In this connection we have to record a strange encounter which took place in 1492 in the vicinity of Halas, in the county of Pesth. Paul Kinizsy, the terror of the Turks, the general who had grown gray on victorious battlefields, met there, in hostile array, the army he himself had formerly commanded, the famous “Black Guard” of Matthias. This very army, with their brave old leader, had a few months earlier repulsed the Turks near Szörény. After this victory the soldiers demanded the pay which had long been in arrears. As usual on such occasions, tumults and disorders broke out in consequence of this failure to keep faith with the troops. The wisdom of the Hungarian National Assembly knew no better remedy than to instruct Kinizsy to march against the exasperated men. The old general obeyed orders. Seven thousand men were massacred, and the remainder, flying to Austria, dragged out their weary lives as robbers, constantly at war with the law. This cruel and impolitic measure deprived the nation, at a time when she was preparing for the life-and-death struggle against the formidable power of the Turks, of one of her main supports, in destroying that army which alone could have saved her. For Kinizsy, the former miller-boy, this was the last campaign, for very soon after he was stricken with paralysis and deprived of the power of speech. His contemporaries saw in this a punishment decreed by Providence for the part he had played on that bloody occasion. The better part of the nation soon grew restless under this state of things, and a party arose which was hostile to the king. Stephen Verböczy was the leader of the new party. He was a thorough patriot and a skilled jurist, well versed in legislation. He was highly esteemed by the middle class, in whom he saw the only element which would restore to his country the universal respect she formerly enjoyed. This party aspired to the government of the land, and their choice of a ruler fell on Stephen Szapolyai, the son of John Szapolyai. If Stephen had not been, in 1490, still a child, his father would then have made him king. That he should become king was the highest ambition of his mother Anna, Duchess of Teschen, a woman more ambitious even than her son, and of whom it is said that she invariably concluded her daily devotions with a special prayer to God, asking that she might be permitted to live to see her son ascend the Hungarian throne. Szapolyai himself did not consider it an arduous task to accomplish this, for he argued that it was a precedent in his favor that Matthias, who was of no more exalted origin than himself, had become king. His partisans first tried to attain their end by marriage, and with this view Szapolyai asked of Uladislaus the hand of the young Duchess Anna. Uladislaus refused to accede to his request, and sought protection against the vaulting ambition of the national candidate in an alliance with the emperor Maximilian.