John Hunyadi’s Anti-Ottoman Campaigns and Their Sources. A Case Study: the Anonymous Czech Report on the Battle of Kunovitsa (2 January 1444)

The Long March in the winter of 1443–1444 is one of the best‑documented episodes of John Hunyadi’s military career. Christian and Ottoman sources alike provide detailed accounts of the routes, tactical maneuvers, and battles of the two opposing armies. Over a century and a half ago, an anonymous Czech report on the battle of Kunovitsa on 2 January 1444 entered the historiography, but it was preserved only in the “Chronicle of the Grand Campaign of the Christians against the Turkish Heathens,” published in Prague in 1543 by the humanist Jan Chocenský. This late compilation has raised many questions among historians about the author and the origin of the report. Based on the 1859 Czech edition by Hermengild Jireček and the 1886 German translation by Prof. Dr. Gindely, we aimed in this paper to identify the elements and sources of the narrative in the “Chronicle of the Grand Campaign of the Christians against the Turkish Heathens” and to what extent its central element, the anonymous Czech report on the Battle of Kunovica, is confirmed by other sources.