King of Hungary (1342–1382) and Poland (1370–1382), a powerful Angevin monarch under whom Hungary reached its greatest medieval extent and influence.
Louis I, called "the Great", was king of Hungary from 1342 and king of Poland from 1370, one of the most powerful European monarchs of the fourteenth century. The son of the Angevin king Charles I, he inherited a strong and wealthy Hungary and raised it to the height of its medieval power and prestige.
He waged wars across a vast arc — in Italy to avenge his murdered brother, against Venice for Dalmatia, and in the Balkans, where his overlordship reached deep into Serbia, Bosnia, and Bulgaria. In 1370 he inherited the Polish crown as well, briefly uniting the two realms. He died in 1382 without a son, leaving Hungary to his daughter Mary and Poland to his daughter Jadwiga.
Louis was born in 1326, the son of Charles I of Hungary, who had restored the Hungarian monarchy after the extinction of the Árpád line and made it strong and rich through his reform of the mines and coinage. Louis inherited this flourishing kingdom in 1342, a well-educated and chivalrous prince raised to the ideals of knighthood and crusade.
Louis the Great embodied the ideal of the chivalric warrior-king: brave, pious, cultivated, and restlessly ambitious for glory and dominion. Contemporaries admired his knightly virtues, his devotion to the Church and to justice, and the splendour of his court, which became a centre of chivalry and learning. He founded the University of Pécs and patronised the arts and the crusading orders.
His energy carried him into war on every frontier, from the plains of Naples to the Dalmatian coast and the Balkan mountains, in pursuit of dynastic claims and Christian conquest. If his campaigns won more glory than lasting territorial gain, and his vast realm depended heavily on his own person, he nonetheless raised Hungary to a peak of prestige it would not see again. He is remembered as one of the greatest of Hungarian kings and the very model of a fourteenth-century chivalric monarch.
Louis's reign was a whirl of campaigns. He twice invaded Italy to avenge the murder of his brother Andrew, husband of Queen Joanna I of Naples; he warred repeatedly with Venice, wresting from it control of the Dalmatian coast; and he pushed Hungarian overlordship deep into the Balkans, over Serbia, Bosnia, Wallachia, and Bulgaria, and even campaigned against the Lithuanians and the Golden Horde.
In 1370, on the death of his uncle Casimir the Great of Poland, Louis inherited the Polish crown, uniting Hungary and Poland in his person — though he governed Poland at a distance and largely through regents. To secure the Polish succession for his daughters, he granted the Polish nobility the important privilege of Košice in 1374.
Louis I died on 10 September 1382, leaving no son. His elder surviving daughter Mary succeeded him in Hungary, and his younger daughter Jadwiga was made "king" of Poland — whose marriage to Jogaila of Lithuania would found the Jagiellonian dynasty and the Polish-Lithuanian union.
Louis the Great is remembered as the monarch under whom medieval Hungary reached its zenith of power, wealth, and prestige, its influence stretching across the Balkans and to the Adriatic and the Baltic. His personal union with Poland and his daughters' inheritances shaped the future of Central Europe: through Jadwiga's marriage to Jogaila, his Polish crown passed to the Jagiellonians, one of the great dynasties of the age.