Who won the siege of Belgrade in 1456?
Hungary won. In July 1456 John Hunyadi's troops and the crusaders of the friar John of Capistrano broke Sultan Mehmed II's siege of Belgrade, then Hungary's great border fortress: a river fleet forced the Danube blockade on 14 July, the defenders threw back the assault of 21 to 22 July, and the wounded sultan retreated.1
Three years after he took Constantinople, the young conqueror marched on the fortress that guarded the road into Hungary. What followed, sometimes called the Battle of Belgrade and remembered by Hungarians as the victory of Nándorfehérvár, was a river battle, a night of street fighting and an unplanned charge by peasant crusaders that ended with the sultan wounded and his camp in Christian hands. The Ottoman wars in Europe had few days like it.2
Why did Mehmed II attack Belgrade?
For Mehmed II, Belgrade was the key to the whole frontier. Halil İnalcık, the leading historian of the early Ottoman state, explains that the sultan knew he could hold Serbia firmly only if he took Belgrade from the Hungarians, and the papal historian Ludwig von Pastor saw the same logic from the other side: Hungary was the power the sultan feared most, and Belgrade was the city that would open it to him and serve as his base for the campaigns beyond.3
The fortress stood on high ground where the Sava flows into the Danube, protected by the two rivers on two sides and by double walls and a ditch on the land side, as the sultan's Greek historian Kritovoulos describes it. Mehmed's father, Murad II, had besieged it for six months in 1440 and given up. The son meant to do better, and Christian writers recorded his boasts in two versions: Pastor reports the story that he would take Belgrade in a fortnight and sup in Buda three months later, while Setton cites deserters who said he had sworn to take Hungary within two months and dine in Buda.4
He came prepared for a long siege, with heavy guns and a river fleet sent up the Danube to cut the city off from Hungary. Setton, drawing on the eyewitness Franciscan Giovanni da Tagliacozzo, lists twenty-two huge cannon dragged to the walls; the friars counted some 200 Ottoman vessels, 64 of them galleys, as both Setton and Held note.5
The size of the army is far less certain. Pastor took more than 150,000 men as the lowest credible figure, and Western estimates of the time ran as high as 400,000. Joseph Held, writing on the conflicting views of the siege, argued that an army marching across the Balkans could not have been that large: he suggests the sultan led some 70,000 people including camp followers, fewer than 50,000 of them fighters. A Viennese witness quoted in a letter of August 1456 spoke of about 100,000 Turks.6
Who defended Belgrade?
The garrison was commanded by Michael Szilágyi, the brother-in-law of John Hunyadi, the veteran commander and former regent of Hungary who had survived the disaster at Varna in 1444. Hungary itself offered little help. As the Ottomans approached, the young King Ladislas V left Buda on the pretext of a hunt and went to Vienna, and most of the barons stayed at home.7
The gap was filled by an old Franciscan, John of Capistrano, who had come to Hungary to preach against heresy and, urged on by the papal legate Juan Carvajal, began recruiting for the crusade in 1456. His sermons drew townsmen, peasants, students, priests and monks, most of them poorly armed with swords, clubs, slings and farm tools.8
How many came is as uncertain as the size of the sultan's army. The Franciscans spoke of 30,000 recruits, and Capistrano's companion Tagliacozzo of 60,000, a figure Setton thought exaggerated; Held, following the Viennese witness, thinks only about 8,000 crusaders fought. Pastor puts the troops Hunyadi raised at his own cost at 7,000. Setton writes that Hunyadi seems to have had very few men under his direct command, perhaps four thousand well-armed and effective troops on the Christian side, though his force may have reached 18,000 by mid-July. Held puts the garrison at about 5,000 and Hunyadi's own army at certainly fewer than 10,000.9
The Danube battle of 14 July
By the first days of July the Ottomans had closed the ring around Belgrade, and their guns fired night and day. Hunyadi gathered a fleet of river boats upstream at Slankamen and, on 14 July, sailed down the Danube against the line of Ottoman ships chained together across the river. After about five hours of fighting the chain was broken. Setton reports three large Ottoman galleys sunk and four ships captured; Hunyadi himself later wrote that his men had taken twenty large ships.10
The victory reopened the river. Hunyadi brought his best troops into the fortress, and with the Danube in Christian hands, food and men could come in from the north. For the sultan the defeat changed only the timetable, and his guns kept battering the outer walls.11
The great assault of 21 July
On the evening of 21 July, when the heat of the day had passed, Mehmed launched the general assault, with the janissaries in the lead. Kritovoulos writes that the sultan himself led the attack on the wall. The Ottomans broke through the ruined outer defenses and poured into the lower town, and for hours the fighting went on from street to street.12
The defenders then turned the breach into a trap. They threw bundles of brushwood soaked in pitch and sulphur onto the Ottoman soldiers packed between the walls and in the ditches below and set them alight, then counterattacked from the inner castle. By dawn on 22 July, the feast of Mary Magdalene, the attackers had been driven out and the ditches were full of their dead.13
The crusaders' charge of 22 July
Hunyadi expected another assault and ordered that no one should leave the walls. The crusaders camped across the Sava did not obey. Some of them began skirmishing with Ottoman horsemen outside the walls, more crossed the river to join them, and Capistrano, who later admitted to the pope that he could not call them back, went down among them and led them on. The crowd swept over the nearest Ottoman batteries and pushed on toward the sultan's camp.14
What happened next is told in different ways. Pastor, following earlier German scholarship, has Hunyadi sally from the fortress to rescue the crusaders and turn the captured guns on the enemy; Setton stresses that the sources are confused and that Capistrano's companions gave Hunyadi no heroic part at all. Held, by contrast, concludes that Hunyadi joined the final battle only after the crusaders had broken the Ottoman lines, but that without his attack they would have been cut down by the Ottoman cavalry. Kritovoulos tells the Ottoman side: the sultan threw himself into the fight with his guard, drove the Christians back toward the walls and stopped them from plundering his camp.15
Whatever the order of events, the sultan was wounded. Kritovoulos reports that a spear wounded his thigh, Setton has him carried away wounded in the left leg or thigh, Pastor speaks of an arrow, and İnalcık writes that he was hit in the forehead when he rushed into the battle to stop the rout. That night the Ottoman army withdrew, and the Christians took the camp and its guns. Setton writes of the wounded carried off in some 140 carts and of all twenty-two great bombards left behind, while the Viennese witness quoted by Held counted only thirteen guns captured, one of them large.16
How many died at the siege of Belgrade?
