Queen Barbara of Cilli / Cillei Borbála (1392-1451)
Posterity does not well remember Cillei Borbála. Not only because she was a descendant of the family that is most remembered in old Hungarian historiography and fiction for being enemies of the Hunyadi family as strangers and for being defeated in the power struggle, but also because she was involved in an adulterous affair, almost unique among medieval Hungarian queens. Her husband, King Zsigmond, who was a regular cheater, took a long time to forgive her for this.
Kings and queens on a crooked road
Medieval Hungary did not stand out from contemporary Europe, and this was true of the more and less gallant adventures surrounding the person of the king and queen. Hungarian kings, if they saw fit, put aside their moral inhibitions and went to bed with whomever they pleased without any particular reservation. Unlike in Western Europe, however, in Hungary it was customary to keep silent about the bastard children born as a result of adultery.
Not only do the narrative sources not abound in mentions of illegitimate children born to noble birth, but the charters also do not, and the same applies to the Hungarian rulers. The reason for this was probably that, unlike in Western Europe, the prevailing practice in Hungary during the Middle Ages was to divide family property between heirs, with illegitimate children being a complication in this legal act. It follows that we have much less data on illegitimate children from charters than we do west of the Lajta River.
This also affected the kings, and illegitimate children and their parents were not recorded in the chronicles or charters. Consequently, very few Hungarian kings are known to have gone astray. King András I had an illegitimate child, but we do not know the exact date of his birth, so it is possible that he was born before the king’s marriage. We also know of three mistresses of King László IV (Kun) from the sources, because contemporary churchmen regularly reproached the king for not being married to his wife. Still, he visited his Kun mistresses Édua, Köpcsecs, and Mandula more often. King Károly I of Hungary also had an illegitimate child by his mistress, who lived on Csepel Island.
Kálmán was later elevated to bishop of Győr. During his European tours, King Zsigmond was fond of choosing temporary partners from among the local girls and women, and in this respect, he became famous throughout the continent. According to Kubinyi András, Hunyadi János was not shy of taking a liaison, and Szapolyai Imre may well have been a half-brother of Matthias. King Matthias himself also had a mistress, the best known being Barbara Edelpöck, the mother of Korvin János. The situation was different at the dawn of the early modern era, and King Lajos II was initiated into sexual pleasures by Wass Angelita, a maid of his mother, resulting in an illegitimate child. After the Battle of Mohács, the royal court donated Wass János, the son of the affair.
While kings were occasionally allowed to commit adultery, this was of course strictly forbidden for queens, whose most important task was to produce a legitimate heir. Any mistress who came into the picture jeopardised the legitimacy of the heir to the throne, so the queen’s virtue was very much guarded. Adulterous queens faced severe punishment, including confiscation of property and, in worse cases, death. In Hungary, adultery by queens was not unprecedented, but on no occasion was there an execution.
The first documented case is that of Euphemia, the wife of King Kálmán I, who was forced back to Kiev by her husband when she was pregnant, and the king never acknowledged the son, Boris, born there. King András II was the husband of an adulterous woman, although he was hardly aware of this. He married his third wife, Beatrix of Este, in 1234. The elderly king died a year later, and the young widow announced that she was expecting his child.
However, King Béla IV and his brother, Prince Kálmán, believed that the father of the unborn child was not András II, but Apod’s son Dénes, who had also held the office of the Palatine during András’s reign. Béla, however, had him imprisoned and blinded, and Beatrix of Este only managed to escape with the help of the German embassy on its way to the king’s funeral. She was not to live to see her grandson become the last king of the House of Árpád, András III.
It is a strange twist of fate that, however much the Hungarian queens were protected from potential lovers, after the birth of Lajos I (the Great) in 1326, they had to wait 180 years for a queen to give the country an heir while her husband was still alive. It was during this period that the adultery case of Borbála of the Cillei family was revealed.
