Library books are long overdue

HENRY E. Huntington once quipped that “the ownership of a fine library is the surest and swiftest way to immortality” -- words that certainly applied to the remarkable rare-books repository that the California railroad baron built in San Marino during the early years of the 20th century, and a sentiment that may well have inspired the creation of a legendary collection assembled by Matthias Corvinus, a Renaissance monarch who ruled Hungary from 1458 to 1490.

Known as the Raven King (corvus is Latin for “crow”), Matthias was an erudite bibliophile, whose lavish court in Buda became the nexus of humanistic thought north of the Alps. He was also a savvy leader whose battlefield exploits in Bosnia, Croatia, Moldavia, Transylvania, Silesia and Austria earned him such nicknames as the new Mars, the new Hercules and the new Attila, and inspired his neighbors to believe he might protect Christendom against the Ottoman Turks, who were threatening Europe from the east.

Not long after Matthias died, at 47, of an apparent stroke -- one rumor had it that he was poisoned by his second wife, Beatrice, the homesick daughter of Ferdinand I, King of Naples -- the kingdom he so tenuously held together began to crumble. Its annexation by the Turks in 1541 ushered in a century and a half of Muslim domination and the eradication of whatever remained of Matthias’ legacy.

Impeccably well-read in her own right, Beatrice had been a prime mover in the making of what is known today as the Bibliotheca Corviniana. Some of the great Italian book people of the age were commissioned to gather a dazzling array of works covering a multitude of secular subjects -- a collection that is now believed to have included 2,500 volumes in manuscript, a remarkable accomplishment that would have rivaled in breadth and excellence the library of the Medicis in Florence.

Unlike the Medici Library, however, which remains housed in a splendid building designed by Michelangelo, the Corviniana was scattered to the four winds, a loss not nearly as egregious as the destruction of the ancient library at Alexandria but deplorable all the same.

It is the story of this library -- the forces that occasioned its creation and dispersion, along with a thorough examination of Matthias and his times -- that is the focus of the English writer Marcus Tanner, former Balkan correspondent for the Independent, in his impressively researched monograph, “The Raven King.”

“It is the King’s aim to surpass all other monarchs in this matter, as he has done with other things,” one Italian scholar wrote in 1489 of Matthias’ “gluttony for books,” an appetite that makes their subsequent disappearance all the more lamentable. Just 216 of Matthias’ books are known to survive, only a few of them located in modern-day Hungary, and there now only by virtue of heroic attempts to reclaim a fragment of lost patrimony. “Hungary was almost the only . . . country in Europe without a decent scattering of Corvinian works of its own,” Tanner writes.

Despite his many achievements, Matthias is little known today, even in his own land, as Tanner concludes, sounding a note of irony: “The fact that the remnant of his library is his only real remaining monument would have surprised no one more than him.”