Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary
Today we will talk a lot about Matthias Corvinus, the legendary renaissance king of Hungary whose library outshone that of the Medici in Florence and whose standing army was one of the greatest – and most expensive – military forces in 15th century Europe.
Why are we talking about a Hungarian ruler in a series about the Habsburgs? Trust me, there is a good reason beyond it being a fascinating life story.
Ep. 212: Matthias Corvinus (1443-1490) – The Library of the Raven King – History of the Germans
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 212 – The Library of the Raven King, also Episode 10 of Season 11: The Fall and Rise of the House of Habsburg.
Today we will talk a lot about Matthias Corvinus, the legendary renaissance king of Hungary whose library outshone that of the Medici in Florence and whose standing army was one of the greatest – and most expensive – military forces in 15th century Europe.
Why are we talking about a Hungarian ruler in a series about the Habsburgs? Trust me, there is a good reason beyond it being a fascinating life story.
But before we start, it is just me in my saffron robes holding out my begging bowl. I cannot offer the Dhamma, the teachings of the Buddha nor can I explain the principles that help you live a fulfilling life. All I can offer in return is the absence of ever more hyperbolic praise for humdrum consumer products, let alone promotion of sports betting sites, which is today the #2 podcast advertiser. If that is enough for you and you want to drop your grains of rice into my bowl, you can do so at historyofthegermans.com/support. And there you can join the immensely generous: Kliment M., Michael N., Sofia G., Tobias P., Ben H., Paul-James V. and Scott P.
And with that, back to the show.
Last week we ended on a cliffhanger. Emperor Friedrich III and his young family were huddling together in the cellars of the Hofburg as cannon pounded the ancient fortress. Walls and towers were crumbling and one errant projectile, one falling piece of masonry or the simple lack of food could have wiped out the dynasty that was destined to rule half of Europe.
How did they get out? Was it the citizens of Vienna realizing they had gone too far? Or the emperor’s brother, the archduke Albrecht VI putting family ahead of personal ambition?
No, help came from one of the least probable corners, from Georg of Podiebrad, the king of Bohemia. Georg, you may remember, had put his name forward as King of the Romans in an attempt to fill the vacuum the 15 year absence of the emperor from the Reich had created. And in this attempt to rise to the title, Georg had allied with Friedrich’s arch enemies, the Wittelsbachs, namely Ludwig the Rich of Bayern-Landshut and Friedrich the Victorious, Count Palatine on the Rhine, and – who would believe it – the emperor’s brother and besieger.
Still, in December 1462 Georg or more precisely his Victorin showed up outside Vienna with of a force of his dreaded Bohemian fighters and demanded that Friederich and Albrecht made peace. Under the watchful eye of the Bohemians, the brothers signed an agreement whereby Albrecht was given control of the whole of the duchy Austria including the city of Vienna for eight years in exchange for a substantial annual payment to Friedrich.
And so the emperor Friedrich III, his wife Eleanor and his son Maximilian were allowed to leave the smoldering ruins of the Hofburg. Teeth clenched and full of anger and hatred, they had to walk the gauntlet of the citizens of Vienna who hissed at them, saying, go back to Graz, seemingly a place so barbarous, no upstanding Viennese felt was fit for human habitation.
Friedrich immediately swore revenge and the war of the brothers continued for another 12 months. In these 12 months Friedrich made some progress, as usual not through action, but through the actions of his enemies. Albrecht VI managed to irritate the Viennese in record time, so that the mayor, Wolfgang Holzer opened secret negotiations inviting Friedrich III to return. Albrecht got wind of that and had Holzer and two of his colleagues torn limb from limb. A move that was not universally popular in the capital. Before the Viennese could gather their spikes and pitchforks to take revenge on their ungraceful lord, Albrecht VI died, of an infection, the bubonic plague or poison, whatever – he was dead.
By 1464 Friedrich III was back in Vienna, as if nothing had happened, well, he did not go back to Vienna obviously since the Hofburg was still in ruins and memories were fresh, but metaphorically and politically, yes, he was back.
But that does not answer the more fundamental question, why did Georg of Podiebrad help Friedrich III? Why did he not just let the stubborn emperor get buried under the rubble of his superannuated castle?
