Elizabeth of the Cumans

Overview

Title social-status

Queen of Hungary, duchess of Macsó, Bosnia and Slavonia

Date of Birth

c.1240

Date of Death

after 1290

Biography

See also Genealogical Table(s): 2.2, 4.2.)
Elizabeth was the daughter of a Cuman leader, perhaps Zeyhanus, who is mentioned in a charter of king Béla IV as “our duke of the Cumans” (noster dux Cumanorum). The Cumans were a nomadic Turkish people who settled in Hungary in the mid thirteenth century. Elizabeth, whose mother is not known, was born c.1240. She married Stephen V in 1247 (or perhaps 1254*); he ascended to the throne in 1270 and died in 1272. Elizabeth died after 1290. They had four daughters, including Catherine and Elizabeth who both became queen of Serbia, Maria who married Charles II, king of Naples, Anna, who married the eventual emperor of Byzantium, and two sons, Ladislaus IV, and Andrew.

When Stephen V died, Ladislaus was ten and Elizabeth attempted to secure control of the royal government; an armed coup against her failed and the only adult male of the dynasty, Béla of Macsó (whose sister Kunigunda married Ottokar II of Bohemia), was killed through the machinations of the Héder kin, leaving Elizabeth in a position to exert influence over the prince, if not the full power of a regent. Charters issued in Ladislaus’s name speak of her consent; others issued in her name suggest she saw herself as regent. Her seal named her “daughter of the emperor of the Cumans” (filia imperatoris Cumanorum), indicating her ambitions, and she tried but failed to fill key positions on the royal council with her favorites. Nobles would not accept a woman as dispenser of justice and made enough trouble that she withdrew to her reginal lands until 1277, when Ladislaus came of age. He transferred the government of various regions in the south to her, Szepes, Macsó, Bosnia, and Slavonia and she used the title of duchess (ducissa totius Sclaonie, de Macho et de Bozna) until 1283. In 1280 she promised the papal legate Philip that she would take measures against the heresy spreading in the counties of Pozsega and Valkó and others in her jurisdiction. There were eventually problems over her seizing of church tithes in Zagreb, and quarrels with nobles who supported the king, which forced her to give up Slavonia.
The information about Elizabeth’s life and role in Hungary is drawn from from Attila Zsoldos, The Árpáds and Their Wives, Queenship in Early Medieval Hungary, 1000-1301 (Rome: Viella, 2019)

Letters from Elizabeth of the Cumans

Letters to Elizabeth of the Cumans

A request for restitution