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Health and Illness in the Angevin dynasty of the Hungarian Kingdom

Charles I of HungaryHealth and Illness in the Angevin dynasty of the Hungarian Kingdom

By Annamária Bartha

Od spitála k nemocnici: Zdravotníctvo, sociálna starostlivost’a osveta v dejinách Slovensk, eds. Ivana Fialová and Daniela Tvrdonová (Bratislava, 2012)

Introduction: Official documents and pictorial representations give us a fairly clear picture of the illnesses and injuries of Charles I (1301-1342). It is suspected by László Józsa that Charles might have had goitre, basing his claim on the pictorial evidence of the coins issued by him, since goitre is hard to identify on cadavers and is rather detectable on works of art.  However, I think that the small size of these coins and their lack of elaboration make them unsuitable to serve as a basis of such conclusions. Nonetheless, this does not mean that no such possibility exists, since Charles comes from a territory where iodine deficiency is common, and the size of the goitre cannot be reduced by sufficient iodine intake later.

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Although I found no record of injuries in the charters the king would have sufferedduring his struggle to ascend to the Hungarian throne, several attempts were made to assassinate him. The first attempt was organized by Péter, son of Petenye but we do not know the exact date. The charter that reports on both of the attempts by Péter only states that this one happened before 1317. On the first occasion, King Charles was lying sick near Patak when Péter, son of Petenye tried to murder hlm. Sadly, neither do we know what illness the king was afflicted by, nor how Péter tried to kill him and if he was injured or not.

On the second occasion, Péter hired assassins, who wanted to take the king out at Temesvár.  As it is reported by a charter of later origin, the would-be murderers tried to utilize archery, but there are no accounts of injuries to the king.

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However the third attempt on the life of King Charles – conducted by Felician Zah – did injure the king, although we are unsure about the severity of this wound, because the Illuminated Chronicle describes it as a minor wound on his right hand, while a letter of sentence dating to 15th March 1330 reports about a major injury. The king “didst appear in his own physical presence in our circle, concurrently showing his injured right arm with that tremendous wound (…) furthermore he didst show us the garments of his own as well as of her royal highness and the clothes of those two youngsters whom I had just mentioned above. All the dresses were soaked wet by the sacred blood spilled, inasmuch it resembled an immense overflow of water. He even didst show us apart from these the cut four fingers of her royal highness and the locks of their beloved sons, which were parted from their bodies by Felicián’s sword.”

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