kingdom, together with Austria and Moravia, both of which had thrown in their lot with Hungary (1608). The king of Hungary, as Matthias now became, was reluctantly compelled to grant religious liberty to the inhabitants of Austria. The strained relations which had arisen between Rudolph and Matthias as a result of these proceedings were temporarily improved, and a formal reconciliation took place in 1610; but affairs in Bohemia soon destroyed this fraternal peace. In spite of the letter of majesty (Majestätsbrief) which the Bohemians had extorted from Rudolph, they were very dissatisfied with their ruler, whose troops were ravaging their land; and in 1611 they invited Matthias to come to their aid. Accepting this invitation, he inflicted another humiliation upon his brother, and was crowned king of Bohemia in May 1611. Rudolph, however, was successful in preventing the election of Matthias as German king, or king of the Romans, and when he died, in January 1612, no provision had been made for a successor. Already king of Hungary and Bohemia, however, Matthias obtained the remaining hereditary dominions of the Habsburgs, and in June 1612 was crowned emperor, although the ecclesiastical electors favoured his younger brother, the archduke Albert (1559–1621).
The short reign of the new emperor was troubled by the religious dissensions of Germany. His health became impaired and his indolence increased, and he fell completely under the influence of Melchior Klesl (q.v.), who practically conducted the imperial business. By Klesl’s advice he took up an attitude of moderation and sought to reconcile the contending religious parties; but the proceedings at the diet of Regensburg in 1613 proved the hopelessness of these attempts, while their author was regarded with general distrust. Meanwhile the younger Habsburgs, led by the emperor’s brother, the archduke Maximilian, and his cousin, Ferdinand, archduke of Styria, afterwards the emperor Ferdinand II., disliking the peaceful policy of Klesl, had allied themselves with the unyielding Roman Catholics, while the question of the imperial succession was forcing its way to the front. In 1611 Matthias had married his cousin Anna (d. 1618), daughter of the archduke Ferdinand (d. 1595), but he was old and childless and the Habsburgs were anxious to retain his extensive possessions in the family. Klesl, on the one hand, wished the settlement of the religious difficulties to precede any arrangement about the imperial succession; the Habsburgs, on the other, regarded the question of the succession as urgent and vital. Meanwhile the disputed succession to the duchies of Cleves and Jülich again threatened a European war; the imperial commands were flouted in Cologne and Aix-la-Chapelle, and the Bohemians were again becoming troublesome. Having decided that Ferdinand should succeed Matthias as emperor, the Habsburgs had secured his election as king of Bohemia in June 1617, but were unable to stem the rising tide of disorder in that country. Matthias and Klesl were in favour of concessions, but Ferdinand and Maximilian met this move by seizing and imprisoning Klesl. Ferdinand had just secured his coronation as king of Hungary when there broke out in Bohemia those struggles which heralded the Thirty Years’ War; and on the 20th of March 1619 the emperor died at Vienna.
For the life and reign of Matthias the following works may be consulted: J. Heling, Die Wahl des römischen Königs Matthias (Belgrade, 1892); A. Gindely, Rudolf II. und seine Zeit (Prague, 1862–1868); F. Stieve, Die Verhandlungen über die Nachfolge Kaisers Rudolf II. (Munich, 1880); P. von Chlumecky, Karl von Zierotin und seine Zeit (Brünn, 1862–1879); A. Kerschbaumer, Kardinal Klesel (Vienna, 1865); M. Ritter, Quellenbeiträge zur Geschichte des Kaisers Rudolf II. (Munich, 1872); Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Gegenreformation und des dreissigjährigen Krieges (Stuttgart, 1887, seq.); and the article on Matthias in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, Bd. XX. (Leipzig, 1884); L. von Ranke, Zur deutschen Geschichte vom Religionsfrieden bis zum 30-jährigen Kriege (Leipzig, 1888); and J. Janssen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters (Freiburg, 1878 seq.), Eng. trans. by M. A. Mitchell and A. M. Christie (London, 1896, seq.).
