Traditionally, literary and cultural life under the Jagiellonian kings Wladislas II and Louis II had been viewed with a certain suspicion in Hungarian historiography. Whereas the rule of King Matthias (1458–1490) has been regarded as the heyday of the medieval Hungarian kingdom, historians writing about the following decades often tended to take over word by word the moralizing chastisement of early 16th century humanists against the vices of the nobility and the clergy. József Fógel, author of two fundamental monographs on the courts of the two Jagiellonian kings, Wladislas II and Louis II, wrote in 1913: “Archbishop Bakócz or bishop Szathmári acted as tyrannically as they wished. The higher aristocracy stripped the nobility of their rights by force or by trickery. They have squandered the income of the country without remorse. Profiteering, party strife, confusion and destruction appeared everywhere.”¹ This traditional, negative image of the cultural trends under the two Jagiellonian kings has been corrected in many respects in the recent years. The aim of this study is to present these findings and to provide a balanced summary of the cultural novelties of this period.

After the death of Matthias, many Italian humanists left the court for Italy (Taddeo Ugoletti, the librarian of the Corvinian library, the Dominican historiographer Pietro Ranzano, Bartolomeo Fonzio, Francesco Fontana, and probably Galeotto Marzio, as well),² but several decided to remain. Most important among them was Antonio Bonfini, who was entrusted by Matthias to compose a humanist history of the medieval kingdom of Hungary, and started his work in 1488.³ After the death of Matthias, Wladislas II urged him to finish his historiographical project, and he received financial support and a title of nobility in 1492 for his efforts.⁴ Although he returned to Ferrara in 1492–93 for a while,⁵ he continued his Decades until 1497, when he reached the events of July 1496, but suffered a stroke, and died in Hungary in the spring of 1502.⁶ Writing a humanist history of the kingdom was of central importance to the royal court, and therefore the text was presented in a parchment copy to the royal library even before the entire project could have been finished.⁷ The surviving fragments of the presentation copy (Budapest, Széchényi National Library, cod. lat. 434) are written in neat humanist minuscule letters, for which the scribe received the title of nobility, as well, which shows that the cultural ideals of the royal court did not change with the coming of a new king.

Nevertheless, his only activity recorded in Hungary during the reign of King Wladislas II was the construction of a ship under the castle of Nándorfehérvár (Belgrade) in 1494.¹⁰ Another Italian humanist, who was already in the service of King Matthias, but decided to remain was Iulius Caesar de Milio (Giulio Cesare de Milio), a physician of Piacenza, who resided in Hungary at least from 1489 until 1501, and became a royal physician of King Matthias, and remained in this function also under Wladislas II.¹¹ Unlike Bonfini or Benincasa, he took up contacts with the new Moravian and Austrian humanist circles around Wladislas II, and his only surviving epigram written in praise of Conrad Celtis in the Episodia sodalitatis litterariae Danubianae (Vienna, 1497) reveals that he was a member of the freshly founded Celtis' Danubian society of humanists.¹²

Just like his Italian peers, the Dalmatian Felix Petancius Ragusinus (Feliks Petančić of Dubrovnik) arrived in Buda in the last years of Matthias' reign, and he started to work as a scribe and a miniaturist in the royal court. After the death of Matthias, he left for his native Dubrovnik, but soon after, he returned to Hungarian services as the chancellor of the castle of Senj on the Adriatic coast. He served Wladislas II both as a diplomat in various missions to France, Rhodes and Venice, and as an intellectual who dedicated several works to the king on Ottoman history and the possible ways of countering the threat posed by the Turkish advances.¹³ In 1501 and 1502, he dedicated three works to King Wladislas II: the Historia Turcica (Turkish history) is a short history of the Ottoman empire, based on Niccolo Sagundino's De familia Otthomanorum. The Genealogia Turcorum imperatorum (Genealogy of the Turkish emperors) contained a brief summary of Ottoman history, followed by a detailed description of the administrative and military structure, and the material resources of the empire. His third work, Quibus itineribus Turci sint aggrediendi (On the best way of attacking the Turks) or De itineribus in Turciam (Ways to Turkey) is an exhortation addressed to Wladislas II arguing in favour of an offensive war and citing John Hunyadi as a model. Although the text includes fresh and first-hand information about the roads leading to Constantinople and the possible methods of attacking the Turks, in fact it was almost entirely plagiarized from Quos terrarum limites by Martin Segon, with only the names replaced in the dedication.¹⁴

