A Beatrix-psalterium geneziséhez

King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (1458‒1490), son of the “Scourge of the Turks,” John Hunyadi, was a foremost patron of early Renaissance art. He was only fourteen years old in 1470 when he was elected king, and his patronage naturally took some time and maturity to develop, notably through his relations with the Neapolitan Aragon dynasty. In December 1476, he married Beatrice, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon, who brought to Buda a love of books and music she had inherited from her grandfather, Alphonse of Aragon. I studied the work of Beatrice’s brother John of Aragon (Giovanni d’Aragona), previously known mainly from Thomas Haffner’s monograph on his library (1997), from the viewpoint of his influence on Matthias’s art patronage. John was born in Naples on June 25, 1456, the third son of Ferdinand I of Aragon. His father, crowned king by Pope Pius II in 1458 following the death of Alphonse of Aragon, intended from the outset that he should pursue a church career. Ferdinand’s children, Alphonse (heir to the throne), Beatrice, and John were educated by outstanding humanist teachers, including Antonio Beccadelli (Il Panormita) and Pietro Ranzano. Through his father and the kingdom’s good relations with the papacy, John acquired many benefices, and when Pope Sixtus IV (1471‒1484) created him cardinal at the age of twenty-one, on December 10, 1477, he made a dazzling entrance to Rome. John was — together with Marco Barbo, Oliviero Carafa, and Francesco Gonzaga — one of the principal contemporary patrons of the College of Cardinals. On April 19, 1479, Sixtus IV appointed John legatus a latere, to support Matthias’s planned crusade against the Ottomans. On August 31, he departed Rome with two eminent humanists, Raffaele Maffei (also known as Volaterranus), encyclopedist and scriptor apostolicus of the Roman Curia, and Felice Feliciano, collector of ancient Roman inscriptions. John made stops in Ferrara, and Milan, and entered Buda — according to Matthias’s historian Antonio Bonfini — with great pomp. During his eight months in Hungary, he accompanied Matthias and Beatrice to Visegrád, Tata, and the Carthusian monastery of Lövöld and probably exerted a significant influence on the royal couple, particularly in the collecting of books. Matthias appointed his brother-in-law archbishop of Esztergom, the highest clerical office in Hungary, with an annual income of thirty thousand ducats. Leaving Hungary in July 1480, John returned to Rome via Venice and Florence, where, as reported by Ercole d’Este’s ambassador to Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici showed him the most valuable works of art in his palace, and he visited San Marco and its library and the nearby Medici sculpture garden. In September 1483, Sixtus IV again appointed John legate, this time to Germany and Hungary. He took with him the Veronese physician Francesco Fontana and stayed in Buda and Esztergom between October 1483 and June 1484. The royal couple presented him with silver church vessels, a gold chalice, vestments, and a miter. John’s patronage focused on book collecting and building. He spent six thousand ducats annually on the former. Among his acquisitions were contemporary architectural treatises by Leon Battista Alberti and Filarete, which he borrowed for copying from Lorenzo’s library. They were also featured in Matthias Corvinus’s library, perhaps reflecting John’s influence. Around 1480, during his stay in Buda (approximately 1478‒1480), the excellent miniaturist, Francesco Rosselli made the first few large-format luxury codices for Matthias and Beatrice. Both Queen Beatrice and John of Aragon played a part of this by bringing with them the Aragon family’s love of books, and perhaps also a few codices. The Paduan illuminator Gaspare da Padova (active 1466‒1517), who introduced the all’antica style to Neapolitan book painting, was employed in Rome by John as well as by Francesco Gonzaga, and John’s example encouraged Matthias and Beatrice commission all’antica codices. He may also have influenced the choice of subject matter: John collected only ancient and late classical manuscripts up to 1483 and mainly theological and scholastic books thereafter; Matthias’s collection followed a similar course in which theological and scholastic works proliferated after 1485. Anthony Hobson has detected a link between Queen Beatrice’s Psalterium and the Livius codex copied for John of Aragon: both were bound by Felice Feliciano, who came to Hungary with the Cardinal. Feliciano’s probable involvement with the Erlangen Bible (in the final period of his work, probably in Buda) may therefore be an important outcome of the art-patronage connections between John and the king of Hungary. John further shared with Matthias a passion for building. He built palaces for himself in the monasteries of Montevergine and Montecassino, of which he was abbot, and made additions to the cathedral of Sant’Agata dei Goti and the villa La Conigliera in Naples. Antonio Bonfini, in his history of Hungary, highlights Matthias’s interest, which had a great impact on contemporaries; but only fragments of his monumental constructions survive. We see another link between John and Matthias in the famous goldsmith of Milan, Cristoforo Foppa (Caradosso, c. 1452‒1526/1527). Caradosso set up his workshop in John’s palace in Rome, where he began but — because of his patron’s death in autumn 1485 — was unable to finish a famous silver salt cellar that he later tried to sell. John may also have prompted Matthias to invite Caradosso to spend several months in Buda, where he made silver tableware. Further items in the metalware category are our patrons’ seal matrices. My research has uncovered two kinds of seal belonging to Giovanni d’Aragona. One, dating from 1473, is held in the archives of the Benedictine Abbey of Montecassino. It is a round seal with the arms of the House of Aragon at the centre. After being created cardinal in late 1477, he had two types of his seal. The first, simple contained only his coat of arm (MNL OL, DL 18166). The second elaborate seal matrix made in the early Renaissance style, of which seals survive in the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (Fondo Veneto I 5752, 30 September 1479) and one or two documents in the Esztergom Primatial Archive (Cathedral Chapter Archive, Lad. 53., Fasc. 3., nr.16., 15 June 1484). At the centre of the mandorla-shaped field, sitting on a throne with balustered arm-rest and tympanum above, is the Virgin Mary (Madonna lactans type), with two supporting figures whose identification requires further research. The legend on the seal is fragmentary: (SIGILL?)VM ……….DON IOANNIS CARDINALIS (D’?) ARAGONIA; beneath it is the cardinal’s coat of arms in the form of a horse’s head (testa di cavallo) crowned with a hat. It may date from the time of Caradosso’s first presumed stay in Rome (1475‒1479), suggesting him as the maker of the matrix, a hypothesis for which as yet no further evidence is known to me. The seals of King Matthias have been thoroughly studied, and the form and use of each type have been almost fully established. John of Aragon was buried in Rome, in his titular church, in the Dominican Basilica of Santa Sabina. Johannes Burckard described the funeral procession from the palace to the Aventine in his Liber notarum. Matthias died in 1490 in his new residence, the Vienna Burg, and his body was taken in grand procession to Buda and subsequently to the basilica of Fehérvár, the traditional place of burial of Hungarian kings. The careers of both men ended prematurely: John might have become pope, and Matthias Holy Roman emperor. (The bulk of the research for this paper was made possible by my two-month Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts [CASVA] of the National Gallery of Art [Washington DC] in autumn 2019.) [fordította: Alan Campbell]

Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary from 1458–1490, recognized an intimate connection between astrology and politics. His rich library contained numerous astrological texts, and he decorated his palaces at Buda and Visegrad with horoscopes. He also provided generous patronage for foreign astrologers. One of the most famous astrologers to spend his career at Corvinus’s court was Martin Bylica. Bylica had been trained in astrology at the University of Krakow before moving, eventually, to Hungary. By 1468, Bylica had attracted Corvinus’s attention and began to benefit from the king’s generous patronage. Bylica provided Corvinus with important political and military advice throughout the king’s reign. Equally important, Bylica’s career in Buda helped to construct the image of Corvinus as a Renaissance monarch who drew on the most sophisticated sciences available in the fifteenth century. Late in the spring 1468, Matthias Corvinus convened the Hungarian diet in the city of Pozsony. Holding the diet in Pozsony enabled him to impress the Hungarian nobles with the local intellectual community that had begun to form at his fledgling Academia Istropolitana, which he had founded the previous year. Pozsony was also conveniently located close to Moravia, where Corvinus had recently initiated hostilities against the governor. The diet had a number important domestic and foreign political issues to resolve. Corvinus’s relations with the Bohemian king, George of Podebrady, had always been strained. Following the death of Corvinus’s wife, Catherine Podebrady in 1464, tensions had increased (Odložilik 1965, pp. 190–221; Engel 2001, p. 304). Corvinus had in March 1468 declared war on Victorin Podebrady, the Bohemian king’s son and governor of Moravia, and had more recently invaded southern Moravia. In addition to the hostilities in Bohemia, Corvinus had to contend with domestic unrest, centered largely around his financial reforms and taxation. In the fall 1467, he had been forced to lead an army into Transylvania to quell a rebellion of barons there. In December, he had been defeated by Prince Stephen in Moldavia when he had tried to force the prince’s allegiance. Corvinus’s hold on the Hungarian throne was certainly not secure. Along with these pressing military and diplomatic issues, Corvinus had scheduled a disputation between two Polish astrologers: Martin Bylica and Jan Stercze. Stercze had been Bylica’s student and was now the court astrologer to Janos Rozgon, a Hungarian count

