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garian Kingdom and Transylvania, but took into consideration the opinions of
the orders, especially the Hungarian noble families (the secular and ecclesiastical
leaders), on raising the general cultural level of the population. The latter regarded
the Hunyadi Era as a Golden Age. An age the achievements of which were (and
still are) activating creative energies for the society. Discussing the history of the
Bibliotheca Corvina, including the desire to collect the codices that belonged to it,
has never been done simply for academic or bibliophilic purposes. Dealing with it
has always had a political message. And it did matter who founded an institution
that would later be called “national” (the emperor gave it to his people, a church
became responsible for it, or it was the sacrifice of a large family).“* Just as the his¬
torical engagement with “the national saints” (the Hungarian saints of the Arpad
Era) was not accidental,* writing the history of the Corvina library was a gesture
on the part of the emperor or the Augustinian order. It was no coincidence that
the history of Hungarian Christianity, established independently of the Austrian
Church," was written by a fellow monk of the Jesuit Archbishop of Esztergom
Péter Pázmány, Melchior Inchofer,**” just when, towards the end of the Thirty
Years’ War, the imperial court began to see the possibility of defeating the Ot¬
toman Turkish power and started to prepare for the territory of the Hungarian
Kingdom (the reoccupied parts, anyway) to not belong to Hungarian families. At
the same time, propaganda began to spread—intellectuals always can be used for
any purpose, even today—that the Hungarians could only belong to Christian
Europe through the Austrians, since they need to become civilised and cultured.
To offset this, Hungarian aristocrats encouraged university students supported by
them to choose one saint of the Hungarian Christian Church as their thesis topic
(disputationes).
‘The interest in the Bibliotheca Corvina was already popular 80 years before the
publication of Schier’s work, when the Turks were ousted from Buda.*** In ad¬
dition, from the beginning of the 18th century a new era of bibliophilia began
throughout Europe, parallel to the establishment of museums** Interest in medi¬
eval codices increased; especially those that survived from well-known major col¬
lections were considered extremely valuable. If a codex was once part of the library
of Matthias Hunyadi, the price and prestige increased significantly. We cannot
ignore the fact that this change in the history of collecting has been accompanied
‘84 See the letters written to the founder of the national library, Ferenc Széchényi, by those noblemen and
church leaders he had asked about the significance of the foundation: DEAK—Zvara 2012.
ReEceEnTLy, Farkas Zs. 2018, 11-38. wrote a nice essay on this.
ANNALES ecclesiastici Regni Hungariae, Romae, Ludovico Grigniani, 1644.
#7 Cr. DUMMERTH 1987a, 155-204.
388 For a summary of early modern views on the Corvina, with bibliography, see: Monox 2004, 45-63.
Tuıs book title is a good example of the change, showcasing what is meant by a museum: La CuHaussE
1690. Cf. Pomran 1994, 107-126.
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486
489
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