The influx of Italian humanists to the Hungarian royal court stopped during the reign of Wladislas II. Instead, some new scholars joined members of the higher clergy and the nobility. The young Ippolito d’Este, archbishop of Esztergom (1487–97) and bishop of Eger (1497–1520), nephew to Queen Beatrix, the widow of King Matthias, attracted a number of distinguished scholars in his Italian retinue. Francesco Negri (Franciscus Niger), the widely known Venetian grammar teacher whose Modus epistolandi (1488) reached Europe-wide fame and was published in 43 editions until 1501, was called to Esztergom by Ercole d’Este and Beatrix to educate the child archbishop. Soon afterwards, Niger was recruited by Miklós Báthory, bishop of Vác and friend of Marsilio Ficino, to teach at the local ‘gymnasium’ [secondary grammar school – translator's note], and he served as a teacher there some time between 1497 and 1503.¹⁵ Celio Calcagnini was similarly an internationally appreciated humanist,¹⁶ who spent one and a half years in 1517–19 in the retinue of Ippolito d’Este, and composed some shorter tracts in Eger on astronomy (including perhaps also the proto-Copernican Quod coelum stet et terra moveatur) and politics (De concordia, arguing for unity in the anti-Ottoman fights), but returned to Italy as soon as his patron left for home.¹⁷ Just like Calcagnini, Giovanni Manardi, the humanist doctor from Ferrara who revolutionized scholarly communication in medicine by introducing the genre of medical letters,¹⁸ left Hungary (where he had been living for five years) soon after the death of his patron, King Wladislas II.¹⁹

With the departure of the most prominent Italian humanists, scholars started to arrive in Buda from new directions, most importantly from Bohemia, Moravia and Vienna. Bohuslaus Lobkovic (Lobkowitz) of Hasištejn/Hassenstein was a Czech aristocrat and already a member of the royal court during the time when Wladislas ruled only Bohemia. After becoming a doctor of canonical and civil law in Bologna, he served as the royal secretary to Wladislas in Bohemia. Returning from a long pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he joined the new royal court of Wladislas II in Buda in 1491. Although he moved back to his properties in Bohemia soon afterwards, he remained in close relationship with the king, which often resembled a friendship, until his death in 1510.²⁰ He composed humanist verses not only on the death of the young Queen Anne, which caused great grief to the aging Wladislas (Elegia consolatoria in funere Annae reginae, published in 1508 and dedicated to Augustinus Moravus), but also on the king's toothache. Still, he does not seem to have had any contacts to the Hungarian aristocracy or humanists.

Unlike Bohuslaus Lobkovic, Augustinus Moravus of Olomouc, son of a German burgher of Olomouc, resided in Buda for a longer period as royal secretary in the Czech chancery after 1495, and served there until early 1511.²¹ He can be considered as the most important humanist figure in Buda in the 1490s, as he built up important ties to contemporary humanists in the region. He studied in Padua, where he was a student of Giovanni Calfurnio, and maintained contacts to Giorgio Valla, Filippo Beroaldo the Elder, and Cassandra Fedele. In this period, he showed serious interest in astronomy, as he published the Tabulae astronomicae of King Alphonse (Venice, 1492) and the Tabulae caelestium motuum of Giovanni Bianchini (Venice, 1495), and contributed to the publication of two calendars in 1491 and 1493. At the same time, philology and rhetoric also belonged to his central interests, publishing the textual emendations of Hieronymus Avantius to Catullus and the Priapic poems (1495), as well as a treatise with the title De modo epistolandi (1495) on writing humanist epistles, which included sample letters of his own. His most influential work was the Defence of poetry (In defensionem poetices, 1493),²² a dialogue within a Platonic setting, situated in Padua, the most important university town in Northern Italy. The text depicts a vivid discussion between Augustinus, the author's alterego; Laelius, a defender of medicine, and Bassareus, a comic doctor, on the merits of poetry as compared to the other arts and sciences, especially to medicine. Laelius even tries to persuade Augustinus to study medicine instead of poetry. Although many of the dialogue's arguments are unoriginal and can be retraced to ancient sources and earlier defenses of poetry,²³ Augustinus has significantly re-elaborated the subject in several of its aspects. First, the target audience of his dialogue was completely novel, as he addressed his dialogue to a Central European readership, and his text had a considerable reception in the circle of German humanists.²⁴ In his In defensionem poetices, the detailed comparison of poetry with medicine serves not only to demonstrate the inferiority of the medical use of language, as compared to the purity of Latin poetry, but it points also to the common root of poetry and medicine, their oracle-like character and their cosmic-astrological correspondence.

