"Albert, afterwards the Emperor Albert II., was the first prince of the House of Habsburg that enjoyed the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, which he owed to his father-in-law, the Emperor Sigismund, whose only daughter, Elizabeth, he had married. Elizabeth was the child of Barbara von Cilly, Sigismund's second wife, whose notorious vices had procured for her the odious epithets of the 'Bad,' and the 'German Messalina.' Barbara had determined to supplant her daughter, to claim the two crowns as her dowry, and to give them, with her hand, to Wladislaus, the young King of Poland, who, though 40 years her junior, she had marked out for her future husband. With this view she was courting the Hussite party in Bohemia: but Sigismund, a little before his death, caused her to be arrested; and, assembling the Hungarian and Bohemian nobles at Znaym, in Moravia, persuaded them, almost with his dying breath, to elect Albert as his successor. Sigismund expired the next day (December 9th, 1437). Albert was soon after recognised as king by the Hungarian diet, and immediately released his mother-in-law Barbara, upon her agreeing to restore some fortresses which she held in Hungary. He did not so easily obtain possession of the Bohemian crown. … The short reign of Albert in Hungary was disastrous both to himself and to the country. Previously to his fatal expedition against the Turks in 1439, … the Hungarian diet, before it would agree to settle the succession to the throne, forced him to accept a constitution which destroyed all unity and strength of government. By the famous 'Decretum Alberti Regis,' he reduced himself to be the mere shadow of a king; while by exalting the Palatine [a magistrate next to the king in rank, who presided over the legal tribunals, and discharged the functions of the king in the absence of the latter], the clergy, and the nobles, he perpetuated all the evils of the feudal system. … The most absurd and pernicious regulations were now adopted respecting the military system of the kingdom, and such as rendered it almost impossible effectually to resist the Turks. … On the death of Albert, Wladislaus [Ladislaus] III., King of Poland [the second Polish king of the dynasty of Jagellon], was … elected to the throne of Hungary. … Albert, besides two daughters, had left his wife Elizabeth pregnant; and the Hungarians, dreading a long minority in case she should give birth to a son, compelled her to offer her hand to Wladislaus, agreeing that the crown should descend to their issue; but at the same time engaging that if Elizabeth's child should prove a male, they would endeavour to procure for him the kingdom of Bohemia and the duchy of Austria; and that he should moreover succeed to the Hungarian throne in case Wladislaus had no issue by Elizabeth.