MATTHIAS I., HUNYADI (1440–1490), king of Hungary, also known as Matthias Corvinus, a surname which he received from the raven (corvus) on his escutcheon, second son of János Hunyadi and Elizabeth Szilágyi, was born at Kolozsvár, probably on the 23rd of February 1440. His tutors were the learned János Vitéz, bishop of Nagyvárad, whom he subsequently raised to the primacy, and the Polish humanist Gregory Sanocki. The precocious lad quickly mastered the German, Latin and principal Slavonic languages, frequently acting as his father’s interpreter at the reception of ambassadors. His military training proceeded under the eye of his father, whom he began to follow on his campaigns when only twelve years of age. In 1453 he was created count of Bistercze, and was knighted at the siege of Belgrade in 1454. The same care for his welfare led his father to choose him a bride in the powerful Cilli family, but the young Elizabeth died before the marriage was consummated, leaving Matthias a widower at the age of fifteen. On the death of his father he was inveigled to Buda by the enemies of his house, and, on the pretext of being concerned in a purely imaginary conspiracy against Ladislaus V., was condemned to decapitation, but was spared on account of his youth, and on the king’s death fell into the hands of George Poděbrad, governor of Bohemia, the friend of the Hunyadis, in whose interests it was that a national king should sit on the Magyar throne. Poděbrad treated Matthias hospitably and affianced him with his daughter Catherine, but still detained him, for safety’s sake, in Prague, even after a Magyar deputation had hastened thither to offer the youth the crown. Matthias was the elect of the Hungarian people, gratefully mindful of his father’s services to the state and inimical to all foreign candidates; and though an influential section of the magnates, headed by the palatine László Garai and the voivode of Transylvania, Miklós Ujlaki, who had been concerned in the judicial murder of Matthias’s brother László, and hated the Hunyadis as semi-foreign upstarts, were fiercely opposed to Matthias’s election, they were not strong enough to resist the manifest wish of the nation, supported as it was by Matthias’s uncle Mihály Szilágyi at the head of 15,000 veterans. On the 24th of January 1458, 40,000 Hungarian noblemen, assembled on the ice of the frozen Danube, unanimously elected Matthias Hunyadi king of Hungary, and on the 14th of February the new king made his state entry into Buda.
The realm at this time was environed by perils. The Turks and the Venetians threatened it from the south, the emperor Frederick III. from the west, and Casimir IV. of Poland from the north, both Frederick and Casimir claiming the throne. The Czech mercenaries under Giszkra held the northern counties and from thence plundered those in the centre. Meanwhile Matthias’s friends had only pacified the hostile dignitaries by engaging to marry the daughter of the palatine Garai to their nominee, whereas Matthias not unnaturally refused to marry into the family of one of his brother’s murderers, and on the 9th of February confirmed his previous nuptial contract with the daughter of George Poděbrad, who shortly afterwards was elected king of Bohemia (March 2, 1458). Throughout 1458 the struggle between the young king and the magnates, reinforced by Matthias’s own uncle and guardian Szilágyi, was acute. But Matthias, who began by deposing Garai and dismissing Szilágyi, and then proceeded to levy a tax, without the consent of the Diet, in order to hire mercenaries, easily prevailed. Nor did these complications prevent him from recovering the fortress of Galamboc from the Turks, successfully invading Servia, and reasserting the suzerainty of the Hungarian crown over Bosnia. In the following year there was a fresh rebellion, when the emperor Frederick was actually crowned king by the malcontents at Vienna-Neustadt (March 4, 1459); but Matthias drove him out, and Pope Pius II. intervened so as to leave Matthias free to engage in a projected crusade against the Turks, which subsequent political complications, however, rendered impossible. From 1461 to 1465 the career of Matthias was a perpetual struggle punctuated by truces. Having come to an understanding with his father-in-law Poděbrad, he was able to turn his arms against the emperor Frederick, and in April 1462 Frederick restored the holy crown for 60,000 ducats and was allowed to retain certain Hungarian counties with the title of king; in return for which concessions, extorted from Matthias by the necessity of coping with a simultaneous rebellion of the Magyar noble