The most detailed account of Augustinus' humanist interests is offered in the Panegyricus in laudem Augustini Moravi (Cracow, 1513), written by young Bavarian humanist Valentinus Eck probably during his sojourn in Olomouc in 1511 as a guest of Augustinus. This panegyric of 285 lines praises the provost of Olomouc and his library, and gives a detailed account of the humanistic group that was formed around Augustinus after his return to Olomouc. Eck's description of Augustinus's library, which included a number of classical and post-classical authors (books of the Greek Stoa, the Old and the New Testament, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Lucan, Statius, Silius Italicus, Ovid, Paulus Orosius, Florus, Fulgentius the Mythographer, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Isidore of Seville, Quintilian, Justinian; and his verses resemble Tibull's, Virgil's and Cicero's writings), is a particularly precious source, as it provides a telling proof of his cultural and literary preferences. After his return to Olomouc, he arranged for the publication of some unpublished works in Vienna in 1512 and 1513 (Guarino's and Poggio Bracciolini's Antilogion, Camillo Paleotti's Sylva and two works by Bessarion) with the aid of the young Swiss humanist Joachim Vadianus.

From 1497 onwards, Renaissance humanism in Hungary had very close ties to Vienna and its university. The wandering humanist Girolamo Balbi, who was a professor at the university, befriended Johannes Vitéz (“Jr.”), the bishop of Veszprém, and Michael Vitéz, and the company shared many adventures together, which were described in a chain of amorous epigrams, imitating the Anthologia Graeca.²⁵ After 1497, Balbi often visited Hungary, while occasionally also offering courses at the university of Vienna and Prague, and he took up several church functions in Hungary after 1501.²⁶ Augustinus exchanged several letters with Conrad Celtis (there are altogether twelve documents concerning him in the correspondence),²⁷ who considered him as one of his peers because of his extensive Italian studies and close relations to Venetian humanism, and this was probably the starting point of a closer contact on behalf of the Buda court with the leader of Viennese humanism.²⁸ Moreover, Jacobus Piso (ca. 1480–1527), a young Transylvanian Saxon, was one of his first students of Conrad Celtis in Vienna, and later on remained in Vienna to establish stronger contacts to the Collegium poetarum et mathematicorum of Celtis (1496–1501).²⁹

Soon, Piso became the most exquisite and elegant Latin poet of the Jagiellonian age in Hungary, but his poems were hardly known outside the private circulation among his close friends. In fact, many of them (including the most interesting ones) are only known because they were published in a small volume with the title Schedia (Impromptus) 27 years after his death in 1554 by Georg Werner, a Silesian-Hungarian humanist.³⁰ He spent a decade in Rome (1503–1513) in the retinue of Cardinal Pietro Isvalies, and became a member of the company of Janus Corycius (Johann Goritz), the organizer of the most important meeting point of Northern and Italian humanists in Rome at the time.³¹ It was during this period that he picked up the Catullian fashion of contemporary Neo-Latin poetry, and learnt to express himself in short, but incisive poems full of recondite Classical references. In 1515, at the congress of Vienna, he found new employment as the tutor of the future King Louis II and returned to Hungary where he had already held church benefices.

These poems by Piso offer an ironic miniature portrait of the patron-client relationship in Renaissance humanism which seems to be unique among his contemporaries, and can be likened to the struggle for intellectual freedom carried out by Erasmus, Piso's friend from Roman times. Nevertheless, the fate of Piso's poems, relinquished to an almost completely forgotten edition and known in only two copies, shows that this kind of poetry could have only a very limited, elite readership and perhaps was not even deemed acceptable for wider circulation.

