On 10 November 1444 the Ottoman army of Sultan Murad II crushed a crusading army of Hungarians, Poles and Wallachians near Varna, on the Black Sea coast of today's Bulgaria. Its commander, the young Władysław III, king of both Poland and Hungary, led a charge at the sultan's position against the advice of his general John Hunyadi and was killed. Poles remember him as Władysław Warneńczyk, Władysław of Varna. Britannica calls the battle the end of Europe's efforts to save Constantinople, which fell to the Ottomans nine years later.
A broken truce
By the 1440s the Ottomans had recovered from their defeat by Tamerlane in 1402 and were pressing again into the Balkans. Pope Eugene IV called a crusade, and in 1443 Hunyadi, serving Władysław, won a series of victories before a truce was agreed. National Geographic Polska writes that the king swore to keep the truce, concluded at Szeged in August 1444, but that the papal legate, Cardinal Julian Cesarini, persuaded him that the Turks were weak and that an oath made to infidels was not binding. Britannica likewise notes that the Christians regarded the truce as nonbinding.1
The plan was for Venetian and papal fleets to stop the Ottomans from bringing reinforcements across from Anatolia while the crusaders destroyed their forces in Europe. The blockade failed, and by the time the crusaders reached Varna they faced a much larger Ottoman army. National Geographic Polska says the Turks outnumbered them three to one, though no reliable count of either army exists.2
The king's charge
According to Britannica, the Ottoman line stretched more than five miles, with heavy cavalry on both wings and infantry in the center. The battle at first went well for the crusaders, as Hunyadi formed and held a strong line and Ottoman troops fell back before a cavalry charge. Then Władysław rejected Hunyadi's cautious advice and led the bulk of his forces against the Ottoman center in an attempt to capture the sultan. The sultan's elite guard threw back the attack, the king was killed, and Britannica records that his head was displayed on a pike. The crusaders retreated with enormous losses.3
The Bulgarian News Agency sums up the result as a victory of Murad II's Ottoman army over the Hungarian, Polish and Wallachian army commanded by Władysław. The date, 10 November, is given in the Julian calendar then in use across Europe.4
A king who would not die
The king's body was never found, and for years many Poles refused to believe he was dead. National Geographic Polska, drawing on the chronicler Jan Długosz, describes rumors that he had escaped to Constantinople, Venice, Wallachia or Transylvania, and church bells ringing in Kraków whenever a letter claimed he was alive. Envoys sent to the Balkans found no trace of him. Poland was left without a king for three years, until his younger brother Casimir accepted the crown and was crowned in 1447. Pretenders kept appearing: in 1459 a nobleman, Mikołaj Rychlik, turned up in Poznań claiming to be the king, was shown to Władysław's mother, who did not recognize him, and was punished as a fraud.5
The road to Constantinople
Varna ended the last great joint effort by the Christian powers to push the Ottomans out of the Balkans for centuries. With no threat from the West, the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453 and reabsorbed Serbia by 1459, though Hunyadi beat them outside Belgrade in 1456. The fall of the city is told in our article on the Siege of Constantinople, and the earlier crusade that ended in disaster in our article on Nicopolis.6
