In the summer of 1456, waves rolled through the sea of grain in the southern Hungarian Vojvodina. No wind moves them, but the trembling of thirty thousand boots. In marching step, their soles crush the stalks. Banners and flags flutter to the horizon: blood-red and snow-white stripes gleam in the sun, forming the old coat of arms of the Árpáds, the first kings of Hungary. Beside it, the double cross—inheritance from Byzantine times, when the sons of the Pannonian Basin married the purple-born imperial children from the Bosporus.
But Byzantium has fallen. The Theodosian Walls, which defied every attack, every conquest for over a thousand years, collapsed amid cannon thunder and “Allahu akbar!” cries. The largest and most beautiful church in the world—converted into a mosque. The old imperial palace—seat of the Sultan. The ringing of bells has given way to the muezzin’s call.
Three years have passed since then. Three years in which the Ottomans under their Sultan Mehmed II ravaged the Balkans. After Constantinople, the Golden Apple, fell into Muslim hands, Belgrade appears as the next worthwhile conquest.
Hunyadi’s March
For days, the army therefore follows the Danube. Boats, barges, and galleys accompany the force marching against the Turks. The Sultan is said to command sixty thousand men. Among them the feared Janissaries. Mehmed’s elite troops are feared by Christian soldiers for their cruelty. Their entire hope rests on their own commander, who rides at the head of his troops: John Hunyadi.
Hunyadi is a legend. For twenty years, he has struggled in the name of the Cross against the Crescent—with mixed success. Unforgotten is the catastrophe of Varna in 1444, where a Christian alliance succumbs to the Turks and the Hungarian king meets his death. The four-year-old Ladislaus follows him to the throne. Hunyadi has since guided the country as regent.
Ladislaus is now sixteen, but Hunyadi remains the most important and powerful figure in Southeastern Europe. Hungary has inherited Byzantium’s role as bulwark. The kingdom, extending from the mountain ranges of Dalmatia to the Carpathians, becomes the shield of the West that Hunyadi wields. The catastrophe of Varna, the defeat on the Field of Blackbirds, the fall of Constantinople—all mere preludes should Belgrade fall and the path to Central Europe open to the Turks.
But Hunyadi’s men do not stand alone on the field. All of Christendom stands on the side of the Hungarian army. Behind the soldiers’ backs, myriads of bells toll. Pope Callixtus III has called for ringing at midday throughout Europe to summon men, women, and children to prayer for Belgrade’s defenders and Hunyadi’s soldiers. Since late June, the sound has rung daily through city alleys and over fields, from the beaches of Portugal to the abbeys of England, in the imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire and the merchant republics of Italy to lonely village chapels at Norwegian fjords.
Capistrano’s Crusade
Rome also sends Hunyadi a secret weapon to decide battle fortune for Christendom: the preacher Giovanni da Capistrano. The Italians consider him a saint; his tongue is known throughout the West. At his sermons, people appear from all parts of the land. In Brescia, Capistrano is said to have reached 100,000 listeners at a public sermon.
The saint works a miracle. On the way to Hunyadi, thousands of men join him to go to war and defend the West. Crusading spirit fills the air.
Capistrano’s people are poorly trained, simple folk. Their strongest weapon: burning passion for the faith. They make up the majority of the 30,000 men with whom Hunyadi marches against his archrival Mehmed. Thousands of inexperienced peasants against the battle-hardened Janissaries who conquered Serbia a few months ago. Mehmed’s entire force is twice as large as Hunyadi’s motley army.
Belgrade’s siege enters its second week when Hunyadi’s force and fleet arrive. The Ottomans have completely enclosed Nándorfehérvár—the Hungarian name of the city. Only 5,000 defenders resist the invaders at the walls. At the confluence of the Danube and Sava, Belgrade lies on a peninsula. Two rings of walls surround the city and castle hill; a third protects the citadel. It was once the seat of Serbian kings who expanded Belgrade into the New Constantinople of Orthodoxy and the mightiest fortress of the entire Balkan Peninsula.
Mehmed has therefore cut the city off from the outside world: his infantry besieges it by land, behind them the Sipahi, the red-cloaked Ottoman cavalry, guard his back. Galleys with crescent pennants anchor on the water and block the harbor. The Sultan wants to demoralize and starve the besieged rather than take the walls by storm.
