Hungary and Crusading in the Fifteenth Century

Abstract

The Hungarian ‘long fifteenth century’ — in this case, from the defeat of the crusaders at Nicopolis in 1396 to the crusade-turned-rebellion of 1514 — was characterized more by the political use of crusading ideas than by actual military actions against ‘enemies of Christendom’, supported by papal indulgences. Late medieval crusade in this part of the world meant almost exclusively the fight against the advancing ‘infidels’, the Ottoman Empire. The rhetoric of crusading in this age began with the reforms introduced in the wake of the failure at Nicopolis, became significant during the interregna between 1439 and 1458, and constituted the central element in the diplomacy of King Matthias I Corvinus (1458–90). Actual crusading campaigns were rather few: one leading to the defeat at Varna (1444), the other relieving Belgrade in 1456. Both have been extensively studied and described, as have the events of 1514, in which the ‘peasant’ crucigeri (in Magyar: kurucok) turned against the ‘enemies inside’, that is, the lords and prelates, who, in their eyes, were not just failing to defend them against the infidel, but were actually worse than the latter.¹