11 November 1444 – autumn 1445
After Varna, 1444–1445
From Varna John Hunyadi escapes north to the Danube and crosses into Wallachia, where Vlad II’s men take him prisoner. In one account Vlad wants a hostage against Ottoman reprisals or a ransom, in another the border guards do not know who he is, and Vlad lets him go when Hungarian nobles threaten to march on Wallachia. Cardinal Cesarini dies in the flight: Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini writes that, wounded and bleeding, he was killed near a marsh by fleeing Hungarians. Murad goes back to Manisa, and Mehmed stays on the throne at Edirne.
In Hungary few believe that the king and the legate are dead, and spies sent south of the Danube bring no news. The diet of April 1445 decides to accept the child Ladislaus V as king if Władysław has not come back by the end of May, and it elects seven captains-in-chief to keep order, among them Hunyadi for the lands east of the Tisza. In Poland Władysław’s brother Casimir IV becomes king in 1447, after three years without a king.
Bombards at a siege, in a copy of Jean de Wavrin’s chronicle made at Bruges about 1480, British LibraryWikimedia Commons, Master of the Vienna and Copenhagen Toison d’Or, Public domain (09-bombardas-jaime-regalado-4 - Image 208000.jpg)
In 1445 the eight Burgundian galleys of Walerand de Wavrin, a nephew of the chronicler Jean de Wavrin, sail from Constantinople into the Black Sea and up the Danube. With Vlad II they take Tutrakan (Turtucaia) and Giurgiu, and in September 1445 they meet Vlad and Hunyadi at Nikopol. Hunyadi does not risk a fight with the Ottoman garrisons on the south bank, and before winter he goes back to Hungary and the galleys turn back down the river. Vlad II soon makes peace with the Ottomans.
Nikopol and the Danube seen from the fortress hillWikimedia Commons, unknown author, Public domain (Nikopolview.JPG)
Sources
- Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, letters (1445).
- Jean de Wavrin, Recueil des croniques et anchiennes istories de la Grant Bretaigne (about 1470).
- Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), vol. 2 (1978).
- Pál Engel, The Realm of St Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary, 895–1526 (2001).
- Richard Vaughan, Philip the Good: The Apogee of Burgundy (2002).
- Colin Imber, The Crusade of Varna, 1443–45 (2006).
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