Francis II Rákóczi
Francis II Rákóczi was the richest landowner in Hungary and the grandson and stepson of rebels, who led the war of independence against the Habsburgs from 1703 to 1711, was elected ruling prince of the confederated estates in 1705 and prince of Transylvania, had the diet of Ónod depose the house of Habsburg in 1707, was beaten in the field and abandoned by Louis XIV, refused the amnesty his own general negotiated at Szatmár in 1711, and spent the last twenty-four years of his life in exile in Poland, France and Turkey, where he died at Tekirdağ on the Sea of Marmara. The Hungarians brought his bones home in 1906 with a state funeral, and his march is played at every national occasion. He was born in 1676, the son of a prince of Transylvania who died months later and of Ilona Zrínyi, who held the castle of Munkács against the imperial army for three years and married the rebel Thököly. The emperor took the boy from his mother in 1688 and had him educated by Jesuits in Bohemia as a loyal Habsburg subject, which he seemed for a decade. He was arrested in 1701 for corresponding with Louis XIV, escaped from Wiener Neustadt to Poland with his gaoler's help, and in 1703, as the War of the Spanish Succession drew the imperial army west, was called in by the peasant bands of the north-east who had risen against the taxes. His proclamation of Brezan promised freedom to the serfs who fought, and within a year the kuruc army held most of Hungary. He was elected leader of the confederated estates at Szécsény in 1705 with the title of prince, governed through a senate, minted copper money that nobody would take, and negotiated with Vienna, France, Russia and Sweden for the recognition none of them gave. The army, brave and unpaid, lost the pitched battles, at Trencsén in 1708 worst of all, and the plague did the rest. His general Károlyi made peace at Szatmár in April 1711 while Rákóczi was in Poland seeking the tsar's help, an amnesty and the restoration of estates for all who swore, and Rákóczi would not swear. He lived at Versailles as the Count of Sáros and in a Camaldolese monastery, wrote his Confessions in Latin in the manner of Augustine, and in 1717 went to Turkey at the sultan's invitation for a war that ended before he could be used. He stayed, in the house at Rodosto that is now a museum, until he died in 1735.
- Lived: 1676 CE – 1735 CE
- Nationality: Hungarian
- Roles: prince, revolutionary, general
