Legendák Mátyás királyról: hogyan lettek a falra festett csillagászokból csillagvizsgálók?
Legends of King Matthias: How the Wall Paintings of Astromoners Became Observatories

Summary/Abstract: In the light of later tragic events, the age of King Matthias I seemed brighter, the deeds of his courtiers looked more significant in the eyes of subsequent generations. According to scholarship and popular literature, there were several working astronomical observatories in the country at that time, and humanists in the court of Matthias have been presented as pre-Copernican thinkers. In this paper, I will attempt to show the error of such beliefs and to find their sources. Contemporary travellers did not mention any observatories in the Castle of Buda. According to the 1591 description by Václav Vratistlav, however, two painted astronomers were visible on the wall of the library; these were later changed into observatories (Sternwarten) in the German translation. The Hungarian public became acquainted with the writing of the Czech traveller through this German translation, so they read about observatories rather than astronomers. This is supported by the fact that the Hungarian sources written before the German translation did not mention any astronomical institutions. The possible cause of the supposed pre-Copernicanism of the humanists in the court of Matthias is possibly the very important role of the Sun in the writings of some of them. The Sun, however, was not the centre of the Universe but the centre of the planets, i.e. the fourth among the seven. The cause of all these misunderstandings and errors was the idealization of the age of Matthias, the yearning for a glorious past, and the sloppy use of such concepts as an astronomical observatory.

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