Battle of Varna, 1444: how Władysław III died charging the sultan's janissaries

The young king rode out of his lines with a few hundred horsemen and went straight for the janissaries around the sultan. Soon his horse was down, his head was off, and it was on its way to Murad II on the point of a lance. So ended, on a wet November day on the Black Sea coast, the last great crusade of the Middle Ages to drive the Ottomans out of Europe. Varna is a turning point in the Ottoman wars in Europe and a late chapter in the story of the Crusades.²

Why was the Battle of Varna fought?

In 1402 the Ottomans had nearly collapsed after Timur beat them at Ankara. By the 1440s Sultan Murad II had rebuilt the state and resumed its advance in the Balkans. Pope Eugene IV called for a crusade to stop him before he pushed deeper into Europe.³

The crusade found its king in Władysław III, son of Władysław Jagiełło, who had inherited the Polish throne at ten in 1434. In 1440 the Hungarian nobles opposed to the Habsburgs elected him king of Hungary, where he reigned as Ulászló I, and he spent two years fighting the supporters of the widowed queen Elizabeth before a settlement in December 1442. His best soldier was John Hunyadi (János Hunyadi), voivode of Transylvania and captain of Belgrade, a self-made nobleman who had studied the Hussite way of war and built up a hard core of paid troops.⁴

In the autumn of 1443 Hunyadi and the king led more than 30,000 men across the Danube in what Hungarians remember as the Long Campaign. They took Niš and Sofia and pushed into the passes of the Balkan Mountains. Christian accounts say frost and hunger turned them back in December; Ottoman tradition, as the Turkish historian Halil İnalcık tells it, credits the sultan's stand at the Zlatitsa pass. Either way, the army returned to Buda early in 1444 to a hero's welcome across Europe.⁵

The broken peace of 1444

Murad had his own reasons to want peace. The emirate of Karaman threatened his Anatolian lands, and İnalcık adds a revolt in Albania under Skanderbeg and the death of the sultan's son Alaeddin Ali at Amasya. He offered generous terms. On 12 June 1444 envoys concluded a ten-year peace at Edirne, the Ottoman capital in Europe: Serbia was to be handed back to its despot, George Branković, with its Danube fortresses.⁶

Then the sultan did something few rulers did. In August 1444, before his janissaries and his commanders, he gave up the throne to his twelve-year-old son, Mehmed II, and withdrew to Anatolia. To the crusade party in Hungary, a boy sultan and a treaty that left the Ottomans in Europe looked like an opportunity, not a settlement.⁷

On 4 August, at Szeged, Władysław issued a manifesto announcing that the war would go on, and the papal legate, Cardinal Julian Cesarini, released him from any oath to the infidel. A papal, Venetian and Burgundian fleet of some twenty galleys was already sailing for the Dardanelles to stop the sultan from bringing his Anatolian army back to Europe. How exactly the king swore to the peace, and whether he knew of every oath taken in his name, is still argued: the Polish historian Stanisław A. Sroka sums up a long debate between Oskar Halecki, Jan Dąbrowski and the Hungarian Pál Engel, who thought Hunyadi ratified the treaty himself at Várad as a piece of theater.⁸

For the Ottomans the matter was simple. The Christians had sworn a peace and broken it within weeks. Olejnik notes that Murad later told the Christian fleet commanders he was marching against a perjured king, and Sroka notes that Władysław was accused of perjury again and again by later writers.⁹

The march to the Black Sea

The army that set out was far smaller than the one planned. The crusaders crossed the Danube near Orșova between 18 and 22 September 1444 and marched east along its southern bank. Olejnik counts about 16,000 men, mostly Hungarians and Transylvanians, with only a few hundred Poles; near Nicopolis Vlad Dracul, prince of Wallachia, joined with some 4,000 horsemen. The Serbian despot, Olejnik notes, had just got his country back under the treaty and stayed at home.¹⁰

