Europe was shaken by the Mongol invasions and then stabilized in a new pattern.
(See Map 7.6.) In Hungary, King Béla IV (r.1235–1270) complained that the
invaders had destroyed his kingdom: “most of the kingdom of Hungary has been
reduced to a desert by the scourge of the Tartars,” he wrote, begging the pope for
help.^9 But the greatest danger to his power came not from the outside but from the
Hungarian nobles, who began to build castles for themselves—in a move reminiscent
of tenth-century French castellans. The nobles eventually elected an Angevin—
Charles Robert, better known as Carobert (r.1308–1342)—to be their king. Under
Carobert, Hungary was very large, even though the region controlled by the king was
quite small.
