Battle of Breadfield

Battle of Breadfield
	Part of the Ottoman–Hungarian Wars
	; Battle of Breadfield by Eduard Gurk
Date	October 13, 1479
Location	The Breadfield (Kenyérmező), in Alkenyér, near the River Maros, Transylvania, Kingdom of Hungary
Result	Hungarian victory
Belligerents
Kingdom of Hungary; Serbian Despotate;	Ottoman Empire
Commanders and leaders
Basarab Laiotă cel Bătrân	Ali Bey
Strength
12-15,000 men ( Poles, Transylvanian Vlachs)	Around 30,000 men consisting of Azaps, and some Janissary; 1,000-2,000 Wallachian mercenaries
Casualties and losses
3,000 killed[citation needed]	5,000-9,000 Ottomans killed; 1,000 Wallachian[citation needed]

The Battle of Breadfield (

Basarab Laiotă cel Bătrân

.

The result of the battle was an important victory for the Kingdom of Hungary and the Serbian Despotate.

Background

From his ascendence to the Hungarian throne in 1458, King Matthias fought with the Turks, and in 1463, he occupied the northern parts of Bosnia. However, this was not a full-scale war.

Turkish marauders attacked Transylvania and Vojvodina several times between 1474 and 1475. The attacks led to the depopulation of some areas with a number of villages abandoned by their inhabitants.

After the

King Matthias was alerted, according to the testament of Miklós Pozsegai, made in Garignica (July 11), he ordered Stephen V Báthory, the Voivode of Transylvania and his general Pál Kinizsi

to mobilize.

The Ottoman army entered Transylvania on October 9, near

Basarab cel Tânăr, a Wallachian prince, who himself brought 1,000–2,000 infantry

to the cause.

The Turks continued pillaging and taking prisoners, while Báthory and Kinizsi made preparations to set forth against the Turks.

Hungarian and Ottoman armies

The numerical strength of the Ottoman army is under debate; one estimate judged them to be 60,000, while Hungarian sources placed them closer to 30,000.

Janissaries and possibly some cannon

. The Ottoman enterprise was not a full-fledged war effort, but rather a very substantial raiding one - the largest expedition Transylvania encountered during a century's worth of Hungarian-Turkish conflicts.

Kinizsi's army consisted of

Bohemians

were privy in part to the battle, but this is rather difficult to substantiate.

On October 9 the Turkish army entered Hungary and began raiding. Báthory waited until the Turks got exhausted in marching and raiding, and once the Ottomans had collected too much loot to move fast enough, he attacked them on October 13.

Both armies were composed of three columns. The right flank of the Hungarian army was led by Kinizsi, the left was the Serbian light cavalry under

Demetrius Jakšić

with the Saxons and Báthory's forces in the center. On the Ottoman side, Koca Bey took the left flank, Isa Bey the center, and Malkoch Oglu the right flank.

The battle commenced in the afternoon. Báthory fell from his horse and the Ottomans nearly captured him, but a nobleman called Antal Nagy whisked the voivode away. Having joined battle, the Ottomans were in ascendancy early on, but Kinizsi charged against the Turks with the Hungarian heavy cavalry and 900 Serbs under Jakšić assisted by "numerous courtiers of the king".

Ali Bey was forced to retreat. Kinizsi moved laterally to vigorously smash the Turkish center and before long Isa Bey also withdrew. The few Turks who survived the massacre fled into the mountains, where the majority were killed by the local men. The hero of the battle was Pál Kinizsi, the legendary Hungarian general and a man of Herculean strength in the service of Matthias Corvinus' Black Army of Hungary

.

Aftermath

Ottoman casualties were extremely high with several thousand men killed, among them

Malkoçoğlu and Isa Bey along with two beys and a thousand of their Wallachian allies.^{[citation needed]} Hungarian forces lost approximately 3,000 men in the battle.^{[citation needed]} A few prisoners were liberated and their ransom was immense.^{[citation needed}

]

In 1480 Kinizsi raided Serbia and several times defeated Ali Koca Bey. The battle of Breadfield was a great psychological victory for the Hungarians, and as a result the Ottoman Turks did not attack southern Hungary and Transylvania for many years thereafter.

References

^ ^a ^b Battle of Breadfield (1479), 'Conflict and Conquest in the Islamic World: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, ed. Alexander Mikaberidze, (ABC-CLIO, 2011), 215.
^ Kármán & Kunčevic 2013, p. 266.