The crusaders burned the outskirts of Nicopolis, then turned southeast and stormed the Ottoman fortresses of Shumen and Provadia. There the news reached them that the plan had failed. The galleys had not closed the straits: Murad had come back and, İnalcık writes, his grand vizier Halil Pasha insisted that he, not the boy sultan, lead the army. He had crossed into Europe with his Anatolian troops, according to Olejnik on hired Genoese ships, and was marching north from Edirne with the combined army of both halves of his empire.¹¹

By 9 November the crusaders stood west of Varna, with the Black Sea behind them, the marshy Lake Varna on their left and wooded hills on their right. That evening the first Ottoman troops came in sight. There was no way south and no fleet to take them off. In Olejnik's account Hunyadi argued for battle, and the sick king and the cardinal agreed.¹²

Armies and commanders at Varna

The crusaders. Modern historians put the Christian army at just under 20,000 men (Karol Olejnik) or about 20,000 (Sroka). It had heavy Hungarian and Polish cavalry, Wallachian light horse, Czech mercenary infantry and a train of war wagons carrying light guns, a Hussite technique Hunyadi had learned. The king was in nominal command; Hunyadi led in practice.¹³

The Ottomans. Olejnik estimates Murad's army at 50,000 to 55,000, Sroka at about 60,000; chroniclers who wrote of 100,000 or more exaggerated. At its center stood several thousand janissaries, the sultan's slave infantry, behind a palisade and ditches, with Murad and his household cavalry among them. The regular cavalry of Rumelia, the European provinces, held the right; that of Anatolia, under its governor Karaca Bey, held the left. Irregular raiders, the akıncı horsemen and azab foot, waited in the hills.¹⁴

Hunyadi drew his army up in a wide arc, its back to the town. According to Olejnik, the left wing, almost half the army, was Transylvanian and Hungarian cavalry under Michael Szilágyi; the center held the royal banner and the banner of St George under the king; the right, at the foot of the hills, held the bishops' troops, Cesarini's crusaders and the Wallachians under the bishop of Várad, Jan Dominis.¹⁵

How the battle unfolded

For hours the armies watched each other. Then, both Olejnik and Sroka write, a violent storm swept the field and tore the Christian banners, which the chronicler Jan Długosz later read as a sign that the elements fought for the infidels. The Ottoman irregulars came down from the hills against the crusaders' right. Twice the heavy cavalry threw them back, but each time its ranks loosened, and Karaca Bey's Anatolian cavalry struck them in the open. The right wing broke; many of the fugitives drowned in the marshes or were cut down as they fled.¹⁶

The crusaders recovered. The king and Hunyadi led the center against the Anatolians, broke them and killed Karaca Bey. Hunyadi then turned on the Rumelian cavalry attacking the Transylvanians on the left and drove it back as well. Britannica's account of Hunyadi's career says simply that his troops dispersed the Turkish cavalry. At that moment, by the Ottomans' own account, the sultan's camp wavered: İnalcık writes that the Hungarian heavy cavalry came close to Murad's headquarters and that his officers had to stop him from leaving the field, and the anonymous Ottoman chronicle has him praying for victory.¹⁷

Why did the crusaders lose at Varna?

To win, the crusaders still had to break the janissaries and the sultan's guard, which had not yet fought. Their cavalry was scattered and tired. Against Hunyadi's advice, says Britannica, and without consulting him, says Sroka, the king led his household knights against the Ottoman center; Olejnik puts the force at about 500 men. Britannica calls it a rash attempt to capture the sultan; Olejnik suggests the twenty-year-old king thought he was delivering the blow that would end the battle.¹⁸

The janissaries met the charge with a storm of arrows from behind their big shields. The knights broke into the square, but no mass of cavalry followed them into the gap, and the infantry closed around them. The king's horse was wounded and threw him. A janissary, whom the Ottoman tradition cited by Sroka names as Koca Hızır, cut off his head and took it to Murad, and it was displayed on a lance. Sroka adds that the sultan had it preserved in honey and sent to Bursa.¹⁹

The sight of the head finished the crusade. Hunyadi tried to rally the scattered units, but the Ottoman cavalry that had fled was coming back, and the Christian army broke and ran for the night and the roads of the Dobruja. Hunyadi escaped north with a small group. Cardinal Cesarini died in the flight, and many Poles and Hungarians were taken into captivity that lasted years.²⁰

Casualties: how many died at Varna?

