On 28 April 1131, Béla II (Blind), the son of Álmos, brother of Kálmán the Bookish (reigned 1095-1116), who succeeded István II (reigned 1116-1131), was crowned King of Hungary.
Béla was blinded as a child at the behest of King Kálmán, and the reason for this can be traced back to the feud between the king and his brother Álmos. After the death of Saint László (r. 1077-1095), the late Géza I (r. 1074-1077) was challenged for the throne by his two sons, the elder of whom, Kálmán, was destined for the priesthood because of his physical defects, and Álmos was the designated heir, but László eventually changed his mind.
During the reign of Kalmán the Bookish, Álmos rebelled on numerous occasions, mainly with the support of his brother-in-law, the Grand Duke of Kiev Svyatopolk, and in 1113, the king had his brother arrested and imprisoned in the monastery of Dömös with his five-year-old son, Béla. To render them unfit to rule, they blinded Álmos and his child on the orders of King Kálmán.
The father fled to the Byzantine Empire in 1126, but left his son in Hungary, who mysteriously ended up in Pécsvárad. Around 1128, István II found Béla in the monastery in Baranya, asked Itona, the daughter of Uros, the Serbian Grand Duke of Serbia, to marry him, and settled the princely couple in Tolna.
After the death of King István in March 1131, Béla, who is wrongly described as the heir, took the throne. In reality, the king’s power was destined for his nephew, Saul (grandson of Kálmán), so he was likely defeated and killed by the supporters of King Béla II during an internal war in 1131. The blind king was crowned on 28 April 1131 in Fehérvár, after which a general assembly was held near Arad, where, at the suggestion of Queen Ilona, Béla’s supporters massacred the 68 lords who were believed to have been involved in the blinding of the monarch.
However, even after the overthrow of the party of Kálmán, the reign of Béla II was not consolidated, because Klmán’s illegitimate son Boris thought that he could easily overthrow the blind king and, taking advantage of the Polish-Hungarian feud, he invaded Hungary with an army supported by Boleslo III (r. 1106-1138).
Helped out by his brother-in-law, the Austrian prince Léopold III, the combined forces defeated Boris in July 1132, and the king used skilful diplomacy to isolate Poland, allying with Bohemia and the Russian princes of Kiev and Przemysl. Hungarian foreign policy was successful at this time, as the king conquered central Dalmatia by 1137, and also conquered Bosnia, making his son László prince of the province.
Béla’s blindness meant that he needed the support of the royal council and the queen to exercise power, and Ilona proved to be sufficiently talented for the job. After King Béla II had defeated the party of Kálmán, he embarked on major reforms, temporarily introducing literacy and establishing the predecessor of the chancellery created by Béla III in Hungary.
The reign of the blind king was also credited with the restoration of the burnt Abbey of Pannonhalma. Despite his physical handicap, Béla proved to be a good king, and with his well-elected advisors and his wife, he successfully consolidated the country, restoring its authority in both the secular and ecclesiastical spheres.
The tragedy of his reign was also his premature death, when he died on 13 February 1141, aged only 33, leaving four sons and two daughters to the House of Árpád, which was on the verge of extinction before his accession. The throne was inherited by his eldest son, Géza II (r. 1141-1162), and his eldest daughter, Zsófia, became engaged to Henry III, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III, but the marriage eventually failed. From King Béla II onwards, the Árpáds who inherited the Hungarian throne were all heirs of the branch of Álmos that opposed Kálmán.
Source: Rubicon Magazine, Tarján M. Tamás
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