15 – The Raven King and His Mercenary Black Army
The Raven King and his mercenary Black Army sound like something straight out of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. However, it refers to a real-life monarch and military unit, who became Europe’s most formidable warriors in the second half of the 15th century. To wit, King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (1443 – 1490), whose name translates as “Matthew the Raven”, and a mercenary army he assembled to hold back the Ottoman Turks.
When Hungary’s king Ladislaus V died childless in 1457, the Diet of Hungary convened in January 1458 to elect a new king. It eventually chose 14-year-old Matthias Corvinus as a compromise candidate to avert a civil war between rival factions. The plan was for Matthias’ uncle to rule as regent until the new king came of age, but the teenager surprised everybody by administering state affairs independently from the outset.
Military matters were high on the list of state affairs that attracted Matthias’ attention, as he ascended the throne only 5 years after the Ottoman Turks had conquered Constantinople and extinguished the Byzantine Empire. The Turks, brimming with confidence, turned their attention to Hungary. Against all precedent, Matthias taxed Hungary’s nobles, and ignoring their howls of protest, used the funds to recruit 30,000 mercenaries, mainly from Germany, Poland, Bohemia, and Serbia, and after 1480, from Hungary.
They were organized into a combined arms mix of light infantry operating around a base of heavily armored infantry, and supplemented by even more heavily armored knights. In a pioneering innovation that took advantage of recent firearms developments, every fourth soldier was armed with an arquebus. Matthias’ mercenaries, who came to be known as the “Black Army”, became a formidable force that dominated Central Europe and the Balkans, and held back the Ottomans for decades.
