Louis II (II. Lajos) is one of the historical dramas Madách drafted at Sztregova in the mid-1850s, in the years of inward retreat that followed the collapse of 1848–49 and his own imprisonment. It survives only as a fragment: a single completed scene of a projected five-act tragedy, breaking off where the manuscript itself breaks off. The subject is the reign of Louis II Jagiellon, the boy-king whose death at Mohács in 1526 opened the long catastrophe of Hungary’s partition between Habsburg and Ottoman. Madách’s recurring preoccupation — a nation undone as much by the vanity and faction of its own great men as by any outward enemy — is announced in this opening scene before the central figures have even taken the stage.

What survives stages the morning of the magnate Szapolyai (the future John Zápolya, voivode of Transylvania and rival claimant to the crown) against a backdrop of social fracture. The scene moves on two levels at once. Above, the aristocratic politics of succession: the death of the old palatine, the question of who inherits both the office and the great name. Below, the brutal economics of the realm in collapse — the royal tax-collectors descend on a village, drum and gallows behind them, and a peasant judge bargains away the women’s jewels to silence them, while the lesser nobility’s tax voted at the Diet of Tolna becomes the occasion for Szapolyai to deny the lower house any claim to embody the nation. Watch how the play sets the great lord’s grand contempt for "petty souls" against his own readiness to drive the king’s officers off his land at pitchfork-point: the diagnosis is even-handed, and the irony is deliberate.

The dramatic interest is concentrated in the figure of the boy Martinúzi — the historical György Martinuzzi (Fráter György), who would rise from obscurity to dominate Transylvanian politics. Madách gives him the scene’s sharpest speeches: the eagle that strikes among the crows like lightning, the leopard that does not wait for foxes to smooth its path, the rose and the nettle drawing fragrance and poison from one indifferent earth. Here, in compressed form, is the aphoristic and dialectical pressure that would find its full scope in The Tragedy of Man a few years later — the ambition that "stoops only so far as spirit and strength descend," set against the dicing and revelry of lesser men. The fragment is valuable precisely as a workshop sketch: the mature Madách voice audible in a play he never finished.