What happened at the Battle of Krbava Field?
On 9 September 1493 a Croatian army under Ban Emerik Derenčin met an Ottoman force under Hadum Jakub Pasha on Krbava Field, below the castle of Udbina in Lika. Derenčin chose to fight in the open instead of waiting in the mountain passes, the Ottomans struck from behind, and the Croatian army was destroyed. The ban was taken prisoner, and so many lords fell that a bishop wrote that the whole Croatian nobility had perished.1
In the spring and summer of 1493 an Ottoman raiding army under Hadum Jakub Pasha, the sanjak-bey of Bosnia, swept through Croatia, Carniola and Styria. The Croatian Catholic news agency IKA says the raid reached the Drava between Ptuj and Varaždin. On its way home to Bosnia, loaded with plunder and captives, it had to cross Krbava, a high karst plain in Lika. There the Croatian lords decided to stop it.2
A kingdom at odds with itself
The Croatian side was not united. Croatia was in union with Hungary under King Wladislas II, who had little money after the death of Matthias Corvinus. In 1493 Count Hans Frankapan of Brinje and Count Charles Kurjaković of Krbava rose against the king, and the king sent Ban Emerik Derenčin (Imre Derencsényi in Hungarian) to crush them. The ban was besieging Brinje when news came that Jakub Pasha was burning the country around Modruš. According to the Hrvatska enciklopedija, the quarrel between the Frankapans and the ban, above all over the port of Senj, ended only in July 1493.3
Derenčin offered the rebels a royal pardon if they joined him against the Ottomans, and most of them came. Hans Frankapan did not. The historians Suzana Miljan and Hrvoje Kekez note that the charge that he had invited the Ottomans to help him against the ban cannot be ruled out.4
The choice of the open field
The Croatian army gathered on Krbava Field below the castle of Udbina. IKA puts it at about 10,000 men, and adds that some historians say 15,000. Miljan and Kekez write that it outnumbered the Ottomans, while the Hrvatska enciklopedija calls the two armies about equal. Both agree on the real difference: the Ottoman troops were veterans with a strong body of cavalry, and the Croatian host was largely infantry and untrained noble levies.5
According to Miljan and Kekez, Jakub Pasha first offered to negotiate a free passage back to Bosnia. The ban refused, most probably because he wanted to show the power of the royal army in an open battle. Count John Frankapan of Cetin, who knew how the Ottomans fought, urged him to trap them in one of the mountain passes; Derenčin rejected the advice and drew up his army on the open plain. The Hrvatska enciklopedija adds that the Styrian captain Jakob Székely asked the Croatian lords to wait for his troops, and that they attacked without him.6
The battle below Udbina
The fight began in the early morning. It opened with an Ottoman decoy, while Jakub Pasha sent part of his force round to fall on the Croatians from behind. IKA says he hid cavalry in a forest and threw it in at the decisive moment against the mostly infantry army. The left wing, chiefly infantry under Count Bernardin Frankapan, was destroyed first, and the rest of the army soon followed.7
How long it lasted is told differently: IKA says until the afternoon, Miljan and Kekez that it did not last long. Bernardin Frankapan got away. Whether he saved himself and a few of his men or simply fled the battle is a question the historian Hrvoje Kekez gave a whole study to.8
The dead and the captured
Nobody counted the dead. IKA speaks of more than 10,000 fallen defenders. Miljan and Kekez quote the annals of the Franciscan friary at Thann in Alsace, which put the dead at about 5,000. The Ottomans took only the most important lords prisoner, for ransom, and killed the rest.9
Ban Derenčin was captured, and so, according to the Hrvatska enciklopedija, were Nikola Frankapan of Trsat and Karlo Gusić. Both that encyclopedia and IKA name a Vlatković among the dead, and the encyclopedia lists many lords of the Frankapan, Zrinski and Blagajski families. Bishop Juraj Divnić of Nin, who visited the field, wrote to Pope Alexander VI on 27 September 1493 that the whole Croatian nobility had perished.10
What the defeat meant
The disaster did not open Croatia to conquest at once. Jakub Pasha marched straight back to Bosnia. Krbava itself was not taken until 1527, and Knin and Skradin fell only in 1522. For decades the Ottomans raided rather than conquered. But the country had lost the men who organized its defense, and Miljan and Kekez stress how the defeat sped up the flight of people from Krbava and the lands around it.11 › The Croatian-Ottoman wars, 1493 to 1593
The news traveled fast. The papal envoy Antonio Fabregues reported to Rome from Senj four days after the battle, on the word of a horseman who escaped. The battle passed into folk poetry, such as the song of Ban Derenčin written down by Pavao Ritter Vitezović in 1682, and into Croatian memory as a national tragedy. A Church of the Croatian Martyrs now stands at Udbina; its building was launched at the 510th anniversary in 2003, and it was consecrated in 2011. The day's other stories are on 9 September in history.12
