Hungary's greatest Renaissance king was proclaimed on a frozen river at 14
In January 1458, nobles gathered on the frozen Danube and unanimously acclaimed a 14-year-old prisoner as King of Hungary. Matthias Corvinus, whose brother had just been beheaded for treason, was then being held in Prague. Within weeks he was ruling in his own right, and he went on to reign for 32 years.
Matthias was born in Kolozsvár, today Cluj-Napoca in Romania, on 23 February 1443, the second son of the regent John Hunyadi, the famous victor over the Ottomans at Belgrade. His father died in 1456. The next year King Ladislaus the Posthumous had Matthias and his elder brother Ladislaus Hunyadi arrested, and the brother was executed. Their mother and uncle Michael Szilágyi rebelled, the king fled and then died suddenly, and Matthias passed into the custody of George of Poděbrady, the Hussite regent of Bohemia. Szilágyi turned up at the election diet with 15,000 troops. It was the first time a Hungarian noble, rather than a royal heir, took the throne, and Poděbrady released him for a ransom of 60,000 gold florins.
The young king quickly sidelined his uncle as regent and made and unmade barons at will, while also raising lesser nobles and capable commoners. He summoned more than 25 diets. His reign was full of war: against Czech mercenaries in Upper Hungary, against Emperor Frederick III, who held the Holy Crown until a 1463 treaty returned it for a coronation in March 1464, and against the Ottomans, who had swallowed Serbia and Bosnia. He conquered Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia, was proclaimed King of Bohemia by Catholic estates in 1469, and occupied Lower Austria from 1482 to 1487. Heavy taxes paid for it all and provoked a revolt in Transylvania in 1467.
Those taxes also bought one of medieval Europe's first professional standing armies, the Black Army. Matthias reformed justice and curbed baronial power. He spoke Hungarian, Latin, Italian, Polish, Czech and German, having been taught by humanists such as Gregory of Sanok, and his library, the Bibliotheca Corviniana, ranked among Europe's largest book collections. Under his patronage, Hungary became the first country to take up the Italian Renaissance.
He died on 6 April 1490. Folk memory kept a gentler image: in Hungarian and Slovak tales he is Matthias the Just, a king who walked among his people in disguise to see how they were treated.
Source: Matthias Corvinus
