ANDREW II. (1175-1235), king of
Hungary, son of [Bela III]
?., king
of Hungary, succeeded his nephew, the infant [Ladislaus III]
?., in
1205. No other Magyar
? king, perhaps, was so mischievous to his
country. Valiant, enterprising, pious as he was, all these
fine qualities were ruined by a reckless good nature which
never thought of the morrow. He declares in one of his decrees
that the generosity of a king should be limitless, and he
acted up to this principle throughout his reign. He gave away
everything, money, villages, domains, whole counties, to the
utter impoverishment of the treasury, thereby rendering the
crown, for the first time in Hungarian history, dependent
upon the great feudatories
?, who, in Hungary as elsewhere,
took all they could get and gave as little as possible in
return. In all matters of government, Andrew was equally
reckless and haphazard. He is directly responsible for the
beginnings of the feudal anarchy which well-nigh led to the
extinction of the monarchy at the end of the 13th century.
The great feudatories did not even respect the lives of the
royal family, for Andrew was recalled from a futile attempt
to reconquer
Galicia (which really lay beyond the Hungarian
sphere of influence), through the murder of his first wife
Gertrude of Meran (September 24, 1213), by rebellious nobles
jealous of the influence of her relatives. In 1215 he married
Iolanthe of France, but in 1217 was compelled by the pope to
lead a crusade to the [Holy Land]
?, which he undertook in hopes
of being elected Latin emperor of
Constantinople. The crusade
excited no enthusiasm in Hungary, but Andrew contrived to
collect 15,000 men together, whom he led to Venice
?; whence, not
without much haggling and the surrender of all the Hungarian
claims upon Zara, about two-thirds of them were conveyed to
Acre. But the whole expedition was a forlorn hope. The
Christian kingdom of
Palestine was by this time reduced to
a strip of coast about 440 sq. m. in extent, and after a
drawn battle with the
Turks on the
Jordan (November 10), and
fruitless assaults on the fortresses of the
Lebanon and on
[Mount Tabor]
?, Andrew started home (January 18, 1218) through Antioch
?,
Iconium
?,
Constantinople and
Bulgaria. On his return he found
the feudal barons in the ascendant, and they extorted from
him the [Golden Bull]
?. Andrew's last
exploit was to defeat an invasion of [Frederick of Austria]
? in
1234. The same year he married his third wife, Beatrice of
Este. Besides his three sons, Bela, Coloman and Andrew,
Andrew had a daughter Iolanthe, who married the king of
Aragon. He was also the father of St Elizabeth of Hungary.
No special monograph for the whole reign exists, but there
is a good description of Andrew's crusade in Reinhold
Roehricht, Geschichte des Konigreiches Jerusalem
(Innsbruck, 1898) . The best account of Andrew's
government is in Laszlo Szalav's History of Hungary
(Hung.), vol. i. (Leipzig and Pest, 1851-1862). (R. N. B.)
Initial text from 1911 encyclopedia -- Please update as needed