Ladislaus the Posthumous, King of Hungary and Bohemia, was born on 22 February 1440. He was the son of Albert of Habsburg, the elected King of the Romans, and Elisabeth of Luxembourg, the only child and heiress of Emperor Sigismund. Through his parents, he inherited both the Austrian lands and the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia.
Yet from his very first day, everything seemed to go wrong for Ladislaus. He was born a few months after his father’s death, losing the most natural protector of his succession. Thanks to his mother’s efforts, Ladislaus was crowned King of Hungary, but the Hungarian nobility, fearing Ottoman invasion, preferred the King of Poland to their rightful infant ruler. Elisabeth’s own death only a few years later further aggravated the situation, triggering a fierce power struggle over the custody of the still minor king. Even his coronation as King of Bohemia, achieved with great difficulty, did not grant the now adolescent Ladislaus any real authority. During the ensuing years of civil war, rival kings, betrayals, murders, and sudden — sometimes natural, yet always destabilising — deaths repeatedly shifted the balance of power.
The most unexpected of all these deaths was Ladislaus’s own. Recently engaged to a French princess and preparing for magnificent wedding celebrations in Prague, he died suddenly in 1457 at the age of seventeen. In the climate of political tension, poisoning was widely suspected, but modern research points rather to plague or leukaemia. With Ladislaus, the senior Habsburg line, known as the Albertines, became extinct.
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