The paper examines the use of the Serbian language in the diplomatic correspondence of Hungarian kings and court officials in the 15th and 16th centuries from a philological point of view. The analysis includes the letters by King Matthias Corvinus (a letter to Friar Alexander from 1465 and a letter to Sultan Bayezid II from 1487), a letter by Stephen Báthory, court judge and Transylvanian Voivode of Matthias Corvinus, addressed to Smederevo sanjak-bey Mihaloğlu Ali Bey in 1483, as well as the letters by King John Zápolya sent in 1537 to Smederevo sanjak-bey Yahyapaşa-oğlu Mehmed Pasha and his deputy Ferhat. In addition to the text in the original script and translation into English, the paper also discusses the most important philological features of the aforementioned letters. The graphic and orthographic analysis indicated a high degree of unevenness and variation both within individual offices and individual documents: in the letter by Matthias Corvinus to Friar Alexander (1465) features of Bosnian-Hum and Raška orthography are mixed; in the letter by Matthias Corvinus to Sultan Bayezid II (1487) Raška orthography is used; in Báthory’s letter, features of Resava orthography predominate, while Raška orthography with elements of Resava prevails in the letters by John Zápolya. Following the criterion of the dialectal foundations of language, the analyzed letters are divided into two groups. The first group contains the letters by King Matthias Corvinus: the language of the letter to Sultan Bayezid II is based upon the Ikavian vernaculars of western Bosnia, and the language of the letter to Friar Alexander points to the Ikavian vernaculars of western Bosnia or the dialect from which the Posavina, Slavonic and Ikavian-Jekavian vernaculars of eastern Bosnia were derived. The second group incorporates Báthory’s letter to Mihaloğlu Ali Bey and letters of John Zápolya, in which the language is based on the southeastern Serbian dialect of the 15th and 16th centuries.

