page_title: History of Hungary
section_title: Matthias Corvinus
hierarchical_section_title: History of Hungary / Medieval Hungary / Late medieval period (1301–1526) / Matthias Corvinus
caption_attribution_description: English: Map showing the direction of attacks in/of Hungary and in/of the surrounding countries in the middle of 15th century concentrating on the Black Army of Hungary.
context_page_description: Hungary in its modern borders roughly corresponds to the Great Hungarian Plain.
  During the Iron Age, it was at the boundary of Celtic, Illyrian and Iranian cultural spheres.
  The name "Pannonian" comes from Pannonia, a province of the Roman Empire. Only the western part of the territory of modern Hungary formed part of the ancient Roman Province of Pannonia. The
  Roman control collapsed with the Hunnic invasions of 370–410 and Pannonia was part of the Ostrogothic Kingdom during the late 5th to mid 6th century, succeeded by the Avar Khaganate.civil
  The Magyar invasion takes place during the 9th century.
  The Magyars were Christianized at the end of the 10th century, and the Christian Kingdom of Hungary was established in AD 1000,
  ruled by the Árpád dynasty for the following three centuries.
  In the high medieval period, the kingdom expanded beyond Pannonia, to the Adriatic coast. In 1241 during the reign of Béla IV, Hungary was invaded by the Mongols under Batu Khan. The outnumbered Hungarians were decisively defeated at the Battle of Mohi by the Mongol army. King Béla fled to the Holy Roman Empire and left the Hungarian population under the mercy of the Mongols.
context_section_description: The last strong Hungarian king was Matthias Corvinus (r. 1458–90), the son of John Hunyadi. His accession represented the first time in the history of the medieval Hungarian kingdom that a member of the nobility without dynastic ancestry mounted the royal throne. Although very prominent in the governing of the kingdom of Hungary, Matthias's father John Hunyadi was never crowned king or contracted a dynastic marriage.
  Matthias was a true Renaissance prince: a successful military leader and administrator, an outstanding linguist, a learned astrologer, and an enlightened patron of the arts and learning. Although he regularly convened the Diet and expanded the lesser nobles' powers in the counties, he exercised absolute rule over Hungary by means of a huge secular bureaucracy.
  Matthias set out to build a realm that would expand to the south and northwest, while he also implemented internal reforms. The serfs considered Matthias a just ruler, because he protected them from excessive demands and other abuses by the magnates. Like his father, Matthias desired to strengthen the kingdom of Hungary to the point where it could become the foremost regional power, indeed strong enough to push back the Ottoman Empire; towards that end he deemed it necessary to conquer large parts of the Holy Roman Empire.
  Matthias's standing mercenary army was called the Black Army of Hungary (Hungarian: Fekete Sereg). It was an unusually large army for its time, and it secured a series of victories in the Austrian-Hungarian War (1477-1488) by capturing parts of Austria (including Vienna) in 1485, as well as parts of Bohemia in the Bohemian War of 1477–88. In 1467, Mathias and his Black Army fought against Moldavia. In this case, the attempt to expand Hungarian territories was unsuccessful when Matthias lost the Battle of Baia.
  In 1479, however, the Hungarian army destroyed the Ottoman and Wallachian troops at the Battle of Breadfield under the leadership of general Pál Kinizsi.
  Matthias's library, the Bibliotheca Corviniana, was Europe's greatest collection of historical chronicles and works of philosophy and science in the 15th century, and second in size only to the Vatican Library in Rome, which mainly contained religious materials. The library, which has been destroyed in 1526 after Hungarian forces at Mohács were defeated by the Ottomans, is registered as a UNESCO Memory of the World site.
  Mattias died without a legal successor, a circumstance that engendered a serious political crisis in the Hungarian kingdom.
caption: Western conquests of Matthias Corvinus.
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