Monday, February 2, 2015

Helene Kottanerin Seizes Crown For Her Lady, Queen Elizabeth: 1440


In order to underscore the theme of 'the fragility of dynasty' in fifteenth century Europe, Thomas A Brady sketches the dramatic events at the center of the passing of the Imperial crown in German lands out of the Luxemburg House, in an attempt to maintain it. He also does this by introducing the oldest known memoir from a German-speaking woman, a noble lady-in-waiting, Helene Kottanerin.

King Sigismund, the last of the Luxemburg kings in German lands died in 1437 and his crowns went to the neighboring prince Archduke Albert II who was a Habsburg. Albert married Sigismund's last surviving heir, Elizabeth (1409-42) and she became pregnant and was named Queen. When Albert died suddenly 27October, 1439 she 'fled south from his funeral'. It was her lady-in-waiting, the Viennese Helene Kottanerin, who picks up the action here and gives us these details. Her job was to secure the royal and coronation articles from a Plintenburg Castle that would be necessary to ensure a future crowning of this possible heir which still lay in Queen Elizabeth's womb. It was 'Castle Visegrad/ Plintenburg',

"... a fortress north of Buda-Ofen. Aided by a brave Croatian nobleman, [p.87] Helene snuck into the castle on the night of 20-21 February 1440, replaced the crowns and other items with copies, and fled upstream to to Komarom/Komorn, where they crossed the frozen Danube. One week later, Elizabeth's son was born and baptized Ladislaus... [and] called "Posthumous." In May the party travelled to the coronation city,
Szekesfehervar/Stuhlweissenburg in southern Hungary, in whose cathedral on 15 May, the tiny 11-week old heir was lifted from his cradle and gently crowned with the crown of St Stephen. All this came to pass because Helene, who "has given service to Her Grace [Queen Elizabeth], also the noble king [Albert], and Their Graces' children of this noble, princely line," and her brave Croatian companion had lifted "Her Grace's crown, her collar, and all of her other regalia" from under their guardian's very eyes." [p.88]

Crowned as a helpless, fugitive infant swathed in his grandfather's cut-down coronation robe, Ladislaus owed his chances solely to his mother and to the redoubtable Helene ... [but] His chances were never good, because a strong party of Hungarian nobles rejected the coronation and supported the Polish king's claim. The young man did live to become King of Hungary and Bohemia, but only briefly, before he died in 1457 at age eighteen. Following his death the Bohemian and Hungarian lords chose to live under native dynasties much as they had done before the coming of the Luxemburgs." [p.88]

But the failure for the Luxemburg project was that they "...failed to gain a secure territorial base, just as they failed to perpetuate their line." Elizabeth died before Christmas 1442 and with her so did the inherited patrimonies of the kings of Hungary, Bohemia, and part of Poland.
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quotes and pagination from: Thomas A Brady Jr: German Histories in The Age of Reformations, 1400-1650;  University of California, Berkeley for the Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2009

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