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Home , Hunyadi family, King of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus

THE MARRIAGE OF CORVINUS TO BEATRICE OF ARAGÓN (1476) IN URBAN AND COURT HISTORIOGRAPHY

Volker Honemann

In December 1476 Matthias I Corvinus, king of , took as his second wife Beatrice of Aragón, daughter of Ferrante of Aragón, king of Naples.1 The lavish celebrations of the wedding demonstrated how important politically this union was to Matthias. He had earlier been rebuffed several times in his desire to marry the Polish princess Jadwiga, mainly by the stigma of a low birth that was to affect him during his entire life. Matthias’s father, Johannes Hunyadi, had been governor of Hungary for the Emperor without being king, and the House of Hunyadi could not be traced further back than to the fifteenth century – enough reason for the of the time to give this Hungarian parvenu the cold shoulder.2 In these circumstances, Matthias took up an offer that had been made in 1465 by king Ferrante of Naples to ‘marry one of his daughters’. In the summer of 1474 a Hungarian embassy led by the archbishop of Kalocza and Miklós Bánfi was despatched to Naples to woo the bride. Although news of the success of this embassy reached Hungary by 30 October 1474, it would still be two years before the marriage was consummated. Matthias was heavily engaged by the Turkish Wars, while at the same time the marriage contract itself (June 1475) was not something that could be negotiated at short notice. When the wedding invitations had finally been sent around in May 1476, a strong delegation of 800 departed the court in August to fetch the bride. At the beginning of October it returned with the bride, reaching ‘Hungarian territory on the other side of Pettau in mid-November’ after a rather perilous voyage due to the dangers posed by the Turks.3

1 The best modern account is in Hoensch, , pp. 148-151. It is – inevitably – based on the report of Peter Eschenloer; see below. Corvinus’s first wife, Katerina, daughter of Georg of Podiebrad, had died in 1464, after a marriage of only three years. 2 For the see the genealogical table in Hoensch, ed, Matthias Corvinus, p. 328, note 1, and p. 148ff for Corvinus’s problematical status; see also Honemann, ‘Herrscheradventus’, p. 3. 3 See Hoensch’s representation (Matthias Corvinus), p. 149ff, quotation on p. 150. 214 VOLKER HONEMANN

The ensuing celebrations lasted from 10 December 1476 until 6 January 1477. Besides the wedding, they also included Beatrice’s as queen of Hungary; the combined festivities have been related in two contemporary chronicles. The first is the most notable vernacular chronicle of fifteenth-century , written by the town scribe of Wrocław, Peter Eschenloer (†1481), between 1475 and 1479.4 The other is a chronicle that was compiled at the court of Matthias Corvinus by the Italian humanist Antonio Bonfini (born 1427/8 in Ascoli Piceno), who since early 1487 had been a guest there as a reader to the Queen, and acted as a translator and a later historiographer. At Bonfini he wrote his Rerum Ungaricarum decades, a ‘shining example of humanist historio- graphy’, which also records the Stuhlweißenburg-Ofen coronation and wedding celebrations.5 In modern, secondary literature these two accounts are often regarded as examples of either late-medieval urban or court- influenced humanist historiography. It is my aim in the present essay to compare them, and to determine whether these characterisations are justified.

Peter Eschenloer’s account in the Geschichte der Stadt Breslau

Peter Eschenloer, who often represented Wrocław at important occasions concerning ‘foreign policy’,6 did not personally attend the wedding and coronation in Stuhlweißenburg and Ofen, possibly due to his low rank. Instead, the town sent a delegation of members of the council. Such a high- ranking delegation was appropriate and very much in the political interest of the town because Matthias Corvinus, as king of , was also lord over Silesia and its ‘capital’, Wrocław. An Instruktion der Breslauer Ratmannen für ihre Gesandten zur Hochzeit des Königs (part of the Scriptores rerum Silesiacarum) reveals that the Wrocław town council sent

4 Cf. Roth, ed, Peter Eschenloer. Eschenloer had been town scribe of Wrocław since 1455 and as such he stood at the head of the municipal administration; for his life and work, see ibidem, pp. 1-24, and for the time of its writing, pp. 25-27. The German chronicle derives from a Historia Wratislaviensis by Eschenloer, which ends in 1472. 5 Feo, ‘Bonfini, Antonio’. For editions of this text, see below. For Bonfini’s life, see Ungarischer biographischer Index, microfiche edition, here fiche 083, p. 238ff (including a reproduction of articles on Bonfini in David Czvittlinger, Specimen Hungariae litteratae and Georg Jeremias Haner, De scriptoribus rerum hungaricarum as well as numerous other entries). See also Apr5’s introduction to his edition Antonius Bonfini, Symposion de virginitate et pudicitia coniugali (p. iii ff). 6 Cf Roth, ed, Peter Eschenloer, vol. I, p. 13ff: ‘Eschenloer as delegate of his town’, with a directory of his foreign missions.