Ex Urbe

Time to meet one of the coolest Renaissance queens no one has heard of: Beatrice of Naples TWICE Queen of Hungary. She’s one of the awesome people who didn’t quite get a chapter to herself in “Inventing the Renaissance” but gets lots of tales woven throughout.

(This is part of my countdown series for the book release).

Why “Twice” Queen of Hungary? Because when the first king she married died with no heir, the people loved her so much they told her she could marry anyone she wanted and they’d make her new husband king, so they could settle the succession smoothly and keep her as queen. Impressive popularity, especially given that Beatrice wasn’t Hungarian, she was a princess from Naples.

In fact, her sister Eleanor married the Duke of Ferrara and was the mother of Alfonso, Beatrice, and Isabella d’Este, whom we’ve met in my other tales of Milan & Ferrara. Beatrice’s mother Isabella of Clermont was an Orsini, the mighty Roman leaders of the Guelph party (in the Guelph-Ghibelline faction feud). Her father King Ferrante was the illegitimate son of Alfonso the Magnanimous, King of Aragon by birth who conquered Naples by war (ousting René of Anjou, father of Margaret who married England’s Henry VI).

 

Beatrice’s grandfather King Alfonso had been an exceptional patron of arts & scholars, and he gave his children and grandchildren the latest in Renaissance education: Greek, Latin, history, philosophy, music, everything.

King Alfonso was especially fond of the classics because one of his court scholars, reading ancient accounts, told him “Apparently Belisarius snuck an army into Naples through the tunnel of an old aqueduct and took it easily,” which Alfonso then tried and the old trick still worked. And to make his conquered people love him, Alfonso built splendid neoclassical palaces, founded a scholarly academy, held grand Roman-style triumphs, repaired ancient aqueducts, and generally used all the soft power cultural trappings of antiquity to make himself feel like Caesar, and it worked.

Meanwhile in Hungary, amidst many border wars and fear of Ottoman or German invasion, the old king died without an heir, and a quick royal election to avoid a succession war selected the implausibly badass Matthias Corvinus the Raven King.

Matthias’s father had been a great general and regent of Hungary during the minority of an earlier king, and his mother Elizabeth Szilágyi had given him an exceptional education; he spoke Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Czech, German, Latin and probably French and Romanian as well. After their father’s death, the king feared his sons’ influence, and Matthias’s elder brother was beheaded for killing a rival, Matthias himself held prisoner until the childless king’s death led the nobles to ransom him (for $60 million) and crown him rather than face protracted civil war.

Footnote: one of Matthias’s early political challenges was making peace with Vlad the Impaler, and their (totally real!) mutual niece Ruxandra of Wallachia the real life Vampire Raven Princess somehow doesn’t already have a YA romance novel about her! (Though most of the sources on her are in Hungarian).

Matthias’s election was the first time Hungary filled its throne by electing merely one among many peer nobles, and he knew he had to work hard to seem more kingly than a lot of men who had been his equals not long before. Thinking of his mother and education, he turned to the culture option.

Marrying Beatrice of Naples didn’t just bring him a princess of extremely royal mixed Spanish-and-Italian blood, it brought a cultural wonder-woman, who spoke more languages than he did and brought from Italy the wonders of new Renaissance art, music, scholarship, architects, everything.

The classical revival had just started in Italy, and Hungary built the first neoclassical palaces outside the Italian peninsula. Beatrice and Matthias also assembled a vast library of classical manuscripts (many supplied by Lorenzo de Medici) and founded a university.

These investments paid huge dividends, as princes and warlords of the region came to the capital expecting a king who’d seem no better than they were, and found themselves walking what felt like the palaces of Caesar. Culture is amazing at intimidation, and at making someone *seem* like a king.

Matthias also continued his father’s tradition of martial valor and fought many successful wars, his legendary “Black Army” conquering first disobedient borderlands, Bohemia, Austria, making inroads against and the Ottomans, and earning the nickname “The Second Attila.”

If Beatrice and Matthias had a son all might have ended happily, but, alas, Matthias’s death left only his illegitimate son John, hence another succession crisis, so Hungary’s nobles turned to the incredible royal princess with the blood of ancient Rome in her veins: pick your husband, pick the king.

I want to pause a moment to the first time I ran across reference to Beatrice in a history it described her as “shrewish and unpopular” and then went on to say people loved her so much they let her pick the king.

The antiquated word “shrewish” made me suspicious, and I followed footnotes to an earlier source which said she was not only shrewish but so annoying that she pestered her mother-in-law to death (Matthias’s awesome mom who gave him his education). Still suspicious, I followed footnotes further to…

…a nineteenth-century art historian who said Beatrice must have been “shrewish and annoying” because she looks chubby in her bust, and all chubby women are annoying shrews. And her mother-in-law died soon after her arrival, so it must have been her fault.

Yeah… this portrait was the *only* evidence.

 

Okay, king-making time. Beatrice’s first pick was one of her late husband’s skilled veteran generals, Simon Keglevich, but he was too fearful to accept the precarious and high-risk honor of stepping into the throne with many envious peers around him. Her second pick was Vladislaus II, King of Bohemia and son of King Casimir of Poland, a former military rival but of very noble blood and with mighty allies (Poland, Emperor Maximilian) and confidence enough to stand before Hungary’s nobles and dare them to oppose him.

Matthias & Beatrice’s reign is called the Golden Age of Hungary. Alas, Vladislaus was a disaster, so bellicose his own father *disowned him* as heir to Poland, & his wars triggered invasions which smashed all the great Renaissance stuff. This is mostly why Matthias & Beatrice aren’t more famous. There aren’t beautiful monuments still standing to draw tourists, it’s all been scattered. That and that few historians can read Spanish, Italian, Latin, and Hungarian, all necessary to study them, so there are dozens of books in English about Beatrice’s niece Isabella d’Este but zero about Beatrice.

Beatrice is one of many cases of “Why is X famous not Y?” that I explore in “Inventing the Renaissance” as I dive deep into the Renaissance art as war-by-other-means, the tactic Matthias and Beatrice employed so potently.