What with enemies without and enemies within, there were extensive districts in some parts of Hungary, and among them some of the royal domains, which were little better than wildernesses when the king came to the throne. Villages had been burned down, the inhabitants driven away, and the land left desolate in many parts; and in order to tempt the people back, and induce others to come and settle in these deserted spots, the king caused it to be proclaimed at the fairs that land might be had rent-free by those who would undertake to cultivate it, and that for a certain number of years they should be exempt from taxes of all sorts.
The king did all he could to induce the great landed nobles to follow his example in these matters, and to pay more heed to the cultivation of their property, and to the peasants who laboured for them, than they had been in the habit of doing.
One day, so the story goes, he invited a number of distinguished nobles to dine with him in one of the northerly counties, and when the meal was ended he distributed among them a number of pick-axes and spades, and taking one himself, called on them to join him in clearing away the underwood and digging up the ground.
The active young king, who was well accustomed to exert himself, worked away energetically; but the well-fed, self-indulgent lords almost melted away, the labour made them so hot, and very soon they were completely exhausted.
"That's enough, my friends," said the king, observing the state they were in. "Now we know a little of what it costs the peasants to produce that which we waste in idleness while they live in poverty. They are human beings like ourselves, yet we often treat them worse than we do our horses and dogs."
The spot where Matthias read his nobles this wholesome lesson is still pointed out in Gömör.
But indeed some of them needed sharper teaching than this, and Matthias did not scruple to give it them.
Where was the use of the peasant's ploughing and sowing his fields or planting and tending his orchards and vineyards, where was the use of trying to encourage trade and manufactures, when at any moment the farmer, merchant, peddler, might be set upon and robbed of all his hardly-earned goods? Yet so it was; for in some parts of the country, especially in the north, there were robber-knights and freebooting nobles, chiefly Bohemians, who had been invited into the country during the civil wars, and now, finding their occupation gone, had built themselves strongholds among the mountains, from which they issued forth to plunder and rob and often to murder travellers, traders, farmers, and any one they could lay hands on. Yet these same robbers were many of them men of noble birth, and there were some who were not ashamed to make their appearance in the courts of law, and to help in bringing smaller thieves and robbers to justice.
Now King Matthias was so true a lover of justice that his name has become a proverb, and when he died there was a general sigh and exclamation, "Matthias is dead! justice is fled!" It was not likely, therefore, that he was going to tolerate robbers merely because they were nobles; and after giving them fair warning—for he would be just even to them—he destroyed their castles, and hung a few of them on their own towers by way of example to the rest, who did not fail to profit by it and amend their ways: so that by the end of his reign travellers could pass from one end of the kingdom to the other in perfect safety, and the peasants could gather in their crops without fear of having them taken from them by violence.
At the time when our story begins, the war against the robbers was being carried on with great energy, and the king's generals were busily engaged in storming their strongholds.