Meeting the Raven King

by

Nicki Leone

Lorenzo:        Where is this CORVINIAN LIBRARY to be seen?

Philemon:       I will take post-horses ere sun-set, and borrow ‘the wings of the wind” when the fleetness of my coursers fails!

Lisardo:        You need do neither. List! The library of Corvinus has CEASED TO EXIST.

Lysander:      Oh horrible!

          —The Biographical Decameron, 1817

It’s nice to know that I can still be surprised, even shocked. Until very recently, if anyone had asked me to name the largest, most significant libraries of the Quattrocento Renaissance (and yes, there are reasons while someone might ask me that) I would have guessed the Papal Library in Rome, and the library of the Medicis perhaps a close second. I would have been correct about the first, but wrong about the second, for how was I to know that one of the greatest libraries of the Renaissance in the western world existed not in Florence, not even in Italy, but in the remote backwater city of Buda in Hungary, on the wild frontier between Christendom and the rising Ottoman Empire? And that the collector of this library was neither was not a pampered, soft, self-indulgent nobleman with nothing better to do but attend fashionable lectures and parties, but a militant, battle-ready, self-made warrior who spent more time at war than at peace and yet apparently still found plenty of time to read?

But a king of a remote and mountainous country does not win the praises of sophisticated Italian intellectuals just for beating back the Muslim threat to Christian lands. They don’t compose poems to military generals because such men sit tall in the saddle. No, when they dedicated their books and treatises and philosophical essays to Matthias Hundayi, Matthias Corvinus, it was because they expected he would actually read them. The court of the Hungarian king may have been distant from the cultural centers of Florence or Rome, but the king was known for his generosity to scholars, his patronage of humanists, his cultivation of the arts and sciences, and his generous standing orders with the Florentine copyists, scribes and booksellers. The largest library outside Italy of secular Greek and Roman texts—and contemporary commentaries—was not in Paris and not in Oxford. It was his.

According to Marcus Tanner, author of The Raven King: Matthias Corvinus and the Fate of His Lost Library, the royal library of Matthias Hunyadi probably contained about 2,500 Greek and Latin volumes—and maybe as much as 6,000 individual works. (It was standard practice to bind several works together into the same volume.) That is a staggering number of books for even a king in an era where most books were still copied out and illuminated by hand.

I have an affinity for people who are mad for books. I have quite a lot of books myself—more than I can be reasonably expected to finish reading in the time left to me—so it isn’t unusual for me to  muse on why, what, compels me to this particular obsession. And I’m naturally curious about other people with similar tastes. Still, it is a little odd to feel such a sense of kinship with a man who lived in a wild, barbaric land in the fifteenth century, who was both generous and strangely greedy, intellectually curious, but also a dilettante, considered just, but was also incredibly ruthless. “We would have been friends” I found myself thinking as I turned the pages of Tanner’s book. If, you know, I lived in the fifteenth century, wasn’t a woman, and didn’t get squeamish over a little thing like placing the heads of your enemies on spikes.

Tanner makes a valiant attempt to trace the history of the library of this all but forgotten king, but he isn’t always successful. It is, on the surface, a tantalizing and romantic story—a king of a faraway land, reachable only by traversing bandit-infested woods and mountainous paths—born a commoner but who ascended by steadfastness and virtue and great bravery in combat to claim the throne, who drew all manner of scholars and philosophers to his court, fought off infidels, enticed astrologers and astronomers to his side, and built a fantastic library filled with jewel-encrusted volumes of rare and beautifully illuminated texts—only to have it all melt away like snow within a few years of the king’s death. And the king himself becomes only legend among the common folk, who speak of him slumbering, with his black army beside him, until the day his beard grows to encircle the stone table he sits at nine times. Then he will awake and ride forth and make Hungary great again. It’s a fairy tale. Someone could write a novel.

As history, The Raven King is both fascinating and frustrating. Fascinating, because the Renaissance was a time of cultural, intellectual and scientific exploration—coupled with political chaos and religious foment. Really, how could it not be interesting? The sudden influx of Greek texts as scholars fled the Muslim conquered Constantinople for safer Christian countries heralded a new age of intellectual inquiry, along with its corresponding attacks on traditional mores. People who complain that we live today in a morally bankrupt era should take a look at Italy in the late 1400s. Sophisticated young intelligentsia derided religion and celebrated the secular (and the carnal) openly. The ruler Alphonso of Naples—whose granddaughter Beatrice would become Matthias’s queen—was the patron of the (in)famous poet Panormita (it was an artifice of the age to take a Latinized nom de plume). Panormita’s great claim to literary fame was the Hermaphroditus, which is basically one long series of graphically described sexual encounters, both heterosexual and homosexual, (“Why is it,” goes one epigram, “that someone who has once indulged in fellatio or pederasty can never forget the experience?” Why indeed.) The book was banned and burned, of course. But it was also in high demand and the less discerning critics likened the author to Ovid. It was, as Tanner explains, all written “in the most exquisite Latin.”

