Blessed Louis IV

Louis IV the Saint (German: Ludwig IV. der Heilige; 28 October 1200 – 11 September 1227), a member of the Ludovingian dynasty, was Landgrave of Thuringia and Saxon Count palatine from 1217 until his death. He was the husband of Elizabeth of Hungary. Louis was born at Creuzburg Castle, the second son of Landgrave Hermann I of Thuringia, from his marriage with Sophia, a daughter of the Wittelsbach duke Otto I of Bavaria. During the German throne quarrel between the Hohenstaufen ruler Philip of Swabia and his Welf rival Otto IV, his father switched sides several times and tried to expand his own influence by betrothing his eldest son Hermann to the Hungarian princess Elizabeth, daughter of King Andrew II. The young girl arrived in Thuringia in 1211 to be raised at the Ludovingian court, then a venue for poets and minnesingers like Walther von der Vogelweide or Wolfram von Eschenbach. Louis elder brother died in 1216, therefore he himself, upon his father's death on 25 April 1217, ascended the Thuringian throne at the age of sixteen. In 1218, on the Feast of St. Kilian, at age eighteen, he was armed as a knight in the Church of St. George in Eisenach. At Wartburg Castle in 1220 at age twenty, Louis married 14-year-old Elizabeth of Hungary, with whom he had three children: Hermann II, Sophie, and Gertrude, later abbess at Altenberg. He set up his court at Wartburg Castle near Eisenach. When in 1221 Louis' Wettin brother-in-law, Margrave Theodoric I of Meissen died, he acted as a guardian for Theodoric's minor son Henry III. However, his attempts to occupy the Meissen and Lusatian lands were rejected by his sister Jutta. Like his father, Louis was in close contact with the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II, who appointed him a Marshal of the Holy Roman Empire and confirmed his rights in the Margraviate of Meissen. Louis came to consider it a religious duty to restrain his nobles from oppressing the poor, and would lay siege to their castles if necessary.