Episode 210 – Ladislaus PostumusThat gets us back to the circumstances that had brought Georg of Podiebrad to the throne of Bohemia. Georg, as we have heard, had not an ounce of royal blood in his veins. He had been elevated to the title because he had exercised de facto control of Bohemia for more than a decade already. When the nominal king of Bohemia, Ladislaus Postumus, died, the estates of Bohemia preferred the devil they knew to some hereditary claimant like Friedrich III, Kasimir of Poland or the duke of Saxony they didn’t.
Podiebrad had managed to walk a thin tightrope between the two main political factions, the moderate Hussites, known as the Utraquists, and the old school Catholics. The Utraquists had emerged from the heretical Hussite movement that had taken control of the kingdom in 1420 and that no catholic army could overthrow. In 1436 the council of Basel had agreed the Compacta with the Hussites, an agreement that readmitted them into the church, and allowed them certain Hussite practices, such as the eucharist in the form of bread and wine. Hence the name Utraquists, which translates as “under both kinds”.
Georg had been the leader of the Utraquists but through a sequence of military successes and subsequent compromises had gained acceptance by the Catholics in Bohemia as well. By 1462, when Podiebrad appeared before Vienna, this political construct had come under ever increasing pressure, not from the emperor or any of the other frustrated candidates, or from within, but from the papacy.
Ever since Friedrich had signed the concordat of Vienna, the papacy had gained the upper hand over the conciliar movement. The Roman Curia began to systematically dismantle the reforms that had been agreed at Basel. One of the decisions the popes, in particular pope Pius II, aka Silvio Piccolomini, wanted to reverse was the compacta that allowed Hussitism to exist, even in its massively watered down form.
Before his coronation, the papal nuncio had made Georg of Podiebrad swear a secret oath that he would suppress the Hussite religion. Georg did swear the oath but crossed his fingers behind his back, since executing the wish of the Roman pontiff would have been obvious political suicide.
Georg needed to find a way to legitimize his rule without suppressing his own people, the Utraquists. Which is why he became keen to be elected King of the Romans. If that had worked out, he would have been largely immune from papal excommunication. I have not done the numbers, but by my estimate, more than half of the rulers of the empire since Henry IV had been excommunicated at one point or another, and all of them had held on to their crowns, except for Otto IV.
The other way he hoped to inveigle his way into the hearts of the Roman prelates was by promising to fight against the Turks. Bohemia had at the time the most effective war machine in western europe making this a valuable offer.
And then there was another player who could provide Georg with his much needed air cover, and that was the emperor Friedrich III himself. For one, Friedrich III was the emperor and Bohemia was part of the Holy Roman Empire. As long as Friedrich recognized Georg as king, Georg was the legitimate king. Moreover, in 1462 the pope was Pius II, aka the former chief secretary of the emperor, Silvio Piccolomini. Doing the emperor a big favour might keep the pope from going all guns blazing after the Hussites and after himself.
And the other question is, what happened if Friedrich managed to get out of Vienna under his own steam? If he found Georg on the side of his enemies, he would almost certainly ban him and encourage the pope to excommunicate him and depose him. And that could easily lead to an uprising of the Catholics inside Bohemia, plus an invasion by his rapacious catholic neighbors.
So, much better to gain eternal imperial gratitude as the white knight who had come to the rescue. And that is why Friedrich III did not end up dead under a pile of rubble.
Georg’s search for legitimacy of his kingship stayed within the established legal and cultural frameworks of the Late Middle Ages. As far as he could make out, it was the Popes and emperors who ultimately decided what was right in the eyes of god, and hence what was right in the eyes of men.
But we are in the year 1462, the year when Piero della Francesco painted his Madonna della Misericordia, Mantegna began work on the Camera degli Sposi in Mantua, Botticelli was apprenticed to Filippo Lippi and Leon Battista Alberti had published his book on architecture. The Humanists had learned Greek from the envoys of the emperor of Constantinople and were compiling the definitive versions of the works of the great philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus and all the others. And these definitive versions were coming off the printing presses that had been running for a decade now. The world was changing. The Renaissance was not just coming, it was here.
