ABSTRACT
While the Turks of Murad II. were overrunning the minor Balkan principalities, there was a fierce struggle going on in Central Europe, whose vicissitudes account in great measure for the intermittent attention which the Hungarian state gave to the advance of the Ottomans. It was a public misfortune for Christendom that Sigismund, King of Hungary, was also Sigismund the much-distracted head of the Holy Roman Empire. For while every Magyar’s lance and bow should have been turned against the Sultan, half their energies were being employed in the long Bohemian War—no real concern of Hungary—in which their king had got himself involved.