The court remained the strongest supporter of literary and cultural efforts despite all the political and financial difficulties. Literature on political theory was slowly beginning to emerge: the treatise On the education of the royal son (written in the name of Queen Elizabeth, the widow of King Casimir IV) was composed in Poland by an anonymous author on the occasion of the firstborn son of Wladislas II and Anne de Foix in 1502 or 1503.³³ Isocrates' two political orations, the one addressed to Nicocles (Ad Nicoclem), and the other bearing the title Nicocles (Symmachikos, or On the peace), were translated into Latin by Mihály Keserű (Chesserius), a student in the school of Filippo Beroaldo Sr., in Bologna, and later bishop of Srem (Szerém), and he dedicated these texts to the king and bishop György Szatmári as political counsel for the administration of the country.³⁴ Two further texts were composed for the young King Louis, offering political guidance with moralizing principles: Josse Clichtove (Iodocus Clichtoveus) wrote a mirror of princes (De regis officio, On the duty of the king) for him in Paris in 1519, when the king was 13 years old.³⁵ Clichtove, as a professor of theology at the Sorbonne, based his argument on an analysis of royal virtues and vices which he illustrated by Biblical stories of good and bad kingship. On the other hand, the Czech humanist Johannes (Jan) Dubravius composed an animal fable in Latin with the title Theriobulia (Council of animals, 1520) which was a Latin paraphrase of an earlier Czech text with a similar subject.³⁶ Exactly in the same year, the first open declarations of a civic political philosophy appear in a dialogue of Valentin Eck On the administration of the state (De reipublicae administratione, 1520).³⁷ Eck's work is an interesting mixture of legal precepts and of the cardinal virtues taken from Cicero, applied to the context of a civic community, hence the word respublica in the title could also be translated as city. Eck's work can no longer be categorised as purely rhetorical in purpose, as it contains explicit declarations concerning issues in which a local community could show serious interest: how to react to an unjust ruler, or to wrongful laws? Thus, it can be considered as the first representative of the political literature of civic humanism in the kingdom of Hungary.

Collecting the laws of the country and publishing them in print had become and increasingly pressing task in Jagiellonian Hungary. In October-November 1512, István Werbőczy (1458?–1541), a clerk and judge with a background in humanist education from Vienna, was asked by the nobility to collect the written law (lex scripta) of the country and create a compilation of royal decrees (comportatio decretorum). Although some preparatory work may have already been done on this work (Ádám Liszkai, his boss and colleague, had already been asked to prepare a similar collection), Werbőczy managed to finish this task in a surprisingly short time, and presented his work to the Parliament of 1514. Although the new collection of laws was approved by the Parliament and by the king (decree LXIII of 1514), it was not sealed by Wladislas II due to the unrest which followed the peasant rebellion of the same year. Nevertheless, Werbőczy decided to publish it in Vienna in 1517. The Tripartitum opus iuris consuetudinarii inclyti regni Hungariae (The three parts of the customary law of the very noble Kingdom of Hungary) is constructed in the following manner: the first part deals with persons (freedoms of the nobility, acquisition of property and property rights, inheritance); the second with things (that is to say the legal procedures of the abovementioned matters), and the third with the system of appealing before the royal court. Alongside his legal training, Werbőczi had a marked interest in humanism. The Viennese publisher Singrenius dedicated an edition of Petronius' Satyricon to him in 1517; and his edition of the Tripartitum was surrounded by poems by Hungarian humanists like Benedictus Bekényi; also, he often quoted classical authors. His most important literary work, the Booklet on the ten commandments (Decem praeceptorum divinorum libellus, 1524), is a commentary on the decalogue, which paralleled the Biblical text with the ten plagues of Egypt by opposing them to the seven deadly sins. The process of legal codification in Hungary and its connections to Renaissance humanism can be paralleled to the collection of Czech provincial law in the O práviech, o súdiech io dskách země české knihy devatery of Viktorin Kornel of Všehrd (1497–1507), who similarly dedicated his book to King Wladislas II, and was a strong supporter of Czech vernacular humanism and Classical translations.

