Matthias I Corvinus

King of Hungary (r. 1458-1490)

• Born: February 24, 1443
• Birthplace: Kolozsvár, Transylvania (now Cluj, Romania)
• Died: April 6, 1490
• Place of death: Vienna, Austria

Matthias I moved Hungary from feudal particularism toward a more centralized state, and through his lavish patronage promoted remarkable Humanist literary and artistic achievements on the model of the Italian Renaissance.

Early Life

Matthias I Corvinus (mah-THI-uhs kawr-VI-nuhs) was the second son of János Hunyadi, a self-made individual of the Hungarian nobility. Hunyadi won great military renown fighting against the Ottoman Turks and in the process had become the largest single landowner in the kingdom, arousing the fear and resentment of the magnates, to Matthias’s later detriment.

As a boy, Matthias received under his father a rigorous military training. He polished his soldierly skills in battle and was knighted at the age of fourteen during a victorious engagement with the Turks at Belgrade. Matthias’s father also provided him with a superior education through private tutors headed by János Vitéz, who had strong Humanist sympathies. Matthias became fascinated with Italian Renaissance culture.

On the sudden death of his father in 1456, Matthias and his elder brother were seized by feudal enemies of the Hunyadi family, with the approval of the impressionable boy-king Ladislas V. Matthias’s brother was executed, but Matthias was spared, apparently because of his youth. When Ladislas died without an heir in late 1457, the diet of Hungarian nobles decided, with some qualms, to elect as king the fifteen-year-old Matthias, preferring him both for his native birth and for the heroic image left by his father. The candidates of assorted Polish, Saxon, and Austrian Habsburg dynasties were passed over. At his accession, Matthias was a vigorous, powerfully built youth. He had a charming manner that belied a sometimes-fiery temper.

Life’s Work

The new king faced a desperate situation. The royal treasury was empty, while hostile forces pressed from virtually all sides. As Czech marauders and Hungarian rebels plagued much of northern Hungary, Turkish armies to the south held Serbia in its entirety and raided Hungarian territory continually. Meanwhile, to the west, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III , who coveted the Hungarian crown, plotted Matthias’s overthrow with the help of an alienated faction of the Hungarian magnates. Finally, a crippling condition of Matthias’s election was that he submit during the first five years of his reign to a regency government under his uncle and a council of state composed mainly of magnates. In meeting these challenges, Matthias soon demonstrated that Hungary had acquired no ordinary monarch.

Matthias I rejected from the outset the authority of the regency council. Within months, he had deposed his uncle, the regent, and replaced the magnates on the council with his personal choices. The young king then drew on his private resources to crush the northern rebellion and clear that region of its roving Czech military bands. By 1462, he had met temporarily the challenge of the Austrian emperor from the west through a skillfully negotiated treaty. That gave Matthias the breathing space to turn finally to the south, where Turkish forces had advanced from Serbian bases to overrun the neighboring Hungarian region of Wallachia. In a series of brilliant campaigns, Matthias recovered northern Serbia and most of Wallachia. He consolidated his gains with a chain of forts.

Matthias’s impressive military and diplomatic successes were attributable largely to a complete restructuring of the Hungarian army accomplished during his first years in power. Believing the traditional feudal levy inadequate to his needs, the king recruited an army composed mostly of Czech and German mercenaries, professional soldiers who could be mobilized on short notice. These troops, supplemented by native feudal contingents, he personally trained and maintained with firm discipline and good pay. At its peak, the new standing army numbered some thirty thousand men, about two-thirds of them heavily armed cavalry. Known from their garb as the Black Army, these forces became the chief instrument in carrying out Matthias’s foreign policy objectives.

To support his large military establishment, the king had to overhaul the tax system. A decree of 1467 became the cornerstone of a fiscal policy designed to produce the funds not only for the army but also for Matthias’s extensive political and cultural projects. Previously inviolate tax exemptions for the magnates were drastically curtailed, while heavy new taxes were imposed on the free peasantry. Old taxes were given new names and expanded in scope. To handle the windfall of revenue, Matthias staffed his treasury office with specialists. Despite widespread protests and occasional tax rebellions, Matthias’s fiscal reforms yielded a tenfold increase in royal income over that of his predecessor.