No reliable count exists, and the numbers given are far apart. In a letter of 17 August 1456 Capistrano passed on to the pope a report from the Serbian despot that more than 24,000 Turks had been killed. The Viennese witness quoted by Held put the dead of both sides together at only 4,000 to 5,000, a figure Held himself finds very low. Kritovoulos, writing for Mehmed, admits that many fell, including men of the sultan's own guard.17
Why did the Ottomans fail at Belgrade?
The siege failed because the Ottomans never cut Belgrade off. Once Hunyadi broke the river blockade on 14 July, fresh troops and supplies could reach the fortress, and the garrison was strong enough to throw back the assault of 21 July and destroy the attackers caught inside the walls. The next day the uncoordinated crusader attack caught the Ottoman camp unprepared, and the sultan's wound ended the campaign.18
Who deserved the credit was argued at once. Hunyadi's letters about the victory hardly mention Capistrano, and Capistrano's hardly mention Hunyadi. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, remarked that the friar could despise property and pleasure but not glory, a judgment both Setton and Pastor quote. Pope Callixtus III, for his part, praised them together.19
The Ottoman account puts the weight elsewhere. Kritovoulos has the sultan give up the siege because the city was now held by a very large garrison. İnalcık judges that Mehmed withdrew despite his personal courage, and that the failure revived hopes of a crusade in the West.20
Is the noon bell rung for the victory at Belgrade?
Not originally. On 29 June 1456, while the Ottoman army was on the march, Pope Callixtus III issued a bull calling all of Christendom to prayer against the Turks. Pastor, who summarized its text, records that it ordered one or more bells to be rung in every church between noon and vespers, as for the Angelus, while the faithful said three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys.21
The link with the victory came afterward. The news from Belgrade reached Rome on 6 August, soon after the order had been published across Europe, and the noon bell came to be remembered as a celebration of the triumph. The Hungarian Review presents the daily bell as a reminder of Hunyadi's victory, while Artúr Köő, writing in Hungarian Conservative, calls the idea that the pope ordered it to commemorate the battle a common misconception.22
What happened after the siege?
Victory was followed by death. A pestilence broke out after the battle, and John Hunyadi died of it on 11 August 1456. John of Capistrano, exhausted by the campaign, died at Ilok on the Danube on 23 October. In Rome, Callixtus III told the Milanese ambassador that Hunyadi was one of the most glorious men the world had seen in three hundred years.23
The crusade the pope hoped for never came. Hungary fell into a feud between Hunyadi's family and the king's party, and Hunyadi's elder son László was beheaded in 1457. When King Ladislas died in late 1457, however, the diet elected Hunyadi's younger son, Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary.24
Why was the siege of Belgrade important?
Belgrade was the first great setback for the sultan who had taken Constantinople, and it kept Hungary's southern gate closed for two more generations. Fighting along the frontier went on, and İnalcık notes that the failure revived crusading hopes in the West, but no sultan besieged Belgrade again until Süleyman the Magnificent took it on his first campaign, in August 1521. Held points out how much followed from its fall: within a few years the Ottomans destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohács in 1526 and reached Vienna in 1529.25
For more on the sultan who lost here, read the life of Mehmed II the Conqueror and the story of the fall of Constantinople in 1453; for the long Hungarian story, see the military history of Hungary, and for the earlier crusading disaster on the Danube, the Battle of Nicopolis, 1396. The guide to the greatest battles of the Ottoman Empire follows the whole story.
Where did the siege of Belgrade take place?
It was fought at Belgrade, today the capital of Serbia, then a Hungarian fortress known to Hungarians as Nándorfehérvár. The city stands on a plateau above the point where the Sava flows into the Danube, with the castle on the heights and the lower town on the slope toward the rivers, the same layout the 1456 accounts describe.26
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