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576th Year since Battle of , ‘Battle of Peoples’ of European Christians against Ottoman Empire.
“Battle of Peoples" or the last medieval battle for Bulgaria, in which the Ottoman Empire routed the European Christian forces, was marked on Tuesday, November 10, 2020.
Unlike the 575th year since the Battle of Varna in 1444, which was celebrated with formal events in 2019, the 2020 anniversary has gone without any events in Bulgaria, largely due to the coronavirus pandemic situation. The events are traditionally hosted by the Vladislav Varnenchik Museum Park on the site of the battle.
In recent decades, November 10 is far more widely known in Bulgaria for another historical anniversary, the formal end of the communist regime on November 10, 1989 (545 years after the Battle of Varna), at the time, however, epitomized solely by the deposing of Bulgaria’s long-time communist dictator Todor Zhivkov.
The 1444 Battle of Varna, near today’s Black Sea city of Varna in Bulgaria, saw the Christian European force led by Vladislav (Wladyslaw) III Jagello, also known as Varnenchik (Warnenczyk), King of Poland and Hungary, and made up of Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Wallachians, Bosnians, Croatians, Bulgarians, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Germans, and Teutonic Knights pitted against the Ottoman Turks and their Janissaries (warriors forcefully converted to Islam when they were seized from their Christian families).
Polish and Hungarian King Vladislav III Jagello Varnenchik’s two campaigns against the Ottoman Empire – in 1443 and 1444 – are sometimes described as Crusades but are the last attempts to liberate Southeast Europe from the Ottomans and to preempt their subsequent incursions into Central Europe (which were successfully stopped only two-and-a-half centuries later by another Polish King, Jan Sobieski, during the 1683 Siege of Vienna).
The rump states of the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185-1396/1422) were conquered by the invading Ottoman Turks around the turn of the 15th century, prompting in 1396, Hungarian King Sigismund of Luxembourg (r. 1387-1437 AD, later Holy Roman Emperor in 1433-1437 AD), to stage the first united Christian European crusade-type campaign against the Ottoman Turks, which, however, ended in a disaster for the Christian forces in the Battle of Nicopolis (today’s Bulgarian town of Nikopol).
Several decades later, after reaching the region southeast of Sofia and retreating because of the winter in his first anti-Ottoman campaign in 1443, in 1444, King Vladislav (Wladyslaw) III Jagello and his ally John Hunyadi led an army of some 20,000 European Christian warriors, including Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Wallachians, Ruthenes (Rusyns), Bulgarians, Croatians, Saxons, Lithuanians, and Crusader Knights of Pope Eugene IV (r. 1431-1477).
Before reaching Varna on the Black Sea coast, the Christian Europeans’ forces advanced along the Danube in Northern Bulgaria, with Bulgarian rebels led by Fruzhin, the heir to the Bulgarian throne in Tarnovgrad (Veliko Tarnovo), son of Tsar Ivan Shishman (r. 1371-1395), joining along the way.
On November 9, 1444, the Ottoman army, which is estimated to have been about 60,000-strong, approached Varna from the west catching the Christian forces between the Black Sea, the Varna Lake, and the Frangen Plateau.
In the ensuing Battle of Varna, on November 10, 1444, the European Christian army led by King Vladislav Varnenchik, the Transylvanian voivode John Hunyadi, and Mircea II of Wallachia was outnumbered roughly three to one by the forces of Ottoman Sultan Murad II.
The two armies faced one another on a front of about 3.5 km. In the rear of the Christian army, the Czech Hussites formed a wagon fort (Wagenburg) armed with bombards.
For Bulgaria, the Christian Europeans’ defeat in the Battle of Varna sealed its fate for several centuries, a historical period known as the Ottoman Yoke (1396/1422 – 1878/1912). The battle also foreboded the end of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire with the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453.
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