Which gets us to Georg’s colleague, Matthias Hunyadi, the 15 year-old who had been made king of Hungary about the same time as Georg had become king of Bohemia.
And when Georg had an issue with legitimacy, young Hunyadi had the same problem, but tenfold.
When Georg became king he had ruled Bohemia already for a decade. Matthias on the other hand was a boy of 15 with no experience or track record. His only claim to fame was descent from Janos Hunyadi, the hero of Belgrade. It was his uncle, the commander of the Belgrade garrison, who used his substantial influence to get the magnates to elect him. This uncle may have believed he would be rewarded with at lest a few years of regency on behalf of his nephew, but found himself instead confronted with the harshness of Matthias character. The young king sent him off to defend the border in Serbia where the Ottomans promptly captured and decapitated him.
In light of these events, several senior magnates became unsure about young Matthias, left Buda and elected of all people, Friedrich III as king of Hungary. What made this an even more serious challenge to the son of Janos Hunyadi was that Friedrich had the crown of St. Steven. You may remember that 28 years earlier the mother of the boy king Ladislaus Postumus got her lady in waiting to steal the crown of St. Steven to prevent the coronation of the Polish king as king of Hungary. That particular part of the plot failed, but the crown of St. Steven had remained in Vienna all that time. Friedrich III now had it and used it to get crowned as king of Hungary.
As usual, this was the maximum extent of Friedrich’s activity as king of Hungary. He fortified the castles he already held in the west of the country and went home to Wiener Neustadt for more gardening.
That allowed Matthias and his advisers to stabilize the situation and regain the confidence of several of the magnates who had rebelled. But the issue of the crown remained.
These crowns were not just decorative objects, but spiritual ones as well. They contained relics, they were linked to saints, in this case Saint Steven of Hungary, and over the long period that Hungary was ruled by foreign families, had become the symbol of the state itself.
We have already seen that Karl IV had quite deliberately made the Crown of St. Wenceslaus the object that the Kingdom of Bohemia rallied around, rather than the person of the king. In Hungary that process had not been that deliberate, but the result was similar. Only a king who walked under the crown of St. Steven was the real king.
And that applied even more to a king who had no royal blood. Matthias needed the crown of St. Steven if he wanted to make sure his kingdom and his dynasty would endure.
And in 1463 he got it back. Matthias had been negotiating with Friedrich III for years over his claim to be king of Hungary and the crown. And as always, Friedrich had blocked and insisted on his rights, even when he had no chance at all of turning them into tangible power. But when Friedrich returned from his ordeal in the Hofburg he was ready to trade. For the right sum, a sum large enough to muster an army against his hated brother, he would hand over the saintly headgear. 80,000 gulden was the price, and some minor small print. Friedrich was allowed to retain a few Hungarian counties and castles, places he had held since 1440 anyway. And just one minor thing – Friedrich was allowed to retain the title of a king of Hungary and if Matthias would die without heir, Friedrich would inherit Hungary.
That should have been one of those completely out of the money options that were practically worthless. Matthias was 20 years old, Friedrich was 48. Matthias had just got engaged to Catherine, the daughter of Georg of Podiebrad, 14 years old and ready to produce heirs. What were the chances that Friedrich would outlive Matthias and that Matthias would have no legitimate children. Yeah, what were the chances indeed?
The crown of St. Stephen did help Matthias to establish his right to rule Hungary, but that was by no means enough.
The Magnates of Hungary, the 60 families that controlled this enormous kingdom that at the time comprised not just modern day Hungary, but also Slovakia, Croatia and Transylvania, they did not regard the Hunyadis as equals. Matthias had not been born in a massive castle in the Hungarian plain, but in the house of a well-to-do wine grower in a city that is now in Romania where it is called Cluj-Napoco, but is known to Hungarians as Kolozsvár and to Germans as Klausenburg. This was and is one of these regions of Europe that are heavily contested between various ethnic groups, including the Siebenbürger Sachsen who had come there in the 13th century. There is no way I can get through this story as a sidebar in this episode, so we just leave it at that.
