The Horoscopes of Hungarian Kings Ladislaus the Posthumous, Matthias Corvinus and Louis II

Abstract

In the present article I examine the extant horoscopes of three kings of Hungary, Ladislaus the Posthumous (1440–1457), his successor, Matthias Corvinus (1458–1490), and Louis II (1516–1526). Several of these horoscopes were little used by or completely unknown to modern historians, and a systematic treatment of them was a desiderata in the Hungarian scholarship for a long time. Although when examining sixteenth-century geniture collections the exact source and transmission history of a single horoscope is often difficult to reconstruct, in some cases the source of nativity horoscopes can be traced back from Johannes Kepler through Paul Eber, Georg Joachim Rheticus, Philipp Melanchthon and Johannes Schöner to Johannes Regiomontanus and Georg von Peuerbach.