Louis I of Hungary
Louis the Great was king of Hungary for forty years and of Poland for twelve, fought Naples twice to avenge a brother, Venice three times for the Dalmatian coast, and Lithuania, Serbia and Bulgaria for the crown's overlordship, and reigned over the largest state in Europe, which he left to two daughters and which came apart on his death. He was born in 1326, the son of Charles Robert of Anjou, who had spent thirty years making the Hungarian crown obey him, and succeeded at sixteen in 1342 to a treasury full of Transylvanian gold and a nobility that had learned to serve. His brother Andrew had been married to Joanna of Naples and was strangled in her palace in 1345; Louis marched the length of Italy in 1347, had the prince he blamed beheaded on the spot where his brother had died, held Naples, could not keep it through the plague, and came back in 1350 and gave it up for a pardon he did not need. The Dalmatian war was better business. By the peace of Zadar in 1358 Venice surrendered the whole coast from the Kvarner to Durazzo and the doge gave up the title of Duke of Dalmatia. He held Bosnia, Serbia, Wallachia and Moldavia as vassals with varying success, sent his armies against the Lithuanians as crusades, and in 1370, when his uncle Casimir the Great died without a son, was crowned king of Poland at Kraków under an agreement made twenty years before. He governed it through his mother and, in the Privilege of Koszyce of 1374, bought the Polish nobles' acceptance of a daughter as heir with an exemption from nearly all taxes that they kept for four centuries. At home he issued the decree of 1351 that made noble estates inalienable and every noble equal in law, founded the university of Pécs, and built Diósgyőr. He had no son. When he died in September 1382 the eleven-year-old Mary took Hungary and the ten-year-old Jadwiga was sent to Poland, where her marriage to Jagiełło made the union with Lithuania, and Mary's husband Sigismund took Hungary into the Luxembourg inheritance; the empire of the Angevins was gone in five years.
- Lived: 1326 CE – 1382 CE
- Nationality: Hungarian
- Roles: king, monarch
