The Economic Background to and the Financial Politics of Queen Barbara of Cilli in Hungary (1406–1438)

Abstract

The Queen of Hungary, Germany and Bohemia, and Holy Roman Empress, Barbara of Cilli (1392–1451), the second wife of King Sigismund of Luxembourg, is one of the most remarkable historical female personalities of the Middle Ages. She is one of that select group of historical figures who become part of legends, myths and national folklore as well. From the earliest humanist histories, Queen Barbara has been viewed as an utterly negative character, schemer, power-desiring woman, alchemist, heretic, and agnostic. In historiography, she has even earned the unflattering epithet ‘German Messalina’, given to her by Johannes Cuspinianus at the beginning of the 16th century (Cuspinianus, 1540, p. 602). However, these legends about Queen Barbara have been reliably disproved by modern historical investigation. A detailed analysis of contemporary written sources enables us to reconstruct the reasons for the later creation of the negative legends about her, its initiators, and how it was spread in literature of that era and later, as well as in historical works (Dvořáková, 2013).