In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Raven King: Matthias Corvinus and the Fate of his Lost Library
  • Valery Rees (bio)
The Raven King: Matthias Corvinus and the Fate of his Lost Library. By Marcus Tanner. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2008. xxi + 265 pp. + 16 pp. black-and-white plates. £20. isbn 978 0 300 12034 9.

Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary from 1458 to 1490, deserves to be better known. Living at the edge of Christendom, on the boundary with the Ottoman Turks, he dazzled contemporaries with his extraordinary achievements both on the battlefield and in cultural affairs. His life and times offer plenty of fascinating material for readers today and Marcus Tanner focuses this lively account through one of the projects especially dear to the King: the building of a magnificent collection of books that was intended as a repository of the entire foundation of [End Page 75] knowledge. If Tanner sometimes fails to keep the King's intent in view, beguiled by the opulence and beauty of manuscripts in the collection, it is disappointing but perhaps not entirely surprising. Taking the long view, he follows the fall of the Corvinian kingdom, when Hungary was divided up between foreign rulers and the library started to acquire a symbolic importance of quite another type, related to nationhood. This almost mythical status endured far longer than the original purpose for which the library had been founded, and it accounts for the rapturous public response to the return of some of the books by the Turks in 1877. It also accounts, however, for one of the main problems of this book: tracing the development of such an important collection in parallel with the political and social history not just of one era but across several centuries of complex and dramatic change poses great challenges and a risk of superficiality, to which Tanner often succumbs. Yet the main tale is told with verve and pace, interspersed with personal insights drawn from the author's travels.

Tanner is at his best describing the political murders of 1457 (pp. 49–50), or the military campaigns of Matthias's early years. Where he lacks depth and subtlety is in his assessments of character. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the treatment of the two main figures, Matthias and his Queen Consort Beatrice, who both become caricatures. Emphasis is given to their looks, based on portraiture —which is not a reliable guide —and the adjectives used hardly increase our confidence: we are told that Beatrice, though 'charismatic' (p. xvii), is 'pudgy' and 'spoiled' (p. xi), with 'a jowly face, a small double chin and piggy eyes' (p. 77), while Matthias's 'ugly, powerful features' (p. xi) are somehow related to his allegedly 'wilful dictatorial temperament' (p. 60). Similarly their actions are often crudely summarized where a deeper and more sympathetic analysis of the situations they faced would have been in order. They deserve better treatment, and sometimes they receive it: Tanner's imaginative reconstruction of Matthias's deathbed flashbacks (p. 140) is clearly a passage inspired by his reflections on the historical evidence. However he often fails to resist the purely sensational, with gratuitous detours through the homosexual erotic writings of Pannonius and Beccadelli, and the practices of Count Dracula.

More irritating are the constant lapses into inaccuracy and misquotation. These range from the complete omission of all accents on Hungarian words and names (though not on French words!) to anachronistic expressions and, more seriously, numerous spelling errors and slips, wrong references, and outright errors of fact. There is no excuse for these, even in a work that is clearly intended to be a popular account rather than a work of historical scholarship. To cite a few, Piero de' Medici was Lorenzo's father, not grandfather (p. 124); Marsilio Ficino was hardly 'bombarded with requests to come to Hungary' (p. 114) if he received two invitations (which are referenced wrongly), nor could Taddeo Ugoleto (also p. 114) have taken back to Hungary in 1487 a work that Ficino did not in fact complete until two years later. Still on the same page, Francesco Sassetti is described as a victim of the Medici bank's losses, whereas...

pdf

Share