Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
The Medieval Sister Cities
turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a certain progress could again be observed. The peasants moving out of the surrounding villages—it is interesting to note—settled first in Óbuda and later some of them would make a second move to Buda or to Pest. In spite of the fact that neither city was the seat of a bishopric, Buda and its sister city were also the most important cultural centres of Hungary. This of course was connected with the presence of the king and his court at Buda. The splendid court of King Matthias who reigned from 1458 to 1490, a centre of the new humanist culture, made Buda a city of international importance. Matthias Corvinus rebuilt his Buda Palace in Renaissance style and invited foreign scholars and artists to his court. Among the best known are the historians Antonio Bonfini and Marzio Galeotto, both Italians, the artist Ivan Duknovic (Giovanni Dalmata) a South-Slav, and the astronomer Regiomontanus, who was German. During the reign of Matthias’s successors, the royal court drew far fewer foreign scholars and artists to Hungary, but in the reign of Louis II (1516-1526), composers renowned all over Europe, as for instance the Flemish Adriaen Willaert and the German Thomas Stoltzer, were in charge of the royal choir and the king’s musicians. True, the university founded by King Sigismund in Óbuda in 1395 closed its doors soon afterwards, and the Dominican College founded in the reign of King Matthias was in no sense a real university, but it was from Buda and Pest that most students went on to foreign universities, primarily to Vienna and Cracow. The first printed book in Hungary, the Buda Chronicle (Chronicon Budense), was published in Buda by András Hess in 1473. This eventful work was finished on the eve of the Whitsun market of Buda, and was obviously designed for sale at the market. All medieval Hungarian printers and most booksellers lived in Buda, not only because it was the royal seat, but also because the most important market in Hungary was held there and it was there that books could best be sold. In spite of the invention of printing, King Matthias commissioned a large number of manuscripts illuminated by Italian painters, which made up the bulk of his famous Corvina Library. Most of the official class, royal clerks, lawyers and judges also lived in Buda, where the law courts were situated. We possess no information or evidence from the early Middle Ages which would allow any valid estimate of the population figures for Pest and Buda to be made. It only becomes possible from the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: at that time Buda, together with the surrounding settlements, may have had approximately 12,000 to 15,000 inhabitants, and Pest 10,000 at the most. In the medieval context, they were large cities, and since economically the two cities already counted as one—at least as much, for instance, as the disparate parts of Prague at the time—together they undoubtedly can be considered as one of the large medieval cities. No information on Óbuda has survived. It appears that the settlement, which was in an advanced state of decay by 1350, picked up again at the end of the fifteenth century, but even so it may have had no more than 1,000 or 2,000 inhabitants. The newcomers from the settlements surrounding the three cities helped to increase the Hungarian-speaking population. But with Buda fulfilling the role of a capital and engaging in widespread trade with the other cities of Hungary and many parts of Europe, a large number of the new citizens travelled from those regions as well to settle there. The majority were Germans, but a good many Italians, mainly from Florence and Venice, where trade with Hungary was brisk, were also to be found. At the end of the Middle Ages, and before King John (1526-1540) expelled the Buda Germans in 1529, despite the fact that more than half of the population of Buda was Hungarian, the German minority, including artisans 21
