George of Podebrady Elected King of Bohemia

1458

A moderate Hussite nobleman was elected king of Bohemia by its feudal estates, becoming the only non-Catholic crowned monarch in all of fifteenth-century Europe. He governed pragmatically, balancing Czech Utraquist religious traditions against relentless papal demands for full recatholicization. His visionary proposal for a pan-European peace league of sovereign states anticipated the logic of the United Nations by five full centuries, and was universally ignored by every ruler who received it.