At the end of June 1498, king Vladislas II of Hungary received at his court in Buda Ștefan Stoica, judge and vaivode (commander in chief of the local hussars) of the borough (oppidum) of Caransebeș and his juror Thomas Nagy. The two leaders of the urban community asked the sovereign to approve the release of copies from several privilegial documents granted to the capital‑city of Buda. On the kings order, Johannes Kanczlir, chief‑judge in Buda and his jurors transcribed into a diploma from June 30th, 1498 (published in appendix 3) – a five leafs strong notebook on parchement – two documents issued by king Sigismund of Luxemburg on December 9th, 1403 (published in appendix 1) and on April 15th, 1404 (published in appendix 2), related to different questions on the election and tasks of the judge and jurors in Buda and the status of citizens. At the same time, in the diploma of 1498 were excerpted stipulations from the Golden Bull of king Andrew II (1222) and from other privilegial documents granted to Buda by the kings Vladislas I and Matthias Corvinus. Connected to legal measures taken by other hungarian kings, these rules represented the so‑called Buda‑law, gathered in an codex nown as the Ofner Stadtrecht/Budai jogkönyv. Even if the document from 1498 was edited yet 1878 by Pesty Frigyes, nevertheless he did not publish the text of the diplomas from 1403 and 1404 and overlooked totally a very important paragraph: the excerpts from kind Andrew’s II Golden Bull and from other royal privileges granted by Vladislas I and Matthias Corvinus. Far more, Pesty, as well as other recent authors seized only in a peripheral way the true significance of the diploma from 1498, according to that Caransebeș were confirmed the rights resulting from the Buda‑law. But the royal court focused his attention on Caransebeș far earlier, mainly with the reign of Sigismund of Luxemburg, due to his military importance as a point in the defence at the border of the kingdom to the ceaseless threat of an Ottoman attack, as well as a crossing point of the roads and of the trade to Transylvania and Timișoara. We are not aware if the legal stipulations of the Buda law were included, as for a certain number of cities in Transylvania and Hungary, in a statute of municipal rights, but it is sure, that at least to the second half of the 16th century, with Caransebeș as part of the autonomous principality of Transylvania, the rules of the Buda‑law were here still in effect.

Connections between the Balkan-Serbian-Pannonian corridor and the Pannonian-Finnish corridor extending to the Silk Road are multiple and complex. Thus Stefan Vladislav, son of Stefan Dragutin (King of Serbia) is depicted holding an axe by Hieromonk Stefan, symbol of his Árpádian ancestry, his Árpádian position, related to his victorious ancestor at Kerlés. In Wallachia, the saint popularly known as Philothea is depicted with the axe of St. Ladislaus. St. Catherine, depicted next to a breaking wheel, symbol of gnosis, but also the instrument of her death, or the martyrs, depicted by the Cross, symbol of Christ's divinity, but analogously, way of our death and redemption, give us a glimpse of St. Philothea's axe double meaning. Catherine, in her lives in Greek and in her hymnography, is called Philothea, the one who loves God. St. Philothea of Argeş is depicted in her lay attire, and she is not a nun, and by tradition she lived in the 13th century. St. Philothea, the historical one, lived in the 4th century, and was a nun. It is clear that it is another character. Although Euthymius of Tarnovo wrote about the life of this holy nun, there is no evidence that her relics existed at Tarnovo. In correlation with Ladislaus cycle, archetype for that, the earliest representation of the concept of liberating the state from a false emperor or illegitimate conqueror, is in Constantine's cup (dated after 300 AD), where Constantine liberates Sofia as a state from the pagan Licinius. The model monarch of Moscow, the monarchical ancestor of the era when Moscow became a state, is the main character of Skazanie o Drakule voievode. He is Vlad the Impaler. The ultimate expression, on European level, of the imperial nature of the Nemanjić branch who inherited the Árpádians in Ungrovlachia. The branch that preserved the name of the Árpádian imperial succession through the Nemanjić. Hungarian Vlach. And national consciousness. Dynasty symbolized by the axe of St. Ladislaus, which for this reason appears on Hungarian-Vlachian coins, including those of Mircea the Elder, next to the holy ancestor, as well as on the first coinage of Moscow, from the time of Ivan III. The presence of Ladislaus in that context on the Moscow coinage with Matthias Corvinus’ weapons but the name of Ivan III and the name of Moscow in the legend, shows us a possible archaic alternative genealogy of the rulers of Moscow, visible in the systematic election of the Hungarian kings, including Matthias’ in the Chronicle of Faces, whose death is depicted in detail there with Orthodox priests present and Serbian nobility next to him with the title of tsar. Roman and Vlahata is not only a text about Moldova, but also about the founding of Moscow, Caraș (the land of Criș), Maramureș and Moldova being landmarks of entrance to a north Pontic and north Caucasian corridor leading to Moscow. It is the mechanism of the Third Rome foundation, and the Romanovich family name, which later got linked to the Romanov dynasty, and archaically also added the history of the ancient Rurik family, also using that name, and the history of the Moldavian lords bearing these names and the city founded, confirms that yes, Moscow had become somewhat of a Hungarian-Wallachia. This ideology led to the adoption of the tree of Jesse in Moscow, but also to the somehow ethnic name of medieval Serbs, as rumâni, old Romans. The name game of Roma, Roman and Vlahata, and the ethnic name of the Serbs at St. Sava, rumâni, linked to the existence of a parallel medieval Hungarian legend about the eponymous heroes Hunor and Magor, which include, as in the case of the Romanovich, the names given at the time to the Hungarians (Hungarians and Magyars, respectively Romanians and Vlachs) shows us that the Hungarian-Wallachian ideology that inherited through Dragutin the Árpádians and the Nemanjić was also the state ideology of Moscow at the time. Basically these two chronicles, Hunor and Magor and Roman and Vlahata show us the history of the Jewish-Khazar world on the Moscow-Pannonia route. They came as Hunor and Magor, as Hungarian-Magyars, and returned as Serbs, as Roman and Vlahata, as Romanian-Wallachians. From Moscow to Pannonia-Ilyria and back again.

The Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus’s royal library as the collection of a renaissance/humanist ruler was enriched not only with works ordered or purchased in Italy but also with manuscripts made in Buda. Most recent investigations suggest that illumining and copying activity started in the Buda court only after the arrival of Queen Beatrice (1476). The paper is concerned with one of the marked illuminator figures of the Buda workshop labelled – for want of real identification – as “the first emblazoner”. (His figure was first outlined by Edith Hoffmann in the 1920s, who also verified that he had been trained in Florence.) So far modest floral ornaments and Matthias’s coat of arms had been attributed to this illuminator, in addition to two voluminous manuscripts, the Alberti Corvina in Modena and the Ambrosius Corvina in Paris (Modena, BEU, ms.Lat.419; Paris, BnF, Cod. Latin 1767). The paper sheds light on the illuminator’s figure embedded in a broader context and viewed from a new angle. The novel aspect is the differentiation between the illuminator’s own style and style imitation. The author managed to demonstrate that the master did not only create his own style but occasionally imitated the style of others. Accordingly, the first half of the study analyses the illuminator’s own style in detail, and the second half discusses his work with the method of imitation. The basis for the examination of the latter is the Ransanus manuscript (Bp. OSZK, cod. Lat. 249) in which the master’s hand imitating a certain Franco-Flemish style can be safely identified. While explicating the above topics, the author also proposes new ideas about the genesis and localization of two important corvina manuscripts. She proves that the Philostratus (Bp., OSZK, Cod. Lat. 417) and Ransanus Corvinae so-far believed to have been made in Florence and Southern Italy were actually produced in the Buda workshop. The author uses all aspects of codicological research in her argumentation. This is the first time during the research that a scribe figure is also delineated who worked in the Buda workshop at the very end of the 1480s. The Beda Corvina as well as Nagylucsei’s Psalter (Venice, BNM, Lat. VIII. 2=2796; Munich, BSB, Clm 175; Budapest, OSZK, Cod. Lat. 369) are by his hand. The Philostratus Corvina can be attributed to a scribe who imitated him fairly closely. The author concludes that the working method of the “first emblazoner” (idiosyncratic and imitated styles) and his role in different codices epitomize the functioning of the Buda workshop. She opines that the structure of the workshop was based on the parallel activity and occasional collaboration of outstanding and lesser masters. It is almost self-evident to infer from her reasoning that the Florentine illuminator Boccardino il Vecchio possibly decorated the Philostratus Corvina in Buda. The author points out that the inner initials of the manuscript are not by Boccardino il Vecchio but by a lesser figural painter. One of the secondary initials is clearly the copy of a Francesco Rosselli half-figure type. This phenomenon locates the second hand (“first emblazoner”?) to Buda. (Rosselli worked in Buda in 1479/80, his works were included in the Buda library, too.) The fact that a lesser master had a role in such an exquisite manuscript is ascribed by the author to the structure of the Buda workshop. At the same time the paper also raises the question of the contribution of the “second emblazoner” within the Corvina Library and concludes that the Ransanus manuscript is the joint work of the “first” and “second emblazoners” in Buda (working on the codex with time lags). The author reflects upon the long-standing question of dating the two heraldic painters and adduces important data to support the earlier also proposed hypothesis that the first and second emblazoners worked parallel, and their work coincided with the comprehensive development and unification of the Buda library at the very end of the 1480s.

Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary

This paper examines a historical record dated September 6, 1471, known as Diffiditoria a rege Pollonie regni Hungarie, which has received limited scholarly attention despite its relevance to the political and diplomatic strategies employed during the conflict between Poland and Hungary. Slightly different versions of this text preserved now in Romania were traditionally understood as a declaration of war against Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, asserting the claims of Polish Prince Casimir’s legitimate succession rights to the Hungarian throne while publicly accusing Matthias of tyranny and misgovernance. By analysing the dual role of the document as a political manifesto and propaganda tool, the authors highlight the intricate interplay of power, legitimacy, and public sentiment. Furthermore, this historical testimony illustrates how written communication was leveraged to influence political narratives and outcomes, making it a valuable resource for historians investigating late 15th-century Polish-Hungarian relations.

The paper provides a short overview of a frequently neglected twofold question: what were the costs of anti-Ottoman crusading and what were the profits that one hoped that anti-Ottoman crusading would trigger? The documentary appendix provides some insight into these issues, based on the special case of Stephen III of Moldavia in 1475-1476. He had become the athlete of the Papacy and was to face the might of Sultan Mehmed II. Stephen survived, with (belated) support from Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, his (unwanted) suzerain.

In this essay, I examine how people with business and political interest on both sides of Austrian–Hungarian border, sometimes even in royal courts, could survive in spite of the rather capricious relationship between Hungarian kings and Habsburg rulers in the second half of the fifteenth century and the early sixteenth century. Most of them sought a solution that would enable them to keep the estates and the positions they had already acquired. This “double loyalty” was practically impossible in the midst of the war between Matthias Corvinus and Frederick III, Holy Roman emperor: very few of the figures in question managed to maintain attachments to both sides. A window of opportunity opened with the Peace of Pressburg in 1491, when the two parties recognized the possibility of service in the neighboring ruler’s service. Although the peace treaty did not alter the significant shrinking of the camp supporting the Habsburg claim to the throne, which had been relatively large in the time of the 1490–91 Austro-Hungarian War, from the 1490s on and in strikingly large numbers from the mid-1510s, more and more people could be found whose activities made plainly clear that they were not exclusive in their loyalties: they were quite able to serve two masters at the same time.