The Cillei family of bad recollections
In the earliest times, the Cillei family owned the castle of Žovnek, not Celje, where their name derived from. In their politics, they were consistent in ensuring the family’s prosperity and chose their allies well. They fought alongside Rudolf against Otto II at the Battle of Marchfeld (Dürnkurt / Morvamező), and in 1308, in an unexpected move, they gave their estates to the Habsburgs; even so, they were immediately returned to them as fiefs. In 1322, they inherited the castle of Celje, and from then on it became the family’s eponymous estate. Frederick of Celje was made a count by Emperor Louis IV of Bavaria in 1341, which meant a turn away from the Habsburgs, who were able to temporarily persuade Wenceslaus IV (of Luxembourg) to revoke the count’s grant.
With their twenty or so castles in what is now Slovenia, they were already a very powerful force. The first sign of their ascendancy in Hungary was that they accompanied King Lajos the Great to Zara on his campaign to Naples, and then King Károly IV (of Luxembourg) to his coronation in Rome. By 1380, William of Cille was already married to Anna Piast, daughter of the Polish King Casimir III, making them a first-rate royal relation. The marriage was also favoured by King Lajos the Great. His son, Hermann Cillei, also married a royal relative, Catherine of Kotromanic, sister of the Bosnian monarch, and thus became a relative of the Hungarian monarch’s wife.
In 1396, at the Battle of Nicopolis, Hermann II of Cillei saved the life of King Zsigmond of Hungary and became indebted to the ruler. Hermann also took part in Zsigmond’s confrontation with the Lackfi clan. As a reward for all this, he was given the castle of Varasd, the title of Count of Zagorje, and several estates in Croatia. The family thus became a significant factor in Hungary. From 1406, Hermann Cillei was a Slavonic Ban, one of the most important baronial titles in Hungary.
Cillei was one of the barons who captured King Sigismund in 1401 after they were dissatisfied with his rule. In exchange for his release, the Hungarian king broke off his existing engagement and betrothed Cillei Borbála to him as a seal of the settlement. A year later, in 1402, Cillei Anna, second cousin of Borbála, became Queen of Poland after marrying King Ulászló II of Poland.
The rest of the family’s life will not be discussed here, but their main opponents in the Holy Roman Empire were the Habsburgs, while King Zsigmond was, of course, their ally. The situation in Hungary was similar; the Cilleies were bound to the Gara family by marriage, who rose at the end of King Zsigmond’s reign.
Adultery and punishment
Borbála was nine years old at the time of her engagement and thirteen at the time of their marriage in 1405. Zsigmond was twenty-four years older than his wife. At the beginning of their relationship, the royal and queenly itinerary shows that they moved around together, giving the impression of a normal royal couple. Borbála accompanied King Sigismund to the Synod of Constance in 1414, but from there the queen returned to Hungary. While her husband was away from home trying to solve the problems of the Church, and not lacking in gallant adventures, she also became involved in the government of the country, originally entrusted to the reigns of Palatine Garai Miklós and Kanizsai János, Archbishop of Esztergom, but the latter died in 1418.
The following year, Zsigmond returned home from Constance, about which Eberhard Windecke wrote the following:
“You should know that in the year of our Lord 1419, when King Sigismund returned to Hungary from the German provinces and the synod, a very rude slander came to his ears about his wife Borbála. This caused His Majesty to develop such hostile feelings towards her that he refused to see or hear of her. As soon, therefore, as his Majesty approached Buda, the Queen was obliged to leave the city and go through the territory of the Jász people and the Kuns to Várad in the Great Plain.
She spent about six months here, but the queen, her daughter, and her servants were so miserable that they all fell ill. It was often the case that they had no bread or wine on their table until they had paid the price. They always had to wear the same clothes to walk and sleep in, and they all became lice-ridden and dirty. It must have been three quarters of a year before His Majesty was willing to go to Várad. All this happened when the King of Rome went to Sandec to meet the Polish monarch and make a treaty with him.
While the king was away, he sent word to his wife to return to Buda, as he was going to Várad, and still did not want to see or hear the queen. So the entourage accompanied her to Buda, and His Majesty arrived at Várad. At this time, His Majesty was visited by the Turkish Sultan’s envoy to make peace for fifty years, and when the King then set out again for Buda, the Queen was sent back to Várad, but this time she did not wish to go south, but rather north. So it was that the king and queen did not meet for a year and a half, until the monarch left for Boroszló, as described above.
