Matthias Corvinus
Matthias Corvinus was King of Hungary and Croatia from 1458 to 1490, and he died in the city he had conquered - Vienna - under circumstances his doctors still dispute to this day. Some said it was a stroke. Others refused to rule out poison. The rotten fig he tasted at a Palm Sunday ceremony was the last thing he ate before losing his voice and then his life.
He was 14 years old when he became king - not through inheritance but by acclamation on a frozen river in January 1458, while 15,000 armed soldiers surrounded the noblemen who had assembled to vote. He had been a prisoner months before that. His older brother had been beheaded. His father was already dead. What follows is the story of how a teenage captive built one of medieval Europe's earliest professional standing armies, turned Hungary into the first country outside Italy to embrace the Renaissance, and earned a reputation so contradictory that peasants cursed him for crushing taxes even as the same people mourned him with the saying "Dead is Matthias, lost is justice."
Matthias was born in Kolozsvár, now Cluj-Napoca in Romania, on the 23rd of February 1443. His father, John Hunyadi, was Regent of Hungary - one of the most powerful men in the kingdom - and died on the 11th of August 1456, less than three weeks after his greatest victory over the Ottomans at Belgrade. The death left the family exposed.
The trouble came quickly. In November 1456, Matthias's older brother Ladislaus killed a man named Ulrich of Celje, who was connected to King Ladislaus the Posthumous. The King had promised not to take revenge, but by March 1457, the Hunyadi brothers were imprisoned in Buda. Ladislaus was beheaded two days after his arrest, on the 16th of March, condemned by the royal council for high treason. Matthias, younger and still a boy, was spared.
King Ladislaus then took Matthias with him from Vienna to Prague, where the Hussite Regent of Bohemia, George of Poděbrady, held him as a political asset. The King died unexpectedly on the 23rd of November 1457, childless. That sudden vacuum opened the path to a throne that nobody had seriously expected Matthias to occupy. His uncle Michael Szilágyi had been waging a rebellion in eastern Hungary and arrived at the Diet of Hungary in Pest with 15,000 troops. The noblemen, intimidated and politically exhausted, gathered on the frozen River Danube and unanimously proclaimed the 14-year-old king on the 24th of January 1458.
George of Poděbrady released Matthias for a ransom of 60,000 gold florins, with Matthias promising to marry his daughter. Matthias arrived in Buda on the 14th of February 1458 and took his seat in the Church of Our Lady. Within two weeks, he had begun administering state affairs independently - and within months he had dismissed the uncle who put him there.
One of Matthias's first domestic tests was John Jiskra of Brandýs, the Czech mercenary commander who controlled most of Upper Hungary and who offered the throne to the King of Poland in late March 1458. The General sejm of Poland declined the offer, but Jiskra remained a thorn for years - at one point capturing the town of Késmárk. In 1460, when Jiskra swore loyalty to Emperor Frederick III, Matthias had to fight on that front too.
The Emperor was a persistent rival. As early as February 1459, at least 30 barons gathered in Németújvár - now Güssing in Austria - and offered the Hungarian crown to Frederick. The Emperor accepted and even allied with the Czech mercenaries against Matthias. Skirmishes continued for years before an April 1462 agreement set the terms: Matthias would pay 80,000 golden florins for the return of the Holy Crown of Hungary, and Frederick would keep the right to call himself King of Hungary alongside him. Frederick also formally adopted Matthias, making him a potential imperial heir - an arrangement that suited both sides, at least for the moment. The peace was ratified at Wiener Neustadt on the 19th of July 1463.
The Ottoman threat ran in parallel throughout. The empire had seized Smederevo, completing its conquest of Serbia, on the 29th of June 1459, and invaded Bosnia in 1463, murdering King Stephen Tomašević and taking the entire country in under a month. After the peace with Frederick was signed, Matthias moved into Bosnia and seized Jajce and other northern forts. But he understood quickly that no substantial help was coming from Christian powers in the west. He signed a peace with Mehmed II's envoy who arrived in 1465, and the two sides largely held off major offensives against each other for the next several years.
