Siege of Belgrade (1456)

Three years after taking Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed II tried to seize Belgrade, the great Hungarian fortress where the Sava meets the Danube. From 4 to 22 July 1456 its garrison, relieved by John Hunyadi and a crusading army of peasants rallied by the friar Giovanni da Capistrano, held out and finally drove the Ottomans away. Known in Hungarian as the triumph of Nándorfehérvár, the victory kept the Ottomans from advancing deeper into central Europe for some seventy years.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and two campaigns against the Serbian Despotate in 1454 and 1455, Mehmed turned on Belgrade, the southern gateway of the Kingdom of Hungary. The city had been the Serbian capital in the early fifteenth century and passed to Hungary in 1427. Its castle, built on a hill above the two rivers with an inner castle, an upper town and a lower town with a harbour, was one of the strongest in the Balkans. The sultan prepared carefully, casting 22 large cannon and building a river fleet to sail up the Danube.

Hunyadi, captain general of Hungary, stocked the fortress at his own expense and placed 5,000 mercenaries there under his brother-in-law Mihály Szilágyi and his eldest son László. He then gathered a relief army, while Capistrano preached a crusade that drew some 25,000 volunteers, mostly untrained peasants, some armed only with clubs and slings. On 18 June the advancing Ottomans destroyed a Serbian force of about 9,000, and by late June they were before Belgrade. Their army is given as 160,000 in early accounts, but modern research suggests 60,000 to 70,000.

Mehmed began bombarding the walls on 4 July, with about 300 guns divided between his land forces and a fleet of some 200 river vessels that cut the city off. On 14 July Hunyadi's flotilla attacked the blockade and, after five hours of fighting, sank three large galleys and captured 24 other vessels. He was then able to bring men and food into the fortress.

The Ottoman guns opened several breaches, and on the evening of 21 July Mehmed launched a general assault that lasted through the night. Janissaries poured into the lower town and pressed on towards the upper town. The defenders threw down burning tar-soaked wood, creating a wall of fire that cut the attackers inside off from those behind. The Janissaries trapped within were killed, and the assault outside the walls was beaten back with heavy losses.

On 22 July, according to some accounts, crusaders slipped out of the fortress against orders and began skirmishing with the Ottoman lines. The fighting spread, and Capistrano led some 2,000 peasants across the Sava against the Ottoman rear while Hunyadi charged out to take the siege guns. The Christians overran part of the camp and its artillery. Mehmed joined the fighting himself and was wounded, and his troops recovered the camp, but the army was too weakened to go on. That night the Ottomans withdrew south-east, leaving much of their baggage behind.

The victory came at a heavy price. Plague swept through the Christian camp, and Hunyadi died of it on 11 August 1456 at Zimony, today's Zemun. The pope had already ordered prayers for Belgrade's defenders, and a legend grew that the Catholic custom of ringing a bell at noon commemorates the battle; 22 July is still a memorial day in Hungary. Mehmed went on to absorb Serbia and Bosnia but did not attack Hungary directly, and Hunyadi's son Matthias Corvinus became king. Belgrade held until Suleiman the Magnificent took it in 1521, and much of Hungary fell after the Battle of Mohács in 1526.

Our 1492 map shows Belgrade still on the Hungarian frontier facing the Ottoman Empire, with Serbia by then under Ottoman rule; the 1530 map shows the city in Ottoman hands.