Stephen the Posthumous

Stephen the Posthumous (; 1236–1271) was the posthumous son of King Andrew II of Hungary by his third wife, Beatrice d'Este. He was regarded as bastard son of infidelity by his much older half-brothers, including King Béla IV of Hungary, and was not allowed to receive ducal revenues from Hungary to which he would have been entitled as son of a Hungarian king. He was first married to a widow, Isabella Traversari, by whom he had a short-lived son named Stephen. His second wife was Tomasina Morosini. Their son would later become King Andrew III of Hungary. Early years The elderly Andrew II, who had been widowed recently for the second time, married the 23-year-old Beatrice d'Este in Székesfehérvár on 14 May 1234, even though his sons – Béla and Coloman – were sharply opposed to his third marriage. She was pregnant, when Andrew II died on 21 September 1235. The king's eldest son Béla IV ascended the Hungarian throne shortly thereafter. Béla and Coloman accused her of having, in King Andrew's life, an adulterous liaison with their father's influential lord Denis, son of Ampud. Béla IV dismissed and punished many of his father's closest advisors, including Denis, who was blinded and imprisoned; he died in captivity. Béla also ordered Beatrice's imprisonment, but she managed to escape to the Holy Roman Empire, where she gave birth to a posthumous son in the town of Wehrda, Duchy of Thuringia (present-day a borough of Marburg) in early 1236. Béla and Coloman considered her child to be a bastard, who was born out of the queen's extramarital affair with comes Denis. Later chronicles, for instance the Illuminated Chronicle, which sought to prove the lawful origin of Andrew III, were ignoring these details and emphasized that Beatrice wanted to return home voluntarily.