Matthias Corvinus: Renaissance King of Hungary, 1458–1490

Matthias Corvinus was King of Hungary from 1458 until his death in 1490. The son of the famous general John Hunyadi, he was elected king at the age of 14, built one of Europe’s first professional standing armies, conquered Vienna and made his court at Buda a leading centre of the Renaissance outside Italy. In Hungarian memory he remains the archetypal just king.

Background and election

Matthias was born on 23 February 1443 in Kolozsvár, today Cluj-Napoca in Romania. His father, John Hunyadi, was the leading Hungarian general of his day and regent of the kingdom from 1446 to 1452. After Hunyadi’s death following his victory at the siege of Belgrade in 1456, the family’s enemies struck. Matthias’s elder brother László was executed in March 1457 on the orders of King Ladislaus V, and Matthias himself was taken prisoner.

When Ladislaus died unexpectedly in November 1457, the Hunyadi family and its allies, led by Matthias’s uncle Mihály Szilágyi, pressed his claim. On 24 January 1458 the Hungarian nobility, gathered at Pest, elected Matthias king. According to tradition, the lesser nobles assembled on the frozen Danube to acclaim him. He was then a hostage of George of Poděbrady, the regent of Bohemia, who released him and arranged his marriage to his daughter Catherine.

Securing the crown

The young king faced powerful opponents. A group of barons offered the Hungarian crown to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, who also held the Holy Crown of Hungary, the object then considered necessary for a lawful coronation. Matthias first freed himself from his uncle’s regency and then fought and negotiated with his rivals.

In 1463 the Treaty of Wiener Neustadt returned the Holy Crown to Hungary in exchange for 80,000 gold florins and a promise that Frederick or his heirs would inherit the throne if Matthias died without a legitimate son. Matthias was crowned at Székesfehérvár on 29 March 1464. In late 1463 he also recaptured the fortress of Jajce in Bosnia from the Ottomans.

The Black Army and royal power

To rule independently of the barons, Matthias needed money and soldiers. He reformed taxation, introducing new royal taxes and collecting them more effectively, which made him unpopular with many nobles and clergy. In 1471 even his former tutor, Archbishop János Vitéz, and the humanist poet Janus Pannonius joined a conspiracy against him.

The revenue paid for a standing mercenary army, later called the Black Army. It included heavy cavalry, light hussars, infantry armed with handguns and pikes, and artillery. At its height it numbered perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 men, an exceptional force for Central Europe at the time.

Wars and conquests

Matthias used his army mostly in the west rather than against the Ottomans. In 1468 he went to war with George of Poděbrady, the Hussite king of Bohemia, in a war encouraged by the pope. Catholic Bohemian nobles elected Matthias king of Bohemia at Olomouc in 1469, but the Bohemian heartland accepted Vladislaus II of the Jagiellonian dynasty after George’s death in 1471. The Peace of Olomouc in 1479 left Matthias with Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia.

He then turned against Frederick III. After years of campaigning, his army captured Vienna in 1485, and Matthias made the city one of his residences. Wiener Neustadt fell in 1487, giving him control of much of Lower Austria.

On the southern frontier Matthias generally preferred defence. His commanders, including Pál Kinizsi and Stephen Báthory, won a major victory over Ottoman raiders at the Battle of Breadfield (Kenyérmező) in Transylvania on 13 October 1479. In 1462 Matthias imprisoned the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler, who had come to him for help.

Renaissance court and the Corvina library

Matthias’s second marriage, in 1476, to Beatrice of Naples, daughter of King Ferdinand I of Naples, strengthened links with Italy. Italian architects, sculptors and scholars came to Buda and Visegrád, where royal palaces were rebuilt in Renaissance style. The Italian humanist Antonio Bonfini wrote a history of Hungary at the court.

The most famous achievement was the royal library, the Bibliotheca Corviniana. It probably contained about 2,000 to 2,500 volumes, many of them richly illuminated manuscripts made in Florence and Buda, covering classical literature, theology, philosophy, astronomy and medicine. After 1526 the library was dispersed and largely destroyed during the Ottoman conquest. Around 200 manuscripts survive in libraries across Europe and are known as Corvinas. In 2005 they were added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.

Key people

• Matthias Corvinus (1443–1490): King of Hungary and, from 1469, claimant King of Bohemia.
• John Hunyadi: His father, general and regent of Hungary.
• Frederick III: Holy Roman Emperor and Matthias’s main rival in the west.
• Beatrice of Naples: His second wife, who brought Italian influence to the court.
• John Corvinus: His illegitimate son, whom he hoped would succeed him.

Death and succession

Matthias died in Vienna on 6 April 1490, probably of a stroke. He had no legitimate son, and his efforts to secure the succession for his illegitimate son, John Corvinus, failed. The Hungarian nobles chose Vladislaus II Jagiellon, the king of Bohemia, partly because he was expected to be weak and to lower taxes.

The Black Army was disbanded after it was left unpaid, the Austrian conquests were lost, and royal revenue fell sharply. Many historians link this decline to Hungary’s later defeat by the Ottomans. The Ottoman capture of Belgrade in 1521 and the Battle of Mohács in 1526 ended the independent medieval kingdom.

Timeline

• 1443, 23 February: Matthias is born in Kolozsvár.
• 1457, March: His brother László Hunyadi is executed.
• 1458, 24 January: Matthias is elected King of Hungary.
• 1464, 29 March: He is crowned with the Holy Crown at Székesfehérvár.
• 1469: He is elected King of Bohemia by Catholic nobles at Olomouc.
• 1476: He marries Beatrice of Naples.
• 1479: Peace of Olomouc; victory at Breadfield over Ottoman raiders.
• 1485: Matthias captures Vienna.
• 1490, 6 April: Matthias dies in Vienna.

Legacy

Folk tales present Matthias as a king who wandered in disguise among ordinary people and punished greedy nobles, and he is known as Matthias the Just. A Hungarian saying holds that “King Matthias is dead, justice is gone”. His image appears on monuments such as the statue in his birthplace, Cluj-Napoca, and the Matthias Fountain at Buda Castle.

Historians take a more mixed view. Matthias is admired as a capable soldier, an able diplomat and a generous patron of learning, and his court helped spread humanist scholarship and Renaissance art into Central Europe. At the same time, his heavy taxes weighed on peasants and towns, and critics argue that his long wars in Bohemia and Austria drained resources that could have been used to strengthen the southern frontier against the Ottomans.

Others reply that Matthias understood that Hungary alone could not defeat the Ottoman Empire, and that his western conquests were meant to build a Central European power large enough to do so, possibly with the imperial title as the final aim. Whatever his intentions, the system he created depended heavily on his own personality and did not survive him.

The legend of the just king partly grew out of this contrast. Under the weak Jagiellonian kings who followed him, royal authority declined, the nobility became more powerful and the burdens on peasants increased, culminating in the great peasant revolt of 1514. Looking back, many Hungarians remembered Matthias’s reign as a time of strong government and national greatness.

Why it matters

Matthias Corvinus turned Hungary, for a generation, into one of the strongest states in Central Europe and brought the Italian Renaissance north of the Alps earlier than almost anywhere else. His reign also shows the limits of personal power: built on one ruler’s energy and heavy taxation, his achievements largely collapsed after his death.