In 1467, his tax reforms sparked a revolt in Transylvania. The representatives of the three nations of the province - the noblemen, the Saxons, and the Székelys - formed an alliance against him on the 18th of August. Matthias moved fast, subdued the revolt without pitched battle, and then punished the leaders with methods the source describes as severe: many were impaled, beheaded, or tortured. Suspecting Stephen the Great of Moldavia had aided the rebels, Matthias invaded Moldavia. On the night of the 15th of December, Stephen's troops caught the Hungarian forces by surprise in the town of Baia. Matthias counterattacked and forced a retreat, but suffered a serious injury in the fighting.
Matthias's war for the Lands of the Bohemian Crown began on the 31st of March 1468, when he declared war on King George of Bohemia - a Hussite whom the Pope had excommunicated. His stated motivation was to support the Czech Catholic lords, but Emperor Frederick's suggestion that Matthias might be elected King of the Romans was also in the air.
The campaign was reckless in ways that illuminate his character. He was injured at the siege of Třebíč in May 1468. In February 1469, while spying out an enemy camp in disguise, he was captured at Chrudim. He escaped by convincing his captors he was a local Czech groom. When his allied forces were then encircled by George of Poděbrady's army at Vilémov, Matthias opened negotiations - meeting his former father-in-law in a nearby hovel and persuading him to sign an armistice.
On the 3rd of May 1469, the Czech Catholic Estates proclaimed Matthias King of Bohemia in Olomouc. He was never crowned. Moravia, Silesia, and Lusatia accepted him, but Bohemia proper did not. When George of Poděbrady died on the 22nd of March 1471, the Bohemian Diet elected Vladislaus Jagiellon, son of the King of Poland, as his successor. A papal legate declared this election void, but the Imperial Diet rejected Matthias's claim all the same.
The internal threat came next. Archbishop John Vitéz and his nephew Janus Pannonius, Bishop of Pécs, had organized a conspiracy to offer the Hungarian throne to a Polish prince named Casimir. Most of the Estates initially supported them, but no one moved against Matthias openly when he returned to Hungary. He held a Diet, made promises about not levying taxes without consent, and watched as nearly 50 barons reaffirmed their loyalty to him on the 21st of September 1471. Casimir Jagiellon invaded two weeks later, seized Nyitra, and then withdrew within five months. Janus Pannonius died while fleeing. John Vitéz was confined to his see and died within a year.
Matthias concluded a formal division of the Bohemian lands with Vladislaus Jagiellon in 1478, ratified at a meeting in Olomouc on the 21st of July. Vladislaus kept Bohemia proper; Matthias kept Moravia, Silesia, and Lusatia. Both could call themselves King of Bohemia.
Matthias had begun organizing the professional force that would become known as the Black Army as early as 1462, hiring mercenaries from among Jiskra's disbanded troops after the Czech commander surrendered his forts. By the time Matthias turned his attention to Austria, the army was a seasoned instrument.
The war against Emperor Frederick began in earnest in 1482. The Black Army had already been at siege of Hainburg an der Donau in January of that year; Matthias officially declared war three months later and directed the fighting in person from late June. Hainburg fell in October. Sankt Veit an der Glan, Enzersdorf an der Fischa, and Kőszeg followed in the next three months. Vienna itself was encircled in January 1485. The siege lasted five months. On the 1st of June 1485, Matthias rode into Vienna at the head of 8,000 veterans. He moved the royal court to the conquered city and summoned the Estates of Lower Austria to swear loyalty to him.
Wiener Neustadt, the last town holding out in Lower Austria, fell on the 17th of August 1487. Matthias assumed the title of Duke of Austria that same year. He was negotiating to become Frederick's designated heir and possibly inheritor of the title of Holy Roman Emperor when he died in Vienna on the 6th of April 1490.