Hunyadi knows that time presses—and sounds the attack.
The Naval Battle on the Danube
The ram of Hungarian ships digs into Turkish wood. Two hundred ships under the Christian cross engage their Ottoman rivals in a naval battle on the Danube. On board, thousands of soldiers engage in boarding combat. In a moment of surprise, they manage to capture four large Turkish galleys; twenty smaller ships fall to the Hungarians. Hunyadi breaks through the wooden blockade; behind remain shattered masts and sinking hulls drifting in the red-colored Danube waters toward the Black Sea. The Christians annihilate the Muslim fleet; Hunyadi is greeted in the harbor under jubilant storms. The army of Western nobles, Hungarian soldiers, mercenaries, and lay fighters crosses the European stream and reinforces Belgrade’s walls. Supply from the kingdom’s interior is secured.
Hunyadi’s opening move weakens Mehmed’s position, but the Sultan is not ready to give up. The nimbus of Ottoman invincibility is worth more than thousands of human lives; and where the man who bears the name “Fatih”—Conqueror—in the Muslim world was victorious in Constantinople, he does not want to fail in Belgrade.
The Turkish cannons thunder ceaselessly from then on, shaking day and night the foundations of the ramparts and houses, robbing the defenders of sleep. Powder smoke plunges Belgrade into fog. Projectiles break holes in the gray walls that crash to the ground. For a week, hell roars over the battlefield—until the outer ring yields, stone breaks, and the cannons drive several breaches into the wall.
The Night of Fire and Steel
Mehmed does not hesitate. Still at dusk, he calls for the storm. It is a total attack from all sides. Suddenly the avalanche of besiegers sets in motion and rolls toward Belgrade, floods through the broken defense into the city; foremost the Janissaries, behind them the soldiers from the Balkans and Anatolia. The night of July 21 to 22 is to bring the decision, at any price.
When enemy troops flood Belgrade’s upper city, Hunyadi strikes back. Straw and tar-soaked wood plunge down from the stone walls. The inhabitants bring forth everything combustible, throw it at the attackers—and then set it ablaze with arrows and torches. In seconds, a sea of flames spreads, dividing the upper city in two. A wall of fire separates the Janissaries’ vanguard from the rest of the infantry.
Commander Michael Szilágyi, who with his knights has held out in Belgrade for three weeks, throws himself with his men against the Sultan’s trapped elite fighters. Between fire and steel, Christians and Muslims fight a merciless battle. The smell of burned corpses bites in the noses as Szilágyi’s men gain the upper hand, driving the Janissaries into the fire or cutting them down. Motivated by this, the defenders drive the enemy back and inflict severe losses on the Sultan’s streaming men.
It is a night when legends are born. Into Hunyadi’s maneuver and Szilágyi’s battle mixes the myth of a Serbian soldier named Titusz Dugovics, who resists the Ottomans on the walls: when an Anatolian wants to hoist the Turkish crescent on a tower, Dugovics throws himself against the attacker and plunges with him and the banner to their deaths.
The Miracle at Dawn
That chaos and myth can become true in history, that miracles happen and the inexplicable remains part of the world, manifests itself at dawn. Without consultation, without explanation, and without recognizable motivation, parts of Capistrano’s crusader army break loose. Armed only with slings and scythes, the peasants suddenly storm from the breaches toward the Ottoman army. For Hunyadi, a nightmare: against the experienced fighters from both sides of the Mediterranean, the preacher’s lay army has no chance. The general expects a catastrophe, orders his own men to reinforce.
The Price of Victory
Yet the greatness of the victory overshadows its tragedy. An epidemic breaks out in the victors’ camp. Hunyadi and Capistrano perish from it weeks later. Szilágyi falls into Ottoman captivity at the Battle of Baziaș four years later. In Constantinople, he is tortured and sawed in half.
This article was first published on Marco Gallinas personal Substack. Make sure to pay him a visit and subscribe for more gripping historical write-ups.
 | A guest post by
|
And here we are, generations later, thanking God that the Ottomans did not advance. I have Slovak heritage. My ancestors could easily have been Muslim if these men had not been so brave.
This is why we choose life. Many babies and counting.