Reviewed by: Közép-Európa harca a török ellen a 16 század első felében [The Central-Europeans’ struggle with the Turks during the former half of the sixteenth century] Z. J. Kosztolnyik Közép-Európa harca a török ellen a 16 század első felében [The Central-Europeans’ struggle with the Turks during the former half of the sixteenth century]. Edited by István Zombori. (Budapest: METEM. 2004. Pp. 219.) When the new Ottoman sultan, Mohammed II (the Conqueror, 1451–1481) occupied Constantinople in 1453, he intended to draw Europe, especially Central Europe, under his sway. Although three years later Christian armies led by the Hungarian Regent, John Hunyadi, and the Franciscan friar, John Capistrano, thoroughly defeated the Turks at Belgrade, European leaders neglected to prepare for a final confrontation with the Turk for several decades, and by 1521, Sultan Suleiman I was able to occupy Belgrade; sensing the weakness of domestic leadership in countries north of the Danube, he invaded Hungary in 1526 and demolished the medieval Hungarian kingdom at Mohács. The Ottomans besieged, but could not conquer Vienna; however, the Magyar capital Buda passed under permanent Turkish rule in 1541, and the major portion of the country remained under Ottoman occupation until the end of the seventeenth century. Consequently, the Turks presented a steady threat to Bohemia, the Austrian territories of Steyermark and Carinthia, and, through their allies with Crimean Tartars, also to Poland. Taking a common military front of resistance toward the Turk would have served the mutual interests of the peoples in Central Europe. The authors of the ten essays collected in this volume emphasize this common interest as they evaluate the sequence of events during the cited time period. Their works are divided in three groups by the editor of the volume. In the first group of essays—"The Turks: a new threat to Central Europe"—Pál Fodor discusses relations between Hungary and the Ottoman empire from 1390 to [End Page 526] 1533, using primary sources—in Turkish and in Magyar—and recent studies. Sándor Papp analyzes the beginnings of Magyar-Turkish contacts from the mid-fourteenth century to 1540. He goes into detail on events in Balkan politics, including the bloody confrontation in 1371 at the Marica stream, where the Christian forces suffered defeat (an engagement, from which even the Hungarian king, Louis the Great, 1342–1382, only miraculously escaped). And yet, the author explained that Ottoman diplomacy treated the Hungarian court with respect and on equal terms until 1526. Ilona Czaman´ska places Polish-Turkish relations in the former half of the 1500's under microscopic examination; in her short but precise study she argues that the Polish court seriously considered confronting the Turks through military means, especially after the nephew of King Sigismund I (of Poland, 1506–1548), the nine-year-old Louis II, ascended to the Hungarian throne in 1516. On the other hand, the Slovak Vladimír Segesš rationalizes in philosophical terms the sometimes logical, sometimes really mindless, background of the wars fought with the Turks as he views those battles from a triangular aspect in terms of time, space, and mobility. The four studies that form the second part of the book deal with the co-ordinated Polish-Habsburg effort to stand up to the Turk. András Kubinyi opens this section with his exemplarily detailed and thoroughly researched study, painting, as you will, a historic fresco of the role played by members of the mighty Magyar aristocracy, how they reacted to the Ottoman threat to their country in the age of Jagiello kings, 1490–1526. Although his piece relies quite heavily on his earlier works published in Hungarian and in German—as, e.g., "Historische Skizze Ungarns in der Jagiellonenzeit," in his König und Volk im spätmittelalterlichen Ungarn (Herne, 1998), pp. 322–368, or, his essay, "Königtum, Stände und Regierungen am Ende des Mittelalters in Ungarn," in his Matthias Corvinus. Die Regierung eines Königreichs in Ostmitteleuropa, 1458–90 (Herne, 1999), pp. 216–237, just as Kubinyi refers to his study [in Hungarian], "The role held by the Church in...

The myths about the birth of Matthias Corvinus - though varied in contents - were written with the view to his legality as king. Even after the coronation his authorization was called into question by many Hungarian aristocrats, because his father János Hunyadi, the celebrated fighter against the Turks, was a homo novus. Although the royal propaganda led back the family Hunyadi, bearing the raven (corvus) in the coat of arms, to the famous Roman Corvini, a widespread myth about the aition of this raven - a story which made János Hunyadi a natural son of king Sigismund - still circulated and was used against Matthias. Examination of this story makes quite sure that it was not invented by Matthias' enemies; the invention was rather an attempt made by his father János to prepare the basis for his and his children's influence and power.

Summary The erection of the first retable of remarkable dimension in the Leutschau Parish Church can be dated on the basis of the coats of arms of King Matthias Corvinus and of his wife, Beatrix, sculpted on its predella. As Matthias visited the city in 1474, the donation can be attributed to him, while the armory of Beatrice proves that the execution was not earlier than their marriage in 1476. An analogue to the use of royal coats of arms is given by the retable of Our Lady of the Snow in the same church, which is traditionally considered as a commemoration of the Leutschau meeting of the Dukes of the Jagiellonian Dynasty in 1494.