Matthias Hunyadi was born in Transsylvania. His father, though a great hero, had come from a family of lower nobility who had risen to prominence and enormous wealth under Sigismund’s reign as king of Hungary. A hero, sure, but still, not exactly the right sort of chap. Even if his son now carried the most holy crown of St. Stephen on his head underneath it he was still the same old chav.
What Matthias needed was a way to bend the magnates to his will. And not just one way, but preferably a whole set of tools. And since Matthias was a very smart guy, educated by one of Hungary’s most learned and most astute churchmen, he came up with several.
The first one was to style himself as Europe’s bulwark against the infidels. In 1456 Hungary had – again – stood alone against the Ottomans coming up the Balkans. And since the empire was unable to get its act together and neither Bohemia nor Poland really helped, Matthias could quite credibly claim that he, and only he, was the shield of Christendom. And that was a claim that resonated very strongly in Italy.
We tend to forget how close the Ottoman empire was to Italy, in particular southern Italy. The Straight of Otranto is the narrowest point of the Adriatic where just 45 miles separate the coast of Italy from Albania. I have been to Otranto and you can actually see the mountains of Albania from there. For now Skanderbeg, the most successful Albanian leader of the period was winning his battles against Mehmed II, but he died in 1468 and from then onwards an Ottoman invasion into Italy became a possibility, a possibility that materialised in 1480, when Ottoman troops took the city of Otranto in Puglia.
Long story short, the Italians were a lot more concerned about an Ottoman invasion than the rest of Western Europe. Byzantine exiles from Constantinople had been stirring up fear of the alleged barbaric turks for decades. Their pupils, the Italian humanists would write long elegies about the Hunyadis and their valiant defence of Christendom against these vicious fiends. The popes in particular bought into that sentiment and supported a united and powerful Hungary. And as long as Matthias was the most likely person to keep Hungary together and ready to fight, the popes held their hand over the young king, come what may.
The second pillar of his regime was the army. And what an army it was. Matthias had inherited his father’s mercenary force of 6,000 to 8,000 men, kept under arms at all times. Over his 32 year reign he wil expand this force to its peak of 28,000 men, making it the by far largest standing army in christian europe, twice as large as the standing army of Louis XII of France. This army consisted of four main forces, the heavy cavalry, infantry and the light cavalry, the famous hussars and finally regiments of field artillery, used in the early stages of battle and during sieges.
The regular use of artillery was not the only innovation. A quarter of Matthias’ infantry men was equipped with an arquebuse, a type of early musket, more than any other army at the time. Their fighting tactics took some inspiration from Jan Zizka’s Hussite wagenburgs. Though instead of bringing along carts, his infantry used pikemen to form defensive squares allowing the arquebusiers and crossbowmen to shoot at the enemy from inside this square, very much like Zizka’s fighters shot from inside their wagenburgs. Light cavalry too was an innovation, likely inspired by Ottoman warfare. These forces were highly mobile, brilliant at raids and surprise attacks.
What made this force the most powerful fighting force in europe though was that key ingredient of modern warfare, discipline. The soldiers in the Black Army were professional soldiers who fought for money. Matthias paid them well. His heavy cavalry men were paid five florins a month, well above the usual 3 florins, light cavalry revceived 3 florins a month, again sustantially more than normal. Within the infantry pay varied between simple pikemen and the crssbowmen and arquebusiers and the most specialised, the gunners, operating the field cannon. But all were paid a lot more than anyone else would. And in return they had to follow orders, train, work together across cavalry and infantry and accept that their officers were chosen on merit, not on who their dad was. Compare that to the battle of Nicopol 70 years earlier where the arrogance and stupidity of the Burgundian and French high aristicrats led to the annihilation of the Christian forces by the Ottomans.
When Matthias army reached its maximum size of 28,000, the cost of keeping it in the field is estimated at 300,000 to 350,000 florins per quarter. To put that in context, Matthias paid Friedrich III 80,000 ducats for the crown of St. Stephen, basically a month’s wages. When Albrecht II paid up for the privilege to marry the daughter of emperor Sigismund and with her the right to the Hungarian and Bohemian crowns, he paid 400,000 florins, again, the equivalent of four months of Matthias’ army.
