DEFEAT AT COSSOVO-POL : ITS EFFECTS 175 attacked in front and rear, but contrived to reach its en- trenchments. Judging that its condition was hopeless, Hunyadi made his escape in the evening, leaving the Ger- mans and Bohemians to hold the central position of his encampment. This they did with magnificent courage, but the battle was already lost. Out of the army of twenty-four thousand, seventeen thousand men, including the flower of the Hungarian nobility, are said to have been left dead on the field. 1 But the victory had been dearly bought by Murad. During the three days' fight, forty thousand Turks had fallen. 2 The Christians had lost the battle through the rash courage and confidence of their leader. Hunyadi had refused to wait for Iskender Bey and his Albanians, had abandoned a strong position in order to attack an enemy largely superior in numbers, and his desertion of the best of his auxiliaries is inexplicable or unjustifiable. The defeat at Cossovo-pol, following that at Varna, made men forget for a time the series of brilliant victories which the great Hungarian had gained over the Turks in Transylvania and elsewhere. But in the glorious defence of Belgrade against Mahomet after the capture of Constantinople, Hunyadi recovered greater reputation than ever, and the West recognised in that city the first bulwark of Christendom, and in its defender the greatest soldier of the age. 3 The effect in Hungary and Constantinople of these vic- tories of Murad was appalling. The sultan and his suc- cessors for many years had nothing to fear from the enemy north of the Danube. The great combined efforts of the West to break the Otto- Reasons man power and, incidentally, to save Constantinople had of Western failed disastrously. Nor are the reasons for such failure difii- J^£S tB cult to understand. They are mainly two : underestimating Turks - 1 Bonfinius makes Murad state in a letter to Corinth that eight thousand Hungarians were left dead on the plain : a much more likely number. 2 Von Hammer gives the numbers I have adopted. 3 For the siege of Belgrade see a paper in the English Historical Review, 1892, by Mr. R. N. Bain.