The provenance of several stone carvings thought to have belonged among the renaissance carved stones of King Matthias Corvinus' Buda palace is uncertain. A huge gable field with a coat of arms and a monumental inscribed tablet came to the collection of the Hungarian National Museum in 1874. Earlier, they adorned the old building of the University Library — the convent of the Franciscans of Pest — but it has not been clarified yet how they had got there. This time, sources have been found about their transfer into the National Museum. They were involved in an exchange: for the carved stones (some Roman ones as well in addition to the renaissance stones) that were extracted when the old library building was pulled down, the University Library received the second copy of Chronica Hungarorum (Buda, Andreas Hess, 1473), the first book printed in Hungary preserved in the National Széchényi Library. This copy of the Chronicle has permanently been in Hungary and eventually got into the National Museum and the Library together with the collection of Miklós Jankovich, the great art collector. It was part of a colligatum containing Caius Julius Caesar's De bello Gallico, which — to a superficial observer — might also have been taken for a product of the Hess printing office. From the colligatum (adorned with a late medieval Hungarian book cover) the Hess incunabulum was removed and given to the University Library together with another four old books printed in Hungary.

! e present article reff ers to the phenomenon of 19th century nobility confi rmations asked by members of the noble families that gained their nobility during the 16th – 18th centuries for devoted military or executory services. ! e Romanian origin of the protagonists of the 19th century documents kept in the local administration archives is not explicitly revealed but more or less presumed based on their christian names and sometimes on their religion.Starting with the second half of the 16th century there can be detected a radical change in the way the nobility parchments were conferred being of common knowledge the proliferation of the armorial nobility in Transylvania, Banat and Partium. ! e exempt from obligations, usually of fi scal origin and the conferring of certain privileges to the ennobled person, which sometimes extended also upon his descendants, accompanied by a coat of arms, represented a characteristic of the phenomenon of ennoblement.! e information kept about certain families of Romanian origin who’s descendents asked the confi rmation of their nobility based on nobility parchments received by their forefathers from the Hungarian kings, rulers of Transylvanian Principality and later on by the Habsburg emperors, help the historians to complete a global image of the phenomenon of ennoblement during the centuries.! ere are plenty of documents kept at the level of local administration during the 19th century in which one witnesses the practice of requiring and getting the confi rmation of the nobility. One of the families that frequently appears in documents and sometimes the information is backed up also by the Romanian and Hungarian bibliography of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is Faur family originally from Teiuș who’s members lived also in Arad, Timiș, Caraș, Cenad, Zărand Counties. Testimony was also kept about a member of the well known Matskási of Tinkova family, namely Matskásy Lajos junior who asked the representatives of Caraș county to confirm his nobility based on the fact that his father Matskásy Lajos senior enjoyed certain privileges as a noble and civil servant of the Szeckler Chairs of Odorhei, Cristur and Brăduţ.Not only well known families of Romanian origin as Matskásy (Măcicaș) family can be traced out but also other names as Cornia alias Barb, Pap alias Popvici, Fogarasy, Șubony, Jumanca and Racz. Certain descendents with the name of Racz appear during the 19th century process of nobility confirmation but one cannot tell if the family was of Serbian or Romanian origin, on the one hand because of the fact that both Romanians and Serbians had the same orthodox religion and on the other hand because the translation from Hungarian language of the word „racz” is Serbian. There are also some Romanian names recorded in the lists of noble man from Caraș county such as Nicolae Krecsun, Koszta Greku, Mihaly Krecsun, Iuon Blusovan, Athanasie Doma, Dioniszie Popeszko, Paszku Miksa and so on but they might gain their nobility during the second half of the 18th century or even during the 19th century as the documents do not give information concerning this aspect.