17–18 October 1448
The wings
The Ottomans draw up with the Anatolian troops of Mehmed on the right wing and the Rumelian sipahis on the left. In the centre Murad stands with the janissaries and the azaps behind a ditch. Turkish accounts put a line of shield bearers and spearmen round the ditch against the crusader horse, with camels and guns along it. John Hunyadi holds the crusader centre with his heavy horse in front of the wagon fort, and the Wallachians form his left wing.
The battle opens on Thursday 17 October, when Hunyadi sends his horse, light and heavy, against both Ottoman wings. The sipahis of Rumelia and Anatolia give ground until the Ottoman light horse comes up to support them. Turkish accounts say instead that Murad keeps the Anatolian wing out of the first day’s fighting to rest it, and that the two sides spend the day testing each other’s strength.
Horsemen overrun a Hussite war wagon, in Eberhard Windecke’s book of Emperor Sigismund, about 1440Wikimedia Commons, workshop of Diebold Lauber, Public domain (Buch-kaiser-sigismund-L09740-26-lr-8.png)
On 18 October the horsemen fight again on the flanks of the two stockades. The fighting of the first two days costs both sides heavily and settles nothing.
Sources
- Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Histories (c. 1464).
- Aşıkpaşazade, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osmân (late 15th century).
- Mehmed Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ (late 15th century).
- Johannes de Thurocz, Chronica Hungarorum (1488).
- 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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