At the head of this band, which was inspired with zeal equal to that of the Turk, the brave Hunniades, in a fleet of boats, descended the Danube.  The river in front of Belgrade was covered with the flotilla of the Turks.  The wall in many places was broken down, and at other points in the wall they had obtained a foothold, and the crescent was proudly unfurled to the breeze.  The feeble garrison, worn out with toil and perishing with famine, were in the last stages of despair.  Hunniades came down upon the Turkish flotilla like an inundation; both parties fought with almost unprecedented ferocity, but the Christians drove every thing before them, sinking, dispersing, and capturing the boats, which were by no means prepared for so sudden and terrible an assault.  The immense reinforcement, with arms and provisions, thus entered the city, and securing the navigation of the Danube and the Save, opened the way for continued supplies.  The immense hosts of the Mohammedans now girdled the city in a semicircle on the land side.  Their tents, gorgeously embellished and surmounted with the crescent, glittered in the rays of the sun as far as the eye could extend.  Squadrons of steel-clad horsemen swept the field, while bands of the besiegers pressed the city without intermission, night and day.

Mohammed, irritated by this unexpected accession of strength to the besieged, in his passion ordered an immediate and simultaneous attack upon the town by his whole force.  The battle was long and bloody, both parties struggling with utter desperation.  The Turks were repulsed.  After one of the longest continuous conflicts recorded in history, lasting all one night, and all the following day until the going down of the sun, the Turks, leaving thirty thousand of their dead beneath the ramparts of the city, and taking with them the sultan desperately wounded, struck their tents in the darkness of the night and retreated.

Great was the exultation in Hungary, in Germany and all over Europe.  But this joy was speedily clouded by the intelligence that Hunniades, the deliverer of Europe from Moslem invasion, exhausted with toil, had been seized by a fever and had died.  It is said that the young King Ladislaus rejoiced in his death, for he was greatly annoyed in having a subject attain such a degree of splendor as to cast his own name into insignificance.  Hunniades left two sons, Ladislaus and Matthias.  The king and Cilli manifested the meanest jealousy in reference to these young men, and fearful that the renown of their father, which had inspired pride and gratitude in every Hungarian heart, might give them power, they did every thing they could to humiliate and depress them.  The king lured them both to Buda, where he perfidiously beheaded the eldest, Ladislaus, for wounding Cilli, in defending himself from an attack which the implacable count had made upon him, and he also threw the younger son, Matthias, into a prison.

The widow of Hunniades, the heroic mother of these children, with a spirit worthy of the wife of her renowned husband, called the nobles to her aid.  They rallied in great numbers, roused to indignation.  The inglorious king, terrified by the storm he had raised, released Matthias, and fled from Buda to Vienna, pursued by the execrations and menaces of the Hungarians.