Oldal 10 [10]
and interpreted, while secular humanists did the same with the ancient corpus
of texts and the textual memories that had been preserved from the early church
fathers. Furthermore, they collected, or, being short of funds, persuaded others to
collect them as well. People like Cosimo de Medici il Vecchio (1389-1464), who
had the Bibliotheca Graeca and Bibliotheca Latina chambers set up in the convent of
San Marco in Florence, and Matthias Corvinus, who did the same in Buda. The
intention was to collect as many textual memoirs as possible. The Hungarian king
was more successful than his contemporaries in achieving this goal.
After the death of Matthias Hunyadi, the Hungarian aristocrats wanted to
keep the valuable library in Buda, thus they asked Janos Corvin (1473-1504), the
king’s illegitimate son, to return the volumes taken from there. From this point
on, the political leaders of the Hungarian Kingdom looked upon the Corvina as a
symbol of the country’s golden age. After the kingdom came to an end, the future
Hungarian leaders continued to do similarly. Today it is no different if we sup¬
pose that not only those who are more sensitive to cultural politics are aware of
what the torso that survived from the Bibliotheca Corvina was and what its actual
value is. This awareness is, of course, also typically Hungarian. It really matters
only when there is hardship and one can lament over the fact that other nations
do not recognise our past as sufficiently great and bright, insomuch as our present
is considered at all. The Bibliotheca Corvina Digitalis programme was ahead of
the other European cultural communities in bringing together the fragments of
a major historical library in a digital library, to which the proud — surely proud? —
representatives of the community could contribute as a worthy presentation of that
collection’s past. The Hungarian initiative was timely, however, nowadays no one
pays attention to its implementation, which is why the Renaissance libraries of the
Duchy of Burgundy and the Kingdom of Naples are now available and research¬
able in a codified structure on the Internet. They are not to be blamed for being
ahead of us.
After the defeat at the Battle of Mohacs (1526) and the fall of the capital of
the Hungarian Kingdom to the Ottoman Turks (1541), the disintegration of the
Corvina became a symbol of the collapse of the kingdom.Those who had always
hoped for the unification of the country — the territories conquered by the Turks,
the Principality of Transylvania, then the Grand Principality, and the territories
under the Habsburg kings — had always sought to restore the Bibliotheca Corvina
(the collection of books). Anyone who can bring the pieces of the Corvina back
together in one place can also bring unity to the country. The Hungarian aristo¬
crats and high priests, ambitious religious orders (like the Jesuits), the Transyl¬
vanian princes, and of course the Habsburg court thought along similar lines.
From the beginning of the 17th century, the latter worked towards a unified cult
of the Habsburg Empire, and they made the Corvina a part of this. After the
legal establishment of the Habsburg Empire (1806), the Library was only seen
as a means of helping the rapprochement with the Hungarians. From the early