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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 suppose 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 researchable 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 aristocrats and high priests, ambitious religious orders (like the Jesuits), the Transylvanian 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
