page_title: Kingdom of Hungary (1000–1301)
section_title: Last Árpáds (1242–1301)
hierarchical_section_title: Kingdom of Hungary (1000–1301) / Development of the Estates of the realm / Last Árpáds (1242–1301)
caption_attribution_description: Hungary in the late 1200s (including Kingdom of Croatia in personal union with Hungary)
context_page_description: The Kingdom of Hungary came into existence in Central Europe when Stephen I, Grand Prince of the Hungarians, was crowned king in 1000 or 1001. He reinforced central authority and forced his subjects to accept Christianity. Although all written sources emphasize only the role played by German and Italian knights and clerics in the process, a significant part of the Hungarian vocabulary for agriculture, religion and state was taken from Slavic languages. Civil wars and pagan uprisings, along with attempts by the Holy Roman Emperors to expand their authority over Hungary, jeopardized the new monarchy. The monarchy stabilized during the reigns of Ladislaus I and Coloman. These rulers occupied Croatia and Dalmatia with the support of a part of the local population. Both realms retained their autonomous position. The successors of Ladislaus and Coloman—especially Béla II, Béla III, Andrew II, and Béla IV —continued this policy of expansion towards the Balkan Peninsula and the lands east of the Carpathian Mountains, transforming their kingdom into one of the major powers of medieval Europe.
context_section_description: After the Mongol withdrawal, Béla IV abandoned his policy of recovering former crown lands. Instead, he granted large estates to his supporters, and urged them to construct stone-and-mortar castles. He initiated a new wave of colonization that resulted in the arrival of a number of Germans, Moravians, Poles, and Romanians. The king re-invited the Cumans and settled them in the plains along the Danube and the Tisza. A group of Alans, the ancestors of the Jassic people, seems to have settled in the kingdom around the same time.
  New villages appeared, consisting of timber houses built side by side in equal parcels of land. For instance, the scarcely inhabited forests of the Western Carpathians (in present-day Slovakia) developed a network of settlements under Béla IV. Huts disappeared, and new rural houses consisting of a living room, a kitchen and a pantry were built. The most advanced agricultural techniques, including asymmetric heavy ploughs, also spread throughout the kingdom.
  Internal migration was likewise instrumental in the development of the new domains emerging in former royal lands. The new landholders granted personal freedom and more favorable financial conditions to those who arrived in their estates, which also enabled the peasants who decided not to move to improve their position. Béla IV granted privileges to more than a dozen towns, including Nagyszombat (Trnava, Slovakia) and Pest.
  Although threatening letters sent to Béla IV by the khans of the Golden Horde proved that the danger of a new Mongol invasion still existed, he adopted an expansionist foreign policy. Frederick II of Austria died fighting against Hungarian troops in 1246, and Béla IV's son-in-law, Rostislav Mikhailovich, annexed large territories along the kingdom's southern frontiers. Conflicts between the elderly monarch and his heir, Stephen, caused a civil war in the 1260s.
  Béla IV and his son jointly confirmed the liberties of the royal servants and started referring to them as noblemen in 1267. By that time, "true noblemen" were legally differentiated from other landholders. They held their estates free from any obligation, but everybody else (even the ecclesiastic nobles, Romanian knezes and other "conditional nobles") owed services to their lords in exchange for the lands they held. In a growing number of counties, local nobility acquired the right to elect four "judges of the nobles" to represent them in official procedures (or two, in Transylvania and Slavonia). The idea of equating the Hungarian "nation" with the community of noblemen also emerged in this period. It was first expressed in Simon of Kéza's Gesta Hungarorum, a chronicle written in the 1280s.
  The wealthiest landholders forced the lesser nobles to join their retinue, which increased their power. One of the barons, Joachim of the Gutkeled clan, even captured Stephen V's heir, the infant Ladislaus, in 1272. Stephen V died some months later, causing a new civil war between the Csák, Kőszegi, and other leading families who attempted to control the central government in the name of the young Ladislaus IV. He was declared to be of age in 1277 at an assembly of the spiritual and temporal lords and of the noblemen's and Cumans' representatives, but he could not strengthen royal authority. Ladislaus IV, whose mother, Elisabeth, was a Cuman chieftain's daughter, preferred his Cuman kin, which made him unpopular. He was even accused of initiating a second Mongol invasion in 1285, although the invaders were routed by the royal troops.
  When Ladislaus IV was murdered in 1290, the Holy See declared the kingdom a vacant fief. Although Rome granted the kingdom to his sister's son, Charles Martel, crown prince of the Kingdom of Naples, the majority of the Hungarian lords chose Andrew, the grandson of Andrew II and son of a prince of dubious legitimacy. Andrew became the first monarch to take an oath respecting the liberties of the Church and the nobility before his coronation. He regularly convoked the prelates, the lords and the noblemen's representatives to assemblies known as Diets, wh
caption: Local autonomies in the Kingdom of Hungary (late 1200s)
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