20 October 1448
The fall of the camp
On 20 October the Wallachians go over to Murad on terms that he offers them, and Hunyadi is left with too few men to hold the field. The historian Emanuel Antoche thinks that the sources exaggerate the desertion.
With Murad watching, the janissaries attack the crusader stockade and kill those they find in it. Through the night the Ottoman foot shoots into the wagon fort, and the Hungarians answer with their guns. On the next day a last assault destroys what is left of the army. Hunyadi escapes from the field with a few men, by Turkish accounts under cover of his wagons.
Janissaries in the Futûhât-ı Cemîle of Arifi, 1558, Topkapı Palace MuseumWikimedia Commons, unknown Ottoman painter, Public domain (Janissaries in 1558. Futūhāt-i jamīla of Arifi. Istanbul, Topkapi Palace Museum, H. 1592.jpg)
The accounts give very different losses. Laonikos Chalkokondyles writes of 17,000 crusaders and 4,000 Ottomans killed, Antonio Bonfini of 8,000 crusaders and 30,000 Ottomans, and Franz Babinger gives about 17,000 crusaders and 34,000 Ottomans. Franko Talovac, who led the Croatian banner at Varna, is among the dead.
Sources
- Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Histories (c. 1464).
- Aşıkpaşazade, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osmân (late 15th century).
- Johannes de Thurocz, Chronica Hungarorum (1488).
- Antonio Bonfini, Rerum Ungaricarum decades (about 1497).
- Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (1978).
- Emanuel Constantin Antoche, “Hunyadi’s Campaign of 1448 and the Second Battle of Kosovo Polje (October 17–20)”, in Norman Housley (ed.), Reconfiguring the Fifteenth-Century Crusade (2017), 245–284.
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