Janos Hunyadi

Janos Hunyadi held the Ottoman advance out of central Europe for two decades and died of plague days after breaking the siege of Belgrade in 1456. He was the son of a Wallachian noble in Hungarian service, learned war as a mercenary in Italy and under the Emperor Sigismund, and rose through the frontier commands to become voivode of Transylvania and then regent of Hungary for the child king Ladislaus. His campaign of 1443, the so-called Long Campaign, took a Hungarian army deep into the Balkans in winter and forced a truce; his crusade of the following year ended in catastrophe at Varna, where the young king Vladislaus was killed charging the janissaries and the army was destroyed. He was beaten again at the second battle of Kosovo in 1448 and briefly imprisoned by the Serbian despot on his way home. His reputation rests on Belgrade in July 1456, when Mehmed II arrived with the army that had taken Constantinople three years earlier; Hunyadi broke the river blockade with a fleet of improvised boats, the peasant crusaders gathered by the friar John of Capistrano attacked without orders, and the Ottomans withdrew with the sultan wounded. Pope Callixtus III had ordered church bells rung at noon for the defenders, and the custom outlived the battle it was meant to accompany, which is why the noon bell is still rung in Catholic churches. He died of plague in the camp three weeks later. His younger son Matthias Corvinus was elected king of Hungary in 1458 and gave the kingdom its last period of great power. The Ottomans did not take Belgrade until 1521. Serbian, Hungarian, Romanian and Croatian traditions all claim him, which is a fair reflection of where he fought. His Hungarian name is Hunyadi Janos and the Romanian Iancu de Hunedoara.

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