| Notes |
- Stephen V, King of Hungary, was the eldest son of Béla IV, whom he succeeded in 1270. As crown prince he had exhibited considerable ability, but also a disquieting restlessness and violence. In 1262 he compelled his father, whom he had assisted in the Bohemian War, to surrender twenty-nine counties to him, so that Hungary was virtually divided into two kingdoms. Not content with this he subsequently seized the southern banate of Macso, which led to a fresh war between father and son in which the latter triumphed. In 1268 he undertook an expedition against the Bulgarians, conquering the land as far as Tirnova and styling himself henceforth king of Bulgaria. Stephen was a keen and circumspect politician, and for his future security contracted, during his father's lifetime, a double matrimonial alliance with the Neapolitan princes of the House of Anjou, the chief partisans of the pope. He certainly needed exterior support; for on his accession to the Hungarian throne, as he himself declared, everyone was his enemy. This hostility was due to the almost universal opinion of western Europe that Stephen was a semi-pagan. His father had married him while still a youth (c. 1255) to Elizabeth, daughter of the Rumanian chieftain Köteny, with a view to binding the Rumanians (who could put in the field 16,000 men) more closely to the dynasty in the then by no means improbable contingency of a second Tatar invasion. The lady was duly baptized and remained a Christian; but the adversaries of Stephen, especially Ottakar II of Bohemia, affected to believe that Stephen was too great a friend of the Rumanians to be a true Catholic. Ottakar endeavored, with the aid of the Magyar malcontents, to conquer the western provinces of Hungary, but after some successes was utterly routed by Stephen in 1271 near Mosony and by the peace of Pressburg, the same year, relinquished all his conquests. Stephen died suddenly on the 6th of August 1272, just as he was raising an army to recover his kidnapped infant son Ladislas from the hands of his rebellious vassals.
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1239 - 1272 (32 years)