John Hunyadi

John Hunyadi rose from the minor nobility of Transylvania to become the leading soldier and statesman of fifteenth-century Hungary. For almost two decades he led the kingdom's defence against the expanding Ottoman Empire, governed Hungary as regent from 1446 to 1453, and in 1456 turned back Sultan Mehmed II at Belgrade. His fame later helped put his son on the throne.

Hunyadi's birth date is unrecorded; historians place it between about 1405 and 1407. He first appears in a royal charter of 1409, in which King Sigismund granted Hunyad Castle, in present-day Hunedoara in Romania, to his father Voyk, a knight of the royal household. Fifteenth-century chroniclers say Voyk had come from Wallachia, a view many modern scholars accept. A rumour that John was really Sigismund's illegitimate son was dismissed even by the chronicler who first recorded it, and modern historians treat it as unverifiable gossip.

As a young man Hunyadi served in the households of great lords and of Sigismund himself, whom he followed to Italy in 1431. He spent perhaps two years with the army of the Duke of Milan, where he probably learned the use of professional mercenaries. In Bohemia he seems to have studied the Hussites' tactic of linking wagons into a mobile fortress, which he later adopted. From 1438 he fought Ottoman raiders in the south.

When a succession war followed King Albert's death in 1439, Hunyadi backed Vladislaus of Poland, and his victory at Bátaszék early in 1441 effectively ended the conflict. The grateful king made him joint voivode of Transylvania and commander of Belgrade and the Danube castles. In 1442 he destroyed an Ottoman raiding army that had besieged Hermannstadt and then defeated a much larger force under the governor of Rumelia. In 1443 to 1444 he led the so-called Long Campaign deep into the Balkans, taking Niš and Sofia before winter forced a retreat. The campaign encouraged revolts against the Ottomans, including that of Skanderbeg in Albania.

In 1444 the sultan Murad II offered a ten-year truce, but under pressure from the papal legate King Vladislaus resumed the crusade. On 10 November 1444, at Varna, the king was killed charging the janissaries and the Christian army was destroyed; Hunyadi escaped only to be briefly held by the Wallachians. In October 1448 he led another army against Murad and was defeated after three days of fighting at Kosovo Polje. On the way home the Serbian despot Đurađ Branković imprisoned him and released him only for a heavy ransom.

In 1445 the Hungarian diet named Hunyadi one of seven captains to restore order, and on 6 June 1446 it elected him governor for the child king Ladislaus V. He fought the emperor Frederick III, guardian of the young king, and the Czech commander John Jiskra, with mixed success, and became one of the largest landowners in the kingdom, spending much of his income on the war. After resigning the regency, he was appointed captain general in January 1453 and received the first hereditary title in Hungary, perpetual count of Bistrița.

After taking Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed II besieged Belgrade in July 1456. Hunyadi assembled a Danube flotilla that broke the Ottoman blockade on 14 July, entered the fortress, and with the help of a peasant crusade raised by the friar John of Capistrano repulsed the general assault of 21 July. The next day the defenders broke into the Ottoman camp, and the wounded sultan withdrew. Plague then swept the camp, and Hunyadi died near Zimony on 11 August 1456.

Pope Callixtus III had ordered church bells rung at noon to call for prayers for Belgrade's defenders, a custom later tied to the victory. Hunyadi's fame helped secure the election of his son Matthias Corvinus as king by the diet that assembled in 1457. He remains a national hero in Hungary and is also claimed by Romanian historiography.

Our 1400 map shows the Kingdom of Hungary and the Ottoman Balkans in his childhood, and the 1492 map shows the frontier he defended, still holding a generation after his death.