 Front of a Hungarian Shield with Crow and Sun |
 Back of a Hungarian Shield with Crow and Sun |
 Grip of a Hungarian Shield with Crow and Sun |
Source: British Museum, London
Museum number: 1881,0802.138
Description: Hussar shield, rectangular with a rounded-off upper right corner and of rounded horizontal section. It is made of wood, the exterior covered with gesso and painted vermillion with a white border decorated with a geometrical vegetal scroll, across the centre is a white band. It is painted with an inescutcheon of vermillion with a black sun with gold rays, a continuation of the white band and crest in the form of a crow in black with white flashes standing on a black scroll. The inside is painted white with a vermillion border and black spiral scrolls outlined in vermillion. At the front are two original buff leather straps joined by a spirally-bound leather thong forming the front hand-grip. At the centre rear is another nail retaining the base of two buff leather straps. Above the lower hand-grip are two additional nails for straps, now lost. Each of these nails originally had a large triangular washer on the outside, all but one of which survive.
Date: 15thC (late)
Made in: Hungary
Materials: wood, metal, gesso
Dimensions: Height: 77.2 centimetres (Highest point) Width: 52 centimetres Weight: 3070 grams
5 King Matthias — the Myth of the Black Army
The organization of Matthias’s army in the very last part of his reign, on the eve of the conquest of Austria, is fairly well known thanks to descriptions of it by the king himself and his eyewitness Italian chronicler, Antonio Bonfini. in his well-known letter of March 1481, Matthias details a threefold division of his armed forces.57 First were the men-at-arms (armigeri), paid 15 florins for a quarter of a year, that is, five florins per month, more than the normal wage for such combatants of three florins.58 Then were the lightly-armed cavalry, also called hussars (equitum levis armature, quod hussarones appellamus), retained at ten florins each for a quarter of a year, again more than lightly armoured horsemen were usually paid. The third part of the army was constituted of the infantry, which was itself divided into several units. What exactly is meant by the gregarii milites seu pedites is a matter for conjecture; as, in a later section of the letter, Matthias wrote that they fought from within a square formed by the pikemen and shield-holders and occasionally sallied forth before going back again, they must have been partly gunners or crossbowmen and partly lightly-equipped footmen. The pikemen (armati) and the shield-holders (clipeati), the latter equipped with huge standing shields the size of a man (pavese),59 were expected to provide the kind of defensive structure previously offered by the wagenburg (figure 5).60 Finally, there were the master gunners (magistri pixidum). clearly distinguished from the handgunners; they fired small-calibre cannon (ex sclopetis), especially before the hand-to-hand fighting began, and when attacking or defending fortifications.
In his equally well-known narrative, Bonfini described in similar terms the armed forces commanded by King Matthias in 1487.61 Alongside the men-at-arms and the “hussars and lightly-armed raiders,” he enumerates heavily-armed footmen, pikemen, halberdiers, and archers as constituent parts of the infantry. The numbers he gives — 20,000 cavalry and 8,000 foot — probably represent at the height of the Austrian war after the taking of Wiener Neustadt, the largest armed force ever assembled by the king in the course of his Bohemian and Austrian wars. The armies he led against King George of Bohemia, and then against the united forces of kings Wladislas and Casimir in 1474, were certainly on a much smaller scale. Including the wages as stated by Matthias himself in his letter, cited above, the overall cost of an army of the size mustered at Wiener Neustadt would have been in the region of between 300,000 and 350,000 florins for three months62 — more than half the annual revenue of the king in the best years. In the Austrian wars Matthias rarely had to fear major relief campaigns mounted by his adversary and consequently could keep his troops tied down by prolonged sieges, while he could also temporarily disband the troops he did not need.
Source: pp.28-31, "From Nicopolis to Mohacs" by Tamás Pálosfalvi, 2018.
