frequent guest of Edward at Westminster. He died on the 8th of April, and the body was sent back to France with royal honours.
See Froissart’s Chronicles; Duc d’Aumale, Notes et documents relatifs à Jean, roi de France, et à sa captivité (1856); A. Coville, in Lavisse’s Histoire de France, vol. iv., and authorities cited there.
JOHN (Zapolya) (1487–1540), king of Hungary, was the son of the palatine Stephen Zapolya and the princess Hedwig of Teschen, and was born at the castle of Szepesvár. He began his public career at the famous Rákos diet of 1505, when, on his motion, the assembly decided that after the death of the reigning king, Wladislaus II., no foreign prince should be elected king of Hungary. Henceforth he became the national candidate for the throne, which his family had long coveted. As far back as 1491 his mother had proposed to the sick king that his daughter Anne should be committed to her care in order, subsequently, to be married to her son; but Wladislaus frustrated this project by contracting a matrimonial alliance with the Habsburgs. In 1510 Zapolya sued in person for the hand of the Princess Anne in vain, and his appointment to the voivody of Transylvania (1511) was with the evident intention of removing him far from court. In 1513, after a successful raid in Turkish territory, he hastened to Buda at the head of 1000 horsemen and renewed his suit, which was again rejected. In 1514 he stamped out the dangerous peasant rising under Dozsa (q.v.) and the infernal torments by means of which the rebel leader was slowly done to death were the invention of Zapolya. With the gentry, whose hideous oppression had moved the peasantry to revolt, he was now more than ever popular, and, on the death of Wladislaus II., the second diet of Rákos (1516) appointed him the governor of the infant king Louis II. He now aimed at the dignity of palatine also, but the council of state and the court party combined against him and appointed István Báthory instead (1519). The strife of factions now burnt more fiercely than ever at the very time when the pressure of the Turk demanded the combination of all the national forces against a common danger. It was entirely due to the dilatoriness and dissensions of Zapolya and Báthory that the great fortress of Belgrade was captured in 1521, a loss which really sealed the fate of Hungary. In 1522 the diet would have appointed both Zapolya and Báthory captains-general of the realm, but the court set Zapolya aside and chose Báthory only. At the diets of Hátvan and Rákos in 1522, Zapolya placed himself at the head of a confederation to depose the palatine and the other great officers of state, but the attempt failed. In the following year, however, the revolutionary Hátvan diet drove out all the members of the council of state and made István Verböczy, the great jurist, and a friend of Zapolya, palatine. In the midst of this hopeless anarchy, Suleiman I., the Magnificent, invaded Hungary with a countless army, and the young king perished on the field of Mohács in a vain attempt to stay his progress, the contradictory orders of Louis II. preventing Zapolya from arriving in time to turn the fortunes of the day. The court party accused him of deliberate treachery on this occasion; but the charge must be pronounced groundless. His younger brother George was killed at Mohács, where he was second commander-in-chief. Zapolya was elected king of Hungary at the subsequent diet of Tokaj (Oct. 14), the election was confirmed by the diet of Székesfehérvár (10th of November), and he was crowned on the following day with the holy crown.
A struggle with the rival candidate, the German king Ferdinand I., at once ensued (see Hungary: History) and it was only with the aid of the Turks that king John was able to exhaust his opponent and compel him to come to terms. Finally, in 1538, by the compact of Nagyvárad, Ferdinand recognized John as king of Hungary, but secured the right of succession on his death. Nevertheless John broke the compact by bequeathing the kingdom to his infant son John Sigismund under Turkish protection. John was the last national king of Hungary. His merit, as a statesman, lies in his stout vindication of the national independence, though without the assistance of his great minister György Utiesenovich, better known as “Frater George” (Cardinal Martinuzzi (q.v.)), this would have been impossible. Indirectly he contributed to the subsequent conquest of Hungary by admitting the Turk as a friend.