And this was not the only standing army in Hungary at the time. Apart from the mobile Black Army, Matthias furnished the fortresses along the southern border with permanent garrisons, equipped with cannon and trained in defensive siege warfare. These fortresses covered an unbroken line stretching 500km from the Adriatic see to Wallachia, almost five times the length of Hadrain’s wall.
Bottom line, we are talking an absolutely unprecedented expenditure here. Now where did the money for all that come from?
Certainly not from the royal purse. The magnates controlled 2/3rds of the land directly and another quarter through the church. The king himself owned only about 5%. Nowhere near enough revenue to cover even a week of the army’s cost.
Then we have the Hunyadi’s personal fortune. Matthias Hunyadi had inherited 2.3 million hectares, 28 castles, 57 towns and 1,000 villages from his father. Now we are talking. But again, how long would that last?
Then there were the mines in what is now Slovakia. These were famous for their silver and copper and one of them, Neusohl, provided the Fugger’s with a virtual monopoly in copper after Matthias was dead. But as we have heard in the epsiodes about Nurnberg, in the 15th century the Hungarians never saw the true benefit of their copper. The copper seams in Slovakia were heavily mixed with silver, but it was the Nurnberger smelters who had the technique to extract the silver from the copper ore, making them immensely rich, whilst the king of Hungary and the local mining operators saw only a fraction of the value.
Engraving from De re metallica di Georg Agricola, Basilea, 1556
Now what? There is a reason we associate the appearance of standing armies with the establishment of modern states. General taxation was the only way such forces could be built, equipped and maintained. And the ability to set and collect general taxes required a large and powerful bureaucracy, the kind of bureaucracy normally assocoiated with a modern state.
Matthias stablished a bureacracy across Hungary, though it is doubtful it had the same breadth and depth as a modern state. The true reason his people were prepared to pay his general tax of 1 gold florin for each household, was his army. These soldiers were not just permanently under arms, but they were also utterly loyal to the king. In particular in the beginning, the vast majority of them weren’t Hungarins, but Bohemians, Germans, Croats and Poles. They didn’t have any links to the peasants and minor nobles who they made to pay. Faced with a professional army even the great Hungarian magnates coughed up their due.
The Black Army and the line of fortresses along the border turned Matthias’ Hungary into a major European power, a power that could defend itself and the lands behind it against an Otttoman invasion. But it wasn’t powerful enough to take the offense to sultan Mehmet’s 60,000 cavalry and 10,000 Janissaries. Which explains Matthias’ rather lacklustre attempts to join the crusades the popes kept calling for. In fact he only pursued one major campaign, in 1464 in Bosnia where he recaptured an important fortress. But that was as far as it went.
When his ally, Vlad III, Voivode of Vallachia stood up against the Ottoman sultan and raided across Ottoman Bulgaria, Matthias not only left him hanging out to dry, but took him prisoner. We know Vlad III by his epithet Vlad the Impaler, or even better by his other nckname, Dracula, the little dragon. I am not going to discuss the contested question whether or not he was indeed a monster who had 10s of thousands of men, women and children, even babies impaled. What matters here is that Matthias used these stories to paint Vlad as a psychpath, which justified his decision to not support his crusade, to lock him up and thereby appease the Sultan.
Which gets us to the third leg of his power, a tremendous public relations machine. Matthias had enjoyed a very thorough education. His tutor was Janos Vitez, one of the early Humanists in Hungary. Vitez had studied in Vienna and had risen to prominece in the service of emperor Sigismund. In 1445 he became the bishop of Oradea where he built one of the earliest Renaissance palaces in central Europe. That palace held a great library that contained the latest editions of the Latin and Greek classics, to be perused by his circle of Humanist friends, many of them Italians, but also Germans, Poles and obviously locals. He sponsored many young Hunagrians to study in Italy, including his nephew, Janos Pannonius, who became the best known Hungarian writer of this period.
Matthias, who had grown up in this environment was naturally drawn to the new ideas about architecture and culture that came over from Italy. It is again important to understand that Hungary at the time had access to the Adriatic and connections to Italy were close and well established. After all, the dynasty that ruled Hungary before Sigismund had been the Anjou of Naples. It is therefore not at all surprising that Italian Humanists, architects and artists were attracted by offers from Hungarian courts.
