of attending every year. Moreover, to promote their own convenience, they readily allowed the king to assess as well as to collect the taxes, which consequently tended to become regular and permanent, while Matthias’ reform of the treasury, which was now administered by specialists with separate functions, was economically of great benefit to the state. Yet Matthias never dispensed with the diet. During the thirty-two years of his reign he held at least fifteen diets,[1] at which no fewer than 450 statutes were passed. He re-codified the Hungarian common law; strictly defined the jurisdiction of the whole official hierarchy from the palatine to the humblest village judge; cheapened and accelerated legal procedure, and in an age when might was right did his utmost to protect the weak from the strong. There is not a single branch of the law which he did not simplify and amend, and the iron firmness with which he caused justice to be administered, irrespective of persons, if it exposed him to the charge of tyranny from the nobles, also won for him from the common people the epithet of “the Just.” To Matthias is also due the credit of creating an efficient official class. Merit was with him the sole qualification for advancement. One of his best generals, Pál Kinizsy, was a miller’s son, and his capable chancellor, Péter Várady, whom he made archbishop of Kálocsa, came of a family of small squires. For education so scholarly a monarch as Matthias naturally did what he could. He founded the university of Pressburg (Academia Istropolitana, 1467), revived the declining university of Pécs, and, at the time of his death, was meditating the establishment of a third university at Buda.
Unfortunately the civilizing efforts of Matthias made but little impression on society at large. The bulk of the Magyar nobility was still semi-barbaric. Immensely wealthy (it is estimated that most of the land, at this time, was in the hands of 25 great families, the Zapolyas alone holding an eighth of it), it was a point of honour with them to appear in public in costly raiment ablaze with silver, gold and precious stones, followed at every step by armies of retainers scarcely less gorgeous. At the same time their ignorance was profound. Many of the highest dignitaries of state did not know their alphabet. Signatures to documents of the period are rare; seals served instead of signatures, because most of the nobles were unable to sign their names. Learning, indeed, was often ridiculed as pedantry in a gentleman of good family.
The clergy, the chief official class, were naturally less ignorant than the gentry. Some of the prelates—notably János Csezmeczey, better known as Janus Pannonius (1433–1472)—had a European reputation for learning. The primate Cardinal, János Vitez (1408–1472), at the beginning, and the primate, Cardinal Tamas Bakócz (q.v.), at the end of the reign were men of eminent ability and the highest culture. But the moral tone of the Magyar church at this period was very low. The bishops prided themselves on being great statesmen, great scholars, great financiers, great diplomatists—anything, in fact, but good Christians. Most of them, except when actually celebrating mass, were indistinguishable alike in costume and conduct from the temporal magnates. Of twelve of them it is said that foreigners took them at first for independent temporal princes, so vast were their estates, so splendid their courts, so numerous their armed retainers. Under such guides as these the lower clergy erred deplorably, and drunkenness, gross immorality, brawling and manslaughter were common occurrences in the lives of the parish priests. The regular clergy were if possible worse than the secular, with the exception of the Paulicians, the sole religious order which steadily resisted the general corruption, of whose abbot, the saintly Gregory, was the personal friend of Matthias.
What little culture there was outside the court, the capital and the palaces of a few prelates, was to be found in the towns, most of them of German origin. Matthias laboured strenuously to develop and protect the towns, multiplied municipal charters, and materially improved the means of communication, especially in Transylvania. His Silesian and Austrian acquisitions were also very beneficial to trade, throwing open as they did the western markets to Hungarian produce. Wine and meat were the chief exports. The wines of Hungary were already renowned throughout Europe, and cattle breeding was conducted on a great scale. Of agricultural produce there was barely sufficient for home consumption, but the mining industries had reached a very high level of excellence, and iron, tin and copper were very largely exported from the northern counties to Danzig and other Baltic ports. So highly developed indeed were the Magyar methods of smelting, that Louis XI. of France took the Hungarian mining system as the model for his metallurgical reforms, and Hungarian master-miners were also in great demand at the court of Ivan the Terrible. Moreover, the keen artistic instincts of Matthias led him to embellish his cities as well as fortify them. Debreczen was practically rebuilt by him, and dates its prosperity from his reign. Breslau, his favourite town, he endowed with many fine public buildings. Buda he endeavoured to make the worthy capital of a great realm, and the palace which he built there was pronounced by the papal legates to be superior to any in Italy.
Politically Matthias raised Hungary to the rank of the greatest power in central Europe, her influence extending into Asia and Africa. Poland was restrained by his alliances with the Teutonic Knights and the tsardom of Muscovy, and his envoys appeared in Persia and in Egypt to Power in Europe. combat the diplomacy of the Porte. He never, indeed, jeopardized the position of the Moslems in Europe as his father had done, and thus the peace of Szeged (1444), which regained the line of the Danube and drove the Turk behind the Balkans, must always be reckoned as the high-water mark of Hungary’s Turkish triumphs. But Matthias at least taught the sultan to respect the territorial integrity of Hungary, and throughout his reign the Eastern Question, though often vexatious, was never acute. Only after his death did the Ottoman empire become a menace to Christendom. Besides, his hands were tied by the unappeasable enmity of the emperor and the emperor’s allies, and he could never count upon any material help from the West against the East. The age of the crusades had gone. Throughout his reign the Czechs and the Germans were every whit as dangerous to Hungary as the Turks, and the political necessity which finally compelled Matthias to partition Austria and Bohemia, in order to secure Hungary, committed him to a policy of extreme circumspection. He has sometimes been blamed for not crushing his incurably disloyal and rebellious nobles, instead of cajoling them, after the example of his contemporary, Louis XI., who laid the foundations of the greatness of France on the ruin of the vassals. But Louis XI. had a relatively civilized and politically developed middle class behind him, whereas Matthias had not. It was as much as Matthias could do to keep the civic life of Hungary from expiring altogether, and nine-tenths of his burgesses were foreigners with no political interest in the country of their adoption. Never was any dominion so purely personal, and therefore so artificial as his. His astounding energy and resource curbed all his enemies during his lifetime, but they were content to wait patiently for his death, well aware that the collapse of his empire would immediately follow.
All that human foresight could devise for the consolidation and perpetuation of the newly established Hungarian empire had been done by Matthias in the last years of his reign. He had designated as his successor his natural son, the highly gifted János (John) Corvinus, a youth of Period of decline. seventeen. He had raised him to princely rank, endowed him with property which made him the greatest territorial magnate in the kingdom, placed in his hands the sacred crown and half-a-dozen of the strongest fortresses, and won over to his cause the majority of the royal council. How János was cajoled out of an almost impregnable position, and gradually reduced to insignificance, is told elsewhere (see Corvinus, János). The nobles Wladislaus II. and prelates, who detested the severe and strenuous Matthian system, desired, as they expressed it, “a king whose beard they could hold in their fists,” and they found a monarch after their own heart in Wladislaus Jagiello, since 1471
- ↑ We know actually of fifteen, but there may have been many more.
