Battle of Varna

Near the Black Sea port of Varna, in today's eastern Bulgaria, the Ottoman sultan Murad II crushed a crusading army on 10 November 1444. The Christian force, led by the young Władysław III, king of Poland and Hungary, and the Hungarian commander John Hunyadi, had marched in breach of a recent truce. The king vanished in the fighting, and the defeat ended the last major attempt of its kind to push the Ottomans out of the Balkans.

Hungary had been unsettled since the death of King Sigismund in 1437 and of his successor Albert two years later. Its nobles offered the crown to Władysław III of Poland, hoping he would help defend them against the Ottomans. After Hunyadi's successful "long campaign" of 1442–1443, Murad II agreed a ten-year truce with Hungary, made peace with the Karamanid emirate in Anatolia in August 1444 and handed the throne to his twelve-year-old son Mehmed II.

The papal legate, Cardinal Julian Cesarini, urged Władysław to break the truce, arguing that an agreement with non-Christians was not binding. With Venice and Pope Eugene IV, Hungary launched a new crusade. In response, the leading Ottoman vizier recalled Murad to take command.

The crusader army was drawn mainly from Hungary, Poland and Bohemia, about 16,000 men, with some 4,000 Wallachians and smaller groups from the Papal States, the Teutonic Knights, Bosnia, Croatia and elsewhere. Local Bulgarians joined as it passed Vidin and Nicopolis, and on 10 October around 7,000 Wallachian horsemen under Mircea II arrived. A Christian fleet was supposed to stop the sultan crossing from Asia, but it failed, and Murad's army crossed the Bosphorus on 18 October.

Late on 9 November an Ottoman army of perhaps 40,000 to 60,000 men appeared west of Varna. The crusaders, about 20,000 strong, were hemmed in between the sea, Lake Varna, the wooded Franga plateau and the enemy. Cesarini first argued for withdrawal and then for a defensive camp of linked war wagons. Hunyadi and the twenty-year-old king chose to fight, and Władysław gave Hunyadi the command. He drew up his army in an arc about 3.5 kilometres long, with the wagon fort behind it. Murad's Janissaries dug in behind ditches and palisades in the centre, while the sultan watched from a burial mound.

The Ottoman light cavalry attacked the Christian right and was driven back by guns, but the pursuers were ambushed by Anatolian cavalry, and most of the right wing died in the marshes around the lake. Cesarini was among the dead. On the left the Hungarians held, and Hunyadi rode to support them, asking the king to wait. Instead Władysław charged the Ottoman centre with 500 Polish knights, trying to seize the sultan. Near Murad's tent his horse went down. Turkish chroniclers say he was beheaded on the spot, while a memorandum attributed to Murad has him executed later in captivity. His body was never recovered. Hunyadi could only organise a retreat, and the crusader army was all but destroyed.

Hunyadi was briefly detained in Wallachia by Vlad Dracul before being released. In 1446 he became governor of Hungary on behalf of the child king Ladislaus the Posthumous, while Poland, after a three-year interregnum, passed to Casimir IV. The defeat, followed by another Ottoman victory at Kosovo in 1448, discouraged European states from sending real help to Constantinople before its fall in 1453. Only the siege of Belgrade in 1456 checked the Ottoman advance. In Poland the lost king is remembered as Władysław of Varna.

Our 1400 map shows the Ottoman Empire already established south of the Danube, and the 1492 map shows it after the conquest of Constantinople.