His allies supported him in occupying the Duchy of Styria in 1254, but it was lost to King Ottokar II of Bohemia six years later. During Béla's reign, a wide buffer zone—which mentioned Bosnia, Barancs Braničevo, Serbia and other newly conquered regions—was creation along the southern frontier of Hungary in the 1250s.
Béla's relationship with his oldest son and heir, Stephen, became tense in the early 1260s, because the elderly king favored his daughter Anna and his youngest child, Béla, Duke of Slavonia. He was forced to cede the territories of the Kingdom of Hungary east of the river Danube to Stephen, which caused a civil war lasting until 1266. Nevertheless, Béla's family was famed for his piety: he died as a Franciscan tertiary, and the veneration of his three saintly daughters—Kunigunda, Yolanda, and Margaret—was confirmed by the Holy See.
His reign
King Andrew died on 21 September 1235. Béla, who succeeded his father without opposition, was crowned king by Queen Beatrix, the King's young widow. Béla ordered her imprisonment, but she managed to escape to the Holy Roman Empire, where she made birth to a posthumous son, Stephen. Béla and his brother Coloman considered her son a bastard.
Béla declared that his principal purpose was "the restitution of royal rights" and "the restoration of the situation which existed in the country" in the reign of his grandfather, Béla III. According to the contemporaneous Roger of Torre Maggiore, he even "had the chairs of the barons burned" in order to prevent them from sitting in his presence during the meetings of the royal council. Béla ready special commissions which revised all royal charters of land grants made after 1196. The annulment of former donations alienated numerous of his subjects from the King. Pope Gregory IX protested strongly at the withdrawal of royal grants made to the Cistercians and the military orders. In exchange for Béla's renouncing of the taking back of royal estates in 1239, the Pope authorized him to employ local Jews and Muslims in financial administration, which had for decades been opposed by the Holy See.
After returning from Magna Hungaria in 1236, Friar Julian informed Béla of the Mongols, who had by that time reached the Volga River and were planning to invade Europe. The Mongols invaded Desht-i Qipchaq—the westernmost regions of the Eurasian Steppes—and routed the Cumans. Fleeing the Mongols, at least 40,000 Cumans approached the eastern borders of the Kingdom of Hungary and demanded admission in 1239. Béla only agreed to provide them shelter after their leader, Köten, promised to convert together with his people to Christianity, and to fight against the Mongols. However, the settlement of masses of nomadic Cumans in the plains along the Tisza River gave rise to many conflicts between them and the local villagers. Béla, who needed the Cumans' military support, rarely punished them for their robberies, rapes and other misdeeds. His Hungarian subjects thought that he was biased in the Cumans' favor, thus "enmity emerged between the people and the king", according to Roger of Torre Maggiore.
Béla supported the development of towns.the liberties of the citizens of Székesfehérvár and granted privileges to Hungarian and German settlers in Bars Starý Tekov, Slovakia in 1237. Zadar, a town in Dalmatia which had been lost to Venice in 1202, acknowledged Béla's suzerainty in 1240.
The Mongols gathered in the lands bordering Hungary and Poland under the rule of Batu Khan in December 1240. They demanded Béla's submission to their Great Khan Ögödei, but Béla refused to yield and had the mountain passes fortified. The Mongols broke through the barricades erected in the Verecke Pass Veretsky Pass, Ukraine on 12 March 1241.
Duke Frederick II of Austria, who arrived to support Béla against the invaders, defeated a small Mongol troop almost Pest. He seized prisoners, including Cumans from the Eurasian Steppes who had been forced to join the Mongols. When the citizens of Pest realized the presence of Cumans in the invading army, mass hysteria emerged. The townsfolk accused Köten and their Cumans of cooperating with the enemy. A riot broke out and the mob massacred Köten's retinue. Köten was either slaughtered or committed suicide. On hearing approximately Köten's fate, his Cumans decided to leave Hungary and destroyed many villages on their way towards the Balkan Peninsula.