But there was also a political dimension to these cultural exchanges that Matthias sought to benefit from. Let’s take a look at who was in charge of the major Italian states in 1460/1470. Florence was ruled by the Medici, a family of bankers, Venice by an oligarchy of traders, Mantua, Bologna, Rimini, Perugia by local strongmen who had risen as condottiere, and then most of Northern Italy was under the control of Francesco Sforza, the greatest mercenary captain of his age. Very few of these were held by ancient aristocratic families, and even those like for instance Naples were held by rulers of dubious legality.
And one way in which these commoners justified their rule was through art and architecture. Brunelleschi’s cupola of the duomo in Florence was not just an engineering marvel, it was also a symbol of the effectiveness of the Medici rule. Leonardo’s last supper was not just a masterpiece, but also a sign that the Sforza were ruling with god’s blessing. But the biggest propaganda value lay in the references back to the ancient Romans. The great Roman consuls and emperors, Scipio, Marius, Caesar, Augustus, Trajan, Marcus, Aurelius, Constantine did not inherit absolute power but had earned it, whilst those who just inherited power, the Caligulas, Neros, Commodus and Heligobalus squandered it.
By going back to the ancients, these strongmen could justify their rule, claiming their merit superseded the herditary rights of the Visconti or the Anjou. So when the Malatesta of Rimini comissioned Lean Battista Alberti to turn the old gothic cathedral into a mausoleum for his family in the style of a roman temple, it wasn’t a fashion statement, but a political one.
Art and Architecture was one component of this large public relations effort to legitimise the power of these nouveau riches, the other was science, knowledge, literature, and also libraries. The great Italian princes competed hard over who had the most dazzling court of intellectuals and the largest and best library in the land. Cosimo de Medici and his grandson Lorenzo were avid collectors, bringing together a thousand or so manuscripts covering both religious and secular topics, now in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library. Frederico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino and quintessential Renaissance prince had a similar number of books, most of them in Latin, but also 168 were in Greek, 82 in Hebrew and even 2 in Arabic.
And that is where Matthias, a new man like all of these, superseded them all. In the magnificent renaissance palace his Italian architects erected for him in Buda, his library comprised roughly 3,000 volumes, three times as many as the Medici and almost as many as the largest library in Christendom, the Vatican library. To amass such a number of books was at a minimum a huge logistical challenge. Travelling from Florence, where the best booksellers of the age operated, to Buda could easily take months. The roads were not always safe and these books were not only incredibly valuable, but also easy to conceal and sell, a bit like 19th century imperial jewellery. Some of these books Matthias took from other Hungarian libraries whose owners had either passed away or fallen into disgrace. Others he had produced in the workshop he established in his palace at Buda, but the majority he ordered from Italy.
Hardly anything that Matthias built or collected survived the vagaries of time. His palaces in Buda and Visegrad have been entirely destroyed, so that just one of the many fountains that once adored his gardens survived. Of his famed library only 200 books can still be attributed.
But as a political tool it did work. He had placed the library right behind the throne room. Foreign dignitaries and local magnates could see the rows and rows of books behind the king, making clear that his power wasn’t just built on brawn but also brain.
And whilst the Italian princes competed over books, painters and writers amngst each other, Matthias’ message had another, wider audience. In the 15th century most of Europe saw the Hungarians as fierce, but rustic and uneducated warriors. Meanwhile despite what the Greek refugees in Italy said about the Turks, thoe who travelled there knew that Constantinople had benefitted enormously from being again the capital of a huge empire. Wonderous new mosques and palaces were comissioned, old trade routes that had been disrupted reopened and Venetian and Genoese merchants resumed their activities. Italian artists like Gentile Bellini came to paint the sultan and Mehmet II’s library could easily rival thos eof teh Italian princes.
Hence Matthias needed to show Hungary not just as a military, but also as a cultural bulwark of Western Europe. His library, his buildings and the humanists at his court were there as the intellectual force that held back the alleged barbarism of the Turks.
