It has long been debated whether the king’s decision to volunteer for a ‘crusade’ with papal sanction against the ‘heretical’ King George of Bohemia (whose daughter, Matyas’s first wife, had died in childbirth in 1464) and fight his wars in the north and west was motivated by his plan to establish a powerful empire that could successfully fight the Ottomans. His chancellery did not cease emphasising, with the best humanist rhetoric, that this was Matyas’s longterm design. The acquisition of Moravia, Silesia, Lusatia and, finally, sizeable parts of Austria might have added up to an agglomeration of resources nearly sufficient for the expulsion of the Ottomans from Europe. (The Habsburgs, centuries later, partially accomplished the task, albeit under different conditions.) But since ‘the king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord’ (Prov. 21:1), the controversy will probably never be resolved. What the records show is that in 1468 Matyas attacked Bohemia, scoring in the next six years a series of military and diplomatic victories. Although the Catholic lords made him king of Bohemia in 1469, most of the kingdom remained in the hands of King George and, after his death in 1471, in those of Wladyslaw Jagiello (King Vladislav I of Bohemia). Hungarian armies resisted several Polish sieges in Silesia and secured that province for ten years for Hungary. In 1477 and in 1480, Matyas’s troops marched against Frederick III, and in 1485 he victoriously entered Vienna. Altogether, Matyas spent twenty-three years at war on the northern and western front: by contrast, his activities against the Ottoman Turks (including the successful conquest of the fortress at Sabac on the Lower Danube, in 1476) took up only ten years at the most.
These military operations were made possible by Matyas’s most successful governmental reform, the establishment of a mercenary army. Beginning in 1462, with the hiring of the last remnants of the formerly Hussite Czech troops of Jiskra, and continuing with systematic recruitment of domestic and foreign professional soldiers, in the 1470s, Matyas kept approximately 20,000 men at arms. The army was financed by the extraordinary war tax (called subsidium), four to five times higher than the regular portal levy, which the king collected almost every year. Such subsidia had been occasionally levied earlier under the threat of attacks from the Ottomans, but Matyas made the war tax into a regular income of the crown. First he called diets to approve it (an innovation, for the noble diets of the 1440s did not insist on their right, in contrast to the European-wide practice, to approve taxation) in return for strengthening the power of the counties. Later the noble deputies found it cheaper to empower the king for years in advance, rather than spend weeks at the diet. With this special income, by the end of Matyas’s reign the treasury’s income may have been in some years as high as 800,000 florins, a sum not very much lower than the budget of western European monarchies. Still, the country’s own resources, although stretched to their limits, did not suffice to pay up to 600,000 florins for a standing army. Hence, the mercenaries (after Matyas’s death, called from their commander, the ‘Black’ Haugwitz, the ‘Black Army’) had to be steadily deployed in campaigns with opportunities to acquire booty. Last but not least, newly conquered territories had to finance the wars fought for acquiring and keeping them. (Contemporary opinion does not make it clear whether they did this or not. The sources are insufficient and Matyas’s hold on the conquered regions was too short to draw a reliable balance sheet.)
According to the description of the court historian, Antonio Bonfini, the muster of the 28,000 man army at Wiener Neustadt in 1487 was the most impressive military show he had ever seen. By that time Matyas’s troops were certainly equal to the best military forces of their time. The combination of foreign mercenaries, Hungarian banderia and the light cavalry (Hussars) of the noble levy and Hungarian professional soldiers, applying their traditional hit and run tactics, remained unbeaten in the northern and western theatres.
The shifting of Matyas’s foreign policy away from the south, combined with the efforts at reducing the aristocracy’s influence in government, caused the growth of ever more serious opposition against him. While a revolt in Transylvania in 1467 was still easily quelled, in 1471, the king’s closest supporters, Archbishop John Vitez and his nephew Bishop and Ban Janus Pannonius, the acclaimed Neo-Latin poet, raised the flag of rebellion. They offered the throne to Prince Casimir of Poland, who entered the country with force.
Matyas swiftly returned from Bohemia, arrested the conspirators, repelled the Polish pretender with ease, even winning over some of his troops for the new mercenary army. Janus Pannonius died while fleeing the irate king, while old Vitez, humiliated and under house arrest, followed a few months later. The king’s disappointment must have run deep. After 1471 foreign-born prelates, for example the Silesian Johannes Beckensloer, archbishop of Esztergom, and, after his defection to the Emperor Frederick, Friar Gabriele Rangoni from Verona and the Moravian John Filipec, became his trusted councillors.
Attempts at replacing the barons with Matyas’s own men seem to have also gained momentum after the conspiracy, yet the latter never outnumbered the magnates from the old families. Clearly, the military, economic and political preponderance of the great landowning clans could not be broken in a few decades. Conspicuously, the homines novi who were able to remain on the council and in national positions for more than short periods of office were only those, who, by marriage and land acquisition, managed to join the aristocracy and thus, in fact, changed sides from crown to baronage. While in the branches of the treasury and in the command of the mercenary army the king succeeded in having his appointees from the lesser nobility keep the leading positions, in the royal courts and the council the balance of power remained precarious. The reorganisation of the central courts of justice, now only formally presided over by magnates, but in fact staffed by jurists, combined with the issuing of an extensive law code (Matyas’s Decretum Maius of 1486, the first law to be published in print, in 1488) and the king’s insistence on equity in the administration of justice, seem to have been particularly successful. A jingle about ‘Dead is Matyas — Justice is Lost’ and anecdotes about the king’s meting out punishment to cruel lords were recorded soon after his death, even before the loss of the country’s independence made his reign appear the last ‘golden age’. Strangely enough, the increased tax burden, deeply resented by contemporaries and denounced by mendicant preachers, was forgotten, while the results of a stronger control over local lords found their way into the ‘collective memory’.