Say It Again

References in this song

• ♦"New blood at a table of old names" - Hunyadi's family was brand-new nobility: his father Voyk, a Wallachian (Romanian) knez, was granted Hunyad castle only in 1409. Contemporary documents used the name Johannes Olah - John the Vlach. Antonio Bonfini later recorded an oral tradition that Hunyadi was secretly King Sigismund's illegitimate son; the song turns those documented origin labels and the later rumor into the old nobility's contempt.
• ♦"Then let my own gold pay for their war" - he financed anti-Ottoman campaigns out of his own estates, spending roughly 32,000 gold florins of his own money on the 1443 campaign. He was one of very few Hungarian barons who put his personal revenue into the war.
• ♦"Yet the realm that whispered about my blood / Put itself in my hands" - the 1444 crusade ended in catastrophe at Varna, where the young King Wladyslaw was killed. Hunyadi survived, was made one of the kingdom's Captains in Chief the next year, and was elected regent of Hungary in 1446, governing in the minor king's name until 1453.
• ♦"A Christian lord jailed me on the road home" - retreating from his second great defeat, at Kosovo in 1448, he was seized and imprisoned by Djuradj Brankovic, the Serbian despot - a fellow Christian ruler, not the Ottomans - and released only on terms that included a ransom.
• ♦"A friar came, and the farmers came" - when Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople in 1453, brought his giant bombards to Belgrade in 1456, the king and the great barons stayed away. The relief force was largely peasant crusaders rallied by the elderly Franciscan friar John of Capistrano, fighting alongside the fortress's professional garrison under Hunyadi's brother-in-law Michael Szilagyi. The song's wagon-in-the-breach image is artistic compression: the bombardment opened breaches, and Hunyadi's armies are independently documented using Hussite-style war wagons, but the surviving Belgrade accounts checked for this release do not place wagons specifically inside a breach.
• ♦"The farmers charged without an order / And the Conqueror fled from Belgrade bleeding" - according to the main accounts, the decisive 22 July 1456 assault on the Ottoman camp began spontaneously, without orders. Sultan Mehmed II was wounded and forced to flee - often called the most famous personal defeat of his career.
• ♦"Belgrade held for sixty-five years / And my son sits on Hungary's throne" - Hunyadi died of plague in his own victorious camp on 11 August 1456, three weeks after the battle: death cheating a man decades of war could not kill. But Belgrade did not fall to the Ottomans until 1521, and in 1458 his son Matthias Corvinus was elected King of Hungary - the outsider family's boy wearing the crown the old names had guarded.