King Matthias and the Medieval Hungarian State
King Matthias and the Medieval Hungarian State

Summary/Abstract: Matthias Corvinus’s reign (1458–90) has long fascinated historians. Along with the prehistory of the Magyars (before they took possession of historical Hungary in 896) and the early Hungarian kingdom during the reign of the Árpád kings (1000–1301), this is the most extensively researched period in the country’s history. What follows will make no attempt to sum up the whole of Matthias’s reign but will engage with a few of the more problematic aspects. Matthias Corvinus came to the Hungarian throne 550 years ago, in 1458. The most illustrious of all the country’s monarchs in the late Middle Ages, he reigned for thirty-two years, until 1490. He was not a member of a princely family: his father, John (1407–56), was the son of a Transylvanian lesser noble who, thanks to his outstanding talents as a warrior and statesman under Sigismund of Luxembourg2, had risen to the position of Voivode of Transylvania (1441–56) and later Regent (1446–53) of Hungary. Incidentally, in Bohemia the estates had shortly before, in the same year of 1458, elected to the kingship George of Podiebrad (1420–71), another nobleman who was not of royal blood. Matthias was elected to the throne at the age of fifteen, when he was a prisoner of George of Podiebrad in Prague, and he had to be ransomed by his mother, Erzsébet Szilágyi. By then Hungary had been in a state of almost unbroken civil war since 1440. Matthias temporarily put a halt to Ottoman expansion in Bosnia; the first ten years of his reign saw him engaged in bitter combat with the Turks, but he developed more peaceful relations with the Sultan, concluded with a treaty in the last decade of his reign.[...]

• Details
• Contents