The fame of the father, the army of the family and a deal with the leading families secured the unanimous acclamation of Matyas Hunyadi, the first Hungarian magnate to become king of Hungary. In January 1458, the nobles assembled en masse on the frozen Danube and hailed the son of the great hero of anti-Ottoman wars. His uncle, Michael Szilagyi, assured the other barons that, as regent during Matyas’s minority, he would guard their interests. However, the young Hunyadi, betrothed to the daughter of George of Podebrady, the elected king of Bohemia (also the first ruler of that country chosen from the local nobility), soon upset these plans. Even though his rule was not rendered legitimate by a coronation for six years (the Holy Crown was still in the hands of Frederick III), he dismissed Szilagyi and made his tutor, the old family friend, John Vitez, arch chancellor and later archbishop of Esztergom. The spurned Garai—Cilli group thereupon ‘elected’ the Emperor Frederick III, who claimed dynastic rights to Hungary, to be king. Years of negotiations were to follow; they finally ended with the emperor forsaking the crown (in consideration of the sum of 80,000 florins) but retaining a claim to Hungary for life while recognising Matyas ‘as his son’, in return for the promise of Habsburg succession to Hungary should Matyas die without an heir. Considering the age difference of thirty-odd years between the two men it seemed unlikely that the clause about succession would ever lead to Hungary becoming part of the Habsburg Empire.
The coronation in 1464 having strengthened the king’s hand, he introduced a series of financial and administrative reforms. First he officially renamed the old portal tax as the ‘tax of the royal treasury’ (by which token all previous exemptions were cancelled) and made sure the moneys were more rigorously collected than before. The same was done with the customs duties (earlier called ‘thirtieth’, now rebaptised vectigal coronae). More important, Matyas engaged a number of commoners, among them a very able merchant, the baptised Jew, John Ernuszt, later to become his chief treasurer, to farm the major revenues. Other burgher and lesser noble officers were also brought into the fiscal administration, which began to grow into a true bureaucracy. Systematic collection of regalia, regular imposition of extraordinary taxes, and revenue from the extensive Hunyadi domains increased the income of the treasury many times over. With the defeat or death of the opposing magnates, Matyas obtained the chance to introduce political changes: during the years 1458—71, more than one third of baronial office holders were new men, promoted by the king. In the following decades this number rose to nearly half of the members of the royal council. Matyas organised an inner council in which the old aristocracy was less preponderant and business was frequently transacted by the king and his secretarii, just as under Sigismund. Although the introduction of new seals was not as unequivocally connected to new chancelleries and offices as in some western monarchies, the use of the privy seal and the signet for important decisions suggests a considered move towards exploiting the royal prerogative and restricting the control of the baronial council.
As was expected of the son of Hunyadi, as soon as his hands were free from parrying domestic opposition, Matyas embarked on anti-Ottoman campaigns. The results of Janos Hunyadi’s campaigns were slowly vanishing. In 1458 Sultan Mehemmed II conquered Serbia and defeated Vlad of Wallachia, Hungary’s vassal. The Ottomans now moved against Bosnia. Matyas, unable to counter the main Ottoman forces, waited out his time and used the collapse of the Bosnian resistance to secure the northern part of the country, with the fortress of Jajce at its centre. The conquest of the citadel and its subsequent defence against repeated Ottoman attacks was an impressive military feat. The new banate of Jajce, established in 1464, withstood Ottoman attacks and secured the south-western flank of the Hungarian—Croatian border for almost seventy years. However, precisely because he was his father’s son, Matyas also knew that without significant outside help, Hungary could not do more than secure her own frontier against the most powerful military machine of the times. Hungarian diplomacy was very active in searching for support, but rarely successful. The most reliable allies were the Papacy and Venice. In the 1450s, several elaborate schemes were floated by Rome for an all-European army. The experts calculated, realistically, that some 200,000 soldiers, in co-operation with the Middle Eastern enemies of the sultan, could expel the Ottomans from Europe. What was unrealistic, however, was that popes and some politicians expected that countries not immediately threatened by the Turk would embark on such an enterprise. The new pope, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II), well acquainted with the central European scene from the service at the Habsburg court, was a great champion of crusading ideas. Some money did come to Buda from Rome, but irregularly and mostly late; temporary alliances with Venice and Moldavia were established, but these did not allow more than defensive operations. The chances for a great war of coalition were as slim as those of concentrated counter-attack by Hungary’s neighbours. Therefore, in 1465 Matyas signed a truce on the basis of the status quo that secured the Hungarian lines of defence. In fact, between 1465 and 1520 no Ottoman imperial army appeared on the frontiers of Hungary: the Balkans were firmly in the hands of the sultan, and the empire was engaged in expansion elsewhere.