Maria Laskarina
Overview
Biography
(See also Genealogical Table(s): 2.2, 4.2.)
Maria Laskarina Comnene Angelina (whose father was the Byzantine emperor, Alexios III). She married Béla IV in 1220, with whom she had ten children, eight daughters, Kunigunda, Margaret, Anne, Catherine, Elizabeth, Constance, Helen, and Margaret, and two sons, Stephen V, and Béla. Widowed in May, 1270, she remained in Hungary, but died shorty after her husband and was buried next to him in church of Friars Minor at Esztergom. Early in their marriage, in 1222, Béla’s father, Andrew II, had attempted to have his son divorce Maria, with the intent of finding him a consort of greater benefit to the country (maior … utilitas regno), as he explained in his petition to the pope, Honorius III (see Zsoldos, 18). The pope, having consulted Hungarian prelates, refused to sanction the divorce, and the marriage lasted fifty years, the longest in the Árpád dynasty.
A Hungarian queen could obtain lands and their revenue in various ways, by reginal right (lands assigned to the queen), by personal grant from the king, or by escheat. Maria also acquired a number of noble lands in ways that were later judged unlawful, either by violence, by false accusation, or by unjust occupation, abuses that would be rectified by successor queens, Elizabeth and Isabella. A law was enacted in 1267 that ordered the restoration of lands unlawfully seized from nobles (Zsoldos, 42). Maria held lands mainly to the west of the Danube, while the lands of her daughter-in-law Elizabeth were in the east, but Maria tried to claim eastern lands, creating problems within the dynasty (Zsoldos, 63). On the other hand, she had also spent some of her jewelry to defend the country and to construct the castle of Visegrád, in return for which the king transferred lands to her and, according to her daughter-in-law, Maria fought the war with Urosh of Serbia in 1268: “ipsa domina Maria, regina mater nostra karissima contra regem Servie fecisset exercitum” (cited by Zsoldos, 100, fn.18). She also administered Slavonia for her son, prince Béla, when he was a child in the 1260’s and she resolved problems brought to her by the burghers of Zagreb (see CDCr 5.202).
The material in this biography was drawn from Attila Zsoldoa, The Árpáds and Their Wives, Queenship in Early Medieval Hungary, 1000-1301 (Rome: Viella, 2019).