Hungary

Description

In the Heaven of the Sun Dante meets Charles Martel, son of Charles II of Anjou and of Mary of Hungary, who explains to the poet the three hereditary crowns to which he could have given good government: that of Provence on the left bank of the Rhône, that of Naples in the southern horn of the Italian peninsula, and that of Hungary, transmitted to him through his maternal line. The premature death of the prince, who lived little more than twenty years, marked for these territories the beginning of an evil lordship, stigmatized in the cantos of Paradise dedicated to the Angevin dynasty. The same Hungarian inheritance returns in the closing lines of canto XIX, where the character laments the disasters that would befall his house and the regions that ought to have received his guidance, among them Hungary itself, designated by its simple name and without further topographical specifications.