The king pursued other administrative and social reforms. Deeply suspicious of the feudal magnates, Matthias chose to run his government through a professionalized chancellery office staffed by men of humbler social background. He also won the gratitude of many towns through royal grants of autonomous status through the local feudal jurisdictions. To improve the administration of justice generally, Matthias revamped the court system. He installed a new appeals procedure that ran from local jurisdictions through an intermediate level to the royal court itself, at each stage conducted by judges knowledgeable in the law. Also, new laws were decreed that protected the rights of the free peasantry, softening the impact of his taxes by improving the peasantry’s status in relation to the magnates, while other legislation prohibited the tightening of bonds on serfs. Matthias’s legal reforms culminated in a royal decree of 1486, in which he sought to provide a synthesis or codification of the best principles of Hungarian jurisprudence, both in criminal and in civil law.

Following his early military and diplomatic victories, Matthias determined to use the Black Army to unite the Czech and Austrian realms with Hungary. Although his long-range policy goals were never clearly stated, it is possible that he contemplated the building of a coalition of central European Christian states to deal decisively with the Muslim Turkish menace in the Balkans, something he felt unable to achieve alone. In any case, from 1468 onward, Matthias began to compete more aggressively for the crown of Bohemia.

By 1478, after defeating a combined Czech, Polish, and Austrian force four times the size of the Black Army, Matthias had his prize. Under terms of the Peace of Olomouc, the Hungarian monarch took not only the title of king of Bohemia but also the associated lands of Moravia, Silesia, and Lusatia. Then, Matthias fought three wars against his old antagonist the Austrian emperor Frederick III. By 1485, the Black Army had occupied the Habsburg capital of Vienna, and it occupied most of southern Austria soon afterward. Matthias triumphantly took up residence in Vienna, but the imperial crown itself would elude him, as Frederick III refused to designate Matthias his heir.

The most enduring achievement in Matthias’s reign would lie not in his political and military exploits but in the prodigious cultural energies he brought to focus in Hungary. Convinced that cultural distinction was essential to a prince of his eminence in the Renaissance era, Matthias determined early to create a court life that was at once enlightened, elegant, and cosmopolitan. To this end, he gathered Humanist scholars around him, mostly from Italy, and drew many of his officials from their ranks. Further, he subsidized with great generosity the work of painters, sculptors, architects, and goldsmiths. Himself highly educated, the king often was a participant in the lively philosophical and scientific discussions he encouraged at court. His marriage in 1476 to Beatrix, daughter of the king of Naples, further intensified the impact of the Italian Renaissance on Hungarian elite society.

Resident Italian historians such as Antonio Bonfini now wrote histories of Hungary in which Matthias, to his delight, was hailed as a “second Attila.” The same flattering Humanist Bonfini also stretched Matthias’s genealogy to include as forebear a distinguished ancient Roman consul whose family crest, a crow (corvinus), Matthias promptly made his own. Finally, the king imported artwork from Italy and ordered the decoration of his various palaces with appropriate Renaissance paintings and statues.

Matthias’s reputation as “friend of the muses” would rest above all on the splendid Corvina library he assembled in his Buda palace. The estimated twenty-five hundred manuscripts of the Corvina at its peak contained some six thousand distinct Greek and Latin works. These titles, by pagan and Christian alike, reflected the breadth of Matthias’s interests. The books ranged in subject from military strategy and law through art and theology to Renaissance literature. Matthias also employed transcribers and book illuminators to copy and adorn selected works and emboss them with gems and precious metals. The Corvina would remain his greatest cultural legacy.

Matthias Corvinus died at age forty-seven in Vienna, the victim of a stroke that ended prematurely his grand scheme of a Hungarian empire embracing south-central Europe. He was interred near Budapest. He left only an illegitimate son who was quickly passed over by the Diet of magnates. They elected a Polish youth who seemed malleable enough and who, above all, was not of the house of Corvinus. In the grim generation that followed, the Black Army was disbanded, and Matthias’s other major reforms were allowed to lapse. In 1526, an overwhelming Hungarian defeat at Mohács began two centuries of Turkish occupation.

Significance

Most of King Matthias’s achievements proved fleeting because of the lack of capable successors. Yet the thirty-two years of his reign remain among the most remarkable in Hungarian history. Against heavy odds, Matthias I Corvinus managed to reverse several generations of feudal anarchy. He did so by remodeling the central government in ways similar to innovations then being ventured in the major Renaissance monarchies of the West. In particular, Matthias’s administrative and legal reforms laid the foundations for a regime perceived as more stable and more just in its relations with its citizens generally. The renown of his judicial measures is reflected in the popular lament that followed his passing: “Matthias is dead; justice has fled.”

