Corvinus, Matthias

(1440-1490)

   A younger son of János Hunyadi, king of Hungary, he successfully contended for the succession against the Habsburg Emperor Frederick III and ruled as king from 1458 to 1490. In 1469 he also became king of Bohemia. Given a humanist education and influenced by Italian conceptions of a ruler as well as by his family's military tradition, he made his capital at Buda a center for humanists from many parts of Europe and assembled the famous Corviniana library. His marriage to a Neapolitan princess in 1476 was linked to an expansionist foreign policy that extended his lands westward but led to neglect of the threat from the Ottoman Turks on his southern border that contributed to the Turkish conquest of most of Hungary in 1526.