The decade of the 1510s shows a proliferation of humanist cultural efforts and a faster spread of literacy both in Latin and in Hungarian. By this time, Renaissance humanism becomes less limited to the Buda court, and also extends to other cultural centers, bishopric seats and also to minor market towns. István Werbőczy, already in his function as the chief justice of Hungary— to quote just one, although a most trustworthy, witness — described the changes in the following words: “From the earliest days of our nascent realm, our people were given over to warlike pursuits and had little care for other concerns. For the Hungarians descend and originate from the Scythian peoples, who left their native land and settled in upper Pannonia (which embraces both sides of the Danube) and under the leadership of Attila extended the bounds of their empire far and wide, carrying their victorious arms deep into Germany, Italy, and Spain. Eventually, by the command of the holy king Saint Stephen, as if a light from heaven, they, having dropped superstition and completely rejected paganism, accepted the doctrines of Catholic faith. Thereafter no country or people (I say ungrudgingly) guarded more determinedly or more constantly the protection and expansion of the Christian commonwealth than the Hungarians. Being well trained through many hard-fought battles against the barbarous Mohammedan pest, they have for more than a hundred and forty years (not counting earlier times) time and time again in attack and counterattack waged to their enormous credit the most bloody wars against the savage Turks. They kept the rest of Christendom safe and unharmed at the cost of their blood […]. Not engaged in commercial or vulgar matters, the nobility was defined by fighting. Hence it came that little time or leisure remained to them for framing the laws with special care or reviewing them at length before promulgation.”³⁸ Writing in 1517, István Werbőczy presented the widespread opinion about the relationship of the Hungarian nobility to written laws in general in the preface to his collection of the customary law of Hungary. As the Hungarian nobles always stood ready to fight, they cared little for trade or any of the arts, and had neglected to collect their laws in a single book. Not only was a book of laws beyond the scope of the bellicose Hungarians, but all cultural activities were neglected due to continuous warfare. As Benedek Bekényi, a client of Werbőczy, had written three years earlier in the dedicatory epistle of an edition of Janus Pannonius (1514), the most significant, and almost the only, Hungarian poet in the fifteenth century: “There would be no other country — except the virtuous Romans, whose deeds ascend to the highest point of the starry sky — that could compete with the striving virtues of our kind. What, then, could be more beautiful than for someone to make the excellent deeds of the fathers more influential and conspicuous by literary monuments, which are more lasting than hard bronze? The absence of sophisticated minds (ingenio elucubratorum) in our nation has given rise to an ominous silence, while the crazed envy of foreigners has neglected the most excellent deeds of our people, thus we have spent our days without celebrated memories, as if in stultifying silence, for long, long years. It was not because our nation lacked the mental capacity, or the continuous majesty of generosity, that lead exclusively to the peaks of abundant sciences, nor did we lack the adorned nobility of the body that everyone knows is required for students. But the condition most harmful for studies was the continuous fighting in bloody wars. This was what delighted the souls of our ancestors, and those who — led by some mad stubbornness of pride — fought against them, who came to know how much lamentable misery they were able to cause with the all-destructive war. When, finally, the wealth of merciful peace bestowed splendid glory on both the fatherland and the nation, only then did the sweet-talking grace of slowly fading Minerva begin to strengthen our men. The poet Janus Pannonius provides the clearest proof of how fast we advanced in the study of those things that make life honest, extend its glory, and finally amplify the honor of flowering virtue.”³⁹ From the words of Benedek Bekényi, Stephen Werbőczy and some of their contemporaries (such as Girolamo Balbi),⁴⁰ we might conclude that such statements are more than literary commonplaces, and that in the 1510s there was a generally growing sentiment among the intellectuals of the age in Hungary that a watershed had been reached in their cultural life.

When even the parish priest of a small market town is invited to take part in a Bacchic ritual, the imagery of Antiquity and the learned vocabulary indicate the spread of the new poetic ideals as far as the lower social strata and minor towns, where such highbrow Latin poetry would scarcely have been conceivable in the age of Matthias Corvinus.⁴³ Obviously, the spread of these new humanist poetic practices also widened the social penetration of humanist ideas.

