John Hunyadi

Today is the 565th anniversary of the death in 1456 of John Hunyadi, sometime regent of Hungary and victor on July 22nd that year of the Battle of Belgrade ( Nandofevehar ), to which I referred in my post about the feast of the Transfiguration. 

At the time of his death he was being hailed as the saviour of Christian Europe from the advance of the Ottomans for his relief of Belgrade. Only three years beforehand Constantinople had fallen to the Turks.

His death came as a result of the outbreak of plague amongst his army, and had the consequence of exposing his sons to danger from competing rivalries at the Hungarian court. Although the elder, Ladislas, was beheaded the following year, in 1458 the younger one, Matthias, was as a teenager elected as King of Hungary. His reign until his death in 1490 was to be remembered as a golden age of artistic and cultural patronage, and of the re-emergence of Hungary as a an expansive and powerful realm.

John Hunyadi’s eventful life, which included much more than the saving of Belgrade, is recounted in some considerable detail in the Wikipedia biography at John Hunyadi and the 1456 battle is covered in Siege of Belgrade (1456)

In Hungary Hunyadi has long been celebrated as a national hero, as the biography linked to above explains. In more recent years there have been attempts to present him as a Romanian hero as that is now country where Hunyad ( Hunedoara ) lies. His actual ancestry and ethnicity remains a subject of debate. He is buried in the Catholic cathedral at Gyulafehevar/Alba Julia in Transylvania. His effigy, much damaged alas, which is reproduced in the Wikipedia biography, suggests an energy and restlessness that struggles against death, and the very stone of the monument, itself