18–19 October 1448
The night attack and the left wing
On the night of 18 to 19 October the crusaders bring their wagons and guns forward against the sultan’s position in the centre. The fighting in the dark is bloody and settles nothing. Turkish accounts put a night attack on the evening of the first day, which the Ottomans beat off.
A Hussite war wagon with its crew, handguns and a gun, from a manuscript on the art of war of about 1437Wikimedia Commons, Johannes Wienner, Public domain (War Wagon - Manuscript on the Art of War.jpg)
On 19 October Murad sends the sipahis of Thessaly round the crusader left, while the rest of his army attacks along the whole line to hold Hunyadi’s attention. The Thessalians fall on the horse of the left wing, Wallachian, Moldavian and Hungarian, and cut it down without taking prisoners. The survivors flee to Hunyadi’s main body.
When Hunyadi sees his wings defeated, he attacks the Ottoman centre with his knights and his light foot. The janissaries fail to stop them, and the knights ride through the centre as far as the Ottoman camp, where they are stopped. The Ottoman foot rallies and drives the knights back, the light troops behind them are overcome, and much of the crusader army falls back to its camp. In the Turkish accounts Murad orders his wings and then his centre to fall back, and when the crusaders press into the centre, the troops of Anatolia and Rumelia turn and close round them.
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).
- Tamás Pálosfalvi, From Nicopolis to Mohács: A History of Ottoman-Hungarian Warfare, 1389–1526 (2018).
- 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.
Prev: The wingsNext: The fall of the camp