Matthias Corvinus

Matthias Corvinus was King of Hungary and Croatia from 1458 to 1490, and in his later years also ruled much of the lands of the Bohemian crown and eastern Austria, including Vienna. The son of a famous general rather than of a royal house, he built one of the first professional standing armies in Europe, strengthened royal power at the expense of the great barons and made his court at Buda the first centre of the Italian Renaissance north of the Alps. In Hungarian memory he is "Matthias the Just", though his wars were paid for by some of the heaviest taxes his subjects had ever known.

Matthias was born on 23 February 1443 in Kolozsvár, today Cluj-Napoca in Romania; one older source gives 1440, but 1443 is now generally accepted. He was the younger son of John Hunyadi, a nobleman of Wallachian descent who rose to become regent of Hungary and its leading commander against the Ottoman Empire, and of Elizabeth Szilágyi. With his father constantly at war, his education was overseen by his mother and by humanist scholars at the family court, among them the Polish scholar Gregory of Sanok and John Vitéz, later archbishop of Esztergom. He learned Latin and several modern languages and read widely in classical history and military writing.

Hunyadi died in August 1456, weeks after relieving the siege of Belgrade by Sultan Mehmed II. His elder son Ladislaus then killed the family's great enemy, Count Ulrich of Celje, the young king's uncle and chief adviser. In revenge, King Ladislaus V had Ladislaus Hunyadi beheaded in 1457 and held Matthias prisoner, taking him first to Vienna and then to Prague.

Ladislaus V died suddenly, childless, in November 1457. In January 1458 the Hungarian diet met at Pest, while Matthias's uncle Michael Szilágyi stood by with some 15,000 troops. The lesser nobility, gathered on the frozen Danube, acclaimed the fourteen-year-old Matthias king on 24 January. It was the first time a Hungarian noble without royal ancestry had been elected. He was released from Bohemian custody after his captor, George of Poděbrady, was promised a ransom and Matthias's marriage to his daughter, and he soon threw off his uncle's regency.

The early years were a fight for survival. A group of barons offered the throne to the emperor Frederick III, who held the Holy Crown of Hungary, without which a coronation was not considered lawful. Matthias bought the crown back for 80,000 florins under a treaty of 1463, accepting that Frederick would inherit Hungary if Matthias died without a son, and was crowned at Székesfehérvár in March 1464.

During Matthias's reign the Ottomans completed their conquest of Serbia and, in 1463, of Bosnia, destroying the ring of buffer states that had protected Hungary's south. Matthias answered by retaking part of northern Bosnia, including the fortress of Jajce, in 1463, and organised the southern border into a chain of fortified districts. In 1462 he had arrested his ally the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler and kept him captive for years, later releasing him to fight the Ottomans in 1476. Hungarian troops helped Stephen the Great of Moldavia to his victory at Vaslui in 1475, and in 1479 a Hungarian army under Paul Kinizsi and Stephen Báthory destroyed an Ottoman raiding force at Breadfield in Transylvania.

From the late 1460s, however, Matthias concluded that he could expect little help from the rest of Christendom and turned his main effort westwards, keeping the Ottoman frontier mostly on the defensive. Critics then and since have argued that he wasted Hungary's strength in the west; defenders reply that he needed a larger power base to face the sultan.

In 1468, at the urging of the pope and the emperor, Matthias declared war on his former father-in-law, George of Poděbrady, the Hussite king of Bohemia. The Catholic estates elected Matthias King of Bohemia in 1469, and he won Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia, but never Bohemia itself. After years of fighting, a settlement of 1478 and 1479 left him the outlying provinces while the Polish prince Vladislaus Jagiellon held Bohemia, both men using the royal title.

Matthias then turned on Frederick III. His armies overran Lower Austria and Styria, and after a five-month siege he entered Vienna on 1 June 1485 and made it his residence; Wiener Neustadt fell in 1487, and he took the title Duke of Austria. For a few years Hungary was the strongest power in central Europe.

The basis of this power was the mercenary force later called the Black Army, of Czech, German, Polish, Serbian and Hungarian soldiers, paid by the crown and loyal to it. At its height it may have numbered around 28,000 men, with heavy cavalry, light hussars, infantry, artillery and a river fleet on the Danube. Keeping it required money on a new scale. Matthias levied extraordinary taxes year after year, abolished old exemptions by renaming duties, and sometimes collected taxes without the consent of the diet. A revolt in Transylvania in 1467 was crushed, and in 1471 a conspiracy led by his old tutor Vitéz and the poet Janus Pannonius, who offered the crown to a Polish prince, collapsed.

He reorganised the chancery and the royal courts, promoted able men of modest birth, and in the mid-1480s had the diet pass a large law code, the Decretum maius. Peasants carried the heaviest share of the cost.

Matthias's second marriage, to Beatrice of Naples in 1476, strengthened his court's links with Italy, but his interest in humanist learning was older. He rebuilt the royal palaces at Buda and Visegrád in the new Italian style, employed Italian architects, sculptors and painters, and in 1485 tried to commission a painting from Leonardo da Vinci. Italian scholars such as the historian Antonio Bonfini lived at his court, and a short-lived university was founded at Pressburg, today Bratislava, in 1465. His library, the Bibliotheca Corviniana, held perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 volumes, many richly illuminated manuscripts made in Florence, and was among the largest in Europe. It was scattered after the Ottoman conquest of Buda; a little over 200 volumes survive, kept in libraries across Europe. Through this patronage Hungary became the first country outside Italy to take up the Renaissance. The name Corvinus, from the Latin for raven, came from the raven on his family's coat of arms.

Matthias suffered from gout in his last years and died suddenly in Vienna on 6 April 1490, probably of a stroke. He left only an illegitimate son, John Corvinus, whom the barons rejected. They chose the weaker Vladislaus Jagiellon, partly because he promised lower taxes, and the Black Army was disbanded. Vienna and the Austrian lands returned to the Habsburgs almost at once, and within decades Hungary's weakened state was defeated by the Ottomans at Mohács in 1526.

That catastrophe coloured Matthias's reputation. Folk tales show him wandering among his subjects in disguise and punishing unjust lords, and the saying that with his death justice died too became proverbial. Historians also note his ruthlessness and the burden of his taxes. His reign is remembered as the last great age of the medieval kingdom of Hungary, centred on the royal city that is now Budapest.