Ottoman-Hungarian Wars: Siege of Belgrade in 1456

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The siege of Belgrade by Ottoman Sultan Mehmet (Mohammed) II the Conqueror in the summer of 1456 aroused considerable contemporary attention and has remained an event of great interest to historians ever since. The fall of that fortress city, less than three years after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, could have opened the gates of the European heartland to the Turks, and that would certainly have changed the history of the world. The battle for Belgrade also witnessed the emergence of the first peasant movements in Hungary, then one of the most powerful states of Christendom. The appearance of large numbers of armed peasants in Transylvania in 1437­

1438 signaled both a peak in the cycle of peasant discontent and a prelude to several minor rebellions–and one major one.

Peasants had taken up arms soon after the disastrous crusade of Sigismund, emperor of Germany and king of Hungary, against the Turks in 1396. Sigismund’s army had been annihilated by a numerically superior–and better led–Ottoman force. That defeat pointed to the elementary need for Hungary to increase the size of its armies. But the pool from which soldiers had generally been recruited in the past, the mass of lesser nobility, was already reduced in size–partly by the Black Death, and partly due to the gradual impoverishment of that stratum of Hungarian society. Many of the lesser nobles could no longer afford the expensive armor, weapons and horses necessary for late-medieval warfare. The Hungarians thus recognized that they had to turn to a relatively untapped source, the peasantry, to reman their armies.

So it was that an army comprised mostly of peasants defended Belgrade and Christendom in the summer of 1456 against Mehmet II’s Turkish host. The leader of that hodge-podge army was legendary Hungarian General János Hunyadi.

Hunyadi’s name may not be widely known in the West, but his memory has been honored since 1456, albeit unknowingly, in Catholic countries all over the world, by the ringing of church bells every day at noon.

János (the Hungarian name for John) Hunyadi was a truly universal folk hero of his time. In a Serb epic, he is Sibinyanin Janko; the Slavs generally called him Ugrin Janko (John the Hungarian). To the Romanians, who claim he was of Wallachian extraction, he is Ion of Hunedoara. To the Bulgars and Macedonians he is Jansekula. Greek folk singers arbitrarily changed his name to Janko of Byzantium. Dukas, the Greek historian, compared him to the two most valiant figures of Greek mythology, Achilles and Hector.

It is generally believed that Hunyadi was born in 1387. The earliest document dealing with the Hunyadi name is a royal patent signed by King Sigismund on October 8, 1409, in which the ruler donated Hunyadvár, a castle in Transylvania, to Serba Vojk. Vojk, János Hunyadi’s father, thereupon changed his name to Hunyadi.

There is some doubt over the identity of Hunyadi’s real father. According to contemporary gossip spawned by János Hunyadi’s phenomenal rise in fame and fortune, his birth was the fruit of an illicit love affair between King Sigismund–a notorious womanizer–and Vojk’s wife, Erzsébet Morsina, either before or after her marriage to Vojk.

That version of his origin–which, if true, would indicate royal blood–is vehemently disputed by Romanians, who are proud of Hunyadi’s Wallachian heritage.

Regardless of his background, it is indisputable that his father had become a loyal subject of the Hungarian king. János Hunyadi married a Hungarian noblewoman (Erzsébet Szilagyi), and he reared his children as Magyars. He regarded himself as a Hungarian nobleman and went down in history as one of Hungary’s most celebrated heroes.

Hunyadi grew up a deeply religious man. His comrades at court frequently saw him slip out of bed late at night to spend hours on his knees in devout prayer in the royal chapel. He was also most definitely a born soldier. Initially fighting as a mercenary condottiere in Italy, he later came to be filled with a zealous dedication to one great cause–fighting the Ottoman Empire, then regarded as the greatest enemy of his country and his church.

Tags: 15th-16th Century, Historical Conflicts

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