In truth, his caution seemed reasonable.  An immense host surrounded the city on the land side, and had done so on the water side, also, until the Christian flotilla had sunk, captured, and dispersed its boats.  Far as the eye could see, the gorgeously-embellished tents of the Turkish army, with their gilded crescents glittering in the sun, filled the field of view.  Cannon-mounted earthworks threatened the walls from every quarter.  Squadrons of steel-clad horsemen swept the field.  The crowding thousands of besiegers pressed the city day and night.  Even defence seemed useless.  Assault on such a host appeared madness to experienced eyes.  Hunyades seemed wise in his stern disapproval of such an idea.

Yet military knowledge has its limitations, when it fails to take into account the power of enthusiasm.  Blind zeal is a force whose possibilities a general does not always estimate.  It is capable of performing miracles, as Hunyades was to learn.  His orders, his threats of death, had no restraining effect on the minds of the crusaders.  They had come to save Europe from the Turks, and they were not to be stayed by orders or threats.  What though the enemy greatly outnumbered them, and had cannons and scimitars against their pikes and flails, had they not God on their side, and should God’s army pause to consider numbers and cannon-balls?  They were not to be restrained; attack they would, and attack they did.

The siege had made great progress.  The reinforcement had come barely in time.  The walls were crumbling under the incessant bombardment.  Convinced that he had made a practicable breach, Mahomet, the sultan, ordered an assault in force.  The Turks advanced, full of barbarian courage, climbed the crumbled walls, and broke, as they supposed, into the town, only to find new walls frowning before them.  The vigorous garrison had built new defences behind the old ones, and the disheartened assailants learned that they had done their work in vain.

This repulse greatly discouraged the sultan.  He was still more discouraged when the crusaders, irrepressible in their hot enthusiasm, broke from the city and made a fierce attack upon his works.  Capistrano, seeing that they were not to be restrained, put himself at their head, and with a stick in one hand and a crucifix in the other, led them to the assault.  It proved an irresistible one.  The Turks could not sustain themselves against these flail-swinging peasants.  One intrenchment after another fell into their hands, until three had been stormed and taken.  Their success inspired Hunyades.  Filled with a new respect for his peasant allies, and seeing that now or never was the time to strike, he came to their aid with his cavalry, and fell so suddenly and violently upon the Turkish rear that the invaders were put to rout.

Onward pushed the crusaders and their allies; backward went the Turks.  The remaining intrenchments were stubbornly defended, but that storm of iron flails, those pikes and pitchforks, wielded by the zeal of enthusiasts, were not to be resisted, and in the end all that remained of the Turkish army broke into panic flight, the sultan himself being wounded, and more than twenty thousand of his men left dead upon the field.