page_title: Upper nobility (Kingdom of Hungary)
section_title: The rule of the barons' leagues
hierarchical_section_title: Upper nobility (Kingdom of Hungary) / The rule of the barons' leagues
context_page_description: The upper nobility was the highest stratum of the temporal society in the Kingdom of Hungary until 1946 when the Parliament passed an act that prohibited the use of noble titles, following the declaration of the Republic of Hungary.
context_section_description: Following the death of King Louis I, his daughter Queen Mary I (1382–1385, 1386–1395) acceded to the throne, but the majority of the nobles opposed her rule. In 1385, the young queen had to abdicate in favor of her distant cousin, King Charles II (1385–1386), but her partisans murdered the new king soon and thus she could ascend the throne again. However, the followers of her murdered opponent's son, King Ladislaus of Naples rose up in open rebellion and captured her; thus the realm stayed without a monarch.
  
  At that moment, the prelates and the "barons of the realm" set up a council; they have a seal prepared with the inscription "Seal of the People of the Kingdom of Hungary" (Latin: Sigillum regnicolarum regni Hungariæ) and issued decrees sealed by it in the name of the "prelates, barons, notabilities and all nobles of the realm". The members of the council entered into a contract with Queen Mary's fiancé and elected him king; in the contract, King Sigismund (1387–1437) accepted that his
  counsillors shall be the prelates, the barons, their offsprings and heirs, of those who used to be the counsillors of the kings of Hungary
  The contract also recorded that the king and his counsillors would form a league and according to their contract, the king could not dismiss his counsillors without the consent of the other members of the Royal Council. The contract suggests that the members of the Royal Council endeavored to strengthen the hereditary character of their position. The first league was led by the Palatine Stephen II Lackfi and the Archbishop John Kanizsai, but the latter could drive the former out of the power in 1397. However, King Sigismund favorized his counsillors of foreign origin (e.g., his favourite was the Polish Stibor of Stiboricz) which resulted in his imprisonment, in 1401, by the discontent members of the Royal Council led by the Archbishop John Kanizsai, but he managed to conclude a new agreement with some members of the Royal Council who set him free.
  The public law of the kingdom also started to differentiate the descendants of the "barons of the realm", even if they did not held any higher offices, from other nobles: the Act of 1397 referred to them as the "barons' sons" (Hungarian: bárófi, Latin: filii baronum) while later documents called them "magnates" (Hungarian: mágnás, Latin: magnates). From the 1430s, the "magnates" received the honorific magnificus, an expression that had earlier been used only when addressing the "barons of the realm".
  During his reign, King Sigismund granted several royal castles and the royal domains attached to them to the members of the barons' leagues; by 1407, the number of royal castles decreased from 111 to 66. The king, however, wanted to strengthen his position and for this purpose, in 1408, he founded the Order of the Dragon, a chivalric order whose 22 members (e.g., the Palatine Nicholas II Garai, count Hermann II of Celje, Stibor of Stiboricz and the Despot Stefan Lazarević) swore fidelity to the king, his queen and their future children.
  Some signs of the increasing self-consciousness of the "magnates" appeared in the 1420s. Some of them commenced to use names that referred to the high office their ancestors had held; e.g., the members of the Losonci family started to call themselves Bánfi meaning the "son of a Ban" in reference to their forefather who had been the Ban of Dalmatia and Croatia. Other magnates clearly referred to their descent from former "barons of the realm" in their deeds or used noble titles (such as "count" or "duke") abroad following the example of the western nobility although the public law of the kingdom did not accept their claim to distinctive titles.
  When King Sigismund's son-in-law, Albert I (1437–1439) was proclaimed king, he had to take a solemn oath that he would exercise his prerogative powers only with the consent of the Royal Council. Following King Albert's death, a civil war broke out between the followers of his posthumous son, King Ladislaus V (1440–1457) and the partisans of his opponent, King Vladislaus I (1440–1444). Bet
caption: Reconstruction of the insignia of the Order of the Dragon