Matyas’s marriage in 1476 to Beatriz, daughter of the Aragonese king of Naples, brought about noticeable changes not so much in foreign and military affairs, which were western oriented in any case, but in the style of the court. Matyas wished to match the fashionable courts of the princes of the small northern Italian states — mostly, like himself, descendants of condottieri — in pomp, artistic display and hospitality for scholars and poets. He may not have been fully successful in making his monarchy into a ‘Renaissance state’ in terms of an independent civil service, regular diplomacy and a less aristocratic social base, but he was a true Renaissance prince in utilising the political value of sponsorship for the arts, architecture and literature. Italian humanists were welcomed at his court, duly delivering the panegyrics expected from them. Buildings in Buda and in the summer residence of Visegrad along the Danube, started in a late Gothic style, acquired in the course of the years Renaissance marble decorations and sculptures at the hands of Dalmatian and Italian artists. Doubtless the most impressive achievement was the Corvinian Library, for which the king ordered manuscripts from the best workshops in Italy, establishing one such in Buda as well. By 1490 it may have contained as many as 2,500 volumes, mainly manuscripts (only a fraction of them survived the Ottoman occupation and the destruction of Buda). According to incomplete estimates, in the last decades of his reign, Matyas spent up to 80,000 gold florins annually on artistic patronage. Plans for establishing a university in Pozsony (Bratislava) — after several failed trials at a studiumgenerale in the preceding centuries — were progressing well, when the death of Janus Pannonius and the arrest of John Vitez cut them, as well as many other humanist projects, short. The patronage of the new learning and arts remained limited in Matyas’s time: while the king and a few prelates embraced the fashionable trends, the rest of Hungary remained, as the hapless Janus had put it, a ‘frozen land, a barbarian country’. However, the seeds had germinated and, under the Jagiellonians, humanist centres grew up in several episcopal towns and aristocratic courts.
The last years of Matyas were devoted primarily to securing the succession of his sole heir, his natural son (from the Austrian burgher woman, Barbara Edelpeck), John Corvinus. Great parts of the enormous Hunyadi—Szilagyi family fortune were transferred to him, he was given the title of duke, and elaborate marriage plans were contemplated, the last including Bianca Sforza of Milan. In 1486 Matyas issued new regulations for the office of the count palatine, the king’s deputy, by which he hoped to leave a reliable baron in charge of the royal election. Many of the king’s men were given comital positions to control the noble diet and bound by oaths to support the election of Corvinus. In the midst of these plans and of preparations for securing the Austrian conquest, the fifty-year-old king died unexpectedly in Vienna.