The Black Army outlived him by only two years. Vladislaus Jagiellon, who was elected king after Matthias's death partly because the barons saw him as pliable, could not pay the mercenaries. The unpaid army began plundering the countryside. A royal force under Paul Kinizsi destroyed them on the river Száva in 1492. Vienna and Wiener Neustadt returned to Habsburg control without resistance, and the conquests of a reign vanished within months.
Hungary became the first country outside Italy to embrace the Renaissance under Matthias - a fact that requires some unpacking. His marriage to Beatrice of Naples in 1476 deepened Italian influence, but the inclination had begun earlier. The Italian scholar Marsilio Ficino introduced Matthias to Plato's ideas of the philosopher-king who unites wisdom with strength. That idea appealed to him.
The building projects at Buda and Visegrád began around 1479. Two new wings and a hanging garden were added to the royal castle at Buda; the palace at Visegrád was rebuilt in Renaissance style. Matthias appointed the Italian Chimenti Camicia and the Dalmatian Giovanni Dalmata to lead the work. He commissioned the sculptor Benedetto da Majano, and the painters Filippino Lippi and Andrea Mantegna, to decorate the palaces. In the spring of 1485, he decided to commission Leonardo da Vinci to paint a Madonna for him.
The royal library, the Bibliotheca Corviniana, was one of the largest book collections in Europe at his death. Matthias began systematic acquisition around 1465, when his first librarian, Martius Galeotti from Ferrara, arrived. Taddeo Ugoleto succeeded Galeotti in 1471 and maintained an active correspondence with the Florentine Francesco Bandini, who kept him informed of new manuscripts. The surviving 216 volumes show, according to Marcus Tanner, that Matthias had the tastes of a classic reader who preferred secular books to devotional ones. A Latin translation of Xenophon's biography of Cyrus the Great survived, as did a copy of Roberto Valturio's military treatise and a work on the Second Punic War that Matthias received with thanks from the Italian scholar Pomponio Leto.
The court's musicians were equally exceptional. The master of the Papal Chapel, Bartolomeo Maraschi, described Matthias's chapel choir as the best he had ever heard. Composers Josquin Dor and Johannes de Stokem both spent time at court. A later remark by an Archbishop of Esztergom implies that the influential composer Josquin des Prez was active at Matthias's court for years in the 1480s, though documentary proof is absent.
Astrology was as important to Matthias as art. Antonio Bonfini said Matthias "never did anything without consulting the stars". Upon his request, the astronomers Johannes Regiomontanus and Marcin Bylica set up an observatory in Buda equipped with astrolabes and celestial globes. Regiomontanus dedicated his navigation book - later used by Christopher Columbus - to Matthias. Bylica was appointed as royal advisor in 1468.
The contradiction at the heart of Matthias's reign is sharpest in how his subjects remembered him. The Chronicle of Dubnic, written in eastern Hungary in 1479, records "widows and orphans" cursing the King for tax burdens. Peasants paid at least 85% of his taxes. His ordinary revenues stood around 250,000 golden florins per year at the start of his reign. By the time Beatrice had arrived and the royal court had grown more sumptuous, a contemporaneous record put his revenues at about 500,000 florins - half of it from the treasury tax and extraordinary levies.
And yet the saying that spread after his death was "Dead is Matthias, lost is justice." The folk figure of Matthias the Just - a monarch who wandered his realm in disguise to deliver fair verdicts to ordinary people - took hold during his own lifetime. The same king who had rebels tortured and impaled was remembered as the commoners' champion. His legal reforms supported the image: he united the superior courts of justice into one supreme court, diminishing the authority of the baronial courts, and the Decretum maius of 1485 replaced a tangle of contradictory decrees with a coherent law code that abolished certain onerous practices and strengthened county courts.
