Battle of Kosovo (1448)

For three days in October 1448, on the same Kosovo plain where Serbs and Ottomans had fought in 1389, the Ottoman sultan Murad II defeated a crusading army led by the Hungarian regent John Hunyadi. The defeat ended half a century of crusading threats to the Ottoman frontier in Europe, left Hungary without the means to take the offensive again and cleared the way for the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople five years later.

In 1444 the young king Władysław, ruler of both Poland and Hungary, broke a truce with the Ottomans and led a crusade that was destroyed at the Battle of Varna, where he was killed. Murad then went back on the offensive, breaking through the Hexamilion wall into the Peloponnese in 1446 and campaigning in Albania. Hunyadi, the richest landowner in Hungary and now its regent, planned a new war. In a letter sent in his name to Pope Nicholas V on 17 September 1448, he described his aim as defeating the Ottomans in a decisive battle and driving them from Europe altogether.

Hunyadi raised a force reported at about 24,000 men, including Wallachian and Moldavian contingents and German and Bohemian mercenary infantry alongside his Hungarian cavalry. He hoped for a Balkan uprising and for help from the Albanian leader Skanderbeg. In September he crossed the Danube into Serbia and waited about a month for allies. The Serbian ruler Đurađ Branković, bound by a truce with the sultan, stayed out, and Skanderbeg's Albanians were held up, possibly by Serbian troops blocking the mountain passes. Hunyadi decided to go ahead without them.

Figures in the sources differ widely. The crusader army at Kosovo is put at somewhere between about 22,000 and more than 40,000 men, and the Ottoman army at between 40,000 and 60,000. Murad commanded the centre with his janissaries and artillery, while his 16-year-old son Mehmed II, in his first battle, led the Anatolian troops on the right.

Hunyadi, who believed the main Ottoman army was still far away at Edirne, was surprised when it appeared on 17 October. He built a wagon fort, and the Ottomans answered with a stockade of their own. For two days the cavalry skirmished around the flanks, and on the night of 18–19 October the crusaders launched an attack with wagons and guns on the sultan's centre; the fighting was bloody but indecisive.

On 19 October Murad sent sipahi cavalry from Thessaly round the crusader left while attacking all along the line. The manoeuvre succeeded, and the Wallachian, Moldavian and Hungarian horsemen on the flanks were cut down. Hunyadi then threw his knights and infantry at the Ottoman centre. They broke through as far as the Ottoman camp before being halted and pushed back. On 20 October, according to some sources, the Wallachians went over to the Ottomans, though one modern historian regards this claim as exaggerated. The janissaries stormed the wagon fort, and the remaining crusaders were destroyed.

Hunyadi escaped but was captured by Branković, who released him only after a ransom of 100,000 florins and other concessions. Estimates of the losses on both sides vary enormously. Murad punished Hunyadi's supporters, bringing Wallachia to heel in 1449 and invading Albania in 1450, though Skanderbeg held out at Krujë. Murad died in 1451 and was succeeded by Mehmed, who took Constantinople in 1453 in the fall of Constantinople. Hunyadi spent the rest of his life successfully defending the Kingdom of Hungary against Ottoman attacks, while the Christian states of the Balkans fell one after another.

Our 1400 map shows the Ottomans already established in the Balkans, and the 1492 map shows the central Balkans, including today's Kosovo, under Ottoman rule.