No one counted. Andrea de Palatio, a participant who sent a report to the papal Curia, wrote that the royal army lost a quarter of its strength; on that basis Olejnik estimates some 5,000 dead and captured, and Sroka puts the crusaders' losses at about 4,000. Britannica gives a far higher Christian toll of 20,000, which would be nearly the whole army. Ottoman losses are unknown; Olejnik suggests about 10,000.²¹

What happened after the Battle of Varna?

For the Ottomans, Varna saved Rumelia. The victory was proclaimed across the Islamic world, İnalcık writes, and the crisis of 1444 passed. Murad went back into retirement, but in 1446 the grand vizier recalled him and he took the throne again; in 1448 he beat Hunyadi once more in a three-day battle at Kosovo, 17 to 20 October.²²

For Poland and Hungary, Varna left an empty throne in each. Poland waited three years for a new king, Władysław's brother Casimir, crowned in 1447. With no Western army left to fear, Britannica writes, the Ottomans tightened their hold on the Greek despots of the Peloponnese, who had backed the crusade, took Constantinople in 1453 and absorbed Serbia by 1459. Hunyadi's defense of Belgrade in 1456 bought Hungary what Britannica calls a long period of uneasy peace, which ended at Mohács in 1526.²³

Did Władysław III survive Varna? The legend of the lost king

The king's body was never identified, and his tomb in Wawel Cathedral in Kraków is empty. That gap fed a legend. For years impostors appeared claiming to be the lost king, one of them at Poznań in 1459. A later story, traced to a Franciscan's letter of 1452, had Władysław living as a penitent on the island of Madeira, and a modern author has even made him the father of Christopher Columbus. Sroka dismisses these theories as the work of amateurs who ignore the many Ottoman chronicles that record the king's death in battle.²⁴

Poles remember him as Władysław Warneńczyk, Władysław of Varna, a young king who died for Christendom. In Hungary and Poland his memory has always been mixed with the charge that he broke a sworn peace, and with the question of whether his charge threw away a battle that Hunyadi might still have won.²⁵

Why the Battle of Varna mattered

Britannica's verdict is that Varna ended Europe's efforts to save Constantinople, opened the way to its conquest and was the last concerted campaign to drive the Turks from Europe until the 19th century. Olejnik's judgment is harder on the crusaders: the king lost the battle with his charge, but defeat was likely from the moment an army that was too small, too late in the year and without its Serbian allies or a working fleet set out with the fantastic goal of reaching Edirne. For the Ottomans, in Britannica's words, it confirmed and expanded their control over the Balkans.²⁶

Where was the Battle of Varna fought, and can you visit it?

The battlefield lies in the western part of today's city of Varna, in northeastern Bulgaria. The Park-Museum of Military Friendship "Vladislav Varnenchik", a branch of the National Museum of Military History, covers it. Its symbolic mausoleum of the king, built on one of two ancient Thracian burial mounds, was opened on 4 August 1935; the museum building opened on 21 September 1964. The museum identifies a Thracian mound in the area as Murad's command post during the battle.²⁷

The site was marked long before. Urszula Kaczmarek traces the first Polish memorial to the Crimean War: in 1856 Polish soldiers of Władysław Zamoyski's division, raised for the Crimean War, put up a granite obelisk on a mound at the presumed place of the king's death. It later disappeared. Today the park also holds a monument to Hunyadi and symbolic sarcophagi bearing the arms of the nations whose soldiers fell in the battle, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Croats, Poles, Czechs, Wallachians and others.²⁸