The most distinguished poetic output of this decade is the Stauromachia of Stephanus Taurinus, the first epic poem composed in Hungary (written between 1514–1519 in five books, published in 1519), which contains a contemporary literary account of the Dózsa Revolt (1514). Taurinus, a Moravian born humanist educated in Cracow and Vienna, was employed by Cardinal Tamás Bakócz, archbishop of Esztergom, as secretary in 1511 He wad to live through the course of events preceding the Dózsa Revolt as a member of the archbishop's retinue —Bakócz’ journey to Rome, the unsuccessful papal election, their return to Hungary, and the outbreak of the rebellion. Unlike many of the panegyric poems written by his contemporaries which celebrate the virtues of the victorious rulers using rhetoric topoi, the message of this epic poem remains hard to decode. Several scholars —including László Szörényi and László Jankovits — have recently called attention to the subversive, pessimistic, ironical, or paradoxical overtones of the text, both in its overt authorial judgments about the depravity of the nobles and in the textual imitations of its most direct poetic sources, the Pharsalia of Lucan, and the Battle of Frogs and Mice attributed to Homer.⁴⁴ The demonized figure of Dózsa is an amalgam of Catiline – whose oration from Sallust's Conspiracy of Catiline he delivers in a versified form⁴⁵ – of the evil Rufinus of Claudian's In Rufinum, and of the figure of Caesar in Lucan's Pharsalia. Despite this negative characterization, Dózsa still delivers a heroic speech during his torture, based on Cato's exemplary and morally unquestionable Stoic oration in Lucan's Pharsalia. At the same time, the entire story is framed within the epic language and the typological pattern of Homer's Battle of Frogs and Mice, the main comic characters of which – the king of the frogs, the mice and the crabs – can be paralleled to the main heroes of the Stauromachia, Dózsa/Zeglius, archbishop Bakócz and the Transylvanian bishop Ferenc Várdai. Thus, Taurinus avoided composing a panegyric description of the deeds of archbishop Bakócz (who was dead by the time of publication), and of Ferenc Várdai, his new patron, and created an ambiguous epic message, which could keep some distance from forming a biased judgment about these contemporary events.

Irony and ambivalent rhetoric become recurring traits of the humanist works of the Jagiellonian period. The author of the anonymous Apologia regis Wladislai (Apology of King Wladislas),⁴⁶ a political pamphlet written in Latin against Queen Beatrix, is called Udis in the text, i.e., the well-known Outis, or Nobody of Homer's Odyssey. Thus, Udis – or Nobody –speaks up against the infertile Beatrix in defence of the annulment of her marriage to King Wladislas II, claiming that even the gods of the pagan mythology stand on his side. By applying popular mythological imagery, Udis-Nobody tried to charm his public in Rome with a fictitious literary frame with which the local audience might have been familiar from the pasquillades. Irony begins to occur in the literary descriptions of internal political affairs: whereas Janus Pannonius criticized only the Emperor and the Pope, Bohuslaus Lobkowic turned against the ambitious future archbishop Tamás Bakócz in an epigram.⁴⁷ In the comedy entitled Gryllus,⁴⁸ written by Bartholomaeus Francfordinus, a schoolmaster in Buda in 1519,⁴⁹ the protagonist Gryllus (named after one of the comrades of Ulysses who was turned into a pig by Circe) is a parasite who earns his bread by flattering and dropping useful information to his patron just as any humanistic poet would do.⁵⁰ After he reveals how the son of his patron was abducted, he gets beaten and receives no award for finding the lost son. Significantly, he recites a monologue that recalls the main statements of Erasmus' Praise of Folly: “pro sapiente quisque morionem agitat” – everybody is acting like a fool instead of a wise man. Irony and mockery becomes a standard model of communication in the works of Jacobus Piso, Stephanus Taurinus or Bartholomaeus Frankfordinus, a rhetorical trait which also surfaces in the vernacular satirical song of Ferenc Apáti.⁵¹

The literary production of the Jagiellonian period exhibits a number of further features that distinguish it from the times of King Matthias Corvinus. Firstly, it was during this period that Latin ecclesiastical scholarship also became visible in Hungary. Serious scholastic debates may doubtless have been held at the short-lived University of Pécs (1367), or at the Dominican studium generale in Buda (14th and 15th centuries), but very few traces survive. It is only due to the appearance of the printed publications of the Observant Franciscan Pelbartus of Temesvár (from 1498),⁵² and the sermons of his student Osvaldus of Laskó (from 1497),⁵³ that we have a significant quantity of theological texts at our disposal. These scholastic tracts – mostly sermons (Pomerium, Biga salutis, Gemma fidei), commentaries (on the Psalms) and encyclopaedic works (Rosarium) following a Scotist direction – reveal a level of ecclesiastical literacy in the Pest convent of the Observant Franciscans that easily rivals the standard of texts produced in any of the European educational centres.

