Six hundreds years ago Hungary was what people fond of making other people quickly realizing their abundant wisdom would call Regnum Hungarorum, since the intellectuals spoke latin at the time and that means Hungarian Kingdom in latin. In recent times Hungary’s main features are widely known. Then, as now, the not so little country within the Pannonian or Carpathian basin, situated well north of the equator, on the eastern end of Europe, had the Ottoman Empire, the Czech Kingdom, the Holy Roman Empire as main neighbouring countries.

At that period an especially bright young man appeared in the tormented country to emerge as king from an ancestry completely lacking royal origins, if we don’t count the rumours that his father was the illegitimate love child of the Holy Roman Emperor, Sigismund. Meanwhile he essentially served his own interests by stabilizing the country, weakening the power of the barons, cutting the nobility short in extorting the poor and the weak. For that after his death he became and still is revered through centuries by Hungarians. His actions became subjects of legends. I endeavoured in this book to share some of them with the English speaking world, especially with the children, who love knights’ tales, and whose hearts are so easily influenced by good deeds.

Concerning the legends in this book, they really just lightly painted pictures about some important moments in Matthias’s life. I have felt myself more at liberty than the historians, who pursue generally long and detailed debates over some aspects of these pieces of history as well. I have just put aside those and picked one simpathic version, which seemed true enough in order that the legends should be characteristically Hungarian, sometimes giving even romantic and idealized impression of Matthias. I have had no scruple in interpolating now and then any typical Hungarian names, places, or otherwise make them longer and more detailed, which promised to provide a more (or less) authentic Hungarian atmosphere.

As to the truth of these legends, I can only say that they are told in a wide variety of versions in Hungary, any of which may be spoken of with great fondness. To me they are just good stories teaching about the past of a medieval Kingdom sniffing the benefits of the Renaissance with high hopes, where one shrewd man could achieve so much. Thus the perfect accuracy of the stories were though endeavoured not consistently achieved.

Don’t stumble over the names in these stories; they are easy. Everyone’s is pronounced almost exactly as it is spelled.

And — since the original paintings available are so painfully scarce — almost half the pictures selected only provide a sense to the fragment of the legends, so don’t bother to find a hidden meaning where there is none.

Malcolm Peters

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