Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/609

 EASTERN EUROPE IN LATER MIDDLE AGES 553 started in the Empire north of the Alps, and was meant for Germans as much as for Poles and Bohemians, he lo- cated it in the Bohemian capital. In the fifteenth century Bohemia became a prey to religious discontent and the destructive Hussite Wars of which we shall speak in the next
 * chapter in connection with church history.

A branch of the same House of Anjou which the popes I had called in to rule Naples in the thirteenth century, reigned in Hungary in the fourteenth from 1309 to 1382. When King Louis died in 1382, Sigis- jmund, who had married his older daughter, became King as we have seen, instead took Louis's younger daughter and married her to Jagello of Lithuania and chose him as their king. The reign of Sigismund in Hungary was not over- glorious, since it took him some time to establish his au- thority, and then in 1396 the Ottoman Turks defeated him at Nicopolis and overran a good deal of his kingdom. Sigis- mund, who it will be remembered, became emperor in 1410, (succeeded his brother Wenzel as King of Bohemia as well, where he reigned from 141 9 to his death in 1437, so far as jthe Hussites, indignant at his betrayal of their leader, would jlet him. On Sigismund's death, Bohemia and Hungary, Hike the imperial office which he had held, passed for a few years to the House of Hapsburg. But then, through exer- bise of the old custom of election by the nobility, the two lands came under the rule of native kings and did not again
 * of Hungary, although the Poles refused to have him and,
 * ome into the possession of the Austrian dynasty until well

into the sixteenth century. From Hungary we pass on in our survey of Eastern lands to the Balkan peninsula. In 1261 the Genoese, who were ealous of Venetian preponderance in the ^Egean The Balkan md Black Seas, helped to overthrow the Latin %$ Coi- Smpire, which the Fourth Crusade had set up stantinople< n 1204, and to restore the rule of a Greek dynasty at Constantinople. But this revived Byzantine Empire was imall and weak; the Frankish principalities in central and southern Greece remained independent; and Venice kept