Background
Tamas Bakocz was born in 1442 in Erdőd (Ardud) Satu Mare, Transylvania, Romania; the son of a wagoner, adopted by his uncle.
clergyman ecclesiastic statesman
Tamas Bakocz was born in 1442 in Erdőd (Ardud) Satu Mare, Transylvania, Romania; the son of a wagoner, adopted by his uncle.
Tamas Bakocz studied in Breslau and Padua.
In 1480 Tamas succeeded his uncle as rector of Tetel. Shortly afterwards he became one of the secretaries of King Matthias I, who made him bishop of Gyor and a member of the royal council (1490). Under Wladislaus II (1490 - 1516) he became successively bishop of Eger, the richest of the Hungarian sees, archbishop of Esztergom (1497), cardinal (1500), and titular patriarch of Constantinople (1510). From 1490 to his death in 1521 he was the leading statesman of Hungary and mainly responsible for her foreign policy.
In 1513, on the death of Julius II, he went to Rome for the express purpose of bringing about his own election as pope. He was received with more than princely pomp, and all but succeeded in his design, thanks to his extraordinary adroitness and the command of an almost unlimited bribing-fund. But Venice and the emperor played him false, and he failed. He returned to Hungary as papal legate, bringing with him the bull of Leo X proclaiming a fresh crusade against the Turks. But the crusade degenerated into a jacquerie which ravaged the whole kingdom, and much discredited Bakocz. He lost some of his influence at first after the death of Wladislaus, but continued to be the guiding spirit at court, till age and infirmity confined him almost entirely to his house in the last three years of his life.
Bakocz was a man of great ability but of no moral principle whatever. His whole life was a tissue of treachery. He was false to his benefactor Matthias, false to Matthias's son Janos Corvinus, whom he chicaned out of the throne, and false to his accomplice in that transaction, Queen Beatrice. His rapacity disgusted even an age in which every one could be bought and sold. His attempt to incorporate the wealthy diocese of Transylvania with his own primatial province was one of the principal causes of the spread of the Reformation in Hungary. He left a fortune of many millions. His one redeeming feature was a love of art; his own cathedral was a veritable Pantheon.