Matyas’s efforts were not sufficient to secure the succession: John Corvinus was only one of the candidates at the election diet, and not the most popular. The Emperor Maximilian raised claims based on the Habsburg—Hunyadi treaty; Vladislav, the Jagiello king of Bohemia, and his brother, Jan Olbracht, could count on the support of various noble factions. The crucial post of count palatine happened to be vacant, and the lesser nobles placed at the head of counties by Matyas did not support the son of their benefactor. Instead, the diet chose Vladislav of Bohemia (as Wladislas II of Hungary), apparently because, in the words of the lords, he promised to be a king ‘whose braids they could hold in their hands’. When Corvinus and his party attempted a coup, they were defeated by Paul Kinizsi, the man his father had raised from common estate to become the famous commander of the southern defence. Wladislas signed an elaborate treaty repudiating the centralising reforms of his predecessor, agreed to marry Queen Beatriz (celebrated proforma, the marriage was annulled ten years later) and was crowned in September 1490. John Corvinus, accepting his defeat, received the government of Slavonia and Croatia, where he led many successful campaigns against the Ottomans until his death in 1504. Maximilian and Jan Olbracht did not give up so easily; both marched with force deep into the country, before being finally repelled.
The victory of the barons over Matyas’s innovations did not mean that all the reforms of the treasury and the administration were to be abolished, but that the new offices and structures were to serve the interests of the barons and prelates of the council and not the central authority of the crown. One of the main promises of the new king, not to collect the extraordinary subsidy any more (though in fact disregarded within a few years), immediately lowered the country’s defence capability. Other consequences included the loss of Matyas’s conquests and the demoralisation of the ‘Black Army’, which, neither paid nor deployed on campaigns which promised booty, looted the villages of southern Hungary. In 1492 this unruly company had to be dispersed by its own former commanders.
During the last decades of its existence as an independent kingdom, Hungary’s main problem was to counter the increasing pressure on the southern border. The professional army disbanded, the defence was once again entrusted to the banderia of the barons and prelates and the local militia. The great landowners were now allowed to collect the subsidy themselves in return for mobilising their own troops. The lesser nobles, however, not receiving anything for joining the general levy and raising the militia porlalis, were reluctant to do so. In 1498—1500 a series of decrees (partly lost) introduced a military reform: the subsidy of one florin or more per tenant household came to be split between the king and the estates. For their share, the magnates and the nobles of the counties had the duty to hire mercenaries according to the traditional quota of one soldier for every twenty ten ants. Thelawof 1500 esignated by name those who had the right and duty to have their own troops under their flag (thus updating the Siena Register and keeping it current, year by year).
The reforms of the system of recruitment seem to have had greater political than military significance. The list of ‘banderial lords’ made a definite distinction between magnates and the rest of the nobility, which was contrary to customary law. The county nobles were placated by receiving the right to send sixteen lesser noble jurors to the benches of the royal courts and, from 1500, into the royal council as well. From the mid-1490s the noble counties, or their different factions, sometimes supporting one baronial group, sometimes the other, appeared at the diet with their hired soldiers. Typically, those lesser barons who were omitted from the banderial list succeeded in rallying the county nobility and presenting themselves as spokesmen for the commoners. The king, ever more threatened by the armed baronial and noble factions, looked to other monarchs for support. In 1492 the Jagiello brothers agreed to support each other in case of rebellion, and there was also a gradual rapprochement between Wladislas and Maximilian. In response to the king’s overtures to the Habsburgs and in support of the popular voivode of Transylvania, John Szapolyai (to become King John from 1526 to 1541), the diet of 1505 passed a decree against ever electing a ‘foreign king’, should Wladislas die without an heir. However, the birth of Louis (as Louis II, king of Hungary and Bohemia 1516—26) having taken the edge off this ‘national’ grumbling, the diet accepted the king’s coronation oath in the name of his son and crowned the baby king of Hungary in 1508. Nevertheless, in 1506, a Jagiello—Habsburg family treaty was signed (renewed in 1515), sealed by a marriage arrangement between the children of Wladislas and Maximilian, confirming the latter’s right to succession in Hungary.