LOUIS I. (1326-1382), called "the great," king of Hungary and Poland, was the third son of Charles Robert, king of Hungary, and Elizabeth, daughter of the Polish king, Ladislaus Lokietek. In 1342 he succeeded his father as king of Hungary and was crowned at Székesfehérvár on the 21st of July with great enthusiasm. Though only sixteen he understood Latin, German and Italian as well as his mother tongue. He owed his relatively excellent education to the care of his mother, a woman of profound political sagacity, who was his chief counsellor in diplomatic affairs during the greater part of his long reign. Italian politics first occupied his attention. As a ruler of a rising great power in search of a seaboard he was the natural adversary of the Venetian republic, which already aimed at making the Adriatic a purely Venetian sea and resented the proximity of the Magyars in Dalmatia. The first trial of strength began in 1345, when the city of Zara placed herself under the protection of Hungary and was thereupon invested by the Venetians. Louis fought a battle beneath the walls of Zara (July 1st, 1346), which has been immortalized by Tintoretto, but was defeated and compelled to abandon the city to the republic. The struggle was renewed eleven years later when Louis, having formed, with infinite trouble, a league of all the enemies of Venice, including the emperor, the Habsburgs, Genoa and other Italian towns, attacked his maritime rival with such vigour that she sued for peace, and by the treaty of Zara (February 18th, 1358) ceded most of the Dalmatian towns and renounced the title of duke of Dalmatia and Croatia, hitherto borne by the doge. Far more important than the treaty itself was the consequent voluntary submission of the independent republic of Ragusa to the suzerainty of the crown of St Stephen the same year, Louis, in return for an annual tribute of 500 ducats and a fleet, undertaking to defend Ragusa against all her enemies. Still more glorious for Hungary was Louis's third war with Venice (1378-1381), when he was again aided by the Genoese. At an early stage of the contest Venice was so hardly pressed that she offered to do homage to Hungary for all her possessions. But her immense resources enabled her to rally her forces, and peace was finally concluded between all the powers concerned at the congress of Turin (1381), Venice virtually surrendering Dalmatia to Louis and undertaking to pay him an annual tribute of 7000 ducats. The persistent hostility of Venice is partially attributable to her constant fear lest Louis should inherit the crown of Naples and thus threaten her trade and her sea-power from two sides simultaneously. Louis's younger brother Andrew had wedded Joanna, granddaughter and heiress of old King Robert of Naples, on whose death, in 1343, she reigned in her own right, refused her consort any share in the government, and is very strongly suspected of having secured his removal by assassination on the night of the 19th