A Young King and a Great Soldier
In the half century of security that Hunyadi had won for Hungary, his son Matthias Corvinus brought the Hungarian nation to the high point of its history. Matthias was no more than sixteen when he took the throne (the book's figure), and he did not look the part of a king: his legs were short in proportion to his torso, so that he seemed tall only on horseback. Yet he had the chest, arms, strength and courage of a gladiator. Soon after his coronation he fought hand to hand with a German knight, a heavy and powerful man who had beaten every rival in a tournament at Buda. Before the fight Matthias threatened to have the knight punished unless he fought with all his strength and skill, and Hungarian historians assure us that the young king used this dilemma to defeat his gigantic opponent.
As an adult Matthias proved a good soldier and commander. Wherever he met the Turks he defeated them; he conquered Moravia and Silesia, though he could not take Bohemia. He fought Emperor Frederick III four times, took Vienna and annexed Austria (1485). In the book's phrase he was the first Austro-Hungarian emperor, and a Hungarian.
Centralized Rule and a Brilliant Court
His victories for a time made the crown stronger than the great lords. Here, as in western Europe, the central problem was the centralization of the state. At Buda and in the royal palace of Visegrád Matthias's court had the splendor of any court of the age. Nobles of every rank served him, and his ambassadors were famed for rich clothing, magnificent coaches and impressive retinues. His government was shrewd, informal, agreeable and generous; what war would have bought dearly he bought with money. At the same time he reorganized the whole machinery of the state and took on the labor of a careful administrator and impartial judge.
He went among the people, soldiers and courtiers in disguise, checking the conduct of his officials and correcting failures, incompetence and injustice without fear or favor. He did all he could to protect the weak against the strong and peasants against greedy lords. While the Church still claimed ownership of the land, Matthias deposed, appointed and disciplined clergy, and when he named a seven-year-old Italian boy archbishop in Hungary, the royal prank had the flavor of madness. The merchants of Ferrara, with a joke worthy of the appointment, sent the new archbishop a set of toys.
Beatrice of Aragon and the Italian Spirit
In 1476 Matthias married Beatrice of Aragon, a princess of Naples, and welcomed to Hungary the cheerful Neapolitan temperament and refined Italian taste of the granddaughter of Alfonso the Magnanimous. The marriage tied Hungary to Naples through the two kings' connection with the house of Anjou, and most of the great men at the court of Buda were Italian-educated. Matthias himself, in cultural tastes and in Machiavellian statecraft, resembled the "despots" of the Italian Renaissance. Lorenzo de' Medici sent him two bronze reliefs by Verrocchio. Ludovico il Moro commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint a Madonna for the king of Hungary, assuring the artist that Matthias recognized great pictures so well that few could equal him. Filippino Lippi also painted a Madonna for him, and his pupils decorated the royal palace at Esztergom with frescoes.
Art in Hungary
An Italian sculptor made a fine bust of Beatrice. It is thought that the famed Milanese goldsmith Caradosso designed at Esztergom a masterly Crucifixion. Benedetto da Maiano carved decorations for the king's palace at Buda, and various Italian artists built the altar niche of the church in the old part of the capital in Renaissance style.
Nobles and bishops followed the king in supporting artists and scholars, and even in the mining towns wealthy men devoted their fortunes to art. Handsome buildings, public and ecclesiastical, were raised not only in Buda but in Visegrád, Tata, Esztergom, Nagyvárad and Vác. Hundreds of sculptors and painters decorated them. Giovanni Dalmata carved reliefs of János Hunyadi and other Hungarian heroes. A true school of artists formed in Kassa (Košice), where "Master Stephen" and others carved the elaborate rear wall of the great altar of the church of St. Elizabeth (1474–1477), whose central statues match Italian sculpture in carving, grace and beauty. In the church of Besztercebánya (Banská Bystrica) another group carved a large stone relief, Christ on the Mount of Olives, remarkable for its exact detail and dramatic effect. Hungarian paintings surviving from that time show the same gripping intensity, as in the Visitation by the "Master M. S.," now in the museum at Budapest. Almost all the art of this brilliant period was destroyed or lost in the Turkish invasions of the sixteenth century. Some sculptures are in Istanbul, carried there by the conquerors.
Humanists and the Corvina Library
Matthias cared more for letters than for painting, sculpture or the other arts. He welcomed humanists, foreign and native, to his court and gave them adequate stipends from state revenue. Antonio Bonfini wrote a history of his reign in Latin in the manner of Livy. János Vitéz, archbishop of Esztergom, assembled a library of classics and set aside funds to send students to Italy to learn Greek. One of them, Janus Pannonius, spent seven years at Ferrara and won entry to Lorenzo's circle in Florence; when he returned to Hungary he amazed the courtiers with elegant Latin poems and letters in Greek.
Bonfini writes: "When Pannonius speaks Greek, one would think he was born in the heart of Athens." In the last quarter of the fifteenth century perhaps only in Italy could one find a gathering of scholars and artists like the one that drew its livelihood from the court of Matthias. The Danubian Literary Society, which according to the book was formed at Buda in 1497, is one of the oldest literary societies in the world.
Like the Medici of his time, Matthias collected books and works of art, and his palace became a museum of sculpture and art. According to tradition he spent 30,000 florins a year (about $750,000 in the book's conversion) on books, mostly costly illuminated religious manuscripts. Yet, like Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, he had nothing against printed books: in 1473, three years before printing reached England, he set up a press at Buda.
The Corvinus library, which held ten thousand volumes at his death, was the best of its kind outside Italy (the book says "of the fourteenth century," evidently meaning the fifteenth). The books stood in two great halls in the palace at Buda whose windows, with painted glass, looked on the Danube. The shelves were fully carved, and in front of the books, most of them bound in calfskin, hung velvet tapestries. Matthias seems to have read some of them; at least he used a Livy to induce sleep. He wrote to one humanist: "Ah, how fortunate you scholars are! You do not strive for a glory stained with blood; you do not seek a royal crown; your effort is to place on your heads the crown of the masters of poetry and virtue. You can even make us forget the tumult of war."
Collapse and the Peasant Revolt of 1514
The centralized power Matthias created lasted only a short while after his death (1490). Powerful nobles dominated Ladislaus II and pocketed the revenues that had paid for the army. The army refused obedience and the soldiers went home. The nobles, exempt from taxes, squandered their income and strength in debauchery while the armies of Islam pressed on the frontiers and exploited peasants nursed thoughts of revolution.
In 1514 the Hungarian Diet proclaimed a crusade against the Turks and called for volunteers. Peasants, for whom life and death made little difference, enlisted in crowds under the cross. Once armed, they began to ask why they should go to kill Turks when their hated native enemies, the lords, were so near. A soldier named György Dózsa led them in a savage kind of "Jacquerie." They trampled all of Hungary, burned castles and killed every noble they caught, men, women and children.
The nobles called for help from every quarter, hired and armed mercenaries, defeated the undisciplined and disorganized peasants, and punished their leaders with extreme cruelty. Dózsa was put to death in a ghastly public execution. As the author remarks, it is a long road from savagery to civilization, but only a step from civilization back to savagery.
The peasants as a whole were not massacred, because they could not be done without; but the "Tripartitum" law (1514) declared that "the late revolt ... has branded the peasants forever with the mark of faithlessness and treachery, and from this time they have lost their freedom and are forever, without any condition, slaves and servants of their lords ... everything, of whatever kind, is the absolute property of the lord, and the peasant has no right to it; nor may he bring suit against his lord." Twelve years later Hungary fell to the Ottoman Turks.