In addition to his judicial and economic reforms, Matthias created in the Black Army one of the earliest standing armies in Europe. It made Hungary for a time the major power of central Europe. Yet there is some validity to the criticism that Matthias became so obsessed with the conquest of the Habsburg lands and the imperial crown that he badly neglected the critical problem of the Turks.

Matthias is remembered not only as a warrior, statesman, and lawgiver, but also as an extremely generous patron of arts and letters. The Corvina library ranked with the Vatican and the Medici collections in Italy as the foremost in Europe.

Matthias I, the Renaissance king of Hungary, was inspired by a larger vision than most princes of his time regarding the distinctive values of a civilized society and how to achieve them. A generation of prosperity and promise for his people expired with the man himself.

Bibliography

Bibliotheca Corviniana, 1490-1990: International Corvina Exhibition on the Five Hundredth Anniversary of the Death of King Matthias, National Széchényi Library, 6 April-6 October 1990. Budapest, Hungary: The Library, 1990. Catalog of an exhibition of materials from Matthias’s library. Includes color illustrations and bibliographic references.

Birnbaum, Marianna D. Thr [sic] Orb and the Pen: Janus Pannonius, Matthias Corvinus, and the Buda Court. Budapest, Hungary: Balassi, 1996. Collection of eleven interdisciplinary essays on the Hungarian Renaissance, focusing especially on Pannonius’s poetry and Matthias’s library. Includes color illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Csapodi, Csaba. The Corvinian Library: History and Stock. Translated by Imre Gombos. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1973. The definitive descriptive and historical account of Matthias’s library. Provides valuable information on the scribes and illuminators of the books and where manuscripts are to be found. Provides an informed estimate that the Corvina originally contained at least twenty-five hundred manuscripts.

Feuer-Tóth, Rózsa. Art and Humanism in Hungary in the Age of Matthais Corvinus. Translated by Györgyi Jakobi. Edited by Péter Farbaky. Budapest, Hungary: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990. A study of Matthias’s court, his patronage of the arts, and the spread of Humanism in the Hungarian Renaissance. Include eight pages of photographic plates, illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Klaniczay, Tibor, and József Jankovics, eds. Matthias Corvinus and the Humanism in Central Europe. Budapest, Hungary: Balassi Kiadó, 1994. Anthology of essays originally presented at a conference on Matthias I and Humanism in Székesfehérvár, Hungary in May, 1990. Includes photographic plates, illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Kosáry, Dominic G. A History of Hungary. Foreword by Julius Szekfü. New York: Benjamin Franklin Bibliophile Society, 1941. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1971. An admiring but solid account of Matthias’s chief policies and achievements. Kosáry argues that Matthias’s efforts at erecting a central European empire of Austria and Bohemia, along with Hungary, was intended only as a prelude to ending decisively the Turkish threat in the south.

Kosztolynik, Zoltan J. “Some Hungarian Theologians in the Late Renaissance.” Church History 57 (1988): 5-18. A good overview of an important segment of intellectual life in Matthias’s Hungary, focused especially on the distinguished theologian Pelbart of Temesvar. Valuable for aspects of Matthias’s relationship with the Hungarian church, particularly in substantiating the underlying resentment and hostility of leading Hungarian churchmen toward their Renaissance king.

Sinor, Denis. History of Hungary. New York: Praeger, 1959. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976. The most balanced, scholarly, and informative account available in English. Provides a careful appraisal of the weaknesses as well as the strengths of Matthias’s impressive reign. Sinor argues, contrary to Kosáry, that Matthias’s pursuit of an elusive Hungarian empire that would include Austria and Bohemia was an end in itself, not directed toward building an anti-Turkish alliance.

Vámbéry, Arminius, with Louis Heilprin. The Story of Hungary. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1886. Reprinted as Hungary in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Times. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1972. Lacking a good modern biography in English, this rather uncritical treatment remains useful for the vivid, extensive detail relating to Matthias himself, especially the earlier years, on which little is available elsewhere.

Varga, Domokos G. Hungary in Greatness and Decline: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Translated by Martha S. Liptaks. Budapest, Hungary: Corvina Kiadó, 1982. The most extensive treatment available in English on the core period of Matthias’s regime. The main value of this work lies in its extensive citations of original chronicle sources and its excellent illustrations.