Then George, Bishop of Passau, Count of Hohenlohe, and Louis, Count of Göttingen, the King’s Chancellor and Master of the Court, began to negotiate and reconciled His Majesty with the Royal Lady. Thus, they met again at Szakolca on Christmas Eve in the year mentioned above. The queen knelt before His Majesty, begging his mercy to forgive her in case she had done anything against him.
King Sigismund, however, did not wish to listen to the words of his wife, but as soon as his daughter, Princess Elizabeth, who afterwards, as I have said, became the wife of Prince Albert of Austria, came to him, and, as his Majesty was particularly fond of her daughter, he acceded to her request, and forgave the queen in case she should have done anything against him. And they passed the night together, and their quarrel was at an end.” (Translation by Renáta Skorka)
We can only guess who the people were with whom Borbála was associated. One of the candidates was Johannes von Wallenrode, Archbishop of Riga, who had visited Hungary as a representative of the Teutonic Knights. The other suspect was Frederick I, Margrave of Brandenburg, who was remembered by Windecke in a later passage.
“In the Lent-day year 1419, when King Sigismund marched into Hungary, Louis, Duke of Ingolstadt, hurling curses at the Margrave of Brandenburg, declared war on him. The Margrave, however, found no worthy opponent in the Duke, who, as he said, had already twice been found to be an oathbreaker. And so it was that both of them armed themselves, gathering their forces to defend themselves manfully.
The feud between the two dates back to the time when King Sigismund needed money to proceed to Catalonia. Prince Louis had promised to lend him 17,000 gold pieces, but at the time, he only made part of this money available to His Majesty. When the King returned from his journey, he said nothing, and the Prince thought that what he had once lent to His Majesty he must reclaim from the Queen, as His Majesty had assured him in the letter he had given him in return for the money.
Now, when His Majesty returned, he handed another letter to Louis, who still showed no inclination to hand over the full amount to His Majesty’s envoys, although the decision was to pay the king’s debts that had arisen in the meantime. The King ordered the Margrave of Brandenburg to guarantee the repayment of the money. And the Margrave undertook to do all this to serve the Queen and to win her favour, which later proved a great disadvantage, as he was brought into disgrace with her Majesty.” (Translation by Renáta Skorka)
The actual occurrence of adultery is now difficult to verify. Zsigmond banished Cillei Borbála to Várad, near the resting place of his first wife, Mary, seized the queen’s court, and confiscated her estates. It is not at all impossible that the reproached Borbála was exiled not because of gossip but because she interfered in the government or her estates.
Whatever Zsigmond’s reasons for anger, he kept not only Borbála but also his daughter Erzsébet in exile and poverty for almost a year. After a year or so, a reconciliation took place, but she did not receive her estates back, and that was not until 1 February 1427. After 1419, we have no documentary record of her whereabouts in 1420, but although she did not accompany Zsigmond to Moravia in 1421, they were together in Pozsony in the summer of the same year, and then for a short period the following year. These years, up to the return of the estate in 1427 mentioned above, show a certain distance, but after that, we see Borbála again at King Zsigmond’s side.
The last years of Borbála
Zsigmond probably never fully trusted his wife again. She managed her royal manor efficiently and effectively, and regularly lent money to her husband. But she had other ideas about succession to the throne. Some of the Bohemians believed that it should not be Albert who succeeded King Zsigmond, but Ulászló III, King of Poland, who was still a minor (later King of Hungary as Ulászló I), a plan which was supported by Borbála. When Zsigmond learned of this, he had his wife arrested in 1437 and imprisoned in Pozsony Castle. The Hungarian monarch died four days later.
Her son-in-law, Albert, did not want to see Borbála in Hungary or Bohemia, and he forced her to give up all her possessions. The former Empress sought refuge in Poland, where she was welcomed. Two years later, after Albert’s death, she reconciled with Erzsébet, renounced all her rights in Hungary, and retired from political life. She was not popular at the Habsburg court, as she was an alchemist and was considered a heretic and apostate. She died of plague in Mělník Castle, Bohemia, in 1451. It is interesting to note that all the Hungarian kings who reigned until the Battle of Mohács were her descendants, from László V onwards, except, of course, King Matthias Hunyadi.
Source: Kanyó Ferenc