Hunyadi had long wished to revenge himself for the humiliating defeat at Varna. Acting as regent of Hungary (for an infant king), he gradually rebuilt the Hungarian army. From early 1447 he was trying to put together an alliance of Balkan and Danubian rulers, and during that year he sent requests for help to the Pope, to Venice, and to the King of Aragon and Naples, but with no success. According to some early chroniclers he also sent envoys to Skanderbeg, who did agree to cooperate with him.” In July 1448 Murat II brought a large army into Albania to crush Skanderbeg’s revolt: this provided just the opportunity Hunyadi had been waiting for. In July and August he gathered an army of at least 30,000 — and perhaps as many as 72,000 — men, consisting mainly of Hungarians, but including also a Wallachian (Romanian)
contingent of 8,000 soldiers, as well as German and Czech mercenaries.
During these final stages of preparation Hunyadi seems also to have tried to persuade Djuradj Brankovi¢ to join him; but the Serbian Despot was determined not to get involved, and even forbade him to pass through Serbian territory. (Relations between Hunyadi and Djuradj Brankovic were in any case not good: they were locked in a bitter dispute about some estates in southern Hungary which Hunyadi had seized from Brankovic in 1445, after the latter’s reinstatement in Serbia by the Sultan.) The early Ragusan chronicler Mavro Orbini recorded rumours that Djuradj actually passed on intelligence reports about Hunyadi’s army to Sultan Murat. Some modern historians have been sceptical about this, but one such report does in fact survive: it is a detailed description of Hunyadi’s army, sent from Hunyadi’s camp on 11 September 1448 by a Ragusan, Pasquale de Sorgo, who was in the service of Djuradj Brankovic. De Sorgo’s report also included the information that messengers had arrived from Skanderbeg, promising 20,000 armed men. But of the various details supplied by de Sorgo, few can have been more galling to Djuradj than the news that many people from Serbia itself had come ‘with great alacrity’ to join Hunyadi’s army.”
At the end of September Hunyadi crossed into Serbia and, ignoring Djuradj’s requests, marched his army southwards, up the Morava valley. Murat II, informed of Hunyadi’s plans, had broken off his siege of Skanderbeg’s stronghold of Kruja in mid-August, and had withdrawn his army to a waiting position near Sofia. Having established (probably with Brankovic’s help) that Hunyadi was now moving due south, he brought his army to Kosovo in order to block his advance. And so it was that, on 17 October 1448, Hunyadi’s army found itself drawn up in front of a larger Ottoman force, on almost exactly the same spot as Lazar had chosen for his final battle against the Turks in 1389.
Unlike Lazar, Hunyadi had one potential advantage: he was expecting, any moment now, the arrival of significant reinforcements, in the form of an Albanian army. Skanderbeg had not forgotten his promise; but, unfortunately for Hunyadi, he had meanwhile become embroiled again in a long-running struggle against Venice for possessions in north- western Albania. On 4 October the Venetians finally submitted, agreeing to pay Skanderbeg a tribute of 1,400 ducats a year. He asked for a speedy down-payment, because he was now hurrying with his army, as the official document put it, ‘to join the lord Janos’. But the delay was fatal. While Skanderbeg marched eastwards, the second battle of Kosovo had already begun. Hunyadi fought, according to the early historians, for three days. On the third day (19 October) one entire section of his army was surrounded and destroyed; there are also reports that the Wallachian commander deserted to the Turkish side. The Hungarian army began to flee, and Hunyadi was obliged to flee with it. Just 20 miles from Kosovo Polje, Skanderbeg encountered Hungarian soldiers hasten- ing away from the battlefield, and learned that all was lost. He quickly turned his army round and returned to his mountain domain.”
This second battle of Kosovo is one of the great might-have-beens of Balkan history. If it is true that the battle lasted for three days, this must indicate that the forces were quite evenly balanced. The arrival of a large and fresh Albanian force, under a charismatic leader with five years of experience in anti-Ottoman campaigns, might well have been decisive. An even greater might-have-been concerns the role of Djuradj Bran- kovi¢: after all, if he had joined this campaign instead of sabotaging it, there would have been a military alliance against Murat stretching all the way from Wallachia and Transylvania, through Hungary and the whole of Serbia, down to the Albanian coast. But on the other hand the general history of this period teaches that anti-Ottoman alliances were always liable to break up under their own internal strains and rivalries; and the Ottoman rulers could draw, as the next few centuries would show, on huge reservoirs of manpower in Asia as well as in their European territories. That the battle might have been turned by Skanderbeg’s arrival is quite likely; that the whole of Balkan history might have been changed by an Ottoman defeat at this stage is much less easy to imagine. It is quite possible that Djuradj Brankovic had a surer grasp of the political and strategic realities than Hunyadi or even Skanderbeg, and the sheer romanticism of those two commanders’ stories should not, in the end, be allowed to obscure that possibility.
In 1454 Mehmet sent a large force against the elderly Djuradj Brankovi¢, who retreated to his northern fortresses and called on Hunyadi for assistance. By the end of the year, much of southern and central Serbia had been seized by the Turks. In 1455 Mehmet assembled a larger army; moving through eastern Macedonia, it headed straight for the fortified town of Novo Brdo. When the town’s commander refused to surrender to Mehmet’s general, Novo Brdo was put under siege, and over the next forty days its walls were gradually demolished by the Ottoman artillery. Finally, on 1 June 1455, a treaty of surrender was agreed. Mehmet, who by this time had come in person to direct the campaign, promised that the inhabitants would be allowed to keep their possessions, and that their women and boys would not be enslaved; but it seems that the initial refusal of the city to surrender had cancelled, in his mind, any further moral obligations. No sooner was Novo Brdo in his hands than he broke his promise: seventy-four women were (in the words of one eye-witness) ‘distributed among the heathen’, and 320 boys were taken off to be trained as Janissaries in Anatolia.**? Other towns in Kosovo were also taken: Prizren surrendered on 21 June.“* The entire territory of Kosovo was brought under direct Ottoman rule, and would remain so until the early twentieth century.
- Kosovo: A Short History