See Vilmos Fraknoi, Ungarn vor der Schlacht bei Mohács (Budapest, 1886); L. Kupelwieser, Die Kämpfe Ungarns mit den Osmanen bis zur Schlacht bei Mohács (Vienna, 1895); Ignacz Acsády, History of the Hungarian Realm, vol. i. (Hung.) (Budapest, 1902–1904).
JOHN OF BRIENNE (c. 1148–1237), king of Jerusalem and Latin emperor of Constantinople, was a man of sixty years of age before he began to play any considerable part in history. Destined originally for the Church, he had preferred to become a knight, and in forty years of tournaments and fights he had won himself a considerable reputation, when in 1208 envoys came from the Holy Land to ask Philip Augustus, king of France, to select one of his barons as husband to the heiress, and ruler of the kingdom, of Jerusalem. Philip selected John of Brienne, and promised to support him in his new dignity. In 1210 John married the heiress Mary (daughter of Isabella and Conrad of Montferrat), assuming the title of king in right of his wife. In 1211, after some desultory operations, he concluded a six years’ truce with Malik-el-Adil; in 1212 he lost his wife, who left him a daughter, Isabella; soon afterwards he married an Armenian princess. In the fifth crusade (1218–1221) he was a prominent figure. The legate Pelagius, however, claimed the command; and insisting on the advance from Damietta, in spite of the warnings of King John, he refused to accept the favourable terms of the sultan, as the king advised, until it was too late. After the failure of the crusade, King John came to the West to obtain help for his kingdom. In 1223 he met Honorius III. and the emperor Frederick II. at Ferentino, where, in order that he might be connected more closely with the Holy Land, Frederick was betrothed to John’s daughter Isabella, now heiress of the kingdom. After the meeting at Ferentino, John went to France and England, finding little consolation; and thence he travelled to Compostella, where he married a new wife, Berengaria of Castile. After a visit to Germany he returned to Rome (1225). Here he received a demand from Frederick II. (who had now married Isabella) that he should abandon his title and dignity of king, which—so Frederick claimed—had passed to himself along with the heiress of the kingdom. John was now a septuagenarian “king in exile,” but he was still vigorous enough to revenge himself on Frederick, by commanding the papal troops which attacked southern Italy during the emperor’s absence on the sixth crusade (1228–1229). In 1229 John, now eighty years of age, was invited by the barons of the Latin empire of Constantinople to become emperor, on condition that Baldwin of Courtenay should marry his second daughter and succeed him. For nine years he ruled in Constantinople, and in 1235, with a few troops, he repelled a great siege of the city by Vataces of Nicaea and Azen of Bulgaria. After this last feat of arms, which has perhaps been exaggerated by the Latin chroniclers, who compare him to Hector and the Maccabees, John died in the habit of a Franciscan friar. An aged paladin, somewhat uxorious and always penniless, he was a typical knight errant, whose wanderings led him all over Europe, and planted him successively on the thrones of Jerusalem and Constantinople.
The story of John’s career must be sought partly in histories of the kingdom of Jerusalem and of the Latin Empire of the East, partly in monographs. Among these, of which R. Röhricht gives a list (Geschichte des Königreichs Jerusalem, p. 699, n. 3), see especially that of E. de Montcarmet, Un chevalier du temps passé (Limoges, 1876 and 1881).
JOHN III. (Sobieski) (1624–1696), king of Poland, was the eldest son of James Sobieski, castellan of Cracow, and Theofila Danillowiczowna, grand-daughter of the great Hetman Zolkiewski. After being educated at Cracow, he made the grand tour with his brother Mark and returned to Poland in 1648. He served against Chmielnicki and the Cossacks and was present at the battles of Beresteczko (1651) and Batoka (1652), but was one of the first to desert his unhappy country when invaded by the Swedes in 1654, and actually assisted them to conquer the Prussian provinces in 1655. He returned to his lawful allegiance
