Andrew II of Hungary
Andrew II gave away the royal estates of Hungary to whoever asked, led a crusade that achieved nothing, and in 1222 was made by his own barons to seal the Golden Bull, which promised the nobility that they could not be arrested without trial or taxed without consent and that they could resist a king who broke it, seven years after Magna Carta and cited beside it for the next seven hundred. He was born in 1177, the second son of Béla III, rebelled against his elder brother Emeric for most of a decade, and became king in 1205 when Emeric's infant son died. His method of government was the grant. Counties, castles and their revenues were given in perpetuity to his supporters, which he called the new institutions and which emptied the crown of what the Arpads had governed with. His wife Gertrude of Merania brought her German relatives to fill the offices, and in 1213 while he was campaigning in Galicia the magnates murdered her in the forest of Pilis. He went on the Fifth Crusade in 1217, having been promised it since childhood, sailed from Split with the largest army that ever took the cross from the kingdom, marched about Galilee for three months, and went home in January 1218 with relics, leaving the siege of Damietta to others. The debts and the disorder at home produced the Golden Bull in the spring of 1222. Its thirty-one articles confirmed the liberties of the royal servants, the lesser nobility, against the magnates and the crown, banned the grant of whole counties, forbade Jews and Muslims from the offices of the treasury, and ended with the right of resistance, which the Habsburgs were still trying to get struck out in 1687. He reissued it in 1231 with the church's demands added, and the archbishop excommunicated the kingdom in 1232 anyway. His daughter Elizabeth, married to the landgrave of Thuringia, gave away her dowry to the poor and was canonised four years after her death at twenty-four. He died in September 1235, having married a third time at fifty-seven, and his son Béla IV spent his reign taking back what the father had given, until the Mongols made the question moot.
- Lived: 1177 CE – 1235 CE
- Nationality: Hungarian
- Roles: king, monarch