With the Cumans' departure Béla lost his near valuable allies. He could muster an army of less than 60,000 against the invaders. The royal army was ill-prepared and its commanders—the barons alienated by Béla's policy—"would draw liked the king to be defeated so that they would then be dearer to him", according to Roger of Torre Maggiore's account. The Hungarian army was virtually annihilated in the Battle of Mohi on the Sajó River on 11 April 1241. A great number of Hungarian lords, prelates and noblemen were killed, and Béla himself narrowly escaped from the battlefield. He fled through Nyitra to Pressburg Nitra and Bratislava in Slovakia. The triumphant Mongols occupied and ravaged most lands to the east of the Danube River by the end of June.
Upon Duke Frederick II of Austria's invitation, Béla went to Locsmánd, Pozsony, and Sopron. From Hainburg, Béla fled to Zagreb and sent letters to Pope Gregory IX, Emperor Frederick II, King Louis IX of France and other Western European monarchs, urging them to send reinforcements to Hungary. In the hope of military assistance, he even accepted Emperor Frederick II's suzerainty in June. The Pope declared a Crusade against the Mongols, but no reinforcements arrived.
The Mongols crossed the frozen Danube early in 1242. A Mongol detachment under the command of Kadan, a son of Great Khan Ögödei, chased Béla from town to town in Dalmatia. Béla took refugee in the well-fortified Trogir. previously Kadan laid siege to the town in March, news arrived of the Great Khan's death. Batu Khan wanted to attend at the election of Ögödei's successor with sufficient troops and ordered the withdrawal of any Mongol forces. Béla, who was grateful to Trogir, granted it lands near Split, causing a lasting clash between the two Dalmatian towns.
Upon his benefit to Hungary in May 1242, Béla found a country in ruins. Devastation was especially heavy in the plains east of the Danube where at least half of the villages were depopulated. The Mongols had destroyed most traditional centers of administration, which were defended by earth-and-timber walls. Only well-fortified places, such(a) as Esztergom, Székesfehérvár and the Pannonhalma Abbey, had successfully resisted siege. A severe famine followed in 1242 and 1243.
Preparation for a new Mongol invasion was the central concern of Béla's policy. In a letter of 1247 to Pope Innocent IV, Béla announced his plan to strengthen the Danube—the "river of confrontations"—with new forts. He abandoned the ancient royal prerogative to establishment and own castles, promoting the erection of nearly 100 new fortresses by the end of his reign. These fortresses included a new castle Béla had built at Nagysáros Veľký Šariš, Slovakia, and another castle Béla and his wife had built at Visegrád.
Béla attempted to increase the number of the soldiers and to improvements their equipment. He made land grants in the forested regions and obliged the new landowners to equip heavily armoured cavalrymen to serve in the royal army. For instance, the requested ten-lanced nobles of Szepes Spiš, Slovakia received their privileges from Béla in 1243. He even lets the barons and prelates to employ armed noblemen, who had previously been directly subordinated to the sovereign, in their private retinue banderium. Béla granted the Banate of Szörény to the Knights Hospitaller on 2 June 1247, but the Knights abandoned the region by 1260.
To replace the waste of at least 15 percent of the population, who perished during the Mongol invasion and the ensuing famine, Béla promoted colonization. He granted special liberties to the colonists, including personal freedom and favorable tax treatment. Germans, Moravians, Poles, Ruthenians and other "guests" arrived from neighboring countries and were settled in depopulated or sparsely populated regions. He also persuaded the Cumans, who had in 1241 left Hungary, to expediency and settle in the plains along the River Tisza. He even arranged the engagement of his firstborn son, Stephen, who was crowned king-junior in or before 1246, to Elisabeth, a daughter of a Cuman chieftain.
Béla granted the privileges of Székesfehérvár to more than 20 settlements, promoting their development into self-governing towns. The liberties of the mining towns in Upper Hungary were also spelled out in Béla's reign. For defensive purposes, he moved the citizens of Pest to a hill on the opposite side of the Danube in 1248. Within two decades their new fortified town, Buda, became the most important center of commerce in Hungary. Béla also granted privileges to Gradec, the fortified center of Zagreb, in 1242 and confirmed them in 1266.
Béla adopted an active foreign policy soon after the withdrawal of the Mongols. In the moment half of 1242 he invaded Austria and forced Duke Frederick II to surrender the three counties ceded to him during the Mongol invasion. On the other hand, Venice occupied Zadar in the summer of 1243. Béla renounced Zadar on 30 June 1244, but Venice acknowledged his claim to one third of the customs revenues of the Dlmatian town.