We know him today as Matthias Corvinus, after his heraldic symbol, the raven, corvus in Latin. In the 15th century the raven was not yet a symbol of darkness and witchcraft. It appeared in Genesis when Noah sent a raven to find out whether the waters have receded, ravens fed the prophet Elias during a drought, and in Luke 12,24 it says: „Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them”. Ravens were birds sent by God for a specific purpose, and hence most suitable for a king tasked with the defence of Christendom.
Some Italian humanists then concocted the idea that the Hunyadis were descendant of Marcus Valerius Corvus, a roman senator elected consul six times and dictator twice. Matthias never formally endorsed the theory, but also did not deny it, again adding to the reasons he was the rightful ruler of Hungary.
Not just Hungary. As we already mentioned, Matthias Corvinus did not use his great army and broad support at home and abroad to regain lost territory from the Ottomans. In fact, he largely left the Ottomans alone after 1464.
Instead, he turned his gaze north, to Bohemia and Austria. It was these lands he used his army to conquer. First, he went for Bohemia, the kingdom of his erstwhile father in law, Georg of Podiebrad. By now pope Paul II had revoked the Compacta and Georg of Podiebrad had been excommunicated and declared a heretic. This gave Matthias the justification he needed. As the shield of Christendom, he was not only tasked with defence against the Muslims, but also with eradicating heresies. Or so he claimed. In 1471 he had succeeded in a manner of speaking. Georg of Podiebrad had given up the hope of creating a dynasty and had made Kasimir IV of Poland the heir to the kingdom of Bohemia, and he had given up the outer territories of Bohemia, Silesia, Moravia and Lusatia to Matthias.
After this success, Matthias turned on Austria and on Friedrich III. This war, that lasted until his death in 1490 could not be justified as a crusade against a heretic or a war against the Turks.
If there was to be a justification for his ambition, it went as follows. The Ottoman armies are far stronger than those of Hungary alone, even his Black Army. If Europe was to be defended successfully, all of the forces of central Europe, Hungary, Bohemia, Austria, the Holy Roman Empire and Poland have to act in unison. And guess how one can ensure that these diverse places act in unison…
Now, you ask, what has that to do with the Habsburgs?
States and empires stick together for a reason, often these reasons are cultural or linguistic. But sometimes they are not, sometimes they are driven by a shared belief in institutions – like in Switzerland – sometime they are a function of geography, like Britain, and sometimes they are a function of geopolitical circumstances.
If one wonders why three so culturally different nations like the Hungarians, the Czechs and the Austrians, plus a large number of others stuck together from the 15th to the early 20th century, it wasn’t just the iron will of the Habsburg dynasty. As we have seen at the top of the episode, the Habsburgs could have easily disappeared from history in 1462. If they had disappeared, I am fairly convinced that a multinational state in central europe would have emerged anyway, be it under the Hunyadis or the Jagiellons or someone else. Because only a combination of these forces and support from Poland and the Empire was strong enough to halt the Ottoman progress.
This objective was what gave legitimacy to the state and the campaigns of Matthias Corvinus and will give justification for the existence of the Habsburg empire. And the Habsburgs adopted some of the other elements of Matthias Hunyadi’s concept; the Landsknechte were the Maximilan’s version of the Black Army, general taxation, which in turn required the bureaucracy of a modern, absolutist state were introduced in the hereditary lands and in the empire. The sponsorship of art, architecture and literature as a counterpoint to the alleged barbarity of the Ottomans embellished Vienna. And last but definitely not least, the ferocious persecution of anyone who wasn’t Catholic became a key Habsburg feature.
That is not to say the Habsburgs slavishly copied Matthias Hunyadi. Friedrich III was no fan of the renaissance and his architectural taste remained rooted in the Gothic style; his right to rule was not based merit, but on his unshakeable belief that his family was divinely ordained . His son Maximilian was the first Habsburg to be a true Renaissance prince, but he left neither much architecture nor did he create a library. But he understood the importance of public relations in a way no emperor had before, using painting, engraving and the printing press to achieve what the Biblioteca Corvina did for Matthias.
But that is for next week when we will take a look at how Friedrich III responded to the emergence of the Black Army and the great Corvinian Library on his doorstep and how he finally, finally got out of his apathy, and went off to talk first marriage and and then war with Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, getting a ball rolling that will drop into the net that we call the Habsburg empire.