He also reduced the power of the barons as a class, promoted people of talent from the lesser nobility and even from common backgrounds, and appointed the converted merchant John Ernuszt to administer the Crown's customs - a role that eventually expanded to oversight of all ordinary and extraordinary taxes and the salt mines. Matthias held more than 25 Diets during his reign, convening the Estates more frequently than his predecessors.
His nickname Corvinus - Latin for raven - came from the raven on his family coat of arms. The chronicler Antonio Bonfini used it to construct a genealogy connecting the Hunyadi family to the ancient Roman patrician clan of the Corvinus name, tracing the line back to the legendary Marcus Valerius Corvus. For Matthias, who faced aristocratic disdain for his family's origins, a claimed descent from Roman nobility was politically useful. He embraced it fully, and the name outlasted every other piece of the image he built. Stephen Zápolya reportedly said after the king's death that Matthias had relieved Hungary "of the trouble and oppression from which it had suffered so far" - but folk tales across Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia went on telling a different story, one where the king in disguise was still wandering the countryside looking for wrongs to set right.
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Common questions
Who was Matthias Corvinus and why is he called "the Just"?
Matthias Corvinus was King of Hungary and Croatia from 1458 to 1490. He earned the epithet "the Just" from folk tales depicting him as a monarch who wandered his realm in disguise to deliver fair verdicts to ordinary people; the saying "Dead is Matthias, lost is justice" spread widely after his death in 1490.
How did Matthias Corvinus become King of Hungary at age 14?
Matthias Corvinus was proclaimed king on the 24th of January 1458 after his uncle Michael Szilágyi arrived at the Diet of Hungary in Pest with 15,000 troops and intimidated the assembled barons into a unanimous vote. His older brother had been executed in March 1457 and King Ladislaus the Posthumous died unexpectedly in November 1457, leaving the throne vacant.
What was the Bibliotheca Corviniana?
The Bibliotheca Corviniana was the royal library of Matthias Corvinus and one of the largest book collections in Europe at the time of his death in 1490. Matthias began building it around 1465 under his first librarian Martius Galeotti from Ferrara; 216 volumes have survived, showing a preference for secular works including classical military treatises and histories.
What was the Black Army of Hungary under Matthias Corvinus?
The Black Army was a professional standing mercenary force that Matthias Corvinus began organizing around 1462, recruiting from the disbanded Czech mercenaries of John Jiskra. It was one of the earliest professional standing armies of medieval Europe and was used to conquer Vienna in 1485 and Lower Austria by 1487; after Matthias died in 1490, the unpaid army turned to plunder and was destroyed on the river Száva in 1492.
How did Matthias Corvinus promote the Renaissance in Hungary?
Matthias Corvinus made Hungary the first country outside Italy to embrace the Renaissance. He commissioned artists including Filippino Lippi, Andrea Mantegna, and Benedetto da Majano, rebuilt the palace at Visegrád in Renaissance style beginning around 1479, and in 1485 decided to commission Leonardo da Vinci to paint a Madonna. His marriage to Beatrice of Naples in 1476 deepened Italian cultural influence at his court.
How did Matthias Corvinus die?
Matthias Corvinus died on the 6th of April 1490 in Vienna. He participated in a Palm Sunday ceremony despite feeling ill, tasted a rotten fig, and lost consciousness the following day. Professor Frigyes Korányi concluded he died of a stroke; Dr. Herwig Egert did not exclude the possibility of poisoning. He was buried at Székesfehérvár Cathedral on 24 or the 25th of April 1490.
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11 references cited across the entry
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- 7bookThe Causes of War: Volume III: 1400 CE to 1650 CEAlexander Gillespie — Bloomsbury Publishing — 2017
- 8bookUseful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750Noel Malcolm — Oxford University Press — 2019
- 9bookIrodalomtörténeti Közlemények, 102 (5-6)György Dr. Szabados — MTA Irodalomtudományi Intézet (Institute for Literary Studies of Hungarian Academy of Sciences) — 1998
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