Hermaphroditus, however, was not among the texts known to exist in the library of Matthias Corvinus, and this is an example of what makes Tanner’s book rather frustrating. For a book ostensibly about a single man and his singular passion to create a singular library, The Raven King is a diffuse and often entangled account. The author is a historian first and a storyteller second, which makes for excellent documentation and a truly admirable bibliography and collection of footnotes. But it also means that where he has no primary sources, he is forced to reach further afield. As it turns out, there is no known “master list” or catalog of the books in the legendary library of this legendary king, so the author must talk instead about the libraries of Italian contemporaries which are better known and better catalogued. Readers will get an excellent, if erudite, understanding of the role of the princely library as a cultural resource (the first “public” libraries were private collections that noblemen opened for the use of scholars). They will not, however, get a good idea of why Matthias liked books.

The truth is, no one really knows. Historians can only speculate and extrapolate. Tanner does his best to explain the king’s humanistic enthusiasms, despite the lack of source material, by tracing the early Italian influences in his life—tutors and churchmen that were assigned to the bishopric of Buda by the Pope. In fact, it appears that most of his early exposure to humanistic thought happened after he was fifteen, when he went literally from imprisonment by his enemies to being elected to the throne. The politics of fifteenth-century Hungary were convoluted in the extreme, but the upshot was that the Pope felt Matthias to be a better candidate for the throne of the country that stood between Italy and the alarming advances of the Ottoman Empire than any other contender. Matthias, it was hoped, might actually be persuaded to lead a crusade against the infidel.

It says something—I’m not quite sure what—that I when I finished the book I felt like I had a better understanding of fifteenth-century politics in Eastern Europe than I had of the contents of Matthias’ library. But I can’t say I was disappointed. There are hints and intimations for the imaginative reader. Of the known 216 volumes still extant, (containing some 600 individual works) it is clear the King had a fondness for biographies of military leaders, war stories, and books that described mechanical devices and inventions. I could wholly relate to that. The seed of his collection probably came from appropriating the libraries of others. Matthias was not the most brutal of rulers in that age but it wasn’t a gentle time by any means; among the people wandering his halls was the political prisoner Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. He apparently stalked the castle byways for nearly a decade while in exile, entertaining himself by pulling the wings off bats. Matthias, Tanner reports, found him amusing. No word on whether he was a big reader.

But the greatest part of the library was amassed in the last years of Matthias’ reign—when he had established a détente with the Turks (much to the dismay of the Pope, who still wanted that crusade), and vanquished as well his enemies in the north and west. By 1485, he was sitting triumphantly in Vienna, and what was left of the Holy Roman Empire was cowering, licking its wounds. An emperor in his own right, Matthias went on what I’d call a book-buying binge—sending emissaries to Florence to commission works and buy up Greek and Roman texts. “Finally,” I can almost hear him thinking, “I’ve got the time to read.” And the place to read in:

Then there was the library, the King’s trophy and sanctuary. Here, Naldo Naldi wrote, sunbeams poured through high, stained glass windows, casting curious patterns on the vaulted ceilings. Beneath tall lancet windows, light fell on to the King’s couch, a ‘bed with golden coverings on which the royal hero is often wont to snatch some peaceful rest for his limbs.’ Here the King reclined, scrutinising [sic] a recently purchased illuminated manuscript, or chairing a debate between rival clerics or philosophers . . .

The notion of the king—ruddy, squat, his health all but ruined by years of campaigning and bad food—lying in state on “golden coverings” chairing debates on the niceties of neo-platonic thought is somewhat entrancing. Especially when one pictures the surroundings, as described by that same chronicler:

In the library, light also fell on to jewel-encrusted veils, set in place to shield the most expensive and cherished items of the collection from the bleaching sunlight. These books did not lie stacked upon one another in heavy chests like the majority of volumes. They stood upright on snakeskin tripods, waiting for the hand of the King, Queen, or the librarians, to part the curtain and reveal the liquid colors beneath.

According to Naldi, the curious bookrests attracted particular interest ‘because the spotted skin of a snake covered those tripods and a shining gold-colored cloth covered them, adorned with so many heavy gems and sparkling precious stones that you would think Matthias had accumulated whatever the kings of Persia are thought to have possessed.’

During the Renaissance, books were a form of conspicuous consumption. Or, to be more generous, a lasting legacy for the owner. Matthias was in ill health, his queen was capricious and childless, his only heir an illegitimate son whose succession to the throne was doubtful at best. But books are permanent—lasting vessels of the wisdom of the ages. A king who is elected cannot be assured of a dynasty. But a library can stand for eons.

Alas, within a few years of his triumphant entry into Vienna, Matthias was dead, presumably of food poisoning. Within a few years of his death, his “empire” was carved up, squabbled over, and disintegrated. And within a few years of that, Suleiman the Magnificent marched on Hungary, swept into the power vacuum left by the death of the Raven King, and conquered most of Eastern Europe. In devout Muslim fashion, he leveled all the Christian icons he could find, demolished the houses and castles of the king, and appropriated whatever wealth could be packed into a cart and moved. What was left of the great library disappeared into the Seraglio of the Sultan, mostly never to be seen again. Nothing remains of the reign of the Raven King except a few dingy historic plaques, and some 216 old volumes scattered among private and university library collections, known to belong to Matthias only by the existence of his sign of the raven embossed into the leather, or drawn into the frontispieces. The fate of the library of Matthias Corvinus, the philosopher king, remains largely unknown.

There are probably better ways to tell the story, but Tanner is too conscientious a historian to speculate or invent what he needs to fill the gaps. Someone should write a novel.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Raven King: Matthias Corvinus and the Fate of His Lost Library by Marcus Tanner (Yale, 2008)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.