User:OrionNimrod/Rerum Hungaricarum decades

The Rerum Hungaricarum decades (Latin for "Decades of Hungarian History") (A magyar történelem tizedei) is a Latin medieval chronicle from the Kingdom of Hungary from 1497. The work was written by the Italian humanist, Antonio Bonfini (Antonius Bonfinius) who was commissioned by King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary in 1488.

Antonio Bonfini (1427‒1502) gained invaluable merits in the history-writing of Hungary with this work. Up until the end of the 18th century, this work served as primary source for Hungarian history in the European academic thought.

History of the chronicle
The Italian Humanist Bonfini arrived at King Matthias’s court in 1486; the king assigned him this great project in 1488. As Matthias’s successor Vladislaus II also recognized the importance of the work, Bonfini could continue it intermittently until 1497. The accounting book of Vladislaus II records that the manuscript in 1494‒95 was already near completion: there are entries of purchasing parchments for clear copies to be made for the Corvina Library and of the salary of master Johannes, the copyist. By the end of the century, the volume had provenly been completed and placed into the Library. 16th century sources testify that several copies were made of its excerpts, and there is knowledge of an entire copy made by several hands. The printed copy of the entire work was not published until 1568. The whereabouts of the entire original codex of the Corvina Library have been unknown for centuries, and we cannot reconstruct its afterlife. We only know of three fragments, the first of which arrived at the National Library in 1872, the second in 1923 and the third in 1975. The extent of the entire Bonfini Corvina is assumed to be of four volumes, something more than two thousand pages. As the decoration is scarce, we can hardly tell anything of its one-time title-page. We suppose that if this volume, in a sense the most important one of the Corvina Library, had been completed in King Matthias’s lifetime, an exquisite decoration and binding would have been added similarly to the Philostratus Corvina. However, as a result of the financial problems in Vladislaus’s time and the overall decay of the Buda workshop, it received a decoration too modest for its valuable contents.