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Distinctive Facts About The Mighty Ottoman Empire

Khalid Elhassan August 13, 2020 35 min

Battle of Ankara - Timurid Empire — Tamerlane gloating over the captured Bayezid I. Wikimedia

27. The Raven King Who Fought the Ottomans

Matthias Corvinus. Stephan Cruysbergh Photography

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 greatest warriors in the second half of the fifteenth 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 of 1458 to elect a new king. It eventually chose fourteen-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. Instead, the teenager surprised everybody by administering state affairs independently from the outset. He ended up being a thorn in the side of the expansionist Ottoman Empire.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.