9–10 November 1444
The armies at Varna
Varna stands on the Black Sea at the head of Varna Bay. West of the town Lake Varna reaches about 15 km inland and drains into the bay south of the town, and north of the lake the ground rises to the Franga plateau, about 350 m high. The crusaders camp west of the town between the lake and the slopes. Late on 9 November the Ottoman army comes in from the west and camps about 4 km away, so that the crusaders are shut in between the sea, the lake, the plateau and the enemy.
Lake Varna west of the townWikimedia Commons, ShockD, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Lake Varna (cropped).jpg)
Kenneth Setton gives the crusaders about 16,000 men and 4,000 Wallachians, and the Hungarian historian Lajos Elekes puts the Hungarians and Poles alone at 30,000. Modern estimates of the Ottoman army run from 50,000 to 60,000 men, and Halil İnalcık gives 37,000 to 40,000, about 30,000 of them from Anatolia.
At a war council in the night Cardinal Cesarini first urges a retreat, then proposes to wait behind the wagon fort until the fleet arrives, and the Hungarian magnates and the Croatian and Czech captains back him. John Hunyadi answers that an army waiting behind its wagons for a fleet that may not come will grow weak from hunger. Władysław, who is twenty, sides with Hunyadi and gives him the command.
Sources
- Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Histories (c. 1464).
- Jan Długosz, Annales seu Cronicae incliti Regni Poloniae (late 15th century).
- Oskar Halecki, The Crusade of Varna: A Discussion of Controversial Problems (1943).
- Halil İnalcık, Fatih Devri Üzerinde Tetkikler ve Vesikalar I (1954).
- Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), vol. 2 (1978).
- Colin Imber, The Crusade of Varna, 1443–45 (2006).
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