tournaments became frequent, and the new knights, with their fresh heraldic devices, had an opportunity of meeting each other in armed combat in the presence of their foreign king. The king’s court came to be the resort of noble youths, and boys of noble descent became the playmates of the royal princes. In order to rouse the warlike spirit of his great nobles, he allowed those of them who joined in a campaign with a certain number of soldiers, to lead their men under banners bearing their own armorial devices. An event, however, of most tragic issue, which has furnished a fruitful theme to Hungarian poets and artists, almost overthrew the effect of the king’s wise policy and endangered his life. The scene of the occurrence, which took place on the 17th of April, 1330, was the magnificent palace of Visegrád. The former palatine of Csák, Felician Zách, had become one of the king’s chief councillors, and he, with his daughter Clara, one of the queen’s maids of honor, a lady of extraordinary beauty, resided in the king’s palace. Casimir, the King of Poland, and the queen’s brother, was at the time a guest at Visegrád, and during his stay there, behaved improperly towards Clara Zách. The infuriated father, on learning this, broke in upon the royal family sitting in the dining-hall, and intent upon avenging the affront offered to his daughter, threatened every one in his way. He fell with sword drawn upon the royal children and their parents. The children remained unhurt, but the king was seriously wounded, and the queen had four of her fingers cut off. John Cselényi, the queen’s treasurer, finally rushed to the rescue and felled the exasperated father with his bronze pole-axe to the ground, and the alarmed servants, who had meanwhile hastened to the hall, gave the miserable man, in presence of the royal family, the _coup de grace_. A frightful and most cruel punishment was inflicted, for her father’s bloody act, on the unhappy Clara and all the members of the Zách family. The maiden’s ears, nose, lips, and hands were cut off, and in this condition she was tied, together with her brother, to a horse’s tail, and dragged through the land until both died a miserable death. The Zách family were exterminated to the third degree, and the remoter kinspeople doomed to slavery. Such a sentence upon those who had committed no crime was a most vindictive and savage one, and the people saw the avenging finger of God in the results of the unhappy campaign of that year against the Wallachians. One of the chronicles, referring to the disastrous issue of the war, says: “The king had hitherto sailed under favorable signs, and cut, according to his heart’s desire, through the stormy waves with the ship of his fortune. But changeable fortune had now turned her back upon him. His army had been defeated, and he himself is suffering tortures from his gouty hands and feet.”