Two major figures wrote extensive works among the Dominicans in the Jagiellonian period: the Italian-Hungarian Nicolaus de Mirabilibus, whose father was an Italian sculptor who had moved to Cluj (Kolozsvár), had written a treatise in Italian while he was in Florence in 1488 (Libello de consciencia, 1488) and held a dispute on the original sin there against Giorgio Benigno Salviati (1489) in the presence of Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola. As he moved back to the royal court of Hungary in 1490 and became the vicar general of the Hungarian province in 1493, he dedicated a treatise on predestination to Johann von Schallenberg, the Czech chancellor in Buda, and to István Fodor of Nagylucse, based on a sermon that he held in the court of Wladislas II.⁵⁴ Another Dominican author, Jakob von Lilienstein wrote two works: a short Treatise against the erring Valdensian brethren (Tractatus contra Waldenses fratres erroneos, 1505) was dedicated to Ambrose of Plzen, the archbishop administrator of Prague, and confuted the articles of faith which he attributed to the Czech Brethren;⁵⁵ and a much larger encyclopaedia entitled On divine wisdom (De divina sapientia, 1505), dedicated to Wladislas II.⁵⁶ Both of these works reveal the strong impact of Renaissance humanism (e.g. Scipio the African is paralleled to Solomon as a good orator),⁵⁷ especially in the dedications, where ancient and Biblical examples are cited side by side, and the latter work, which is structured according to vices and virtues, is heavily influenced by astrology.

Towards the end of the period, the Benedictine and Pauline monks followed suit: Ambrosius Pannonius, abbot of the Benedictine Schottenstift, issued a number of devotional texts from Vienna for Hungary (1513–1518), and Gergely Gyöngyösi, prior of Santo Stefano Rotondo, published spiritual admonitions and sermons in Rome (Decalogus de sancto Paulo primo heremita, 1516, second edition in 1532).⁵⁸ Significantly, although both of them were writing for a Hungarian audience, neither of them was actually writing any longer in Hungary. Besides, a few authors dedicated their works to Wladislas II while they sojourned in his kingdom, but did not necessarily settle there. Dominico Rannusio Crispo held a sermon in the presence of the king, “in front of the Hungarian lords”, while the court visited Bohemia between February and October 1497,⁵⁹ and he resided in the country until at least 1498, as he became the archdeacon of Ung. He must have been one of the first preachers to give a humanist sermon in Hungary, a practice which he had borrowed from Rome, where he had already given a sermon at the funeral of Cardinal Jean de la Balue and in front of the Pope in 1491.⁶⁰ Another humanist scholar who dedicated a scholarly treatise to Wladislas II was Johannes Bolkenhayn, who composed his work in defence of the clergy: in his On the immunity and liberty of the church and the dignity of clergy (De immunitate et libertate ecclesiastica atque de sacerdotum honore, 1499), he listed arguments in favour of the priestly order and against the bad councillors surrounding the king in royal courts, and asked for the protection of church benefices.⁶¹

Secondly, by this period the elite humanism of the Corvinian age had expanded to a wider circle and the humanists themselves had become socially stratified. Books became easily accessible to every literate person: there are more book catalogues surviving from the period between 1501 and 1526 (19 altogether) than from between 1450 and 1500 (18), and the number of books catalogued also increased.⁶² During the reign of Matthias, many active humanists pursued brilliant careers and became members of the ecclesiastical aristocracy after study tours to Italy, when they became elected as bishops and archbishops of the country (we need think no further than Janus Pannonius, Ladislaus Vetesius, Péter Váradi or Johannes Vitéz the Younger). In the Jagiellonian age, it is almost exclusively the middle-ranking clergy and lay secretaries and chancellors who pursue humanistic studies and publish their works. Although the educational careers of the church elite resemble the patterns of the Corvinian age, and although many bishops visited elite Italian universities such as Padua or Bologna (among them Philip Csulai Móré, György Szathmári and Ferenc Várdai, or — with only a Cracovian university background — László Szalkay, to name but a few), thus obviously meeting the most modern cultural standards of their age, paradoxically, they no longer published humanist texts. It was the task of the middle-ranking clergy to write polished humanist works, for which they might have received a canonry or an endowment as a provost at the height of their career, while also having to fulfil the official administrative duties connected to their position. Jacobus Piso, Stephanus Taurinus, Valentinus Cybeleius/Hagymási,⁶³ Martinus Thyrnavinus,⁶⁴ and Bartholomaeus Frankfordinus are typical representatives of this stratum: all of them served noble patrons with similar cultural interests to their own, although their patrons did not produce any published works. Of course, there are significant differences in the cultural commitments and social rank of Jacobus Piso, royal secretary and private tutor to the young Louis II, and the Benedictine abbot Martinus Thyrnavinus, although they are similar in the sense that neither of them reached higher ecclesiastic rank, whereas their patron, Ladislaus Szalkay, bishop of Eger and later archbishop of Esztergom, wrote only two epigrams⁶⁵ and probably had no literary ambitions. Foreign humanists arriving in the country often had to satisfy themselves with the position of a personal secretary (as Taurinus or Rudolf Agricola Jr., both of whom started to work in Esztergom under Cardinal Bakócz), or of a private tutor, as Valentine Eck, who acted as a preceptor to Alexius Thurzó.⁶⁶ Valentine Eck soon became a schoolmaster in the city of Bardejov (Bártfa), and Leonard Cox a schoolmaster in Košice (Kassa), thus, they were independent of any direct aristocratic patronage.⁶⁷ The general intellectual trend of the Jagiellonian age can thus be characterized as the divergence and separation of cultural and political ambitions.

This separation of political and humanistic/literary careers forms the background of the phenomenon once described by János Horváth in his classic work as the proliferation of “humanists with party allegiances”,⁶⁸ which he regarded as characterizing the Jagiellonian period. Still, it was not the humanists who strove harder for party or power positions in this period. Their stronger “party allegiance” is, in fact, the direct result of the steady growth in the number of intellectuals with a modern, humanistic educational outlook, while the number of available positions in church and state administration remained unchanged. The career opportunities that could have provided them with financial and — at least to a certain extent — intellectual independence were no longer available to all those with talent, and the closing of their career prospects obliged them to look for patrons inside the church (or state) hierarchy. The elected few who were able to reach the highest ranks of church administration were satisfied with propagating their humanist commitment through patronage, and at the same time were able to use the works of their clients to publicize their own political agenda (e.g. the case of Ladislas Szalkai and Martinus Tyrnavinus).

Finally, this was an age in which the presence of a vernacular culture also became apparent in Hungarian. While at present we know of only three manuscripts written in Hungarian and dating back to before 1490,⁶⁹ this number rises to at least thirty-five codices in the period between 1490 and 1526.⁷⁰ Three decades ago, Andor Tarnai summarized these changes in a now classic monograph on vernacular Hungarian culture with the telling title which translates literally as “The Hungarian language starts to be written.”⁷¹ Although Hungarian literary culture still remained limited to small ecclesiastical circles — essentially to texts required by nuns, private aristocratic (mostly female) readers and lay brethren — a certain continuity in the vernacular literary tradition is already apparent.⁷² We can find texts that survive in multiple copies, indicating the existence of regular readers and scribes who were concerned with their circulation, which, in turn, is a sign of a developing literary culture. In a few cases, it can be clearly demonstrated that Renaissance humanism had an indirect influence on these vernacular texts that were mostly translated as readings for nuns. The early 16th century Hungarian translation of Roswitha's Dulcitius (Három körösztény leány),⁷³ a medieval drama about the martyrdom of three virgins in the hands of the pagans, was in all probability based on Conrad Celtis' humanist edition of the piece (1501), or on a slightly modified manuscript copy related to it, as the text of Roswitha's dramas had a very limited circulation beforehand. The Verse legend of St Catherine of Alexandria, written for Dominican nuns (copied in 1530/31, but probably composed a few decades earlier), contains a great number of Classicizing elements and references to Plato, Aristotle, Avicenna and Al-Gazel among other philosophers, which are not present in its most important source, the version of the legend composed by Pelbárt of Temesvár. These Classicizing features may be likened to the humanist trends in the Dominican treatises mentioned above.

To sum up, the age of the Jagiellonian kings brought along a previously unseen growth and expansion of late medieval and humanist scholarly and lay culture.⁷⁴ These changes were partly due to the radical cultural developments of the ages (the arrival of the printing press and the availability of cheap prints, the spread of literacy due to the growing population living in cities and easier access to education), but partly also because of the decentralization of culture in the country. While the rule of Wladislas II and Louis II might have been less successful on the military and strategic level, it did allow for a plurality and cross-fertilization of late medieval and humanist cultural currents that had not been characteristic of the reign of King Matthias.